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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 warfare by modern technology, see my ''Medievalist Impulse'' 163–83. </ref> {{sfn|Moreland|1996|p=267}} On the other hand, he also expressed anger at the strange new kind of woman who was invading the male war front, displacing his anger onto the personal behavior of individual women and expressing it dramatically by his characterization of his female protagonists. He thereby transformed geopolitical war into what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” {{sfn|Baker|1969|p=481-482}}. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar brilliantly explore in their ''No Man’s Land'' trilogy, the sexual struggle initiated by the suffrage movement of the mid-nineteenth century became “a key theme in late Victorian literature and ultimately a shaping element in modernist and post-modernist literature. . . [such that] writers increasingly represented women’s unprecedented invasion of the public sphere as a battle of the sexes.”{{sfn|Gilbert|1988-1994|p=1:4}}{{pg|371|372}} Hemingway thus valorizes in ''Farewell'' the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in ''Fifth Column'' the female war correspondent who refuses to leave the war front of Madrid when her lover directs her to do so. Not one war but two—the geopolitical and the sexual—are thus fought in the pages of Hemingway’s works.
-The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote ''Farewell'' some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote ''Fifth Column'' while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram” (455), citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos”(265). Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of ''The Nation'', “There is no front. Madrid is the front” (202). The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled ''A Play'' in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.
+The composition circumstances of the novel and play are markedly different. Hemingway wrote ''Farewell'' some ten years after World War I had ended in victory for the Allies. The years between the war’s conclusion and the novel’s composition provided time for reflection on the war’s meaning. Hemingway’s post-war novel offered the opportunity to call the war itself into question—in effect, to argue against the war while not endangering the chance of victory. In contrast, Hemingway wrote ''Fifth Column'' while living in war-ravaged Madrid at the Hotel Florida, some fifteen blocks from the front. Ronald Fraser sums up many first-person accounts in his oral history by noting that Madrid was “the only city where you could go to the front by tram,” {{sfn|Fraser|1979|p=455}} citing an interview subject as remembering that conductors called out “To the front—five céntimos”(265). Peter Wyden notes that secret-police chief Alexander Orlov once told war correspondent Louis Fischer of ''The Nation'', “There is no front. Madrid is the front” (202). The Hotel Florida was shelled over thirty times in the fall of 1937 while Hemingway was drafting his play, during the second and longest of his four wartime visits to Spain (completing a clean typescript manuscript titled ''A Play'' in Madrid on 23 November 1937, and revising the manuscript in Key West in the summer of 1938, between his third and fourth visits to Spain). Published in October 1938, the play was largely a propaganda vehicle designed to encourage American sympathy for the Republican cause, which might result in a change in American policy that would allow the sale of war material to Republican Spain. It was thus necessary that Philip Rawlings choose war over love, else the play would have seemed to support the American neutrality policy.
 Perceptions about World War I and the Spanish Civil War were also markedly different. The causes of World War I were murky, the conduct of the war disconcerting because traditional ways of battle had been rendered obsolete, and the meaning of the Allied victory in this war of attrition was unclear. The only hope was that this was the war to end all wars—ironic, given that the Treaty of Versailles in effect set up the circumstances that led to World War II. Speaking for an entire generation, Hemingway’s Frederic {{pg|372|373}} Henry famously says, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (185)—in short, a slaughter without meaning or higher purpose.<ref group=Notes> Hemingway draws an equivalent relationship between the Chicago slaughterhouse and World War I, and then between the Spanish bullfight and the knightly tournament. He deconstructs the seeming equality of these sets of terms, revealing the hierarchical relationship that always already obtains, the first set of terms being subordinated to the second set of terms. For an argument as to the central significance of these terms to an interpretation of ''Farewell'', see my “World War I.” </ref> As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous “separate peace” (243).