HEMINGWAY AND FEMINISM. There was a wonderful phrase in the Wall Street Journal for December 23-24. In an article on William Empson, Robin Moroney refers to the “Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway types who made their discoveries while drunk in brothels in countries where the president had just been shot.” When I read that quote to my wife Mary Jane, she said, “That reminds me how much I hate all that Alpha Male tough guy stuff that Hemingway has.” With the successes of the feminist movement, we tend to forget that Hemingway led the way in the opposite direction. Kurt Vonnegut has a Hemingway caricature in his play HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE. The caricature says at one point, “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey in a fine Swiss watch.” I used to repeat this line from time to time in appropriately ironic inflections. Then one day my wife told me that she had repeated the line to her book club and that they were not amused. I asked if she had made it clear that this was a quotation. No, she hadn’t had a chance to. I was already afraid of her book club.
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I’m performing post necromancy because on the last day of my Hemingway/Fitzgerald seminar a classmate gave a very detailed report on The Garden of Eden, one of Hemingway’s posthumous novels. It features a woman that becomes more and more masculine and dominant in the relationship—talk about breaking out of the usual mold. It was surprising to hear about such a change of pace from Hemingway.
Wikipedia says: “The novel has received much attention for its sexual content, especially in the context of Hemingway’s canon. Some scholars have suggested that the novel effects a more tender, effeminate, ‘new Hemingway.’ In this vein, it has been interpreted as an exuberant celebration of free sexuality.”
Of course Hemingway still prized manliness above all, I’m sure. Dr. Mangum told us about Hemingway exposing his own chest hair to a negative critic in a restaurant, then tearing open the critic’s shirt to expose a humiliating dearth of hair.