Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women's War Writing

Using women's war memoirs and poetry from World War One and the Vietnam War, this essay explores how women's gaze on war reveals the trauma of their experience. In particular this discussion focuses on the relationship between what is seen and not seen, examining how the diversion of the gaze and the attendant paradoxical presence of an unseen text is fundamental in understanding the connection between seeing and writing war. The paper begins by examining the gendered question of authenticity that connects "seeing" with "knowing" in wartime. It goes on to look at the extent to which cultural prescriptions and the trauma of the experience itself influence what is seen and not seen and therefore what is revealed and not revealed in the text itself. It argues that in reading war writing we must be alert to the meaning of the traumatic experience that can only be located in what is absent: unseen and unwritten.