In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley's Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms

Catherine Barkley’s Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms

197Twentieth-Century Literature 62.2 June 2016 197© 2016 Hofstra University DOI 10.1215/10.1215/0041462X-3616588

In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley’s Wartime

Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms

Michelle N. Huang

With scientific precision, I studied the memoirs of Blunden, Sassoon, and Graves. Surely, I thought, my story is as interesting as theirs. Besides, I see things other than they have seen, and some of the things they perceived, I see differently.

—Vera Brittain, Testament of Experience

When former Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse Vera Brittain began penning her own account of World War I, Testament of Youth (1933), she studied the writing of disillusioned soldier-poets such as Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. While Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), the foundational text of World War I literary scholarship, argues that these soldiers were the agents of modernism, Brittain’s close study of the male memoirs served to confirm that her experience as a war nurse was fundamentally different from that of a soldier, not only in practical duty but also in perspective and style.1 Testament of Youth chronologically traces Brittain’s engagement with the war, beginning with her joining the nursing service at the same time her brother and fiancé enlisted in the army.2 Through her description of the horrors of wartime hospitals, the deaths of her fiancé and brother in combat, and her alienating return to civil society, Brittain shows that war’s effects were not confined to the front lines. The Great War rendered both the young men and the young women of the time a “lost generation” crushed in numbers and jaded in spirit. Recent feminist recovery efforts have restored critical attention to the essential work nurses like Brittain contributed to the war effort.3 However, these examinations almost

Twentieth-Century Literature

Published by Duke University Press

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exclusively deal with the nonfictional tradition, focusing primarily on memoirs like Brittain’s as well as those of fellow nurses Mary Borden, Enid Bagnold, Ellen LaMotte, and Irene Rathbone.4

The soldiers whose memoirs Brittain studied represent part of a larger group of World War I veterans who suffered from the condition then known as “shell shock.”5 Initially, the malady was thought to be physical, garnering its name from the presumed damage done to soldiers’ nerve endings by the blast of detonating missiles. But doctors soon realized what the soldiers suffered from was a psychological condition, one whose reverberations lingered long after the fighting’s conclusion. By 1917, it was estimated that “war neuroses” accounted for over one in seven of the men discharged from the army for disabilities. Today, what was then called shell shock would almost certainly be recognizable as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a term that did not enter the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III ) until 1980, after the Vietnam War. In other words, the psychological damage resulting from experiencing war is itself now recognizable as medical trauma (Higonnet 2001, xiv). This belated insight has led to rereadings of literary World War I veterans such as Virginia Woolf ’s Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Rebecca West’s Chris Baldry in The Return of the Soldier (1918), characters who embody the difficulty of reintegrating into civilian life rather than of active service. Other famous war-damaged fictional characters include Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams (in various short stories), Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms (1929). Drawing from both these strands of scholarship, this article proposes a return to Catherine Barkley, the controversial female protagonist of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,6 whose scholarly treatment has largely ignored her position as a volunteer war nurse. The landscape of critical readings of Catherine resembles a battlefield in itself; since the novel’s initial publication she has been variously understood as, among other things, the protean manifestation of Frederic’s desire, an idealized picture of feminine virtue, a blowup sex doll, and a destructive harpy.7 In many of these readings, Catherine has concomitantly been upheld as the prime example of a “Hemingway woman,” an amorphous characterization that underscores the unstable nature of the label itself. For the most part, the focus on sexual politics has obscured historicist considerations. When nursing has been considered in analyses of the novel,




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it has appeared in two dominant guises. The first is as a costume of sexual-ized femininity, with little or no contemplation of the actual labor entailed by wartime nursing. The second is biographical, bent on establishing the real-life models for Catherine, Helen Ferguson, and the other nurses in A Farewell to Arms. Most attention in this vein has been paid to Agnes von Kurowsky, the Red Cross nurse a nineteen-year-old Hemingway fell in love with in a Milanese hospital while he was recovering from shrapnel wounds he suffered as an ambulance driver for the Italian army during World War I.8 The fact that von Kurowsky broke Hemingway’s heart with a “Dear John” letter has led many critics to read Catherine’s death as Hemingway’s fictional revenge.9 Such scholarship, viewing the novel as evidence of Hemingway’s male chauvinism, too often relies on an uncritical conflation of Hemingway with his character Frederic Henry. While these approaches sacrifice the novel’s war story for its love story, more recent scholarship has sought to rehabilitate Catherine’s individual agency and her status as a war veteran by arguing that her resourcefulness allows her to survive and to create meaning within a world fragmented by war.10 These readings begin to open a space in which Catherine’s performance of a devoted, ministering woman appears as both purposeful and practical, instead of as weak and sentimental. Theorizing Catherine through her occupational role as a war nurse and not solely as a woman will allow us to see how she, too, incisively embodies Hemingway’s critique of the antinomies of grand narratives of war. Although scholars of A Farewell to Arms have made much of the trauma of Frederic’s status as a volunteer ambulance driver, they have overlooked the significance of Catherine’s similarly elective VAD position. In fact, critics (with the exception of Alex Vernon [2002] ) have failed to differentiate Frederic’s spectatorial position as an ambulance driver from that of a soldier, elevating Frederic to the level of combatant in order to maintain a masculinist hierarchy of trauma. But as Diane Price Herndl points out, Frederic’s war experience is actually characterized by watching and waiting—roles traditionally embodied by the war nurses (2001, 42). Hemingway’s subtle presentation of Catherine’s emotional labor and self-presentation has led many critics to forget that she has been as damaged and disillusioned by the war as Frederic. They thus hold her up to a retrospective standard of what would define reasonable behavior in her circumstances.



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The difficulty of reading Catherine is further compounded by Hemingway’s choice of Frederic as a narrator. The reader cannot see, for example, a firsthand account of Catherine’s reaction to the death of her fiancé in the Battle of the Somme. Having already served as a VAD for two years and acutely aware of the bloodbath of the French battlefield, the Catherine whom Frederic meets has already developed the stoicism of the “code hero” (Spanier 1987, 140). But despite her composure and Frederic’s resistance to hearing about Catherine’s past, there are clues that Catherine’s sometimes stilted manner is not her natural demeanor but a product of her wartime experience. Infrequently, Catherine does speak to Frederic about her psychological pain—“I haven’t been happy for a long time and when I met you perhaps I was nearly crazy. Perhaps I was crazy” (FTA 101). For less explicit clues, we must look first to moments that let slip her underlying psychological state and, second, to the way Hemingway suggests that Frederic’s readings of Catherine reflect his limited understanding of her intentions and actions. Considered in relation to World War I nursing memoirs, Catherine appears differently than she does in the debate about her in Hemingway scholarship. She is ineradicably marked by her wartime nursing duties, that is, and understandings of her should be historicized accordingly. This reading thus represents a radical break from Judith Fetterley’s weighty verdict that the contradictions in Catherine’s character signify a “resentful cryptogram” of Hemingway’s fear and hostility toward women that can be resolved only by her death (1978, 48). First, then, this article surveys recent scholarship about the intensive work wartime nurses—especially VAD nurses—did to manage both physical and psychological pain for the wounded soldiers in their care. That scholarship lays the groundwork for a reparative rereading of Catherine’s character in A Farewell to Arms—a reading that considers the gap between the ideals and the reality of nursing, examines how Catherine as a VAD nurse can fulfill a nurturing role for Frederic, and, finally, reframes the scene of Catherine’s death as a failure of nursing. That Frederic cannot ultimately reciprocate Catherine’s care underscores his belated realization of how her work as a nurse has enabled her to maintain strength and stoicism in the face of many upheav-als. By foregrounding Catherine’s nursing work, then, this article not only uncovers a more nuanced version of Catherine but also reveals a more complicated view of Hemingway. As a narrative that acknowledges the work of war nurses, A Farewell to Arms illustrates how the trauma of World War I underwrote history and identity for women as well as men.




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The place of the nurseThe writing produced by World War I soldiers has become synonymous with foundational markers of modernist aesthetics such as “decentering of the subject, montage, ellipses or gaps in narrative, and startlingly vivid images” (Higonnet 2002, 92). This has helped create a self-perpetuating canon of masculine modernism anchored by the figure of the soldier-poet. As a result, the primacy of war trauma has itself become gendered, marked as the privileged property of men—a position that persists in contemporary consciousness and scholarship on war testimony and witnessing.11 By contrast, texts centered on the wartime work of women and noncombatants have been sidelined as irrelevant or, even worse, sen-timental. Upon telling a male friend that she was working on an autobi-ography, Vera Brittain was told, “But I shouldn’t have thought anything in your life was worth recording!” ( Brittain 1957, 79). In response, recent feminist scholarship has sought to bring accounts of female wartime work to the forefront of Great War testimony. Through her recovery of texts by women—writers, nurses, and other participants in World War I—Margaret Higonnet, for example, has contested the existence of a hard and bright line between authenticity and artifice, arguing that this false dichotomy governs the opposition between combatant and noncombatant as well as between male and female (2002, 104). In fact, these divisions were formulated after the war, and are not supported by contemporaneous accounts. The VAD organization was founded in Great Britain in 1909 as a joint venture between the Red Cross and the Order of St. John, but World War I’s outsized demand for medical assistance posed the young organization’s first real test. Women responded enthusiastically to the call to arms: as of April 1, 1920, 82,857 wartime nurses were enlisted as VADs (Marwick 1977, 168). These women were part of an early generation of feminists, whose notions about emancipation from the familial home had not involved the severe devastation of war (Das 2005, 186). They forewent Siegfried Sassoon’s celebrated “Battalion spirit” ([1929] 1960, 191), for the nursing service, or what Brittain describes as “the next best thing” ( [1933] 1994, 213–14). Their indispensable work constituted the underside of war, the psychological and physical aftermath of combat. However, where for the soldiers the hospital provided refuge from the surreal battlefields, there was no similar reprieve for the nurses.12 For them, the hospital was not a respite, but the front lines.



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Léonie Godfroy, an American Red Cross nurse serving in France, described the “woman’s share” of the war experience: “To men in the first rank of danger go the superb élan, the epic spectacles of the battlefield. . . . They come to us afterwards, bloody, weary, mute. It is not surprising that our recollections often have an element of nightmare” (1917, 5). In recounting her memories of her nursing service as gory aftershocks of the soldiers’ battle experience, Godfroy captures not only the inglorious work of repair that nurses did but also the abject state of the stunned soldiers they received as patients. The day-to-day trauma management that VAD nurses like Catherine undertook thus produced emotional dissonance. Higonnet describes the war nurse’s psyche as a “diptych,” reflecting a cognitive rift where “self-control and technical efficiency conflict with emotional involvement and the threat of hysteria” (2001, xviii). The emotional labor of coping with this dissonance blurred the distinction between truth and lies, as performance was integral to a nurse’s efficacy. Intimate contact with the wounded required war nurses to exercise an unprecedented degree of professional control over their emotional response in order to take care of the patients. Catherine’s obsequious tics, such as her premature proclamations of love and her seemingly inappropriate flippancy (at one point, she calls the warfront “a silly front” [FTA 17]), have often been taken to represent her entire personality. Much of this flattening is due to Frederic’s frequent misreading of Catherine; he constantly approaches her with expectations of antebellum femininity, forgetting that he is dealing with a seasoned war nurse. “There’s a war on, you know,” the head nurse admonishes Frederic when he goes to call on Catherine at the hospital (19). Her accommodating demeanor has led some to see Catherine as a mindless sex object, even as she levies some of the novel’s earliest condemnations of the war, telling Frederic, “People can’t realize what France is like. If they did, it couldn’t all go on,” and “They can’t go on doing things like the Somme and not crack” (17). Here Catherine positions herself both as a war insider, or someone who has experienced France, as well as an outside observer and critic. In doing so, she contests the sharp division between combatant experiences of war and those of noncombatants. Like many VAD nurses, Catherine demonstrates a markedly ambivalent relationship to her nursing work. When she first describes her position to Frederic, she identifies herself not as a professional nurse but as “something called a V.A.D. . . . A short cut,” referring to her position




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as a volunteer. She then explains the institutional politics: “We work very hard but no one trusts us. . . . They don’t trust us when there’s nothing going on. When there is really work they trust us” (22).13 From the beginning, Hemingway sets up a clear parallel between Catherine’s secondary, peripheral relationship to war and that of Frederic. As an ambulance driver he is, like Catherine, not a soldier, and he describes his work in terms markedly similar to hers: “It’s not really the army. It’s only the ambulance.”14

Catherine can perhaps be read as the novel’s sharpest war critic, because of, not despite, the fact that she does her voluntary service with a smile. The brutality of the cycle the nurses helped sustain was not lost on them. Mary Borden, an American nurse, paints a desperate picture: “And we send our men to the war again and again, just as long as they will stand it; just until they are dead, and then we throw them into the ground” (1929, 117). While the primary role of the war nurse is to care for and assuage—using “the VAD touch” (Bagnold 1918, 94)—injured bodies and minds with the end goal of returning them to service, the gendered aspect of the role dictates that they do so with a tenderness that must be maintained even in the face of fatigue and horror. Throughout A Farewell to Arms, Catherine manages her feelings in order to impose a visible sense of consistency and control upon the unpredictability of war. Contextualizing Catherine’s intentions and actions in relation to World War I reveals not a weak and intrinsically flawed female character but one who is actively recalibrating her expectations and sense of selfhood.

“A little crazy,” or shell-shocked Before Frederic Henry meets Catherine Barkley, he identifies her from a distance through the trees by her white nurse’s uniform (FTA 15). Rigid dress codes—“collars were to be stiff, white, 2⅜ inches deep; cuffs stiff, white, 3⅜ inches deep; belts stiff, white, 3 inches deep”—flattened the individuality of nurses, efficiently transforming them into standardized units of the Taylorized modern war machine (Ouditt 1994, 18). The practice of nursing, indispensable to wartime efforts, and to the soldiers, took its toll on the nurses themselves. This section thus focuses on the gap between the dream of becoming a war nurse and the harsh realities of the work itself to suggest Catherine’s nursing experience is shaped by disillusionment.



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Initially stunned by the bodily disintegration surrounding them, the VAD nurses quickly adapted to their duties. The psychological transformation Vera Brittain underwent to learn to “dress unaided and without emotion, the quivering stump of a newly amputated limb” was so profound that her fiancé describes it as Brittain’s “metamorpho-sis” (Brittain [1933] 1994, 216). Accordingly, we should remember the Catherine we meet at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms, having already dedicated two years to war service, has acclimated to the demands of nursing work. Requiring “the amputation of one’s own intimate nerves” ( Das 2005, 175), the nurses’ psychological anesthetization can be read as analogous to the lasting damage suffered by the soldiers themselves. In short, as World War I nurses touched and probed the bodies of the wounded soldiers, they in turn suffered the interaction’s ineffaceable psychological effects. Just as their regimented dress codes mirrored those of the male soldiers, the diaries of World War I nurses often catalogued war’s relentlessness in the same spare and minimalist style used by their male patients. However, in public they had to be cheerful and accommodating, outwardly presenting what VAD Enid Bagnold describes as “too-easy compassion” (1918, 141). Their gender, which protected them from combat, was also seen as limiting their comprehension of the men’s suffering. But such a reading obscures how powerful the effects of war were on nurse as well as soldier. Instead of viewing nursing as simply a weaker version of soldiering, focusing on the qualitative differences between the roles produces a multidimensional reading of the work of wartime nursing. For example, where soldiers belonged to a stable battalion or division, VADs were expected to work in isolation—their individual rotations through different hospitals actually prefigured the rotational system for soldiers that would be used during the Vietnam War that similarly inhibited the establishment of a community or group support system ( Badenhausen 2003, 427–28). In addition, the traditional split between the nurse and the trauma-tized patient ignores the mental burden of surviving. Catherine mentions her dead fiancé to Frederic during their very first meeting, suggesting the primacy of his memory: “He was a very nice boy. He was going to marry me and he was killed in the Somme” (FTA 16). Catherine’s unadorned diction and simple declarative sentences mask the weightiness of her statement, and the omission of events between their engagement and his death marks a purposeful elision disguised as minimalism. In fact,




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several details hint that Catherine is not as impassive about her fiancé’s death as she might first seem. For example, she continues to carry his riding crop, what she calls “the little stick,” as a reminder of “the other thing”—sex—that she never gave him (16). Also, although Catherine mostly keeps silent about her traumatic experience, we need not remain as incurious as Frederic about the dark place she repeatedly goes before “she [comes] back from wherever she had been” (26, 121). Throughout the narrative, Frederic insistently shies away from exploring Catherine’s consciousness—the only time Frederic willingly contemplates her fiancé is when he crudely speculates it will help him seduce her, that “maybe she would pretend that I was her boy that was killed” (32). When Catherine does speak to him about joining the service with her fiancé and his subsequently being “blown to bits,” Frederic tells us, twice, “I did not say anything” (16, 17). Similarly, when Catherine later attempts to bring up her fiancé, Frederic responds, “I don’t want to hear about it,” attentive more to his own jealousy than to Catherine’s significant loss (100). While nurses were not killed or physically wounded to the same degree as soldiers, they did nevertheless suffer serious psychological damage. For Catherine, the practice of nursing both reinforces and ame-liorates the loss of her fiancé, showing that survival itself can be traumatic. Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” contempora-neous with the action in A Farewell to Arms, is illuminating in this regard. In it Freud distinguishes mourning, the successful detachment of ego from the lost object of desire, from melancholia, a mourning that cannot end (1957, 244). For Catherine, mourning is rendered interminable by her war service, just as Brittain reflects on her own nursing: “It was always Roland [her fiancé] whom I was nursing by proxy,” suggesting the inseparability of the personal and professional in her VAD service ( [1933] 1994, 166). By focusing on her nursing experience rather than just her romantic re-lationship with Frederic, we can understand Catherine’s character beyond readings that argue she pathologically transfers her unresolved feelings for her dead fiancé onto Frederic.15 We can see her melancholia rooted not only in her fiancé’s death but also in her own war experience that continually revives that loss. Much of the nurses’ trauma stemmed from the radical disparity between the romanticized expectations of wartime nursing and the actual day-to-day labor. Many VADs had joined the corps with grand aspirations, viewing their nursing work as a patriotic wartime sacrifice parallel to the military service of male soldiers. Catherine’s enlist-ment is coupled with her fiancé’s: “I started when he did. I remember



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having a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was. With a sabre cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder. Something picturesque” (FTA 17). Revealingly, Catherine imagines being reunited with her fiancé, not as civilians after the war but in the midst of it, a fantasy of herself ministering to her wounded fiancé that suggests the efficacy of the war’s propaganda campaign. A popular 1918 American Red Cross recruitment poster titled “The Greatest Mother in the World” by A. E. Foringer depicts a larger-than-life wartime nurse, in the style of Michaelangelo’s Pietà, who is cradling a child-sized soldier in her arms while gazing serenely upward (Figure 1). In the poster, the soldier’s only visible wound is indicated by the same “bandage around his head” that Catherine imagines on her fiancé, suggesting wartime propaganda infused the imaginations and expecta-tions of volunteer nurses.16 The visual and textual representation of the nurse as an idealized “mother” obscures the devastating scale of the war, domesticating the nurse-soldier relationship and implying that the nurse possesses the feminine power to protect and care for the wounded soldier. Her “silly idea” is not primarily Catherine’s own, that is, and derives from the glamorized representation of wartime nursing as a simple extension of the domestic sphere.17 In reality, of course, the injuries and diseases of war were anything but glamorous. As described by Rinaldi, the Italian military surgeon in A Farewell to Arms, they consisted of “frostbites, chilblains, jaundice, gonorrhea, self-inflicted wounds, pneumonia and hard and soft chancres. Every week someone gets wounded by rock fragments”—hardly the stuff of effective recruitment posters (10–11). Most VAD nurses were genteel Englishwomen with well-to-do upbringings (Ouditt 1994, 31). Catherine is familiar with Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” Shakespeare’s Othello, and the classical painters Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Andrea Mantegna, suggesting an educated and privileged upbringing imbued with humanist ideals (FTA 135, 222, 241). However, her dreams of being able to help her fiancé are atomized when he is unromantically blown to “bits.” Instead of acknowledging the harsh disparity between her original motives for joining the VAD and ensuing reality, Catherine trivializes her original hope as her own “silly idea” (17). This is a crucial early example of the way that Catherine uses simple, dismissive language in order to maintain a facade that Frederic continually reads at face value. Alexander Hollenberg’s insightful analysis of Catherine’s “thinness” of character as “recalcitrant simplicity” suggests that A Farewell to Arms revises the association between a character’s straightforward speech




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and ease of interpretation (2012, 301). Taken individually, Catherine’s statements are easily comprehended, and this is how Frederic reads her,

Figure 1. “The Greatest Mother in the World” ( Foringer 1918) without probing further. However, even in a single conversation, they often vacillate sharply between serious and glib, and taken together paint a rather complicated picture of someone still coming to terms with grief. Coupling severe loss with self-dismissal, Catherine’s seemingly simple utterances may be better read as a purposefully partial erasure, serving to draw attention to the shocking clash between her initial expectations about her wartime service and its subsequent uncontained violence. As this violence persists, her trauma remains fresh, each patient serving as another reminder of her perceived failure to save her fiancé. As a war nurse, Catherine’s involvement with war is always dependent on the presence of human suffering and pain. When she joins Frederic at the hospital in Milan, she tells him, “There must be some more patients or they’ll send us away” (FTA 90). The viability of their romantic relationship



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thus ironically depends on Frederic being wounded: Catherine is only able to be close to Frederic because of her position as a nurse. In fact, public acknowledgment of their relationship would be met with disapproba-tion. If she married Frederic, she would not be able to stay with him; Catherine’s occupation both allows and prevents her being together with Frederic, so that she must conspire with the military system in order to circumvent it. Put simply, Catherine’s behavior is better read as a studied response to the irresolvability between the ideals and realities of wartime nursing than as female foolishness.

“See the patients first”: embodied hospitality As Peter Hays has noted, Frederic frequently and explicitly refers to his room in the hospital as “home” (1990, 14). For Carlos Baker it is Catherine herself that for Frederic represents home ( [1952] 1972, 102), even while, as Gerry Brenner points out, much of the action of A Farewell to Arms takes place in hospitals in Gorizia, Milan, and Lausanne (1994, 130). In order to clarify this connection between hospital and home, this section approaches Catherine’s role as a war nurse through what Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity (1961) calls “hospitality,” arguing that the feeling of comfort and familiarity Frederic describes is found not within the walls of the hospital room but within the psychological space Catherine creates to protect Frederic from the emasculating experience of being injured in war. Levinas’s conception of hospitality is more involved than that of the Kantian formulation of tolerance. Rather than merely accepting the presence of another, for Levinas the host is required to make a guest feel “at home.” Characterized by the host’s self-effacement in favor of the guest, the concept of hospitality first concerned the private home (Aristarkhova 2012, 34). Although we are now used to its modern defini-tion as a medical institution, “hospital” originally connoted a house for receiving travelers (OED). The word “nurse” also has nonmedical roots, deriving from the French nourisse and originally meaning “wet nurse” before evolving to denote one who nurtures (OED). The appropriation of these more general terms into modern medicine has been accompanied by the loss of the more interpersonal qualities of hospitality, a process now essentially complete in our institutionalized conception of medical care. With its demand for standardized, large-scale general hospitals, World War I was crucial in escalating the turn into medical modernity in the early twentieth century.




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Throughout A Farewell to Arms, Catherine frequently instructs and cares for Frederic with her nurse’s knowledge. She manages his care to the point of personal possession: “I get furious if [the other nurses] touch you,” she says, claiming Frederic’s body as her property and the intimate power to nurture and care for him as her vocation. When she gives him an enema, she speaks in euphemism, downplaying the procedure as, “Not much. But quite unpleasant,” in an effort to preserve Frederic’s propriety. She distracts him by talking during the procedure, seemingly effectively, as Frederic’s narrative does not register anything else until her signal of completion,“Now you’re clean inside and out” (FTA 89–91).18 Catherine’s bantering cultivates a hospitable environment, recasting the potentially emasculating medical procedure into more affectionate terms. Here and elsewhere, reading Catherine merely as a romantic partner, and not also as a nurse, is woefully insufficient. Although her care for Frederic extends to her responsibility for his medical needs, the unreflective nar-rative—Frederic never thanks her—allows Catherine’s nursing work to pass unremarked upon.19 The blurriness between Catherine as lover and Catherine as nurse is often marked by stilted speech and social interactions. In the hospital in Milan, for instance, as Frederic petulantly tries to get her to stay with him (essentially asking her to shirk her nursing duties), she replies firmly:

“No. . . . I have to do the chart, darling, and fix you up.” “You don’t really love me or you’d come back again.” “You’re such a silly boy. . . . That’s all right for the chart. Your temperature’s always normal. You’ve such a lovely temperature.” (FTA 89)

In this exchange, Catherine shrouds her dedication to her responsibility in platitudes. She calls Frederic “darling” and, almost maternally, “silly boy” to distract him, buying herself time to complete the chart. However, her awkward compliment about Frederic’s temperature is a split signifier that mirrors the schizoid nature of their relationship as lovers as well as nurse and patient. The meaningfulness of her comment is found more in her tone of supplication than anything actually related to the “loveliness” of Frederic’s temperature. However, Frederic does not comment at all on this awkward encounter, showing no awareness of Catherine’s negotiation of her dual roles as nurse and romantic interest. Although Catherine possesses medical knowledge and expertise that Frederic does not, she never holds this over him. She patiently teaches



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him about his x-rays, for instance: “Catherine Barkley showed them to me. They were in red envelopes and she took them out of the envelopes and held them up to the light and we both looked. ‘That’s your right leg,’ she said, and then put the plate back in the envelope. ‘This is your left’” (83). Here Catherine shows Frederic the details of his fractured body with slow and methodical care. Furthermore, as they “both look” at the x-rays, she shares his point of view while helping him understand his injuries. Fostering such mutuality, she represents a sharp contrast to the three bumbling doctors who burst into the scene shortly afterward, who glance at the same x-rays fleetingly and upside down, explain nothing to Frederic, and disappear after dispensing brief desultory recommendations. This scene highlights how Catherine maintains professionalism and warmth simultaneously, providing the relational quality of hospitality that the doctors do not. Frederic constantly downplays the gravity of Catherine’s nursing work, only minimally registering her professional duties even as she works extra night duty in order to spend more time with him. While he does remark that “she had quite a little work with the malaria people” (94), his narration deemphasizes the amount and intensity of the work entailed by taking care of patients with malaria in addition to those injured by exploding grenades. Despite Frederic’s resistance to acknowledging Catherine’s work, nursing nevertheless continually permeates their inter-actions. When Frederic tries to distract her from her duties, for example, Catherine puts him off with a lighthearted tone, asking:

“Do you want to play?” “Yes and come to bed.” “All right. I’ll go and see the patients first.” (101)

Catherine codeswitches between the intimate and the occupational—her language shifts from the sexually tinged “play” to the work-related “patients.” However, she “see[s] the patients first,” showing her dutiful commitment to her work and her awareness of the hospital as her workplace. Before he undergoes surgery for his knee wound, she warns Frederic not to reveal their personal relationship, “because people get very blabby under an anaesthetic” (90), and, though teasing, her concern about a potential disclosure of impropriety is serious. Frederic is a comically difficult patient—he drinks copiously in the hospital and disobeys the other nurses. Although he does seem to




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recognize them as nurses as opposed to simply as women, he still does not fully respect them or their work. At this point in the narrative, Frederic still believes in military hierarchy as a good indicator of skill and character, despite his own ingloriously achieved Silver Medal of Military Valor. When he is disappointed by the first doctor’s medical opinion of the operability of his knee, he attributes it to the doctor’s only being a first captain, because “if he was any good he would be made a major” (85). While Frederic does later come to learn that valor or wisdom does not always reside with men in decorated uniforms, Catherine realizes this already, dismissing the pompous prestige-monger Ettore Moretti, whom Frederic calls “a legitimate hero,” as “conceited” and a “dreadful boy” (108). The narrative thus underscores how Catherine’s quiet strength transforms Frederic’s understanding of his war experience. In the expatriate expanse of A Farewell to Arms, home is less a physical space than an experience: a sense of hospitality Catherine continually recreates for Frederic with her emotional labor.

“Self-conscious”: zone interdite As the novel progresses, Frederic narrates his growing disillusionment with his wartime service, stating, “I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it” (FTA 161). The last straw is when, on the retreat from Caporetto, he jumps into the river to flee a kangaroo court, the threat of death coming not from combat but from the mindless execution of Italian military officers by their own soldiers. After his narrow escape, Frederic resolves, “I was going to forget the war. I had made a separate peace” (210). But even as he dons civilian clothes, Frederic feels like a “masquerader”—to leave war behind is not as simple as it seems, even for an American volunteer ambulance driver in the Italian army. Significantly, this is something that Catherine already knows at the beginning of the narrative—when Frederic suggests, “Let’s drop the war,” Catherine replies, “It’s very hard. There’s no place to drop it” (22). Only eventually does Frederic realize what Catherine already understands: that there is no “separate peace,” only the ability to create limited peace and rationale within war. The previous sections of this article argue that the unique duties of wartime nursing became integrated into Catherine’s being and that, as a result,



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her role as the war nurse and her role as the lover resist being separated. But rather than trying to split them apart, we should think of the two as conjoined—informing, overlapping, and at times contradicting each other. This final section first traces how Catherine’s training inflects scenes that take place outside the hospital and then rereads the novel’s controversial ending to show how Frederic’s loss of Catherine’s hospitality during her childbirth and death underscores the centrality of her nursing work in A Farewell to Arms. Military hospitals, surrounded by barbed wire, were known as “zone interdite,” or the forbidden zone.20 Wartime nursing figures this space psychologically—wholly unprepared for the tasks that confronted them, the nurses developed new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. Perhaps best characterized by an overwhelming sense of inadequacy coupled with little guidance, the work of wartime nursing cannot be judged alongside conventional standards of behavior and emotional expression. A common theme among World War I nurse memoirs is shame, a result of the women’s inability to staunch the blood and the death of the soldiers pouring into their hospital rooms (Das 2005, 224). World War I blurred the divisions previously denoted by home front/war front, life/death, civilian/soldier, public/private, and this blurring engendered new structures of feeling governing female experience. What has been interpreted as contradictions of selfhood in Catherine’s character can be read more equitably by understanding her deep ambivalence. In one of the earliest scenes of the novel, as Catherine and Frederic are walking together, she expresses an almost childish fear of the rain. “I’ve always been afraid of the rain,” she avers, before later admit-ting, “All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it. . . . And sometimes I see you dead in it” (FTA 109–10). This confession divulges her darkest fears, her hesitation signaling her misgiving about sharing it with Frederic. However, when Catherine and Frederic flee the Italian police by rowboat, making their escape toward Switzerland across Lake Maggiore in the middle of a cold and stormy night—a situation undoubtedly more perilous than their rainy garden walk—her fear of the rain goes unmentioned. Although she is very likely frightened and almost certainly uncomfortable, being in an advanced state of pregnancy, Catherine assists Frederic by getting him water to drink and taking her turn rowing. She even finds humor in their dire situation, such as when their makeshift umbrella sail collapses on Frederic:




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She was laughing. She took my hand and kept on laughing. “What’s the matter?” I took the oar. “You looked so funny holding that thing.” “I suppose so.” “Don’t be cross, darling. It was awfully funny. You looked about twenty feet broad and very affectionate holding the umbrella by the edges—” she choked. (235)

Coping with her dread of rain, and with the deathly dangers they face, Catherine playfully pokes fun at Frederic, even as she appreciatively acknowledges his labor. Furthermore, this passage hints that Catherine’s attempt to remain spirited is meant to compensate for Frederic’s inward-ness. In this scene, while Catherine takes his hand, joining them together in a shared moment, he takes a single oar, distancing himself from her. His clipped speech suggests that Catherine’s overwrought response is partly a response to Frederic’s despondent mood, though he remains clearly unamused—responding to her laughter with a short “I’ll row.” Catherine has been perceived as didactic in the way she sometimes directs Frederic. In one of their earliest conversations, Catherine leads Frederic through an instructive exercise, a kind of teacher’s repeat-after-me:

“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?” “Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before. . . . “Say, ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.’” “I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.” (FTA 26)

What might seem sentimental or melodramatic here can be read as Catherine’s calculated attempts to cement their relationship, a move whose importance Frederic initially does not understand. What Margot Norris calls the “echoic structure” of her speech (1994, 698), I thus see as Catherine’s managing Frederic. He is echoing her. Her seemingly maudlin statement, “I do anything you want,” far from merely repeat-ing Frederic’s words while adding nothing, like an echo, instead draws attention to her devotion to Frederic as a gift to be reciprocated. Elaine Scarry identifies proleptic memorialization—the process through which present actions will ultimately be justified and sacrifice eventually rewarded—as a mechanism for validating war’s violence (1985, 121), and Catherine reconfigures this strategy into her intimate personal relation-ship with Frederic in order to forge human relationships other than the instrumental ones sanctioned by war.



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Catherine’s lack of straightforwardness in this scene should not be interpreted as spineless feminine virtue. As soon as she senses Frederic’s early resistance, she immediately short-circuits the gendered routine. “It’s a rotten game we play,” she pronounces (263). By denigrating their back and forth, she conveys her acute awareness of his conception of their rapport—a seduction plot—without explicitly acknowledging it. Frederic, bewildered by her insight, acknowledges her diagnostic acumen, asking, “Do you always know what people think?” Undeterred, she continues, “You don’t have to pretend you love me. That’s over for the evening. . . . I had a very fine little show and I’m all right now. You see I’m not mad and I’m not gone off. It’s only a little sometimes” (26–27). Her transition from a single use of the inclusive plural pronoun “we” to individual-izing pronouns, “I” and “you,” instantiates the divide between them. Characterizing the encounter diminutively—“a very fine little show”—indicates that her playacting was purposeful, and she preempts any protest from Frederic by affirming she is neither angry nor insane. She even goes as far to pronounce, “And you don’t have to say you love me. That’s all over for a while,” not only leaving Frederic with the impression that he has missed something (he has) but also implicitly acknowledging that she knows he had not said, “I love you” before, again revealing that she can see through his game. When she claims, “That’s all over,” she modifies it with “for a while,” signifying that the problem is not her initial intent to bring them together but, rather, Frederic’s unpreparedness to connect with her. By the novel’s end, her prediction—“We’re going to have a strange life”—is borne out, and Frederic’s early distrust of Catherine has evolved into complete faith (23). Although Catherine is the one who utters what some have considered an overly sentimental profession of devotion—“There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me”—by the end of the novel, we see that the converse is true as well (99). This process, of Frederic learning to feel from Catherine, illuminates why Hemingway considered naming the novel “The Sentimental Education of Frederic Henry.”21 Significantly, it is when Catherine is furthest removed from her role as nurse—during the protracted labor that leads to her death—that the careful framework she has constructed comes undone. When she steps into the hospital in Switzerland, she is once again given a depersonalizing uniform—but this time that of a patient. The nightgown she dies in is not the extravagant one she bought for herself as an indulgence but the




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standard issue hospital one. At first, she continues to manage her pain, although the strain does not entirely escape Frederic’s notice: “She looked very tired and worn now but she was still cheerful” (FTA 271). But as Catherine’s labor intensifies, she is unable to help revealing more and more of her own pain, and the physical labor of birth saps her ability to compensate for Frederic’s apathy. However, even here, the transition to patient is neither clean nor complete. Although Catherine’s physical pain pierces the ritualized processes she had learned for managing her emotions, she still retains something of her nurse’s mentality. As birth contractions challenge her composure, she tells Frederic, “I try as hard as I can. I push down but it goes away. There it comes. Give it to me” (272). In the first and second sentences, Catherine is able to present herself as in control, working and talking through her physical hardship. But in the third and fourth sentences, pain punctures Catherine’s outward display. She is acutely aware of this switch, and confirms her shame about this loss of control by asking Frederic to leave because he makes her “self-conscious”—as if she had not seen much worse while attending to him as his nurse (269). While tending to his medical needs constituted Catherine’s work and pleasure, Frederic is ill-equipped to reciprocate her care. Anesthetized, Catherine is unable to enact the hospitality by which she used to comfort herself and Frederic; as the baby’s head crowns, her coping techniques break down. The marked difference in their hospital experiences is telling—in contrast to Catherine’s understated mastery and ability to comfort in the hospital room, Frederic is helpless, incapable of creating the same feeling of home that Catherine had established for him. Instead, although they have “escaped” war and are no longer in a war hospital, Frederic is only able to woodenly follow the doctors’ and nurses’ directives. Powerless to do anything except watch, he leaves Catherine to labor alone. Mentally severed from her, Frederic turns to alcohol and food, drinking and eating in excess to fill the psychological gap left by Catherine’s absence. This absence registers in the narrative fabric as well. At the very end of the novel, when a hospitalized Catherine is unable to tend to his frantic thoughts and Frederic’s mind runs unchecked, “What if she should die?” is repeated over and over again, showing Frederic’s brutally limited mindscape without Catherine’s presence to solace him (274). As a patient in a foreign hospital, Catherine surrenders her role as a war nurse. Frederic, no longer injured or enlisted in the army, does



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not require her professional care any longer. In addition, Catherine dies after the baby is born, thereby precluding the other meaning of nursing: nursing a baby. Significantly, Catherine is not killed in the line of duty but as a civilian patient. Unable to assist in the care of others any longer, Catherine dies in the famously sanitized and neutral Switzerland—a country that shares its flag with the Red Cross and to this day is known for its hospitals—the role of the war nurse no longer needed.

ConclusionKatharine Furse, founder of the VAD force, wrote that at her field hospital, they “hoisted the Union Jack and Red Cross flags side by side” (1940, 311). I have tried to bring attention back to the overlooked presence of that second flag—to return the nurse to her place in the literary expanse of World War I. Reading Catherine through wartime nursing, a practice that lies at the intersection of gender and sociohistorical research, works against understandings of her that rely on ahistorical and essentialist conceptions of gender. Nursing is a learned discipline, and this article has attended to the process by which the task of wartime nursing molded Catherine’s mind and body into an instrument of pragmatic management, a transformation not easily undone. The question of how best to admin-ister the shell-shocked soldiers presented an unprecedented quandary; unsurprisingly, then, the occupational hazards of wartime nursing were hardly considered at all. The significant contributions of World War I war nurses are still just coming to light, a delayed development that demands we revisit even the most canonical of texts. Catherine Barkley might very well be the character that most epitomizes Hemingway’s famous iceberg theory of omission. Despite her minimalist presence, she provides the organizing logic for the narrative—her relationship with Frederic frames the entire novel. Crucially, the final scene of Catherine’s death reverses traditional gender dynamics: rather than locating Catherine within the masculinist hierarchy of martial valor, Hemingway places Frederic in the position of witnessing loss typically experienced by wartime nurses. At the narrative’s end, Frederic is just beginning to learn the lesson of survival that Catherine has embodied throughout the novel. Ultimately, in these and other ways, A Farewell to Arms contests the idea that war trauma is the privileged domain of men. If initially one is inclined to identify with Frederic and thus, to see




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Catherine his way—as “a little crazy”—after realizing the depth of her loss and labor, we, like Frederic, become aware of Catherine’s quiet and understated strength (a belated recognition strengthened with subsequent rereadings of the text). Hemingway struggled to conclude the novel, writing forty-seven drafts of the ending.22 If we read A Farewell to Arms as Catherine’s war story rather than as her love story, then Hemingway’s final choice to have Catherine die suggests how difficult it would be for a woman so altered by war to reintegrate into civilization. With these insights in mind, perhaps next it is time to return to Lady Brett Ashley, the volatile female protagonist of The Sun Also Rises, who has been seen as an unapolo-getic bitch, bent on ruining the life of disabled World War I veteran Jake Barnes.23 Like Catherine, Brett was also a VAD nurse, and not enough has been made of her experience of World War I, including the traumatic loss of her “own true love” to dysentery, and its reverberations in her behavior (Hemingway [1926] 2006, 46). Ultimately, a “Hemingway woman” might be best understood as one who has to forge her own path through the zone interdite—a task that does not end at the close of war.

§ Michelle Huang is a dual-degree doctoral student in the departments of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her articles and reviews on medicine, disability, and gender in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature have appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Configurations, and Hypatia. From 2013 to 2015, her research at the Hemingway Letters Project contributed to the publication of volumes 3 and 4 of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge University Press).

AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Sandra Spanier and Kit Hume, both of whom read multiple drafts of this article. I am also the grateful recipient of support provided by the Bernard and Ann Re Oldsey Endowment for American Literary Studies at Penn State; the Constance Shehan Graduate Support in Women’s Studies Fund Award at Penn State; and the Jim and Nancy Hinkle Travel Grant, administered by the Ernest Hemingway Society.



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Notes1. Angela Smith borrows the phrase the “second battlefield” from Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse’s Impressions of the First World War (1929) to argue that the first “literary battlefield” involves the acknowledgment of women as active participants and creators in the discourse of war, while the second involves the recognition of the female experimental writing that resulted from encountering war as modernist practice (2000, 71).

2. Badenhausen (2003) offers an excellent reading of Brittain’s war memoirs as communal testimony and mourning as well as a critique of Paul Fussell’s valorization of the male soldier’s experience.

3. See Higonnet 2001 and 2002, Gilbert 1987, Potter 2005, Badenhausen 2003, Freedman 2002, Tylee 1990, Das 2005, Hallett 2014, and Smith 2000.

4. Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet: Stepdaughters of War (1930 [1989]), a semi-biographical account of ambulance driver Winifred Constance Young’s diaries, is also often included in this list.

5. Shell shock is part of a constellation of terms that also includes “soldier’s heart,” “male hysteria,” “combat fatigue,” and “hypochondria.” See Dodman 2006 for a reading of A Farewell to Arms as Frederic’s trauma narrative.

6. A Farewell to Arms will be cited as FTA.

7. Sandra Spanier (1990) provides a detailed history of Catherine Barkley’s critical reception.

8. This biographical fact has received a tremendous amount of popular atten-tion, including a book based upon von Kurowsky’s letters titled Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky (1989) and its movie adap-tation In Love and War (1996), starring Sandra Bullock and Chris O’Donnell.

9. Matthew Bruccoli, for example, writes, “It is possible to detect A Farewell to Arms operating as retaliation. Hemingway gets even with Agnes by killing off Catherine at the end of the novel” (2002, 103).

10. See, for example, Wexler 1981; Spanier 1987, 1990; and Traber 2005.

11. As Jane Potter points out, the work of female memoirists often explicitly reinforces the eminence of the male experience while only implicitly avowing the importance of female perspectives on war (2005, 154).

12. Diane Price Herndl (2001) discusses A Farewell to Arms in relation to “slackers,” or soldiers who were suspected of malingering in hospitals in order to delay returning to the front.




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13. As Christine Hallett documents, volunteer nurses were resented by career nurses, who were struggling to receive professional recognition and compensa-tion for their work (2014, 20).

14. See Vernon 2002 for a discussion of Hemingway’s crisis of masculinity regarding his ambulance work.

15. See Comley and Scholes 1994.

16. See Gilbert 1987 for an analysis of this and other recruitment posters’ relation to anxiety about war’s impact on gender relations.

17. The contemporaneous proliferation of romance novels authored by both men and women about World War I is explored in Potter 2005, chapter 3, “‘Putting Things in Their Right Places’: The War in Romance Novels.” A Farewell to Arms can be read as Hemingway’s subversion of the patriotic genre’s expectation of a happy ending.

18. Throughout the novel, Frederic elides much of his medical interaction with the nurses, such as when he writes vaguely that Miss Gage had “done something for me very skillfully” (FTA 76).

19. As documented in Trogdon (2007), when Scribner’s editor Max Perkins asked Hemingway to consider excising the word “bedpan” from the galleys, Hemingway wrote back, “This instrument dominates hospital life—I have only mentioned it once I believe I mentioned it to give the natural and unembar-rassed attitude of nurse toward all the natural functions. The first and biggest impression one who has never been in a hospital receives” (77).

20. This reference lends Mary Borden’s memoir The Forbidden Zone (1929) its title.

21. Spanier (1987) reads Catherine’s manipulation of Frederic here as a survival tactic. A Farewell to Arms’s original title is a nod to Gustave Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale (1869), whose protagonist is named Frédéric.

22. As documented in Seán Hemingway’s introduction to the 2012 Scribner’s edition of A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway [1929] 2012). Bernard Oldsey (1977) catalogs forty-one endings.

23. Lorie Watkins Fulton (2004) provides an overview of the “Brett-as-bitch” school of criticism, as well as a rereading of The Sun Also Rises analyzing Jake’s limited and uncritical narration of Brett.



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Documents

In Uniform Code: Catherine Barkley's Wartime Nursing Service in A Farewell to Arms