Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" and the tradition of the American in Europe - Articles - Ernest Hemingway

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by David Grant

   "I sometimes wonder.... if I shall have much of it."
   Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"
   "Of everything. Of everything I have."
   ... "You `have' everything; so that when you say `much' of
   it--"
   "I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That
   is if I have got it."
   ... "If you've got an ailment?"
   "If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
   "Ah that--like almost nobody else."
   "Then for how long?" (90-91)

As the convergence between "having" an ailment and "having" everything makes clear, Milly's illness encloses and qualifies the otherwise unlimited range of her possession. To make her gains permanent, then, Milly must enter into the very European system that binds Kate in her dilemma--must, like the Europeans she admires, compete under the kind of rigorous terms unknown in James's America outside of the economic realm. For various reasons, of course, this project fails, and the temporal limits on Milly's absolute possession reassert themselves in her death, the metaphor for Europe's refusal to enshrine her possession within its narrative system and for its determination to keep her an anchorless American.

The passage in Hemingway's story that echoes the dialogue between Susan and Milly follows upon the man's successful manipulation of his lover into agreeing to an abortion. As Jig looks out toward the river over the field of grain, the new phase of the conversation marks both her acceptance of their decision and her protest against it:

   "And we could have all this," she said. "And we could have
   everything and every day we make it more impossible."
   "What did you say?"
   "I said we could have everything."
   "We can have everything."
   "No, we can't"
   "We can have the whole world."
   "No, we can't."
   "We can go everywhere."
   "No, we can't. It isn't ours any more."
   "It's ours."
   "No, it isn't. And once they take it away, you never get it
   back." (Hemingway, "Hills" 74-75)

This conversation is fueled by the same dynamic as its predecessor: in both cases the responding party (Susan Stringham, the American man) attempts to evade the relationship between having everything and the great issue facing the pair (Milly's mortality, the pregnancy), treating the American power to own as a given, unaffected by context. This dodge is possible, however, only because of the high level of abstraction at which both Milly and Jig couch their dilemma. As they look out on a scene of Europe, their vision of the continent fuses with their longing to crystalize into a permanent life the unstructured moments that have made up their existence.

Both works thus participate in an international tradition not fully realized until James's works: the interdependence of a character's concrete goals with an unspecified but no less real possession of Europe. Typically the relationship is circular: the goals are attainable only if Europe can be appropriated, yet the only measure of that appropriation is the attainment of the goals. Europe, then, becomes not only a kind of marker of narrative success, but also a sign that narrative struggles will ground American power. In "Hills" this dynamic is more abstract than it is in Wings: In place of a concrete object of desire, fleshing out Milly's quest to win Europe, Jig contemplates only the prospect of having everything--that is, presumably, continuing to live the life they have led before in perpetuity. In this respect, the couple faces the same fate as the doomed Milly--the dissolution of their gains into mortality. Both have Europe dangled before them, only to have it snatched away by time's progress. What is left ambiguous in "Hills" is whether Jig considers the pregnancy itself or the decision to end it responsible for this deprivation. The answer "both and neither" becomes satisfactory only if we return to the Jamesian tradition of Europe as the home of irresponsible freedom. Whereas in his more weighty works James's Americans want but fail to appropriate history by inscribing themselves in its progress, Hemingway's characters, like James's more comic Americans, look to Europe for an escape from an American mode of time.