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

Martha Gellhorn came to recognize the dilemma that inevitably resulted when modern men were attracted to modern women for qualities that they {{pg|397|398}} would abjure in a wife, playing it for comedy in the 1945 play she and Virginia Cowles wrote, ''Love Goes to Press'' (originally titled ''Men Must Weep'' and then, with wonderful ambiguity, ''Take My Love Away''). The two female protagonists, Annabelle Jones (based on Gellhorn) and Jane Mason (based on Cowles), are successful war correspondents who report from the front lines of World War II, when “any decent woman would stay at home” according to Philip, the British Public Relations Officer and Jane’s love interest.{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=10}} Joe Rogers, war correspondent and Annabelle’s ex-husband, “says war’s no place for a woman” according to his new fiancée, actress Daphne Rutherford.{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=14}} She is entertaining the troops rather nearer to the front line than she had expected, and he promises to “bundle [her] up and send [her] straight off to America where it’s safe.”{{sfn|Gellhorn|Cowles|1995|p=14}}

<blockquote> The fact is, of course, that being female is a definite occupational handicap for a war correspondent, and both Jane and Annabelle know it. But because their womanhood is something that they have never been allowed to forget, they have great fun flaunting it. With a perfect understanding of the currency of power, they turn a handicap to their own advantage in repeated acts of subversion that the authors exploit to comic effect.{{sfn|Spanier|1995|p=82-83}} </blockquote>

In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, “It is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than ever.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=90}}''Letters''

Jane briefly thinks that what she herself wants is marriage to Philip, who suddenly expresses admiration for her independence and professionalism as a war correspondent. But soon he says, “I can’t have you going to the front any more. . . [because] you’re mine now.”{{sfn|Gellhorn and Cowles|1995|p=60}} He sabotages her work by arranging for her to sleep through an attack she is to report, and he makes plans to send her to his family home in England. This last is too much for Jane. She is appalled by his description of the life his mother and sister lead there—notably, not because she finds it trivial, but rather because the riding and hunting, the bee-keeping and cow-tending, the war committees and the uniformed “land army” all require a different sort of courage and a different set of talents than she possesses.{{sfn|Gellhorn and Cowles|1995|p=76}} She is horrified to discover, for example, that there are no “field dressing station[s]” at fox hunts, and she bewails the fact that “there’s no one to pick up the wounded.”{{sfn|Gellhorn and Cowles|1995|p=69, 64}} Imagining a future where she will be “kicked by horses and stung by bees and finally die of mastitis from a cow,” she envies Annabelle whom she envisions “in a lovely dry dug-out somewhere.”{{sfn|Gellhorn and Cowles|1995|p=73, 69}} Jane changes her mind about marrying Philip and lights out for the territory—to Burma, in fact, with Annabelle, to report on the war front there.