Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Regeneration, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Masculinity, Expectations, and Psychological Health
War, Duty, and Loyalty
Male Relationships
Trauma and Mental Illness
Alienation vs. Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Bryce has already left Craiglockhart, and Rivers is due to leave on November 14. His last days are more dramatic than he feels he deserves, particularly because Willard has overcome his paralysis. However, Willard still won’t admit that it was a psychological problem and has a god-like reverence for Rivers, whom he believes magically reconnected the nerves in his spine, dismaying Rivers and annoying the other medical officers.
Willard’s obsession with maintaining his own sense of masculinity is so strong that he would rather assume that Rivers has magical power than admit that he had a psychological disorder, suggesting that such a preoccupation with masculinity and stoicism can lead one to near-insanity.
Themes
On his last day, Rivers visits Sassoon, who sits on the floor in the middle of his room, staring at the fire, hands clasped around his knees. Their exchange is brief; Sassoon has obviously withdrawn into himself. Rivers secretly fears that Craiglockhart has broken Sassoon in the way combat never could, but he keeps it to himself, bidding Sassoon goodbye and informing him he’ll be back for Sassoon’s board.
Although Rivers’s has accomplished his stated goal of returning Sassoon to combat—without manipulation—he seems almost guilty to see Sassoon so defeated, having set aside his protest to return to duty. This again suggests that Rivers’s own views on war and duty are drastically shifting.
Themes
Rivers moves to work with the RFC alongside Head in Cambridge. There are air raids periodically and everyone in Rivers’s lodging huddles in the basement through each one, but Rivers chooses to just remain in bed, unbothered, in his upper-floor bedroom. He finds working with pilots quite interesting, observing that airplane pilots suffer less frequent and less severe breakdowns, but the men who manned weather balloons broke down more than any class of soldier in the war as they floated helplessly in the sky, trapped while enemy soldiers shot at them. To Rivers, confinement leading to greater war neurosis confirms his theory that women suffer greater levels of hysteria during peacetime, when they are more confined to the home.
Rivers once argued that unnecessary risk-taking constitutes a form of self-destructive behavior and indicates that mental breakdown is approaching. His remaining in bed in an upper-story bedroom while everyone else shelters certainly appears to be an unnecessary risk, suggesting that Rivers’s own mental health is in question. Once again, the narrative also suggests that mental breakdown results from stress and confinement, not weak moral character or latent cowardice.
Themes
The day before Rivers is due back at Craiglockhart for Sassoon’s examination board, he is invited to visit the National Hospital in Queen’s Square by Dr. Yealland. Entering the hospital, Rivers passes a man with a grotesquely bent back and neck. He meets Dr. Yealland, an imperious figure who projects such authority that Rivers finds it almost humorous. Yealland shows him their post-treatment ward, where he makes brief, impersonal conversation with each patient. Rivers notes that many patients look depressed, but in the National Hospital, as soon as the physical wound is taken care of, they are considered cured. Rivers asks if anyone knows the soldiers’ relapse or suicide rates, but predictably no one knows.
Yealland is an obvious foil for Rivers, exercising a masculine dominion over his patients where Rivers would have offered nurturing care. Yealland thus represents the sort of therapist Rivers might be if he felt bound to behave in a manner that society deemed typically masculine, meaning that he could not be maternal or nurturing and did not listen to his patients but simply took control and “cured” them by his own willpower. This masculine alternative to Rivers is horrific, demonstrating the importance of allowing men to embody both masculine and feminine traits.
Themes
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In the next ward, they find the man with the bent back, whom Rivers learns was half-buried by an explosion in this position for several days. Yealland assumes a nearly god-like tone, stating powerfully to the patient that he will straighten the man’s back with an electrical current, and the man shall be completely healed. When the patient asks if it will hurt, Yealland states that the patient did not mean to ask that question so it won’t be answered, and reminds him that the patient’s role is to pay strict attention to the doctor and never ask questions.
Once again, Yealland’s domineering, imperious tone and complete disregard for the patient’s concerns embody an utterly masculine approach to medical practice. Yealland’s complete lack of empathy—since empathy is not normally considered a masculine ideal—makes him seem rather like a psychopath, suggesting that unbridled masculinity is not only foolish, but dangerous.
Themes
Yealland shows Rivers a young man named Callan, struck with neurotic mutism just like Prior. When Rivers asks how Yealland is treating his problem, Yealland states plainly that he straps the man into a chair and electrocutes his throat and burns his tongue with light cigarettes. So far it has not worked, Yealland believes, because Callan does not want it to work. He admittedly does not care what Callan thinks, however; he will force him to recover. Yealland offers Rivers the chance to watch the treatment so long as he does not interfere, and Rivers eagerly accepts, curious though privately disturbed.
Callan is an explicit parallel to Prior, possessing the same mutism as well as the same smugness, and this gives the reader an even clearer picture of who Rivers could be and how he could operate if he were confined to a masculine image of himself. Significantly, Yealland’s treatments all involve an element of violence—electrocution, burning, strapping someone in a chair—which seems to be the inevitable outcome of masculinity unhindered by any reasoning or empathic impulses.
Themes
