Revisiting History: A Critical Study of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls

Abstract

The Western literary tradition since its beginning has invariably foregrounded the experiences and perceptions of men suppressing the voices of women and, thus, relegated women’s voices to the margins of history. Issues concerning ‘identity’ and ‘representation’ have preoccupied both feminist theorists and women writers from the beginning of the women’s liberation movement to the present. As Patricia Waugh points out, exploring the contradictoriness of female identity, women writers have recognised that, the formulation of a unified “woman’s voice is as risky a strategy as its dissolution into a fluid and free-floating semiosis” (204). Throughout 1970s and 1980s feminist theorists were particularly concerned with this contradiction: how might women affirm a feminine identity historically constructed through the very cultural and ideological formations which feminism as a movement was also seeking to challenge and deconstruct. Eva Figes in her feminist manifesto Patriarchal Attitudes argues, “women have been largely man-made” (14). In other words, woman’s identity and representation in the literature is constructed as the projection of men’s fears and desires, it is a ‘distorted mirror’ which shows a woman not what she is but rather what she should be.