Masculinity, Expectations, and Psychological Health Theme Analysis

During World War I, Dr. Rivers works as a psychiatrist in the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, treating British officers in various stages of mental breakdown. As a psychiatrist, Rivers is in a position to closely analyze the various pressures that soldiers feel during wartime, not only from the battlefield, but from society. The most powerful forces in a soldier’s life, Rivers observes, are the narrow expectations of masculinity and what it means to be a man, which often exacerbates his patients’ mental trauma. Through Rivers’s observations, Regeneration argues that in order to produce healthier men, society must redefine what it means to be a man, with far less emphasis placed on stereotypically masculine traits.

Both Rivers and his patients constantly feel pressured to behave in stereotypically masculine ways, suggesting that society at large expects all men to fit into a narrow ideal of what it means to be a man. Rivers observes that, although soldiers in World War I witness and directly experience horrific suffering, society expects them to remain absolutely stoic, suggesting that emotional repression is held up as a mark of masculinity. He notes, “They’d been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men.” However, such emotional repression often leads their minds to feel overwhelmed, triggering a psychological breakdown, suggesting that such masculine repression is deeply unhealthy. Fellow soldiers expect each other to fit into the stereotypical masculine ideal as well. One of Rivers’ patients, Second-Lieutenant Prior, recalls that even on the front lines in France, he sometimes felt belittled because he did not fit the stereotypical ideal: he did not hunt, he did not wear khaki shirts, and so on. This feeling of inadequacy suggests that men themselves are prone to judge each other’s manhood, as well as their own, by whether or not they behave in a supposedly masculine fashion. Even soldiers, who are often seen as the ideal of masculinity and bravery, are not exempt from these societal expectations. Prior’s father embodies society’s expectations for how a masculine man is supposed to behave. Although Prior had a debilitating mental breakdown (causing intermittent mutism) on the battlefield and requires psychiatric treatment, Prior’s father is dismissive of it, feeling that it makes him less than a man, since Prior was unable to remain stoic and endure the hardships. Prior’s father even tells Rivers that he wishes Prior had actually been shot, since then he might feel some level of sympathy for his son, suggesting that societal expectations are so strongly-held that Prior’s father would rather his own son be physically injured than to endure the shame of Prior not meeting society’s ideals of masculine strength.

As a psychiatrist, Rivers argues that while masculine ideals are not inherently wrong, in many instances they are counterproductive to the tasks at hand, and soldiers may even need to exhibit traits that society deems feminine. Rivers observes that although they will not admit it, officers take on a motherly role toward their men. An officer tends to his soldiers’ blistered feet on long marches, ensures that each man has the food and gear he needs to survive, and gives comfort as best he can when his soldiers are afraid. Rivers notes that the “perpetually harried expression” officers have while they speak of their men is exactly the same expression worn by impoverished mothers trying to sustain large families, “totally responsible for lives they have no power to save.” As Rivers observes, even in war, a seemingly masculine setting, officers must embody a stereotypically feminine role to care for and protect the lives of their troops, suggesting that masculine ideals are inadequate—and even harmful—in many situations.

As a psychiatrist, Rivers’s own style of treatment is notably feminine. Rather than stoically repressing his patients’ emotions, Rivers gently and patiently counsels his patients to feel their emotions, to cry or scream at the horrors of war as they need. Although Rivers’ goal is to recuperate his patients to the point that they can return to war, he does so by “nurturing,” not by threatening. One of his patients even refers to him as a “male mother.” Contrasting with Rivers’s feminine, nurturing approach to psychiatry, Dr. Yealland, whom Rivers witnesses working in London, takes a stereotypically masculine approach to psychiatry. Yealland holds a god-like view of his own power and authority, and tells his patients that he will unquestionably cure them within a single session. To treat a patient with mutism, Yealland locks himself and the man in a dark room and electrocutes the man, torturing him for hours until he regains a shaky ability to form words with his mouth once again. Although the patient is technically cured of mutism, Rivers can clearly see that his psychological trauma has only increased, implying that Rivers’s feminine, nurturing approach leads to a better long-term outcome than Yealland’s domineering, masculine method.

Rivers’s practice and observations do not argue that men should be emasculated or made effeminate, but suggests that society ought to reevaluate what it means to be a man, with less emphasis on meeting narrowly-defined and often inadequate masculine ideals. Rivers’s ultimate goal for his patients is to return them to the battlefield, and thus his treatment does not make “any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy.” Rather, Rivers recognizes that stereotypically feminine characteristics—tenderness, a nurturing spirit, emotional expression—are necessary even for men on the battlefield, arguing that society needs to loosen its strict expectations on men to meet a stoic, masculine ideal. However, Rivers also recognizes that such characteristics so contradict masculine ideals that “they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.” This ultimately suggests that in order to produce psychologically healthy men, society must adjust its view of manhood to allow for a balance between stereotypically masculine and feminine characteristics.

Pat Barker’s novel points out the extreme pressure that society exerts upon men to fit a narrow ideal of masculinity and argues that this concept of manhood needs to be redefined in much broader terms.