Hemingway, Women, and Gender

I had always hated Hemingway.  He was, after all, the classic misogynist. 

It seemed I was forced to read Hemingway every year in school.  Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Old Man and the Sea.  I read them all, against my will.  To me they were boring stories about men.  The words were short, cold, and devoid of beauty or lyricism.  The topics were harsh and violent -- masculine topics of war, bullfighting, and big game hunting.  Moreover, the works were filled with hateful depictions of women. Women were crazy harpies, tempting devils, or dead mothers.  In Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical accounts, women were merely the women objects of antipathy, perhaps like the many wives that he continually traded in like cars.

So when I heard that PBS was featuring a new documentary series on Hemingway, I rolled my eyes and thought, “how tone deaf.”  How misguided to hear yet again about a privileged white man, and one who had already received his acclaim.  In this time of intense public debate of race and gender, in this time when so many women and people of color have not yet been recovered, why return to the same old story.  For indeed, I had not encountered even famous writers like Zora Huston Neale or Daphne du Maurier until my own independent reading, long after school.  But, like so many things that one dismisses, I discovered more complexity and nuance in Hemingway’s story, particular in the realm of gender.

The film reveals Hemingway not as a model of masculinity, but as a man battling with his own masculinity.  Understanding this as toxic masculinity, changed the narrative for me.  We learn of Hemingway’s Freudian early years with a mother who wrote him a rejection letter, and dressed him like a twin to his sister.  We then understand his early attraction to two older woman, maternal figures, one of whom becomes his first wife.  We see the author constrained by family demands--fighting for the time to write and feed his creative muse, diverted by screaming babies, marital demands, and unpaid bills until he can get alone, on the road or with his thoughts.  This is all juxtaposed against the raucous pull of the popular writing crowd, with their carousing and attention-seeking affairs.

The film also shows us a broader range of topics that occupied Hemingway’s mind beyond bulls, bullets, and booze.  One of his earliest stories, Up in Michigan, was about date rape.  A shocking story that barely saw the publishing light, writer Edna O’Brien explains as actually told from the woman’s perspective, which is why it was so powerful.  He wrote about abortion, suicide, STDs, childbirth, Caesarean sections, and death in childbirth – grim accounts of women (and men’s) reality.  A later work, published posthumously, engages with transgender and same-sex attraction.

The short words took on new meaning for me as well.  Rather than just a mimic of his journalism years, the short words were explained as a revolution in writing that left behind conventional indicators of writing prowess.  I discovered the beauty of the short form, in the repetition of the same words that function as the action itself, as when repeating words form the march of the soldiers.  Right, left, right, left, right, left.  Like lawyers learning the impact of plain, unaffected writing, I could now appreciate the power of the staccato, and what the film describes as musical. The film reveals these words slowly on the screen, literally showing us the beauty of the typed word as Jeff Daniels' voice-over reads aloud.

This all came together for me in the discussion of the short story, Hills Like White Elephants.   In this story, a man pressures his lover, “the girl,” to get an abortion.  Most of the story is the man controlling the conversation, working through various points to win the argument, eventually gaslighting his partner, claiming, “I only want what you want.” He is dismissive of the way in which the young woman sees the world, whether its her vision of the looming white elephants overshadowing their lives or the personal and relational consequences of the abortion.  Eventually, the young woman demands: "Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?" 

See also:

PBS, Video, Hemingway, Gender and Identity

NYT, They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look. So You Can Too.

Esquire, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick Reveal Ernest Hemingway's Private Fascination with Gender Fluidity