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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 But this ongoing historical erasure was countered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of new professional roles for women at war. The New Woman was first incarnated on the battlefield as the female war nurse.{{efn|See Reeves for an overview of the role female nurses have played in American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War. For a discussion of their role in the American Civil War, see Garrison, Maher, Oates, Pryor, and Wormeley; in World War I, see {{harvtxt|Gavin|1997|pp=43–76}}; and as camp followers in the American Revolution, see {{harvtxt|Mayer|1996|pp=17, 142–143, and 219–223}}.}} This new development was marked in England by the Crimean {{pg|382|383}} War (1853–1856) and in the United States by the American Civil War (1861–1865). In part, this new female identity developed in response to the actions of men who were themselves creating a new male identity, that of the war correspondent. William Howard Russell of the ''London Times'' is most often cited as the first war correspondent, though other challengers inevitably exist. It was the reporting of Russell and several others, for example Edwin Lawrence Godkin and especially Thomas Chenery, that roused the English public to outrage over the despicable conditions of the British army in the Crimea, especially regarding medical care.{{efn|This new male identity was initially suspect, the military deriding war correspondents as camp followers. For a discussion of the vexed question of the identity of the first war correspondent, see {{harvtxt|Mathews|1957|pp=31–78}}. For a description of the role of the Crimean war correspondents, their treatment by the military, and their role in the introduction of female nurses to the war theater, see {{harvtxt|Knightley|1975|pp=6–17}}. For a discussion of William Howard Russell’s actions in the Crimea, see {{harvtxt|Bullard|1914|pp=31–48}}.}} Florence Nightingale responded to the request for nursing aid (female nurses from France were already on scene), and her “aristocratic background” and “social and political connections” enabled her to overcome the prejudice against sending female nurses to the field.{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=12}} But the nurses nonetheless suffered under public charges of immodesty and worse—that is, sexual promiscuity and prostitution—because they breached the boundary between home front and war front. They left the private for the public sphere, even though they did so while practicing the traditionally female actions of nurturing and caretaking, often fulfilling specifically domestic functions such as cooking and cleaning. In this regard, Hemingway’s Pilar is ironically like them.
-Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted “an historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to them.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=13}} In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked.{{sfn|Mayer|1989|p=219–223}}
+Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted “an historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to them.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=13}} In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked.{{sfn|Mayer|1989|pp=219–223}}
 Like the female war nurses of the Crimea, those led by Dorothea Dix in the American Civil War largely remained behind the lines, though more often near the battle front. Katherine Prescott Wormely wrote of her experiences, “I see the worst, short of the actual battle-field, that there is to see.”{{sfn|Wormeley|1998|p=131}} Clara Barton responded yet more radically, providing independent nursing and relief services on the battle front itself. The middle- or upper- class status of these “ladies” rendered their wartime actions surprising on the one hand (why weren’t they satisfied rolling bandages in ladies’ aid societies?) yet also protected them to some degree from sexual gossip. As a {{pg|383|384}} mark of over-compensation, they were apostrophized as saints and angels, Nightingale known as “The Angel of the Crimea” and “The Lady with the Lamp,” and Barton as “The Angel of the Battlefield.” They were also apostrophized more domestically as mothers and sisters, which was especially appropriate for the many Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses in the American Civil War.{{efn|See Maher for a discussion of the role of Roman Catholic nuns as nurses in the American Civil War.}} Their vows of chastity and obedience rendered them particularly appealing to male authorities, notably doctors; female doctors were forbidden from serving—a situation that also obtained in World War I, though many female doctors found their way around American Expeditionary Force regulations by attaching themselves to volunteer organizations.{{efn|See Hawks for a first-hand account of a female doctor in the American Civil War. For a discussion of the role of female doctors in World War I, see {{harvtxt|Gavin|1997|pp=157–178}}.}}
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 Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in ''The Sun Also Rises'' and Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and “plain to the point of ugliness.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=18}}  American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were “forbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman caller.”{{sfn|Villard|Nagel|1989|p=239}}
-Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}} Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=117-118}} Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.{{efn|For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see {{harvtxt|Oates|1994|pp=148–158}} and {{harvtxt|Pryor|1987|pp=112–117}}.}} Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=152}} to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.
+Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=25}} Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1969|pp=117-118}} Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.{{efn|For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see {{harvtxt|Oates|1994|pp=148–158}} and {{harvtxt|Pryor|1987|pp=112–117}}.}} Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=152}} to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.
 The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous “doughnut dollies” operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingway’s Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than men—hence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.
-During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xviii}} and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris.”{{sfn|Knightley|1975|p=127}}  Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,{{efn|Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}} ''Gellhorn'' She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}} ''Gellhorn''}} though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.
+During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xviii}} and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris.”{{sfn|Knightley|1975|p=127}}  Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,{{efn|Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}} ''Gellhorn'' She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}}''Gellhorn''}} though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.
 It would seem that ''The Fifth Column''’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre- {{pg|385|386}} spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=82}}  But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=4}}—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=5}} Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=33}} Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.