War, gender, and Ernest Hemingway.
So much childbirth in Hemingway's stories. Especially in his war stories. --Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S "Big Two-Hearted River" remains perhaps the most famous piece of fiction about war with no mention of the war in it. The absence of war is exactly the point of the story, as Nick Adams, a recently returned veteran of the Great War, attempts to forget the war, to recover his prewar adolescent self by engaging in his favorite prewar adolescent activity, fishing. Yet the very language of the story reveals Nick's soldierly sell and betrays his attempt to escape that self:
Nick went over to the pack and found, with his fingers, a long nail in a paper sack of nails, in the bottom of the pack. He drove it into the pine tree, holding it close and hitting it gently with the flat of the axe. He hung the pack up on the nail. All his supplies were in the pack. They were off the ground and sheltered now. (CSS 167)
This is the language of a soldier carrying out the physical tasks of soldiering, of getting down to his business. Ulysses S. Grant's mantra resonates here, and seems applicable to both Nick Adams and Ernest Hemingway: "I am a verb"
Nick manages over the course of this very long trip to suppress his memory and imagination almost entirely, except for one remembered pre-war fishing trip with friends. Nick has mastered what Hemingway later calls "the greatest gift a soldier can acquire," the ability to "suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after" (MAW xxvii). In "Big Two-Hearted River," besides war, the other significant absence from Nick Adams's consciousness is love. No women in Nick's life appear in the story, as if to suppress thoughts of one--war or women--he necessarily must suppress the other. Even the two trout he catches are both male.
Military and war experiences affect the soldier's sense of gender identity, which for the male veteran means his masculinity, his conception of himself as a man, and by extension his general conception and experience of gender relations. Thus even when a veteran avoids writing directly about his war and military experiences, we ought to be able, through textual performances of gender, to read the war in the text despite authorial intent. In speaking of war and gender relations we are not talking only about romantic relations, but about the multiple possible relations the (male) veteran has with the gendered self and with gendered others--with, as an example, one's mother. For one of Hemingway's several literary biographers, Kenneth Lynn, "Big Two-Hearted River" addresses not Nick-Ernest's divided heart over the recent world war, but rather his divided heart over the "open warfare" he had more recently been engaged upon against his mother. Indeed, Lynn offers, "Not a single reference to war appears in the story," and its author's late-life commentary on the war's hidden presence represents a desperate "need of a heroic explanation for his life" as his writing career and mental stability suffered their painful breakdown (106).
Why must the story, however, be about either war or Nick-Ernest's mother? Why can't it be about both? This is the question Matthew C. Stewart poses in "Ernest Hemingway and World War I: Combatting [sic] Recent Psychobiographical Reassessments, Restoring the War" (2000). Stewart rightly challenges Lynn's excision of the war from the text. To Lynn's assertion that the story provides no explicit textual reference to the war, Stewart counters that "neither is there a single reference to Nick's conflicted feelings towards his mother [... nor] to familial strife of any kind" (210-211). Lynn's argument wants it both ways, to deny any intentional or unconscious connection with the war while positing an intentional or unconscious (he makes no distinction) connection with Nick-Ernest's mother. Even if Hemingway did come to the realization years later that the story was about the war, and regardless of whether his late-life commentary was accurate or revisionist, we readers can still understand the war as an unconscious motivation.
Stewart's conclusion offers us a way to read the story as about both the war in Europe and the war at home:
But surely the war itself was an integral part of Hemingway's conflict with the old-fashioned, sanctimonious, emotionally coercive Grace. Surely it was doubly difficult in his particular situation to be treated like a kid. It was the summer of his coming of age, a stage of life when the final thrust towards independence and adult status is normal and necessary. But also, as a young man who had been to the war and a one-time city-beat reporter in Kansas City, he had already seen much more than someone his age would usually see, and had experienced things far beyond the ken of his suburban, essentially Victorian parents. The same mother who had initially doted on her son's war-hero status overlooked the deeper changes his experience had caused him. (209-210)
This resolution of Lynn's false either war/or mother dilemma feels half-hearted to me, a diplomatic compromise when read against the article's vitriolic attack on Lynn's interpretation and as Stewart participates in the very same muddling of character and author for which he criticizes Lynn. Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes's Hemingway's Genders (1994) only mentions "Big Two-Hearted River" once, and in passing, but in a way that does connect war and gender relations. "In that story there was no feminine element present, the feminine being one of those complications best avoided--like the swamp--by a man in Nick's delicate psychic condition" (71), or, I would add, by a vet in Harold Kreb's delicate condition in "Soldier's Home," a story written a month before "Big Two-Hearted River" (April and May 1924). Like Stewart, Comley and Scholes connect war and gender in Hemingway's fiction on the personal level of a returned veteran forced to relate to the women in his immediate environment.
In contrast, I believe we can connect war and gender through Hemingway both on and beyond the personal level, taking a cue from Comley and Scholes by "extending the interpretation beyond the bounds of individual works and into the larger text of the cultural codes that are active in the thought of any writer as alert and sensitive as Ernest Hemingway" (9). As does any major life experience, war contributes to the construction of one's identity, and doubtless does so in a gendered way, and thus in a way that must affect one's sense of gender dynamics. The Great War especially, as Sandra Gilbert concluded for literary critics; profoundly troubled gender Constructions and relations. Gilbert's "Soldier's Heart," which first appeared in 1983, chiefly concerns the gender antagonism inspired by the war and its British literary response, because the experience of American combatants was significantly "less extended and less extensive" (269)--though she briefly connects Hemingway three times to this cultural gender antagonism (269, 287, 319).
Gilbert's essay appeared alongside a number of other feminist works in the early 1980s that delved into the relationship between gender and war.1 This moment occurred contemporaneously with the important initial feminist reconsideration of Hemingway, yet the two critical movements never fully converged. As with Lynn, critics have tended to approach Hemingway through either war or gender. Comley and Scholes mention the war only once, in an introductory comment that was not pursued but that attributes his achievements "in part [to] the abrupt displacement of his youth that forced him to compare the culture of Oak Park with the cultures of Europe and of war" (4). Similarly, Jamie Barlowe's "Hemingway's Gender Training" urges us to continue the work of examining
the complex web of forces and conditions into which Ernest Hemingway was born and in which he existed. [...] As I and others have argued elsewhere, Hemingway offers us a valuable site for studying the contested, fraught, and interesting late nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of gender in the United States, as well as in the other countries where he lived, fought, reported, and wrote. (147-148)
Yet Barlowe only mentions war as contributing to Hemingway's gender training in terms of the Spanish Civil War and World War n as mere backdrops for Hemingway's relationships with Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, his third and fourth wives. Barlowe's short essay cannot include everything, of course, and she concentrates on the women and feminists who touched Hemingway's life. Still, for such an ambitiously titled essay to completely omit his formative war and postwar experience is striking. Discussions of gender and Hemingway can only be illuminated by consideration of Hemingway the veteran.
Man or, Nurse?
The mature Hemingway's devotion to the infantry--"nobody has ever been anywhere that hasn't been with Infantry" he wrote to Colonel Charles "Buck" Lanham after returning from World War II (SL 586)--stands in stark contrast to the teenager's days driving Red Cross ambulances and delivering postcards, cigarettes, and candy to the Italian infantry. Real men did not join the Red Cross. While Teddy Roosevelt proclaimed in 1917 that "Red Cross work, YMCA work, driving ambulances, and the like, excellent though it all is, should be left to men not of military age or unfit for military service, and to women; young men of vigorous bodies and sound hearts should be left free to do their proper work in the fighting line" (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 22-23), war posters clearly depicted Red Cross work as a feminine endeavor. The threat of Red Cross service to a man's male image was widespread and persistent. Over a decade after the war, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld's quirky The Sexual History of the World War (1930) reports how "feminine urnings," or homosexuals,
evinced a strong disinclination to active [combat] service [... and] corresponding to their feminine constitution they desired to be used only for the care of the sick. [...] Immediately at the outbreak of the war, numerous homosexuals volunteered their services to the Red Cross, thus obeying the distinctive calling which, as the history of the homosexual problem informs us, urnings performed even among primitive peoples. (137)
The popularity of Hirschfeld's odd book certainly argues for its acceptance and authority in the popular imagination. Hemingway could only be acutely sensitive to the implication of his Red Cross days, could only feel his male self-image undermined by his mode of war service. Whether he worried more about his compromised public image or about his own potentially compromised virility (given the social codes) seems both unknowable and moot. Either way, surrounded by soldiers with real war stories, the young Hemingway began exaggerating his war record while still recovering from his wound in Europe. The nature of both his Red Cross service and his wounding--while delivering cigarettes, postcards, and chocolates to the entrenched Italian infantry--gave him cause to later mislead others about his service, all toward preserving a more manly and heroic image of himself. (2) After Frederic Henry's wounding, the surgeon Rinaldi visits him at the field hospital and jokingly accuses him and the priest of being "a little that way. You know"--by which he means a little homosexual (AFTA 65).
I do not intend simply to reiterate Philip Young's argument that Hemingway lived his postwar life asserting his manliness to compensate for the unmanly nature of his wound, much less that these assertions were expressions of a deep homophobia. Rather, I want to return his war experiences to critical discussions of how gender is performed in his texts. Hemingway criticism has for so long and productively followed a trajectory away from Young's wound theory and from the war as the principal event of Hemingway's life that, for a feminist and gender studies approach, returning to the war would seem a backwards movement.
In terms of male homosexuality, if Hemingway had little to no awareness of it growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, he certainly learned about it in Europe during the war. A 1953 letter to Charles Poore intimates that while in the hospital in 1918, an Englishman made sexual advances toward him (Brenner 94), (3) and Reynolds confirms that "in Italy, he was propositioned by an older man and tested by a younger one" (The Paris Years 33). Hemingway's first published story featuring male homosexuality, "A Simple Enquiry" involves a major and his orderly in the Italian army, the army to which Hemingway was attached. The story appeared in Men Without Women in 1927, Hemingway having written it in 1926 and 1927, between The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms--the war and postwar experiences, and gender issues, were very much on his mind. (4) If it is only natural that Hemingway foregrounds "gay Paris" in The Sun Also Rises, it is just as natural that he suppress any homoeroticism in A Farewell to Arms, the novel most closely linked to his own war days and to the image of himself as a soldier, especially given that he already feels a degree of sexual ambiguity about his war service. His first three books, In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Men Without Women (1927), already revealed Hemingway's curiosity about the variety of human genders and sexualities. In, A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway hides homoeroticism in the least likely place--within the famous heterosexual romance of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley.
I should perhaps state here, with Debra A. Moddelmog, that I am not asserting "a gay Hemingway, or even a `queer' one, but instead am locating "Hemingway's sexual identity in the tension between the homosexual and the heterosexual" (Reading Desire 4-7). We can, in other words, discover an overlapping of the purely homosexual and the purely heterosexual encoded in the language and scenes of A Farewell to Arms, especially when We read it against his later, more explicitly gender-blurring novel, The Garden of Eden. In the process of tentatively proposing a homoerotic element in Frederic and Catherine's relationship, I am also, of course, associating Hemingway's various performances of gender with his war experience.
On the one hand, Catherine's position as nurse seems to confirm the staple wartime fantasy of the nurse as nympho. On the other hand, her position as a Red Cross nurse suggests a certain element of narcissistic mirroring in Frederic's attraction to her, given his own position as an ambulance driver (and Hemingway's as Red Cross volunteer). Catherine's mirroring of Frederic is also reflected in what Margot Norris calls the "echoic structure" of the dialogue whereby Catherine's responses frequently echo Frederic's lines (AFTA 68); she is his erotic double in both word and job. According to Moddelmog's summary of the early 20th century Western understanding of homosexuality as pathology, the term homosexuality "suggests sex with the same, love of the self" ("Protecting the Hemingway Myth" 101). She quotes Michael Warner on this point:
Having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest either in the Other or, more generally, in others. That is why in our century it has acquired the name heterosexuality--a sexuality of otherness.... [A]ccording to this logic homoerotics is an unrecognized version of autoerotics, or more precisely of narcissism; both are seen as essentially an interest in the self rather than in the other.
According to this post-Freudian, post-Victorian modernist logic, Catherine's position as nurse and her echoic dialogue present the potential for a narcissistic homoerotic element in the heterosexual lovers' relationship.
This pair's mirroring, however, has a significant twist. Frederic falls in love with her in Book II only after his wounding, after he has found himself in her care. After, that is, he finds himself in a passive position, which in Hemingway's time was associated with the feminine and, in men, with the homosexual. As the letter to Poore tells us, Hemingway had homosexuality on his mind while in the hospital. Like Catherine, the highly sexual and gender-bending Brett Ashley served as a V.A.D. in the war, and ministers to Jake Barnes in his hotel bed (Barnes, like Hemingway, can't have the nurse of his fantasies). As a V.A.D., Catherine is also in a position of skill, as Frederic is not. Dr. Valentini, the man who operates on Frederic and restores him to full masculinity, tells Frederic that Catherine is "a lovely girl" who will "make you a fine boy," by which he could mean she will nurse him back to manly health, or that she will bear him a fine son, or perhaps that she will play the role of a fine boy for Frederic, sexually speaking. "I will do all your maternity work free," the doctor offers, addressing not Catherine but the bed-bound, on his back, passive Frederic Henry (99).
The doctor takes his leave of Frederic by declaring that before the operation he "must be washed out" (99), referring to the enema Catherine administers to him prior to his operation. Nothing in the text suggests that he experiences the enema erotically, but still he is penetrated, just as another Catherine will anally penetrate her lover, David Bourne, in The Garden of Eden. Both scenes were edited to remove the most direct statements about what is transpiring, (5) yet despite the decorous omission of the word `enema,' Hemingway still apparently needs to have it occur, just as he needs Catherine to need to do it because only she can touch her lover. The enema itself, however unerotic, nevertheless reinforces Frederic's relative position of passivity to Catherine, a position, in Hemingway's day, considered feminine--and for a man, queer. Even the dialogue between Frederic and Catherine, with his repeatedly calling her his girl--my good girl, my lovely girl, my fine simple girl (153)--her repetition of the idea, and the couple's insistence on their oneness intimates the dialogue to come, between Mary and Ernest and Catherine and David, in those future gender-bending, role-reversing love games. (Perhaps not coincidentally, that most exotic exploration o(gender in Hemingway that is The Garden of Eden was begun in the burst of writing that occurred upon his return from World War II.)
According to this reading of A Farewell to Arms, Catherine's death in childbirth exposes the limitations of such male homoerotic projection onto a woman; as a mother, she can no longer be imagined (even subconsciously) into a man. Nancy Huston's argument in "The Matrix of War" that it is mothers, and not women, who are traditionally excluded from becoming warriors (think of Diana, the Amazons, and Joan of Arc), might apply here. If motherhood distinguishes between men and women for the purposes of fighting, then a woman who isn't a mother, a woman in uniform, "passes" for a man--in Frederic Henry's case, for a version of himself (and/or his ambulance unit comrades). On the general association of non-mothers with men, Carl Eby summarizes Daniel Rancour-Laferriere's conclusion that "within a phallocentric signifying system [...] virgins are traditionally unconsciously regarded as phallic, since defloration is imagined as a symbolic `castration.'" Eby quotes Rancour-Laferriere: "For a man, it is as if a virgin were another man (note that, in English, `virgin,' `virile,' and `virago' are etymologically related). Not until he has deflowered her has he `made a woman out of her.'" Eby uses this idea to assert that For Whom the Bell Tolls' Pilar is "an icon of the phallic woman in her maternal aspect" (45), though I believe we should focus on Pilar's and Catherine's non-maternal status. Motherhood being the only public evidence of a woman's lost virginity, it becomes, per Huston, the martial disqualifier--and Pilar and Catherine are, of course, every bit the soldiers that Robert Jordan and Frederic Henry respectively are. In Farewell, motherhood becomes the homoerotic disqualifier.
Scholars generally credit Europe as the source of Hemingway's discovery of unconventional sexual postures and behaviors during his 1920s Paris expatriation, yet it was in wartime and postwar Europe and Paris where such practices introduced themselves to him, at the very moment he was confronted by the "woman problem" and industrial revolution's challenge to his masculinity back home. Undoubtedly Ernest Hemingway lived through a particular historical moment and participated in its challenges to strict gender and sexual prescriptions, and this historical moment very much involved the war.
The Great War and the Gender War
Beginning with World War I, veterans of 20th century wars have a unique challenge to deal with in the combination of new forms of love--i.e., gender definitions and relations--with new forms of war. In addition to the profound technological changes and the total war strategy of the new warfare, one final distinct aspect of war for 20th century Americans is that it occurred entirely on foreign soil, that in every case it was an over there experience which (with some notable exceptions) has excluded American women, so that women and love become associated in the male psyche with a very distant home, the home they left behind and to which they will return, and the home that sent them to war in the first place. The "woman problem" came to a head, and the paradigm of gender confusion in 20th century warfare arose, during the First World War, and Hemingway could not but absorb its lessons.
One historical consensus about World War I is the unprecedented degree to which its soldiers were rendered passive by the new technology of machine guns, indirect fire artillery, and mustard gas. Soldiers rarely had the opportunity to fight the enemy, not in any classic sense in which one's own agency and skill might affect the outcome. Instead, bullets from great distance sprayed them, bombs dropped on them, and gas invaded their lungs, and they were powerless to prevent it. That male sufferers from shell-shock during the Great War were routinely characterized as exhibiting symptoms of hysteria, a purported mental affliction traditionally afflicting only women, reiterates the emasculating (and feminizing) nature of the war. Think of Jake Barnes, and of Sir Clifford Chatterley.
Alongside this disempowerment of the male soldier, this undermining of the very sense of active agency by which manhood in the Western world has long been defined, emerged an empowerment of women both at home and in service relatively near the front. This is the subject of Gilbert's "Soldier's Heart" essay--how in the British male literary response to the Great War, "the unmanning terrors of combat lead not just to a generalized sexual anxiety but also to an anger directed specially against the female" because women did not fight; because they entered the homefront workforce, took financial control over their lives, and loosened conventional gender restrictions on their behavior; and because they remained ignorant of the facts of the front while enthusiastically supporting the war. Women, according to Gilbert, appeared to men to celebrate and enjoy images of the self-sacrificing male soldier so that "the words of woman propagandists as well as the deeds of feather-carrying girls had evidently transformed the classical Roman's noble patria into an indifferent or avaricious death-dealing matria" (285).
On the personal level of our subject, and setting aside the well-known tensions between Hemingway and his mother, we can read Nick-Ernest's mother as embodying the American version of the Great War's matria fatale. My resolution of the false dilemma of reading "Big Two-Hearted River" as a story about either war or the mother but not both sees Nick's mother as inextricably connected with the war. Reynolds quotes a letter that Hemingway's mother wrote him on the occasion of "his nineteenth birthday, as he lay wounded in the Milan hospital." In the letter Grace Hall Hemingway "rejoiced `to know that in the eyes of humanity my boy is every inch a man.... God bless you, my darling.... It's great to be the mother of a hero'" (Young Hemingway 33). The young veteran might very well feel some resentment toward his mother's celebration of the event that nearly killed him, and her characterizing her son as a man and a hero because of it sat at odds with his own experience of the event as decidedly unmanly and unheroic--blown up delivering candy and tea to `real' soldiers. (6) It only makes sense that, to forget the war and its effect upon him during the fishing trip, Nick Adams must also forget his mother. "`Don't you love your mother, dear boy?'" asks Mrs. Krebs in "A Soldier's Home" of her son the veteran. "`No,' Krebs said" (CSS 116).
Although written over a decade after the war, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" offers another possible expression of the male psyche's postwar anxiety of having been figuratively unmanned by the war, coupled with a fear of what Gilbert labels "the deadliness of female [sexual] desire" (291). Having already unmanned her husband by sleeping with their hunting guide, Robert Wilson, did Margot Macomber intentionally kill her husband, as Wilson suspects? Did she intend to shoot the buffalo but, unconsciously perhaps, desire and bring about the death of her husband? Or was the shooting really just an accident? Hemingway leaves the story ambiguous, but perhaps in terms of his own status as a veteran of the Great War the story's final answer is irrelevant. What matters is this veteran's expression of a protagonist first unmanned on a foreign expedition and subsequently killed by his promiscuous wife.
A chain of associations connects Mrs. Macomber with the Great War, specifically with woman-sponsored pro-war propaganda. Margot Macomber was drawn from Jane Mason, and both the fictional and the actual woman appeared in a magazine beauty-product advertisement; that magazine, in Jane Mason's cases was The Ladies' Home Journal, a publication which unabashedly supported the war effort in World War I. (7) According to Joanne L. Karetzky's The Mustering of Support for World War I By The Ladies' Home Journal (1997), The Journal deliberately participated in the transformation of the American public's "traditional isolationism to a new willingness to become actively involved in world affairs"--in, that is, the First World War (1). In January 1917, The Journal's editor, Edward William Bok, met with President Woodrow Wilson to offer his magazine's service in the patriotic cause: "Not only did the President outline The Journal's wartime mission, but Bok credited him with suggesting specific topics as well" (20). Despite its male editorship, the magazine appeared to voice women's encouragement of the war and their menfolk's manly duty to fight. It even printed letters identical in spirit to the one Grace sent her son after learning of his wounding.
For male soldiers and front-line volunteers, like Hemingway, who passively suffered the new technology, the war paradoxically made men of them and unmanned them. Like the soldiers motivated by the same ideology behind The Ladies' Home Journal, Francis Macomber goes after the lion to assert his maleness, to defy his woman's challenge of it, and suffers in the extreme. That Wilson is not only a veteran but also a machine-gunner (CSS 8, 26), an agent of one of the new mass-casualty technologies, underscores his emasculating effect on Macomber and the story's potential resonance with the Great War. The ambiguity of Margot's volition also resonates with the war; no woman directly wished death on any man in her life, even as her collective message compelled him to be manly and placed him in front of the enemy gun.
I do not claim that Hemingway intentionally wanted us to read "Macomber" as a war story, nor that he consciously associated the Jane Mason advertisement with The Journal's pro-war ideology (though it seems plausible enough). But he most decidedly had the war on his mind while finishing the story in early 1936, as evidenced textually by Wilson's past and contextually by contemporary events. Only a few months earlier, Hemingway had joined some two hundred volunteers to help clean up the over six hundred bodies of World War I veterans killed during a hurricane that overswept their makeshift camps in the Florida Keys. Later that month, September 1935, Hemingway's article "Who Murdered the Vets?" appeared in New Masses, and his "Notes on the Next War" appeared in Esquire. Memories of the past war with Germany and talk of the next one were significant presences during the composition of "Macomber."
War, Marriage; and Childbirth
Writes Judith Fetterley in 1978 about A Farewell to Arms:
If we weep reading the book at the death of soldiers, we are weeping for the tragic and senseless waste of their lives; we are weeping for them. If we weep at the end of the book, however, it is not for Catherine but for Frederic Henry. All our tears are ultimately for men, because, in the world of A Farewell to Arms male life is what counts. And the message to women reading this classic love story is clear and simple: the only good woman is a dead one, and even then there are questions. (71)
Fetterley's book arrived during the salad days of feminist literary criticism, and the deep misogyny she finds in Hemingway has since been somewhat ameliorated in the criticism. One still finds, however, such antagonistic assertions as Margaret Higonnet's, that Hemingway's image of soldiers appearing pregnant when "protecting their cartridges under their capes" in A Farewell to Arms is an "aggressive masculinist metaphor" (215) that wrongly appropriates feminine imagery. Following Nancy Huston, who essentially argues that men turn to hunting and soldiering out of venus envy, Jennifer Haytock's recent essay in this journal concludes that the novel's opening imagery symbolizes how the "soldiers will give birth not to a living being but to violence and death" (70).
Images and talk of pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage in Hemingway have received much critical attention. As generally interpreted, they indicate Hemingway's male characters' fear of losing independence, freedom, and the pleasures of male camaraderie--their refusal, in other words, to grow up and accept adult responsibilities. I would like to suggest that these images and this discourse can also be directly linked to war.
One way to read the scene of the soldiers marching with "the two leather cartridge boxes on the front of their belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long, 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child" (4), is as an expression of their experiencing the military and war as emasculating and thus feminizing insofar as the soldier's losing agency. His story becomes one of "being done to," to use Samuel Hynes' phrase in his book The Soldiers' Tale, with its apt subtitle, Bearing Witness to Modern War (3; emphasis added). The male soldier is "done to" not only by the enemy and by the new technology, he also becomes an instrument for and an object of the warmakers on his own side, a victim bearing the burden for empowered others, as the image depicts. Here Reynolds summarizes Hemingway's experience of childbirth through 1922:
Hemingway grew up with an unusual awareness of a woman's painful and bloody birthing process. Early, before he understood sex and death, he was marked by birth's pain and its accompanying screams. His mother, Grace, continued bearing children until she was forty-three and he was fifteen; at age eleven, Ernest was present when Grace bore his sister Carol at the summer cottage. His father specialized in obstetrics in his home office; all his early life Ernest lived in the presence of pregnant women who carried the secret and suffered the pain. That woman [he saw] birthing on the Adrianople road brought it all back to him, the mystery and the pain. Nowhere in his later fiction would babies ease gently into this world. (The Paris Years 77)
To depict a soldier six months gone with child, then, is hardly an envious appropriation of the feminine, hardly a male soldier's empowerment through violence; it is instead a rendering of the man's position as soldier as one of severe suffering--of the suffering to come as their metaphoric burden approaches term in range of the enemy's guns.
If pregnancy and childbirth for women signify and embody their social bonds, military service signifies a man's social bonds. Paradoxically, military service--and especially for American men headed to the Great War--serves as a liberation from domestic, economic, and social obligations, and a reassertion of manly autonomy, but also as the ultimate tie to society, one that demands the selfless sacrifice of the individual for society. If, as Nina Baym and other feminist scholars have maintained, woman for the male psyche represents social integration, responsibility, and self-sacrifice for community (through marriage), (8) then she also embodies that very social contract which got him to the battlefield--a symbolic fact which, again, must affect his relations with her. War poster after war poster depicted women (and children) as the motivating spirit calling the soldier to arms; the woman figure was often draped in the American flag. In the foreground of a 1918 poster from the Liberty Loan Committee of Washington, troops in various uniforms bearing their rifles with bayonets fixed at port arms march toward the viewer, and above them the image of a mother holding a child merges into the American flag. (9) Another poster features such a female figure pointing to a roll call of dead soldiers. But for two transposed letters, marital and martial are the same word.
Thus Nick Adams in "Night Before Landing," on a ship on his way to war, discusses marriage, and the story ends the night before landing with Nick's pronouncement about his girl, "We're going to get married" (Nick 142). In "Now I Lay Me," Nick in a tent during the war remembers his wounding and fights sleep to fight death, the story concluding with his conversation with another soldier, again, about marriage. And in that originating Nick Adams story, "Indian Camp," the young Nick associates childbirth with the husband's death and with a crippling leg injury similar enough to Hemingway's own war wound; to the degree that Hemingway volunteered for ambulance duty, his wound too, like the Indian husband's wound and subsequent death, was self-inflicted. Frederic Henry too conceives his child with Catherine Barkley on his hospital bed, once again suggesting an association between fatherhood and war wounds.
"Rather than being a study in war, love or initiation" wrote Michael Reynolds in Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms, the novel "is more properly a study in isolation. Frederic's progression in the novel is from group participation to total isolation" (271). Nick Adams' solo journey in "Big Two-Hearted River" portrays another veteran seeking escape from social allegiance. For an American male to escape war, he must escape social ties. He must, like Harold Krebs and Frederic Henry, desire to relinquish love. Elsewhere Reynolds reports on a correspondence between Owen Wister, the father of the Western genre, and Hemingway's editor Max Perkins. Farewell's "flaw," as Reynolds paraphrases Perkins, "is that the war story and the love story do not combine. [...] If only the war were in some way responsible for the nurse's death in childbirth" (The 1930s 4-5). The war, I contend, is entirely responsible. Catherine Barkley and the baby both must die at the end of A Farewell to Arms not because "for Hemingway the only good woman is a dead one" as Fetterley argues (71), but because for Frederic Henry to have a final farewell to arms, he must lose all obligatory social ties, must escape the social contract embodied in wife and child, just as in an older American tale, Rip Van Winkle escapes his henpecking wife and, simultaneously and ironically, the Revolutionary War.
Another source, then, for a misogynist or misogamist strain in Hemingway and in other veterans is this symbolic association of women and wives with society and therefore as the cause for the soldier's wartime suffering. The association of children with social responsibility also contributes to a misopedist strain, so that the presence of childbirth in Hemingway's war stories signifies what sends the male soldier to war as well as what the emasculated soldier must bear during war. Publications like The Ladies' Home Journal and posters and articles exhorting men to defend their homes, their women and children, reinforce the association. The male soldier, especially during World War I, finds himself--to use a literary metaphor from World War II--in a Catch-22. To escape the emasculating nature of the industrializing, bureaucratic new 20th century world, he escapes in literature to the Western frontier and to Tarzan's Africa, and in life to the war--but the military and the war actually subvert the possibility for autonomous agency and self-definition. One is subject to the desires of the chain of command, and subjected to the guns of the enemy. One is bound to the military family as well as to the social family which the military serves. Hemingway, with his ambiguous soldierly status and his wounding, with his confrontation with male homosexuality and the dissolution of women's gender roles and prescriptions, hardly discovers in war a buttress for his masculine sense of self.
Conclusion
I conclude this study on war and gender in Hemingway with a discussion of two related stories rarely commented upon as war stories, "Cross-Country Snow" and "An Alpine Idyll." The first story appeared in In Our Time; the second in Men Without Women. Both stories, to quote Joseph Flora on "Cross-Country Snow," move "from action to dialogue, from outdoors to indoors" (192). Both stories also invite us to ask questions about the two main male characters' attitudes toward women--in the first case, to a pregnant waitress and Nick's pregnant wife, and in the second case to a local man's dead wife.
For Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Cross-Country Snow" is very much a war story, or rather a postwar story:
It is only after Nick has confronted death and pain firsthand in the war that he can truly appreciate the miracle of that which is peaceful and beautiful and good in life. It is significant that "Cross-Country Snow," an idyll permeated by friendship, trust, and exhilaration with living, is placed after the chapters dealing with the war. It is not an innocent's idyll. It is a reverie of two men fully aware of the impermanence of life, and thus the value of the present; of two men familiar with the world's imperfections savoring the perfect moment. [...] One must confront a world of chaos and war to understand the value of order and peace. (152)
My reading of the relationship between war and pregnancy works well with Fishkin, because the pregnancy of the waitress and Nick's wife Helen suggests the impermanence not of undomesticated male camaraderie, but of the world at peace and of the male citizen's respite from his social obligation as a soldier. The other story, "An Alpine Idyll," reiterates this message through the presence Of the local man with the dead wife, as the man happens to be a veteran of the Great War.
The idylls of both stories remain a Swiss ski trip, but they also imply a larger idyll, the one between the wars. Though Hemingway wrote the stories in the 1920s, he was fully aware that the First World War had satisfactorily solved nothing, and that another war was likely. Writing in hindsight, Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory reminds us of the historical continuity between the wars, as essentially the same event separated only by a generation. Fussell's seventh chapter, "Arcadian Recourses," offers an interesting interpretive strategy for "Cross-Country Snow" and "An Alpine Idyll." In that chapter Fussell describes how narratives of the Great War often have a seemingly standardized inclusion Of "pastoral oases," moments of pause between the fighting, moments of peace. In British texts such pastoral reference "is a way of invoking a code to hint by antithesis at the indescribable," at the war; "at the same time, it is a comfort in itself" (235-236). (10)
Using an essay by Erwin Panofsky, Fussell explores the English tradition of the memento mori, of for example juxtaposing skulls among pastoral roses "as an emblem of the omnipotence of Death, whose power is not finally to be excluded even from the sequestered, `safe' world of pastoral," a tradition which adds "a special resonance of melancholy to wartime pastoral." This tradition understands the classical line Et in arcadia ego as "Even in Arcadia I, Death, hold sway" (246)--an apt epigraph for "An Alpine Idyll," which provides a memento mori in the figure of the local veteran's dead wife, and the image of her husband Olz hanging his lantern from her mouth, frozen in rigor mortis, when he needed to cut wood in the shed where he stored her Until the snow cleared and he could bring her to town. The two Hemingway stories are idylls, pastoral oases between the world wars, but ones in which war and death also hold sway, reminding us of such idylls' transience.
If the unnamed narrator of "An Alpine Idyll" is Nick Adams, then the story offers us a sympathetic position toward a fellow veteran, Olz, a man alone and utterly misunderstood by his own community. Several times the innkeeper refers to Olz as a beast, while the narrator and John hardly blanch at Olz's tale because veterans of the Great War's Western Front wouldn't. If Hemingway did not experience in Italy the horrible conditions of trench life on the Western Front, we can safely assume that he would have known about them from storytelling veteran friends and strangers, and from his reading. It was not rare for corpses, unable to be removed for any number of reasons (bad weather being one), to linger in the trenches for some time. And not only linger, but be used. Where duckboards ran short, soldiers walked on corpses to keep their boots out of the standing water and mud. Where trench walls threatened to collapse, corpses were used to buttress them until better materials could be brought forward. For the millions of troops who over the course of four years lived such a life with corpses, it would not be difficult to imagine a corpse as the best place for hanging a lantern for lighting a nighttime task--and most work in the trenches took place at night. Soldiers living so much around corpses soon enough become inured to their presence; they learned to separate the person they knew from the heap of flesh now holding up sandbags, a necessary separation that helped distance them emotionally from lost friends and psychically from their Own too-vulnerable bodies. The narrator and John, read as veterans, would not give Olz's tale a second thought.
The character whom the narrator and John (read as veterans) would most dislike is the innkeeper, the civilian who didn't go to the war, living in a country that didn't go to the war, the civilian who so misunderstands trench life that he considers it "beastly." Fussell and others have remarked on the intense aversion for civilians--indeed for anyone not at the front line--felt by soldiers of the First World War--for not suffering, for not understanding, for allowing the inhumanity to continue. The grotesque part of Hemingway's story isn't what Olz does with his wife's corpse, but the innkeeper's reaction, or rather his failure to appreciate the veteran's life. The presence of women in both "Cross-Country Snow" and "An Alpine Idyll" keep us aware of the past war and warn us of the next one. The dead woman in "An Alpine Idyll," instead of supporting the argument that the only good woman for Hemingway is a dead one, Underscores the passive, suffering, `feminine' nature of soldiering in World War I, and in effect shows us a veteran, Olz, who treats his wife's body exactly as he might have treated a male comrade's in the European trenches.
While Hemingway's warring and wounding are an essential element of the man he afterward became, to ascribe anyone's complex gender sensibilities to a single factor, such as wartime experience, would be to commit a serious critical oversight. In the case of Ernest Hemingway, so many other factors contribute: the general Crisis of manhood and the vexing "woman problem" of the beginning of the 20th century; Hemingway's boyhood spent mostly among sisters and under the example of his independently-minded suffragette mother and his rather domesticated and mentally troubled father; the conventional morality and gender ideas of his Midwest, middle-class upbringing in Oak Park, Illinois; the heritage of nineteenth century self-reliant frontier manliness, of which Theodore Roosevelt was the last great champion; the heritage of 19th century literary gender constructions in some American but primarily in Victorian novels written by both men and women; and the sexual psychology of the day, as chiefly professed by Have-lock Ellis, whom Hemingway read.
But we cannot afford, if we want to understand Hemingway's gender troubles, to ignore the war's impact. Judith Fetterley has asserted that "war simplifies men's relation to women" (49). I disagree. War simplifies nothing; it complicates everything.
NOTES
(1.) 1982: Jean Bethke Elshtain's "Women as Mirror and Other: Toward a Theory of Woman, War, and Feminism" and Nancy Huston's "Tales of War and Tears of Women." 1983: Sandra Gilbert's "Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War," Cynthia Enloe's "Does Khaki Become You? The Militarization of Women's Lives." 1984: Nancy C. Harsock's "Prologue to a Feminist Critique of War and Politics."
(2.) Reynolds doubts that Hemingway's heroic carrying of a wounded Italian soldier while he was himself wounded ever happened (Young Hemingway 18-21).
(3.) One of the purposes of Brenner's essay is to present the lack of convincing evidence of James Gamble's homosexuality--though if Brenner is incorrect, Gamble's position as Hemingway's Red Cross commander reinforces the association of the Red Cross with homosexuality, and Hemingway's exposure to homosexuality during the war.
(4.) In The Sun Also Rises, Bill Gorton says the Civil War was about homosexuality. "Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis" (121).
(5.) See Moddelmog on Garden, "Protecting the Hemingway Myth" 98; Norris on Farewell, 67.
(6.) Hemingway was perhaps (if unconsciously) responding to his mother in Farewell when he has various characters talk to Frederic Henry as if he were a little boy: "Be a good boy" (98), "You're such a silly boy" (102), "you sleep like a little boy" (104).
(7.) Hemingway had the clipped ad in his files (Reynolds, The 1930s 224).
(8.) Baym's "Melodramas of Beset Manhood." See also Laura Mulvey's idea of the "split hero" motif in the Western film genre (Visual and Other Pleasures).
(9.) Used by permission of The Provincial Museum of Alberta, with grateful thanks to Maurice F.V. Doll, Curator of Government and Military History. Visit the museum's on-line exhibit at "The Poster War: Allied Propaganda Art of the First World War" (© 1999) (http://www.pma.edmonton.ab.ca/vexhibit/warpost/english/post29.htm).
(10.) Irwin Shaw's 1948 WWII novel The Young Lions begins before the war, in 1938, at a ski hotel in the Austrian mountains, where a young American woman's idyll is shattered when a young Nazi soldier attempts to rape her.
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| Author: | Vernon, Alex |
|---|---|
| Publication: | The Hemingway Review |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Date: | Sep 22, 2002 |
| Words: | 8359 |
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