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

Hemingway's story, then, builds first toward Jig's construction of a framework that divides the couple's experience along the lines of gain and loss, and then toward an unconvincing retreat from that construction. To feel safe, the couple must imagine a world where an action is nothing at all, an operation is no real operation, where they can have Europe again because they are frozen in a present that neither the pregnancy nor the abortion could disrupt, a present whose stability even their quarrel cannot pierce because the behavior of having a fine time has crossed over into the permanent state of feeling fine. In Jig's withdrawal from her vision, the echo of the scene in The Wings of the Dove gains its greatest significance, for the parallel passages bear a dissimilar relation to discontinuities in the two characters' lives. Whereas Milly questions how long she can have everything in order to spur her on her mission to make her gains at least figuratively permanent, Jig can only recognize irrevocable loss in the disruptions that either an abortion or a continuing pregnancy will bring about. Her retreat into a desperate optimism takes her only to the other side of this absolute vision: like her pessimistic diagnosis, her final declaration of stability precludes the kind of gain through performance that James's international fictions seem to hold out as a possibility to their pilgrims. It is, thus, in one sense, a greater admission of defeat than her earlier challenge. Both Jig's recognition of loss and her glossing over of that recognition spring from Hemingway's peculiar recombination of the various Europes found within the universe of international fiction: that aristocratic world of corrupting luxury--feared by such comic Jamesian figures as Waymarsh from The Ambassadors--in Hemingway becomes a serious threat in its fusion with James's more sinister stable aristocratic world where nothing can ever make a deadly difference. Hemingway's Americans seek this world not to escape their native country's uncrystalizing present but to translate America's ahistorical eternal now into a personal life of safety and radical, non-progressive continuity. In Hemingway's fiction such an order can only end, one way or another, in death.

(1) One detailed study has viewed Hemingway and Fitzgerald together in this regard (Porsdam). Individual Hemingway texts, such as "A Canary for One" (Martin), have also been analysed in the light of the Jamesian international tradition.

(2) Jig's nationality is not made clear in Hemingway's story but for the following reasons I have taken her to be American: her speech patterns; the implication that the American man has introduced her to life in Europe; the contrast between her as a "girl" and the European woman who is their waitress.

(3) From a very different perspective from the one taken in this paper, Timothy O'Brien has analysed the ambiguities of Jig's final words (24). O'Brien also considers the punning play on the word "fine" in the story (23).