Regeneration (1991) is
the first of an anti-war trilogy about the First World War (1914-1918) and the
British poet’s who fought as conscripted men and wrote about their experiences.
It is a re-imagined novel with historical figures and fictional characters, the
basis for the 1997 film.
It commences in 1917 with
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), an English poet who received a medal for
bravery, and his letter of protest about the war. Instead of sending him to
prison, he is incarcerated in the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh,
Scotland (now a university).
In hospital Sassoon is
treated by army neurologist, Dr. William Rivers, a pioneer of ‘nerve
regeneration’ therapy, for it was believed that post-traumatic stress was a
breakdown of nerves – a nervous disorder. And Sassoon’s written public protest
was seen to be ‘degenerate’ but curable.
Dr. Rivers uses sleeping
tablets, dream therapy, hypnosis, and talk therapy to ‘cure’ his patients of
war neuroses. Sassoon sends him poems. Rivers initially finds this odd because
his other patients want to forget the war, but Sassoon wants to remember it
through his poetry. Sassoon meets British war poets Robert Graves (1895-1985)
and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) in the War Hospital, as well as patients such as
Billy Prior, mute from the trauma of war. Sassoon also receives a letter from
British writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946), the author of The Time Machine (1895) and War
of the Worlds (1898). One patient thinks Sassoon is a German spy, but Dr.
Rivers assures him that a spy would not use the name Siegfried.
The central characters
are equally Rivers and Sassoon – the doctor and the patient – and their
relationship. Dr. Rivers, who has a nervous stammer, is conflicted between
believing that the war must continue for ‘the sake of future generations’ and
his horror that such events should continue. For Sassoon ‘Craiglockhart
frightened him more than the front had ever done’ due to the screaming, the
smell of the rubber underlay on his bed, the haunted faces, the stammers, the
stumbling walkers, and the indefinable look of being ‘mental’.
Dr. Rivers takes notes
about his patients, and these are descriptive of the 1917 treatments for
neuroses, as well as other observations, such as, in war men became caring
towards each other: ‘The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’
activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity on a scale that their
mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.’
When Dr. Rivers leaves
he is replaced by Dr. Lewis Yealland, who immediately introduces electric shock
therapy – protopathic and epicritic innervation – in which electrodes were
applied to the back of the throat for an hour at a time.
Regeneration has a
simple construct, but a complex set of interwoven themes all centered on the
treatment of patients that were affected by the war, or protested its horrors,
and the decision whether to return them to active duty. Themes such as mental
disorder, Freudian psychology, identity, creative therapies, masculinity,
sexuality, repression, and aggression are integrated into themes of trench
warfare versus passive beliefs, real versus psychosomatic traumas, and war
versus anti-war neuroses.
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