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
LogansPop22 (talk | contribs) citations added Tag: Manual revert |
Jules Carry (talk | contribs) m Minor fixes. |
||
| Line 9: | Line 9: | ||
| notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable) | | notes = publication or editor's notes (if applicable) | ||
| url = the short link to the article using prmlr.us (this link will be filled in by the editor)}} | | url = the short link to the article using prmlr.us (this link will be filled in by the editor)}} | ||
{{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. | |||
Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play ''The Fifth Column'', whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration” (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some {{pg|370|371}} place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez ''was''” (23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go” (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses. | |||
Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play ''The Fifth Column'', whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration” (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some {{pg|370|371}} place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez ''was''”(23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go” (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses. | |||
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. | 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. | ||
| Line 173: | Line 167: | ||
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. | 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. | ||
=== | ==Citations== | ||
{{reflist}} | {{reflist}} | ||
== | ==Works Cited== | ||
{{Refbegin}} | {{Refbegin}} | ||
* {{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=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=Beevor |first=Antony |date= |title=The Spanish Civil War |url= |location=New York |publisher=Peter Bedrick Books, 1983 |pages= |ref=harv }} | ||
| Line 224: | Line 216: | ||
* {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |author-mask=1 |date= |title=The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=UP of Virginia, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Moreland |first=Kim |author-mask=1 |date= |title=The Medievalist Impulse in American Literature: Twain, Adams, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway |url= |location=Charlottesville |publisher=UP of Virginia, 1996 |pages= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |date= |title=''Hemingway's'' The Fifth Column ''and the Question of Ideology'' |url= |location=North Dakota |publisher=Quarterly 60.2, 1992 |pages=159-184 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Nakjavani |first=Erik |date= |title=''Hemingway's'' The Fifth Column ''and the Question of Ideology'' |url= |location=North Dakota |publisher=Quarterly 60.2, 1992 |pages=159-184 |ref=harv }} | ||
{{Review}} | |||
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hemingway and Women at the Front: Blowing Bridges in The Fifth Column, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Other Works}} | |||
[[Category:Articles (MR)]] | |||