An Ecofeminist Reading Of Hemingway's Main Heroines

Ernest Hemingway is now recognized as the most important and influential American novelist of the twentieth century. The male celebrity embodied in his fiction as well as in his personal myth caused some readers to assume that Hemingway has absolutely nothing to say about women. Some critics even declare that Hemingway cannot portray women or that he is better at portraying men without women. There are of course women characters of all kinds in Hemingway's fiction, but the general tendency in Hemingway criticism is to divide them into stereotypes of either bitches or angels, either castrators or love-slaves, rather than real persons flesh and blood.This thesis is to offer a relatively comprehensive and detailed look into Hemingway's main female characters from ecofeminist perspective. This study will show that Hemingway presents an ethic of interconnection and caring. From this perspective I wish to present Hemingway as a writer who is much concerned with the proper relationship between men and women, human and nonhuman world as well and prove that Hemingway is a man writer with ecofeminist consciousness.