Very Chicago: Mary Borden and the Art of Fiction

Very Chicago: Mary Borden and the Art of Fiction内容摘要：

1 Hazel Hutchison University of Aberdeen ‘“Very Chicago”: Mary Borden and the Art of Fiction’ Mary Borden’s searing account of the Western Front, The Forbidden Zone, has recently become one of the most celebrated texts about the First World War by a female writer. Unflinching in its descriptions of the horrors and ironies of life and death in a military hospital, Borden’s book, largely composed while she was running L’Hôpital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1 for the French Army at Rousbrugge in Belgium, deserves every line of the attention that has, rather belatedly, come its way. Rejected in 1917 by publishers wary of censorship regulations, criticized by reviewers when it finally appeared in 1929 as “dreadful,” full of “mannerisms” and “ugly” images, and largely ignored by readers and scholars over the following decades, The Forbidden Zone was never a success in Borden’s lifetime (TLS, 1030). However, since the 1990s, with an upsurge of interest in women’s writing from the war, and with a broadening awareness of international perspectives on the war, sections have found their way into anthologies, the book has been reprinted, and scholars such as Christine Hallett, Margaret Higonnet, Angela K. Smith and Santanu Das have given it a place in the history of nursing narratives and in the development of modernist literary methods. Jane Conway’s finely researched biography has also pieced together the story of Borden’s dramatic life, from her childhood in Chicago to her adult life in the political and literary elite of British society, allowing her work to be understood in its context. The Forbidden Zone looks set, at last, to be recognized for what it is, a classic text of the First World War. Hardhitting, pensive, innovative in style and structure, fearless in its examination of the mystery of human suffering, this book offers a view of the consequences of war as damning and as 2 eloquent as any of the more celebrated war texts by writers such as Siegfried Sassoon, Erich Marie Remarque or Vera Britten (Hutchison, 87-96). However, The Forbidden Zone, fragmented, inventive and brilliant as it is, was not Borden’s only statement about the war. Like many of her generation, Borden found the war all-engrossing, a physical and emotional ordeal that left a lasting impression of the fragility of human society and that redefined her sense of her own identity. Borden’s identity is heavily masked in The Forbidden Zone. The prose sketches that make up the book deliberately confuse any sense of a consistent speaking voice, lapsing between first, third and even second-person narration, destabilizing the reader’s viewpoint to create the sense of dislocation and detachment that was such a distinctive feature of the front-line experience. Although it is often described as a “memoir,” there is little information in this text about how Borden came to be at the Front; there is no discussion of her mid-Western background, her politics, or even the practicalities of her role there. Indeed, one of the virtues of this remarkable little book is its vivid depiction of the claustrophobia of the war-zone, the apparent irrelevance of all experience beyond the limits of the hospital compound, and the difficulty of conceiving of a world either before or after the war. Many sections in the book are framed in present tense, thus affirming the intensity of these moments of perception as they unfold, and the hopelessness of a world in which war seems the only eternal truth. As she phrases it in the verbal sketch “Moonlight”: “It had no beginning, it will have no end. War, the Alpha and the Omega, world without end—I don’t mind it. I am used to it” (The Forbidden Zone, 53). In contrast, Borden’s fiction relating to the war generates a very different voice. The novels which she wrote during and about the war offer more open explorations of the impact of the war on society and on personal relationships, and provide the cultural context so markedly absent from The Forbidden Zone. Given Borden’s tendency to draw on her own 3 experiences in her art, these novels also provide, if not exactly biographical information, at least an exploration of feelings and responses related to Borden’s own as she struggled to make sense of the meaning of the war in her own life and the lives of those around her. Borden’s novels are mostly out of print and are firmly off the radar of both popular readers and literary scholars. They have never been taken seriously as war literatu