by Klaudia Franeková

This essay explores the horrors of female bodies through the perspectives of different women in Pat Barker’s novel, Union Street. The main objective is to understand the impact of the inevitable physical changes Barker’s female characters undergo and how expectations, sexualization, shame, and fear are associated with these changes. This is explored through three different stages and the individual experience of each female character, encompassed by a universal experience of womanhood: childhood and the loss of innocence, pregnancy and motherhood, and old age. The women in the novel do not have a positive relationship with their bodies; nonetheless, they continue to struggle against the external and internal pressures imposed by social conditioning.

In the first story, the focus is on a young girl, Kelly Brown. At the beginning, she is perceived as an innocent child, but through events out of her control, her identity changes to that of a sexual woman. The change is forced and she is not prepared for it; it happens after she is raped. It is not the act itself, but rather the knowledge of her violation that corrupts Kelly in other people’s eyes. Moreover, they sexualize her: “The trouble was, she was not enough of a child. Her nipples were bigger than they had been. It was difficult to avoid seeing them. . . . Whatever else she was, she was no longer the child they had known. Dimly they sensed an inner transformation that parallelled the one they saw. But they did not try, or hope, to understand it.”¹ Virginity is a social construct that determines a girl’s purity and cleanliness. Therefore, after losing it, she is no longer a girl but a woman, regardless of age. Additionally, shame seems to be associated with a woman’s sexuality, her sexual life, and her want of pleasure. She is seen as dirty, spoiled, and as a sexual object. Similarly, grown women are infantilized if they are known or thought to be virgins, presumably to satisfy a man’s sexual fantasy. Kelly is transformed from a sexless child to a sexual object.

 Kelly’s youth is emphasized right from the beginning, as is her reluctance to grow up. Most of that reluctance is associated with her body: “She looked at the hair in Linda’s armpits, at the breasts that shook and wobbled when she ran, and no, she didn’t want to get like that. And she certainly didn’t want to drip foul-smelling, brown blood out of her fanny every month.”² The upcoming physical changes in her body are certainly not an attractive prospect for her. Ingrained into the minds of many girls is the belief that looking young and clean is what they should strive for. Even if it might not be the most apparent reason for Kelly, it certainly plays a role in her distaste for aging, given the difficulty of escaping social conditioning. A scene in the book presents a fitting metaphor for Kelly’s unreadiness. She meets the rapist while looking for conkers. After she finds one, Kelly suspects it is not ripe yet and tells the man so. Yet the man, inserting himself into the situation, decides to open it anyway: “‘Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes they are. You can’t always tell from the outside.’ He took it from her. She watched his long fingers with their curved nails probe the green skin, searching for the place where it would most easily open and admit them.”³ This is foreshadowing for what later occurs, when he forces himself on her and sexually assaults her. Kelly is clearly unprepared for her exposure to sexuality, just like the conker was not ready to be opened, though that does not deter the man from assaulting her, despite her young age. The description itself is grotesque and vivid, further asserting the crudity of the act. Not only is he a rapist, but by definition, a pedophile as well. Due to the expectations society imposes on female bodies, young girls like Kelly are often seen as more desirable than older women, due to their youthful appearance, smooth skin and hairless body.

Furthermore, just as the man throws the conker away after finding it unripe, so does he want to dispose of Kelly from his mind after the sexual assault. However, she cannot dissociate herself from him as he does from her; it is impossible for Kelly to return to who she was, and like the conker, she starts rotting from the inside out. The physical invasion of her body violates her inner self, and the effect is irreversible: “She would carry him with her always, wherever she went, a homunculus, coiled inside her brain.”⁴ The man leaves a mark on her, and she is unable to separate herself from his influence. Kelly continues to be defined by him until the end of the story, both by others and herself. Furthermore, the blame for the cause of the assault shifts onto her, since the rapist cannot be found and held accountable for his actions. According to society, Kelly is sullied and becomes a disgrace to her family. They only see her for her body, not the person that she is. Even internally, she cannot move on, and with lack of help from outside, she is left confused and lost: “She had started to think about what had happened, to try to place it in the context of her life. . . . all these pieces started to fall into position, began to make sense, though not yet a sense she could use.”⁵ This further stresses her young age and her unpreparedness for the sexual life forced onto her. However, as is the case for many young girls, Kelly’s situation is neglected and she is lacking support.

Within traditional patriarchal discourses, female sexuality is frequently viewed as shameful, as something that should be reserved solely for a woman’s private life, and due to these expectations, there is often a lack of justice in cases of sexual assault, just like in Kelly’s case. This leaves Kelly with no other choice but to try and handle the situation herself. No one offers a helping hand, for fear of being associated with it, too, which is what bothers Kelly the most, along with people acting as if the rape never occurred, despite the obvious change in their behaviour: “She wished she had torn and scattered and smashed, because then nobody could have pretended that nothing had happened.”⁶ She feels the wrongness of the situation but at the same time, without guidance from others, she is unable to cope and starts being aggressive and vandalizes places. What she seeks is acknowledgment that the act did happen, considering that it has changed her life irreversibly. In the end, Kelly loses her childhood innocence in the eyes of others, and for herself, she is left only with confusion, rage and uncertainty for the future, as it seems she will never be able to separate herself from her body, which is seen as disgraceful because of an act that she never consented to.

Another stage of a woman’s life is being desired, as seen in the character of Joanne. She is a young, attractive woman with no worries about the future ahead of her. However, that stage ends when she discovers she is pregnant. Suddenly, she begins to fear for her body, for her romantic relationship, and for her social standing. She constantly compares herself with the women around her, thinking that: “[e]verybody she met today she seemed to be seeing for the first time. Perhaps it was because her own life was about to change so radically: every older woman became an image of the future, a reason for hope or fear. Now, looking at Maureen Sullivan and thinking what her life had been, Jo felt a sense of oppression.”⁷ She does not want to end up trapped and miserable like so many women around her. Similarly, like Kelly, Joanne is unwilling to accept change, because of the physical changes that accompany growth, and in her case, pregnancy as well. She is not fond of her reflection in the mirror:

She stood, pressing her hands fearfully against the still flat belly. No sign there at least. But her shoulders, her arms, her breasts! Blue veins showed up all over them, as intricately linked as the branches of a tree; all leading down to the nipples which themselves were bigger and browner than they had been a month ago. . . . Her body, from childhood so familiar, had become frightening.⁸

It is clear from this passage that Joanne’s body is already beginning to change due to her pregnancy, and for the first time, she mourns the body she had as a child. For many women, not just Joanne, there is difficulty in accepting that their soft, attractive young body will one day be transformed beyond recognition. Joanne feels a sense of loss that is not only physical, but also internal. She no longer identifies with her younger self and the physical changes lead to the exchange of her past identity of a desired object with the role of a mother.

In a patriarchal society, a woman is defined by her body and based on the evaluation, she is either given or has her privileges taken away, which in turn leads to the woman’s private reconstruction of her self. For example, as some men catcall Joanne, she thinks that “in a few months’ time they wouldn’t fancy her.”⁹ In their eyes, a pregnant woman loses value. The two most obvious reasons are the knowledge that she is no longer a virgin, and that there is going to be a child to take care of. While the man can leave a pregnant woman, a pregnant woman is unable to abandon her pregnancy so easily. She is the one who has to bear all the struggles of pregnancy and childbirth. However, men frequently refuse to bear responsibility for their actions. Joanne feels just as confined by the pregnancy as her boyfriend does, yet she is expected to want it: “Instead there’d be a house. Somewhere. Housework. And, eventually, a baby. Well, that was what she wanted. Wasn’t it? . . . She said, more wistfully now, ‘I wish I didn’t have to go.’”¹⁰ She does not want to leave this time and place in her life, where she feels comfortable. Pregnancy forever changes the trajectory of a woman’s life, often in an unexpected and often unwelcome way. This can concern her body, work or love life. Joanne feels trapped by her body and her mind is filled with worries about her uncertain future, already mourning her present life, because of the possibility that she might not be able to return to her life of independence. Already, she is sharing her body with her child and unlike some women, she sees it as a parasite feeding on her youth. Joanne’s pregnant, altered body renders her undesirable by society and consequently negatively affects her perception of herself.

Furthermore, pregnancy and motherhood are associated with femininity, love, care, and gentleness, which causes the negative aspects of these to be overlooked. Women are expected to bear those struggles in private. Childbirth itself is a grotesque affair, as can be seen when another character, Lisa, is giving birth: “Now she sweated and laboured for delivery, bearing down as though the baby had to be forced through a solid wall of flesh.”¹¹ Women are not always delicate, and their bodies are not always pretty and perfect. Women can also be plain-looking and powerful, which is not desirable in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, when Lisa gives birth to her daughter, she is filled with anxiety: “And the thought that inside that tiny body was a womb like hers with eggs waiting to be released, caused the same fear, the same wonder.”¹² Lisa is afraid for her daughter’s future, knowing that due to having been born as a girl, she will have to face similar challenges and struggles as Lisa did. From birth, the girl is associated with her body, suggesting that she cannot escape her fate of being a mother, that she is never simply a baby, as a boy can be. Perhaps a boy would be thought to be a football player or a doctor — not just a role waiting to be fulfilled, a body to grow into, in order to continue the cycle of giving birth, as girls often have to.

In another story, because of the shame connected to single motherhood, Iris decides her pregnant daughter needs to get rid of her baby, so she does not disgrace her family and herself. When the abortion takes place and the daughter asks about the baby, Iris lies and says it is dead, and that it was not alive in the first place, fully knowing that “a few yards away, on the floor of the lavatory, the rustling of the newspaper ceased.”¹³ Regardless of a single woman’s feelings concerning her pregnancy, she has to choose between giving birth or aborting the child, both painful and often lonely affairs.

Under ideal circumstances, the last stage of a person’s life is old age. For women, that bears more significance than for men as appearance seems to be crucial in evaluating a woman’s worth. Disregarding the opinions of others, it is still difficult for women to think of themselves outside of that relation. Due to social conditioning from an early age, they end up judging themselves based on the same standards. Internal shame that elderly women carry can often have a significant impact on their identity. Conversely, many women disassociate themselves from their bodies, because of failure to adapt and identify themselves after physical changes occur. Instead, they resort to avoidance, which is the case for Alice Bell:

She hid herself from the mirror. For years she had avoided looking into it: the hag it showed bore no relation to the person she thought she was. Inside herself, she was still sixteen. She had all the passion, all the silliness. Still there behind the grey hair and wrinkled skin. Now the dislocation between what the mirror showed and what she knew herself to be, was absolute. She would have liked to break the glass.¹⁴

While she is unable to accept the change in her physical appearance, she still thinks of herself as the same person, with the same vitality. That is apparent from the fact that despite her ageing body, she persists in maintaining her autonomy and dignity until her death. Alice refuses to let her identity be bound to her body. All of the women mentioned above struggle against being defined by their bodies and even though it affects them deeply, they refuse to submit themselves to patriarchal standards and rebel against them in their own way. They continue to struggle to prove that they are more than their bodies and that they grow despite, not because of them.

Female bodies are rarely seen as neutral, simple physical vessels. Historically, they have been objects of attraction and scorn, used for sex, breeding, and violence. Women did not have much time or space to think about their bodies outside of their functions, and that is why nowadays there is a discussion about reclaiming and neutralizing female bodies from the patriarchal standards. The objective is to perceive bodies just as they are portrayed in Barker’s novel — as physical vessels, not a reflection of identities. To see them as they are: imperfect, changing, beautiful and grotesque, functional and aesthetic, smooth or otherwise.

Bibliography:

Barker, Pat. Union Street. London: Virago, 2016.

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Notes:

1. Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 2016), 46-47. ↩︎
2. Barker, Union Street, 3. ↩︎
3. Barker, Union Street, 14. ↩︎
4. Barker, Union Street, 56. ↩︎
5. Barker, Union Street, 32. ↩︎
6. Barker, Union Street, 55. ↩︎
7. Barker, Union Street, 94. ↩︎
8. Barker, Union Street, 72. ↩︎
9. Barker, Union Street, 80. ↩︎
10. Barker, Union Street, 106. ↩︎
11. Barker, Union Street, 130. ↩︎
12. Barker, Union Street, 139. ↩︎
13. Barker, Union Street, 216. ↩︎
14. Barker, Union Street, 255. ↩︎