Vietnam Generation Volume 1 Number 3 Gender and the War: Men, Women and Article 8 Vietnam 10-1989 Visions of Vietnam in Women's Short Fiction Susanne Carter Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Carter, Susanne (1989) "Visions of Vietnam in Women's Short Fiction," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 1 : No. 3 , Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol1/iss3/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vietnam Generation by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. VisioNs of ViETNAM iN Women's SHort FicTioN S usanne C arter During World War II, British Writer Elizabeth Bowen recognized the short story as the “ideal prose medium for war-time creative writing.” To her it seemed the only genre “capable of conveying the immediacy of her experiences.” Both a novelist and a short story writer, Bowen discovered the “disjointed nature of wartime experience was exhilarating for the short story writer” while it “created serious impediments for the novelist who wished to portray these years in fiction.” The short story seemed better suited than the novel to capture the “fragmentary and abrupt quality of life” characteristic of wartime.1 The Vietnam war fictional writings of contemporary women authors would seem to corroborate Bowen’s assertions, for the majority of these women have elected the short story genre to express their individual interpretations of the Vietnam experience rather than the novel form, although there are noteworthy exceptions in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s The Healer’s War, Patricia Walsh’s Forever Sad the Hearts, and Susan Schaeffer’s Buffalo Afternoon.