University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

(USC Thesis Other)

Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

GOING BEYOND THE VICTORY GARDEN:
WAR, GENDER, AND WOMEN OF NATIONAL CONCERN

by

Elizabeth Park Suarez

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2011

Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Park Suarez

ii

Dedication

For my Father, Stephen Randall Park

iii

Acknowledgements

This project could never have been completed without the hard work and endless
patience of my dissertation committee: Professor John Carlos Rowe, Professor Tania
Modleski, and Professor Lois Banner.
I am eternally grateful.
I must also thank my family for their tireless support.
And of course, my husband, for his unfailing encouragement.

iv

Table of Contents

Dedication

ii
Acknowledgements

iii
Abstract

v
Introduction 1
Introduction References

30
Chapter One: Nursing and American Fantasy: Catherine Barkley
And the Obfuscation of Masculine Trauma in A
Farewell to Arms.
33
Chapter One References

77
Chapter Two: Dropping Bombs and Picking Up Bombshells:
Wartime Prostitution in Alfred Hayes’ The Girl on the
Via Flaminia.
79
Chapter Two References

120
Chapter Three: Raspberry Jam and Refugees: The Housewife at
The Front in Dorothy Fisher’s The Deepening Stream.
122
Chapter Three References

173
Chapter Four: Sissy Boys and Servicemen: Evaluating Mothers,
Masculinity, and Militarism in Willa Cather’s One of
Ours.
176
Chapter Four References

232
Comprehensive Bibliography 236

v

Abstract

World War I and World War II powerfully influenced American cultural fears and
fantasies attached to shifting ideologies of gender. A new and fast-evolving industrial
revolution, the growing social and political power of the New Woman, and cultural
changes facilitated by the Industrial Revolution coalesced in the early twentieth-century
and contributed to a sense that traditional masculine prerogative was in danger. Both
World War I and World War II were propagandized as the solution to this perceived
instability in gender relationships. In both cases the war failed to return American gender
relations to the more clearly bifurcated private/public spheres of the nineteenth century.
Militarism, as the process by which communities and cultures come to be
controlled by the military itself or military ideas, capitalized on the fears of the nation in
order to foster public acceptance of the war and to encourage the enlistment of young
men. I argue that the spectacular failure of either war to re-create a sense of masculine
primacy in these young men is then documented in the American war literature of the era.
Struggles to locate a more stable paradigm of gender play themselves out through war
texts in which the disillusionment of soldiers who suffered physical, emotional, and
psychological trauma is linked to a failing tradition of separate spheres between men and
women. Anxiety regarding shifting modes of gender and power are expressed in a sense

vi
of betrayal felt by men who believed themselves to have been misled by their country
into fighting, and preyed upon by their country's women.
In my first chapter, “Nursing an American Fantasy: Catherine Barkley and the
Obfuscation of Masculine Trauma in A Farewell to Arms,” Catherine Barkley's role as
the military nurse and love object for her soldier hero reveal a powerful negotiation of
social, literary, and national concerns regarding sex and power during World War I.
When viewed in terms of the history of the war nurse, Catherine’s much analyzed lack of
relevance in the novel is soundly refuted. My second chapter, “Dropping Bombs and
Picking Up Bombshells: Wartime Prostitution in Alfred Hayes' The Girl on the Via
Flaminia” addresses the nurse's perceived cultural other, the wartime prostitute. Alfred
Hayes attempts to debunk some of the myths and fantasies attached to wartime
prostitution in this short novel set during World War II. While his nuanced approach to
soldiering and prostitution is an interesting alternative to the standard texts regarding sex
work during times of war, he is ultimately unable to escape the sexual and racial coding
applied to prostitutes at the time. In my third chapter, “Raspberry Jam and Refugees: the
Housewife at the Front in The Deepening Stream” I move to female authors in my
analysis of Dorothy Fisher's popular novel. This move from more traditional war texts
written by men to a so-called “domestic novel” entails an analysis of the social and
literary definitions of value that were used to disenfranchise female authors who sought
to politicize their personal opinions. Fisher's fictionalized military housewife Matey
represents a complete departure from the propagandized vision of the soldier's wife at
that time, and offers readers an alternative war experience that rarely receives adequate

vii
representation, even today. In my final chapter, “Sissy Boys and Servicemen: Evaluating
Masculinity and Militarism in Willa Cather's One of Ours,” I evaluate Willa Cather's
imagining of early twentieth-century masculinity, revealing the deep insecurities of men
in this era, and the role that World War I played in the mediation of those insecurities.
Cather's use of her cousin's personal experiences, as well as her well-documented reliance
upon soldiers' memoirs to write the controversial last third of the book, offer modern
readers a glimpse into the ways that gender, power and war were imagined by the men
who served.

1

Introduction

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British
Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, this was
their finest hour! - Winston Churchill

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in
modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for
no good reason. - Ernest Hemingway

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead.
He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war. - Robert Mueller

The obvious disconnect between the traditional language of war and the actual
experiences of the men who fight are depicted in the above quotations by Winston
Churchill and Ernest Hemingway. Churchill's soaring rhetoric was designed to inspire
social and political support during World War II and to encourage enlistment to repel the
Nazi offensive. The extreme brutality of World War II, which would eventually cost the
lives of over 60 million people, stands in stark contrast to the powerful and often
beautiful language used to inspire servicemen and civilians by leaders like Roosevelt,

2
Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. Ernest Hemingway had witnessed a similar
phenomenon a generation earlier; World War I didn't produce the same scope of violence
and suffering for most of the world, but the newer technologies deployed during the
Great War proved devastating to the men who fought it, as did the dehumanizing effects
of trench warfare. In contrast, the language of military propaganda crucial to garnering
support for the conflict situated World War I as a global theater of power and glory,
where democratic ideals would be defended by men who fought in gallant, old-world
style. As Allen Frantzen puts it, “chivalry was born in the court of King Arthur and laid
to rest in the trenches of World War I” (1). Writers like Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria
Remarque, John Dos Passos and Wilfred Owen would fictionalize the reality they
endured in painful detail and contribute to a new literary style in America and Europe
featuring the matter-of-fact portrayal of suffering and death during the war.
In the final quotation Mueller's acknowledgement of the misogynistic treatment of
the women living in Myanmar is intertwined with its position as a country under strict
military rule by one of the most abusive and repressive regimes in power today. The
Burmese man who risks his wife's life is able to do so because she has been doubly
subjugated, first by a patriarchal system that fails to recognize women as human beings
equal in value to men, and again by a system of military power that endangers the lives of
all citizens and further facilitates abuses committed against powerless communities like
women and children. Unlike Churchill and Hemingway, the Burmese woman has no
voice; she has been silenced by the conflation of militarism and misogyny in a modern
world where experiences like hers are regularly repressed. Cynthia Enloe defines

3
militarism as a process by which a community “comes to be controlled by the military or
comes to depend on its well-being on militaristic ideas” (3). These ideas are contingent
upon the acquiescence of both men and women, but they privilege masculinity in a way
that is revealed in the images of women propagandized by military governments. The
deleterious effects of militarism on female populations around the world have been
addressed in recent years by transnational theorists like Enloe, as well as Sonya Michel,
Philomena Goodman and Miriam Cooke, to name a few.
However, the application of militaristic ideologies to the analysis of literature has
not received a great deal of critical attention, in part because the populations most
affected by organized, state-controlled violence are rarely able to speak against it, and in
part because “war literature” is a type of literature usually written by men. Moreover, it is
often analyzed retrospectively. However, I contend that the benefits of analyzing war
literature from previous generations through the lens of militarism are numerous. By
examining what Enloe calls militaristic “maneuvers” in literature we can gain a better
understanding of how global conflict has shaped literary expression, as well as the
evolution of gender ideologies on a cultural level (1). As Sandra Lipsitz Bem asserts, the
“lenses of gender” through which we see and evaluate the world remain “embedded in
cultural discourses, social institutions, and individual psyches” in a way that enables the
systematic reproduction of militarized patriarchy in generation after generation (2).
Understanding how these fantasies of gender and power have shaped historical and
current forms of literature can facilitate the cultural recognition of militarism and
misogyny as they reproduce themselves in often unrecognized ways.

4
I have chosen American literature for a variety of reasons. First, the tradition of
the American war novel has been mostly subsumed in the study of Modernist literature;
World War I has often been posited as the defining event that inspired the modernist
movement as we know it today. Thus the study of American war literature outside of
Modernism itself has received relatively little attention. Furthermore, modern feminist
evaluations of twentieth-century literature can benefit from a deeper understanding of
how the world wars, and militarism itself, influenced the genesis of, and critical value
attached to, literature of the era. As Andreas Huyssen has said of the modernist era, this is
a cultural movement that produced art and literature deeply invested in “a conscious
strategy of exclusion” that labeled women's contributions at best suspect, and at worst
inferior and inauthentic (44). In a similar vein, by looking at the canon of American war
literature it appears that only men wrote war novels, though a closer look reveals that
women's experiences were simply not valued in the same way as those of their male
counterparts. The masculine ideology of war was used to dismiss and even denigrate
women's war novels as well as their personal experiences. Above all, there is real cultural
value in appreciating how America's understanding of war and gender have been shaped
historically and in evaluating the impact of that understanding as it is represented in
literature.
American cultural fears and fantasies attached to shifting ideologies of gender
were powerfully influenced by World War I and World War II. Struggles to locate a more
stable paradigm of gender play themselves out through war texts in which the
disillusionment of soldiers who suffered physical, emotional, and psychological trauma is

5
linked to a failing tradition of separate spheres between men and women. Anxiety
regarding shifting modes of gender and power are expressed in a sense of betrayal felt by
men who believed themselves to have been misled by their country into fighting, and
preyed upon by their country's women. In particular, World War I occurred in the middle
of America's first feminist movement, and it played a powerful part in women gaining the
right to vote in 1920. The Victorian model of womanhood as pious and unassuming
appeared to be fading away; the “Angel in the House” was demanding political power
and taking center stage in nationally recognized movements such as organizations for
urban improvement, prohibition, and women's suffrage. As Jean Matthews asserts, the
latter half of the nineteenth century offered women a “sense of progress and widening
horizons” that incited anxiety in culture at large (3). As the doctrine of separate spheres
found itself under assault, cries to uphold it grew louder and louder. Even the
“Maternalists” found themselves and their political doctrines questioned. They embraced
traditional notions of women's biological destiny towards motherhood and wifely duty,
but they used these notions to argue for women's greater political power. Maternalists
had successfully campaigned for the financial support of widows and orphans, and for
greater medical attention to infant mortality rates in the nineteenth century (Ladd-Taylor
10). Further complicating traditional beliefs, Freudian interpretations of sexuality began
circulating in America at the turn of the century with new and threatening theories of
homosexuality, neurosis, and mothers' powerful influence on their children.
A new and fast-evolving industrial revolution was further changing the balance of
power between men and women in America. Andreas Huyssen asserts that by the end of

6
the nineteenth century “woman, nature, [and] machine had become a mesh of
significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they
raise fears and threatened male authority and control” (70). Technological innovations
such as washing machines, automobiles and refrigerators were freeing women from many
of the traditional duties associated with mothering and wifehood and allowing them more
time for public interests. Technology would later take on even greater significance as an
agent of emasculation, when the machinery attached to World War I would enable a new
and grisly means of killing soldiers. As a result, in the post-war environment it appeared
that technology had succeeded in “obliterating masculinity” instead of rejuvenating it, as
had been propagandized before America's entrance to the war (Braudy 381). Thus the
growing presence of technology in America, combined with the rise of the New Woman
and the devastation of soldiers during World War I, collided in the United States to create
the perception of a dangerous threat to traditional masculinity. This “threat” would be
virulently attacked in the post-war years by traditionalists who lamented the loss of male
social and political primacy.
These concerns regarding women's growing social and political power took on
global significance with the advent of World War I. Specifically, women's theoretical
ability to erode their male children's sense of masculinity was viewed as central to a
perceived waning of patriarchal privilege and national security. As the war loomed
closer, fears of dangerous mothers pathologically attached to their sons were cited as the
cause of everything from dangerous pacifism to child neglect and eventually
homosexuality. Teddy Roosevelt famously launched an attack on these mothers as a

7
national blight, particularly in light of women-led anti-draft and peace movements in
1917. He claimed that any mother who loved her son in an inappropriate manner –
meaning in a way that did not encourage participation in the war – was “turning him into
an emasculated coward, thus hastening moral disintegration and heading the nation into
ruin” (Ladd-Taylor, 169). In the space of a generation women's use of motherhood to
facilitate political change had been thwarted by a traditional militarist ideology with a
long history of manipulating images of mothers. The fantasy of the “patriotic mother” is
one of the most deeply ingrained models of militarized femininity. Military strategists
have found that “the militarization of mothers – and the very idea of motherhood – has
been crucial for any successful manpower formula” (Enloe, 237). Dovetailing ideologies
of gender and biological determinism embodied in the popularity of eugenics would also
support the notion that inappropriate motherhood was dangerous for the nation.
According to many eugenicists, “neurotic” mothers who did not embrace their biological
role to produce racially superior sons and daughters created “unfit children” whose very
existence threatened the fabric of American society, and contributed to a perceived
failing of American power (Winfield 78). Eugenics had managed to maintain the
importance of women's reproductive behavior on a cultural and national level, but had
robbed women of any authority in its deployment as an ideology of gender and power
(Wolff 2). This instability in mothers' perceived cultural importance, alongside a new
fascination with their potential impact upon their children, created a new matrix of gender
and power that required careful negotiation by military policy-makers. For this reason
mothers, whether good or bad, are prominent figures in everything from soldiers'

8
memoirs to fictionalizations of the war itself.
But the mother isn't the only iconic female figure to be found in the war literature
of the era. Sexually contentious relationships between men and women are often central
issues in twentieth-century war novels. This is due in part to the process of militarizing
any community, which depends heavily upon controlling ideas of femininity, even as it
serves to subjugate the women who are subjected to these ideologies. According to
Philomena Goodman, during times of war “male morale is directly linked to packagable,
salable fantasies of sexual women” (14). In German soldiers' memoirs Klaus Thewelweit
has found a preoccupation with women and female sexuality that paradoxically exists
alongside a powerful need to erase women from the war experience altogether (74). Leo
Braudy recognizes that in war military masculinity is situated as “the core of national
cohesiveness” against a vision of femininity that is passive, accepting, and nurturing of
men and their war efforts (378). However, throughout the twentieth century the real-life
expectations of women during war often clashed with these ideologies, creating
conflicting images of power and sexuality in the minds of Americans. Women were
expected to step into the public sphere in order to 'do their duty' on the home front,
including taking up work outside the home and facilitating the smooth progress of an
American economy at war. That requirement was at odds with the American fantasy of
them as background figures whose duty was to quietly support the war effort and raise
patriotic children. The gaps between what was expected of women and what was
propagandized as a woman's role during wartime led to an inescapable dissonance
between reality and fantasy as it was applied to women during World Wars I and II. In

9
literature it would also lead to a postwar backlash against women when the inevitable
failure to live-up to such expectations, alongside women's real social and economic
empowerment in postwar America, was interpreted as a form betrayal and an overt attack
upon masculine prerogative (Gilbert and Gubar 262). The direct result of this dissonance
and sense of wounded masculinity would reveal itself in images of women that are
unconventional, predatory, emasculating, or in contrast, properly supportive of
patriarchal mores and war making.
Unrealistic expectations for masculinity would also play a part in this postwar
backlash in literature, as well as representations of another fearful figure of the era – that
of the civilized and sinister homosexual. As I have mentioned before, Freudian analyses
of human sexuality would gain traction as the twentieth century progressed, and in
conjunction with Darwinism would contribute to a more “complex” view of sexual
identity that did nothing to quell the growing concerns regarding waning masculine
prerogative (Braudy 451). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have found that men of
literary circles in prewar America had already begun to fear the collapse of their
masculine identity, and found the encroachment of the New Woman went hand-in-hand
with the growing visibility of the homosexual, particularly in images of the artistic elite,
such as Oscar Wilde and Henry James (259). The advent of the war originally appeared
as an opportunity to reestablish masculine identity and conquer the homosexual threat
through heroic deeds and the embrace of chivalric ideology, a perception that would be
bitterly denounced by postwar artists and writers. Military propagandists capitalized on
this association between war and masculinity, and used both women and homosexuals as

10
an ideological “other” against which young men who enlisted could situate themselves.
As Kathy Phillips asserts, the young men who enlisted were imagined as “real men” who
had embraced a warrior ideology (7). The fear of a growing homosexual population,
further incited by an environment of dandyism in urban centers and elite circles, was also
attached to women in their duty as mothers. Women who emasculated their sons and
husbands were said to create “unnatural” children who would stray from the biological,
sexual, and social roles prescribed for them by culture at large. Thus predatory and
unnaturally empowered women would constitute a sinister partnership with encroaching
homosexuality that required a new imagining of masculinity throughout the twentieth
century. After World War II these fears would lead to a new hyper-masculine hero who
would be portrayed in literature through “lone vigilantes” and “individualist fantasy
figures” that situated men as safely distanced from women, bureaucracy, and the
homosexual threat (Braudy 436-437). This hyper-masculine hero would find great
popularity in detective fiction featuring male figures like Mickey Spillane, in westerns
that imagined the lone cowboy hero, and through science fiction heroes by writers like
Isaac Asimov, whose feminizing enemies could be literally cast as “alien.” In the
modernist works considered “high art” this re-imagining of masculinity was
accomplished through a blatant disregard for women's contributions to art and literature,
and an association between women and an artistically inferior sentimental tradition.
Huyssen refers to this as the “male mystique” of modernism, which though imagined as
separate from these other forms of literature, bears a striking similarity in their
imaginings of women as dangerous and inferior (50).

11
The need to construct an image of a powerful and individual masculinity reveals
not just the perceived danger of shifting paradigms of gender, but the spectacular failure
of militarism to adequately prepare men for modern global warfare. Evidence of this
failure is nowhere more clearly evinced than through the image of the soldier's wound,
the physical representation of militarism’s inability to protect soldiers. As a result the
soldier's wound appears throughout war texts as a horrific, castrating agent of
bureaucracy, and is often linked to betrayal on the part of women. Fetishistic fantasies
also abound when the soldier's body is maimed, indicating a deep-seated psychological
drive to erase the implications of the wounding. Joanna Bourke addresses many
interpretations of the soldier's wound in her text Dismembering the Male, beginning with
the assertion that in pre-World War I society, the ideal man was as the object of the same
careful cultural definition as the pre-war woman. While the ideal woman was gentle,
domestic and virginal, the ideal man was athletic, stoical, and courageous (13). These
masculine attributes were accomplished through the wholeness and imagined
impermeability of the male body. Because the soldier's intact body carries both national
and cultural implications of power and sexuality, the soldier's wound then reveals the
very instability of such institutions and fantasies (Michel 260). Bourke suggests that the
war maimed reveal the true impact of war on the male body, destroying the notions of
chivalry and honor that had been attached to war before the advent of World War I (15).
At the same time such wounds attract attention to the theatricality of masculinity,
revealing that the martial male body is in fact just as delicate as the body of woman,
drawing dangerous parallels between genders that war was supposed to have erased. The

12
accompaniment of fetishistic fantasy and a sense of castration anxiety along with the
soldier's wound evident throughout many war texts reveals that the trauma of the war
wound must be obscured by an object of fetishization, which is most often a woman
herself. If, as Louise Kaplan sums it up, the eroticism of fetish can work both to obscure
the death drive and reestablish authoritarianism, then nowhere is fetish more
appropriately deployed than during times of war (8). It is no coincidence, it seems, that
Freud's own theories of sadomasochism and fetish were formulated in post World War I
Europe through his evaluation of soldiers struggling with what today we would call Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The female figures that appear in war texts are designed to absorb a multitude of
male anxieties, including castration anxiety, the terror of the wound, and the specter of
homosexuality that necessarily hangs over powerfully homosocial environments such as
army barracks. This use of women to relieve sexual tension and anxiety has a long
military history that Lynn Higgins finds dangerously misogynistic. Higgins' example of
the World War II pinup reflects a tradition in which images and stories about women
allow men to enjoy their socially constructed role as heterosexual subject, with women
occupying the role of the object of both action – as a sexual conquest – and representation
as pinup (253-254). In Higgins' analysis women are thus doubly objectified to fuel a
sense of masculine superiority at a time when that masculinity faces multiple threats,
leaving women removed twice over from the realm of agency. This imagining of women
coincides with the use of female icons by military propagandists, and results in images of
women whose wartime participation acts as a front behind which cultural and national

13
fears may be addressed. While theorists may argue over which images of women are
more popularly used during times of war, the general consensus includes nurses, mothers,
housewives, prostitutes, and victims of physical and sexual violence. In every case the
importance of these figures is situated through their relationship to the soldier and his
duty to his country: the nurse as soldier’s helpmate and sometime girlfriend, the patriotic
mother as both authority figure and ambassador for the state, the housewife as
representative of the home front, prostitute as sexual object, and victims that provide men
with chivalric motivation. Each of these figures of militarism were regularly deployed
during World War I and World War II through recruitment posters imaginatively
designed to facilitate enlistment and shame those who embraced pacifism. In the case of
the prostitute, whose sexual manipulation was rendered suspicious by her active
participation in both sex acts and commerce, these images also address the dangers
associated with women who are so empowered as to verge on economic independence.
Once again the conflation of militarism and modern evaluations of women and power
results in an image that reveals the anxieties inherent to the era. As Philomena Goodman
makes clear, the cracks in the boundaries between spheres are revealed in the public
preoccupation with “female morality” during times of war, specifically as a means of
controlling women's bodies during a time of gender instability (23).
These same dangers - of women seizing the power associated with sexuality and
political participation - are similarly addressed in female figures that appear in American
war literature of the twentieth century. When set against the devastation of World Wars I
and II, these transgressions on the part of women take on even deeper and more

14
treacherous connotations, and must be resolved in order for the suffering soldier to regain
his sense of physical and emotional primacy. However, what my project reveals is the
very different means of resolving these issues as they were imagined by male and female
authors. Male authors more commonly depicted the war as a force of psychic and
physical castration, with the wartime activities of women constituting a sexual wounding
of men (Gilbert and Gubar, 262-263). Thus poetry such as Wilfred Owens’ “The Last
Laugh” and literary works such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises incorporate female
figures who are easily as dangerous to the male characters as the war itself. In contrast,
Virginia Woolf wrote that women had unconsciously desired the war, since it brought
with it power and freedoms that had not been permitted before (Gilbert and Gubar, 264).
Thus their own representations of the war and of the shifting relationship between the
sexes explore alternate means of reconciling the two. Male authors typically incorporate
these themes into their works and seek to ameliorate anxiety produced by them, often at
the expense of female characters. Female authors, on the other hand, understand the
postwar environment from a different point of view, and often cede authority to female
characters whose experiences of the war are validated in interesting ways.
An important part of this validation is situated through a new American
understanding of global politics and commerce necessarily introduced through
participation in a global war. Coinciding with a perceived death of the American Frontier
at the turn of the century, American masculinity is often rediscovered in these texts
within the imagined new frontier of Europe. John Esperjesi defines the “Imperialist
Imaginary” as “a moment in which a particular representation, or misrepresentation, of

15
geographical space supports the expansion of the nation’s political and economic
borders” (2). With American soldiers venturing abroad in order to conquer an enemy
imaginatively rendered through inflated terminology and images, the loss of the
American frontier as a space of masculine self-discovery is neatly replaced by the
misrepresentation of Europe as the American man’s new playground of conquest and
sexual reinvigoration. Bill Handley defines all American fantasies of the west as, by
definition, Imperialist (5). These fantasies of a lost frontier and waning American
masculinity were easily transferred to a European environment devastated by the war, in
dire need of manpower and economic support. They often encompass ideas of gender and
femininity, with European women whose distance from the threatening New Woman of
America make them a safer alternative for men. Furthermore, the war itself constitutes its
own imaginative space, allowing men to re-situate their notions of masculinity in an
environment that was fantasized as one removed from the influences of women. As Klaus
Thewelweit finds in German soldiers’ memoirs, the war is imagined as a space wholly
removed from femininity and female influence, where male primacy cannot and will not
be questioned (33). Of course there is no such thing as a war without women. As feminist
theorists have rightly pointed out, there are always women present at war. Thus,while
male authors tend to imagine a war with few women, or in which women play tangential
or secondary parts, women writers acknowledge the variety of wartime experiences that
go beyond soldiering. They are more adept at recognizing how the experience of war
impacts men and women alike, although in very different ways.
This displacement of American Frontier Imperialism upon the European continent

16
also bears interesting connotations for capitalistic enterprise in the twentieth century,
reflecting America’s growing economic might and the impact of industrialization on
ideas of gender. In the works of male authors like Hemingway and Dos Passos,
capitalism is often represented as another facet of the vast bureaucracy that was deployed
to ensnare unsuspecting young soldiers. Often, capitalism's dehumanizing effects are
contrasted by a re-establishment of the intrinsic value once attached to the male soldier's
whole and powerful body, and a “natural” environment that exists outside the newly
mechanized world of industrialization. Don Scheese finds that masculine nature writing
blossomed after World War I as a more virile form of the nature writing popular in
America during the nineteenth century (4). Women and technology then combine with
industrialization - and by extension capitalism - to oppress the individual man, who finds
solace in the uncivilized wilderness. Female authors, however, imagine their relationship
with capitalism in a variety of ways, each of which sheds light on the complex and
evolving nature of economics and women in America's twentieth century. Capital itself
can be an agent of freedom for those women who have access to it, or of oppression for
women whose inability to provide for themselves and their children in war-torn
communities leave them dangerously dependent on male populations with few resources
or little incentive to help them. In some cases women who sought social and economic
freedom through their wartime duties, including the famous British nurse and author Vera
Britain, retroactively view their motivations as naive and even insensitive when
compared to the reality of wartime violence (Caesar 2). At the same time, the moral
implications of capitalism and its part in the Treaty of Versailles occupy the pages of

17
texts by Willa Cather and Dorothy Fisher, forcing readers to question the legitimacy of
America's participation in global conflict to begin with. Since women's participation in
their state's growing capitalist economy was rife with conflict, such nuanced and even
paradoxical representations of power, money, gender and war reveal how women
themselves struggled to negotiate a rapidly changing American landscape.
Religion, and its perceived ability to contain inappropriate female behavior, was
yet another piece of that changing landscape. As a traditional vehicle of patriarchy and in
its ideological connection with militarism and war, religion represents yet another factor
contributing to a sense of wavering masculinity in both America and western Europe.
Adrian Cesar connects the heroic validation of male suffering at times of war with a long
Christian tradition that embraces suffering on a cultural level, termed “moral” masochism
(5). Thus the suffering of the male body is connected to both religious and state
apparatuses that also underwrote much of the sexual mores of Victorian America, and
then were used to support nationalism and empire. But along with the rise of science and
Darwinism, industrialization brought greater numbers of young Americans into urban
cities, and away from a more traditional, rural atmosphere. The result was a growing
secularization that Henry Idema sees as one of the biggest ideological shifts in American
culture in the twentieth century (1). A resulting anxiety regarding the stability of gender
roles and the power of traditional, authoritative religious models
1
to mediate supposedly
inappropriate behavior for women combines with World War I to create for men, in
Idema's analysis, a growing sense of “helplessness” and anger towards the war, towards

1 Idema specifically refers to Catholicism and Calvinist models of religion, whose patriarchal belief
systems seemed less relevant in the new, evolving social structure of the United States.

18
women, and towards a failed system of religion (15). As a result male authors are
skeptical of religion, particularly in light of their own personal wartime experiences, and
more often than not treat it as cultural apparatus that has failed to preserve them either
physically or emotionally. Women, on the other hand, tend to approach religious faith
from a more concrete point of view, offering alternative analyses of how religiosity
influences day-to-day life. Ann Douglas believes this is because sentimental literature,
whose roots would be seen in the“lady novelists” of the early twentieth century, sprung
up as a defense against calvinism, which was “repressive, authoritarian, dogmatic, [and]
patriarchal to the extreme” (13). For this reason religious faith in women's war novels
represents a range of experiences, whether it offers characters in the novel a real means of
managing emotional distress during and after the war, or only serves as palliative for a
short time.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms (1929) is a famously anti-war novel
whose main character Frederic struggles to free himself from the bureaucratic oppression
of a dehumanizing war. His wartime experiences are set alongside his love affair with
nurse Catherine Barkley, whose lack of personality has earned her character negative
reviews on the part of critics, both at the time of the novel's publication as well as today.
However, as I demonstrate in my first chapter “Nursing an American Fantasy: Catherine
Barkley and the Obfuscation of Masculine Trauma in A Farewell to Arms,” Catherine’s
role as the military nurse and love object for her soldier hero reveal a powerful
negotiation of social, literary, and national concerns regarding sex and power during
World War I. When viewed in terms of the history of the war nurse, and in light of the

19
military use of the nurse figure to accomplish a variety of social and military maneuvers,
Catherine’s supposed lack of relevance in the novel is refuted. The paradox created in the
juxtapositioning of women's expected wartime duties against the cultural representation
of the war nurse as a romantic figure and object of sexualization creates a potentially
dangerous gap in the process of militarization itself that reveals the oppressive nature of
violence and conflict. Furthermore, in A Farewell to Arms Frederic's war wound and his
concurrent sexual relationship with Catherine also involves a negotiation of the
implications of this wound, and by extension the instability of gender roles and power in
America at the time. The war nurse is, on a basic level, a patriotic woman in her own
right whose self-sacrifice and duty to her country is well documented. However, in a time
when women's roles at home and at the front were the object of concern, America's
understanding of the deployment of nurses during World War I was carefully
manipulated in a manner that re-established their true desires as hetero-normative and
absent of dangerous political motivations. This was accomplished through the cultural
imagination of the nurse/soldier romance, which served in literature, propaganda and film
to obscure the real-life suffering of injured soldiers and the temporary empowerment of
the women who tend them.
The proximity to male bodies that predicates nursing also enabled the
sexualization of the nurse figure. The result is a powerful fetishization of the nurse that
facilitates sadomasochistic fantasy to veil the reality of the fragile male body, and
obscure the nurse's power in her role as the phallic woman. For this reason the nurse is, in
Klaus Thewelweit's words, “ubiquitous” as a figure of sexual fantasy (126). In A

20
Farewell to Arms Catherine’s sexual relationship with Frederic takes on sadomasochistic
connotations from the start, and turns toward a more sinister relationship when Frederic is
injured and sent to Milan to recover. With Catherine occupying dual roles as his nurse
and love-object, their romance exemplifies the nurse/soldier pairing as it was imagined
by military policy-makers, film-makers, and writers of the time. However, Hemingway’s
use of fetish objects like Catherine’s riding-crop, and her maternal tendencies toward him
even as they engage in a sexual relationship, reveal Frederic's struggle with gender and
power as they are embodied by women like Catherine. Catherine’s secondary role as
mediator between Frederic and Rinaldi's homoerotic relationship also reveals how
women during times of war are, in Lynn Higgins' words, “doubly objectified” so as to
protect men from the threat of an empowered woman, from the homosexual menace, and
from the frailty of the male body (253). Frederic conquers Catherine and each of these
dangers when he recovers from his wound and when Catherine becomes pregnant,
rendering her dependent upon him for her safety and that of her baby. Thus, when women
accept their supposed biological destiny as wives and mothers the threat to male privilege
is removed. Significantly, while Hemingway clearly attacks the language of militarism as
it was applied to the men who fought during World War I, he still relies upon ideas of
militarized femininity to reconstruct Catherine as a pliant and nurturing love object.
Frederic's assumption of his hyper-masculinity and his embrace of a loner-hero status is
accomplished when he abandons the war effort, but isn't truly achieved until both
Catherine and the baby die in childbirth, leaving him free of the civilizing tenets of
marriage and family, as well as the crushing dehumanization of the war.

21
My second chapter, “Dropping Bombs and Picking Up Bombshells: Wartime
Prostitution in Alfred Hayes' The Girl on the Via Flaminia” addresses the nurse's
perceived cultural other, the wartime prostitute. Florence Nightingale herself espoused
the notion that should nursing gain enough public support as an acceptable means of
employment for young women, prostitution would no longer exist, situating sex work as
diametrically opposed to nursing (Swensen 57). However, the realities of wartime
prostitution are far more complex, and entail a host of cultural fears regarding sexually
empowered women with economic freedoms made possible by the war. These fears
rarely take into account the difficult and dangerous realities negotiated by wartime
prostitutes who often find themselves without recourse in war-ridden countries. Further
complicating the image of the wartime prostitute were the variety of social theories
popular until the 1960s that associated prostitution with defects of character such as
laziness, irresponsibility, and even “psychologically maladjusted” behaviors and
“criminal” tendencies (Hobson 182). Closely tied to the pseudo-science of eugenics, such
theories were espoused by medical professionals, social theorists, and military
propagandists who could conveniently blame supposedly immoral women for
endangering the health and well-being of male soldiers, who were considered innocent in
the eyes of the law. Posters of wartime prostitutes also situate them as a national threat
whose uncontrollable sexuality could be used to manipulate soldiers into revealing
military secrets, establishing the prostitute as a danger on multiple levels even as
prostitution is facilitated by military personnel on the ground. She is a woman who
enjoys economic profit, she is a theoretical threat to male soldiers through the

22
transmission of venereal disease, and she is a danger to the state due to her manipulation
of a sinister female sexuality. Finally, as Philippa Levine has written, the prostitute can
also constitute an ethnic and racial threat. Prostitutes constructed in the western
imagination as “dark” ladies exhibit an animal sexuality that reinforces long-held
stereotypes of non-white sexuality (5). The non-white prostitute and her fearful ability to
transmit disease to white male bodies, and by extension white women, then situates this
prostitute as a threat to white culture at large.
Alfred Hayes attempts to debunk some of these myths attached to wartime
prostitution in his short novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949). His main character
Lisa isn't the dark and immoral prostitute, but instead an “angelic” woman who is forced
into prostitution in order to survive. She poses as the wife of a soldier named Robert, who
is seeking physical and emotional comfort to ameliorate the sense of alienation and
dehumanization he has suffered during World War II. Hayes' representation of the
psychological disorders that plague some of the soldiers offers readers a glimpse into the
phenomenon of “shell shock” as it was known at the time. This more nuanced approach
to soldiering is even further complicated by secondary characters in the text in the form
of Italian citizens, whose abuses at the hands of German occupiers, and later the
American forces, are rendered in interesting detail. The specter of the wound returns
again in the character of Antonio, the Italian boy whose humiliating defeat in North
Africa is compounded by his physical “wound,” which while sexually coded is never
clearly named. The recent collapse of Fascism, the inability of the Roman Catholic
Church to protect Italian citizens, and even the dehumanizing effects of capitalism all

23
combine to create in Antonio a deep and abiding hatred for women who prostitute
themselves to the “enemy.” His attempt to displace his own castration anxiety upon Lisa
when he discovers that she isn't married to Robert reflects once again how women in war-
torn communities are at the mercy of multiple communities that reinforce their
subjugation, including invading forces, local government, and their own citizens.
Unfortunately, even Hayes is unable to escape the sexual and racial coding applied to
prostitutes during times of war. Lisa's frequently-mentioned whiteness is set against the
darker and more immoral character of Nina. Nina is an unrepentant vamp character
whose likeability is unfortunately mediated by her role as the traditional “dark” lady,
whose sexual exploits and embrace of prostitution as a means to an end lean too close to
the stereotypes of prostitutes that were used to further disenfranchise an already fragile
community of women. Lisa's suicide at the end of the text, when she is found out and
forced to register as a prostitute, unfortunately situates Robert's epiphany as one bought
at the expense of her life, but also insinuates that truly “good” girls would rather die than
become sex workers.
In my third chapter, “Raspberry Jam and Refugees: the Housewife at the Front in
The Deepening Stream” I move to female authors in my analysis of Dorothy Fisher's
much loved text. This move from more traditional war texts written by men to a so-called
“domestic novel” entails an analysis of the social and literary definitions of value that
were used to disenfranchise female authors who sought to politicize their personal
experiences and opinions. In the post-war environment of modernist literature and art,
women's domestic novels were considered an inauthentic cultural product tied to an ever-

24
growing mass market and fueled by a dangerously empowered female population
(Huyssen 47). This “literary imperialism” as it has been so termed by Karen Kilcup (2),
runs parallel to a similar exclusion of women's voices in the political arena and reveals
how it is that women writers struggled to prevent themselves and their experiences from
being “written out of the war story and civic belonging” (Cooke 5). Women's war
literature of this time is therefore transgressive in nature. Such texts trespass upon the
male territory of the war novel, and in so doing highlight the exclusion of women from
multiple venues of power and authenticity as they were defined during the twentieth
century, particularly in response to the perceived salience of public/private spheres and in
reaction to the passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920. Fisher herself was
politically active in mothers' rights movements, regularly speaking for the National
Congress of Mothers, contributing articles to women's magazines regarding federal care
for women and children, and offering support for women who relied upon the veneration
of motherhood to rationalize their political aspirations. She was named one of the ten
most influential women in America by Eleanor Roosevelt, pursued and received her
doctoral degree in 1904, and is said to have spoken five languages fluently. As an
educated and politically active woman, as well as a prolific and dearly loved novelist,
Fisher embodies many of the most fearful aspects of the New Woman as this figure was
imagined at the time.
Predictably Fisher's war story, which occupies half of The Deepening Stream,
received no critical attention at the time of its publication because it was considered a
sentimental novel, and therefore not an authentic war text. However, like both Hayes and

25
Hemingway, Fisher's war experience was achieved first hand. The Deepening Stream is a
fictionalization of her experiences tending the injured, feeding homeless soldiers, and
caring for war orphans in France during World War I. Fisher's fictionalized military
housewife Matey represents a complete departure from the propagandized vision of the
soldier's wife at that time, whose duty was to embody the moral compass of the soldier
and to support his military participation, but never to tread upon the male-only terrain of
combat and “true” military participation. Instead Matey embodies an experience of war
that rarely receives adequate or nuanced representation, even today. Her
acknowledgement of the daily brutality of war, and its terrible impact upon
disenfranchised populations such as women, children and the elderly, serve to relocate
the “battlefront” as it was imagined by the American public at the time, and reveal that all
citizens suffer the brutality of war regardless of their status in the eyes of policy-makers.
Fisher's home front is therefore another equally valid battlefront, and the women who
confront the ramifications of the war in their own parlors are, by the end of the text,
soldiers in their own right. The war's impact upon the bodies of the women, their
psychological suffering in the aftermath of the war, and their struggles to carry on in the
face of the inevitable loss of their husbands, fathers and sons, are also powerfully
rendered. At the same time, complex social and cultural movements, such as militarism
itself, the wavering of religious authority, the influence of capitalism on women's
individual empowerment, and its impact on a world made larger by a global war, are all
addressed in more neutral terms than those evinced by most male authors. Fisher's less
aggressive approach to failing systems of power and gender reflect a more ambivalent

26
attitude towards traditionally masculine markers of social superiority that had only
recently become more available to women in America. And while Fisher's postwar
imagining of women's participation in the workplace isn't without complications, it still
offers her readers a means of negotiating their own sense of self outside the home in an
environment that became hostile to working women in the interwar years.
In my final chapter, “Sissy Boys and Servicemen: Evaluating Masculinity and
Militarism in Willa Cather's One of Ours,” I shift gears and evaluate Willa Cather's
imagining of early twentieth-century masculinity in the persona of Claude, her main
character in One of Ours (1922). If Andreas Huyssen is correct, and Gustave Flaubert's
identification with Madame Bovary reveals a growing twentieth-century fetishization of
women that results in both a male “imaginary femininity” as well as “hostility towards
real women” then Willa Cather's negotiation of masculinity in Claude could well
represent the unthinkable in her time: a female imaginary masculinity that goes far in
revealing the deep insecurities of men in the early twentieth-century, and the role that
World War I played in the mediation of those insecurities (45). Cather's Claude is based
in part on her cousin G.P. Cather, whose real-life inability to reconcile his unhappy life in
Nebraska with his expectations of it were ameliorated by his participation in the war, and
his subsequent death in the trenches. The last third of the novel takes place overseas,
chronicling Claude's escape from an emotionally and spiritually deadening American
experience to a European wartime adventure marked by his unfailing patriotism and his
achievement of a victorious masculinity. It is capped by his heroic death accomplished in
order to save the lives of the men serving beneath him. Critically One of Ours was poorly

27
received, and Cather suffered unusually vitriolic attacks upon the text and her authorship
based on the novel's supposed failure to address the modern understanding of the war
experience, as well as Cather's personal inexperience with the war. However, popularly
the book was a bestseller. Thanks to One of Ours Willa Cather was able to work outside
of economic restraint for the rest of her life. She also received a Pulitzer Prize for One of
Ours in 1923, highlighting once again the disparity between the critical value attached to
literature at the time, evaluated against a rubric established by male authors and
maintained by male critics, and the growing economic power associated with popular
literature, to which women had greater access.
Cather's use of her cousin's personal experiences, as well as her well-documented
reliance upon soldiers' memoirs to write the controversial last third of the book, offer
modern readers a glimpse into the ways that gender, power and war were imagined by the
men who served during World War I. Just as Klaus Thewelweit's analysis of more than
250 novels and memoirs written by German Freikorps finds them rife with fantasy,
misogyny, violence and anxiety, Cather's fictionalization of American war memoirs
unveils a host of America's masculine fears. These include a powerful sense of
emasculation at the hands of the New Woman, the death of the frontier as an imaginary
space of masculinity, and the de-individualization of modern man in the face of
capitalism and technological innovation. In contrast to texts written by male authors of
the time, the war becomes Claude's saving grace, allowing him to escape these castrating
influences and “find himself” through an imperialist re-imagining of wartime Europe, an
“ideational construct” of France as a projection of his fantasies of gender, power and war

28
(Esperjesi 3). One of Ours was the subject of criticism because Claude dies happy, having
finally found the romantic and heroic world he always yearned for, and the sense of
masculinity he had always lacked at home. But what Cather's female imagination of
masculinity ultimately reveals is the falsity of that world itself, the terrible truth of
masculinity as performance, in this case as uniform, and its status through militarism as a
mere cultural construct. Furthermore, by questioning the role of the war in the commonly
accepted notion of modern man's cultural disenchantment in this era, she hints at what
Andreas Huyssen theorizes in The Great Divide; the modernist movement itself looks
less like “the heroic feat steeled in the fires of the modern experience” and more like a
“reaction formation” based upon the real threat, the growing social and political power of
women (53). In this light the war's true failure isn't in the manipulation of idealistic
young soldiers, but its inability to save men from their real enemy, The New Woman.
Finally, Cather's construction of the Patriotic Mother in the figure of Claude's mother
Evangeline Wheeler succeeds in shifting the focus of the war's impact back to women,
again questioning the tendency to simplify women's experiences of the war, and to
disregard those experiences as somehow less valid than those of the soldiers who served.
In the examination of each of these texts the impact of militarism on American
culture and the literature of the twentieth century becomes evident. Its intersection with
gender and power in a fast-changing social demographic offers modern critics a new
means of evaluating war literature, including a renegotiation of the very definition of war
literature as it has been traditionally accepted by the critical establishment. In this light,
militarism and its manipulations of gender are also a powerful factor in the birth of the

29
modernist movement, perhaps more so than the experience of the war itself for American
culture at-large. And by examining how male and female authors imagined the war as a
personal experience, and war literature as a vehicle for expressing that experience, the
contentious relationships between women's personal rights, war, and literary expression
take on new and more relevant meaning.

30
Introduction References

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual
Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great
War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
New York: Knopf, 2003.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Cooke, Miriam. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s
Lives. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Esperjesi, John. The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American
Culture. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2005.

Frantzen, Allen J. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gilbert, Sandra & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the 20
th
Century, Vol 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Goodman, Philomena. Women, Sexuality and War. New York, Palgrave, 2002.

Handley, William R. and Nathaniel Lewis. “Introduction.” True West: Authenticity and
the American West. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 1-20.

Higgins, Lynn A. “Sexual Fantasies and War Memories: Claude Simon’s Narratology.”
Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993. 249-260.

31

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the
American Reform Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Idema, Henry. Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Pyschoanalytic Theory
of Secularization in Three Novels: Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publications, 1990.

Kaplan, Louise. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Kilcup, Karen L. “Introduction: A Conversation on Nineteenth-Century American
Women’s Writing.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A
Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. 1-15.

Ladd-Taylor, Molly. Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the
British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Matthews, Jean. The Rise of the New Woman: the Women's Movement in America 1875-
1930. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2003.

Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled
Veterans in American Postwar Films.” Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke
and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 260-283.

Phillips, Kathy. Manipulating masculinity : War and Gender in Modern British and
American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Routledge,
2002.

Swensen, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2005.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vol 2. Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

32
Winfield, Ann Gibson. Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and
the Implications of History, Ideology and Memory. New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2007.

Wolff, Tamsen. Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century
AmericanDrama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

33

Chapter One

Nursing an American Fantasy: Catherine Barkley and the Obfuscation of Masculine
Trauma in A Farewell to Arms

Dedicating an entire chapter to the analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s Catherine
Barkley in American literature might seem impossible to many literary critics. While
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was greeted in 1929 with overall applause, the
character of Catherine Barkley has rarely been reviewed as more than fluff, a male
fantasy figure, or in more recent years, as evidence of a more sinister misogynistic drive
on the part of Hemingway himself. In 1960 Leslie Fiedler would claim in Love and Death
in the American Novel that, while there are female characters in Hemingway’s texts, there
“are no women,” and that Catherine Barkley is nothing more than the imaginary
manifestation of a sadly repressed American sexuality (316). In 1978 Judith Fetterly
famously critiqued Catherine in “Hemingway’s ‘Resentful Cryptogram’”as a two-
dimensional scapegoat who dies only to relieve and absorb Frederic Henry’s misogynistic

34
hate (117). Even more positive feminist critics like Linda Wagner-Martin have conceded
that Catherine, as is often the case in Hemingway’s portrayal of women, exists “only as a
key means of understanding the male character” (57). In all, the general consensus of this
character has been that Catherine is shallow, weak, silly, or plainly unrealistic, and
therefore not well suited for an in-depth analysis of women and gender in American
literature.
Certainly I must agree that Catherine isn’t a fully rounded character in the way
that most critics would like her to be. But I contend that in light of modern nationalist and
feminist reevaluations of the roles that men and women play, both in the American
psyche and in the world at large during times of war, there is an added dimension to her
persona and to her relationship with Frederic that has yet to be fully explored. Militarism,
or the propagation of specific gender ideologies designed to provide social and
ideological support for military purpose, is based upon the understanding that to facilitate
war making military policymakers are profoundly invested in the ways that men and
women interact with the nation as it makes war. In terms of specifically managing female
participation in the war effort, these policy makers walk a fine line between recruiting
women to do the work necessary to fund and support the war, in essence making women
viable members of their state, and yet cementing traditional notions of gender. These
more simple notions of masculinity and femininity redefine war into a national theater of
masculinity, with women occupying an essentially passive role as mother, sister, lover, or
some combination of them all. While notions of militarism have yet to be applied to
literature, I believe that by evaluating Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry as figures of

35
American militarism it is not only possible to reinvest Catherine with literary importance,
but to gain a clearer understanding of how it is that American literature and American
notions of gender are shaped by our participation in World War I. In this new light
Catherine can be seen as a character whose role in A Farewell to Arms reveals the
ideologies associated with war-making in America at the turn of the century, the fears
and fantasies applied to gender roles of the time, and new perceptions of masculinity and
American nationalism as they were negotiated by Hemingway himself, and the country at
large post World War I.
In addressing the character of Catherine Barkley, her relationship with Frederic
Henry, and his struggle to negotiate their relationship against the backdrop of the war, it
becomes necessary to defend my decision to analyze the influence of militarism upon a
famously anti-war novel. A Farewell to Arms falls into a tradition of anti-war novels and
memoirs that appeared around the end of World War I, all bent upon revealing and (if
possible) making some sense of the tremendous shock that so many soldiers suffered
during their wartime service. As Leo Braudy addresses in From Chivalry to Terrorism:
War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, soldiers and policy-makers alike initially
viewed national and individual wartime participation as a means of reinvigorating a
weakened sense of traditional masculinity (Braudy 425). For those who had yet to
experience the devastation and dehumanizing nature of trench warfare, outdated notions
of wartime participation, chivalry, and romantic, masculine self-discovery permeated
culture at large in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In an
example of classic militaristic maneuvering, wartime participation was hailed as a way to

36
teach boys how to be men, to reaffirm the supporting role that women ought to occupy,
and even to cement an association of masculinity with hard work, depravation, and the
endurance of pain in a modern trial of manhood by fire (Caesar 5).
But World War I didn’t prove a trial by fire. Instead it burned these old and dearly
held notions of masculinity to ashes. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted that the
industrialized nature of this new and modern war annihilated a sense of male
individuality, honor and privilege, churning out instead a dehumanized and essentially
castrated sense of masculinity lost, one in which men represent nothing more than canon
fodder in a global war-making project (259). And as Leo Braudy further notes, the
soldier who went into the war with fantasies of camaraderie, chivalry, and heroism
fueling his participation found himself vastly disillusioned, and soon harbored a sense of
betrayal at the rhetoric of nationalism that not only predicated his enlistment, but was
also maintained throughout the war to stabilize support on the home front (380). Braudy
specifically refers to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as indicative of the trend in anti-
war literature that tried to make some sense of this now shattered relationship between a
national cause and male identity, and struggled to express the terror of a suddenly
inadequate and dangerously fragile male body.
The mental, physical, and emotional anguish created for men who experienced
the war was only compounded by the prevailing social notion that women were suddenly
in a position to benefit from this same war that was destroying their sons, brothers, lovers
and husbands: “The Great War at least temporarily dispossessed male citizens of the
primacy that had always been their birthright, while permanently granting women access

37
to both the votes and the professions that they had never before possessed” (Gilbert and
Gubar 263). One such profession would prove to be nursing, which gained such
widespread popular support as a wartime alternative for women that eventually there
would be a post-war backlash, in which popular narratives would feature dangerous nurse
figures that were sexually licentious, and typically murderous (Swensen 56). Nurses
working alongside and upon injured soldiers are closely associated with the twin specters
of emotional and physical invalidity (or “in-valids,” as Gilbert and Gubar refer to them),
and as such occupy roles that are simultaneously comforting – as healing mother figures
and/or sex objects – and frightening, as soldiers must cede their physical and figurative
primacy to nurses. As such, the empowerment and education so lauded by many nurses
during World War I was often construed as a form of exploitation by the male patient in
the postwar environment. This exploitation, and a sense even of endangerment at the
hands of the female nurse doesn’t just occupy the “bad nurse” serials of postwar America
– as I will demonstrate, the relationship between Frederic and Catherine takes on a
sinister undertone when he is injured, and in a weakened state is sent to Milan to be
tended by his love interest.
The anti-war position of A Farewell to Arms does not mean that militaristic
influence within the text is mutually exclusive. In fact, I will argue that throughout the
novel Hemingway relies heavily on militarized notions of gender and sexuality, and
simply reinserts these same traditional notions into a new context. In this way he
manages to reestablish a sense of masculine prerogative, rebuild male individuality
outside the oppressive influence of a global war machine, and subjugate a dangerously

38
empowered femininity that had found traction in women’s wartime participation. As
Braudy would call it, Hemingway simply finds a way to “carry on the war by other
means,” using one of the most successful tools of militarism: the feminization of the
enemy (436). While his main character Frederic Henry may no longer be fighting the
Germans, his new enemies are just as insidious, and represent a dangerous threat to
patriarchy, including tendencies toward European degeneracy, homosexuality, a weak
and therefore feminized notion of in-action, the frailty of the male body as it insinuated
by the traumatic war wound, and above all, the destabilizing shifts in gender and power
most clearly reflected in his relationship with Catherine Barkley herself. This is
accomplished by tracing Frederic Henry’s rise back into the realms of male individuality
and empowerment through the conquering of various effeminate and feminizing enemies,
set against a backdrop of war and within the context of a nurse/soldier romance narrative.
A Farewell to Arms is on the surface an anti-war novel, but it is one that actually manages
to take back the traditional notions of masculinity that have been historically associated
with wartime participation. In pre-war America this same sense of masculinity was
perceived to have fallen under threat in the mind of Hemingway himself, as well as
scores of men who suddenly found that old notions of manhood and power were now in
question.
Further evidence of the militarized nature of the text can also be found in an
examination of Hemingway’s representation of other cultures and peoples, specifically
those of Europe. Aside from gender, militarism is secondarily concerned with global
relationships and the ways in which those who wield power use military influence,

39
ideology, and their economic might to negotiate their relationships with other countries
and peoples. In this way, A Farewell to Arms does not disappoint. Specifically, while
Hemingway certainly does decry the de-individuation of soldiers through a vast and
mechanical war apparatus, he still does so by aligning that apparatus with a fading
European power, and in its place develops Frederic Henry’s newfound sense of American
masculinity in the traditional “us vs. them” dynamic that is the hallmark of militaristic
self-definition. This American model of manhood is embodied in “lone vigilantes” or
“individualist fantasy figures,” super-individuals who reflect an extreme version of
hyper-masculinity and isolationism that would become popular in pop-culture and literary
heroes (Braudy, 436-437). Furthermore, because this new model of masculinity has been
molded in opposition to a failing model of European empowerment – as is evidenced in
Frederic’s experiences in Europe, as an enlistee in the Italian army, and through the
evolution of his relationship with Catherine – I would suggest that this new policy of
masculine super-independence would later reflect the isolationist stance that much of the
country took in the early stages of World War II, before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Militarism explicitly attaches perceptions of masculinity to a nationalist agenda, and the
stand-apart masculine hero that would fascinate the American public in the years
following World War I would in many ways mirror America’s perception of itself in
terms of further global, wartime participation, until a personal attack on American soil
would galvanize the war support that Franklin Roosevelt so needed.
By establishing a failed version of European masculinity in contrast to Frederic’s
newer and more virile American version, he is able to become “the victor” in a different

40
kind of war – a war in which his sense of individual valor was nearly eradicated by an
overarching military command structure. While much of Frederic Henry and Catherine’s
experiences in A Farewell to Arms reveal an overall sense of European impotence and
failure, it is perhaps the figure of Count Greffi that stands apart as an almost wistful
representation of a waning sense of chivalry and worldwide diplomatic power
represented in traditional European modes of masculinity. Count Greffi is the ninety-
four-year-old gentlemen Frederic re-encounters after his escape to Stresa, who “had been
a contemporary of Metternich and was an old man with white hair and mustache and
beautiful manners” (254). Greffi’s relationship with Metternich, or Prince Klemens
Wenzel von Metternich, reflects his importance as a figure of historical military
significance, though that meaning is abandoned in light of the oppressive nature of the
Great War. Metternich, who lived from 1773 to 1859, was in the service of diplomacy in
Austria throughout the Napoleonic Wars, is remembered as a master diplomat, a man of
outstanding social graces, and more important, as a figure of political reactionism who
embodied the desire to preserve old-world traditions of aristocracy and monarchical
privilege. Greffi, like Metternich, is a living fossil of the romantic notions of masculinity
and war that had saturated much of Europe and America before the advent of World War
I, and would play heavily into the pro-war fervor that is clearly attacked throughout the
text.
And even Greffi seems to realize that these outmoded representations of
masculinity are fading away, to be replaced by a newer, younger, and more virile hero
figure. During their encounter Greffi himself reflects upon the war and suggests that it is

41
always the “younger nation” who wins (262). Though Greffi is speaking of Italy, for the
readers of A Farewell to Arms, which was written and published after the end of World
War I, the United States would undoubtedly come to mind as the youngest nation to
participate in the war, establishing it as the prime example of victory and masculine
superiority. In this way Hemingway can continue to rely on notions of militarism to
establish a successful and dominating sense of male empowerment, even as he debunks
the old-world versions that had so recently failed to produce their desired effect. This
nostalgic look at the “beautiful manners” and fading political and patriarchal domination
of an older European legacy is painfully contrasted with the other more contemporary
examples of European in-action, failure, and even sinisterly oppressive effeminacy in the
book. The scathing look at inadequate wartime bureaucracy as represented in the Italian
military is also a running theme throughout the text, including offensives that go
nowhere, a failed military medical system that doesn’t adequately prepare for its
wounded, and the famous scene in which Frederic is commended for a silver medal of
honor for getting blown up “while eating cheese” (63). But nowhere is it at its most
disturbing than during his crucial turning point scene, the moment that establishes
Frederic’s leap away from an overarching sense of oppressive bureaucratic control as it is
represented by the Italian defeat and retreat, and towards his newer and more successful
role as the super-individual male. When Frederic chooses to desert the military rather
than be murdered by Italian police as punishment for the retreat, he finds the means that
will lead him back to Catherine, that will re-establish their relationship along traditional,
family-oriented, biologistic terms, and cement his role as a true “hero” in the text.

42
This turning point scene takes place in Tagliamento, along a bridge where all
retreating infantry must converge. Frederic’s experience there reveals the point in the
text where the most bitter failure of traditional militarization has occurred, and reflects
how it is that the individual male soldier has been eradicated in the name of the state. In
the scenes previous, Frederic and a band of straggling officers and infantry have been
struggling to avoid capture and death at the hands of the advancing German military,
during which time Frederic did not hesitate to shoot an officer who failed to obey his
orders. This unquestioning support of military protocol will contrast sharply with
Frederic’s decision to desert at Tagliamento when he realizes that many officers are being
killed on the spot out of a sense of outraged retribution, because “‘Italy should never
retreat’” (223). In war failure always heralds the losing side’s assumption of a
specifically feminized role, since the victor is always the “active” dominating force, the
empowered side that now has physical control over the land and resources of the loser
(Braudy 386). Rather than pay the price for Italy’s humiliating failure, Frederic makes a
decision that reflects a new tradition that Americans would find quite vogue in the
coming years, one which would later come to define Hemingway himself: he abandons
himself to the whims of nature. “I looked at the carabinieri. They were looking at the
newcomers. The others were looking at the colonel. I ducked down, pushed between the
two men, and ran for the river, my head down” (225). Frederic dives into the flooded
river, letting the current take him away from the tenets of civilization, from an oppressive
and unmanning military endeavor, and from his own history of struggle against
feminizing forces. When he resurfaces, he is a new man.

43
Hemingway's pursuit of a new manhood, and the literary critique that his efforts
have engendered, have often centered on his own conflicted relationship with Europe. It
is common knowledge that Hemingway spent time in Europe establishing his skills as a
writer, an experience that may seem at odds with his seeming attack upon European
modes of gender and sexual representation. As Dierdre Anne Pettipiece has revealed in
her studies of Hemingway’s personal concerns with sexuality and gender, Hemingway
did go to Paris after the war in order to expand his authorial expertise – to “find himself”
as an author in many ways. In Paris, he would be situated among other expatriate authors,
including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, the latter whose impact on
his work would be theorized as a profound influence in Hemingway’s experiments with
style and language. His experiences with these other authors would fuel “Hemingway’s
awareness of shifting identity; the influence of other expatriated writers work, as well as
the exposure to these writers’ often sexually ambiguous or dysfunctional lives” (xxiv).
Not coincidentally, while Hemingway was situating Paris as the backdrop for his own
personal and professional evolution, Pettipiece finds that the most “profound impact of
expatriation is most acute in the ‘war’ stories of… [among others] Hemingway,” and
specifically linked to questions of “sexual identity” (xxiv). Famously, this intersection of
sexual identity, war, and his experiences in Europe had been previously established by
Hemingway’s decision to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver during World War I,
where he was injured and spent time recuperating under circumstances very similar to
what is recounted as Frederic’s experience in A Farewell to Arms.
While this particular experience of Europe isn’t the traditional “us vs. them” of

44
war and conquest, Hemingway (and by extension Frederic) still discovers and fosters a
sense of self, particularly a sexually coded masculine self, set against a playground of
European otherness. Eric Haralson’s study of Hemingway further supports the notion that
professionally and personally Hemingway spent a tremendous amount of his time and
energy moving away from the previous Victorian style of both literary expression and
sexual ambiguity. Instead Hemingway makes way for a “he-man” style of “exaggerated
virility” in a manner that clearly resonates with the post-war need to establish a new and
more successful means of masculine prerogative (181). Leo Braudy sees Oscar Wilde as
the figure from which so many artists would try to break away, while Haralson argues
that it’s Henry James – the American expatriate turned British citizen – who would
occupy that role for Hemingway himself. Significantly, both authors are associated with a
sense of Europeaness that will contrast sharply with the Teddy Roosevelt style
masculinity that Hemingway would attempt to emulate. At the same time that the
traditional fiber of manhood was so grievously under siege, from everything from
Freudian psychoanalysis, to shifts in gender and social empowerment, to the devastation
of the war itself, literary manhood was also “felt to be threatened not merely by the
feminine in conventional forms (women writers, editors, and critics) but also by the
effeminacy of the queer, which indicates that biological gender alone could not guarantee
heteromanliness” (Haralson 181). This preoccupation with homosexuality is also evident
in A Farewell to Arms, insinuating that Europe is where real men go to discover what
they aren’t – to uncover the reality of the new “us vs. them,” which really translates to
“men vs. queers and women.” By extension, Frederic’s love affair with Catherine then

45
becomes just another means by which he discovers his true capacity for masculinity. She
is, as a Brit and a woman, one more playground through which masculinity can be tried
and reformulated.
By situating her as a romantic nurse figure Hemingway is also more easily able to
codify Catherine’s role – to ensure that her relationship with Frederic is fleshed out not so
much by characterization, but by her role within the text as a war nurse and love interest.
Cynthia Enloe refers to nurse figures like Catherine as the most well received of
militarized female forms, based on the nurse’s ability to explicitly support the war
machine, and yet implicitly embody biologistic notions of femininity that place a
nurturing and pliant sexual object in the foreground, and obscure the hard work and
sacrifice that real nurses make in the background (199). My analysis of Catherine’s role
in the text and as Frederic’s love interest demonstrates that not only does Catherine
conform to all of these notions, but that Hemingway so constructs her by manipulating a
popular militarized plot device that was routinely used to romanticize and diminish
women’s contributions to the war. This plot device, the nurse/soldier romance, not only
worked to propagandize the desired roles that men and women should play according to
the military policy makers during the war – as wholehearted supporters of the conflict –
but also worked to reinforce traditional notions of why it is that women and men go to
war in the first place. Specifically, men go to war to fight, and women like Catherine go
to war based out of their supposedly heterosexual notions of romance, and traditional
desires to serve and care for men. While this could seem to only further demonize
Catherine within the canon, I feel that it does quite the opposite. By recognizing

46
Catherine’s role in the text as a militarized figure, we can uncover the ways that gender
and war collide in American society, and better understand the complex negotiations
between militarism and sexual politics, especially in terms of the ways in which these
negotiations find themselves expressed in literary representation.
In order to reflect upon Catherine as a figure with a complex militaristic back
history, it is important to first note that regardless of her failure to espouse any particular
interest in the war itself, in this era, any fictionalized war nurse is one with a particular
military lineage. Early in the text, when Catherine Barkley meets Frederic Henry in the
garden beside their Italian military hospital, readers of this era would have seen her as a
standard representation of a romantic female character in wartime. Clad in the trademark
white uniform, lovely and lonely, searching for someone to fill the void of her lost airman
boyfriend, Catherine embodies a host of national and social assumptions regarding sex,
gender, and biology that coalesce into the figure of the Military War Nurse in the last half
of the 19
th
and early 20
th
centuries. She is a figure with a distinctly complex and (at that
time) fairly recent history of militaristic influence brought about by shifting notions of
gender, medicine, sexuality and military policy-making. Historically, women have
always nursed soldiers, and the professionalization of nursing did not begin until the
Crimean War in the mid 1800’s, at the hands of Florence Nightingale, reflecting the close
ties between nursing as a woman’s profession and the need to facilitate military conflict.
Before this time, nursing did not apply to specialized or trained individuals, but was
rather a duty performed by the various communities of women who followed men into
war: the camp followers. Nurses, or rather, the women who did the nursing, were

47
imagined as a step below chambermaids, and the proximity to male bodies that predicated
the nursing of injured soldiers placed them about on par with prostitutes (Enloe 209).
Thanks to Nightingale, nursing would evolve rapidly from 1850 until well into the 1950s,
moving from a lower class duty to a middle class “calling,” and further create spaces
where nurses like Catherine – who are heavily romanticized and heavily militarized –
would become figures of patriotic and sexual importance. As Cynthia Enloe ironically
notes, the personal “freedoms” attached to the professionalization of military nursing has
only come about with “increasing visibility,” and thereby, “increasing military control”
(Enloe 199). This demonstrates that as nursing moved women towards a viability as
citizens of a war-making state, the processes of militarization and social repression
likewise evolved, and moved towards controlling nurses in the workplace as well as
within the social arena. Narratives circulating about Nightingale’s young, middle-class,
unmarried nurses would reflect the desire to control that potential empowerment,
eventually giving rise to romantic figures like Catherine Barkley who would capture the
public imagination.
And capture it they did, especially when these women were young, lovely, and
clearly very Anglo-Saxon. Beginning in World War I and throughout World War II
propaganda would prove a very useful tool in calling nurses to action. Propaganda posters
would often feature pretty, blonde nurses as a tool of recruitment. And though she isn’t
American but British, Catherine’s Anglo-Saxon whiteness – typified by her light eyes
and long, blonde hair - only further establishes her as a traditional version of acceptable
femininity. While Hemingway’s fascination with women’s hair would later go on to

48
occupy a lot of critical attention in his other novels, in A Farewell to Arms Frederic is
truly hypnotized by Catherine’s blondeness, focusing again and again on the brushing of
her hair, the look of her hair in moonlight, and on the texture of her hair during their
sexual encounters. Concurrent with notions of gender and war, notions of race often
commingle in militaristic endeavors, creating multiple hierarchies of race and gender
operating against each other within paradigms of military conflict, a process that is
“mutually supportive in a national security state” (Enloe 46). The “whiteness” of the
fantasy nurse who goes to war not in order to participate in the affairs of her state, but to
care for wounded warriors, works as a defining factor in her image, much in the same
vein as Richard Dyer suggests in his text White that “white women simultaneously stand
for white power and yet are shown to be unable either to exercise it effectively or to
change what they perceive to be its abuses” (30). Any literary nurse figure at this time
would be perceived almost instantly in light of a recent military history and current
military context, but the lovely, blonde nurse stands-in even more so for notions of
whiteness, masculinity, power, and a sense of superiority that she herself may not be able
to access. Simply put, in a wartime context in which men imagine themselves and seek to
project themselves as agents of a superior whiteness, the white woman is most desired
and most sacred. And, in a concurrent context that simultaneously seeks to project a
military image as one of masculine prerogative, the white nurse can accomplish both. All
of this factored into the decision not only to exclude real non-white women from
propaganda posters during World War I, but to disallow their service during the war at all
(Enloe 211).

49
Catherine’s relationships with men further reveal her role as a clearly militarized
figure whose role in the text is designed to help her male counterpart negotiate and
understand his own sense of masculine superiority. The real-life military propaganda that
is reflected in Catherine and Frederic’s affair reached such heights during World War I
that nurses and soldiers would appear together again in recruitment posters during World
War II, as well as in novels and films, regardless of the fact that traditional versions of
militarization and masculinity had suffered a tremendous blow during and after World
War I. The nurse/soldier romance thus became a popular strategy by which notions of
militarized feminine respectability could still be maintained in the face of the deployment
of women into the front line as nurses, a move that disrupted the more traditional notions
of gender that have been historically necessary when this country needs the physical and
ideological support of the public to wage a war. Cynthia Enloe calls this the “Nurse as
Ideal Soldier’s Girlfriend” strategy, which “seemed to place value on innocence,
emotional generosity, and perhaps, availability, as if the wounded male soldier would
recover more quickly if he could fantasize about his nurse” (219). The fantasy of the
nurse/soldier romance was very useful as a means of bolstering wartime morale and
feminine orthodoxy, and did much to shape perceptions of gender as they were molded in
the new twentieth century to facilitate the waging of the war. These public fantasies about
unmarried, young nurses would prove so important to military policy that they would
contribute to the policy makers’ attempts to keep married nurses out of the corps, a plan
that wasn’t completely abandoned until World War II (Enloe 212).
This notion that a narrative such as the nurse/soldier romance, as publicly popular

50
as it may be, could constitute the genuine production and dissemination of important
gendered identity mores for an entire generation seems, on the surface, questionable. On
the contrary, it is not my intention to suggest that the nationwide deployment of
romanticized nurse/soldier relations led all men to join up and/or prey upon nurses as sex
objects. Nor did all women view nursing as a means of finding a prospective lover and
husband. However, as Graham Dawson has made clear in his work on the post-war
imagining of masculinity in Britain, narratives of masculinity and femininity are at once
“made up” as creative, cultural activity and yet still materialize as “structured forms” that
have real effects on both men and women (48). In times as unstable as war, when issues
of masculinity, femininity and nation are all highlighted, questioned and enmeshed, any
culturally and militarily approved narrative of gender and state represents a space of self
negotiation where sex and gender can be structured according to (and indicative of)
standards necessary for the smooth functioning of the state at war. While it’s true that
Hemingway does an excellent job of calling such constructions into question through the
experiences of Frederic Henry, in terms of both sexuality and femininity, Catherine falls
neatly into the recognizable category of the romantic nurse, and her love affair with
Frederic situates them both in what was a popular and formulaic construction of
heterosexual romance during wartime. As such Catherine’s role in the text as a traditional
militarized figure is reinforced when she is “conquered,” or more specifically inserted in
her proper place by Frederic’s evolution out of a weaker role, and into his newer and
more virile status as the super-individual.
The narrative of the nurse/soldier romance also diffused the fear aroused by the

51
social and economic empowerment women gained during the war by their achievements;
by focusing on the supposedly hetero-romantic nature of the fantasy nurse her potential
sense of independence in a society still reeling from non-traditional social reform, as well
as the sudden success of the nurse as a tool of the military and as a burgeoning career for
women, could be obscured beneath a veneer of social and sexual acceptability. Nurses
like Catherine, who care only for their beloved hero (and in her case obsessively so),
were comforting. They were easily reduced to sexual objects or markers of acceptable
gendered relationships, and clearly less reminiscent of the more independent New
Woman who threatened traditional patriarchy with her newfound economic
empowerment. Thus matters of the state are concealed beneath a mask of sexual desire,
romantic adventure, and objectification achieved by focusing on the nurse-as-sex-object
and the soldier-as-hero. This in turn would later help to override and obscure the notion
that war may not be the proving ground for a “real” or viable masculinity that it had
always been propagandized to be.
Just as Catherine will prove to be an appropriate partner for the super-individual
hero (once she is put back into her rightful place) Hemingway also makes it clear what
type of nurse doesn’t conform to his notions of appropriate male/female compatibility;
Catherine is not the only nurse in the novel, but she is one of the only nurses represented
in a mostly positive light. In his text Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie
Fiedler has argued that the female characters in Hemingway’s work are all represented by
a juvenile, repressed orientalism. In his analysis, Hemingway’s women are typified by,
on the one hand, mindless and sexually available “dark ladies,” clearly coded or

52
described as non-white and far removed from the “civilizing” forces of the West. Or
conversely, they are the Anglo-Saxon bitch figure, scheming and castrating “white
ladies” bent on using prevailing social contracts of marriage, gender and sexuality to
disenfranchise a heavily mythologized sense of male privilege (318). But in terms of this
particular text the other nurses, Mrs. Walker, Miss VanCampen, and Ferguson,
complicate such a reading. All of these women are white; what separates them from one
another is in their representation as “types” as nurses. The “man-loving” and nurturing
nurses like Catherine and Miss Gage are cast in the beneficial glow of the bedside
Madonna, the nurse’s ultimate patron saint, and the appropriately self-abnegating partner
of the new American hero. The “man-hating” nurses, or even those who appear neutral
towards men, have failed to conform to their natural and even biological drives, and thus
are cast as cold, sexless, useless, and even potentially as lesbians who represent an
emasculating threat to patriarchal power systems.
In the hospital in Milan, where Frederic Henry is sent after his injury, he is tended
in turn by all of these nurses, with the exception of Ferguson, the potential lesbian. On a
professional level, Mrs. Walker is perhaps the most “useless” nurse – she cries in
frustration, the traditional feminine mark of uselessness, and as Miss Gage makes clear,
Mrs. Walker is “old” and of “no use” (83). She’s a benign figure for the most part and not
nearly as sinister as the other nurses – after all in that very uselessness she still establishes
the supposedly logical and rational sense of traditional male authority, and she doesn’t
embody the threat to the sanctity of the male body that the more professional and clearly
empowered women will represent. But on a metaphorical level Mrs. Walker’s uselessness

53
extends beyond her skills in the hospital. She is ultimately discredited in almost every
way based upon the hero’s inability to reduce her to a romantic or sexual object; she is an
asexual female character, and controlling the dangerous sexual powers of the female are
an absolutely necessity in order to contain the threat of female empowerment that the
military nurse could potentially produce. Just as Mrs. Walker is of “no use” in her field,
she is also of “no use” to Frederic as a woman who could suitably represent the soft,
feminine other to his lone masculine hero subject; and since she cannot help him to
establish his masculinity, Mrs. Walker is quickly dismissed as a character who is truly of
“no use” to Frederic within the text. Her age also represents the easiest means of
devaluing her as a woman, further cementing notions of youth and beauty with an
appropriate image of the war nurse as they were propagandized by the military war
machine.
The clearly demonized nurse figure at this point in the text is Miss VanCampen,
the “small and neatly suspicious” nurse’s superintendent who is “too good for her
position” (86). Miss VanCampen is offered up as a cutting critique of the sexless and
morally superior nurse figure exemplified by Florence Nightingale, whose manipulation
of Victorian notions of female moral superiority had provided women of previous
generations with the public acceptance required to form a social presence, and to take
steps towards overcoming some of what critics would later call Hemingway’s sense of a
waning masculine prerogative. To the British and Americans of a previous generation,
the figure of Florence Nightingale embodied the perfect representation of a social ideal
that had reached its pinnacle in the “Angel in the House,” based in the Victorian social

54
rhetoric as it was applied to the ideally asexual image of the perfect woman. By rendering
her nurses sexless in the eyes of society, and therefore superior to male desires,
Nightingale was able to provide women with a new measure of empowerment outside the
home, and even to help diminish some of the sexual harassment these women faced in a
male dominated field (Swensen 35). Nightingale represents, within the same militaristic
venue, everything Hemingway wants to erase regarding sex, gender, war, and even
shifting European conventions of masculinity. She’s an asexual Victorian lady with
upper-class conventions, and she embraces a war machine that systematically crushes
male individuality and masculine empowerment. She even works to better organize that
machine, and has power over men on a physical, professional, and social level.
As such, Miss VanCampen-as-Nightingale embodies many of the factors that
represent a dangerously feminizing influence over men in the text. This is particularly
threatening as her appearance coincides with Frederic’s wounding, as well as the
beginning of his relationship with Catherine in Milan, which won’t take on its
appropriately traditional and biologically driven motivations until Frederic has recovered
and is able to assert his newfound sense of stand-alone masculinity. Through VanCampen
Hemingway is then able to criticize the previous British “model” of the military nurse. In
effect he makes corrections that assuage his endangered sense of masculinity, and
simultaneously reinserts women into a construct of femininity that is not only acceptable
for the project of the text, but is ironically symbolic of the very function of militarization
that Hemingway would attack. Lytton Strachey’s famous analysis of Florence
Nightingale reveals a similar sense of an icon that is, though interesting, also very

55
disturbing and at times, sinister in her desires for “victory.” Strachey’s work cleanly
undermines the Victorian fantasy of the “Lady with the Lamp,” revealing instead a
woman who is at times an “administrative chief” in her own right (133), a woman with a
“harsh and dangerous temper” who despised failure and disorganization (135), and who
viewed the “adventure” of the Crimean War as “scarcely more than a useful stepping-
stone in her career” (141). Certainly Nightingale also receives her due for almost single-
handedly reorganizing a sadly dysfunctional military system and saving countless
soldiers’ lives. However even Strachey makes clear that in her relationships with men
“the roles were reversed; the qualities of pliancy and sympathy fell to the man, those of
command and initiative to the woman” and “it was through the man that the woman must
work her will” (147). It is this sense of role reversal that had troubled so many men,
including Hemingway, who felt that an overall sense of emasculation was pervading their
social consciousness, and who hoped that participation in the war would revitalize that
sense of atrophied masculinity (Braudy 380). When the war not only failed to provide
this revitalization, but in fact greatly contributed to the perceived feminization of male
soldiers, those women who were thought to have benefitted from war participation
seemed to become agents of an attack upon masculinity (Gilbert and Gubar 262).
So it is Miss VanCampen who represents in the text one of the barriers between
Frederic and Catherine’s love affair, based mostly on her dislike for Frederic’s cavalier
attitude. She finds him “rude and domineering” (87), and refers to him as the “privileged
patient” (110). But his dislike for her takes on specifically gendered terms when she
accuses him of purposefully inducing jaundice so as to avoid being sent back to the front.

56
Frederic asks her if she “ever knew a man who tried to disable himself by kicking himself
in the scrotum’?” (144). When she ignores him, he suggests that she cannot possibly
understand the pain he is in, since “it is a sensation that I believe few women have ever
experienced” (144). The privileging of this particularly male pain is designed to reduce
Miss VanCampen’s authority and immediately discredit her appraisal of his situation, not
because she’s never had jaundice, but because she is a woman. Frederic takes this attack
even one step further, insinuating to Miss Gage after Miss VanCampen has left the room
that VanCampen can’t even lay claim to true “suffering” as a woman because he thinks
“she had never experienced childbirth” (145). Because Catherine’s pregnancy will later
help Frederic to reinsert her into a more acceptable relationship with him, this reference
to women who choose not to have children, like Florence Nightingale herself, reveals a
subtext wherein inappropriate, unsympathetic, or just plain unpleasant women are
typified by a denial of a traditional, heterosexual, and procreative identity. Furthermore,
by choosing to compare a man suffering from being “kicked in the scrotum” with the
pain associated with childbirth, even the impact of childbearing itself is minimized,
reduced to nothing more than a short-term experience, and prioritizing male pain well
above any of the suffering women endure not just during war, but as a matter of
biological fact.
In the case of nurse Ferguson, it isn’t a sense of self-righteousness but a false
sense of “morality” that attempts to dislodge Frederic’s sexual relationship with
Catherine. However, I suggest that that morality is conveniently cast as a mask for
Ferguson’s true homosexual desires for Catherine. At other points in the text the dangers

57
inherent in the homosocial environment of the front must be dealt with more aggressively
in order to keep the homosocial from bleeding into the homosexual. But in this case, it
only requires the appearance of the hero – the “real man” - to conquer this lesbian threat.
On the surface Ferguson decries their relationship because Catherine has become
pregnant out of wedlock, has become just another woman whose seducer has left her with
a nameless war baby. “‘Will you come to our wedding, Fergy?’ I said to her once.
‘You’ll never get married…watch out you don’t get her in trouble. You get her in trouble
and I’ll kill you’” (108). But what seems to bother Ferguson even more is Catherine’s
culpability in the relationship with Frederic, her love and her sexual desire for him when
she could instead be passing her time with Ferguson herself. When the three of them are
reunited in Stresa, Ferguson is disappointed in Frederic’s arrival, and attacks them both
using a tone indicating “bitterness,” first by questioning the appropriateness of their
relationship, and then Catherine’s desire for Frederic, “‘I suppose you’ll go off with him
now tonight,’” she says unhappily, and later, as if she saw herself and Catherine traveling
on a romantic trip, “‘what about me? I’ve always wanted to go to the Italian lakes and
this is how it is’” (248). Her distaste and feelings of rejection regarding Catherine’s
decision to abandon her for Frederic leave him to suggest that “I don’t think she wants
what we have” (257 italics mine), which is to say, that it isn’t a sense of moral
righteousness that Ferguson really espouses, but a jealousy and distaste for their sexual
relationship, their enactment of the perfect heterosexual male fantasy in Hemingway’s
text. Ultimately, Ferguson is nothing more than another man-hating woman hiding
behind her contrived morality, the nurse-as-betrayer who has failed in her real female

58
duty to shape her own desires towards that of the solitary man-hero.
But Catherine herself initially poses a dangerous and feminizing threat earlier in
the text. This threat is represented in fetishistic terms and that reflects many of the same
concerns regarding gender and sexuality that were faced by Hemingway himself, as well
as military policy makers seeking to capitalize on women’s labor potential while
simultaneously projecting comforting images of traditional female behavior. This
paradox is particularly well represented in the image of the war nurse. Klaus Thewelweit
writes of nurses that “one of the most pervasive male fantasies in our society concerns
sexual relations with nurses. It crops up in war films, in reports about nursing, and
becomes a standard theme in novels” (126). A Farewell to Arms is clearly no exception to
this rule. In regards to my analysis, what bears close examination in Thewelweit’s text
Male Fantasies is the conflicted nature of sexual relations with nurses, and especially
those relations that occur during times of war, and between nurses and soldiers. As I
mentioned previously, Kristine Swensen has traced the sexualization of nurses back to
the Victorian era, where a post-Crimean war backlash led to the serialization and
publication of texts about “sensation nurses” who often murdered patients, and engaged
in sexually licentious behavior (56). Joan Roberts and Thetis Group have suggested that
nurses became the object of overt sexualization and/or romanticization from post-World
War I on, and recognize the concomitant rise of a “cruel nurse” figure associated with
“disturbing and discomforting images” (277). And, as Valerie Steele notes of nurses and
the preoccupation with them as sexual objects, nurses can inflict pain, and they can take
pain away, again associating nurses with both sexual and fearful images (183). What each

59
argument seeks to address from its own point of view is the complicated relationship
between sexuality, power, pain and pleasure that makes the nurse figure one of the most
ubiquitous figures of fetish fantasy in Western culture. But to move a step further, it is
equally important in a modern context to recognize how that fetishization is also tied into
militaristic concepts of power, sexuality, and a fearful feminization of the injured male
body. The compromised status of that body reflects the threat of castration - a threat
against patriarchy, and ultimately, a threat against the power of the state itself.
It is interesting that while numerous critics have labeled Catherine Barkley a
simple male fantasy, few of them have ever recognized what kind of fantasy she might
be, and fewer still seem to have recognized her sadomasochistic and fetishistic role
throughout much of the text. Frederic’s first glimpse of her as he nears the garden in Italy
is not of her specifically, but is a reductive vision that encompasses perhaps the most
significant marker of the nurse fetish: her uniform; “We saw their white uniforms though
the trees and walked toward them” (18). In terms of fetish appeal, uniforms represent a
powerful and important facet of what Valerie Steele calls clothing fetishes, which are
assembled into a uniform as a means of signaling power, and in particular, the power of
the “phallic woman” (17). Between 1850 and World War I, illicit sex practices began to
shift towards a more “theatrical production,” and many brothels began to carry a full
range of costumes, including the nurse’s uniform. The whiteness of the uniform, while
seemingly incongruous during times of war when white does not offer the protective
benefits of drab fatigues, is an important signal to the masochistic fetishist. It provides the
appropriate clinical atmosphere that smacks of hospitals, and validates the male’s

60
renunciation of physical and sexual power, and his assumption of the masochist’s role.
This will become quite apparent when Frederic is injured and, as his ministering nurse,
Catherine permits their sexual relationship to begin on her own terms. Klaus Thewelweit
also sees the nurse’s uniform as the “blank terrain” of male fantasies, a signifier that
removes the soldier to the world of sexual fantasy. This is a useful tool during stressful
times of war, particularly due to the fact that soldiers tend to see real nurses when they
themselves have suffered a potentially traumatic injury (134). Moreover, the whiteness of
the uniform is also reminiscent of the purity and wholesomeness that Florence
Nightingale wanted associated with her nurses, offering a bride-like association for the
woman who is respectable, and yet on a subconscious level, still sexually available for
the right “bridegroom.”
If Catherine’s white uniform weren’t enough to insinuate a potentially fetishistic
relationship with Frederic, Hemingway gives her an accessory designed to make it all too
clear – Catherine carries with her “a thin rattan stick like a toy riding-crop, bound in
leather” (18 italics mine). The association of leather with sadomasochistic practice has a
long and well-established history, as does the riding crop used to degrade the masochistic
subject for both pain and pleasure. But, what most interests me is the link between the
riding crop and Catherine’s previous involvement with a nurse/soldier love affair. By
extension this insinuates the relationship between sado-masochism, the nurse/soldier
romance, and the effects of war in general upon the social and sexual practices and
fantasies of men and women. Catherine’s riding crop belonged to her airman fiancée:
“It belonged to a boy who was killed last year.”
“I’m awfully sorry.”

61
“He was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the
Somme” (18).

The riding crop functions, first and foremost, as Catherine’s own fetish object. It both
obscures and memorializes the pain of her lost love object, diverting the pain of
something immutable and immaterial as death into a controllable and finite object. And
by carrying the crop around with her, Catherine carries a constant reminder of the young
man, and the guilt she feels for having denied him sexual favors; “I could have given him
that anyway. But I thought it would be bad for him” (19). In essence, by carrying the
leather riding crop of her dead airman fiancée, Catherine is engaging in a symbolic self-
flagellation designed to punish her for refusing her lover, and perhaps offering her the
sexual excitement that she denied to them both before his death.
But the crop also works as a physical reminder of her own nurse/soldier fantasies,
and can even be interpreted as a tool designed to enrich and mythologize that fantasy in
order to obscure the ugly reality often faced by nurses at the front line. As I have
previously mentioned, the cultural fantasy of the nurse/soldier romance had been
embraced and propagandized by the military as a means of defusing public concerns over
the inherent death and suffering associated with war. This fantasy also worked to obscure
the reality of the injured male body, and at the same time to ensure the enlistment of both
male soldiers and female nurses. Catherine herself has joined the V.A.D. to be close to
her lover, unaware that the odds of her ever seeing him were infinitesimal: “I started
when he did. I remember having a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was.
With a saber cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder.

62
Something picturesque” (20). What she would find as a nurse at the front lines would be
anything but picturesque, a truth signaled by Catherine’s bitter assertion that this same
lover was “blown all to bits,” with none of the romantic fanfare that had been
propagandized to them both (18). Along similar but more obvious lines Frederic Henry
will also discover that war is as meaningless as it is gruesome, though he achieves a sense
of clarity and self-consciousness that she will never enjoy. Catherine’s riding crop then
memorializes the fantasy of her lost nurse/soldier romance as well as her lost lover, and
will significantly disappear when she and Frederic begin their relationship because she
has regained that fantasy which so perfectly obscures a disappointing and even traumatic
reality. Until then, it serves to rewrite the war for her into a terrain of romance and
adventure; it gives the war the romantic meaning she craves to validate her presence at
the front, and to mask the immutable and uncontrollable fact of death as it occurs during
all times of war.
The nurse/soldier romance narrative is, in itself, a marvelous vehicle of fantasy
that is rife with fetishistic and sadomasochistic subtext, much of which is evident in A
Farewell to Arms. Frederic and Catherine themselves are the most obvious example, and
multiple references to war babies, men and women in “beautiful uniforms,” and even
Catherine’s previous love affair attest to this popular phenomenon (23). But the
nurse/soldier romance also operates in the text to renegotiate and obscure a multitude of
discomforting realities associated with men and women, their roles during times of war,
and even fluctuations in heterosexuality and sexual relations. The nurse/soldier romance
also reflects a redeployment of traditional modes of power designed to rebuff feminist or

63
socialist maneuvers. But in its convoluted machinations, as they are clearly represented in
A Farewell to Arms, this particular fetish fantasy is like all others: while it obscures all of
the dark, immaterial, deathly and uncontrollable aspects of war and sexuality, at the same
time it serves to remind us of these same things again and again, memorializing such
fears at the same time that it seeks to contain them.
This fetishistic fascination reveals itself in Hemingway’s texts through a unique
passing back and forth of various objects and behaviors that symbolize the Lacanian
phallus, particularly between male and female characters whose relationships reveal
anxiety over female empowerment, male insecurity, and shifting notions of sexuality
itself. Numerous authors have noted that Hemingway, like many men of this era, was
forced to confront the influence of Freud and Darwin, whose more complex views of
sexuality proved very unsettling to those who preferred previous models of masculinity
and femininity (Braudy 451). Dierdre Anne Pettipiece even suggests that these
influences, as well as those of Havelock Ellis, “were rubrics used by Hemingway…as
[he] examined what it meant to be a man or woman” in his texts (xvii). As such,
Hemingway seems to be drawn to female characters who are both empowered, and yet
dangerous to men and to a male sense of empowerment. These women must be somehow
contained, and in Catherine’s case it is her pregnancy, the maintenance of a “biological
purpose” to stabilize male/female relations that shifts Catherine’s and Frederic’s story to
one that is more traditional and comforting to readers searching for traditional values in a
sea of change (Pettipiece 68). This “evolution” is rooted in a more Darwinian (and less
Freudian) approach to gender identity. But as Catherine renounces her riding crop and

64
her role in their love affair as the more aggressive and proactive of the lovers, she
replaces such behaviors with a desire to cut her hair short, which is, as Carl Eby believes,
a means of accepting herself as the one who is castrated, the one who no longer wields
phallic power (72). This renunciation of empowerment on Catherine’s part, alongside
Frederic’s desertion of the Italian military and his efforts to escape into neutral territory,
allows Hemingway to work through these destabilizing shifts in gender identity that were
brought about by social theory and women’s war work. Furthermore, this shift in
Catherine’s behavior and role in the text paves the way for Frederic’s assumption of the
role as the more masculine and empowered loner hero, a role that is ultimately cemented
when Catherine dies in childbirth.
But even Hemingway is unable to avoid shades of Freudian interpretation,
especially when Catherine’s behavior in Milan also reflects so many oedipal fantasies and
fears of an empowered mother figure. Though a full analysis of the sexual implications of
their affair is not addressed, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar recognize that the
relationship between Frederic and Catherine changes when Frederic is injured, and at the
mercy of his love interest. In one telling scene, Catherine prepares Frederic for surgery by
performing a nameless cleansing act upon him with clear maternal implications. The act
in question is “quite unpleasant,” and though it continues on throughout the next page of
dialogue, we are not made aware of its finish until Catherine declares that he is “clean
inside and out” (103-104). The twin associations of mother and lover that are highlighted
here are also complicated by what Gilbert and Gubar call Catherine’s “sinister” desire to
perform this unpleasant act, and her “frighteningly possessive” assertion that “ ‘I don’t

65
want anyone else to touch you…I get furious if they touch you” (287). This confluence of
masochistic desire, mother-lover associations, sexuality, and power are, as Klaus
Thewelweit asserts, those same relations that occupy a space of central importance not
just in the social consciousness of the time, but in the soldier’s wartime psyche as well
(112). And in his weakened, injured and feminized state, Catherine’s “sinister” sense of
empowerment can temporarily run amok.
Freudian implications also meet with military symbolism in the persona of this
sinister but sexual military nurse. Carl Eby hypothesizes that Hemingway had a
fascination with nurses, military or otherwise, that is linked to his complicated
relationship with an admittedly domineering mother (140), and numerous critics have
excavated this relationship to its fullest potential, even hinting at fantasies of matricide in
his texts (Pettipiece 21). Militarized mothers, whether real or symbolic, constitute an
original and very effective manipulation of gender roles, offering another interpretation
of how it is that Catherine’s possessive and dominant behavior can be interpreted within
the novel and particularly within a wartime context. Graham Dawson claims that in war
there are two iconic figures – the soldier/hero, and the nationalist mother, whose job is to
produce more soldiers (12). Cynthia Enloe also recognizes the history and power of the
patriotic mother, explicitly referring to the womb as a primary station of military
recruitment (244). And as is evident in military propaganda both here and abroad, the
manipulation of the patriotic mother figure has secured her as a culturally recognized
icon in her own right. But as is the case with all fetish objects, this mother figure both
obscures the fears she represents - fears regarding femininity, of weakened masculinity,

66
and of a weakened state generated by war – and yet memorializes them. Klaus
Thewelweit has extensively analyzed the nurse figure as she is imagined by soldiers, and
finds that while the mother-as-nurse is supposed to be reassuring, she can only be so if
she is totally asexual; her purity negates the deeply entrenched, subconscious patriarchal
association of powerful female sexuality and death (91). Thus the good mother/nurse is
completely sexless, she bears no association with the dreaded “phallic woman,” and as
Barbara Ehrenreich aptly notes, she is “already dead” (xiv), insinuating that any live
woman with power over potentially weakened male bodies is a danger that must be
eradicated.
But, as Catherine’s nameless cleansing act makes obvious, attractive young
women performing the nursing of male soldiers at the front are more likely perceived to
combine the duties of the mother with a dangerous sexuality that reinforces the many
fears and fantasies associated with the phallic woman. Hence, the act of Catherine’s
cleansing ritual is situated in the context of their sexual liaison, but is also literally
nameless, too horrifying to enunciate. The silence that accompanies her act, which is
devoid of any description at all, renders it both conspicuously silent and painfully
obvious. At the same time, the “sinister” and “frighteningly possessive” behavior we see
with Catherine while she performs the act proves that the nurse fetish absorbs and
simultaneously displays much of the anxieties generated by the injured male body
through the very act of her fetishization, and incorporates the power of the Mother with a
sexual potential that is well suited to sado-masochistic practice. In fact, for the duration
of his stay in the Milan hospital, Catherine often takes advantage of her role as the

67
empowered, sexual woman. It is still true that she also plays the role of male fantasy
object as well, telling Frederic that he is her “religion,” that his is “all [she’s] got” (116).
But then, upon leading him to expect sex with her, she abruptly walks out, re-establishing
herself as the dominant partner:
“You are happy, aren’t you? Is there anything I do you don’t like? Can I do
anything to please you? Would you like me to take down my hair? Do you want
to play?”
“Yes and come to bed.”
“All right, I’ll go and see the patients first” (116).

By reasserting her own control over Frederic and their sexual relationship, Catherine
cements her role as the phallic woman and sadistic partner in their love affair, enjoying
an empowerment that reveals the true fear behind the nurse/soldier romance: that of the
powerful, vindictive and sexual woman, the woman with the phallus, the uniform, and the
power over men’s bodies.
It is clear then that at the bottom of the relationship in Milan between Catherine
and Frederic is fear, a fear of female social and sexual empowerment. But there is more at
stake here for patriarchy beyond the uncontrollable female element. The vulnerability of
the injured soldier – the specter of the soldier’s wound – is an even more terrible threat
than the powerful phallic woman herself. Leo Braudy writes of post World War I texts
that they were obsessed with “the body, along with its wounds, messes, and decay” (398).
The newer, industrialized nature of this war had created mechanisms for the destruction
of the body that had never been seen before. The potential for human devastation was
shocking. And, in conjunction with other feminizing factors associated with both society
at large and the war, the wounded male body came to represent the state of in-validity

68
that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see as central to male fears of the era (259). This
wounded body is, especially in Hemingway’s texts, a potentially castrated body, a
connection that will be made more concrete in later texts like The Sun Also Rises. But in
A Farewell to Arms, this feminized, wounded body is fetishistically obscured by the
sado-masochistic overtones of the nurse/soldier romance. This is why the truly sexual
nature of the affair between Frederic and Catherine does not begin until Frederic is
wounded, and continues with Catherine in the role of the caretaker and sexual aggressor
until, significantly, Frederic recovers and goes back to the front. After his recovery and
desertion, their affair changes to reflect his newer position of masculine superiority.
If the Great War was supposed to have been a proving ground for masculinity,
then the wounded soldier proves the instability, the permeability, and by extension, the
dreaded femininity of the male body. As Kathy Phillips says, if a society can convince its
citizens that “real men” love to fight, and “real women” hate to fight, men can be
manipulated to go to war if only to demonstrate to themselves and their peers that they
are real men (2). This works to polarize and control gender, but it also works to
illuminate the conundrum of the nurse/soldier romance. If the soldier is wounded at war,
is he socially and physically castrated? And as such, is he still a “real man?” If the nurse
works for the war effort at the front lines alongside soldiers, is she still a “real woman?”
If not, what exactly is she? As is made clear by Frederic’s childlike treatment when he is
injured, and the sexual relationship between he and Catherine, the trauma of the male
wound comes too close to revealing the instability of gendered prerogative, and must be
obscured. In discussing Klaus Thewelweit’s work, Barbara Ehrenreich reports that at war,

69
the perception of the truly male body is as one that is “clean and dry,” and more
important, “intact” and “erect” (xiv). The female body, on the other hand, is associated
with filth, a “bloody mass” that represents, and brings, death (xiv). In this way the trauma
of the wounded male body, reduced now to a feminized “bloody mass” - much like
Frederic’s knee - does too much to undermine militarized notions of masculinity for the
state, and the sanctity of the male body for the soldiers.
The soldier’s wound is, therefore, of central concern to both the man, and the
state. It provides a point of instability with the potential to undermine the very
mechanisms of militarization, and reveals the socially constructed nature of gender itself.
In this case I depart from the notion that the wounded soldier occupies a state of
increased masculine privilege. Kathy Phillips, for instance, reads the soldier’s wound as
an “automatic badge of courage” (3). However, I contend that such notions of the
soldier’s wound are usually the by-product of intense militaristic propagandizing
designed to obscure the reality of the soldier’s mental and physical trauma. It is an
argument that can really only apply to wounds that are, in Catherine Barkley’s bitter
terms, “something picturesque,” and therefore suitable for the social interpellation of
military success. Hemingway’s attacks upon the notion of the wound as badge-of-courage
are notorious, particularly when Frederic is commended for the silver medal of valor for
getting “blown up while…eating cheese” (63). More often in the text, the less serious of
the soldier’s wounds are useful only as a means of escaping the war, such as Frederic’s
stint in Milan, after which a major tells him “it has been bad…I’ve often thought you
were lucky to be hit when you were” (165).

70
The fetish of the nurse is therefore perfectly suited to absorb and deflect the fear
and anger that stems from the wounded male body. Louise Kaplan’s work in culture and
fetish reminds us that fetishistic behavior functions to obscure trauma, such as the wound
and its feminized connotations, as well as transforming the ambiguous, the uncertain, and
the uncontrollable into the knowable and the certain (6). In this case, the trauma of the
feminizing wound and the uncontrollable female nurse with power over her hapless and
now feminized male patient are carefully obscured by a sexual fantasy with all the marks
of sado-masochistic relations. This act of fetishization is supposed to be veiled on a social
level by an adherence to notions of an appropriate courting ritual, a ritual that is
popularized by many nurse/soldier romance stories during both world wars, but that is
notably altered in A Farewell to Arms. Cynthia Enloe writes of the nurse/soldier romance
that:
“Romance” in the military hospital ward only works politically for the military
command if the soldier-boyfriend can be portrayed as innocent. His wounds, his
immobility, his isolation from society, and his battlefield sacrifice all can lend
themselves to this portrayal of innocence masculinized (221).

In this way, through the reconstruction of the appropriately “civilized” courting rituals
that denote traditional gender roles, and are so often disrupted during war, the
relationship between the nurse and the soldier can be a socially acceptable one, yet
maintain its ability to veil the physical and emotional trauma of the soldier’s wound.
Hemingway, with his famous disdain for “civilizing” rituals and social demands, is quick
to reveal a very different reality for Frederic. He not only abandons the previously
embraced notions of war and a national agenda, but establishes himself as that “real man”
by engaging in sexual relations with Catherine right from the start. For Hemingway, the

71
“innocent” man is bad enough, but the innocent man with a wound is feminized beyond
acceptability. A claim could also be made that since Catherine consents to this
relationship she too has been sexually “freed” by the war, enjoying sexual relationships
outside of marriage that, though roundly condemned at the time, were not uncommon
during either world war. However, the evolution of her character into the more traditional
role of passive mother-to-be negates any notions of social and sexual freedom that could
have been gleaned from wartime participation.
There is one final place where the narrative of the nurse/soldier romance works to
obscure a truth that proves threatening to both social and militaristic notions of gender -
this would be the perceived threat of homosexuality necessarily created in powerfully
homosocial environments such as those evident during times of war. In fact, much of the
literature of this era is “preoccupied with the distinction between the homosocial, the
homoerotic, and the homosexual,” with a particular fear associated with the idea that
“once could shade too easily into the others” (Braudy 412). The potential dangers of a
homosexuality born out of circumstances is clearly at issue in A Farewell to Arms,
appearing throughout the text in various forms, but none so clearly as through the fearful
experience of “Rinaldi’s Kiss.” Ferguson’s lesbian threat had been easily dismissed by
Frederic’s mere arrival, reflecting the notion that lesbian women are simply mimicking
men, and that the appearance or presence of the “real man” could summarily dispel their
supposed attempts at masculinity. However, the male homosexual threat is more
insidious here because it grows in strength during those times when Frederic is in a
weakened state, namely when he is injured. It is during these dangerous moments that the

72
women at the war front – in this case prostitutes, the nurses in general, and Catherine in
particular – become once again tools that reinstate masculinity by assigning those women
the role of the sexual conquest/enemy/loser, and establishing the man as the hero and
empowered figure at their expense.
The relationship between Rinaldi, a lieutenant surgeon, and Frederic is established
early on in the text when Frederic has returned after leave:
“Ciaou!” he said. “What kind of time did you have?”
“Magnificent.”
We shook hands and he put his arm around my neck and kissed me.
“Oughf,” I said (1).

The potential sexual tension between them is diffused immediately after by talk of
women as sexual objects and conquests, including prostitutes, boasting of sexual
adventures, and the arrival of the new nurses: “Here now we have beautiful girls. New
girls never been to the front before” (12). Lynn Higgins suggests that such
demonstrations serve to re-establish heterosexual manliness within the barracks, marking
the supremacy of straight masculinity, but always at the expense of the female “object”
who is dehumanized as a non-person and as a sexual conquest, sacrificed in order to
reinstate gender norms (254). Catherine then provides yet another service for Frederic, as
she constitutes the sexual conquest, or the conquered “enemy,” that pronounces the
soldier a “whole man;” she becomes the loser in the battle of the sexes with or without
her actual participation. And in her loss she secures the military’s control and deployment
of actual soldiers who have objectified women in order to prove themselves not the “half
man,” or coded homosexual “sissies,” regarded as a real danger to World War I military
operations at that time (Phillips 25). But significantly, when Frederic is injured and

73
occupies the weakened, injured, “in-valid” state of the wounded soldier, Rinaldi’s kiss
takes on a much more threatening meaning (Gilbert and Gubar, 285).
Once Frederic’s injury destabilizes his sense of masculine privilege, he is no
longer happy to tolerate Rinaldi’s affections. Before he is sent to Milan Frederic lies in
the field hospital. He recounts that Rinaldi, in a visit, “came in very fast and bent down
over the bed and kissed me” (63). Rinaldi goes on to refer to Frederic repeatedly as his
poor dear “baby” (63). And, in reference to the field surgeon’s work on Frederic’s knee,
Rinaldi’s remarks take on clearly sexual undertones: “I would take you and never hurt
you. I never hurt anybody. I learn how to do it” (64). Frederic, seeking to alleviate this
more dangerous threat, first asks Rinaldi if he has seen Catherine, and next asks, in an
apparent change of subject, “How are the girls?” - meaning, are there prostitutes available
to you at the front? This apparent tactical shift not only brings in the female sexual object
as a means of re-establishing heterosexual masculinity, but also suggests that a lack of
available women as a sexual outlet for Rinaldi could perhaps be fueling the homosexual
danger that is lurking beneath his affections. However, after a brief reference to the
inadequacy of the military prostitutes, Rinaldi returns to his previous approach: “Tell me,
baby, when you lie here all the time in the hot weather don’t you get excited?” (65).
Throughout the rest of the chapter, Rinaldi jokingly insinuates that Frederic and the priest
are both homosexuals, and then goes on to decry Catherine’s supposed lack of sexuality,
“I will send her. Your lovely cool goddess” (66). Their final goodbye reads almost as a
lover’s tiff, with Rinaldi jealous that Frederic prefers the attentions of Catherine:
“Kiss me goodbye.”
“You’re sloppy.”

74
“No. I am just more affectionate.”
I felt his breath come toward me. “Good-by. I come to see you again soon.” His
breath went away. “I won’t kiss you if you don’t want. I’ll send your English girl.
Good-by, baby” (67).

Catherine arrives soon after his transfer to Milan, where their sexual relationship takes on
the fetishistic tone that obscures this homosexual tension and marks Frederic’s weakened
state.
This palpable scene of homosexual tension between Frederic and Rinaldi in the
text reflects not just the soldier’s concerns, but in terms of military policy making, the
state’s concerns in the protection, control, and deployment of the male soldier’s body. As
I have stated before, by minimizing the trauma of the soldier’s wound military
propaganda succeeds in boosting both morale and enlistment. But regardless, when the
soldier is injured, as will inevitably happen to many men at some point, that injury
reflects the nation’s inability to protect its soldiers. Sonya Michel points out that such
wounds are “naturally unstable” and threaten to “expose the political system that cannot
protect all of its citizens” (260). It isn’t just the man who falls into question, but the
military machine, the Fatherland, and by extension the masculinist fantasies upon which
modern warfare have been based, and which military policy makers were struggling to
maintain in the face of the dehumanizing effects of World War I. This clarifies yet again
why it is that these policy makers were so very invested in the social perceptions of the
war as a territory of heroism and romance, and both pursued and supported the
propaganda that redefined nurses like Catherine as no more than “those women who
nursed soldiers” – the camp followers of an era bygone – and the male wound as nothing
more than a simple excuse to enjoy sexual relations with pretty nurses. Unfortunately, in

75
this interpretative light those real women who nurse soldiers, who exist as both fetish
objects and real war workers, are indeed “nursing imperialism” as Cynthia Enloe so sees
it (199). And, at least in the eyes of policy-makers, the iconic role that the female nurse
has occupied as a romantic and sexual object, as a figure to be used in order to reorder
heterosexual masculinity, and as a real-life war worker who keeps soldiers alive and
fighting, the military nurse represents perhaps the most successful deployment of both
real women and gendered ideology that any militaristic nation of the West has ever
enjoyed.
I hope to have shown that within Hemingway’s text A Farewell to Arms, as well
as within a larger social context, Catherine Barkley has come to reflect much more than a
“silly” male fantasy, or mere fluff in a genuine war novel. Perhaps she isn’t a real
“person” as most modern literary and feminist critics would prefer, but she is
undoubtedly a militarized figure with the potential to reveal the many ways that gender
and sexuality have been, and still are, shaped by nationalist concerns, and later explored
in the texts that deal with those concerns. This analysis of Catherine suggests that she is
in fact part of powerful wartime landscape, with historical, literary, and social
implications, and as such forces us to question today’s manifestations and representations
of women, power, and the state as they are both figuratively and literally represented. In
terms of literary criticism, Catherine also reveals how easy it is for militaristic coding to
go unnoticed, for generations of war texts and critics alike to simply discredit female
characters whose weakness we find unappealing and whose nationalist connotations are
so deeply embedded in our imagination that they seem quite natural. Catherine Barkley

76
is a direct manifestation of evolutions in patriarchy and militarism that work to cement
traditional and inflexible notions of sex and gender. However, by applying social theories
of power and militarism to such figures of literature, it’s possible to facilitate a greater
understanding not just of the text itself, but of the ways that we have been historically and
culturally manipulated to accept imbalanced notions of gender and power in the name of
the state.

77
Chapter One Bibliography

Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
New York: Knopf, 2003.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of
Masculinities. London: Routledge, 1994.

Dyer, Richard.White. London: Routledge, 1997.

Eby, Carl. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. New
York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Introduction. . Male Fantasies. Vol 2. By Klaus Thewelweit.
Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989. v-xvii.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s
Lives. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Fetterly, Judith. “Hemingway’s ‘Resentful Cryptogram.’” Critical Essays on Ernest
Heminway’s A Farewell to Arms. Ed. George Monteiro. New York: G.K.
Hall & Co., 1994. 117-129.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day,
1966.

Gilbert, Sandra & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the 20
th
Century, Vol 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and
Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Group, Thetis and Joan Roberts. Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical
Monopoly: Historical Perspectives on Gendered Inequality in Roles, Rights,
and Range of Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003.

78

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929.

Higgins, Lynn A. “Sexual Fantasies and War Memories: Claude Simon’s Narratology.”
Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993. 249-260.

Kaplan, Louise. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled
Veterans in American Postwar Films.” Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke
and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 260-283.

Pettipiece, Dierdre Anne. Sex Theories and the Shaping of Two Moderns: Hemingway
And H.D. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Phillips, Kathy. Manipulating masculinity : War and Gender in Modern British and
American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Steele, Valerie. Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition. London: Continuum,
2002.

Swensen, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2005.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vol 2. Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction.” Hemingway
And Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Ed. Lawrence Broer and
Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 54-69.

Yellin, Emily. Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During
World War II. New York: Free Press, 2004.

79

Chapter Two
Dropping Bombs and Picking Up Bombshells: Wartime Prostitution in Alfred Hayes' The
Girl on the Via Flaminia.

While my first chapter addresses various social and literary representations of the
military nurse during times of war, my second chapter reflects upon the figure most often
considered her opposite: the wartime prostitute. While it had not always been the case, by
the advent of World Wars I and II the most popular image of the military nurse was as a
patriotic version of the Bedside Madonna – lovely, nurturing, and unthreatening to the
military supremacy of the armed forces or the sanctity of the symbolically impervious
male body. In contrast, the military prostitute would be cast in the social imaginary as a
figure like the Whore of Babylon: unrepentant, basely sexual, diseased, and
representative of the physical and moral degeneration of both the soldier's body and state
security after World War II. Alfred Hayes' short novel The Girl on the Via Flaminia
(1949) addresses popular and simplistic notions of prostitution and war during the second

80
world war. The text is situated in Rome, which many biblical scholars have
coincidentally considered the best representative of Babylon itself, and offers readers an
impressively nuanced interpretation of how war can drive women to prostitution, even as
prostitutes themselves are physically punished and otherwise maligned by their own
countrymen, as well as those of invading forces. Hayes' text offers a more complicated
understanding of prostitution during the war than had been given by military policy-
makers or even medical professionals at the time. In its place he offers his audience an
example of the culturally motivated realities of sex work, even as he struggles to
represent the characters in the text outside the racially and sexually motivated boundaries
of militarism.
Alfred Hayes was born in London, and emigrated to the United States when he
was three years old. He graduated from New York City College, and worked as a
journalist and poet in the United States before joining the Armed Forces and traveling to
Europe during the war. His experiences in Italy after America liberated the northern
provinces (including Rome) from Nazi occupation would influence his work on the film
Paisan (1946), which he co-wrote with Roberto Rossellini, and for which he would be
nominated for an academy award. He would go on to work on Vittorio De Sica's famous
Bicycle Thieves (1948), and would be nominated for another academy award in 1951 for
his work on the film Teresa (1951). However one of his first literary works, his poem
“Joe Hill,” is the one for which he is most famous. It was set to music by Earl Robinson
in the nineteen-thirties, commemorating the false imprisonment and execution of the
famous labor activist in New York. His credits would also include numerous television

81
shows, and seven novels. The Girl on the Via Flaminia was converted into a screenplay,
and would gain popularity on the stage in the United States as well as in France.
The Girl on the Via Flaminia is the story of Lisa, a young Italian woman forced
into prostitution in order to survive in post-war Italy. She has agreed to become the
mistress of Robert, an American serviceman, in exchange for food, money, and a place to
live. This agreement has been arranged by Nina, Lisa's friend, who has survived as a
prostitute throughout the war. Robert and Lisa will be posing as a married couple living
in the home of Adele and Ugo, an older couple who rents rooms in their home to
American servicemen for much-needed food and supplies. Since prostitution is legal but
heavily regulated by the Italian government, and neither Nina nor Lisa are registered as
prostitutes, this transgression could lead each woman to detention, punishment in the
form of jail-time, and forced registration. Since prostitutes who associate with non-Italian
forces – either German or American – were the subject of cultural outrage and public
condemnation, Lisa's decision to pose as Robert's wife is designed to protect her
reputation as well as her physical well-being. Throughout the story the relationship
between Lisa and Robert is rife with tension. Lisa is never able to accept her role as a
prostitute; she also struggles with her deception of Adele and Ugo as well as her own
self-condemnation and religious devotion. In contrast, Robert initially sees no problem
with their arrangement. He prefers to think of Lisa's body as something he has purchased,
and ignores her moral quandry. However, when Lisa is uncovered as a prostitute, and
physically attacked by Adele's son for her transgressions with an American soldier,
Robert begins to reconsider his feelings for her. By the end of the text it appears that

82
Robert has had an emotional epiphany, has recognized the ordeal that Lisa has endured,
and has decided to propose marriage to save her honor. However, after the humiliation
she has suffered in San Giacomo, the detention center where prostitutes are “examined”
and registered, Lisa commits suicide by throwing herself in the Tiber river.
Depending upon social and historical circumstances, wartime prostitutes like Lisa
and the military nurse have been imagined as either opposed to one another, or
conversely, as only slightly different representations of the same woman. As I discussed
in my previous chapter, the military nurse escaped rigid military oversight until the
Crimean War, when the efforts of Florence Nightingale made nursing a profession that
was at least marginally acceptable to women above the lowest class (Swensen 56). Before
this time, the women who nursed men during times of war were known as camp
followers. And alongside those women, or in many cases those same women themselves,
were also prostitutes (Enloe 37). Because of this situation nurses were considered little
better than prostitutes, particularly because of their proximity to the male bodies they
tended. To be a camp follower was to be a woman of the lower orders, a woman who
benefitted either economically or through some form of exchange value from her
closeness to male bodies, and whose morality was thus suspect no matter what she did.
From this common historical base we can say that in the eyes of the military and of
society at large, nurses and prostitutes were originally one in the same. Each endangered
traditional masculine and military notions of gender by participating not only in the
affairs of state through wartime service, but by enjoying economic benefit from that
service. In doing so these women broke through traditionally conceived ideas of moral

83
purity and bodily control (Levine 2).
During the Victorian era, nursing evolved in the social imagination to become, for
the most part, the antithesis of prostitution. This was due to Florence Nightingale’s canny
use of the media, and her personal representation as an angelic figure whose sacrifices
during the Crimean War saved the lives of thousands of British soldiers. In fact,
Nightingale herself often asserted that prostitution would no longer exist if women of
lower and middle class income had access to respectable employment (Swensen 57 ). In
essence, she saw nursing as a viable career in war work available to women and
prostitution as a sinister trade associated with “fallen” women. This, then, formulates an
important part of the Madonna/whore complex as it has been embodied by the
nurse/prostitute dichotomy. This simplistic coding not only pits nurses against prostitutes,
but in terms of this text, reveals the ways in which sex and gender are written by military
policymakers during times of war. Alfred Hayes makes clear in The Girl on the Via
Flaminia that this simplistic coding is detrimental to women's survival during times of
war. It not only facilitates misogynistic oppression, but also divides women into symbolic
figures, limiting their ability to interact with one another or with the men around them in
empowering ways. In the same vein, Cynthia Enloe observes that military policy has long
been invested in separating women who participate in wartime activities as a means of
extending the “divide and conquer” mentality to another population with the potential to
undermine male privilege (Enloe 51).
Though most critics and readers categorize Hemingway’s work as “high art,” and
Farewell to Arms as a significant canonical text, Hayes' text is more likely a “popular”

84
text designed to appeal to the masses. Regardless, the similarities between Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms and Hayes’ The Girl on the Via Flaminia are numerous and
surprising. I contend that these similarities are easily attributed to the fact that both texts
are wartime novels. As such, they uphold representations of gender and sex that are
important during times of war in order to buttress traditional notions of gender identity.
Both texts feature soldiers who fall in love with beautiful blonde women whom they meet
in Italy. Both involve men and women in economic situations defined and controlled by
the advent of war. In each case the main characters are militarized figures such as
soldiers, nurses and even prostitutes. Both texts focus on fantasy courtship rituals that are
endangered during times of war – for example, each pair masquerades as a happily
married couple in order to veil the reality of wartime intrusion upon such a traditionally
beloved concept. In each text lurks the specter of the male soldier’s wound and his
subsequent desire to overcome that wound through a projection of castration anxiety
upon a female body. Both texts were written by men who supposedly “lived it” in terms
of wartime experience. Yet both can be called an “anti-war novel” in some aspects. In in
each case the text reveals fantasies of masculinity aligned with a national agenda.
Finally, both texts finish with the death of the female love object and the male soldier’s
emotional epiphany brought on by her demise.
Yet in one crucial way these novels differ. Hemingway’s heroine is a respectable
wartime nurse, while Hayes’ heroine is a woman driven to prostitution against her will by
the conditions of war imposed on her and her country. This plot twist could situate this
novel as an “anti-war” text, though I would contend that any war text that features such

85
heavily militarized figures and relationships as this one does still deals in the currency of
militarization. What makes Hayes’ approach unique is its denial of prostitution as the
result of “inherited traits” or some psychological disorder. These notions were popularly
espoused by military policy makers, social theorists, and even medical professionals at
the time. When Hayes wrote The Girl on the Via Flaminia popular perceptions of
prostitution had only recently moved away from blaming an expansion of the sex trade
upon economic conditions like urbanization and industrialization. Instead prostitution
was attributed to the supposedly “inherited traits” of the prostitute herself, including
“criminal tendencies” and “psychological disorders” that would create in the imagination
of the public an idea of the prostitute as a maladjusted individual destined for nothing
more than sex work (Hobson 182). Closely linked to the popular pseudo-science of
eugenics, this theory would typify the accepted belief regarding prostitution until well
beyond the 1960s in the United States. Prostitutes would also be thought of as self
destructive, irresponsible, and lazy, as well as representing the transmission of VD to
soldiers and other men who were widely considered innocent in the eyes of the law
(Levine 195).
But Hayes’ female protagonist Lisa is none of these. Although she’s at times a
problematic character, neither she nor her vampish cohort Nina fall into such easily
condemned categories. In fact, both women are likeable and interesting in their unique
situations and the ways in which they do or do not rationalize their role as prostitutes.
Lisa is the angelic, blonde Italian whose foray into prostitution is caused by her need to
survive during the American occupation of Italy at the end of World War II. In the

86
opening of the novel, she has arrived at Adele's house to meet Robert for the first time,
and to establish her relationship with him as his mistress (Hayes 21). Adele and her
family have been told that Lisa and Robert are married, not just in an attempt to validate
their relationship in the eyes of other Italians, but to avoid legal penalty for Lisa’s role as
an unregistered prostitute, and later, in what I believe to be an attempt to falsely maintain
notions of traditional male/female relationships that are usually disrupted by times of
war.2 For example, Lisa and Robert’s trip to Lake Bracciano reflects Robert’s desire for a
pre-war type of relationship, a trip that is ruinous when it becomes obvious that not only
is he despised as an American soldier, but that Lisa’s relationship with him, married or
not, also makes her the target of nationalist outrage (67). Robert’s particular fantasy is
based upon his need to re-establish normative gendered relationships in the first place,
explained in the text in that he didn’t want to go to a regular prostitute, he “wanted his
own girl” (91). He later thinks of his relationship with Lisa as an attempt to establish an
“imitation of home,” a false feeling of normalcy that has been eradicated by his service as
a soldier (71). This lost normalcy and need for reassurance through his relationship with
Lisa is directly attributed to his wartime service, which as left him feeling “lost,” haunted
by “the nights in a long room where somebody shouted in his sleep, or somebody cried”
(90). Robert believes that his desires are simple, that he will simply exchange something
that he has – money and foodstuffs – for something that he wants from Lisa, namely sex
and companionship. However, as he will discover, his arrangement with Lisa is far from

2 Interestingly, Hemingway’s Frederic and Catherine also posed as a married couple during their stay in
Switzerland, and referred to themselves as husband and wife throughout the text, though they were
never actually married.

87
simple. It has its basis in the social constructions of women and war that work to
invalidate women's experiences and sublimate them to a masculinist and nationalist
agenda.
Hayes attempted to address two separate realities of war that might distres
American audiences. First, in addressing Robert’s feelings of dehumanization through his
war service, Hayes questions an enormously popular war effort, its impact upon
individual soldiers, and even hints at much of what we would call the post traumatic
stress that many soldiers suffer from, called “shell shock” at this time. Stories of shell
shock made the public, soldiers, and military policy-makers uncomfortable, since its
acknowledgement as a real mental and emotional illness not only questions the role of
war as the ultimate masculine proving ground, but aligns male soldiers with “hysteria,” a
supposedly feminine ailment (Braudy 391). Just as the fear of the wounded male body
was obfuscated in Hemingway’s text to elide the ramifications of a potentially feminized
and impotent soldier, so “shell shock” represents the mental and emotional wounding of
men who were supposed to come out of the war victorious, whole, and more masculine
than ever. While Robert’s trysts with Lisa are complicated by her lingering resistance to
their arrangement, Hayes does his audience a service in examining how wartime
participation could negatively impact male soldiers not just physically but
psychologically, and contribute to the drinking, aggression, and reliance on local
prostitutes that takes place in the text. Unfortunately, this more compassionate approach
to male soldiers and their behavior during times of war is overshadowed by the fact that
Robert buys his sense of “home” when he buys Lisa herself, purchasing his own sense of

88
wholeness at her expense.
This approach to postwar male soldiers has depth, but his approach to wartime
prostitution is what makes Hayes’ text most interesting. Having joined the war effort as
part of the U.S. Army Special Services (morale division)3 Hayes spent enough time in
war and postwar Italy to understand the effect of wartime economies on helpless
populations like women, particularly in patriarchal societies that offer women few
resources to begin with. Anti-vice campaigns in the U.S. and the U.K. painted wartime
prostitution as monstrous. Prostitutes themselves were seen as dangerous purveyors of sin
and VD that threatened not only healthy male bodies, but also the safety and security of
the state itself. It could be argued that since Lisa's punishment happens at the hands of
her local government the physical and emotional impact of her role as a prostitute is only
peripherally influenced by global militarism. However, closer inspection of global and
local governments reveal how they work together to pursue their individual agendas. This
in turn reveals that women trapped in war zones are doubly objectified and strictly
regulated by multiple parties. Instead of the American army, the Italian carabinieri
arrests Lisa as a prostitute, but as Cynthia Enloe argues, one way to minimize the
political risks associated with militarizing prostitution is to pass it on through local
officials, and to restrict official acknowledgement of it as a “health issue” (53). This way,
Lisa is a danger because of her potential of “infection,” not because she poses a sexual
threat dangerous to the normal function of soldiering. Furthermore, Lisa’s role as an
amateur prostitute marks her as doubly dangerous; instead of the easily recognizable and

3 Like Hemingway, Hayes’ service did not include actual front-line soldiering.

89
therefore more easily controlled ‘streetwalker,’ she is an uncontrolled danger to the
vitality of the martial male body. This is compounded by the fact that prostitution, though
legal at the time in Italy, was a fiercely regulated trade that had been monitored closely
since the civil wars and would continue to be so regulated into the late 1950s (Wanrooij
147).
Hayes’ revelation that prostitution is based upon economic realities and wartime
oppression is unique in its departure from the social and military policies of the time in
the U.S., the U.K., and Italy. Unfortunately, two factors impede the subversive potential
in Hayes’ text; the first is Lisa’s racial coding and the second is her suicide at the end of
the text. Just as Hemingway’s Catherine is described in terms of her blondeness, Lisa’s
fair coloring is used to separate her from the other women in the text, and in particular
from Nina. Lisa is described as a “pretty girl”, who is “tall” with “good shoulders” and
“soft blonde hair” (14). Adele notes her “pretty skin,” and Nina states that while Lisa has
“wonderful shoulders” that it’s Lisa’s hair that is her most enviable quality (17). Later,
when she and Robert are alone for the first time he tells her that two things surprised him,
that she’s “blonde…and pretty” (34). On one level, the focus upon Lisa’s fair coloring
could be based on popular conventions of the time. As Lois Banner writes, towards the
end of World War II notions of beauty switched from earthier sex goddesses to the
kittenish “blonde bombshell” type represented by Marilyn Monroe. These “earthier”
women like Nina herself were then relegated to “foreign climes where they could portray
fallen women outside the bounds of society” (284). Hayes, who would work in film and
television after the war, was well aware of such conventions. Furthermore, in order to

90
create tension in the text, Lisa’s foray into prostitution must look like a forced
transgression for the angelic protagonist, so that she can still be a potential wife for
Robert should their affair become serious. The anglicized and innocent blonde woman
fits such a role better than the earthy sex goddess who views prostitution as a means to an
end.
But Lisa’s racial coding accomplishes more traditional militaristic goals as well,
particularly since race is closely tied to militarism. Philippa Levine asserts that
historically VD has been seen as weakening more than soldier’s bodies, or even the
national body. It could also “weaken the race” if nonwhite women have sex with white
soldiers (2). In both colonialist and militaristic venues prostitution then takes on notions
of empire and race that would accelerate fears of both contamination with sexually
transmitted disease and non-white bloodlines. Cynthia Enloe states that “racism and
militarism become mutually supportive in…a national security state” (46), and John
Dower recognizes that America's powerful fixation on whiteness during and after World
War II reveals the hypocrisy of virulent campaigns against elitist Germans bent on
eradicating racial and ethnic difference (5). Particularly during World War II, military
policy-makers focused on scrutinizing women’s racial makeup, especially those who
served overseas during the war. This fact was made evident in their separation into white
groups, and “racially integrated units – that is, units that included small numbers of
Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Chinese Americans” (Enloe 215). African
American women were further isolated into groups separating them from other wartime
workers. By continually highlighting Lisa’s whiteness, Hayes is able to exclude her from

91
a dangerous categorization as a non-white prostitute and to associate her with the beauty
and racial superiority that would soften her role as sex worker. Furthermore, as Richard
Dyer notes in his text White, to be white is also to be “clean” and free of the “dirt”
associated with the body, and therefore with sex (76). Thus Lisa’s white body as one that
is free of VD, connected to civilization and purity and to the Madonna instead of the
Whore, as represented by the vamp character, Nina.
Lisa’s suicide at the end of the text establishes her as morally righteous in the face
of her fall from grace. Interestingly, Hemingway’s Frederic dives into a river in order to
escape the oppression and dehumanization of the war that had stifled his individuality
and masculinity. But in Hayes’ text, the river represents death, especially for women.
Early in The Girl on the Via Flaminia the ever-realistic Nina suggests that the only
alternative to prostitution in occupied Italy is to “jump in the Tiber.” She continues that
“there’s enough corpses on the bottom now” (23). Unlike the cleansing and restorative
powers of Hemingway’s river, Hayes describes the Tiber as full of debris and the detritus
of war, including “the discarded souvenirs of love” (condoms), “fruit rinds” and “broken
branches” (104). Unfortunately at the end of the text it also washes away Lisa, whose
arrest and categorization as a prostitute is more than she can bear. Her suicide then
washes the “dirt” of sex and sin away from her body, validating her in the eyes of her
audience, and offering Robert the epiphany of his own failed morality. Like
Hemingway’s Frederic, the male character walks away at the end of the text having
gleaned this epiphany at the expense of his dead love object. In this way both
Hemingway and Hayes exhibit a hyper-masculine, isolationist approach to women and

92
gender during times of war, regardless of their supposedly “anti-war” texts. In both books
women should support men and freely offer what those men need, whether that be sex or
moral support. However, should they represent a threat to masculinity as it is established
by patriarchal society and militaristic policy-making in particular, they need to
conveniently disappear.
Reinforcing this trope of gender and power through natural forces such as rivers
was not uncommon at the time. In fact it reflects a powerful trend towards nature writing
that had appeared in American literature for almost a century when Hayes wrote. Don
Scheese notes that with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Nature,” nature-
writing assumed a new and powerful importance in American literature (3). Reflecting
the American expansionist ideal of Manifest Destiny, alongside concerns regarding
industrialization and the perceived waning of patriarchal privilege in the United States,
Scheese argues that American nature writing has always been infused with notions of
masculinity and power (4). Thus in Hemingway’s text the river represents a wilderness
that rejuvenates Frederic’s waning masculinity and empowers him to separate himself
from the dangerous, feminizing forces of civilization, war, and bureaucracy. Wilderness
and the forces of nature represented a new escape from changing societal norms,
including the political empowerment of women and the growing business sector in the
United States that appeared to minimize overtly masculine markers of identity such as
hunting and outdoorsmanship (Ross 23). In Hayes' text the wild forces of nature enforce
this sense of male prerogative, as the river devours women like Lisa whose transgressions
against gender norms have rendered them unfit for participation in anything other than

93
the “fallen woman” category. With her suicide in the river Lisa has been reinserted in an
acceptable role; she has accepted her prescribed part as the dangerous and immoral
prostitute, and has absolved herself of this sin through her suicide, thereby reconstructing
traditional male/female relationships.
While Lisa is the angelic “good” prostitute whose fall from grace forms the
tragedy of the text, Nina represents the Whore in the story – and she does so as one that is
surprisingly empowered. Nina reveals yet again how the simple binaries of
Madonna/Whore in the text are insufficient for representing the real experience of war for
women. She embodies the vamp character that had become popularized in 1930s films
featuring strong and sexual female characters like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
Before this, vamp characters like Theda Bara, popular in the 1920s, had concentrated on
the vampire-like tendencies of the vamp, including a supposedly insatiable sexual desire
that “drained men of their masculinity and destroyed them” (Banner 279). By the end of
World War II the vamp's more sinister undertones were often replaced by the childlike
blonde-bombshell (Banner 284). Postwar concerns regarding the potential empowerment
women had enjoyed during the war years fueled social fears that women would usurp
traditionally masculine roles, including a more aggressive sexuality. As Leo Braudy
notes, “postwar images of women who have strength, sexual and otherwise, undermined
male power and authority,” and thus threatened men with castration anxiety by revealing
the false underpinnings of patriarchy (454). The more malleable bombshell character
would then step-in to take the place of the vamp, and to assuage cultural fears of gender
transgression.

94
While Nina is an enjoyable character with a penchant for revealing the realities of
her own situation, as well as that of those around her, paradoxically she isn’t a character
devised to appeal to audiences in the same way as Lisa. She can’t be the heroine because
she can’t be paired with a hero due to the double-standards applied to women, and
embraced by audiences of the time. This analysis is based upon variable factors that are
insinuated about her in the text, including her association with unrepentant prostitution,
her race, and though it’s represented at times in a positive light, her blatant attack upon
masculine prerogative. Thus Nina’s role as a prostitute isn’t the only factor that
condemns her to a subsidiary role – after all Lisa has been forced into the same situation.
What does separate Nina and Lisa as women involved in sex work throughout the text is
Nina’s acceptance of her role, and her fierce defense of prostitution in occupied Italy. She
tells Lisa that “wars are all the same. The men become thieves and the women…” (Nina
simply shrugs and doesn’t bother to finish this sentence) (21). She goes on to say “at least
with Roberto you’ll eat, and you’ll have somewhere to live” (20). Still, Nina’s defense of
prostitution would be a difficult sell to the public. It’s true that some fears of VD had
subsided during World War II with the discovery of penicillin, though it didn’t become
widely available until midway through the war. However, uncontrolled sexuality itself
still functioned in the minds of the American public as dangerous and immoral. These
fears of prostitution, VD, and unbridled sexuality would then alter social perceptions of
the vamp character, and would be perfectly complemented by military attempts to
minimize uncontrolled and unregulated prostitution. “The disease-producing effect of
sexuality was only the most obvious side-effect of a general condemnation of the kind of

95
promiscuity embodied in the figure of the vamp” (Braudy 454). Nina’s role as both vamp
and prostitute would likely alienate her from much of the postwar American audience
and make it impossible for her to be more than a secondary character.
Furthermore, while Lisa’s sexual stain is whitewashed by her race and her
reluctance to engage in sex work and the “dirt” of her sin is washed away by her suicide
in the river, Nina’s racial makeup reveals racial stereotypes of prostitution and sexuality
that not even Hayes could undermine. Unlike the blonde Lisa, Nina is dark-haired, and
she dyes her hair red to appeal to her soldier clients. Like the roles portrayed by Rita
Hayworth, made wildly popular in the 1940s after she changed her name and dyed her
hair red, Nina is at times both amoral and seductive. Described as “very trim” and “very
red-haired” she fears that her new officer will discover that her hair is really dark and cast
her aside (9). Nina is, in effect, passing as an anglicized character, much as nonwhite
characters in American literature had “passed” before. This is also revealed in her
jealousy of Lisa’s blonde hair over her own black hair (15). This insinuates that Nina,
being not as Anglo-Saxon as Lisa, is also, as Richard Dyer makes clear, not as pure, not
as beautiful, and not free from the stains of sexuality (76). Further, by marking her as
nonwhite or lesser white as well as an unrepentant prostitute, Nina becomes what
Philippa Levine sees as a threat to the sanctity and superiority of white culture based on
her potential ability to infect white men with disease that could then be brought home to
further infect white women and threaten the viability of white culture itself (2). This
status as non-Anglo and her ability to embrace prostitution without feeling guilt make
hers a very dangerous and deviant body. Finally, as another unregistered prostitute

96
refusing to accept the categorization of fallen woman that would be imposed upon her by
society, Nina's deviance has yet to be contained by any form of enforced regulation
(Davidson 9).
Yet, paradoxically, Nina is also an enjoyable character, so much so that these
same categories of deviance and sexual danger must still be reexamined by the final
pages of the book. In one scene Nina happily puts a sexually aggressive soldier in his
place; he wants to accompany her to Florence, and trade sex for transportation. Nina
deftly handles the situation by examining his teeth, and telling him that “with teeth like
that you stay in Rome” (10). She will, instead, go to Florence with her latest and more
attractive officer client. This effectively turns the tables on a prostitute/client relationship
in which her body could potentially be judged based on basic physical characteristics.
Nina empowers herself by controlling her own sexual commerce. She isn’t afraid to
criticize any man, particularly Italian men who attack Italian women who have turned to
prostitution. “Let them whimper and shout – the cigarettes they smoke, and the coffee
they drink, we buy them” (21). She even tears down traditional notions of prostitution
and class, in which women of lower class stations are supposed to be more likely to turn
to prostitution than women raised in better economic circumstances. “What do you think
the Contessa calls it? It’s an arrangement – it’s love…but she, too, needs sugar and coffee
when she wakes up in a cold room” (21). Perhaps most telling, when her officer in
Florence dumps her Nina returns looking “as unconquerable as ever” (126). This
compliment, set in a text that examines the effect of losing the war on a culture and its
female population, is heady indeed. While Nina embodies the most dangerous attributes

97
that a prostitute can wield against male clients and male prerogative itself, it is only she
who cannot be conquered, implying that even in this military venue she reflects the false
notions of superiority and power that are regularly associated with gender.
This paradoxical representation of Nina, as both a dangerous sexual threat and an
unconquerable female figure, begs the question of her likeability; why is it, exactly, that a
character who walks such a fine line between social outcast and victorious survivor is so
very likeable? The answer, I believe, lies in Hayes' appeal to individualist American
audiences as well as his examination of the “grey areas” of gender and power that make
themselves known whenever traditional black-and-white social structures struggle for
supremacy. Nina is the most honest character in the text; she never engages in the
romantic notions of love and respectability deployed and manipulated by Lisa and
Robert. This honesty then marks her as the truth-teller of the text, and in so doing aligns
her with an individualist and non-conformist anti-sentimentality that had gained
tremendous popularity in post-World War I and Depression-era America. World War I
had brutally eradicated fantasies of war, love, and masculinity, leaving a new America in
its wake that struggled between an embrace of the old fantasies of the past – represented
in popular loves stories in film and other media – and a more aggressive, pared-down
approach to media and representations of sex and power that would delineate “modernist”
literature and film from the Victorian era. This same sense of brutal honesty also
highlights the “grey areas” of reality that Adrian Caesar sees as dangerously salient
during times of war, and that Hayes does an admirable job of examining (5). The harder
society struggles to cement traditional and more simplistic fantasies of sex, power and

98
gender the more we are reminded of those areas of fetishistic non-conformity that always
serve to question simplistic binaries. Nina's “unconquerable” nature comes from her
powerful individuality alongside her ability to live outside of traditional social mores, and
while she may never be the heroine, she is an immensely likeable person nonetheless.
Unfortunately, it is Nina’s unconquerability that drives the most dangerous male
character, Antonio, to attack the repentant Lisa for her decision to engage in sex work.
Nina is also the one who introduces Lisa to prostitution, insinuating, as many traditional
male theorists had suggested, that unrepentant female prostitutes are both physically and
morally contagious. The attack upon Lisa is then another catalyst for her suicide,
revealing that while Nina can enjoy exemption for the moral expectations applied to
women and sexuality, the more delicate, angelic, and Anglo-Saxon Lisa must pay for
such immorality with her life. Antonio’s reaction to Nina’s unconquerability is to extend
his anger into violence against any woman. “She is not afraid of me, but she will be, they
all will be, some day” (128). This division between the women – Nina’s darker role as the
deviant body who does not fear male prerogative, and Lisa’s lighter role as the woman
who can’t bear her own shame – inadvertently sets up yet another Madonna/Whore
binary within the text. As the Madonna who has fallen, Lisa becomes a martyr for her
morality by throwing herself into the river. In the end, while Nina’s blatant attack on
male prerogative is fine for a character such as herself, it leads a more morally conscious
woman to her death. This further separates the women into superficial “types” and
divides them against one another in a manner that makes it much easier for patriarchy,
including militaristic policy, to both condemn and control women.

99
Representations of the Madonna aren’t restricted to Lisa or other metaphorical
imagery in Hayes’ text. In fact, the image of the Virgin Mary is invoked repeatedly
throughout the story. This isn’t surprising in a novel that’s situated in Rome, next to the
Vatican, and that involves a traditional Catholic population. But, just as many other war
authors of this and the previous generation called the power of religion into question in
their texts, Hayes is quick to prove that the ability of religion to soothe the suffering of
the Italian people during the occupation is non-existent. The opening of the text focuses
on a lithograph in Adele’s home of the sacred heart, an image that invokes a Roman
Catholic devotion to Jesus Christ as the son of God, and to his physical heart as a
representation of his love for humanity. However, the failure of the church to end the
suffering of the Italian people is made clear in a conversation between Lisa and Adele.
Lisa remarks that everyone has come to Rome because they believe that the Pope is
protecting his people. In response Adele says drily, “Well…one must be grateful to the
priests for something” (17). Further mention of religion by Adele, who owns the home
featuring the lithograph, is limited to curses and exclamations of “Madonna!” when she is
angered by the behavior of the others in the novel. In particular this is the case when Lisa
faces potential imprisonment for her relationship with Robert: “Madonna, they bomb
each other, they destroy cities – but a girl in bed is a crime” (112). Even the character
most tortured by the commandments of morality, Lisa, feels ambivalent about faith and
God by the end of the novel. When Robert finds her waiting in their room in the dark, she
tells him she’s thinking of God, and that “He has a lot to forgive me, and I have as much
to forgive Him” (64). Only Antonio seems to lament the loss of traditional religious

100
devotion when he attacks Lisa for her “crime,” telling her that San Giacomo, the
detention center and supposed hospital for sick prostitutes, will be her “paradise” because
of her “dishonor” (133).
That Antonio should be the character most tortured by the failure of Catholicism
to regulate the behavior of the women in the text is not surprising, particularly in light of
his overall rage at the Italian wartime defeat and losses, and the manner in which he shifts
his own castration anxiety to the female characters. However, growing secularity had
already drawn a great deal of attention throughout Europe for some time, revealing for
many the shifting nature of gender politics. For Italy in particular, religion had been
losing ground as a means of controlling the population of a fast growing country with
expanding urban centers and industrial advancements since World War I (Idema1). With
this growth had come an influx of young, unmarried women looking for work outside the
traditional care of a rural, patriarchal figure. And with the church losing ground it seemed
that these long-held patriarchal mores were beginning to fail. Intensifying the tension was
a rift between the Vatican and a government that favored the legalization of prostitution;
such sex trade had been legalized by Camillo di Cavour after the Italian civil wars
(Gibson 3). According to many critics at the time, to legalize prostitution was to validate
it in some way, and that to do so would hold up the advancement of a properly religious
country (Levine 134). The failure of the Vatican to sway the political legalization of
prostitution further insinuates a weakening of papal authority, and the shifting of attitudes
about religion and its place not just in society, but in government as well.
For a time religion’s panacea had been replaced for many men and women by the

101
masculine and militarist movement of fascism, yet another political structure of sex and
power that would fail Antonio and fall prey to an unstable postwar environment. In light
of religion’s waning power to control evolutions of gender and sexuality, fascism had
assumed what J.A. Mangan sees as an analogous function, “it would grant the
disillusioned comfort, and a sense of belonging which society failed to provide” (7).
Fascism was also centered upon a reinvigoration of Italian social and political power that
was embodied figuratively in an “old warrior purity” derived from the perceived
superiority of Roman social and military history (Braudy 425), and literally in the body
of the masculine, military male. Mangan asserts that the martial male body, represented
as whole, powerful and virile, became a “symbol of state power: his powerful body
personified the powerful state” (5). Mussolini himself often appeared shirtless for the
press during his rise to political power, and he used his formidable physical presence to
symbolize his own political movement. This cult of male virility “was deeply sexist and
strongly patriarchal” (Mangan). It provided Italian culture with a solution to the anxiety
induced by social change and religion’s apparent disempowerment by reconstructing the
traditional binaries of male agency and female dependence. However, with Italy's defeats
in North Africa, occupation by an often-brutal Nazi regime, the death of Mussolini and
the second occupation by American forces, it became clear that fascism had failed. With
it had failed the cult of virility that had sustained the embattled masculinity of characters
like Antonio. Antonio, like many men in Italy, has “left his manhood in Libya” and has
yet to recuperate a sense of physical or ideological self that will provide him with the
masculine empowerment more typical of pre-war Italy (49).

102
In light of these shifting attitudes, a growing sense of what Idema calls
“helplessness” in the face of failing patriarchal values in the guise of fascism or
organized religion had lasting repercussions for the day-to-day lives of Italian citizens,
particularly for prostitutes like Lisa and Nina (Idema 13). The strict regulation of these
women reveals a desire to control their sexuality and to ensure its subjugation to
masculine prerogative at all costs. Italian prostitutes were required to be registered, to
suffer painful and humiliating “examinations” at the whim of male health officials, and
were often sent to supposed hospitals that were nothing more than prisons in disguise
(Wanrooij 139). This is, in fact, the very road that Lisa travels, who only avoids being
sent to San Giacomo because she tests negative for VD. This strict regulation reveals the
fear of women who are sexually “out of control,” who have freed themselves from the
moral strictures pervasive to a patriarchal and strictly Catholic country, and the terror that
the “deviant bodies” of such women can induce (Davidson 9). Public condemnation of
prostitutes was also rampant, though paradoxically many men also thought of prostitution
as a necessary evil to alleviate the supposedly aggressive sexual needs of young men, and
to protect the “honorable” women from those same men (Wanrooij 147). In post-World
War I Italy, and particularly fascist Italy, the only sex for women that was “honorable”
would be married sex in the name of procreation, yet another standard Catholic
commandment, so as to produce more young men who would invigorate Italy in the
postwar years and populate the country with the new and more militarized masculinity
that Mussolini lauded. Lisa's embrace of unmarried sexuality then situates her as the
antithesis to Antonio's lost masculine prerogative, a literal embodiment of all he feels he

103
has lost.
This fascination with “appropriate” sex for women is summarized by Cynthia
Enloe as “militarized fertility” (248). It reveals itself in the need to control not just
prostitutes, but all women, and specifically mothers’ bodies in their reproductive
capacity. In Hayes’ text, the struggle to maintain patriarchal control over these women is
verbalized by men who mourn the loss of, and and hope to reinstate, traditional modes of
motherhood. And once again no character is more obsessed with such issues than
Antonio. Antonio’s mother Adele, referred to as “mamma” by her tenants, is a primary
example of how his notions of appropriate femininity have gone astray. Adele’s home has
become a bordello, not just in terms of Lisa and Robert’s arrangement, but through the
behaviors of their previous tenant, the sexually promiscuous Nina. Early in the text,
Adele herself arranges for a soldier to meet a young woman named Maria, who will
exchange sex for food, situating Adele as a sort of madam (Hayes 12). And when Lisa’s
true arrangement with Robert is revealed, Adele only criticizes the social and political
systems put in place by men who would punish Lisa for an arrangement that provides her
with food and shelter (109). Adele even infantilizes her own son Antonio in front of the
others when his angry outbursts become embarrassing:
“Go to your room,” Adele said.
“The liberatori!” Antonio said. He laughed a short, hard quick laugh. There was
no humor in it.
“Go to your room,” Adele said.
She took his arm. “Antonio! Do you hear me?” He allowed her to draw him away.

Time and again it’s only Ugo, Antonio’s father, who defends him, explaining his son's
misogynous behavior is because Antonio’s previous girlfriend had abandoned him for a

104
German soldier while had hidden in their basement for two months in order to avoid
fighting for the Germans (79). Ugo's defense of his son reiterates Antonio's emasculation,
physically in his wounding in Libya, and emotionally through his hiding underground in
order to avoid military conscription. Later, Antonio will seek to assuage his feelings of
feminization and infantilization by punishing women who don't embrace traditional roles
such as marriage and motherhood, transferring his own sense of castration upon them
through acts of violence.
This fascination with appropriate motherhood is one place where militarization
and patriarchal religious tenets meet. In Hayes’ text it is the Virgin Mother who is more
often invoked, not Christ himself, revealing what Henry Idema sees as an association of
religious devotion with motherhood and with underlying oedipal desires. Using Freudian
analysis Idema suggests that the “genius of religion” lies in its “metaphorical substitutes
for the breast…that the believer latches onto in danger situations” (25). He goes on to say
that
The Virgin Mary, women clergy, the image of church as the bride of Christ,
feminine portrayals of Jesus, maternal features in the symbol of God, and
the food in the Holy Communion all may function in this way during a crisis
(25).

Religion’s success is based in its ability to bind oedipal desires, by being in part a
substitute for the parents, and for radiating love and security to the believer without the
anxieties that are usually aroused by an intense libidinal tie to the mother figure (33). But
what happens when this mother figure, as it has been defined by the church, fails? How
might this failure, reflected in increasing secularization, affect ideas of motherhood for
those believers who rely upon it to substantiate their overall sense of security? Idema

105
suggests that the result is tremendous anxiety and a clear resurgence of the fear of
castration that has been mediated by religion (33). In Antonio's case this fear and anxiety
will become most apparent when he regresses to a near-animal state and attacks Lisa.
The depth of Antonio’s obsession with Lisa and with her downfall is played out in
her abandonment of moral stricture, which occurs during the novel, and is only resolved
when she reincorporates such strictures through her suicide. Lisa is positioned by Hayes
from the beginning of the text as a character with traditional moral standards endangered
by the war. As the main representative of whiteness in the text, Lisa is the most obvious
stand-in for the Virgin Mother herself. As Richard Dyer notes, the Virgin Mary is “the
supreme exemplar of…feminine whiteness” (74). Lisa’s role as the Madonna is then
reinforced by her memories of her life before the war, in which she wears a “white dress”
and seems unsullied by the destruction of her country (94). When Lisa’s turn to
prostitution is made public, Antonio reacts with rage and violence, regressing to an
“animal” state – as so angrily expressed by Nina - when his anxieties surface and reveal
the failure of his Madonna figure to live up to his expectations (136). He wants Lisa to be
someone who will “be hungry” and “be poor” rather than relinquish the religious tenets
of morality and purity he holds most dear (133). In other words, he wants a female
martyr, reflecting what Adrian Caesar calls a drive for “moral masochism” propagated by
the Catholic church and used to “provide a hierarchical model of service and
sacrifice...[and underwrite] the sexual mores which in turn perpetuated and supported
nationalism and empire” (5). With the resurgence of his own castration anxieties, Antonio
seeks to transfer his fears back upon Lisa by attacking her with a knife and attempting to

106
cut off her hair to publicize her relationship with the conquering military forces; “when
you walk in the street with a naked head people will be able to tell!” (134).
The final mother figure in Antonio’s fast failing world is yet another one
governed by militarism’s tenets: the motherland. It is true that like most fascist countries,
Mussolini’s Italy was obsessed with establishing its masculinity, particularly in light of
the embarrassing results of World War I4 (Braudy 425). In Mussolini’s case a fascination
with Roman militarism would situate Italy as a uniquely militarized state between the
world wars. However, in Hayes’ text we hear of Italian suffering in the form of the
“patria” or motherland. In fact, Antonio’s repeated refrain – “O Patria Mia!” -- is from
the poetry of a noted Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi and his “Ode to Italy.” In the ode,
Leopardi refers to Italy as a once-beautiful woman who is chained, disheveled, and
weeping in response to a perceived fall of Roman enlightenment, and failure and
hypocrisy in the church. The refrain “O Patria Mia!” from the ode also reveals a
militaristic theme, as the ode finishes with citing Italy as a motherland “born to conquer”
whether fate smiles or frowns upon her. This combination of military aggression and
female symbolism binds notions of motherhood, nationalism, and militarism to create a
unique and potent fascination with appropriate modes of patriotic motherhood that
expresses itself in Antonio’s fascination with the poem. When Lisa’s failure to conform
to his notions of traditional feminism come to light, Antonio responds with angry
recitations of “O Patria Mia!” and later attacks Lisa for dishonoring “her,” his motherland
(133). Yet, as a failed country in the war, Italy herself has failed Antonio. As is often the

4 As Leo Braudy addresses it in his text War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity, Italy was noted
more for its defeats than victories in World War I.

107
case, conquering forces tend to feminize a nation that has been invaded, and this
feminization extends to all citizens. Antonio’s motherland has been conquered and
dishonored, and as a citizen of such a country, he too faces what he feels to be
feminization at the hands of his enemies.
Antonio’s feminization is, as is the case with Hemingway’s Frederic, linked to a
war wound. However, while Frederic’s wound is an insinuation of impotence later
remedied by his recovery and subjugation of Catherine, Antonio’s wound is more overtly
tied to impotence, and is never remedied but rather reinforced by Lisa’s participation in
the sex trade. Antonio’s wound is also more ambiguous, never fully described, and is
openly linked to the manhood that Antonio supposedly left in “the Libyan desert” (49).
Antonio refers to his service in Libya when he describes the failed offensive waged in
North Africa by Italian General Graziani, in which 200,000 Italian soldiers were soundly
beaten by 36,000 Allied forces, a defeat that definitely damaged his fascist, nationalist
pride. Like most young men of his era, he was mislead by the military propaganda that
assured him that his masculinity was tied to wartime service and that he would emerge
victorious from his participation in the conflict:
“Do you know, signora, when I left in my transport from Augusta to sail for
Africa there was a time when I thought I would enjoy the war? It thought it would
force me into heroism, and to be a hero, even a reluctant one, is an attractive idea.
I thought war was something like fire fighting: a great blaze, and then men, all
together, working to put it out.” He grinned, savagely, and she realized that the
mockery was not directed at her, but at himself, at the poor illusioned Antonio
who had gone into the transport at Augusta (50).

Instead, Antonio’s forces were severely beaten, and forced to retreat. Antonio sustained
the wound that will torment him throughout the text, his girlfriend will flee with the

108
Germans, and he will conceal himself in his father’s basement until the arrival of the
American troops. His wound then takes on symbolic proportions, and will be referred to
throughout the text as indicative of the disillusioned man he was, and the less-than man
he has become. It even stands in for the feminization of his country as the loser in the
war. This impotence brought on by the wound is “his truth” now, but rather than face
these losses himself, Antonio responds by turning his anxieties upon the women who best
represent his failed and prostituted nation, and who he blames for the feminization that is
so well analogized by his injury (80).
Yet, while Antonio is tormented by his wound, and while he uses that torment to
rationalize his treatment of Lisa, Antonio’s behavior is still not devised outside of the
typical double-standard that applies to most men who are accustomed to patriarchal
culture. Antonio decries Nina’s behavior as she leaves for Florence with her lover, and
yet he himself insinuates that he visited prostitutes in North Africa:
“Come,” Nina said to Antonio. “I’ll kiss you too.”
“No, grazie,” the boy said.
… “I kissed better girls in Libya,” the boy said.
“But dirtier,” Nina answered.
“Only their skin,” Antonio said.

This double standard also applies to the goods that Nina brings into the home purchased
through her relationships with men. Antonio is quick to say that it’s a good thing when
Nina leaves with her captain lover, even though it will mean no more coffee for their
household. However, his practical mother is quick to remind him that he drinks the coffee
too, even if he suggests that he only does so “reluctantly” (48). Antonio’s attitude isn’t
surprising based upon the reality of prostitution in Italy before the wars. Even as

109
legalized prostitution garnered vicious criticism in Italy, at the same time social theorists,
statesmen, and even medical doctors all espoused the notion that young men “needed”
prostitutes as a sexual outlet, especially if they weren’t married (Wanrooij 139). And
reportedly a full twenty-five percent of men Antonio’s age first discovered sex through
prostitution at this time, meaning that while Antonio will criticize prostitutes who are
available to the invading army, he probably isn’t surprised, scandalized, or even bothered
by prostitutes making themselves available to Italian men (Wanrooij 147). In Antonio's
world the Virgin and the Whore are both useful, so long as they are fulfilling their duties
according to carefully controlled strictures of traditional masculine prerogative.
Antonio’s own perceived feminization has led him to associate his wound, his
hopelessness, and his national defeat with the subjugated role of women in the text. This
is made most notable by his rage at the American woman who feels comfortable entering
a bar in Italy, a freedom that Italian women did not enjoy. It doesn’t help hat the woman
is “in a uniform,” identifying her as a probable WAAC (Women’s Auxiliary Army
Corps), and signaling her intrusion upon the traditionally masculine grounds of military
service (74). “It is very convenient to leave their morals behind, isn’t it signor?..One does
not feel shame before an inferior people” (75). His inferiority complex is heightened for
Hayes’ readers when Robert draws parallels between Antonio and Lisa. Both of them, in
Robert’s eyes, are belted tightly into raincoats instead of clothing more appropriate for
the cold weather (103). Both are “tightly belted,” withdrawn from the reality of the
situation around them, and engrossed in their own personal turmoil. Later, Robert realizes
that both Lisa and Antonio despise the Americans, since they’ve both been “conquered”

110
by them in some way. “Underneath, there’s this, the actual thing, how they really feel.
And we don’t, or don’t want to, see it” (143). Ironically, while this comparison helps
Robert to understand how it is that Lisa feels about him, that same comparison is part of
what drives Antonio into such a rage: his manhood is threatened by his similarity in
status with the fallen Lisa, highlighting his castration anxiety and revealing why it is that
he so despises the women in the text. Laura Kaplan's analysis of fetishism and culture
stresses that physical and psychological wounding can “stimulate an unconscious
association with femininity,” a common response to which is to “silence the sexuality of
women” (31). Antonio will do exactly that, and when his attempts to silence the women
fail, he will attempt to physically relocate the castrating effects of his war wound upon
Lisa herself.
Just as Lisa bears a noticeable resemblance to Hemingway’s Catherine, so Hayes’
Robert is yet another young soldier who finds love during a war in Italy. Like Frederic,
Robert pursues a fantasy of romance designed to make his wartime experiences more
palatable, and like Frederic, Robert’s final epiphany in the text is discovered only after
the death of his love object. Yet one fundamental difference between the two male
protagonists exists in Hayes’ obvious criticism of Robert and his blatant inability to
empathize with Lisa's experiences, truly with all of Italy, until it is too late to save Lisa’s
life. From the start, both Lisa and Italy are one in the same to him – they are the losers of
a war in which he has emerged victorious, entitling him to take liberties that only the
losers must allow. When asked how Robert feels about Italy, his response is carefully
coded, since he is actually meeting his “wife” Lisa for the first time in the scene: “‘I

111
didn’t expect [Italy] to be as nice as it is.’ He slipped the musette bag from his shoulder.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said carefully, ‘it’s much prettier than I thought it would be.
Much more’” (27). Later, when confronted with Lisa’s rage at having been forced into
prostitution, an argument sparked by his insinuation that she had also been prostituting
herself to the Germans, he slaps her and says “‘Baby, I told you: you lost this war’” (39).
Robert’s lack of empathy for Lisa reveals his position as a militarized soldier – she is
simply part of the spoils of war and has been conquered by the Americans just as surely
as Italy herself had fallen.
This association with Lisa and Italy is therefore a role forced upon her by both
Antonio and Robert, illuminating how women in times of war are often doubly oppressed
and dehumanized. In Robert's case, this dehumanization is also compounded by an
imperialist, nationalist agenda bent on restructuring American-Italian relations to better
enhance and represent American capital enterprise. In Robert's imagination Lisa has been
absorbed by what John Esperjesi calls a “regional imaginary,” or a constructed myth of a
people or region designed to overcome certain spatial barriers to expansion (23). Robert
imagines that he and his American compatriots have done Italy a service by driving the
Nazis out of Italy and “liberating” their country. Early in the novel another soldier of a
similar attitude suggest that Italians – particularly Italian women – should be more
“grateful” for America's intervention on their behalf, revealing the commonality of this
fantasy (11). However, Antonio refers sneeringly to Robert as the “liberatori” who have
only succeeded in further humiliating the Italians, and Lisa will call American forces the
“conquistatori,” barbarians who have only furthered Italian decline (38). This disjunction

112
between Robert, Lisa, and Antonio's perceptions of American-Italian relations reflect the
American construct of Italy as something owned, purchased with the blood of American
soldiers and through the power of “American steel,” which Robert suggests to Lisa is
more meaningful than Italian art in a new, wartime global marketplace:
“You may have Leonardo da Vinci, but we've got US Steel...”
“And it rusts,” She said.
“And Da Vinci peels...”
“It lasts longer than metal!”
“But it ain't so hot on a tank” (38).

The nameless soldier of earlier in the novel will blindly ask Adele what he is to do with
“the money I got” - money he will use to purchase food for another prostitute – in a house
full of people who have struggled with Nazi brutality and wartime rationing for years
(11). Robert himself tells Lisa to “be grateful” because without American intervention
she would still be “doing the tedeschi's laundry” (39). This insensitivity to others,
facilitated by America's economic empowerment and rising capitalist enterprise, will find
its ultimate representation in Robert's purchase of Lisa and his inability to understand her
struggle to accept her new role as a prostitute.
Robert’s lack of empathy explains why his imagining of his relationship with Lisa
is so radically different from hers. Robert never fully understands Lisa’s moral and
physical predicament, preferring to think of their arrangement as a simple outgrowth of
his status as the victor of the war. Even the “love scene” between the two of them reads
like two different experiences, his as a victory, and hers like a rape scene. For Robert
there is “the overwhelming sense of a woman being with him, in a clean place, in a clean
bed, just being there, in a room, alone, feeling the warmth even though it was not given

113
and voluntary” (46, italics mine). Lisa, for her part, says “nothing,” and “did not move,”
but in Robert’s mind “it was not necessary for her to say anything or even give him
anything” (46). In other words, her sexual consent is unnecessary because he is the victor
in the war and has purchased her body. Later, the cold reality of their affair will present
itself when Lisa awakes to find that Robert has left her foodstuffs in exchange for sex,
including milk, chocolate, soup, and even coffee and cigarettes (47). Robert’s sense of
such an arrangement is that is should be “simple”: he wants someone to be sexually
available to him and only him, and she needs to eat and have a place to live. In truth, the
reader later finds that he is using Lisa sexually in order to deflect his own sense of
dehumanization brought on by his participation in the war. He wanted to “get away from
the army” and from the feelings of mortality induced by his military service (91). This
divide between their understanding of a mutual sexual arrangement will play itself out in
Lisa’s suicide. But until her death, Robert imagines their relationship as one of simple
barter without any of the moral or emotional ties that so torture Lisa. His callousness, and
that of other soldiers in occupied Rome with similar attitudes, insinuates a critique not
just of Robert but of the United States as a whole. Militarism and America's capitalist
mentality appear as a patriarchal social paradigm that ultimately facilitates Lisa’s
dehumanization and death.
Leo Braudy notes that “as a political theory, fascism represented a revolt against a
nineteenth century Europe defined by capitalism” (426). The fascist state's failure and the
invasion of American soldiers, each with a “wad of lire,” reveals an interesting
relationship between some tenets of militarism and capitalism (11). On the one hand, as

114
Braudy asserts, capitalism seemed to lead directly into the world of “commerce and
competition” that would later be embodied in a society obsessed with “polarizing
male/female difference” and the specter of civilization as a feminizing force robbing men
of their masculine power (454-455). Yet, as Cynthia Enloe has argued, militarism is also
closely linked to consumerism. After all, one cannot “militarize a can of soup” if there
isn’t a public induced to buy the soup (1). “Militarization, therefore, affects not just the
executives and factory floor workers who make fighter planes, lands mines, and
intercontinental missiles but also the employees of food companies, toy companies,
clothing companies, film studios, stock brokerages, and advertising agencies” (2).
Culturally we must “buy” into our own identity as a warrior nation, just as we must buy
into our participation in global conflict. In Hayes’ text the capitalist tendencies of
conquering American forces contribute to Robert’s inability to understand Lisa’s moral
predicament, aligning militarism and industrial America with an unsympathetic,
consumerist streak. However multiple forms of capital are involved in Hayes' militaristic
enterprise, all represented in The Girl on the Via Flaminia. This becomes evident as Lisa
is forced to contend with several versions of “capital” in occupied Italy.
Robert’s version of capital is the one most clearly criticized in the text. Aside
from their previous argument regarding the artwork of Leonardo Da Vinci and the power
of U.S. steel, and Robert's purchase of her body regardless of her resulting moral
quandary, the novel also fictionalizes tales of US soldiers blithely carving their names in
the walls of the Coliseum, and the US millionaire who wants to purchase the great
obelisk that “Emperor Augustus himself brought back from Egypt” without even

115
knowing what it is (123). This cultural insensitivity appears to be based in the American
fascination with wealth and industrial enterprise that has supposedly robbed them of any
ability to appreciate more humanistic expressions of art and history. Furthermore,
Robert’s inability to see Lisa outside the terms of exchange value clearly enunciates an
eradication of basic human connection in the name of capital. He wants their relationship
to be one of uncomplicated bartering, “just…exchanging something somebody needed
for something I needed” (91). Robert is at this point in the text unable to see Lisa as a
person at all, but only as the “something” he needs. Certainly by the end of the text
Robert’s epiphany regarding Lisa’s predicament seems to reflect a newer understanding
of the human condition, but this only occurs after her arrest, detention, and suicide,
suggesting that his understanding has still been bought at her expense.
But Lisa pays with her life not just because of Robert’s cold capitalism, but
because she is caught between that and another system of economic value that is also
criticized in the text, even if only marginally. As Bruno Wanrooij as suggests in “The
Thorns of Love,” a woman’s “value” at this time was based upon patriarchal notions of
“honor” (139). Lisa’s own personal worth is then predicated upon her sexual
relationships. The virginity of “good girls” constitutes a sort of “symbolic capital” of its
own, a notion that has been historically espoused by Christianity and through a
fascination with virginity as seen in the Virgin Mary (154). This type of capital is best
described as Antonio’s definition of capital, and is clearly aligned with masculine control
over the female body. Once again, Lisa is in a situation in which she herself is devalued
because of her failure to protect her own moral and physical “value” as it has been

116
defined not by her, but by the men in her life.
Furthermore, neither man seems capable of recognizing that the need for real
capital, as in money, is the reason why she has been driven into prostitution in the first
place. This fact has been ignored not just in the text, but historically by many theorists
who would criticize prostitutes and prostitution as the work of lazy, greedy, or
maladjusted women. For this reason, women like Nina, whose prostitution has bought
them financial freedom, invoke the truly dangerous body - they have abandoned
traditional notions of “honor” as its value has been asserted by patriarchy, and have
broken through the public/private divide that separates men from women by assuming
control of their own financial destiny, rejecting an enforced female dependence upon
male providers. Capitalism can then be viewed in one of two ways; first, it is the system
that drives women like Nina and Lisa to prostitution in order to survive. And second, in a
potentially more beneficial light, it fosters an environment in which women can engage in
a form of commerce that could move them from the more traditionally embraced
“private” sphere to a more dangerous “public sphere” of economic empowerment and
self-ownership (Levine 7). Unfortunately, in Lisa’s case she has fallen victim to the
former, and unlike Nina cannot reconcile her participation in the latter. Combined with
her perceived lack of value for having given up her virginity outside the bonds of
marriage, Lisa’s only escape from the trisection of militarism, capitalism and religious
oppression is to drown herself in the Tiber, in effect accepting her position as a body
without value.
In the final scene of the novel Robert runs in search of Lisa who has fled, intent

117
upon killing herself. Tellingly, Robert runs towards the city and not towards the river,
failing to find her before she can drown herself in the Tiber. His failure to stop her stands
in contrast to his previous feeling that, now that he has decided to marry Lisa, everyone
around him has become his “allies” (152). This use of military terminology, combined
with his still ego-centric feeling that everything was going to be different based on “how
he felt” reveals that even in light of his more generous intentions, Robert never really
understands Lisa nor her predicament (151). Throughout the text she represents many
things to the men in the text: she stands-in as a conquered Italy, as the fallen Virgin, as
the great Whore, as the threat of infection, and as a commodity of capital, but never does
she appear to them as a real person trapped in an unalterable situation that has robbed her
of her decision-making abilities. This, in light of how it is that “the lives of so many
women in so many countries have been directly and indirectly affected by this
institution” of military prostitution reflects the endemic nature of militarism and its
tremendous impact on popular notions of masculinity (Enloe 51). And while Hayes’ The
Girl on the Via Flaminia is not a text held in the highest of literary esteem, it’s
contribution to an understanding of military prostitution during the second world war
does much to unpack the ways in which women are dehumanized in the name of military
conflict, and how that dehumanization reveals itself in our cultural imagination.
At the same time it is also true that Hayes' text is not one without troubling
representations of race, sex and power. Lisa's casting as the angelic blonde contrasts too
neatly with Nina as the dark, sexual, and immoral prostitute, revealing that even as Hayes
struggles against common perceptions of women and prostitution he engages in other,

118
equally disheartening stereotypes of race and sexuality. And of course, Lisa's ultimate
suicide robs her character of any agency she may have gained in the text, revealing her
inability to escape moral and cultural disapproval in an environment that has objectified
her many times over. The deployment of such stereotypes in a text that struggles to
adequately represent the complex circumstances of wartime prostitution reveals that
escaping militaristic interpretations of gender and sex is difficult.
However, in questioning the masculinist potential of militarism through Antonio's
wounding and Robert's dehumanization Hayes reveals the many complicated forces that
are often obscured in global conflict, and by examining how these forces play themselves
out upon the bodies of women he criticizes popular conceptions of war and prostitution
itself. His examination of the role of religion in Italy during World War II also
illuminates the spaces where the goals of military policy-makers intersect with
traditionally patriarchal systems of oppression and bodily control, and illuminates the
ways in which local governments participate in their own agendas of sex and power to
the detriment of their female populations. His analysis of the fantasies of motherhood
circulating in Italy during World War II reveal the simplistic coding of women's roles in a
society that wanted desperately to maintain traditional modes of power in the wake of
fascism's failure and the waning power of the Catholic church. And by drawing
connections between militarism and American capitalism Hayes questions the imperialist
motives of a country that in his opinion appeared to view the war as a means of attaining
financial power. He reveals how those same motives filter down to impact the real men
and women who must contend with the violence and social disruption of war while

119
negotiating a variety of social constructs such as “value” and “honor.” Most of all, Hayes'
attempt to put a human face to prostitution constitutes a real departure from the cultural,
military, and even scientific analyses of sex workers at the time, offering the American
public an alternative understanding of militarism's impact on a population of women
often left voiceless in the wake of their own oppression from multiple sources of
institutionalized power.

120
Chapter Two Bibliography

Banner, Lois. American Beauty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
New York: Knopf, 2003.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets Brooke,
Sassoon, Owen, Graves. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

Davidson, Roger and Lesley Hall. “Introduction.” Sex, Sin and Suffering:
Venereal Disease and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and
Lesley Hall. London: Routledge, 2001. 1-15.

Dombrowski, Nicole Ann. “Soldiers, Saints or Sacrificial Lambs? Women's Relationship
to Combat and the Fortification of the Home Front in the Twentieth Century.”
Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent. Ed.
Nicole Ann Dombrowski. New York, Garland 1999. 1-30.

Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York:
Pantheon, 1986.

Dyer, Richard.White. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s
Lives. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy: 1860-1915. Ohio, Ohio State
University Press, 1999.

Gilbert, Sandra & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the 20
th
Century, Vol 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and
Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Goodman, Philomena. Women, Sexuality and War. New York, Palgrave, 2002.

Hayes, Alfred. The Girl on the Via Flaminia., New York: Pocket Books, 1949.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929.

121

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the
American Reform Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Idema, Henry. Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Pyschoanalytic Theory
of Secularization in Three Novels: Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publications, 1990.

Kaplan, Louise. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the
British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Mangan, J.A. Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Global Fascism.
London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000.

Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled
Veterans in American Postwar Films.” Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke
and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 260-283.

Phillips, Kathy J. Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and
American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Ross, Patricia A. The Spell Cast by Remains: The Myth of Wilderness in Modern
American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Sauertaig, Lutz. “The Fatherland is in Danger, Save the Fatherland!: Venereal Disease,
Sexuality and Gender in Imperial and Weimar Germany.” Sex, Sin and Suffering:
Venereal Desease and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and
Lesley Hall. London: Routledge, 2001. 76-93.

Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Routledge,
2002.

Swensen, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2005.

Wanrooij, Bruno. “The Thorns of Love.” Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Desease
and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall.
London: Routledge, 2001. 137-160.

122

Chapter Three
Raspberry Jam and Refugees: the Housewife at the Front in Dorothy Fisher's The
Deepening Stream.

In the early twentieth century war and militarization were entrenched as bastions
of masculine prerogative. As a result, women writers often found that their perceptions of
World Wars I and II, and of the resulting impact of global conflict on men, women and
children, were easily ridiculed our outright rejected based on their gender, and on the
stylistic devices and literary genres in which they sought to express themselves. There
were few critiques more cutting within the so-called literary circles than to be called a
“lady novelist” at this time. However, in order to fully examine the impact of
militarization and its relationship with gender upon the war novels of the early twentieth
century, it is imperative to examine those war texts that were not thought to be an
example of a “good” war novel by the critical establishment. This is particularly the case
when those texts suffer their popular or canonical rejection for daring to represent

123
militaristic ideals in a skewed, modified, or unattractive light.
The war novels of some women writers like Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and
Edith Wharton have received positive criticism, even if only based on their texts’
perceived status as “serious” or “high art” modernist work. But those women who
addressed the war in more domestic terms have often been ignored completely by critics
both then and now, mainly because they address the war within the confines of what
Jaime Harker calls “middlebrow” literature, or the domestic novel (3). Among them
perhaps one of the best-loved authors of domestic literature in post World War I America
was Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Though she was a prolific and very popular writer in
America from 1930 on, Fisher’s work has largely been ignored within the literary canon
because her novels, short stories and children’s fiction fail to conform to the traditional
notions of “art.” Only recently has her work received critical attention, as many feminist
scholars attempt to redefine the notion of art within the confines of a historically male-
centered value system. As a woman writing domestic literature from the 1930s on
Fisher’s version of the war novel has never been examined, or analyzed alongside those
World War I texts by famous male authors like Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria
Remarque, and C.S. Forester.
But Fisher did write a novel based on the war. And, as is the case with many of
the male authors whose work is viewed as “valid” and “authentic,” a large portion of her
book The Deepening Stream (1930) is based upon her personal experiences in France
during World War I. Fisher’s husband John served as an ambulance driver during the
war and, fluent in French and passionate about both the war and humanitarian causes,

124
Dorothy Fisher accompanied him to France along with their two small children. Half of
The Deepening Stream takes place in France during the war, and though it is a work of
fiction, Fisher’s personal experiences heavily influenced the novel (Harker 24). It was, as
is the case with all of her work, very popular with female readers. For the purposes of this
project, The Deepening Stream also represents a unique departure from the traditionally
accepted notion of what defines a war novel. In 1975 Paul Fussell famously wrote about
World War I literature in his book The Great War in Modern Memory, and defined
“true” war literature as that which is based on the experiences of the soldier in combat
(Hanley 6). In contrast, Fisher’s journey to the front stopped in France because, as a
woman, she could not enlist in the armed services. Because the military definition of the
front specifically means the battlefront, and has historically excluded those women and
children who must fend for themselves in occupied territories, Fisher's war story has been
viewed as a lesser experience compared to soldiers who served in the trenches. She was
not only denied access to the military’s battlefront, but also denied validity in her own
wartime experience, and then denied the right to pen a “war novel.” In reaction, Fisher
embarked on an extraordinary novelistic enterprise: by redefining the notion of the home
front to reveal its role in the wartime experience, and by later publishing that experience
within the confines of a traditionally domestic genre of literature, Fisher brings the war
into the ladies’ parlor. She succeeds in questioning notions of public and private spheres,
of perceived hierarchies in male and female sacrifice during wartime, and of popularly
held fantasies of gender during times of war.
By blurring the lines between domestic novels and war novels Fisher’s novel

125
represents a complex negotiation, and in many ways rejection, of traditional militarism as
it plays itself out in American texts during the twentieth century. However, hers is not a
project without complications. In fact the paradoxical turns evident in The Deepening
Stream reveal how patriarchal notions of gender and value are difficult to unseat, as well
as how militarism relies on those notions and uses them to disempower men and women
who do not agree with its message. Still, by reading domestic novels about the war
alongside traditional war novels it is possible to uncover the complex and sometimes
contradictory responses of women writers to American participation in World War I, and
to gain insight into the importance of women's roles during times of war in general.
Militaristic policymaking heavily influences the cultural imagination of all women during
times of war (Enloe 5). This is no less true for Fisher’s audience, mostly middle-class
housewives who would find themselves and their social roles the object of intense
cultural imaginings with the outset of the war. “Marriage maneuvers,” as they are so
called by Cynthia Enloe, reveal the military’s campaign to construct a socially accepted
“loyal, respectable, patriotic wife” (155). Such women should provide the appropriate
“moral dimension” to a male soldier’s fighting career, and embody the private home, and
the security of the home front itself, for men who were expected to risk their lives in
times of war (155).
But as is the case with all of the real-life relationships between soldiers and
women, when a male soldier seeks to establish a permanent relationship with a wife
military officials “may get nervous” (157). Such relationships entail not only expensive
and ongoing social services, but also the alien presence of the wife and children in a

126
traditionally masculine environment, who after all may not provide their husband/father
the kind of encouragement to leave home and risk life and limb. As a woman living
within the boundaries of a male-dominated cultural institution, alongside a soldier during
times of peace, and awaiting his return during times of war, military wives are both
“fundamentally marginal,” and yet “integral to that institution’s daily maintenance”
(161). This paradoxical arrangement would necessarily produce a confused and
sometimes resentful perception of militarism and of war itself. Fisher's text offers readers
a unique insight into this confusing world, and reveals a space of women's literary
expression that examines the impact of militaristic campaigns on gender in the twentieth
century.
The Deepening Stream is the story of Matey, a young woman whose childhood
experiences make it difficult for her to establish a healthy relationship with her husband.
Her parents' unhappy marriage has a deep and lasting effect on their three children,
leading Matey to suffer from depression and anxiety. At the age of twenty-three she
discovers an inheritance left to her by a distant aunt. Her father has since passed away,
and her mother is not an active participant in her life. At the bank, she meets Adrian, who
will later become her husband. Through a series of emotional struggles she falls in love
with him, they marry, and have two children. At this point, midway through the novel,
World War I begins to attract public attention in the United States. Matey's foster
family,the Vinets, are French – they often cared for her and her siblings when her parents
were “touring the continent.” Having heard of the situation of the French people through
letters from Madam Vinet, Matey and her husband decide to spend her inheritance by

127
traveling to France and helping in the war effort. Adrian becomes an ambulance driver,
and Matey and her children live with Madame Vinet. Their experiences of the war,
including rationing and hunger, cold winters without coal, caring for orphaned children,
and feeding and clothing malnourished and emotionally devastated French soldiers, are
bleak and painful. When the war has ended Matey discovers that both she and her
husband are suffering from what we would today know as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Once back at home, Matey turns her attention to her family, and their inability to
reintegrate themselves in American society. The novel ends on a positive note, as Matey
takes on work in her husband's bank so as to better facilitate their mutual recovery from
the war.
The importance of novels like this in the earlier part of the twentieth century -- in
comparison with well-received war novels of the same era – lies in its ability to reconcile
female experiences both within the canon, and in terms of cannons, so to speak. In this
case the “literary imperialism” that Karen Kilcup recognizes in the historical rejection of
women from the literary canon is compounded by women’s similar exclusion from the
writing of war novels (2). This same exclusion also runs parallel to female
disenfranchisement as democratic citizens whose participation as members of the state
has historically been denigrated, especially during times of war. According to traditional
military policymaking, women are not supposed to participate at the front during times of
war, though they always have. Woman are also not supposed to have abrasive or
aggressive ideas regarding war, are not supposed to make decisions regarding war, and
are not supposed to express those feelings in literature or other public media. This

128
exclusion of women who seek to speak out and write out about experiences they aren’t
supposed to have had is clearly reflected in the overall exclusion of women’s domestic
literature from the canon of literary achievement. From this vantage point examining
Fisher’s work as a war novel alongside well-established novels penned by men positions
texts like The Deepening Stream as subversive texts.
To be fair, perhaps another reason why The Deepening Stream has never been
recognized as a war novel is because is defies simple categorization. While most texts
about World War I and World War II feature a romantic plot, more often the war takes
center stage, and all other experiences are either tangential to, or derive their meaning
from, the war itself. Fisher’s text, however, turns this stylistic device on its head. Hers is
a war story wrapped in a domestic novel, with the relationship between Matey and her
husband taking up the primary concern of the book. The first part of the text is concerned
with Matey’s difficult relationship with her emotionally distant parents. Her inability to
reconcile their unhappy marriage until her father’s dying moments then carries over into
her relationship with Adrian, and her fear that she won’t be able to “make a good wife”
for him (156). Repeatedly throughout the text they each express the concern that they
won’t be able to make each other happy in their marriage, and reveal their inability to
understand one another as individuals who want to make a life together (157). The war,
then, becomes another trial for their marriage, albeit one that changes them both
dramatically. It is just as Matey and Adrian have established themselves in their marriage
that “into this beatitude came Adrian’s father, an open newspaper in his hand” (197) to
announce that French troops have been amassed in the defense of Belgium. Tellingly,

129
Matey had been so much absorbed in her role as a housewife that “she had been very
busy with raspberry jam for the last few days and had not taken the time to glance at the
papers,” and as such she was unaware of the political tensions growing between Germany
and France (197).
But Matey’s concern for domestic realities isn’t simply the kind of wifely detail
that many critics would dismiss as trivial. The war intrudes upon Matey’s life because up
to this point her life has been fashioned as a private sphere that has little interaction with
public realities. But rather than turn a blind eye to the public nature of global politics,
Fisher fashions Matey’s response to the intrusion of the war as one that allows her to
renegotiate her relationship with both public and private realities. Matey re-shuffles her
at-home duties, and redefines their importance in terms of their usefulness to her,
facilitating her participation in both private affairs and public politics. This works to
elevate the importance of her at-home work, as well as to create a space for her to
participate in a traditionally male arena without sacrificing her “feminine duties.” As
John Cawelti notes, formula stories such as domestic novels reveal important cultural
tendencies with “special appeal and significance,” and through such texts men and
women could address a variety of social problems and concerns through a fantasy
situation that would allow them to step across certain boundaries in a carefully controlled
fashion (7). When the war, a cultural apparatus of great proportions, intrudes upon
Matey’s presumed domestic bliss her response is to relegate housework to a useful but
secondary position in her life. She is then able to use domestic duties to help her
overcome her grief upon hearing that the son of her dear friend Madame Vinet has died in

130
battle:
“Incessant activity of the most primitive kind was the only screen between her
and the sight of Paul Vinet as his mother saw him in the hospital where he died,
armless, blinded, mutilated beyond her recognition – Little Polo! The harmless,
lovable boy…It was almost with a recurrent cry that she sprang upon scrubbing-
brush and broom to shield herself from that sight” (208).

In so doing women’s work assumes a value that would be overlooked by other authors,
particularly male authors who placed little importance on women’s domestic chores. And
by linking women’s work to her wartime concerns, Fisher also refutes the notion that
housewives aren’t interested in national affairs, but only in the care and maintenance of
their domain. Fisher has therefore imbued women’s work with an emotional value at the
same time that she validates the housewife’s political participation, even when that
participation must be confined to the home.
But Matey’s participation in the war effort doesn’t stay confined to the home at
all, and in fact spills out of the private sphere into the public sphere of transnational war-
making. She vows that she will no longer “omit to read the newspaper on account of
raspberry jam,” and becomes an avid reader of the local and national newspapers (200).
When her husband attempts to privilege his personal feelings of inadequacy over
America’s isolationist stance, she reminds him that women can suffer similar feelings as
well, though theirs are not validated as such:
Forgetting her, he burst out loudly, “It makes a man feel like a dog to be
wallowing here in comfort and safety, while…other men, old friends, old
comrades…”
Matey felt as if he had struck her, and instantly struck back at him in a reflex of
anger. “How do you think it makes a woman feel? You think it’s perfectly all
right and natural, I suppose, for a woman to be in a position that makes a man feel like
a dog?” (212).

131
Matey’s “comrades” aren’t the ambulance drivers and soldiers like her husband Adrian,
hers are the “women and children and old men” who are left behind at the French front,
struggling to feed and care for themselves and the “destitute refugees” (213). Matey’s
desire to go to the front reflects her desire to participate in what would be considered
appropriate “women’s work” for the war effort, and in not validating those feelings she
rightly points out that Adrian has inadvertently reduced her to a non-person in regards to
her state (213). This alignment of women’s home work with valuable war work would be
mirrored by American housewives’ contributions to charities, growing their own foods,
and various other contributions for those allies who were maimed or left without an
adequate means of sustain themselves during and after the war.
Still, Fisher’s attempt to create a more equal playing field for women’s work in an
environment of militarism isn’t without its own ideological problems. By privileging
women’s right to patriotic idealism, and by suggesting that women’s work is also war
work, Fisher unknowingly propagates the anti-woman tenets that function throughout the
cycle of militarism itself. Matey’s embrace of militarism for American women fails at
this point in the text to account for the fact that war is almost always inflicted on women
on both sides of the conflict, and designed to do so through a blatant negation of their
personal rights. Matey constructs herself as the ideal patriotic housewife who would
have earned great support before the war. But by making her domestic sphere an active
part of war, Fisher is inadvertently furthering the oppression of “women and children and
old men” on the other side of the conflict.
In her text Maneuvers Cynthia Enloe asks, “How do they militarize a can of

132
soup?” (1). The answer is that they get a housewife to buy it, both literally and
figuratively. Militarism is invested in separating women into groups that oppose one
another as a means of preventing the overall questioning of military validity by a group
of women large enough and visible enough to cast suspicion upon the waging of war.
“The gendered divisions of labor have worked best – “best” as measured by military
criteria – when women acting in each role have felt unconnected to, even wary of,
women in the other roles” (45). Thus, Fisher’s focus on women’s work at the French
front, and Matey’s fictional contributions to that front, work to obscure the reality that all
women and children and old men suffer during times of war. Furthermore, Matey’s
acceptable war work could also be used to cast a suspicious light upon what could be
considered less appropriate or “unacceptable” war work, including prostitution, and even
participation through legal and often propagandized war roles such as factory work and
volunteering for the WAACs and WAVES.
Domesticating war work within the text also plays a part in the debates regarding
women’s rights that were circulating throughout the United States at the time. The Seneca
Falls Convention had taken place 65 years before the outbreak of World War I, and no
small part of the argument regarding woman’s right to vote was concerned with women's
supposedly domestic nature, and how that nature should or should not function within the
state. In situating the housewife as someone who does her patriotic duty from the home
Fisher reinforces popular notions of biological determinism, the idea that biology
determines reality. In particular, Matey could appear to embody the notion that women
are naturally inclined to do “women’s work,” even when that work is expanded to

133
embrace traditionally male notions of war. Even when Matey comes to revile what has
come of the war she never speaks against war itself. Instead she constructs men’s and
women’s work as a natural means of ordering their experiences, and uses this biologically
supported notion to establish a feasible coping mechanism for men and women during
and after the war. “Where were her husband, her children, her home, that she could not
pull them up between her and the hideousness of what men made of life?” (342). In this
case, Matey’s ideological construction of the home serves to protect her psychologically
from the horrors of the war around her. In an interesting twist, Fisher has inserted Matey
into a role traditionally reserved for the male soldier at the battlefront. It was supposed to
be the woman’s job to give her soldier husband something to look back to, to distract him
from the horrors of war by offering herself as his moral compass and figure of ideological
security. However, by reconciling herself to the notion that war is something that “men
made of life,” and by embracing her own part to play as the image of home and hearth,
Matey also situates herself as a military domestic. Even in her attempts to embrace a
newer dynamic for women, this domestic version of war is still something that men have
made of her life, and that she has accepted as her duty.
To her credit, however, Fisher’s own conflicted nature about war, militarism, and
woman’s roles during times of war are mirrored in her contradictory approach to these
topics throughout The Deepening Stream. While many male authors decried the sense of
betrayal they felt at the hands of social and military propagandizing, Fisher more often
recognizes the paradoxical nature of the impulses that many men and women find
attached to war. Matey both feverishly condemns the atrocities committed by Germans,

134
and yet recognizes that in many cases the German civilians conscripted by their own
military were no more to blame for the war than the French and allied soldiers whom she
supported with her efforts: “Their voices…had had long to travel before in mid-ocean
silence it roared sullenly in her ears from those long dead men, ‘We were killed by those
tired, kind, homeless men to whom you devoted yourself. You helped murderers take our
lives’”(355).
Matey’s guilt and her recognition of the all-consuming nature of war will continue
to haunt her when she seeks to reintegrate herself in American culture. But her
simultaneous attraction to and repugnance from the aggressive and masculine nature of
militarism is most clearly expressed in the arrival of the first Americans in France:
And now they were marching by the crowd on the sidewalk – left! right! left!
right! – swinging their long legs from loose hips, their hard small eyes impassive
and expressionless in the leathery faces with the high cheek-bones…. ‘God! How
ugly they are!’...an American flag went by, bright, new, silken, gold-fringed.
Adrian stiffened to salute, and wild sudden tears of pride and love and
homesickness came to Matey’s eyes (287-288).

The “ugliness” of the soldiers is encapsulated by their lack of individuality, their
expressionless dehumanization, and later in their aggressive and lascivious masculinity
when young women begin to throw them flowers and cheer for them. Yet, at the same
time Matey herself cannot help but feel “pride and love” for her country when such an
impressive array of military might represents its arrival on the battlefront. This
contradiction in feelings leaves Matey both “excited and depressed” – excited because
she has responded to the powerful allure of militarization, and depressed because on
some level she is aware of the dehumanization that these men represent (289). As a
woman, Matey doesn’t feel personally betrayed by such feelings in the same way as a

135
man whose patriotic fervor would have been used to encourage his enlistment. But she is
left with the real and sinking feeling that her embrace of militaristic ideals represents her
own freely constituted participation in “a bewildering world” in which that which she
instinctively despises is also that which she finds attractive (290), and in either case, her
embracing of such ideals have led to the deaths of many young men.
This less than concrete representation of militarism, constituted by mixed feelings
of both desire and distaste for militarism’s “maneuvers,” might be yet another reason why
The Deepening Stream would be so poorly received as a war novel. As Susan Gubar and
Sandra Gilbert have noted in No Man’s Land, women seemed to emerge from their
wartime experiences relatively unscathed, and more often to have enjoyed the benefits of
an unstable social and economic era that had provided them with new freedoms denied to
them in pre-war America (262). Men, however, found that the Great War had crushed
their sense of individual masculinity, and that the dehumanizing nature of World War I
had enacted upon them a “psychic and physical castration” (260). Fisher’s even-handed
portrayal of militarism doesn’t explore the sense of illusion that had left so many men
feeling betrayed, because women didn’t have the benefit of such illusions of social and
national viability to begin with (Gilbert & Gubar 270). Instead, Fisher’s approach takes
into account Matey’s mixed feelings of personal responsibility for the ways in which her
embrace of militaristic ideals have had morally questionable repercussions. Matey’s
“wild tears” at the sight of the American soldiers are tempered by her feelings of distaste
for what they represent, but at no time does she apologize, or regret, or make a clear and
concise judgment regarding those feelings. Fisher’s Matey is simply content to recognize

136
the complicated nature of militarism, that the world is sometimes “bewildering,” and to
note that our reactions to military power during times of war isn’t as clear cut and simple
as propaganda would lead us to believe. This failure to openly criticize militaristic
propagandizing could seem to implicate Fisher in what many male authors felt were the
benefits that women enjoyed at their expense – the social and personal growth that men
had paid for with their idealistic hopes, and in many cases, with their lives.
But a closer look at the text reveals that Matey does pay a heavy price for her
embrace of militarism. Fisher situates many of Matey’s experiences, as well as the
experiences of the other women at the home front, as similar to those suffered by the
soldiers actively serving at the battle-front. It is important to note that by no means does
Fisher ever denigrate the experiences of the soldiers that appear throughout the text. In
fact, their lives, their personalities, and their sacrifices are painstakingly described in an
effort to convey the horror of what they have experienced. Once at the home front Matey
and Madame Vinet begin caring for the soldiers on leave who have no friends or family.
Matey quickly becomes accustomed to “their profound silence on the subject of
exploding shells, bayonet attacks, trench life – war in general – and their deep concern
over the state of their underwear5” (242). In feeding, housing and clothing these men
Matey develops a deep attachment to these soldiers, including “a raw-boned Fleming,
whose wife and little boy, if still alive, were beyond German lines” (242), the “brilliant,
cynical-talking young dandy, who had been a student in Henri’s classes” (242), and even
the “hard-bitten, handsome, swaggering, front-line fighter, recklessly outspoken in his

5 In this case by underwear what Matey means are the undershirts, long johns, and socks intended to
protect the men from harsh winters.

137
detestation of war and its makers” (243). Later, in nursing French prisoners of war who
had suffered grave injuries, she will struggle to provide some sort of succor to them,
including a man with “but half his face” (343), another with “no arms” (341), and one
with “most of his jawbone gone” (341). In cataloguing the lives of the soldiers, their
human hopes and desires, and their tragic suffering, Fisher succeeds simultaneously in
exalting their sacrifice as well as illuminating the impact of war, and militarism, upon the
male body.
Matey’s own experiences in France aren’t designed to supersede any those
experienced by soldiers, however what they do accomplish is the creation of a gender
specific parallel, in which the suffering of the women at the home front is validated as
similar to that which is suffered by the men. Matey herself becomes thin and worn from
having given much of her share of their food to her children, and to the soldiers that they
have tended: “I thought she looked dreadfully when I first saw her,” said Mrs. Whitlock
fondly, reaching for a bonbon. “But I must say her thinness is very becoming to her. It
makes your eyes look simply enormous, Matey dear” (335). And the other Vinet women
do not fare any better. Matey’s one time playmate Mimi becomes a “gaunt, masterful,
steady-eyed woman, with gray in her carelessly arranged hair, and machine-oil ground
into her hands” (239). Madame Vinet herself struggles to support Matey in their daily
duties “limping and faltering as she walked, like an old woman” (260). And Ziza, who
was trapped for months behind enemy lines with her children, becomes a ghost of herself,
one whom Matey does not recognize on sight: “Now she could see the yellow-gray face
of the woman who had Ziza’s voice. She was startled. It did not look at all like Ziza.

138
Nothing in eyes, mouth, or expression was like Ziza” (261). While the suffering of the
women does not compare to the physical maiming of the soldiers, the war still leaves its
physical mark upon them. And if Joanna Bourke is correct in her assumption that “the
decisive impact of the Great War on men’s bodies can be seen most clearly by looking at
the war-maimed,” then its impact is also reflected in the physical suffering of those
women at the home front (15). By illuminating how it is that war marks itself upon
women’s bodies Fisher succeeds in unmasking a particularly cherished notion of
militarism – that the men must fight in order to protect their women from bodily harm.
When it becomes clear that everyone suffers during the war – men, women and children –
this particular manipulation of gender, so often used to promote enlistment, becomes an
obvious falsehood.
Matey’s physical losses are further compounded by her emotional suffering
during her time in France. Paul Fussell discusses the physical and emotional suffering of
soldiers in World War I with his dedication to The Great War and Modern Memory. In it
he situates the experiences of the man who fought at the battlefront as those that are truly
authentic within western war literature. Fussell’s text begins with this dedication, which
reads:
To the Memory of
Technical Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson, ASN 36548772
Co. F, 410
th
Infantry
Killed beside me in France
March 15, 1945

By dedicating his text to his fallen comrade, Fussell illuminates one of the most painfully
real, and yet carefully obscured wartime realities– that losing one’s close friends in battle

139
is very likely, and that such a loss will constitute a psychic war wound that does not heal
easily (Hanley 30). Fisher would seem to agree wholeheartedly, and extends the
ramifications of this psychic wound back to the home front, where Matey and the Vinets
must part with those soldiers that they have grown to love.
Death after death had struck into their circle. The boy from Lille who put perfume
on his hair and loved good clothes and Palais-Royal farces was part of the human
chaff blown into eternity at Dounaumont…Louis Plon…who loved to put up
shelves and mend broken locks, was sent from Mort Homme…dying with
Madame Vinet beside him. The stubbornly land-loving Breton farm-hand lay
down in the earth forever in Avoncourt (260).

The bitterness of Fisher’s language – particularly the “human chaff” that has become of
her carefully tended soldiers - reveals that the loss of beloved comrades extends well into
the woman’s domestic sphere, and encompasses more than the romantically infused
plotline of the husband/lover, or the paternally acceptable mourning of the
father/brother/son. Matey grieves these men because they had become her friends, part of
“their circle,” and losing them in the war contributes to her sense of postwar
disillusionment, which she will share not just with the men in her life, but with each of
the women who “stood beside a newly made grave” (328).
This bitterness at the loss of her own soldier friends validates Fisher’s war text
much in the way that Paul Fussell would later privilege the soldier’s emotional loss and
its literary representation. Fussell’s landmark book begins with two assertions: first, that
his text is specifically about the “literary means” by which the Great War “has been
remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized” (ix). The well-known artists that
occupy his pages, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden,
have been considered part of the traditional canon of war literature since before the

140
publication of Fussell’s text. The second assertion made in Fussell’s preface is that these
“literary means” are best expressed as “dimensions of the trench experience itself” (ix).
This notion that only those men who had “lived it” could truly express the impact of war
on the human psyche is delicately but clearly negated by Fisher’s women characters and
their equally difficult wartime experiences. Fussell later remarks in his textual analysis
that “what makes the experience of the Great War unique and gives it a special freight of
irony is the ridiculous proximity of the trenches to home. Just seventy miles from ‘this
stinking world of sticky trickling earth’ was the rich plush of London theater seats” (64).
As Dorothy Fisher makes clear in The Deepening Stream, such fantasies of a secure
home front aren’t always realistic. For those women left behind in France, their
battlefront was in the home, and their experience of the Great War was equally unique,
and rife with struggle, sacrifice, pain and loss.
And like a great many of those soldiers, Matey and the other women who must
survive at the home front soon develop the symptoms of what we would call today Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. At the time of Fisher’s writing, PTSD was known
as shell shock, or by the less-kind term “neurasthenia,” and would only be grudgingly
recognized as a true disorder during Fisher’s lifetime. It was theoretically induced by the
constant shelling of the trenches during World War I. Matey’s symptoms and those of the
women around her reflect their own “war worn nerves,” with the “involuntary
flick…with which in those years every one greeted any sudden sound” (309). Later, when
Matey and Adrian are aboard a steamer heading home, her symptoms worsen: “she tried
hard to stay there in her steamer chair…but all at once she would not be at this dubious

141
end of the war, but still in the midst of it, coming down the walk from Mimi’s house, a
frightened little boy clutching at each of her hands” (354). Later she begins to suffer from
nightmares, and to feel depressed: “not a single night could she get herself safely into
sleep without jerking up at least once out of her doze, heart pounding, nerves twitching,
feet and hands icy cold with consternation over some past catastrophe or over one merely
dreaded, that had never happened at all” (354-355). Only now does Matey realize that the
militarization of her role as the supportive housewife had worked to obscure the reality of
her actions, a reality that she must now face without the benefit of pre-war illusions.
However, Matey still embraces her own sense of personal responsibility. She accepts that
she had chosen to believe what had been offered to her as a means of avoiding the most
objectionable ramifications of her actions: “She had drugged herself to unconsciousness
of what they were all doing by the traditional woman’s narcotic of small personal
services” (355). Eventually Matey’s husband Adrian notices that she is having symptoms
similar to his own, and advises her one night after she wakes from her nightmares “ ‘Put
that all behind you, Matey,’ he whispered. ‘Forget it. That’s the only way to stay sane.
Forget it!’” (356). In their shared postwar trauma, and in her husband’s specific
recognition that their two maladies are actually one in the same, Fisher ultimately
succeeds in aligning Matey’s home front experience with that of her soldier husband.
Matey’s experience of shell shock is never intended to invalidate the suffering of
soldiers like her husband, but it does serve to question the primacy of the soldier’s
experience of war. Unfortunately, in focusing on Matey’s experience of shell shock
Fisher may have inadvertently reinforced negative stereotypes of soldiers who suffered

142
from it during and after the Great War. On the one hand, Joanna Bourke argues that when
military officials were forced to recognize shell shock as a true ailment, it “enabled
neurasthenic servicemen to be regarded as wounded” and encouraged a positive, if short
lived, “sympathetic response” to soldiers who suffered from the disease (118). Dorothy
Goldman suggests that the commonality of shell shock created a cultural shift, in which
“mental damage…frequently represents the common vulnerability of the times” (84).
However, until World War I shell shock, and any disease that was thought to be linked to
hysteria, was considered a woman’s ailment and indicative of “weak nerves.” Men who
admitted to such illnesses before the war were considered feminine, weak, and nervous.
They were also subject to the social and cultural disdain reserved for men considered
effeminate. Leo Braudy writes in From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing
Nature of Masculinity, that the attempt to “define shell shock marks a crucial landmark in
the history of warfare because it was a much greater challenge to the assumed relation of
war and masculinity than even the highest casualty report” (391). By admitting that war
was not the masculine proving ground of military propaganda, but instead a force of
physical and psychological destruction, militarism itself suffered perhaps its most
damaging critique.
The recognition and treatment of shell shock would force military officials,
soldiers, and the public to acknowledge that the war could inflict psychological as well as
physical damage upon the soldier. Fisher’s revelation of Matey’s own stress syndrome,
and that of the other women at the front, could then hypothetically support the notion that
the war had inflicted psychological damage upon the whole population. This would

143
again refute Fussell’s assertions that there was a space of leisure and peace outside of the
trenches. Fisher’s appropriation of shell shock for women then strikes a double blow
against militarism . It seeks to align the suffering at the home front with that of soldiers at
the battlefront, and it calls into question the propagandized fantasies of a safe and secure
home space that must be protected by enlisted men. Still, even Bourke must admit that
support for soldiers who suffered from shell shock was short lived, and that the visual
specter of the maimed soldier reflects “the fit man, the potent man rendered impotent”
(38). Leo Braudy concurs that after the brief and “giddy days of 1914 and 1915” when it
seemed that the Great War would provide a masculinizing force designed to invigorate
western culture, there appeared a fearful consensus that “the kind of masculinity that can
wage war is [not] normal,” and would play itself out in the observation by psychologists
of the time that there existed “widespread impotence in frontline soldiers” (393-394).
This overwhelming sense of impotence, and of the perceived feminization of soldiers,
would later be blamed in part upon the presumed successes of women who enjoyed
greater freedoms during the war (Gilbert & Gubar 262). Unfortunately, by highlighting
Matey’s own symptoms Fisher's discussion of shell shock in women could have been
subsumed by social fears of the feminizing effects of hysteria.
Fisher’s evaluation of militarization moves with equal force into one of the most
powerful ideological spaces attributed to women during the war: that of the patriotic
mother. The idealistic construction of motherhood, and the social and political
empowerment of mothers themselves, had been hotly contested in the years before the
war. In the mid-nineteenth century the Victorian ideal of motherhood would identify

144
mothers as gentle, self-abnegating, domestic creatures whose only concerns would be for
the health and well-being of their children, and the comfort and care of their husbands
(Ladd-Taylor 6). But as the nineteenth century progressed, many women used their role
as the gatekeeper of the home to rationalize entrance into public affairs. Molly Ladd-
Taylor finds that “women’s private experiences of mothering were deeply connected to
political developments, especially to the expanding public health, education, and welfare
services” (2). The so-called “Maternalists” of this era would campaign for political
change based on their argument that they were more sensitive to the needs of children
and the poor due to their capacity for motherhood. Organizations of women waving the
banner of motherhood eventually established private-sector child welfare services,
campaigned for more medical research into infant mortality, and lobbied the government
for various reforms. Major accomplishments attached to the Maternalist movement
include the passage of mothers’ pensions – later known as Aid for Dependent Children –
as well as protective labor laws for women workers. They also facilitated the
establishment in 1912 of the U.S. Children’s Bureau, and the 1921 passage of the
Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, “the first national welfare
measure, which provided federal matching grants for infant health clinics” (Ladd-Taylor
2).
The Maternalist movement also found popular representation in the literature of
the time. In analyzing the works of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jane
Tompkins writes in Sensational Designs that the direct appeal to women, and mothers in
particular, to become involved in social and cultural concerns like child welfare, poverty,

145
alcoholism and slavery reveals that “out of the ideological materials at their disposal, the
sentimental novelists elaborated a myth that gave women the central position of power
and authority in the culture” (125). Continuing in the same tradition, Dorothy Fisher
stated in 1914 that “middle-aged women were making ‘themselves more useful to the
world than ever before by applying to various forms of social uplift the experience, the
poise, the knowledge of life which they have acquired in the years of their mothering’”
(Ladd-Taylor 43). Fisher was involved with these social uplift programs throughout her
career, including a wartime campaign from the home front in France to house and care
for war orphans, which is fictionalized in The Deepening Stream. She also wrote several
children’s books, a child-care manual titled Mothers and Children, and was perhaps the
most ardent supporter and public spokesperson for the Montessori Method of childhood
education that continues today. Fisher was also well-received as a speaker for the
National Congress of Mothers, and contributed often to magazines that focused on child
care issues of the day.
However, with the advent of the war the public empowerment of mothers would
face a tremendous stumbling block in the form of militarism. While campaigns by
pacifist mothers’ groups would be minimal, many women would find that the relationship
between the mother and her son would suddenly become the focus of intense national
scrutiny. Women like Fisher would find themselves struggling to maintain the authority
won by Maternalists in the face of a powerful attack on motherhood, one that would later
be termed “momism” in the post World War II era. In militarism’s public battle over
ownership of valuable male bodies, the first and most dangerous opponent has proven to

146
be mothers. Long before the military focuses on women as nurses, as sexual objects, as
representations of homeland security, or even as soldiers, it must “think about women as
the mothers of sons” (Enloe 245). During World War I Canadian and Belgian legislators
awarded women who were the mothers of soldiers the right to vote before other women,
and in Germany and Italy intense campaigns were waged to “persuade women that
militarized mothering could earn them public respect” (248). Here in the United States,
the mother/son relationship was criticized as being detrimental to masculinity,
particularly during times of war when male aggression becomes a military resource. On
1917, on the eve of America’s entry into the war, Teddy Roosevelt “launched an attack
on the women-led peace and antidraft movements by singling out the image of the
pacifist mother whose pathological attachment to her son was turning him into an
emasculated coward, thus hastening moral disintegration and head[ing] the nation to
ruin” (Ladd Taylor, 169). With the advent of the war, the mother’s relationship to the
state had suddenly been inverted, swiftly moving from one in which she had a unique
right to campaign for changes in state legislation, to one in which her attachment to her
male child could signal the end of western national security.
The conflict between motherhood and militarism is also evident in the experiences
of the Vinet women. Fisher was by no means a pacifist – she supported American
involvement in the war from the start, and wrote fictional pieces from France designed to
encourage American financial contributions. However, though Matey’s patriotic fervor
reflects a powerful pro-war sentiment in the beginning of the text, it is later tempered by
her growing understanding of the impact of war and of militarism on the men, women

147
and children at its mercy. Though she at no point criticizes American participation in the
war, her text privileges the mother’s struggle to protect small children during times of
war, and to endure the suffering and loss of adult sons who become part of the “human
chaff” denigrated by a dehumanizing war and by the tremendous bureaucracy of the war
machine. Fisher eventually positions the mother-figure as one uniquely suited for, and
actually driven into, postwar political activism as a means of salvaging a sense of
ontological meaning in the deaths of husbands and fathers, and especially sons.
Fisher’s first attempt to reconcile motherhood and patriotism is revealed in
Matey’s embrace of her role as the patriotic mother and wife. Fisher also uses that same
traditional imagery to justify Matey’s nontraditional response to the war, much in the
same way that motherhood itself was used to justify women’s political achievements in
the previous generation. Matey is very pro-war in the beginning; she is angered by the
isolationist stance taken by America at the outset of the war, and frustrated by the
apparent blindness of her community: “for an instant she saw that Rustdorf people were
acting as they did according to a universal law – not because they were bad or inhuman,
not even because they were indifferent but because they did not see what was happening”
(206). Matey’s contrasting ability to see that the war represents “civilization going to the
scrapheap,” and her ardent support of American military involvement in the war,
outwardly serves to reinforce traditional expectations of the wife as the mouthpiece of
cultural morale when society needs its manpower to wage war (215). It’s important to
note that because Matey’s son is a small child she wouldn’t have faced the same pressure
to support the soldiering of sons as would mothers of military aged boys and men. She is

148
more rightly a military housewife, and not yet a military mother. However, Matey
eventually uses both of these stereotypes to her advantage when she decides to participate
in the war effort. In feeding and clothing all the soldiers she can afford to care for during
her time in France Matey becomes a universal military housewife, taking the “woman’s
work” expected of all women during times of war, and using it to justify her own military
participation (213). But in order to do this Matey must first justify taking her children
with her to the French front, a maneuver that would require more finesse.
As part of a Quaker community Matey and her husband must discuss their plans
to move their family to France with the rest of Rustdorf. Matey’s role as military
housewife, and the cultural currency she wields, is called into question by the very real
fact that she plans to take her two small children into a war zone. They are met with a
“storm of horrified disapproval” (219). Ultimately, Matey wins the support of her
community, and permission to take her children with her to the French front, by asserting
her authority as their mother; she knows that “anything is better than letting a barrier
grow up between parents and children” (220). She would rather her children brave
physical danger than allow them to be separated from their parents, and significantly,
from their parents’ ideological quest. Adrian Sr., the idealized patriarchal figure of the
text, theorizes that the children would feel shame as adults if they learned that their
parents had not acted on their wartime impulses in order to protect their children from
harm:
“Honestly, Mr. Fort, it seems to me wickedly wrong, to do anything that might in
any way be a disadvantage to your children!”
“Ah, there are various kinds of disadvantages,” Mr. Fort reminded her. “Perhaps
when they grow up, to know that they did not stand in the way of a generous-

149
hearted action of their parents’ but shared it will be no disadvantage” (221).

Adrian Senior’s concern for the potential patriotism of the grown children reveals that
Matey has won her right to participate in the front based on her future role as a military
mother. By taking her children with her to the front, she is teaching them to support
military action, even at great cost, and even when that support is potentially life
threatening.
Once Matey arrives in France she is quickly disabused of any simple notions
regarding the roles of mothers during times of war. The experiences of the Vinet women
differ dramatically from those of Matey and her family, proving not only that the
idealized image of the patriotic mother is shallow and simplistic, but that the real-life
experiences of mothers during times of war are usually rife with pain, suffering, and loss.
By the time Matey arrives in France Madame Vinet has already lost her youngest son
Paolo. Still, Paolo’s death had actually been one of the factors that drove Matey to
support the war in the first place (208). It isn’t until Matey must see such suffering for
herself, and realizes how commonplace it is during the war, that Matey will reassess her
fantasy of what it means to be a patriotic mother. The same blindness that had so
infuriated her at home has come back to haunt Matey. She discovers that she had been
blind herself, blind to what war means for real-life women. The process of her
reassessment begins immediately upon her arrival when she encounters Madame Vinet.
This is just months after Paolo’s death and the disappearance of her youngest daughter
Ziza behind enemy lines. Matey does not recognize the “small, thin old woman in black,
with a long black mourning-veil, who was crying and waving her handkerchief at

150
someone on the ship” (229). The grieving mother in black, whose image runs contrary to
the militarized image of the proudly sacrificing mother, shocks Matey. When she realizes
that “she was looking full into the eyes of Mme. Vinet,” Matey has her first epiphany,
that this was “her first glimpse of the war” (230).
Mimi, Madame Vinet’s oldest daughter and Matey’s childhood playmate, also
contributes to Matey’s reevaluations of the war with her appearance in the later sections
of the text. Mimi has been left with a business to run, a husband at war, and two small
boys to care for. Once the typical, leisurely bourgeois housewife, Mimi voluntarily takes
up the physical labor of the business, “soiling her white fingers with machinery” and
“trying to understand business accounts” out of her belief that “she must save what she
can out of the wreck for her children’s future” (209). Mimi is the patriotic mother who
occupies dual roles, supporting her husband’s service in the war and taking up the cause
by working in the factory – much like Rosie the Riveter would later do during America’s
participation in World War II. Mimi eventually becomes an adept business-woman, and
while she relishes her newfound competence in the business world, it is only when her
sons begin to near the age of the draft that both Mimi and Matey really begin to question
the war. Upon hearing that America might join the war effort Matey is torn between her
love for her community, and her fear of what may become of all the boys nearing the age
of the draft:
Matey was asking herself, “Will this mean war – real war – for my country? Men
and boys from Rustdorf…lying in those dreadful hospital beds, looking their last
at the world with those dreadful death-shadowed eyes?”…She stood looking at
them blankly, not seeing them, but in their places the people for whom the
shortening of the war would mean deliverance – Mimi’s older boys nearer with
every day to military service…and the women, all the women – behind the

151
playing children, row upon row, the shadowy millions of heartsick women
everywhere, waiting (275).

Matey’s previous frustration at America’s isolationist stance has now been tempered by
her new experience and understanding of war as a mother. This fearful and nuanced
approach to militarism, war and motherhood, though not “pacifist” in its nature, reveals
that the propagandized notions of patriotic motherhood are incapable of encompassing
the truly complex and emotionally turbulent reality of her position. Ultimately, this very
type of complexity breaks apart the simple binary attached to motherhood by militaristic
policy-makers like Teddy Roosevelt himself – “good” patriotic mothers who support the
war aren’t always happy to see their sons become soldiers, and “bad” mothers who don’t
want to sacrifice their sons aren’t always pacifists.
The mother who suffers the most psychological trauma in the text is Ziza,
Madame Vinet’s youngest daughter. Ziza was living in Belgium at the time of the
German invasion. Throughout the story she would lose her husband for four years, only
to discover that he has survived as a prisoner of war, but has been tragically maimed. Her
first child will suffer severe psychological trauma that will be difficult to reverse, and her
second child will die shortly after his birth. She will trek on foot with her little boy and an
adopted baby all the way from Belgium to France, on foot and across enemy lines, a total
distance of almost one hundred and sixty three miles. This takes her almost an entire
year, and when she finally makes her way home she is so changed that Matey cannot
recognize “the yellow-gray face of the woman who had Ziza’s voice” (261). Madame
Vinet expresses her fear that “she has lost her mind entirely,” much like “other refugees
from Belgium whom they had known” (264). Ziza’s recovery takes another year, during

152
which time she displays fearful and anti-social behaviors that the other women associate
with her status as a war refugee. It isn’t until later in the text that Ziza reveals the real
reason she cannot come to terms with her experience. Before the advent of the war she
had “only thought of war like longer maneuvers” and had seen it as a convenient means
of separating her husband from his mistress (279). Pregnant at the time with her second
child, she had embraced the war and her husband’s role in it, and upon losing him (not
yet knowing he still lived), and losing her baby, she felt tremendous guilt believing that
she had “brought on the war” by embracing militaristic propaganda (278). Later Ziza and
her son will achieve some measure of recovery, and she will find her now-invalid
husband alive. Though she is portrayed as overjoyed at finding him, her future is now
dependent on a job that is “ill paid” and features “long hours” so that she may support her
husband and child (346). This subplot within The Deepening Stream displays the types of
rewards that too often greeted patriotic women at the end of the war. This “patriotic
mother” had lost one child, and must now care for the other, as well as her maimed
husband. She will be unlikely to enjoy any kind of physical or financial help from the
State in managing their care This reveals that the pre-war support and dependence upon
the morale of patriotic mothers does not entail literal support in a post-war world, where
women must cope with the real-life ramifications of war making, as well as debilitating
gender bias.
While Ziza’s experience as a patriotic mother is boldly outlined throughout the
text, fears regarding the affections between mothers and sons during times of war are
perhaps most carefully addressed in Madame Vinet’s relationship with her oldest son

153
Henri. Henri is the sensitive pianist who, though never outright defined, is coded as a
homosexual. In a pre-war visit to the Vinets, Matey asks of Henri:
“I thought surely by this time I’d find Henri engaged to be married.”
Mme. Vinet’s face changed. “Henri never seems to think of marrying,” she said
carefully. “His profession absorbs him wholly. And his music.”
“She is frightened as ever at the idea of living a minute without him,” thought
Matey crossly. She remembered the intimate special look the mother and son had
had, and how it made the rest of them feel left out (144).

Earlier in the text, when Henri is a boy studying music with his mother, Matey notes that
“he was never far from his mother. They had a special way of looking at each other
unlike anything Matey had ever seen” (48). And during trips to the symphony Henri and
his mother sit side by side, “hand in hand” (51). From these passages it becomes clear
that Henri’s unusual attachment to his mother is somehow related to his homosexuality,
much as Roosevelt and later the supporters of “momism” would claim that an
overbearing or overprotective mother figure would make it “difficult to create a
generation of warrior males” (Braudy 503). Henri’s professional adulthood, in which he
becomes an “intellectual” and a pianist, also seems to suggest that typical stereotypes
regarding “sensitive” and “artistic” homosexuals are accurate.
While she fears for the safety of her sons, Madame Vinet never openly attacks the
war until it is over and appears to have specific capitalist connotations attached to it.
This approach couldn’t be called pacifist, since it isn’t the waging of war she protests, but
the use of the war to promote financial gain. Madame Vinet is clearly no pacifist in the
Roosevelt sense of the word, and though she sacrifices both of her sons to the war, to
Matey’s astonishment she “remained the strongest” of all the women (323). When Matey
asks her why she “did not falter” she responds that “it is the only way left me of being

154
worthy of Henri and Polo and their father” (323). And though Henri disagrees with the
war itself, he also serves his country well, returning to the front after injury to serve until
his death. If anything, Henri’s critique of the war is attributed to his status as an
“intellectual” and not to his supposed homosexuality or his attachment to his mother:
“Henri’s letter…had nothing in it but the disgust at the idiocy of the war and the self-
contempt at being a helpless part of it which colored all letters from French intellectuals
at the front” (246). As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have said in No Man’s Land, the
feelings of disillusionment apparent in Henri’s letters were very common among all men
during and after World War I, including intellectuals who used their literary connections
to publicize those feelings (Gilbert & Gubar 260). Henri’s anti-war sentiments are
therefore not unusual for a man of his education and social standing. Aside from Fisher’s
characterization of an unusual attachment between mother and son, Henri’s sexuality and
his love of his mother never appear to influence his wartime service, nor his mother’s
belief that the war must be fought to protect the French and free Belgium.
However, Fisher’s attempt at a more nuanced approach to Henri and Madame
Vinet’s relationship is ultimately more problematic than it is illuminating. Public
interpretations of Freud’s theories of the male oedipal complex would influence notions
of sexuality during Fisher’s time, fueling cultural fears that an inappropriate mother/son
relationship could shape a boy into a homosexual (Braudy 503). Perhaps by establishing
such a relationship, and then by purposefully separating that relationship and Henri’s
sexuality from wartime service, Fisher had hoped to refute the notion that a mother’s love
could ultimately prove disastrous for national security during times of war. However,

155
such an approach to this topic would more likely be subsumed beneath the competing
discourses regarding homosexuals in the military, and the overall cultural stigma attached
to homosexuality in general. In constructing Henri and Madame Vinet’s relationship as
“unlike anything Matey had ever seen” Fisher still appears to support the indictment
against a mother’s “unusual” love for her son, even if she only does so indirectly. That
same indictment would be used to discredit the Maternalist movement, of which Fisher
was a part, and to fuel fears of homosexuals as a threat to the safety of the State. As Leo
Braudy says, the “association between sexual deviation and political unreliability
continued to be a preoccupation” until well into the McCarthy era (412), and by
validating pseudo-scientific and militaristic attacks on a too-powerful maternal bond,
Fisher appears to place the blame for an unreliable homosexual citizen at the door of
his/her mother. It does not matter if that son died heroically in battle during the war, or if
his mother supported the war all along, so long as the mother’s love can be proven
responsible for the “creation” of a homosexual citizen whose participation in state affairs
is at worst insidious, or at best, questionable.
What Fisher does do, however, is use that mother’s love and the mother’s loss of
her son as a means of justifying female political involvement. Matey and the Vinet
women await the terms of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and the Treaty of
Versailles, each of them consumed with rage and fear that the loss of their loved ones
will be reduced to a financial agreement between the Allies and Germany:
Women for whom personal affection had been all, who never before had felt the
remotest connection with politics, now found the dignity of their deepest personal
loves helplessly dependent on politicians. Every woman Matey knew stood beside
a newly made grave. With the fierceness of women guarding their dead from

156
desecration they cried out in horror at the implication that their sons and husbands
and brothers had died to win material advantages (328).

While Fisher clearly refers to the deaths of all the men in the above citation, the
circumstances of the text focus more heavily on the mothers of sons. While the husbands
of Mimi and Ziza survive the war, Madame Vinet loses both of her sons, Ziza loses her
infant boy, and the barely mentioned Dominiqua – the longtime nanny and kitchen help
who worked for the Vinet’s for over 20 years – becomes a sympathetic character when
she loses her son Jean. Compounded by the losses that all of the French women endure,
women in this text are driven into the political arena. This movement into politics is
validated not because of their hard work and the sacrifices they made during the war, but
because they must do so to protect the “dignity” of their dead male family from the
implication that the war could be condensed into “material revenges to be had” (329).
The betrayal the women feel on behalf of their dead sons, brothers, and husbands is, in
effect, used to justify the woman’s venture into politics in their stead, not on her own
terms. This same notion – that a woman’s social and financial postwar freedoms can only
become culturally acceptable if she is accepting her role as a lower-grade male
replacement – will be repeated in the finale of the text, and reflect many of the cultural
assumptions circulating in American culture after World War I.
Dorothy Fisher’s focus on motherhood as political discourse throughout The
Deepening Stream is problematic in other ways as well. Aside from the obvious
exclusion of women who did not have children from public politics, Fisher’s final means
of facilitating a sense of postwar understanding is to analogize war with the act of giving
birth. “What was it she wanted to tell her husband? Fragments of it could perhaps be

157
forced to speech – that it takes anguish to bring new life to birth” (391). The use of
women’s experiences as a means of understanding the impact of the war was not
uncommon when Fisher was writing her novel. Dorothy Goldman writes in Women
Writers and the Great War that “women writers took the opportunity to suggest that the
traditional peacetime roles women continued to perform during the war had gained an
additional resonance” (34), and that “women’s ability to realize their understanding
through gender-specific imagery is an element in the reliance on allusiveness, on
indirection, on writing from the margins that can still be found today” (88). As a woman
writing her own war experiences in a traditionally male venue, Fisher could certainly be
seen as “writing from the margins.” However, in likening the war experience to birth,
Fisher has inadvertently erased the experiences of those women during the war who did
not have children, for whom the war is not represented by the act of giving birth, or for
whom the war experience is not so easily encapsulated. Furthermore, this approach to the
war as the birthing of a new world also occludes the experiences of men, many of whom
would find their own war experiences dehumanizing and emasculating. Just as many
male authors would contend that theirs was the only valid experience of the war, Fisher’s
birth analogy only succeeds in suggesting that hers – and that of mothers in general – is
the “true” interpretation of the war.
And what appears to be Fisher’s personal definition of “appropriate” motherhood
also complicates its deployment throughout the text. Throughout The Deepening Stream
the definition of a “good” mother becomes one of the central points in the development
of Matey’s character. Matey’s early difficulties in personal relationships are traced back

158
to the contentious relationship between her mother and her father. Matey’s mother is
superficial and shallow, concerned with appearing “young-for-her-age” to her academic
husband’s professional acquaintances (23). Matey’s father jokes about his wife’s “strong
maternal instinct” (26), and it’s clear that her mother’s constant focus on finding
“something worthwhile”(31) to entertain herself – namely a charity function, artistic
movement, or some dramatic interlude – has drawn her away from that which apparently
is “worthwhile,” the happiness of her emotionally sensitive daughters and the stability of
her family. Later in the text, when Matey discovers her first sense of an inclusive family
unit through her in-laws, she is specifically asked “did your mother make a home for
you?” to which she answers, “No, I have usually lived in boarding-houses…Mother
became very much absorbed by her Church” (103-104). While her father’s overbearing
and insensitive attitude also occupies the earlier parts of The Deepening Stream, it is the
mother’s desire for personal happiness outside of her home that seems to have formed a
lasting and negative impression in Matey’s life. She is continually overshadowed by her
mother’s apparently selfish desires to occupy herself with the outside world, revealing
that in Fisher’s definition of appropriate motherhood the happiness of the children should
take precedence over the mother’s desires for personal achievement. Conveniently,
Matey’s own children seem to find their mother’s wartime activities personally fulfilling
and unproblematic in their lives. Thus, Fisher can criticize women who don’t place
appropriate emphasis on the happiness of their children within the home without drawing
the same critique upon Matey, and by proxy, upon herself.
The legacy of bad motherhood is then carried on by Priscilla, Matey’s older sister,

159
but is paradoxically compounded by Priscilla’s too-powerful desire to be a mother.
Priscilla is so handicapped by the poor parenting skills of her parents that she does not
marry for love. Instead, she marries an older widower so that she may tend to his four
children. In this instance, because Priscilla has chosen motherhood as her only means of
establishing personal worth, she fails to grow into an emotionally stable, adult woman.
Instead she becomes the embodiment of the overly obsessive mother that had appeared as
such a threat during the war. As Priscilla ages she fails to take any notice of the world
around her, and carefully avoids the mental stress associated with confronting “what was
dark and true,” including the war and its effects (374). Her inability to grow into Fisher’s
definition of healthy womanhood appears as a handicap, first instigated by her own
mother’s poor parenting, and later compounded by Priscilla’s decision to marry,
“drudging her life away taking care of another woman’s children” (178):
Matey saw that the surface of Priscilla’s face was older, the flesh of the cheeks
that had been apple-firm a little flaccid. New lines showed at the corners of her
lips, paler than they had been. But it was still a face of girlish immaturity…
Priscilla had been lamed by life (368).

Priscilla’s entire life revolves around the care of the children, so much so that she
abandons her career as a teacher for young ladies at an exclusive boarding school. The
potential for a militarized threat in the person of the overbearing and emasculating
mother is conveniently defused by the fact that Priscilla’s adopted children are all girls.
However, once again Fisher seems to be embracing beliefs designed to disempower
motherhood, at the same time that she supports Maternalist ambitions. Motherhood
appears as a role of tremendous value for women in Fisher’s texts, one that provides
women with unique insights to the world that make women into suitable state citizens.

160
However, that suitability is directly related to how “good” a mother that woman is, how
carefully she subsumes her personal desires beneath her role as mother, and in Priscilla’s
case, is even dependent upon having one’s own children – adopting other children
appears inadequate. Molly Ladd-Taylor argues in Bad Mothers that mother-blaming has
been historically common during times of gender instability (170). She suggests that the
empowerment women have been allowed as mothers is squelched when women seem to
overstep their bounds. In this case, Fisher’s embrace of militarism, alongside her
simultaneous support of Maternalist ambitions, has resulted in conflicted notions of
motherhood. These notions play themselves out in the text through a paradoxical
definition of maternal power, to its relationship to women’s militarized disempowerment,
and to gendered behaviors throughout her text.
Such a complicated maneuver is bound to result in conflicting representations of
motherhood, particularly when definitions of appropriate femininity are already in flux.
However, in other cases Fisher’s defense of traditionally feminine roles during times of
political instability are more easily negotiated. One such example lies in Fisher’s blatant
attack upon capitalist enterprise, and its dehumanizing effect on the characters of The
Deepening Stream. In the text capitalism and militarism make obvious bedfellows, and
their alignment stands in opposition to the humanistic enterprises represented by
women’s work. Matey's brother Francis had originally protested her marriage to Adrian
because marrying someone who worked in a savings bank would be the equivalent of
marrying “a settlement worker” and a “dead loss” (133). Later, when the war has begun
and Matey is secretly making her plan to spend her inheritance in France, Francis urges

161
her to “put every penny…into steel” (216). Francis’ perception of the war as a new
capitalist venture stands in bold relief against Matey’s fears of human suffering and the
physical brutality of the war:
“Fortunes are going to be made there. This war is going to last lots longer than
most people think. The European factories can’t begin to supply their demands.
It’s a wonderful new market. Every American manufacturer who’s got anything to
sell is going to make money” (216).

Francis’ vision of the war as a “wonderful new market” is a common one that still bears
fruit in the form of today’s defense department spending. The manufacturing of military
hardware and software is big business, and in Fisher’s text Francis is quick to capitalize
on the close relationship between militarization and capitalism.
Fisher’s attack on capitalism is not unusual within the larger tradition of women’s
literature. Annegret Ogden writes in The Great American Housewife that the post-
industrialist division of labor between husband and wife “soon grew into a maze of
contradictions and subterfuges” born from the realization that “the roots of our modern
problems sprouted in the fetid soil of crowded cities, industrial blight, and capitalist
corruption” (67). In the estimation of many women capitalist corruption would stand in
direct opposition to wholesome women’s work, and would be reflected in the absence of
value attributed to woman’s contribution in the home. As Marilyn Porter writes the “lack
of social recognition is an important aspect of women’s work. At its simplest the
argument runs: housework is not paid, therefore it has no value” (115). However, by
devaluing that definition of “value,” or in other words, by reinterpreting the notion of
value outside of capitalist enterprise, women like Fisher could reinvest women’s

162
contributions with another type of capital. In this way woman’s work in Fisher’s text
comes to represent everything moral and emotional that capitalism is not, a move of
particular importance when such work must also contend with traditionally anti-woman
notions of militarism, gender instability, and questions of citizenry and statehood.
Woman’s work – in the guise of Matey’s patriotism, sacrifice, and war work - provides
succor to those in need. It constitutes an emotional and physical bond between family and
friends and instills a sense of moral value in the home struggling with the dehumanizing
machinery of the war, and the dangers of self-aggrandizing capitalistic ideals.
This notion that woman’s work is morally superior to the apparently base nature
of a traditionally public and patriarchal capitalism is a direct descendent of the Victorian
ideology of the “Angel in the House,” reflecting the long-standing ties in women’s
writing to a sentimental tradition that grew out of the nineteenth century As Ann Douglas
writes in The Feminization of American Culture:
The sentimentalization of theological and secular culture was an inevitable part of
the self-evasion of a society both committed to laissez-faire industrial expansion
and disturbed by its consequences…sentimentalism…heralded the cultural sprawl
that has increasingly characterized post-Victorian life (12-13).

The evolution of the sentimental tradition into the domestic literary tradition of the early
twentieth century would mean that a sense of social duty, moral superiority, and
adherence to domestic ideals would remain entrenched in much of the work written by
women like Dorothy Fisher. However in Fisher’s case the unusual literary negotiation of
the cultural triad of militarism, capitalism, and woman’s work complicates this tradition.
Each are at times imagined as contradictory to one another, and yet also constructed as
useful to one another when viewed through the lens of feminine moral superiority. While

163
Francis sees the war as a “new market,” aligning militarism and capitalism, Matey and
the other women in the text are revolted and infuriated by the notion that “men had been
beaten and broken and made ignominious so that…fortune[s] might be trebled” (342).
When patriotism and a sense of military duty drive Matey’s husband to volunteer as an
ambulance driver at the front, she asserts that supporting the “destitute refugees” in
France is also “woman’s work” (213). And though Joyce Warren asserts that “the
construction of women as financially dependent ensured the maintenance of “patriarchal
capitalism” (152), it is with Matey’s inheritance that the family embarks on their trip to
the front.
In fact, capitalism isn’t necessarily patriarchal at all in The Deepening Stream.
Throughout the text women are also to blame when capitalistic enterprise obscures
humanistic enterprises, particularly in the case of Mrs. Whitlock, a figure from Matey’s
childhood who also makes an appearance at the front. When Matey is struggling to find
food, shelter, and clothing for war orphans and sick children at the front she finds that the
emotionally bankrupt nature of capitalism is proportional to the bureaucratic
empowerment of the wealthy. When the home she manages to arrange threatens to close,
right in the middle of a cold winter when resources such as food and coal are very
limited, the plight of the children becomes nothing more than “business” to the relief
agency:
“You promised those mothers!”
Dr. Taylor reminded her, “No American war relief workers ever enter into
contracts, Madam.”
Matey cried out wrathfully, “Oh, I don’t mean legally!”
…Dr. Taylor rose. “there is no use going on discussing it in this unbusiness-like
manner…have you any idea of the complexity of the business end of an

164
organization like ours?” (304-305).

However, when Matey encounters Mrs. Whitlock in France, who is using her extensive
personal wealth to tour the front and make contributions wherever she finds it to be
publicly advantageous, Mrs. Whitlock becomes Matey’s entrée into the world of
capitalism and success: “I’m on my way to a very important tea, with an Ambassador.
Never mind about details…Just tell me what it is you want…I can fix that for you in ten
minutes” (307-308). Mrs. Whitlock’s wealth, and her complete lack of concern for the
care of the orphans, reveals an important set of beliefs regarding economic success that
occupy the text. The fruits of capitalism aren’t necessarily to blame for the
dehumanization witnessed in Francis or Mrs. Whitlock. In Fisher’s text the real danger
lies not in economic success, but in the ontological materialism that too many people
embrace in order to utilize that wealth for their own selfish reasons.
What Dorothy Fisher achieves in The Deepening Stream is not strictly a criticism
of capitalism, but a criticism of the materialistic ideology with which too many people
approach capitalism. In essence, it isn’t money that is so much to blame for the lack of
emotional investment we see in Francis and Mrs. Whitlock, but their inability to embrace
the socialist potential for wealth outside of materialist self-empowerment. Fisher
continues to separate notions of gender from capitalistic success even as she continues to
validate traditional notions of “women’s work.” This could be based on the simple fact
that Fisher herself was a woman of means, who had come from an educated and upper-
middle class family, and who would later go on to accumulate impressive personal
wealth. However, when the different definitions of “women’s work” in the text are

165
evaluated based on their role within a shifting cultural paradigm of gender and economic
potential, it also seems clear that separating gender from capitalism accomplishes
important cultural work for women of the era. Fisher’s generation would see many of the
restrictions preventing women from enjoying the fruits of capitalism waver, particularly
when women’s war work would be taken into account. In 1920 women would finally win
the vote, and though many of the wartime jobs would disappear once soldiers returned
home, the economic potential for women would be forever changed (Warren 152). In
Fisher’s text capitalism is removed from patriarchy in order to facilitate its access by
women, but only so long as those women never fail to grasp the humanistic, moral value
that wealth requires. This is exemplified in Matey’s use of her inheritance to care for
refugees and orphans, and in Fisher’s own use of her wealth to advance social causes that
benefitted women and children at home and abroad.
This analysis of capitalism and its relationship in a postwar environment to
notions of morality provide a useful means of interpreting the final pages of The
Deepening Stream, in which Matey eventually decides to take a job at the bank with her
husband. While on the surface this sounds beneficial in terms of progressive gender
relations in postwar America, Matey’s decision is bracketed in language designed to
offset what could represent a potentially threatening proto-feminist finale. It is heavily
infused with traditional notions of gender that appear as palliative for the threateningly
subversive nature of the working wife. When Adrian’s father declares his intentions to
retire from the savings bank, he suggests that Adrian take up his role as manager, and that
Matey could work as the bank teller. Unfortunately, this opportunity isn’t offered to her

166
based on her suitability for the job, or even based on her own extensive education
acquired before meeting her husband. “Adrian would need some one who could learn to
be bookkeeper and teller. Why not Matey? The hours were not long. The work was
nothing more than any intelligent grown person could learn. The children would be in
school most of the day...” (381). Matey’s ability to do work that any “intelligent” person
could do seems to contradict her achievements throughout the book, in which she earned
a college degree, supported herself, invested her inheritance wisely, and then went on to
manage the economic and physical burdens of caring for war refugees at the front.
However, in a paradoxical turn, here at the finale of the text Matey suddenly “balked
stupidly ” at this new venture (381). When Matey later confides in her father-in-law that
she doesn’t know how to deal with Adrian’s post-war sense of malaise, he speaks to her
“like a grown person mocking a child’s ignorance” (389), and she herself embraces this
infantilization, agreeing that “I have no head for abstract ideas. I’m good for nothing but
to plod along, one step after another, following the windings of the path wherever it
leads” (390). Though the fact still remains that Matey is stepping into the role of working
woman after the war, doing so requires that she appear childish and unthreatening, and
includes a seeming disavowal of all the she has accomplished throughout the book.
Finally, when Matey justifies her acceptance of the position, she does so because in her
estimation, her “job in life” is now “to keep Adrian from making of work and
cheerfulness a dreary substitute for joy” (392). In essence, she will take the position at the
bank because it will afford her a greater opportunity to watch over her husband, and care
for him in the aftermath of his wartime experiences.

167
Dorothy Goldman argues in Women Writers and the Great War that the lack of
fulfillment in the end of similar postwar women’s novels constitute a “familiar
compromise” that defines the experience of the text as “an adventure not so much
resolved as shut down” (57). Furthermore, she suggests that the failure to “engage
openly” with the issues at hand mean that “its significance is also limited” (57). However,
I suggest that there is more to the finale of The Deepening Stream than the frustrated
potential for feminist discourse. Fisher’s attempt to construct a postwar environment in
her text that is conducive to positive sex/gender relations must operate within the
confines of her particular genre, a genre that is typified by the careful adherence to what
John Cawelti refers to as “the expected experience” for the reader (9). As Cawelti notes
in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, both the “pleasure” and the “experience” of
reading formulaic stories like domestic novels depends upon their “intensification of a
familiar experience, the formula creates its own world with which we become familiar by
repetition” (10). Later he goes on to say that one of the most important functions of such
literary formulas is to “assist the process of assimilating changes in values to traditional
imaginative constructs…literary formulas ease the transition between old and new ways
of expressing things and thus contribute to cultural continuity” (36). While more overtly
transgressive women’s texts of the era - including works by women like Gertrude Stein,
Djuna Barnes, and H.D. – relied upon the notoriously un-formulaic traditions of early
modernism, women like Dorothy Fisher worked within the paradigms of a vastly more
restrictive, and yet more popular mode of literary expression in order to “ease the
transition” from old to new. In this way, Matey’s “familiar compromise” in the final

168
pages of the book can be read less as a betrayal of her personal achievements, and more
as a means of facilitating her entrance into the public sphere in a postwar environment
that had become openly hostile to the notion of women maintaining the social and
economic freedoms they had enjoyed during the war years.
When viewed through this alternate lens, Fisher’s text also manages to redefine
the notion of “woman’s work” at the same time that she continues to validate all forms of
female labor. It’s true that Fisher’s justification of Matey’s decision to work outside the
home is couched in language that seemingly agrees with Marilyn Porter’s traditional
definition of women’s work: “the task is essentially to maintain, service and take care of
the home, husband and children: in short to ensure the reproduction of labor power at
day-to-day and generational levels” (112). After the Industrial Revolution this was
accomplished through the strict bifurcation of cultural spheres. But when Matey’s
different forms of labor are broken down and analyzed throughout the text, it becomes
clear that through her personal evolution in the text women’s work not only moves
outside of the home, but in Fisher’s estimation, has a moral duty to do so. When Matey
marries, her roles as wife and mother consume her with the busy day-to-day duties, the
“reproduction of labor power” within the home that Porter sees as mutually exclusive to
culturally validated men’s work. But with the outbreak of the war Matey’s work evolves
to embrace her war efforts and she declares to her husband that supporting war orphans,
displaced refugees, and undernourished soldiers is now also “woman’s work” (213). In
both cases her decision relies on a manipulation of traditional notions regarding gender
and labor – most essentially that caring for others is women’s work, and will continue to

169
be the case regardless of the venue in which it takes place.
Therefore, when Matey decides to enter the workforce in a postwar environment,
Fisher’s decision to justify this move is still validated in the language of traditional
women’s roles, even as that role is relocated outside the home. As Janet Sharistinian says
in Beyond the Public/Domestic Dichotomy, in contemporary capitalist economies the
cultural fantasy of the public/private divide is just that: a fantasy designed to obscure the
rapidly evolving roles of men and women in response to capitalist enterprise. “Since the
late nineteenth century the meanings of public and private have become thoroughly
confused” and she goes on to assert that since that time it makes more sense to see
women like Matey “as people with two jobs rather than identifying them with the
domestic sphere” (5). Fisher further justifies Matey’s decision to step into a new
workplace as a morally appropriate decision to help people “hold on to their money” in a
competitive, capitalistic market intent on robbing the poor of their hard earned wages in
order to facilitate the easy earnings of the wealthy (381). Helping others to protect their
earnings against predatory lenders is further justified in that “in the modern world of
capital, money – whether you liked to have it so or not – stood for independence –
freedom – personal dignity” (381). And while this passage is written as part of the
defense of banking in general, it is easy to reapply those same justifications to the
benefits enjoyed by working women. Whether it was culturally accepted or not, it is
certainly true that in the estimation of many women earning their own income supplied
them with the “independence,” the “freedom,” and the “personal dignity” that was so
easily denied to them in the home.

170
Finally, when Matey agrees to take the job, her husband’s response is to feel a
tremendous sense of relief. He has grown dependent on Matey, who has been helping him
cope with the depression and the symptoms of shell shock that have plagued him since
the end of the war:
“Oh Adrian, I thought I’d run in to tell you that after you left I got to thinking
about your father’s idea, and of course I want to take that job. It’ll be the best
thing in the world for me. As soon as ever I get the children settled in school I’m
coming to start work.”
At the deepening of his eyes, at his long breath – she had not dreamed he wanted
her so! – “it takes so long for me to get anything through my head” (393).

While it could be construed as unrealistic that Matey’s husband would be so pleased to
have her enter the workplace, particularly in light of the postwar backlash against
working women, it is notable that Fisher posits a postwar world in which men and
women could come to terms with the Great War, so long as they worked together as
equal partners. Matey comes to the conclusion that if they “share life wholly” and “work
together” she can help him cope with the aftereffects of their war experience (392).
Fisher’s own war text then stands apart from traditional war novels once again. The
more critically received texts of this era could not fathom a postwar environment that
wasn’t bitterly and irrevocably changed by the war’s impact on modern society (Gilbert
& Gubar 268). In contrast Fisher posits one in which men and women alike could
overcome their sense of betrayal and cultural disenchantment, so long as they do so by
working together. While Matey’s decision to go to work is justified in her need to care
for her husband, the idealistic setting in which this decision is made, one where “men’s
work” is as equally valued as a newly opened paradigm of “women’s work,” revealing
that Fisher’s text is indeed able to ease the cultural transition from “old to new” (Cawelti

171
31). Ironically, though modernist writers struggled to separate themselves from formulaic
texts such as domestic novels, and while Fisher herself referred to modernism as “the
worst kind of self-indulgent snobbery,” in either case the desire to enact cultural and
literary change – to “make it new” – is as clearly reflected in Fisher’s work as it is in
those whose texts have been validated as modern critical masterpieces in postwar
America (Harker 31).
At the advent of World War II, Dorothy Fisher’s son James, who had lived with
her at the French front during the worst world war, became a surgeon and captain in the
U.S. Army. He served with the famed Alamo Scouts for three months at the end of 1944,
and died liberating American POWs imprisoned in the Philippines. It’s tempting to ask
whether or not her ultimate assumption of the role of the military mother, and her loss of
her son, ever tempted Dorothy Fisher to reconsider her previous embrace of militarism on
behalf of women. Did she find herself stoically and privately enduring this tremendous
sacrifice in the name of her country? Or, did she instead opt to follow in the footsteps of
Madame Vinet, and publicly mourn her son in the manner least appreciated by military
policymakers? If her deft handling of women, politics, gender roles, and war in The
Deepening Stream serves as a blueprint for her personal feelings, it’s likely that Fisher’s
response would be nuanced, complicated, and painfully honest. Fisher’s work in this text
is rife with paradox, in which conflicting notions of femininity, patriotism, and political
empowerment are dealt with in a manner that belies the criticisms often leveled against
domestic novels – that they are simplistic fantasies. Using popular conceptions of
authentic war stories to carve out a space for her own, Fisher lived and wrote about what

172
it meant to be a patriot, to offer her labor for the war, and to make tremendous sacrifices
of a personal and financial nature in the name of a conflict that was, in her opinion,
morally justified. Yet at the same time, her beliefs regarding women as subjects of the
State led her to campaign for the Maternalists, to publicly support women’s active
participation in politics, and to work towards the economic and social empowerment of
all women in the United States whether they chose to stay in the home or venture into the
workplace. She also wrote about the war, particularly in The Deepening Stream, in
manner that refused to cede to the notion that the “true” war experience belonged to men
and men only, and published her own war novel at a time when “true” war texts were
thought to be the literary domain of male writers who had served as soldiers at the front.
The Deepening Stream is both a domestic novel and a war novel, it is a woman’s text that
makes a place for itself in a man’s world, and it is, though clearly a militarized text in the
purest sense of the word, at the same time a novel whose reflection of a specifically
female American experience – before, during, and after the Great War –is past its due in
terms of an analysis of women’s roles in literature and in American culture itself during
the war years.

173
Chapter Three Bibliography

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual
Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Bergmann, Barbara R. The Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.

Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great
War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of
Masculinity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Canfield-Fisher, Dorothy. The Deepening Stream. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1930.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular
Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution
And Female Aspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Cooke, Miriam. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996.

Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977.

Ehrhardt, Julia C. Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy
Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder-Lane, and Josephine Herbst. Columbia,
University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press,
1975.

174
Gilbert, Sandra & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the 20
th
Century, Vol 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Goldman, Dorothy, Jane Gledhill, and Judith Hattaway. Women Writers and the Great
War. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Hanley, Lynne. Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Harker, Jaime. America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and
Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: the University of
Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Haytock, Jennifer. At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American
Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century
America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Kilcup, Karen L. “Introduction: A Conversation on Nineteenth-Century American
Women’s Writing.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A
Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. 1-15.

Kleinberg, S.J. Women in the United States, 1830-1945. New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1999.

Ladd-Taylor, Molly and Lauri Umansky. “Introduction.” “Bad” Mothers: The Politics
Of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri
Umansky. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 1-31.

---. Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1994.

Longmire, Linda and Lisa Merrill. “Introduction.” Untying the Tongue: Gender, Power
And the Word. Ed. Linda Longmire and Lisa Merrill. Connecticut: Hofstra
University, 1998. 1-6.

Ogden, Annegret S. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner,
1776-1986. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986.

175

Phillips, Kathy J. Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and
American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Porter, Marilyn. Home, Work and Class Consciousness. Oxford: Manchester University
Press, 1983.

Potter, Jane. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great
War 1914-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

Sharistanian, Janet. “Introduction: Women’s Lives in the Public and Domestic Spheres.”
Beyond the Public/Domestic Dichotomy: Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s
Public Lives. Ed. Janet Sharistanian. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 1-11.

Showlater, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte
To Lessing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-
1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Warren, Joyce. “Fracturing Gender: Woman’s Economic Independence.” Nineteenth-
Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup.
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. 146-164.

Washington, Ida H. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Vermont: The New England
Press, 1982.

176

Chapter Four

Sissy Boys and Servicemen: Evaluating Mothers, Masculinity, and Militarism in Willa
Cather's One of Ours.

In the context of war literature written by authors like Ernest Hemingway, Alfred
Hayes and Dorothy Fisher, it may seem a departure to examine Willa Cather’s One of
Ours (1922). Each of these authors charted their first-person experiences of war through
their work, while Cather had no war experience to speak of. In fact she did not see
firsthand what had become of Europe until 1920, well after World War I was over. She
primarily experienced the war through newspaper accounts and memoirs. In fact, she
only learned of the death of her cousin G.P. Cather when it was listed in the obituary
section reserved for war deaths (Harris 614). While Hemingway, Hayes and Fisher each
offer prominent women as main characters in their war texts, One of Ours is the story of
Claude, a Nebraskan farm boy who finds his moment of true glory shortly before his
death as a soldier fighting for France in World War I. And while Hemingway, Hayes and

177
Fisher constructed their works with the war in mind, including its social and political
impact on American culture, Cather clearly stated that One of Ours was never intended to
be a “war novel.” Rather it was an examination of how World War I impacted a young
man who found Nebraskan farm life spiritually and emotionally oppressive.
But a closer look at this text reveals a new means of examining One of Ours in the
context of militarism and modern American literature. Despite her disclaimer, One of
Ours has continually been referred to as Willa Cather’s war novel. It is a text deeply
invested in the ramifications of global conflict, its relationship to American literature, and
the different ways that militarism influenced American notions of gender and power in
the early twentieth century. The overwhelmingly negative response to One of Ours from
the critical establishment was deeply troubling to Cather, who admitted later that this
work lacked “aesthetic distance” due to her familial relationship with G.P. Cather, upon
whom the text is loosely based. Her deeply personal investment in this text was also
facilitated by her reading of soldiers' memoirs, many of whom were friends or the
deceased family members of friends, in an effort to understand how the war was
experienced by American servicemen (Harris 624). However, this very writing process,
based on absorbing men's personal memories of the war itself, offers readers of One of
Ours the opportunity to study their subjective perceptions of World War I.
Klaus Thewelweit famously addresses similar subjective perceptions of German
Friekorps, a paramilitary group formed during World War I that later gained political
power in postwar Germany. In his text Male Fantasies, he finds that the diaries of these
lifelong military men reveal a powerful combination of misogynistic fears, sexual

178
fantasies, and violence situated alongside the daily brutality of World War I. Unlike
Thewelweit, Cather's work was fictionalized. However she admitted that the last third of
the book – in which Claude leaves home to fight in France – was heavily influenced by
the memoirs of servicemen who had served during the war (Harris 625). In writing One
of Ours as the fictionalization of soldiers' memoirs, Cather's work loses the aesthetic
distance she found necessary to write her better received works, but in its place she gives
American readers uncommon insights that, like Thewelweit's Freikorps, reveal the social
and psychological toll that war and unstable gender identities had upon a generation of
young soldiers. The assertion that personal memoirs would reflect not reality itself but the
fantasies of the men writing them are substantiated by the works of Thewelweit, who
found that in the minds of the Friekorpsmen “We ourselves are the war. Its flame burns
strongly in us. It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with the enticing urge to
destroy” (X). The conflation of war and self alongside an urge to commit violent acts
revealed in this entry reflect what Thewelweit will analyze as a socially constructed sense
of memory and being – the soldier is war - with the violent experiences of the war itself
working as a framework for the collective experiences of German soldiers.
This phenomenon is also addressed by Maurice Halbwachs in The Collective
Memory. As Paul Ricoeur suggests in his analysis of Halbwachs' work, “to remember, we
need others” (8), as well as a communal experience because “a person remembers only
by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several groups and one or several
currents of collective thought” (15). World War I, and the experience of remembering it
through memoir, reveals not a clear representation of the experience itself, which Ricoeur

179
calls “inconceivable,” but a personal interpretation of the experience within a socially
constructed group from which a sense of individuality has been derived. These memoirs,
both those that were read and analyzed by Thewelweit as well as those read by Cather to
write her novel, are not so much about the war itself as they are about the psychological
toll of war upon the men who remembered it, and the social atmosphere that shaped their
perceptions. Compounding this sense of distance from the reality of the war itself, and its
personal importance to Cather, was her personal attachment to Claude as a character
generated by the celebrated death of her cousin G.P. Cather. Claude's pre-war
experiences were modeled after G.P.'s feelings about his life in a small town, including
his failed marriage and his sense of personal unhappiness. This unhappiness was
alleviated upon G.P.'s enlistment with the army, which was followed by his death shortly
after (Harris 614).
This distance from the perceived reality of the war experience contributed to the
negative critical reception received by One of Ours upon its release. The majority of the
critics – almost all of them male and all situated within a male-dominated canon - were
unusually vitriolic in their attacks upon One of Ours. Not surprisingly, those attacks were
usually laced with gender specific criticisms. H.L. Mencken, previously a sympathetic
critic, referred to One of Ours as a novel that “drops precipitately to the level of a serial
in the Ladies Home Journal.” He compares her work negatively to John Dos Passos’
“bold [and more masculine] realism” in Three Soldiers, and he finishes with the most
disparaging remark of them all - that Cather’s “half pathetic” attempt at a war novel “is
precious near the war of the standard model of lady novelist” (Willa Cather and her

180
Critics 10, 12). Sinclair Lewis argued that because of Cather’s talent, a lower-grade work
like One of Ours must be judged “not by the tenderly paternal standards which one grants
to clever children” but more aggressively, perhaps like that of an adult (Willa Cather 31).
And in what Richard Harris calls a “gratuitously nasty comment” to Edmund Wilson,
Ernest Hemingway famously writes:
…Look at One of Ours. Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the
war weren’t you? Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know
where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode
after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience
somewhere (Reynolds 4).

As Guy Reynolds argues, Hemingway’s use of the word “Catherized” is an
“uncomfortable surgical pun” that implies “a bodily unease with this invasion” by a
woman into the territories of the war novel (4). Time and again it appears that the
unusually poor critical reception of One of Ours had less to do with the quality of the
book itself, and more to do with the author’s gender and choice of subject matter. In
writing a war novel that was very well received by the public, Cather had successfully
broken across enemy lines in the battle of the literary sexes, and she was roundly
punished for it. Ultimately, this punishment also reflects the intensely gendered nature of
war itself, and militarism’s reliance upon traditional notions of gender. Both of these
features were easily transferred to the male-dominated fields of war literature and literary
criticism.
While Cather's novel was attacked for its “unrealistic” portrayal of the war and
the soldiers fighting it, I contend that the sense of distaste – and in Hemingway’s case
discomfort – suffered by male critics reveals a very different concern that literary men of

181
the era faced when reading One of Ours. The terrible dehumanization suffered by the
men who fought during World War I and the simultaneous development of what today is
known as modernist literature has led to a historical association between the two. It is
commonly asserted that after the war film and literature changed to reflect a new and
more masculine aesthetic of anti-romanticism, and the abandonment of Victorian modes
of literary expression. Andreas Huyssen refers to this as a “male mystique” that
predicated its literary supremacy upon a “conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of
contamination by its other,” namely, the New Woman and the growing social
empowerment that such women seemed to enjoy before, during, and after the war (ix).
For the excessively masculinist modernists, the lowly and dangerously consuming nature
of mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains
the “prerogative of men” (47). Women's literature, women's growing political power, and
women's changing social prerogatives coalesce, creating a “fear of the masses,” which is
also “a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of
sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass” (52). Huyssen's
analysis of post-war modernist fears are remarkably similar to those that Thewelweit
finds in the memoirs of soldiers fighting during the war, namely that all things feminine
had become grotesque, emasculating, consuming, and affiliated with the “bloody mass”
that is the monstrous female body (xii). For Thewelweit's soldiers, to wage war is to
repudiate femininity, to escape the feminized mass of political revolution threatening to
devour male soldiers, and to embrace the whole, impenetrable, supremely masculine male
body. In this commonality between pre-war soldier's memoirs and post-war modernist

182
fears lies proof of Huyssen's claims regarding the true genesis of modernism, and what
Cather's text ultimately elucidates, that “the modern aesthetic itself...begins to look more
and more like a reaction formation rather than like the heroic feat steeled in the fires of
the modern experience” (53). What Cather's text makes obvious is that perhaps the war's
greatest failing was not its destruction of idealistic young men, but its inability to protect
men from their real fear – the female “mass.”
One of Ours is the story of Claude Wheeler, a young Nebraskan man who finds
life on the farm oppressive. The first two-thirds of the book chronicle his poor
relationship with is father and brothers, who are cruel and infantilizing in their treatment
of him. He is his mother's favorite, and as a result spends the majority of his time with
her doing household duties. This closeness to his mother, and his location within the
traditionally “feminine” spaces of the kitchen, gardens, and his mother's study, enhance
his feelings of inadequate masculinity and his inability to foster healthy relationships with
others. He desires a modern education, but his parents refuse to send him anywhere other
than the local theological institution, which he finds backwards and unrewarding. In an
effort to alleviate his unhappiness he marries Enid, the daughter of a neighbor. Their
marriage is poorly made, and Enid's status as a New Woman has a negative impact on
their relationship. She is too busy with her social and political activities to be the
traditional wife Claude had dreamed of. Eventually Enid abandons Claude altogether
when she receives word that her sister has taken ill on a missionary trip in China. She
leaves to tend her sister and continue that work, humiliating Claude. Claude's
embarrassment and resulting depression only begin to lift with the advent of World War

183
I, which he and his mother follow closely. Claude decides to enlist, and is sent to France
to fight. During this last third of the novel Claude's experiences traveling abroad, fighting
in France, and witnessing war firsthand are situated as directly related to his new sense of
belonging and masculinity. He dies heroically defending his men in the trenches. The
final pages of the book return to Mrs. Wheeler's kitchen, where she struggles to come to
terms with the death of her favorite son.
Contrary to its deceptively traditional storyline, One of Ours is a war story that
defies many of the popularly held conventions of war, particularly in Cather's refusal to
construct a war experience that excludes women. Thewelweit's soldiers are explicit
regarding their distaste for women at war, while Leo Braudy notes that historically much
of the fanfare surrounding America's foray into any armed conflict included the language
of chivalry, of heroics, and other traditional markers of masculinity (464). However, as
modern feminist theorists have recently proven, there is no such thing as a war without
women. The ramifications of war impact all citizens, and leave the women and children
on the home front as vulnerable to violence and suffering as the men on the battlefield.
Women also participate as members of the community who support and enact war. In
either case, the experiences of such women have historically been denigrated, and
outright denied. Cather's work, however, refuses to re-enact this tradition within her text.
In fact, the difficulties of Claude's life appear to stem from the fact that he can't escape
women – at home or abroad. His life is lived in women's spaces, his war is fought for
romantic notions of women's salvation, and only in his death does he finally escape their
influence.

184
Claude is emasculated by his love of female spaces in the early part of the
text, and he is only truly accepted by the other men in the novel when the war offers him
an environment in which he can foster appropriate – or at least culturally accepted - male
relationships. Janis Stout sees in these “delusions” of masculinity a subtle indictment of
male warmongering that is further illuminated by the roles that women play in the text
and during the war (180). She goes on to say that “Cather emphasized in her writing
about the war the great range of women’s roles. That women both suffer from and are
active in modern total warfare” (172). This range of women's experiences will present for
Claude a maze of gender and power that he must navigate in order to establish himself as
a “real” man. His journey is complicated by an ever-shifting social landscape in an
America struggling to cope with the growing social and political power of women, and
complicated by the first global war in modern history. And while One of Ours was
originally contested as a “war novel,” it is one of the few that features an array of iconic
wartime female figures, some of them written with an eye towards revealing the difficult
realities for women in the era, while others reveal the fantasies of women and war that
permeate American culture. Throughout the text there are references to everything from
early female warrior figures to camp followers, from rape victims to patriotic mothers, all
of whom play their part in Claude’s quest towards a sense of valid masculinity, and
ultimately, towards a new American sense of heroic global imperialism.
In my previous chapter I examined how Dorothy Fisher moved the war front into
the home, and the home front to the battlefield, by illuminating the varied and difficult
experiences of women who lived through World War I. Similarly, One of Ours offers

185
critical readers the opportunity to approach Cather’s text with what Jennifer Haytock
calls “an eye for the nuances of women’s culture and women’s space” in a war novel (xi).
Haytock sees One of Ours as another text in which a woman writer relies upon domestic
language in order to facilitate an understanding of the war itself (xviii). And Stephanie
Thompson argues that while Cather is usually considered an early modernist writer, the
“domestic ideals” of her work also situate her alongside women like Fisher whose novels
were classified as “middlebrow” women’s literature (9). Certainly One of Ours features
many instances in which the war invades the private spaces associated with women,
beginning with the war’s inception during the last third of the book and Mrs. Wheeler's
participation in political discourse. The women's integration of war in the novel – war
constituting a very public sphere of power and influence- with their private spaces serves
to establish a wartime community of American women in One of Ours who are engaged
in their country’s politics, regardless of their own inability to participate through the right
to vote.
When news of the war reaches Nebraska, Claude’s mother purchases a map of
Europe and hangs it in her personal sitting room:
Claude followed her to the sitting-room, where her new map hung on the wall
above the carpet lounge. Leaning against the back of a willow rocking-chair, she
began to move her hand about over the brightly coloured, shiny surface,
murmuring, “Yes, there is Bordeaux, so far to the south; and there is Paris” (168).

Through this neatly handled metaphor the war invades Mrs. Wheeler’s sitting room, and
in so doing makes her – a Midwestern housewife – an unexpected critic of global politics.
As she learns more and more about the war going on a continent away, the quiet and

186
long-suffering Mrs. Wheeler forgets about many of her household chores “as if they had
never been” and begins to busy her mind, which is “never tired” with the political history
and current events happening in Europe (169). In establishing her as a woman with
political interests Cather portrays the average farmstead housewife as one whose interest
in state affairs is in no way hampered by her inability to vote or participate in politics.
The nuances of Mrs. Wheeler's personality, including her fascination with global politics,
the abandonment of a career in order to marry, and her unhappy role as the traditional
housewife, represent a more complicated and interesting portrayal of women during the
war than that proposed by military propagandists and social theorists. At the time such
theorists maintained that women were natural pacifists with little understanding of global
politics. Cather projects her contrary viewpoint outward from the Wheeler home by
stating that as the war broke out, “on many prairie homesteads, the women, American
and foreign-born, were hunting for a map” (161), establishing that all women in America
have a stake in this military conflict, even when they aren't recognized as citizens of the
state in the same way as men. Unfortunately, the only woman publicly espousing political
rights for women is the unpleasant Enid. Later, as Claude's fears regarding his own
inadequate masculinity lead him towards a deep depression, Enid's cruelty will reveal that
in the minds of many traditionalists the New Woman is their most dangerous opponent.
Mrs. Wheeler’s humanitarian interest in the war is contradicted by her husband’s
superficial vision of it as a means to further his economic interests. This, in turn, validates
her reading of the war as the more thoughtful and “feminine” approach. While Mrs.
Wheeler is reading the papers, poring over maps, and reading the military history of

187
France, Nat Wheeler evaluates the war in terms of his own financial benefit, seeing the
outbreak of the conflict as representing “seventy cents a bushel…anyway” (161). Nat
Wheeler’s disinterest in the human lives risked in the conflict continues when England
declares war, suggesting to Claude “‘I guess you needn’t get up early tomorrow. If this is
to be a sure enough war, wheat will go higher’” (166). When Claude joins the war effort
and is shipped overseas Mr. Wheeler’s associations between war and economic profit
end, but significantly, so does his participation in the storyline of the book. It is Mrs.
Wheeler’s difficulty in parting with her son that is poignantly presented to the reader, and
Mrs. Wheeler’s suffering at his loss that fills the final pages of the book, once again
establishing the humanitarian and “feminine” interest that women have in the war. As
Deborah Williams notes, there are no men at all in those final pages, just the women in
the kitchen, mourning the real and very tragic loss of a favorite son (146). Claude has
become a “kitchen God” whose occupation of this feminized space bridges the gap
between wartime participation, supposedly a male-only domain, and women’s
experiences of the same conflict and loss (146). And while Mrs. Wheeler's loss would be
publicly represented by the gold star hung in her window, the careful representation of
her personal tragedy undermines the state decree that women not wear black to mourn the
death of their loves ones. The mourning of the women in their kitchen reveals a powerful
and painful connection between the war itself and women’s domestic spaces, even when
that connection is propagandized, glossed over, or outright denied by military policy-
makers and society at large.
Mrs. Wheeler's participation in wartime dialogue, alongside the portrayal of her

188
personal tragedy and her concerns for the lives at stake during the war, paradoxically uses
women’s humanitarian nature to establish their viability as supporters of the conflict, a
sentiment reinforced by the house servant Mahailey:
[Mahailey] asked him to tell her what was to become of this family, photographed
among the ruins of their home…of this old woman, who sat by the roadside with
her bundles. ‘Where’s she goin’ to anyways? See, Mr. Claude, she’s got her iron
cook-pot, pore old thing, carryin’ it all the way!’ (232-233).

This passage reveals how One of Ours situates women’s ability to empathize with others,
and specifically to recognize the pain and suffering of other women and children at the
front, as justification for their participation in the state. This participation had been hotly
contested by suffragettes to extend the vote to women. Women's theoretical ability to
empathize with others had been popularly espoused during the Victorian era to form the
basis of their supposed moral superiority and establishment as the “Angel in the House.”
In this text women like Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey are morally superior to men like Nat
Wheeler, and therefore their opinions of war should be integral to their country's political
process. This communal validation of women’s militarism can also be linked directly to
the use of moralistic language as it was applied to World War I propaganda. This war
was framed in terms of “good” and “evil,” (Braudy 375) and inadvertently created an
ideological space in which women’s perceived knowledge of morality could be structured
towards a denouncement of their similarly perceived lack of political understanding. In a
country that validated patriotism as the height of social and political empowerment,
Cather’s use of this language can be construed as a canny manipulation of social
discourse to establish female political viability. Since this viability appears to exist
without class bias Susan Rosowski sees Cather’s work as a returning of language,

189
creativity, and knowledge “to a woman’s principles of storytelling as cooperative and
communal” (12). Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey’s interest in the other women also
establishes them within that larger community of women whose burdens of caring for the
home and family were necessarily disrupted and imperiled by the advent of the war, both
at home, and eventually abroad.
Later, when the plot line of One of Ours moves overseas into occupied territories,
Cather constructs a different integration of war and women’s spaces, one that is less
politically motivated and clearly representative of Claude's new embrace of stereotypical
constructions of gender during times of war. By this point in the text Cather was relying
heavily upon soldier's memoirs to reconstruct an authentic experience of the conflict. In
these cases women’s homes and gardens are not a mix of the private sphere of the home
with the public sphere of political discourse, but become spaces of tranquility and beauty,
emblematic of civilization in an environment of violence and devastation fostered by
men. While American women's support of the war and their suffering European sisters is
established through their humanitarianism, in One of Ours theirs is still a support
established by trespassing across boundaries of gender and power that Claude finds
emasculating and in the case of his wife Enid, emotionally devastating.
However in One of Ours European women appear in the imaginations of the
soldiers to exhibit traditional and more “feminine” behaviors, and to cultivate feminine
spaces that work to maintain gender relations beneficial to attitudes of militarism. Much
critical interpretation has been applied to Madame Joubert’s garden in France, where
Claude is billeted with his friend David Gerhardt. Janis Stout reads her introduction to the

190
text, seated in “a little sanded garden…under a cherry tree” as a tie to Claude’s mother,
whose beloved cherry tree was cruelly chopped down by her husband earlier in the text.
The garden itself and Madame Joubert’s home are also illuminating in their physical
situation as a feminine oasis set in the middle of a war torn community. When he arrives
Claude discovers a city of “crowded, narrow streets” and citizens with “hard voices and
crafty faces…who seemed rough and unfriendly” (341). He and the other soldiers are
overcharged for foodstuffs by French shopkeepers who find their continued military
presence characterized by inconsiderate joviality in the face of their own suffering: “The
money that lay in their palms had no relation to these big, coaxing, boisterous fellows; it
was a joke to them; they didn’t know what it meant in the world. Behind them were
shiploads of money, and behind the ships…The situation was unfair” (325). And
Claude’s visit to the infirmary is marred by his discovery of “the first wounded men [he]
had seen,” whose terribly maimed bodies belie his fantasy “to shed bright blood, to wear
the red badge of courage” (335).
In contrast, Madame Joubert’s garden is characterized by the nostalgic cherry
tree, as well as “a many-branched rose vine that ran all over the wall, full of cream-
coloured, pink-tipped roses,” and the refugee child from Belgium “with her lap full of
baby kittens” (349). When he wakes in her home it is with “a sense of physical well-
being as he had not had for a long time” (350). He enjoys “the feeling of dry, clean linen
against his body” and the “smell of lavender about his warm pillow” (350). Here in a
nurturing woman’s space of kitchens, linens and gardens he discovers a “sort of peace
one wanted to enjoy alone” (350). Yet it is also a peace that never threatens his

191
masculinity in the way that his mother's kitchen always has. Because Claude has found
the path to masculinity through militarism and the military community, he now enjoys
women's spaces without suffering the emasculating effects that had plagued him at home.
The peace of the garden, protected by its clay colored walls from the war outside, is
Edenic, romantically establishing women's cultivation of private spaces as tailored to the
needs of men. After a grueling day of maneuvers Claude returns to find that:
The garden was fresh and bright after the rain. The cherry tree shook down bright
drops on the tablecloth when the breeze stirred. The mother cat dozed on the red
cushion in Madame Joubert’s sewing chair, and the pigeons fluttered down to
snap up earthworms that wriggled in the wet sand. The shadow of the
house fell over the dinner-table, but the tree-tops stood up in full sunlight,
and the yellow sun poured on the earth wall and the cream-coloured roses (355).

This oasis of contentment represents a superior alternative to his wife Enid's cold and
unappealing kitchen, often left bare due to the fact the she spends more time campaigning
for prohibition than keeping house for her husband. In Claude's experience, women in
America seek to incorporate the war into their lives in a way that is politically
empowering but devastating to men, while their European sisters offer soldiers like him a
fantasy of bifurcated living spaces where women nurture masculinity and are uninterested
in their own public empowerment. This fantasy that traditional gender roles are important
for the proper development of the soldier's masculinity will replay itself in the
relationships between men and women in One of Ours as they take place in Europe, and
as they compare to disrupted relationships that occur in the United States.
This sense that women create peace while men foster violence is later reiterated
with Claude’s visit to Mlle. Olive de Courcy, whose characterization is the perfect

192
fantasy of romantic (dis)interest for Claude, both through her physical unavailability and
her romantic beauty. From the start of his appointment with her, Olive represents notions
of civility and respectability that are sharply contrasted with the effect that the war has
had upon her body, her family, and her home. She herself appears exhausted with fatigue
and overburdened with her care for sick and injured civilians who have suffered the
effects of the war. Her home has been devastated by the war, and is only being rebuilt
with slow deliberation by the one-armed man who had once served alongside her brother
(388). However, when Claude arrives he still comes with a formal note of introduction,
and she invites him as “a guest from the front” who should stop and enjoy lunch before
going on (384). Inside her home, which is still in pieces from constant shelling, her
living room is “unpainted, uncarpeted, light and airy” (384). Accents such as “wild
flowers and garden flowers” sit alongside shelves of books, and “a table covered by a
white silk shawl embroidered with big butterflies”(384). Claude is offered hot water and
“scented soap” with which to tidy himself for his luncheon, along with “white
handkerchiefs fresh from the iron” (385). Their conversations regarding the war, the
idealism behind it, and the role America has played in it leaves Claude with a “feeling of
being completely understood, of being no longer a stranger” (391), a significant moment
since Claude’s entire life to this point has been characterized by his sense of alienation
from others. The combination of a woman’s civility, a space apart from violence, and yet
an idealism that recognizes and validates Claude’s sense of heroism has created for him
the sense of belonging that he had vainly tried to capture at home. The careful and more
obvious delineation of genders achieved through markers such as Claude's uniform and

193
Olive's scented soaps have allowed Claude to enjoy his time within this particular space
of feminine tranquility without succumbing to the emasculation that had plagued him in
similar spaces back in Nebraska.
Unfortunately the idealism shared between Olive and Claude also fostered much
of the criticism against One of Ours at the time of its publication. Claude's romantic
notions of war are never disproved during his service - a point of tremendous contention
for male reviewers - but rather re-enforced by Olive's adoration of them. This support for
Claude's chivalric motivations, along with Olive's beauty and romanticization, instead
reflects her situation as a safe female figure who allows the soldier at war to project his
own fantasies of gender and power upon her. What makes Olive a figure of such interest
to Claude also reveals many of the modern fears of women and sexuality that had been
momentarily obscured by soldiers' participation in the war. Klaus Thewelweit's analysis
of German soldiers' fantasies finds that female sexuality in any form is threatening to the
men, unless it can be absorbed and deflected by the “good woman” figure (100). The
“good woman” exhibits a combination of features that make her lovely yet asexual, and
often near death. She is also courageous, but still in need of male help, and never as
politically active as the dreaded “Red Woman” whose sexuality, aggressive violence, and
political motivations render her the most hideous threat to the men (74). Olive is clearly a
“good woman,” forgiving of her personal losses at the front, and romanticized through
the suffering of her physical body. During their meeting Claude observes that Olive
“looked over-taxed by her care and responsibility” of the women, children, and elderly
men who have returned to their devastated village and rely on her storage and dispensing

194
of American foodstuffs for survival (387). Her experiences of the war have left her with
“transparent skin and a too ardent colour in her lips and cheeks, - like the flame of
feverish activity within” her drooping shoulders reflect the fact that “she [was] always
tired” and though she is a young woman, “there were threads of grey in her hair” (387).
Her father and brother have died in battle by the time Claude meets her, her grandfather
having died in the war of 1870, and Olive’s family is described as “a family of soldiers,
but not one of the men would be left to see the day of victory” (391).
As is always the case with militarism, the key to understanding how gender and
violence function in this passage is to ask, in a family of fallen soldiers, what became of
the women? In Olive’s case her physical state does, in some way, reveal the very real toll
of the war on women’s bodies. It's clear that Olive has suffered physical and emotional
losses at the front – her body is in failing health, and she has lost her brother in combat.
However the obvious physical toll of the war is mediated by her ideological zeal and
admiration for American soldiers. She is entirely supportive of Claude's military
enterprise, a perfect “good woman” whose failing health protects Claude from the
dangerous female sexuality that requires “desensualization” in order to protect his new
sense of masculinity (Thewelweit 63). Claude finds that conversation with Olive verges
on ecstasy, since “the strain of this war had given her a perception that was almost like a
gift of prophecy” (390). Furthermore, while Olive’s body has obviously suffered from the
war, she is still described as tall, slender, and romantically pretty with fair skin, flushed
cheeks, and grey eyes. Her physical suffering has only served to enhance her beauty and
her mysterious “perceptions” regarding life during and after the war. And though many of

195
her family members and friends have died since the outset of the war, her home has been
destroyed, and she herself has suffered from her physical burdens since its inception,
Olive’s perception of it is that the war has only “taught us how little the made things
matter. Only the feeling matters” (386). This fantasy that her experience of the war has
only served to eradicate materialistic notions is dangerously close to propagandizing
wartime participation, and validating an experience that other modernist authors like
Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque and John Dos Passos would violently attack
in the postwar literary environment. By combining the romanticization of Olive’s
physical suffering with her pained body and fevered support of America’s “men of
destiny” Cather succeeds in establishing her as a romantic military martyr along much the
same lines as Claude’s beloved Joan of Arc, offering Claude the kind of woman he can
finally love: one who is admirable and beautiful, yet unthreatening in any way.
The sense that Olive is a figure of martyrdom specifically appeals to Claude’s
fascination with martyred women, hearkening back to his childhood and later to his study
of Joan of Arc in college. As Claude's fascination with martyred women develops
throughout the text, it will reveal a host of sexual fears and desires that reflect a
dangerous mix of gender identities in Claude's imagination, the impossibility of bringing
his romantic desires to fruition, and ultimately the obfuscation of his own gender
confusion through his participation in the war. Claude's love of Joan of Arc works to
analogize the real-life concerns of gender, sex and power that were circulating in
America before the war, and never really vanquished by returning soldiers. His
fascination with the Maid of Orleans, and with an idealized or mysterious masculine-

196
femininity set against the backdrop of war, begins when he is still a child:
He first heard of her from his mother, one day when he was a little boy. He had
been shut up in the house with a cold, he remembered, and he found a picture of
her in armour…from that time on he knew the essential facts about Joan of Arc,
and she was a living figure in his mind…he pictured her then very much as he did
now; about her figure there gathered a luminous cloud, like dust, with soldiers in
it…the banner with lilies…a great church (62).

The language of armor, of soldiers, and of physical sacrifice merge here with images of
military prowess and religious fervor to reveal the powerful relationship between
militarization and patriarchal religious tradition. So powerful was this message that it
would find new representation in World War I propaganda posters. And like Joan of Arc,
Olive de Courcy offers Claude a combination of military heroism, feminine frailty, and
European culture that is far superior to anything offered by the New Woman back home
in Nebraska. Claude’s fascination with martyrdom, while hinting at his own idealism and
its later role in his death, is tied up in both militarism and femininity, as well as his own
struggle to be true man. In some ways this fascination finds another means of
representation through his failed marriage to Enid Royce. Enid herself is a woman of
powerful religious conviction, willing to sacrifice her life for her mission. Unfortunately,
Enid's real-life pursuit of her dreams does not earn her the same love and admiration that
Claude has for Joan of Arc, and instead reflects the failure of Claude's fantasy to play out
in reality, at least in pre-war Nebraska. Throughout the majority of the text Enid’s
distasteful and even cruel personifications are linked to notions of soldiering, martyrdom,
and gender in interesting ways.
But what Claude's fascination with Joan of Arc hints at is his own inability to
establish a sense of masculinity at home, and his secret fear – that he himself is really a

197
“sissy” or a homosexual, even perhaps a woman in male garb, seeking entrance into a
man's world where he doesn't truly belong. At the time Cather was writing One of Ours
Joan of Arc had gained tremendous popularity in the United States, culminating with her
canonization in 1920. During this time hundreds of original works of art were produced
depicting her life and death, thousands of books about her were published in the United
States for children and adults, and Ringling Brothers featured a Joan of Arc circus show
that appeared for two summers and was performed in over three hundred American towns
(Heimann and Coyle 53). Joan of Arc storybooks were designed to teach children lessons
of morality and humility, Joan of Arc paintings often represented her as patriotic and
loyal, and suffragettes often dressed as Joan of Arc during their marches. Suffragettes
would be particularly drawn to Joan because of her unconventional lifestyle – even as she
was remembered as a war hero and martyr, Joan of Arc was also a woman known for
cross-dressing, who never married and embraced a public role in political affairs. While
Claude's fascination with her will draw him into military conflict, and will culminate in
his own heroic death, Joan's personification of masculinity as garb, and particularly as
military garb, will mirror Claude's own journey towards a more masculine culture when
he joins the service. Like Joan, Claude will “hear the call” of militarism, leading him into
a war that he feels is just, to fight alongside men he dreams of as chivalrous and true of
heart. He too will wear the markers of military masculinity; while Joan was famous for
wearing armor Claude's uniform will allow him to gain new respect among his
townspeople, many of whom will assert that he's actually “grown taller” after he joins the
service (241). And like her he will die fighting for his beliefs. But beneath these

198
associations lie the reality of Claude's fearful feminine nature. Claude's masculinity is
only achieved when he “dresses the part,” insinuating that beneath that uniform he isn't a
real man. Even worse, the achievement of such masculinity with the simple use of a
military uniform reflects an even more terrible threat: the revelation that masculinity
itself is nothing more than a socially constructed fantasy reliant upon visual markers and
behaviors, gender as performance, which belies any concrete category of “masculine” or
“feminine” (Butler 24). As more and more women of this era began filtering into the
public spotlight traditional markers of gender would be called into question. This would
continue to be the case after the war, when women were granted the right to vote. Kathy
Phillips has found that in order to attain a fantasy of “true masculinity” many men could
be enticed into a war, if only to avoid being called “sissies” or half-men (7). In Cather's
text this is certainly true, particularly for men whose masculinity is already in question.
Unfortunately the war failed to reinstate traditional gender norms, as so many had hoped,
and the only way that a man could maintain such a fantasy was to die believing it, like
Claude.
David Stouck suggests in Willa Cather’s Imagination that Claude’s earliest
fascination with Joan of Arc and her martyrdom is also recreated in his future wife Enid,
and yet also denigrated by the cold reality of Enid’s personality and their loveless
marriage (90). In the persona of Enid Claude's fantasy of the martyred woman warrior is
crushed by his real-life experiences with a wife whose sense of independence is actually
emasculating and cruel. Through Enid, readers of One of Ours are treated to the
embodiment of all things fearful to modern men: she is the New Woman, she is

199
unnatural, she is an emasculating technological force, and she is even a better “soldier”
than Claude. Before their marriage Enid appears as an object of fascination for Claude,
and his myopic focus upon his own romantic notions of femininity, masculinity and
marriage serve to conceal the very real defects of her character until they are man and
wife. In Claude’s recollections he dwells upon a memory of Enid in Sunday school in
which “the pallor of her skin, the submissive inclination of her forehead, and her dark,
unchanging eyes made one think of something ‘early Christian’” (123). And like Joan of
Arc, Enid wants to offer her life in the name of her faith. Her only desire is to travel to
China and work as a missionary, much as her sister has done before her. Instead of taking
her desires seriously Claude finds them “unusual and touching…something quite
charming” (127), and attributes them to his notion that “women ought to be religious;
faith was the natural fragrance of their minds” (127). He will not discover until after his
marriage, when Enid actually leaves for China, that her dream of missionary work wasn’t
a passing infatuation with “flowers and foreign missions” (127).
His own romantic fascination with her “infatuations” reveals that Claude never
actually knows who Enid is – she is an idea or symbol of femininity, another fantasy
figure whose real-life aspirations mean nothing to him. This begs the question of whether
or not modern men like Claude understand women at all, particularly the New Woman
who has less interest in conforming to the idealistic notions of gender that he so espouses.
During a sickness brought on by an injury on the farm Enid spends afternoons talking
with Claude. It is interesting to note that he doesn’t really listen to her at all and has no
interest in facilitating an actual dialogue between them. What he really wants is an image

200
of femininity, a symbol that will define and reinforce his own endangered sense of
masculinity. As he lies there in his sick bed “he listened but absently” to her thoughts
and opinions, and goes on to wish that “Enid would not talk at all, but would sit there and
let him look at her” (141). Even in his dreams of her “he never wakened her, but loved
her while she was still unconscious like a statue” (145). As Janis Stout rightly notes,
while Enid’s later behavior towards Claude is callous, it is simultaneously true that what
is most disagreeable to Claude is that Enid wants her own “sense of profession” (173). In
short, Enid's greatest fault is that her own sense of destiny is not affiliated in any way
with Claude’s romanticized notion of her as his own version of Joan of Arc.
The character of Enid is a fictionalization of the wife of G.P. Cather, whose
unhappy marriage had been the subject of town gossip for years, and would lead him to
join the military during the war (Harris 637). On the surface Enid is, as Joseph Urgo
suggests, a typical “Catherian heroine” who sees what it is that she really wants and goes
after it (161). She is capable, well respected in her community, attractive, and hard
working. Yet at the same time Enid is cold, unpleasant, ascetic, and is represented as
unnatural in her relationship with Claude and her preference for the public life required of
her prohibition campaigns. Claude's fanciful idea that marriage would reduce Enid's
“cool, self–satisfied” behavior and turn her into a “loving and generous” wife (177) is
dashed from the start, when on their wedding night she locks him out of their room on the
train car (195). Her attentions to his care and dress “unmanned him” and in combination
with the humiliation of his wedding night bring “the smart of tears to his eyes” (197). She
is so preoccupied with prohibition that she is often not at home when he returns from

201
working the fields, leaving instead cold meals and a table “neatly set for one” (201). As
his neighbor Leonard Dawson points out, being married to a woman like Enid is “next
thing to having no wife at all,” and Claude's public humiliation is directly related to her
status as a New Woman who eschews her traditional wifely duties (202).
Enid’s role as a terrible threat to his masculinity is further represented in her
distaste for physical pleasures, including alcohol, meat, and sex. “Everything about a
man’s embrace [is] distasteful to Enid” and unlike Claude, whose romantic notions have
plagued him from the start of the book, she “disliked ardour of any kind, even religious
ardour” (210). This behavior is coded as unnatural in many ways. Earlier in the text Enid
and her mother are criticized for being unnatural vegetarians, and when Leonard Dawson
discovers that Enid keeps her rooster “shut up in the coop” (203) away from the hens, he
is appalled that she doesn't raise chickens “on a natural basis” (204). Claude even finds
sadness in the “natural” growth of his garden as compared to the rest of his life with her:
Claude had watched its rapid growth and the opening of its splotchy yellow
blossoms, feeling grateful to a thing that did so lustily what it was put there to do.
He had the same feeling for his little Jersey cow, which came home every night
with full udders and gave down her milk willingly, keeping her tail out of his face,
as only a well-disposed cow will do” (206).

Enid's state of emotional and physical frigidity correlates directly to her public activities,
and only compounds Claude's previous state of emasculation in the home of his parents.
She clearly has no interest in doing “what she was put there to do” and is certainly not
“well-disposed” towards the life of a traditional farmstead wife. When Enid leaves
Claude to go to China it is the achievement of her dreams, and yet to Claude his
masculinity has been publicly denounced, and he feels that there isn’t anything left to

202
hope for now (224).
Enid's embrace of missionary work in China inverts the “natural” order of gender
relations in Claude's life, leaving him home to tend the farm and kitchen while she travels
abroad as a soldier of Christ. This inversion threatens yet again to reveal Claude's true
fear – that he isn't a real man at all. Enid's discipline, her distaste for private life and her
fearlessness in the face of public ventures establish her as the adventurous soldier that
Claude has yet to become. It will only be through his assumption of a properly male role
that he will find peace, something impossible to accomplish until he can escape Enid and
her emasculating sense of new womanhood. As Joseph Urgo says, Enid “is as restless as
Claude” (158), and the other “imperial task” that is represented in the book – missionary
work – so absorbs her that she “is already the soldier that [Claude] must go through
training to become” (159). Significantly, Claude will need to learn manhood through
training and the military system in order to become this soldier, while Enid's only natural
inclination appears to be the embrace of her “imperial task,” reflecting yet again that
Claude's masculinity is a simple veil of behaviors and uniforms that obscures the reality
of his effeminacy. Unlike Claude, who will only discover personal satisfaction when he
wages war on others, Enid “has fewer apparent anxieties about her sexuality and seems
comfortable with herself” (161) from the start. Urgo goes on to suggest that in Enid’s
successful escape to China to pursue her dreams, and through Claude’s transformation
from “a loser…to heroic status through war death” that Cather has recognized and clearly
enunciated the “conflation of religious and militarist imperatives into an imperial style”
that would encapsulate American global politics in the wake of World War I and

203
particularly after World War II (163).
However, I must contend that while Enid’s hopes and dreams are apparently
achieved, and her attitudes do reflect those of Claude before his death, their experiences
should not be conflated; Claude’s death is written as a triumph, as the achievement of all
that he has struggled to attain throughout the book, and in particular as the successful
attainment of his masculinity. Enid, however, is unlikeable, unfeminine, and as I have
already established, characterized as unnatural. In the imagination of Claude-as-soldier,
the New Woman is devastating to the “natural” order of things, and only by embracing
militarism and going to war can he escape her. If Claude’s success as a soldier reveals
that “war making in America is the one political act that is held sacred” and that war acts
are emblematic “of American authentication” (162) then Enid – the soldier of Christ –
exists in a state of unnaturalness and unlikeability that reflects male fears of “the
feminine mass” intruding upon the public sphere of authentic American political
participation as Andreas Huyssen addresses it in postwar American culture. Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar also contribute to this theoretical train of thought, and find that
in postwar America the social empowerment of women is somehow associated with the
sexual wounding of men, particularly since the war failed to return American culture to
simpler times where the public and private spheres were carefully delineated (262). In a
world where Claude's deepest fears prove true, women who participate in nation-building
are negating their biological identity, emasculating men and weakening American
culture. This is why Claude's departure to Europe and his military service bring him such
“a sense of relief at being rid of all [he] had ever been before” (278). The erasure of Enid

204
and of their failed marriage seems to come as another benefit of Claude’s new
masculinity, and his participation in the global adventure constructed as the war. This
ability to cast off women whose own aspirations seem to hinder a new American
masculinity is repeated again once Claude has landed in France, in the persona of the
“lost” American soldier, and more specifically in the “lost” women who were once a part
of his life.
Cather’s “lost” American soldier represents, on the surface, an attempt to describe
and understand the phenomenon of “shell shock” as it was just beginning to gain public
attention in post-war America. The soldier in question has suffered the loss of an arm and
a wound to the neck, which leaves him partially physically incapacitated, but more
significantly, leaves him with amnesia. However, this particular form of this amnesia is
strangely gender specific; it appears that he cannot remember the women from his life,
though his memory of male figures is not affected:
The queer thing is, it’s his recollection of women that is most affected. He can
remember his father, but not his mother; doesn’t know if he has sisters or not, -
can remember seeing girls around the house, but thinks they may have been
cousins. His photographs and belongings were lost when he was hurt, all except a
bunch of letters he had in his pocket. They are from a girl he’s engaged to, and
declares he can’t remember her at all…The doctor has the letters. They seem to be
from a nice girl in his own town who is very ambitious for him to make the most
of himself (337-338).

While the soldier has suffered physical injuries that will trouble him for the rest of his
life, Claude’s first response is to feel that this man has been “fortunate,” to have escaped
the clutches of the “ambitious” girl he was to marry, who wants him to make the most of
himself (338). We know nothing else of his engagement except that this lost soldier has
replaced his fiancée with a French farm girl, whose characterization as a pretty country-

205
girl, with a face that is “young and soft” and a nurturing attitude towards her soldier
directly contrasts the ambitions of the American woman whose own desires seem to have
nearly trapped the soldier in a marriage that we must presume would be as loveless and
cold as Claude’s own (333). Once again, in the eyes of the modern man a woman who
has her own set of ambitions is a dangerous castrator and an unnatural partner whose
personal goals will only succeed in emasculating her husband. This “lost” soldier
manages to “find himself” in France by escaping this aggressive fiancée, conveniently
through shell shock, and replaces her with a woman whose child-like adoration of him is
represented as far more desirable. This fantasy of Europe as a place where traditional
masculinity can be reclaimed, and the New Woman can be escaped, will also mirror the
development of American imperialist fantasies operating on a larger scale. Ultimately
Europe is where Claude's lost frontier, man's endangered masculinity, and America's
Manifest Destiny can all be recovered in a new, global market.
In the opening of the section in One of Ours ominously titled “Enid,” Claude
reflects upon the statue of Kit Carson he sees in Colorado, with the sun setting behind the
statue, lamenting that “there was no West” for men like him, no place for him to “run
away into a new country” (118). The masculine ideology behind Manifest Destiny in One
of Ours has been replaced by an empty spirituality represented in Enid’s wheedling
preacher, and a cold business ethos and blind consumerism embodied in Claude’s vile
brother Bayliss and his materialistic father. And as it is viewed through Claude's eyes,
women are certainly benefiting from this lost masculine destiny. Instead of Kit Carson on
horseback Claude sees the ever-popular automobile, which Enid uses to drive to faraway

206
towns when she campaigns for prohibition, and which leads his neighbor to observe that
he’s “been mighty blamed careful to see that [his wife] never learned to drive a car”
(202). Consumerism provides women with new ice boxes and state-of-the-art kitchen
tools, which Enid uses to leave Claude cold meals out of a can. After her departure
overseas she leaves him alone in their modern and well-built home, gazing at their state-
of-the-art goods and wedding china: “all of these things that he had selected with care
and in which he had taken such pride, were no more to him now than the lumber piled in
the shop of any second-hand dealer. How inherently mournful and ugly such objects
were” (223). The death of the frontier portends another death of masculine privilege, and
in its place once again is the New Woman, who drives her car from town to town, who
doesn’t need to cook or care for children, and whose newfound freedoms have been
achieved at the expense of men like Claude Wheeler. This association of women with
technology would later translate into modernist associations of women with a soulless,
crushing mass culture, while authentic culture would be reserved for the male-dominated
critical establishment (Huyssen 47). Technology would also be responsible for the
devastating effects of World War I upon male bodies, unleashing carnage in never-
before-imagined ways and dehumanizing men who had hoped to find heroism in the
trenches. In this way the war only furthered the perceived attack on traditional
masculinity and would be compounded by women's social advancements in postwar
America.
Europe, however, appears in Claude's imagination as a new frontier where all of
his perceived inadequacies can be erased and a new sense of masculinity can be achieved.

207
Once Claude arrives in Europe he is able to admire and connect with women whose
traditional sense of culture and civility coincide perfectly with the adoption of his new,
chivalric male identity and his proud embrace of cultural imperialism. Returning again to
Olive de Courcy, Claude’s experiences with her also reveal how America’s “long arm”
(386) of manufacture is complimented by women who embrace American men as “men
of destiny” (390). John Esperjesi's analysis of imperialism as it functions in the western
psyche suggests that we derive all of our geographical sensibilities from “ideational
constructs,” allowing us to project our own fantasies and fears upon a geographical space
and its people so that our culturally specific desires can be achieved outside of any moral
limitations (2). Olive's love of all things American reflects the heavily propagandized and
militarized notion that occupied peoples actually enjoy and benefit from American
cultural imperialism, a fantasy that would have been absorbed by soldiers who had
enlisted.
Olive’s home, the very roof over her head, are facilitated by American goods. As
Joseph Urgo suggests these “made things” that make up her new life reveal the global
turn that America would take in the postwar environment, one in which such “heroic
actions” as war are sustained by a “cultural style” of consumerism that is validated by
global enterprise (151). The walls of Olive’s home are covered by “coloured war posters”
from the Red Cross (384), her dresser is made up of “an old goods box” and her
storeroom is “stocked with rows of coffee tins, condensed milk, canned vegetables and
meat, all with American trade names” (385-386). Olive goes on to tell him that she and
her townspeople could not have survived the winter without the American goods, that

208
“they made the difference between life and death” (386). Claude’s response is to feel
pride in his country for the first time, and pride in his own role as a U.S. soldier sent to
liberate France (386). In Claude's imagination America’s past glory – of heroics, of
chivalry, and of territorial expansion - has been rediscovered in a new global empire
where the United States' turn towards industrialism and production can be achieved by
exporting its goods and inserting itself into war ravaged France. America’s arrival is
hailed by Olive as “the last miracle of this war” (390), and as American soldiers marched
through Paris on the fourth of July she proclaimed “That is a new man!” (390), one that
has conquered the unnatural and oppressive new American woman and the spiritually
deadening Industrial revolution by going abroad.
Paradoxically, this new man so beloved in the soldier's imagination would only be
made possible by the participation of women on the home front, both literally as a labor
force and figuratively in their ideological situation by military propaganda. These same
women, who worked during the war and sacrificed their loved ones, who embraced their
roles as patriotic mothers and housewives, would later be attacked as symbolic of the
castrating effects of wartime violence and the shifting nature of gender in America. Leo
Braudy recognizes that when it came to the dissemination of the ideology of the war,
“women were needed as well, in the war as nurses but also at home” in order to support
“images of warrior masculinity” as well as to offer its feminine counterpoint (378). As a
result some of the more tangential female characters in Cather’s text appear
unconventional and occupy roles that are expansive, while others occupy more traditional
wartime roles as imaginary constructs representative of the masculine ideology behind

209
war. And in more than once case, they can be both. Claude’s vision of the Statue of
Liberty is one such example, and reveals the paradoxical nature of women’s roles during
times of war, in this case as both the mythologized symbol of liberty, and the deceptive
fantasy of war that sends young men to a grisly death. For Claude and his soldier friends
their first vision of the statue is indicative of their perception of war itself; it is romantic,
dream-like, and moving:

They shouted and gesticulated to the image they were all looking for, - so much
nearer than they had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist
streaming up like smoke behind… Though she was a definite image in their
minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of sea and sky, with the shipping
of the world coming and going at her feet, and the moving cloud-masses behind
her. Post-card pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large gesture,
or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish elements…before
Claude had got over his first thrill, the Kansas band in the bow began playing
“Over There.” Two thousand voices took it up, booming out over the water the
gay, indomitable resolution of that jaunty air (273).

Unlike the statue of Kit Carson, with the setting sun behind it revealing the waning of
America’s frontier in the face of Industrial enterprise, the Statue of Liberty appears like a
goddess of America’s salvation out of the sea. She is larger than life, economic might
evident in the “shipping of the world” passing at her very feet. She is their inspiration, a
warrior goddess, and a gift from France that justifies their upcoming foray into the war.
But at the same time another passerby sees an entirely different scene, one that
foreshadows the war's eventual inability to reinstate gender norms and the upcoming
backlash against women who enjoyed greater freedoms through America's participation
in the conflict. An aging clergyman in the next ferry, noted as a “famous speaker in his

210
day,” absorbs Claude’s thrilling moment as one that is “ageless; youths were sailing away
to die for an idea, a sentiment, for the mere sound of a phrase…and on their departure
they were making vows to a bronze image in the sea” (274). This direct contradiction to
Claude’s recollections of the same experience is repeated throughout the book, where
grisly war scenes are set against Claude’s romantic ideas and perceptions of his “great
adventure.” In this case the idealization of the Statue of Liberty has special significance
because, as was often the case for real life women in postwar America, Liberty is a
woman figure who appears as symbolic of an ideology that reinforces the masculine
desire to participate in the war, and yet simultaneously becomes a deceiver, falsely
representing the same sentiment that will lead many of them to their deaths. As Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted in No Man’s Land, many returning servicemen saw
the women who had previously supported their enlistment as predatory, having used the
instability in gender roles created by the war to enjoy freedoms and economic successes
usually denied to them. This would become particularly evident as women won the right
to vote in 1920 shortly after the end of World War I (262). Authors like Wilfred Owens
and Siegfried Sassoon would appear particularly vitriolic in their attacks upon female or
feminized symbols of the war, (311) and the movement to return women to their rightful
pre-war status would be urgently addressed in the aftermath of American involvement in
the conflict. In the text itself the surviving soldiers arrive back in New York, but the
Statue of Liberty is conspicuously absent while the now cynical and battle scarred
soldiers greet their homecoming and ticker-tape parade with a combination of
“melancholy,” or indifference (455). They have been cheated, they have suffered, and the

211
Statue of Liberty represents not only the ideological mechanism deployed to cheat them,
but the women who benefitted from their deception.
While French women seem to occupy the more romantic and traditionally
feminine counterparts to their American sisters, there are also instances in which French
women and French girls embody the most culturally feared aspect of the war in the minds
of the soldiers – the rape and murder of defenseless women and children at the hands of
an aggressive, monstrous invading force. Military propaganda had regularly relied upon
images of rape and violence against women and children to facilitate enlistment.
Nowhere in One of Ours is this use of tragic female symbols more clearly drawn than in
the encounter between Claude's men and the raped Frenchwoman. She is found by the
soldiers on one of their marches, trapped in a low field where neglected drain ditches
have created a mire that is difficult to pass, with three children and a baby in her lap. She
appears “ill and wretched looking...far gone in consumption” (359). She is also described
as having once belonged to a likely middle-class family: “she didn't look like a tramp
woman, but like one who had once been able to take proper care of herself, and she was
still young” (360). The oldest child of the group, a young girl with a “hard little face”
explains that they are refugees returning to their village so that their mother can die in
familiar territory (360). When she explains that her father has died at the Marne, a battle
which at this point has passed more than a year ago, the girl is forced to explain to the
soldiers that the baby in her mother's arms is the product of her rape at the hands of
German soldiers. He is a “Boche,” and the girl must repeatedly refer to him as such, with
“something disdainful and sinister in her metallic little voice” before the men understand

212
the circumstances of his birth (360). That it takes so long for Claude and his men to
understand that this woman has been the victim of rape is testament to what many critics
see as Cather's attempt to construct American soldiers as men of virtue and innocence
paradoxically engaged in a war that is brutal and dehumanizing. However, in light of her
use of soldier's memoirs it is just as easy to see how this scene represents the soldiers'
imagination of themselves as men of honor fighting a war to defend women against the
rapacious Huns. The responses of the soldiers themselves in her text support this notion.
Bert Fuller is “afraid he might cry” and the men take it upon themselves to rescue the
family – who have no papers in order to return to France – because as the little girl notes,
American soldiers are their last hope and rumored to be great gentlemen (361).
Cather's inclusion of the raped woman in One of Ours is unusual for the time.
Very few war novels of this era make such explicit reference to rape, though the threat of
rape was used then, as it is now, as a tool of propaganda by the military before the war,
just as the act of rape was clearly a real-life violence perpetrated by the soldiers
themselves (Lilly xxix). The rape of Belgium and the rape of Germany are well known
historical facts today that received little popular attention when these crimes against
women were committed, regardless of the tireless work by Jane Addams in the 1915
Hague Conference to do otherwise (Goldstein 363). Even as Joshua Goldstein notes that
rape is too often an accompaniment to war, with historical references that go back as
records have been kept (362), J. Robert Lilly's analysis of soldiers' memoirs finds that
“amid all the frankness about the hatred, the killing, the cruelty, and sheer madness of
war...rape in GI testimonies remains the ultimate taboo” (xxix). In Cather's text her

213
reference to the raped woman could be seen as a brutally honest approach to women and
war that succeeds in establishing hers as a particularly authentic war novel, something
that was reiterated to her by the letters she received from ex-soldiers who had read the
book (Harris 613). Thus in referring to wartime rape, something that at this time was
usually only hinted at by a lady writer, Cather's text is perhaps more honest in its
portrayal of women and the impact of war upon their lives than most texts written by
either male or female authors of this era. This fairly fearless representation of the raped
woman, regardless of the commonality of her situation and victimization, could also be
due in part to Cather's well-established refusal to adhere to notions of literary
respectability that were usually applied to lady writers. At the same time, fear of rape was
widely used to create social support for the war itself, something that Cather's soldiers
would have seen and likely absorbed in the United States' run up to wartime participation.
Referring again to Goldstein, propaganda in both World Wars “used the theme of rape to
rally patriotism. In World War I...the rape and sexual mutilation of women dominated
contemporaries' imaginings and representations of the war” (368). And Leo Braudy
notes that propaganda situated the Huns as beast-like creatures bent upon invading
peaceful Europe and victimizing the women (377). The fear of wartime rape would then
be paramount in the minds of the soldiers who wanted to prevent it by invading and
protecting defenseless women, even when actual references to such rapes would be few
and far between.
The association between rape victims and conquered countries is another
ideological association that is revealed in the passage – even today the event known as

214
The Rape of Belgium inserts the nation itself in the place of the real victims of rape,
almost always women and children. Joshua Goldstein notes that “the nation is often
gendered female, and the state male. Women in some sense embody the nation” (369).
Cynthia Enloe also addresses such symbolism in recognizing that the raped woman can
remain a symbol of militarism used to facilitate further violence against women and
children if “her ordeal is made visible chiefly for the purpose of mobilizing her male
compatriots to take up arms to avenge her – and their – allegedly lost honor” (109).This
association between male honor and women's bodies was heavily propagandized by
military policy-makers in recruitment posters, further associating participation in the war
with chivalric notions of masculinity and conquest.
By focusing upon the man's duty to prevent rape, this association succeeds in
obscuring the real victims of rape, which was commonly underreported due to shame felt
on the part of the victims, and shame later felt on the part of rapists who had committed a
crime “of utter subjugation and supreme humiliation...against wholly innocent civilians”
(Lilly xxix). Thus the raped Frenchwoman is also a nameless symbol of militarization,
and her victimization deals a significant and symbolic blow to Claude's soldiers, one of
whom exclaims upon learning the parentage of her child: “By God, of we'd a got her
sooner, by God if we had!” (362). These remarks place the blame for her rape at the feet
of the men who failed to protect her from the invasion of German troops, in much the
same way that Claude laments throughout the latter half of the book that the US had
failed to protect France through the isolationist stance that kept the largest deployment of
soldiers out of the war until years after Germany's original invasion of Belgium. The

215
notion that the rape victim represents France to these men, and America's failure to
protect France, is also mirrored in the environment that surrounds her when the men
stumble upon the family:
Long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and torn; big holes gashed out of fields
and hillsides, already half concealed by new undergrowth; winding depressions in
the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying along the road,
and everywhere endless straggling lines of rusty barbed-wire, that seemed to have
been put there by chance, - with no purpose at all (358).

The devastation of France is then reflected in the rape of the woman they meet soon after.
Unfortunately, because the blame for her violation has been laid on her failed protectors,
and not upon the perpetrators of her attack or upon the institution of war itself, the raped
Frenchwoman retains an anonymity and an affiliation with France that obscures her
suffering as well as that of all wartime rape victims.
The rape of France, however, isn't the only ideological confrontation between
gender and nation for the soldiers in this particular scene and throughout the text; in fact
Cather often reveals how children appear as symbols of France in the imagination of
soldiers, and how their victimization reflects the unmitigated evil of the Germans. The
only exception appears to be the raped woman's baby, whose German nationality
overrides his basic humanity and causes the soldiers to feel unease in his presence. While
the raped woman is written as a sympathetic character, her male child is, in fact, a very
disturbing characterization of a fearful crossbreeding between the once cultured France
and the unnaturally predatory Germans. As the sick woman struggles to nurse the
demanding baby it “howls” like an animal, “dissatisfied with its nourishment” (361).
Upon closer inspection the men see that the baby is “a big, heavy baby, but white and

216
sickly...it was too painful, it was almost indecent, to see this exhausted woman trying to
feed her baby” (361). As the product of Germany's rape of France literally struggles to
devour her, Claude carries the baby to the farmhouse beyond the fields, thinking “how
was it possible for a baby to have such a definite personality...and how was it possible to
dislike a baby so much?” (362). The reader soon discovers that it is more than dislike
that Claude feels, “he hated it for its square, tow-thatched head and bloodless ears,” and
the demonic representation of the child is completed by its pale blue eyes and the “grimy
little fist” grasping at his coat buttons (362).
For modern readers Claude's hatred of the baby could be difficult to understand
unless notions of race and ethnicity are examined alongside its characterization. The
pseudo-science known as eugenics was tremendously popular at this time. Since the
Germans had been so carefully constructed by military propaganda as beasts and devils
bent on raping and murdering innocent women and children, it becomes easier to see how
the German baby represents a dangerous mix of what would be considered very
undesirable ethnicities in the minds of the soldiers. Thomas Fahy writes that “Woodrow
Wilson's Committee on Public Information devised a propaganda campaign that depicted
the enemy as both a military and ethnic threat” (53). And Richard Dyer notes in his text
White that the ultimate danger that exists behind the ideological and cultural specter of
rape is the product of mixed race or ethnicity, whose very existence threatens the
superiority of Western white culture (26). It is interesting that under other circumstances
Germany would have fallen neatly into that category of Western whiteness, yet in light of
the wartime propaganda that defined the invading German forces as a monstrous threat

217
the German baby becomes a devouring monster hastening the demise of its own mother.
This demonization of the baby seems to directly contradict many of the other characters
in Willa Cather's works – she is, in fact, well known for her positive portrayal of
immigrants in America. This strange departure can again be attributed to Cather's use of
soldiers' memoirs to recreate psychological experiences in as true a form as possible, and
unearths the deep-seated impact of militarism and ethnically charged symbolism as it
affected American soldiers.
The cynical and hard-faced daughter of the raped woman is one of several girl
children used in the text to further demonstrate the impact of the German invasion upon
France itself, and reinforces notions of heroism and chivalry as they were propagandized
and absorbed by American soldiers. Her experiences have rendered the child “bold” and
“hard” with “uneasy, crafty eyes” (360). And a further example can be found in the
Belgian child adopted by Madame Joubert, a refugee whose experiences have left her
with such severe post traumatic stress that she is nearly incapacitated. She never speaks,
and never associates with other children. “Her dull eyes” never look directly at Claude or
the other soldiers (357), and when Claude absently scoops up a kitten of hers, she
“uttered a shrill scream, a really terrible scream, and squatted down, covering her face
with her hands” (357). When Claude asks what has happened to her he discovers that no
one knows the extent of her experiences, only that she screams at night, and hides in the
shed for much of the day (357). This loss of innocence, indeed of sanity, is a terrible by-
product of the war that seems specifically memorable when applied to girl-children in the
text. The reliance upon their gender could be born of their combination of youth and

218
femininity, which marks girl-children as particularly vulnerable. In combination with
Claude's chivalric fantasies of war-making they fuel his militaristic fervor and heighten
his idealistic embrace of a military system that has finally situated him as a savior of
women, and no longer as their victim.
While these examples are tragic but brief, the murder of a small girl in Beaufort is
striking in its barbarity, as well as its cultural and militaristic implications. The people of
Beaufort receive the soldiers with open arms after having endured months of German
occupation. The paternalistic and heroic nature of the soldiers are highlighted in their
treatment of the children in a scene strikingly reminiscent of the current practice of
handing out candy to children in military zones: “A crowd of children were running
about, making friends with the soldiers. One little girl with yellow curls and a clean white
dress had attached herself to Hicks, and was eating chocolate out of his pocket” (428).
Unfortunately, there are still Germans in hiding throughout Beaufort, including a sniper
whose two victims include an old woman, and the yellow-haired girl:
Suddenly a shot rang out above the chatter, and an old woman in a white cap
screamed and tumbled over on the pavement, - rolled about, kicking indecorously
with both hands and feet. A second crack, - the little girl who stood beside Hicks,
eating chocolate, threw out her hands, ran a few steps, and fell, blood and brains
oozing out of her yellow hair (428).

The blondness of the girl is emphasized twice, particularly in contrast to the blood that
saturates her hair, and alongside the “clean white dress” mark her as an image of both
purity and whiteness, each destroyed by the German sniper. Lois Banner writes in
American Beauty that “For centuries European culture has identified...blonde hair with
purity” (63). And Richard Dyer adds that “blondness and beauty are synonymous in

219
Western myth and fairy-tale,” and serve to reiterate the assumption that whiteness
literally embodies both beauty and morality (71). Her brutal murder is found to have been
the work of a character who has incited a great deal of critical disagreement for One of
Ours. When the soldiers avenge the murder of the child they discover that the killer is a
cultured German officer, and clearly a homosexual. “His linen and his hands were as
white as if he were going to a ball,” and “he had kept his nails ...pink and smooth” (430-
431). Claude's men keep his delicate ruby pinky ring, but not the chain around his neck
that features a photo not of a woman, “but of a young man, pale as snow, with blurred
forget-me-not eyes” (431). Marilee Lindemann writes in Willa Cather Queering America
that this scene is one of blatant homophobia, and is carefully constructed in order to
clearly delineate between innocent American homosociality and perverse German
homosexuality (75). While Linda Williams and Guy Reynolds concur in their own works,
John Anders suggests that in creating such a character homosexuality is normalized in the
context of the war itself (77). However when viewed in terms of modernism and shifting
notions of power and sex, the corrupt homosexual officer comes to represent another of
the true fears lurking beneath the soldiers' military participation. The German sniper is
the embodiment of the same “sissy” or “half-man” who has haunted Claude all his life.
Civilized, effeminate, and completely amoral, his death represents the annihilation of
Claude's worst enemy – the feminine part of himself that must be completely destroyed in
order to guarantee his own masculinity.
Of all the characters in Willa Cather's One of Ours Claude's mother Evangeline
Wheeler is the one most commonly addressed, and in decidedly conflicting terms.

220
Claude's dissatisfactory relationships with women do not extend to his mother, and in fact
their remarkable closeness forms the most powerful bond in the first two thirds of the
book, only eclipsed by his later friendship with David Gerhardt. For her part, Mrs.
Wheeler adores her son Claude. While she has successfully managed to remove the
personal sadness of her unsatisfactory marriage to Nat Wheeler from her “daily
activities” when it comes to Claude she lives only for his happiness:
His chagrins shrivelled her. When he was hurt and suffered silently, something
ached in her. On the other hand, when he was happy, a wave of physical
contentment went through her. If she wakened in the night and happened to think
that he had been happy lately, she would lie softly and gratefully in her warm
place (69).

For his part Claude is also most content in his life when he is with her. He takes
inspiration from her, his “plucky...dear mother” (5), enjoys listening to her read to him in
the study (85), and in the evenings when they discuss religion and politics they are
described as “two natures in one person” (87), happiest when they can be together.
But this love isn't without some interesting Oedipal connotations whose impact
upon Claude's masculinity will not be eradicated until he joins the military and assumes
his rightful role as a “man” instead of a boy. In one of the few instances where their love
is so addressed, Merrill Maguire Skaggs notes in Axes: Willa Cather and William
Faulkner that in the text “mother love is the best a man ever gets...the most passionate
kiss in One of Ours is between Claude and his mother” (11). When Claude stays home to
run the farm in the absence of his father and brother, Mrs. Wheeler remarks that “It's
almost like being a bride, keeping house for just you, Claude,” and she happily makes
herself “some new house-dresses out of grey material that Claude chose” (78). In one of

221
the most painful scenes of the novel, in which Enid locks Claude out of their stateroom
on their wedding night, he comforts himself by thinking of his mother, the one woman he
knows loves him: “When he closed his eyes he could see the light in his mother's
window...human love was a wonderful thing, he told himself, and it was most wonderful
where it had least to gain” (196). Afterwards, when his marriage has revealed itself to be
poorly made, his mother feels “lonely for him” and sometimes searches him out in his
own fields to “take [him] home for dinner” (213). With Enid's cold meals in a can waiting
in his ice-box, it is only with his mother that Claude can enjoy a home-made meal and
female companionship, and her role as the replacement for his similarly cold wife has
received surprisingly little critical attention.
While Janis Stout thinks that “Claude wants to escape his mother” and therefore
joins the army, I would contend otherwise, that in fact much of the first portion of the
book is occupied with Claude's search for a safe place to play out his Oedipal desires
(171). It is only after his obvious failure to find a suitable replacement for his mother as
his love object that Claude finally joins the army. Enid herself shares much of his
mother's sense of decorum and piety, so much so that both women entertain the same
local preacher. But it is his relationship with Mrs. Ehrlich, the mother of a friend he
makes in college, that will most clearly reveal his attraction to mother figures. When
Claude meets Mrs. Ehrlich he notes that “she seemed to him very young to be the head of
such a family,” and “her skin had the soft whiteness of white flowers that have been
drenched by rain” (40). As the semester goes on he finds himself dropping by in the
afternoons when he knows her sons won't be there, so “he could have Mrs. Ehrlich to

222
himself for half-an-hour” (45). He is so charmed by her that he “did something a Wheeler
didn't do; he...sent her a box of the reddest roses he could find” (45). Mrs. Ehrlich has
similarly passionate feelings for Claude. She asks him to be her date to the opera when
her cousin arrives to perform. When he arrives dressed in a black suit “Mrs. Ehrlich's
eyes swept his long black legs, his smooth shoulders, and lastly his square red head,
affectionately inclined toward her. She laughed and clapped her hands. 'Now all the girls
will...wonder where I got him!” (58). Mrs. Ehrlich's cousin will go on to suggest that
perhaps a relationship between the two would be possible (60), and when Claude returns
from a long absence her response is girlish excitement; “what a welcome she gave him,
and how much she had to tell him!” (82). Mrs. Ehrlich's role as a stand-in for his mother
is cemented in Claude's feelings of guilt over his enjoyment of her company, not because
she is the mother of one of his friends, but because “he sometimes felt as if it were
disloyal to [his mother] for him to be so happy with Mrs. Ehrlich” (84). Claude's guilty
feelings are more those of a cheating lover than a son, and he will soon choose to marry
Enid in order to escape them.
Idealization of the mother was never uncommon among soldiers. Thewelweit
reports that the love of a “good mother” is validated throughout soldiers' memoirs,
particularly as one that is “loving” and simultaneously “protective, especially of children
against their fathers” (103). However, at the same time the relationship between mothers
and sons was not without contention in American culture. As men and women began to
see a growing salience between the public and private spheres that women, and by
extensions mothers, could use to their advantage, fears of the relationship between these

223
women and their children would occupy the minds of social theorists and the public.
Combined with a cultural absorption of Freudian analysis, it was commonly believed that
“neurotic mothers create unfit children” (Winfield 78). The notion circulating at the time
that all women were pacifists also lead to a fear that women would emasculate their male
children, a danger espoused by Teddy Roosevelt himself who placed the blame for unfit
soldiers squarely at the feet of their mothers. And, as the military sought to sell
Americans on a war that wasn't terribly popular throughout the country, the relationships
between mothers and sons gained new national importance, an example of a situation
where Cynthia Enloe sees that women-as-mothers can “make governments quake” (11).
While Claude's relationship with his mother is rewarding and perhaps the only one that
provides him any solace in Nebraska, his fearful effeminacy could also be attributed to
the fact that he is his mother's favorite son. The power of this relationship will only fade
away when Claude joins the army and goes overseas, insinuating that his final
detachment from his mother is only possible when Claude becomes the appropriately
masculine soldier, and that military service constitutes the final stage in his personal
development into manhood. An important step in this process would be the soldier's
relationship with the afore mentioned “good woman,” who absorbs and deflects the
Oedipal desire for a mother without threatening male masculinity through female
sexuality (Thewelweit 100). That Claude encounters Olive, his own “good woman,” after
he has separated himself from his mother and joined the armed services reiterates the
power of ideological fantasies of manhood as they were attributed to wartime
participation before World War I.

224
Mrs. Wheeler's personal role in Claude's perceptions of the war and their part in
his eventual wartime service are similarly complex, though her part in his decision to
enlist and her reaction to his death have received a great deal of critical attention. The
majority of such arguments focus on the final pages of the book, where Mrs. Wheeler's
thoughts on the death of her son set the tone that many hoped would reveal whether or
not the book was to be taken as an ironic portrayal of the war, or as a romantic ode to
masculinity and war-making. Critics who follow either interpretation seem to find much
that supports their opinion. The “intimate scene of quite grief” that takes place in “a
Nebraska farmer's kitchen” is contrasted, in Steven Trout's opinion, with the “epic vistas
of American crusaders crossing the Atlantic,” and indeed this contrast has led many
critics to wonder exactly how to take Mrs. Wheeler's words (58). Both Mrs. Wheeler and
Mahailey “work together in the farmhouse” where “the thought of him is always there,
beyond everything else, at the farthest edge of consciousness” (457). Mrs. Wheeler's
imaginations upon his death, that somewhere in France her son had “found his place”
(457) are contrasted starkly in the “dark months that followed” where only his letters
offered her comfort (458). Though she “can see nothing that has come of it all but evil”
she also believes “he must have found his life” in his military service (458). Stories of
other “heroes of that war” who have survived, only to commit suicide in the years after
the war lead her to feel “as if God saved him from some horrible suffering, some horrible
end” (458). She knows that her son was one who “could ill bear disillusion” and who
would have been crushed by the minimal impact the war had in the world in comparison
to his passionate idealization of the conflict (459). These paradoxical sentiments, that

225
Claude's death has somehow protected him from later disillusionment, and that the war
had no real positive impact on the world, have fueled debate regarding exactly how it is
that Cather wants the war to be remembered, and in what way the war did or did not
effect American society.
For those whose experiences in the war would be decidedly negative, this
epilogue would be read as justification for seemingly senseless wartime slaughter, and
critical reception of the novel at that time concurred for the most part. Even today Mrs.
Wheeler's words are often interpreted as supportive of militaristic notions of violence and
its importance in the development of an appropriate masculinity. Joseph Urgo writes that
his loss “is turned into a secret triumph. At home in Nebraska Claude's mother has
accepted the death of her son as a part of the cult of the fallen soldier” (164). And Steven
Trout writes that “Mrs. Wheeler's faith that her son's ideals were 'beautiful beliefs to die
with' implicates her in the social structure that continues to perpetuate warmongering”
(178). On the other hand, contrasting opinions are not without support either. Linda
Williams believes that “Claude's mother...bids farewell to romanticism and ushers in a
new world” and goes on to say that the final scene reveals how “ultimately heroes don't
survive: women do” (147). The absence of any men in the final pages, including the
noticeable absence of Claude's father and brothers, supports the notion that war only kills
men, it doesn't help to make them. Steven Trout goes on to suggest that Mrs. Wheeler has
turned the “Cult of Patriotic Motherhood” inside out in those final pages with her bitter
take on the war's outcome (55), while John Anders sees this scene as critical not just of
militarism, but of masculinity in general when it bases itself on the “the twin violences of

226
war and misogyny” (74). In essence, what these conflicting critical interpretations
struggle to uncover is whether or not Mrs. Wheeler is a traditional “patriotic mother,” and
if so, how her political feelings reflect upon the book as a whole.
But what few have noticed about this ongoing argument is how Mrs. Wheeler's
voice at the end of the novel highlights the importance of military mothers in the war's
aftermath, something that Cather would have seen firsthand. By analyzing her situation
within the text as a patriotic mother, and in a social environment that sought to reward
such women, a much more interesting and complex interpretation of Mrs. Wheeler is
possible. This also necessitates a reading of how Mrs. Wheeler herself imagines the war,
and her son's role in it, not just in those final pages but throughout the text. That the final
words of the novel belong to Mrs. Wheeler also reveal the military's powerful
incorporation of women-as-mothers when they seek to garner support for military
conflict, and political pressures in the post-war environment that demanded recognition
of their personal losses. Linda Williams comes perhaps closest to this revelation when
she suggests that “Claude's story is flanked by women's voices, by mothers” (147), but
the specific importance of Mrs. Wheeler's role as a postwar military mother is not
addressed. Kurt Piehler's study of postwar memorials reveals that the increasing social
and political power of women in the early twentieth-century would actually be
compounded by the social popularity of military mothers. “Gold Star Mothers,” so named
because they were urged to display a gold star instead of wearing the traditional black
garb when their son died at war, “served as the theme of many speeches and poems
commemorating the First World War, and monuments were erected in their honor” (102).

227
Gold Star Mothers' societies lobbied successfully for a federally sponsored pilgrimage to
Europe for mothers to see the graves of their sons buried overseas, leading the
administrations of Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize and fund the
pilgrimages from 1931 to 1933, regardless of the Great Depression and its economic
impact at the time (Piehler 102). The growing political solidarity among Gold Star
Mothers would be delicately handled and their wishes fulfilled based on growing
concerns that with the right to vote women would have a greater say in the doings of their
own state. At the same time, this validation of women who had lost their sons at war was
paradoxically contrary to the prevailing notion that women's losses could not compare to
the experiences of the men who had served. That Willa Cather would dedicate the final
passages of the novel to Claude's mother reveals her understanding of the impact of the
war on these women and simultaneously reiterates the unpopular idea that every war is
also a woman's war, that women suffer alongside men, even if they are barred from active
military service.
As I have stated, the answer to Mrs. Wheeler's feelings about the war and her
son's participation and death lies not in the final pages of the novel, where much of the
criticism has focused, but early on when her own political interest collides with her son's
decision to enlist. This creates a necessarily complicated relationship between her role as
a member of her state and her love of her son, revealing that simple images of the
Patriotic Mother are insufficient representations that fail to encompass the real
experiences of these women. In the end, when she must cope with the loss of her son,
Mrs. Wheeler is neither symbolic of the anti-war pacifist, nor the pro-war patriotic

228
mother. She is a real woman who must reconcile her own tragedy with her son's personal
decision to enlist in a war she too had believed in. While the advent of the war had led
Mrs. Wheeler to take a special interest in the conflict – including the map in her study,
and her avid reading of local newspapers – when Claude announces his decision to join
the army her reaction isn't one of pride, it's one of terror. “She remained sitting at the
foot of the deserted breakfast table. She was not crying. Her eyes were utterly sightless.
Her back so stooped that she seemed to be bending under a burden” (235). Later, when
she tries to discuss his orders with him, the rumors of German submarines deployed to
sink transports full of American soldiers before they can land in France is a thought so
frightening, she is rendered utterly speechless and again, blind, “the thought of transports
going down with thousands of young men on board is something so terrible -' she put her
hands quickly over her eyes” (256). This symbol of sightlessness, of having been
emotionally and physically blinded by terror is once again carried out in their final scene
together, where Mrs. Wheeler must bid farewell to her son for the last time:
She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to the window; he
was vaulting down the hill as fast as he could go. He jumped into the car beside
his father...As they neared the crest of the hill, Claude stood up in the car and
looked back at the house, waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained
her sight, but her tears blurred everything...'Old eyes,' she cried, 'why do you
betray me? Why do you cheat me of my last sight of my splendid son!'” (263).

Notably Mrs. Wheeler keeps her fears to herself, belying the popular notion that women
who were overly attached to their sons would prevent the enlistment of able-bodied
soldiers. Her struggle to support her son's decision, her belief in the importance of the
conflict itself, and her own fear that she will never see her son again establish in Mrs.
Wheeler a type of courage that validates the experiences of all “patriotic mothers.” It also

229
succeeds in complicating the simple binaries attached to these women, namely that
“good” mothers are proud to see their son go to war, and “bad” mothers will prevent their
son's enlistment in the armed services.
Significantly, there is one other major scene where blindness, darkness, and fear
come together; when Claude asks his mother to read to him from Paradise Lost:
“A dungeon, on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed; yet from the flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe” (87).

Just as Mrs. Wheeler's complex feelings about the war and her son's death defy easy
critical analyses of women and war in One of Ours, Milton's iconic description of
blindness and Hell offers readers several different interpretations. It could be read as the
hell experienced by soldiers at war, or the hell of Claude's life in Nebraska before he
finds his cause. But in terms of Mrs. Wheeler, whose love of her son is the single guiding
principle of her life, there is no hell like the loss of Claude, even as she must accept his
personal happiness upon enlistment. If before his “chagrins” had “shrivelled” her, then in
his absence she finds only “darkness visible,” referenced again by those “dark months”
that followed in the wake of his death. Her final words are indeed bitter; the war is, as she
calls it, “evil” and her only comfort is that Claude did not return home to kill himself, as
did others of her recollection. Yet her comfort in this knowledge contrasts with her
understanding of what the war meant for Claude. Her knowledge that he believed in his
mission, that he “found his place,” leaves readers with no easy interpretations of women,
particularly as mothers, and war. By leaving the final pages of the book to Mrs. Wheeler,
and refusing to construct her as an easily categorized figure in the post-war environment,

230
Cather actually succeeds in connecting Evangeline Wheeler's situation to the thousands
of mothers who lost their sons to World War I without simplifying their experiences or
attributing any particular political interpretation to their personal tragedy.
Contrary to the efforts of literary critics both today and at the time of its
publication, One of Ours is certainly not a clear-cut war text designed to convey a single
message. From a feminist perspective its representation of female characters, both from
within the memoirs of soldiers at war and through Cather's handling of women like
Evangeline Wheeler, is rich with meaning. The complex interactions between the men
and women in One of Ours reveals the powerful impact of shifting modes of gender,
power, and sexuality in America on young men whose enlistment in the armed services
was posited as the solution to their growing cultural fears. Her portrayal of the
masculinist nature of war, both as the source of Claude's final triumph and in its
superficial construction as a heroic ideal, makes it easier to see why Cather would later
become famous for calling the war a “great catastrophe,” claiming that the world “broke
in two” (639) because of World War I, and yet referred to the enlisted men as “God's
soldiers” and offered her services to the Red Cross (Harris 639). She herself believed in
the importance of America's participation in the conflict, yet her reading of soldier's
memoirs and representation of G.P. Cather's life and death are not without a sense of
grief if not outright disillusionment. Finally, One of Ours is a remarkable text in which
Willa Cather writes twentieth-century American masculinity as a cultural phenomenon
perceived to be in great danger, particularly when faced with the growing independence
of women. By examining this text with modern militarism and the evolution of gender

231
roles in mind, Willa Cather's One of Ours facilitates a fuller understanding of how
American participation in global conflict designs notions of selfhood within the State for
men and women. And though it was not considered a valid war text by the critical
establishment upon its publication, it is a novel that interacts with social politics of power
and sexuality, with perceptions of nation and state, and reveals how those perceptions are
filtered into American literature.

232
Chapter Four Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000.

Anders, John P. Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary
Tradition.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Banner, Lois W. American Beauty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Barillas, William. The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the
American Heartland. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge,1990.

Cather, Willa. One of Ours. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1922.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977.

Dyer, Richard. White. London: Routledge, 1997.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Fahy, Thomas. Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Goldman, Dorothy. Women Writers and the Great War. New York: Twayne Publishers,
1995.

Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice
Versa.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Halbwachs, Maurice and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory. Chicago: The
Universityof Chicago, 1992.

Harris, Richard C. “Textual Essay.” Willa Cather: One of Ours. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006. 801-833.

233

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942.

---. Writing was Everything. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Lee, Hermione. Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

Lewis, Sinclair. “A Hamlet of the Plains.” Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James
Shroeter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. 25.

Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia University
Press,1999.

Mencken, H.L. “One of Ours.” Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James Shroeter. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1967. 10.

Middleton, Jo Ann. Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique.
Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1990.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.

Ogden, Annegret S. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner,
1776-1986. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Ouditt, Sharon. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First
World War.London: Routledge, 1994.

Piehler, G. Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995.

Potter, Jane. “'A Great Purifier': The Great War and Women's Romances and Memoirs,
1914-1918.” Women's Fiction and the Great War. Ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi
Tate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 85-107.

Reynolds, Guy. Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1996.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2004.

Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American
Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

234

Rossen, Janice, Women Writing Modern Fiction: A Passion for Ideas. New York:
Palgrave, 2003.

Russell, Danielle. Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and
Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Sanders, Julie. “A World Broken in Two: The Writing of the European War in Willa
Cather's One of Ours and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.” Willa Cather and her
European Cultural Influences. Ed. Helen May Dennis. Lewiston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 1996. 79-97.

Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Stouck, David. Willa Cather's Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and her World. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2000.

Thompson, Stephanie Lewis. Influencing America's Tastes: Realism in the Works of
Wharton, Cather & Hurst. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Trout, Stephen. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Urgo, Joseph R. Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in
AmericanCulture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

---. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1995.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Willa Cather. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Williams, Deborah Lindsay. Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale,
and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Wilson, Edmund. “One of Ours.” Willa Cather and her Critics. Ed. James Schroeter.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. 25.

235
Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1987.

---. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art. New York: Western Publishing Company
Inc., 1970.

236
Comprehensive Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000.

Anders, John P. Willa Cather's Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary
Tradition.Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Banner, Lois. American Beauty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Barillas, William. The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the
American Heartland. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Bem, Sandra Lipsitz. The Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Sexual
Inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Bergmann, Barbara R. The Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great
War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Braudy, Leo. From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of
Masculinity. New York: Knopf, 2003.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York:
Routledge,1990.

Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.
Canfield-Fisher, Dorothy. The Deepening Stream. New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1930.

Cather, Willa. One of Ours. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1922.

Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular
Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution
And Female Aspiration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

237
Cooke, Miriam. Women and the War Story. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1996.

Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Davidson, Roger and Lesley Hall. “Introduction.” Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal
Disease and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley
Hall. London: Routledge, 2001. 1-15.

Dawson, Graham. Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of
Masculinities. London: Routledge, 1994.

Dombrowski, Nicole Ann. “Soldiers, Saints or Sacrificial Lambs? Women's Relationship
to Combat and the Fortification of the Home Front in the Twentieth Century.”
Women and War in the Twentieth Century: Enlisted With or Without Consent. Ed.
Nicole Ann Dombrowski. New York, Garland 1999. 1-30.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1977.

Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York:
Pantheon, 1986.

Dyer, Richard. White. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Eby, Carl. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. New
York: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Introduction. . Male Fantasies. Vol 2. By Klaus Thewelweit.
Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989. v-xvii.

Ehrhardt, Julia C. Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona Gale, Dorothy
Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder-Lane, and Josephine Herbst. Columbia,
University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s
Lives. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.

Esperjesi, John. The Imperialist Imaginary: Visions of Asia and the Pacific in American
Culture. New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2005.

238
Fahy, Thomas. Freak Shows and the Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Fetterly, Judith. “Hemingway’s ‘Resentful Cryptogram.’” Critical Essays on Ernest
Heminway’s A Farewell to Arms. Ed. George Monteiro. New York: G.K.
Hall & Co., 1994. 117-129.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day,
1966.

Frantzen, Allen J. Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press,
1975.

Gibson, Mary. Prostitution and the State in Italy: 1860-1915. Ohio, Ohio State
University Press, 1999.

Gilbert, Sandra & Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer
in the 20
th
Century, Vol 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994.

Goldman, Dorothy, Jane Gledhill, and Judith Hattaway. Women Writers and the Great
War. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and
Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Goodman, Philomena. Women, Sexuality and War. New York, Palgrave, 2002.

Group, Thetis and Joan Roberts. Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical
Monopoly: Historical Perspectives on Gendered Inequality in Roles, Rights,
and Range of Practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Halbwachs, Maurice and Lewis A. Coser. On Collective Memory. Chicago: The
Universityof Chicago, 1992.

Handley, William R. and Nathaniel Lewis. “Introduction.” True West: Authenticity and
the American West. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 1-20.

Hanley, Lynne. Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1991.

239
Haralson, Eric. Henry James and Queer Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003.

Harker, Jaime. America the Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism, and
Middlebrow Authorship Between the Wars. Amherst: the University of
Massachusetts Press, 2007.

Harris, Richard C. “Textual Essay.” Willa Cather: One of Ours. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2006. 801-833.

Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s.
Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.

Hayes, Alfred. The Girl on the Via Flaminia., New York: Pocket Books, 1949.
Haytock, Jennifer. At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American
Literature. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929.
Higgins, Lynn A. “Sexual Fantasies and War Memories: Claude Simon’s Narratology.”
Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993. 249-260.

Hobson, Barbara Meil. Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the
American Reform Tradition. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Idema, Henry. Freud, Religion and the Roaring Twenties: A Pyschoanalytic Theory
of Secularization in Three Novels: Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publications, 1990.

Kaplan, Louise. Cultures of Fetishism. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1942.

---. Writing was Everything. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century
America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

240
Kilcup, Karen L. “Introduction: A Conversation on Nineteenth-Century American
Women’s Writing.” Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A
Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. 1-15.

Kleinberg, S.J. Women in the United States, 1830-1945. New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 1999.

Ladd-Taylor, Molly and Lauri Umansky. “Introduction.” “Bad” Mothers: The Politics
Of Blame in Twentieth-Century America. Ed. Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri
Umansky. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 1-31.

---. Mother Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1994.

Lee, Hermione. Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon Books, 1989.

Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race & Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the
British Empire. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Lewis, Sinclair. “A Hamlet of the Plains.” Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James
Shroeter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. 25.

Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia University
Press,1999.

Longmire, Linda and Lisa Merrill. “Introduction.” Untying the Tongue: Gender, Power
And the Word. Ed. Linda Longmire and Lisa Merrill. Connecticut: Hofstra
University, 1998. 1-6.

Mangan, J.A. Superman Supreme: Fascist Body as Political Icon – Global Fascism.
London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2000.

Matthews, Jean. The Rise of the New Woman: the Women's Movement in America 1875-
1930. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee Publishing, 2003.

Mencken, H.L. “One of Ours.” Willa Cather and Her Critics. Ed. James Shroeter. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1967. 10.

Michel, Sonya. “Danger on the Home Front: Motherhood, Sexuality, and Disabled
Veterans in American Postwar Films.” Gendering War Talk. Ed. Miriam Cooke
and Angela Woollacott. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 260-283.

241
Middleton, Jo Ann. Willa Cather's Modernism: A Study of Style and Technique.
Rutherford: Associated University Presses, 1990.

O'Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987.

Ogden, Annegret S. The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner,
1776-1986. Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Ouditt, Sharon. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First
World War.London: Routledge, 1994.

Pettipiece, Dierdre Anne. Sex Theories and the Shaping of Two Moderns: Hemingway
And H.D. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Phillips, Kathy. Manipulating masculinity : War and Gender in Modern British and
American Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2006.

Piehler, G. Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Washington: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1995.

Porter, Marilyn. Home, Work and Class Consciousness. Oxford: Manchester University
Press, 1983.

Potter, Jane. Boys in Khaki, Girls in Print: Women’s Literary Responses to the Great
War 1914-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005.

---. “'A Great Purifier': The Great War and Women's Romances and Memoirs, 1914-
1918.” Women's Fiction and the Great War. Ed. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi
Tate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 85-107.

Reynolds, Guy. Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1996.

Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2004.

Rosowski, Susan J. Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American
Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Ross, Patricia A. The Spell Cast by Remains: The Myth of Wilderness in Modern
American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Rossen, Janice, Women Writing Modern Fiction: A Passion for Ideas. New York:
Palgrave, 2003.

242

Russell, Danielle. Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space, and
Identity in Willa Cather and Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Sanders, Julie. “A World Broken in Two: The Writing of the European War in Willa
Cather's One of Ours and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.” Willa Cather and her
European Cultural Influences. Ed. Helen May Dennis. Lewiston: The Edwin
Mellen Press, 1996. 79-97.

Sauertaig, Lutz. “The Fatherland is in Danger, Save the Fatherland!: Venereal Disease,
Sexuality and Gender in Imperial and Weimar Germany.” Sex, Sin and Suffering:
Venereal Desease and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and
Lesley Hall. London: Routledge, 2001. 76-93.

Scheese, Don. Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Routledge,
2002.

Sharistanian, Janet. “Introduction: Women’s Lives in the Public and Domestic Spheres.”
Beyond the Public/Domestic Dichotomy: Contemporary Perspectives on Women’s
Public Lives. Ed. Janet Sharistanian. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 1-11.

Sherry, Vincent. The Great War and the Language of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003.

Showlater, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte
To Lessing. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. Axes: Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2007.

Steele, Valerie. Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996.

Stouck, David. Willa Cather's Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and her World. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2000.

Swensen, Kristine. Medical Women and Victorian Fiction. Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2005.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians: The Definitive Edition. London: Continuum,
2002.

243

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Vol 2. Trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Thompson, Stephanie Lewis. Influencing America's Tastes: Realism in the Works of
Wharton, Cather & Hurst. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-
1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Trout, Stephen. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Urgo, Joseph R. Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in
AmericanCulture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991.

---. Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1995.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Willa Cather. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction.” Hemingway
And Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Ed. Lawrence Broer and
Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. 54-69.

Wanrooij, Bruno. “The Thorns of Love.” Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Desease
and European Society Since 1870. Ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley Hall.
London: Routledge, 2001. 137-160.

Warren, Joyce. “Fracturing Gender: Woman’s Economic Independence.” Nineteenth-
Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup.
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers,
1998. 146-164.

Washington, Ida H. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Vermont: The New England
Press, 1982.

Williams, Deborah Lindsay. Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale,
and the Politics of Female Authorship. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Wilson, Edmund. “One of Ours.” Willa Cather and her Critics. Ed. James Schroeter.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. 25.

244
Winfield, Ann Gibson. Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and
the Implications of History, Ideology and Memory. New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2007.

Wolff, Tamsen. Mendel's Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century
AmericanDrama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1987.

---. Willa Cather: Her Life and Art. New York: Western Publishing Company
Inc., 1970.

Yellin, Emily. Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During
World War II. New York: Free Press, 2004.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Domestic topographies: gender and the house in the nineteenth-century British novel

PDF

Errant maternity: threatening femininity in Caribbean discourses of family, nation, and revolution

PDF

Between homes: moving house in the Victorian novel and popular culture; and, Heroine (poems)

PDF

Mercy and metaphor: the empathy era and its discontents

PDF

Let us fake out a frontier: dissent and the settler colonial imaginary in U.S. literature after 1945

Asset Metadata

Creator Park Suarez, Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Going beyond the victory garden: War, gender, and women of national concern

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 05/05/2011

Defense Date 03/22/2011

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag A farewell to arms,Alfred Hayes,American Literature,domestic literature,Dorothy Fisher,Ernest Hemingway,middlebrow literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,One of ours,twentieth century literature,war literature,Willa Cather,women in literature,women in twentieth century literature

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Banner, Lois (committee member), Modleski, Tania (committee member)

Creator Email efp@usc.edu,elizabeth.park.suarez@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3916

Unique identifier UC1326274

Identifier etd-Suarez-4572 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-473992 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3916 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Suarez-4572.pdf

Dmrecord 473992

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Park Suarez, Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu