Mary Borden: The Forbidden Soldier

Mary Borden, also known as May by her close friends and family, was born in 1886. Mary was the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. Her mother was a very extreme evangelist, which Mary was not very fond of. As Soon as Mary was old enough she got away from the Evangelism religion, by moving to India. There she married and had two daughters. Her life there was not very nice, so divorced and in 1913 she moved her family to London. While in London she soon became part of a literary circle, where she socialized with different writers (Borden/biography).

When World War 1 began, she met Edward Spears, head of the British Military Mission in Paris. The couple soon married in March of 1918. When he enlisted she was determined to contribute to the war

It is one of the most powerful pieces of writing from the war. Although Borden's asserts the truth of her account, her method is more imagistic than documentary. Indeed, she wrote a surreal memoir about the war during a period when most war memoirs were written as autobiographies. Not a record, her war memoir attempted to register the impact of World War I through strategies.Beginning with the unfocused, muddy fields of Belgium, she portrays war as a series of phantasmic dislocations, an apocalyptic landscape marked by the war machine. She describes the men and women of the war as displaced inhabitants of a strange, hallucinated world where people are reduced to bodies and functions. Borden's text works at this dangerous edge of representation. She can not claim the eyewitness status of the soldier, nor does she remove herself from the field of action. Her experimental vision of the war dramatizes the limitations inherent in the non combatant's representation of trauma. Simultaneously, Borden attempts to go beyond "representation" by using strategies of dislocation that destabilize the reader. about gender. Her fictionalized memoir offers an original articulation of a war which involved easy categorization by a writer who did the