초록 열기/닫기 버튼
War is the quintessential experience of international military conflict, and twentieth-century U.S. wars not only dispatch American soldiers through the route of U.S. expansionism but also reinscribe the notion of heteronormative domesticity. This essay addresses the complicated intersections of war, domesticity, and gender roles in two Vietnam War novels by comparing them with William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy. The latter exemplifies how the masculine drama of World War II involves the absence and presence of women and home: a faraway home, a women’s sphere protected by men, is a space of longing which can heal the soldiers’ traumatized souls. Invoking their own era’s fierce women’s liberation movement, however, Tim O’brien’s and Erica Jong’s works on the Vietnam War demonstrate a more subversive and ambivalent rendering of women’s gender role during wartime. On the one hand, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” depicts a drastic transformation of an All-American girl who moves away from home into the war zone; on the other, Fear of Flying presents an intricate narrative of a female voice, problematizing the gendered logic of war and marriage, and of the public and the private. In short, both narratives offer a critique of traditional Cold War ideology, manifested within the realm of domesticity in the lives of dependents of U.S. servicemen.
