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 correlation between Dorothy and the whore would thus seem to be historically inevitable, a correlation that develops from the play’s very first short scene, which exists solely to provide a gloss on the play. A whore sees the sign on the door to Dorothy’s room: “Working. Do Not Disturb.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=3}} When she asks her soldier-customer to read it to her, he responds with contempt: “So that’s what I’d draw. A literary one. The hell with it.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=3}}  She responds—to the sign? to his contempt?—with “a dry high, hard laugh,” asserting, “I’ll get me a sign like that too.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=3}} The stage goes dark and the scene ends, these allegorical characters disappearing forever, having provided their implicit commentary on all that follows. {{pg|390|391}}
-In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=76, 85}} In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services.{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=118}} Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=64}}—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.
+In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=76, 85}} In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services.{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=118}} Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=64}}—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.
 In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargain,”{{sfn|Trogden|1999|p=213}} thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.
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 Annabelle is terribly hurt by Joe’s betrayal, but she vows not “to let any worthless man ruin [her] job,”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=74}} and she is cheered at the prospect of covering the war in Burma: “It sounds too terrible. Those poor men, and no one to tell what they’re doing. Forgotten Army. How dare people treat them like that”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=75}} Annabelle proves herself “still out to save the world,” as Jane had earlier described her, claiming, “We have to write, Jane. The people who fight can’t. It’s our job.  Our duty, really.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|pp=19, 18}} So Annabelle and Jane go off to yet another war front, finding it “lovely to be at the same war” but regretting that the men they love cannot somehow tolerate sharing the ex- perience with them.{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=23}} Hemingway’s Philip Rawlings had criticized Dorothy, saying that “the first thing an American woman does is try to get the man she’s interested in to give up something,”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=24}} but in ''Love Goes to Press'' it is the men who try to change the women. As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword, ''"Love Goes to Press'' portrays men and women in love and at war from a distinctly female point of view, a lens through which we rarely have had the opportunity in American literature to view any war. And in this wartime drama, the European Theater of Operations is literally that— the stage set for the main action: the War between the Sexes.”{{sfn|Spanier|1995|p=82}}
-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|1969|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|1969|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.
+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.
 ==Notes==