For Whom the Bell Tolls.

• Author: Engle, Karen
• Position: Book review

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. By Ernest Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner Sons. Scribner 1996 ed. Pp. 471. Cloth, $30; paper, $15.

What does it mean--rape ? When I said the word for the first time aloud, ... it sent shivers down my spine. Now I can think it and write it with an untrembling hand, say it out loud to get used to hearing it said. It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything--but it's not.

--Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin, 1945 (1)

Generally, it bothers me when someone says raped women.... [R]aped women--that hurts a person, to be marked as a raped woman, as if you had no other characteristic, as if that were your sole identity.

--Judge Nusreta Sivac, in Calling the Ghosts, 1996 (2)

She said that nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept....

--Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940 (3)

INTRODUCTION

Rape is often said to constitute a fate worse than death. It has long been deployed as an instrument of war and outlawed by international humanitarian law as a serious--sometimes even capital--crime. While disagreement exists over the meaning of rape and the proof that should be required to convict an individual of the crime, today the view that rape is harmful to women enjoys wide concurrence. Advocates for greater legal protection against rape often argue that rape brings shame upon raped women as well as upon their communities. Shame thus adds to rape's power as a war weapon. Sexual violence has not, however, been deployed as an instrument in every war. In this sense it is neither universal nor inevitable, as political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood has recently demonstrated. (4) If wartime rape is not inevitable, I would argue that neither is the shame often seen to accompany it.

In this Review, I use For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway's novel of the Spanish Civil War, and other narratives that consider sexual violence in war to demonstrate that women's roles in war extend far beyond that of victim. By showing how different characters and agents in the stories offer possibilities for reimagining the harm of rape, I encourage feminists and humanitarians to question the assumption that women who have been raped in wartime are destroyed. By seeing rape as a fate worse than death, at least in part because of the harm of shame they assume it brings, feminists and humanitarians often exacerbate the very shame they hope to relieve. Particularly when made hypervisible in the context of mass rape, (5) wartime rape risks becoming the exclusive identifying element for women who are members of the group primarily subjected to it.

Though rape has long been considered a crime, the past fifteen years have brought renewed attempts to define wartime rape as an international crime and to increase the enforcement of its prohibition. These attempts, largely but not exclusively spearheaded by Western feminists, have been aligned with the development of new international mechanisms for the adjudication of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ("ICTY").

I have written elsewhere about the judicial treatment of rape by the ICTY and have argued that its jurisprudence--perhaps unwittingly and at the urging of many feminists--has functioned to limit the narratives about women in war, denying much of women's sexual, political, and military agency (6). During and after the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, many feminists tended to portray all women (but especially Bosnian Muslim women) as potential sexual victims and to deny the extent to which women participated in the war militarily and politically. All men (but especially Serbian men) were seen as potential sexual perpetrators, and the possibility of consensual sex between those on opposite sides of the war seemed inconceivable. In a series of what are generally considered progressive decisions, the ICTY found rape to be a war crime and in one case a crime against humanity. (7) Yet these decisions served to reproduce many assumptions about women's (lack of) agency. Through its rules regarding evidence of consent and its equation of rape with torture, the ICTY essentially created a jurisprudence in which much of the sex between opposing sides in the war was made criminal.

For Whom the Bell Tolls offers a lens through which to view narratives about sex and war that are less essentialized than those that have generally appeared in the ICTY's decisions. Hemingway offers an account of war that is unusually open to the ambivalences of killing, the value and threat of sex to battle, and the meaning of life and death and one's sense of one's mission in war. I use Hemingway's novel both as a way to identify the suppression of certain types of narratives in the ICTY's decisions and to suggest new contours to some of the stories that in fact emerged in ICTY testimony. I neither want to equate all sexual relations that occur in war (8) nor suggest that literary (fictional and nonfictional) narratives are necessarily more powerful than legal narratives. Rather, I hope to convince legal activists to consider the need for the admissibility of nuanced accounts of sex and war and to discourage them from assuming that suppression of such stories is necessary to a system of justice.

1. HEMINGWAY'S HISTORICAL CONTEXT

   Over the three years between 1936 and 1939, fascist rebel forces, eventually supported by Italy and Germany, brought down the Second Spanish Republic. This military victory marked the beginning of Franco's dictatorship.

   The Spanish Civil War attracted the interest and participation of men and women from both inside and outside Spain by literally providing a battleground for those who wanted to fight for various shades of fascism, antifascism, Marxism, and Communism. A number of women participated in the war, serving as nurses, militia fighters, and political and philanthropic supporters. The first British volunteer to be killed in battle, for example, was Felicia Browne, a Communist artist in Spain at the outset of the war who fought in a militia unit. (9) One of the leading Spanish Communists at the time was Dolores Ibarruri Gomez, known as La Pasionara ("the passion flower"). Ibarrruri delivered what became a well-known rallying cry for the Republic during a radio address in July 1936: "It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees. No Pasaran!" (10) One of the Republican fighters in Hemingway's fictional account of the war admires La Pasionara and repeats parts of this line during what turns out to be his final battle. (11)

   Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell were two of the many journalists who made their way to Spain to fight for the Republic. While Hemingway traveled with the Communist-led International Brigades, Orwell fought in the trenches for a Marxist militia group. They reported their experiences in different ways: Orwell in a nonfiction work entitled Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway in one of his best-known novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls'.

   Both books offer powerful narrative accounts of daily, even hourly, life during the war. Orwell's book begins in December 1936 when he joins the militia. It concludes with his injury in mid-May 1937 and his fairly abrupt departure from Spain when the organization for which he fought began to be accused of treachery and fascism. Orwell takes us painstakingly through the various disagreements and deadly conflicts among the left supporters of the Republic, many of which he acknowledges he was unable to see while in the midst of the war. Hemingway, for his part, immerses us in the love, hatred, sex, hope, and despair of three days of battle in the spring of 1937.

   Even though women played significant roles in the war, only one woman makes repeat appearances in Orwell's book, and that is his wife. She is a nurse, but she is generally in the background, in Barcelona, whether he is there in the city with her or off fighting at the front. Orwell notes that, while women were fighting alongside men in the very early days of the war, few women remained in the militias by the time he came onto the scene several months later. (13) Thus, we do not see women on the battlefield in his book. In contrast, two women are integral to Hemingway's fictional account. These women play a significant role in the guerilla operations undertaken by his characters. Hemingway's portrayal of these two women both relies upon and challenges stereotypes about sex and gender in war. The novel provides a useful comparison with narratives of women in war embodied elsewhere, including in international jurisprudence.

2. SEX AND GENDER IN FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

   In 471 pages, Hemingway explores in great detail three-and-a-half days behind fascist lines. The war is already underway, and he relates the characters' current lives as well as their memories of the earlier days of the war. The protagonist is Robert Jordan, a Spanish professor from the University of Montana who is fighting as a guerilla for the Republic during his sabbatical in Spain. He has been sent on what we learn from the beginning all believe will be a deadly mission--to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines. Two female characters play significant roles in the story, and they express sexual and political power in a way that challenges the dominant narratives often told about women in war, including those told by many feminists.

   Pilar is the lover of a ruthless male guerilla leader named Pablo. She is also the ex-lover of a bullfighter. Rafael, a character referred to throughout the novel as "the gypsy," describes Pilar as "[s]omething barbarous.... Something very barbarous. If you think Pablo is ugly you should see his woman. But brave. A hundred times braver than Pablo. But something barbarous" (p. 26). Pilaf refers to herself as ugly as well. But she is strong and determined and, for a while, Pablo makes her the commander of the guerillas' mission. At...