Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T06:04:14.770Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 4 - “That’s All She Wrote”: Telling Dear John Stories

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2022

Susan L. Carruthers
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores how servicemen and veterans have conjured the Dear John through oral story-telling and life-writing. They have ascribed various motives to women who end relationships with men at war, and ventriloquized their voices. The paradigmatic Dear John is a note in which a girlfriend or wife announces not only the end of an old relationship but the beginning of a new one. Female disloyalty reverberates loudly through through this male vernacular tradition. But tragedy isn‘t the only register in which men recount heartbreak. Humorous yarns of recuperation from rejection, including inventive forms of payback, also abound. The sharing of Dear John anecdotes, jokes, and apocrypha has thus functioned as a vehicle for men‘s recovery and revenge. The chapter concludes, however, by giving women the last word. Even though some servicemen at war initiated breakups with their female partners, either conveying this news by letter or letting silence speak for itself, women have struggled to gain an audience for their stories of abandonment and betrayal. Wartime culture routinely held men and women to different standards of fidelity, as the Dear Jane‘s invisibility attests.

Type
Chapter
Information
Dear John
Love and Loyalty in Wartime America
, pp. 114 - 145
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×