ABSTRACT “Our Grand Narrative of Women and War”: Writing, And
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ABSTRACT “Our Grand Narrative of Women and War”: Writing, and Writing Past, a Gendered Understanding of War Front and Home Front in the War Writing of Hemingway, O’Brien, Plath, and Salinger Julie Ooms, Ph.D. Mentor: Luke Ferretter, Ph.D. Scholars and theorists who discuss the relationship between gender and war agree that the divide between the war front and the home front is gendered. This boundary is also a cause of pain, of misunderstanding, and of the breakdown of community. One way that soldiers and citizens, men and women, on either side of the boundary can rebuild community and find peace after war is to think—and write—past this gendered understanding of the divide between home front and war front. In their war writing, the four authors this dissertation explores—Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Sylvia Plath, and J.D. Salinger—display evidence of this boundary, as well as its destructive effects on persons on both sides of it. They also, in different ways, and with different levels of success, write or begin to write past this boundary and its gendered understanding of home front and war front. Through my exploration of these four authors’ work, I conclude that the war writers of the twentieth century have a problem to solve: they still write within an understanding of war that very clearly genders combatants and noncombatants, warriors and home front helpers. However, they also live and write within a historical and political era that opens up a greater possibility to think and write past this gendered understanding. Those writers who successfully utilize these tools are those able to restore their characters to at least some level of community and peace after war’s end. Copyright ©2014 by Julie Ooms All rights reserved TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction 1 Chapter Two: “All alone at the war with no new girls”: Nightmares and “War Comrades” in the Work of Ernest Hemingway 15 Chapter Three: “This I dreamed of sharing”: Complexity and Contradiction in Tim O’Brien’s Portrayal of Women and War 83 Chapter Four: “I’m willing to let you know me if you’ll do the same”: The Possibility and Importance of Mutual Understanding in Sylvia Plath’s War Writing 134 Chapter Five: “Some quick, however slight, therapy”: Writing War Obliquely and Rebuilding Community in J.D. Salinger’s War Stories 211 Chapter Six: Conclusion 264 v CHAPTER ONE Introduction In sketches, stories, and novels, Ernest Hemingway seeks to keep women separate from war experiences and laments the results of a relationship between women and war. Tim O’Brien, in his novels, introduces us not only to women who seem to be comforting reminders of home, yet are actually dangerous and deadly, but also to women who can come to understand their (male) veteran lovers and offer them a possibility of peace. Sylvia Plath, in letters, fiction, poems, and artwork, mourns the effects of war on women and children, often elided by discussions of war’s effects on soldiers and against faceless foreign powers, and seeks to involve women in the global conversation on war and politics so that their distinct concerns can be heard. And in his stories, J.D. Salinger writes of veterans, families, children, and girlfriends who all endure war experiences, and whose common experiences and understanding might lead to their transcending the divisive borders between home front and war front experiences, a path toward healing after the wars have ceased. All four of these authors’ work displays three truths about how wars, at least in the Western world in the twentieth century, are thought and portrayed in writing. First, they often serve to define and sharpen boundaries between people whose experiences in war differ, often, and allegedly, in ways that create uncrossable chasms between one group and another. Second, most often, these chasms separate people along a strictly gendered line. And third, the existence, and widening, of these chasms often does little to stop those on either side from attempting to communicate their experiences to those on 1 the other in order to bridge that gap—attempts that often take the form of storytelling, and only sometimes offer any possibility of communication or rebuilt community. The ways in which war perpetuates sharply defined boundaries between those who fight and those who do not, between the war front and the home front, between those who know what it was like over there and those who cannot begin to understand, is, in my view, most clearly articulated by Jean Bethke Elshtain in her 1987 book Women and War, and it is her ideas that I use to frame my discussion here. Elshtain is adamant that this war front / home front boundary is most often a strictly gendered one; further, this boundary often assumes a mythic quality that transcends the reality of men’s and women’s actual relationships to war. “In time of war,” Elshtain writes, “real men and women…take on, in cultural memory and narrative, the personas of Just Warriors and Beautiful Souls,” masculine and feminine tropes according to which men’s and women’s relationships to war are defined, consciously or unconsciously, in the war stories we continue to tell (4). According to Elshtain’s analysis, one of the reasons why war “seduces us” is that we “continue to locate ourselves inside its prototypical emblems and identities” (3), among them gender tropes that persist despite evidence that men’s and women’s involvement in war extends far beyond their confines: “Man construed as violent, whether eagerly and inevitably or reluctantly and tragically; women as nonviolent, offering succor and compassion: these tropes…function…to re-create and secure women’s location as noncombatants and men’s as warriors.” Thus, “sedimented lore—stories of male war fighters and women home keepers and designated weepers over war’s inevitable tragedies—have spilled over from one epoch to the next” (4). 2 Significantly, the strictly gendered war front / home front boundary’s mythic quality not only overshadows men’s and women’s actual relationships to war. It also, Elshtain argues, persists, with remarkable consistency, despite the changing face of war and society’s relationship to it, particularly in the twentieth century, when wars have become increasingly bloody; death tolls have mounted astronomically; methods of waging war have distanced the soldier, in space and also psychologically, from his enemy; and when, perhaps most significantly, women have assumed more roles in combat such that the enemy might just as well be “hers” as “his.” Though she acknowledges the clear differences between post-WWII and post-Vietnam American society and gender roles, Elshtain still goes on to assert: But it would be unwise to assume that the combined effects of Vietnam, feminism, the involvement of over 50 percent of adult American women in the labor force, and the growing postponement of marriage and childbirth by young women undercut received webs of social meaning as these revolve around men, women, and war. (7) Further, and ironically, the efforts of various feminisms to change the relationship between women and war have often ended up re-inscribing women in the same “Beautiful Soul,” home front roles: To the extent that feminist pacifism reproduces Beautiful Soul presumptions and evocations it, paradoxically, helps to ensure the continued triumph of our grand narrative of women and war, of male and female identities insofar as these are forged around the matter of collective violence. The “solution”…would seem to be insisting that women, too, can take up arms. But…Western history is dotted with tales of…women who reversed cultural expectations by donning warrior’s garb and doing battle; and their existence as fact and myth seems not to have put much of a dent in the overall edifice of the way war figures in the structure of male and female experience and reactions. (8) Even in the latter years of the twentieth century, then, despite the shifting face of war and place of women in it and in society, we can still see, Elshtain argues, a clear and 3 dichotomous relationship between a masculine war front and feminine home front—a relationship based on separation and division, rather than communication and the possibility of reconciliation. Paradoxically, however, many veterans of the war front return to become tellers (and writers) of war stories who seek communication with others back home—or, at the very least, seek a way to communicate their experience that rings true to them. Thus, war perpetuates division between people while simultaneously producing storytellers who desire to communicate across those divisions. The authors this dissertation considers— Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Sylvia Plath, and J.D. Salinger—all participate in this kind of storytelling: storytelling that, with varying levels of success, attempts to speak across the persistent gap between home front and war front in an effort to bridge or even close it. The success or failure of these authors depends upon their ability to transcend these pervasive, gendered categories and notions of what constitutes “war experience,” and to write instead of men and women not as denizens of war front and home front but as what Elshtain terms “chastened patriots” who work together to “break cycles of vengeance” and the harrowing effects of war. Defining “Gender” and “War” as Categories of Analysis Before I discuss Elshtain’s “chastened patriot” idea more fully, and apply it to these four authors in the next four chapters, first I want to define what I mean here by “gender” and “war,” and also chart briefly how other scholars have considered the relationship between gender and war.