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

Though Dorothy commits herself to remaining near the battle front, she has simultaneously worked to make her own room homey, and she makes over Philip’s adjoining room as well. In the context of the play, Dorothy’s redecoration of Philip’s room signals her desire to domesticate him, to lure him away from the war to the home front. Certainly that is how Philip interprets it. His ambivalence about this domestication is revealed by his dis- {{pg|386|387}} comfort in the redecorated room and by his conflicted responses to Dorothy. In the midst of the war, she has created a home front of sorts, a conflation that confuses Philip. He attempts to reestablish the division by associating nighttime with the home front and daytime with the war front, declaring during the night not only his love but more tellingly his desire to marry her, and repudiating these declarations during the day. Dorothy reacts to both nighttime and daytime pronouncements with equanimity, enjoying Philip’s nighttime fantasies which she also shares, yet recognizing them as such. When Philip rejects her at the end of the play, he does so because he fears he will be unable to withstand the temptation she represents to abandon the war front for the home front, a concern that his German comrade Max reinforces. But Philip’s rejection of Dorothy, however painful, does not result in her departure from Madrid.{{efn|In Benjamin Glazer’s adaptation of the play for production, the much-revised character of Dorothy ''does'' leave Madrid, hoping but not expecting Philip to follow her. Glazer’s Dorothy is more conventional than Hemingway’s, an attempt to make her more sympathetic to the audience. Notably, she is only pretending to be a war correspondent while she is actually searching for her lost brother who has joined the Lincoln Brigade. In Glazer’s adaptation she is, bizarrely, raped by Philip. She is thereby transformed from Hemingway’s female war correspondent into the conventional female rape victim of war. Despite the rape, Glazer’s Dorothy falls in love with Philip, a response that the audience is expected to approve. For a discussion of Glazer’s version as compared to Hemingway’s, see {{harvtxt|Fellner|1986|pp=5–30}}.}} Just as Philip has volunteered for the duration, so too, it would seem, has Dorothy. But she is better able to assimilate fantasy and reality, nighttime and daytime, home front and war front, into a complex whole. For Dorothy, the conversations about other places are “just ''playing'',”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=62}} a kind of bedtime story ritual. Realist to his romantic, she accepts the constraints placed on them by their mutual presence at the war: “But can’t we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we aren’t going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=63}}

wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw.”{{sfn|Gelhorn|1978|p=22}} In a 1945 ''Collier''’s article describing the end of World War II in Europe, “You’re on Your Way Home,” Gellhorn writes that “the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=389}}

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 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.