Far From The Madding War?

Women are never far from the madding war; yet in terms of war literature, which is long supposed to be a masculine genre, women writers'voice has always been marginalized. Today, as the designation of"war literature"has moved beyond the battlefield to include the creative expression of anyone who tried to interpret the unthinkable, a lot of women writers'works concerning war have achieved new interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to explore, in a tentative way, issues of gender and war in three war novels (namely Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Toni Morrison's Sula and Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country) by three women writers, all of whom link war's destruction of human life and of the landscape to the reflection of an age-old relationship between men and women. In their novels, they all choose to tell the story of war in peacetime and from a postwar civilian's point of view, which enables them to find a dimension of war quite different from male writers do. For them, the interweaving issues of gender and war are inevitable, and an understanding of humanity and peace is the ultimate aim. As for peace, the three women writers'attitudes toward it in connection with gender are not all similar, by studying which we can catch a glimpse of women writers'changing comprehension of peace through the years.