The Hemingway Cult of Love

Abstract

The Hemingway hero, though he is sensitive and feels deeply the pains and penalties of life, is resolved not to give in to his feelings. He holds himself under tight control. He has worked out a code of behavior of his own, a “grace under pressure,” which enables him to bear up with honor in a situation of danger. The Sun Also Rises with its striking epigraph, “You are all a lost generation,” a remark made by Gertrude Stein, the high priestess of the expatriates in Paris during the twenties, presents one version of the Hemingway hero. The incapacitating wound Jake has received in the genitals is intended to symbolize how a whole generation of the young have been emasculated and crippled by the war. Jake, like his boon companions, is in revolt against the mores of middle-class society, but it is a revolt that is despairing in its negativity. The novel exemplifies the theme of futility, the mood of reckless nihilism that infected the lost generation. Jake is the victim of a hopeless love for Brett, a love that cannot in the nature of things be consummated. In the wasteland of the twenties both the life of the spirit and that of the senses have been perverted. As in the fictive world of the jazz age that Fitzgerald so luminously portrayed, the old distinctions between good and evil have broken down. The horror of war strips the experience of sexual love of the need for moral sanctions; the belief in the sanctity of life has been destroyed. The Hemingway protagonist may regret committing a given act because it brought about a series of unfortunate consequences but not because he has violated some moral principles. He is not deceived or held back by the socially established categories of good and evil, and yet he abides by a moral code of his own.