Hemingway's Themes of Relationship, Identity, Sex
HEMINGWAY’S THEMES OF RELATIONSHIP, IDENTITY, SEX AND DEATH IN TEN SELECTED SHORT STORIES AND THE PARALLELS TO THE AUTHOR’S LIFE
A THESIS
Presented as a Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Magister Humaniora (M.Hum) Degree in English Language Studies
by SUSANTY Student Number: 066332019
THE GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE STUDIES SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA 2010
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STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
This is to certify that all ideas, phrases, sentences, unless otherwise stated, are the ideas, phrases, and sentences of the thesis writer. The writer understands the full consequences including degree cancellation if she took somebody else's ideas, phrases, or sentences without proper references.
Yogyakarta, December 20, 2009
Susanty
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all I would like to thank the Lord for all His blessings. I would like to thank to
my Supervisor, Prof. Dr. Soebakdi Soemanto, for his expertise, insight, advice, much-
appreciated assistance and encouragement during my hard study which have made the completion of this thesis possible. I am also grateful to Dr. Novita Dewi for her support, guidance and affection to me and to all Master Program lecturers at Sanata Dharma
University.
I would like to thank to my beloved husband, Heri Sampel for his endless and valuable love and care for our children while I was studying in Yogya. He is always the one who cares about me. I also thank my curious son, Vincensius Alexandro and my brave daughter,
Elisabeth Grisella. You have been so wonderful children to me and always become the spirit
of my life.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my parents, Bethel Rampay and Anie
Nahason for their love, care, and financial support, thank you for all prayers and patience with my children and to my sister and brother, Detrianae and Rendra Rampay, for their enduring love and emotional support. Even though they are thousands of miles away, their belief in me serves as a constant inspiration. I am also grateful for any help that you give to
me.
I would like to thank to my colleagues, such as Zaki, John, Tigor, Thomas, Suryo,
Kapris, Ruth and many more. I also thank my friends in my neighbors, such as Lintang,
Deva, Fatim, Mr. and Mrs. Tri Sunarto. You are all my truly friends.
I also thank Mbak Lely, and everyone at English Language Studies Sanata Dharma
University.
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CONTENTS Page
TITLE PAGE ……………………………………………………………………………. i APPROVAL PAGE …………………………………………………………………….. ii DEFENSE APPROVAL PAGE ………………………………………………………… iii STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY …………………………………………………….. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………….. v CONTENTS …………………………………………………………………………….. vi ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………….. viii ABSTRAK ……………………………………………………………………………… ix
I. INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………… 1 A. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY ………………………………………… 1 B. PROBLEM LIMITATION …………………………………………………. 3 C. PROBLEM FORMULATION ………………………………………………. 4 D. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY ……………………………………………. 4 E. RESEARCH APPROACH ………………………………………………….. 5 F. BENEFITS OF THE STUDY ……………………………………………….. 6
II. LITERATURE REVIEW ………………………………………………………. 8 A. REVIEW ON RELATED THEORIES ……………………………………… 8 1. Theory of Relationship…………………………………………………. 8 2. Theory of Identity………………………………………………………. 9 3. The Material Objects of the Study …………………………………….. 10 4. Biographical Sketch of Hemingway …………………………………… 18 5. Hemingway’s Public Image …………………………………………… 23 6. Hemingway’s Writing Style …………………………………………… 25
B. REVIEW ON RELATED STUDIES ……………………………………….. 31 C. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK …………………………………………… 38
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III. THE FOUR THEMES IN HEMINGWAY’S TEN SHORT STORIES …………………………………………………………….. 40 A. RELATIONSHIP ………………………………………………………….. 43 B. IDENTITY …………………………………………………………………. 65 C. SEX ………………………………………………………………………… 72 D. DEATH ……………………………………………………………………. 80
IV. THE PARALLELS BETWEEN HEMINGWAY’S THEMES AND HIS OWN LIFE …………………………………………………………. 88 A. HEMINGWAY’S RELATIONSHIP ………………………………………. 89 B. HEMINGWAY’S IDENTITY …………………………………………….. 100 C. HEMINGWAY’S VIEW ABOUT SEX ………………………………….. 107 D. HEMINGWAY’S VIEW ABOUT DEATH ……………………………….. 110
V. CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………….. 115
BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………. 121
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ABSTRACT
Susanty. 2010. Hemingway’s Themes of Relationship, Identity, Sex and Death in Ten Selected Short Stories and the Parallels to the Author’s Life. Yogyakarta: Sanata Dharma University
Previous studies on Hemingway are mostly about his major novels. The writer of the thesis therefore chose another form of Hemingway’s, those are short stories. This thesis argues that it is important to read Hemingway’s works with the knowledge about his own complex characters. From reading the biographies, readers will learn more about Hemingway both as a man and a legend. The other reason is the numbers of female characters in Hemingway’s works is scarce and it does not mean he is not interesting in female characters. There are two main objectives the thesis writer tries to answer: first, the four significant themes in the ten short stories and second, the parallels between Hemingway’s themes to the author’s life. The desire to read excellent fiction by a fascinating author, and moreover a common interest in supplementing the thesis with biographical approach is attempted to achieve a better understanding of Hemingway’s stories and authorship. Here the writer uses biographical approach since there are obvious parallels between Hemingway’s themes of stories to his own life. Biographies and biographical approach are the most suitable data and tool to see the traces of Hemingway. This study has attempted to answer the two questions posed. The answer to the first question illustrates the importance to read Hemingway’s ten short stories in order to find themes of relationship, identity, sex, and death. These four themes reflect Hemingway’s approach to life in general. The second question has been answered, namely is the importance to connect Hemingway’s themes of stories to his own life. Many parallels have been drawn. When creating his fiction, he invents from his experience. This thesis intends to indicate to the readers that by reading biographies and learning more of the personal life, we will learn more about Hemingway both as a man and a legend. It is expected to be a reference to the other researchers who are going to apply biographical approach in literary studies. Biographical information provides the practical assistance of underscoring subtle and important meanings in the stories. By examining not only the male characters but also the female characters, we began to overturn received opinion about Hemingway’s treatment of his female characters. Our whole understanding of Hemingway’s view of relationship, human identity, sex, and the meaning of death become much broader and we see that Hemingway has a multidimensional perspective.
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ABSTRAK
Susanty. 2010. Hemingway’s Themes of Relatioship, Identity, Sex and Death in Ten Selected Short Stories and the Parallels to the Author’s Life. Yogyakarta: Sanata Dharma University
Karya-karya ilmiah sebelumnya tentang Hemingway umumnya pada novel-novel besarnya. Penulis tesis ini mengambil bentuk karya Hemingway yang lain, yaitu cerita pendek. Tesis ini mengungkapkan bahwa penting untuk membaca karya Hemingway bersamaan dengan memahami para karakternya yang kompleks. Dari membaca biografi, pembaca akan mengetahui banyak tentang Hemingway sebagai seorang manusia dan seorang legenda. Alasan lain adalah jumlah karakter wanita yang jarang pada karya-karya Hemingway tidak berarti ia tidak tertarik pada karakter wanita. Ada dua tujuan utama penulisan yang dicoba untuk dijawab: pertama, tema-tema yang menonjol dalam kesepuluh cerita pendek tersebut, dan kedua, paralel-paralel antara tema- tema cerita Hemingway tersebut dengan kehidupan pengarang itu sendiri. Hasrat untuk membaca karya fiksi yang bagus oleh seorang pengarang terkenal dan ditambah lagi dengan ketertarikan untuk melengkapi tesis ini dengan pendekatan biografi dimaksudkan untuk mendapatkan pemahaman yang lebih baik tentang karya Hemingway dan pengarangnya. Penulis tesis menggunakan pendekatan biografi karena ada paralel yang jelas antara tema-tema cerita Hemingway dengan kehidupan pengarangnya sendiri. Biografi dan pendekatan biografi adalah data dan alat yang paling tepat untuk melihat jejak-jejak Hemingway. Tesis ini berusaha untuk menjawab dua pertanyaan. Jawaban untuk pertanyaan pertama menunjukkan pentingnya membaca kesepuluh cerita pendek Hemingway sehingga didapatkan empat tema pokok, yaitu hubungan atau kekerabatan, identitas, sex, dan kematian. Keempat tema ini merefleksikan pandangan Hemingway tentang kehidupan secara umum. Pertanyaan kedua telah terjawab, yaitu pentingnya menghubungkan tema-tema cerita Hemingway dengan kehidupannya. Banyak paralel yang ditemukan. Saat menciptakan karya fiksinya, ia menemukan itu dari pengalamannya. Tesis ini menunjukkan kepada pembaca bahwa dengan membaca biografi dan mempelajari kehidupan pengarang, kita akan belajar banyak tentang Hemingway baik sebagai seorang manusia dan sebagai legenda. Tesis ini diharapkan menjadi bahan acuan bagi peneliti lainnya yang menggunakan pendekatan biografi. Informasi dari tulisan biografi memberikan bantuan praktis untuk memahami makna-makna penting dan terdalam dalam karya sastra. Dengan mengamati bukan hanya karakter pria tapi juga karakter wanita, kita mulai mengubah opini yang telah diterima tentang perlakuan Hemingway pada para karakter wanitanya. Pemahaman kita yang menyeluruh pada pandangan Hemingway tentang hubungan atau kekerabatan, identitas, sex, dan kematian menjadi lebih luas dan kita melihat bahwa Hemingway adalah seseorang yang berwawasan multidimensi.
ix LEMBAR PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI KARYA ILMIAH UNTUK KEPENTINGAN AKADEMIS
Yang bertanda tangan di bawah ini, saya mahasiswa Universitas Sanata Dharma :
Nama : Susanty
Nomor Mahasiswa : 06.6332.019
Demi pengembangan ilmu pengetahuan, saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma karya ilmiah saya yang berjudul : HEMINGWAY’S THEMES OF RELATIONSHIP, IDENTITY, SEX AND DEATH IN TEN SELECTED SHORT STORIES AND THE PARALLELS TO THE AUTHOR’S LIFE beserta perangkat yang diperlukan (bila ada). Dengan demikian saya memberikan kepada Perpustakaan Universitas Sanata Dharma hak untuk menyimpan, me- ngalihkan dalam bentuk media lain, mengelolanya dalam bentuk pangkalan data, mendistribusikan secara terbatas, dan mempublikasikannya di Internet atau media lain untuk kepentingan akademis tanpa perlu meminta ijin dari saya maupun mem- berikan royalti kepada saya selama tetap mencantumkan nama saya sebagai penulis.
Demikian pernyataan ini yang saya buat dengan sebenarnya.
Dibuat di Yogyakarta
Pada tanggal : 24 Mei 2010
Yang menyatakan
( Susanty)
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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
This chapter discusses the background of the study, problem limitation, problem formulation, objectives of the study, research approach and benefits of the study.
A. Background of the Study
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is one of the greatest American writers, and he is also the writer who always depicts life and women in his works. Hemingway’s women characters
fall into one of the two categories, either that of the bitch who threatens to rob the male’s
strength, or that of the dream girl, a mindless creature who makes no demands upon her man
and who exists only to satisfy his sexual needs. Both creatures are regarded as the product of masculine sensibility. There are certain elements in his works that refuse to be fitted into that formula. We need to refine our conception of his treatment of women and the implications of that treatment.
Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave. He had great style. His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him. He was a connoisseur of food and wine. He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons. Almost as soon as he became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle. It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined.
Hemingway was once involved in a war and this often challenge his basic beliefs and philosophy. He was raised by parents who were very religious: his mother taught him music and creativity and took him to galleries and operas, while his father taught him about out
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door activities and physical courage. A nice balance in many ways, but it is, also clearly
sexist that differentiate the male and female roles along these biased culturally influenced
lines. However, according to his biography, since leaving home he appears to move on and
wrote novels and short stories which were usually semi-autobiographical before his suicide in
1961 (“Biography” retrieved from
Hemingway’s stories, particularly “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber” are centered on women, alcohol, money, and ambition. In
both of these stories, Hemingway portrays the wife either as a “bitch” in character or was
considered to be a bitch by the husband. The woman is also seen as smart and challenged the
male’s ego. They are seen either by a male character or by the husband as controlling and
manipulative. In other stories, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “Cat in the Rain”, “Ten
Indians”, “Up in Michigan”, and “A Canary for One”, Hemingway depicts the female
characters as weak, stupid, and ignorant. Meanwhile, in “Soldier’s Home”, it is a conflict
between a mother and a son. It is also about the mother’s problem that devoted herself to her
religion and as a housewife. She is the typical view of women around the World War I era.
Two other stories which are selected are “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” and “The Sea Change”. These
stories focus on a turning point in an unhappy romantic relationship. It is unusual love triangle. In these ten stories although the focus is on the man, however, Hemingway has been able to widen his view and he tends to look at the woman through the eyes of the abstracted male, and a consequent tension in the work as a whole between that attitude and a tendency to empathize with the woman.
Previous studies on Hemingway are mostly about his four major novels, The Sun Also
Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man
and the Sea (1952). However, the identification of Hemingway as a uniquely American
writer is not adequate only from the observation of his four major novels and his masculinity
3 since those novels are told by and or through American men while Hemingway’s protagonists are expatriates, and his fictional settings are mainly in France, Spain, and later Cuba, rather than in America. The writer of the thesis therefore chose another form of Hemingway’s, those are short stories.
This thesis argues that it is important to read his works with the knowledge about his own complex character. From reading the biographies, readers will learn more about Hemingway both as a man and a legend. Learning more of the personal life of a legend has made us appreciate Hemingway as a man. The other reason is the numbers of female characters in
Hemingway’s works is few and it does not mean he is not interesting in female characters.
The writer of the thesis observes that in his short stories, Hemingway’s female characters are important. It is important therefore to analyze these female characters in order to give the balance view on Hemingway who is not only as a macho writer but also he cares about the women’s world. His female characters seemed depressed and have a big burden on their shoulders. They look happy but actually they are not. Furthermore, the writer of the thesis uses biographical approach as her main tool since there are parallels between the author’s life and his works. From the reading of Hemingway’s short stories and his biographies, they are always in line with the author’s experiences in the real life, in other words, it seems that he writes his stories after he did or experienced something.
B. Problem Limitation
This study limits itself to discussing the ten short stories: “Hills like White
Elephants”, “Cat in the Rain”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, “The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber”, “Ten Indians”, “Soldier’s Home”, “Up in Michigan”, Mr. and Mrs.
Elliot”, “A Canary for One”, and “The Sea Change”. This limitation also extends to the themes of relationship, identity, sex, and death narrated in Hemingway’s ten short stories
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along with the problems of female characters faced in the patriarchal society. The parallels between those themes to Hemingway’s own life are also observed. The ten female characters’
characterizations here are inspired by the author’s life and experience besides his creativity and imagination. He creates his female characters’ personalities in their life when interacting
with others.
C. Problem Formulation
The writer of the thesis focuses her attention on the analysis of the female characters
by using textual analysis and biographical approach in Hemingway’s ten selected short
stories. In this study, she chose ten female characters who are depressed. They are the girl
called Jig, an American wife, Helen, Margaret, Prudie, Harold Krebs’s mother, Liz Coates,
Mrs. Elliot, a mother, and a girl. The discussion is not only about the female characters but
also touches the male characters since all the conflicts created simultaneously by all the
characters. From the reading of the ten short stories, there are eleven themes found:
relationship, identity, sex, death, love, bravery, courage, womanizer, alcoholism, abortion,
and race. However, only four themes of them which are significant and there is why there are
two main questions the thesis tries to answer, namely:
1. How are the themes of relationship, identity, sex, and death narrated in
Hemingway’s ten selected short stories?
2. What are the parallels between Hemingway’s themes to his own life?
D. Objectives of the Study
From questions that are formulated, the writer of the thesis wishes to find out and
present firstly, the significant themes in those ten stories which influenced the
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characterization of the female characters, and secondly, the parallels between Hemingway’s
stories and his own life.
E. Research Approach
The desire to read excellent fiction by a fascinating author, and moreover a common
interest in supplementing the thesis with biographical approach is attempted to achieve a
better understanding of Hemingway’s stories and authorship. If we can achieve a better
understanding, means we can appreciate the stories better. Here the writer uses biographical approach since there are obvious parallels between Hemingway’s stories with his own life and experiences.
It has been often asserted that biographies play a key role in helping a nation understand itself and its identity. Casper (1999) has demonstrated the double-edged relationship of biographies to history; on the one hand, they may reinforce dominant values by presenting to readers’ individuals whose life and character must be imitated, for instance, by telling nationals how they must conduct their lives. Not surprisingly, biography has been defined as one of the instruments which a prevailing culture uses “to reinforce its own values and structures” (Novarr, 1986:154). On the other, it can also divert the readers’ attention to marginal and neglected people whose lives may question establishment values.
Biographical approach begins with the simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding an author’s life can help readers to more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes both directly and indirectly what he or she creates.
Reading biography will also change and usually deepen our response to the work. Sometimes even knowing a single important fact illuminates our reading of a piece of work. Learning, for example, that author Ernest Hemingway was regarded as the macho writer or as the
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womanizer by people will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of his works we
might otherwise have missed or considered unimportant. A formalist critic might complain
that we would also have noticed those things through careful textual analysis, but
biographical information provides the practical assistance of underscoring subtle and
important meanings in the stories. Though many literary theorists have assailed biographical
criticism on philosophical grounds, the biographical approach to literature has never
disappeared because of its obvious practical advantage in illuminating literary texts.
The decision to investigate Hemingway’s public image is because the writer cannot conclude upon his personality. Hence the writer will use her knowledge about Hemingway’s public image which the writer will compare to his literature. Another interesting subject for investigation is Hemingway’s writing style, which is often described using the metaphor of an iceberg. Only one of eight of the meanings is visible to the eye, while the rest is hidden below the surface. What moves below the surface is what we have already named the subtext, which triggers the writer to read more and search carefully for the small traces and symbols that reveal even more of the meaning. Since the main focus of the thesis is female characters, the writer decided to look into the male-female relationship, the crisis of male-female identity, the problems of sex, and the issue of death in the stories.
F. Benefits of the Study
Reading a literary work gives many benefits, such as enjoyment, pleasure and knowledge about the whole life of human kind. The work of literature such as short stories can give people who read it more experiences and knowledge. Some benefits that the writer of the thesis can acquire from this thesis are firstly, the interpretation on Hemingway’s short
stories will be better when the readers apply biographical approach since most of his short
stories are the reflection of his own life. Secondly, it is expected to be a reference to the other
7 researchers who are going to apply textual analysis and biographical approach in literary studies. Thirdly, from reading Hemingway’s ten short stories, the readers understand that
Hemingway’s views about relationship, identity, sex and death in his works are the reflections of the author’s experiences and also the author’s emotional expression.
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CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
This chapter consists of review on related theories, related data, related studies and theoretical framework.
A. Review on Related Theories
To achieve the aims of the study, this thesis needs a biographical approach as the main tool of analysis. This approach observes the author’s biographies which are written by the biographers as the main resources. The following theories and data are relevant to meet the aims such as the theories of relationship and identity, the notion of sex and death, the material objects of the study, biographical sketch of Hemingway, Hemingway’s public image, and Hemingway’s writing style.
1. Theory of Relationship
Relationship Awareness gives organizations and individuals the tools they need to build more effective personal and professional relationships. It helps them to sustain those relationships through understanding the underlying motivational value systems of themselves and others, not just when things are going well, but also when they are managing conflicts. It helps people to recognize that they can choose their behaviors to accommodate their underlying values, while also taking into account the values of others. It is a dynamic and powerful way of looking at human relationships that aid in building communication, trust, empathy, effective and productive relationships.
Relationship Awareness is founded on four simple yet profound premises. Those are behavior is driven by motivation, motivation changes in conflict, personal weaknesses are overdone strengths and personal filters influence perception. Relationship Awareness Theory,
9 like many psychological theories, holds that all people want to have relationships with other people. From birth, human infants seek positive connections with their care-givers. It is through interactions and relationships with other that we exist and that our world has meaning. Therefore, our behaviors are expressions of this desire to be connected with others.
Relationship Awareness Theory is a Motivational Theory which addresses the motives that are behind everyday behavior when we are relating to others. By shifting our focus from only looking at behavior to looking at the motive behind the behavior, we can gain a clearer understanding of ourselves and others. In this theory we look at motives as a basic antecedent of behavior. In other words, motives in this theory are the “why” of what we do. People are born with a predisposition for a particular motive set. Throughout childhood and adolescence a person may receive positive or negative feedback regarding their Valued Relating Style.
The degree of finesse that a person has with their Valued Relating Style is then, a function of the opportunities they have had to use and refine their use of their personal strengths, thus consolidating their Valued Relating Style by late adolescence or early adulthood. The
Motivational Value System is seen as unchanging over the course of a lifetime (adapted from
“Relationship Awareness” retrieved from
2. Theory of Identity
Erikson (1970) stated that an identity crisis is a time of intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of looking at oneself. Erikson described identity as “a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his communality. In him we see emerge a unique unification of what is irreversibly given—that is, body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability,
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infantile models and acquired ideals—with the open choices provided in available roles, occupational possibilities, values offered, mentors met, friendships made, and first sexual encounters”.
In Erikson’s stages of psychological development, the emergence of an identity crisis occurs during the teenage years in which people struggle between feelings of identity versus role confusion. Researcher Marcia (1966, 1976, and 1980) has expanded upon Erikson’s initial theory. According to Marcia and his colleagues, the balance between identity and confusion lies in making a commitment to an identity. Marcia also developed an interview method to measure identity as well as four different identity statuses. First, identity achievement occurs when an individual has gone through an exploration of different identities and made a commitment to one. Second, moratorium is the status of a person who is actively involved in exploring different identities, but has not made a commitment. Third, foreclosure status is when a person has made a commitment without attempting identity exploration. The last is identity diffusion occurs when there is neither an identity crisis nor commitment.
Researchers have found that those who have made a strong commitment to an identity tend to be happier and healthier than those who have not. Those with a status of identity diffusion tend to fell out of place in the world and do not pursue a sense of identity.
Exploring different aspects of oneself in the different areas of life, including the role at work, within the family, and in romantic relationships, can help strengthen the personal identity.
3. The Material Objects of the Study
The material objects of this study are ten short stories by Hemingway namely “Hills
like White Elephants”, “Cat in the Rain”, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, “The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber”, “Ten Indians”, “Soldier’s Home”, “Up in Michigan”, “Mr. and
Mrs. Elliot”, “A Canary for One”, and “The Sea Change”. They all appear in The First Forty-
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Nine Stories (1938). It is a careful selection because the female characters are scarce in
Hemingway’s works.
The first story is “Cat in the Rain” written in 1920. It is about an American couple
who spends their holidays in an Italian hotel. It is a rainy day and the American woman sees a
cat in the rain, which she wants to protect from the raindrops. When she goes out of the hotel,
which is kept by an old Italian who really seems to do everything to please that woman, and
wants to get the cat, it is gone. After returning to the hotel room, she starts a conversation with her husband George, who is reading all the time, telling him how much she wants to have a cat and other things, for instance her own silver to eat with. Her husband seems to be annoyed by that and not interested at all. At the end of the story there is a knock on the door and the maid stands there holding a cat for the American woman in her hands.
It seems to the writer of the thesis that “Cat in the Rain” is an experience of
Hemingway after serving as a Red Cross Ambulance driver in Italy during World War I. He married Hadley Richardson, a comfortably-wealthy young woman several years older than he. Immediately after their marriage, the couple moved to Paris, where due to the favorable rate of monetary exchange, it was possible to live comfortably on a writer’s salary
(
On the one hand, the American wife seems a rather silly, childish, petulant woman, which may reflect what Hemingway thought of Hadley. She continually refers to the cat as a
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“kitty”, and her most significant speech in the story is delivered in front of the mirror, when
she says, “I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I
can feel. I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her…. And I want to
eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to
brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes”.
Hemingway’s use of animal symbolism is a contribution to the richness of his characters. It provides the reader with a vehicle through which to better understand the psychological experiences of the characters with which they are associates. Without them, the stories would
lose much of both their color and their clarity (
These may seem like vanities, but the other hand these “wishes” are symbolic of a
deeply-felt human need with which we can sympathize (
the American wife is saying is that she wants concrete, and what she has is a husband reading
in bed; the emotional distance between the couple is illustrated by her husband’s remark,
“Oh, shut up and get something to read”. The American wife does not need something to read, she needs something to feel. It is significant that Hemingway recognized what was going wrong in his marriage to Hadley; he even recognized his own pain in it; but he obviously felt powerless to change. It should come as no surprise that within a few years, the
Hemingways divorced (
The second story is “Hills like White Elephants”. It was first published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women. It is commonly studied in literature courses because, while brief and accessible, it contains ingenious symbolism, efficient and powerful dialogue, and it deals with universal themes applied to a controversial topic (abortion) which is explored without ever being explicitly stated. These elements combine to make the story an apt introduction to Hemingway’s minimalist narrative style and it also illustrates the extent to which setting can contribute to meaning in fiction (Fletcher, M., 1980).
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“Hills like White Elephants” is thematically rich, given its short length and sparse
narrative. On the surface, it deals with concepts such as the conflict between personal
responsibility and hedonism; rhetorical and psychological manipulation; coming of age; and
the dynamics of the romantic relationship and its metamorphosis into the family. At a more
abstract and general level, it can be interpreted as a statement about the Zeitgeist of the
Roaring Twenties and the lifestyles and attitudes of the post-World War I “Lost Generation”
of American expatriates in Europe (Grant, D., 1980).
The third and fourth stories under study, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short
Happy Life of Francis Macomber” which written in 1936 are two of Hemingway’s finest stories which come out from his experience on safari in Africa. Yet there is relatively little discussion of his love of Africa and his African stories. The narrator of “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro”, Harry, is a dying writer. He’s stuck in an isolated area in Africa with his wife and a couple of African servants, and he’s got a terrible case of gangrene. They’re waiting for a plane to come rescue them, but it’s been a couple of weeks and so far there’s been no sign of planes. Harry spends most of his time thinking about past experiences (and the fact that he ought to have written about them and now never will); fighting with his wife (largely because she’s a symbol of the comfortable life he’s slouched into when he should have been writing); and storing away experiences the way writers do, saving them up for later so as to use them one way or another in the writing even though, at this point, Harry knows he won’t be doing any writing.
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is a quintessential Hemingway tale of one man’s attempt to overcome an internal struggle by mastering the external world. Francis
Macomber, hunting dangerous game in East Africa, discovers his own bravery and strength when ignores his self-consciousness and instead relies on instinct. Though Macomber is thirt-
five, his realization of his own bravery marks the true start of his life, but that life ends
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quickly and violently only minutes later. Macomber, his beautiful wife Margot, and the
experienced “white hunter” Robert Wilson are on safari together in East Africa. The wealthy
Macomber has hired Wilson as his safari guide, and Wilson looks upon his two American
customers with some contempt, Francis, because he is a “coward”, and Margot, because she
is “simply enameled in that American female cruelty”. The two have “a sound basis of union.
Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money
for Margot ever to leave him”. After this horrible display of cowardice, Margot torments her
husband by sneaking out of their tent that night to sleep with Wilson. The next day
Macomber is too angry to be afraid, and when the group is surprised by three water buffalo
he responds instinctively, shooting without hesitation. He is exhilarated with the kill, and
when one of the buffalo gets up and goes into the brush “he expected the feeling he had had
about the lion to come back but it did not. For the first time in his life he really felt wholly
without fear”. He declares “I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again” and Margot
“eyed him strangely” (Kale, 2008).
The fifth story, “Soldier’s Home”, is an ironic story like other Hemingway’s stories.
After being wounded, he used these experiences in many of his writings. One such writing is
“Soldier’s Home”, the short story taken from the compilation In Our Time. It tells about
Harold Krebs went to the war in 1917 from a Methodist college in Kansas. He came back
from the war in 1919, after he had been in the Rhine. There, a picture was taken of him, a
fellow corporal, and two German ladies. When he returns, no one celebrates. He comes back
after most everyone else, so he misses the hysteria. He also cannot get anyone to listen to his
stories. Everyone has heard too many gruesome stories to care. To get people to listen, he has
lied twice. But he is disgusted by that so he has stopped talking about the war. Even his lies
bore people, anyway. During this time, he is sleeping late and hanging around all day. He is a
hero to his younger sisters and to his mother. Harold’s mother tells him that he can take the
15 car out at night. He goes downstairs for breakfast and starts to read the paper. His mother tells him not to muss it. She tells him that he should think about finding a job. She tells him that she prays for him and the temptations that he must have faced. After all, she says, the other boys his age are getting jobs and wives. She asks if he loves her. He says no, meaning that he cannot love anyone. She is only hurt, so he tells her that he did not mean it.
The sixth story, “Ten Indians”, has Nick, a young boy who has passed the phase of transition from a boy to a teenager, as the main character. Meanwhile, the other important character is an Indian girl named Prudie. Her description is significant in the story through mainly the Garner’s. The Garner’s are the American family. In the story, Indian society is associated as ennoble society, easily making affairs, and drunkard men. It is told that Nick while in way home from fourth July Celebration with the Garner’s is being a hot topic for the
Garner’s boys. Prudie as the silent character is described badly by Mrs. Garner. On the contrary, Nick is appreciated her better. Nick likes her in his own way. What important here is that most people have to admit that love or sympathy is not restricted by race, skin color, economic level, and other things. Love becomes Prudie’s weapon in her unwelcome society.
The seventh story, “Up in Michigan”, has a woman character named Liz who has mistakenly taken infatuation for love. She is actually somewhat obsessed with Jim right from the beginning. Hemingway writes, “She liked it about how his teeth were when he smiled, … that his hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house. Liking that made her feel funny”. Clearly, sentences like this demonstrate the girlish nature of Liz. She notices all the little things that women notice in infatuation with men. There is no mention of his character, of what kind of man he is, only of his physical characteristics. She feels “funny” inside thinking about his white skin where it disappears into his clothes. This is the equivalent of the pounding heartbeat of infatuation. In fact, “All the time Liz was thinking about Jim Gilmore. He didn’t
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seem to notice her much”. Clearly, the feelings are one-sided here. It is impossible for Liz to
love him if he takes no notice of her. Real love is about reciprocity.
The eighth story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” is also a story taken from the compilation In
Our Time. The story concerns the attempts of the title couple to conceive a baby. They tried
in Boston and on the boat over to Europe. On the boat, Cornelia Elliot was very sick. She was
a Southern woman and became ill easily. When they were married, Hubert Elliot was
studying at Harvard in a postgraduate program. He was a poet. He had never slept with a
woman before he married. Most women to whom he told that fact immediately left him.
Cornelia thought his chastity was lovely. She also adored the way that he kissed her.
“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” portrays a man with a lack of masculinity. They tried very hard
to have a baby. This kind of problem is often used to point out a lack of male virility.
Similarly, the women that ran away from Elliot when he told them he was a virgin also feared a certain lack of manliness. As strange as it seemed to Elliot himself, these girls were happy
to have a man who had slept with many women. Despite the fact that Hubert did not have
casual sex with a lot of women, he still could not develop a close relationship with Cornelia.
He did not know why they married, and she spent much of her time crying. She was only
relieved when her girlfriend came to visit. Those two could create a much tighter bond than
she could with her husband.
The ninth story, “A Canary for One” is written in September 1926. It is the story of three people on a journey across Europe. A married couple shares a compartment with a woman who will be visiting her daughter. She is taking the daughter a canary. They are all
Americans living in Europe so their conversation soon becomes easy and revealing, turning to intimate topics, the kind of things one can comfortable confess to strangers on a train. The two women do most of the talking which is about the woman’s daughter and the man she’s about to marry. The story is good enough and there is as always undercurrent of tension in the
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dialogue, something else going on that we don’t find out until the very end of the story that
makes it much more compelling reading than it should be. Things happen on trains. Try to
imagine three people having a conversation about something serious on a trip.
The tenth or last story, “The Sea Change”, is first published in This Quarter (1931) before its appearance in Winner Take Nothing. It is a neglected short story among
Hemingway’s work, perhaps because of its controversial subject matter. Like “Cat in the
Rain”, “A Canary for One”, and “Hills Like White Elephants”, “The Sea Change” focuses on a turning point in an unhappy romantic relationship. Its unusual love triangle recalls the story
“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” from In Our Time. Although Hemingway claimed in a letter to his
Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, that he had invented the plot of “The Sea Change”, in
1954 he told an associate, A.E. Hotchner, that the story was based on a conversation he overheard in a bar in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France (Hotchner 139-40). As Hemingway wrote
cryptically in his essay entitled “The Art of the Short Story”: “In a story called ‘A Sea
Change’, everything is left out. I had seen the couple in the Bar Basque in St. Jean de Luz and
I knew the story too well….So I left the story out. But it is all there”.
In “The Sea Change”, Phil tries to persuade an unnamed “girl”, with whom he has
evidently had a romantic relationship, to stay with him, while she tries to make him
understand that she cannot. It eventually becomes evident that she wants to leave him for a romantic relationship with another woman. Like the couple in “Hills Like White Elephants”, the couple in “The Sea Change” never refer directly to the event that is causing their
argument, perhaps because, like abortion, a woman leaving a man for a lesbian relationship
was unspeakable subject for 1930’s Americans.
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4. Biographical Sketch of Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. His father was a
medical doctor, Clarence Edmunds Hemingway and he was a fervent member of the First
Congregational church. Ernest’s mother was Grace Hall Hemingway and she sang in the
church choir. He was the 2nd of 6 children and weighed 9.5 pounds at birth. His mother
described him at age 3.5 as being able to dress himself, a member of a nature group his father
had formed, able to count to 100, able to spell by ear very well, and that he liked to build
cannons and forts with building blocks and collected cartoons of the Russo-Japanese war. His
mother taught her children music and creativity and took them to art galleries and operas. His
father taught them about out of doors and taught Ernest physical courage and endurance. The
family maintained a summer house on a lake in Michigan (Mangum, 1982). It was a nice
balance in many ways; however, also clearly sexist. We see from early on how he began to
differentiate the male and female roles along these biased culturally influenced lines.
His first job was as a reporter covering crime and violence. He got the job with the
Kansas City Star where he learned to write but it was also here that he saw how his mentor
carried on and drank excessively. Both traits he kept. The writing one helped him change the
way novels would be written in the 20th century and helped establish his claim to greatness.
He only stayed a reporter for six months before heading off to the war. He probably would have joined the army except that was against his father’s wishes and he had a bad eye which may have caused his rejection. However, the Red Cross accepted him despite the eye and urged him to get glasses—a suggestion he elected to ignore. He was just shy of his 19th
birthday when he entered the war effort on the side of the Italians. It was only a matter of
weeks before he was injured. They promoted him and gave him a medal. By December he
had left the war and by January 1919 he was back in America staying with his parents in Oak
Park. This is a suburb of Chicago which was mainly for the Protestant upper-middle class and
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Hemingway would later refer to is as a town of “wide lawns and narrow minds” as it was a
very conservative town. But here he obtained the values that assured his success: strong
religion, hard work, physical fitness, and self-determination—the same values that would
over time turn against him and lead to his suicide. When he returned from the war he
collected $1,000 in insurance in compensation for his war related wounds. In 1919 this was a
fairly large amount of money and it allowed him to take a year off. During this time he made
phony talks about his war experiences at libraries and a rich woman heard one of them and
asked him to help her son and this developed into important contacts that got him a job at the
Toronto Star Weekly which led to his being their European correspondent. He got some very lucky breaks early on in his writing career (Mangum, 1982).
Hemingway was somewhat more open-minded. His first wife, Hadley, had once been
accused of lesbianism by her mother, and he was good friends with Jinny Pfeffer, an avowed
lesbian and the sister of his second wife, Pauline. There are also persistent unresolved
questions about the intimate relationship between Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest’s mother,
and the much younger Ruth Arnold, a former music student of Grace’s who became a part- time mother’s helper. Both Ernest and his father evidently believed the relationship was a sexual one (Lynn 100-101). In 1922, Hemingway and his first wife (he married four times) moved to Paris in November only a couple of months after they had married. In Paris he came into his own and it is here that he taught Ezra Pound how to box, let Gertrude Stein mind the baby, and talked literary shop with expatriate writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia
Beach and James Joyce. He was, said Joyce, ‘a big, powerful peasant, as strong as a buffalo…and ready to live the life he writes about’ (Mangum, 1982). Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses, owned the bookshop Shakespeare and Company that was a popular gathering place for writers, where Hemingway meet Joyce in March 1922. The two writers frequently embarked on “alcoholic sprees” (
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In fact, this public image of the “man’s man”—the war correspondent, the deep-sea fisherman, the hunter on safari—was one Hemingway carefully created for himself.
Hemingway’s heroes embody the writer’s own belief that strong individuals can embrace life and live it with dignity and honor. In 1961, plagued by poor health and mental illness and perhaps by the difficulty of living up to his own image, Hemingway took his own life. He sees life as nothingness unless you have something to do and the money to do it. It is a dangerous and bleak view of life. “The public remembered his life as an expatriate in France and Cuba, deep-sea fisherman, great white hunter, and bullfighter. However, far from being
strutting macho males, the men in his fiction are often emotionally impaired characters who
have lost their bearings in a cynical, violent modern world” (Guth and Rico, 2000). It seems
society that is dangerous, not the pure and wondrous out of doors. Nature is where the “real”
man recharges his batteries enabling him to reenter the good fight. Life is presented as a
tough, demanding challenge. Ultimately you are being tested, are you courageous or not?
This may sound difficult given the impact that the war has had on him. However, many fine
men and women went through the war without letting it impact them negatively. Hemingway
only caught the tail end of the war.
According to novelist and critic Anthony Burges, Hemingway changed the sound of
English prose by struggling to write a ‘true simple declarative sentence.’ We can see some
examples for this quotation such as in “A Canary for One”, when a male character announces
“There’s been a wreck” (Hemingway 341), in his second and final speech, calls their
attention to the present “Look”. Just as in an earlier speech, his statement seems
commonplace but actually reveals his hostility and resentment toward the American lady, the
dissolution of his marriage, and the painful reliving of the happy past. When the male
character points out the wreck, in 5 syllables totaling a mere 20 letters, his statement serves 6
functions which are first, he indicates the literal wreck that has occurred. Second, the wreck is
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the physical realization of the fears about a train crash that the American lady has expressed
throughout the story. Third, the couple’s marriage, which the male character’s wife has been
reliving, is a wreck. Fourth, the three people, like the three cars they are passing, are also
wrecks (the wreck symbolizes the three characters as well as the couple’s marriage). Fifth,
the male character, by his statement, wrecks the women’s conversation. Second example is in
“Cat in the Rain”. Throughout the plot of the story, the male character, George, is
characterized as being oblivious to his wife’s underlying feelings. He sits on his bed in a
hotel in Italy and reads the newspaper while his wife goes through an ordeal of saving a stranded cat in the rain and revealing her feelings about needing change in her life. “I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of the mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes” (Hemingway 170), exclaims George’s wife. She basically wants
reaction and sympathy from her husband, but George’s only response is “Oh, shut up and get
something to read” (Hemingway 170). He does not listen to his wife and does not realize that
they need change in their relationship in order to make her feel happy and loved. The
American husband is dry, desiccated, unable or unwilling to act. George is too focused on his
newspaper to even listen to his wife. Third example is found in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” when
Cornelia said, “You dear sweet boy” (Hemingway 162), she continues to treat Elliot as if he
were younger and unequal to her. The last example of simple true declarative sentence is in
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, when Margot said, “Out to get a breath of air”
and “Well, you’re a coward” (Hemingway 22-23), it shows her bad feeling to Macomber and
decided to use his cowardice as an excuse to have an affair with Wilson. In many ways,
Macomber felt that in order to win back his wife he had to prove his courage as a hunter.
When Margot flaunted her unfaithfulness in front of her husband, something in his soul
changed. He resolved that the situation between them was going to change. Somehow he was
going to incorporate courage into his character.
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Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature, partly because of his splendid contribution of The Old Man and the Sea (1952). His greatest contribution, as the
Nobel Prize committee acknowledged, was in the area of “prose style”. In his use of the “zero ending”, which goes counter to the traditional “well-made” ending, he has influenced the form of the modern short story (Mangum, 1982). The type of story he wrote reflects the selection of significant details. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he concludes with these words: “A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it” (Mangum, 1982). Through the short story, the genre by which he learned to practice his craft, he wrote what he had to say perhaps until he had too few things left on the surface that he did not know about and which did not go without saying. After that, what remained for him was to embrace the thing itself in his suicide.
Hemingway’s speech above has the similarity with Barthes’s idea about “readerly” and “writerly” text as his ways of reading. In Barthes (1974), it is important to note that the
“readerly” and “writerly” are more like positive or negative habits by which the modern reader brings with him or her to text themselves. Regardless, there remains a spectrum of literature Barthes terms “Replete Literature”, which are “any classic (readerly) texts that” work “like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded” (200). A readerly text, in other words, is one wherein the reader need not “write” or “produce” his or her own meanings but one where one can find, by passive means, meaning “ready-made”. In another variation upon the “readerly”, Barthes writes that these sorts of text are “controlled by the principle of non-contradiction” (156), that is, they do not disturb the “common sense”, or “Doxa”, of the surrounding culture. The “readerly texts”, moreover, “are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature” (5). Unlike the required passivity before the readerly text, i.e. one which is “replete” with meanings already easily discernable, the goal of any “writerly text” for Barthes is the proper goal of literature and criticism: “…the goal is to
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make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text” (4). “Writerly texts” and
ways of reading are, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts that Barthes implies should never be accepted in its given forms and tradition. As opposed to the “readerly texts” as “product”, the “writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (5). In the end, for Barthes reading “is not a parastical
act, the reactive complement of a writing”, but rather a “form of work” (10).
His biography reveals a man who, despite four marriages and numerous affairs, found
neither stability nor lasting satisfaction in his relationships with women. His short stories and
novels likewise reveal an ambivalence toward and distrust of women (sentiments so intensely expressed in some of his works that they have long been considered proof of the author’s sexism). There are often superficial or misguided interpretations of Hemingway’s treatment of women, for instance interpreting his female characters as one-dimensional and
unsympathetic. The writer of the thesis recognizes and address with the complexity of
Hemingway’s relationship with women.
5. Hemingway’s Public Image
Hemingway’s fame is not only thanks to his fiction, but also to his radical behavior
and public person, an image he himself encouraged. The white-bearded handsome looking man by the original name of Ernest Hemingway was throughout his adult life demanding the rest of the world to refer to him as Papa Hemingway. This was however only one brick in the wall of his creation of a public image as a true macho man. Hemingway lived with the expectation of fulfilling his idea of ideal masculinity. This embraced the notion of honour,
courage and strength. Honor and courage was practiced as the most important factor in life by
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implying capability of acting with “grace under pressure”, meaning to be able to act as a man
even in the most brutal situation. This thought appears to require a strength, which seems to
excess the limit of what human beings are able to cope with, hence heavy drinking was also
on the list of codes to masculinity. This idea of strength is also relevant to Hemingway’s
perception of recreation and sports: fishing, hunting and bullfighting as activities in which
men can demonstrate their masculinity. Another way for men to prove their manhood could
also be by having many lovers, which we saw as the primary use of women. Hemingway
appeared to regard women as subordinate to men and sometimes even a nuisance, since they
distracted men by demanding attention and affection (Guth and Rico, 2000).
It seems that during his whole career Hemingway has focused on creating a strong
public image as a stereotype of macho behavior and on increasing his fame as a celebrity. He
was used to doing many interviews and having many pictures taken, including the most
symbolic elements of a “real man”: guns, big fish, bottles of tequila and cigars. It appears that
he in his public life really wanted to play the role of the macho and probably succeeded, as he
is still nowadays remembered and famous for this image. However, this image is not what the
writer primarily found reflected in his stories.
From the very beginning of Hemingway’s career he was known for his masculine style of writing as well as his masculine public image. From the 1940s and onwards critics started to disapprove of his inability to depict women more nuanced than as “either castrators or love-slaves, either “bitches” or helpmates – the simplicity of the dichotomy presumably mirroring Hemingway’s own sexist mindset” (The Cambridge Companion to Ernest
Hemingway, 1996:171). The assumption that Hemingway’s writings were sexist increased
with the feminist literary criticism, which accused him of reinforcing sexist stereotypes in his
writings. Nevertheless later and present readings of Hemingway have shown the contrary,
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namely that Hemingway does in fact depict characters that are of a more complex and mixed
gender constitution.
6. Hemingway’s Writing Style
Hemingway was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his
adventurous and widely publicized life. Most of the main characters of his famous novels are
deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the
world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost
unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, one must conduct oneself
with honor, courage, endurance, and dignity. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a
powerful influence on American and British fiction and the most widely imitated of any in
the 20th century. He wished to strip his own use of language inessentials, ridding it of all
traces of verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as objective and
honest as possible, he hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short,
simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. These
sentences are composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and
rely on repetition and rhythm for much of their effect. The resulting terse, concentrated prose
is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony. His use of dialogue was similarly fresh, simple, and natural-sounding. The influence of this style was felt worldwide wherever novels were written, particularly from the 1930s through the
1950s. The virile nature of his writing, which attempted to recreate the exact physical sensations he experienced in wartime, big-game hunting, and bullfighting, in fact masked an aesthetic sensibility of great delicacy. He was a celebrity long before he reached middle age, but his popularity continues to be validated by serious critical opinion.
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His own background as a wounded veteran of World War I and his passion for
outdoors adventures also pursuits his themes in stories. The writing of books occupied him
for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the
skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then become part of his life and formed the
background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been
advanced by “Men without Women” in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in
Winner Take Nothing (1933). Among his finest stories are “The Killers”, “The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber”, and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. The choice of words, in turn,
occur through the mind and experience of his novels’ central characters whether they serve
explicitly as narrators of their experience or as a focal character from whose perspectives the
story unfolds.
Hemingway is considered one of the most important writers in American literature.
He was the pioneer of a new style of writing that was certainly based on modernism, but was
enriched by his own personal ability to write “live in action”. He created a new kind of prose,
which became a model to follow and is part of the reason why his style is still imitated all
over the world. The main focus of his writing was the factual. He tried to portray the reality
of situations with the simplest and most concrete words without any comments or descriptive
details. He let the images speak for themselves and the scenes that he displays in a tough, crude and unsentimental way hides vibrant emotion beyond the events. For this reason the image of the iceberg is the most famous figure used to define this style of writing. Since a clear visual representation in Hemingway’s way of writing is represented, we can argue that only little of the actual meaning of the text appears, whereas the vital importance is hidden in the subtext.
The basis of Hemingway’s literary style is his iceberg theory. Usually we can only see the tip of an iceberg while the lower parts of it are under water. Transferring this into
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literature it becomes clear that he used this symbol for this theory because the intention of his
works is also hidden.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water (adapted from
This statement by Hemingway himself concerning his creative principle contains the iceberg theory. It shows that for him, writing was a complex art that depends on consideration rather than just expressing an intention unambiguously. He was always anxious to conserve the dignity of his works by making them a mystery and at the same time, referring to the statement above, tried to make his intention as obvious as necessary.
The most important issue for Hemingway was to record the bare actions and thoughts through a controlled use of words and a stylistic and bodily toughness, creating what has been defined as the “dispassionate understatement” (Bradbury, 1992). He accepted as a postulate that the function of any literary work is to evoke a particular emotion from the reader; to achieve this he tried to make his readers feel the emotion directly not as if they were being told about it, but as if they were taking part of it. He put down exactly the sights, sounds and smells that had evoked an emotion. He wrote in Death in the afternoon “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt rather then what you were supposed to feel, and had been thought to feel, was to put down what really happen in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced (…) I was trying to learn how to write commencing with the simplest things
(Hemingway, 1932).
As critics had pointed out, his objective technique was analogous to modernist poetic doctrines of impersonality and objective correlative and at the same time characterized by personal experience. His descriptive details are at minimum, he uses plain but exact words
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that convey the precise nature of an event without any decorations. Colloquial phrases,
simple sentences, few metaphors and objects that act as subdued symbols characterize his
style (Bradbury, 1992). In an age when much more modernist writing was moving towards
the exploration of consciousness, according to Bradbury, Hemingway’s style could appear
non-psychological. “It does not go inside but projects action outwards that is why everything
is so exactly mapped and placed and details are so crucial. But this outward world is so
precisely because it is a total metaphor for an inward and psychic condition, as the reader fills
the empty spaces and the areas of implied pain and hysteria” (Bradbury, 1992).
It is through his synthetic but very exact use of words that Hemingway succeeds in
telling only the surface of the story leaving the text full of hidden meanings, creating a
subtext. Posing these two terms it seems that Hemingway adds to his art of literature what
Freud developed in the field of psychoanalysis and dream analysis. It seems almost natural to
draw a parallel between the concept of the manifest, which will then correspond to the text
and the latent corresponding to the subtext. The manifest is the form while the latent is the
deeper unconscious level; hence if the role of the psychoanalyst is to discover the latent of a
dream, understanding Hemingway will be to uncover the subtext.
This implies a very active role for the reader who seems to be attributed the role of
finishing the author’s work by perceiving the whole meaning – or rather the different
meanings. In regards to this the reader-response criticism is important. This does not imply a
critical theory, but it focuses on the process of reading a literary text. During the years many
different ideas within this area have been postulated; a work of literature leaves room for
interpretation in the manifest text, which motivates the reader to reflect upon his
understanding, using creativity and imagination. This can lead to two different roles of
readers where one can be categorized as the actual reader who will be practicing his or her own experiences and emotional background for the interpretation of a text, whereas the
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implied reader seeks to understand the text simply through the experience of reading
(Abrams, 1999:258). Through symbols, images and irony Hemingway creates this subtext in
the text, a deeper meaning of reality, which is not directly shown but which can be intuited,
discovered and analyzed and in which the psychological and emotional parts of the stories
hidden.
Irony is an important tool for implying what is not directly said, in other words it is
used in the manifest in order to achieve an effect within the latent of a story, which is one of
the most characteristic traits in Hemingway’s works. The word irony has its roots in the
Greek word Eiron who was a character in Greek tragedies who “characteristically spoke in understatement and pretended to be less intelligent than he was” (Abrams, 1999:135). In modern use the term irony can be defined as “dissembling or hiding what is actually the case: not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects”
(Abrams, 1999:135). An author’s use of irony is often complicated and leaves the reader in doubt about whether or not it was intentionally ironic from the author’s account. Hence, use of irony in literary works can be seen as a compliment from the artist to the reader’s intelligence.
Irony can be used in various ways. Two different kinds of irony are verbal irony and structural irony. A character within the fiction uses verbal irony intentionally; structural irony is intended by the author and for the reader to understand, but the fictional character is unaware of the irony. There are other forms of irony such as dramatic and romantic, but they are not relevant in order to describe Hemingway’s use of irony. The examples of
Hemingway’s use of irony are the irony of the title of “Soldier’s Home”. It may mean either
“The Soldier is home” or “The home of the soldier”, but, ironically, the soldier’s home no longer seems to be home. Other example is in “Hills like White Elephants”, the couple’s dialogue was hard to follow because they did not really express their feelings or emotions.
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Another reason the dialogue was hard to follow was because Jig and the American had
trouble deciding on a topic, so they were constantly switching topics. It was clear that the
American wanted a secure answer to whether she was going to have the abortion or not. Jig
never really gave him an answer, instead she talked about drinks. Although both characters
use language to express their anxieties, no constructive communication occurs to lead them to
reconciliation. References to drinks seems a “safe” topic section off the story and set up the
irony of the man’s final solo drink of anis, which Jig found disappointing. Meanwhile, Harry
in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, by compromising his literary talent, he has already embraced
a kind of death in life. The corruption spreading from his gangrenous leg simply makes
manifest his moral decay, an irony of which he is painfully aware.
In “A Canary for One”, the conversation is manifestly repetitious, which invests it
with verisimilitude as the two women repeat, in various contexts, each other’s phrases. The
American lady, who seems incapable of meaningful conversation, is only able to repeat what
the narrator’s wife says. For instance, the words fall, Vevey, and lovely are each used four
times and the word fine twice. The American lady tells the narrator’s wife that she and her daughter left Vevey two years ago “this fall”. Moments later, responding to the information that the couple had been in Vevey on their honeymoon, she says “that must have been lovely” and follows by saying that her daughter would “fall in love with” the Swiss, the original meaning of fall changing. The wife agrees that “it was a very lovely place”, changing the
referent of lovely from honeymooning to Vevey itself. A second implied meaning to Vevey is
that it was a place where one could “fall in love”. The American lady then agrees with the
wife and she puts her statement in the present tense, “Isn’t it lovely?” changing the referent
from Vevey past to Vevey present. The wife then calls the Trois Couronnes as “a fine old
hotel”. The wife then gathers up the repeated words in the sentence, “We had a very fine
room and in the fall the country was lovely”. In her sentence, the meaning of fine changes
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from “prestigious” which reveals the American lady’s values to lovely which indicates the
wife’s values and fall once more refers to a season and lovely describes Vevey in the past tense or the memories.
B. Review on Related Studies
As any scholar even vaguely familiar with the critical dialogue on Hemingway’s life and work knows, “Papa” or Hemingway’s relationship with and literary treatment of women has, for decades now, been fraught with controversy. His biography reveals a man who,
despite four marriages and numerous affairs, found neither stability nor lasting satisfaction in
his relationships with women. His short stories and novels likewise reveal ambivalence
toward and distrust of women and sentiments so intensely expressed in some of his works
that they have long been considered proof of the author’s sexism. Given Hemingway’s
seeming inability to portray women as independent, strong, and sympathetic, as well as his
iconic status as the quintessential “man’s man”, why should women continue to read and
write about his work? In Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice
(2002), edited by Broer and Holland, they have assembled an impressive array of seventeen
critical essays by female critics. Rather than dismissing both Hemingway and his work as
sexist, interpreting his female characters as one-dimensional and unsympathetic, or deeming the author undeserving of a female readership and critical base, the scholars included in this volume recognize, address, and grapple with the complexity of Hemingway’s relationship with women, both real and fictional. The essays in this collection “expand and deepen our appreciation of gender issues in Hemingway’s novels and stories, and in his life as a whole”
(xiii). As Broer and Holland note in their introduction, “these scholars do not speak in a single voice with equal sympathy for Hemingway’s treatment of women nor do they respond with like readings of Hemingway’s life and work” (xiii). What the scholars included in this
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collection do share is a common aim: to reveal how the conflicts in Hemingway’s short
stories, novels, and personal relationships –familial, romantic, and professional –“revolve
around questions of gender … and that understanding these complicated gender dynamic offers vital new ways of interpreting Hemingway’s fiction as a whole” (xiv).
Part one also features essays that interrogate both Hemingway’s relationship to the feminine and the female reader’s relationship to Hemingway’s work. In the most convincing and impressively researched essay in the volume, “Santiago and the Eternal Feminine:
Gendering La Mar in The Old Man and the Sea”, Beegel offers a stunning interdisciplinary essay in which she establishes the centrality of the “Eternal Feminine” in Hemingway’s novella. Drawing from a remarkable array of sources –mythology, religion, folklore, marine history, and literature –Beegel argues that the sea itself, “gender(ed) as feminine throughout the text” (132), is “a protagonist on an equal footing with Santiago” (131). In “On Defilling
Eden: The Search for Eve in the Garden of Sorrows”, Putnam similarly explores the presence of the feminine in the most unlikely of places: stories such as “Big Two-Hearted River” and
Green Hills of Africa, which feature “a solitary hero journeying across … paradisal land- scapes” (111). Putnam’s desire to elicit the feminine in Hemingway’s oeuvre stems from a crucial question that has long haunted female Hemingway scholars: “how do female readers who have always been moved by Hemingway’s works … negotiate theories that insists upon the exclusionary quality of the Hemingway world?” (110). This critical tension that Putnam identifies –a tension which underlies many of the essays in this volume –is most eloquently and compellingly addressed in Miller’s “In Love with Papa”. Combining personal reflection on Hemingway’s work with critical analysis of his female characters, Miller acknowledges that “any lover of Hemingway’s art who surveys his biography feels a bit betrayed by the man” (40).
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Finally, several essays in “Heroine and Heroes, the Female Presence” examine the
politics of gender, sexuality, and desire that characterize Papa’s work, drawing attention to
how his narratives often blur rather than reinscribe boundaries between male and female,
masculine and feminine, straight and gay. Comley and Burwell specifically address how these blurrings have been suppressed in Hemingway’s posthumous publications. In “The
Light from Hemingway’s Garden: Regendering Papa”, Comley discusses how The Garden of
Eden challenges the longstanding image of Hemingway as the representative of machismo, yet argues that the edited, published version of the book –particularly its characterization of
Catherine –belies the complexity of the novel and the author alike. Burwell, in “West of
Everything: The High Cost of Making Men in Islands in the Stream”, voices a similar concern regarding the editing of Islands in the Stream, noting how those involved in the publication process “ignore(d) the complex musings on the problems of gender and creativity that are embodied in the deleted episodes” of the novel (172). Moddelmog and Wagner-
Martin draw attention to how Hemingway’s published narratives –even those posthumously published –often reveal his abiding interest in configurations of gender and sexuality that fall outside the “norm” of society. In “Queer Families in Hemingway’s Fiction”, Moddelmog maintains that “Hemingway’s works are rife with alternative families” (174) –or what she calls “queer” families –which “reconfigure the bonds of belonging … (and) target various norms of (the traditional) family –especially norms of sexuality and power” (175). Finally,
Martin’s “The Romance of Desire in Hemingway’s Fiction” examines how Papa’s works reflect the sexual ethos of their historical and cultural contexts –“times … marked with a nearly obsessive interest in sexuality and erotica” (54). Martin provocatively argues that
“Hemingway’s real subject was eroticism and the form he needed to tell that story, to entice the general reader, was the romance” (55).
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Thirteen of the seventeen essays in Hemingway and Women appear in Part One; by
comparison, Part Two, “Mothers, Wives, Sisters”, is somewhat sparse. The four essays in this
second edition focus on historical and biographical contexts of Hemingway’s work and
connect these contexts to his representations of women. Of particular note are the last two
essays in this section –Spanier’s “Rivalry, Romance, and War Reporters: Martha Gellhorn’s
Love Goes to Press and the Collier’s Files” and Sanderson’s “Hemingway’s Literary Sisters:
The Author through the Eyes of Women Writers” –which offer fascinating accounts of
Hemingway’s relationship with women who were his professional equal: his third wife,
reporter Martha Gellhorn, and his literary peers, Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Spanier
and Sanderson adeptly illustrate Hemingway’s complicated relationship with these women –
as well as his indebtedness to them. As Sanderson succinctly concludes: “Whether they were
adoring (Parker), critical (Hellman), or begrudging (like Gellhorn), they helped to identify
and advertise Hemingway’s message, style, method, and persona” (294).
Talking the lifestyle of Hemingway, Field’s Expatriate Lifestyle as Tourist
Destination: The Sun Also Rises and Experiential Travelogues of the Twenties, she said that
the novel belongs to the tradition of period travelogues such as Pages from the Book of Paris,
Paris with the Lid Lifted, How to be Happy in Paris (without being ruined), and Paris on
Parade, which served as guides to a lifestyle. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway depicts the
fictional movements of his characters as experiential travelogue, making the expatriate artist
lifestyle a tourist experience. Jake Barnes’s emphasis on his environment and recurrent
references to the streets, bars, and cafes is frequented by his expatriate companions place. The
Sun Also Rises within a body of travel literature is describing the infamous expatriate
lifestyle. The Sun Also Rises does indeed question the concept of traditional masculinity.
Hemingway implicitly condemns contemporary Western standards of manhood but while
indulging in the depiction of wounded masculinity he projects a self-conscious vision of a
35 restructured male subjectivity. The new construction would elevate the more sensitive qualities of Jake Barnes, and combine them with the solitary, heroic qualities that
Hemingway invests in the matador. His novels and stories contain many treatments of heterosexual love. While Jake remains the only major Hemingway character actually to lack a complete penis, the other heroes rarely make use of that organ in lovemaking.
Again, the masculinity of Hemingway’s character is also observed by Ebersole’s
Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. He stated that the treatment to the man is exposed mostly by Hemingway to show the superior of the man such as the themes of war, bullfighting, safari, fishing game, and hunting. The ideas are closely related to the business of the man. The male heterosexual masochism represents to some a legitimate, alternative form of masculine sexuality and has been the focus of study in recent gender theory. Traditionally, when critics comment on masochism in Hemingway they generally do so idiomatically, without touching on the sexual implications, by referring to the many physical wounds his characters suffer. Yet the wounded heroes exhibit a non-genital sexuality and occasionally submit to passive sodomy. Their general physical and psychological submission to women who alternately punish, humiliate, and nurture these suffering men, sufficiently demonstrates masochism. Some contemporary critics see male masochism as a liberating sexual practice.
Forter writes of the period and the response of American modernists, including Hemingway, as a “reaction to the loss of masculine authority and potency” before “the onslaught of a destructive and emasculating modernity” a reaction characterized by nostalgia for a
“disappearing ideal of male autonomy”. Hemingway’s work can be seen as subversive to the ideas of the family. The nuclear family plays virtually no role in Hemingway’s fiction.
Schorer in Technique as Discovery (1948) explained that Hemingway’s The Sun Also
Rises is consummate work of art not because it may be measured by some external, neoclassical notion of form, but because its form is so exactly equivalent to its subject, and
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because the evaluation of its subject exists in the style. The contribution of his prose was to his subject, and the terseness of style for which his early work is justly celebrated is no more valuable as an end in itself. His early subject, the exhaustion of value, was perfectly investigated and invested by his bare style, and in story after story, no meaning at all is to be inferred from the fiction except as the style itself suggests that there is no meaning in life. So,
Hemingway’s early work makes moving splendor from nothingness. This style, more than that, was the perfect technical substitute for the conventional commentator since it expresses and measures the peculiar morality.
Evidently the reader of a short story not only should be sensitive to implication, but should be able to store away details for future understanding. And evidently he should read the story more than once. A reader can understand A Farewell to Arms without knowing that
rain symbolizes death, but he cannot understand Hemingway’s “The Snow of Kilimanjaro”
without knowing that the mountain toward which the dying writer imagines himself flying at
the end symbolizes lost integrity. Since the typical short story can be read within an hour, it is
very compressed to present in detail the development of characters, a complex social
situation, a complicated events and relationships involving many characters. According to
Poe’s 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, the short story’s chief advantage over
the novel is that it can be read in one uninterrupted sitting, and is therefore capable of an
intense unity of effect. First, according to Poe’s theory, the story was to be unified around an
“effect”, that is an exercising of the reader’s emotions or intellect. They aim at understanding
some problems of values. A second is most short stories have been realistic in style; the
dialogue is true to life, the settings detailed and recognizable, and the situations probable.
Even, most modern authors consider the story an exploration of a specific experience, and
since most experience consists of an encounter with and reaction to actual events, most
stories today reproduce the surface of actuality. However, any really mature literary
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enjoyment requires an appreciation of the author’s artistry, and short story offer in addition to
their own value as literature, an ideal training ground for the appreciation.
Friedman (1955) in Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,
PMLA, LXX, talked about the editorial omniscience as the point of view of the stories that is
mastered by Hemingway. For an example of immediate scene is like in “The Killers’”
quotation, “The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard.
The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees. Nick stopped and
picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain. He
put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat”. Here, although no one has yet spoken, we
have Hemingway’s typically patient presentation of detail such as setting (weather: rain,
wind, road, trees, apple, grass), action (Nick turned, stopped, picked up, put), and character
(Nick and his Mackinaw coat). The event itself rather than the overt attitude of the narrator
dominates. Also as “Hills like White Elephants”, the setting may be supplied by the author as
in stage directions where the reader apparently listens to no one but the characters themselves
who move as it were upon a stage.
However, this identification of Hemingway as a unique American writer, is not
enough only from the observation of his major novels. He is also a famous short story writer.
In this case, the writer of the thesis takes the other form that is short stories, which is different from novel. The intention is to dig out Hemingway’s ten selected short stories in order to identify what the significant themes are, how the themes influenced the female characters’ characterization, and what is the parallel between Hemingway’s works and his life. Although many critics are now ready to dismiss the old Hemingway myth of machismo, few seem prepared to acknowledge that the way Hemingway characterizes his female characters is more sharply in his short stories and also influenced by his own experiences in the real life
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when he interacted with women. Thus, in this case, the biographical approach and the
biographies of Hemingway are the best tool and appropriate data to apply.
C. Theoretical Framework
The material objects of the study are ten short stories of Hemingway and the female characters are chosen by the writer of the thesis as the item of analysis because they are not only as supporting characters but they are important characters. They have many problems indeed but still they try to do something in their surroundings according to their own ways and interest. This is one of the considerations in seeing the women’s problems in their society and how their reactions and struggles in that kind of depressed situation. It is to see that
Hemingway is not only as a macho writer but he has also the responses and the sympathy for women in his inner mind. Thus, the biographical approach of Hemingway is applicable to relate the parallel of his short stories to the situation happened in his real life.
According to Wellek and Warren in Theory of Literature (1963), the biographical approach actually obscures a proper comprehension of the literary process, since it breaks up the order of literary tradition to substitute the life-cycle of an individual. A work of art may rather embody the ‘dream’ of an author than his actual life, or it may be the ‘mask’, the ‘anti- self’ behind which his real person is hiding, or it may be a picture of the life from which the author wants to escape (p. 78). Thus, there is a person behind the work. The author’s work may be a mask, but it is frequently a conventionalization of his own experiences, his own life.
Furthermore, Wellek and Warren added that the biographical framework will also help us in studying the growth, maturing, and possible decline of an author’s art. Biography also accumulates the materials for other questions of literary history such as the reading of the poet, his personal associations with literary men, his travels, the landscape and cities he saw and lived in … (p. 79). Biographical data should amplify the meaning of the text, not drown it
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out with irrelevant material. Biographical approach focuses on explicating the literary work
by using the insight provided knowledge of the author’s life.
According to A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature: Fourth Edition, the
historical-biographical approach can be defined as the approach that “sees a literary work
chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of the author’s life and times or the life and times of
the characters in the work” (Guerin, 1998). Understanding the social structure or way of life
of a certain time period give the reader a greater knowledge base from which to draw
conclusions and better understand the story. Discovering details about the author’s life and
times also provide similar ways to further develop ideas about a story.
To establish and understand the author’s works deeply, besides using the textual reading and all the available information about the facts of the author’s life, such as author’s biographies while reading the stories, the thesis writer would use the theory of relationship, theory of identity, the notion of sex and the notion of death. These kinds of theories are applied to see the uniqueness of Hemingway’s point of view in narrating those four themes both in his works and in his real life.
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CHAPTER III
THE FOUR SIGNIFICANT THEMES IN HEMINGWAY’S TEN SHORT STORIES
The position of women as a marginal part of a patriarchal society is described well by
Hemingway as a girl called Jig in “Hills like White Elephants”, an unnamed American wife in “Cat in the Rain”, Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, Margaret in “The Short Happy
Life of Francis Macomber”, Prudie in “Ten Indians”, Krebs’ mother in “Soldier’s Home”, Liz in “Up in Michigan”, Mrs. Elliot in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, a mother and a daughter in “A
Canary for One”, and an unnamed girl in “The Sea Change”. All of the female characters have the problem in their marriage and in their life and they try to react and give their opinion or argument to reduce the problem.
It is difficult to describe the exact nature of a man-woman relationship in Hemingway as the woman characters are so thinly portrayed. The male characters, on the other hand, have such gigantic egos that it is not possible for them to achieve any but the most unsatisfactory level of relationship with their women: a relationship of animal attraction or infatuation.
Their silly interaction of the need to protect their freedom does not justify their initial need for woman. They are largely so full of themselves that they are incapable of responding to their female partners’ feelings and sentiments. Male character is unable to comprehend that a love-relationship is a two-way channel that involves give and take, sacrifice and responsibility and that a woman’s feelings should be taken into consideration.
On the first reading of Hemingway’s short stories, we may not get the true nature of man-woman relationship which Hemingway approves. His stories have many meanings sometimes and we have to catch the true meaning carefully. We may be inclined to think that
Hemingway deliberately makes the woman less than the man and that the woman is
41 subservient to the man. To blame Hemingway as an insensitive, one-dimensional man is to condemn his art. Objective readers, however, would recognize that Hemingway wants his readers to focus on the male protagonist in his fiction. This is because the male protagonist has the courage that takes into account physical power, brute force and a corresponding mental freedom from fear. Second, the world of Hemingway is the world of man where the man is guided by the sole yardstick of courage. The woman has neither the scope nor the rightful place in it. Here man single-handedly pursues his manliness without seeking help from woman or without being dependent on her.
On the surface, Hemingway seems to portray love, marriage, and women as inevitable paths to heartache and injury. Yet, one must consider the female characters in Hemingway’s works that do not intend to wound those they love. In “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, Harry claims that he became involved with Helen to spy on the wealthy, to write about them from an informed stance. However “each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work”, contaminating his mind just as the gangrene pollutes his body. Flashbacks, well-written stories Harry never had the chance to write, intermittently surface in the story as he drifts in and out of consciousness, acting as a momentary escape for the past. In this way the story itself, a piece about stories unwritten, is therapeutic for Harry, who is no longer able to write.
Hemingway’s art so often associated with his public persona as above all the masculine, indeed macho writer beat its finest when it is dealing about men without women and about the ambiguities of sexual experience. The early story “Up in Michigan” was omitted from In Our Time because the publisher, Liveright, objected to its explicit sexual content. But from today’s perspective it strikes one as a sensitive treatment of a youthful sexual encounter, in which the man’s clumsiness is contrasted with the girl’s deeper emotional involvement and tenderness. The story is told in the third person, but its point of
42 view and style is primarily that of the girl, Liz. Hemingway uses a kind of free indirect
discourse, which describes Liz’s feelings by using her own style of language, but without
quotation marks. “Cat in the Rain” about a bored American couple in an Italian hotel, is also
told mainly from the woman’s point of view. Focusing on the briefest and slightest of
incidents, it evokes the whole world of the relationship such as the rainy Italian town, the
rootless hotel existence, the woman’s frustrated desire for children and her responsiveness to
the hotel’s owner. In “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” the tone is marred by a kind of sneering contempt
towards the hapless protagonists’ unsuccessful attempts to have a child. It also hints a lesbian
relationship between Mrs. Elliot and her female friend. A more subtle treatment of lesbianism
can be found in “The Sea Change”, where a young man in a café breaks with his girlfriend
because of her relationship with another woman. “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber”, is a memorable treatment of the psychological effects of physical courage and a
disenchanted portrait of a certain type of rich and ruthless American woman. “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro” on the other hand, loses itself in a difficult situation of retrospection, and one is
suspicious, given the obvious closeness of the dying writer Harry to Hemingway himself, of
the tortuous combination of self-criticism, self-pity and justification in which those
retrospections
The woman’s point of view is again central to “Hills like White Elephants”. This is
episode-story, presenting simply a couple’s forty-minute wait at a small Spanish railway station and their conversation about (it is implicitly clear but never stated) the woman’s proposed abortion. The story is almost entirely made up of simple dialogue, and its success lies in the way this dialogue is charged with tone and implication. The man’s detachment and the woman’s deeper emotional involvement and anxiety emerge sharply in their tense exchanges. The brevity of the story and the absence of tonal markers (adverbs, for instance)
43 make for an active participation by the reader. In a similar way the title’s relation to the story
prompts the imaginative response. It evokes both the place and her response to it.
Many of Hemingway’s stories, though ostensibly “without women”, gain their
significance and point from the fact that women’s presence is still felt significantly in the
background. Women seem unable to move outside of the societal boundaries without negative consequences. They may assume as the following characteristics: subservient,
accommodating, dependent, unstable, weak, selfless, restrained, sacrificing, inferior and
passive. Despite these claims, all of the characters in these selected stories are actually strong
characters and have strong will. Therefore, from the reading of the ten short stories, the
problems faced by the female characters can be categorized into 4 themes: relationship,
identity, sex, and death.
A. Relationship
Characters are similar to people in the real life. People are seen as either using their
Valued Relating Style and feeling empowered and rewarded, or using a non-preferred style and feeling devalued and unrewarded. If the environment provides opportunities for an individual to use their Valued Relating Style and rewards the subsequent behavior, the individual usually reports feeling good about him or herself and good about their relationships. Their sense of self-esteem rises and their sense of well-being are enhanced. If, on the other hand, the person is consistently denied the opportunity to use their Valued
Relating Style, there can be serious consequences. It is assumed that every individual has some quantity of each of the personal strengths in their makeup. The degree of each strength varies from individual to individual. In other words, no two people are exactly alike, even when the personal strengths that they use most frequently are the same. Thus, the six stories
44 here illustrate terrific relationships. They give us a picture of what causes tension in
relationships and the quality of listening is vital to the relationship.
Move to the first story, “Hills like White Elephants”, touches the issue of communication problem in a relationship. The story flows through the conversation between the two main characters, the American and the girl, called Jig. The American seems to love adventurous life, traveling and seeing new sights. He chooses his words advantageously, almost deceitfully when trying to convince the girl that an abortion is easy surgery, “It’s not really an operation at all” (Hemingway 275). This remark reveals how desperate he is to make the decision for the girl. Meanwhile, by the end of the story, the girl or Jig knows that the abortion will cause their relationship to fail, but she does not want to give up. Like Jig and her boyfriend, we have to face the similar situation. Along with the anxiety of our minds, nature also responds in a meaningful way. This feeling is quite intense. The act of abortion is not new in human culture and activity, and although we find it in this story in the American
society, it is familiar as well in every part of the world.
Hemingway begins the story by giving the details of the setting. The openness and loneliness around the railroad station imply that there is no way to back out of the problem at hand and that the man and the girl must address it now. The heat turns the scene into a virtual teakettle, boiling and screaming under pressure. The landscape that encompasses the station plays a fundamental role in the conflict of the story through its extensive symbolism. The train tracks form a dividing line between the barren expanse of land stretching toward the hills on one side and the green, fertile farmland on the other, symbolizing the choice faced by each of them and their differing interpretations of the dilemma of pregnancy. Jig focuses on the landscape during the conversation, rarely making eye contact with the man (Fletcher,
1980).
45 When the girl sees the long and white hills she says “they look like white elephants”.
As she observes the white hills she foresees elatedly the birth of her baby which is something unique like the uncommon white elephant. The color white symbolizes the innocence and purity of her unborn child. She also admires the rest of the scenery,
The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were the fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees…(Hemingway 276).
The fields of grain and trees represent fertility and fruitfulness, which symbolize her
current pregnant state and the life in her womb. The Ebro River also represents life, as it
germinates the fields. Just as the girl appreciates the panorama and its connection to her
unborn child the “shadow of a cloud”, which represents the abortion of the fetus, overcomes
her happiness. After an exchange of words with the man, she again looks at the scenery, but
this time in a different way, as the following sentence illustrates, “They sat down at the table
and the girl looked across the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and
at the table” (Hemingway 277). The man is obviously in favor of the abortion, and everything
he says is an effort to persuade her into it. As she considers his point of view she looks at the
dry side of the valley, which is barren and sterile, symbolizing her body after the abortion.
The man further complicates the discussion by contradicting himself. For each time
he reassures the girl he wants what she wants, he spends at least one line identifying exactly
what he wants. This is clearly seen in the following conversation, “You’ve got to realize …
that I don’t want you to do it if you don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it
if it means anything to you” (Hemingway 277). So far it sounds as if his only wish is for her
to do what she wants. But when she asks if it means anything to him, he immediately
responds, “Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want anyone else.
And I know it’s perfectly simple” (Hemingway 277).
46 Right away the girl seems to show what is going on in her mind. When the man
initially directs the conversation to the operation (abortion), her reaction is described, “The
girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on … did not say anything” (Hemingway 275).
“Once they take it away, you never get it back” (Hemingway 276). An obvious hint, yet she never clearly voices her hunger to have the baby. She continues to desire his will over hers in
lines such as this one, “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me” (Hemingway 275).
After a few of these vain attempts to convince the man to consider having the baby, she implores him to “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking”
(Hemingway 277). These words do not show the girl’s weakness and dependent nature anymore but it implies something more. She wants his man to stop pushing her to do the
abortion.
Hemingway also uses a component of the setting, a beaded curtain which serves as a
partition in the bar, to show the conflict between the characters. At one point during their
conversation, “the girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of
the strings of beads” (Hemingway 275). It seems that she diverts her attention by busying
herself. Others symbolisms are the curtain, drinking and Jig’s name. The curtain includes the
man’s opinion which may be said to represent the man’s desire to maintain the status quo in
their relationship and indeed, drinking is a part of the man’s present lifestyle. Upon entering
the bar the man orders a pair of alcoholic drinks for the couple, then another. The girl later
comments about how their relationship seems to revolve around looking at things and trying
new drinks.
When the conversation begins, Jig asks the man what they should have to drink. They
decide on beer, and he orders two “big ones”. The hot weather, the relief sought in beer and
cold alcoholic drinks mirror a disagreement between the two people. They spend the time
drinking and waiting for the train to arrive. Jig comments on the beaded curtains and asks
47 what it says. The American replies “Anis del Toro. It’s a drink” (Hemingway 274). They
order this because they want to try new things, perhaps considering the possibility of having a
new relationship or a new experience in life, but when she tastes it she says “it tastes like
licorice” (Hemingway 274) which is very common and not exotic taste, and she adds that
“Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for…”
(Hemingway 274) implies that when you wait for something for a long time, once you get it, it loses its appeal. Later on there is a reference to the routine they seem to be in when she says “that’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” (Hemingway 274). This seems to be saying that she is dissatisfied with their life together. She could want more from life, thinking about a possible life including a baby. After trying the new, they order another round of beer and continue their conversation about the abortion. Jig’s name is symbolically significant, as in the fact that her real name is never given, that “Jig” is only her lover’s pet name for her. In addition to being a dated slang term for sexual intercourse, the word jig can mean a sprightly Celtic dance or any of several different kinds of tools; this implies that the
American views Jig as more of a loving object or tool than a person with feelings and values to be respected (O’Brien, 1982).
“Hills like White Elephants” suggests a relationship between the meaning of white elephants and the man’s attitude toward the unborn child. One definition of white elephant as given by Webster’s 21st Century Dictionary: “[An] awkward, useless possession”. A white
elephant has also been defined as an item that is worthless to one but priceless to another,
bringing to mind the saying, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. In the case of
Hemingway’s couple, the baby represents something of no apparent value to the man, yet
priceless to the girl. Jig’s reference to white elephants might be a characterization of the
emotional neglect occurring in the relationship. Jig’s statement that she “[doesn’t] care about
[herself]”, would seem to indicate that her lover’s inability to recognize her emotional needs
48 leaves her life, which is implicitly spent entirely with the American, meaningless. Her
submission to his will, in conceding to have the operation, reflects an underlying feeling of
worthlessness that the American, perhaps unconsciously, exploits to gain individual
happiness from her. In this way, Jig might feel that she is the American’s white elephant; a
useless artifact that serves only to bolster the pride of its owner.
The story also can be defined into a two-part theme. The first is a commentary about
the way selfishness can corrupt a relationship. The second comments on life and what it
means to bear life. The way the girl sees part of the valley as brown and dry image
symbolizes what her womb will be like when the abortion is over. Later she looks out over
the fertile side of the valley and a cloud passes over it, symbolizing the loss of fertility that
can come with abortion. She has a choice to make between death or fertility and life.
Hemingway even uses something as seemingly insignificant as the curtain as a symbol. The
curtain is a barrier, much like the cervical opening is to the womb, which the man disturbs by
walking through it in the end.
The topic of the conversation and the way both characters handle it, is the main
element that draws their characters into sharp round focus. Though the girl does not want to
talk about the issue, they do anyway. From this, the reader gets a clear picture of how each
character feels, and reacts to such a brash topic. The man seems to think its no big deal to
have an abortion and is drawn as a manipulative jerk. The girl, on the other hand, is submissive, but would like to keep the child growing in her womb. Both characters are drawn quickly, but very effectively, by their viewpoints.
The man in the story is the antagonist. He is the jerk who knocked up the girl, and
doesn't want to take responsibility. He tries to convince her about having an abortion is the only thing that will help their relationship. Apparently he has grown cold towards her since she found out that she is pregnant. She asks him whether he still loves her again if she has it
49 done. He insists that he already does love her, but the reader can see only his selfishness, in
only wanting her, has already begun to take its toll on the relationship. He tries to convince
her that the surgery is a "simple operation," all they do is "let the air in”. He tries to tell her
that everyone is doing it these days. He is a manipulative person who has no respect for life.
He also manipulates her further by saying he doesn't care if she does it, that he would be just
fine if she didn't. He doesn't really mean it. He continually pushes her when she doesn't want
to talk about it. He really has no respect for her. He corrupts their relationship with his
selfishness, which eventually causes it to fall apart.
The girl juxtaposes the man manipulative nature in that she is submissive, willing to
please, even though she feels otherwise. She is thinking about the life she carries inside of
her, but she wants the love of her man. She tries to avoid the conversation, so she won't have to deal with what he is making her do. When she does talk, they end up ordering several drinks. She seems to want to drown out her misery. One of the most character defining places in the story is when she says, "And we could have everything and every day we make it more
impossible" (Hemingway 276). She wants a full life with her husband but because of his attitude towards the life within her it is impossible. He says they could have everything, but
"No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you can never get it back" (Hemingway 276). She knows they can't have everything. They can't have their child. She values life, but to save their relationship she feels she has to submit.
Hemingway uses the word “abortion” which is a well-known phenomenon in the story. In reality, we know that a woman has to abort because of her physical problems. Often the husband or the male figure in the family wants the abortion because he wants to spend more and longer time with his wife or his female counterpart or the husband feels that he will lose his wife’s uninterrupted love and attention if she gives birth to a child. His wife’s love and attention has to be shared with the baby. Because of the baby, his wife will not be able to
50 give him company as before and will not be able to accompany him anywhere at the spur of
the moment. For these reasons, the wife is compelled to resort to abortion. Misunderstandings
arise when the wife lacks interest in doing so. Because of this issue of abortion, the two main
characters of the story run into conflict between themselves.
There is only one reason here, that is, the man cannot assure his girl that the abortion
is no big deal and that if she goes for it things will be all right as before. The girl says, “And
if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” (Hemingway
275). The girl in the story all along is torn by this conflict, to be or not to be. If she does it “it
will be nice again” and the hills will look “like white elephants”. Their agony,
misunderstandings, anxiety, and restlessness have been depicted so adroitly by Hemingway.
Generally the pressure comes from the male partner.
This incident may apparently be an insignificant one for some, but it has changed our perspectives on life. Obviously, the man has more control and authority than the girl. The man is the protagonist so he takes more space in the story and the story is based on what he wants. His goal is to convince Jig to get aborted while Jig has an opposed idea, which is not getting an abortion. Her man has insisted so much that she can not express her words, opinion and feeling. The man’s power over woman is demonstrated clearly. The girl is a weak person, someone who can not decide an important thing in her whole life without asking her husband, someone who is unable to use her own judgment; someone who needs her man’s approval before doing anything, in the eyes of the man. She says “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy?” “And you really want to?” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” (Hemingway 275). All these questions seem sacrifice her desire. She tends to care about his happiness than hers. She does not mean it. She gives the question in order to make her man think and open his eyes.
51 On the contrary, the man is forceful and dominant. He insists her and puts a lot of
pressure on her to do the abortion. He is so persistent and almost commands her to get the
abortion in order to push her to have no choices and accept it. By saying these following
sentences, for example, “But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else”. “I
don’t care anything about it”. “It’s really an awfully simple operation”. “You don’t have to be afraid, I know lots of people that have done it”. “I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple” (Hemingway 277) over and over again, he has applied his strategy to win.
Of course, the girl is very tempted but she still confused because she really wants the baby.
The interesting words come from the girl when she says “Would you please please
please…stop talking”. It is very important to the writer of the thesis to pay more attention to
these girl’s words. She feels powerless about the depressed situation. Maybe she is so fed up
of hearing her man’s words. Truly she is in a weakly position. However it is not the end to
the girl. She needs a little courage to say that words. “Please stop talking” is not directly
stated that the winner is the man, not yet. It is a kind of self-reliance and a protest not only to the man but also to her, to her surrounding. It is the time to stop hearing to the man. In short,
Hemingway transmitted the message that man’s power over woman is noticeable in this story. The man is the boss and he still leads the society. On the other hand, Hemingway also digs out the deepest thing in woman heart and mind. Through the female character, that is the girl, he shows that woman actually needs more space to breath in their life. Their relationship is not a comfort thing to go on living. Sometimes man must stop talking or stop asking. At the end of the story, the man takes the initiative to pick up the couple’s luggage and port it to the
“other tracks” on the opposite side of the station, symbolizing his sense of primacy in making the decision to give up their child and betraying his insistence to Jig that the decision is entirely in her hands.
52 The second story, “Cat in the Rain”, the problem of relationship happens when one partner becomes dominant or repressive and the other is trying to change and improve the situation. If they are aware of their problems they might be able to save their marriage, but if they do not recognize that their relationship will become more and more like the depressive weather in the story. It begins with a long description of the environment in good weather, which means spring or summer, then a description of the momentary situation in the rain.
This description creates an atmosphere that is sad, cold and unfriendly. To create this atmosphere Hemingway uses words such as “empty” or “the motorcars were gone”. This description is a foreshadowing of the state of the couple’s relationship. First it was nice, the spring time of their love, and then there is only rain, their relationship got cold and unfriendly. Another symbolic hint in the introduction is the war monument, which is mentioned three times. This is done to show that a conflict is to be expected.
The husband, George, is completely indifferent to his wife’s feelings. As the story progresses, the wife is pining away for domesticity which her husband has denied her.
George prefers his freedom without the concomitant responsibilities of parenthood and domesticity. He wants the body of his wife without the feminine feelings that normally come with the territory. The bored and lonely American wife is dragged around Europe by her husband, George, who neglects her emotional needs. The wife’s longing for a cat that she found outside of their hotel, ignites her want and need for rebirth in her life. Throughout the story, the characterizations of George and his wife demonstrate how the couple needs some type of change in order to save their relationship. George is content with his life, but his wife wants some type of spark in their relationship.
Contrast to George who sees nothing wrong with their relationship, his wife feels that they need excitement and change in order to make their relationship last. Hemingway portrays the wife as wanting to create new ways to live her life away from boredom. She
53 repeatedly tells her husband that she wants a cat, after seeing a poor cat trapped in the rain outside of their hotel. Her desire for a cat symbolizes that she wants a baby so they can start building a family. She also wants to grow out her hair so she can wear it in a bun, because she is sick and tired of looking like a boy. The wife seems to be on a quest for a femininity that will arouse her husband and bring spark into their love life. But in order for these things to happen, change must occur to settle the tension. The wife tells her husband, “I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles” (Hemingway 170). It seems that George’s wife basically wants their relationship to become stronger by adding change and excitement to their lives. She does not want them to become tired of each other and bored from their normal, day-to-day, actions and roles.
Something has to be wrong with the spark in their relationship when they are in Italy in a hotel room facing the sea, a public garden, and a famous war monument, and still go about their ordinary ways of life. They are amidst new experiences and excitement yet the wife is bored and needs love from her husband. The American wife thinks of how dry and dead their relationship is as she looks out the window into the rain and then gets wet herself as she goes to fetch the stranded kitten. When she said “I want to have a kitty to sit on my lap and purr when I stroke her” (Hemingway 169) shows her desire for a cat that she can take care of and cuddle with symbolizes her wish for a baby that would definitely bring change in her life. George’s wife also feels that change needs to be made in the way her husband acknowledges her and expresses his love for her. She feels unimportant when she expresses her feelings to George because he either ignores her or acts like he does not care.
Her husband is the source of her emotional despair. He leaves her drowning in an avalanche of apathy and lack of affection. When she tells him of all the things she desires, he merely tells her to shut up. The woman wants the cat so that she can hold it on her lap and pet it as it purrs. If the cat is a symbol for the woman, then she is expressing a desire for someone
54 to do the same for her. She wants someone to stroke her, perhaps physically as well as emotionally. She feels unwomanly, like a boy with her short hair. She is starved for the physical and emotional attention that the husband should be giving to her. When the cat is finally brought in from the rain, it is the hotel-keeper that has responded to her needs, rather than her husband. The man who had caused in her “a momentary feeling of supreme importance” (Hemingway 169), in whom she admired “the way he wanted to serve her”
(Hemingway 168), has brought both the literal and symbolic cats in from the rain. He has provided the woman with the attention that she is not receiving from her husband, at least in an emotional sense. The maid, however, holds the “cat pressed tight against her and swung down against her body” (Hemingway 170) in much the same way that one would hold a baby. This, combined with the husband’s apathy and the wife’s obvious connection with the hotel-keeper, suggests that the wife will be satisfied sexually as well as emotionally by this man.
When the American couple arrives in the Italian hotel, George’s wife explains how nice the hotel keeper was to them. She likes his “heavy face” and his “big hands”. “The wife
liked him and liked the way he wanted to serve her” (Hemingway 168). She likes his
attention and kindness, and the comforts that he provided. Even the nice hotel maid holds an umbrella for her when she goes out in the rain to search for the cat. On the other hand, these
qualities are lacking in her husband George, who only lies in bed with propped up pillows
and reads. Hemingway uses the characterizations of the hotel keeper and the maid to contrast
with the characterization of George. George’s wife uses the cat as a way to try and grasp her
husband’s attention so that he may see that they need something new in their relationship.
She studies her profile and hairdo in the mirror and then after George says he likes the way
she looks, she goes to the window to watch the sky grow dark. She knows that he is only
trying to get her to stop talking so he can continue reading and that he does not consider the
55 need for her to change her appearance. “It was getting dark” (Hemingway 169) reveals that
she does not expect much sympathy from George. She is used to being ignored. The
American wife fells that she expresses her feelings quite clearly to George about her need for change, but his character inevitably shows no interest.
George’s wife looks towards femininity by wanting to grow her hair out and buy new
clothes so that maybe she can spark her love life with George. The American wife is filled
with boredom and longs for love and understanding from her husband, while George does not
consider his wife’s emotions an important issue, therefore neglecting her. He also may have
his own concerns if he is sexually impotent during their stay in the winter. George’s wife
looks forward to the rebirth of spring and the hopeful possibilities that it might bring. These
detailed descriptions developed the plot of the story and we are able to see that Hemingway is
a master of creating short stories because he picked out the details in order to infer the outcome. Perhaps the coming of spring will bring a rebirth to this American couple’s relationship. All in all “Cat in the Rain” can be seen not just as a short story but also as a mirror for the society. It is a symbolic story. It shows as well that communicating is one of the most important aspects for living together in harmony, no matter in which kind of relationship. Especially today as the number of failed marriage is still rising, the moral value of the story is still up to date. It means we can see that kind of situation in our real life.
The third story, “Soldier’s Home”, mainly focuses on the relationship between mother and son. The son, Harold Krebs went to the war in 1917 from a Methodist college in Kansas.
There is a picture of him with his fraternity brothers all in the same collar. He came back from the war in 1919, after he had been in the Rhine. There, a picture was taken of him, a fellow corporal, and two German ladies. When Harold returns, no one celebrates. He comes back after most everyone else, so he misses the hysteria. He also cannot get anyone to listen to his stories. To get people to listen, he has lied twice. But he is disgusted by that so he has
56 stopped talking about the war. During this time, Harold is sleeping late and hanging around
all day. He is a hero to his younger sister and to his mother. She sometimes asks about the
war, but she gets bored. The town has not changed in his absence except that some of the girls have become women. He likes to watch them, but he does not want to be a part of their lives. He does not want any consequences. The army had taught him that he did not need a girl. He likes the looks of the girls, but does not want to have to talk. He had not wanted to come home, but he had.
Harold’s mother tells him that he can take the car out at night. Harold goes downstairs for breakfast and starts to read the paper. His mother tells him to muss it. His sister, Helen
Krebs tells him that she will be pitching in an indoor baseball game that day. She asks if he’ll come. Their mother shoos her away and tells him that he should think about finding a job.
She tells him that she prays for him and the temptations that he must have faced. But, she says, he must find a job. After all, she says, the other boys his age are getting jobs and wives.
She asks if he loves her. He says no, meaning that he cannot love anyone. She is only hurt, so he tells her that he did not mean it. He tells her that he will try to be good. She asks him to kneel and pray. She prays, but he cannot. He leaves, thinking that he will get a job in Kansas
City and get out of the house without too many more confrontations. He only wants to have his life go smoothly, which it is not. The protagonist, Harold, proves himself to be a typical product of Hemingway. Hemingway’s mold often required a character to be socially withdrawn, from women and faith, and to overcome these disillusions by becoming heroic.
Harold succeeded in this mold by engaging in non-sociable activities and ridiculing the complexity of relationships with women.
Harold’s mother reflects the typical view of women during the era in the story. She is a God fearing mother, and a housewife. Before Harold’s mother begins her lecture, she takes off her glasses. This gesture seems to imply that she either can not, or does not want to see
57 him. His mother, in other words, does not want to be distracted by Harold’s point of view while she is expounding on hers. She attempts to persuade Harold that he should find a job and be more like the other boys. Harold, having once been faithful himself, now finds that he has lost the thing his mother holds so dear, her belief in God. He feels the conflict of his belief in God, and is unsure of how to deal with this. Harold’s mother pressures him to get a job by arguing that “There can be no idle hands in His Kingdom” (Hemingway 151), to which Harold significantly observes, “I’m not in His Kingdom” (Hemingway 151). Finally, his mother asks whether he loves her. He replies quite truthfully that he does not. We know that this is because his entire worldview has been turned upside down by his traumatic experiences in the war, and the ability to genuinely love requires an emotional balance he does not have right now. But his mother does not understand this, because she cannot identify with his experiences. She devotes herself to her religion. She sees that he isn’t the boy he was in high school or the boy she thought he was. Harold’s small-town mother cannot comprehend her son’s struggles and sufferings caused by the war.
The fourth story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, considers the problems of marriage that was destined to be a failure from the start. The relationship was not built on a foundation of love, but rather on individual expectations and motives which resulted in Mr. and Mrs. Elliot being rather unhappy people. Both Mr. and Mrs. Elliot did find somewhat of a substitute for their spouse. Mr. Elliot found it in his poetry while Mrs. Elliot found it in her best friend.
This story is about a young man, Hubert Elliot, marrying an older woman, Cornelia, and their endeavor to have a baby. They decided to marry after having a long friendship that turned romantic one late night in the tea shop that she owned. For their honeymoon they decided to take a cruise over seas to see different parts of Europe. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby. They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it” (Hemingway 161).
This, the opening line of the story, gives the reader an idea of what to expect later on from
58 Hubert and Cornelia. It projects the idea of unfulfilled desires and a failed marriage from the very beginning, in spite of “trying as often as they could stand it”.
Hubert was twenty-five years old when he married Cornelia. He was taking post graduate work in law at Harvard when he was married. He was a poet with an income nearly ten thousand dollars a year. He wrote very long poems very rapidly. He had never gone to bed with a woman. He wanted to keep himself pure so that he could bring to his wife the same purity of mind and body that he expected of her. He called himself living straight. He had been in love with various girls before he kissed Cornelia and always told them sooner or later that he had led a clean life. Both remain virgins until their marriage. They believe in staying pure for whomever they marry, but this idea does not seem to work out so well, because on their wedding night they end up disappointed. Mr. Elliot’s mother does not approve their marriage, though she is happy when they go to live in Europe. This is another strained relationship in the story.
As the story progresses, Mrs. Elliot becomes rather ill and is forced to put aside most of the attempts to have a baby. This is also the same time where Hubert’s perception of his wife starts to change. “In reality she was forty years old. Her years had been precipitated suddenly when she started traveling. She had seemed much younger; in fact she had seemed not to have any age at all, when Elliot had married her …” (Hemingway 161). The fact that the relationship is not working out quite like he had expected leads Hubert to start questioning the marriage itself. Hubert and Cornelia begin their slow declines into their own little words at this point and only seldom have meaningful contact with each other, whether physical or emotional.
Cornelia somewhat liked the idea of Hubert’s “pureness” and would often have him tell her over and over again that he had somehow saved himself just for her. It was almost like she saw him as a young boy and she was some type of a mentor. Cornelia was forty at
59 the time they were married and worked long hours in her quite tea shop as she continued to
grow older. It seems very likely that the two were drawn to each other not so much out of
love as by the places they were at in their lives. He really wanted to have a kid and she
wanted to make herself feel younger again and once again suggests that their relationship was
not built on love, but rather on other personal motives.
They continue their vacation by going to several different places, cities and countries
but that does not change the fact that they ultimately find comfort in other people, rather than
in each other. They tried in Boston after they were married and they tried coming over on the
boat. They did not try very often on the boat because Cornelia was quite sick. She
disintegrated very quickly under sea sickness, traveling at night, and getting up too early in
the morning. It is apparent that they are becoming unhappy as time goes by, mainly due to the
nature of their sexual relationship and the communication problems they are having. In order
to deal with these problems they both found distractions and other people to interact with.
“Elliot had a number of friends by now all of whom admired his poetry and Mrs. Elliot had
prevailed upon him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been in the tea shop”
(Hemingway 163). Elliot found company in the friends that he had, friends that were really
only around him because he was becoming somewhat of a famous poet. Mrs. Elliot had to
have her friend from home come over in order to have any real peace of mind in her life.
Once Mrs. Elliot’s friend was there the marriage pretty much came to a stopping
point. The Elliot’s gave up on having a child. It seems odd about to see they continue to live with each other even though they have no real interaction. The friends who follow the couple to Europe stay with them for a short while, but they eventually leave and attach themselves to a young, rich poet who lives in a seaside resort. The narrator says that they are happy there with the younger poet. Mr. and Mrs. Elliot and the friend from Boston remain at the chateau in Touraine after their friends leave, and although the narrator claims they are happy, the
60 claim seems false. The husband and wife no longer sleep in the same bed, and the marriage clearly has not worked. These failed relationships are the center of the story, and the idea of happiness comes up at the end of the chapter. The marriage does not make either party happy.
Thus they search for happiness from some other source.
The fifth story, “A Canary for One”, is about the marital problem in a couple who is returning from the southern coast of France to begin their separation. The action of the narrative takes place in a train compartment during an overnight journey from the Riviera to
Paris, which they share with an elderly American lady who is bringing a canary home to her daughter. The lady, who is really quite deaf, talks about a canary she bought in Palermo. She is taking it home to her little girl in New York. In Vevey, the girl, she says, fell madly in love with a Swiss from a very good family who was going to be an engineer. That was why they left the Continent, she adds, for she couldn’t have her daughter marrying a foreigner.
The story disguised until midpoint as a third person narrative, focuses on the behavior of the woman and on the passing scenery as the narrator tries not to think about
Paris and the impending separation. The American lady who monopolizes the story’s action is self-centered and domineering. She iterates her fear of a possible train wreck and reveals that she has ended her daughter’s romance with a man in Vevey, Switzerland, because he was a foreigner, an act that has devastated her daughter. Just before the conclusion of the story, as the train pulls into the Paris station, the American lady and the narrator’s wife engage in their second and last fully reported dialogue, which ends with the narrator’s second and final speech. It is the most complex piece of dialogue,
“Americans make the best husband,” the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. “American men are the only men in the world to marry.” “How long ago did you leave Vevey?” asked my wife. “Two years ago this fall. It’s her, you know, that I’m taking the canary to.” “Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?” “Yes,” said the American lady. “He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go on long walk together.”
61 “I know Vevey,” said my wife. “We were there on our honeymoon.” “Were you really? That must have been lovely. I had no idea, of course, that she’d fall in love with him.” “It was a very lovely place,” said my wife. “Yes,” said the American lady. “Isn’t it lovely? Where did you stop there?” “We stayed at the Trois Couronnes,” said my wife. “It’s such a fine old hotel,” said the American lady. “Yes,” said my wife. “We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely.” “Were you there in the fall?” “Yes,” said my wife. We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered open and the roofs sagged in. “Look,” I said. “There’s been a wreck.” The American lady looked and saw the last car (Hemingway 340-341).
On the surface, the conversation seems superficial, repetitious, and awkward. It is what one might expect from strangers in such circumstances. The conversation appears to be about Vevey and the American lady’s daughter, but it is really about the conflicted emotions experienced by the separating couple. The passage is also almost the case in real life where few people listen, because they are always preparing their own next speeches. But beneath the surface there is calculation and revelation, character is expressed, and plot is advanced.
The passage provides the emotional climax to any rereading of the story. Moreover, even the repetition here changes their referents and meaning.
The narrator and his wife are facing forward. He is looking out the window toward
Paris and the future. His wife is looking at the American lady with whom she is speaking, and the American lady is looking backward to the rear of the train and the past. Because they are nearing the station and the external scenes he observes remind him of his approaching loss, and because he hears the two women speaking of matters that concern him, the narrator listens carefully to the conversation and, for only the second time in the story, reports is fully.
The American lady makes her comment about the exclusive virtue of American
husbands in conjunction with the narrator’s apparently quotidian act of getting down the
bags, an act that seems to correspond to her views on American husband but that is given
62 ironic relevance in juxtaposition with what must surely be the narrator’s sense of it as a
physical step toward the separation of the couple’s possessions. When the American lady
repeats her observation, the wife asks about Vevey, partly to change the painful course of the
conversation. Yet, by choosing to divert it with talk of Vevey, she involuntarily betrays her
desire to talk about the once happy past. The American lady predictably takes the question
about Vevey as a cue to talk about her daughter, and the wife goes along on that track. But
instead of conversing about the canary that the American lady has just mentioned, the wife is
irresistibly drawn to asking about the nature of the broken love affair that stands, for her, as a
sign of her own impending separation.
When the American lady then tells of the Swiss with whom her daughter fell in love,
she twice mentions Vevey, causing the narrator’s wife, in a moment of weakness and out of a
desire to turn from the sign of her unhappy future to the memory of her happy past, to utter
the enormously understated “I know Vevey” and to reveal that it was the site of her
honeymoon. From that moment on, the narrator’s wife will try to hold onto Vevey and the
past. At the same time, the narrator experiences her attempts, by dwelling on Vevey, to ward
off the painful emotions caused by their ever-nearing separation. He, in turn, tries
unconsciously to hold onto their married status by using, in his wife’s remaining five
speeches, the identification tags “said my wife”, although these are obviously unnecessary for the purposes of identifying the speaker.
The American lady, who could not care less about the couple’s honeymoon, swiftly shifts the conversation back to her daughter’s love affair and inadvertently reveals that she feels somewhat defensive, perhaps even guilty, about what she has done. As in a previous dialogue, she uses the phrase “of course” to justify her actions. But the narrator’s wife is no longer interested in the unhappy daughter. She drops even the amenity of talking about the
daughter and continues her spoken reverie on Vevey. Here an extraordinary event occurs.
63 The American lady, who throughout the story has been totally oblivious to all around her,
realizes that the narrator’s wife wants to talk about Vevey. For the rest of the conversation
she actually focuses on what the narrator’s wife wants to talk about, and she responds with
questions about the honeymoon and with statements that relate to what the wife says.
Part of the emotional impact of the conversation derives from the fact that if the narrator’s wife makes an impression strong enough to pierce the self-absorption and alter the behavior of the American lady, then it must be quite a strong impression indeed. The wife also emerges from her near anonymity to become the center of the scene, a transformation heightened by the drum roll of “said my wife” tags supplied by the narrator. And when the wife’s speeches are stitched together, they are emotionally compelling in and of themselves,
“I know Vevey. We were there on our honeymoon. It was a very lovely place. We stayed at the Trois Couronnes. Yes. We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely.
Yes” (Hemingway 341).
This is a story of traps and cages: the canary, of course, is trapped in its cage, the
American lady’s daughter is trapped by her own weakness and her mother’s prejudices, the
American lady is trapped in a cage of deafness, pettiness, self-interest, intolerance, and fear of foreigners and of train wrecks. Each of the American couple is also trapped in his or her own egocentrism. It is oddly enough, not once do the narrator and his wife speak to each other in the story, and they even say goodbye to the American lady separately, “My wife said good-by and I said good-by to the American lady” (Hemingway 341).
The surprise ending of the story is likely to lead the reader to a hasty conclusion that this is the story of disintegration of the married life of the American couple. It may have to be stressed, however, that the motif of love and marriage in disrepair is nothing but a minor one, and that the irreconcilable discrepancy between the American lady and her daughter in New
York should be accepted as the major one. Again, although the surprise ending, sure enough,
64 has the effect to suggest the coming crack between the American couple, emphasis should be
put on its vital main function to ascertain the American lady’s fallibility that she has been
easily deceived by appearances. One of the American lady’s tragic defects is stunningly emphasized by the revelation that the couple are coming back to separate.
The sixth or the last story is “The Sea Change”. In this story, Phil tries to persuade an unnamed “girl”, with whom he has evidently had a romantic relationship, to stay with him, while she tries to make him understand that she cannot. It eventually becomes evident that she wants to leave him for a romantic relationship with another woman. Like the couple in
“Hills like White Elephants”, the couple in “The Sea Change” never refers directly to the event that is causing their argument, perhaps because, like abortion, a woman leaving a man for a lesbian relationship was an unspeakable subject for 1930s Americans. Phil is a weak man who resorts to bitterness and sarcasm in an unsuccessful attempt to keep his girlfriend.
He longs to resort to violence but cannot, since his rival is a woman. His whole sense of self- worth is predicated upon having a beautiful, tanned blonde on his arm, and once she is gone, his sense of self collapses. He seems genuinely bewildered by his girlfriend’s defection, as if he cannot imagine any woman preferring another woman to him.
Stereotypically feminine, Phil’s “girl” is so eager to please him that even while she is breaking off their relationship, she repeatedly apologizes and promises to come back to him.
She is offended when he first asks her to prove her love. She values politeness and harmony over the harshly stated truth. Homosexual is considered sinful and unnatural in a society.
Their relationship is apparently superficial. She leaves him happily when he says he can, even though she knows that he has said so unwillingly and only because he has no other choice. He focuses primarily on her beauty and seems upset over her loss, more because of what it says about him than because of any genuine feelings for her. Their relationship was also apparently an unequal one, for when he mentions wanting to have his own way, she tells him
65 that he did for a long time. The implication is that Phil has controlled the relationship, so that
her decision to leave him must be especially startling, since it switches their roles and robs
him of his power in the relationship.
The theme of relationship is mostly found in Hemingway’s short stories in various
ways and characters, for instance, man-woman relationship, husband-wife relationship, mother-son relationship, and mother-daughter relationship. It is an interesting and humanistic theme to learn. Considering the pervasiveness of relationships in human experience, one may well wonder whether developing relationships with others may be, in fact, the fundamental task of each individual. Relationship is not just a psychological need but a biological one as well. It is a fundamental aspect of human nature. All of the characters in the stories who
trapped in a failed relationship need to be changed and healed by the better relationships,
such as good communication, better treatment from the partner, and better tolerance to each
other.
B. Identity
The theme of identity in Hemingway’s stories covers the identity crisis of an unhappy
woman, the crisis of man’s sexual identity, and an ex-soldier who seeks for his identity after
coming home from the war. The characters cannot concern to develop their personal identity.
Their partners or the other family members display a certain identity and they do not have the
ability to be sensitive and prevent negative feelings. The main characters belong to
moratorium and foreclosure statuses. If the individual does not like the responses of others
they will look at how they can change their views of their identity or their identity towards
themselves to produce a positive outcome. A person’s identity should be fully recognized by those around them. If someone receives a lack of recognition, negative emotions will produce, such as depression. If an individual does not focus enough attention on the identity
66 they wish to portray, it will not be received fully either. This usually happens because all of their attention is normally focused on another aspect of their identity and all other facets are neglected. These neglected aspects are not displayed well by the individual, so they are not received by others as the individual hoped. This is a sure way for the individual to become down upon themselves or even extremely angry with themselves for not developing that aspect of their identities and being misunderstood.
First, we take a look at “Cat in the Rain”, Hemingway uses the technique by not giving the wife a name, shows her unimportance in the story. She needs to feel loved and important in her relationship with George so that there will be some type of change in her life that will make their commitment to each other last. She needs more compassion in her life, so she seeks this by pursuing change through such things as a cat, hairstyle, and clothing. A cat may symbolize loyalty and love, and a new hairstyle and wardrobe shows her strive for an appearance that would attract her husband. The story starts with the sentence “There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel” introducing the two main characters. The fact that it is just their nationality that is indicated and that they are not mentioned by name is a hint of a lack of individuality. The following line “They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to and from their room” stresses the isolation and anonymity that shadows them.
Being right in front of the hotel and the public garden symbolizes isolation as well as loneliness and unhappiness of the woman who is standing at the window looking out into the world. Standing at the window of the hotel-room looking out in the rain while her husband is reading, the “American wife” spots a cat, which is crouched under a table. On the spur of the moment she decides to protect that cat from the rain even though she will get wet. It is the spontaneous reaction of the woman after she saw that cat. Usually only children want to protect cats or dogs from the rain, because a grown-up knows that rain does not do any harm
67 to animals living on the street. From that point the thesis writer can find an interpretation
which is quite complex and not that easy to explain. On the one hand the woman wants to
protect that little cat, like a baby. So she wants to protect that vulnerable thing, which is more
the behavior of an adult. But on the other hand she acts like a little child by having this wish
for a cat. Another hint for that is that the woman is referred to as “girl” in the following
paragraph, not as “wife” like before. The ambition of saving a cat from the rain is a childish behavior that even becomes strengthened by her saying that “it isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty
out in the rain”. This obviously builds up a parallel between the woman and the helpless cat.
In the first place children use to identify themselves with pets, but indeed this can be
transferred to the woman’s life. Looking for love and closeness, for tenderness and someone
who needs her, it seems as though her process of self-discovery has not finished yet, which makes her unsure of herself.
The sequence in which we get to know that she likes the hotelkeeper a lot is next. She likes the way he wants to serve her. Why? Because it gives her the feeling to be grown up, to be treated like a lady. But the other reasons for fancying him originate from a more childish thinking, like the fact that she likes him because of his big hands. To underline this childish behavior, all sentences in this part begin with “She liked…”, which is the typical way of a child to want something. When she talks about the cat in this situation, she does not say “cat” but “kitty”, which is usually a childish expression as well. The next sentence that seems to be important is, “The padrone made her feel very small and at the same time very important. She had a momentary feeling of being of great importance” (Hemingway 169). At this point the thesis writer can see again the two parts of her personality. The child in her feels very timid because of the presence of this tall, old, serious man, the woman in her feels flattered by the way he cares for her. She seems to be like a girl of teenage, still being a child and now slowly
noticing the woman inside her.
68 The identity crisis of the woman is stressed by the following scene in which the woman expresses that she is dissatisfied with her hair looking like a boy’s. She manifests herself by expressing her desires for not only a female hairstyle but also “a kitty to sit on her lap and purr when she strokes her”, her “own silver”, “candles”, “new clothes”, and so on.
All these are symbols of femininity, a home and maybe also a hidden wish to become a mother, aspects she misses in her marriage. From this point on she is called a “wife” again, underlining that she became conscious of what she wants. “And I want it to be spring” may not only be a reference to the bad weather but also means that she wants it to be spring in their relationship again. However she knows that all her wishes are nearly unrealizable, saying “If I can’t have long hair or any fun, I can have a cat” underlines the central position of this certain desire.
Move to the second story, “The Sea Change” is a story in which Phil experiences separation from his girlfriend because she is going away with a lesbian. Although
Hemingway also writes on the theme of women’s crisis identity in “Cat in the Rain”, “The
Sea Change”, unlike “Cat in the Rain”, steps into the male protagonist’s consciousness and depicts the transformation of his sexual identity. As he discusses their relationship in a bar,
Phil confronts his own “perversion” that he unconsciously had in their sexual practices. The girl asks, “You don’t think things we’ve had and done should make any difference in understanding?” (Hemingway 399). Phil mentions that what they did is “vice”, quoting
Pope’s verse of which he remembers only a part, “’Vice is a monster of such fearful mien,’” the young man said bitterly, “that to be something or other needs but to seen. Then we something, something, then embrace”. He could not remember the words. “I can’t quote”, he said (Hemingway 399). Pope seems to be saying that while the mere sight of “vice” is hateful, repeated exposure to it prompt us to first tolerate it, then to feel sorry for those who engaged in it, and finally to welcome it into our own lives. When Phil renames it
69 “perversion”, the girl, although refusing to call it either “vice” or “perversion”, reassures that what Phil names “perversion” is all they have done, “We’re made up all sorts of things.
You’ve known that. You’ve used it well enough” (Hemingway 400). Finally, he accepts the
“perversion” as his own by letting the girl go with her lesbian lover.
Regarding this, Bennett suggests that the story is about the crisis of Phil’s heterosexual identity in which he has “lost his sexual identity” (242). In his interpretation of
“The Sea Change”, however, Bennett suggests that “the one logical sexual activity in which
Phil and the girl could have engaged that would enable Phil in any way to ‘understand’ the girl’s lesbian urges would be cunnilingus” (232). The thesis writer should not totally agree with Bennett’s argument because oral sex should not be taken as a prototype of lesbian love making. In this sense, Hemingway may assume the girl’s preference of that certain sexual activity which, in Phil’s consciousness, characterizes her and his own “lesbianism”. When the girl mentions that she will come back to Phil in the future, her sexual transgression indicates her preference of a certain sexual act rather than a change in her object-choice. Her trespass between the homo/heterosexual boundaries, therefore, obscures the distinction between homo and heterosexual sexual practices. Attributing her first experience of what Phil comes to understand as a “lesbian” sexual act to her heterosexual relations with Phil, then participating in it through her relationship with the lesbian lover, and finally relocating this act to her heterosexual relations once again, she deconstructs the distinction between heterosexual sexual practices and lesbian sexual practices.
On the contrary, Phil seeks the “truth” of his sexuality and finds his sexual transformation in the mirror which reflects “quite a different looking man”; his “lesbian” body depresses his masculinity. The girl’s preference for “lesbian” sex, which was merely one of the heterosexual sexual variation they had enjoyed until the girl declared her desire for another woman, now becomes the evidence of her homosexuality, and also proves Phil’s
70 status as “the girl’s ‘first girl’” (Bennett 236). In his consciousness, his heterosexual
relationship with the girl turns out to have been the parody of a lesbian relationship, and
lesbianism becomes the “truth” of their parodic physical activities. Consequently, he re-
identifies himself in despair with it, that is, a homosexual subject that depresses his
masculinity. Phil discovers his own homosexual body which brings about his gender identity
crisis.
The third story, “Soldier’s Home” has to do with Harold’s problem to define of who
he has become. The problem arises when he tries to return from a simplistic lifestyle of war,
to a much more complicated domestic lifestyle. His parent’s comfortable, middle-class lifestyle which used to feel like home to him is no longer does. The situation is more dramatic because he has not only lived on his own, but has dealt with life and death situations his parents could not possibly understand. He realizes the problems that he faces; he no longer believes in society, particularly love and faith. “Ironically, Krebs is disillusioned less by the war than by the normal peacetime world which the war had made him to see too clearly to accept” (Burhans 190). Harold seeks refuge from this disillusion by withdrawing from society and engaging himself in individual activities. A typical day for him consists of going to the library for a book, practicing his clarinet, and shooting pool in the middle of the day.
He loses the purity of experience which he encountered at times in the war. Hemingway writes, “The times so long back when he had done the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally, when he might have done something else, now lost their cool, valuable quality and then were lost themselves” (Hemingway 145). He is making the comparison to Harold himself, when he remarks on these past experiences. Not only is the thing lost, so is the man that used to do them. Harold now finds himself adrift, in a society that he no longer feels he belongs in.
71 To comprehend Harold’s behavior, it is important to view the style in which the story
is written. Hemingway’s writing style is flat and lifeless, with much of it in a negative
connotation. The narrative voice is supplied for support only, and lends no depth or feeling to
the story. This void is felt when the two photographs are being described. There is no
mention of any characters behind the camera, nor are the characters in front of the camera
round or dynamic. The narrator tells us that the uniforms are too small, but does not expound
on the why, or even who. Third person limited omniscience is used by the narrator, as we see
insights into Harold mind, but no one else’s. This lack of verbosity in the narrator helps to
convey the dilemma faced by Harold. He is lifeless and flat, enjoys the show of the world, but
no longer feels he belongs in it.
A more specific way that Harold withdraws from society is his view of women and
love. In a society full of talk, he would have to engage in conversation and interaction in
order to win a woman’s heart. He did not want to go through all of that again. He found it much easier during the war to become intimate with a French or German girl. It was just too complicated to adjust himself back to an American relationship which he deemed full of consequences. His desire to avoid consequences is his single overriding motivation. He realizes that he cannot continue to live at home any more when his mother confronts him over breakfast about his future. His desire echoes his earlier observation that “Later he felt the need to talk but no one wanted to hear about it” (Hemingway 145). Essentially, no one wants to recognize his unique identity. Another way that Harold withdraws from society is the loss of his faith. Before the war he attended a Methodist college, which reinforces the idea that he was a man of faith. During the war though, he experiences a change in his beliefs. It can only be imagined what unholy things he had seen and done in the midst of battle. Once home, he denounces existing in God’s Kingdom to his mother and refuses to pray.
72 C. Sex
The theme of sex covers the problem of sex of man and woman in their marriage and
women who becomes the object of sex. In these five stories below, the sex and sexuality
becomes their conflict. Sex problems have a lot to do with communication because no one can read anyone else’s mind. Men seem better to compartmentalize their feelings and seek out sex as a stress-reliever. It is generally does not work that way with women. Actually the
sex problems in Hemingway’s works are all common sex problems. Men touch women when
they want sex and most women want physical affection all the time.
The desire for sex in Hemingway’s women is a fundamental part of their being in the
narrative. Women are also only a sexual object to the male character. Women are
insignificant to the man’s life. The male character just requires sexual intercourse or the fun
of having sex. All of Hemingway’s women carry either destruction or are strictly a form of
sexual pleasure. However, Hemingway is not devoid of feeling empathetic notions towards
those feminine characters that are abused. He displays the relationships and stories of his
fiction in front of his reader, in a way to allow them to sympathize with some of his female
characters. He may not be completely prejudiced or have hatred toward women in general,
but he seems does not understand them beyond the point of their sexual value.
First story, “Cat in the Rain”, a male character named George, is a complex character
and also seems to be a boring, selfish, and insensitive man, who looks past his wife’s emotional turmoil. It can be inferred that he has possible concerns of his own that explain his characterizations toward his wife. His lack of response to his wife’s silent pleas for a little physical closeness, suggests that something is “wrong” with him. Maybe he is sexually impotent and unable to provide her with the child that the wife seemed to be hinting at, which would bring rebirth to their lives. There has to be something more involved in the situation besides the fact that he is just a boring and insensitive individual to explain why the wife is in
73 such distress and that their relationship needs change. He may have been sexually impotent during the winter months. During the time that the couple was in Italy, it was winter and rained a lot. George’s wife words of how she couldn’t wait till the rebirth of spring time, signifies that she will get a cat and possibly finds herself pregnant.
The second story, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, the theme of sex is closely related to the meaning of destruction. In the following passage, the couple’s dialogue illustrates the two types of destruction,
“You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a middle-aged woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?” “I’d like to destroy you a few times in bed,” he said. “Yes. That’s the good destruction. That’s the way we’re made to be destroyed. The plane will be here tomorrow … Then, in town, they will fix up your leg and then we will have some good destruction. Not that dreadful talking kind” (Hemingway 63).
Hemingway puts two forms of destruction in this story. The first is clearly straight- forward that is gangrene rots Harry’s body, luxury decays his mind, and Harry’s verbal abuse repeatedly destroys his wife. In these examples, destruction is the concept of breaking things down, destroying a body, a person, a mind. Second, Hemingway also points to sex as destruction, as the previous excerpt demonstrates.
Meanwhile in the third story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, the first piece of information that the reader learns about Mr. Elliot is that he is sexually inept, the first sentence reading, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby”. From this point on in the story, Mr. Elliot and his relationship to both sex and sexuality come into question. Elliot has an unusual lack of enthusiasm when it comes to having a relationship with the opposite sex, especially with his own wife. The reader ultimately questions Elliot’s true reasoning behind staying sexually pure before marriage when Hemingway writes that women would happily “become engaged to and marry men whom they must know had dragged themselves through the gutter”
(Hemingway 162). Elliot still diligently kept himself pure, “lived straight”, until marriage,
74 which was unusual feat for a man to take on, especially in the face of so little regard for his
efforts. Although he assumes that he is doing something admirable, “Nearly all the girls lost
interest in him” (Hemingway 161), and he is left feeling hapless and inexperienced by the
time he ends up marrying Mrs. Elliot, which had not been a future that he specifically
desired, but more an occurrence that he stumbles upon, as “He had never thought of her that
way” (Hemingway 162).
As if Elliot’s lack of sexual desire was not odd enough when considering
Hemingway’s typical masculine characters and the strong association of sexuality to
masculinity, Elliot’s eyes do not open to the sumptuous world of sex once he consummates his relationship with Cornelia, “They were both disappointed but finally Cornelia went to sleep” (Hemingway 162). Other than being used as a means to produce children, sex becomes an undesirable chore that is expected for a married couple to perform. Since Elliot cannot fulfill a masculine role in the marriage, Hemingway evolves Cornelia’s character into the dominant half of the relationship. “Many of the people on the boat took her for Elliot’s mother” (Hemingway 161), an assumption that puts Elliot in a subordinate role next to his wife. She continues to treat him as if he were younger and unequal to her, like a charge under her care. Instead of asking him to call her by her childhood nickname, “She had taught him to call her Calutina” (Hemingway 162), which by the use of the word, taught, shows Cornelia in a superior position as teacher and Elliot as pupil. In addition to her instructive methods and domineering position, Cornelia’s general speech and treatment of Elliot portrays her as older and above him, “Cornelia had said, ‘You dear sweet boy’, and held him closer than ever”
(Hemingway 162).
The unsatisfactory nature of the Elliot’s marriage could not keep on as it had without some reprieve. Since Elliot could not be what Cornelia wanted, she sought a replacement for
his company. “Mrs. Elliot became much brighter after her girl friend came and they had
75 many good cries together. The girl friend was several years older than Cornelia and called her
Honey” (Hemingway 163). This girl friend now fills Cornelia’s role as caretaker and matriarch, shifting Cornelia into Elliot’s role, making Elliot’s position in the marriage obsolete. She did not need sex, as “Mrs. Elliot and the girl friend now slept together in the big medieval bed” (Hemingway 164), and her emotional needs were cared for by someone with whom she connected better than her husband. Elliot is left to console himself, but does so in an asexual manner. The masculinity portrayed in drinking away his troubles is canceled-out by choice of a feminine drink, “Elliot had taken to drinking white wine and lived apart in his own room” (Hemingway 164). Elliot secludes himself from femininity which was his only alternative to asexuality, since he did not possess enough masculinity to make such a quality a choice for himself.
The vignette before the Elliot’s story, Chapter IX, both compliments and contrasts illustrates Elliot’s struggle with masculinity. On the surface, bull fighting is the epitome of masculinity, especially when compared to Elliot’s career of being a poet, which is a feminized art. The matadors are symbols of masculinity whether they win the bull fight or lose the fight. Since they are trying to conquer extremely masculine symbols such as bulls, the matadors would have to demonstrate just how much more masculine they are than such an animal by defeating it. If Elliot were to fail at poetry, he would not be considered anything more than a failure, and a failure at something very feminine at that. Surprisingly, Elliot has much in common with the matadors. Like the two matadors who are replaced by “the kid”,
Elliot is replaced by women. Elliot’s masculine task of making babies is humiliatingly thwarted by his impotence, like the way the gored matadors are jeered by the crowd. Similar to “the kid”, who “tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword”
(Hemingway 159), Elliot fought to continue trying to do his masculine duty. These men only gave up when they had to, Elliot conceding to being impotent and “the kid” fainting.
76 The reader, in this case, tries to believe that even if Elliot had triumphed and had
impregnated his wife, it still would not have been good enough to rescue him from ridicule.
Although “the kid” defeated the bulls, he ended his triumph in humiliation when “He sat
down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and
threw things down into the bull ring” (Hemingway 159). The hopeless feeling a reader has for
Elliot’s masculinity is triggered by “the kid” not even being able to revel in his
accomplishments when he has proven himself to be extremely masculine. Elliot has no choice
but to concede to his asexuality when a masculine example such as a successful matador
cannot come away without jeers.
It seems that by not giving Chapter IX, a reader could not have fully understood the
finality of Elliot’s asexuality. Through comparison and contrast to the matadors, Elliot is
shown to be doomed to a lack of sexuality. The females in Mr. and Mrs. Elliot exist without
him, and he is perfectly content with retreating into himself and not having a fulfilling male-
female relationship. Elliot is destined to be a sexually middle-ground and ambiguous
character by being barred from either sex since he is neither feminine enough to be gay nor
he is masculine enough to be an average heterosexual male.
In the fourth story, “Up in Michigan”, demonstrates that Hemingway employed natural objects to symbolize sexual matters. The story is set through with a number of natural objects and activities that all involve painful and hurting penetration in order to suggest the deeply injurious nature of Liz’s defloration. Liz was depicted by Hemingway to be the
“neatest girl she’d ever seen. Liz had good legs and always wore clean gingham aprons and
Jim noticed that her hair was always neat behind. He liked her face because it was so jolly but he never thought about her” (Hemingway 81). This quote shows the indifferent man that
Hemingway portrayed in the relationship to women. Liz on the other hand seemed to notice every last detail about Jim and thought about him constantly. Hemingway also stated that,
77 “All the time now Liz was thinking about Jim Gilmore. He didn’t notice her much”
(Hemingway 82).
Liz was afraid to even make Jim something because Mrs. Smith would know and she was afraid. Liz watched the barges outside and when she was watching them they did not seem to move but as soon as she went inside to dry some dishes and when she came out again they were gone. It was as if life was passing her by while she was working for Mrs. Smith.
She missed Jim terribly while he went deer hunting and couldn’t sleep. When they all had dinner she wanted to wait for Jim to come out so she could remember the way he looked and take that image to bed with her. When Jim is a little tipsy and makes advances, Liz doesn’t seem to know what to do. She thinks with the wits Hemingway has given her that Jim is finally coming to her and she is frightened. She goes for a walk with him and then again maybe she shouldn’t have because she could not control the outcome. She said no but didn’t seem to mean it. And in the end he had hurt her in many ways. She walked over to the edge of the dock and cried. She was cold, miserable and everything was gone. She still covered him with her coat and then went to bed alone in the coldness.
Liz was portrayed as the simple lovesick character who down deep feels that life is passing her by. She has latched on to Jim as the man of her dreams. She was obsessed with him and wanted him to notice her and to love her. What she got in return is someone who took advantage of her and did not share any of the same feelings she had for him. She mistakenly thought of his advances as love which they were not and what she envisioned as a potential married life with Jim was basically a one night stand not even a whole night. She knew that she had been used and she cried for her personal loss and how stupid she felt. She had lost a lot that night. She has an empty feeling at the end because she knows that she cannot make a dream into a reality alone. She was another woman trying way too hard.
Hemingway portrays the male hero as the taker who has no regard for the feelings of the
78 women characters. They are simply wrapped up in their own needs at the time and dwell on
what they want, do and feel. The women are not always portrayed as being very bright or
similarly self serving. They are in the story to make the male look or feel better.
It is noteworthy that Hemingway chose to approach this story from a woman’s
viewpoint. He has successfully captured the physical and emotional beginnings of sexual
awakening in a young woman. However here again the lack of communication becomes a
factor. The conflict is in the basic “wants and needs” of men and women. Women seem to fill two roles as either a family member or a potential sexual partner or wife. Friendship was gender-specific, for instance, women had female friends and men had male friends. Liz has not made her attraction to Jim or relationship expectations known to anyone in any concrete verbal way. Undoubtedly, her youth and inexperience account for Jim. Jim is being “manly” in his pursuit of sexual satisfaction and has no reason to consider her feelings. Hemingway had the sensitivity to perceive and reproduce this situation in his writing. The thesis writer argues that what Liz Coates experiences on that dock is what we have since come to call date or acquaintance rape. “Up in Michigan” is Hemingway’s twist on the fallen state of human relationship.
In the fifth story, “Ten Indians”, an Indian woman becomes an object of sex. This story images of a threatening and destructive female presence or the telling absence of a female presence altogether, the difficulty often the impossibility of finding love and lasting commitment, the loneliness of a world of men without women. The central character is Nick, a young boy who has passed the phase of transition from a boy to a teenager. It is also known when Nick has been attracted to Prudie, an Indian maid, for the very first time. It is clear from the context that the Garners and Nick believe that white are superior. Carl claims that
Prudie and the other Indians smell like skunks. It seems that Nick is please to be teased about
79 Prudie Mitchell. Of course, Prudie’s faithlessness while Nick is in town with the Garners, though it wounds Nick, serves only to reinforce the cultural hierarchy.
It is told that Nick while in way home from fourth July Celebration with the Garner’s is being a hot topic for the Garner’s boys. They say that Nick attracted to the Indian girl named Prudie. As Mrs. Garner hears this, she says to all of the boys to stay away from Indian especially the girl. Prudie as an Indian born is not a member of their society. They thought that Indian as uneducated and prefer to get drunk like ten Indians they met along way home.
She is a kind of protected mother in her own sense. The cynical perception on Prudie is mostly comes from Mrs. Garner. She said that Prudie is not a proper girl Nick should be attracted. The basic ability, right and obligation are ignored. It is added to by Nick’s father who shows up finally near the end of the story. He does not take aside in Nick. He goes along with Mrs. Garner’s opinion, in the name of father’s love to his only son. He knows that
Prudie has an affair with someone else. It leads a deep disappointment and bad broken heart to Nick. In the end of the story, this point of view affirms to be true when Prudie surprisingly has an affair with Frank Washburn, one of the tenants in Nick and the Garner’s neighborhood.
The female character, Prudie, whom Nick falls in love, actually is a silent character.
She never speaks in the story but narrated through other characters. Mostly through Mrs.
Garner’s point of view toward Prudie, we know that Indian girl supposed to be part of marginal society, uneducated, low level in socio-economic, as found in the story that the
Indian passed the time by doing unimportant things like having fun and drinking than become hard workers. The Indian girl is easily in making sexual interaction. Prudie is also used as part of boy’s initiation time towards adulthood. Prudie as the silent character, her performance and her attitude, becomes a hot topic for the rest of the characters except Mr.
Garner and Nick. Both appreciated her better. Nick likes her in his own way. He knows how
80 his feeling to her but he does not want other people know it. He is just a teenager. What is important here is that most people have to admit that love is not restricted by anything, says race, skin color, the level of education, economic position, and so on. Mrs. Garner maybe forgets it. And Prudie in this case proves that she wins a boy’s heart because of love. Her physical attraction becomes her weapon in her unwelcome society.
In five Hemingway’s stories above, the theme of sex happens to both male and female characters. Sex is illustrated sometimes as inconvenient situation and women mostly become stressed under it; women as the sexual playmate. Conflict in marriage, partnership, and relationship is closely related to the problem of sex and sexuality.
D. Death
The male characters in Hemingway’s stories must accept the realities of nada (chance, accident and death). Then, they must attempt to discover through experience and honest evaluation of experience. The Hemingway “code” consists of standards and forms of conduct by which a man can confront the realities of nada with dignity and thus by which he can impose a measure of purpose, order, meaning and value upon his life. For Hemingway, dignity is the expression of true moral integrity and it is the highest possible attainment of character. Basically, dignity is self-control in the face of nada, destruction and death. Such self-control is a visible expression of the self-discipline, knowledge, skill and poise a man must achieve as well as the honesty, courage, persistent and stoic endurance he must possess in order to confront the vicissitudes of his life and the inevitability of his death on his own terms and with honor.
The theme of death is found in two Hemingway’s short stories, namely “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. The epigraph to “The
Snows of Kilimanjaro” describes the frozen carcass of a leopard preserved near the icy
81 summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa. This image stands in startling
contrast to the opening details of Hemingway's story. Stranded on the hot African plain,
within sight of the snow-capped mountain, the protagonist, Harry, suffers from a gangrenous
leg wound. He is accompanied by his wealthy lover, Helen, on whom he is financially
dependent. As they await rescue by plane, Harry bitterly reflects on his once-promising
writing career. He realizes that he has sacrificed his talent for the material pleasures offered
by Helen. Filled with rage and self-disgust, Harry responds with sarcasm to Helen's
thoughtful ministrations. The couple fruitlessly bickers, and as they argue he has a
premonition of his own death. He wistfully recalls his life, packed with experiences he once
planned to translate into art: the purity of skiing in the Austrian Alps; the torment of first love; the charm and absurdity of bohemian Paris; the stark beauty of his grandfather's farm in
Michigan; and the horror of trench warfare during World War I. As night falls and a hyena flits past the camp, Harry once again senses the approach of death. He feels a sudden sensation of weight on his chest, but as he is carried to his tent his discomfort is abruptly relieved. The following morning the rescue plane arrives and Harry is airlifted to apparent safety. However, as the plane rises into the clouds, he suddenly realizes that he is headed not for the hospital but for the blindingly white summit of Kilimanjaro. At this moment, the story abruptly cuts to the sound of Helen's sobs as she discovers Harry's corpse and we realize that the "plane trip" was, in fact, the final flight of Harry's imagination.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” reveals the preoccupation with mortality common to much of Hemingway's fiction. By compromising his literary talent, Harry has already embraced a kind of death-in-life. The corruption spreading from his gangrenous leg simply
makes manifest his moral decay, an irony of which he is painfully aware. Elsewhere in the
Hemingway’s canon, the theme of death is examined with an almost journalistic realism. The
story presents a fascinating exception to this rule by making use of a group of recurrent
82 symbols. The figures of the frozen leopard and scavenging hyena contrast two attitudes to
death, while the leopard's preserved corpse suggests the possibility of permanence through
fame, the hyena signifies the inevitability of death. Kilimanjaro itself offers a powerfully
multifaceted symbol. Most importantly, however, the mountain represents the mystery of death.
For Harry, illness and loses are an ever-present of life. Hemingway portrays him suffering from physical illness and mental disease. In literature, illness serves as metaphor for the human condition. Harry’s disease could never be dismissed as coincidental. It is a purposeful choice on Hemingway’s part to illustrate Harry’s moral and creative decay. Harry, having lived in the lap of luxury for years after marrying a woman he does not love for her money, has lost the ability to write. Thus, gangrene not only rots Harry’s flesh, but also serves as metaphor for moral and mental decay. It is fitting, therefore, that gangrene eats away at him, a physical manifestation of his decaying soul and mind. Rotting and destruction are the subjects of significant wordplay throughout the story, both in dialogue and
Hemingway’s descriptive narration. Harry blames his wife, Helen, for his inability to write,
“You rich bitch. That’s poetry. I’m full of poetry now. Rot and poetry. Rotten poetry”
(Hemingway 58). Deterioration spreads through the pages and Harry’s mind. Gangrene’s destruction of Harry’s body and his neglect of his talent culminate in all-encompassing deterioration. After years of soft living, Harry’s once sharp mind has worn away, capable now only of “rotten poetry”.
Meanwhile Helen’s characterization brings us to the characteristic of a wife which
full of patience facing her husband moan. Helen’s characteristics are described as very
patient, devoted and malleable wife so her generosity and wealth paralyze her husband
superiority in writing. Woman’s characteristics in this domestic domain bring the role of social agreement in patriarchal system which places woman more inferior. She eventually
83 falls in love with Harry. Besides, having lost her first husband and son, she was searching for a secure refuge in Harry. She has loved her husband one-sidedly. But even after his marriage,
Harry socializes with women as before. Hurt, she endures it. She is such a woman that always goes along with her husband’s likings. Having visited one of Harry’s favorite spots in Africa, she happily says, “Darling, you don’t know how marvelous it is to see you feeling better. I couldn’t stand it when you felt that way. You won’t talk to me like that again, will you?
Promise me?” (Hemingway 69). In another place we see her cheering up and consoling her sickly husband, “You’ve never lost anything. You’re the most complete man I’ve ever known” (Hemingway 74). Harry realizes that he had mistreated her for many years.
Helen is patient, has a deep love for her husband and has a sense of nursing. She endures her husband’s ill treatment toward her. In another despite, Helen is also a tragic
character, a loser in her battle to keep Harry alive for her own sake. Despite her sincere efforts, she loses Harry to death. Everything appears to be meaningless to her. Helen almost loses her breath in the vortex of life and death. She waits and waits. She waits to go through the things that are going to happen.
The theme of death in a bit different nuance is found in “The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber”. It can be viewed thematically as the last phase of the initiation of the man which moves closer to death and finally embracing the thing itself, a phase whose echoes are heard in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”. In the story, there is a conviction that man’s awareness of death is one of the guiding forces in life. Hemingway does something unexpected. He describes the shooting of the lion from the lion’s viewpoint. And Wilson displayed a certain amount empathy for the wounded creature. While Macomber wanted to just leave and get away from the place where he had displayed his cowardness, Wilson in some ways is the perfect existential hero. It seems that men who are successful in brutal activities, war, football, boxing, etcetera, are generally much in demand by beautiful women.
84 The day after the incident with the lion they went after buffalo and they chased the herd with
their vehicle which was illegal. Margot commented that it seemed unsporting. Again we see
Hemingway, the consummate hunter, raise questions about hunting.
A rather surprising statement is found in “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber”. Macomber had great success in shooting the buffalo and he seemed for the first
time in his life to find courage. Up until this time Macomber’s moral code had been written
for him by his wife and Wilson. He had to live up to what they expected him to be. But, as he gained skill, he seemed to begin to gain confidence and the way that he perceived himself
started to become more important than the way the others viewed him. While there is nothing
manly in shooting a creature that has not got a chance against you, there is something manly
in facing your own fears and overcoming them. Unfortunately Margot preferred a weak
husband who would let her fool around to a strong one who would put his foot down and, just
as her husband was being incredibly brave by standing his ground against a large wounded
buffalo that was charging him, Margot shot Francis in the back of the head.
However, Macomber surprises both Wilson and Margot his wife because he
continues to hunt and overcomes his fear. For Wilson, this makes all the difference.
Macomber was now a real man. In the story it end when the wife realizes that he has become
such a strong man through his killing of animals that she won’t be able to control him any
longer. According to the thesis writer it is society that is dangerous to women. It is not a fair
condition to Margot. She is not so important in the family and for her husband except the goal
to be “a brave man” by doing a hunt business to kill the lions. A wife cannot stand in such
condition. Margot has to make up her mind. It is a depressed situation between the both
husband and wife. Macomber is being tested, whether he is courageous or not. This kind of
“bravery” is not what a marriage couple exactly need. You, as a wife could not be easily
happy in your family because your husband can kill the wild animals and now everyone calls
85 him a brave man. You need a brave man in the family but not exactly in such as Macomber
did. It is a brave man who defends his family and his wife. Macomber did not do this.
Before setting out for the safari, in response to a question by Wilson whether he wants
Margot to go, Macomber remarks that it does not make any difference whether he does or
not. Despite the lack of love, the house of Macomber stands out only because of the resources
of Macomber and the beauty of Margaret. These two help maintain their relationship and this
makes them keep going. They are devoid of happiness. This married man, having failed in
killing lions, has failed to prove his manhood. He has lost his chance. He is scared of his
wife. He hates his wife, hate himself for his predicament and he repents constantly till the
ends his life.
A number of questions about this story are unanswered explicitly. Hemingway knows
that the unstated answers tell what the story is really about. Macomber, although a coward,
goes on a big-game hunt because of his craving to break free of the oppressive forces,
represented by his wife, which bind him. Perhaps the fear is, on one level, of castration;
perhaps on another, it is a fear of being forever bound to woman, a condition which keeps his
identity as a male and as an individual in eclipse. On the deepest level, as the text of the story
indicates, it is a fear of death, which because of the heroic Wilson’s presence and with his
guidance, Macomber overcomes. The title of the story suggest that every moment Macomber
lived in fear was not actually life at all; only in overcoming the fear of death did he escape
the sarcasm of Margot and actually have a life, although the life was only of a few seconds’
duration.
Like in many Hemingway’s stories the wife is a very flawed person who is always beautiful. Margareth has a strong character here. She is very smart in her own way and seemed to be an aggressive female who went after what she wanted no matter who got hurt or what the consequences were. The man does a very natural thing when the lion charges him.
86 He runs like hell. No problem here, the white hunter kills the lion so he is safe. Actually the writer of the thesis thinks that Macomber just shows himself to be normal but Hemingway thinks you must be able to control your fight reaction and fight even if you die doing it. The wife disgusted and that night she sneaks into the professional hunter’s tent and goes to bed with him. This is a way of insulting her husband. Wilson deliberately sleeps in a double bed just in case any of the wives want him to demonstrate what he can do in bed.
Margaret in the story discovers timidity and cowardliness in her husband. She is aware of her strange physical beauty. She takes advantage of this situation, becomes arbitrary as her husband fails to rein her in. She applies complete control upon her husband. This woman has complete dominion over his husband. At one point Wilson describes her as follows, “She’s damn cruel but they’re all cruel. They govern, of course, and to govern one has to be cruel sometimes. Still, I’ve seen enough of their damn terrorism” (Hemingway 10).
It is a bleak and sexist view of women. Wilson speaks of their marriage as follows, “All in all they were known as a comparatively happily married couple, one of those whose disruption are often rumored but never occurs… They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him” (Hemingway 22). The next chapter will discuss further the meaning of death to
Hemingway himself.
The theme of death as well as relationship, identity, and sex, is also found in
Hemingway’s career as a writer as he acknowledges death as the point in life. Below the water level of the iceberg is a conviction that man’s awareness of death is one of the guiding forces in life. Beneath every surface activity is the awareness of death. There is also the notion that conventional and traditional ways of coping with the fact of man’s mortality are based on romantic illusions which cause one to avoid thinking about the central fact of existence that one must eventually die. It is with man’s attitudes toward life in the presence of
87 death that he is most concerned. The surfaces of his stories, the tips of the icebergs, most often show individuals whether in war, in a big-game hunt, or in some other life-threatening situation (dealing either gracefully or cowardly way with death). The characters to whom
Hemingway is mostly sympathetic are those who usually live life in the present and live it to its fullest extent, enjoying the sensual pleasures that life has to offer. Those are characters who are eating, drinking, and being merry with the knowledge that tomorrow they may die. It is with man’s attitudes toward life in the presence of death that Hemingway is most concerned, like Harry and Francis Macomber. On the next chapter, Chapter IV, the parallel between Hemingway’s themes and Hemingway’s life will be discussed.
88
CHAPTER IV
THE PARALLELS BETWEEN HEMINGWAY’S THEMES AND HIS OWN LIFE
All imaginative literature bears the impress of the author’s mind, interest, personality,
perhaps even traces of actual experiences. But rarely does fictional art reflects so vividly, as it
does with Ernest Hemingway, the actual experiences whether directly transcribed or whether
transmuted into a disguised or veiled reality. However, what is also interesting to us about
Hemingway is that, more so than for almost any other writer of his time, his life as lived
came more and more to take on the shape and design of one of his own fictional creations.
For if Hemingway was the inventor of a hero who had great experience with war, bullfights,
and big game hunting, with deep-sea fishing, with love, with drink, with suffering, this hero came in time to mold the life of the author himself. The four themes which is discussed in
Chapter III: relationship, identity, sex, and death, are also found in Hemingway’s real life.
It is difficult for Americans in the twenty-first century to appreciate the devastating impact of the Great War on those who witnessed it firsthand. In his “Introduction” to the
1942 anthology Hemingway edited, Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, he himself wrote, “The last war, during the years 1915, 1916, 1917, was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied”. The armies spent much of the war in deep, mud-filled trenches, fighting savagely for days without gaining or losing a foot of ground. Technology made the war much more deadly than previous conflicts had been. Poisonous mustard gas killed many men, and those it did not kill were left so permanently damaged that many could never resume normal lives. The war destroyed society’s confident belief in human progress. 89
As for example, Harry of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” feels illness and loses are ever-
present parts of life. Hemingway portrays him suffering from physical illness and mental
disease. He seems to suggest that to live is to live with disease. Indeed, the world in which he
lived was a world of illness. A part of multiple wars, unsuccessful relationships and the “lost
generation” was perpetually illness-stricken. Whether or not one believes his works are
autobiographical, his characters undoubtedly reflect his experiences and he connected life and
fiction. From a young age, he knew the pains of loss and illness, earning an inescapable
knowledge of disease that influenced much of his work. Avoiding illness and pain is
impossible in the world of his literature just as it was for him in his own life. He was able to
step outside his own pain and explore disease through literature and his characters’ only
possible course of action is to find a way to cope with the pain inherent in human condition.
He suffered through an enormous amount of accidents and ailments in his lifetime. In Lynn’s
Hemingway, he gives an inventory list of health problems that consumed Hemingway in his
later years. These included such as concussion of the brain, ruptured liver, crushed vertebra,
temporary hearing, vision loss and first-degree burns from two planes crashes in 1954 (Lynn
529). His deteriorating heath compromised his writing, a loss that hurt him deeper than any of his serious ailments. Perpetually afflicted by illness, he used writing and his numerous relationships to try to remedy his ailments. Writing, illness and love were intimately connected in his life and his literature (Lynn, 1987). He did suffer from depression,
particularly in the last years of his life. His depression was so severe that he was admitted to
the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota in December of 1960.
A. Hemingway’s Relationships
Most of Hemingway’s biographies do show the author’s distaste for his mother. He
also did not attend her funeral when she died in June of 1951. Hate may have been a 90 motivating factor in his decision not to go. However, we must not forget that Grace
Hemingway was a good mother in the traditional sense, showering her son with warmth and affection early on his life. Hemingway did harbor a great deal of hatred for his mother. He seems to have held her partly responsible for his father’s 1928 suicide. We must remember, though, that the accounts we receive through biographies and letters of Hemingway’s hatred for his mother are mostly his own confessions to friends. By making such remarks about his mother, he might have been trying to create some particular image of himself in their eyes.
As far as Hemingway loving his mother, that is more complicated. Hate was an emotion displayed much more regularly and openly in his lifetime than love. It is the public
Hemingway we remember brawling with fellow writers, hunting in Africa and enjoying the bullfights in Spain. Such images seem to communicate more anger and aggression in this man than love and compassion though he loved to do all of the things above.
A few of Hemingway’s contemporaries had theories as to why the great author was so prone to walking down the aisle. Fitzegerald felt that Hemingway needed a new woman for every big book and Faulkner perceptively noted: “Hemingway’s mistake was that he thought he had to marry all of them”. Hemingway married four times and divorced three times.
According to Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, he reports that Hemingway once told him: “I wish I could leave her, I really do, but I’m too old now to afford a fourth divorce and the hell
Mary would put me through”. Towards the end of his life, what Hemingway needed more than a live-in nurse, and unfortunately for Mary, she had to fill this roll. Hemingway’s biographer, Meyers, had noted that Mary “could take an infinite amount of abuse”. He is not entirely sure if this quality in Mary is one we should admire or pity. He tends to lean towards the latter feeling. She was literally determined to the final Mrs. Hemingway (Meyers, 1985).
The geographical placement of Hemingway’s stories is usually limited to minimal physical settings and the time span is short. All stories discussed in the thesis are limited to a 91
little place, whether that is a bar, train station, café or the small hunting camp on the great
plains of Africa. This is a usual trait in many short stories and this is a trait Hemingway often
uses. The women or the supporting characters are all weak or treated badly without them
doing anything about it. Meanwhile, the male characters of his stories are often emotionally
cold and flat characters. This could be a reflection of Hemingway’s own life since he was
married several times and never seemed emotionally stabile. He eventually even took his life.
His characters are usually mobile and unattached. Often they are people who are traveling in
strange and unfamiliar environments. He writes about lovers, often tearing each other apart.
He writes about the old writer on his deathbed, glancing at the snow covered top of
Kilimanjaro and thinking about everything his life should have been.
Beyond the conventional and comfortable life of Oak Park, the Hemingway’s also
maintained a summer house near Petoskey in Northern Michigan, where game was plentiful
and fishing a delight in lake or stream. Here, were Indians whom he came to know and whom
he was to depict in some of his early stories. The character of Nick in “Ten Indians” is
created mostly derived from Hemingway himself from his experiences in Michigan. In
Young’s thesis, it is stated that the real Hemingway could be traced more snugly in his short
stories than in his more celebrated novels. In “Ten Indians” and “In Another Country”,
Hemingway depicted courage not as the “absence of fear, but as the conquering” of it; and hardness defined not as the “lack of feelings”, but as the “necessary protection of a wounded mind” (Young 1966:46).
Also in “Up in Michigan”, there is a little town in which Hemingway really grew up.
It is Horton Bay. He used the little town as the raw materials of his life to create his fiction.
According to Fitzpatrick’s “In Hemingway Country” (1993), the road is narrow. No traffic.
Hemingway spent all the summers of his formative years there. He started there, by
describing the general store Fitzpatrick can see on the corner to his left. He wrote about the 92 church that is still standing in the next block up on the hill. He began with small stories about the relationship between two people at a time he experienced as a young man. Here is the way he described Horton Bay in his first published story, “Up in Michigan”:
The town was only five houses on the main road between Boyne City and Charlevoix…. There was farming country and timber up the road. Up the road always was the Methodist church…. You could look across the woods that ran down to the lake. It was very beautiful in the spring and summer with the bay blue and bright usually whitecaps out on the lake…. (Hemingway 81-82).
The bay was blue today and there were whitecaps. The Methodist church in which
Hemingway married his first wife on September 3, 1920, still stands on the hill. Fitzpatrick drives half a block to general store, the one Hemingway described. It is the same place in which Jim Gilmore, the young blacksmith, met the pretty waitress Liz Coates. According to
Hemingway’s biographer, Baker, “Up in Michigan” and several others are written in a rooming house in the nearby town of Petoskey upon his return from World War I. The story dealt so graphically with sexual intercourse and near-rape that Hemingway was forced to publish it in the Toronto Star rather than in that country. Baker leaves no doubt that
Hemingway was writing about his own early experiences with women (Baker, 1969).
Hemingway as one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century continues to capture our imaginations. Born during the First World War, he served in the Ambulance
Corps. After being wounded, he used these experiences in many of his writings. One such writings is “Soldier’s Home” which taken from the compilation In Our Time. Harold Krebs returns from World War I having lost everything. His home town immediately impresses its demand for conformity upon Harold’s arrival. The people of the town find it odd that he should return so much later than the other men, which begins to show the conflict between
Harold and the views of the local community. Hemingway paints a dark picture of how society demands that all participants fall in line with mainstream ideals. It lends to the idea that Hemingway himself was an outsider and that he saw himself as an interloper in his rural 93 home town. Harold arrives home too late for the heroes welcome and instead finds a society interested only in lies not the realities of war. These lies are acceptable because they allow
Harold to fit neatly into society’s expectations of him and others. Hemingway does not divulge why Harold was the last person in his home town to return home from the war.
According to the Kansas City Star, Hemingway himself “left Kansas City in the spring of
1918 and did not return for 10 years, [becoming] “the first of 132 former Star employees to be wounded in World War I”, according to a Star article at the time of his death”
(
Hemingway relates his experiences in “Soldier’s Home” since he grew up in small town in America and experienced military life during World War I. He sets about making the narrator’s voice detached and emotionally drained, to mimic the emptiness in Harold. The narration’s lack of involvement mirrors Harold’s lack of involvement with his family and life within the community. Hemingway obsesses over Harold likes and dislikes. Hemingway had a family much like the one in the story and it is apparent that it is a rough draft of his life.
Harold is caught somewhere in the mix of his former life, his life in the military and his new life at home. Hemingway too was caught in a mental turmoil and ended up taking his own life. Harold may have been a foreshadowing look into the future of Hemingway.
Unquestionably, the most important woman in Hemingway’s life was his mother,
Grace Hall Hemingway. This is the parallel found in “Soldier’s Home” in relation to
Hemingway’s boyhood experience. From boyhood on, there had been a measure of discord between the forceful mother and the headstrong son. The disaffection reached its worst stage during the summer of 1920, shortly after Ernest’s twenty-first birthday. It had been eighteen months since he had come back from Italy, yet he had not taken a full-time job, and both his parents were worried about his future. He and friend were staying at Walloon Lake, and
Grace believed they were not pulling their weight in terms of performing the necessary 94
chores around the place. Worse yet, Ernest was openly rebellious when Grace tried to tell him
what to do. Matters boiled over when Ernest and his friend took his younger sister Ursula and
Sunny, along with two thirteen-year-old girlfriends of theirs, on a clandestine post-midnight picnic. The escapade might have gone undiscovered had not the mother of one of the thirteen- year-olds knocked on the door of Hemingway cabin at three in the morning, demanding to know the whereabouts of her daughter.
The next day, Grace banished her son from Windemere with a scathing letter. In sending Ernest away, she had full support of her husband, who had been at the lake and observed his son’s disobedient way. Even before the picnic episode Dr. Hemingway had twice written Ernest advising him to leave the cabin, to find a job that paid decent wages, and to stay away until invited back. Nonetheless Ernest focused his resentment on his mother, who in her letter of dismissal suggested that emotional and economic debts were interchangeable. Her children were born she began, “with a large and prosperous bank account, seemingly inexhaustible”. But the persistent and unavoidable withdrawals made during childhood and adolescence made the balance of her mother’s love account “low”.
Now it was time for Ernest to repay her with gratitude and appreciation and small gestures of recognition, not with open defiance. She concluded her letter with a passage that in effect, accused her son of intentionally immoral behavior:
Unless you, my son Ernest, come to yourself, cease your lazy loafing, and pleasure seeking –borrowing with no thought of returning: -stop trying to graft a living of anybody and everybody, spending all your earnings lavishly and wastefully on luxuries for yourself. Stop trading on your handsome face, to fool gullable (sic) little girls, and neglecting your duties to God and your Savior Jesus Christ, unless, in other words, you come into your manhood. –there is nothing before you but bankruptcy.
You have overdrawn. (Adapted from
For Ernest Hemingway who like his parents was brought up on the principles of the
Protestant ethic, it was a message he could neither forgive nor forget. 95
The way Hemingway depicted marriage in his stories has both been deeply compromised by the financial inequality of the partners. Margot in “The Short Happy Life of
Francis Macomber” may be regularly unfaithful to her husband Francis, but as the narrator sarcastically observes, “They had a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for
Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him”.
The situation is transposed in the more autobiographical “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, where the writer, Harry, is married to a rich woman and engaged in a life of idleness that “dulls his ability and softens his will to work”. As he lies dying of gangrene in Africa, Harry thinks of all the stories he has never written, he is inclined to blame his wife Helen for what he has left undone. But he knows that he himself has “destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much”. And “it was strange too, wasn’t it”, he goes on his continuing self-excoriation, “that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one?” In Hemingway’s own case, his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was a wealthy woman, and it was through her generosity that he was able to buy a house in Key West, go on safari in Africa and otherwise indulge his enthusiasm for hunting and fishing.
In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, Hemingway make no effort to conceal his general view on women and maybe that some of his ex wives form the basis of the traits and behaviors of the female characters in the stories. It could help us to understand the incident with Macomber’s death better if we dug a little better into Hemingway’s relationships with the American women as such. His animosity towards them or fear must be seated in his own bad experiences with women during his many marriages. A very obvious question to consider is whether Hemingway thinks that the American women are born like
Margot or if they become cynical and frustrated as a result of their cowardly and incompetent men who cannot satisfy them sexually and who cannot seem to put their feet down. A thing 96
worth is that Wilson’s perception through Margot’s masquerade and he also knows how
women like her are. “He was grateful he had gone through his education on American women
before now, because this was a very attractive one” (Hemingway 8). Through this sentence,
Hemingway makes it clear that he sees American women as the most dangerous predator
around. He sees Macomber as a poor chap. “How should a woman act when she discovers her
husband is a bloody coward?” (Hemingway 10). This line makes it clear to us that he
empathizes with Margot and not Macomber.
Hemingway explores with sensitivity the difficult relationship between men and
women. It is striking how often he uses silence or monosyllabic responses to convey emotion.
Like all accomplished dramatists, he understood that in dialogue what is not said van be fully
as important as what is, for example, in “A Canary for One”, the husband’s quiet
concentration on a fallow landscape as he and his wife return to Paris to establish separate
residences. “A Canary for One” and the brilliant “Hills like White Elephants” deal directly
and indirectly with love and marriage gone wrong. Those are about the breakup of his first marriage and a woman being coerced by her male companion into having an abortion.
In “Hills like White Elephants”, Hemingway distinguishes between the simplistic feelings of the man about the operation, in other words, the man in the story sees the operation is a simple matter and the welter of Jig’s emotions, yet the man’s existence can be seen as emblematic of the post-World War I expatriates. Meyers (1985) claims that this story is Hemingway’s most subtle story (196). One of Hemingway’s Paris friends, Robert
McAlmon, suggests the story came from a discussion of birth control and laws against abortion. On the other hand, the story was drafted in the first person, so it could reflect some aspects of Hemingway’s reaction to his first wife’s pregnancy (196-197). 97
Fleming’s “An Early Manuscript of Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants””
(NMAL, 7: 1 (1983 Spring-Summer), p. Item 3), states four sources that are interwoven in the story:
1. McAlmon, Hemingway’s first publisher, mentioned to Hemingway on a trip they took to Rapallo in 1923 a woman he knew who had had an abortion. She described the operation with the notion that the “doctor just let the air in” and he ordeal ended in a few hours. Hemingway apparently admitted to McAlmon that this tidbit was the origin of the story.
2. Interviewed by Plimpton in 1954, Hemingway claims to have met a woman himself in Prunier whom he knew had had an abortion; this encounter supposedly inspired him to skip lunch and write the story.
3. The “earliest” surviving manuscript of the story contains an unused start written in the first person about Hemingway’s trip from Pamplona to Madrid with Hadley, his first wife.
This unused opening starts on the train as it travels through the Ebro River valley and Hadley points out the white mountains; they changed trains at Caseta, Spain, ordering beer, and catching the express from Barcelona to head for Madrid.
4. One event that is apparently not a source of the story is the fact that Hemingway, though distraught over her pregnancy never asked Hadley to have an abortion. One of
Hemingway’s protagonists, Nick Adams, becomes a father rather grudgingly in an earlier story [in a note Fleming reminds readers that Adams came to accept the pregnancy later]; in real life, Gertrude Stein, [who knew Hemingway well enough to influence his writing style] claimed that he seemed bitter about the pregnancy. Hemingway supposedly said to her that he was “too young to be a father” [he was 24] and complained to Hickock, another acquaintance, that there was no sure means for preventing pregnancy. The son was born in
1924, [apparently in Paris, where they were living]. The train ride to Madrid occurred in 98
1925. Fleming concludes that knowing about these four different pieces help the readers
understand how subtle the artistic process of fictionalizing is.
Justice’s “Well, Well, Well: Cross-Gendered Autobiography and the Manuscript of
‘Hills like White Elephants’” for the Hemingway Review (18:1 [1998 Fall]: 17-32) links the
story to Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer, a Catholic, with whom Hemingway was on his
honeymoon when he finished writing “Hills like White Elephants”. This story is published in
the European magazine Transition and later in a collection of stories called Men Without
Women (1928). Justice examines the ambiguities of the story to see why the ending can be
read as indicating that Jig will have the abortion or that she will not, the two meanings of
“white elephant” as “honor and ruin”, and two sides of Ebro valley, “both barren and fertile”.
Justice’s surprising claim is that the American joins Jig on her side of the train station after
she walks away from the table, her evidence is that they both returned to the table and “sat
down”. Such movement indicates the man’s coming to her way of thinking though the
dialogue they speak has them disagreeing about “everything”.
Justice also points out that Jig’s perceptions are spatial (she sees the scenery) while
the American’s are temporal, due to the impending train arrival. She also notes that in the manuscript for the story, Hemingway at one point has the man admit that “the three of us could along”, but that overly obvious statement was crossed out. He, separated somewhat involuntary from Pauline, compares the separation in a letter to an abortion. He apparently wrote “Hills like White Elephants” in two days while on his honeymoon with second wife
Pauline in le-Grau-du-Roi, France, in May, 1927. Maybe he resembles Jig, who is seeking a romantic commitment and Pauline resembles the man who moves the bags to the “other side” of the train station, implying a commitment to Jig by abandoning the trip to Madrid and abortion. By the way, Hemingway married Pauline in a Catholic wedding ceremony. 99
Wyche’s “Letting the Air into a Relationship: Metaphorical Abortion in ‘Hills like
White Elephants’” in Hemingway Review, 22:1 (2002 Fall), p. 56-71 cites whether Jig has the
abortion and whether real life experiences grounded Hemingway’s portrayal of the couple in
the story. He cites Justice as claiming that abortion was metaphorically a threat to his relationship with his first wife, Hadley, because he was already having an affair with his soon-to-be second wife, Pauline. Wyche’s thesis seems to be that both the quantity of metaphors in the story and Hemingway’s life support the notion of the abortion in “Hills like
White Elephants” as signifying trouble in the author’s marriage.
Wyche notes four biographical sources for the story: “The first is McAlmon’s claim to have inspired the story and to have provided the euphemism of letting the air in. The second is a comment related by Stein and Hickock’s report that Hemingway recognized that no form of birth control was completely effective (207). The third is the 1925 sketch that
“shares the story’s setting and the simile that become the story’s title”, but whose “events and moods could not differ more” (204). The fourth is a story Hemingway told to Plimpton about meeting a girl who had had an abortion and going home to write the story. Lynn suggested that Hemingway saw the birth of his first son to Hadley as the end of their relationship but
Wyche claims this is too literal a reading of the story. In addition, Hemingway himself seems to have used the metaphor that compared separation of lovers to an abortion: “To his future wife he wrote, ‘when two people love each other terribly much and need each other in every way and then go away from each other it works almost as bad as an abortion’ (Lynn 363)”.
He wrote these words to Pauline a year and a half before writing “Hills like White
Elephants”. Wyche cites several broken friendships at the end of Hemingway’s first marriage and estrangement from his son as analogs for the abortion in “Hills like White Elephants” along with a warning from Fleming against trying to find one, single, real-life event as the inspiration for any story. 100
To see Hemingway’s perception as the writer and his work “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro”, in a letter to his good friend and advisee, Hotchner, he writes, “writing is the only thing that makes me feel that I am not wasting my time sticking around”, indirectly affirming the idea that another career choice would have been unsatisfactory (Hotchner 174).
Thus, it is fitting that writing possess the ability to ease his character’s physical and internal injuries. The protagonist, Harry, has neither love nor talent as he dies at top of the mountain.
Consequently, he is unable to cure his deteriorating physical and mental state. According to
Hemingway’s philosophy that writing has curative powers, Harry might have helped himself by making use of his talent. He becomes diseased both inside and out and allows his mind and body to disintegrate.
As Hotchner points out in Dear Papa, Dear Hotch, pain and accidents actually kept
Ernest and Mary’s marriage together:
…[Mary’s] ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage in August 1946 precluded her from bearing a child, and ill health, accidents, alcohol, and animosity jaded their relationship and began to accelerate the aging process of both Hemingways. In the end, it was not an abiding love that bound them but accident and circumstance –plane crashes, concussions, broken bones, the Cuban revolution, and Ernest’s mental disease. There was never an opportune time for Mary to depart, and the longer she remained, the more determined she became to reign as the final Mrs. Hemingway (Hotchner 2005:3).
Thus, the illness and injuries they endured made their marriage last. She was his caregiver in his declining years and his failing health brought her love and dedication as a positive effect reminiscent of the love and loyalty of his literary caretakers.
B. Hemingway’s Identity
In doing the thesis, the main information is gained from three biographers, Lynn,
Baker and Meyers. From Lynn’s 1987 provocative account of the writer’s androgynous experiences, biographies on Hemingway, fueled by the postmodernist tenet that any system of domination must be destabilized, have largely contributed to the demise of patriarchal 101 values. The goal has always been to demonstrate the following principle: gender binaries – masculine and feminine – are cultural categories which must be denaturalized. Hemingway was presumably interested in recovering, or looked back with nostalgia on, long gone or debilitated values, and this necessarily involved reinstating the strict Victorian gender division. Yet both his childhood experiences – the roles enacted by his parents – and the world that emerged after World War I openly contradicted what the young artist desperately believed to be an infallible principle. The modern age Hemingway woke up to one morning simply validated Marx’s old conviction that “all that is solid melts in the air” (quoted in
Tallack, 1991:15). Gender roles as God-given and Darwin-selected categories, characterized by a set of invariable natural attitudes, were inevitably the first to crumble.
The traditional system based upon the opposition masculine/feminine only reinforces stereotypes and favors a dominant/dominated dualism. Hemingway, the writer who most unambiguously “gave us male definitions of manhood to ponder” (Spilka, 1999:29), has to be buried in order to resurrect a new writer whose gender identity can be used to unmask patriarchy. As Barlowe (2000:148) points out, Hemingway has become “a valuable site for studying the contested, fraught, and interesting late nineteenth century and twentieth century history of gender in the United States.”
It is evident that Hemingway wrought a self-image as he-man of American letters, the writer who created an exclusively male preserve – athletes, prize fighters, sportsmen, killers – a world of “men without women,” were outdated models of heroism, though extinct in a highly industrialized country, were still incessantly sought and worshipped: “Hemingway is the modern primitive … the frontiersman of the loins, heart and biceps, the stoic Red Indian minus traditions, scornful of the past, bare of sentimentality, catching the muscular life in a plain and muscular prose” (Fadiman, 1997:126). This image of male identity, which faithfully reproduced all the stereotypical traits assigned to the gender role, automatically 102 granted Hemingway a niche in American patriarchy. In the forties and fifties, the decades during which homosexuality was diagnosed as a psychological disorder latent in a high proportion of citizens (Sinfield, 1994:212-219), Hemingway was hailed as the embodiment of manliness which Americans needed in order to recover the lost confidence in traditional values. In a way, Hemingway demonstrated that it was possible to be a writer and “a full-size man,” despite some critics’ nagging suspicious (Eastman, 1997:131). It is then to see to what extent Hemingway articulated the male code he never stopped celebrating.
If gender is a changing cultural construct, nothing remains stable, and the whole array of attributes which draw the line between masculine and feminine gets suspended or canceled. Either we have to look at ourselves in the mirror to search for new values which revalidate our gender identity so as to overcome the feeling of emptiness caused by the temporary cancellation of the binaries, or we can choose to break down the dichotomy masculine/feminine with the aim of denaturalizing gender. Hemingway seems to be ideologically trapped in this dilemma: on the one hand, his fear of losing stability made him yearn for a world in which normative gender binaries were automatically reinscribed, that is, men and women were to be genitalized again. Women must wear long hair, be affective mothers and wives, and remain indoors; men, in turn, must defend and protect them, and be brave and stalwart fighters.
The growing masculinization of women which the outbreak of the First World War brought to the Western World (women incorporated into the labor market caused the gradual obliteration of gender-based signs of traditional feminine identity: hair, dress, behavior, etc.) can only entail a parallel process tinged with no less imminent dangers: the emasculation of men. The tragic result is a modern world dominated by the inversion of gender roles and, therefore, the most widespread disease of modernity is none other than sterility. Women cannot beget children either because they do not find suitable partners to mate with or 103 because they do not want to, thus unfulfilling what heretofore seemed to be an inevitable biological law. And, unfortunately for Hemingway, men are also losing a part of their manly as this is a value no longer in demand by strong, empowered women who have decided to fulfill their roles by themselves in a new regendered society. As Reynolds notes, Oak Park, the hometown which became a synonym of morality and traditional values, “remains beneath the surface, invisible and inviolate [in his narrative]. It was his first world, the world he lost, not to the war, but to modern times” (1986:5).
Wagner-Martin (2000) has summarized the critical evolution of the novelist’s work throughout the twentieth century. She points out that the dominant critical school in the forties that is New Criticism, imposed the subjugation of all literary genres to the supremacy of poetic language. Narrative was to be shaped by the concurrence of formal devices in order to endow the text with a myriad of symbolic/mythological meanings. Hemingway’s style which is simple, laconic, minimalist, repellent of any rhetorical figure and superfluous adjectives hardly fitted into the canonical model of literature. Without the trappings of conventional literary techniques and built upon the subtleties of the iceberg principle (the essential meaning always remaining underwater), Hemingway’s language gave critics little or nothing to analyze. Thematically, Wagner-Martin also tells us, Americans were more “in need of reassurance” (2000:7), and the novelist’s recurrent themes only insisted upon loneliness, sterility, loss and emptiness.
In the fifties, Hemingway was still timidly admitted into the course syllabi. His short stories began to be class but his novels continued to be left out. During the sixties, Faulkner or Fitzgerald, but not Hemingway, took up most of the critical attention. Yet this situation began to change after the writer’s death, when A Moveable Feast (1964) and Baker’s seminal biography (1969) were published. The Writer as an Artist (1952) aimed to demonstrate that beneath the writer’s prosaic, hard-boiled language there laid a well-crafted structure of non- 104
literary symbols. Hemingway’s style was dual: on the one hand, he was a naturalistic reporter
and a faithful observer of reality; on the other, he managed to build a subtle network of
symbols which only those endowed with acute perception were able to retrieve. Subjective and objective became blended.
This principle of duality, i.e. the notion that two opposed principles are reunited, is a pervasive idea in the biographies and literary criticism on the writer. The hero’s crippled body is only a symptom of his silenced psychological conflicts: courage becomes the most visible mark of the writer’s deep-rooted anxiety (Meyers 1985:17). The iceberg principle insists on the idea of a wealth of meanings concealed below the surface; fiction becomes a mask to hide the persona and true feelings, “he was in reality so susceptible to emotion that he strove constantly for the elimination of himself, his thoughts and feelings” (Meyers
1985:139). Baker solves this tension of opposites by simply defining Hemingway as a man of contradictions, “complex and many-sided,” “shy and braggart,” “sentimentalist and bully.”
Baker’s classic biography, one in which documentation prevails over interpretation, was completed before the opening of the writer’s posthumous papers in 1975 and the housing of the collection at the Kennedy Library, Boston in 1980. Baker dedicates pages to the novelist’s childhood and adolescent years, and eschews any interpretation which could give a fixed pattern to the mosaic of the subject’s life. He is the first to tell us that Ernest and his older sister Marcelline were dressed alike (pink gingham dresses and flower ornamented hats) during the boy’s first months, and that the child was given dolls to play with, but he hastens to add that as early as 1900 (when he was barely one year-old!) “he began to assert his boyhood … in an environment ideally suited to manly endeavors” (Baker, 1972). The last trace of troubling femininity (the long hair or the Dutch-boy haircut his mother adored) was abandoned when he entered first grade, i.e. at the age of six. 105
Certainly we move closer to interpretation with Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography
(1985). Meyers explains Grace Hemingway’s determination to have her children appear as twins as the direct consequence of the Victorian era’s fashion to dress boys in girls’ clothing, but he apprises us that Ernest was dressed in lace-trimmed dresses until three, a fact that
Lynn (1987:38-40) will later demonstrate to be statistically unusual: only twenty per cent of boys in the age group between one and two remained indistinguishable from little girls; after the age of two, the percentage was five per cent or less. Ernest’s education did not therefore fit into the average American family’s formula but into his mother’s peculiar twinning of her children. Meyers soon identifies the clash between the two stereotypical gender roles Ernest grows up with: on the one hand, Ed, the father, a natural-born hunter, woodsman and sportsman brought up in the manly tradition; on the other, Grace, the mother, the sensitive artist, the opera singer whose career was partly sacrificed for the sake of rearing her children.
Yet the conflict between both personalities soon explodes. Ed is nervous, weak, cowardly and insecure. He makes less money than his wife, likes cooking, is unable to impose his criteria on home affairs and is barely allowed to make any important decision. Much to the contrary,
Grace is firm, strong, daring and domineering. Meyers interpret this inversion of the gender roles as the driving force of Ernest’s conflicting personality. As he later identified himself with his father, who also committed suicide, and saw his mother as the root of evil, he associated Grace’s world with a destructive, emasculating power. As a result, he equated art and culture “with the aesthetes of the 1890’s, with homosexual and with sissified music pupils of his mother” (Meyers 1985:17). The only way to escape from this castrating influence was to suppress “the sensitive side of his nature” and to assert his masculinity through the resurrection of the father’s image: “He wrote about the Indians and violence of
Michigan, rather than the stuffy culture of Oak Park, because he wished to remember and recreate his father’s world” (Meyers 1985:17). 106
Two years after the publication of Meyer’s work, Lynn (1987) picks out Grace’s
twinning designs not only as the basis of Hemingway’s major emotional conflict but also the
leitmotif of his fiction. Lynn thoroughly analyses Grace’s obsession to convert Ernest into a girl and later Marcelline into a boy as the means of healing the wounds inflicted upon her as a girl competing with her brother during her childhood, and as a way of putting an end to gender-based discrimination. The Hemingway myth, the indisputable masculine life, is exploded, for his outbursts of manliness were only a sign of the anxiety he felt in relation to the gender role he was expected to fulfill. “Caught between his mother’s wish to conceal his masculinity and her eagerness to encourage it, was it any wonder that he was anxious and insecure?” (Lynn 1987:41). These early experiences of looking like a girl and feeling like a boy became “the fountainhead of his fascination with the ambiguities of feminine identity”
(Lynn 1987:322) and his contradictory attitude, utter rejection and unquenched curiosity, towards male homosexuals.
Lynn never uses the word “androgyny” but he provides a detailed analysis of the conflicting gender identities of Hemingway and his characters. The word is first used in
Spilka’s study (1989). Hemingway spent his life quarreling with his androgynous nature, for instance, with “devilish and adoring female versions of himself”, which he tried to repress and mostly disguise beneath his constant displays of virility. Only through the exchange of sexual identities could he recover the female side of his identity which was the source of happiness during his childhood, and thus heal the androgynous wound. Spilka argues that
Hemingway found a series of typified male attitudes in the Victorian ideal of Christian manliness he learned during his adolescent education: virtue was achieved through
“separation from women, love of sport and animals, ability to withstand pain … religious devotion and … mighty action” (Spilka 21). Spilka also sees Hemingway as embodying a crisis of maleness in twentieth century America: the end of the conquest of the West, the 107
disappearance of the frontier and genocide of Native Americans made violence and
belligerence unjustified and male behaviors outdated in an ever-growing urbane landscape
(Spilka 63).
For a long time, critics and scholars have found two Hemingways emerging. The first is Ernest Hemingway, the brilliant writer. The second is Papa Hemingway, “Papa” having long signified Hemingway’s more masculine public alias. Whether it was “Papa” hunting in
Africa, or “Papa” in Spain watching the bullfights, or “Papa” at a café in Paris chatting with acquaintances, this was the public image Hemingway projected to others, a real man’s man.
To those who knew Hemingway more personally, “Papa” might have been used as a term of affection, an intimate reference to the gentler Hemingway that they had all come to know. In his biography, Baker explores some of the darker connotations of “Papa”, as he notes the phrase, “Yes, Papa”, which according to Baker was “brought out the less admirable traits in
his character” (Baker, 1969). I see the term “Papa” encapsulating all of these qualities, as
well as Hemingway’s unique need to see himself as a father type figure.
C. Hemingway’s View of Sex
In one of the gay serial publication The Advocate, “Hemingway’s son Gloria”
(Quittner, 2001), it is informed that, in 1995, Gregory, the author’s youngest son, underwent
a sex change and adopted a new name Gloria after having married four wives and fathering
eight children. Athletic, muscular, a keen fisherman, and an accomplished doctor, he decided
to become a transgender in his early sixties because he had always struggled, his eldest
daughter asserts, with his gender identity. Gregory’s life story echoes some of the thorny
questions posed by his father’s conflicting personality.
Hemingway was somewhat more open-minded, counting Gertrude Stein and Sylvia
Beach among his lesbian friends. His first wife, Hadley, had once been accused of lesbianism 108 by her mother, and he was good friends with Jinny Pfeiffer, an avowed lesbian and the sister of his second wife, Pauline. There are also persistent unresolved questions about the intimate relationship between Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest’s mother, and the much younger Ruth
Arnold, a former music student of Grace’s who became a part-time mother’s helper. Both
Ernest and his father evidently believed the relationship was a sexual one (Lynn 100-101).
Since his death in 1961, media has been laboring to reconstruct the exotic traits of
Hemingway’s life. This is fueled by the facts that Hemingway set background of his fiction in exotic locales such as Cuba, France, and Spain. Hemingway as a man was very complicated: a very active, charismatic public figure, but at heart lonely, this is something complex. It is difficult to judge Hemingway as a ‘man’ because our knowledge is limited and also because it is almost impossible for any reader to not get biased while reading Hemingway as his reputation as ‘Hemingway’ precedes his writing at times. From reading the biographies, readers learned more about both Hemingway as a man as well as a legend, the part of the life that bewitched them: Hemingway’s rebellion against his parents at Oak Park, Illinois, his displaying of war wounds after his return from Italy in 1918, his failed marriages and his friendships.
We found the issue of lesbian in “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” and “The Sea Change” which seems much inspired by Hemingway’s own mother, Grace Hall Hemingway. His characterizations allow us to see that the characters’ motives are not as innocent as they appear. He also shows us a side of his personality and reasons for writing those stories.
Hemingway who was born in his maternal grandfather’s Oak Park house in 1899 was the second of six children and Grace’s first son. He left home at her urging when he was twenty- one and never really came home again. In Kuda’s article entitled “Was Hemingway’s Mother a Lesbian?” from Outlines, volume 13, no.14 September 8, 1999 pages 20-32, she explains that Grace had stayed on, moving to neighboring River Forest for some years later. 109
Hemingway hated her and called her “my bitch mother”. He also held her responsible for his father’s suicide and told folks her spendthrift ways had cost him the chance to go to college.
Some writers made much of the fact that he had refused to let his son, Patrick, visit Grace, giving as a reason that she was “androgynous”.
Kuda’s article (1999) also explains that Grace had wanted to be an opera singer, was classically trained in New York and debuted at Madison Square Garden, took private music students and run a church choir. She married Dr. Clarence Hemingway whose family lived across the street from hers and they shared similar Christian values. They lived in her father’s house until Ernest was six years old, the, with money inherited from her father she designed and had built a fifteen room home with an adjoining music studio for teaching and student recitals. In addition to her music and lectures, she was a composer with published song sheets. She had studied at the Art Institute and newspaper records indicate she had several one-woman shows. She taught her children to play instruments and coached their voices for choir. Her daughter, Marcelline, wrote that her mother had hired household help from her earnings to keep her freedom to pursue her muses. The husband did shopping, the canning, some of the cooking and hired the help along with taking care of patients from his home medical office. He taught the children and his wife to shoot and appreciate the outdoors.
In 1907 when Grace was 36, Ruth Arnold, a 13-year old music student from a troubled home became part of the family as “mother’s helper”. Ruth went along to help care for the younger children. When Grace was 48 and Ruth was 24 after several years of caring, cooking and cleaning up after six kids and guests all summer, she told her family she needed to get away from them if she was to survive. Over the objections of her husband, she designed and had built for herself a summer escape across Walloon Lake on a 40 acre farm she had earlier purchased from a tax sale. She took classes in furniture making and constructed several pieces for her cottage. She and Ruth braided the rugs for the cottage 110
floors. Here she would compose her music. She would sound a bell if she wanted one of the older children to take the boat across and bring her to Windemere. After Clarence took his life in 1928 there are references to Ruth in various biographies as companion to Grace in Oak
Park and later in River Forest. In 1949, a little over a year before her death, Ernest wrote
twice two his mother and asked her to pass on his “love” to Ruth. In 1950, someone on staff
had upset Grace’s wheelchair while she was hospitalized. The resultant brain damage
rendered her totally unable to contribute to her own care. She went to live with her daughter,
Sunny, in Memphis until her death in 1951 at age 79. Ernest did not attend his mother’s
funeral (adapted from Kuda, 1999).
What we do know is that from the time Ruth was 13 until she was 68, the major part
of Ruth’s life seems to have been given over to the “service” of a woman we have evidence
she deeply loved. From all that has been written, it would not have been in Grace’s nature on
a good day to play nurse. Indeed she may well have taken refuge in Ruth’s adoration.
However whether or not we consider the relationship between Ruth and Grace to be “lesbian”
depends on our definition of the word. Grace seems a woman who loved her and appreciated
her talents. She could not and would not conform to the gender roles of her day if her work
and patriarchal inheritance gave her the financial freedom to do otherwise. One can
understand why Hemingway saw her as a “selfish woman”. It is the inspiring and important
experiences in his life that he cannot deny to put those memories in his works.
D. Hemingway’s View of Death
From boyhood on, Hemingway was fascinated by death and particularly by suicide.
He could imagine how a man could be so weighed down by obligations as to commit suicide.
When he broke off his marriage to Hadley in 1926 in order to marry Pauline Pfeiffer, he and
Pauline agreed to stay apart for a hundred days as a test of their resolve. During this 111
separation the attack of depression descended and he did not recover from it until he and
Pauline were reunited. Yet two years later, when his father killed himself, one of his
manuscript fragments reads, “We are the generation whose fathers shot themselves. It is a
very American thing to do and it is done, usually, when they lose their money, although their
wives are almost always a contributing cause”. Much as he was disposed to blame his
mother, though, Hemingway could not condone what his father had done. It seemed to us that
the death of a father is the most important even in a man’s life and the suicide of a father is
still more troubling experience.
In Hemingway’s case, while the decade of the 1930s, it was a period of development.
In his two short stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber”, he interested in big game hunting and wild adventurous. Those stories are essentially an account of Hemingway’s 1935 safari to Africa. In “The Snows of
Kilimanjaro”, Hemingway explains why Harry, a good writer, goes wrong. One problem is his perceived if not real need for enough money to lead conventional lives. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives and so on. Hemingway advocated that a good writer has something that is not for sale. This principle and the African trip were very much on his mind as he turned to write his two wonderful long stories. Hemingway took a step further by seeking out fresh experience in the service of his writing, such as ambulance driving in the Spanish Civil War, marlin fishing off Cuba and running with the bulls in
Pamplona. He sought to live more in order to write better. That is not to say that one has to be chased by bulls to get experience. It could be something as slight as the difference between the works one might get from an author strolling past construction site versus the work one might get from the author who is pouring concrete. Either could produce the better work but the latter’s will be deeper informed by experience. 112
In 1966, Young argued which became an influential critical interpretation that
Hemingway’s near fatal injury on the Italian front was a traumatic event that lay at the source
of most of Hemingway’s writing. According to this psychoanalytical wound theory,
Hemingway’s frequent fictional accounts of confrontation with death and anger were
manifestations of a “repetition compulsion” to confront and eventually master the trauma he
went through at Fossalta. The same compulsion, Young believed, accounted for
Hemingway’s repeatedly testing his courage by climbing into bullrings, hunting wild game
and facing enemy fire during subsequent wars. He put himself at risk and paid the
consequences, suffering an astounding series of blows to head and limbs (Young, 1966).
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is a written manifestation of
Hemingway’s own life philosophy which says that as a true man one should face the difficulties of life with grace and steadfastness. For good reason, he believes that nothing in life comes for free and that first one has to endure in order to achieve. The man will live in anxiety without being able to prove himself and this narrowing of his manhood is bound to have some serious effect on his self-esteem. “It isn’t done”, says Wilson and “why not”
Macomer asks. These words sound like a tutor to his apprentice. The words are a part of the learning process and they are normally a result of one persons wondering. They are also the words which best describe the interaction between Wilson and Macomber and which describe one of the significant themes of the story. Hemingway chooses to leave the ever-questionable difference between courage and stupidity open because in order to be a true man one has to be courageous. Macomber acquires his manhood and therefore courage in the end of the story but this makes him reckless and he acts stupidly when faced with the wounded buffalo and he dies. To deny this ambiguity, we would have to know whether or not he could have killed the buffalo if he had had a shot at it. If he could not, his stupidity would indeed have become his nemesis as the buffalo would have impaled him. If he could then it is his wife who becomes 113
his nemesis. Hemingway pulls us through his catching story of obtaining the true code of a
man, a code that he himself followed.
From the parallels above we see that Hemingway’s characters troubled in love, he
troubled in love as well. For him and his characters, love has wounding and palliative
properties. Whether one considers turbulent love to be a disease itself or a manifestation of
other problems, it certainly represents an alternative sort of illness in his life and literature.
Whether one believes that his life imitates his art or that his art imitates his life, undeniably
his work is at least partially autobiographical. The female characters in his literature impair
the men who love them such as Helen, Margot, Jig and Liz. The choice to love brings
difficulty but again the characters choose to love and live. Not all women are necessarily
injurious but love always proves painful because it is inevitably lost, for example Harry’s
relationship with Helen as a parasitic disease which suck away his productivity or talent.
This chapter is concluded with a perspective on Hemingway as a legend and as a man.
With the publication of Rascoe’s review of In Our Time in Arts and Decoration in 1925, the
Hemingway legend slowly but gradually began to take its root. Besides generalizing about
Hemingway the novelist, Rascoe fine-tuned his other themes and concerns of life, masculinity, adventure, suffering and defeat and violence and loss. Also with the appearance of Fadiman’s article entitled “Ernest Hemingway: An American Byron” in the January 18,
1933 issue of Nation”, the image of Hemingway as a democratic, proletarian Byron become more current” (quoted in Jones 390). Fadiman points out that Hemingway received more publicity and name-recognition than any other American author because he represents a new brand of romanticism. Fadiman goes on to say that Hemingway was decidedly romantic, zeroing in on the postwar disillusion, turmoil and bitterness. “Like Byron, he expresses the aspirations of that portion of his generation which genuinely feel itself lost and is eager to admire a way of life which combines lostness with courage and color” (Fadiman 64). 114
From 1933 to 1936, Hemingway’s contribution of many pieces on hunting, fishing
and traveling to the magazine further fueled the legend. Incidentally, his publications during
the thirties, Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not and The
Fifth Column, all denoted expressions of Hemingway the popular personality rather than
Hemingway the artist. He maintained his image in the 1940’s. He wrote noticeably very little
between 1941 and 1948 but managed to remain relentlessly in the news either as a bearded
hunter or as a war correspondent. With the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952
in Life magazine, the perception of Hemingway the legend had almost evaporated.
Hemingway as a man and as a legend forms two sides of the same coin. As a man, he
seems to have learned to overcome his childhood traumas and put on the mask of the tough
and yet less sure about his willingness, at times very frustrated, while the legendary he is the
bullfighting and big game hunting. Legends, however, are built on reality. Since his death in
1961, media has been laboring to reconstruct the exotic traits of his life. This is fueled by the
facts that he set background of his fiction in exotic locales such as Spain, France and Cuba.
He as a man was a very complicated person. He is very active, a public figure, but he is
lonely. Then, it is difficult to judge him as a “man” because our knowledge is limited and
also because it is almost impossible for any reader to not get biased while reading
Hemingway as his reputation as “public image” precedes his writing at times. From reading his biographies, readers learned more about both Hemingway as a man as well as a legend.
We also know the part of the life that bewitched him such as his rebellion against his parents, his displaying of war wounds, his failed marriages and his complicated relationships.
115
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Hemingway responded to every pressure of his time, recording its progress and
aging as it aged. His life seemed to embody the promise of America with good fortune,
hard work, talent, ambition, and a little ruthlessness a man can create himself in the
image of his choosing. As a young man in Paris, Hemingway dedicated himself to his
writing, and he let nothing interfere with his goal. He created a public persona to match
his prose, becoming the person he wanted to be. Like that of other self-made Americans,
however, Hemingway’s invented self was a mask that he wore with less and less ease as
he grew older. Despite his public image, despite his raucous life and several wives, and
despite the critics who turned on him, he left stories and novels so starkly moving that
some have become a permanent part of the American cultural inheritance.
This study has attempted to answer the two questions posed. The answer to the first question illustrates the importance to do a close reading on Hemingway’s ten short
stories and then the four themes are found: relationship, identity, sex, and death. It is to
know the main issues faced especially by women in Hemingway’s stories. It is
Hemingway’s own intention to explore those themes which is based on his life
experiences. These four themes are all general issues in ordinarily human life. The four
themes reflect Hemingway’s approach to life in general. His literature was his own
interests in hunting, love, military services, adventure, and so on. Hemingway’s talent
lies in deep psychological insight into human nature. Moreover, the way Hemingway 116
portrayed characters in the stories are dynamic, deep, and open ended. The theme of
relationships cover the very basic matter in human life, for instance, man-woman
relationship in marriage, son-mother relationship, daughter-mother relationship, and son-
father relationship. It describes the pressure in the human relationship and always a failed
relationship or the relationship finally ends in abandonment. The relationship presents the
representation of boredom, desperateness of life, the sense of lost happiness, and the
awareness of the failure of love. The man has authority about language, money, science,
and reason (all cultural bases). Woman’s authority is physical in that she is imaginative
and resistant to the man’s cultural weapons.
The theme of identity touches clearly three issues. First, we saw a woman who
seeks for the femininity and even motherliness. Women in Hemingway’s stories extends
to seeing the child as precious, get readers’ sympathies, whereas the man’s flat literalness
insults female characters and alienates readers. Throughout the story the woman
repeatedly attempts to get the man to see the emotional costs of the abortion or not having
a child. Woman is not weak, as their sarcasm makes clear that woman is seeking
diversion and digression. Second, we see a male character who depicts the transformation
of his sexual identity. He seeks the “truth” of his sexuality and he finds also that his
girlfriend is a lesbian. Third, it is told about an ex-soldier who seeks for identity after coming home from the war. He is hard to define of who he has become. From the three problems of identity, we see that to have an identity as the human being is a very important matter no matter who you are.
The theme of sex obviously shows that women only as sexual playmate.
Hemingway points to sex as destruction. Sex can be viewed as animalistic destruction, 117 the idea of the orgasm and destruction as one. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” ends with
Harry’s vision of ascending to the top of Kilimanjaro, “all he could see, as wide as all the world, great,, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of
Kilimanjaro”, a sort of soul orgasm before he dies. Hemingway’s “Up in Michigan”, demonstrating that Hemingway employed natural objects to symbolize sexual matters.
The story is shot through with a number of natural objects and activities that all involve painful and hurting penetration in order to suggest the deeply injurious nature of Liz’s defloration. Most of the male characters patronize their partners or their wives with their matter-of-fact tone. They see women as a problem that has destroyed their abilities and their bodies. At first glance, Hemingway seems to portray the male characters’ point of view. They see love as a constant power struggle, marriage and sex has parasitic and emasculating qualities, and death is the end of life. Yet, we must consider the female characters in Hemingway’s work that do not intend to wound those they love.
The theme of death is the awareness of death. It is man’s attitudes toward life in the presence of death that Hemingway is most concerned. What evolves then is to know death as the end point in life. The characters to whom Hemingway is most sympathetic are those who exhibit “grace under the pressure” of an acute awareness of death. These characters usually live life in the present and live it to its fullest extent, enjoying the sensual pleasures that life has to offer with the knowledge that tomorrow they may die. It is no simple matter to pass into the knowledge of one’s mortality as the characters in
Hemingway’s stories do. Every moment lived in fear of death was not actually life at all.
Only in overcoming the fear of death is actually a life. Hemingway’s triumph is the knowledge that death can be faced gracefully and with courage. Hemingway also inserted 118 several of the observations in “Hills like White Elephants” where Jig looks at the table legs, two strands of beads, and that shadow that crosses the fertile side as she views it.
The meaning of a “white elephant” is the unwanted and the precious. It seems that the cloud foreshadows the death of the fetus.
Next, the second question of this thesis has been answered, namely the importance to connect Hemingway’s stories to his own life. Whether or not one believes
Hemingway’s works to be semi-autobiographical, his characters undoubtedly reflect
Hemingway’s experiences, connecting life and fiction. Many parallels have been drawn between Hemingway’s life and fiction. Most of Hemingway’s fiction is based on his own personal experience. When creating the fiction, he invents from his experience.
Hemingway led a troubled life. The suffering he experienced due to injury, illness, love, multiple wars, and unsuccessful relationships undoubtedly inspired much of his writing, and ultimately culminated with his suicide in 1961. He suffered a number of accidents as well, both war-related and not. Hemingway badly injured his leg while he was as an ambulance driver, suffered a car crash, plane crashes and a variety of serious health problems throughout his life.
Perpetually afflicted by illness, Hemingway used writing and his numerous relationships to try to remedy his ailments. Writing, illness, and love were intimately connected in Hemingway’s life and his literature. Love, body, country, and mind are all at least somewhat infected. In his short stories, Hemingway depicts the injured nature of humankind. No one is spared pain or death. Living, for Hemingway’s characters, is a struggle to accept and survive. Hemingway suggests that, in term of the human condition,
Hemingway chooses risk in his own life and literature, opting for life, pain, and love 119
rather than emptiness. Refer to his stories, a Hemingway hero would take notice of this ill
fate and make the best of it. The motive behind his heroic figure is not glory, or fortune,
or the justice, or the need for experience. They are inspired neither by vanity or ambition
nor a desire to better the world. Instead, their behavior is a reaction to the moral
emptiness of the universe, an emptiness that they feel compelled to fill by their own
special efforts.
Thus, not all women are necessarily injurious, but their life always gets painful
because they are inevitably lost. Again and again, in Jig, Helen, Margareth, Mrs. Elliot, an American wife, and Liz, readers see female characters impair the men who love them.
The choice to love brings difficulty, yet again the characters choose to love and live.
Hemingway, through his characters, illustrates that human relationship, seeking for identity, the problems of sex, and the understanding of death are part of the human condition. They are undeniable truths that give life to humanity, Hemingway’s characters, and Hemingway himself. It is human will that allows author as Hemingway to be the agent in his own texts. Hemingway’s role in his texts is big.
Biographies and biographical approach are the most suitable data and tool to see the trace of Hemingway’s in his short stories. Biographical approach begins with the
simple but central insight that literature is written by actual people and that understanding
an author’s life can help readers to more thoroughly comprehend the work. Anyone who
reads the biography of a writer quickly sees how much an author’s experience shapes
both directly and indirectly what he creates. Biographical information provides the
practical assistance of underscoring subtle and important meanings in the stories. The
biographical approach to literature has never disappeared because of its obvious practical 120
advantage in illuminating literary texts. Warm thanks to the critics and scholars who have
helped readers appreciate the art and life of Hemingway.
This thesis agrees with Young and Baker who made clear that many of the main characters in the short stories all had the same psychological history and early childhood, and that all were wounded men, both psychologically and often physically, left to confront the modern world without religion, family, government. These isolated and frequently alienated characters struggled to find a way of living in a world that had gone to smash, suffering their fate. Because of the way in which the Hemingway protagonists faced their individual situations, they became heroic and they came to be called the
Hemingway hero. However, by examining not only the male characters but also the female characters in the short stories, we began to overturn received opinion about
Hemingway’s treatment of his women characters and also about his gay and lesbian figures. Our whole understanding of Hemingway’s views of men-women relationship, human identity, sex, and the meaning of death in human life become much broader now and we can see that Hemingway has a multidimensional perspective.
121
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