الفهرس 
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Abstract
The thesis is divided into three chapters. The introductory chapter is a survey chapter that begins with an overview of Patriarchy as an ideology based on hierarchy and the oppositional logic of ‘the norm’ vs ‘the other’. The chapter then moves on to a discussion of Paul Fussell’s theory of binary oppositions and the ‘versus habit’ through a review of his influential study of the war, The Great War and Modern Memory, to show the compatibility of his binary opposition model, based on the trench deadlock, with the concept of polarization at the heart of Patriarchy, with the aim of proving that the ‘gross dichotomizing’ which he saw as a legacy of the Great War is in fact a deep-rooted structure in the very culture that produced the war. Using selected war novels of the 20s and 30s by men and women, the chapter will explore their relation to the cultural paradigm of binary opposites which the war, as a violent conflict, both exposed about British society, and enhanced in post-war life and imagination.
Chapter Two begins by mapping out Virginia Woolf’s view of the war and fascism, shaped by her life-long commitment to pacifism, as evidenced in her influential anti- war polemic Three Guineas (1938). In this work, she explores the complex relations between gender and war, especially during the rise of fascism in the thirties, linking war with the oppression of women in the domestic sphere in an attempt to deconstruct the gender binary as Karen Schneider argues in her gender study of the war, Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War (1997). In this study, Schneider correctly places Woolf as the writer who “articulated prototypical theories of gender and war” (7) through her anti-fascist stance and resistance to patriotic rhetoric, and her appeal for a recognition of the bonds between the private and the public spheres of life. The chapter then proceeds to give a textual analysis, based on Fussell’s model of binary oppositions, of selected novels written in the 20s and 30s in which the war comes to the fore in various shapes and techniques. For Woolf, war belongs to the world of men from which she is vigorously polarized as a woman and a pacifist. Through her critique of the male world of the University in Jacob’s Room (1922), she sought to deconstruct traditional cultural binaries. Woolf addresses the theme of war through the elusive character of Jacob Flanders, the Unknown Soldier, who is a typical prototype of the male milieu of the university, emphasizing the polarization of his world from that of the anonymous female narrator of his story. She also addresses the opposition of generals/soldiers. In Mrs Dalloway (1925), the post-war British society is set in confrontation to the world of the shell-shocked soldier, Septimus Smith, and the novel dramatizes the civilian/combatant opposition brilliantly through the psychological trauma of Septimus whose suffering is intensified in the civilian society of post-war London at the hands of the medical patriarchs. In this novel, Woolf also confronts the issue of silencing war victims like Septimus who is also a social victim of the Westminster world of Mrs Dalloway and her class. The war then assumes central place in To the Lighthouse (1927) where the ultimate division of “time” into ‘before’ and ‘after’ dramatizes Fussell’s image of the Great War as the ‘classical dividing line’ between past and present; life and death. Woolf tackles the devastating effects wrought by this man-made catastrophe in the ‘Time Passes’ section through an almost poetic description of nature’s wrath at man’s (male) violence. The chapter then ends with an analysis of The Years (1937) in which Woolf’s increasing apprehension with the rise of fascism in the thirties overshadows the whole novel. Direct and explicit reference to the war appears only in the air-raid scene and in the character of North Pargiter, the returned soldier who feels alienated upon his return and is in fact a minor character. It is the women in the novel, however, who occupy central ground in their struggle against, or submission to, the patriarchal rule of their father as the paradigm of gender domination and violence. Though Woolf sought to empower her female characters in her deconstruction of the gender binary, the novel ends on an alien, fragmented note denoting her loss of hope and foreshadowing her final choice of opting out, by committing suicide, from a retrogressive pattern that once more asserted militarism, with its patriotic rhetoric, in the face of fascism, and condemned pacifists or at least smothered their voice in favour of violence and war.
Chapter Three examines Barker’s renowned Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) with reference to her views about violence, trauma and the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers during the war. The analysis of the trio of novels highlights how she analyses the common gender opposition in the context of a wider norm/other dichotomy. She probes this dichotomy through the character of the ostracized Billy Prior, who suffers a split personality as a result of the polarized roles he is forced to adopt in his doomed struggle to belong in such an uncompromising society, and thus finally opts to return to the violence of the front as his only option. She underlines the issue of silencing the wounded voice through her open and unflinching exploration of the psychological devastation that the violence of the war inflicted upon the souls of the men on the front. Through her examination of the power struggle between patient and therapist, men and women, soldiers and civilians, heterosexuals and homosexuals , officers and privates, and across class, she makes a strong statement about violence enacted in the social hypocrisy of English society that forces men to remain trapped in narrow