Forget the legend and read the work: Teaching two stories by Ernest Hemingway

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Bauer, Margaret D

Critical reputation is the reputation an author enjoys among critics, that cadre of literary professionals who decide which books will be treated as serious and important when they are published, and which will be taught in our high schools, colleges, and universities as examples of American literature. (Beegel, The Cambrige Companion to Hemingway).

Although I am not suggesting that we attempt again to read literature as the New Critics asked us to (but could not themselves do)-that is, divorced from any consideration of the history and culture that influenced the work, I do like to teach works of literature that run counter to authors' reputations and thus remind us not to jump to conclusions about a work based on biographical knowledge (or pseudo-knowledge) of its creator. For example, in order to help students understand why they cannot assume that the first-person persona of a poem is the poet herself, I read Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights," then ask students to contrast the poem's speaker with the poet, as her reclusive, apparently celibate life is described in their anthology's introduction.

Two of my favorite Ernest Hemingway stories are "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants." I teach these stories in spite of Hemingway's reputation as a misogynist and my own feminist sensibilities. I teach them not only because I recognize Hemingway's genius with the craft of the short story, but also to show students that they should not make assumptions about a writer's work based on some vague impression they have of the author's character. For example, I've had students insist that Edgar Allan Poe wrote some fantastic story we were discussing while on a drug-induced trip or that William Faulkner's rambling, page-long sentences are a result of writing while intoxicated. Similarly, their image of Hemingway as some macho hunter, drinker, womanizer, and misogynist often blinds them to any positive reading of his female characters.

In the introduction to his 1999 book on Hemingway, Carl P. Eby points out that "[f]or the past two decades, Hemingway criticism has been dominated by a reconsideration of the role of gender in his work"; therefore, Eby contends, "Hemingway's reign as the hairy-chested icon of American masculinity is coming to an end." However, Eby quickly qualifies this statement:

[T]his message hasn't yet filtered down to the general reading public. In the popular imagination, Ernest the monovocally masculine bullfight aficionado, boxer, hunter, deep-sea fisherman, and pitchman for Ballantine Ale and khaki pants still looms over the American literary horizon like a testosterone-crazed colossus. Neither has the message filtered down to many academic departments, where opinions like those expressed by Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader [1978] (i.e., that Hemingway was merely a male chauvinist-pig) are as often as not still in vogue. (Eby 1999, 3)1

Such was the attitude toward Hemingway I detected as a graduate student listening to other graduate students and some professors who seemed puzzled as to why I, presumably a feminist scholar, would include a chapter on him in my dissertation; such has been my experience, as I've already indicated, as a professor introducing Hemingway to students with preconceived notions about Ernest Hemingway the man (and thus regarding his depiction of women). Consequently, I agree with such scholars as Stephen P. Clifford "that the myth of Hemingway's misogyny, at least in his fiction, is itself a construct created by his readers" (1998, 177).2

Therefore, when I teach these two Hemingway stories in particular, I approach them from a "feminist" perspective, ironically in the tradition of Judith Fetterley (ironic since Fetterley incorporated her 1977 article condemning Hemingway's characterization of Catherine Barkley into her book, The Resisting Reader3). I agree with and here employ the reading method Fetterley promotes in her book-re-examining male-centered texts from the woman's perspective-even as I disagree with her perception of Hemingway's characterization of women. Thus, I am a "resisting reader," but what I resist is pre-judging the work based on the author's reputation.

Linda Patterson Miller poses several questions regarding reader responses to Hemingway's female characters as "weak in character and weak as characters." Among the questions she asks are: "Do critics condemn Hemingway's heroines because they . . . dislike Hemingway's supposed male chauvinistic views about women? Or because they dislike the Hemingway that fame erected?" Miller argues that"[a]lthough the important issue to focus on is the artistic one, not the sociological or the biographical one, too many readers of Hemingway impose Hemingway's personas (man, writer, legend) upon his art" (1990, 3). In contrast, Nina Baym discusses teaching "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" to student readers who "know little or nothing about the Hemingway mystique" and finding that they do not respond to Margot as an exemplar of the "'bitch' stereotype" (1992, 72) or to Wilson "as the moral center of the story" (79). Indeed, she reports, "Nobody much likes Wilson" (79). Baym contrasts these students' unbiased response to the story and its characters with the apparent attitude of the editors who have chosen to include this story in four editions of a feminist anthology of short fiction "as a leading example of the 'bitch' stereotype." She argues "that the anthology accepts without question a reading that is likely more the critics' than the author's construction" (Baym 1992, 72). Similarly, once I get students away from the pre-programmed responses to Hemingway outlined earlier, our discussion of "Indian Camp" is similar to Baym's: the students don't much like Dr. Adams. And if I have a class of students not much aware of Hemingway's reputation for writing about bitchy women and heroic men who behave gracefully under pressure, then discussion of "Hills Like White Elephants" often leads to the perception of the woman as the story's protagonist.