Hemingway’s Ecological Ambivalence Embodied In The Old Man And The Sea

Ernest Hemingway, American journalist and writer, is regarded as one of the most important novelists during the twentieth century, playing a significant role in the history of American Literature. Simplicity and plain words embody Hemingway’s unique writing style, which has had a great influence on the evolution of the twentieth-century fictions. As one of the well-known novelists who enjoy great reputation in American Literature in the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway’s works have drawn widespread attention among the critics. Among the numerous novels and short stories, The Old Man and the Sea, one of his masterpieces, can be regarded as the crystallization of his ample life experiences and writing career. Its publication again aroused critics’great attention and push Hemingway forward to the glory of Nobel Prize in Literature.As the newly born ecocriticism becomes widely applied to literary criticism, many scholars begin to rereading this masterpiece from the perspective of ecocriticism. Nevertheless, they mostly probe into the ecological metaphors in The Old Man and the Sea, emphasizing Hemingway’s ecological consciousness. Hemingway, though having begun to change his view a little on the relationship between human beings and nature, can never diminish the deep-rooted anthropocentric concepts because of the influence of Christianity and other complicated factor on him. Thus, what is perceived in this novella is an ecological ambivalence. The paper will reread the novella from the perspectives of deep ecology and ecofeminism, with the purpose of revealing Hemingway’s ecological and gender ambivalence and enriching the researches on Hemingway. Firstly, this paper will analyze the formation of Hemingway’s ambivalent ecological views through his life experience, and then detect Hemingway’s complex views on nature by analyzing Santiago’s complex psychology in treating the sea and marine animals. Then, the paper will try to analyze Santiago’s monologues and the relation between the sea and women so as to reveal Hemingway’s contradictory views on women. Finally, the paper makes a conclusion that Hemingway’s attitude toward both women and nature is ambivalent, but not just love or mere domination. Meanwhile, this paper offers a basis for solving the problems concerning the relation between human and nature as well as that between man and women.