Civilians
Civilians—the final collection in Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse—examines an important moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service into civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dubrow’s own husband came to the end of his career as an officer. Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the Classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s The Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. The collection addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for conflict returns to the status of noncombatant. Civilians asks: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language transformed? His geography? And what happens to the spouse, once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war?