The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works: Difference between revisions

In ''The Fifth Column'', Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481-82), though he plays it for tragedy rather than comedy. His biting portrait of Dorothy Bridges, Philip Rawlings’ potential wife, provided a cautionary example that Hemingway proceeded to ignore, as so many critics have pointed out, and as Philip seems to know when he famously confesses, “I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistake” (42). But in order to render evident this colossal mistake, which Philip actually avoids, {{pg|400|401}} Hemingway is reduced to caricaturing Martha in the role of Dorothy—in point of fact, underplaying those characteristics that he found most attractive in Martha and also most disconcerting. But the play didn’t work, critics citing most often as its primary flaw the unbelievable characterization of Dorothy. And so he easily ignored his own warning, as Martha also apparently did, though her fictional counterpart quite rightly says of Philip, “You’re a very serious problem for any woman” (24). These two willful, talented, independent people came together in the heat of battle, then waged their own personal war, from which Martha emerged an accomplished war correspondent and Hemingway emerged as husband to a woman whom he had persuaded to abandon war correspondence—not a pocket Reubens, as he affectionately termed her, but a pocket female war correspondent whom he packed up for the home front once he decided he wanted to leave the war behind. But given the modernist merging of home front and war front, Hemingway should not have been surprised to discover that in moving Mary into Martha’s room at the Finca Vigía, he had not emerged as victor in the war between the sexes but had merely shifted the battlelines.

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