The Gender Roles Of Hemingway's Fictional Male Characters

Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961) has long been known for his stoic, understated "masculine" style and his graphic description of male pursuit, attitude, virility and camaraderie in his writing. His nickname "Papa Hemingway" is synonymous with the stereotypical notion of masculinity. The heroes in his work seem to be produced out of a single mold and they behave according to the same "code". With the rise of feminist literary criticism of the 1970's, Hemingway has been attacked by critics who accused him of perpetuating gender roles and sexist stereotypes. These attacks have, in one way or another, tarnished his literary reputation, and a fresh examination of his works is called for. The resulting rereading has given new visibility to Hemingway's characters, and revealed the author's alertness and sensitivity to gender issues, thus casting doubt on the assumption that his writings were one-sidedly masculine. That assumption has been further undermined by Scribner's publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 with its strong androgynous theme, and especially by the publication of Kenneth Lynn's 1987 biography Hemingway, which stresses the utterly different characteristics, motifs and images in Hemingway's writing - from emasculation to bobbed hair - that betray the author's entrapment in sexual uncertainties of his youth and his "helpless fascination with androgyny and sexual transportation." Some critics have initiated a reassessment of Hemingway's view of gender and of his presentation of male and female characters from gendered perspective. Unfortunately however, up to now, no book-length endeavors have, to my knowledge, been made to explore the engendered roles in Hemingway's fiction. This study is an attempt to concentrate on the male characters in Hemingway's writing and study them in the light of gender roles. Such a study, primarily at a textual level, entails a comprehensive look into the variations and complexity of Hemingway's male characters in some of his important, surely selected in such a short thesis, works, the historical, cultural and biographical elements that help forge their depiction as well as their influence on the male protagonists, their significance in Hemingway's writing and more generally, their relation to gender issues or to the reconstruction of gender in modern culture.To fulfill the reassessment of Hemingway and his works from gendered perspective, three types of male characters will be included: Nick Adams and Pedro Romero, the self-controlled men in traditional sense, who still have worries about their gender roles and sexual identity; Jake Barnes, the most important one of Hemingway's self-split men, who acts in a self-divided way and whose masculinity was under acute threat (in the sense of dramatization of manhood, Romero and other bullfighters are included); Frederic Henry and David Bourne, the androgynous men, who keep lingering between their fascination with androgynous experimentation and their attempt to reassert masculinity.An analysis of Hemingway's view of gender, based on a comprehension of the complexity of his fictional characters, are helpful to a better understanding of Hemingway as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century and of contemporary feminist assertion of gender, as well.