American Women Writers and the First World War

American Women Writers and the FirstWorld War

Elizabeth Nolan*Manchester Metropolitan University

Abstract

Traditionally, the literary representation of the First World War has been the preserveof the male author. In particular, it is the account of the combat experienced soldier,most often the English soldier poets, which has been privileged. For more than twodecades, however, critics have been actively engaged in establishing a more inclusivecanon of war literature along gendered and national lines. Feminist scholars, inparticular, have vigorously explored the complex intersection between war, writingand gender, recovering and re-evaluating women’s narratives of war, recognisingthem as important literary, social and historical documents. This article will addressboth gendered and national concerns, offering an overview of importantdevelopments in the study of American women’s writings from the First WorldWar. It will also engage with current critical debates which address issues such asthe development of distinctly female modernisms and the presentation of warthrough the female gaze.

Traditionally, the literary representation of the First World War has beenthe preserve of the male author. In particular, it is the account of the combatexperienced soldier which has been privileged. The English poets,WilfredOwen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, are the figures most oftenassociated, in the popular imagination, with the authentic war text. In recentyears, however, a significant body of scholarship has sought to redefine thisnarrow canon of war literature arguing for the inclusion of variedmodes of representation including: poetry, prose, letters, diaries and journals,autobiography, journalism, photography and film from an equally diverserange of contributors. Contemporary studies of First World War literatureare likely to recognise both the combatant and non-combatant as author ofthe war text, to examine imaginative engagements with conflict as well asthose informed by first-hand experience of the battle zone and to takeaccount of perspectives determined by nationality, political orientation andgender. The most recent publication in the field serves as an illustration ofthis trend. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War(2005), edited by Vincent Sherry, is ambitious in scope, engaging withBritish, French, German and American literatures. Contributors draw on awide range of texts, from the poetic to the cinematic, to explore issues which© 2007 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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include British women’s written responses, the impact of the conflict onthe European avant-garde and the war’s relationship to literary modernism. Asection entitled ‘Postwar Engagements’ addresses the legacy of the GreatWar and its resonance in representations throughout the twentieth centuryand beyond.

This article will bring together two strands of recent critical debate,examining reconsiderations of the war text according to national andgendered concerns. Its particular focus will be developments in the study ofAmerican women’s writings from the First World War. The Americancontext is of interest here due to the country’s unique relation to the conflict,one which is determined both by geographical distance from the battlefieldsof Europe and late entry into the fighting. John T. Matthews, whocontributes an essay on American literature of the Great War to theCambridge companion, recognises the particular significance of ‘texts’ asmediators of the war experience for a distanced American populace:

The American side of the Great War necessarily relied on institutions ofrepresentation – journalism, print propaganda, fiction, sermons – to make thewar real in the place where it was not occurring. In important respects, Americanwriting of the war was the war. (217)

Matthews offers an interesting account of the effects of the European conflictand ongoing debates about American intervention on the domestic politicaland social scene in the lead up to American engagement. He considers theways in which these concerns were articulated by American writers, notingthat artists disillusioned with modern American society including ArthurTrain, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Edith Wharton, imaginedthe regenerative possibilities of war to reverse the ‘moral and social decline’of the nation. His discussion of later American war writing is morepredictable, focusing almost entirely on an examination of the disillusionmentevident in the work of the so called ‘lost generation’ writers whose canonicalstatus is second only to the English soldier poets. It should be acknowledged,however, that when trying to encompass the entire body of Americanliterature of the First World War within a single article, limitations areinevitable.

Matthews’s treatment of women’s literary engagements with the war doesinclude a discussion of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. In much pre-1980sliterary criticism, these two female artists are the only recognised Americanfemale commentators on war and are often paired. Their shared appreciationof French culture and advocacy of American military intervention has,however, resulted in the frequent dismissal of their writings as merepropagandist tracts. Invariably, they are cited as producers of inferior andinsubstantial war literature due to their gendered ‘outsider’ status. FrederickJ. Hoffman, for example, writing in 1962, specifically refers to Wharton’sThe Marne (1918) and Cather’s One of Ours (1922), describing them asthe ‘worst kind of contrivance . . . remote from other contemporaryaccounts . . . [with] descriptions of battles [that are] secondhand’ (70). In

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common with several early critics, Hoffman’s interpretation of women’sliterature of war is extremely narrow and focuses attention on relatively fewtexts – only those which overtly engage with the war. In fact, in additionto their obvious ‘war texts’, both Wharton and Cather authored worksduring wartime which have settings distant in time, space and subject matterfrom the conflict, but whose composition is undoubtedly informed by eventsof the period. Wharton’s novel Summer (1917) is set in pre-war New Englandand Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) in the nineteenth-century West, but inboth, the shadow of war looms large. For these women the First WorldWar also had long-term implications for the development of their writingpractices, but the legacy of war, evident in the work of both writers fromthe 1920s and beyond, is only now beginning to be addressed as will bediscussed later in the article.

One of the most significant developments in the study of war repre-sentation has been the work done by feminist critics who, for the past twodecades, have been actively engaged in contesting the assumption thatwomen have neither the authority nor the ability to write anythingworthwhile about war. In their efforts to displace the male voice, and moreparticularly that of the combat soldier, as the only voice of war, scholars haveexplored the complex intersection between war, writing and gender. Theyhave considered the wider social and cultural implications of modern,universal conflict and have recovered and re-evaluated women’s narrativesof war, recognising them as important literary, social and historicaldocuments. Their work is revisionist in its intent, writing women into ahistory from which they have traditionally been absent or excluded. Feministcriticism establishes women as recorders of, and respondents to conflicts andwars – significant events which necessarily affect, not only the combatant,but all members of societies and nations who live through them. Severalanthologies of women’s war writings have been published including: YvonneM. Klein’s Beyond the Home Front: Autobiographical Writing of the Two WorldWars (1997); Sayre P. Sheldon’s Her War Story: Twentieth Century WomenWrite About War (1999); and Angela K. Smith’s Women’s Writing of the FirstWorld War: An Anthology (2000). This article will survey the body ofscholarship on women’s written responses to the war which has beenundertaken throughout the past two decades and will provide an overviewof current critical debate which addresses issues including the developmentof distinctly female modernisms in wartime and the presentation of warthrough the female gaze.

The study of American women’s literary engagements with the 1914–18European conflict is most often directed by this focus on the relationshipbetween gender and war. The widely held assumption that all women,regardless of nationality, occupy an outsider or ‘other’ position in war andthat their writings express a similar set of concerns has resulted in Americanwomen’s works being considered alongside those of their British counterpartsand more recently the writings of women from other European countries


American Women Writers and the First World War . 527

and those from Canada,Australia and New Zealand. Issues which are widelyrecognised as common to the writings composed by women in time of warinclude: the possibilities for a renegotiation of traditional gendered identitiesduring periods of social upheaval – sometimes framed as a ‘battle of thesexes’; the role of propaganda in constructing and directing wartime genderedroles and behaviours; issues of authority in female authors positioningthemselves as commentators on the masculine business of war; and theliterary forms available to women for expression of their experience ofconflict. Commenting on the concerns shared by women across nationalboundaries, for example, Jean E. Kennard has noted the international natureof the ‘Women’s Peace Party’. In ‘Feminism, Pacifism and World War I’,she examines similarities between pacifist/feminist connections in the writingsof American social reformer Jane Addams and her suffragist compatriotCarrie Chapman Catt and those evident in the memoirs of English, Swedish,Dutch and Canadian women. Critics of women’s war literature alsofrequently examine similarities in the approaches women writers use in theirresponses to wars of various eras, so American women’s writings of the GreatWar are discussed alongside artistic engagements with the Second WorldWar and the Vietnam War. As such, treatments of American women’swritings of the First World War are often contained in discrete chapterswithin collections and volumes which by their nature, and often by theireditors’ admission, are selective. There is, to date, no single volume dedicatedto exploring the range of American female responses. And yet the range iswide, the approaches diverse and the representations often informed byconcerns particular to the United States.

Many American women produced First World War narratives. Theyinclude women from a range of regions, backgrounds and political positions,both professional writers and private individuals. I have already mentionedthe writings of established authors Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, artistswho were already interested in the position of the woman in a changingsociety and who now engaged with issues of gender in a wartime context.Other important works include The Forbidden Zone, a fragmentary,experimental nurse’s narrative by Mary Borden, and four volumes ofeye-witness testimony from Mildred Aldrich, a writer and editor who retiredto an isolated house overlooking the Marne only to find herself a close-rangespectator of the bloody First World War battle which took place there.1

Other American novelists who engaged in literary interpretations of theconflict include Gertrude Atherton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and MarieVan Vorst.2 Alongside these are the numerous war narratives of Americanwomen who did not have literary careers. The Imperial War Museum inLondon, for example, holds papers which detail the war experiences of anumber of women from the United States: Mrs Gladys Winterbottom, acharity worker in Belgium; Carolyn Clarke, a nurse’s aide in a Frenchmilitary hospital; and Miss A Peck, who operated a mobile canteen whichserved trench soldiers. Some of these women, like Willa Cather, spent their



wars at home, composing imaginative interpretations of the conflict, others,including Wharton, Canfield Fisher,Van Vorst and the women listed abovetravelled to the European front recording their experience of witnessingbattle at first hand or participating in war-related work. Some of the writingis informed by the politics of pacifism and some motivated by propagandistintent. These are women who expressed themselves variously in poetry,prose, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, treatise, the novel, the short story,and in the private diary and the journal. Whatever forms their response towar take, each of these women is involved, to some extent, in transgressingsignificant, socially recognised boundaries. For some the boundaries crossedare literary as women go beyond form and subject matter deemedappropriately ‘feminine’ to author war texts – an encroachment intoexclusively masculine literary territory. For others, the front line medics andrelief workers in particular, the lines crossed are both literary and literal –those between the conventional female narrative and the representation ofwar, but also those between home and front.

As noted, only in recent years has the complex and multiform nature ofAmerican women’s written responses to the First World War been recognisedby scholars. During the 1980s and 1990s a wide ranging feminist engagementwith the study of war literature emerged to challenge to the male-orientedview of the war text. An overview of the major critical studies will be offeredhere.

One of the first feminist critics to take up the issue of gender and warwas Sandra M. Gilbert who, in her essay ‘Soldier’s Heart: Literary Men,Literary Women and the Great War’, published in 1983, figures the conflictas a ‘battle of the sexes’. Gilbert recognises the First World War as an historicevent which afforded women significant opportunities:

women in the terrible war years of 1914–18 would seem to have had . . .something to gain: a place in public history, a chance, even, to make history . . .For, of course, when their men folk went off to the trenches to be literally andfiguratively shattered, the women on the home front literally and figurativelyrose to the occasion and replaced them in farms and factories. (287)

She refers to photographs of women held in the Imperial War Museumarchives, ‘Liberated from parlors and petticoats alike, trousered ‘war girls’beam as they shovel coal, shoe horses, fight fires, drive buses, chop downtrees, make shells, dig graves’ (287). Her discussion of the literature of theperiod traces women writers’ explorations of the possibilities of war forfacilitating liberation from socially imposed constraints and the hostility andresentment evident in much male-authored literature to what was interpretedas women’s profiting at the expense of male suffering.

In 1987 Gilbert’s essay was reprinted in one of the first comprehensiveconsiderations of war and gender. Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two WorldWars, is an interdisciplinary study which takes as its organising principle theidentification of wars as ‘events of gender politics’. Clear in its aim to explorethe ways in which ‘systems’ of gender respond to social change, the volume© 2007 The Author Literature Compass 4/3 (2007): 525–538, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2007.00424.xJournal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd


seeks not to offer an alternative female perspective of conflict but to examinere-negotiations of masculine and feminine identities and the relationshipbetween the two during periods of total war. Citing the blurring ofboundaries between home and front brought about by twentieth century‘[a]dvances in military technology and strategy’, the study examines the waysin which modern warfare touches the lives of all citizens regardless of gender.Contributors, who include scholars of history, literature, sociology andpsychology, consider the impact of war on women’s rights movements andwomen’s increased participation in the public sphere during wartime asmedics, munitions workers, and in auxiliary positions in the military. Waris discussed here in terms of an opportunity to challenge hierarchical genderrelationships, and is figured simultaneously as a period in which traditionalgender roles are reinforced through literary, social and political discourses.Propaganda, the ‘principal tool of governments seeking to mobilize peopleto assume unaccustomed roles’ is identified as one such discourse. Here itis implicated in the manipulation of the image of the woman for variousends, at once depicting her as the epitome of vulnerability in need of maleprotection whilst also, out of necessity, depicting the image of the capableworking woman – sanctioning gender behaviour which would previouslyhave been considered aberrant:

although wartime propaganda exhorted women to brave unfamiliar work, theseappeals were contained within a nationalist and militarist discourse that reinforcedpatriarchal, organicist notions of gender relations. It stipulated that women’s newroles were ‘only for the duration’ and that wives and mothers must make heroicsacrifices ‘for the nation in its time of need.’ Propaganda reminded female defenseworkers that they were not themselves – that is, ‘natural’ – but behavingtemporarily like men. (Higonnet et al. 7)

An essay in the volume by Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L. R.Higonnet, employs the effective metaphor of the ‘intertwined strands’ ofthe double helix to articulate the ‘paradoxical progress and regress’ ofwomen’s status during war noting that despite radical shifts in women’s rolesduring wartime, gendered ‘relationships of domination and subordinationare retained’ (8).

Following on from these pioneering studies, the 1990s saw a burgeoningof feminist re-readings of the war text, several of which took as their startingpoint one of the seminal volumes of First World War criticism, Paul Fussell’sThe Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Any survey of the study of theliterature of this period must acknowledge the importance of Fussell’scontribution to the field. As James Campbell, a contributor to the Cambridgecompanion points out, this 1975 volume is widely acknowledged as signallingthe point at which a major shift in critical approaches to the war text takesplace: ‘The book’s ambition and popularity move interpretation of the warfrom a relatively minor literary and historical specialization to a muchmore widespread cultural concern’ (267). Fussell’s achievement lies in hisrecognition of the ways in which modern culture and modern literary



consciousness are largely informed by the experience of the First WorldWar. The study does, indeed, as Campbell notes, ‘set the agenda’ (267) formuch of the criticism that follows. But in addition to broadening the scopeof inquiry, Fussell’s work has provoked significant negative response. Thisis due, in large part, to the fact that despite its ground-breaking approach,the text concentrates on the writings of soldier poets, identifying Sassoon,Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen as the authentic voiceof war.

The Great War and Modern Memory provides a point of reference for severalfeminist critics who, in their revisionist studies, take issue with Fussell’sexclusion of voices other than those of the combat soldier from therecognised body of war literature. Lynne Hanley, for example, offers anovert critique of the ‘stunningly narrow’, canon of war literature heestablishes. In Writing War: Fiction, Gender and Memory (1991), she claims:

for the most part Fussell’s premise that war literature is by and about men at thefront remains the operative premise in our identification of what poems,memoirs,and fictions constitute our literature on war . . . Over and over again we hearthe story of the white English or American soldier, as though his was the onlyreal human presence on the field of war. And this story is almost always told bythe soldier himself . . . Since women are presumed to be absent from war, theyare presumed to have no story to tell . . . Women are robbed of the authorityto express themselves on the subject of war because they are assumed not to bein war. (6)

As the title suggests, Claire M. Tylee’s, The Great War and Women’sConsciousness, published in 1990, also enters into dialogue with Fussell. Tyleeacknowledges the significance of his work, particularly in relation to theidea that modern ‘ironic’ understanding and modern culture originates inthe First World War, but she challenges the marginalisation of women inhis thesis. Her contention is that if the War is a ‘determinant of subsequentlife’ (6) and women are excluded from participation in its interpretation,then they are excluded from a ‘share in the formation of modern culture’(8). The war texts considered in this study include the writings of Americanwomen Ellen La Motte, Mary Borden and Enid Bagnold. Tylee is concernedwith the effects on women’s consciousness of war and war-related printmedia including journalism, propaganda and fiction. She is interested inwhether there is an ‘imaginative memory of the First World War which isdistinctively women’s’ and her study seeks to identify ‘what part women’swriting plays in the construction of a national culture’ (8).

Taking as its focus the construction and negotiation of female identity inpropagandist literature and images is Sharon Ouditt’s 1994 study, FightingForces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. Offeringreadings of fiction, pamphlets, magazines and women’s unpublished memoirs,this volume is organised into explorations of a range of female experiencesduring war as VAD nurses, munitions workers and mothers. Of particularinterest is the way in which Ouditt contests Sandra Gilbert’s interpretation



of the conflict as inducing a ‘topsy-turvy’ world in which women gain themeans to empower themselves and escape the traditional limitations ofgender. Instead she explores the complexities and difficulties that womenencountered in negotiating feminine identities in order to operate in thepublic sphere during war time. Ouditt’s rejection of the oppositionalapproach to readings of the war text along gender lines is shared by severalstudies published during the 1990s. Dorothy Goldman, Suzanne Raitt andTrudi Tate are amongst the scholars who advance debates about women’sliterary responses to war beyond the framework of a ‘battle of the sexes’.

Goldman, in an edited collection of essays and a study authored with JaneGledhill and Judith Hattaway, recognises the differences in men’s andwomen’s experience of the First World War.3 She is careful to acknowledgemen’s greater physical suffering in combat, but stakes a claim for the inclusionof women’s writings in the canon of war literature in the interests ofestablishing a comprehensive understanding of the conflict from allperspectives. Concerned with the literary forms available to both men andwomen in their representation of unprecedented experience, she also exploresthe particular difficulties women encounter in establishing a credible andauthoritative voice to articulate their war. In her own contribution to thevolume Goldman engages specifically with American women’s writtenresponses to the European conflict interpreting their wartime literary voiceas the exception to this trend – as one which identifies itself as ‘truly equal,indeed similar to that of men’ (9). ‘Eagles of the West’ cites Americanwomen’s geographical and political distance from events in Europe as thereason for the differences in tone between their writings and those of womenon the other side of Atlantic. Examining the wartime works of Willa Cather,Edith Wharton, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Mildred Aldrich, she notesthat their literature is motivated by an interest in the shift in gender politicsbrought about by world war: ‘The War changed American women’sperception of themselves, of men and of the future relationships betweenthe sexes, and American women writers charted the change’ (188).

In their introduction to Women’s Fiction and the Great War (1997) SuzanneRaitt and Trudi Tate express reservations about the type of literary criticismwhich seeks merely to oppose women’s experiences of and writings aboutwar with those of men:

some feminists are becoming slightly uneasy about writing separately aboutwomen as if women were a unified group, requiring special pleading; or as if‘woman’ were an unproblematic category for organizing knowledge. (2)

Their collection aims to challenge the assumption that women’s war writingsare informed primarily by issues of gender and instead to analyse differencesin female-authored responses to the war in terms of ‘political, philosophical,and aesthetic positions’. Contributions to the volume examine the work ofpacifists alongside those who occupied a pro-war stance. Considerations ofthe modernist writings of Gertrude Stein and H.D. share space with readings



of the wartime romances of little known writers including Berta Ruck andRuby M. Ayres.

As the twentieth century has drawn to a close critical interest in thediversity of literary responses to its most cataclysmic war has not diminishedand, in fact, vigorous scholarly debate about representations of the FirstWorld War continues into the new millennium. In 2001 Patrick J. Quinnand Steven Trout published The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered:Beyond Modern Memory. As the title suggests, contemporary revisionist studiescontinue to invoke Paul Fussel’s work. In terms of American women’s warliterature, this collection contains an essay by Mary R. Ryder which focuseson Wharton’s novel The Marne and Canfield’s volume of short stories HomeFires in France (1918). Ryder explores the authors’ desire to utilise theirwritings to achieve a common goal: ‘As two of the leading women writersof their day, Canfield and Wharton knew their reputations could serve themwell as propagandists for American participation in the First World War’(144). With aims similar to those of the Cambridge companion, Quinn andTrout’s book seeks to broaden understandings of the war text, consideringnational and gendered responses and paying attention to mediums ofexpression previously ignored in studies of war representation.

Recent years have also seen further critical approaches determined bygender and women’s position as the ‘other’ or outsider in time of war. AngelaK. Smith, for example, has examined the writings of British and Americanwomen, both professional authors and private individuals, to explore theways in which women, as well as men, might test the limits of representationand participate in the creation of experimental modernist narratives of war.4

Smith’s latest offering, Gender and Warfare in the Twentieth Century (2004)sets the First World War within the context of a century of conflict rightup to the current ‘war on terror’. Again, taking gender as its focus, thecollection examines constructions of masculinity and femininity in wartimethrough readings of literature and film produced by men and women,American and European.5 There has also, however, been a move towardsmore comprehensive treatments of the impact of the conflict on the workof individual female authors. Book length studies of the work of WillaCather, Edith Wharton, Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden are amongstrecent publications.

In 2001 Margaret Higonnet was responsible for reprinting selections fromThe Backwash of War (1916) and The Forbidden Zone (1929), the wartimenarratives of American women La Motte and Borden respectively. Theformer, a professional nurse from Baltimore and the latter, a wealthy Chicagosocialite turned medic, spent the First World War nursing wounded militarypersonnel in front line field hospitals. In her lengthy introduction Higonnetnotes the ‘stylistic innovation’ evident in the women’s accounts of theirexperience. She highlights the fragmentary nature of the texts and theshifting, unstable narrative voice which she suggests is directed towards‘break[ing] down the uniformity of an official, militarized, propagandist



view of the war’ (xxxii).‘Writing in the voice of the nurse’, Higonnet notes,‘enables La Motte and Borden to engage the central theme of the GreatWar: needless wounding and destruction’ (xx). Borden’s writing and thenarratives of female medics in general have been the focus of several recentstudies. In 2004, for example, Laurie Kaplan discusses The Forbidden Zonealongside Helena Zenna Smith’s Not so Quiet . . . : Stepdaughters of War(1930), examining their modernist experimentation with form and theiremployment of shockingly graphic descriptions of bodies mutilated by war.‘[T]he subtext of their war-writing’, she notes, ‘emphasizes the inadequacyof language and the ineffective simple-mindedness of a singular form’ (35).Kaplan also considers the ways in which Borden and Smith’s bold wartexts challenge assumptions about the form and subject matter deemed‘appropriate’ for women authors.

Steven Trout’s Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War(2002), offers a re-evaluation of Cather’s war related fictions, focusing onthe novels One of Ours (1922), and The Professor’s House (1925). With theintention to counter the negative criticism the earlier work has consistentlyattracted,Trout puts forward a persuasive argument to suggest that thenovel has a greater complexity than has previously been acknowledged.Highlighting the minimal authorial commentary and the unreliable narrationsuggested by multiple, contradictory perspectives, Trout re-examines thetext’s relation to literary modernism. In this original approach to Cather’swork,Trout situates One of Ours within the context of American militarycommemorations through a discussion of various public monuments andshrines. He identifies the text as a ‘war memorial in prose’, part of thenation’s attempt to assimilate and interpret the conflict experience, whichdraws much of its imagery from the ‘iconography of remembrance’ (8). Hegoes on, however, to evoke the sense of ‘modernist ambiguity’ he hasidentified in the writing to figure Cather’s response as a collapsing of such‘iconography’, an exploration of the instability of the meaning of war.Commentary on the later novel examines its concentration on the aftermathof war and the implications for Western civilization, intellectualism andscientific enquiry. Trout discusses the way in which the novel interrogateshistorical narratives and highlights the significance of Cather’s use of silence,suggesting that ‘the thing not named’ in The Professor’s House is, in fact, theFirst World War. A similar reappraisal of an American woman’s writtenresponse to the First World War is offered by Julie Olin-Ammentorp inEdith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004). This volume, whichgoes beyond the obvious narratives of conflict to examine a wide range oftexts: novels, short stories, poetry, essays, magazine and newspaper pieces,represents the first extended study of Wharton’s war-related writings. Intracing Wharton’s literary output during this period, Olin-Ammentorpidentifies three major phases in the author’s ‘shifting reactions to the war’:an early ‘fascination’ and ‘tendency to see and depict it in romanticterms’; a later ‘commitment to propaganda, or at least polemic, in favour of



U.S. involvement’; and an ‘elegiac’ phase in which war and its victims arememorialised in literature (3). The volume also evaluates the longer termimplications of war for the way in which Edith Wharton practiced her artand considers her changing view of the role of the artist in a world drasticallyaltered by conflict.

A further recent trend in the study of interpretations of the First WorldWar is a focus on the perception of warfare through the gendered gaze. JeanGallagher’s The World Wars through the Female Gaze (1998) participates indiscourses of gender, warfare and representation. Spanning the two worldwars, the study examines a range of literary and visual texts producedby American women based in Europe during periods of conflict. Theeye-witness accounts of war penned by Edith Wharton with the purposeof encouraging American involvement in the 1914–18 conflict are consideredhere alongside those of fellow expatriate and pro-interventionist, thejournalist and editor Mildred Aldrich. In addition, the writings andphotographic work of Second World War journalists Martha Gelhorn andLee Miller are examined, as is the experimental autobiographical writing ofH.D. and Gertrude Stein. Gallagher draws on the theories of scholars suchas Paul Virilio and Martin Jay to explore the visual element of the ‘spectacle’of war and the complex act of ‘seeing’ war from a female subject position.Recognising the importance of eye witness testimony to the writingsof Wharton and Aldrich, she suggests that in addressing an Americanaudience distanced from the war, both women rely on the female gaze andeye witnessing to imbue their accounts with authority and authenticity. Sheis, however, also concerned with the limits of gendered vision of the waridentifying ‘a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer’sstruggles with authority, resistance . . . and the promises and impossibilitiesof ‘direct’ vision of war’ (7). A similar theme is taken up by Carol Actonwho, in ‘Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women’s War Writing’(2004), builds on Gallagher’s work to examine the female gaze in wartimeand the notion of ‘traumatic seeing’. She discusses the diversion of the gazeand reads narratives including The Forbidden Zone to identify subtexts thatgesture towards that which ‘cannot be told’ (75).

It is clear then that American women’s writings from the First WorldWar continue to provoke robust critical debate. And whilst they do sharemany concerns with their contemporaries elsewhere – often determined bytheir gender and consequent ‘outsider’ status – it is increasingly the case, asthe recent studies of Wharton, Cather, Borden and La Motte demonstrate,that the importance of the national context is being recognised. There arestill areas which are under researched and individual American writers whoseconnections to the war have not been explored fully. For example, despitethe fact that she based her forthright critique of gender inequality onwhat she identified as excessively aggressive and destructive masculinecharacteristics, and regardless of her prolific outpouring of writings duringthe early years of the First World War, the social reformer and activist



Charlotte Perkins Gilman has rarely been discussed as a war writer. Gilman’sliterary output during this period was certainly informed by the conflict andthe American context is central to an understanding of the nature of herengagement with the war. Essentially, Gilman had consistently expressedoptimism about the progress being made toward social justice and genderequality, within the context of wider American progressivism, measuredagainst European tradition. Once it became clear that the United Stateswould abandon its neutral position and become embroiled in the fightingshe found it impossible to maintain her optimism and, after 1916, she wrotevery little. In effect, the war silenced one of the most outspoken and prolificfeminist writers of the age because she was unable to fit it into an Americanframework. In addition to further investigation of the work of figures likeGilman, a fuller understanding of American women’s literary engagementwith the first transatlantic European war would be achieved by the continuedretrieval of their narratives and the adding of their voices to the story of theconflict. Angela Smith’s The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and theFirst World War contributes to this project by introducing some previouslyunpublished British material. As I have indicated, there are similar documentswhich provide a distinctly American perspective – American women’swritten responses to the First World War indeed provide a promising andfar from exhausted field of study.

Short Biography

Elizabeth Nolan is a lecturer in the Department of English at ManchesterMetropolitan University. She is co-editor of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening:A Sourcebook (2004), the Broadview Press,The House of Mirth (2005), Lives ofVictorian Literary Figures IV: Edith Wharton (2006), and the Routledge LiteraryGuide to the House of Mirth (2007). She also works on women’s war writingsand women’s periodicals of the early twentieth century.

Notes* Correspondence Address: 441 Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan University,All Saints Campus, Manchester, M15 6BH.

1 Aldrich, Hilltop on the Marne; On the Edge of the War Zone; Peak of the Load; When Johnny ComesMarching Home.2 See for example: Atherton, White Morning; Fisher, Home Fires in France;Van Vorst, War Lettersof an American Woman.3 Goldman, ed., The Written Response; Goldman, Gledhill and Hattaway, Women Writers and theGreat War.4 Smith, Second Battlefield.5 Smith, Gender and Warfare.

Works Cited

Acton, Carol. ‘Diverting the Gaze: The Unseen Text in Women’s War Writing’. College Literature31.2 (2004): 53–79.



Aldrich, Mildred. A Hilltop on the Marne, Being Letters Written June 3–September 8 1914. Bostonand New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1915.

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