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

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Bauer, Margaret D

Furthermore, in "Hills Like White Elephants," the man's past is so far beneath the surface that only after such an intratextual reading with a work like "Soldier's Home," from which the man's possible "baggage" can be discerned, do we find a sympathetic explanation for his behavior. Therefore, in spite of my own employment of the iceberg theory here, I share Kenneth S. Lynn's concern about imposing a World War I experience on just any Hemingway character. Lynn questions, for example, the support to be found in "Big Two-Hearted River" for reading Nick Adams's psychological distress as being a result of his recent war experiences, "for World War I is not mentioned in 'BigTwo-Hearted River'" (1981, 24); similarly, neither is there any actual mention in "Hills Like White Elephants" of the man having recently gotten out of the service. And as Lynn does in his reading of the other story, if one is going to draw from the author's biography for explanations for the character's behavior, one could just as easily suggest that negative experience with his mother is at the root of the character's resistance to having a family.

Undeniably, the man in "Hills Like White Elephants" and Krebs do have in common a resistance to marriage and fatherhood. Whereas the woman in "Hills Like White Elephants" may be perceived as the ultimate victim of this attitude, Krebs seems to be the victim in "Soldier's Home"-of his community not understanding his resistance to a traditional lifestyle, as epitomized by his mother's attitude toward him. Thus, in works like "Soldier's Home" Hemingway does portray women like Krebs's mother as shallow: she does not understand what her son has been through and makes no sincere effort to find out. In such works, too, Hemingway often depicts women as-put simply-bitches: Krebs's mother bullies her son to shape up.

A re-reading of Hemingway via "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," however, might lead one to reconsider viewing such negative and shallow characterizations as reflective of his overall attitude toward women. Certainly the woman in "Hills Like White Elephants" cannot be viewed as either, using Linda Miller's phrases again, "weak in character" or "weak as character" (1990, 3). She ultimately emerges as the stronger of the pair-both in character (she is more willing to pay the consequences of her actions) and as a character (her character develops in the course of the story). True, "Hills Like White Elephants" is one of few Hemingway stories in which one could perceive the female character as the protagonist. Even at the other extreme in his canon-stories in which a female character, like the woman in "Indian Camp," is a mere prop-one should consider as more important than the "weak" development of such a minor character, the authorial attitude toward the story's main characters. One does not get the sense, for example, that Hemingway approves of the doctor's misogynistic behavior toward the woman in labor. Ultimately, more often than the misogynistic depictions of women that so many critics perceive in Hemingway's works, I see what Einda Wagner pointed out in one of the earliest contributions to the positive re-readings of Hemingway's female characters: "his characterization of male characters as adolescent, selfish, misdirected" and "evidence of much sympathy on Hemingway's part of the women he portrays" (1981, 69).