ABSTRACT
In the last thirty years feminist historians and literary scholars have searched out, republished and performed important critical work on women’s war narratives of the twentieth century. One of the most remarkable figures to emerge from this work is Mary Borden, an American heiress and socialite who, at the age of 28, utilised her family and social connections in the United States and Europe to raise enough funds to establish and manage her own field hospital unit with the French Army. The Forbidden Zone (1929), Borden’s fragmented memoir of her years spent at war, has maintained itself as a continual source for the critical examination of women’s war writing, in addition to providing a rare and troubling non-combatant perspective of the First World War’s Western front. 1 This chapter argues that The Forbidden Zone functions as a memoir of abjection for both the combatant and non-combatant participants of the First World War, individuals who were defined by their corporeality, and yet whose bodies were not individual or unified but multiple and fragmented. Comparable to the monstrous bodies described by Ally Crockford in this volume as ‘fluctuat[ing] seamlessly between two worlds’ (133), these war-bodies exist and move within an interstitial non-place, a literal and metaphorical Forbidden Zone; a space between the trenches and the home front, between life and death, between meaning and non-meaning. Mary Borden’s memoir not only captures the abjected war-body’s movement within and through the Forbidden Zone, it also displays the destabilising and affective moment of encounter between such bodies.
