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

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 The attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingway’s two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingway’s attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingway’s return to the American home front. The lyric passages of ''A Farewell to Arms'', especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingway’s love for Agnes, just as Catherine’s death (however {{pg|373|374}} tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingway’s anger at Agnes’s betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in “A Very Short Story.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1966|p=1925}}
-Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.<ref group=Notes> This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.</ref>
+Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.{{efn|This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.}}
 Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingway’s personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingway’s complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the “New Woman” in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern wars—notably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do “male” jobs to free men for the battle front—exacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Ages—that is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of “wife” is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially {{pg|374|375}} and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that “the military is a ‘gendered institution’ because soldiering has been about not only war, but being ‘a man’,” {{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=7}} and she argues that “much of the strategy [designed to establish one’s status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminine.”{{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=8}} To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman.