“Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together?”: The Literary Sibling as Dr Frankenstein in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room
“Such were some of the parts, but how bring them together?”: The Literary Sibling as Dr Frankenstein in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room

Summary/Abstract: Harold Bloom’s highly influential model of the ‘anxiety of influence’—the agon between fathers and sons—and the haunting presence of the ‘myth’of literary Modernism, which all succeeding generations of writers have hadto contend with, may induce literary critics to view contemporary writers as the‘children’ or ‘grandchildren’ of their great Modernist precursors. While investigating the intertextual relationship between Pat Barker and Virginia Woolf,however, it is, I argue, far more useful to analyse Barker’s engagement withWoolf’s work in the context of Juliet Mitchell’s theories of sibling relationships(2003). The lateral aspect of Barker’s intertextual relationship with her precursoris best demonstrated through a detailed analysis of Toby’s Room (2012), whosetitle is a direct reference to Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922). Like ElinorBrooke, whose paintings express her desire for freedom from the oppressiveabsence of her dead brother, Toby, Barker attempts to „clear [some] imaginativespace”2 for herself, to make some ‚room’ in which she can exist, by challenginga few of Woolf’s most influential views, as expressed in her fiction and in suchworks as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Toby’s Room is thus the productof Barker’s combined admiration and hostility towards Woolf’s oeuvre—an ambivalent hommage in which Barker positions herself not as Woolf’s descendant,but as a literary sibling. By re-assembling various fragments of Woolf’s oeuvre,just as Elinor re-assembles the ‘pieces’ of her brother, Barker resurrects her precursor in such a way as to be able to simultaneously honour her and to allow herown literary self to exist.

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