War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings

Chapter 16: Hemingway and Women at the Front Blowing Bridges in A Farewell to Arms, The Fifth Column, and For Whom the Bell Tolls

286 KIM MORELAND HeMIngWaY and WoMen aT THe FronT Blowing Bridges in A Farewell to Arms, The Fifth Column, and For Whom the Bell Tolls Kim Moreland 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 place like Saint-Tropez or, you know, some place like Saint-Tropez was” (23)—that is, an idyllic haven outside of time. Instead, 286 HEMINGWAY AND WOMEN AT THE FRONT 287 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 the 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 fiction1 (“New Kind of War” 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” (1: 4). Hemingway thus valorizes 288 KIM MORELAND in A Farewell to Arms the war nurse who abandons her military hospital for life as a wife at home in neutral Switzerland, whereas he repudiates in The...