النص
Volume 11, Numéro 2, Pages 49-68
2025-12-10
War And Gender: A Deconstructive Reading Of Tim O’brien’s “sweetheart Of The Song Tra Bong” (1990)
Authors : Haddad Mordjana .
Abstract
War stories are strongly marked by the presence of the masculine soldier, relegating women and any feminine expression to the margins, particularly on the battlefield. Tim O’Brien’s “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” comes to challenge this representation by introducing a female character into the heart of the war experience; what, at first sight, might seem like a love story about a girl visiting her fiancé. Upon arrival in Vietnam, Mary Ann incarnates the archetype of a feminine character. Afterwards, she has, however, gradually changed; she stops wearing jewelry, cuts her hair short, and starts to use guns. Eventually, she joins the Green Berets and blends into the jungles. The profound mutation, which takes Mary Ann from a feminine icon to a bestial figure, then to a shadow, almost quasi mythic figure, disrupts the binary boundary between the masculine and feminine. While the soldiers are observing Mary Ann’s metamorphosis, they project it onto what war did to them; it corrupted their innocence and unleashed a part they hardly recognize of themselves: vulnerable, emotional, and human. So, this article will adopt a deconstructive method to perturb traditional gender roles and war narratives. It will likewise highlight that beneath the text lies multi-layered inconsistencies that question the instability of the language system to subvert the rigid division of masculine and feminine, dominant war narratives, and the American history viewed as a founding metanarrative.
Keywords
Deconstruction ; Gender ; Tim O'Brien ; the Vietnam War
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