Between the Language and Silence of War: Martha Gellhorn and the Female Characters of Hemingway's The Fifth Column

The Fifth Column (1938) explicitly dramatizes militarized codes of behaviour among men in war. The play also documents the labour of women produced by the economic realities and imaginative possibilities of war time. Hemingway's written representations of women, intended for mimetic embodiment, enact both misogynist fantasy and feminist agency and embody, to draw from Teresa de Lauretis, the language of men and the silence of women. Dorothy Bridges is based on the real Martha Gellhorn who, in 1937, was crafting a burgeoning career as a war journalist. Dorothy, like Martha on whom she is based, remakes, from her own vantage point, a world unmade by spectacular violence. Simultaneously, Anita, a fictive prostitute, exposes the multiple sexualized spheres of inter- and intra- gender exploitation produced by militarism. Hemingway's fictional characters combine with their historical counterparts to disrupt the oppositional categorizations of masculinity versus femininity upon which the rhetoric of war depends.