Title
"I’m not sick," I said. "I’m wounded": Disrupting Wounded Masculinity through the Lyrical Spaces of War
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Hindrichs distinguishes between sickness and wounds in the literature of World War I, focusing on the intersection of illness and gender in A Farewell to Arms and Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers (1921). Argues that the authors’ ambivalence toward illness enables their construction of male protagonists capable of critiquing the oppression of masculine hierarchy but ultimately incapable of overcoming it. Determines that doctors in hospitals have the effect of feminizing patients, and it is through this feminization that an alternative masculinity can be pursued. Considers the implications of both authors’ evocation of the pastoral and romantic genres in their modernist narratives of war trauma.
Published in
Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature
Date
2019
Pages
79-102
Citation
Hindrichs, Cheryl. “‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’m wounded’: Disrupting Wounded Masculinity through the Lyrical Spaces of War.” In Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature, edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett, 79-102. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019.