Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

For some women writers and photographers during the two world wars--Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, H.D., and Gertrude Stein--the construction of the female subject as an observer of combat became a vital concern. Their explorations of vision took place against the backdrop of a larger shift in Western culture's understanding of what "seeing" meant in common practice and philosophical discourse alike. The role of visuality in their lives was massively transformed not only by the rigid gender roles of war but by the introduction of new combat practices and technologies such as aerial surveillance, trench warfare, and civilian bombardment.

In The World Wars Through the Female Gaze , Jean Gallagher maps one portion of the historicized, gendered territory of what Nancy K. Miller calls the "gaze in representation." Expanding the notion of the gaze in critical discourse, Gallagher situates a number of visual acts within specific historic contexts to reconstruct the wartime female subject. She looks at both the female observer's physical act of seeing--and the refusal to see--for example, a battlefield, a wounded soldier, a torture victim, a national flag, a fashion model, a bombed city, or a wartime hallucination.

The book begins with two instances of wartime propaganda written by American women in France in 1915. Both Edith Wharton's Fighting France and Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne offer a complex and often contradictory sense of a woman writer's struggles with authority, resistance, and killing. In the process, Gallagher teases out the role of specular vision and the impossibility of "directly" seeing the war.

Gallagher then turns to literary and visual texts produced by two female journalists between 1940 and 1945. Martha Gellhorn's 1940 novel A Stricken Field exhibits a range of gendered seeing positions within and in opposition to the visual ideologies of fascism during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue show how Miller constructed herself and her predominantly female American audience as antifascist observers of war by working with and against some of the conventions of surrealist fashion photography.

Gallagher concludes by focusing on the experimental autobiographical prose of H.D. and Gertrude Stein to explore the functions of vision on two World War II "homefronts"--London during the Blitz and Vichy France.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Gallagher uses feminist critical theory to offer a subtle and nuanced approach to war literature and figuration. She examines the construction of the female seeing subject, discussing the process whereby women and what they see are represented as sites of political manipulation through the very act of seeing. What one sees, what one does not see, what one is prevented from seeing, and how one goes about seeing--all resolve in this sophisticated and clearly written study into the cultural and gendered struggle that informs the heart of a feminist critical outlook on war literature. The author examines in particular Edith Wharton's "Writing a War Story" and Fighting France; Mildred Aldrich's A Hilltop on the Marne; Martha Gellhorn's A Stricken Field; Lee Miller's war correspondence and photography for Vogue; and the writings of H.D. and Gertrude Stein--works concerned centrally with visuality and with the contradictions inherent in subjects who are also conscious of themselves as objects. Gallagher nicely reveals the process whereby wartime subjectivity becomes gendered, foregrounding the essentially visual nature of war as it is portrayed in its theater. Not overly technical or jargon filled, this study is suitable and recommended for all levels--and it is a crucial addition for woman's studies and all general collections. B. Adler Valdosta State University

Booklist Review

In 1944, Kay Boyle used the startling image of American women battling over a supply of sequined blouses as the springboard for an essay about how the war abroad was visualized at home. In this carefully researched book, Gallagher explores how Boyle's point of view (like that of Edith Wharton writing war propaganda or Martha Gellhorn writing about Nazi occupation) is shaped by her gender. This would seem an easy task. Women are typically cast as witnesses, nonwitnesses, and victims of war, not as combatants; their perceptions necessarily reflect their experience. But gender influences prove more nuanced, diverse, and technical than one might expect. In deconstructing the work of six writers and photographers, Gallagher cites more than 200 works and examines complex theories of vision, specularity, and visuality. The result is an intense, scholarly work that may prove inaccessible to casual readers of history or feminism, but readers who persevere will appreciate the book's valiant breadth and its reluctance to portray a single vision or struggle to see. --Lee Reilly

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jean Gallagher is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Polytechnic University in New York City.