Hemingway and the Influence of Religion and Culture
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
HEMINGWAY AND THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION AND CULTURE ____________ A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University Dominguez Hills ____________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Humanities ____________ by Jeremiah Ewing Spring 2019 Copyright by Jeremiah Ewing 2019 All Rights Reserved This work is dedicated to my father, Larry Eugene Ewing, who finished his Master’s in Liberal Arts in 2004 from California State University, Sacramento, and encouraged me to pursue my own. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My thanks to Dr. Lyle Smith who helped and guided me through the process. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE COPYRIGHT PAGE .......................................................................................................... ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .....................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 New Historicism ......................................................................................................1 The Cultural Context and Overview of the Chapters to Follow ..............................4 2. HEMINGWAY AND JUDAISM ....................................................................................6 Historical Overview of Judaism...............................................................................6 Judaism in Hemingway’s Biography and in his Novels ........................................15 3. HEMINGWAY AND CHRISTIANITY .......................................................................28 4. HEMINGWAY’S SPIRITUALITY ..............................................................................48 5. CONCLUSION ..............................................................................................................71 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................74 v ABSTRACT Despite having been raised a Congregational Protestant, Ernest Hemingway abandoned the faith of his youth after he left home—especially, after he experienced destruction and death in the Italian theater during World War I. In the following years, Hemingway converted to Catholicism when he married his second wife, Pauline Pfeifer. Hemingway also had an anti-Semitic streak, often using racial slurs, and even making the villain in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, to be a rich Jew. This thesis uses new historicism as the critical lens through which to view Hemingway’s attitude towards Judaism and Christianity. It includes an investigation of his biography and some of his novels. Though he practiced Catholicism, he sometimes had negative things to say about it. Yet, his later novels show an increased level of spirituality culminating in The Old Man and the Sea. 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This thesis utilizes new historicism as a lens through which to view Hemingway’s attitude towards religion and spirituality. It involves first a brief explanation of this perspective and then an investigation of Hemingway’s life and several of his novels. New Historicism Stephen Greenblatt gets the credit for coining the term “new historicism” in a 1982 issue of Genre (Harpham 363). Greenblatt saw new historicism as a practice, not a doctrine. Greenblatt preferred the term, “cultural poetics,” in lieu of the term, new historicism. New historicism is cultural interpretation. New historicism searches the real and the raw and claims to give a new approach to history. Brook Thomas sees new historicism as linking a bridge to the literary past (Thomas 182). It claims to give a new approach to history, providing a new angle from which to view the past. According to Thomas: “New historicism suggests the newness of the past” (25). According to Joel Fineman, new historicism “proposes to introduce a novelty or an innovation, something ‘[n]ew,’ into the closed and closing historiography of successive innovation” (qtd. in Harpham 362). New historicism suggests that, through an understanding of the past, the reader will see the past through new eyes and as it was seen in the past itself (Thomas 187). Plus, new historicism seeks to represent those who were not represented in the past. New historicism is categorized as “Against Theory” (187). Yet, it is a theory in its own respect. New historicism questions whether dominant cultural forces predominate or 2 if cultural power is potentially undermined by other, underlying, destabilizing, forces (Harpham 360). New historicism incorporates the reading of “both literary and non-literary texts” in order to understand the past from the point of view of the past (Kerridge 10). Literature is defined as a cultural construct, being unique to its own era and it is “shaped by the many peoples and discourses of that era” (10). New historicists believe that texts should be viewed from their original setting and from the cultural context of that particular period (10). Jane Tompkins in writing from the new historicist perspective tries to sympathetically recreate the context in which literary works were produced and the specific problems to which these literary works were devoted (185). Put simply, new historicism seeks to understand writers via their own historical terms (Veeser 186). New historicists hope that by “Reconstructing an era from the materials it produced, the historian could sympathetically reinhabit the past” (89). Using the new historicist model, texts can reveal insights about the people that created them, their discourses, and their ideology (Kerridge 10-11). In new historicism “literary and non-literary texts” are given equal scrutiny and regard (11). Consequently, literature is a unique by-product of the culture from which it originated and sheds unique insight into that culture. Despite Greenblatt’s preference for his own term, “cultural poetics,” the term, new historicism, stuck. Whereas Greenblatt coined the term, some scholars see Michel Foucault as the power behind the method (Harpham 369). Foucault encouraged a group of young scholars at Berkeley to promote new historicism in their journal 3 Representations. In addition, Foucault seemed to learn from this group. Foucault’s “most identifiable legacy in American literary studies” was new historicism (370). New historicism claims to represent the real by defining the real as the textual (360). According to Harpham: “Literature is traditionally said to produce an ‘ethical’ effect through its ability to transcend its historical moment” (374). Harpham says that the real is defined as the local, the material, and the specific. He also notes that “A ‘new’ historicism promises knowledge of the past that really is knowledge, that discloses the object as in itself it really was, that is not simply a reflex or internal mirroring of contemporary self-awareness” (362). It is the goal of the new historicist to be objective instead of subjective. For instance, the subjective seeks to define history through personal tastes, feelings, and opinions. New historicism is the opposed to this. New historicism seeks to present the past as it really was, without the modern biases and prejudices of those currently researching it. New historicism tries to see through the eyes and minds of the people who actually lived through and experienced history. It tries to understand the mindset and the feelings of the people of the time period in question. What people thought and how people thought is important. Today’s current beliefs should be left out of the mix. Past beliefs are essential to understanding the thinking processes of the past. 4 The Cultural Context and Overview of the Chapters To Follow Ernest Hemingway was a man of his times. Like many of his Lost Generation, after the Great War (in particular), he abandoned the faith of his youth, although he quite possibly did earlier. World War I cemented this rejection. In Hemingway’s twenties, he married and then committed adultery. According to Hemingway biographer, Mary V. Dearborn, he liked to marry those with whom he slept. Hemingway started attending religious services again after his second marriage to the rich Catholic, Pauline Pfeiffer. Hemingway lived as an expat in Paris during the Roaring 20s. Hemingway’s friends were newspapermen, artists, and writers. Paris was hedonistic in those days. After the carnage and terror of World War I, the returning Lost Generation just wanted to live life to the utmost and the fullest. In early-twentieth-century Paris, Hemingway lived in an atmosphere of lax morals. Anything went. In consequence, he conformed to the culture around him. Some of Hemingway’s literary friends were anti-Semitic. Perhaps they influenced him, but Hemingway eventually showed signs of anti-Semitism too. Moreover, some of the authors that Hemingway read, especially as he was trying to become a better writer, were anti-Semitic themselves. Living in predominantly Catholic France, converting to Catholicism at the insistence of his second wife was an easy task for Hemingway. Many of his friends were Catholic—James Joyce, being one. At the time,