Diverting the gaze: the unseen text in women's war writing.

In her discussion of the way women "look" at war and interpret that act of looking through language and image, The World Wars through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher asserts that "Vision has ... played an important role in the development and gendering of cultural discourses about war" (1998, 3). Gallagher develops her theories of this female gaze through readings of civilian, journalistic, and photojournalistic responses to war, yet her theoretical approach to the relationship between seeing and writing war has equally important applications for the discussion of the traumatic seeing out of which women narrate their frontline nursing experience. While Gallagher focuses primarily on what is seen and how the gaze is articulated, my discussion explores the relationship between what is seen and not seen, in particular examining how the diversion of the gaze and the attendant paradoxical presence of an unseen text is fundamental in understanding the connections between seeing and writing war.

While women's war writing from the First World War has received much critical attention over the past ten or more years that has established its authenticity as witness to war, scant attention has been paid to how women see the trauma of frontline combat nursing and how, consequently, such seeing or not seeing influences the narrative. (1) With the exception of Gallagher's study and Claire Tylee's recent discussion of Florence Farmborough's photographs from the Russian Front both of which focus on how women "see" war and on the relationship between seeing and narrating war, and Tylee and Higonnet's examinations of the relationship between frontline nursing and trauma, little critical discussion has focused on these areas. (2) Moreover, women's writing from the Vietnam War has been excluded from most discussions of women and the war experience in spite of several fine memoirs, short story collections, and an anthology of women's poetry that have been published over the past twenty years. (3) While critical discussion of combatant writing has noted connections between such writing from the First World War and Vietnam, (4) understanding the connections between nurses' narratives from these wars draws attention to the common elements in how war is seen and consequently to the relationship between seeing and bearing witness to war. (5) In demonstrating such commonality, this discussion draws on First World War writing by British writers Enid Bagnold and Vera Brittain, an American, Mary Borden, and on memoirs from the Vietnam War by Americans Lynda Van Devanter and Winnie Smith.

On a general level, the striking similarity in the narratives of these two wars seems to arise from the compulsion to bear witness to the trauma of combat nursing. More specifically, British writers from the First World War and American writers from the Vietnam War were both concerned with carrying what Jane Marcus has called "a terrible knowledge" to a civilian population that seemed completely removed from any understanding of the war experience (1989, 126). This sets them apart from their Second World War counterparts whose experience, at least in Britain, was shared by the civilian population. The impetus behind the writing thus has much in common with combatant writing where we find that integral to the telling is representing the paradoxical presence of what cannot be told. The context for these writings, wherein the woman's role as nurse to the injured men occasions her traumatic seeing, draws attention to the role of vision as a gendered activity; at the same time, we find that in writing trauma women and men employ similar representations of the diverted gaze as an absent narrative or unseen text.

Focusing on the diversion of the gaze here means examining the relationship between the "seen" and "unseen" texts in women's war writing that comes out of the direct experience of combat nursing. To provide a context for the reading of specific texts I begin by examining the gendered question of authenticity that connects "seeing" with "knowing" in wartime. The discussion then concentrates on three related contexts within which these writers are compelled to divert the gaze while at the same time revealing or partially revealing the trauma from which the gaze is diverted. First, it examines the cultural prescriptions that influence the writer's seeing and revealing and attendant avoidance of seeing and revealing. It then goes on to focus on texts where traumatic seeing (or not seeing) is influenced by the problems inherent to the eye's registration of visual information--the traumatic event can only be partially seen or apprehended--and the psychological processing of such seeing which itself involves an avoidance of looking. In these instances the narrative itself must be made, paradoxically, to reveal what cannot be seen: the unseen text. The discussion concludes with an analysis of extreme circumstances where controlling the act of looking means erasing trauma with an alternate set of images that establishes a new diversionary narrative.

Establishing a claim to the legitimacy of their seeing and knowing war is a necessary starting point for much women's writing from both the First World War and the Vietnam War. Even after the participation of American women in two world wars, Vietnam nurses like Lynda Van Devanter were faced with the struggle to validate their war experience. As Van Devanter was asked before she published her memoir of Vietnam, Home Before Morning, "What could a woman possibly have to say about war, especially the Vietnam war" (1991, xxi). (6) The problem, according to Margaret Higonnet, is defined by the authenticity of the gaze: "authentic speech, it has often been repeated, could only come from the trenches in the disabused words of a man who had 'seen' combat." The question she asks is therefore "Can authentic words be found by a woman?" (1993, 205). The male combatant has seen war, when war is defined as combat, and speaks of war from a privileged position. Seeing and its attendant knowledge give him the right to speak and by definition deny the woman who has not seen a voice.

The 1915 exchange of letters between the young Vera Brittain, discovering war through her work as a VAD nurse in London, and her fiance. Roland Leighton, serving on the Western Front goes some way toward collapsing the idea that women on the home front did not experience or "see" war; (7) yet one particular letter from Leighton provides a useful position from which to begin the discussion of traumatic seeing in the larger context of the debate surrounding vision and the "gendering of cultural discourses." Describing the decayed remains of German soldiers in a captured trench. Leighton ends his letter to Brittain with a bitter rejection of the heroic language that hides what he now sees as "real" war.

 
    The dug-outs have been nearly all blown in, the wire entanglements 
    are a wreck, and in among this chaos of twisted iron and splintered 
    timber and shapeless earth are the fleshless, blackened bones of 
    simple men who poured out their red, sweet wine of youth 
    unknowing.... Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden 
    thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, 
    invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country ... let 
    him realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled 
    all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous 
    putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen, who can say that 
    Victory is worth the death of even one of these 
    (Brittain 1982, 344) (8)