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

UnrestrictedWorld 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.; 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 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