Mary Borden's Forbidden Zone: Women's writing from no-man's-land

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 109-124

  Freedman, Ariela ^a  

^a Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36248961440     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2002.0006     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. The Lancet, 18 March 1916, 267. I am grateful to Jeremy Wexler for his help in the course of writing this essay.
2. Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, 23 March 1918, Selected Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 79.
3. Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (London: Heinemann, 1929), 1; hereafter abbreviated FZ.
4. Times, 3 December 1968, 10.
5. In addition to The Forbidden Zone, Borden's books include: Jane: Our Stranger (1923), Four O'Clock and Other Stories (1926), Jericho Sands (1926), Flamingo (1927), King of the Jews (1935), Jehovah's Day (1929), For the Record (1950), You, the Jury (1952), Journey Down a Blind Alley (1946), a memoir of the Second World War, and Action for Slander (1937), which was later made into a film.
6. Margaret Higonnet's edited collection, Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001) excerpts the war writings of Borden and Ellen La Motte, who worked together on the frontline at Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. I. Higonnet points to "striking parallels between the two collections," particularly in their "bitter irony" of tone, their loosely autobiographical narrative, and their unconventional treatment of the subject matter. Higonnet emphasizes the way in which these two nurses and writers "expose wounds" of war, and in doing so, take "a first step" in healing them. Until the publication of Higonnet's anthology, The Forbidden Zone (1929), Borden's most powerful book, had been out of print since 1930. Higonnet's anthology, however, downplays the length and breadth of Borden's literary career and her considerable differences from La Motte by presenting the two women generically as her title indicates, as "nurses at the front." By leaving out many of the opening vignettes of Borden's book and all of the poetry with which the book concludes, Higonnet edits the wartime sketches to further emphasize their similarities. However, when these books are read in full they create quite a different impression. La Motte's is more reportorial, more consistently ironic, and more even in tone and genre, whereas Borden's employs three different genres - prose poem, short story, and free verse - and veers wildly in tone from the gently whimsical to the professionally detached to the sentimentally engaged. La Motte's disillusionment is predictable in a way that Borden's is not; Borden crosses more boundaries, takes more risks, and while she does not always do so with complete success, she does so with talent and originality.
7. The most significant of these include Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930).
8. Robert Graves, Goodbye to all That (1929).
9. Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1929).
10. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933).
11. and Frederic Manning, Her Privates We (1930).
12. James Kribb, "Literary Strategies of War, Strategies of Literary War," in Literature and War, ed. David Bevan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 21.
13. Despite this recent trend, critical discussions of Borden's work have been few and far between. Those few include Margaret Higonnet's article "Women in The Forbidden Zone: War, Women and Death," in Death and Representation, ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
14. and Nosheen Khan's "Mary Borden's 'Unidentified' and W.B. Yeats's 'The Second Coming,'" ANQ 4.1 (January 1991), 20-1.
15. Khan also discusses Borden in Women's Poetry of the First World War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988)
16. Brief discussions of Borden can be found in Claire Tylee's The Great War and Women's Consciousness: Images of Militarism and Womanhood in Women's Writings, 1914-64 (New York: Macmillan, 1990)
17. and Jane Marcus's "Afterword: Corpus/ Corps/ Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War," in Helena Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet ... Stepdaughters of War (New York: Feminist Press, 1989)
18. Surprisingly, Borden is not mentioned in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's seminal work on women and war writing, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988).
19. Recent anthologies of women's writing include The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, ed. Joyce Marlow (London: Virago, 1999).
20. Beyond the Home Front: Women's Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars, ed. Yvonne Klein (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
21. Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I, ed. Margaret Higonnet (New York: Penguin, 1999).
22. and Women's Writing of the First World War, ed. Angela K. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
23. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 213.
24. See also Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes' Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (London: Constable, 1965)
25. and Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
26. Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 204.
27. See E. Baxton Shanes, "London Letter," The Little Review (December 1914): 55.
28. Richard Cork writes, "Wyndham Lewis may have declared, in 1915, that 'there is no room, when praising soldiers, for anything but an abstract hymn.' But the latter stages of the conflict proved so repugnant that more and more artists turned to representational imagery fired by a protesting vehemence." Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde and the Great War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press and Barbican Gallery, 1994), 10.
29. Along with the previously mentioned works by Khan, Tylee, and Gilbert and Gubar, other important works on women and war writing include: Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women (London: Routledge, 1994);
30. Dorothy Goldman, ed. Women and World War I: The Written Response (London: Macmillan, 1993);
31. Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds., Women's Fiction and the Great War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997);
32. and Margaret Higonnet, Jane Jenson, and Margaret Collins Weitz, eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
33. Tylee, The Great War, 13;
34. Higonnet, Jenson, and Weitz, Behind the Lines, 15.
35. Higonnet, "Women in The Forbidden Zone," 202.
36. Mary Borden, Four O'clock and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1926), 9; hereafter abbreviated FO.
37. Higonnet also makes the point in her introduction to Nurses at the Front that Borden writes "the wounds of war" as a step towards healing, though she does not develop this assertion (Higonnet, Nurses at the Front, xxxiv).
38. The reaction against gender-based criticism of war literature has already begun. In Modernism, History and the First World War (1998), Trudi Tate writes: I am not trying to produce a taxonomy of war writings, nor to make a case for "women's writing" or "men's writing"; I am increasingly convinced that this kind of category obscures more than it illuminates. The works I discuss are preoccupied with questions of who has seen what, and how one is positioned in relation to war's trauma. [5] Tate shifts the focus from questions of gender to questions of trauma and representation and claims that "these concerns often far outweigh those of gender and sexual difference" (ibid.). Her readings, however, are still deeply concerned with the role of gender, despite her introduction's claim. Her work has helped establish a recognition of the complexity and multivalence of the term "trauma" itself.
39. Interestingly, Tate does not spend much time on Borden, although Borden is centrally and productively preoccupied with the questions Tate raises. Ruth Leys's recent study of trauma, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) also deals with the term's multivalence
40. Lynne Layton, "Vera Brittain's Testament(s)," in Behind the Lines, 72.
41. Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1923), 190.
42. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 63.
43. Qtd. in Cork, The Bitter Truth, 77.
44. Primo Levi, "Why Does One Write," in Other People's Trades (Great Britain: Michael Joseph, 1989), 66.
45. Levi, "On Obscure Writing," in Other People's Trades, 161.