| Chapter 1: | Caging or Community? The “Working Class” Novels |
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of objectification and speechlessness and given back the humanity that society more generally denies them” (Monteith, “Pat Barker” 9; see Jouve 144). Even so, the term “community” must be used cautiously, as it implies what Brannigan calls “homeliness” (“Small World,” 5), or what Monteith calls “easy community—the working classes in and out of each others’ houses to borrow a cup of sugar or for emotional sustenance” (Monteith, “Pat Barker” 14), aware as we are that Barker challenges such popular, romanticized representations as a means of asking collective, critical questions regarding how the working class is represented, not only within the world-at-large but also how they see themselves.
Violence is endemic in the derelict neighborhoods of the novels, an overt violence that cannot be neatly separated into public and private, nor, as we will see, into perpetrator and victim. Union Street very early on deals with the rape of eleven-year-old Kelly Brown (29–30), a rape that has, according to Brannigan, “obvious allegorical significance for the community as a whole. It destroys any sense of connection, cohesion or self-validation” (“Pat Barker” 21). But the outcome of this rape is unexpected, as neither the assailant nor the victim flees; within the geographical confines of this rundown neighborhood, the question comes up—where would Kelly go?—although it must be said that her confinement is more than simply geographical, while her assailant—from a higher social class, hence an outsider to this community—would presumably have more options for escape. In any case, Barker never allows such simple binary categorizations as assailant and victim:
Not only is the victim never purely a victim in Barker's fiction, but criminals also reveal a human face, a face that complicates our reaction