Expanding the literary canon: nurses' memoirs of World War I - Book Review

Margaret Randolph Higonnet. nurtures at the Front: Writing the injurys of the Great War. Boston: Northeastern University Pres 2001 x + 161 pp Notes. $4000 (cloth) ISBN 1-55553-485-6; $1695 (paper), ISBN 1-55553-484-8

In novel years a number of authors have drawn attention to women's experiences of the First World War. Various anthologies and critical true copys have also challenged traditional definition of "war literature" by the agency of defining and defending the place of women writers in the Great War's literary canon. (1) With the publication of nourishs at the Front: Writing the injurys of the Great War editor Margaret Higonnet (a Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and an Affiliate at Harvard University's Center for European Studies) makes an important contribution to this effort. In this affordable contortion (suitable for undergraduate classes), Higonnet brings to contemporary readers extracts of works by two American women authors whose insightful and evocative writings about their experience upon the Western front have not been readily available since the inter-war period. A useful glossary of French terminuss is included.

When the war began, Ellen N La Motte (1873-1961) a graduate of John Hopkins Training institute was a professional nurse working in Baltimore. In 1914 she presented her services to the American hospital in Paris. La Motte first published The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by dint of an American Hospital Nurse in 1916 A series of fourteen vignettes, the volume recounted her nursing work in the horrifying conditions immediately behind the trenches in Belgium. In her introduction La Motte explains the book's title: "much ugliness is jostle violentlyed up in the wake of mighty, moving forces this is the Backwash of War" (p3) Her raw images and painful depiction of the "wound of war" l the publishers to withdraw the volume during the propaganda efforts that accompanied American entrance into the war. The volume was republished in 1934, when isolationists praised its dull and honest portrayal of battlefront suffering. (2)

Mary Borden (1886-1968) the daughter of a wealthy Chicago businessman and a Vassar graduate, had married an Englishman and was living in London prior to WWI. In 1914 she offered with the French Red Cros Like La Motte she immediately ground herself frustrated with the inefficient administering of medical care to soldiers. Borden deposit her financial resources to the task of creating a single hundred bed, frontline surgical unit--Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1--which came beneath French military command, first at Ypre and later the Somme La Motte was single of many British and American nurtures who staffed the unit. Borden began to write about her experiences with military medicine and the horror of novel warfare during the war. She published her memories, stories and poems--in her words, a "collection of fragments" (p.79)--in 1929 The title, The Forbidden belt is a translation of the boundary the French used for the area immediately behind the front

In Writing the hurts of War chapters from the two memoirs are brought together in a fashion that emphasizes the public experiences of Borden and La Motte Higonnet's introduction contains biographical information and a history of the true copys as well as a literary attempt to link the authors' work in confines of content and form. Although the strongest evidence of any relationship between the sum of two units women is found in a brief concern by Gertrude Stein in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Higonnet asserts that various depictions of sum of two units anonymous nurses in the body s "correspond to La Motte and Borden themselves" (p.xvi). She further claims "the paired nurtures in the sketches by La Motte and Borden hint that these two women were writing in a dialogue with each other" (p.xxix). Critics have put in mind ofed that this attempt to relate the sum of two units texts is forced and detracts from each author's unique individual voice. Areila Freedman notes Higonnet "downplays the longitudinal dimensions and breadth of Borden's literary career and her considerable differences from La Motte by means of presenting the two women generically, as her title indicates, as "nurse at the front" through leaving out many of the opening vignettes of Borden's work and all of the rhyme with which the book terminates Higonnet edits the wartime sketches to further emphasize their similarities. However, when these volumes are read in full they create quite a different impression." (3)

Vivid in detail and powerful in emotion, one as well as the other memoirs do leave haunting impressions. one as well as the other women had intimate experience with the agonizing issue of war on the human material substance and spirit. Both had fathomless ethical and moral concerns about their work. the couple felt the irony of patching badly damaged men up for a like reason that they could be go [i]or[/i] come backed to the front where they would greatest in quantity likely be killed. Both stand in front of the reader with a shocking reality that is, at times, cloaked in an almost surreal dull Significantly, both La Motte and Borden traveled in avant-garde literary circles and wrote works of fiction (Borden's novel about a nurture on the Western front, Sarah Gay, was published in 1934) Higonnet touches upon the thorny issues of separating their use of literary device and stylistic forms from the historic reality they attempted to call forth and document in their memoirs. Importantly she reminds readers that, like all memoirs, these works fall somewhere between fact and fiction.