User:LogansPop22/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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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’” (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”(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman. Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in ''Green Hills of Africa'' [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, ''American Commander in Spain''. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines” (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:

::

<blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I

said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not. (148–49)</blockquote>

Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat” (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:

<blockquote>Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily (210).</blockquote>

In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military” (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.

Moon notes that “[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything else—as domestic attachments”(275). Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way” (14), they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officer’s wives were “ladies” who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year- {{pg|376|377}} round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably “supplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitution” (7). Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that “the degree to which military prostitutes’ lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors]” (210), and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military” (64). In ''A Farewell to Arms'', Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate “bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers” (5). Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades” (64-65).

It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by men—more specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the “masculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiers” (Herbert 6).

But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commander’s wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called “woman-less war” (148). And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.

While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.5 From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.

Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men:

<blockquote>The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of

women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936 (Coleman 48).</blockquote>

But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Re- publican soldiers were uncomfortable with the miliciana. For the most part, men expected milicianas to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses” (Coleman 49). One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side” (Thomas 322, n. l). Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front” (quoted by Coleman 49).

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 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’” (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”(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman. Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in ''Green Hills of Africa'' [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, ''American Commander in Spain''. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines” (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:
-::
+<blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I
+said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not. (148–49)</blockquote>
+Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat” (quoted by Kert 297). His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:
+<blockquote>Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily (210).</blockquote>
+In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military” (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.
+Moon notes that “[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything else—as domestic attachments”(275). Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way” (14), they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officer’s wives were “ladies” who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year- {{pg|376|377}} round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably “supplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitution” (7). Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that “the degree to which military prostitutes’ lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors]” (210), and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military” (64). In ''A Farewell to Arms'', Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate “bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers” (5). Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades” (64-65).
+It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by men—more specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the “masculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiers” (Herbert 6).
+But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commander’s wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called “woman-less war” (148). And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.
+While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.5 From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.
+Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men:
+<blockquote>The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of
+women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936 (Coleman 48).</blockquote>
+But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Re- publican soldiers were uncomfortable with the miliciana. For the most part, men expected milicianas to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses” (Coleman 49). One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side” (Thomas 322, n. l). Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front” (quoted by Coleman 49).