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

While the male correspondents are satisfied to rewrite military communiques, Annabelle and Jane show remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to get to the front so as to report the action firsthand. However, their efforts are denigrated, Joe Rogers repeatedly complaining, to the widespread agreement of the other men, that they “run this lousy war on sex-appeal.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=45, 49}} As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword to the play:

In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, “It is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than ever.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=90}}

Annabelle does indeed plan to continue her war correspondence, but she hopes to do so with Joe Rogers, who has proclaimed not only his continuing love for her but also a new attitude of respect for her work: “No other girl would have dared to fly that mission  You’re everything. You’re pretty and funny and brave. I think being so brave is one of the things I’m proudest of.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=67}} He promises never again to steal her stories as he did during their brief marriage. “He said he did it because he loved me so much he couldn’t bear to have me in danger,” Annabelle tells Jane, but “it turned out he married me to silence the opposition.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=19}} Joe now asserts, “Nothing means anything without you,” and he promises never to interfere in her work again.{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=67}} Annabelle imagines a future with this “beautiful, funny, fascinating man” in which they will cover wars together in happy comradeship,{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=20}} having learned that marriage is “too dangerous” and that “you risk ruining everything with marriage.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=69}} But Annabelle discovers that Joe has not {{pg|399|400}} changed when he steals her trip to Poland. The theft is bad enough, but his condescending explanation is still more infuriating: “Hawkins sent for you, but it’s too dangerous. I love you too much. It doesn’t matter for a man. P.S. Back tomorrow.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=73}} Annabelle’s earlier comment, “If there’s anything I really loathe, it’s a woman protector,” resonates for she senses personal motivations beneath this seemingly generous sentiment.{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=25}} Moreover, the same sentiment is expressed by Philip, as one of the male correspondents tells her: “You’ve got to be more tolerant, Annabelle. The poor guy’s been away from England for three years, fighting to protect womankind from the horrors of war. And then the womankind walks in on him. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. You can see it would upset him for a while.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995a|p=25}}

In ''The Fifth Column'', Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women,”{{sfn|Baker|1969|pp=481-482}} 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.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=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.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=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.