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In her discussion of the way women "look" at war and interpret that act of looking through language and image, The World Wars through the Female Gaze, Jean Gallagher asserts that "Vision has . . . played an important role in the development and gendering of cultural discourses about war" (1998, 3). Gallagher develops her theories of this female gaze through readings of civilian, journalistic, and photojournalistic responses to war, yet her theoretical approach to the relationship between seeing and writing war has equally important applications for the discussion of the traumatic seeing out of which women narrate their frontline nursing experience. While Gallagher focuses primarily on what is seen and how the gaze is articulated, my discussion explores the relationship between what is seen and not seen, in particular examining how the diversion of the gaze and the attendant paradoxical presence of an unseen text is fundamental in understanding the connections between seeing and writing war.
While women's war writing from the First World War has received much critical attention over the past ten or more years that has established its authenticity as witness to war, scant attention has been paid to how women see the trauma of frontline combat nursing and how, consequently, such seeing or not seeing influences the narrative.1 With the exception of Gallagher's study and Claire Tylee's recent discussion of Florence Farmborough's photographs from the Russian Front both of which focus on how women "see" war and on the relationship between seeing and narrating war, andTylee and Higonnet's examinations of the relationship between frontline nursing and trauma, little critical discussion has focused on these areas.2 Moreover, women's writing from the Vietnam War has been excluded from most discussions of women and the war experience in spite of several fine memoirs, short story collections, and an anthology of women's poetry that have been published over the past twenty years.3 While critical discussion of combatant writing has noted connections between such writing from the First World War andVietnam,4 understanding the connections between nurses' narratives from these wars draws attention to the common elements in how war is seen and consequently to the relationship between seeing and bearing witness to war.5 In demonstrating such commonality, this discussion draws on First World War writing...