Rewriting the self against the National text: Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2000 by Tellefsen, Blythe

The reasons for that failure are complicated and interwoven. Certainly, her failure stems in part from the sheer difficulty of sustaining a self that does not conform to cultural expectations. Catherine's difficulty also emerges, however, from her inculcation with Christian ideology and with the modernist replacement of religion with art. In fact, the substitution of Artist for God and Art for Religion is a significant reason for Catherine's destructive behavior that, in fact, results from the frustration of her creative drive. Catherine longs to be an artist but believes that she cannot be one. She tells David,

The whole way here I saw wonderful things to paint and I can't paint at all and never could. But I know wonderful things to write and I can't even write a letter that isn't stupid. I never wanted to be a painter nor a writer until I came to this country. Now it's just like being hungry all the time and there's nothing you can ever do about it. (53)

Catherine's constant self-fashioning can be understood as a result of this frustrated artistry; unable to create more traditional forms of art, she turns to her body as the one palette available to her. Indeed, Catherine's language reflects this understanding of her body-fashioning; she speaks of her haircuts in terms of a project that she has carefully considered, planned, and executed, saying, "First I had the idea on the road somewhere after Aix en Provence.... But I didn't know how it would work or how to tell them how to do it. Then I thought it out and yesterday I decided . . ." (47). Her efforts to include David in this refashioning, too, are exercises in artistry-she is "creating" a new person out of the material of her husband. When, under her direction, David suntans with her and cuts and bleaches his hair exactly like hers, Catherine becomes the creator and David her creation-she is the Artist/God and David the Art/Being created in her own image.

Catherine's artistry and her destruction of David's stories are often read by critics as a feminist response to the pressures of the patriarchy-a patriarchy that dictates art's parameters and constituents, establishes men as creators, and defines women as their creations, muses, or, often, as obstacles to their artistic fulfillment. Thus, for instance, Kathy Willingham argues that Catherine's suffering and presumed descent into madness relate directly to her debilitating insecurities in the face of the patriarchal dominance of the arts .... Throughout the novel Catherine struggles heroically to legitimize her creativity, and she does so by using her physical body . . She literally embraces the avenue of artistic expression which "l'ecriture feminine" advocates. (47)

In such a reading, Catherine's unhappiness is a direct result of the patriarchy's refusal to grant legitimacy to her artistry, an oral, not written, artistry (she insists repeatedly that David let her "tell" it), and her experiments with the body as an art form. Willingham asserts, "In every respect Catherine's personal actions signify the larger political revolution that Cixous maintains results inevitably from a woman's liberation" (59); thus, destroying David's stories is a triumphant assertion of woman's freedom from the "art" that would constrain her. Indeed, the story burning prompts the final break between Catherine and David, which can be read as the achievement of female independence.