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Article Excerpt
This essay argues that a queer sensibility is central to A Farewell to Arms, underwriting the connections between the characters, including the desire that binds Catherine and Frederic. This sensibility is informed by changing views--some of them quite radical for the time--about marriage, homosexuality, and prostitution, but it also challenges gender and sexual norms of the 1920s and even today. The novel's emphasis on the queer (defined here as the "anti-normal") reveals that it seeks to invent new forms of relationships that might outlast the chaos of war and overturn repressive societal dictates regarding sexual expression.
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IN LETTERS BETWEEN Hemingway and his editor Max Perkins about material that Scribner's wanted to eliminate from the serialized version of A Farewell to Arms, one suggested cut--Rinaldi's insinuation that Frederic Henry and the priest are homosexuals--stands out as rather odd (Hemingway, 11 March 1929; The Only Thing That Counts 94-96). (1) Scribner's interest in cutting, this passage is not so odd. After all, by proposing that Frederic Henry and the priest might be "a little that way" (65), Rinaldi puts their relationship into a category that transgresses conventions related to the Catholic priesthood, the military, and men's friendships not only of that time but even of ours. Why wouldn't the editors of a respected publishing house and magazine prefer to eliminate a reference that might raise not only eyebrows but ire? What is strange is that Hemingway included the homosexual allusion in the first place and then insisted it not be touched.
Attempting to justify the changes that Scribner's wanted to make to the Farewell manuscript for serialization in Scribners Magazine, Perkins wrote to Hemingway, "I think ... that cuts can be philosophically made, for if we can keep people from being diverted from the qualities of the material itself, by words and passages which have on account of conventions, an astonishingly exaggerated importance to them, a great thing will have been done. Your mind is so completely free of these conventions--and it is fortunate it is--that you do not realize the strength with which they are held. If you knew a few of the genteel!" (19 February 1929, The Only Thing That Counts 92-93; emphasis in original). While Perkins makes a case for excision on the basis of not wanting to offend a group of important, albeit prudish, readers--thus revealing his concerns about censorship, marketability, the firm's reputation, and his own uneasiness regarding transgressions of certain norms--an argument could be made that the passage in question might be cut without damage to story. (2) But that's not the argument I want to make. Instead, I will propose that this passage is one of many that reveal a queer sensibility underwriting the connections among the characters in the novel, including that between Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry. Far from suggesting that this sensibility is peripheral to the novel, this essay will contend that it is philosophically central, helping to explain many issues of importance, including the desire that binds Frederic and Catherine and the larger meaning of the story.
For the purposes of my argument, "the queer" will be defined not merely as the abnormal or the immoral, i.e., that which helps define the "normal" by being its "inferior" other, but also as the anti-normal, that which purposefully resists the normal--especially as it pertains to sexual and gender expectations--and even presents itself as superior to it. (3) Within this perspective, the materialization of the queer can simply stand in opposition to the normal, attempt to redefine that standard, and/or actively resist "normalcy" by presenting its inversion as preferable. In A Farewell to Arms, both resistance to and reconstitution of traditional gender-and sexual mores are at work as Hemingway's characters act both in opposition to time-honored conventions about sexual behavior and desire and in accordance with changing views of sexuality expressed by some of the more liberal marriage "experts" and sexologists writing in the early part of the 20th century. (4)
If one thinks about it, there are hardly any normal sexual relationships and very little normal sex in A Farewell to Arms if by "normal" we mean heterosexual missionary-position sex within the context of a religious- or state-approved marriage. This partly explains why, during its serialization in 1929, the novel was banned in Boston for being "salacious." Sex with prostitutes, often while drunk, sex outside of marriage, sex in a hospital bed almost surely with the woman on top (5)--this sounds more like an episode of Grey's Anatomy than the plot of a classic American novel. It's not that Hemingway didn't recognize that his audience, even beyond the "genteel" readers, might condemn Frederic and Catherine rather than sympathize with them. After all, his text is full of arguments justifying their actions.
Consider, for example, the text's recurring attention to sex with prostitutes. It might sound sordid, but during a war who can blame soldiers for seeking pleasurable diversions from the gritty horrors they encounter every day? Certainly not the Italians or their military, for as Frederic points out, there were two "bawdy houses" in the town where his unit was stationed, "one for troops and one for officers" (FTA 5). (6) Indeed, at one point, Rinaldi complains that the "girls" don't seem like prostitutes anymore; "they are old war comrades.... It is a disgrace that they should stay so long that they become friends" (65). In America, however, the sentiment was less indulgent, and Frederic's fairly positive reports of his experiences with prostitutes take on a different light with that context in mind. Nancy Bristow notes that as the United States entered the war, "American troops became the target of an important domestic program" (7). Formerly tolerated brothels were closed by anti-vice campaigns during the 1910s, and parents as well as progressive groups such as the American Social Hygiene Association (7) lobbied to cleanse U.S. military training camps, perceived as breeding grounds for vice, illicit sex, alcohol, and venereal disease. According to Ruth Rosen, the anti-vice movement developed into a full-scale campaign against prostitutes, with federal authorities concerned about estimates that half the U.S. Army might be infected with gonorrhea. As potential carriers, prostitutes became identified as "a significant and dangerous internal domestic enemy" (Rosen 33). The federal government responded by forming the Commission on Training Camp Activities (CTCA), whose job it was to keep U.S. troops "physically healthy and morally pure," to lead them away from dissipation and debauchery, and toward an improved moral state and higher social values (Bristow 7, 12). Bombarded by letters from concerned parents and wives, who worried that their sons and husbands would be forever changed in military training camps by the temptations of alcohol, illicit sex, and immorality, President Wilson declared, "The Federal Government has pledged its word that as far as care and vigilance can accomplish the result, men committed to its charge will be returned to the homes...
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