Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender: A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Selected Works

Description

Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender presents fresh insight into the gender issues and sexual ambiguities that have always been present in Hemingway’s work, utilising a variety of historical, socio-cultural and biographical contexts. Offering a close analysis of the gender issues and sexual ambiguities present in Hemingway’s work, this book provides insight into the position of white middle-class women in America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, illuminating Hemingway’s androgynous impulses and the attitudinal changes that occurred during Ernest Hemingway’s lifetime. Women and gender were Hemingway’s steady concern; his fictional females are drawn with the same kind of complexity and individuality like his fictional males, manifesting endurance, stoic courage and grace under pressure. This volume highlights Hemingway’s textual world’s resistance of patriarchal phallocratism and his abolition of the binaries of masculinity/femininity, passivity/activity and the like, dismantling binary oppositions involving gender and sexuality. Exploring the metamorphosis of American social and cultural history, this volume unravels the stereotypical myths associated with womanhood and the complexity of women in Ernest Hemingway’s novels. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Introduction 1 Women and Ernest Hemingway’s World: A General Survey of White Middle-Class American Women and their Socio-Cultural Milieu from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century 2 Reformulations of Gender Roles in The Sun Also Rises 3 The Heroic and Stoical Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms 4 Gendered Conflicts in Selected Short Stories 5 Marital Relations in To Have and Have Not 6 The Question of Woman and Consent in For Whom the Bell Tolls 7 Across the River and Into the Trees: Yet Another Tale of War and Death and of a Love Like No Other 8 Transgressions in The Garden of Eden 9 Conclusion: Ernest Hemingway, Androgyny and Mergers of the Masculine-Feminine Status Quo Index