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

  | abstract  = An exploration of Hemingway’s interest in the topic of love and war in a number of his important works.

  | notes    = publication or editor's notes (if applicable)

{{dc|dc=O|ne of the central issues on which critics}} of ''A Farewell to Arms'' focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his “separate peace” (243), an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arena—she abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan—for a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewell—existential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.

In ''The Fifth Column'', Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481-82), 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” (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” (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.

{{reflist}}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date= |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |url= |location=New York |publisher=Avon, 1969 |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Beevor |first=Antony |date= |title=The Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Peter Bedrick Books, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wormeley |first=Katharine Prescott |date=1889 |title=The Other Side of War: On the Hospital Transports with the Army of the Potomac |url= |location=Gansevoort, New York |publisher=Comer House Historical Publications, 1998 |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wyden |first=Peter |date= |title=The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish War, 1936-1939 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon and Schuster, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }}

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works}}

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