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

The couple's experience in Europe is temporalized only in terms of possession, that is, of "having a fine time" (71). In no other respect is their life in Europe seen to involve the kind of goal-driven progression Krebs in "Soldier's Home," for instance, finds increasingly urged upon him when he returns from the battle field in Europe. Just as Krebs's memories of his life in Europe are of fixed, still moments free from the obligation to achieve beyond the transcendent intensity of battle, for the couple Europe seems to offer the prospect of endlessly trying new things--that is, of living for the purpose of experiment rather than of ends. This mode of existence emerges as at once a fulfillment and a degradation of the international tradition of the young American in Europe who is wonderfully open to new experiences, who has "an extraordinary susceptibility to new impressions" (Fuller 1). The muffled dispute over Jig's pregnancy already sullies this way of life by infusing it with self-consciousness: the couple now must, in a sinister combination of their two dominant modes of existence, "try and have a fine time" (71). Release from such meta-spontaneity is precisely what the man offers Jig as the reward for ending the pregnancy and restoring their earlier patterns. Yet Jig's claim that Europe "isn't ours anymore" expresses her knowledge that such an innocent return to a secularized American-in-Europe experience of time is impossible. Europe is the field for American freedom not because Americans are themselves free but because Europe offers a world only of fruits, not of labor (in its various meanings). If, therefore, Europe points to an escape from what Melville, echoing a traditional critique, calls America's "everlasting uncrystalizing Present" (9), it does so only by presenting the opposite: a present so perfectly crystalized by the efforts and relics of the past that it too escapes the ravages of historical process. Just as continuing the pregnancy would clearly undermine this system by inscribing the couple within an unfolding process, ending it would require an action, and as an action the abortion also threatens their way of life.

The text presents the abortion in terms at odds with the man's euphemisms. In crafting the couple's minimalist dialogue in the first half of the story, Hemingway so carefully restricts the stand-in verb "do" to references to the abortion that it becomes identified as the one great act within a life otherwise composed of having, wanting, being, and loving (not only each other, but also their utterances and fresh observations). This textual suggestion that the abortion will be the demarcating event bound to form the dividing line between their past and future experience is what the man seeks to neutralize by depicting the operation as a natural process of healing and restoration: "It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.... They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural" (72). According to this metaphor, the abortion becomes equivalent to those natural processes around the couple that frame their experience of Europe, and that, also, through the spontaneous movements of the environment, protect them from the enclosing heat, providing ambient change without fundamental transformation. A benevolent--almost cyclical--process of involvement with the world replaces the prospect of a disruptive, decisive act that deprives them of Europe. Thus, while guaranteeing that the continuity of their lives will not be disrupted by the operation, the man corrects Jig's one anomalous use of the verb "do" to refer not to the abortion but to their life after it: