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

Moon notes that “[camp-following] women belonged to the army, but they belonged to it in the same way they belonged to anything else—as domestic attachments.”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=275}} Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way,”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=14}} they were regarded as outsiders, historically marginalized though they traveled with and supported the army. Mayer notes that this community was class-inflected, such that officer’s wives were “ladies” who typically visited only during winter quarters and created a social life for the officers, while lower-class women not only traveled year- {{pg|376|377}} round with their men-folk but also necessarily worked to support themselves and their families, thus rendering them suspect since some female merchants inevitably “supplement[ed] their incomes by engaging in prostitution.”{{sfn|Mayer|1996|p=7}} Prostitutes from nearby and typically urban areas also saw encamped armies as commercial opportunities. Moon notes that “the degree to which military prostitutes’ lives have been controlled or regulated by the armed forces has depended on [a variety of factors],”{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=210}} and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military.”{{sfn|Herbert|1998|p=64}} In ''A Farewell to Arms'', Hemingway describes a relatively regulated degree of military control, Frederic observing that Gorizia has two separate “bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=5}} Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1929|p=64-65}}  

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.