War at the Home Front: Re-Gendered Trauma Tropes in You Know When the Men are Gone

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Notes

¹ Some key nonfiction texts by female veterans include Kayla Williams’s Love My Rifle More than You and Plenty of Time When We Get Home, Shoshana Johnson’s I’m Still Standing, Jane Blair’s Hesitation Kills, Kim Olson’s Iraq and Back, and Jessica Goodell’s Shade It Black. Other collections of female veterans’ stories include Kirstel Holmstedt’s Band of Sisters and The Girls Come Marching Home, Helen Benedict’s The Lonely Soldier, and Tanya Biank’s Undaunted, as well as Kirby Dick’s award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War.

² Although this still depends on Western psychoanalytic views of the self as an integrated cohesive whole.

³ See Buelens et al.’s The Future of Trauma Theory for a wide-ranging discussion of the problems of traditional trauma models and the potentials for representation beyond the dominant narrative of individual suffering and catharsis.

⁴ An issue that also has plagued trauma studies; see particularly Ruth Leys’s critique of Caruth’s Tancread and Clorinda parable, in which the physical death of the female becomes merely a metaphor for the psychological trauma of the male (who happens to be a soldier) (Leys 292–97).

⁵ Cara Hoffman makes just such a claim in her op-ed “The Things She Carried,” which argues that “stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our culture. It’s not that their stories are poorly told. It’s that their stories are simply not told in our literature, film, and popular culture.” Hoffman’s piece is brief, and makes no mention of the many memoirs and secondhand accounts; nonetheless it indicates a clear gap in the existing canon.

⁶ Both Halftime Walk and Yellow Birds were finalists for the National Book Award, just one of the many accolades heaped on each text.

⁷ For a more recent critically acclaimed example, see Matt Gallagher’s Youngblood (2016), which is rightly praised for its more nuanced exploration of Iraqi perspectives in the closing days of the war, yet still includes a narrative in which the male American soldier feels traumatized because he failed to “save” an Iraqi female civilian with whom he fell in love.

⁸ Even though women have long served in combat areas, the fact that until 2013 women were not officially allowed to serve as combat troops has of course figured the combat narrative as a fundamentally male story.

⁹ Sanfilippo’s piece contributes to such a discussion, investigating specifically disabled female veteran figures in war stories, figures she describes as doubly elided from the canon.

¹⁰ While both the increased presence of women in combat and the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” will undoubtedly complicate existing tropes, the image of the wife/girlfriend as the embodiment of all things “home” remains a dominant one in contemporary war fiction.

¹¹ You Know When the Men Are Gone is one of a relatively few emerging texts focusing specifically on the female non-combatant experience. Other texts engaging this theme include Lea Carpenter’s Eleven Days, which divides equally between the story of a Navy SEAL and his mother’s turmoil when he goes missing in action, and Fallon’s follow-up novel, The Confusion of Languages, which tells the story of two wives who follow their military husbands to Jordan. The latter, while not exploring the American home front, still considers the gendered traumas that come from being adjacent to military trauma, while also investigating two army wives dislocated from their communities and networks of safety.

¹² A few of his key examples involve the mutually constitutive discourses of the Holocaust and the Algerian War for Independence, the American legacy of slavery, and multiple genocides that took place as part of mid-twentieth-century decolonizations.

¹³ It is worth noting that much of my language here will describe the text along strict gender lines, as her relationships are almost exclusively those of male soldiers with female wives and girlfriends. Absent are any questions of non-heteronormative relationships, and only a few stories even mention women in the combat zone. I shall discuss this more in depth later.

¹⁴ One striking example involves a dual problem for a military spouse who goes grocery shopping, in that she dislikes shopping both because “she hated cooking without a man to satiate”—the traditional domestic role—and because the raw meat at the butcher “horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same if packaged by a butcher” (6). The chaotic supermarket is itself a recurring trope in contemporary war literature; consider, for example, the end of The Hurt Locker, wherein the excess choice of the supermarket proves traumatic to the returning soldier.

¹⁵ See Dori Laub’s foundational “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening” for an in-depth discussion of the role of the listener in trauma recovery.