Seeing battle, knowing war: feminist re-visioning in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's "The Man Whose Heart They Could See".(Critical Essay)

Abstract

As an exploration of the themes of disillusionment and the failure of language, Romanian writer Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" would seem to share much with better-known men's writing on the war such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms or Henri Barbusse's Le Feu: Journal d'une Escouade. But a careful reading of the text reveals some crucial differences from these works. Treating the subject of war not in terms of an easily definable "scene of battle" or "war front" but instead as a deeply entrenched cultural logic in which varied aspects of society are both affected and, in an important sense, complicit, "The Man Whose Heart They Could See" mounts a critique of language far more radical and modernist than that found in most war literature, one which explores the extent to which questions of historical memory are inextricably bound up with issues of gender and power.

Key Words: women and war, feminist literature, Papadat-Bangescu

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When Mary Lee remarked that a book about war "may not, perhaps, be written by a man" who "sees only one small corner of the army," she was working to overturn one of the moldiest assumptions of the war literature: that "first-hand" accounts of the scene of battle written by men constitute the only "authentic" writing on war. (1) If this idea rankled writers like Lee in 1929, little wonder that contemporary feminist scholars show concern when, as recently as 1990, Sam Hynes writes that the authentic texts about war "have the authority of direct experience," and that a woman's writing on war must be " about failure, a woman's unsuccessful attempt to enter the heroic world of war" (2). Fortunately critics and writers like Margaret Higonnet, Jane Marcus, and Elaine Showalter have contributed greatly to a new understanding of war--one that goes beyond the narrow focus of the "scene of battle" to examine, in Higonnet's words, "the broad social and economic mechanisms" deeply affected by war. (3) Viewed in this light, women's writing on war gains a long overdue legitimacy.