Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 Of fathers and sons: generational conflicts and literary lineage--the case of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Gaines Wolfgang Lepschy Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Lepschy, Wolfgang, "Of fathers and sons: generational conflicts and literary lineage--the case of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Gaines" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2589. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2589 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. OF FATHERS AND SONS: GENERATIONAL CONFLICTS AND LITERARY LINEAGE— THE CASE OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND ERNEST GAINES A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Wolfgang Lepschy M.A., Augsburg University, 1997 December 2003 My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design. He ask’d me what reasons more than a meer wandring inclination I had for leaving my father’s house and my native country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortunes by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. Daniel Defoe. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The fathers may soar And the children may know their names. Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. John Lowe, for his expertise, insight, and advice, which have made the completion of this project possible. More importantly, I am grateful for his friendship and support during all the years we have known each other. I am furthermore indebted to my other committee members: Dr. James Olney, Dr. J. Gerald Kennedy, Dr. Nghana Lewis, and Dr. William Cooper. Dr. Olney’s friendship, support, and thoroughly enjoyable seminars have been crucial in completing this project. In addition, I wish to express my appreciation to Dr. Peggy Prenshaw for her helpful advice during the general exam, to Dr. Kevin Cope for his assistance in researching specific aspects of this work, as well as for his friendship, and to Dr. Malcolm Richardson, Chair of the English Department, and Dr. Joseph Kronick, Director of Graduate Studies, for the departmental support in finishing my studies. Special thanks go to Drs. Dan Gonzalez, Christopher Rieger, and Bill Scalia for their friendship and help during various stages of graduate school. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to my parents, Eduard and Helga Lepschy, as well as to my brother, Norbert Lepschy, for their enduring love and emotional support. Even though they are thousands of miles away, their belief in me serves as a constant inspiration. Finally, this work could not have been completed without the love, patience, support, and critical insight of my wife, Margaret Songe. She gave of herself in countless ways, sacrificing time and energy to help me, and remained positive throughout. This accomplishment is as much hers as mine. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ……………………………………………………………….iii ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………………………......…vi INTRODUCTION. THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND ERNEST GAINES ………………………………………………………….……...1 PART ONE. “HOLLOW AND HAPPY” INSIDE THE FATHER’S HOUSE: SONS LOOKING FOR THEIR FATHERS .…………...…………………….………...39 Chapter One. Oscar, Louisiana and Oak Park, Illinois …….…...…………...…..43 Chapter Two. The Deconstruction of the Traditional Nuclear Family in Gaines’s Short Stories …………...……………………………………............56 Chapter Three. Rejection/Deconstruction of the Father/Race in Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories ……………………………………………...88 PART TWO. RECLAIMING THEIR VOICES: FATHERS LOOKING FOR THEIR SONS ....……………………...………...………145 Chapter Four. Like Father, Like Son: Breaking the Cycle in Hemingway’s “Fathers and Sons,” For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea ……....……………...146 Chapter Five. The Struggle to Find a Voice and Reclaim the Son in Gaines’s In My Father's House and A Gathering of Old Men …………........198 PART THREE. LITERARY LINEAGE: TURGENEV—HEMINGWAY—GAINES ..................................................................249 Chapter Six. Generational Conflicts in Turgenev, Hemingway, and Gaines .....257 Chapter Seven. Evgeny Bazarov and Jake Barnes: Existentialists or Romantics?— Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises ……………………………………………………………………………268 Chapter Eight. Jackson Bradley and Grant Wiggins— Nihilism in Catherine Carmier and A Lesson Before Dying …………………..297 CONCLUSION. INSTANCES OF LIFE-WRITING: HEMINGWAY AND GAINES ………………………………………………………..344 iv BIBLIOGRAPHY ….…...……………………………………………………………...353 VITA ………….………………………………………………………………………..365 v ABSTRACT Focusing on the depiction of the father-son relationship and the generational conflicts in their works, as well as the metaphorical literary father-son relationship between the two authors, this dissertation offers an intertextual reading of the works of Ernest Hemingway and Ernest J. Gaines. Part One examines Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories that feature the young hero’s growing disillusionment with and eventual rejection of his home and family. Parodying conventional stereotypes about Native American ways of life, Hemingway deconstructs prevailing notions of race by aligning Nick’s father with the wilderness and the Indians. Gaines’s earliest short stories focus on a reunion of the historically-divided African American family. Deconstructing traditional views of gender, Gaines emphasizes the concept of the African American extended and surrogate family as ever-changing. Part Two shifts the focus from the son to the fathers. Hemingway’s seminal story “Fathers and Sons” presents a cyclical view of time, according to which the son runs the risk of repeating the father’s mistakes. The father’s “sins,” especially his suicide, are not resolved until Robert Jordan sacrifices himself for his friends at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls and thus becomes a “father” to others. The discussion of Gaines’s two major novels on the perspective of fathers, In My Father's House and A Gathering of Old Men, demonstrates how the generational gap can be bridged. Part Three analyzes the metaphorical father-son relationship between Hemingway and Gaines. Using Harold Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence theory as a model, and Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons as the original text both Hemingway and Gaines studied and “misread,” this section compares and contrasts the generational conflicts in vi Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Gaines’s Catherine Carmier and A Lesson Before Dying. The conclusion looks at Hemingway’s and Gaines’s works as instances of life- writing and places the two writers in two different traditions, with Hemingway representing a Western form of autobiography that emphasizes the individual and with Gaines representing an African form of autobiography that stresses the interdependence of individual and group experience. vii INTRODUCTION THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ERNEST HEMINGWAY AND ERNEST GAINES An intertextual reading of two writers as ostensibly diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Gaines may seem to be a risky endeavor at first. After all, the two authors differ markedly in their regional, social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. The one, Ernest Hemingway, is generally seen as a modernist writer, a member of the “lost generation,” and a representative of the privileged white middle class, whose works have often been criticized as insensitive to racial and gender issues. The other, Ernest Gaines, published the majority of his work during and shortly after the Civil Rights era, grew up in the racially segregated Deep South, and made the social and racial conditions in his native Louisiana the focus of all of his work. Whereas Ernest Hemingway’s style evolved from his time as a journalist at the Kansas City Star and later acquired traces of Gertrude Stein’s experiments with language and rhythm as well as Ezra Pound’s imagism, many of Ernest Gaines’s novels and stories can be regarded as descendants of the African American slave narrative tradition and are heavily informed by black folk culture, especially the element of orality. This study will demonstrate, on the one hand, that there is a profound connection between the two writers, a connection that pertains not only to themes and style but also to a shared world view and the central place the father-son conflict occupies in each author’s oeuvre. On the other hand, I will argue that it is the ultimate differences between the two writers, both in themes and style, that illuminate their works. This study, then, seeks to contribute to a richer understanding of both writers’ works and the different literary traditions their works represent. 1 To begin, any discussion of influences on the writing career of Ernest Gaines needs to distinguish between literary and non-literary influences. The latter are especially crucial in Gaines’s case, as he was shaped