ABSTRACT
A recent American sculptural memorial to the women who served in Vietnam says it all. A woman in army fatigues cradles a dying soldier who lies across her lap in the pose of the Pieta. The focus of course, is not on her, the putative honoree of this memorial. Rather, directed by her gaze of compassion and sorrow, the sculpture’s focus is on the soldier’s agonized, dying face. A bandage hides his eyes so that (predictably) he cannot see her. Minus his reciprocal gaze, the woman does not exist as herself because she has been defined in relation to him, the man, the subject of our story. As the ‘(m)other’ in this tale of heroes and martyrs, she is the object of our complex fantasies about the second sex. For example, she is powerful and survives while he is weak and dying. She may be the nurse who comforts him in the hour of his death, but she is also the mother who trained him to risk his life in his father’s wars. As a French woman once said to the poet, Adrienne Rich, who bore three sons, ‘Vous travaillez pour l’armee, madame?’ (Rich 1976).
