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 |
LogansPop22 (talk | contribs) citations added |
||
| Line 32: | Line 32: | ||
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: | 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: | ||
<blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not. | <blockquote>I had to calm myself. This is a war, I told myself. Men are dying and maimed. This is my burden. . . . But should I tell Bob? . . . [I] finally concluded: I must not hurt Bob with this. No, this must be my secret burden. I cannot tell anyone—ever. I could not get the rape off my mind. But I went on with my work. I said nothing about the rape. The war filled Bob’s mind. I could not trouble him further, and I did not.{{sfn|Merriman|1986|p=148–49}}</blockquote> | ||
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” (quoted by Kert 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: | 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” (quoted by Kert 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: | ||