Seeing into the great war patriarchal discourse and practices through the male gaze: Pat Barker’s "Regeneration trilogy"

El canon ingles sobre la literatura de la primera guerra mundial ha estado configurado por la poesia de los poetas que lucharon en la contienda por considerar que su vision y su experiencia directa del combate garantizaban la inmediatez y la veracidad de la representacion. Este criterio excluyo del canon la escritura de mujeres cuya participacion y experiencia de la guerra eran obviamente muy distintas. La critica feminista ha reequilibrado el canon gracias a una exhaustiva investigacion sobre la abundante contribucion literaria de escritoras a la representacion de la contienda que cuestiona tal criterio. En este contexto, las novelas sobre la primera guerra mundial de autoras contemporaneas que eligen el protagonismo masculino sufren valoraciones negativas, acusadas de mimetismo con la mirada masculina. En este articulo me propongo demostrar como, lejos de ello, la trilogia Regeneration de Pat Barker, por el tercer volumen de la cual recibio el prestigioso premio Booker, se vale de la mirada masculina para denunciar y poner de relieve el discurso y las practicas patriarcales imperantes en la contienda. The English literary canon of the Great War has been traditionally shaped by the poetry of the poets who fought the war on the basis of their having seen and experienced its full horror, which attested truthful representation. This premise excluded women writers, whose participation in and experience of the war was obviously very different. Feminist research on the literary contribution of female writers to the representation of the conflict based on the plurality of experiences of many women that challenge that assumption have effectively worked to redress the balance. In this context, the war novels of contemporary female writers with male protagonists are negatively judged for miming the male gaze. In this article I would like to show that far from it Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, whose third volume was awarded with the Booker Prize, uses the male gaze precisely to unveil and expose the war entrenched patriarchal discourse and practices.