THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DIVISION OF ARTS AND HUMANITIES REFLECTIONS OF THE FATHER Mirroring in Hemingway’s Garden of Eden KRISTIN DANELLA Spring 2012 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in English with honors in Letters, Arts, and Sciences Reviewed and approved* by the following: Dr. Linda Miller Professor of English Thesis Supervisor Dr. Ellen Knodt Professor of English Honors Adviser * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College Abstract Garden of Eden, one of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novels, concentrates a tremendous amount of autobiographical material into one work. Hemingway always strived to “get the actual feel of things” into his writing. In Garden of Eden, Hemingway uses both physical mirror scenes where his protagonists gaze into their own reflections, and mirrored stories, such as “African Story,” which parallels “Indian Camp,” and “My Old Man,” to analyze his artistic identity, his own family relations, and ultimately, his role as a son. My thesis purports to discuss Garden of Eden in three distinct chapters. The first chapter looks at several of David and Catherine’s many scenes where they look into their own reflection in the mirror. These physical mirror scenes in Garden of Eden shed light on Catherine’s lack of artistic identity, and David’s newly found identity that he achieves through his writing. The second chapter discusses how Catherine’s struggle for power causes David to seek refuge in his short stories, which ultimately forces Catherine to destroy his manuscripts. Catherine’s actions and personality mirrors Mrs. Adams’s (a stand-in for Hemingway’s mother) actions in Hemingway’s early Nick Adams stories. The second chapter looks at Hemingway’s relations with his own parents and how this is reflected in Garden of Eden. Finally, the third chapter is a close textual comparison of “African Story,” written into the text of this late novel, and two early In Our Time short stories, “Indian Camp” and “My Old Man.” Garden of Eden, although a controversial novel, is fascinating because it combines so many different aspects of Hemingway’s life as a writer, a husband, and a son into the story of David and Catherine Bourne’s crumbling marriage. Ultimately, Garden of Eden is an affirmation of Hemingway’s vocation as a writer. Through writing, he not only discovers himself, but also redefines his relationship with his father. i Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Mirror and Artistic Identity 2 Chapter 2: Reflections of “The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife” 13 Chapter 3: Discovering the Father through Short Stories 34 Works Cited 51 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Linda Miller for all her guidance and astute criticism on this thesis, as well as for innumerable things from English 015 until now. I would also like to thank Dr. Ellen Knodt for taking the time to meet with me throughout the year and for thoroughly reviewing this thesis. iii Introduction For this project, I am using Garden of Eden as it was first published by Scribner in 1987. I understand there is much controversy over the editing of this posthumous novel; however, I choose to discuss the novel in its published format rather than the manuscripts. Furthermore, all Hemingway short stories that are discussed come from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Finca Vigia Edition, published by Scribner in 1987. 1 Chapter I Hemingway’s preface to his memoir, A Moveable Feast, reads: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact” (1). Hemingway often discussed his belief that writing fiction held more truth and value than did transcribing actual circumstances. Michael Reynolds’s biography, Hemingway: The Paris Years, includes an excerpt in which Hemingway attests, “It is not un-natural that the best writers are liars” (18). Fiction freed Hemingway to write the truth as he felt it rather than the truth as he saw it with his eyes. Writing became Hemingway’s ultimate method of discovering the truth about not only himself, and his craft, but also those whose lives helped shape his. Although we see Hemingway using autobiographical material in much, if not all, of his writing, his personal experiences are most crucial in the early Nick Adams stories and the final four narratives Hemingway worked on between the end of World War II and his suicide in 1961. These narratives, Garden of Eden, A Moveable Feast, The African Book, and Islands in the Stream, all form what scholar Rose Marie Burwell refers to as the “ur-text.” Her book, Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels, argues that the four final narratives are best understood if read in entirety. Burwell states, “In their totality, four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist” (1). Burwell sees “a discernible movement toward what we have come to call a postmodern narrative in these works” where “all of the writing is, at one level, about the cost of the creative process- to the artist and those whose lives are united with his” (2). Burwell further discusses how these four works as a whole shed new light on Hemingway’s “search for form” and together form a complete analysis of “the cost of the creative process.” However, one particular novel out of what Burwell refers to as Hemingway’s 2 “ur-text,” Garden of Eden, focuses most heavily on not only “the cost of the creative process- to the artist and those whose lives are united with his” but also on autobiographical materials that Hemingway kept coming back to throughout his life: his relationships with his parents, particularly his father, the loss of his early manuscripts, and his struggle over balancing his personal relationships with the isolated life of a writer. Similar to Hemingway’s belief that “a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact,” Hemingway explores truth and identity in Garden of Eden through mirroring scenes and parallel stories. Essentially, Garden of Eden is a novel of reflections. Burwell argues that this novel is most valuable when placed in context with the other three parts of the ur-text, but I would argue that the novel as Tom Jenks edited it stands on its own.1 Garden of Eden, through the story of Catherine and David’s crumbling relationship, and the power that David finds through writing “African Story,” a story with striking similarities to both “Indian Camp” and “My Old Man,” comes full circle on reproducing recurring themes in Hemingway’s writing. 2 Garden of Eden essentially leads Hemingway into the African jungle where he finds an understanding of his father that the short stories of his entire career have led him towards. Although Garden of Eden ultimately does culminate in David Bourne discovering his identity through the resurrection of his lost stories that center on his father, the novel also encompasses many recurrent themes in the Hemingway canon. Garden of Eden is an important analysis of Hemingway’s life as a writer, his family background, and his personal relationship with women. This novel, perhaps even more so than the memoir A Moveable Feast, projects a 1 In discussing the published version of Garden of Eden, Burwell writes, “In editing the manuscript for publication in 1986, Tom Jenks, working for Scribner’s, chose to end the novel with the rewriting of the African stories, suggesting that David Bourne has pulled affirmation out of ashes, and making his earlier quest for a fluid gender alignment that would cross-fertilize the creative imagination irrelevant. There is no manuscript evidence that Hemingway ever considered ending the novel at the point Jenks chose.” (98) 2 In the Preface to Hemingway, Burwell does note a chief similarity between “African Story” and “Indian Camp:” “David Bourne is a younger version of the writer in the longer work I discuss in this volume; and like Nick Adams in “Indian Camp,” he is coerced into a bloody ritual by a father whose approval he wants. (xii) 3 true reflection of these many different aspects of Hemingway’s life into one narrative. While A Moveable Feast paints the story of Hemingway and Hadley Richardson living in Paris during Hemingway’s early literary career, Garden of Eden almost seems to be a play on this same story, reflecting it backwards, similar to how our own mirror images are flipped. However, Garden of Eden goes beyond the short time span of A Moveable Feast and manages to include the entirety of Hemingway’s personal and literary life.3 Because this novel does focus heavily on identity, it is first necessary to discuss, as Burwell puts it, David’s struggle with “the cost of the creative process” before it is possible to argue that Garden of Eden allowed David to make peace with his father’s memory. In this novel, Hemingway explores the cost of writing through repetitive mirror scenes which address artistic identity and how it ravages the Bourne’s marriage. Garden of Eden includes over twenty scenes where David and Catherine Bourne look into mirrors or discuss mirrors. Scholar Robert Fleming argues in his book The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers that the mirrors in Garden of Eden symbolize “the cost of the creative process.” Fleming writes, David seems to understand the price he is paying [for his art] when he repeatedly looks into the mirror as if attempting to detect signs of corruption in the glass….Hemingway’s repeated use of the face in the mirror as an objectification of the artist’s ethical dilemma is a powerful recurring symbol….Whatever Hemingway saw in the reflections of his own face, his fictional artists bear witness to the inadequacy of the mirror as accurate reflector of the inner nature of its subject” (11-12).