Jenny's Madness

Throughout World War I, there were many different opinions about war and its effect on the soldiers. Both “They” by Siegfried Sassoon, and “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen talk about how war dehumanizes the soldiers. After a soldier comes out of war, whether by injury or ending of the war, he comes out a changed man, not always in the way that the women think that the soldiers should come out. Women tend to want and picture their soldiers coming out of the war as a hero, but so often, the soldiers come out of war with physical, mental, and/or emotional damage.

It is a well known fact that experiencing war changes people; there is an innocence that is forever lost. In Tim O’Brian’s, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”, Mary Anne Bell is an unusual example of the innocence that is lost in war because unlike the rest of the soldiers, she is a woman. Mary Anne’s transformation from innocent “sweetheart” to fierce warrior left readers with mixed emotions because although Mary Anne felt at peace with her transformation, she was also disconnected from reality.

My response has been inspired by a study of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Attwood (Section XIV-Salvaging, Chapter 45 and Section XV- Night, Chapter 46). I shall demonstrate my understanding of the text of these chapters in the form of a memoir by rewriting the chapters from another character’s perspective i.e. Serena Joy’s perspective. Though memoirs are written for non-fiction literature, I noticed the features of memoir in this novel. Serena Joy is one of the important character, of the novel, at the top social level permitted to women. The intended purpose of this Written Task 1 is to know and understand Serena Joy’s perspective (Wife of a Commander), who was a singer and advocate for “traditional values” in the old world before Gilead and now the state took away her power and public recognition. This text starts from the point when Serena Joy comes to know

For most women, however, the experience of war was masked and covered behind nationalism and propaganda. Although much of the book takes place on the front, hints of what is happening back home are frequently given, mostly through letters received by Smithie from her mother and through the character of B.F. Mrs. Evans-Mawning, throughout the novel, serves as a figure of the worst kind of feminine nationalism, boasting about Roy but not having the edge on Smithie's mother because she has only her one son to sacrifice as opposed to Smithie's larger family. Smithie also notes that she is sick of reading positive news about wonder war girls in the news, comparing her experience to having a baby because once you get started "your trapped in it." (Smith, pg. 134). Women on the home front were being coddled into believing everything was going well because this was still a time in which men saw women as more sensitive then they were intelligent and therefore needed to be protected (Thebaud, pg. 95). This sort of "sugar-coating" gave women false impressions about the war, which was particularly disappointing to those who enlisted. In one letter from Smithie's younger sister, Trix, she writes "Why the dickens they dress you up in a pretty cap and make you think you're going to smooth the patients fevered brow beats me hollow." (Smith, pg. 84). Another letter in the book that is very reflective of home front feelings is the one Smithie receives from B.F, who

By spending just a night with a femme fatale type woman, men can suffer extreme harm or even death. The sheer power a Siren has over sailors passing her island can make a reader feel sympathetic for these relatively powerless sailors. This power that women can have over men is illustrated in a strong manner with this allusion, and leads to a reader feeling sorry for these men. Furthermore, Tim Buckley, showing the indecision that could strike a man when confronted by a threatening woman, writes “I am puzzled as the newborn child/ I am troubled at the tide:/ Should I stand amid the breakers?/ Should I lie with death my bride?” (Buckley). The mental argument that a man has of whether or not to go the the woman who is calling him or to stay where he is can be likened to the decision the sailors had to make upon hearing the Siren. The allusion to the victims of the Sirens debating whether or not to jump off their ship and swim to the Sirens is similar to the situations that men in Buckley’s era would have to deal with when faced with the questions of whether to become intimate with a threatening women or

Novels are written with a hidden meaning behind it and it is the readers’ duty to decipher the point the author is trying to get across. Sometimes novels are all a writer has to express themselves and have some sort of outlet for their beliefs or ideals. In Sandra Benitez's novel, A Place Where The Sea Remembers, illustrates how ideologies consumed by society contribute to the oppression of women. When looking at Benitez’s novel in the feminist critical lens, it reveals the underlying patriarchal society that the characters live in and portrays how that affects how men treat women and how women treat women.

The story “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien is an enormously detailed fictional account of a wartime scenario in which jimmy Cross (the story’s main character) grows as a person, and the emotional and physical baggage of wartime are brought to light. The most obvious and prominent feature of O’Brien’s writing is a repetition of detail. O’brien also passively analyzes the effects of wartime on the underdeveloped psyche by giving the reader close up insight into common tribulations of war, but not in a necessarily expositorial sense.. He takes us into the minds of mere kids as they cope with the unbelievable and under-talked-about effects or rationalizing

When men are sent to war most fear that they’ll never return home but both Tayo in Silko’s Ceremony and Frank Money in Toni Morrison’s Home found their sense of home in the status of the uniforms they wore and orders they followed. Though these character’s appear to exhibit the lasting wound of post traumatic stress disorder in their daily lives after the war and are struggling to cope with there identity as a minority in America without the respect of being a soldier. The continuing effects caused by the traumatic experience of war allows for both Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison to use it to their advantage in narrating the story of these characters by their style of writing and what the characters recall or what they can or cannot remember.

Cynthia Rylant’s novel, ‘I Had Seen Castles’, describes the war experiences of the character John Dante and illustrates the personal trauma those experiences caused him. John’s encounter with the war transformed his life forever. His family was driven apart and his relationship with them was damaged beyond repair. As a consequence of being at war John suffered terrible mental trauma, leaving him scarred and psychologically unstable. John’s hopes and dreams were also lost as he endured the horrors of war and he was left drained, with no zest for life.

William Dean Howell’s “Editha” gives a rich feel for the way for how the people of the United States viewed war and the way people should react. Through the of romantic love, patriotism, honor and duty and transcendent humanism Howell displayed how much pressure men were put under in the eyes of their women and community to participate in the brutality of the war. Men obviously withheld this role simply because it was not a task for women to preform, therefore women did not take the lifelong harm that could be caused into deep consideration which could clearly be interpreted through “Editha”.

Seymour has become an outsider in a world that is directed by materialism, gluttonous, and unimportance , has no real outlet for the complicated emotions he carries around inside him. He has been damaged psychologically by the war and is clearly not receiving the medical care he needs. Muriel, along with her family live in a world he can no longer understand, and his behavior in that world is unsuitable, disturbing, and dangerous. Seymour in the story displays classic signs of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder “PTSD”, and at that time no one knew exactly what PTSD was and back then it was called shell shock and was at an all time high and “during the early years of World War II, psychiatric casualties had increased some 300 percent when compared with World War I, even though the pre-induction psychiatric rejection rate was three to four times higher than World War I. At one point in the war, the number of men being discharged from the service for psychiatric reasons exceeded the total number of men being newly drafted.

The next time Sergeant speaks of this feeling of unanimisme, is when she is being taken to get x-rayed. It is at this point again that we see Sergeant look at her experience in a masculine light. This time she is "translated into the body of a soldier, and into the system in which he lives and moves.." (p.78) Here again we see that women aren't fully a part of the war, although Sergeant was injured during duty, she feels like a soldier, as if soldiers were the only ones to deserve that treatment. It is also as a soldier that we see Sergeant behave, yet again, as a man. Sergeant "demanded, in the voice of Julius Caesar or Napoleon, a hypodermic."(p.78) Again she resumes the role of a man to receive the needle.

In exploring the growing loss of shared exchanges, Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” specifically touches upon the silence of soldiers returning home after war. These men, “...not richer, but poorer in communicable experience” (Benjamin 84), are unable to fully express themselves, the horrors seen on the battlefield too much to accurately convey through words alone. Veterans are therefore alienated as a consequence, with civilians lacking the proper understanding needed to connect with their country’s supposed “heroes.” Further expanding upon this emotional disconnect, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Glory of Women” compares the praises from civilians with the realities lived by soldiers, in turn exemplifying the divide in perspectives:

Her breakfast include a bland cereal, ham and eggs, and a glass of milk. She often does not have time for lunch but when she does, she’ll usual have a roasted turkey sandwich and a cup small of coffee. Jenny enjoys eating healthy for dinner. Her meal consists mainly of a lightly salted vegetable and a steamed fish dish, but occasionally, she will have a beef rib eye steak cooked medium rare.

I like how you analyze that the women in Return of the Soldier are constantly under the control of the patriarchy even when the head of the household is completely dependent on them and is unable to fulfill his “normal and masculine” duties. Jenny, Kitty, and Margaret all must pander to Chris’s version of reality in one way or another, and they must disregard their own sense of reality to positively affect Chris. Kitty must cast herself aside and let Chris see his old sweetheart, Margaret must dig up the past and be present to Chris even though she has set a new life for herself, and Jenny must throw herself into Chris’s mind to understand what has changed in his mind through shellshock. These women must work together to