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One of the central issues on which critics of A Farewell to Arms focus is the vexed relationship between love and war, a response Hemingway invites with his punningly ambiguous title. Certainly Frederic Henry rejects the arms of war in his “separate peace” (243), an act of desertion validated by the confused and murderous actions of the Italian officers in the army he serves. Yet Frederic is also pulled from the arms of war by the arms of love in the person of Catherine Barkley. The two flee the war arena—she abandoning her post as nurse in the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan—for a safe retreat in neutral Switzerland, an idyllic haven that protects them from wartime reality. That Frederic must ultimately say farewell to the arms of love when Catherine dies in childbirth is tragedy of a different order from his first farewell—existential or perhaps ontological tragedy, the tragedy of life itself, not the sociopolitical tragedy of war.
Some nine years later Hemingway revisits this same vexed relationship in his 1938 play The Fifth Column, whose setting is the Spanish Civil War. Whereas Frederic Henry ultimately chooses love over war, Philip Rawlings chooses war over love, declaring, “We’re in for fifty years of undeclared wars and I’ve signed up for the duration” (80). He rejects his lover Dorothy Bridges, along with her fantasy of sharing “a long, happy, quiet life at some
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place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez was”(23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, he embraces the wartime reality, declaiming, “Where I go now, I go alone, or with others who go there for the same reason I go” (83). Loyalty to his comrades in arms supersedes loyalty to his lover, whom he pointedly stops calling “comrade” in a politically and emotionally significant act. Not a separate peace but voluntary enlistment “for the duration” is the fate Philip Rawlings chooses.
Why love over war in the novel and war over love in the play? Independent critical discussions of the two works point to several explanations, including differing composition circumstances, differing perceptions of the wars’ meanings, and differing characterizations of the female protagonists. These three reasons deserve brief discussion here because they point to an additional issue that has not been discussed in this context, that of the increasing breakdown of the boundary between the foundational western categories of “home front” and “war front.” This breakdown had two causes. One cause was the increasing penetration of the home front by so-called total war, which was enabled by changing military technology and a concomitant changing ethic of war. Another cause was the increasing penetration of the war front by women in various professional roles—a change less abstract, more personalized, than the first. As home front and war front became increasingly difficult to distinguish, confusion and anger inevitably resulted.
Hemingway’s significance as a cultural icon reveals itself in his own confusion at this breakdown of boundaries. On the one hand, he repeatedly expressed anger at the impersonal forces of technology that characterize the “strange new kind of war” represented in all his war fiction [1] (“New Kind” 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” (Baker 481–82). 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”
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(1:4). 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.
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
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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.[2] As such, Frederic Henry is justified in making his famous “separate peace” (243).
In contrast, the Spanish Civil War was “a most passionate war” (Thomas 616), indeed a cause célèbre perceived as a fight for the soul of Spain and ultimately that of the world. Those who sympathized with the democratically elected Republican government of Spain regarded the war as a conflict between freedom and tyranny, offering an opportunity to stop fascism (most immediately in the person of General Franco and the rebellious Spanish Army, which was supported with material and men by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). A war to determine who would govern Spain—in this regard “a conflict small enough to be comprehensible to individuals” (Thomas 616)—it was more largely an ideological war, a war of competing belief systems. The Loyalists who supported the Republican government included a complicated coalition of Spanish and foreign communists, socialists, syndicalists, anarchists, and democratic liberals, ultimately subsumed into the Popular Front.[3] Moreover, both sides regarded the war as important not only in itself and for what it represented, but also for what it presaged—either the containment of fascism, or its expansion and a resultant world war. Everyone involved knew that the war’s outcome would profoundly matter to the course of history. To make a “separate peace” from the Spanish Civil War, as indeed England and France in effect had done via the Non-Intervention Pact and America via a revision of the Neutrality Act, would unwittingly encourage the triumph of fascism, the destruction unleashed by another world war, and the possible end of political freedom and self-determination in the modern world. In these terms, it is unthinkable that Philip Rawlings not commit himself to the fight “for the duration.”
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
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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.[4]
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
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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.
Historically, the visible roles for women in the male arena of war have been limited. Always, of course, and especially in civil wars (“the best war for a writer,” Hemingway claims in Green Hills of Africa [71]), women have been war victims, often victims of rape, whereby the woman’s body is regarded as enemy property to be looted, or as enemy military terrain to be invaded and conquered, as is Maria’s body by the Nationalist soldiers in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Women are even at risk from their own army, whose soldiers may regard use of the female body as rightful recompense for placing their own bodies on the line. Marion Merriman, the wife of Robert Merriman of the Lincoln Battalion, who was the figure on whom Hemingway based Robert Jordan, recounts her own rape by a Lincoln Battalion officer in her 1986 memoir, American Commander in Spain. Having traveled to Spain to nurse her husband after his first wounding, she chose to remain with him in the only way possible, International Brigade officials allowing her to enlist “if [she] would promise to never, under any circumstances, try to get to the front lines” (78). One of only two American women actually in the Lincoln Battalion (women comprising a majority of the staff of the twenty-five-or-so American medical units), she was assigned largely to office duties, at one point making an official trip with two officers under her husband’s command. She recounts her thoughts after one of her fellow officers raped her in the night:
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. (148–49)
Just as women historically, if often silently, have been war victims, so too have women historically functioned, in Hemingway’s term, as ‘‘whores de
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combat” (quoted by Kert 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:
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 (210).
In her study of camp followers in the American Revolution, Holly Mayer reminds us that camp followers should be understood broadly as the men and women who “live[d] and work[ed] with the military” (1). They traditionally formed part of the European and American military communities, supplying many of the support services (transportation, nursing, laundry, food and other supplies) that were gradually absorbed into the military itself only beginning in the eighteenth century. The increasing professionalization of the army in the nineteenth century resulted in the decline of the camp-following community in which women, especially of the lower classes, had played a significant if historically unremarked role from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. This military change was supported by the nineteenth-century “cult of true womanhood” or “cult of domesticity,” which vigorously delineated the female and male spheres as private and public, respectively. In short, the boundary between home front and war front has always already existed in western society, and simultaneously it has been permeable to a greater or lesser extent.
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”(275). Typically ordered to “accompany the baggage and stay out of the way” (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-
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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” (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]” (210), and Herbert asserts that “historically, in many instances prostitution was organized, or at the very least made available, by the military” (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” (5). Rinaldi alludes to “bad administration,” complaining that “for two weeks now they haven’t changed [the girls, who have become] . . . old war comrades” (64-65).
It would seem that rape victims and prostitutes represent ways in which the boundary between women and war is breached, but women in these two categories are essentially redefined as war booty and are therefore appropriated to the war front by men. In effect, the only women who belong at the war front are rape victims and prostitutes, and their place at the front is validated by men—more specifically, by male sexual activity, which reinforces the “masculinity [that is] . . . one mechanism by which men become soldiers” (Herbert 6).
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
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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.[5] 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:
The first masculine sphere to which women had access was the military one . . . due, primarily to the initial troop disorganization and, second, to the fact that the Republican army was formed of militia columns organized by trade unions and political parties without any military hierarchy. Thousands of women under arms and in female battalions, for example, took part in the defense of Madrid in November of 1936 (Coleman 48).
But once the crises of the first six months or so had passed and the militias were increasingly professionalized as the Popular Front army (this so-called militarization a micro-version of the historical professionalization of armies in the nineteenth century), the Republican leadership moved quickly to discourage women from functioning at the front lines as soldiers—notably, not so much for their own comfort or safety, but that of the male soldiers: “Republican soldiers were uncomfortable with the miliciana. For the most part, men expected milicianas to do kitchen and laundry duties and to act as nurses” (Coleman 49). One International Brigade soldier, for example, was “infuriated” by a women’s battalion that was fighting before the Segovia Bridge, for “women at the battle seemed to him the final degradation of the Republican side” (Thomas 322, n. l). Because such responses testified to male embarrassment and threatened the destruction of male morale, Republican officials launched a propaganda campaign whose slogan was “Men to the front / Women to the home front” (quoted by Coleman 49).
The Republican propaganda effort had a harsher side as well, the milicianas soon publicly redefined as prostitutes who endangered the army by transmitting sexual diseases. Allen Guttmann notes that the contemporary British and American publics were “fascinated by the females who fought
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with the Spanish militia in the early days of the war” (11), and he notes the pornographic combination of sex and violence in the overheated press descriptions of the milicianas as “Red Amazons, many of them actually stripped to the waist, carrying modern rifles, and with blood in their eye,” and as “supple-hipped Carmens of the Revolution, [who] for want of roses, toss bombs as they whirl”(quoted by Guttmann 11, 12). Hemingway offers a variation on this perspective in For Whom the Bell Tolls: “The twenty-three-year-old mistress [of the Republican officer] was having a baby, as were nearly all the other girls who had started out as milicianas in the July of the year before” (399).
After a Republican decree was issued that forbade women from fighting at the front, the “miliciana icon” reappeared, now a “symbol of Republican resistance” rather than a celebration of military heroines, which was used “to inspire men to serve their patriotic duty” (Coleman 50). The balance between the female home front and the male war front was thus reestablished, at least as a useful fiction.
But in point of fact, the “total war” strategy that Nazi Germany was practicing in Spain meant that besieged Madrid (and later Barcelona, as well as the infamous Guernica and other less famous towns) was itself a war front where women died daily without the opportunity to fight for the Cause or even to defend themselves. Martha Gellhorn observes in The Face of War, a collection of her war correspondence, that “what was new and prophetic about the war in Spain was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them The people of the Republic of Spain were the first to suffer the relentless totality of modern war” (22). Gellhorn describes her arrival in Madrid as follows: “I had not felt as if I were at a war until now. [The] whole city was a battlefield” (20-21). Marion Merriman describes the combination of terror and frustration engendered by her own trip to Madrid: “In the trenches I had been nervous but not afraid. That was war. In the city I felt defenseless, trapped. In the city the bombing was a deep personal affront, with no reprisals except a soul-shaking hatred There was no way to fight back”(139). Gellhorn similarly describes “this helpless war in the city,” where women cannot fight back but can only scatter for cover “professionally, like soldiers” (Face 32, 43).
Though the milicianas were banned from the battle front, guerrillerinas continued to work behind the fascist lines, as Maria Teresa Toral describes in her historical account, providing at great personal risk “aid to the
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wounded, to the hungry, to the sick guerrilla, who had descended from the sierra to the village” (308). In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway creates an unforgettable portrait of a guerrillerina in the sympathetic and psychologically complex character of Pilar. A miliciana like many other women at the start of the war, she participated in her lover Pablo’s takeover of their village for the Republicans. When the fascists retook the village, she fled into the mountains as the only female member of Pablo’s guerrilla band, not providing food and nursing care to guerrillas who had descended to the village, as Toral describes, but participating in sabotage activities like Robert Jordan’s blowing of the bridge. Though General Golz had noted that “the more irregular the service, the more irregular the life” (8), Pilar is a most irregular figure indeed. She announces, “Here I command” as she accepts “the allegiance. . . given [by the guerrillas]” once they lose confidence in the increasingly unstable Pablo (55, 53). She is admired as a model of courage by Robert Jordan: “You’re shaking, like a Goddamn woman. What the hell is the matter with you? . . . I’ll bet that Goddamn woman up above isn’t shaking. That Pilar” (437).
An admirable figure, Pilar is constructed by Hemingway as simultaneously revolutionary and conventional in her military role. While her aberrance draws the most attention, it is her conventionalism that is ultimately most telling. Certainly her physical presence is unusual. She is massive, ugly, even masculine in appearance (in this regard reminiscent of the female soldiers who have historically disguised themselves as men), and she sexually admires both Robert and Maria. Her Gypsy blood is invoked throughout the novel as an explanation of her sexual power and her supernatural ability to read the future and smell death. Having been the lover of three matadors, among more casual liaisons, before becoming Pablo’s woman, she has “the heart of a whore,” according to Pablo (53). When she describes her years of traveling with the matadors, she represents herself as a camp-follower of sorts, typically describing the women present as “gypsies and whores of great category” (185).
Pilar’s status as guerrilla leader is unusual not only in terms of history but also Hemingway’s canon. But she supplants Pablo only after Robert Jordan arrives, serving largely as symbolic leader while Jordan acts as operational leader. When Pablo returns after having deserted and sabotaged the band, Pilar largely cedes her authority to him, sympathizing with his need to appear as leader before the men he has newly recruited to help blow the
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bridge. So by the end of the novel, Pilar willingly shares with Pablo the role of symbolic leader and Jordan continues as operational leader until Pablo takes charge of the band’s escape.
Provocatively, Pilar’s combat activities are never dramatized in the novel, despite her putative role as guerrilla leader. For example, though she identifies herself as an active participant in the initial Republican takeover of her town, thereby sharing moral responsibility for its excesses, her description reveals her to have functioned largely as an observer. She watches Pablo execute the four guardia civiles. She stands in the gauntlet through which fascists run to their death though she never wields a flail. She leaves the gauntlet to watch from a bench after becoming sickened by the action. She does not enter the bullring where the remaining fascists are imprisoned, instead witnessing their execution while standing on a chair. Even then she misses the final horrific events because the chair breaks. Pilar sums up her experience by unconscious reference to her role as witness rather than participant: “That was the end of the killing of the fascists in our town and I was glad I did not see more of it” (126, emphasis mine).
As a member of the guerrilla band, she participates in the dynamiting of a train, but the only action of Pilar that is actually represented involves her rescue of Maria, who is being transported to prison.[6] Pilar insists that the guerrillas carry Maria away, beating them when they want to drop her during the dangerous retreat, and also carrying Maria herself. Even during Jordan’s military action, when Pilar directs her own small band above the bridge, separate from Pablo and his small band below the bridge, she is never represented in actual battle (even though gunfire is reported from her position), in contrast to the male characters whom we actually see shooting at the enemy—Robert, Anselmo, Rafael, even Pablo shooting ineffectually at a tank. In short, we never see Pilar in the act of shooting a gun, only holding a gun, carrying a gun, or reloading guns for the men. Instead, Pilar is almost always represented performing domestic activities—cooking, cleaning, sewing. When Pilar declares herself leader, Pablo grudgingly cedes his position while simultaneously undermining her power by commanding her to perform her domestic duty: “‘All right. You command,’ he said. ‘And if you want he [Jordan] can command too.’ . . . He paused. ‘That you should command and that you should like it. Now if you are a woman as well as a commander, that we should have something to eat’” (56–57).
In representing Pilar in a military role, whether as miliciana or guerrille-
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rina, Hemingway clearly presents her as sympathetic and admirable, yet he also restricts his representation of her actions to the domestic sphere, ignoring dramatically her military actions as though they were unthinkable or inappropriate—indeed, not to be witnessed. Moreover, insofar as Pilar is represented as a woman comfortable at the battle front, she is represented as a whore—sexually knowledgeable, widely experienced, at ease describing herself in the company of prostitutes, indeed at ease hearing herself described in rough language by the male guerrillas and using such language herself. She is located in binary opposition to Maria, the virgin raped by Nationalist soldiers, who is simultaneously part of and apart from the guerrilla band.
Tellingly, Pilar wants to send Maria, whom she has nursed back to sanity, to a “home” (32, 70)—that is, to the home front. Robert Jordan first promises to send her to a home for war orphans that also provides shelter for female war victims, but when he falls in love with her, he determines instead to locate a home in Madrid and later Montana for her to inhabit as his wife. Agustin tells Jordan that “Pilar has kept her away from all as fiercely as though she were in a convent of Carmelites,” carefully explaining, “Because she sleeps with thee she is no whore. You do not understand how such a girl would be if there had been no revolution She is not as we are” (290–91).
In one sense, Hemingway presents in Pilar a revolutionary portrait of a woman active as a soldier at the front, indeed behind enemy lines. Yet in another sense he invokes the familiar stereotype of the female at the battle front as whore (indeed, whore with a heart of gold), while invoking in his portrait of Maria the other familiar stereotype of rape victim. These two women in the otherwise male guerrilla band thus represent the only two historically visible roles for women at war. Moreover, even Pilar is restricted dramatically to the domestic sphere, as Maria always is (to the degree that is possible given the constraints of her environment). Paradoxically, Hemingway participates by these strategies in the historical erasure of women other than the whore and the rape victim from the war front, despite his seemingly revolutionary portrait of Pilar as guerrilla leader.[7]
But this ongoing historical erasure was countered, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, by the emergence of new professional roles for women at war. The New Woman was first incarnated on the battlefield as the female war nurse.[8] This new development was marked in England by the Crimean
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War (1853–56) and in the United States by the American Civil War (1861–1865). In part, this new female identity developed in response to the actions of men who were themselves creating a new male identity, that of the war correspondent. William Howard Russell of the London Times is most often cited as the first war correspondent, though other challengers inevitably exist. It was the reporting of Russell and several others, for example Edwin Lawrence Godkin and especially Thomas Chenery, that roused the English public to outrage over the despicable conditions of the British army in the Crimea, especially regarding medical care.[9] Florence Nightingale responded to the request for nursing aid (female nurses from France were already on scene), and her “aristocratic background” and “social and political connections” enabled her to overcome the prejudice against sending female nurses to the field (Garrison 12). But the nurses nonetheless suffered under public charges of immodesty and worse—that is, sexual promiscuity and prostitution—because they breached the boundary between home front and war front. They left the private for the public sphere, even though they did so while practicing the traditionally female actions of nurturing and caretaking, often fulfilling specifically domestic functions such as cooking and cleaning. In this regard, Hemingway’s Pilar is ironically like them.
Nightingale and her party of thirty-eight women constituted “an historic deputation which established a precedent for women determined to serve as nurses in military hospitals, and became the model for respectable female Sanitarians [members of the US Sanitary Commission, a volunteer organization established during the American Civil War] as they entered a male environment previously forbidden to them”(Garrison 13). In fact, the precedent was class-inflected, concerning middle- and upper-class women, since female camp-followers had long functioned as nurses in earlier wars, though their actions went unremarked (Mayer 219-23).
Like the female war nurses of the Crimea, those led by Dorothea Dix in the American Civil War largely remained behind the lines, though more often near the battle front. Katherine Prescott Wormely wrote of her experiences, “I see the worst, short of the actual battle-field, that there is to see” (131). Clara Barton responded yet more radically, providing independent nursing and relief services on the battle front itself. The middle- or upper- class status of these “ladies” rendered their wartime actions surprising on the one hand (why weren’t they satisfied rolling bandages in ladies’ aid societies?) yet also protected them to some degree from sexual gossip. As a
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mark of over-compensation, they were apostrophized as saints and angels, Nightingale known as “The Angel of the Crimea” and “The Lady with the Lamp,” and Barton as “The Angel of the Battlefield.” They were also apostrophized more domestically as mothers and sisters, which was especially appropriate for the many Roman Catholic nuns who served as nurses in the American Civil War.[10] Their vows of chastity and obedience rendered them particularly appealing to male authorities, notably doctors; female doctors were forbidden from serving—a situation that also obtained in World War I, though many female doctors found their way around American Expeditionary Force regulations by attaching themselves to volunteer organizations.[11]
Nightingale, Dix, and Barton are the direct ancestors of later female war nurses, among whom are the VADs (that is, the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British service auxiliary) like Hemingway’s Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms, and also like American Red Cross nurse Agnes von Kurowsky. To combat the potentially salacious reputation of female war nurses, they labored under strict rules of appearance and behavior. Dix required her nurses to be middle-aged and “plain to the point of ugliness” (Garrison 18). American Red Cross nurses serving in World War I were “forbidden to carry on serious romances, even to be alone with a gentleman caller” (Villard and Nagel 239).
Hemingway reflects these rules in A Farewell to Arms when Catherine de- scribes the restrictions on the nurses’ behavior at the hospital in Gorizia, only a mile from the front: “The Italians didn’t want women so near the front. So we’re all on very special behavior. We don’t go out”(25). Though the rules are more relaxed at the American Red Cross Hospital in Milan, Frederic notes that “they would not let us go out together when I was off crutches because it was unseemly for a nurse to be seen unchaperoned with a patient who did not look as though he needed attendance” (117-18). Increased personal freedom resulted inevitably, however, in increased sexual freedom, as represented in the actions of Catherine Barkley and Brett Ashley; indeed, Clara Barton’s intimate relationship with the married Colonel John Elwell, quartermaster for the Department of the South, is illustrative in this regard.[12] Of course, the same point about increased sexual freedom might be made about male soldiers. But only the female nurses labored under moral opprobrium, whether external or introjected, as Hemingway represents. It is no accident that the name of the sexually promiscuous Brett rhymes with that
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of the prostitute Georgette, nor that Jake Barnes confuses their voices. Similarly, Catherine Barkley voices the internal anxiety surrounding the new female role of wartime nurse when she says, “I never felt like a whore before” (152) to her patient-lover. Of course, he is more truly her impatient lover, whose return to the battle front results in her agreeing to a sexual encounter as atonement for her sexual refusal of her now-dead soldier-fiancé.
The type of position that Hemingway held with the American Red Cross as ambulance driver and canteen operator would be appropriated by women once America fully entered World War I. His volunteer service soon became an unwitting escape from the combatant role then urged upon healthy young American men; women were now encouraged to take on the non-combatant roles supervised by volunteer organizations like the Red Cross and YMCA, whose famous “doughnut dollies” operated canteens for the American doughboys fighting the war. By the end of the war, Hemingway’s Red Cross activities would have allied him more with the role of American women than men—hence, perhaps, his public exaggerations of his role on the Italian front and supposedly in the Italian army.
During the early twentieth century, another female figure publicly emerged at the battle front, one yet more troubling in terms of the prevailing paradigm since her activities could not be redefined as appropriately female because domestic: the female war correspondent. The first American woman to win accreditation from the War Department as an official war correspondent was Peggy Hull on 17 September 1918, but she was restricted from access to the battlefields of World War I (as were the few free-lance female correspondents); when the male correspondents realized the popularity of Hull’s stories about “the lives of the common soldier” away from battle, they “demanded her removal” (Sorel xviii) and she was “forced to spend the rest of the war in Paris” (Knightley 127). Some eighteen years later, the women who covered the Spanish Civil War were still small in number but free of official regulations governing their behavior. Outsiders in Spain creating a new professional role, they were little regulated as to dress or behavior (as were the later female correspondents of World War II, who were required to wear uniforms and forbidden access to the front lines,[13] though individual resourcefulness frequently overcame this official restriction). These female correspondents ranged as freely as their inclinations, abilities, and contacts enabled.
It would seem that The Fifth Column’s Dorothy Bridges is a war corre-
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spondent—how else to explain her residence in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, the presence of a large military map and war poster and typewriter in her room, and her announcement late in the play that she has “sent away three articles” (82)? But her lover Robert Preston, himself a war correspondent, calls her “a bored Vassar bitch” (4)—a change from the 1937 Madrid typescript where she is identified with Martha Gellhorn’s own Bryn Mawr. Rather than protesting, Dorothy agrees that she doesn’t “understand anything that is happening here” (5). Dorothy’s stereotypical characterization as a dumb blonde renders her presumed identity problematic. For example, Philip confusedly shouts, “Aren’t you a lady war correspondent or something? Get out of here and go write an article. This [the assassination of a Loyalist soldier in Philip’s room] is none of your business” (33). Her role as war correspondent cannot stand alone, but must be delimited by the modifier “lady”—or better yet relegated to the unnameable “or something.” But if the assassination of a soldier is not the business of a “lady” war correspondent, then what is? Indeed, what is the appropriate material for the article Philip directs her to write while simultaneously identifying what is off limits to her? In this telling scene, Philip places Dorothy in an untenable position because her identity and her subject matter remain unsayable. She fits into neither of the historically accepted categories of women at the battle front, prostitute or rape victim, nor into that of the more recently accepted category of nurse. But there she is nonetheless, at the war front instead of the home front, practicing it would seem the male profession of war correspondent.
As soon as Philip falls in love with Dorothy, a romance that she boldly initiates, he demands that she “move out of this hotel and . . . go back to America” (31). But Dorothy refuses to leave, calling him an “impudent, impertinent man” (31). An independent woman, she need not comply with his demand that she return to the home front. That is, after all, the realm of wives, as evidenced by Preston’s wife, about whom he is “always going on,” according to Dorothy, who adds, “Let him go back to his wife and children if he’s so excited about them. I’ll bet he won’t” (25).
Though Dorothy commits herself to remaining near the battle front, she has simultaneously worked to make her own room homey, and she makes over Philip’s adjoining room as well. In the context of the play, Dorothy’s redecoration of Philip’s room signals her desire to domesticate him, to lure him away from the war to the home front. Certainly that is how Philip interprets it. His ambivalence about this domestication is revealed by his dis-
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comfort in the redecorated room and by his conflicted responses to Dorothy. In the midst of the war, she has created a home front of sorts, a conflation that confuses Philip. He attempts to reestablish the division by associating nighttime with the home front and daytime with the war front, declaring during the night not only his love but more tellingly his desire to marry her, and repudiating these declarations during the day. Dorothy reacts to both nighttime and daytime pronouncements with equanimity, enjoying Philip’s nighttime fantasies which she also shares, yet recognizing them as such. When Philip rejects her at the end of the play, he does so because he fears he will be unable to withstand the temptation she represents to abandon the war front for the home front, a concern that his German comrade Max reinforces. But Philip’s rejection of Dorothy, however painful, does not result in her departure from Madrid.[14] Just as Philip has volunteered for the duration, so too, it would seem, has Dorothy. But she is better able to assimilate fantasy and reality, nighttime and daytime, home front and war front, into a complex whole. For Dorothy, the conversations about other places are “just playing” (62), a kind of bedtime story ritual. Realist to his romantic, she accepts the constraints placed on them by their mutual presence at the war: “But can’t we just go on now, as long as we have each other, I mean if we aren’t going to always keep on, and be nice and enjoy what we have and not be bitter?” (63).
In creating a home front at the war front, Dorothy does not split but compounds her loyalties, voluntarily remaining at home in war-torn Madrid. Gellhorn asserts in her 1959 Introduction to The Face of War: “War was our condition and our history, the place we had to live in” (viii). In making the war front their home, women were thus making themselves at home in the public sphere of the world at large. In “The War in Spain” section of The Face of War, Gellhorn specifies: “Thanks to Collier’s I had the chance to see the life of my time, which was war For eight years, I could go where I wanted, when I wanted, and write what I saw” (22). In a 1945 Collier’s article describing the end of World War II in Europe, “You’re on Your Way Home,” Gellhorn writes that “the war, the hated and perilous and mad, had been home for a long time too; everyone had learned how to live in it, everyone had something to do, something that looked necessary, and now we were back in this beautiful big safe place called home and what would become of us?” (qtd. in Sorel 389).
For women at the war front, now at home in the public sphere, what in
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fact was there to return to, since the home front was publicly defined by the presence of a waiting wife? Yet such a return was necessary if the balance between the male public sphere and the female private sphere was to be reestablished. Margaret Mead addressed this male anxiety, complaining about the “continuous harping on the theme: ‘Will the women be willing to return to the home?’’’ and noting the male self-interest involved in this particular skirmish between the sexes: “[This question was] repeated over and over again. . . by those to whose interest it will be to discharge women workers . . . as soon as the war is over” (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 3:214). The female war correspondent at the battle front was an extreme example of the millions of women who had entered the public sphere of war work, if most often on the home front.
Dorothy Bridges’ identity as female war correspondent is undermined not only by her characterization but by the very structure of the play, which rigidly confines her to the domestic sphere—a strategy that Hemingway later employed more subtly in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Act One, where Dorothy is prominent, has three scenes, all set at the Hotel Florida. Act Two, where Dorothy is less prominent, has only one scene set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, where two Loyalist soldiers are being interrogated for suspected treason, and at Chicote’s Bar, the hangout for International Brigade soldiers, prostitutes, and war correspondents. Act Three, where Dorothy is again less prominent, has two scenes set at the Hotel Florida; the other two scenes are set at Seguridad headquarters, and at a Republican artillery observation post that Philip and Max infiltrate. The active Philip’s scenes include not only those in his and Dorothy’s rooms at the Hotel Florida, but also those at Seguridad Headquarters, Chicote’s Bar, and the Republican observation post. In contrast, Dorothy is never presented outside of the Hotel Florida, almost always in her own room (only once entering Philip’s room). Indeed, she is most frequently seen in bed, for example “sleeping soundly” through Philip’s extended conversation with the hotel manager (16), “go[ing] back to sleep for just a little while longer” after waking for breakfast and conversation (26), pushed by Philip “toward the bed” in a protective gesture when the Loyalist soldier is shot in Philip’s room (33), eating breakfast in bed, reading in bed, lying in bed with Philip while she wears her new silver fox cape,[15] “asleep in bed” when Philip and Max discuss the initial failure of their counterespionage plan (55). Jeffrey Meyers de-
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scribes her with understandable hyperbole as “virtually narcoleptic” (318). The bed is Dorothy’s locus classicus, both defining and containing her.
In the second scene of the play, Dorothy easily switches her sexual loyalties from Preston to Philip, thereby introducing the motifs of loyalty and betrayal that suffuse the play. These motifs are appropriate given the complex politics of the Spanish Civil War, but also the complicated personal situation of Hemingway, who was emotionally torn between his wife and his lover. In an unlikely judgment, the prostitute Anita criticizes Dorothy for “tak[ing] a man just like you pick a flowers [sic]” (43). Dorothy casually rejects Preston, who makes bad puns and takes cover during shelling, in favor of Philip, who does not take cover but otherwise seems Preston’s inferior. A war correspondent who spends his time drinking and carousing rather than writing, he is certainly “livel[y]” (5), as Dorothy notes with approval, but not productive. On the other hand, she scorns Preston’s productivity since “he never goes to the front . . . [but] just writes about it” (20)—a scruple that suggests her own ethics concerning war correspondence. Of course, Dorothy does not know that Philip is deadly serious, his carousing a cover for counterespionage activities at which he is extraordinarily successful. In company with Max, he overcomes a Nationalist command post, kills multiple soldiers, captures a general and a political leader, and gains information that ultimately results in the capture of three hundred Fifth Columnists in Madrid. Petra the hotel maid explains that the Fifth Column is “the people who fight us from inside the city” (46). This term gained its historical currency from Nationalist General Mola who, “when asked by a group of foreign journalists which of his four columns he expected would take Madrid . .. replied, in words repeated incessantly during the . . . years of treachery and espionage since that time, that it would be that ‘Fifth Column’ of secret Nationalist supporters within the city” (Thomas 317)—a term that Hemingway’s play popularized. General Mola’s words unleashed in Madrid and elsewhere a charged atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia, which promoted a civil war within the civil war, given the uneasy coalition of political parties that eventually composed the Republic’s Popular Front.
That Philip, the seeming playboy-correspondent, is involved in something secret and serious is realized even by the idiot hotel manager, a point emphasized not in the 1937 Madrid typescript but in Hemingway’s 1938 Key West revision of the play. But dim Dorothy, who lives with Philip in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Florida, never suspects his other life, the resulting
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dramatic irony redounding always to Philip’s credit. Philip’s apologia for loving Dorothy sounds instead like an indictment: “Granted she’s lazy and spoiled, and rather stupid, and enormously on the make. Still she’s very beautiful, very friendly, and very charming and rather innocent—and quite brave” (44). While Dorothy is here damned by faint praise, Philip’s description calls his own values into question. Philip loves her because of her superficial qualities, only his appreciation of her bravery hinting at something deeper. In this sense, they are well matched, each largely drawn to the other because of physical size and sexual appeal. Dorothy is referred to as “that great big blonde” (41), and she is attracted by Philip’s sexual prowess,[16] noting that “he made me happier than anyone has ever made me” (47). When he throws her over, asserting, “You’re uneducated, you’re useless, you’re a fool and you’re lazy,” she responds, “Maybe the others. But I’m not useless” (83). She here indirectly refers to her sexual utility, which Philip identifies as “a commodity you shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (83). Hurt and angry, Dorothy retaliates by asking Philip, “Did it ever occur to you that you’re a commodity, too? A commodity one shouldn’t pay too high a price for” (84). Philip is amused, never having had to think of himself as a sexual object, indeed a whore (“commodity” an economic term saturated with Marxist significance). But Dorothy does not have the luxury of Philip’s laughter. She is psychologically vulnerable to the charge, for “women who push the boundaries of gender are censured for such behaviors” in gender- specific ways (Herbert 2). Just as the milicianas were figured forth as whores to discourage their presence at the front lines and to render them a familiar female type if they stayed, so too is Dorothy when she will neither leave the war front for the home front nor deny the interrelationship of war front and home front that she herself has created and represents.
The correlation between Dorothy and the whore would thus seem to be historically inevitable, a correlation that develops from the play’s very first short scene, which exists solely to provide a gloss on the play. A whore sees the sign on the door to Dorothy’s room: “Working. Do Not Disturb” (3). When she asks her soldier-customer to read it to her, he responds with contempt: “So that’s what I’d draw. A literary one. The hell with it” (3). She responds—to the sign? to his contempt?—with “a dry high, hard laugh,” asserting, “I’ll get me a sign like that too” (3). The stage goes dark and the scene ends, these allegorical characters disappearing forever, having provided their implicit commentary on all that follows.
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In the next scene Anita—“a Moorish tart” as the stage directions initially refer to her rather than by name—is brought by Philip to Dorothy’s room, where Anita objects to the sign because “all the time working, isn’t fair” (10). She insists that Dorothy give her the sign as a means of forestalling unfair competition. Anita is, in fact, in competition with Dorothy for Philip’s affections and his sexual favors. At one level, the play presents a choice between Dorothy and Anita. And the final scene of the play presents the high-minded Philip, having rejected Dorothy, initiating a sexual encounter with Anita. Sexuality without strings is preferable to the entanglements of love and marriage when one has committed oneself to fighting for the Cause, although this loveless encounter seems like torture to Max, who responds to it exactly as he does to an interrogation scene earlier (76, 85). In “Night Before Battle,” one of the Spanish Civil War stories that Hemingway blocked out while revising The Fifth Column in Key West, the only difference between “two American girls at the Florida [who are] newspaper correspondents” and two prostitutes is that a soldier must talk to the female war correspondents before sex, while he may simply pay the prostitutes for their sexual services (118). Max’s confused articulation of Dorothy Bridges’ name—“Britches?” (64)—reinforces her redefined identity as sexual object, indeed as whore.
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”(qtd. in Trogdon 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” (10). Philip shares this judgment, labeling her “lazy” (83). In the final scene of the play she is presented in the stage directions as returning “home” (81) to her room at the Hotel Florida—but from where? Her activ-
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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”(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.[17] 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”(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” (10).
Employing understatement like Philip’s own, Dorothy later comments to Philip in passing, “I work when you’re not around,” a claim that Philip could also make (57). Yet Philip has a history on which to draw to enact his role successfully, whereas Dorothy must create a new role without history’s support,
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rendering her circumspect as she defines this identity. Nancy Sorel notes of the women war correspondents who reported World War II—“fewer than a hundred in all” (xili)—that “every women felt vulnerable in regard to her professional status,” whether because of “discriminatory treatment by generals,” “denigrating remarks from hostile male reporters,” or unwanted romantic or sexual advances (xiv). Dorothy disguises her vulnerability at enacting her new role as war correspondent just as Philip does at enacting his role as counterespionage agent. But Dorothy has no one to talk to about her secret life, while Philip has Max, to whom he confides his doubts and fears, and even the hotel manager, to whom he confides information in a code they both understand. As Pilar tells Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, “Everyone needs to talk to someone. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor one could have one becomes very alone”(89). And secretly valorous Dorothy is in this regard far more alone than Philip.
In one sense, of course, Dorothy’s secret life is that of Martha Gellhorn. Accomplished journalist and author of two books, the novel What Mad Pursuit (1934) and the much-lauded fiction collection The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936), Gellhorn had considered covering the Spanish Civil War before she met Hemingway, who had come to a similar decision. His longtime marriage to Pauline Pfeiffer breaking down, he and Gellhorn quickly followed up on their initial attraction in Key West once they arrived separately in Spain in March 1937. Their mutual commitment to the Republican cause, her long-time admiration for him as a writer, her newfound appreciation for his talents as a war correspondent (including a tactical understanding of war and great personal courage), his ease at living in Spain, his willingness to teach an apt and adoring pupil—all combined with the intensity of war such that their love affair ignited almost immediately. During their four stays in Spain, Gellhorn often followed Hemingway about, whether in Madrid, to the front, or on longer battlefield trips around Spain. She actively participated with Hemingway and Joris Ivens in the filming of The Spanish Earth, a propaganda film for which Hemingway wrote the script and which he ultimately narrated. Because of her personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, Gellhorn was able to arrange for the film to be viewed by the Roosevelts at the White House, with her and Hemingway and Ivens in attendance to plead the cause of the Spanish Republic.
But Gellhorn also spent many days in Spain on her own, learning Span-
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ish, visiting hospitals, talking with the common people, traveling to other battlefields. She was smart enough to know that she did not know much about being a war correspondent, but she learned quickly under Hemingway’s apt tutelage (and that of fellow correspondents Herbert Matthews of the New York Times and Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express). In July 1937 she sent off her first article, under Hemingway’s prodding encouragement. Collier’s published it as “Only the Shells Whine,” a title that Gellhorn changed to “High Explosive for Everyone” in The Face of War.
Far from wanting Gellhorn to leave the dangerous arena of war, Hemingway wanted her to stay, for it was the locus of their love affair. Only after their affair was firmly established did he once briefly forbid her from accompanying him, telling her in Paris to wait there with the wife of war correspondent Vincent Sheean, since "Spain’s no place for women,” then promising to “phone to say whether ‘the women’ might come” (quoted by Wyden 450). Gellhorn did not wait for his approval to join him in Barcelona, thereby again demonstrating her independence.
Like Dorothy’s first lover Preston, Hemingway had a wife and children on the home front, and his coverage of the Spanish Civil War provided him with a reason to be away from his family as well as with an environment of danger and intensity where a shared cause subsumed any other differences, encouraging the pleasures of a sexual liaison without thoughts of consequences. Indeed, a wife and children seemed to preclude consequences. Hemingway demonstrates a degree of masculine self-awareness when he has Dorothy say, “Those wife-and-children men at war . . . just use them as sort of an opening wedge to get into bed with some one and then immediately afterwards they club you with them” (25).
Gellhorn most valued her comradeship with Hemingway as they worked together (thereby reversing the priorities of Dorothy and Philip, whose sexual relationship is primary and comradeship a farce). Gellhorn was an apt pupil, and Hemingway loved the role of teacher. His tutelage, born of hard experience, demonstrably influenced Gellhorn, who learned fast and with a gusto that delighted Hemingway, as did her courage.
Yet once Gellhorn and Hemingway were able to live together outside the war zone (even before his divorce was finalized), Hemingway resented Gellhorn’s continuing career as war correspondent because it resulted in what he viewed as her abandonment of him—for example, when she left him in 1939 at Sun Valley in order to cover the Russo-Finnish War. In effect, she thereby
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relegated him to the role of home-front wife. Having experienced that role long before during World War I, he must have feared being jilted again as Agnes had jilted him when he returned to the home front of Oak Park while she remained in Italy, and as he had recently jilted Pauline, who had begged to accompany him to Spain but whom he had insisted remain on the home front in Key West.
Hemingway hoped to keep Gellhorn “away from war, pestilence, carnage and adventure” (Letters 511). Nevertheless, shortly after their 1941 marriage she persuaded him to accompany her as a fellow war correspondent to the Far East (thereby reversing the power-relationship that had obtained between them in Spain), where she was to report for Collier’s on the China-Japan War as well as the defense of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies. Though Gellhorn tolerated the difficulties of this trip less well than did Hemingway, that did not quench her thirst for such assignments. While Hemingway remained at the Finca Vigía on the home front of Cuba, she traveled the Caribbean on assignment for Collier’s in 1942, investigating the impact of submarine warfare on the islands; the lack of action perhaps caused her to underestimate Hemingway’s own later submarine-hunting activities off Cuba and Bimini.[18]
When she left Hemingway in Cuba for the European theater of World War II in 1943, she begged him repeatedly to accompany her or to join her there, as in this letter of 9 December 1943: “I so wish you would come. I think it’s so vital for you to see everything; it’s as if it wouldn’t be entirely seen if you didn’t” (Letters 156). The insistent tone of her letters reveals her desperate desire to recapture their best time together—in Spain, at the Hotel Florida, both comrades, both dedicated to the same cause, both writing.
But Hemingway was comfortable at the Finca and satisfied with his sub-hunting adventures (which incorporated the counterespionage activities that he had invested in Philip Rawlings). He resented Gellhorn’s demands, partly because he was no longer her teacher, but more importantly because she was now his wife instead of his lover. He cabled her, “Are you a war correspondent or wife in my bed”(quoted by Moorehead, Gellhorn 212), thereby drawing an absolute boundary between the war front and home front, and announcing that he would no longer tolerate her conflation of the two. He desperately wanted her to return to the home front and to him, but after her repeated refusals he determined to go to the war front in 1944 in order to defeat her in the battle of the sexes their marriage had become. He wrote to
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her, “Will organize the house, close down boat, go to N.Y., eat shit, get a journalism job, which hate worse than Joyce would, and be over. Excuse bitterness”; in a letter shortly thereafter he labeled her “unscrupulous” and wrote, “Maybe will see you soon maybe not” (qtd. in Moorehead, Gellhorn 212). In his eyes she had betrayed him, and as he wrote in “Treachery in Aragon,” an article about the Spanish Civil War, “When one has become involved in a war there is only one thing to do: win it” (26). Thus he purposely did not travel with Gellhorn, instead flying to Europe while she was relegated to a twenty-day voyage on a dynamite-laden ship traveling through mined waters. World War II became a nightmare version of Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War dream.
In a matter of days, Hemingway met Mary Welsh, Martha’s opposite in appearance, social class, and temperament. Taking Mary’s attentions from fellow war correspondent and novelist Irwin Shaw in what must have been an ego-bolstering move, Hemingway almost immediately asked this female war correspondent to marry him, in yet another example of the repetition compulsion that structured so much of his life. And soon, despite serious doubts, Mary agreed, taking a leave of absence from her job that became permanent. Before the war had officially ended and while Martha was still covering it, Hemingway and Mary were together in Cuba. The only journalism that Mary ever wrote again concerned life with Hemingway on the home front.
Hemingway’s attitude toward the female war correspondent was complex, reflecting that of the culture at large with regard to women “at-home” in the public sphere. He knew a number of such New Women, among them Josephine Herbst (a longtime friend from 1920s Paris) and Virginia Cowles in the Spanish Civil War, and Helen Kirkpatrick and Lee Carson in World War II, along with Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh—women venturing into the heretofore male realm of war, venturing yet further into it than had the female nurses he had come to know during World War I. He admired their sexual independence and also their courage, since grace under pressure was an ideal appropriate for women as well as for men, and war provided the ultimate pressure-cooker in which grace could be measured. He married two female war correspondents.
Yet Hemingway came to resent the very qualities that had attracted him because he was fearful, not without reason, that these women would refuse to return permanently to the home front upon becoming his wife—an iden-
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tity to his mind that subsumed all others. When angry at Mary in later years, he called her a “camp-follower” (quoted by Kert 455), saying, “I haven’t fucked generals to get my information” (quoted by Whiting 20)—a sexually demeaning remark that redefined her war-front identity from war correspondent to whore while simultaneously signaling his uneasy sense of professional rivalry. In calling Mary “you goddamn smirking, useless female war correspondent” (quoted by Lynn 515), he indicted all female war correspondents because the adjective “female” is joined in this list by uniformly pejorative adjectives. And Hemingway’s indictment of Mary was an indictment of Martha Gellhorn, whose war correspondence he chose to criticize at one of their last meetings, knowing exactly how to hurt her. Indeed, it was an indictment of all those women whose positions at the home front had been compromised by their experiences at the war front, which were among the most exaggerated of the public-sphere activities in which modern women were involved. Such activities rendered them simultaneously more fascinating and more terrifyingly unpredictable to modern men.
Hemingway wrote a self-justifying letter to his adolescent son Patrick, explaining the breakdown of his marriage to Gellhorn while also preparing Patrick for his new relationship with Mary Welsh: “We want some straight work, not be alone and not have to go to war to see one’s wife and then have wife want to be in different war theatre in order that stories not compete. Going to get me somebody who wants to stick around with me and let me be the writer of the family” (Letters 576). He wrote similarly to his eldest son John, “[I] would swap her for two non beautiful [sic] wives I might occasionally have the opportunity to go to bed with”(Moorehead, Gellhorn 228). While Hemingway had gone to war to see his lover quite willingly, the change in Gellhorn’s identity from lover to wife was a sea-change that Hemingway could not get past because, by definition, wives were for the home front. Husbands might go to war as an act of self-realization, but wives should not, as he made very sure Mary understood. In his 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees, he provides a thinly veiled attack on Martha that doubles as a warning to Mary: “You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty,” Renata says to Colonel Cantwell about his former wife, adding, “You couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that” (212).
Martha Gellhorn came to recognize the dilemma that inevitably resulted when modern men were attracted to modern women for qualities that they
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would abjure in a wife, playing it for comedy in the 1945 play she and Virginia Cowles wrote, Love Goes to Press (originally titled Men Must Weep and then, with wonderful ambiguity, Take My Love Away). The two female protagonists, Annabelle Jones (based on Gellhorn) and Jane Mason (based on Cowles), are successful war correspondents who report from the front lines of World War II, when “any decent woman would stay at home” according to Philip, the British Public Relations Officer and Jane’s love interest (10). Joe Rogers, war correspondent and Annabelle’s ex-husband, “says war’s no place for a woman” according to his new fiancée, actress Daphne Ruther- ford (14). She is entertaining the troops rather nearer to the front line than she had expected, and he promises to “bundle [her] up and send [her] straight off to America where it’s safe” (14).
While the male correspondents are satisfied to rewrite military communiques, Annabelle and Jane show remarkable ingenuity in finding ways to get to the front so as to report the action firsthand. However, their efforts are denigrated, Joe Rogers repeatedly complaining, to the widespread agreement of the other men, that they “run this lousy war on sex-appeal” (45, 49). As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword to the play:
The fact is, of course, that being female is a definite occupational handicap for a war correspondent, and both Jane and Annabelle know it. But because their womanhood is something that they have never been allowed to forget, they have great fun flaunting it. With a perfect understanding of the currency of power, they turn a handicap to their own advantage in repeated acts of subversion that the authors exploit to comic effect. (82–83)
In considering the likely outbreak of World War II, Gellhorn had noted of her own plan to once again take up the profession of war correspondence, “It is going to be a serious drawback to be a woman, it always has been but probably worse now than ever” (Letters 90).
Jane and Annabelle find it a minor irritant that everyone assumes they must inevitably be nurses. “No, I’m not a nurse,” Jane patiently repeats (16). But this correction implies criticism of the stereotype alone, not the role itself. Indeed, Jane forgoes a scoop in order to render medical aid to a wounded officer on the battlefield, just as Gellhorn helped the medical staff with the wounded on the hospital transport ship where she had stowed away
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in the toilet so as to get to Normandy to report on the D-Day landing. Even the “repugnant” Daphne is recuperated (36). When Philip criticizes Daphne because “all she can think about is her dreadful career,” Jane responds with exquisite irony that “it isn’t the career that’s silly,” and she notes with admiration that Daphne “certainly knows what she wants” (63).
Jane briefly thinks that what she herself wants is marriage to Philip, who suddenly expresses admiration for her independence and professionalism as a war correspondent. But soon he says, “I can’t have you going to the front any more. . . [because] you’re mine now”(60). He sabotages her work by arranging for her to sleep through an attack she is to report, and he makes plans to send her to his family home in England. This last is too much for Jane. She is appalled by his description of the life his mother and sister lead there—notably, not because she finds it trivial, but rather because the riding and hunting, the bee-keeping and cow-tending, the war committees and the uniformed “land army” all require a different sort of courage and a different set of talents than she possesses (76). She is horrified to discover, for example, that there are no “field dressing station[s]” at fox hunts, and she bewails the fact that “there’s no one to pick up the wounded” (69, 64). Imagining a future where she will be “kicked by horses and stung by bees and finally die of mastitis from a cow,” she envies Annabelle whom she envisions “in a lovely dry dug-out somewhere” (73, 69). Jane changes her mind about marrying Philip and lights out for the territory—to Burma, in fact, with Annabelle, to report on the war front there.
Annabelle does indeed plan to continue her war correspondence, but she hopes to do so with Joe Rogers, who has proclaimed not only his continuing love for her but also a new attitude of respect for her work: “No other girl would have dared to fly that mission You’re everything. You’re pretty and funny and brave. I think being so brave is one of the things I’m proudest of” (67). He promises never again to steal her stories as he did during their brief marriage. “He said he did it because he loved me so much he couldn’t bear to have me in danger,” Annabelle tells Jane, but “it turned out he married me to silence the opposition” (19). Joe now asserts, “Nothing means anything without you,” and he promises never to interfere in her work again (67). Annabelle imagines a future with this “beautiful, funny, fascinating man” in which they will cover wars together in happy comradeship (20), having learned that marriage is “too dangerous” and that “you risk ruining everything with marriage” (69). But Annabelle discovers that Joe has not
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changed when he steals her trip to Poland. The theft is bad enough, but his condescending explanation is still more infuriating: “Hawkins sent for you, but it’s too dangerous. I love you too much. It doesn’t matter for a man. P.S. Back tomorrow” (73). Annabelle’s earlier comment, “If there’s anything I really loathe, it’s a woman protector,” resonates for she senses personal motivations beneath this seemingly generous sentiment (25). Moreover, the same sentiment is expressed by Philip, as one of the male correspondents tells her: “You’ve got to be more tolerant, Annabelle. The poor guy’s been away from England for three years, fighting to protect womankind from the horrors of war. And then the womankind walks in on him. He might as well have spared himself the trouble. You can see it would upset him for a while” (25).
Annabelle is terribly hurt by Joe’s betrayal, but she vows not “to let any worthless man ruin [her] job”(74), and she is cheered at the prospect of covering the war in Burma: “It sounds too terrible. Those poor men, and no one to tell what they’re doing. Forgotten Army. How dare people treat them like that” (75). Annabelle proves herself “still out to save the world,” as Jane had earlier described her, claiming, “We have to write, Jane. The people who fight can’t. It’s our job. Our duty, really” (19, 18). So Annabelle and Jane go off to yet another war front, finding it “lovely to be at the same war” but regretting that the men they love cannot somehow tolerate sharing the ex- perience with them (23). Hemingway’s Philip Rawlings had criticized Dorothy, saying that “the first thing an American woman does is try to get the man she’s interested in to give up something” (24), but in Love Goes to Press it is the men who try to change the women. As Sandra Spanier notes in her Afterword, "Love Goes to Press portrays men and women in love and at war from a distinctly female point of view, a lens through which we rarely have had the opportunity in American literature to view any war. And in this wartime drama, the European Theater of Operations is literally that— the stage set for the main action: the War between the Sexes” (82).
In The Fifth Column, Hemingway also portrays what he called “the great unending battle between men and women” (Baker 481-82), though he plays it for tragedy rather than comedy. His biting portrait of Dorothy Bridges, Philip Rawlings’ potential wife, provided a cautionary example that Hemingway proceeded to ignore, as so many critics have pointed out, and as Philip seems to know when he famously confesses, “I’m afraid that’s the whole trouble. I want to make an absolutely colossal mistake” (42). But in order to render evident this colossal mistake, which Philip actually avoids,
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Hemingway is reduced to caricaturing Martha in the role of Dorothy—in point of fact, underplaying those characteristics that he found most attractive in Martha and also most disconcerting. But the play didn’t work, critics citing most often as its primary flaw the unbelievable characterization of Dorothy. And so he easily ignored his own warning, as Martha also apparently did, though her fictional counterpart quite rightly says of Philip, “You’re a very serious problem for any woman” (24). These two willful, talented, independent people came together in the heat of battle, then waged their own personal war, from which Martha emerged an accomplished war correspondent and Hemingway emerged as husband to a woman whom he had persuaded to abandon war correspondence—not a pocket Reubens, as he affectionately termed her, but a pocket female war correspondent whom he packed up for the home front once he decided he wanted to leave the war behind. But given the modernist merging of home front and war front, Hemingway should not have been surprised to discover that in moving Mary into Martha’s room at the Finca Vigía, he had not emerged as victor in the war between the sexes but had merely shifted the battlelines.
- ↑ For an extended discussion of Hemingway’s attitude toward the transformation of traditional warfare by modern technology, see my Medievalist Impulse 163–83.
- ↑ 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.”
- ↑ For a detailed analysis of the ideological positions of these various groups, and also for an analysis of the political in-fighting among them, see Orwell 46–71.
- ↑ This unpublished letter is dated 9–10 June 1943 and was written by Hemingway while he was submarine hunting on the Pilar.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ See Prago and Toral for discussions of conditions in women’s prisons. Prago notes that “in addition to the sufferings common to all political prisoners, women were subjected to unique humiliations and tortures, [including] the violations of the body by ‘macho’ guards” (300).
- ↑ See Weitz for a brilliant discussion of the often overlooked military roles that women in Occupied France played, including as guerrillas. Weitz candidly discusses not only their contributions but also the difficulties they encountered; for example, they were often “assigned traditional feminine support roles, for the customary view was that ‘War is a man’s affair’” (147).
- ↑ See Reeves for an overview of the role female nurses have played in American wars from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War. For a discussion of their role in the American Civil War, see Garrison, Maher, Oates, Pryor, and Wormeley; in World War I, see Gavin 43–76; and as camp followers in the American Revolution, see Mayer 17, 142–43, and 219–23.
- ↑ This new male identity was initially suspect, the military deriding war correspondents as camp followers. For a discussion of the vexed question of the identity of the first war correspondent, see Mathews 31–78. For a description of the role of the Crimean war correspondents, their treatment by the military, and their role in the introduction of female nurses to the war theater, see Knightley 6–17. For a discussion of William Howard Russell’s actions in the Crimea, see Bullard 31–48.
- ↑ See Maher for a discussion of the role of Roman Catholic nuns as nurses in the American Civil War.
- ↑ See Hawks for a first-hand account of a female doctor in the American Civil War. For a discussion of the role of female doctors in World War I, see Gavin 157–78.
- ↑ For discussions of the relationship between Clara Barton and John Elwell, see Oates 148–58 and Pryor 112–17.
- ↑ Gellhorn wrote in 1944 “a formal letter of protest to the military authorities about the ‘curiously condescending’ treatment of women war correspondents which, she said, was as ridiculous as it was undignified, and was preventing professional woman [sic] reporters, with many years’ experience, from carrying out their responsibilities to their editors and to ‘millions of people in America who are desperately in need of seeing, but cannot see for themselves’” (Moorehead, Gellhorn 221). She wrote more pithily to a friend that “female journalists were now seen as lepers” (quoted by Moorehead, Gellhorn 221).
- ↑ In Benjamin Glazer’s adaptation of the play for production, the much-revised character of Dorothy does leave Madrid, hoping but not expecting Philip to follow her. Glazer’s Dorothy is more conventional than Hemingway’s, an attempt to make her more sympathetic to the audience. Notably, she is only pretending to be a war correspondent while she is actually searching for her lost brother who has joined the Lincoln Brigade. In Glazer’s adaptation she is, bizarrely, raped by Philip. She is thereby transformed from Hemingway’s female war correspondent into the conventional female rape victim of war. Despite the rape, Glazer’s Dorothy falls in love with Philip, a response that the audience is expected to approve. For a discussion of Glazer’s version as compared to Hemingway’s, see Fellner 5–30.
- ↑ Dorothy’s silver fox cape is a fictionalized version of Gellhorn’s own. Reynolds asserts that this cape was “a gift [to Gellhorn] from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade” (270), but he provides no note for his source. Lincoln Brigade veterans Milton Wolff (the Brigade’s last commander) and Mo Fishman independently told me in telephone interviews in May 2001 that they considered this claim unlikely given the extremely low pay of the Brigade soldiers, most of which was donated to build orphanages, and the relative infrequency of contact with Gellhorn and her circle. Moorehead notes that in Gellhorn’s first few weeks in Spain, she “went shopping with [fellow war correspondent] Virginia Cowles, . . . priced silver foxes and got desperately greedy wanting them” (Gellhorn 119–20). In The Fifth Column, Hemingway represents Dorothy’s fur as the morally dubious Black Market purchase of a self-centered woman, and in the context of the play he indicts Gellhorn as well. However, the reality is more complicated. Moorehead notes that “often, [Hemingway and Gellhorn] walked together around Madrid, buying silver and jewelry ‘like specula- tors’” (Gellhorn 136), and Kert notes that Hemingway’s sidekick Sidney Franklin not only scrounged food for Hemingway but also “found bargains in furs and perfumes” (297). Hemingway must have found Gellhorn’s fur acceptable, indeed attractive, since she wore it when ac- companying him in 1937 to the Second Congress of American Writers, where he previewed The Spanish Earth, showing an excerpt from it, and gave his famous speech, “Fascism is a Lie”; Gellhorn gave a speech the following day. In a 1937 radio broadcast from Madrid to the United States, Gellhorn “stressed for her radio listeners the composure of Madrid’s population,” noting the irony that “while various staples were scarce, it was possible to purchase ‘furs, fine silk stockings, and beautiful clothes, French perfume, victrolas, wrist watches, and every imaginable luxury’” (Rollyson 115). In order to make such broadcasts, she was required to “dash across the road to the Telefonica, where Madrid’s only radio studio was based, at the moment of peak evening shelling” (Moorehead, Gellhorn 139). But despite her radio broadcasts and her journalism, she upbraided herself during this same period, “fretting about her own idleness, her visits to the dressmaker and furrier ‘Stupid day, stupid woman. I am wasting everything’” (Moorehead, Gellhorn 138)
- ↑ Hemingway here engages in an ego-bolstering move, since Gellhorn “did not find [Hemingway] physically attractive” and sex with Hemingway “was never very good” (Moorehead, Gellhorn 114, 135). Moorehead notes that Gellhorn “told a friend [in a 1950 letter], [that] all through the months in Spain she went to bed with Hemingway ‘as little as she could manage’: My ‘whole memory of sex with Ernest is the invention of excuses and failing that, the hope it would soon be over’” (Gellhorn 135–36).
- ↑ For perhaps the only other interpretation that takes Dorothy seriously, offering a subtextual reading, see Nakjavani. 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).
- ↑ For Gellhorn’s description of her trip to the Far East with Hemingway, see her Travels 19–63; for her description of her Caribbean trip, see her Travels 64–108.