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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 Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in ''The Sun Also Rises'' and Catherine Barkley in ''A Farewell to Arms'', and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and “plain to the point of ugliness.”{{sfn|Garrison|1999|p=18}}  American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were “forbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman caller.”{{sfn|Villard|Nagel|1989|p=239}}
-Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|p=25}} Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|pp=117-118}} Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.{{efn|For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see {{harvtxt|Oates|1994|pp=148–158}} and {{harvtxt|Pryor|1987|pp=112–117}}.}} Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|p=152}} to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.
+Hemingway reflects these rules in ''A Farewell to Arms'' when Catherine describes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|p=25}} Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance.” {{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|pp=117-118}} Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.{{efn|For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see {{harvtxt|Oates|1994|pp=148–158}} and {{harvtxt|Pryor|1987|pp=112–117}}.}} Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that {{pg|384|385}} of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969a|p=152}} to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.
 The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous “doughnut dollies” operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingway’s Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than men—hence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.
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 During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal”{{sfn|Sorel|1999|p=xviii}} and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris.”{{sfn|Knightley|1975|p=127}}  Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,{{efn|Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}}''Gellhorn'' She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers.”{{harvtxt|Moorehead|2003|pp=221}}''Gellhorn''}} though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.
-It would seem that ''The Fifth Column''’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre- {{pg|385|386}} spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=82}}  But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=4}}—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969|p=5}} Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=33}} Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.
+It would seem that ''The Fifth Column''’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre- {{pg|385|386}} spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles?”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=82}}  But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=4}}—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=5}} Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=33}} Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.
 As soon as Philip falls in love with Dorothy, a romance that she boldly initiates, he demands that she “move out of this hotel and . . . go back to America.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=31}} But Dorothy refuses to leave, calling him an “impudent, impertinent man.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=31}} An independent woman, she need not comply with his demand that she return to the home front. That is, after all, the realm of wives, as evidenced by Preston’s wife, about whom he is “always going on,” according to Dorothy, who adds, “Let him go back to his wife and children if he’s so excited about them. I’ll bet he won’t.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1969b|p=25}}