“We Live in a Country Where Nothing Makes any Difference”: The Queer Sensibility of A Farewell to Arms

Abstract

This essay argues that a queer sensibility is central to A Farewell to Arms , underwriting the connections between the characters, including the desire that binds Catherine and Frederic. This sensibility is informed by changing views—some of them quite radical for the time—about marriage, homosexuality, and prostitution, but it also challenges gender and sexual norms of the 1920s and even today. The novel’s emphasis on the queer (defined here as the “anti-normal”) reveals that it seeks to invent new forms of relationships that might outlast the chaos of war and overturn repressive societal dictates regarding sexual expression.