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

Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in ''Green Hills of Africa,''{{sfn|Hemingway|1963|p=71}} women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls''. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, ''American Commander in Spain''. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines.”{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=78}} One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:

Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de {{pg|375|376}} combat.”{{sfn|Kert|1983|p=297}} His pun suggests woman’s dual role with regard to war—either party to it at the battle front as whore, or apart from it (that is, “hors de combat”) at the home front as wife. As Katharine Moon notes:

But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Republican soldiers were uncomfortable with the ''miliciana''. For the most part, men expected ''milicianas'' to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=49}}  One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side.”{{sfn|Thomas|1961|p=322, n.1}} Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=49}}

After a Republican decree was issued that forbade women from fighting at the front, the “''miliciana'' icon” reappeared, now a “symbol of Republican resistance” rather than a celebration of military heroines, which was used “to inspire men to serve their patriotic duty.”{{sfn|Coleman|1999|p=50}} The balance between the female home front and the male war front was thus reestablished, at least as a useful fiction.