Teaching Hemingway and Gender

Verna Kale

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781631012501
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica delle lingue

Ernest Hemingway's place in American letters seems guaranteed: a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Hemingway has long been a fixture in high school and college curricula. Just as influential as his famed economy of style and unflappable heroes, however, is his public persona. Heming- way helped create an image of a masculine ideal: sportsman, brawler, hard drinker, serial monogamist, and world traveler. Yet his iconicity has also worked against him. Because Hemingway is often dismissed by students and scholars alike for his perceived misogyny, instructors might find themselves wondering how to handle the impossibly over-determined author or even if they should include him on their syllabi at all.

With these concerns in mind, the authors of the essays in Teaching Hemingway and Gender introduce both students and scholars to Hemingway's surprisingly multivalent treatment of gender and sexuality. Individual essays deal with Hemingway's short stories, novels, and the posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden, but the ideas are widely applicable in discussions of modernism, authorship, the literary market place, popular culture, gender theory, queer theory, and men's studies.

A state-of-the-field bibliographic essay by Debra A. Moddelmog and an evocative—and provocative— personal narrative by Hilary Kovar Justice bookend the volume, which offers contributions from senior scholars, faculty at community colleges, teachers in ESL and rhetoric programs, a professor at an all-male college, and others with a range of experiences in between. The book also contains an appendix of teaching materials, including suggestions for further reading, syllabi, writing prompts, and other course materials that readers can adapt for use in their own classrooms. The collection will serve as both a valuable source for scholars working on gender and sexuality and a practical handbook for new and veteran instructors.

Teaching Hemingway and Gender deals not only with new readings of Hemingway but also with the ways instructors interact with and make assumptions about their students. The essays in Teaching Hemingway and Gender elucidate Hemingway's emergent themes as well as the ways in which we might challenge students—and ourselves—to engage them.

Part One

Hemingway and Gender

In Our Time and American Modernisms

Interpreting and Writing the Complexities of Gender and Culture

Joseph Fruscione

I start with a confession.

As a high school and then undergraduate student, I disliked Hemingway, specifically The Nick Adams Stories and The Old Man and the Sea. The writing style and content felt forced, unappealing, and plodding. Hemingway’s pared-down aesthetic, for instance, seemed simple compared to Woolf, Faulkner, Shakespeare, García Márquez, and others in my undergraduate curriculum. When I entered academia, first as graduate student and then as professor, I realized that Hemingway’s work was richer and more complex than I’d given him credit for, such as the nuanced, evolving masculinity Nick Adams exhibits in the early stories. Reading In Our Time—especially the opener of the 1930 edition, “On the Quai at Smyrna”—in a graduate seminar reinitiated me into Hemingway studies. In two pages, I’d seen what I’d been missing in the past: rich imagery, subtle style, complex depiction of gender, and overall immediacy. I have often shared these early experiences with my own students to demonstrate that Hemingway requires patience and rereading. Acknowledging potential resistance to the author’s image and interpretive challenges also helps turn a negative into a positive. Students occasionally need reminding that we educators, too, once struggled with material that did not necessarily appeal to us.

In Our Time is a very versatile Hemingway text and has worked well in undergraduate courses as part of a cluster of works exploring constructions of race, class, and gender in the modernist era. I want to focus here on using In Our Time as one of several post-WWI works addressing what Janet Lyon has called “the modernist problem of gender” (230). Lyon explores this “problem” in The Garden of Eden and “The Sea Change,” but her interpretive model applies equally well to In Our Time. I have taught In Our Time in upper- and mid-level undergraduate courses typically titled “American Modernisms” or “Multiethnic American Modernisms.” In Our Time is especially teachable when studied in conjunction with other modernist texts that reveal a spectrum of manhood and womanhood, such as William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Stressing gender as fluid and changeable—a process, spectrum, or performance—when teaching these works helps prevent (or correct) students from seeing it as always stable, binary, or biologically determined.

In this essay, I address the kinds of classroom strategies that buttress my pedagogy for teaching Hemingway, gender, and modernism. I sketch out interpretive and compositional approaches to help students first understand, and then complicate, their connotations of Hemingway. Having students do some kind of writing almost daily—most often a short, focused response to a specific prompt that can evolve into a paper and/or research topic—is a cornerstone of my teaching. Below, I focus on how using key moments and omissions in In Our Time deepens students’ conceptions of masculinity and femininity, both in Hemingway’s texts and in literary modernism. This kind of work also foregrounds patience, rereading, and careful analysis of text, culture, and context as important elements of student learning. I also address how I encourage students to understand the sequences of In Our Time’s gender relationships: such as parents/children, strained lovers, and bonding males.¹ Relatedly, isolating stories (e.g., “Cat in the Rain” or “Cross-Country Snow”) for extended treatment develops students’ reading and writing skills, giving them space to deepen an analysis of one or two texts. By closely studying Hemingway’s work, reading it aloud, and juxtaposing it with that of selected contemporaries, educators can broaden students’ understanding of gender in/of the modernist era. I foreground In Our Time as a key text with which to explore gender, culture, and modernism, specifically considering Hemingway’s conflicted performance of masculinity among his contemporaries.

It may be, as Bonnie Kime Scott has written of the era’s gender constructions, that a “crisis in gender identification … underlies much of modernist literature” (2). Whether it is articulated as a “crisis” or, in Lyon’s terms, as a “problem,” gender in In Our Time allows students to understand that “masculinity” and “femininity” are rarely cut-and-dried concepts, especially with this and other Hemingway works relying on subtlety and multilayered gender roles. Although we discuss In Our Time collectively, “The End of Something,” “The Three-Day Blow,” “Cat in the Rain,” and “Cross-Country Snow,” with their rich dialogue and interactions, are particularly helpful in understanding gender in terms of a masculine-feminine dynamic (as opposed to simply tracking how women and men are portrayed individually).

Our discussions of In Our Time generally begin with a question about what Hemingway connotes for the students, based on past readings and the author’s cultural legacy. When they know his work—which is slightly less common now than in previous years—students tend to bring up his war experience, aura of machismo, apparent male chauvinism, expatriate life, marriages, and apparently “easy” or “simple” writing. (Some have mistaken Jake Barnes’s injury for Hemingway’s, but quickly realize their mistake when I remind them that he had three sons.) From here, I reveal how this foundational text complicates the Hemingway cultural imaginary in terms of the various performances of genders, such as Nick’s evolving masculinity from “Indian Camp” to “Cross-Country Snow.” I then shift discussion to In Our Time (which typically spans two or three classes) by twice reading aloud “On the Quai at Smyrna” as a prologue for the style, themes, and cultural issues we will discuss. Students often understand texts better when reading them aloud. Ideally, in-class reading is a rereading, since they’ve presumably done their homework. In many cases, students noted that they saw new things when speaking Hemingway’s words in class.

In-class prompts deepen students’ knowledge of how gender undergirds In Our Time, the Hemingway persona, and modernism. For example, paired readings of “Cat in the Rain” can highlight Hemingway’s subtlety. I ask students whether the story’s man or woman is more sympathetic to them. I then choose two groups of three (man, woman, narrator) to read the story with different intonations, reflecting where their sympathies lie. “The End of Something” and “Cross-Country Snow” benefit from similar interactive treatment, depending on the students’ readings of Nick’s views of Marjorie and Helen, respectively. (I’m thinking specifically of how many ways one could speak Nick’s “Yes. Now” (111) in response to George’s question about Helen’s pregnancy.) Such focused work underscores complexities in characterization and the narrator’s role.

In Our Time teems with nuanced hetero- and homosocial dynamics in the stories and inter-chapters. The ways in which, for instance, Nick and Bill interact late in “The End of Something” and throughout “The Three-Day Blow” suggest Hemingway’s exploration of dual masculinities—Nick’s more emotional character contrasts Bill’s more stoic one when “that Marge business” comes up. That Nick “said nothing” in response to Bill’s criticisms of marriage reveals to students how close reading can clarify gender constructs—here, that Nick keeps his anxieties about Marjorie to himself to project a controlled aura expected of a postwar man (46–47). This triangulated relationship—Nick, Bill, Marjorie—develops character and theme. One sees the same triangulation in “Out of Season” (the American couple and Peduzzi) and “Cat in the Rain” (the American couple and the hotel keeper), suggesting In Our Time’s rich intratextuality—which students tend to see more clearly when rereading and writing about the stories. That Marjorie is linguistically present in “The Three-Day Blow” indicates how Hemingway outlines Nick’s nuanced masculinity: namely, as Marjorie’s (former) romantic companion and as Bill’s male-bonding and drinking companion. Even in stories in which women are not present in the scene, only talked about—such as “The Three-Day Blow” or “The Battler”—students can see how Hemingway offers an interactive model of gender—namely, how what is “masculine” and/or “feminine” is fluid and socially contingent.²

To encourage a meaningful literary-critical dialogue, I highlight a scholarly claim and then encourage students to repurpose it with a different text. For example, we extend Janet Lyon’s idea about the “fungibility of sexuality and gender” (230) in “The Sea Change” to such stories as “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” or “Out of Season.”³ I ask students, How does Hemingway reflect and complicate gender as something unstable? How does Hemingway help us question Dr. Adams’s conflicted masculinity in relation to his wife and Dick Boulton? Along these lines, Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes give a persuasive reading of “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” in Hemingway’s Genders (1994) that we extend to other In Our Time pieces highlighting “the interaction—and occasional conflict—among … cultural codes,” such as those concerning sexuality, morality, and marriage (83). In their section on Nick Adams’s growing awareness of marriage and parent-child relationships, Comley and Scholes conclude with a claim that students can apply to specific stories: “If Hemingway’s male figures are organized around a problematic opposition of boyhood to fatherhood, his females may well be deployed in a manner that is the shadow of this one, in which the space between girlhood and motherhood is scarcely fit for human habitation” (19). After unpacking Comley and Scholes’s claim—a key first step when using scholarly criticism in class—the students focus on specific characters and their gender roles to determine whose worlds are and are not “problematic” and “scarcely fit for human habitation.” The unnamed mothers of “Indian Camp” and “Cross-Country Snow,” in conjunction with Marjorie, Mrs. Elliot, and Mrs. Adams, give students different kinds of girls and mothers—to use the Comley and Scholes binary—to discuss as they come to understand gender as socially constructed and dynamic. Students can also explore and debate the male-male relations of “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and “The Three-Day Blow” and/or male-female relations in “Cat in the Rain” and “Indian Camp” through the claims of Comley and Scholes.

Another relevant critical work accessible to undergraduates, Rita Barnard’s “Modern American Fiction,” usefully contextualizes the “structural disjuncture,” “rituals of masculinity” (56), and “extreme immediacy” (57) of In Our Time. Students read this essay early in the semester and then read In Our Time vis-à-vis postwar avant-gardism and gender relations. In both cases, students connect Barnard’s sense of “extreme immediacy”—which I read as a complement to the text’s palpable content, imagery, and style—to the gender themes of “The End of Something,” “Indian Camp,” and several inter-chapters of the text. Barnard’s multilayered approach helps prevent compartmentalization that, for instance, might not account for how In Our Time’s story/vignette arrangement complements its manifold gender roles.

To join context and content to structure, I have groups of two or three students do focused work with a two-page sequence of In Our Time to understand the interrelationship between the text’s themes and the order of vignettes and stories. (Students do similar work with other fragmented modernist texts, such as Cane and As I Lay Dying.) Students who choose a vignette and the beginning or ending of an adjacent story are better able to analyze the vignettes as textual bridges that comment on the stories. For instance, students can connect Chapter X (“They whack-whacked the white horse …” [89]) and the preceding “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” in terms of the indecision shown by both the bull and Mr. Elliot. The unnamed soldier’s anxiety in Chapter VII (“While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta …” [67]) at some level anticipates the problems of readjustment Harold Krebs experiences in the following story “Soldier’s Home.” Such close work with the stories’ themes and structure helps students make connections within and among modernist texts. While the unnamed soldier in Chapter VII is not Krebs per se, the story and vignette telescope the issues of war and postwar masculinity that Hemingway explores throughout the text, issues that students encounter initially through the interpretive model Barnard offers.

Having initially come to understand In Our Time on its own as a signature text of Hemingway’s exploration of gender, students then situate it with and against other modernist works. For instance, we explore gender and sexuality in The Awakening, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” In Our Time also gives readers numerous instances of men looking at—and sometimes objectifying—women, such as in “The End of Something” and “Cross-Country Snow.” Juxtaposing these stories with “Karintha” and “Bona and Paul” in Cane or depictions of Addie and Dewey Dell Bundren in As I Lay Dying reveals how the authors imagined gender as a continuum partly defined by the male gaze. This practice, again, gives students some useful critical language to describe something they see often: men gazing at women.⁴ Faulkner’s pregnant, unwed Dewey Dell in some respects echoes the unwed waitress in “Cross-Country Snow” who serves Nick and George. “She’s got that baby coming without being married and she’s touchy,” George observes. He continues: “Hell, no girls get married around here till they’re knocked up,” suggesting a consequence of sexual activity that Hemingway would weave into “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) and other works. Continuing to define gender dynamically, Hemingway has Nick and George wishing “[they] could just bum together” shortly after discussing the pregnant waitress, suggesting an idyllic masculinity free of the fatherly responsibility she symbolizes (In Our Time 110–11). Hemingway again clarifies a key unspoken moment: Nick’s seeing the pregnant waitress seems to trigger the thoughts—and attendant anxieties—about how Helen’s pregnancy is working against the men’s freedom.

When reading Toomer’s Cane—often right before In Our Time—students discuss a similar power juxtaposition in such stories as “Karintha” (“This interest of the male, who wishes to ripen a growing thing too soon, could mean no good to her” [5]) and “Theater” (“Above the staleness, one dancer throws herself into it. Dorris. John sees her. Her hair, crisp-curled, is bobbed. Bushy, black hair bobbing about her lemon-colored face” [52]).⁵ When read consecutively, Cane and In Our Time show students how such multi-perspective modernist texts offer a diversity of gender performances. That these and other texts are more complementary than imitative of each other enables students to develop nuanced arguments about gender and aesthetics as they function across literary modernism.

At key moments within In Our Time, Cane, and As I Lay Dying, the authors reverse this male gaze, giving female characters a greater degree of feminine autonomy and self-confidence. The beginning of Toomer’s “Bona and Paul” shows Bona eyeing Paul in romantic qua erotic terms: “He is a candle that dances in a grove swung with pale balloons,” she thinks while she “sees” him play basketball and “[t]he dance of his blue-trousered limbs thrills her” (70). Relatedly, in As I Lay Dying Addie Bundren’s affair with Reverend Whitfield telescopes her sexual autonomy, resistance to a mother/wife role, and sense of self: “While I waited for him in the woods,” Addie remembers in the novel’s only chapter in her voice, “waiting for him before he saw me, I would think of him as dressed in sin” (175–76; emphasis added). Initially, at least, Addie does the looking in remembering her erotic relationship with Whitfield, a kind of culmination of Bona’s eyeing Paul. The gendered, erotic gaze here is mutual and in keeping with modern constructions of gender, such as the New Woman. It aligns Addie with a woman like Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, another unhappily married character who unapologetically violates the cult of true womanhood. Making such thematic connections helps students see these and other modernist works in sequence and in context, as opposed to in a proverbial vacuum on the pages of an anthology.

In “The End of Something” Marjorie, too, works against Nick’s gaze after their breakup: “He was afraid to look at Marjorie. Then he looked at her. She sat there with her back toward him. He looked at her back.” Nick’s other, more commonly masculine pursuits—fishing, soldiering, male bonding—notwithstanding, his sensitivity toward Marjorie counterbalances the freedom he envisions after the breakup. Bill’s asking “‘Did she go all right?’” suggests that Nick had told Bill his plans (In Our Time 34–35). Bill can be said to embody what Janet Adelman has called in another context an “absent presence” throughout “The End of Something,” since he is presumably biding his time before night-fishing with Nick.⁶ That Nick still thinks fondly of Marjorie in “The Three-Day Blow” when talking with Bill reverses this important absence of a gender-inflected character and again helps (re)define Nick’s masculinity. To fill in the spectrum of womanhood that connects our course readings, I ask the students to situate specific texts’ characters in relation to those in previous readings—such as how Mr. Adams’s role as husband and father relates to those of Anse Bundren, Léonce Pontellier, and Tom Buchanan, or how the wife in “Cat in the Rain” compares to other modern women—is she more of a … Daisy? Jordan? Edna? Addie? Bona?

Through these and other examples, students see evidence of some resistance to patriarchy...