The Journal of Historical Fictions
published by the Historical Fictions Research Network
Volume 7, Issue 2: “Scarred, Marked, Afflicted: The Wounded Body as Place in Global’s Bomb Girls” by Bonnie White, pp. 31-59, 2026.
Abstract:
Bomb Girls is a Canadian television series that follows the lives of female munitions workers employed at the Victory Munitions factory in Scarborough, Ontario, during the Second World War. Through the Vera Burr character, the series examines bodies as sites of war. Vera’s body is wounded, disfigured, repaired, and eventually killed, thus exposing the wounded body as a space that is vulnerable, compromised, oppressed, and othered, and where value is negotiated in relation to its perceived utility to the nation and war effort. Wounded bodies and the fear of wounded bodies are used in the series to compel support and mobilise and manufacture public consent, but the scars, marks, and afflictions also serve as memory keepers, thus preserving the physical and emotional trauma of war. By placing wounded bodies at the centre of our social and cultural understanding of war, Bomb Girls rejects a mimed, sanitised, and mythologised history of the Second World War.
In television and film, wounded bodies convey the inherent danger and vulnerability of the body in war. Bomb Girls is a Canadian television series that aired for two seasons (2012-2013) on Global Television Network, and follows the lives of women working at the Victory Munitions factory in Scarborough, Ontario. Although the factory provides the central locale for the series, the corporeal body is also used as an authentic wartime setting and it is through various wounded bodies that audiences deepen their understanding of war and recognise the unprecedented impact of war on both soldiers and civilian ‘soldiers.’ With a central focus on the Vera Burr character, this study examines the trauma of war through bodies that are scarred psychologically, marked by physical wounds, and afflicted by the conditions of war. It also examines the way wounded bodies are reorientated in relation to one another (and healthy bodies), thus exposing viewers to new sites of war. Wounded bodies are not just confined to the various battlefields; rather, as wounded bodies come into contact with other bodies, they create new wounds through shared trauma. Bomb Girls examines the various ways bodies are literally used in war and how they function as sites of emotional experience and memory. These bodies carry physical and emotional scars, and through its examination of wounded bodies Bomb Girls creates a cultural context for understanding war trauma.
Bomb Girls was meant to appeal to a predominately female audience through its female-centric storylines that celebrate women’s wartime contributions. Bomb Girls, however, actively counters assumptions about the separation between the home and war fronts and explores how culturally constructed experiences based on gender elevate men’s roles in war, including the treatment of grief, loss, and trauma, while overshadowing or even silencing other forms of grief, particularly domestic trauma that was located on the home front and that was separate from the suffering connected to the loss of men’s lives. By emphasising the injured female body, the series rejects simplified histories that present women’s experiences as lesser than or secondary to men’s in war and instead offers a more complex narrative about the enduring traumatic legacy of the war for women.
Bomb Girls was inspired by the work and family histories of Maureen Jennings and Debi Drenman. Jennings’ novel Beware This Boy (2014), a mystery set in a munitions factory in Birmingham during the Blitz, provides a rich historical background against which characters examine their own personal histories of the war. Additionally, Bomb Girlsis shaped by the personal experiences of Drenman’s grandmother, who worked at a munitions factory in Ajax, Ontario.[1]The first series of six episodes was well received by audiences and reached 1.2 million viewers on average, but over the twelve episodes of season two viewership declined and the series was cancelled (Taylor, “Why Fans of Cancelled”). As fans fought to have the series continue, the network offered a two-hour film, Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy (2014), that extended the original story and provided an ending for some of the main characters. Michael MacLennan and Adrienne Mitchell, creators and executive producers on the series, were keen to offer audiences an authentic look into the lives of Canada’s bomb girls by focusing on the lives of working women whose employment required both passing a physical examination to ensure the health of the body and police background checks that confirmed the moral character of the women who would be undertaking dangerous and vital war work. While these may have been expected requirements for any person working in a munitions factory in wartime, the focus on the physical body and the moral character expected of women alerts audiences to the primary methods of analysis used to understand women’s wartime lives. Since the series is set in Canada, which was geographically distant from the main theatres of war, the corporeal body is used as a site of war, bringing the women’s war into the lives of Canadians through the characters’ various moral failings, injuries, and disabilities. Bomb Girls invites audiences to reconsider Canada’s relationship to the Second World War and, rather than seeing the final victory as a vindication for the sacrifices the war exacted, the series instead denies its protagonists their expected happy endings.
Bomb Girls is part of a memory boom that took shape in the 1990s and that was accelerated by the approaching centenary of the First World War. Like other series that have challenged Britain’s ‘People’s War’ history of the Second World War, Bomb Girls similarly interrupts Canada’s traditionally triumphalist history of the ‘good war’ with a story of the physical and emotional trauma experienced by those at home, particularly women (Eley 819). It joins a number of other televisions series that have challenged how the world wars are understood and encourages audiences to reconsider their relationship with the Second World War in particular (Dawson and West 1-7). ITV’s Home Fires (2015-2017), for example, is a Second World War heritage series about the work of the Great Paxford Women’s Institute in England and the women who not only experienced war-related trauma, including secondary trauma, through the loss of sons, husbands, and fathers, but who also bore witness to the trauma of their compatriots—trauma that was often dismissed as a woman’s expected, but secondary, role in war (White, “‘New war, same old story’” 460-480). Like Bomb Girls, Home Fires was cancelled after two seasons, in spite of audience efforts to keep the series going. BBC1’s Land Girls (2009-2011) ran for three seasons, and like Bomb Girls and Home Fires, “de-romanticises notions of a collective national identity” and reimagines the nation’s cultural values for modern audiences (Paris 1-9). As Robert Rosenstone argues, film creates its own rules when recreating the past (1-14). The soap-opera format of all three series was characteristic of dramas from the 1990s onward: these series were audience driven and relied on historical fictions that were grounded in historical events, but diverged significantly from the histories they created as networks sought to meet audience demands (Cannadine 1-4, 35).
Land Girls aired in Canada on Sundance Channel in 2011, and the demand for nostalgia-driven programs meant that networks like Global embraced shows that reoriented popular war narratives for new audiences by creating homegrown feel-good content, rather than the gritty, immersive experiences of the war conveyed in films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016) (Cooke 169-173). On the one hand, series like Bomb Girls, Home Fires, and Land Girls have kept the general framework of popular heritage television programs that audiences expect, while on the other hand these shows also criticise that framework through a metadiscourse that reimagines the nationalist myth of the war. Television and filmic representations of the Second World War have and continue to critique parts of the myth by refocusing on the experiences of ordinary people, as in The Night Watch (2011), Blitz: The Bombing of Coventry (2010), Dunkirk (2004), and Blitz (2024), thus reshaping contemporary memory of the war (Gray and Bell 110-111).
Series like Bomb Girls have been the subject of criticism from television critics and academics for what they leave out or for the false narratives they perpetuate. Headlines like “Bomb Girls: Hokey War series not a dud but hardly dynamite, either,” casts the series as a lighthearted soap opera, while Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy was written off as offering audiences little beyond an entertaining story of espionage (Hinckley, “Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy”). While not writing about Bomb Girls’ specifically, Cat Mahoney’s work on Land Girls, Home Fires, and The Bletchley Circleasserts that, rather than exposing audiences to the realities of wartime for women, many popular heritage shows impose a neoliberal postfeminist framework by reinforcing domesticity for women and promoting heteronormative relationships as a pathway for national success. Mahoney argues that while female-centric narratives have the ability to deepen our understanding of women’s experiences, too often their stories reinforce patriarchal structures and histories, thus creating the illusion of agency and empowerment (7-8, 25). Mahoney’s argument is valid, and at times Bomb Girls’ desire to celebrate women’s empowerment causes it to slip into relatively negative depictions of the consequences of women’s freedom, including cheating, lying, drunkenness, and breaking the law (Stampleton 6 Dec. 2024). Other studies, however, have argued that although Bomb Girls falls short in its gender and racial analysis, it does open the discussion about power dynamics on the home front, social hierarchies and inequalities. Others still have argued that heritage television often engages in a “dialectical narrative-counternarrative” that gently subverts idealised representations of history that still resonate with audiences, without breaking with the patriarchal structures of the period (Sangster 195-199; White, “Britishness and Otherness” 1-16; Paris 13). Bomb Girls’ focus on the injured female body does just that by offering alternative analyses of the implications of the ways in which gender is depicted within the context of national need in wartime.
The expansion of the war front from battlefields to factories is evident from the outset of the series. The first episode opens by juxtaposing women in lingerie preparing for their shift, with a factory that makes 25-pounder artillery shells. While the men are performing a quality test in a nearby field, they are distracted by talk about the women as ‘women,’ not workers. The healthy, young, female body is immediately on display, but audiences are offered two contexts: one where the women’s bodies are appropriately feminine and desired by men, and one where the body is covered and repurposed, but nevertheless reminding the audience that desirable bodies are underneath the uniform (Bomb Girls S1 E1). In a well-lit changing room matron Lorna Corbett makes the women lineup for inspection: clean, make-up clad women who are not only put together when they arrive at the factory but are similarly put together when they leave. They never appear fatigued, disillusioned, or recalcitrant, and they are largely content with their participation in the war effort (Bomb Girls S1 E1). The factory is likewise reflective of a feminine space: clean, well-lit, remarkably spacious, and quiet. This orderly inspection under the stern, rule-following middle-aged matron is interrupted by an explosion at the nearby test site that injures factory worker Archie. Hearing the explosion, the women rush from the factory, temporarily abandoning their roles as bomb makers as they attend to the wounded, immediately recasting them in a more gender appropriate role.
Gender roles in the series are continually in flux. While the women were dressing for their shift, they were preparing to give fellow worker Vera Burr a wig to cover the scars from her accident on the munitions line. Having had her hair catch on the bomb lift, Vera’s face and scalp were severely disfigured (Bomb Girls S1 E2). Vera’s trauma, and the post-traumatic stress she experiences, are not confined to the physical scars her body carries, but extend to the emotional and psychological impact of her loss of identity as a result of her bodily disfigurement. She is already in the hospital when Archie, having sustained life-threatening injuries, arrives. Kelly Moreland’s work shows that bodies are spaces that communicate with other spaces, and not only do they communicate with other bodies, they also make meaning in the process (Moreland 404-406). Wounds—Vera’s face and Archie’s body—represent the reality of the violence of war, but wounded bodies are also used in the series to make political claims about one’s value and place in the factory/country and allude to a hierarchy of wounded bodies through their relationship with Canada’s war effort. A woman’s body or a man’s body are no longer just gendered spaces, but they are also public spaces, and the wounded body is at the centre of the “political work of war” by reordering bodily hierarchies based on their utility (Dawney 50). Bomb Girls aims to show how a group of women responded to the conditions of total war that required the mobilisation of healthy bodies, but it is through wounded bodies that the audience comes to understand the body as a wartime space that is vulnerable to invasion, compromise, and a loss of autonomy, like the nation overall.
Upon their first interaction in the hospital, Vera’s injured body is instantly devalued. In a flowery nightgown with the uninjured side of her face exposed to the audience, Archie draws attention to her disfigurement by saying, “it’s nice to see a friendly face. At least half of one” (Bomb Girls S1 E3). When she turns to leave he says, “if you can’t laugh about it, I ain’t chasing after ya, I promise,” and gestures to his legs that he cannot use (Bomb Girls S1 E3). Judith Butler argues that “only certain bodies matter in wartime,” notably those bodies that can be of service to the war effort, but as Kevin McSorley notes, war is not just about mobilising bodies, but about how social relations are transformed by the mobilisation of bodies (Butler 12; McSorley 4). Just as wartime locations are given places of prominence, elevating a munitions factory, for example, to an essential and uncontested space in terms of its value to the war effort, Paul Kirby argues that so too were bodies (re)ordered as they gained and lost value in the context of total war (211). Vera’s scarred face, a symbol of female identity, brings into question her future value if men are averse to her appearance, and Archie’s inability to use his legs diminishes him as a producer, provider, and protector. In relation to one another and in the context of war, however, the series considers how these injured bodies should be perceived and revalued.
Sarah De Nardi argues that wounds are like “storytelling mementoes” that imprint memory—once identified, wounds do not always have to be seen or active to have impact. Instead, they fit into an emotional economy of war that can compel support and manufacture public consent for the sacrifices required by war or deny that consent (De Nardi 443-444). In narrative television the wound as a storytelling device has dual meaning. It raises the question of how the body was injured, but it also serves as a narrative shorthand that connects the initial injury to the overall message conveyed to audiences through that character: Vera’s initial injury serves as a connection point for other storylines, and as other bodies come into contact with hers, either directly or through the narrative plotlines of the series, they are continually valued and revalued.
What is acceptable in terms of sacrifices and losses is socially determined, especially in wartime, but through Vera the series complicates gender expectations by challenging and reordering the bodily hierarchy and the meanings attached to those bodies. Vera is tired of the other women feeling sorry for her and is saving her sleeping pills until she procures enough to end her life. When Archie finds the pills he tries to dissuade Vera, but she feels hopeless: she cannot go back to the factory, has no family to take care of her, and has been told her whole life that she is “nothing but a pretty face” (Bomb Girls S1 E3). “Now I’m nothing,” she tells Archie, who confirms that her social value has been compromised, but not totally. “Ya still got a killer figure,” he comments, suggesting that men may still find her attractive, so her value is not entirely forsaken (Bomb Girls S1 E3). As a woman in the 1940s, Vera feels that her identity is tied to her physical body (reproduction), but she believes that her ability to survive is also tied to her physical beauty (marriage). The wig offered by her co-workers is not simply about Vera’s vanity or their desire to make her beautiful again, but rather is an object embedded with social and individual meaning. The wig will improve her appearance, make it easier for her to resume war work, and, possibly, restore her feminine value: the wig becomes a prosthetic for a feminine physical loss and gives her the fantasy of healing (by obscuring the scar) in place of actual healing (enduring trauma). Archie’s body, however, is irrevocably broken, thus revaluing his body entirely, and Vera comes to understand that his suffering and her suffering are different. Her injury is not life threatening in the same way as his injures are, and when she sees him in pain, she makes a decision that will prolong her suffering but end his.
Vera and Archie represent two bodies engaged in the same essential war work. As a woman her work carries less value, but because his injuries are potentially unsurvivable, the value assigned to their bodies changes. Archie has sepsis and begs Vera to help him. During a visit, matron Lorna referred to Vera as a soldier. Vera conveys this identity to Archie when she tells him, “it’s the two of us…we’re soldiers on the home front” who have been badly injured in war, thus conferring the soldier identity on them both (Bomb Girls S1 E5). Here Bomb Girls removes the gender framework, leaving only injured bodies to be valued in relation to one another. Vera never takes the pills, choosing instead to give them to her fellow solider as an act of mercy and in recognition of his war service. When death comes, however, Vera’s gendered place in relation to Archie is restored (Bomb Girls S1 E5). When the nurse makes her daily rounds to give Vera the pills, Vera refers to her as an angel, and death is likened to sleep, thus juxtaposing two very different roles for women in wartime: the munitions girl/soldier who is both essential to the war effort and yet her assumption of men’s work poses an internal threat to the nation by disrupting traditional gender roles, and the nurse who is envisioned as a ‘white angel,’ called to service, and a symbol of purity and morality, thereby restoring her gender identity (Bomb Girls S1 E3). Vera enters Archie’s dark room in a soft pink satin nightgown, her scarred face turned to the audience but partially obscured by her blond wig—the prosthetic has done its job. As Vera feeds Archie the pills she whispers, “We’re home,” kisses him on the lips and lays beside him as he dies, assuming a conventional motherly, angelic role (Bomb Girls S1 E5).
Bomb Girls is not content to leave audiences with simple gender dichotomies, and in the next scene Lorna’s husband Bob, who was injured during the First World War, visits the factory. Confined to a wheelchair, Bob resents his wife’s role in the war effort that both keeps her from the home and that assigns her body greater value than his. Most of the manual labour is covered by women, he says, and even Bob’s status as a war veteran does not help him overcome his body’s limitations. Early in the second season Bob visits an employment office and although the man is sympathetic, he cannot offer Bob work. At this moment when the country is desperate for labour, “no gimps,” he scoffs, and tells the man behind the desk that with thick glasses like his he was likely never allowed to serve (Bomb Girls S2 E3). Poor eyesight likely prevented the man from enlisting and out of anger Bob reminds him that his body is also damaged, alluding to the bodily hierarchy that assigns one man work/value but marks the other as dependent/disabled. Like Vera, Bob’s trauma is tied to the emotional and psychological impact of his loss of identity as a result of his disability. Bob is living proof that the wounded body can be a ‘badge of honour’ within the temporal parameters of war, but only so long as its place is understood and value is assigned appropriately (Safran 223). Vera saves the life that matters (her own), the one that is assigned social and economic value, and Bob is proof that in war even injured bodies are revalued and reordered.
Returning to Butler’s argument regarding bodily value in wartime, Vera’s trauma remains, but with no other way to take care of herself, she returns to the factory. While the wig is a tool, in war value is determined by utility for men and women. When called to join the stencil line, where her accident occurred, she says, “of course, it’s my job,” but looks up with apprehension at the machine (Bomb Girls S1 E6). Fellow worker Betty’s hair is exposed as the bombs move past, reminding her of her accident. Vera’s post-traumatic stress causes flashbacks and recurring memories of the event that force her to relive her trauma and not only places physical and emotional strain on Vera, but her disorientated state poses a threat to other workers as well. Vera’s body reacts. She screams out, flailing her arms in front of her before clutching her face where the scar is clearly visible. Later, at the end of season one Vera asks factory manager Harold Akins to work in the office. Her demeanor is shy as she looks at the ground, hands fidgeting as she quietly makes her request, telling him that she has her high school diploma and took a typing class. He is immediately uncomfortable, awkwardly stating that there is a social component to office work and she would be seen by visitors. More assertive now, she interjects with “my wig covers my scars, mostly,” briefly touching the scar as she simultaneously draws attention to and obscures her disfigurement (Bomb Girls S1 E6). Harold is sympathetic, but “safety is a big issue and someone like you is a reminder,” he states, alluding to the stigmatisation attached to the injured female face (Bomb Girls S1 E6). He is sitting on the edge of the desk when she approaches, “they say all cats look grey in the dark,” she teases, and after turning off the desk lamp soft music plays. Leaning in she coos, “do all cats look grey,” and she kisses him (Bomb Girls S1 E6). In the first episode of season two, Vera is working in the office.
Unlike in Archie’s hospital room where Vera’s touch helped sooth a dying ‘soldier,’ here she uses her “killer figure” to coerce her boss, placing her in opposition to her previous motherly, angelic role. Rather than a sex positive portrayal of prostitution, Vera feels shame. Devalued by her disfigurement she felt her only recourse was to do what Archie suggested; use what still had value to regain ‘feminine power’ in the face of her disability through disfigurement (Bomb Girls S1 E6). Vera’s disfigurement is substantial enough that it has an adverse effect on her life and identity, and in this context Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues for interpretating disfigurement as disability, not disfigurement in conjunction with disability. Disability is not just individually constructed; rather, social structures create conditions that other the disfigured body and label it as disabled (Garland-Thomson, “Feminist Disability Studies” 1569). In the context of war, the disabled are often sidelined because bodies are no longer useful in the pursuit of victory. When the military arrives for an inspection, Vera is told “you can’t go in there with your scar” (Bomb Girls S1 E2). She may have secured an office position, but her scar is no less visible and no less problematic within the factory or within the context of the war. Butler argues that not only is “life injurable,” but that its “[p]recariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (Butler 13). The body is not only vulnerable, but its value is determined through a social interdependency that values some bodies more than other bodies (Butler 43). Working in the office is acceptable sometimes, but when it comes into contact with the military the body is sidelined and removed; in making this point, however, Bomb Girls does not dismiss or trivialise her trauma. The wig is not reparative; employment does not restore her value entirely, and a facial wound has implications for the physical body.
Lorna referring to Vera as a soldier on account of her war work at the munitions factory had the potential to reframe her body’s positionality in relation to the war. Suffering injury while making weapons intended to kill and injure enemy combatants suggests that her injuries are no different than those of a soldier. Equating an injured female body with an injured male body, some researchers have argued, creates a false equivalency in this specific circumstance because a woman’s face is closely linked to her sexuality. Although facial attractiveness is also linked to male sexuality and can equally impact a man’s sense of self, men experienced a range of responses to facial injuries from revulsion to sympathy (Kleck and Strenta 257-267; Callister 123; Wood 296-314). Studies have also shown, however, that, regardless of gender, facial disfigurement led to feelings of aversion more often than did other forms of disfigurement, such as missing limbs or sensory injuries (Francis 132-133). Facial disfigurement is not just a bodily scar, but the face in particular serves an important role as an “organ of identity” (Rifkin 310). In an effort to transform her injury into something of value, Vera turns to the street and begins having sex with soldiers. This non-monetary transaction is her way of providing comfort and care to soldiers, offering payment for a job well done if the servicemen are returning from war, or helping new soldiers face possible death by giving them pleasure before they depart for the battlefield. Archie’s death—which ultimately saved Vera’s life—confirms her continued value to the war, as she uses her “killer figure” to remain employed in an essential industry, and then to overcome her erasure in the office by being seen and valued by soldiers. Her financial means are secured by her employment at Victory Munitions, making the non-monetary nature of the transaction important because rather than having sex with strangers for financial gain, Vera receives gifts that help her revalue her own body. The body is never fully repaired, but gifts of jewelry, lingerie, and highly coveted silk stockings, ‘symbols of female sexuality’ partially restore her desirability by masking what the war has taken (Davidson 50).
Vera’s private gender transgression of exchanging sex for promotion in season one is intensified by her decision to publicly solicit sex in season two. In the first episode of season two the street is presented as a complex site of social encounters for various characters. Fellow munitions worker Kate takes to singing in the street to make money after her abusive father finds her and chastises her for making weapons that kill people. Her sweet voice breaks through the bleakness of a cold, snowy night, but when the song ends she admonishes passersby about sin and deviance, demanding that they “forsake your wickedness or taste his wrath and burn in everlasting fire” (Bomb Girls S2 E1). On that same street, Kate’s father is accidently killed by Betty, his dead body erased from view when covered with a dirty sheet. In the same episode matron Lorna, responsible for ensuring that only healthy bodies and moral women enter the factory floor, is pregnant with her lover’s child, and she asks Vera about Chestnut Street. Chestnut Street is dark, fire burns in a barrel and the sound of bottles hitting pavement and dogs barking in the distance conveys that this is a potentially dangerous place. When they arrive at their destination, a child in a yellow sweater and flowered dress opens the door and light floods the street before the woman they seek appears. She is confident, her home warm and inviting, and she will not perform an abortion without first examining the pregnant body. “I don’t take chances with women’s health,” she tells Lorna to the sound of a baby crying in the background (Bomb Girls S2 E1). Rather than the back-alley abortionist the audience was primed to expect, this woman is a mother and her home is a place of responsibility and caring.
In this opening episode of the second season, the audience is exposed to bodies that are sinful, pregnant, dead, and disfigured, before women engaged in prostitution are introduced and with the clear intention of reframing the discussion around prostitution. After seeing Gladys kiss her fiancée on Valentine’s Day, lonely Vera walks in broad daylight down a crowded street filled with shops. Beautiful, well-dressed women smile at soldier patrons and Vera takes the place of a woman who just departed with a soldier. Standing to the side, she is holding an open magazine, Lamplight, with a beautiful woman on the cover and an attractive couple on the back. A young man approaches and offers to buy her dinner, but she is reluctant. “Plenty of other girls to go around,’ she says as she looks at the others and exposes her scar (Bomb Girls S2 E2). He stays focused on Vera and asks if she likes steak. After dinner they have sex in her room, and after the deed is done, he tells her, “I love this war,” and she puts on his army shirt and cap and gives a flirty salute as she temporarily resumes her soldier identity (Bomb Girls S2 E2). “I could die now,” he states, legitimizing the identity and role she has assumed (Bomb Girls S2 E2). When he gives her silk stockings as payment for services rendered, she, holding back tears, accepts the gift. Vera experiences a mix of emotions, including shame and embarrassment before she kisses him and whispers, “My soldier” (Bomb Girls S2 E2). In this instant, Vera the prostitute and Vera the patriot are one and the same, at least in her mind.
Vera attempts to reframe her taboo behaviour by turning the sexual transaction into a patriotic act. Vera is not an official prostitute, but is rather described by fellow office worker, Carol Demers, as a patriotute – a loose woman with poor values who abuses her body under the guise of patriotism, but who in reality poses a threat to soldiers and the war effort through the spread of disease, the danger of unwanted pregnancy, and decaying moral values, as conveyed to the audience in the previous episode (Pratt 117-118). In episode five, Carol confides in Gladys that she saw Vera on the corner “prowling for soldiers,” a description that makes her sound like a predator or deviant (Bomb Girls S2 E5). Not only does Vera’s sex work become an open but still shameful secret, but she also admits to having had an abortion, and dates Marco Moretti, an Italian-born immigrant whose father is detained by authorities for his fascist sympathies and who is himself under suspicion for aiding the enemy (Bomb Girls S2 E3). It is not enough that Vera’s promiscuity threatens the war effort, but consorting with the enemy exacerbates her threat. While Vera attempts to use her healthy body to overcome the limitations of her disability, social structures and conventions, as argued by Mahoney, prevent her from doing so as the healthy body is reimagined as a place of disease, unwanted pregnancy, and social decay (25-29).
Vera’s work as a patriotute had the ability to be empowering by exploring female sexual liberation during the world wars against a backdrop of official practices and policies that condemned such behaviours for women. Mary Louise Roberts and Emma Newlands have demonstrated the importance of sex to soldiers during the Second World War and have shown that women provided physical satisfaction but also emotional relief for enlisted men (Roberts 1-15; Newlands 13-15). Yet, as Marilyn Hegarty has shown, women’s bodies became part of the militarisation of society in wartime and the “connection between the concept of citizenship and military service (the citizen-soldier) complicated, from the start, perceptions of women’s wartime contributions” (Victory Girls 3). Bomb Girls extends this discussion of the place of the female body in wartime and its position in relation to and communication with other bodies by exploring the body as a space on its own. Through its relationship with other spaces, including the factory floor, the hospital, the street corner, the public-private dichotomy of the bedroom, as well as other bodies, Bomb Girls places the disfigured female body at the centre of the politics of wartime. As Moreland argues, “our bodily positionalities, our bodily spaces, contribute to our own and others’ understanding of the world” (407). “Representation attaches meaning to bodies,” Garland-Thomson argues, and acceptance and value are simultaneously public and private constructions (Extraordinary Bodies 5). For Vera, turning to prostitution post-disability was a form of self-loathing, an over compensation for her perceived loss of female beauty by replacing it with sexual availability so men will look past her face. Female bodies were drafted into the war, but rather than romanticising female sexuality, the patriotute was indicative of instability, contamination, and excess and represented an internal threat to the nation as a political body (Hegarty, “Patriot or Prostitute?” 112-113).
Vera and other women work hard to cast off gender discriminatory policies and practices, but the series always returns to problems of women’s transgressive behaviours that centre on the body and bodily injury. Lorna’s affair with a factory worker not only results in an unwanted pregnancy, but both the pregnancy and the procedure to end the pregnancy pose a threat to both the female body and the war effort. Munitions work was one of the most dangerous jobs women undertook in wartime and if a woman became pregnant, she was fired to protect the health of the mother and child, clearly positioning the role of mother above the munitions worker. Bomb Girls, however, alters this predictable pattern. Vera, who has had the procedure before, tells Lorna that there will be cramping and then she will “bleed it out” and “it’s done,” alluding to the bodily trauma of expelling the fetus from the mother’s body (Bomb Girls S2 E1). Elaine Scarry argues that “War is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body,” meaning that in war nations replace abstract ideologies with the bodies of the scarred, marked, afflicted, and dead (81). Soldiers were expected to sacrifice their bodies for the war, but the physical impact of war is largely unrecognised on the female body. Just as Vera’s body bore the scars of the war, so too would Lorna’s body endure the trauma of the procedure, which could result in death. Furthermore, abortion was illegal, and abortion stigma could negatively alter the women’s identity even after the “bodily evidence of it” was removed (Kumar et. al. 626). In the context of war, the bodily hierarchy is reordered. Certainly, women are essential to war in the practical sense of birthing the next generation of soldiers, but in the immediate context of this war Lorna’s body rejects the pregnancy, thus asserting one kind of productive value (munitions worker) over another (mother) (Moniz 207-224). Women were expected to contribute to the war, but it was not acceptable for their bodies to be transformed by it. Lorna is not spared from bodily trauma, but as Kevin McSorley’s work on the ‘embodied sociology of war’ demonstrates, the relationship between war and the body is reciprocal. The body is not only afflicted in some way, but it in turn produces a “socially generative force” that shapes other bodies in turn (McSorley 1). The body was not a passive recipient of the war’s violence but was also an active producer of its effects.
Lorna’s war trauma and injuries, and her inability to carry the fetus to term, are contrasted with her attempts to save her adult son, Eugene. Eugene is an ace pilot home on a war bond tour. Just as Eugene cannot see his mother’s trauma, Lorna does not initially recognise Eugene’s. His father Bob, however, does. Bob’s injuries are clearly visible, but he too experienced psychological trauma, telling Eugene that during the Great War he and his buddy Billy went over the top and ran straight into enemy fire. Shrapnel sliced through Billy’s throat, and every night rather than seeing his own hands trying to stop the bleeding, they are choaking him instead. “I see his blood on my hands every night,” he tells Eugene, and asks, “What do you see?” Eugene says, “Nothing. Up in my glass bubble, no mud, no blood” (Bomb Girls S2 E6). “A head exploding is a head exploding, even from a thousand feet,” he states casually (Bomb Girls S2 E4). Bomb Girls intimates the psychological effects of killing, even from a distance, but it also encourages audiences to explore the silences of bodily trauma and not just the visible wounds. For many soldiers and citizen soldiers the invisible scars of war only became apparent after the fighting was over and the social structures and institutions of civil society rendered the wounded body as vulnerable, ineffective, and wrong. Soldiers suffering from war injuries rarely received the support they needed after the war ended, and care fell disproportionately to women who were consigned to a caretaker role because they could not possibly understand war trauma (Roper 88). When fireworks go off in celebration of the war bond tour, Eugene thinks he sees fighter plane fire and goes to the roof (Bomb Girls S2 E4). He tells his mother, “I’m a loon, Ma,” and when she tells him he would never hurt anyone, he states flatly, “I hurt them all the time” (Bomb Girls S2 E6). Lorna wanted only to see a healthy son and heroic soldier, not the wounded man in front of her, and it took direct and repeated interaction for her to recognise Eugene’s wounds. Lorna may not have been certain that she wanted another child, but the trauma of loss, including the body’s inability to carry the fetus to term, and her inability to help her pilot-son, left scars that were no less real than Bob’s physical futility or Eugene’s damaged mind. Television representations of war tend to focus on battlefield deaths and injuries when examining the trauma of war, but Bomb Girls examines the various ways that women experienced the conditions of war, including physical injury and death, but also the trauma that came with exposure to suffering that directly and indirectly affected a woman’s mental and physical health.
A theme that runs through the series is that there was a perceived need to contain excessive female sexuality (affairs, prostitution, same-sex relationships, etc.), and since the body was the site of transgression, there was a connection between injury, disfigurement, and immorality. To explore this connection, Vera’s service to the war as a patriotute is brought into question. While she refers to the men as ‘her soldiers,’ focusing on the trade of sex for material items as patriotic relationships, she is confronted by a young soldier who tells her after they have sex that he will not go to war. He wants to be like her, a soldier on the home front, and if forced, he will desert. Vera asks him to leave, reminding the audience that “I date soldiers not cowards who won’t fight,” and she insists that her relationships with soldiers are to provide comfort, care, and love—it is how she holds her head high (Bomb Girls S2 E3). While she attempts to shame him, he replies, “you sleep with strangers and you take it out in trade, there’s a common word for that,” suggesting that while the female body may be part of a woman’s patriotism, she is a prostitute pretending to be something else (Bomb Girls S2 E3). “At least I know who I am,” he states (Bomb Girls S2 E3). She is wearing the black slip he just presented her as payment for sex and the dimly lit room is strewn with various hats, fabrics, and gift boxes—evidence of further transactions. He may be a coward, but he counters by telling her that as a prostitute her value is no greater than his.
Bomb Girls is not naive about its representation of prostitution or the connection it draws between prostitution and the disfigured body. In cinema the scarred female face is used to symbolise women who are overtly sexual or who have strayed from the bounds of acceptable womanly behaviour. Or more generally, scars are used to alert audiences that the character is ‘bad,’ such as Heath Ledger’s Joker and Scar in The Lion King. Bomb Girls not only engages with such stereotypes, but it challenges negative representations of facial disfigurements. Midway through season two, for example, Vera, desperate to prove her value, volunteers to help fill ditty bags for the Daughters of the Empire. Vera tries to hide her scar with her hair, but one of the wealthy, distinguished women, catches sight of it and after initially looking away, states, “I can see you are no stranger to adversity” (Bomb Girls S2 E4). Vera is direct: “I got my scalp caught on the bomb track on the stencil line,” but she is interrupted by Carol who tries to dissuade her from sharing her trauma because doing so is not acceptable for women (Bomb Girls S2 E4). Vera apologises but the woman tells her not to, “it is a badge of honour” (Bomb Girls S2 E4). Similarly, Vera’s secret is brought into the open when her sex work is revealed to the other workers at trivia night when Carol asks worker Donald which girl hangs out on the street looking for soldiers? He says Vera, and asks if she will take earrings for twenty minutes in the storeroom. Vera, head held high with a smile on her face, walks straight toward him and says, “Twenty minutes, Donald, word is you’ve never gone longer than three” (Bomb Girls S2 E5). She tells him to keep the earrings, “they’ll look better on you, anyway,” as the men and women laugh at him (Bomb Girls S2 E5). Rather than leaving the revelation of her indiscretion to a series of witty retorts, Vera breaks down crying in the adjacent hallway. When Marco tries to comfort her, suggesting it was just a cruel comment, she whispers “those gifts are like love letters. They help me remember the nights when someone made me feel beautiful” (Bomb Girls S2 E5). “I’m not ashamed of any of it,” she tells him. “Then why are you crying,” he responds with a smile (Bomb Girls S2 E5). He knows the truth, sees her trauma, and does not judge her, thus recasting sex work and the negative stigmas associated with it not as a reflection of her poor character but rather as the consequence of a war-related trauma that is not really much different from a traumatised soldier who chases enemy aircraft over a rooftop (Bomb Girls S1 E2).
Through Vera, Bomb Girls employs a complicated narrative-counternarrative framework that extends the place of war from battlefields to the home front and exposes the breadth of war-related trauma by continually reordering wounded bodies in relation to one another and in relation to other bodies. From the outset, Vera is looking for fulfillment, acceptance, and purpose, but ultimately she wants to serve her country. In the film that follows the series, Facing the Enemy, Vera finds that purpose when she enlists in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps (CWACs). As she removes her cap, the scar is hardly visible. She is happy to be doing work of value for the war effort and after submitting her final report to Harold, she says goodbye and salutes her friends—she is finally a soldier. She also says goodbye to Marco, who gives her his grandmother’s ring and promises to wait for her, thus foreshadowing a happy ending once the war ends. Throughout the series Vera is jealous of fellow worker Gladys, a young woman from a wealthy family who is engaged to a handsome and successful businessman turned soldier, and who is always the object of men’s desires and women’s jealousies. It was Gladys’ intimacy with her fiancée on Valentine’s Day that ignited Vera’s jealously and decision to stand on the street with the other women, and in the film when Gladys leaves Victory Munitions to join the CWACs (she actually became a spy), Vera is envious. If Gladys is the series’ protagonist, Vera is her foil. Both women make mistakes, are injured while performing war work, and engage in behaviours that are uncharacteristic of women of good moral values, but Gladys’ indiscretions are less severe than Vera’s and offer audiences a more traditional narrative of women’s wartime empowerment. Gladys’ sexual encounters outside of marriage do not carry the same social stigma as Vera’s foray into prostitution, nor are Glady’s minor burns on her wrists comparable to the wounds on Vera’s face. Whereas Gladys is celebrated for and elevated by her defiance of social norms, through Vera the series explores a more complex and richer story that helps orient the audience to the fact that the value assigned to bodies was mutable.
As David Cannadine and Tobias Ebbrecht have shown, television has the ability to reimagine the past by highlighting certain events and experiences that can alter modern audiences’ collective memory of those events (Cannadine 1-4; Ebbrecht 35). Bomb Girls therefore resists giving Vera the expected ending. The promise of marriage restores Vera’s femininity and value as a woman, regardless of her time spent as a prostitute, but it is obfuscated by the immediacy of the war that places her soldier identity above marriage. Joining the CWACs is not just a patriotic act, but, as she dons a new uniform, it bestows upon her a fresh relationship with her own body. She is finally proud of herself and tells Marco that although she is scared, she is a better soldier because of it, finally living up to the status bestowed upon her by Lorna after the accident. Maintaining the narrative-counter-narrative of the show, however, this uniform is also a symbol of conscious and unconscious perceptions of male and female roles. Vera is a rule breaker, and joining the CWACs does not force her into gender conformity but rather reshapes her rebellious behaviour, albeit in a less controversial way than prostitution. Tina Davidson argues that “military service and respectable femininity are incompatible,” and that the uniform was intended to introduce “the greatest degree of regimentation to this range of volunteers” (45). In fact, the “conservative femininity of the uniform was enhanced by other signifiers of femininity such as cosmetics and hairdos…and emphasised the subordinate and secondary status of the CWACs” (Davidson 53). This is evident in the series as it gradually turns away from Vera’s role as a patriotute and toward her domestic and lifestyle presentations at the factory where she teaches the other women to protect their bodies against industrial strength attacks. “You’ll be singing like a canary without looking like one,” she tells the other woman as she shows them how to remove the cordite from their skins and apply makeup on a budget (Bomb Girls S2 E3). While the series has restored Vera’s self-respect and femininity through a more respectable type of war work, a telegram soon reveals that she has died “during performance of her duty and in service to her country” when her ship was hit by a U-boat (Bomb Girls: Facing the Enemy).
Like munitions workers, the CWACs provided an essential service to Canada’s war effort, and her soldier death is the tragic catharsis to Vera’s suffering, but also the series’ recognition of the female body as a site of war. After hearing of Vera’s death, the other women contemplate the costs of war, the enormity of the losses suffered, and the unresolved trauma that their bodies have sustained: the body acts as a ledger of war (Parashar 626). It is not simply that trauma is understood through the wounded body, but as Elaine Scarry argues, “it almost cannot be apprehended without it” (16). This is because, as in the case of Vera, the “corpography of war” implies that the “body is always implicated in acts of violence,” and even a patriotic act has a visible and discernable impact on the body (Kirby 211-212).
Vera, like Archie, is simply removed from the production of war and while that may speak to the war’s banality, it shows that like the male body, the female body was also wounded, scarred, and lost as a result of war. Vera bookends the series: she is wounded and disfigured to start, killed and erased at the end. While the series intended to have the characters prevail (and some do), it ultimately exposes the wounded body as a space that is vulnerable, compromised, oppressed, and othered, and where value is negotiated within a broader societal hierarchy—some bodies count and are counted, while others do not and are not (McSorley 3). As such, Bomb Girls joins other heritage television shows that offer contemporary audiences new ways to imagine and remember the war while gently challenging old narratives that dichotomise home and war fronts, narrowly define war trauma, or relegate women to secondary roles. Bomb Girls offers a powerful historically based, yet fictional, narrative of how wounded bodies not only carry the physical and emotional scars of war, but how they function as memory keepers: spaces where experiences are stored, examined, and reconfigured.
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[1] Victory Munitions is based on the General Engineering Company Canada munitions plant in Scarborough, Ontario, that employed mostly women (Dickson 18).
