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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 Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the wars’ meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of “home front” and “war front.” This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional roles—a change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.
-Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction.{{efn|For an extended discussion of Hemingway’s attitude toward the transformation of traditional warfare by modern technology, see {{harvtxt|Moreland|1996|pp=163–168}}''Medievalist Impulse''.}} On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=481–482}} As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their ''No Man’s Land'' trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature . . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes.”{{sfn|Gilbert|Gubar|1988–1994|loc=1:4}} {{pg|371|372}} Hemingway thus valorizes in ''Farewell'' the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in ''Fifth Column'' the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.
+Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction.{{efn|For an extended discussion of Hemingway’s attitude toward the transformation of traditional warfare by modern technology, see {{harvtxt|Moreland|1996|pp=163–168}}''Medievalist Impulse''.}} On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women.”{{sfn|Baker|1969|p=481–482}} As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their ''No Man’s Land'' trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature . . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes.”{{sfn|Gilbert|Gubar|1988–1994}} {{pg|371|372}} Hemingway thus valorizes in ''Farewell'' the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in ''Fifth Column'' the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.
 The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote ''Farewell'' some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote ''Fifth Column'' while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram,”{{sfn|Fraser|1979|p=455}} citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos.”{{sfn|Fraser|1979|p=265}} Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of ''The Nation'', “There is no front. Madrid is the front.”{{sfn|Wyden|1983|p=202}} The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled ''A Play'' in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.