Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender

A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Selected Works

Tania Chakravertty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032343143
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000726572
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Tania Chakravertty is the Dean of Students' Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women's University, West Bengal, India. Chakravertty has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University on "Gender Representations in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway". Chakravertty visited the US to participate in the academic group project "Strengthening and Widening the Scope of American Studies: The U.S. Experience" in 2010 as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her monographs have appeared in national and international journals.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• 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