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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In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargain,”{{sfn|qtd. in Trogden|1999|p=213}} thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity. | In both characterization and structure, then, the play works against the recognition of Dorothy as a serious woman, a competent journalist, a war correspondent. Malcolm Cowley asserted in his review of the play that “if Philip hadn’t left her for the Spanish people, he might have traded her for a flask of Chanel No. 5 and still have had the best of the bargain,”{{sfn|qtd. in Trogden|1999|p=213}} thereby wittily suggesting her triviality, decorative quality, and stereotypical femininity. | ||
But just as Dorothy does not catch on to Philip’s secret life, perhaps neither does Philip catch on to Dorothy’s. Though she is never represented as writing, only once sitting down at her typewriter and then only for a moment (as though to emphasize her disengagement from it), she somehow writes three articles during the play’s time period, not merely the one article whose potential completion Preston doubts, saying, “You never do work anyway.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} Philip shares this judgment, labeling her | But just as Dorothy does not catch on to Philip’s secret life, perhaps neither does Philip catch on to Dorothy’s. Though she is never represented as writing, only once sitting down at her typewriter and then only for a moment (as though to emphasize her disengagement from it), she somehow writes three articles during the play’s time period, not merely the one article whose potential completion Preston doubts, saying, “You never do work anyway.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} Philip shares this judgment, labeling her “lazy.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=83}} In the final scene of the play she is presented in the stage directions as returning “home”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=81}} to her room at the Hotel Florida—but from where? Her activ- {{pg|391|392}} ities outside the confines of her room, if occasionally referenced, are never dramatized like Philip’s. | ||
Yet Dorothy clearly goes out on her own in besieged Madrid when no one (neither the playwright, nor the other characters, nor the audience) is “watching,” and her criticism of Preston for writing articles without visiting the battle front suggests one of her probable destinations. She tells Philip at one point, “You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=57}}—a claim that Philip himself could have made yet to which he does not react. Just as his career requires him to act silly, so too perhaps does hers, for it cannot have been easy to be one of only a few female correspondents in the male realm of war. Indeed, Philip’s cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothy’s Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philip’s manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothy’s manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.{{efn|For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see {{harvtxt|Nakjavani|1992|pp=159-184}}. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavani’s argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).}} Though she earlier claimed that she didn’t “understand anything that is happening here,” she follows up by commenting, “I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera—and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=5}} She cites four critical locations, neighborhoods and suburbs of Madrid where the Nationalist enemy had been dug in since November 1936, sites of horrific battles between Republican militias (soon supported by the International Brigades) and the Nationalist Army that determined whether Madrid would stand or fall. Madrid suffered mightily, but La Pasionaria’s cry "No Pasarán”—“They shall not pass”—became the city’s watchword. For the rest of the war, the Nationalists maintained their positions on the outskirts of Madrid, shelling the city and inhibiting the movement of supplies, while Madrid held fast despite terrible punishment until the very end. It was a “City of Anguish” as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed “dreadful,” as Dorothy asserts in her understated idiom (and as Robert Jordan recollects in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', having fought at Usera and Carabanchel himself). And she keeps her promise to write “just as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit better.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} | Yet Dorothy clearly goes out on her own in besieged Madrid when no one (neither the playwright, nor the other characters, nor the audience) is “watching,” and her criticism of Preston for writing articles without visiting the battle front suggests one of her probable destinations. She tells Philip at one point, “You know I’m not as silly as I sound, or I wouldn’t be here”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=57}}—a claim that Philip himself could have made yet to which he does not react. Just as his career requires him to act silly, so too perhaps does hers, for it cannot have been easy to be one of only a few female correspondents in the male realm of war. Indeed, Philip’s cynical comments and bored manner find their corollary in Dorothy’s Vassar idiom and equally bored manner. Just as Philip’s manner masks his deadly seriousness as a counterespionage agent, so may Dorothy’s manner mask her own seriousness as a war correspondent.{{efn|For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see {{harvtxt|Nakjavani|1992|pp=159-184}}. His argument differs from mine, however, insofar as he focuses narrowly on ideology and politics, associating Dorothy with ideology (a positive value in Nakjavani’s argument) and Max with politics (a negative value).}} Though she earlier claimed that she didn’t “understand anything that is happening here,” she follows up by commenting, “I understand a little bit about University City, but not too much. The Casa del Campo is a complete puzzle to me. And Usera—and Carabanchel. They’re dreadful.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=5}} She cites four critical locations, neighborhoods and suburbs of Madrid where the Nationalist enemy had been dug in since November 1936, sites of horrific battles between Republican militias (soon supported by the International Brigades) and the Nationalist Army that determined whether Madrid would stand or fall. Madrid suffered mightily, but La Pasionaria’s cry "No Pasarán”—“They shall not pass”—became the city’s watchword. For the rest of the war, the Nationalists maintained their positions on the outskirts of Madrid, shelling the city and inhibiting the movement of supplies, while Madrid held fast despite terrible punishment until the very end. It was a “City of Anguish” as Edwin Rolfe titled one of his Spanish Civil War poems. These battle sites were indeed “dreadful,” as Dorothy asserts in her understated idiom (and as Robert Jordan recollects in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', having fought at Usera and Carabanchel himself). And she keeps her promise to write “just as soon as [she] understand[s] things the least bit better.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1968|p=10}} | ||