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

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 33: / Line 33: @@
 <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.”{{sfn|Kert|1983|p=297 quote}} 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.”{{sfn|Kert|1983|p=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:
 <blockquote>Historical conditions of war and military occupation have helped foster socioeconomic conditions that have forced women and girls . . . into sexual labor for the military. In general, they have been grouped together as camp followers, women who have made their sexual and other forms of feminized labor, such as cooking and washing, available to troops either voluntarily or involuntarily.{{sfn|Moon|1999|p=210}}</blockquote>