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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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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}}
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 the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier (76, 85). In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?” (64)—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.
In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier.{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=76, 85}} In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising ''The Fifth Column'' in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?” (64)—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.


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”(qtd. in Trogdon 213), thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.
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”(qtd. in Trogdon 213), thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity.
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