| Chapter : | Introduction |
groups that people form their sense of identity. Social representations are the basis for grounding and communicating a sense of belonging, and Pat Barker's novels, as we will see, ask us to look behind the façade of those representations that serve to maintain the natural order of things. Her novels ask us to interrogate a reality that denies us, they prompt us to question—as children do, but adults seem not to—“Why?”
Barker's early novels Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and The Century's Daughter (1986, later entitled Liza's England) earned her the label of “regional, working-class writer,” although Barker's depictions avoid romantic stereotypes of working-class life, not only by setting the stories in derelict neighborhoods of post-industrial Britain, but also by focusing on women's collective experiences in the stories. The notion of community is central to these novels, a community that is not simply accepted as a given, but as a social construction whose very formation is in itself an ongoing subject of inquiry. Social representation theory requires us to ask how individuals develop such a sense of community, in spite of the discourse of individualism so widespread in Western cultures. “People under threat,” McFarlane and van der Kolk insist, “form very close attachments to other people or communities,” and the greater the threat, the greater the attachment, which can create a profound sense of belonging that can even lead to individual sacrifices in order to preserve the group (25). Certainly there is a feeling of solidarity, especially among the women in the book. But the context of abject poverty and endemic violence forbids any idealistic likening to what Sharon Monteith calls “easy community” (14). Poverty and violence, as we will see, also have allegorical significance for the community as a whole. The stories that these women have to tell serve as links to the past, providing a collective narrative on which to base their sense of community (if only tentatively), without shying away from the realities of poverty, violence, and vulnerability. The stories convey an alternative to the official voices of the community, despite the difficulties the women encounter in seeking a voice with which to represent their traumatic experiences. Trauma need not refer to a single, overwhelming event, as Kai Erikson warns, but may be a defined as a “constellation of life experiences” with effects