Invalid Masculinity: Silence, Hospitals, and Anesthesia in A Farewell to Arms

Abstract

Using Pat Barker's World War I trilogy and recent historical and feminist studies as a lens through which to view masculinity in A Farewell to Arms illustrates the way that medicine in the novel functions as a "technology of gender." The narrative strategies in the novel, the reticence to tell, and the silence about pain reveal the strictures placed on modernist masculinity. Frederic Henry's maladies in the novel are a result of war ideology as much as of his war injuries; his drinking in the novel becomes a kind of self-medication, one designed to help him stop feeling.

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