Reclaiming Female Subjectivity: An Irigarayan Reading of Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls

Abstract

This article aims to highlight the Irigarayan strategies that Pat Barker’s women in her revisionist masterpiece, The Silence of the Girls (2018), can utilize in order to resist being commodified in warstricken conditions and reclaim their subjectivity. The questions that this study tackles to answer are: Are the slave women able to resist commodification? How do certain strategies utilized by the slave women function in resisting commodification and reclaiming their sense of individuality? Will this resistance against commodification enable them to undermine patriarchy? To answer these questions, a feminist theoretical framework is incorporated, and Irigaray’s theories are investigated in the selected feminist revisionist text. Barker depicts women’s commodified status and their subjection to patriarchal roles as slaves and war spoils and, simultaneously, grants them voice and agency to undermine the patriarchal economy of the Same. This article elucidates that in spite of being subjugated to the patriarchal system, they can adopt Irigarayan strategies—appropriating a revisionist mythological narrative, establishing a female culture and utilizing mimicry—in order to resist commodification, defy patriarchy and reclaim their voice and individuality.