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

   "`Then what will we do afterward?"
   "We'll be fine afterward. Just like we were before." (72)

Whereas in the more weighty international tradition the American aims to turn his or her structureless "doing" into some permanent being that will transform raw power into legacy, the man in Hemingway's story seeks only to reconstitute the Europe of the lighter international tradition, the Europe that offers an escape from American temporality and bypasses performance altogether. "Being fine"--not action--will constitute their life after the abortion. The language of health that creeps into the man's tropes here links Hemingway's story in another way to that aspect of the traditional representation of Europe.

The man's assurance that "we'll be fine afterward" helps to explain how he can later insist that Europe will remain theirs. Although in echoing James's novel "Hills" seems to expunge any reference to the mortality that governs Milly's and her companion's thoughts, the prospect of ill health and eventual death that so haunts James's international fiction can also be felt underlying Hemingway's story. For the man, to be fine is to remain "just like we were before." The abortion, by stopping a pregnancy whose progress reminds them of time's passage, allows for this recovery of a stable condition. Yet the promise of good health as a kind of metaphor for permanence is always a delusion in international fiction, not only The Wings of the Dove--whose entire plot grows out of Milly's need, in the face of her limited time, to grasp at a chance for transformation--but also less well-known works such as "`Europe.'" That story, about an apparently dying old woman who manipulates her physical condition to keep most of her daughters from repeating the same European tour she famously experienced in her youth, sets up a contrast between the permanence of Europe, always available to have its fruits plucked and its promise of personal liberation fulfilled, and the deterioration and aging that threaten the daughters' chance to taste those fruits (Complete Tales 10: 427-49). As in Wings and, more obliquely, in Hemingway's story, this contrast comes out through various puns centered on the adjective "better."

Ideally, to be better in Jamesian international fiction means to have acquired enough from Europe to produce a personal transformation. In Hemingway's story the man fights against this association, identifying being better instead with the kind of deathly return to equilibrium that "`Europe'" anatomizes. His insistence that "we'll be fine afterward" receives an implicit challenge not only from Jig's speech on what they have lost, but also from her growing unwillingness to play along with his rhetoric of consensus, by which their disagreement is submerged in soothing declarations of his concern for her and indifference to his own wants. His refusal to acknowledge that they are at odds, that any rift separates their desires or hopes for the future, resembles his denial that time threatens their possession through the rupture of a decision. Hemingway emphasizes the parallel between the man's twin evasions by having Jig use an identical construction to express the loss, and yet possible recapture, of both Europe and their contentment as a couple: in challenging his view of the need for the abortion she echoes her own "we could have everything" in suggesting "we could get along" (76). In both cases the present subjunctive modal auxiliary denotes a possibility whose realization depends on a change of course. The man's own echoes forbid such an understanding. Affirming their unity of intention as a kind of corollary to their bond as a couple serves the purpose of his evasion. Thus, his disingenuous "I don't want you to do it if you don't want to" easily slides into his more honest "I don't want anybody but you" (75-76). Here the two primary meanings of "to want"--to desire something that an action will be likely to gain and to lack something that will make one complete--converge as the abortion loses its status as a willed decision: the pregnancy becomes more and more to seem simply the threat of a spatial separation between the two that is bred by time's accumulations and that the healing of the rupture between them itself will somehow magically end. Their reconciliation, then, becomes a figure for a repossession of Europe not founded on action.