Ernest Hemingway: Men With, or Without, Women

Abstract

‘There are, however, no women in his books!’ wrote Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). The ‘however’ was central to Fiedler’s argument. Hemingway, he believed, was much addicted to describing the sexual act in his fictions — it is the ‘symbolic center of his work’¹ — but since he did not succeed in making his females human, the sexual encounters described in his writings are either ridiculous or horrible; the ‘women’ are fantasy figures whose function is to gratify the men’s desires, and the act is nothing more than a wish-fulfilment or, in Fiedler’s brutally frank words, a wet dream. Since the strategy here, as throughout Love and Death is to foreground the theme of male companionship in American literature, Fiedler’s verdict on the women in Hemingwa’s fiction is hyperbolic, but that, perhaps, is a price worth paying for the perception that ‘the West’ in Hemingway is not limited to the geographical West of the United States but is a ‘world of male companionship and sport, an anti-civilization’ whether in the mountains of Spain or the hills of Africa. No reader who has shared Fiedler’s embarrassment with the ‘inarticulate sentimentality’ of the dialogue between Jake Barnes and his arch-buddy ‘Good old Bill’ at Burguete can fail to be grateful for this perspective on the ‘earthly paradise for men’. However, such a reader may well become suspicious when he is told that Hemingway is ‘only really comfortable’ when dealing with men without women and that the world of male companionship is ‘simple and joyous’.