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 attributes of the female protagonists of Hemingway’s two works also differ significantly, especially insofar as they reflect Hemingway’s attitudes toward the actual women on whom they were based. Catherine Barkley is based on Agnes von Kurowsky, Hemingway’s first love, a World War I nurse he asked to marry him during his convalescence under her care, who jilted him for an Italian artillery officer after Hemingway’s return to the American home front. The lyric passages of ''A Farewell to Arms'', especially in Switzer- land, reflect Hemingway’s love for Agnes, just as Catherine’s death (however {{pg|373|374}} tragic to Frederic) reflects Hemingway’s anger at Agnes’s betrayal, as does the bitter portrait of Luz in “A Very Short Story” (1925).
-Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.<ref> This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.</ref>
+Dorothy Bridges is based on Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover during the Spanish Civil War and later his third wife—once Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer had divorced, a long process whose conclusion was often in doubt, Pauline insistent on maintaining the marriage, and Hemingway wavering between his wife and his lover. The few lyric passages of ''The Fifth Column'' occur at night, when Philip expresses his love for Dorothy and asks her to marry him, a reflection of Hemingway’s own intensifying love for Martha. The daytime exchanges between Philip and Dorothy are marked by arguments and Philip’s contempt, reflecting Hemingway’s anger at Martha for threatening his domestic life with Pauline and their sons. In a telling hand-written letter to Martha in June 1943, Hemingway reminisced about their Spanish Civil War love affair and their subsequent marriage, about which she had hesitated, to his terrible distress. He thanked her for “interven[ing]” in his life, but he first wrote “interf” (that is, interfering) and then marked out this slip of the pen that unconsciously revealed his continuing ambivalence.<ref group=Notes> This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.</ref>
 Though the characterization of Dorothy Bridges is typically read only in relation to Hemingway’s personal and psychological struggle concerning Martha Gellhorn, it is also a reflection of Hemingway’s complicated attitude toward the appropriate role for women at a time of radical change that was simultaneously independent of and precipitated by modern warfare. While the “New Woman” in America and England had been demanding more political, economic, and social rights since the nineteenth century, the role women played in modern wars—notably World War I, when women were first encouraged to do “male” jobs to free men for the battle front—exacerbated this sense of entitlement. If not on the surface of the text, at the subtextual level Dorothy Bridges threatens a set of foundational categories more or less operative in the western world since the chivalric code of the Middle Ages—that is, the home front in binary opposition to the battle front. Love is for the home front, war is for the battle front. Women are for the home front, men for the battle front. Women are idealized because they symbolize the stakes of male combat, while men are realized by their role as combatants. According to this binary opposition, the role of “wife” is at the home front, away from the intensity of battle, which enables male self-realization while also encouraging an inevitable live-for-the-moment mentality that socially {{pg|374|375}} and morally justifies brief sexual liaisons. Melissa Herbert notes that “the military is a ‘gendered institution’ because soldiering has been about not only war, but being ‘a man’” (7), and she argues that “much of the strategy [designed to establish one’s status as soldier] seems to rely on being that which is not feminine”(8). To be a soldier in this sense is to not be a woman.
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 But the woman who goes willingly to war calls into question independently the boundary between women and war, between the private sphere of the home front and the public sphere of the war front. Perhaps that is why the Lincoln Battalion officer felt he had the right to rape Marion Merriman, simultaneously his commander’s wife and a corporal serving in what Marion herself called “woman-less war” (148). And perhaps that is why, over the centuries, whenever women have approached the war front their activities have been marginalized and dismissed, rendered historically invisible, as in the case of the camp-following communities except insofar as they have been reduced to the single identity of prostitute.
-While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.<ref> For an account of two disguised female soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who were discovered only after being wounded, see Brome 206–08. For an extended discussion of female soldiers in the American Civil War, see Leonard 99–272. </ref> From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.
+While women have historically served as soldiers, until comparatively recently they have done so only by disguising themselves as men, and they have most often been discovered only after being wounded. Most important is that these women-disguised-as-men remain largely disguised in the pages of history. Those who succeeded in their disguises were neither identified {{pg|377|378}} nor counted; those who died were regarded as aberrations whose freakishness was buried with them; those who were wounded were removed behind the lines and warned not to return to the battle front.<ref group=Notes> For an account of two disguised female soldiers in the Spanish Civil War who were discovered only after being wounded, see Brome 206–08. For an extended discussion of female soldiers in the American Civil War, see Leonard 99–272. </ref> From the male perspective, the more palatable motivation for such behavior was the search for a lover or husband, while less palatable was a desire to fight for the cause directly on the battle front rather than indirectly on the home front.
 Atypically, in the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, Republican women fought openly beside men: