In Pursuit of the Natural Body:
Hemingway’s Struggle with Conflicting Values in His Life and Works

Yasushi Takano

Contents
Abbreviationsv

Introductionvii

I War and Disruption of Self:
Representations of War Wounds
1 War Stories after the Great War

3

2 A Soldier’s Displaced Intestine

9

3 The Road to the Natural Body

17

II The Politics of Pain:
Representations of the Anaesthetized Body
4 “Her Screams Are Not Important”

33

5 “The Marvellous Thing Is That It’s Painless”

41

III

Countering Victorian Normalization:
Representations of Sexuality

6 Between the Puritan and the Libertine

61

7 The Wrath of God

67

8 That Awful Lust

77

IV

Transgressing the Gender Boundary:Representations of Hair

9 Pregnancy and Sterilization89

10 In Pursuit of Femininity

95

Conclusion

105

Appendix — A Chronology of Hemingway’s Works

107

Works Cited

113

Index

119
iii

Abbreviations
ARIT
CSS
DIA
FTA
FWBT
GE
GHA
MF
NAS
OMS
SAR
SL
THHN
TS
TAF

Across the River and Into the Trees
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Finca Vigı́a Edition
Death in the Afternoon
A Farewell to Arms
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Garden of Eden
Green Hills of Africa
A Moveable Feast
The Nick Adams Stories
The Old Man and the Sea
The Sun Also Rises
Selected Letters: 1917-1961
To Have and Have Not
The Torrents of Spring
True at First Light: A Fictional MemoirvIntroduction
At the beginning of the twentieth century, great upheavals were taking place all over
the world, triggered by the First World War. Ernest Hemingway is one of many
writers who participated in the war and started his career as a professional writerin the period of confusion after the war. This war, which was called “the war toend all wars,” and which was considered the most brutal in previous human history, exerted a crucial influence on the general view of the human body throughtwo innovative technological developments: advancements in medical treatment andscientific improvements in the creation of weapons of mass destruction.1 The former development was accelerated in order to treat wounded soldiers, while the latter
was encouraged by the armament industry in order to kill soldiers as eﬃciently as
possible. Both developments, though used completely for the opposite purposes,
implanted in people’s minds a newly formed conception about the human body: byshattering soldiers’ bodies into pieces with mechanical weapons, and by mechanizing
those soldiers’ bodies with various artificial devices, the latest technology of the age
eventually incorporated into the technological ideology not only participants in the
war but the general public who observed a great number of “broken” and then “repaired” soldiers during and after the war, forcing their views of the body to change
completely. The first decades of the twentieth century, thus, can be characterized bythis supremacy of technology, whereby people’s notion of the body were irrevocablyaltered.
In addition, the Great War also gave birth to various cultural movements thatstarted around the turn of the century, of which we shall discuss two: the dress
reform movement2 and sexual liberation. As Stephen Kern states in his study of
the Victorian view of the body, “During the latter half of the nineteenth century thecall for reform of women’s clothing became steadily more vociferous as physicians,
aestheticians, and physical culture advocates studied the destructive consequencesof tight lacing” (Anatomy 13). Numerous suggestions and attempts were made to
improve the sartorial condition, in the course of which women’s “unnatural” bodily state was gradually exposed to public attention. Though securely covered underelaborate and voluminous corsets and crinolines, the female body was always underdiscussion, women stripped of their clothes and examined from an anatomical pointof view. Those attempts, however, had remained unsuccessful until the First World
War. Kern remarks as follows:
The war also inaugurated changes in clothing which finally began to respond to the advocates of reform, who had been unheeded for the past half
century. The exigencies of a wartime situation led to a reduction of interest
vii

viii

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
in high fashion. Shortages of materials forced designers to use less, anddresses began to shorten. In England dresses were six inches oﬀ the floor
by February 1915. A shortage of manpower obliged women to take on jobs
that had traditionally been reserved for men, with the result that women
employed in factories in England were forced to abandon the corset, thepetticoats, and the puﬀy leg-o-mutton sleeves and adopt safer clothing towork around the machines. The change in jobs followed a change in sex
roles, which led to a masculinization of dress for women, so that by the endof the war women were seen wearing men’s coats and ties and a variety ofmodified military and civilian uniforms. (Anatomy 16-17)

We can easily imagine the enormous impact on soldiers who had been familiar withwomen in traditional attire before the war and who went home to see every femaleacquaintance with her body inordinately exposed in the latest fashion.
What is more, the interwar period witnessed another radical change in women’s
appearance: their short hair. The sudden popularity of women’s bobbed hair in the
1920s is attributed to various factors, yet necessity to “work around the machines”
and “a change in sex roles” during the war certainly contributed to this revolution in
women’s hair.3
Hemingway was also aware of these diﬀerences as is seen in the following passage:
Most of them had their hair cut short. When he went away only little girls
wore their hair like that or girls that were fast. They all wore sweaters andshirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was a pattern. He liked to lookat them from the front porch as they walked on the other side of the street.
He liked to watch them walking under the shade of the trees. He liked theround Dutch collars above their sweaters. He liked their silk stockings andflat shoes. He liked their bobbed hair and the way they walked. (CSS 112)
Their “sweaters and shirt waists” suggest that they have abandoned the traditionaltight lacing, and their “silk stockings” indicate that they wear short skirts. Their“bobbed hair,” which was a sign of loose morals (“girls that were fast”) before thewar, is now merely a fashion of their choice and widely prevalent in the town. Thiswide gap in the level of bodily exposure before and after the war — the exposure ofbodily parts that people could never have seen in public in the prewar era — musthave reawakened in the people’s mind the apparent yet elusive fact that there is abody inside a garment.
In the age of sexual liberation, another social eﬀect of the Great War, people
certainly knew about the birds and the bees — what few people could have known
in the previous century. As Michael Reynolds remarks, “During Hemingway’s highschool years, sex education was the center of national debate.”

Introductionix

Oak Park [Hemingway’s hometown], conservative in behavior but usually progressive in education, accepted sex education as having somemerit. Boys could learn a healthy Christian approach to their bodies at the
Y.M.C.A. The First Congregational Church sponsored lectures for separate
classes of boys and girls in their teens. (Young 119)
Of course, this “sex education” would have been diﬀerent from what we are now
familiar with. What young students were taught in this period was not so muchthe liberal instruction in sexuality as merely the regulation of information about thishighly sensitive matter. It is very likely that sex education in Oak Park at the time
was for the purpose of not only instructing young boys and girls but also suppressing
desires unacceptable in society, for teaching what was regarded as taboo, and reshaping their desires in conformity with the social norm. We can find evidence of this
supposition in Hemingway’s remark:Three things keep boys from promiscuous intercourse, religious belief,
timidity, and fear of venereal diseases. The last is most commonly the basis of appeal made by the Y.M.C.A. and other institutions for clean living.
(DIA 103)
The foremost purpose of sex education, we are told, was to “keep boys from promiscuous intercourse.” This kind of sex instruction, typical of Victorian societies, wasintended not to elucidate the mystery of sexual matters but to provoke an irrational
fear so that children would be confined within the boundary of acceptable behaviors.
Yet it is clear from biographical evidence that Hemingway knew much morethan what was taught in such education and maybe what the average youth in Oak
Park at that time knew: “Growing up as he did in a house full of women and withhis father’s medical library on the shelves, he was fully aware of female anatomy.
[. . . ] What he learned in the army brothels in Italy and listening to soldiers talk, hesupplemented with reading” (Reynolds, Young 120). Many biographers, however,argue that he could never have had “promiscuous intercourse” and, though posing as
a libertine, he strictly observed old-fashioned regulations inscribed in his body since
his childhood.4 Raised in the transition period in which the traditional rigidity about
sexuality was gradually being replaced by the opening stage of our current leniency
in the matter, he must have inherited the sense of repulsion toward the frankness ofyounger generations, and at the same time been initiated into advanced ideas about
sexual matters.
Postwar America was an unstable period between the old set of values and acompletely new mode of thinking — the romantic notion of the body was being supplanted by the mechanized view of the body, the traditional tight lacing by the latest
fashions of shirt waists and short skirts, and the conservative and repressive viewof sexuality by the progressive leniency about the matter — in short, Victorianism
by Modernism. In the society in which mutually exclusive values conflicted withx

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

each other, it is natural that both conflicting value systems were inscribed indelibly
in Hemingway’s body. His life and works, thus, at once reflected the confusion of
turbulent social conditions and represented, as a cultural icon, emotional turmoil ina rapidly changing society. Though he pretended throughout his lifetime to be a person more sexually experienced than he really was, he, as most biographers argue,
could never escape from the stern Victorian rigidity about sexual matters. In short,
Hemingway was a Modernist in appearance, a Victorian at the core.
These contradictory values and their conflicts naturally appear in Hemingway’s
works, and the aim of this thesis is to show this cultural confusion through his various
attempts to reconcile himself with changing values through writing stories. As weshall see below, these attempts oﬀered him a great deal of creative energy. The
first part, entitled “War and Disruption of Self: Representations of War Wounds,”
will demonstrate how one of the most enormous social upheavals in human history
influenced the author’s view of the body. Our reading of Hemingway’s war stories
will clarify the intriguing fact that these stories convey the shift of people’s view ofthe body precipitated by the war. Hemingway participated in the First World War,and his exposure to numerous dead and wounded bodies deeply aﬀected his view ofthe body. What is more, the technology of restoring the naturalness of such bodies
totally fascinated him, and this motif is sublimated into the remarkably illuminating
representation of “mechanotherapy.” We shall make it clear that these stories describe
protagonists’ initiation into the corporeal nature of human existence, which, in thesociety before the war, had escaped from people’s consciousness.
In the second part, “The Politics of Pain: Representations of the Anaesthetized
Body,” we will discuss further the technology that intervenes in the sphere of thebody, taking up anaesthesia, the celebrated technological innovation of the nineteenth century. When first invented, anaesthesia was regarded as the most triumphantsymbol of civilized society, as a great accomplishment indicating that humanity hadat last overcome pain. Yet, at the beginning of the twentieth century and with thedecisive influence of the war producing general disillusionment among the postwar
generation, anaesthesia turned into a symbol of the paralyzed inertness of the era andcame to be charged with negative values. We shall, in the first chapter, see completely
diﬀerent representations of anaesthesia — two Caesarean sections, one in “Indian
Camp” and the other in A Farewell to Arms; the former is done without anaesthesia,
while the latter is marked by much administration of laughing gas. And in the second chapter, we shall concentrate on the negative implication of the paralyzed state;and by looking chronologically at his depictions of the benumbed sensation from theearliest stories to those in the late 1930s, we will make it clear how Hemingway used
the motif of non-sensation in his stories to overcome the period of his literary sterility
and to restore his creative energy.
The third part, “Against the Victorian Normalization: Representations of Sexuality,” will examine Hemingway’s equivocal expression about sexual matters. By
looking over representations of his fear of syphilis, we can recognize Hemingway’s

Introductionxi

ambivalent attitude toward sexual matters: he sometimes depicts the disease as acourageous feat for a libertine; while on another occasion he represents it as a feared
result of sexual promiscuity. In this contradiction, we can detect both his desire forand inability to escape from Victorian morality. In this part, we shall explore his
sense of guilt about his own sexual desire and his desperate attempt to escape fromthe dilemma.
The last part, “Transgressing the Gender Boundary: Representations of Hair,”will deal with the motif of hairstyle to investigate Hemingway’s peculiar concern
with the hair of both women and men. Observing his protagonists’ attitudes toward
hair, we can make it clear that he charged hair with a certain symbolical significance— a sign displaying the procreativity of its wearer. The attempt to crop women’shair, which is often seen in his early stories, is a symbolic sterilization to deprive
them of the reproductive ability. We can thus conclude that the recurrent motif ofwomen’s haircutting reflects Hemingway’s reluctance to become a father in his earlyyears. However, he later describes male characters transgressing the gender boundary through tonsorial experiments to acquire productivity, peculiar, in Hemingway’s
mind, to women. In the course of this reconciliation with femininity, he shows under
the surface of his masculine pose a curious disposition toward feminine quality: his
gradual inclination toward femininity, his discovery of the rich possibility of transgressing the gender boundary, and his persistent desire to merge with femininity.
The body has always been vested with a certain significance particular to every
age and every culture, and it is clear that the most dramatic change of the significanceof the body in our recent history occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century.
This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between such cultural contexts andone of the most influential cultural icons in America.

Notes
1

See Stanley Cooperman’s World War I and the American Novel and Trudi Tate’s Modernism, History and the First World War.

2

Elizabeth Kendall in her history of dance and American culture, describes the movement as follows: “Corsets were made for girls starting at about the age of three; a child could pass throughfifteen or twenty graduated corset sizes before she became an adult. Of course not all motherspressed corsets on their daughters, but even modified versions of this shape slowed children down.
A Dr. Mary J. Saﬀerd-Blake described a visit to a city grammar school where twenty-nine out of
the forty-two girls in the first class wore corsets, and none of the forty-two could raise their arms
over their heads (the corresponding class of boys had no trouble doing this)” (22). The harmful
influences of tight lacing on the female body were the common topic throughout the latter half ofthe nineteenth century.

3

For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Grant McCracken’s study of hair culture, Big Hair: A
Journey into the Transformation of Self.

4

See, for example, Donaldson 179-81.

Part I

War and Disruption of Self:
Representations of War Wounds

Chapter 1
War Stories after the Great WarW

ith the rapid development of mechanized technology — including the extraordinary expansion of worldwide transportation, the spread of the mass
media, and, of course, successive inventions of weapons aimed at mass
destruction — the First World War was completely diﬀerent from any previous war
human beings had ever experienced, thus imposing an unparalleled influence on soldiers who participated in the war as well as civilians who observed it through themass media. In the period of desolate and wasteful devastation, what people witnessed irrevocably changed how they experienced daily life, how they thought abouthumanity, and how they perceived the meanings of life: “In four years the belief in
evolution, progress, and history itself was wiped out as Europeans were separated
from the ‘pre-historic days’ of the prewar years by the violence of war” (Kern, Time291). This radical separateness before and after the war must be represented in the
war literature, and we shall investigate Hemingway’s texts against the background of
this drastic change in people’s perception in the early part of the twentieth century.
To begin with, we shall briefly look at representations of wounded soldiers in the
Civil War literature, which is characterized by what should be called the degenerated
body. In almost all the war books before the First World War, wounded soldiers aredescribed as atavistic figures degenerated into the state of primitive animals. The
most striking evidence of this beast-like retrogression caused by wounding can befound in the finest story written about the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce’s “Chickamauga,” which depicts the horrible parade of black shadows creeping “by dozens
and by hundreds”:
To him [a boy] it was a merry spectacle. [. . . ] He now approached one ofthese crawling figures from behind and with an agile movement mounted
it astride. The man sank upon his breast, recovered, flung the small boy
fiercely to the ground as an unbroken colt might have done, then turned
upon him a face that lacked a lower jaw — from the upper teeth to thethroat was a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The unnatural prominence of nose, the absence of chin, thefierce eyes, gave this man the appearance of a great bird of prey crimsonedin throat and breast by the blood of its quarry. [. . . ] And so the clumsy
multitude dragged itself slowly and painfully along in hideous pantomime— moved forward down the slope like a swarm of great black beetles, withnever a sound of going — in silence profound, absolute. (316, emphases

34

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
are mine)

This mysterious herd is found to be remnants of a defeated army. The description ofwounded soldiers described here is no less atrocious than what was produced after
the First World War, yet there is a fundamental diﬀerence between the novels in both
periods: these soldiers of the Civil War no longer belong to the realm of humanbeings, but to the realm of animals or insects. They are thus repeatedly described inmetaphors and similes of nonhuman creatures as indicated in italics above.
The primary cause of this belittlement of the wounded soldiers can be located in
the great prevalence of Social Darwinism in the latter half of the nineteenth century
and, as a result, in the terror about the degeneration of the human race. If once a
person is heavily disfigured — heavily enough to be deformed out of the ordinary
human shape — the person should be, as it were, ostracized from the boundary ofhumanity.
The representation of wounded soldiers as something other than human is a familiar trope abounding in news articles and war literature in the age to convey thestate of the sick and wounded. Even in the eyes of Walt Whitman, nursing in field
hospitals during the Civil War and known to be so sympathetic to injured soldiers,
deformed figures in the war appeared to him to be removed from humanity: “Thenthe camps of the wounded — O heavens, what scene is this? — is this indeed humanity — these butchers’ shambles? There are several of them. There they lie, in thelargest, in an open space in the woods, from 200 to 300 poor fellows — the groans
and screams — the odor of blood, mixed with the fresh scent of the night, the grass,
the trees — that slaughter-house!” (746-47, emphasis is original). “the poor fellow,
even when awake, is like some frighten’d shy animal” (749). “Can those be men —those little livid brown, ash-streak’d monkey-looking dwarfs? — are they really notmummied, dwindled corpses?” (789, emphasis is original).
As is seen in the following quotation, many of these illustrations transforming
the wounded into animals are primarily to attack their enemies who can treat humanbeings as if they were brutes, namely to impose brutality on their enemies who killand injure “our” soldiers: “[. . . ] at last they brought carts into which they huddled
our sick and wounded and dashed oﬀ, jolting and jostling them as they drove recklessly over the rough pavement very much after the manner of a butcher with a loadof calves” (“In the ‘Libey’ ” 122, emphasis is mine). “[The photographs portraying
rebel cruelty] is the work of desperate and infuriated men whose human instincts
have become inbruted [sic] by the constant habit of outraging humanity. There isno civilized nation In [sic] the world with which we could be at war which would
suﬀer the prisoners in its hands to receive such treatment as our men get from therebels; and the reason is, that none of them are slaveholding nations, for nowhereare human life and human nature so cheap as among those who treat human beings
like cattle” (“Rebel Cruelty” 387, emphasis is mine). However, the simile representing wounded soldiers as so many animals functions as a double-edged symbol:

War and Disruption of Self5

the brutality charged on enemy soldiers is irresistibly passed to their fellow soldiers;
accordingly, they are treated as brutes, and look like brutes because of their injury.
After all, it is always the wounded who are compared with animals. The lately discovered diary of a private, Robert Knox Sneden records, when he was in an enemy
stockade, the animal-like situation that soldiers were in. They never talk but just utter“shrieks, oaths and moans,” and “because some would make much noise while dying
those sleeping near would kick them in the side or head saying ‘why don’t you diequietly you!’ ” (249). They never walk yet “crawl all the way to the gates on hands
and knees — many of the lame and crippled hobble along on crutches made out oftent poles — while hundreds cannot go at all — being too weak to walk there or get
there any how” (251). After all “The sick there lie or wallow like hogs in the sandwhich is teeming with lice and maggots by the million!” (228, emphasis is mine) and“They resemble a lot of wild animals, though half of them are sent back without any
help” (231, emphasis is mine).
In contrast, the literature of the Great War abounds with images of the fragmented
body rather than the degenerated. As Trudi Tate states in his study of World War I
and war literature, fiction of the Great War is marked by the wide prevalence of thefragmentation of the body:
Perhaps the most enduring image of the Great War [in war books] is of
the male body in fragments — an image in which war technology and notions of the human body intersect in horrible new ways. Developments in
weapons technology made it possible for unprecedented numbers of men
to be blown apart in battle; many more were witness to such sight. (78)
Not only did modern technology shatter numerous bodies of soldiers but also helped
them recover from heavily wounded states. The rapid progress of medical technology
in the first decades of the century allowed doctors to treat with much hope to save thelives of soldiers suﬀering from hitherto untreatable wounds, so that medicine seemed
to laymen almost omnipotent, fixing the disfigured body. In Faulkner’s Soldiers’
Pay, for instance, Robert Saunders says that “Doctors can do anything these days”(109).1 In people’s conception in those days, in fact, doctors took charge of repairing
the human body as if it were a kind of machine; thus the body could be divided
into small parts, reassembled into a whole, and replaced by artificial devices such as
wheelchairs, artificial bones, or prostheses.2
The diﬀerence between the fragmented body and the degenerated body is a problem more important than it seems at a glance; leading not merely to the mode ofrepresenting the wounded body, but to the very definition of humanity — the problem whether or not the wounded are human. The answer in each age to this problem
can be seen if the wounded are given a voice of their own. As the soldier who lost his
chin in Bierce’s passage quoted earlier (“a face that lacked a lower jaw”) typicallysymbolizes, deformed and beast-like beings in the Civil War had no voice of their

6

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

own. As primitive animals, they never talk but utter only a growl, a groan, or a roar.
This hideous spectacle is thus dominated by “silence profound, absolute.”
The image of mouthless animals is indeed a recurrent motif in Civil War literature. Without the firsthand experience of soldiering, Stephen Crane inherits thistradition in his classical war novel, The Red Badge of Courage:
The orderly sergeant of the youth’s company was shot through the cheeks.
Its supports being injured, his jaw hung afar down, disclosing in the wide
cavern of his mouth a pulsing mass of blood and teeth. And with it all hemade attempts to cry out. In his endeavor there was a dreadful earnestness,
as if he conceived that one great shriek would make him well. (91)
In the nineteenth century, indeed, the mouth or the jaw was a common part of the
body injured in war. “Receiving no answer, he stooped down and discovered that abullet had entered the poor fellow’s mouth and gone out at the back of his head [. . . ]”(“The Fourteenth at Gettysburg” 747).
Obsessed by the terror of degeneration, people in the nineteenth century had no
generosity to give deformed figures the right to speak. What separates Civil War
literature from Great War literature is not the degree of cruelty of depiction nor ofthe deformation of the body, but the distance between the narrator and the wounded
represented. Hopeless of recovering at the time prior to the dawn of technologicalinnovation in medical science, the wounded, already doomed to death, were not theobject of sympathy but of fear. In short, the wounded were always the others in thenineteenth century.
On the contrary, the remarkable development of medical technology ushered in
a completely diﬀerent way of treating the wounded. Many wounded soldiers in thenovels of the Great War, provided with their own voice, describe their bodily state
to understand what exactly has happened to them. Since a wound itself is the mirror
reflecting the total violence of mass murder, it must be delineated as a testimony by
the injured soldier himself. Some of the wounded in the Great War could survive byvirtue of medical technology, and the experience of being wounded granted them theright to speak out about the unprecedented atrocity of technological warfare. As aresult, even the protagonist most severely wounded in the whole literary history, Joe
Bonham — whose arms and legs are cut oﬀ, and whose ears, eyes, nose, and mouth
are forever lost, who is thereby incapable of the least movement, and completelydeaf and dumb — in the tradition of World War I literature, desperately conveys to
the reader what he is feeling and thinking. In fact, he is so talkative in delivering his
speech in a stream-of-consciousness manner that the speech is sometimes irritatingly
lengthy:He thought here you are Joe Bonham lying like a side of beef all the restof your life and for what? Somebody tapped you on the shoulder and saidcome along son we’re going to war. So you went. But why? In any otherWar and Disruption of Self

7

deal even like buying a car or running an errand you had the right to say
what’s there in it for me? Otherwise you’d be buying bad cars for too muchmoney or running errands for fools and starving to death. It was a kind of
duty you owed yourself that when anybody said come on son do this or dothat you should stand up and say look mister why should I to get out of itin the end? But when a guy comes along and says here come with me andrisk your life and maybe die or be crippled why then you’ve got no rights.
You haven’t even the right to say yes or no or I’ll think it over. There areplenty of laws to protect guys’ money even in war time but there’s nothing
on the books says a man’s life’s his own. (Trumbo 142-43)
Donald Mahon in Soldiers’ Pay is in a similar situation, though the degree of
bodily deformation is much less. Having lost his eyesight and suﬀering from amnesia
as well as physical damage, Donald lives in the same darkness as that which shrouds
Joe. Donald, unlike Joe who desperately wants to communicate with the outside
world, no longer shows interest in anything around him, and this general indiﬀerence
keeps him fairly reticent throughout the novel. However, the narrator records fromthe viewpoint of Donald the memory retrieved just before the death of this “grownchild” (Faulkner 97); the whole eighth section of chapter eight is devoted to hisreverie about what happened to him when he was injured. Donald finally recovers
his voice on his deathbed. Writers who wrote war stories after the Great War were,in a sense, much more sympathetic to the wounded than their predecessors had been.
The fragmentation of the body gave rise to an important change in the definitionof humanity: a human being could be seen as human even if the body of the person
was crucially deformed. Of course people have lost their limbs or other bodily parts
since as early as humanity began, yet those who were heavily disfigured were excluded from the fellowship as we have seen in Civil War fiction. On the other hand,people after the First World War were in great danger in constructing their identity:
in the nineteenth century, people’s identity was based on the body in normal shape,
while, after watching this large-scale butchery of soldiers, people could no longer
confirm their identity by the shape of their body. In short, a prerequisite condition
to being human was now, because of the innovative progress of medical technology,
no longer found in the realm of corporeality but somewhere else between the bodyand the spirit. One of the primary concerns for modernist writers was the quest forthe place where this “somewhere else” is.3 Hereafter, we shall see how Hemingway
captured and conveyed the confusion when people in the time of this great turbulence
faced the unprecedented atrocities and suﬀered from a severe identity crisis.

8

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Notes
1

Joe Bonham in Johnny Got His Gun is a little critical of the medicine at the time: “The doctors
were getting pretty smart especially now that they had had three or four years in the army withplenty of raw material to experiment on. If they got to you quickly enough so you didn’t bleed todeath they could save you from almost any kind of injury” (Trumbo 109-10).

2

We can find many examples of the dividable, combinable, and replaceable body in the twentiethcentury literature. Cliﬀord Chatterley is described to return from war “more or less in bits,” yet“the bits seemed to grow together again. For two years he remained in the doctor’s hands. Thenhe was pronounced a cure, and could return to life again, with the lower half of his body, from thehips down, paralysed for ever” (Lawrence, Chatterley 5). Soldiers’ Pay also records the generalperception of the body in those days: “the human machine can only be patched and parts replaced
up to a certain point” (Faulkner 129). This perception is reflected in Hemingway’s first novel, The
Torrents of Spring, which describes a heavily fragmented character, an Indian who “got both arms
and both legs shot oﬀ at Ypres.” With artificial limbs, the Indian, we are told, plays pool muchbetter than able-bodied Yogi Johnson. Though caricaturally described, this character represents
how people in the postwar years thought about the war and technology.

3

As to the philosophical questioning of the concept of the body among men of letters at the modernist period, see Kern, Love 61-88.

Chapter 2
A Soldier’s Displaced IntestineIn the early part of A Farewell to Arms, we see a curious scene in which Frederic,whose duty is to transport the sick and wounded on the battlefield, meets a soldier
dragging his intestine. The soldier has a hernia, and, as he later admits, hasdeliberately removed his truss to be released from further military service.
“What’s wrong with your leg?”“It’s not my leg. I got a rupture.”“Why don’t you ride with the transport?” I asked. “Why don’t you go
to the hospital?”“They won’t let me. The lieutenant said I slipped the truss on purpose.”“Let me feel it.”
“It’s way out.”“Which side is it on?”“Here.”
I felt it.
“Cough,” I said.
“I’m afraid it will make it bigger. It’s twice as big as it was this morning.” (34)The most striking aspect of this scene is Frederic’s response to this soldier: “Letme feel it.” This request to touch the intestine protruding from its normal position
produces a bizarre impression on the reader. What purpose does the scene serve forthe overall eﬀect of the novel? We can never answer this question, unless we realizethat this novel intends to show a changing perception of the human body during thefirst mechanized war.1
During and after the Great War, numerous war novels were produced to describe
the devastatingly atrocious ravages of new scientific weapons of mass destruction.
This new mode of technological and indiscriminate killing, widely diﬀerent fromthe former romantic and chivalrous face-to-face confrontations repeatedly told andretold by Civil War veterans, must have forced one to observe the body as something
diﬀerent from what it had been previously thought of. People in those days must
naturally have been influenced by the butchery of soldiers, and their former viewsof the body must have been irrevocably shattered once and for all. In this great
turbulence in the people’s view of the human body, this novel conveys the sense ofcollapse of the conception that had been safely retained until the war broke out. The

910

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

close look at the vicissitudes of Frederic’s view of the human body will make it clearthat A Farewell to Arms is a story intending to describe the vast influence of the GreatWar on those who participated in it and on their general views of the body.
People’s conception of wounds and the human body before the Great War iseloquently expressed in Catherine’s romantic notion of helping her fiancé: “[. . . ] I
remember having a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was. With asabre cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder.
Something picturesque” (20). For her, the wound is “something picturesque” anddoes not have the weight of the reality as observed in the real battlefield. Her fiancé inher imagination retains the totality of his body and his body is by no means divisible.
What she had wanted to nurse before she participated in the war was not the body ofher fiancé, but his total being abstracted from everyday experiences of him. At thisstage, she had not been aware of the corporeality of the human body.
According to George Orwell, simply being on a field of battle would exert an
influence on one’s view of the body. In his essay on the Spanish Civil War, Homage
to Catalonia, he states as follows:
You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire — notso much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don’t know where you
will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip
you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness. (44-45,
emphasis is original)
Since the body, under ordinary circumstances, somehow escapes becoming the objectof our attention, Orwell’s hypersensitivity to his own body, generated even before hesees the dead or the wounded, must naturally bring into consciousness the corporeality of his existence. The battlefield is, as it were, the arena of the embodiment ofwhat is normally repressed. Exposed to the danger of being hit by a bombardment
as an ambulance driver, Frederic also must have felt the same sensation, being in thevicinity of the front.
Witnessing wounded and dead bodies leads to the further awareness of one’s
bodily existence and forces one to realize a vast gulf yawning between the previous
notion of the body and the reality one observes. Hemingway records this realizationin “A Natural History of the Dead,” which was first published as a part of his essay,
Death in the Afternoon. Recounting his own experience as an ambulance driver when
he witnessed numerous dead bodies for the first time in a Milan munitions factory,
he points out two unexpected peculiarities that attracted his attention.2 First, he notices “inversion of the usual sex of the dead” for “it is a fact that one becomes so
accustomed to the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman
is quite shocking” (CSS 336). Then, he concludes the episode with the comment:“the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomicallines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a highWar and Disruption of Self

11

explosive shell” (CSS 337). Both peculiarities eﬀectively remind us of the diﬀerence
between the reality of actual killings he witnessed and the presumption about thedead body he had had in mind. The man and the woman being equally susceptible
to mortal danger, being incapable of conceiving of the death of the latter should be
regarded as too romantic a notion, as is Catherine’s imagination about the woundof her fiancé. Moreover, the anatomical line, originally invented for the purpose ofdividing the body into arbitrary categories to help people understand the bodily construction, somehow came to be perceived as a natural principle binding each bodily
part into a whole. Having had those presumptions beforehand, the narrator and othersoldiers involved are forced to think that the incident is paradoxically charged with“the quality of unreality” (CSS 337). It is, in fact, the bodies in their notion thatlack the quality of reality. These unusual peculiarities caught in their mind expose
the essential inadequacy of Western perception of the body which people had taken
for granted before this butchery of the human body; thus, functioning as a defamiliarization of our automatized sense of what we are made of. In short, soldiers inthis war discovered the simple fact that they were made of flesh and blood, bones
and intestines, and were not an assemblage of bodily parts tied together along theanatomical line.
However, the soldier’s protruding intestine in A Farewell to Arms tells us more:that it is uncontrollability and deformation of the body that devastatingly damage ourprevious view of the body. If every part of one’s body is well controlled and posited,
the bodily foundation of our existence will be hidden from our eyes and remain in
the realm of unconsciousness; while a wound or an illness immediately reminds us ofour highly susceptible nature to bodily limitations. For Frederic, the soldier with therupture, as an exemplar of such uncontrollability and deformation, gives rise to thesense of the hitherto unnoticed corporeality of human beings. His request to touch
the intestine displaced from its appropriate position is nothing but a manifestation of
the impact which lead to the collapse of his solid, stable, and sound view of the bodyhe retained up to that point.
Later in the story, Frederic also experiences this same uncontrollability and deformation when he is badly wounded by an Austrian mortar shell. This wound mustcompletely destroy his previous view of the body, and we shall hereafter focus on
the wound and the process of his recuperation from his disabled state. Recovering
consciousness after the bombardment, he first notices Passini, his subordinate, besidehim:
His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they wereboth smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held bytendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though
it were not connected. (55)
Passini’s and Frederic’s fear is not merely that of pain and death, but of the anxiety

12

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

that the body is helplessly deformed, devastatingly deviated from its normal shape,and no longer managed by his will — the fear that the body, which has been without
any doubt nothing but his own, is no longer his own. His identity has been heretofore
based, though unconsciously, on a secure view of the body; however, once he loses
that guarantee, he can no longer keep his identity intact.
Below is Frederic’s narrativization of his identity crisis caused by the enormous
impact of his disfigured body:
My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knewthat I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn’t
there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped myhand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I
looked at my leg and was very afraid. (55-56, emphases are mine)
We should notice here that he uses the word “my” eleven times in no more than fourlines. Though this frequency of first person pronouns is not especially unusual in
English, what he is doing here could be considered a desperate attempt to reaﬃrm
that the body is surely his own. His knee, disconnected from the place to which it belongs, not only causes him inordinate pain, but also reminds him of his corporeality,
giving rise to the awareness of his existence as a bodily substance, and frightening
him by the danger of losing his identity.
Though Frederic, who is the narrator as well, has been reticent throughout thenovel about his mental condition since he was wounded, we can surmise in the following quotation that the shock of this tragic event has had a lasting eﬀect:
Afterward it was dark outside and I could see the beams of the searchlights moving in the sky. I watched for a while and then went to sleep. I
slept heavily except once I woke sweating and scared and then went backto sleep trying to stay outside of my dream. I woke for good long before it
was light and heard roosters crowing and stayed on awake until it began to
be light. I was tired and once it was really light I went back to sleep again.
(88)
Frederic wakes up from a nightmare, presumably caused by a nervous breakdown
following the experience of being hit by the bombardment. Failing in the attempt
to avoid the nightmare, he has to lie awake till the sky brightens. A similar trouble
in sleeping in the dark is recognizable in the Nick Adams stories written around thetime of A Farewell to Arms. For example, “Now I Lay Me” reads thus:
I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long timewith the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself
go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time,ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go oﬀ

War and Disruption of Self

13

and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go
since, in the nights, just at the moment of going oﬀ to sleep, and I could
only stop it by a very great eﬀort. So while now I am fairly sure that it
would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to
make the experiment. (CSS, 276)This sense of the soul going out of the body suggests that his identity is seriously
threatened. In Hemingway’s works, the aftereﬀects of a physical wound are always
represented by insomnia in dark places, as is seen in the quotation above. On thesimplest level, Frederic seems to live a happy life in the hospital, looked after by
the selflessly devoted Catherine. There is, however, no denying that he stays up
all night and goes to sleep after the day breaks, even if he pretends that this vigil
is for the purpose of seeing Catherine alone at night. These clandestine meetings
might be interpreted as a result of insomnia from which he is still in the processof recovering. Bearing this possibility in mind, we might reconsider their romantic
love aﬀair as vital therapy for Frederic to recuperate from the nervous damage of thebombardment. It is very likely that he has an acute need to be blindly in love with
Catherine to repress the reality of his mental state.
After a successful operation on his knee, Frederic undergoes “treatments at theOspedale Maggiore for bending the knees, mechanical treatments, baking in a boxof mirrors with violet rays, massage, and baths” (117). Though the details of these“mechanotherapy treatments” are left unexplained in this novel, similar treatments
are mentioned in another of Hemingway’s war stories, “In Another Country.” Theprotagonist undergoing a mechanical treatment is described thus:
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to theankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it
move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine
lurched when it came to the bending part. (CSS 206)
The therapy we find here is typical of the age during and after the Great War. Modern
technology blew soldiers into pieces on an unprecedented scale, while the very same
technology could revive numerous patients who would have died in the previous age.
Helped by the latest technology, such as wheelchairs, artificial bones, and prosthetic
devices, terrible scars left on the bodies of soldiers easily became signs showing thegreat potential of mechanical technology. A scar, as Hemingway himself made useof in his real life, sometimes functions as a decoration for one’s deed; or sometimes
it is branded as a sign of mechanized civilization, as is seen in Cliﬀord Chatterleyin Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As Donald Mahon in Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay clearlyshows us, a soldier who recovered from a severe wound is a spectacle in which others
can see only what they want to see — such as fear, honor, stigma, and the like.
In the course of undergoing such treatments and being constantly shown theireﬀects — “photographs [. . . ] of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been

14

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

cured by the machines” (CSS 210) — patients gradually acquire a new view of the
body: the view that the human body is an assemblage of dividable segments, which
could be replaced by artificial artifacts.3 In short, patients are incorporated into themechanical ideology of modern medicine; and likewise Frederic’s once disfigured
body is reshaped through the body-as-machine view.4
Frederic afterward goes back to the front, and the Italian army is decisively defeated at the battle of Caporetto. In the confusion of the retreat, Carabinieri, to whom
Frederic refers as “battle police,” executes oﬃcers for absurd reasons. Frederic also
is sentenced to death, but has a narrow escape diving into the Tagliamento River.
After he secures his safety, he contemplates his body as follows:
Lying on the floor of the flat-car with the guns beside me under the canvas
I was wet, cold and very hungry. Finally I rolled over and lay flat on mystomach with my head on my arms. My knee was stiﬀ, but it had been verysatisfactory. Valentini had done a fine job. I had done half the retreat onfoot and swum part of the Tagliamento with his knee. It was his knee allright. The other knee was mine. Doctors did things to you and then it was
not your body any more. The head was mine, and the inside of the belly. It
was very hungry in there. I could feel it turn over on itself. The head wasmine, but not to use, not to think with, only to remember and not too much
remember. (231, emphases are mine)
We should notice again articles and genitive case pronouns attached to parts of the
body. The repetition of the pronoun “my” as is seen in the second line in this quotation is similar to what we observed in Frederic’s frightened meditation on the stateof his wound shortly after the bombardment. However, the very important diﬀerence
between both passages is that, here in this case, we can find his recuperation from theidentity crisis once so keenly felt. His rewording from “my knee” in the second line
to “his knee” in the fourth line, and his insistence that, once taking a doctor’s treatment, the part treated no longer belonged to the former owner of the part but to thedoctor who treated it; these statements — the notion of the replaceable body — indicate that Frederic has already reshaped his view of the body to overcome his identity
crisis. He was, in a sense, both physically and mentally mechanized. According to
the newly assumed view, it is not he but “the inside of the belly” that is hungry. Not
he as a total being, but each part gathered together into his whole body moves, eats,
and thinks. The genitive case pronouns in the first half of the quotation are naturally
replaced by definite articles in the latter half. These two scenes of Frederic’s meditation on his body are of great importance in that they record the shift of his view ofthe body. In the course of his hospitalization over several months, Frederic recovers
his identity shaped through the body-as-machine view.
At the end of the novel, however, he cannot sustain this notion of the body when
he observes the Cæsarian section Catherine undergoes. Her operation is carried out inWar and Disruption of Self

15

“the bright small amphitheatre,” into which nurses are running to watch the operation,laughing: “We’re just in time. Aren’t we lucky?” (324). Having an operation withher privacy lost, she is treated not as a human being, but as a thing — as a machine:
thus, the operation is charged with the peculiar aspect of repairing the machine. At
first, Frederic cannot go into the amphitheatre to watch the operation, but he finallyobserves the last stages of it.
I thought Catherine was dead. She looked dead. Her face was gray, the partof it that I could see. Down below, under the light, the doctor was sewing
up the great long, forcep-spread, thick edged, wound. Another doctor in amask gave the anæsthetic. Two nurses in masks handed things. It looked
like a drawing of the Inquisition. I knew as I watched I could have watched
it all, but I was glad I hadn’t. I do not think I could have watched themcut, but I watched the wound closed into a high welted ridge with quick
skilful-looking stitches like a cobbler’s, and was glad. (325)
His sense of security in looking at the doctor’s “quick skilful-looking stitches likea cobbler’s” indicates his body-as-machine view. The sight of this operation might
remind him of the soldier’s intestine he witnessed at the front. Catherine’s womb
was also displaced from her belly no more than a few minutes ago, and the deviationfrom normalcy is being fixed by the hand of medicine.
At the end of the novel, Frederic unsuccessfully bids farewell to his dead lover:“It was like saying good-by to a statue” (332). As long as he shares the mechanizedview, the dead Catherine is no more than a lifeless “thing,” or the assemblage ofmachine parts. As perhaps we might notice in his rejection of a doctor’s oﬀer toride him to the hotel (331-32), and of nurses’ presence in Catherine’s room — “Youget out [. . . ]. The other one too.” (332) — it is very likely that Catherine’s deathin eﬀect might produce in him some hesitation to take for granted what once fixedand shaped the foundation of his identity — medical ideology. While the soldier’s
intestine protruding from his body triggered Frederic’s reconceptualization of thebody, Catherine’s womb removed outside of her body evokes his skepticism about the
medical view because of this unacceptable reality of Catherine’s death. The intestineout of the body once disturbed Frederic’s automatized view lacking a full awarenessof his own corporeality, whereas the womb here subverts the body-as-machine view,
into which he has been initiated through the course of the mechanotherapy.
It should be concluded, from what has been said above, that the soldier’s intestine in the early part of the novel foreshadows Frederic’s initiation into a recognitionof the body’s corporeality, followed by the incorporation into the medical ideology.
Frustrated at the end of the novel, Frederic represents the general perplexity of thetransition period in which the view of the body completely changed. That Frederic’s
physical and emotional rehabilitation eventually reaches a standstill portrays values
conflicting one another in the appalling devastation wrought by the Great War and in16

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

the rapid progress of medical science. A Farewell to Arms is a story of a backward
glance from more than ten years after the war. In the period of the confusion and disorder, people were completely at a loss what to do to sustain their identity threatenedin the overwhelming turbulence of the war and thereby the violent shift of values.

Notes
1

Indeed it is gradually coming to be accepted that this novel focuses on Frederic’s view of the humanbody as a central theme, as we can see from the fact that many critics of A Farewell to Arms haverecently attached greater importance to the motif of the body. See, for example, Michael Reynolds,“A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the House of Love.”2
Hemingway had a similar experience to Frederic’s in the First World War. Both participated in
the war as ambulance drivers, and were severely injured in a bombardment. Though based considerably on the author’s wartime experience, the fictional character in A Farewell to Arms should
clearly be distinguished from Hemingway himself. See the introductory essay by James Nagel in
Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky.
3
The doctor from Atlanta in Soldiers’ Pay well represents this view: “[. . . ] the human machine canonly be patched and parts replaced up to a certain point” (Faulkner 129).
4
We should notice later in the story that, looking into a mirror, Frederic states an impression of his
own image as “looking like a fake doctor” in a doctor’s white gown (319). He also substitutes for adoctor when giving Catherine anesthesia (317-23). All these details are of course out of necessity,yet, on a deeper level, they might symbolize the fact that Frederic has been inscribed in medical
ideology.

Chapter 3
The Road to the Natural BodyAs we have seen in the previous chapter, the First Word War is characterized
by images of bodily fragmentation: numerous representations of war cripples, whose limbs were dismembered and forever lost, whose corporeality
was radically emphasized by disfigurement and alienation from the conceptual normality of the body, and whose lost bodily parts were technologically compensated forby prosthetic devices. These damaged bodies of soldiers and artificial repairs of themto recover the “natural body” were widely observed during the war, and the application of this technological advance was extended to the bodies of a broader range of
people in the interwar period as a mode of cosmetic re-forming of the body. According to Tim Armstrong in his impressive work on the relationship between Modernist
writers and technology intervening the body, Modernism, Technology, and the Body:
A Cultural Study, post-war societies incorporated the body not only of soldiers who
had participated in the war but also of civilians into the system in which the bodywas prosthetically conceived.
The bodily part is knitted into a system of virtual prosthetics: a system
which both exposes and remedies defects, implying a “whole” body which
can only be achieved by technology; a whole which is constantly deferred.
One practice which mediates between the negative prosthetics of replacement and the advertising / cosmetic system is cosmetic plastic surgery, developed between the wars with experience gained from battlefield cases.
Rather than replacing a lost part, cosmetic surgery works on a “natural”
body which it has declared inadequate, misshapen, or past its prime. (100)1As Elizabeth Haiken argues, the technological development of cosmetic surgery wassuddenly accelerated after the First World War, based on numerous case studies accumulated during the war to reconstruct soldiers’ bodies.2 Still despised by many
as a means of fulfilling one’s vanity by doing harm to a healthy body, the surgery
to reshape the innately wholesome body to acquire a more “natural” and desirable
appearance became gradually and steadily accepted and more widespread after thewar. The sensational news that Fanny Brice, a famous comedienne and singer, had
her nose straightened by the hand of a traveling quack shocked the public and at thesame time made this doctor famous as a reputable beauty doctor, in spite of his poor
medical career and background. Brice later said about this doctor: “I was the beginning of this guy’s career [. . . ]. I posed for him for ‘before and after’ pictures. He

17

18

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

made a big nose on the ‘before’ picture. He was crazy. . . . He’d cut you if you had
dandruﬀ” (Haiken 44). This “before” picture embodies the newly conceived viewof the body that saw the body untouched by technology as “abnormal”; while the“after” picture showed a normative body established in society.
In a sense, the 1920s was a decade that considerably limited people’s unique
individuality.
And as they moved toward a definition of plastic surgery that incorporated
the cosmetic work patients desired, surgeons began to think about terms
like deformity in new ways. Throughout the 1930s, surgeons used the term
to denote an increasingly wide variety of conditions. “Bulbous, prominent
nasal tips” were deformities, according to one surgeon. Another listed theconditions of “humpnose, pendulous breast, abnormally prominent ears, receding chin, moles or other small nevi of the face, lines and wrinkles about
the eyes, jowls and neck.” According to another, “wrinkled forehead, baggy
eyelids, donkey’s ears, wrinkled face, double chin, and various deformitiesof the nose, the most common being the hump and hook nose with or without the twist, and saddle nose” were all “deformities or disfigurements.”(Haiken 122)
The variety that once everyone naturally had had was regarded in this period as adeviance from the newly established normality. Unlike the rich variety with strong
personality before the war, people in the interwar period all looked alike, pursuing
the same ideal figure.3 Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” records this sudden uniformity ofpeople’s appearance in an American town: “Most of them had their hair cut short.
[. . . ] They all wore sweaters and shirt waists with round Dutch collars. It was apattern” (CSS 112). Americans for the first time discarded Victorian morality to acquire a beautiful appearance regardless of an inner moral state. “During the decades
bridging the turn of the century, American culture was transformed from ‘Protestant Victorianism to a secular consumer culture,’ and American ideas about beautychanged accordingly. Although Victorian culture had held that beauty derived solely
from internal qualities of character and health, by 1921 most Americans (and particularly American women) had come to understand physical beauty as an external,
independent — and thus alterable — quality, the pursuit of which demanded a significant amount of time, attention, and money” (Haiken 18-19).
Hemingway was heavily wounded in the war and underwent a series of highly advanced medical operations, and he observed the gruesome prevalence of those technological inventions and improvements. It is no wonder that he had a keen awarenessof the prosthetic conception and the mechanical view of the body in the 1920s and
30s when writing many war stories; in those stories, characters reminding us of theircreator are repeatedly depicted when they are wounded in the battlefield and repaired
through technological interventions into the body. We shall, in this chapter, lookWar and Disruption of Self

19

at the influence of technology on Hemingway’s works and, moreover, the relationship between his works and the wide popularity of a burgeoning medical branch of
cosmetic surgery.
The prosthetic conception of the body is distinct in A Farewell to Arms when
Frederic Henry declares that the leg that was operated on by a doctor is no longer his
own but the doctor’s (231). His view of the body at this point of the story has been
reshaped in the course of medical treatment: the bodily parts can easily be removed
and replaced in the age of mechanized medical treatment. This new view of the bodydeveloped during the war, and gave rise to a normalizing force binding people to desire a “natural body.” By this term, I do not mean the innate body unmolded into any
socio-culturally defined normative shape. In that sense, the body cannot be natural,
for any human body cannot help receiving the influence of the ideal figure generally
conceived as the most desirable in that culture. The “natural body” in my argument
is the very concept of that desirable shape accepted in the society — the body thatlooks natural to the public eye. And remarkably conspicuous representations of thisideological drive in the 1920s are found in the scenes describing mechanotherapy in
A Farewell to Arms and in “In Another Country.”
The doctor went to his oﬃce in a back room and brought a photographwhich showed a hand that had been withered almost as small as the major’s,
before it had taken a machine course, and after was a little larger. The major
held the photograph with his good hand and looked at it very carefully.
(CSS 207)
The before-and-after photograph described here was a familiar strategy of cosmetic
advertisement in the interwar period as is seen in Brice’s comment quoted above, andthe “after” photograph is the normal body, which everyone in society felt forced topursue. The two distinct photographs and the technology intervening between thempoint out at once the defect in the major’s body and the possible body that he mightobtain in the future.
In the view of the body after the outbreak of the Great War, the body “unnaturally” distorted, disfigured, or dismembered should be reincorporated into the naturalness. And the naturalness is socially defined, following images of the ideal bodies
of cultural icons (like Hemingway later in his life), actors and actresses of beautiful figures, successful athletes, or war heroes (again like Hemingway when he, asa youth, returned from the war to receive an enthusiastic welcome from people inhis hometown). Hemingway’s heroes, to function as heroes, must possess this naturalness; and especially to function as war heroes, they must not only retain thenaturalness but also recover it, helped by medical technology. Their bodily parts arepatched together to form the newly developed “natural body,” authorizing them as
ideal heroes: their injured and mutilated parts are above all else the sign of their masculine behavior, the sign indicating how harsh a reality they had lived through. The

20

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

depiction of wounded soldiers in A Moveable Feast clearly exhibits Hemingway’s
adoration of prosthetic technology as well as those who suﬀer from physical loss inbattle:There were other people too who lived in the quarter and came to the Lilas,and some of them wore Croix de Guerre ribbons in their lapels and others
also had the yellow and green of the Médaille Militaire, and I watched how
well they were overcoming the handicap of the loss of limbs, and saw thequality of their artificial eyes and the degree of skill with which their faces
had been reconstructed. There was always an almost iridescent shiny cast
about the considerably reconstructed face, rather like that of a well packed
ski run, and we respected these clients more than we did the savants or the
professors, although the latter might well have done their military service
too without experiencing mutilation. (82, emphasis is original)
Whether or not the soldier is competent as a soldier, it is a wound he received in battle
that is considered worth respect. This adoration for the recovered body is advocatedby the doctor in “In Another Country”:
My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to theankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it
move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine
lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: “That will all
pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like achampion.” (CSS 206-207)
In the present condition, the protagonist is far from “natural,” for his body is disfigured (“without a calf”) and cannot be well controlled (“My knee did not bend”). Yet,
he is indeed “fortunate” because he can recover the natural body, and it is because herecovers that he will be “like a champion” — an ideal figure everyone desires.
However, bodily technology, by which the deformed body could be reshaped into
a normal state, is a double-edged symbol: it fixes defects of the body, reshapes the
body as desired, and sometimes decorates wounds as a sign of bravery; yet, at thesame time, it always points out that the body is lacking something, that the bodyneeds further reshaping, and that the body is not perfect. Armstrong argues thus:
Modernity [. . . ] brings both a fragmentation and augmentation of the bodyin relation to technology; it oﬀers the body as lack, at the same time as
it oﬀers technological compensation. Increasingly, that compensation is
oﬀered as a part of capitalism’s fantasy of the complete body: in the mechanisms of advertising, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, and cinema; all prosthetic in the sense that they promise the perfection of the body. (3)War and Disruption of Self

21

Technology posits the natural body as the norm of which everyone must make amodel; thus, at once degrading and restoring the authentic status of the body. As
is seen with the boy with “a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had
no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt” (CSS 207, emphasis is mine), the body,deviated from a norm that is firmly established within socio-cultural values, must
primarily be fixed and re-incorporated into a “normal” state, whether it is possible
or not. In the case of this boy, the normative body is defined by his family’s social
standing, and we are told that his body could never meet the demand of the normalizing force of his culture: “They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very oldfamily and they could never get the nose exactly right” (CSS 207). Technology, forthis boy, represents an ideological evaluative power over bodily status; even thoughtechnological advance succeeds in restoring his nose to a certain degree, we should
admit that the very same technology humiliates the present state of his body, always
pointing out his being diﬀerent from the “natural body” of the society to which hebelongs.
According to Joseph Slade, American writers before 1945 could not discard negative values pressed upon machines.4 Needing the help of medical technology whenwounded in the battlefield, soldiers nevertheless could not help feeling antipathy
toward their benefactors as well as gratitude for them. This ambivalence toward
technology is well represented by descriptions of the major’s body in “In AnotherCountry.” His diminished hand “like a baby’s” (CSS 207) can never function as anhonorable sign of a brave soldier. He believes in neither bravery nor the machines heuses in his treatment, though he never fails to receive the daily course of mechanotherapy: “The major came very regularly to the hospital. I do not think he ever missed
a day, although I am sure he did not believe in the machines” (CSS 208). He is in asense trapped by the mechanized ideology like other soldiers in the story, in the sensethat he is forced to take the treatment even though he is unable to find any hope in
it. To undergo the treatment — to make an eﬀort to acquire a “natural body” — isthe foremost demand of society, and, in that sense, in this society machines control
human behavior.
The major’s obsession with mechanotherapy reminds us less of the wartime medical situation than of the wide popularity of bodily re-formation at the postwar period,in which mechanical technology was all but omnipresent and ostensibly omnipotent.
Advertising campaigns constantly attempted to invoke and exploit the anxiety about
possible defects in the body untouched by technology. Numerous names of derivative bodily diseases were coined for the first time in the 1920s to precipitate anxious
feelings about the possibility that people’s body deviated somewhat from naturalness:
A new pharmacopoeia of “diseases” appeared: halitosis (bad breath), bodyodor (“b.o.”), bromodosis (odiferous feet), homotosis (furniture in “badtaste”), acidosis (sour stomach), dandruﬀ, constipation, and others. (Green
24)

22

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

“In Another Country” was written and published in this period of general fearof bodily defects, and thus it is very likely that the situation described in the story
is intended to evoke the nationwide popularity of cosmetic bodily re-forming. The
protagonist, indeed, narrates this story after the war — possibly in the mid 1920s
in which the story was published — and sees the events from the vantage point ofa decade later. When he says that “There was a time when none of us believed in
the machines” (CSS 208), his statement suggests, on the simplest level, that theirdisbelief in the machines was only temporary, and that at least to a certain degree
the machines worked out to fix their body like the boy with the black handkerchief,
if not restoring “naturalness.” If we seek for a deeper significance in the statement,
however, the protagonist’s statement refers to the period in which the narrator narrates the story, conveying to the contemporary reader the social milieu at the time inwhich technology in a matter-of-course manner intervened in the human body under
the name of salvation to help people acquire the desirable body. The narrator implies that now everyone believes in, or at least recourses to, the fascinating eﬀects ofmedical technology.
At the end of the story, we find the following sentence: “there were large framed
photographs around the wall, of all sorts of wounds before and after they had been
cured by the machines. In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored” (CSS 210). The beforeand-after photographs, which exemplify the overarching ideology about the human
body, were the most frequently adopted strategy in the advertisement of cosmetic
surgery in the interwar period. The story thus, using the backdrop of the wartime
hospital, dramatizes the mechanized culture of the postwar years rather than the timethat the story describes. And the sad point of the story resides in the major’s being
unable to escape from the trap of the ideology of technology, even if he knows that
he can never be cured of the lack in his body and, more pathetically, of the lack in
his heart caused by his wife’s death. His tragedy would have been certainly sharedby many contemporary readers. Deeply immersed in everyday advertisements concerning possible bodily defects and the reshaping of them, they must have projected
their own situation onto that of the major during the war, and regarded his body dominated by the machines as somewhat like their own, entrapped by the insatiable andinescapable desire to acquire the perfect body that technology promised to give them.
The relationship between technology and the body is a recurrent motif throughout Hemingway’s works, and his insistent attempt to dramatize it culminated in thewriting of “A Way You’ll Never Be.” Although the story “deserves a place among
Hemingway’s major stories” and is “One of his most original, even daring fictions,”
as Paul Smith argues, “The critical history of ‘A Way You’ll Never Be,’ with next tonothing between 1963 and 1982 and little since then, is something of an embarrassment” (Reader’s Guide 275). The primary reason for this critical neglect resides inthe seemingly ambiguous and incoherent structure of the story as shown in Nick’s
hallucinations. In the same way that Sheldon Grebstein calls this story “the rhetoricWar and Disruption of Self23of hysteria” (118),5 critics, who generally have yet to notice the carefully wrought
structure, confuse the narrative of the story and the hysteric tone of the protagonist’s
hallucinations. If we look more carefully at the first paragraph, we can appreciate avariety of elements foreshadowing the later development of the story and intertextually connecting to Hemingway’s other war stories. The first paragraph reads thus:
The attack had gone across the field, been held up by machine-gun firefrom the sunken road and from the group of farm houses, encountered noresistance in the town, and reached the bank of the river. Coming along theroad on a bicycle, getting oﬀ to push the machine when the surface of theroad became too broken, Nicholas Adams saw what had happened by the
position of the dead. (CSS 306, emphases are mine)
To reword the bicycle as “the machine” is rather curious; for, despite the fact that thebicycle functions as a vehicle without any problem, it is seen not from a functional
but from a structural viewpoint (and “the vehicle,” of course, should be the mostappropriate word for substitution). The choice of this word reminds us of the tricyclein “In Another Country,” by the use of which the protagonist attempts to reshape his
deformed body; moreover, at the same time, correlating with “machine-gun fire”6
above to invoke an association between mechanical weapon, medical technology,
and the reshaping of the body.
Riding through the trace of battle, Nick gets oﬀ the bicycle before entering thetown, and advances to the headquarters on foot. Though we are not given a clear
reason, the bicycle (=the machine) somehow cannot enter the town, just as machineguns stop the counterattack in the town. At the end of the story, this bicycle reappears
in Nick’s last words: “I’d better get to that damned bicycle [. . . ]. I don’t want to lose
the way to Fornaci” (CSS 315). On the simplest level, this statement means that “theway to Fornaci” is too long to walk; yet, on a deeper level, it conveys an impressionthat without this machine Nick cannot move into and out of the town of Fossalta, asanctuary into which machines cannot enter.
For Nick, the meaning of the town of Fossalta is primarily the place of his wounding, and his return journey to the place, as most critics accept, has two meanings: oneis an actual trip to the lines ostensibly to show the American uniform he wears. If
soldiers see the uniform and believe the coming of American troops, their morale
might be boosted. And at the same time, this is Nick’s return journey deep in his
own mind that has been badly damaged by the wounding.7 The story on the surface
depicts Nick’s duty to the front, yet under this virtual action it really represents his
psychic journey to find his identity which has been seriously threatened since thewounding. If these two journeys correspond with each other at a metaphorical level,
Nick’s inner psyche, which is, as we shall see later in the story, terribly damaged by
the wounding and crazed out of rational thinking, must be metaphorically projectedto the place of his wounding. We can find a correspondence between Nick’s mind

24

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

and the town in his conversation with Paravicini, his old-time friend and superior in
the army:“How are you really?”“I’m fine. I’m perfectly all right.”“No. I mean really.”“I’m all right. I can’t sleep without a light of some sort. That’s all I
have now.”“I said it should have been trepanned. I’m no doctor but I know that.”“Well, they thought it was better to have it absorb, and that’s what I got.
What’s the matter? I don’t seem crazy to you, do I?”“You seem in top-hole shape.”“It’s a hell of a nuisance once they’ve had you certified as nutty,” Nicksaid. “No one ever has any confidence in you again.” (CSS 309-10)
According to Paravicini, Nick’s head, which was caved in when he was wounded,“should have been trepanned” — that is, a hole should have been made in his skull
to release the pressure of hemorrhage lest it should damage the brain. Instead, thedoctors who treated him considered that they should wait for the blood naturally to beabsorbed without any surgical intervention. The correspondence is evident between
Nick’s brain (the mind) — the place into which medical technology did not enter —and the town of Fossalta — the place into which machines (bicycles and machineguns) cannot enter. If this is the story of “Nick’s journey back into the recesses of hismind” (DeFalco 118) as many critics have accepted, the mind is, in Hemingway’s
conception, placed at an opposite end of the body. Moreover, while the body indisorder radically and repeatedly undergoes technological treatment, the mind (orthe brain), on the contrary, remains intact however severely it is damaged.
Without the help of medical technology, the landscape of Nick’s mind is thoroughly devastated. As many critics argue,8 Nick’s unstable identity is repeatedlyemphasized throughout the story. The often-quoted passage in which Nick is challenged by a young second lieutenant attracts our attention to Nick’s determination
not to relinquish the tessera, his credentials proving his identity.
“Who are you?”
Nick told him“How do I know this?”
Nick showed him the tessera with photograph and identification and theseal of the third army. He took hold of it.
“I will keep this.”“You will not,” Nick said. “Give me back the card and put your gun
away. There. In the holster.”“How am I to know who you are?”

War and Disruption of Self

25

“The tessera tells you.”“And if the tessera is false? Give me that card.”“Don’t be a fool,” Nick said cheerfully. “Take me to your company
commander.” (CSS 307-308)
More intriguing in this scene is that, even with the tessera, Nick cannot establish
who he really is, failing to answer the second lieutenant’s question, “if the tessera isfalse?”
It is primarily Nick’s ostensible duty that threatens his identity. The duty heengages in is to wear the American uniform to make Italian soldiers believe that
the American troops are shortly coming: he is, as it were, living propaganda. Yet his
uniform, as he himself repeatedly insists, is just an imprecise reproduction (“The uniform is not very correct.” “Look at the uniform. Spagnolini made it but it’s not quite
correct.” “Fix your eyes on the uniform. Spagnolini made it, you know” [CSS 31112]). That he reveals the falsity of the uniform and emphasizes its Italian designer
evidences the essential meaninglessness of his duty and annuls the significance of his
presence. Even Paravicini, later in the story, declares that “There’s nothing here for[Nick] to do” (CSS 313). His insignificant role is prefigured early at the beginningof the story. Among Nick’s meticulous enumeration of the debris of war, we see thedescription of another kind of propaganda:[. . . ] propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending
a woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically drawn;
very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape inwhich the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head. There were many of these inciting
cards which had evidently been issued just before the oﬀensive. (CSS 306)
Like these postcards, however Nick’s uniform is “impressionistically” and “attractively” designed, it has “nothing in common with” the actual uniform of the American troops; thus, Nick’s existence itself is imbued with an impression of a fictional
construction like an Austrian soldier in the postcards.
Interestingly, it seems as if Nick wants to underline his falsity and fictionality.
Not only does he expose the fact that the uniform is incorrect, but also he defines theAmerican as what he is not in his speech to the adjutant:“Americans twice as large as myself, healthy, with clean hearts, sleep atnight, never been wounded, never been blown up, never had their heads
caved in, never been scared, don’t drink, faithful to the girls they left behind
them, many of them never had crabs, wonderful chaps.” (CSS 311)
What he is trying to do here is to fictionalize himself. We know that he is not“healthy,” cannot “sleep at night,” was seriously “wounded” when being “blown up,”

26

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

had his head “caved in,” and, as he admits, was “scared” enough not to participate inbattle without “drink.” Extrapolating from this what-he-is-not list, we can justifiably
assume that he has been to a brothel (thus, not “faithful” to his girlfriend if he hasone) and suﬀered from syphilis (“crabs”). He is in short not an American by his own
definition. Thus, when the adjutant, immediately after this speech, questions him
about his nationality (“Are you an Italian?” “A North or South American?”), Nickfeels “it coming on now” (CSS 311), that is, a symptom of his insanity has set in.
This is obviously because the questions put him in a fairly contradicting position that
he is an American by nationality yet nevertheless out of the normative figure of theAmericans.
What is more, considering the similarity between propaganda and advertisement,
we can find another “before-and-after” advertising strategy of ideological bodily reformation. The American troops depicted in Nick’s speech is an ideal norm every
American must pursue; while Nick’s body is a damaged, defective product to be
repaired. With this before-and-after scheme applied to the structure of the story,
Nick symbolizes a “before” photograph against the image of an “after” he recreatedin his own speech to describe American soldiers. We are told that Nick is afraidof “a low house painted yellow with willows all around it and a low stable” and“the diﬀerent width of the river” (310-11). These images have mystified critics, yetseemingly cryptic descriptions can be explained by the state of Nick’s mind before
and after the wounding. The landscape of Nick’s mind, unaltered without medical
intervention, keeps the image of Fossalta as it had been before he was wounded, but
the landscape of Fossalta is irrevocably changed as the yellow house no longer exists
and the width of the river is diﬀerent possibly because of bombardment. Likewise,
Nick’s view of the body remains unchanged as we can see from the fixed image ofFossalta in his mind, while that of the general public is dramatically replaced by themechanical (prosthetic) view. Nick is now left behind these enormous changes ofsociety. Realizing this fact at the end of the story, Nick hurries back to the realm of
carnality that is dominated by technological ideology.
Nick here is aware of the necessity of mechanized technology, yet he does notseem so optimistic about the prosthetic view of the body unlike the author who celebrates the technological advancement to treat the wounded in A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway, when writing this story, was rather ambivalent about mechanical interventions into the body — the possibility of substituting the lost bodily parts withmechanical devices. Across the River and Into the Trees is almost a story to tell thiscontradictory feeling toward the prosthetic view of the body. The narrator of thisnovel persistently and ostentatiously exposes the disfigured hand of Colonel Richard
Cantwell, a veteran of both World Wars (“the Colonel extended his own hand, which
had been shot through twice, and was slightly misshapen” [58]; “[. . . ] and gave theGran Maestro his crooked hand” [66]; “[. . . ] looking at the misshapen hand with
distaste [. . . ]” [82] to cite but a few). And the most intriguing point is that Renata,an 18-year old Italian contessa, and the love of 50-year old Cantwell, incessantly andWar and Disruption of Self

27

stubbornly assures him that the hand is “all right” (82). While Cantwell detests his
own hand (“It’s so damned ugly and I dislike looking at it”); Renata repeatedly feels
his scarred hand, insisting that “You don’t know about your hand” (95) and that “Ilove your hand and all your other wounded places” (133). It seems as if the author
was obsessed with the ugliness of his body and tried to vest the body with the positive
value of an honorable wound in battle.
We can find a similar example in Hemingway’s last novel, The Old Man and theSea. Santiago’s body is deformed with age and cannot be controlled as he wishes —his body is, as it were, “unnatural.” The beginning of the novel describes his body as
follows:
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck.
The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its
reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down
the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handlingheavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as
old as erosions in a fishless desert. (9-10)
The body described here is far from what people pursue as an ideal, but is rather
eaten away by illness and wounds. Even Manolin, a faithful disciple of the old man,worries about the decline of his bodily state, asking: “are you strong enough now fora truly big fish?” (14).
After eighty-four days without a fish, the old man goes fishing as usual, findingout that he hooked a giant marlin. He struggles hard to catch the fish, but it is too
big even to draw an inch. The fight against the marlin lasts three days and threenights. The old man suﬀers from numerous wounds in his face and palms with thecord drawn by the marlin, and finally he is seized with cramp in his left hand, whichis “almost as stiﬀ as rigor mortis” (59). The old man contemplates his left hand thus:“[A cramp] is a treachery of one’s own body. It is humiliating before others to havea diarrhoea from ptomaine poisoning or to vomit from it. But a cramp, he thought of
it as a calambre, humiliates oneself especially when one is alone” (61-62, emphasis
is original). What the cramp in the old man’s hand exposes is the uncontrollabilityof his body; and his body, as we can conclude from this fact, is far away from the“natural body” not only because of the decline with old age but also because he canno longer control his own body.
During the fight against the giant marlin, Santiago meditates on Joe DiMaggio, afamous baseball player, as an exemplar. Throughout the whole career as a player, he
suﬀered from bone spurs in his both legs as well as other many bodily defects, anddespite the handicap he kept playing as a major leaguer with high achievement. As
shown in the following quotations, Santiago fights to demonstrate the indomitable
will that his role model has: “[. . . ] I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does
all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel” (68). “Do you

28

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

believe the great DiMaggio would stay with a fish as long as I will stay with this one?
he thought. I am sure he would and more since he is young and strong” (68). “[. . . ]I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today. I had no bone spurs. But
the hands and the back hurt truly” (97). “I wonder how the great DiMaggio would
have liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any man
could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs?”(103-104). It is not uncommon to make a respectful figure a model for appropriate
behaviors, yet what these quotations make clear is that he identifies the defects in his
body with DiMaggio’s bone spur. In other words, the essential reason that Santiago
put DiMaggio in the place of the role model is DiMaggio’s conquest over his bodily
defects — the acquisition of the “natural body.”
Santiago finally killed and caught the marlin, and through the fight with the fish
he comes to feel inseparably fused with the marlin’s beautiful body. But when hegoes back to the village with the body of the giant fish bound to the side of the skiﬀ,
they are attacked by a horde of sharks. In the course of the first attack, a part ofthe marlin’s meat is eaten away. After driving away the sharks, he contemplates themarlin’s body:
He did not like to look at the fish anymore since he had been mutilated.
When the fish had been hit it was as though he himself were hit. (103)
It is clear from this quotation that Santiago desires the “natural body.” To use theexpression “mutilated” to refer to the bitten-away body of the marlin indicates that
he has regarded the perfect body of the marlin as an ideal body that he desires. Oncethe perfectness is impaired, Santiago can no longer look at the marlin’s body; forthe mutilated body symbolizes his totally collapsed desire, his unfulfilled desire toacquire the “natural body.”
These novels, published in his fifties, most crudely convey Hemingway’s response to the new view of the body after the war, especially because, when writing
the novels, his body had been totally disfigured from advanced age and the aftereﬀects of injuries sustained in many accidents in his forties. To adjust himself tothe fact that he no longer could achieve the natural body because of the decline of
his health, he sublimated his bodily anxiety into characters who essentially deserve
to be called a “hero,” yet who need a guarantee of it from another person.9 Whatmakes Across the River and Into the Trees a total failure among Hemingway’s wholeoeuvre and The Old Man and the Sea a parody of writings in his youth is mainly
this excessive self-consciousness to describe the protagonist. He was so obsessed byfear of the decline of his own body that he could not distance himself from the aged
protagonist on the pages. Yet, on the other hand, it is this failure that tells us how
forcible the bodily ideology was.

29

War and Disruption of Self

Notes
1

Regarding the relationship between bodily advertisements and representations of wounded soldiers, see also Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising andSpectacle 1851 – 1914; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for
Modernity, 1920 – 1940; and Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America:
The First Two Hundred Years.

2

According to Haiken, “Although French, British, and American surgeons worked together during
the war, plastic surgery grew after the war only in the United States. [. . . ] American surgeons [. . . ]returned from the war eager to build the specialty (and by the beginning of World War II would
claim about sixty practicing plastic surgeons — more than ten times as many as Britain, and almost
twice as many as the rest of the world combined)” (34-35). About the rapid development of plastic
surgery in the interwar period, Colonel Cantwell in Hemingway’s Across the River and Into theTrees indicates through his own body: “He [Cantwell] looked at the diﬀerent welts and ridges that
had come before they had plastic surgery, and at the thin, only to be observed by the initiate, linesof the excellent plastic operations after head wounds” (107).

3

Pauline’s letter to Hemingway quoted below shows us that she was under this influence of social
normalization of the “natural” body: “Am having large nose, imperfect lips, protruding ears andwarts and moles all taken oﬀ before coming to Cuba [. . . ]” (Kert 247).

4“Antipathy to technology, by and large covert in the nineteenth century, emerged openly in the next
— aggravated by the seismic forces of economics, the standardization of industry, the urbanizationof the countryside, the realignment of class structure, and the widening distance between scienceand letters” (27).

5See, for other examples, Rovit, S. Baker, and Waldhorn.

6

We should notice here that machine guns were used almost for the first time in the Great War.
According to The Encyclopedia Americana, “The Browning machine gun [one of the first machineguns put to practical use] and Browning automatic rifle (BAR), although perfected by 1900, were
not produced in suﬃcient quantity to see extensive use in World War I. [. . . ] An estimated 92% of
all World War I casualties were inflicted by machine guns.”

7

It is Joseph DeFalco who initially discovered this double meaning of Nick’s journey. He says thatthe purpose of Nick’s coming to the front is “a clarification of the processes of life and death andthe role the individual must play” (118). Sheldon Norman Grebstein also laconically summarizes
the story thus: “two journeys are being made concurrently: one toward the geographic setting,the actual scene of the fighting that caused Nick’s wound; the other an inward journey toward a
confrontation with the crippled psychic self produced by the physical wound” (18).

8

According to Paul S. Quick, “the psychological anxiety that Nick exhibits stems from his loss ofidentity and his inability to secure a stable sense of self after his wounding” (30).

9To Have and Have Not also represents Hemingway’s ambiguous feeling toward the disfigured
body. Harry Morgan openly insists that he does not mind the loss of his arm:

“The hell with my arm. You lose an arm you lose an arm. There’s worse things than lose anarm. You’ve got two arms and you’ve got two of something else. And a man’s still a manwith one arm or with one of those. The hell with it,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Then after a minute he says, “I got those other two still.” (97)30

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
This long-winded sentiment about his lost arm rather indicates his painful realization of the irrevocable loss: here he desperately tries to focus not on the loss but on what he still has. He has toavert his eyes from the loss.
Harry later asks his wife very much worriedly about his lost arm: “Listen, do you mind the arm?
Don’t it make you feel funny?” (113). Looking at the wife’s monologue shortly after the question(“I’m glad it was a [sic] arm and not a leg. I wouldn’t like him to have lost a leg. Why’d hehave to lose that arm? It’s funny though, I don’t mind it. Anything about him I don’t mind”), weshould rather conclude that Hemingway, by having her utter these sentiments, tries to conform to
the newly spread view of the body: in that view, any lost parts can be prosthetically compensatedfor.

Part II

The Politics of Pain:
Representations of the Anaesthetized Body

Chapter 4“Her Screams Are Not Important”

In the United States, as Wertz and Wertz argue (109-77), the field of obstetrics
to date has undergone two great changes, one of which is doctors’ intrusion into
childbirth. Until the end of the nineteenth century, women had been helped by
midwives, who were mostly women specializing in the technique of delivery; hence,
the whole process of childbearing had had no relation to medical institutions. At theend of the nineteenth century, however, doctors began to take the place of midwives,and consequently childbirth has since been incorporated into a branch of medicine.
The second change is the shift of places of parturition from the houses of women inlabor to hospitals, a change which took place in the 1920s and which coincides withthe composition and publication of “Indian Camp.” Both changes can be ascribedto the progressive development of medical science that rapidly took the primary position in maintaining the psychosomatic health of people. These changes, however,
have recently been exposed to severe criticism by feminists saying that the processof achieving the sovereignty over the female body in pregnancy on the part of doctors reflects the age-old male chauvinism which has been dominating the other sex
throughout recorded history. Despite that reproduction is a natural process, female
procreative capacity, from the medical viewpoint, was considered to be abnormal
on the grounds that no equivalent capacity can be found in the male body, for the
male body was the central norm of medical knowledge at that time. Unnatural in theeyes of doctors, childbirth was the object of medical treatment as if it were a certain manifestation of sickness. What is more, women in labor in the first decades of
the twentieth century were treated without any consideration to their privacy when
they delivered, regarded as if they were machines, and undergoing “repairs” as such.1
Barbara Rothman states in her feminist criticism of the male-centered view of this
hospitalized childbirth:
The source of the pathology orientation of medicine toward women’s healthand reproduction is a body-as-machine model (the ideology of technology)
in which the male body is taken as the norm (the ideology of patriarchy).
From that viewpoint, reproductive processes are stresses on the system, andthus diseaselike. (36-37)
The age in which Hemingway was born and raised witnessed this unprecedented
prevalence and dominance of these two medical ideologies.
Biographical evidence shows that Hemingway was in the position to observe

33

34

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

these ideologies and perhaps noticed the problematical aspects as discussed above.
In his high school days, he watched in a hospital a woman’s childbirth delivered byhis father, who was an obstetrician. Marcelline Sanford, Hemingway’s sister, records
this incident as follows:[. . . ] Ernie watched an operation. Dressed in a white gown, he was permitted to stand at the top rear of the operating theater at the hospital where
Daddy was on the staﬀ as head of obstetrics. Ernie was interested, but hesat down when he felt faint and he did not go again. (134)
Given the fact that all of his brothers and sisters were delivered in their home with
their mother being cared for and helped by family members, this obstetrical operation
observed by strangers was for Hemingway somewhat too shocking an experience, too
inhumane compared to the case of his mother. It thus seems reasonable to supposethat he associated medical assistance for childbirth with a technological intrusion
into the natural process of delivery.
If so, the childbirth in “Indian Camp” might be heavily charged with this ideological conflict between the residual and emergent cultural modes. This thematic
presumption is supported by the composition history of the story. The source for“Indian Camp” has been generally sought in the author’s experience in the GrecoTurkish War: Nick Adams, the implied author and the semi-autobiographical protagonist of the series of short stories declares in a deleted part of “Big Two-Hearted
River” that “Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. That waswhat made it good. Nobody knew that. He’d seen a woman have a baby on the roadto Karagatch and tried to help her” (NAS 238).2 Yet, given the similarity between thestory and the incident in his high school days presented above — first, both concern
a boy’s experience of watching childbirth; second, both are delivered by the boy’s
father; and third, both boys feel sick watching the delivery — it is very likely that
he borrowed the genesis of the story from his traumatic witnessing of childbirth in
his youth. If this is the case, it is richly suggestive that the stage for “Indian Camp”
is set not in a hospital but in a primitive, uncivilized heart of darkness, the place
hardly accessible to scientific technology; since the clear contrast is highly accentuated between nature and Western medical technology. “Indian Camp” well captures
the technological invasion of white civilization into the realm of nature.
The story shows the experience of three people — a little boy named Nick
Adams, his father Dr. Adams, and Uncle George. They are camping in the forest,
and, later in the night, summoned to an Indian camp to help a woman’s childbirth.
Arriving at the camp, they find that the woman, unable to deliver the child, has been
screaming for three days. Dr. Adams, after examining her condition, decides to perform a Caesarean section on her with a jackknife and gut leaders without anaesthetic. The operation is successful so that the doctor becomes highly elated by his
own achievement. The doctor tries to tell her husband, who has been in the upper

The Politics of Pain

35

bunk of the wife’s bed because of his badly cut foot, that both the mother and thechild have survived the operation; however, he is found dead with his throat cut from
ear to ear. Feeling distressed about bringing Nick to the camp and allowing him tosee the bloody spectacle of suicide, the father rows a boat back to their place in theearly morning with his son sitting in the stern. Nick then has a sudden convictionthat he will never die.
As can easily be inferred from the discussion of Hemingway’s experience ofwatching his father’s operation, the medical perception of patients’ suﬀering is by nomeans described positively.
“Listen to me. What she is going through is called being in labor. The baby
wants to be born and she wants it to be born. All her muscles are trying to
get the baby born. That is what is happening when she screams.”
Just then the woman cried out.
“Oh, Daddy, can’t you give her something to make her stop screaming?” asked Nick.
“No. I haven’t any anæsthetic,” his father said. “But her screams are
not important. I don’t hear them because they are not important.” (CSS 68)
The doctor’s disregard for the woman’s pain is typical of medical functionalism
as represented in the doctor’s explanation of childbirth: the screams of the Indian
woman are a physiological manifestation of the process helping to make muscles
more flexible to facilitate her delivery. “Her screams are not important,” for they arecaused not by pain and suﬀering but by an appropriate mechanism of the body.
The general neglect of pain on the part of the doctor is partly caused by what
Rothman calls the ideology of technology, which regards the human body as a machine.3 Yet, considering the repeated depiction of the doctor’s detached attitude (Notonly his indiﬀerence to the woman’s pain quoted above, but also his elation after theoperation with paying no attention to the patient is emphatically depicted: “That’s
one for the medical journal, George” [69]), the direct cause of his indiﬀerence toward the Indian woman lies more likely in the widespread prevalence of primitivism,
which created “the myth of painless Indians.” Primitivism at the turn of the century
ostensibly praised the purity of primitive people who were believed to be immune
from harmful influences of corrupt civilization; thus, the sense of pain originally
being caused (in the primitivist theory) by the indulgence of such convenient civilization, the “savages” in the eyes of the Westerners are essentially pain-free.4
Medicine in the story is by no means fully equipped to advocate its own eﬃcacy.
This lack of preparation on the part of the doctor can be explained not only by the
emergent abruptness of the summons but by the author’s unconsciously held assumption that anaesthesia had been from the very beginning of its “invention” considered
to be for civilized races. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who coined the term anaesthesia, sent the following letter to the alleged inventor of the technique, William T. G.

36

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Morton:[. . . ] Everybody wants to have a hand in the great discovery. All I will do
is give you a hint or two as to names, or the name, to be applied to the state
produced, and to the agent. [. . . ]The state should, I think, be called anæsthesia. This signifies insensibility, more particularly [. . . ] to objects of touch. [. . . ]I would have a name pretty soon, and consult some accomplishedscholar such as President Everett, or Dr. Bigelow, Sr., before fixing upon
the terms which will be repeated by the tongues of every civilized race ofmankind. (Warren 79, emphases are original)
The possibility that anaesthesia might be used by Indians would have been in the firstplace excluded from Holmes’s mind. The blessings of “the great discovery” would
have been considered to be received only by “every civilized race of mankind,” andamong “every civilized race of mankind,” Native Americans would not have been
included.
The contrast is too extreme to be overlooked between this Indian woman andCatherine in A Farewell to Arms, who also undergoes a Caesarean section yet isheavily anaesthetized during her painful childbirth. The latter case, though it takes
place in a highly advanced hospital in Switzerland unlike in the former case, shows
us that her pain is above all else what has to be suppressed, controlled, and finally removed. As Stephen Kern argues, after the invention of anaesthesia, the whites could
no longer stand their own pain as they had done before once they knew the possibility of removing pain.5 Though it is ironically not the Indian woman but Catherine,
treated by fully equipped medical technology, who dies after the operation, what we
observe when noticing the asymmetry between both operations is that the white race
is too fragile and sensitive to pain to be left untreated while, as we can see from thedetached attitude of Dr. Adams, Indian women can easily be considered as merely asystem mechanically functioning to sustain life, and hence tough to physical pain.
This prejudice that Indians were insensible to pain had been so widely spreadamong the whites that white readers of the story can never understand why the husband in the story kills himself despite that the wife has survived the operation. Meyers, for example, in one of the most influential studies of this story, is strongly dissatisfied by the explanation that the Indian killed himself because he could not bear
his wife’s screams. Meyers argues that “Despite his badly cut foot, he could havelimped or been carried out of range of the screams, if he had wished to, and joined
the other men” (300). However, it was widely believed at the beginning of the twentieth century that in the Indian’s world view the boundary between the self and others
was highly ambiguous unlike in the case of white people.6[Natural piety] is a mode of feeling and thought that is profoundly at one
with the natural world, that accepts human life as part of that world, andThe Politics of Pain

37

therefore does not question the moral propriety of the cosmic order. It does
not, or cannot, adopt that kind of philosophic detachment. (Bell 11)
Here explained is “natural piety,” a characteristic believed to be generally shared by
Native Americans. Not distinguishing themselves from the environment surrounding
them, they share various perceptions and sensibilities with each other, for they all
belong to the same natural environment and thus are part of nature; hence, the diﬀerence between the pain of the self and that of another is far less distinctive than in thecase of the whites.
If Indians were highly capable of sympathizing with another’s pain and thus susceptible to the suﬀerings of their neighbors,7 the death of the husband is never a
mystery to begin with. When looking in front of his eyes at his wife’s agonizing
predicament of the brutal operation — in which she is cut in the abdomen with ajackknife, the uterus pulled out of the body, and the gash sutured by gut leaders —and perceiving her felt experience of pain as his own, how could the Indian husband
wish to escape from the shanty to “out of range of the screams”? The pain of hiswife should be too inconceivable a brutality to share as his own, so that it is rather
natural that the husband attempts to stop the extraordinary pain by shutting down his
own life — a means to which the wife cannot recourse under the circumstances.
If, as Meyers argues, the Indian husband wants to make a protest against whitemen’s intrusion into the ritual of couvade, or if he merely could not stand his wife’s
suﬀering, his suicide can be read certainly as an attack on the Western medical technology represented by Dr. Adams, who cannot sympathize with the Indian woman’s
suﬀering. Looking at the scene in which Dr. Adams is humiliated when finding himself feeling too elated not to notice the husband’s agony during the operation, it issafely said that Hemingway, at least when writing this story, sympathized more with
the Indian’s plight than with the father of the protagonist. In this line of argument,
Hemingway seemingly attacks the technological invasion of the natural life of Indians, yet, in fact, around pain and anaesthesia, he wavers between the positive view of
medical technology and the negative view of it: not only does he attack the presenceof technology, but also he criticizes the absence of it, the absence of anaesthesia,
the highest achievement of Western civilization. Despite that he deeply sympathizes
with the painful situation of those who live in nature out of the reach of pain-killing
technology, or because of the sympathy, he cannot allow the lack of benefit of technology.
Hemingway’s ambivalent feeling toward medical technology is evident in Frederic’s response to Catherine’s treatment in A Farewell to Arms, with which we are
hereafter concerned. Looking at her pain and suﬀering, he earnestly gives her anaesthesia in place of a doctor. We can observe no negative connotation in the representation of anaesthesia when Catherine undergoes the prolonged delivery. Far fromnegating the technology, he desperately needs it in place of Catherine, acutely sympathizing with her pain, or rather we should say identifying himself with her body by

38

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

feeling her pain as his own.
“[. . . ] I’m almost done, darling. I’m going all to pieces. Please giveme that. It doesn’t work. Oh, it doesn’t work!”“Breathe deeply.”“I am. Oh, it doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t work!”“Get another cylinder,” I said to the nurse.
“That is a new cylinder.”“I’m just a fool, darling,” Catherine said. “But it doesn’t work any
more.” She began to cry. “Oh, I wanted so to have this baby and not maketrouble, and now I’m all done and all gone to pieces and it doesn’t work.
Oh, darling, it doesn’t work at all. I don’t care if I die if it will only stop.
Oh, please, darling, please make it stop. There it comes. Oh Oh Oh!”
She breathed sobbingly in the mask. “It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It
doesn’t work. Don’t mind me, darling. Please don’t cry. Don’t mind me.
I’m just gone all to pieces. You poor sweet. I love you so and I’ll be goodagain. I’ll be good this time. Can’t they give me something? If they could
only give me something.”“I’ll make it work. I’ll turn it all the way.”“Give it to me now.”
I turned the dial all the way and as she breathed hard and deep her handrelaxed on the mask. I shut oﬀ the gas and lifted the mask. She came backfrom a long way away.
“That was lovely, darling. Oh, you’re so good to me.” (322, emphases
are original)
As far as we see these lines, anaesthesia seems certainly a salvation to remove the
gnawing sensation of pain. However, once Catherine goes into “the bright small
amphitheatre of the operating room” with many nurses watching the operation (“Theother [nurse] laughed, ‘We’re just in time. Aren’t we lucky?’ They went in thedoor that led to the gallery” [324]), the situation undergoes a sudden change. Turned
into the object of everyone’s gaze, Catherine under anaesthesia is associated with theimage of death:
I thought Catherine was dead. She looked dead. Her face was gray, the partof it that I could see. Down below, under the light, the doctor was sewing
up the great long, forcep-spread, thick-edged, wound. Another doctor in amask gave the anæsthetic. Two nurses in masks handed things. It looked
like a drawing of the Inquisition. I knew as I watched I could have watched
it all, but I was glad I hadn’t. I do not think I could have watched themcut, but I watched the wound closed into a high welted ridge with quick
skilful-looking stitches like a cobbler’s, and was glad. (325)The Politics of Pain

39

We can see the gradual change of Frederic’s perception of the medical intervention
into Catherine’s body. At first, Catherine, who is put under anaesthesia, appears to
be a dead person (“She looked dead”); then, her body objectified by doctors andnurses seems to be punished for heresy, to be a target of unreasonable attack (“like adrawing of the Inquisition”); yet, seeing the skillful movement of the doctor’s hands(“like a cobbler’s”), he soon feels relieved (“was glad”). His strong sympathy with
Catherine’s pain causes this representation that mingles contradictory perceptions of
medical technology.
Hemingway’s representation of medical technology about anaesthesia is by nomeans consistent throughout the story. Sometimes anaesthesia is an indispensable
benefit to kill pain; sometimes it is a period of unconsciousness causing sickness
afterward:
When I was awake after the operation I had not been away. You do not go
away. They only choke you. It is not like dying it is just a chemical choking
so you do not feel, and afterward you might as well have been drunk exceptthat when you throw up nothing comes but bile and you do not feel better
afterward. (107)This should be the most neutral description of anaesthesia in the novel, seen throughthe eyes of those who are put under anaesthesia. Since Frederic was unconscious
when he was operated on, he cannot appreciate the benefit of the technology. It
is only when a person sees others under anaesthesia that the technology becomescharged with various values. After Catherine’s operation he meditates on the deadbaby with “The cord [. . . ] caught around his neck”: “Maybe he was choked all
the time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I’d been choked like that.” Here, thechoking experience of anaesthesia when he was operated on seems associated withthe dead baby choked by the umbilical cord. This association, separated by as manyas over 200 pages, might be perhaps accidental, yet it is very likely that seeing thedying Catherine provided the negative view of anaesthesia despite that he desperately
attempted to give it to Catherine when she screamed in pain just before the operation.
From the mere choking sensation to the preliminary stage of death, Hemingway
as well as Frederic wavers between two extremes from the total acceptance to the relative rejection. His statements are always inconsistent when he attempts to describe
medical technology: it is sometimes an unwanted intruder into nature; a benefit ofcivilization; a salvation relieving the loved one from pain; or the state analogous todeath. We have seen in this chapter the representation of pain through the technological advancement of anaesthesia. In the next chapter, we shall look at the depiction ofpain through the non-sensation as exemplifying the tendency of the interwar period.

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Notes
1

As accurately depicted in A Farewell to Arms, surgical operating rooms were generally constructed
like amphitheaters with a place for observation attached: “There were benches behind a rail thatlooked down on the white table and the lights” (324).

2

There are some other opinions about the origin of the story. Kenneth Lynn states that “‘IndianCamp’ came from a less obvious cluster of emotions, all of which had been generated by thecircumstances surrounding the birth of John Hadley Nicanor [Hemingway’s first son]” (229). Or
more recently, according to William Adair, Hemingway’s injury in the First World War is anothersource for the story. See “A Source for Hemingway’s ‘Indian Camp.’ ”

3Doctors are generally known to disregard patients’ complaints about pain: “physicians do not trust(hence, hear) the human voice, that they in eﬀect perceive the voice of the patient as an “unreliablenarrator” of bodily events, a voice which must be bypassed as quickly as possible so that they
can get around and behind it to the physical events themselves” (Scarry 6). Morse and Mitchamstate that medical workers have to learn the attitude of neglecting patients’ pain: “they have todeliberately detach themselves from the reality of another’s pain” (653).

4

See David Morris’ The Culture of Pain. “The prevailing Enlightenment thinkers on primitivism
celebrated the pain-free state of the natural savage, who supposedly did not suﬀer the debilitating illnesses and nervous disorders of the ‘hypersensitive’ European races. Thus the widely
published observations of sophisticated travelers and amateur anthropologists lent credence to thewhite man’s belief that his own pain was somehow special. ‘In our process of being civilized,’
wrote S. Weir Mitchell, the famous nineteenth-century American neurologist, ‘we have won, I suspect, intensified capacity to suﬀer. The savage does not feel pain as we do’ ” (39, emphases aremine).

5“[. . . ] the possibility of alleviating physical pain profoundly altered the going view of the ‘value’of pain and lowered the estimation of asceticism. Christian asceticism has often maintained thatsuﬀering ennobles life. [. . . ] In an essay on pain, Jules Rochard concluded that following the
introduction of anesthesia to reduce pain, Europeans had grown to fear pain more than death andhad become less able to endure suﬀering” (Anatomy 78).

6

According to Scarry, “Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it
ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (4).

7Morse and Mitcham propose the new concept of “compathy” by which they mean “an involuntary
distress response in the caregiver that mirrors patient distress” (649). “Compathy [. . . ] refers to
the sharing not so much of an emotional as a physiological state. While theories of sympathy
and empathy aim to account for the sharing of emotional responses (i.e. feelings), the experiencesof shared physical distress responses are seldom included. Here the argument is for recognitionof a new physiological dimension of empathy, that is, for the communication or ‘contagion’ ofphysical responses from one individual to another” (650). And according to them, “Couvade is
not restricted to exotic cultures; males in western cultures are sometimes aﬀected by symptoms
similar to the physical discomforts of pregnancy and labour. Despite the chronological coordination of pregnancy with the occurrence of symptoms which are ‘mimicked in a manner that is quite
remarkable,’ the relationship between these events may nevertheless not be perceived by expectant
fathers” (652). Of great importance here is that the symptoms of couvade is perceived not in theWest but only in “exotic cultures.” That the somatic phenomena of “compathy” are exclusively
recognized in primitive societies is a clear evidence of Eurocentric primitivism.

Chapter 5“The Marvellous Thing Is That It’s Painless”

James Joyce once beautifully captured the moral malaise of citizens in an Irish
town in his short story collection, Dubliners. Paralysis is the term which mostfully expresses the central motif of the stories:[Father Flynn] had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had
thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed
up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis [. . . ]. But now
it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled
me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly
work. (1, emphases are original)

Though all the subsequent stories in this collection also, in one way or another, depict the suﬀocating impasse of paralyzed people,1 the lines above from “The Sisters,”
which contain the single appearance of the word “paralysis” in the volume, elucidate
what it is like to be paralytic; thus, introducing the underlying theme of the following
stories. However hard he tries “to be nearer to [paralysis],” the boy narrator throughout the story can never distinguish it from death or from Father Flynn’s “stupefied
doze” (4). During his futile attempt to comprehend his friend’s death, the boy’s concept of death wanders over the limbo in which death, paralysis, and slumber intersectwith each other. The characters in this collection are all trapped in this limbo and aredesperately struggling to escape from it in vain.
Though the boy in “The Sisters” is by no means morally corrupted, another example from “Eveline” more appropriately explicates the social malaise of Dublin.
Courted by a sailor who wants to leave the city with her and wanting to get out fromthe paralyzed society and her family, Eveline nevertheless cannot decide whether togo with him or not. Clinging to a railing of the station at the last instance before they
get on board the boat, she forever shuts out of her own accord the possibility of escaping to a new life, not because she decided to stay but because she could not decideto go. When she is left behind on the quay, her state of mind is clearly characterizedby paralytic non-sensation, completely passive to anything around her:He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted
at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive,
like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or
recognition. (34)

41

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Yet, this malaise of the emotional stasis was neither exclusively detected in thecity of Dublin nor merely a volatile peculiarity caught in the sensibility of a genius,
but was observed all but universally in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Rapid industrialization and the extremely high mechanization of society, which had
advanced at the turn of the century, brought about the sense of repulsion in the people’s mind against mechano-science; and anaesthesia, a representative technology ofthe nineteenth century’s high achievement of science, was no longer the target of celebration, but a negative indication that people lived in the corrupt society wandering
far away from nature. This retrogressive tendency aspiring to the preindustrializedstate is most conspicuously advocated in the works of D. H. Lawrence, whose attack
on modern civilization and whose devotion to nature worship and primitivism canbe seen in many of his essays and fictions. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he conveys
the dehumanized and morally modern mind paralyzed because of the influence oftechnological advancement, attacking severely though rather too simplistically thecurrent of the time. In Cliﬀord’s social circle in Wragby Hall, people discuss themechanization of the future society, in which “babies would be bred in bottles, andwomen would be ‘immunized.’ ” According to Lady Bennerley, “if the love-business
went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A little morphine in
all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everybody” (74). We can grasp
in this passage that Lawrence, who praised highly above all else human communication through bodily contact, is keenly aware of the imminent crisis that technologicalachievement might disrupt all human relationships. Highly celebrated as it was in
the nineteenth century as a goal of modern science as we have seen in the previous
chapter, the evaluative view of anaesthesia, or the lack of sensation, as is eloquently
expressed in Lawrence’s criticism of modern civilization, gradually through the development of mechanization and the proportional repulsion against it, turned into its
opposite — an object of fear, a despicable state of mind, and, as it were, a mode ofsocial disease. Paralysis, or the lack of sensation, in its both literal and figurative
senses, is a key to understanding the first half of the twentieth century.
In Lawrence’s conception from the earliest stage of his career, morphine wasnever a benevolent salvation to relieve a patient from pain, but what trapped him/her
into a state of living death — the state in which the patient, unable to accept his/her
death, seeks refuge and remains oblivious to the coming of death, satisfied by acomfortable insensibility to pain. He wrote the passage of Mrs. Morel’s deathbed
thus: “She thought of the pain, of the morphia, of the next day; hardly ever of thedeath. That was coming, she knew. She had to submit to it. But she would neverentreat it or make friends with it. Blind, with her face shut hard and blind, she waspushed towards the door” (Sons 430).
Similar examples are abundant. We should clearly remember that Prufrock’s
monologue depicting the lethargic and spiritless quality of the age begins with thepassage: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky /Like a patient etherised upon a table” (Eliot 3). Or we can recognize the echo of Lady

The Politics of Pain

43

Bennerley’s opinion about morphine in Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Swimmers”:
one of Henry Marston’s “strange speeches” in his delirium (“how all the populationof Paris was becoming etherized by cheap gasoline” [497]) never conveys a favorable
impression of anaesthesia. These metaphorical uses of anaesthesia suggest that, up
to the early twentieth century, this technological achievement of nineteenth century
medicine had no longer fascinated people’s minds as a positive benefit that should beenjoyed by every civilized citizen.
Edith Wharton, accordingly, used for her rendering of morally corrupt upper classpeople in New York a most appropriate metaphor of anaesthetized childbirth, which
she also used as the title of the novel — Twilight Sleep. Mrs. Manford declares
to her expectant daughter-in-law: “Of course there ought to be no Pain . . . nothing
but Beauty . . . It ought to be one of the loveliest, most poetic things in the world tohave a baby” (18). Absorbed in spiritual healing, philanthropy, beauty treatment, andother leisured-class engagements, Mrs. Manford embodies the age in which people
are deprived of their ability to feel sensation, used to the lack of perception, andcomfortable in the numbness of their emotional activities.
[. . . ] all her life she had been used to buying oﬀ suﬀering with money,
or denying its existence with words, and her moral muscles had become so atrophied that only some great shock would restore their natural
strength . . . (261)
Paralysis, stupefaction, twilight sleep, and atrophy — such pathological metaphors are found in abundance in literature representing the undercurrent of the age.
Ernest Hemingway was no exception. In the nihilistic milieu of the first decadesof the twentieth century, the Lost Generation is a generation keenly aware of theemotional stasis after the great storm having swept across the European Continent.
The fear of non-sensation, the fear of a numbing of his perception obsessed him andled him to the description of paralyzed characters in order to distance himself fromhis contemporaries trapped in the limbo between life and death.
Take “On the Quai at Smyrna” to begin with. As Louis H. Leiter clarifies, thisstory “dramatizes the gradual numbing of human responses through repeated horrors” (139). The story describes horror and brutality in war through the eyes of a
speaker, who tells seven episodes to the narrator. Yet, after commenting that thefirst three are “strange,” “unimaginable,” and “the worst” (CSS 63), “it is impossible for the speaker’s mind to respond to horror any longer” (Leiter 138). Reaching
the bottom, the speaker’s emotional line somehow goes upward from the fourth tothe seventh episode: the last four are referred to as “extraordinary,” of man’s being “a bit above himself,” “surprising,” and “a most pleasant business” (CSS 63-64).
This anaesthetization of the soldier is a familiar example of a psychological defense
mechanism against horrible experiences that are beyond one’s capacity.
“A Natural History of the Dead,” in a part of which the seventh episode of “On44

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

the Quai at Smyrna” is retold, also presents the narrator who attempts to fortify himself with the strategy of posing as a detached observer among numerous dead bodies.
By contrasting the crude and unvarnished rendering in presenting dead bodies in thebattlefield with the humanist discourse of past naturalists, the story parodies and satirizes such humane attitudes of those who did not participate in war: facing unprecedented brutalities, a human soul could never maintain Christian-oriented sympathy
toward those who were injured and dead. As in “On the Quai at Smyrna,” the narrator ostensibly seems to take pleasure in conveying gloomy and dismal spectacles inwar, assessing them, for instance, as “it being amazing that the human body shouldbe blown into pieces [. . . ]” (CSS 337, emphasis is mine). Once thrown among numerous dead bodies which have been blown apart into bits and fragments, one has
to take as detached an attitude as possible to sustain one’s mental stability, shuttingout humanist sympathy toward fellow beings under tremendous atrocity; just like adoctor must become insensitive to his/her patient’s pain.
This preference of the practical over the humane attitude in combat is repeated in
the struggle between an army surgeon and an artillery oﬃcer at the latter half of thestory. The doctor is represented as an exemplary figure surviving in the battlefield,
and the oﬃcer blames him in a dressing post for his doing nothing for a dying soldierwith his head “broken as a flower-pot may be broken, although it was all held together
by membranes and a skillfully applied bandage now soaked and hardened [. . . ].”The oﬃcer first makes a suggestion to “give him an overdose of morphine,” which
is answered by the doctor: “Do you think that is the only use I have for morphine?
Would you like me to have to operate without morphine? You have a pistol, go out
and shoot him yourself.” The oﬃcer declares at last: “I will shoot the poor fellow[. . . ]. I am a humane man. I will not let him suﬀer.” After a fight between the two,
blinded by a saucer full of iodine flung at his eyes by the doctor, the oﬃcer screams:“You have blinded me! You have blinded me!” The doctor calmly orders a sergeantto hold him tight, saying at the concluding passage: “He is in much pain. Hold himvery tight” (CSS 339-41).
The oﬃcer is indeed going through the pain that the doctor never feels in his
profession, since he is not allowed to feel another’s pain however pained the patient
looks and however much his insensibility seems callous and cruel to another’s eyes.
Too much detachedness, if not in such a violent situation, might of course result ina serious tragedy as can be seen in the case of Doctor Adams in “Indian Camp”; yetto be deprived of the ability to share pain with another, to be, as it were, a doctorlike observer rather than a positive participant during the war is the only way tosave oneself from psychic damage one might receive when confronting unimaginablecalamities and brutalities. Morphine should thus be administered not to the dying
soldier but to the oﬃcer’s mind.
Frederic Henry’s remark that “At the start of the winter came the permanent rain
and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seventhousand died of it in the army” (FTA 4) has been considered a typical example ofThe Politics of Pain

45

Hemingway’s “hard-boiled” style of narrating events from a distance, yet in view ofthese repeated dramatizations of the process of gradual numbing of soldiers’ perception, it is highly probable that Frederic also has to detach himself from the stark realities of war to a psychically safe distance. As Samuel Hynes argues, “in the presenceof such multitudes the psychic defense called numbing quickly sets in” (xii). Seven
thousand should simply be beyond the capacity of which Frederic can conceive. Herehe protects himself from inconceivable brutalities by becoming insensible to the painof others.
Harold Krebs in “Soldier’s Home” defends himself in a like manner. The omniscient narrator’s remark that Krebs “had done the one thing, the only thing for a
man to do, easily and naturally” has hitherto been considered as a reference to his
courage in war,2 yet there appears no mention in this story of a word in whatever way
related to his bravery. The intention of the above sentence should rather be sought in
the defense mechanism employed by soldiers.3 It is very likely that Krebs had shutout his sense of fear in the face of numerous dead colleagues and his possible death
imminent in the situation; otherwise, he might have lost his mental stability under
tremendous atrocity that was yet unheard of.
But when talking about the war with another soldier, “he fell into the easy pose of
the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened
all the time.” This act of lying causes him critical damage, since to tell that he felt fearin the war is to be stripped of the only protection available whereby he has guarded
his right mind. “Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he haddone this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it. A
distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war set in because of the lies
he had told” (CSS 111-12). The “distaste” which arises here is the belated sensation
he ought to have received in combat. By reliving his fear after many months, thearmor of imperception, of being paralytic at a critical moment, with which Krebs has
enshrouded himself, becomes finally cracked apart. Knowing this danger, he feels anurgent necessity to stop talking about the war, to stop having relations with others,
and to crawl back again into his comfortable protection of indiﬀerence to everyone
and everything around him. He finally switches oﬀ all of his nerves so as to receive
no more shocking influences.
When he was in town their [girls’] appeal to him was not very strong.
He did not like them when he saw them in the Greek’s ice cream parlor. He
did not want them themselves really. They were too complicated. Therewas something else. Vaguely he wanted a girl but he did not want to haveto work to get her. He would have liked to have a girl but he did not wantto have to spend a long time getting her. He did not want to get into theintrigue and the politics. He did not want to have to do any courting. He
did not want to tell any more lies. It wasn’t worth it.
He did not want any consequences. He did not want any consequences

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body
ever again. He wanted to live along [sic] without consequences. (CSS 11213)

He does not want to have a girlfriend, though he is sometimes sexually aroused whenlooking at girls (“He did not want them themselves really.” “Vaguely he wanted agirl [. . . ]”); for, if he tried to have, he would undertake all the possibility of being
shocked, injured, and mentally damaged, and accepting its “consequences.” Hemingway well knew how painful such consequences were when he returned from thewar and received a letter from Agnes von Kurowsky, his nurse and girlfriend in a
Milan hospital, to tell him that they should break oﬀ the relationship.
We have discussed the psychic self-defense of soldiers to cope with traumatic
experiences of war. We shall hereafter discuss two means employed by Hemingway’s characters to bring about intentionally such a paralytic state of mind to avert
confronting various emotional stresses — alcohol and self-deceptive illusion. “TheThree-Day Blow” is a good example to start with. The first two thirds of the story justdescribe a room in which Nick, the protagonist of the story, and his friend Bill are
drinking alcohol and enjoying conversation about baseball and their favorite writers.
The content of their idle talk is totally unrelated to what the story intends to show.
Indeed most of the story seems at first meaningless and at best a lengthy recordingof young boys’ idle talk except for the last few pages in which we for the first time
notice Nick’s hidden distress about his lost love. The ostensibly insignificant conversation, however, has an important role in the story to convey how deeply Nick has
been remorseful of his conduct — his jilting Marjorie, the details of which we learn
in “The End of Something” placed immediately before “The Three-Day Blow” inIn Our Time. The long description of his heavy drinking and his seemingly aimlesstalking, if seen against the background of this recent break up with his girlfriend,
suddenly become an account of his attempt to anaesthetize the painful feelings about
what he has lost, the attempt to forget about the “Marge business,” with his headoccupied by other trivial concerns. But this attempt fails only when Bill takes up
the problem; Nick suddenly falls reticent (“Nick said nothing. [. . . ] Nick said nothing. [. . . ] ‘Sure,’ said Nick. [. . . ] ‘Yes,’ said Nick. [. . . ] Nick nodded. [. . . ] Nick sat
quiet [. . . ]” [CSS 90]), and Bill, on the contrary, keeps persuading him that Nick did
right in breaking it oﬀ with her. And we know that Nick’s anaesthetic has completely
worn oﬀ at this stage.
Nick said nothing. The liquor had all died out of him and left him alone.
Bill wasn’t there. He wasn’t sitting in front of the fire or going fishingtomorrow with Bill and his dad or anything. He wasn’t drunk. It was all
gone. All he knew was that he had once had Marjorie and that he had losther. She was gone and he had sent her away. That was all that mattered.
He might never see her again. Probably he never would. It was all gone,finished. (CSS 91)

47

The Politics of Pain

The “Marge business” suddenly flows into his thoughts, and flushes away everythingwhich they have talked about, every other favorable subject and comfortable intoxication, and even Bill’s existence itself.
Yet, he finds another emotional outlet when the possibility occurs to him that
he can resume the relationship with Marjorie. This self-consoling imagination is
the second way of anaesthetizing the painful feelings, the way that “made him feelbetter” (CSS 92). Hemingway well captures the gradual numbing of the pain he has
felt:
Nick had not thought about that. It had seemed so absolute. That was athought. That made him feel better.
.........
He felt happy now. There was not anything that was irrevocable. He
might go into town Saturday night. Today was Thursday.
.........
He felt happy. Nothing was finished. Nothing was ever lost. He would
go into town on Saturday. He felt lighter, as he had felt before Bill started
to talk about it. There was always a way out.
.........
Outside now the Marge business was no longer so tragic. It was noteven very important. The wind blew everything like that away.
.........
None of it was important now. The wind blew it out of his head. Stillhe could always go into town Saturday night. It was a good thing to havein reserve. (CSS 92-93)
The anaesthetic seems successful on the surface. However, the simple repetitive
nature of these sentences gives us the impression that he is trying desperately topersuade himself that he really feels happy, that the Marge business is really not
irrevocable, and that they can really reunite on Saturday — the impression that, at thebottom of his heart, Nick knows the possibility of resuming the relationship is merely
an illusion, just a temporary “way out.” Yet he has to guard his mental stability from
coping with too much damage, and the only means to which he can find recourse
here is to avert his eyes from the distasteful reality. After all, only to kill pain even
without taking appropriate treatment of a wound should still be “a good thing to havein reserve.”
The Sun Also Rises is almost a catalog of paralyzed people helplessly trapped in
an idle and unproductive atmosphere of the age and living a life of Joycean limbo.
They simply cannot escape from the situation, and also do not attempt to escapefrom the present situation. Robert Cohn, to illustrate, deeply absorbed in a fantastic

48

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

novel of “splendid imaginary amorous adventures,” persists in going to the place inwhich the novel is set, but he “can’t get started,” only to complain that he “can’t
stand it to think [his] life is going so fast and [he is] not really living it” (17-18). His
desire to flee from reality most eloquently explicates the nature of post World War I
expatriates: they can never be satisfied by the status quo and are endlessly seeking
refuge in one country after another. Francis, about to be deserted by Cohn, complains
to Jake of her situation, yet does not ask any advice or help: “‘And of course there
isn’t anything I [Jake] can do.’ ‘No. Just don’t let him [Cohn] know I [Francis] talked
to you. I know what he wants’ ” (55). Even in the face of such an unpleasant reality,
any means to prevent the reality is totally beyond her conception.
These characters in paralysis invariably find recourse in alcohol and improbableand self-deceptive imaginations as Nick in “The Three-Day Blow” did to avert hiseyes from the pain in his heart: anaesthetization without treatment. Jake Barnes is
no diﬀerent, yet in his case, the wound itself is represented as a form of paralysis —a paraplegic genital inflicted in the war. Paralysis itself is the cause of pain for him,
and to get rid of the pain he repeatedly recourses to heavy drinking as almost every
character in the novel does. Jake and Brett Ashley love each other, but they cannot
consummate their love because of Jake’s impotence. Unable to live away from eachother because of their aﬀection, and at the same time unable to live together becauseof the wound, they can go nowhere except just wandering through the dark streets ofParis riding in a taxicab, not knowing what to do about their aroused sexual desire.
The quotation below follows Jake’s attempt to commit some sexual act that is rejectedby Brett:“Isn’t there anything we can do about it?”
She was sitting up now. My arm was around her and she was leaningback against me, and we were quite calm. She was looking into my eyeswith that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really
saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else’s
eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there
were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she wasafraid of so many things.
“And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said. (34)There is always nothing they can do about their relationship. Caught by his carnal
needs toward Brett, possessed by the desire aroused by her presence, Jake desperately
seeks in vain whatever way he can ease the desire while he is poignantly aware of thediﬃculty preventing them from achieving ordinary sexual intercourse. Brett, on thecontrary, is rather calm in her attitude, or at least not provoked by sexual desire as
Jake is. The situation is, in short, under her control, and it is Jake who is objectified
by her gaze, the gaze invested with the peculiar features of being ever-continuing(“[Her eyes] would look on and on after every one else’s eyes in the world would

The Politics of Pain

49

have stopped looking”) and horrifyingly impartial (“She looked as though there werenothing on earth she would not look at like that”) eyes. Jake thus turns into “nobody”
to her, for he is sexually impotent; he continues to be “nobody” ever after, for there
is no possibility for him to be cured.
Shortly after the conversation above, Jake leaves Brett in a cafe and goes backhome. To avert his eyes from the failure to consummate his sexual desire, he deals
with the trivialities of daily life, such as reading letters and newspapers, or keeping
the record of expenses, yet, in the middle of the trivialities, flashes of thought sometimes slip into his mind to remind him of the relationship with Brett (“There was acrest on the announcement. Like the Zizi the Greek duke. [. . . ] Brett had a title, too.
Lady Ashley. To hell with Brett. To hell with you, Lady Ashley”), and the wound hesuﬀers (“[The mirror of a big armoire] was a typically French way to furnish a room.
Practical, too, I suppose. Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny”). In
spite of his eﬀort to fall asleep, his “head started to work.” In this “old grievance,” hebroods over a fantastic idea to console his misfortune, to imagine that he was neverin trouble: “Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brettwhen they shipped me to England” (38-39).
Brett, at first glance, lives a self-indulgent life, following her unchecked desire;yet, she is also locked in a paralyzing situation when she says “I’m not going to be
one of these bitches that ruins children” (247). On being asked by a young bullfighter
Pedro Romero to marry him, she takes flight from the only possibility of escaping
from the life of drinking and promiscuity in a way not unlike Joyce’s Eveline. At
the novel’s ending when Brett and Jake talk about the outcome of her aﬀair with
Romero, despite that she suggests four times that she does not want to talk about theaﬀair with Romero (“[. . . ] let’s not talk about it. Let’s never talk about it.” “Oh,
let’s not talk about it.” “Don’t let’s ever talk about it. Please don’t let’s ever talkabout it.” “But, oh, Jake, please let’s never talk about it” [245-47]), she constantly
and immediately returns to the subject by her own will. And she declares: “I’mgoing back to Mike. [. . . ] He’s so damned nice and he’s so awful. He’s my sort ofthing” (247). Mike, who is her ex-fiancé and was deserted when she went away with
Romero, is another figure who indulges in heavy drinking and aimless talking. She iscompletely trapped by this vicious circle of paralyzing malaise in the age. Everything
forces her to return to the old group of culturally dislocated expatriates.
At the end of the novel, however, Jake is at least aware of this claustrophobic
binding force that holds him and his friends, of the situation in which they continue
to wander and from which they can never escape. Brett and Jake ride in a taxicab, as
they did in Paris at the beginning of the novel as quoted earlier. However, the power
relationship between Jake and Brett is completely reversed: in this case, it is Jake
who controls the situation. The famous last passage is thus:“Oh, Jake,” Brett said, “we could have had such a damned good time
together.”

50

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traﬃc. He raised
his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.
“Yes,” I said. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (251)Here Jake clearly refuses to indulge in the same fantastic and self-deceptive idea with
Brett, the idea that is “pretty to think.” To imagine that they “could have had such adamned good time together” might console and anaesthetize their hurt feelings, yet
to picture the if in which they can consummate their love is merely an imagination.
Jake, by articulating the possibility in the form of a negative question, suggests theunproductive result of such an attempt to avert their eyes from the harsh reality.
In 1931, Hemingway rendered “the study in pain” from his experience of a car
accident and the subsequent hospitalization: “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio.”4 The story is about three persons — Cayetano Ruiz, the gambler who is shot
twice in the abdomen and brought to the hospital; Sister Cecilia, the nun who takes
care of patients in the hospital; and Frazer, the writer from whose point of view thestory is told. Cayetano is described as a highly courageous and persevering figurein that he never tells who shot him to the detective sergeant asking questions about
the incident, and that he never cries when suﬀering severe pain in the course of the
medical treatment and afterward. Sister Cecilia highly praises this silent enduranceof the patient:He was so uncomplaining she said and he was very bad now. He had peritonitis and they thought he could not live. Poor Cayetano, she said. He
had such beautiful hands and such a fine face and he never complains. The
odor, now, was really terrific. He would point toward his nose with one
finger and smile and shake his head, she said. He felt badly about the odor.
It embarrassed him, Sister Cecilia said. Oh, he was such a fine patient. He
always smiled. (CSS 357)
Even in this critical moment, he “never complains” about pain, and, what is more,is “embarrassed” by his inability to maintain decency. Frazer, on the contrary, cannot
endure his pain (both physical and psychological) without the consolation of listening
to the radio possibly to distract his consciousness away from the harsh reality of thepresent condition of his wound. For Frazer, the radio is the anaesthetic — or toborrow the words used in the story, “the opium” — a means to escape from thepainful situation. Though the radio does not work well during the day, “all night itworked beautifully and when one station stopped you could go farther west and pickup another” (CSS 358). In this manner, by picturing people in distant places far awayfrom the hospital, he tries to avert his eyes from his wound in the leg, from which tocompletely recover it will take “A long, long time” (CSS 357). When Frazer’s nerves
go bad, he increasingly depends on listening to the radio not to think about his plight:“Mr. Frazer had been through this all before. The only thing which was new to him
was the radio. He played it all night long, turned so low he could barely hear it, andThe Politics of Pain51

he was learning to listen to it without thinking” (CSS 363). This obsession with theradio reminds us of Cliﬀord in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who is absorbed in the radio
to make up for the lost communication with his friends.5 Like many characters ofother Hemingway’s stories as discussed above, he completely relies on illusions thatthe radio creates in his mind, and these illusions are the last resort for him to escapefrom the reality (another familiar method of escape in Hemingway’s texts — alcohol
is of course frequently mentioned throughout the story).
Sister Cecilia also cannot directly confront the reality and takes recourse in praying to God. Even when a football team with the name of “Our Lady,” Notre Dame,is to play a match, she cannot listen to the radio broadcast for she would “be too excited” and remains in the chapel to pray “For Our Lady,” namely, for the victory of theteam (CSS 359). In the opinion of one of the “friends of he who wounded” Cayetano— one of the Mexicans whom the police send to the hospital so that Cayetano hassome visitors — “Religion is the opium of the poor,”6 and thus Sister Cecilia seems
to him “a little crazy” (CSS 361-62). If not crazy, she is at least a person who indulges
in the opium, recourses to the anaesthetic without facing reality.
As most critics agree, Cayetano exemplifies the so-called code-hero.7 He is depicted as independent of self-deceptive illusions unlike Frazer and Sister Cecilia orother paralytic characters in Hemingway’s stories. In the case of Jake Barnes, who
also has a paralyzed bodily part like Cayetano, his paraplegic genital requires him totake whatever means to ease the pain in his life; while in the case of Cayetano, withthe leg paralyzed, he nevertheless needs no anaesthetical flight from the distressing
situation. Unlike Frazer, he can endure his pain without the radio or any other formof consolation — without, in a word, opium.
When Frazer meets Cayetano coming into his room in a wheelchair, the former
asks the latter, “What about the pain? [. . . ] She tells me you never made a sound.”Cayetano is humble enough to insist that it is because there are “So many people in
the ward” that he did not give a shout. He states that “If [he] had a private room and aradio [he] would be crying and yelling all night long” (CSS 364-65).8 What is shownin this conversation is not only Cayetano’s silent fortitude but his humility not to be
proud about his spiritual strength. He pretends that he is ranked with ordinary people
and tries to expose and emphasize his weakness, yet this very condescending blameon himself, if seen from the eyes of an actually weaker person, is naturally shifted
onto the weaker — in this case, onto Frazer. Cayetano even calls himself “the victim
of illusions” by which he means his absorption in the gamble: knowing that he is“completely without luck,” he never stops to be “a professional gambler” and does
just “Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change” (CSS 365-66). Yet, given thiscalm understanding of his own way of living, “the victim of illusions” is the namenot suitable for Cayetano but what should be attributed rather to Frazer who always
imagines daily lives of strangers in strange places in the radio.
After the conversation with Cayetano, Frazer realizes that he is dependent on “theopium,” by which to avert his eyes from the reality. As we can infer, it is because of

52

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

this realization that he suddenly begins to fix his eyes on other patients staying in thesame ward and lists the condition of their wounds:
In that ward there was a rodeo rider who had come out of the chutes on
Midnight on a hot dusty afternoon with the big crowd watching, and now,with a broken back, was going to learn to work in leather and to cane chairs
when he got well enough to leave the hospital. There was a carpenter who
had fallen with a scaﬀolding and broken both ankles and both wrists. He
had lit like a cat but without a cat’s resiliency. They could fix him up so thathe could work again but it would take a long time. There was a boy froma farm, about sixteen years old, with a broken leg that had been badly set
and was to be rebroken. There was Cayetano Ruiz, a small-town gambler
with a paralyzed leg” (CSS 366).
The conditions of his fellow inmates here enumerated being apparently severer thanthat of Frazer, his attempt to describe them in detail shows his acute realization that
there exist people suﬀering in a more depressing situation: they either have diﬃculty
in returning to the former jobs because of their injuries, or have to go through still
more painful ordeals to recover their health completely.
Frazer’s awareness of this abundance of suﬀerers around him leads his thought
to the social situation of the age even though “Usually he avoided thinking all hecould.” His almost philosophical meditation reads thus:
Religion is the opium of the people. He believed that, that dyspeptic little
joint-keeper. Yes, and music is the opium of the people. Old mount-tothe-head hadn’t thought of that. And now economics is the opium of thepeople; along with patriotism the opium of the people in Italy and Germany.
What about sexual intercourse; was that an opium of the people? Of someof the people. Of some of the best of the people. But drink was a sovereign
opium of the people, oh, an excellent opium. Although some prefer theradio, another opium of the people, a cheap one he had just been using.
Along with these went gambling, an opium of the people if there ever wasone, one of the oldest. Ambition was another, an opium of the people,
along with a belief in any new form of government. What you wanted was
the minimum of government, always less government. Liberty, what we
believed in, now the name of a MacFadden publication. We believed inthat although they had not found a new name for it yet. But what was thereal one? What was the real, the actual, opium of the people? He knew itvery well. It was gone just a little way around the corner in that well-lighted
part of his mind that was there after two or more drinks in the evening; that
he knew was there (it was not really there of course). What was it? He
knew very well. What was it? Of course; bread was the opium of thepeople. Would he remember that and would it make sense in the daylight?

The Politics of Pain

53

Bread is the opium of the people. (CSS 367)
In this grand philosophical reverie, the list of opiums includes most forms of humanconsolation and support for life. Frazer seems to argue that almost everyone in theage has been paralyzed by opiums of various forms, that no one really sees anything
in the world without relying on whatever means of mitigation to absorb the directshock of undiluted reality. Considering morally trapped citizens numbed by the social order, he realizes that if he were to evade this trap of opiums, he would never
have any consolation in the daily course of living. Totally at a loss what to do once
he acquired this dismal world view, he seeks desperately for any opinion from the
Mexican, who told him that religion is the opium of the people, only in vain.
“Listen,” said Mr. Frazer. “Why should the people be operated on without an anæsthetic?”“I do not understand.”“Why are not all the opiums of the people good? What do you want to
do with the people?”“They should be rescued from ignorance.”“Don’t talk nonsense. Education is an opium of the people. You ought
to know that. You’ve had a little.” (CSS 367-68)
People who are “operated on without an anæsthetic” means those who are living
without depending on fake consolation to alleviate the painful sensation, someone
who is like Cayetano. In Frazer’s newly acquired philosophy, to live is to endure thepain.9In addition, Frazer’s attack on the social institution of education and the fact that
he repeatedly borrows from Marx the expression, “the opium of the people” (actually
one of the Mexicans who visit Cayetano uses the expression first), lead us to see him
as a Marxist, yet he is never in accord with Marxist theory of the time.10
Revolution, Mr. Frazer thought, is no opium. Revolution is a catharsis; anecstasy which can only be prolonged by tyranny. The opiums are for before
and for after. He was thinking well, a little too well. (CSS 368)
In his view, a political system silently dominates people by way of numbing theirsensation to deprive them of the power of resistance, giving them various modesof consolation to avert their eyes from problems of the social order. However, theopiums are also “after” the revolution. According to Frazer, thus, whether or not
a revolution breaks out, whether or not it succeeds in overthrowing the system, theworld will never change its fundamental structure, continuing to anaesthetize people.
He is thus not going to go through personal revolution, for, when the sound of Cucaracha, a revolutionary song played by Mexicans, stops, he is going to return to his
pet opium: “Then he would have a little spot of the giant killer and play the radio,

54

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

you could play the radio so that you could hardly hear it” (CSS 368). Despite thathe could reach the profound understanding of life, he could choose the comfortable
place deeply immersed with the opium.
Because of a prolific literary career in the 1920s, Hemingway could keep somedistance from the lethargic social milieu after World War I. Since the publication of
In Our Time in 1925, he had published three books and two short story collectionsin less than five years. However, the 1930s was for him a decade of creative slump;while extremely active in his real life, going on safari or absorbed in bullfighting,nevertheless (or therefore?) the 30s, except for a short story collection, Winner Take
Nothing, produced in book form only Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa,
and To Have and Have Not, none of which has been much celebrated either by critics or readers in general. In this period of literary sterility, writing about paralytic
characters naturally means to take a critical attitude toward himself. In the previous decade, he might have been in the middle of the social stagnancy surrounded byparalytic contemporaries, yet he transcended such lifeless inertness by writing about
them; whereas now he himself could be ranked along with those paralytic for hecould not write enough to be exempt from being charged with moral stasis. It is at
this time that he wrote “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which depicts most harshly thenon-sensation of the protagonist.
The story is certainly Hemingway’s purgatorial rendering of his own paralytic
situation, centering on a man’s sense of pain in the past and now. Harry, the protagonist, dying of gangrene yet without pain, is a paradigmatic character who has gonenumb in wealthy laziness. The first lines of the story indicate that the central theme
is insensibility to pain:“The marvellous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how you
know when it starts.”“Is it really?”“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor, though. That must
bother you.” (CSS 39)
We cannot overlook the stark contrast between the passage above and Cayetano enduring his pain yet being embarrassed by the odor. Painless yet reeking Harry on
the one hand, and painful and reeking Cayetano on the other; these two characters
created at the beginning and the height of Hemingway’s infertile period are placedat the opposite extremes. Cayetano is a vigorous character who recovers from theinjuries from which everyone thinks he dies; while Harry is an eﬀete character who
yields to the approaching death without any attempt to resist it. Harry is a typicalcharacter who is trapped by the paralytic malaise of the age.
So now it was all over, he thought. So now he would never have a chance
to finish it. So this was the way it ended, in a bickering over a drink. Since
the gangrene started in his right leg he had no pain and with the pain theThe Politics of Pain

55

horror had gone and all he felt now was a great tiredness and anger that
this was the end of it. For this, that now was coming, he had very little
curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself.
It was strange how easy being tired enough made it. (CSS 40-41)
Here, it is clear that the lack of pain is correlated with “being tired enough” — being
in the Joycean limbo between life and death, in which even death no longer interestshim. In this situation, he, like many of Hemingway’s characters, recourses to drinking, drinking in order to kill sensation. To Helen’s admonition, “Darling, please don’t
drink that. We have to do everything we can,” he replies “You do it [. . . ]. I’m tired”(CSS 41). This is a typical example of anaesthesia without treatment abundantly
found in many of Hemingway’s stories.
The italic parts of the story are concerned with Harry’s reminiscences he has
saved to write, and it is curious that many of the episodes displayed one after anotherwithout much logical connection are about his painful experiences of the past andbrutalities inflicted upon other people. A notable example of this in the first italic
section is Barker’s bombing of a leave train:
But he had never written a line of that, nor of that cold, bright Christmas
day with the mountains showing across the plain that Barker had flown
across the lines to bomb the Austrian oﬃcers’ leave train, machine-gunningthem as they scattered and ran. He remembered Barker afterwards coming
into the mess and starting to tell about it. And how quiet it got and thensomebody saying, “You bloody murderous bastard.” (CSS 42, emphases
are original)
Like the speaker in “On the Quai at Smyrna,” Barker’s perception of other people’s
pain has been completely numbed as he has observed many atrocities during the war.
Harry’s paralysis, however, is not due to the self-defense system which protects
the mind. His gradual loss of perception is conveyed in the often quoted passage asfollows:
He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what
he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, byhook and by crook. (CSS 45, emphasis is mine)
Harry’s paralysis is, in short, caused by not writing. By not using his sensory nerves,
his ability to feel pain has been unwittingly destroyed. As Nick Adams, Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical character, claims in “Fathers and Sons” (“He had gotten
rid of many things by writing them” [CSS 371]), to write is the only means to escapefrom the emotional stasis caused by some traumatic event, yet, nevertheless, Harryhas renounced the will to write leading an idle life with rich people who have enough

56

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

money to sustain his life. In the face of his imminent death, he feels belatedly theneed to write, the need to purge his deadlock situation in which he has been lying
comfortably for so many years. This acute need emerges most keenly at the end of
the second italic part.
But he had always thought that he would write it finally. There was so muchto write. He had seen the world change; not just the events; although hehad seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen thesubtler change and he could remember how the people were at diﬀerent
time. He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to writeof it; but now he never would. (CSS 49, emphases are original)
The expression of his belated feeling of remorse for not writing what he should havewritten constantly appears throughout the story, but he no longer has any means towrite down what should be written. Though he exclaims, “ I want to write” after
the quotation above, Helen does not let him. We see here the structure of a sexually
inverted “The Yellow Wall Paper,” in which the desire of the male protagonist to
write is restricted and repressed by a woman character who attends to him.
The most important part of the story comes before the often quoted sequence asa central image: Harry’s illusion of rising upward toward the snow covered top of
Kilimanjaro. Before his imagined salvation, we see a triad of two sections and an
italic part interposed between them in which the central motif of the story is clearlypresented.
All right. Now he would not care for death. One thing he had always
dreaded was the pain. He could stand pain as well as any man, until it went
on too long, and wore him out, but here he had something that had hurtfrightfully and just when he had felt it breaking him, the pain had stopped.
(CSS 53)
At first, he has been afraid of suﬀering pain rather than death, and in the face of his
actual death, “the pain had stopped” as he has wished. However, the primary reason
for him to dread pain is that it wears him out, and, as we have seen, at this stage
he has already been worn out enough to lose interest in his own life. In short, his
painless death reflects that he has already been dead since he lost his sensation.
The last italic part immediately following the quotation above stands in clear
contrast to Harry’s death, conveying a most extreme example of painful death.
He remembered long ago when Williamson, the bombing oﬃcer, had been
hit by a stick bomb some one in a German patrol had thrown as he wascoming in through the wire that night and, screaming, had begged every
one to kill him. He was a fat man, very brave, and a good oﬃcer, although
addicted to fantastic shows. But that night he was caught in the wire, with

57

The Politics of Paina flare lighting him up and his bowels spilled out into the wire, so when
they brought him in, alive, they had to cut him loose. Shoot me, Harry.
For Christ sake shoot me. They had had an argument one time about our
Lord never sending you anything you could not bear and some one’s theory
had been that meant that at a certain time the pain passed you out automatically. But he had always remembered Williamson, that night. Nothing
passed out Williamson until he gave him all his morphine tablets that hehad always saved to use himself and then they did not work right away.
(CSS 53, emphases are original)This kind of violent death is also frequently seen in Hemingway’s texts. In suchtexts, pain is represented as a test of manhood for those who are facing their imminent death. Looking at these two modes of death, Harry’s and Williamson’s, we canconclude that pain is linked to life itself, the evidence that one is certainly alive, andthe essential sensation one has to cling to. Witnessing this dreadful dying of a fellow soldier, he afterwards becomes fearful about suﬀering such prolonged pain at his
death, and prematurely keeps administering morphine of alcohol and self-deception.
Killing pain completely and losing sensation, he has lost his proof of life and especially as a writer, been dead for a long time before his actual death.
After the reminiscence about Williamson, sensing that death is coming closer
to him, he speaks abruptly to Helen: “You know the only thing I’ve never lost is
curiosity” (CSS 54). But as we have already seen a few pages earlier, “For [his death][. . . ] he had very little curiosity. For years it had obsessed him; but now it meant
nothing in itself” because of “being tired enough.” Then it should be appropriate
to suppose that his sudden insistence of retaining curiosity is caused by his belated
realization that he has already died, by a remorseful illusion that he is still alive, andabove all else by his wish to survive and write all he has saved for a long time.
By writing Harry’s painless death, and by projecting his own literary fruitlessness
into the fictional character, which, certainly for a writer like Hemingway, requires apainful eﬀort and self-examination, he did attempt to purge his sterile paralysis andretrieve his once fruitful creativity. Very much lamentable is the fact that even after
this literary attempt to resurge as a prolific writer he could never be as productive asin those miraculous years of the 1920s.

Notes
1

See Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellman (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), p.83.

2

See, for example, Azevedo. “Harold Krebs, the boy ‘who had been a good soldier’ and ‘had done
the one thing, the only thing for a man to do, easily and naturally,’ is able to retain his integrity
during the war” (102).

3

It is richly suggestive that Krebs Friend, from whom the protagonist’s name was borrowed and58

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
whom Hemingway met in Chicago after the war, was “a badly shell-shocked vet” (Reynolds, Paris
189).

4

In his letter to Ivan Kashkin, August 19, 1935, Hemingway explains how he conceived the story:“The only trouble, to me, is that it ends with me as Mr. Frazer out in Billings Montana with rightarm broken so badly the back of my hand hung down against the back of my shoulder. It takes
five months to fix it and then is paralyzed. I try to write with my left hand and can’t. Finally themusculo-spiral nerve regenerates and I can lift my wrist after five months. But in the meantime one
is discouraged. I remember the study in pain and the discouragement, the people in the hospitaland the rest of it and write a story Gambler, Nun and Radio” (SL 418, emphasis is original).

5“Connie was a good deal alone now, fewer people came to Wragby. Cliﬀord no longer wanted
them. He had turned against even the cronies. He was queer. He preferred the radio, which he had
installed at some expense, with a good deal of success at last. He could sometimes get Madrid orFrankfurt, even there in the uneasy Midlands” (110).

6

To this sentiment, Frazer answers that “I thought marijuana was the opium of the poor” (CSS 362).
This matter-of-fact opinion exhibits a striking contrast to his philosophical reverie which he later
cultivates about “the opium of the people.” We can infer from this that he has gone through sometransformation in his evaluation of anaesthesia.
Another importance of this sequence is that this Mexican will not drink alcohol for “it mounts
to [his] head” (CSS 361). His will to keep his head clear means that he regards alcohol also as theopium.

7

As a rare exception, Earl Rovit condemns Cayetano as an “inadequate father image” (70).

8

It is curious that “a radio” is mentioned here. Cayetano possibly notices that any form of consolation leads to weakening the power to endure pain.

9

A similar expression is found in To Have and Have Not. Meditating on the diﬃcult situation into
which he and Richard Gordon are driven, Professor MacWalsey says to himself that “why must all
the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic?” (221). We can thus surmise that thecomparison of life to an operation without anaesthesia is at least to a certain extent shared by theauthor himself.

10

About Marxism, see Edward Stone, “Hemingway’s Mr. Frazer: From Revolution to Radio.”Part IIICountering Victorian
Normalization:
Representations of Sexuality

Chapter 6
Between the Puritan and the LibertineF

rom its emergence in the sixteenth century, syphilis was always one of themost dreadful diseases in Western societies. Because of its virtual incurability,
syphilis was regarded as the wrath of God against promiscuity, a punishment
caused by perverted sexual intercourse, and a symbol of immoral vice against society.
Thus syphilis with its immoral implication was held in secrecy and closeted under the
genteel surface of Victorian society. However, improvement in medical knowledge
from the middle of the nineteenth century gradually exposed the biological aspectsof this disease, if not presenting an eﬀectual remedy. The fear of as well as the senseof guilt resulted from contracting this stigmatic disease produced various kinds of
discourses — both fictive and factual. According to Claude Quétel, the propaganda
campaign against syphilis was for the purpose of “maintaining the public in a stateof alert by keeping syphilis continually in the news,” and consequently “In 1926
alone, 15,000 articles in the popular press were recorded” not to mention “numerous
scientific journals” (183). Fictive discourses as well proliferated at the turn of the
century. As Elaine Showalter shows us, literature about syphilis at the end of thenineteenth century was divided into two types: one is a women’s version, which
describes syphilis as a punishment for lust, “the most unforgivable of the sins of thefathers” and as “a punishment unjustly shared by innocent women and children”; theother is a men’s version, in which “women are the enemies, whether as the femmes
fatales who lure men into sexual temptation only to destroy them, the frigid wives
who drive them to the brothels, or the puritanical women novelists, readers, andreviewers who would emasculate their art” (“Syphilis” 88).
Indeed, this generation was obsessed by the notion that syphilis was everywhere,
and frightened by the fact that there was no way of knowing if one had contracted
syphilis or not. Stephen Kern refers to this situation as follows:
The fear of syphilis in particular was so acute that it generated an independent derivative disease, a special kind of hypochondria called “syphilophobia.” People suﬀering from this disorder manifested a variety of psychosomatic symptoms of real syphilis and generally suﬀered from the obsessive
thought that they had contracted it, no matter how thorough their precautions. And since the medical theories on the causes of venereal diseases
included infection from contaminated towels, beds, drinking glasses, pipes,
toothbrushes, razors, pencils, musical instruments, tattooing and kissing —even kissing the Bible — the potential syphilophobe had no end of precau-

61

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body
tions to make to feed his obsessive fears. (Anatomy 42)

Susan Sontag argues that illness is charged with metaphor, or the invented andpunitive value pressed upon pure physical state, and that “the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, mostresistant to, metaphoric thinking” (3, emphasis is original). Among other diseases,
syphilis, whose cause of infection was attributed to the most guilt-laden activities
in the first decades of the twentieth century, carried the worst overtones. Indeed,venereal disease at the turn of the century was used “as a symbol for a society characterized by a corrupt sexuality” (Brandt 5).
As Allan M. Brandt states in his social history of venereal disease, “we must
examine venereal disease not only as a biological entity, but as a disease that has
engaged certain attitudes and values; beliefs about its causes and consequences thatin turn aﬀect responses to the problem.” In other words, venereal disease, as well asother diseases, is shaped as both biological and cultural construction. In the paradigmof medicine at the beginning of the twentieth century, “disease is defined as a deviation from a biological norm,” and attracts various symbols and images beyond thefield of medicine, which “reflect social values — patterns of judgment about what
is good or bad that guide perceptions and practice.” Thus venereal disease had been
used, since the middle of the nineteenth century throughout the twentieth, “as a symbol for a society characterized by a corrupt sexuality,” as “a symbol of pollution andcontamination,” and as “a sign of deep-seated sexual disorder” (3-5).1
After due consideration of this situation as above mentioned, we shall assume
that the social attitude toward syphilis is an outer manifestation of the normalizationof sexuality, which leads to the view that patients of this disease are deviants fromthe society’s common assumption about sexuality; thus “discovering” that premarital or extramarital sexual intercourse, mainly with prostitutes, was a “perversion.”
This rigid Puritanism about sexuality dominated the United States in the first yearsof the twentieth century, which, at the same time, witnessed sexual liberation from
Victorian society. Venereal disease exposed the male centered double standard about
sexuality taken for granted in the nineteenth century, while women no longer stayedin that restricted state. Men were thus regarded as abnormal because of their traditional privilege of promiscuous intercourse, yet women were also regarded as abnormal because of their liberated sexual adventures. Taking into account the fact that
Hemingway was born in the age of this general confusion of sexual matters, examining this disease in the context of Hemingway’s attitudes toward the social norm of
sexuality sheds some light upon the previously unrecognized complexities of his life
and works. We shall investigate how syphilis functions in his texts and how it contributes to the making of his public image. Analyzing his representation of syphilis
will make it clear that his works are marked by an equivocalness oscillating between
a repugnance for the Victorian moral standard, on the one hand, and an unintentional
compliance with it, on the other.

Countering Victorian Normalization

63

Hemingway, throughout his career, resisted any form of normalization about sexual matters. He repeatedly professed to be a libertine, and created the public image ofa person more sexually experienced than he really was. According to Scott Donaldson, Hemingway insisted that “he learned practically everything there was to know
about sex while still a teen-ager,” and that “he’d ‘had the clap’ twice before his older
friend Bill Smith ever got laid” (175). Whether this is true or not, this attitude toward venereal disease as a credit upon himself is typical of a revolt against Victorianmorality. No matter how much his biographical evidence indicates the opposite,2 hewore the mask of the debauchee.
His preference for a libertine attitude toward sexual matters is well expressed in
his early short story, “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot.” Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes pointout that this story “is based on a binary opposition, deeply embedded in American
culture, between puritan and libertine” (83), and that the narrator despises Hubert
Elliot’s puritan sex. Hubert, the main character of the story, had never experienced
intercourse with other girls before he marries Cornelia. Now after their marriage,
they set out on a trip to Europe, and the story describes them when they “tried very
hard to have a baby” (CSS 123) only to fail. The story itself is a vicious mockeryof the couple who regard sex only as a procreative process.3 According to Comley
and Scholes, “The explicitly puritanical character of Hubert’s values is emphasized
by the words pure and purity” (83, emphasis is Comley and Scholes’s). The passage
in question is thus:
He was twenty-five years old and had never gone to bed with a woman
until he married Mrs. Elliot. He wanted to keep himself pure so that hecould bring to his wife the same purity of mind and body that he expectedof her. He called it to himself living straight. He had been in love withvarious girls before he kissed Mrs. Elliot and always told them sooner orlater that he had led a clean life. Nearly all the girls lost interest in him. He
was shocked and really horrified at the way girls would become engaged
to and marry men whom they must know had dragged themselves throughthe gutter. He once tried to warn a girl he knew against a man of whom hehad almost proof that he had been a rotter at college and a very unpleasant
incident had resulted. (CSS 123, emphasis is mine)
Hubert’s insistence on his “clean life,” which is a typical Victorian euphemism, signifies his not having had any relationships with prostitutes or extramarital sexualintercourse. Comley and Scholes are right about their insistence that the couple represents a puritanical evaluation, but they are not insistent enough; for the words,“pure,” “purity,” and “clean” are charged not only with a puritanical evaluation but
also with the typical insistence upon the social hygiene movement at the time ofthe publication of this story. Compare the passage above with a lecture delivered toAmerican soldiers in World War I: “It is not true that the absence of previous sexual

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

experience is any handicap to a man in entering the married state [. . . ]. On the contrary, the man who comes to his bride as clean and as pure as he expects that she will
come to him will find the most perfect joy in the married state” (qtd. in Brandt 64,
emphases are mine). It is clear that this attitude toward male sexuality is extremely
similar to Hubert’s desire that he wants to “bring to his wife the same purity of mind
and body that he expected of her.” We should hence conclude that Hubert’s sexualvalue is typical of that of social hygienists.
Hemingway also had been brought up in this rigid puritanical tradition as seen
in his autobiographical story, “Fathers and Sons.” “His [Nick’s] father had summed
up the whole matter by stating that masturbation produced blindness, insanity, anddeath, while a man who went with prostitutes would contract hideous venereal diseases and that the thing to do was to keep your hands oﬀ of people” (CSS 371). Thiskind of statement epitomizes Victorian morality and also appears as the foremost
principle of the antisyphilitic movement. As Brandt states, “Continence [. . . ] became the hallmark of all sexual prescription” (26). The fear of venereal disease wasused to prevent boys from promiscuous intercourse and to support the puritanicalevaluation of the nineteenth century. The evidence is found in Hemingway’s Deathin the Afternoon: “Three things keep boys from promiscuous intercourse, religious
belief, timidity, and fear of venereal diseases. The last is most commonly the basisof appeal made by the Y.M.C.A. and other institutions for clean living” (103).
In the light of this context, it should be said that Hubert advocates then the dominant ideology of the antisyphilitic movement and conforms to the overarching system of evaluation constituted in the fight against the disease, or against the social
vice engendering it — namely prostitutes. In other words, leading a “clean life” wasprimarily the moral standard at that time, and the narrator’s mocking tone against
Hubert implies that the narrator — or Hemingway, it might be said — resisted thisnormalization. The story insists that the value assumed by Hubert — and by social
hygienists as well — does not necessarily produce a satisfactory result. In fact, thecouple’s sex aiming only at procreativity remains futile; and, what is more, the wife
engages in a kind of lesbianism with her friend, while the husband is infatuated withalcohol. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” is thus a protest against the antisyphilitic movement,
or Victorian morality.
In his private life, however, Hemingway had led a rather puritanical sexual life,
and on that point, he is allied to Hubert. As Michael Reynolds notes: “In the pre-war
era that formed his values, sexual congress with a proper woman betokened matrimony,” and “In Oak Park a man married the woman he lay with. In his fiction hemight escape that unwritten rule, but in his own life Hemingway was a native son.
He was capable of one night stands and casual beddings, but he could not sustain anaﬀair without marrying the woman or at least asking” (Young 147). Hadley, Hemingway’s first wife, also, referring to their divorce afterwards, says: “If Ernest had
not been brought up in that damned stuﬀy Oak Park environment [. . . ] he would nothave thought that when you fall in love extramaritally you have to get a divorce andCountering Victorian Normalization

65

marry the girl” (qtd. in Kert 226). As Comley and Scholes argue, Hubert is Hemingway’s self inverted image — Hubert is, on almost all points, a complete reversalof his creator — yet Hemingway positioned him to be “an opposite into whom he[Hemingway] could project himself imaginatively” (85). Hemingway wished to bea libertine, but he could never escape from the puritanical mindset into which his
individuality was forged. By attacking the values represented by the social hygiene
campaign, he wanted to be seen as being outside of the cultural environment which
nurtured him when young.
This influence of the puritanical education in his home town can be seen in manyof his stories, such as “A Very Short Story.” Most critics agree that this story was
written based on Hemingway’s own experience in World War I. Young Hemingway,
after his wounding in the Austrian front, fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, anurse taking care of him in the Milan hospital. They promised to be married after his
getting a job in the United States. He went back to his country, and she continued
to attend as a nurse. She finally changed her mind to marry an Italian oﬃcer, andsent a letter to Hemingway, telling him that “I know that I am still very fond of you,but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart” (Villard and Nagel 163). “A Very
Short Story” records this incident, mostly according to this biographical experience
except for the vicious ending of the story, in which Luz (her name was at first Ag,
short for Agnes, in the previously published version 4 ) and the protagonist falls intoa somewhat tragic conclusion:
The major [Luz’s expected fiancé] did not marry her in the spring, or any
other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A
short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park. (CSS 108)
Of great importance here is the narrator’s malicious addition indicating Luz’s broken
marriage — “or any other time.” Robert Scholes, in one of the most influential studiesof this story, states that: “Something punitive is going on here as the discourse seems
to be revenging itself upon the character [of Luz]” (37). The point to observe is thenature of the “punitive”; that is, how and why she is punished by the author.
Joseph DeFalco, one of the earliest Hemingway critics, mentions that “the original failure of the love-partnership is reflected as both a physical and psychologicaldisease” (163). The physical one is gonorrhea, the psychological her jilting. The
double infliction on the protagonist’s body and mind coincides with what venereal
patients would generally undergo, as Brandt states: “individuals often have suﬀered
a double jeopardy: the physiological consequences of the disease itself, as well as
the deep psychological stigma” (5). The protagonist of the story is inflicted with this“double jeopardy,” though the causal relation is inverted in the case of this story: thecause is, for the ordinary venereal patients, the biological disease and its eﬀect is
psychological stigma; whereas, in the story, the cause is Luz’s jilting of him (psy-66

In Pursuit of the Natural Body

chological) and its eﬀect is the biological disease. This reversed scheme is the mostradical example of Showalter’s “men’s version,” which we have seen at the beginning of this chapter: for the disease, which should originally have been a cause forthe mental aﬄiction, is here transformed into an eﬀect whose cause is attributed toa woman’s evildoing. Luz is thus an enemy, that is, if not one of the “femmes fatales who lure men into sexual temptation only to destroy them,” yet an exemplarof “the frigid wives who drive them to the brothels [. . . ].” It is Luz who tempts
him to promiscuity with a poisonous woman only to blight him. Venereal diseaseaﬄicting the protagonist in this story is, for the author, a useful method to blame
Luz rather than the protagonist; thus, consequently and unintentionally, supporting
the view that venereal disease is the result of a moral violation into which men wereenticed by such women of sexual prudery, the view which leads to a conclusion thatvenereal patients are indeed moral violators, that is, “abnormal.” However hard he
attempted to deprive of, in Sontag’s term, metaphor from the biological disease, notonly was he entrapped by the much charged views of the disease, but also he himself
was complicit with the social normalization aiming at punishing the abnormal — inother words, metaphorized view of the disease.

Notes
1

Kern settles this situation as follows: “Syphilis was a disease ideally suited to bear out the admonitions of zealous Christians who insisted that it was the divinely conceived wages of sin. It wasan ideal Protestant disease, as well as an ironically Victorian disease” (Anatomy 42).

2

Almost all the biographies of Hemingway mention that he could never escape from the stern Victorian influence about sexual matters. See, for a laconic summary, Donaldson, By Force 179-81.

3

As many biographers maintain, the story was originally based on an actual couple. For instance,
Carlos Baker states that the story is “a malicious gossip-story [. . . ] making fun of the alleged
sexual ineptitudes of Mr. and Mrs. Chard Powers Smith” (133).

4“Chapter 10” in in our time.

Chapter 7
The Wrath of GodT

he anti-syphilitic movement after the war returned to the state of the previous
century — society’s conformity to the genteel indiﬀerence to sexual matters.
Although the actual number of venereal patients was steadily increasing after
the war, direct mention of the names of venereal diseases was no longer permitted inpublic. The general release of “Fit to Fight,” the anti-venereal propaganda film during the war, was vehemently protested by censorship throughout the United States,and “By 1922 the Public Health Service had withdrawn all its anti-venereal films”(Brandt 124). This tendency for eradicating “obscene” words culminated in 1934, at
which time Thomas Parran, Jr., New York State Health Commissioner was to holda lecture concerning venereal diseases. “But the talk was never delivered. Moments
before air-time, CBS informed him that he could not mention syphilis and gonorrhea
by name; in response to this decision, Parran refused to go on” (Brandt 122).
The time was, in short, a period of confusion in which two attitudes toward sexuality were, contradicting as they were, intertwined and thus coexistent with eachother. And it was in this atmosphere that Clarence, Hemingway’s father and a physician by profession, was incensed by his son’s first major collection of short stories,
despite his once advanced attitude which led him to provide school children with sex
education during the war (Reynolds, Young 119). According to Hemingway’s sister,“[Father] told him that no gentleman spoke of venereal disease outside a doctor’soﬃce” (Sanford 219). And it was also in this situation that June issue of Scribner’s
Magazine, which serialized Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, was suppressed by
the censor in 1929.
“Up in Michigan” with which we shall begin this chapter and which was composed as early as 1921, had been rejected by his publishers until 1938 because of its
sexual explicitness.1 Liz Coates, a waitress in D. J. Smith’s, secretly has aﬀection
for Jim Gilmore, a blacksmith in Horton’s Bay. Jim never paid much attention toLiz, but, after returning from a deer hunting trip, drunk with whiskey, he is sexually
aroused by Liz, who is alone in the kitchen. Taking her out to the dock, he violently has intercourse with Liz without listening to her cry: “You mustn’t, Jim. You
mustn’t” (CSS 62). After finishing the act, Jim goes to sleep; while Liz, after trying
to wake him in vain, covers him with her coat and goes home.
The cause of rejection in publishing this story can be inferred from the famous argument about the story between the author and his mentor in the Paris years, Gertrude
Stein. His recollection of the incident is recorded in A Movable Feast:

67

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body
“It’s [‘Up in Michigan’ is] good,” she said. “That’s not the question atall. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painterpaints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy
it because they cannot hang it either.”“But what if it is not dirty but it is only that you are trying to use words
that people would actually use? That are the only words that can make thestory come true and that you must use them? You have to use them.”“But you don’t get the point at all,” she said. “You mustn’t write anything that is inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It’s wrong and it’s silly.”(15, emphases are original)

Stein here speaks for the cultural acceptability of sexual expression: even if the work
itself is “good,” one “mustn’t write anything” that includes explicit words and to
do so is “wrong” and “silly.” On the contrary, Hemingway, a few pages before thequotation above, describes his own foremost principle being that “All you have to do
is write one true sentence” (12). Hemingway was well aware of having gone too far
in the realm of restricted expression,2 but he had necessarily to reject society’s codeof acceptability to recreate the “truth” of the generation. The time was one of socalled sexual liberation, the discovery of the unconscious, and the fear of syphilis. If
one can easily discover sexual preoccupations at the root of the generation, it is fairly
reasonable to suggest that he could not avoid depicting the sexual in his attempt towrite “the truth.” He had, in other words, to revolt against the normalizing repressionof sexuality to survive as a writer writing the “truth,” even if the “truth” was forbidden
by society.
The violation of the social code of sexual morality, with which the story was
charged by two publishers, should be attributed not only to the surface level of expression Stein took up as a problem but also to the subject matter. As Alice Hall Petryargues, “The emphasis on Liz’s cleanliness and neatness [. . . ] conveys the purity, thenoncarnal nature of her impulses toward Jim” (355). This noncarnality is the mostimportant norm in Victorian society that social hygienists attempted to establish.3
And if the story describes Liz (an advocator of cleanliness, purity, and noncarnality)
being polluted by a brutal blacksmith (the representative of carnality), it might beinferred that not only “obscene words” but also the subject matter of the story serves
as a revolt against at once censorship, which represents the society’s genteel appearance, and the professed credo of the social hygienists, which determined the courseof social acceptability.
However, even if the author actually intended such resistance, it collapses at thelast instance because of the very structure of the text itself. If Jim, as an adversaryof social hygienists, represents the value of libertinism, his system of values is far
from supported by the text: the story is, peculiar for Hemingway in this period, forthe most part told from Liz’s point of view 4 — that is, the view of a person who
highly esteems the value of cleanliness. The narrator mainly sympathizes with notCountering Victorian Normalization69

Jim but Liz, who resists his seduction. If Hemingway wanted to rehabilitate libertine
values by writing this story, his intention is wholly betrayed by the very style ofhis writing, by his writing from the female point of view, and this style is one of
the most remarkable features of the story when compared with his other masculinist
stories written around the period.
The story may seem at a glance to revolt against the social norm because ofvulgar words chosen for the text, yet such a reading misses the point. The surfaceof the text, or the outward expression, indeed celebrates the libertine evaluation anddenounces the puritanical; while, on the contrary, the core indicates the opposite, tomaintain society’s normative value. Taking into account this coexistence of opposite
values, what seemed like his resistance against social norms in other occasions comesto be seen as dubious. The Sun Also Rises, for instance, was severely criticized forits vulgarity in expression: in his mother’s opinion, it was “one of the filthiest booksof the year” (Lynn 357). Replying to this sentiment, the son writes thus:[. . . ] I am in no way ashamed of the book, except in as I may have failed inaccurately portraying the people I wrote of, or in making them really comealive to the reader. [. . . ] Besides you, as an artist, know that a writer should
not be forced to defend his choice of a subject but should be criticized on
how he has treated that subject. The people I wrote of were certainly burned
out, hollow and smashed — and that is the way I have attempted to show
them. (SL 243)
Here, his mother embodies Victorian morality, while Hemingway also maintains thisvery morality by insisting that immorality should be attributed not to the author but tothe characters — in other words, in the line of his argument, the author who describes
them as immoral (“burned out, hollow and smashed”) should not be accused of immorality; rather he is the advocator of morality because he wrote about immorality,
accused it, and condemned it. Here he assumes, if not deliberately, the mask of amoral lecturer, a mask not unlike that which Parran wore when he was, as it were,
censored in delivering the radio lecture.
The suppression of A Farewell to Arms by Boston police can also be seen froma diﬀerent angle. Answering the charge, Charles Scribner’s Sons issued a statement
as follows: “The ban on the sale of the magazine in Boston is an evidence of the
improper use of censorship which bases its objections upon certain passages without
taking into account the eﬀect and purpose of the story as a whole. ‘A Farewell toArms’ is in its eﬀect distinctly moral. It is the story of a fine and faithful love, born, it
is true, out of physical desire.”5 What the publisher claims for Hemingway is that theauthor of A Farewell to Arms retains morality under the surface of coarse language.
Here again Hemingway’s work is laden with a moral tone.
Some of Hemingway’s stories were indeed censored, yet they were censored not
for violation of the moral code but for mere excess in faithfulness to the actuality

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

— by the use of forbidden words as in the case of Parran’s broadcasting. Thus, therevolt against censorship, or the deliberate use of vulgar language, on the part ofHemingway, by no way leads to the disruption, but rather the support, of society’s
normative values. No matter how hard Hemingway wanted to sympathize with those
who live a libertine life, his cultural morality had a grasp on him throughout his
lifetime; thus, he allied himself with the harsh preacher preaching continence. We
shall hereafter clarify that Hemingway used coarse language as a means of alleviating
the familial disaster caused by syphilitic infection.
It is aptly illuminating for this purpose to compare Hemingway’s “One Reader
Writes” and Eugene Brieux’s Damaged Goods: A Play in Three Acts. The play
was written for the purpose of warning people against committing acts that cause
venereal infection, and theoretically based on Syphilis and Marriage — a treatise
by Alfred Fournier, the most famous of syphilologists in France at the time. The
English translation of the original play was widely performed in the United States inthe years prior to and during the war.6 “The object of this play,” exclaims the theater
manager at the beginning of the play, “is a study of the disease of syphilis and its
bearing on marriage” (180). In the play, the hero-doctor diagnoses George Dupont
as syphilitic, and tries to dissuade him from marriage. The doctor then attempts toextenuate the guilt-laden implication which syphilis conveys to Dupont: “Come now,
I repeat, there is nothing in all this beyond the ordinary. It is simply an accident thatmight happen to anybody. [. . . ] There is, in fact, none that is more universal” (182).
What he attempts to do here is to expose the mystery with which society invests a
mere medical disease (“there is nothing in all this beyond the ordinary”); in eﬀect,
emancipating venereal patients from a sense of dishonor from contracting this muchcharged aﬄiction (because “It is simply an accident”). The doctor maintains that his
infection was not caused by a sinful act but by mere bad luck.
Dupont, after all, proceeds with the marriage with his fiancé without listening to
the doctor’s advice, urged by the necessity of obtaining his bride-to-be’s dowry forbuying a notary’s practice. As a result, a year later, a terrible fact comes to light,
the fact that a wet nurse has contracted syphilis from Dupont’s baby who shows
symptoms of congenital syphilis. Knowing that his son-in-law is the infector, hiswife’s father, M. Loches, comes to the doctor’s oﬃce to obtain a certificate testifyingthat his son-in-law had been infected before their marriage, intending to demand a
divorce of him on behalf of his daughter. After a series of futile attempts at dissuading
him from the idea of divorce, the doctor asks him if he can truly declare that he has
never engaged in the same act as that of his son-in-law’s, the act which causes thepresent disaster.
Come, come: let us have a little plain speaking! I should like to know how
many of these rigid moralists, who are so choked with their middle-classprudery that they dare not mention the name syphilis, or when they bringthemselves to speak of it do so with expressions of every sort of disgust,Countering Victorian Normalization71

and treat its victims as criminals, have never run the risk of contracting itthemselves. It is those alone who have the right to talk. How many do you
think there are? Four out of a thousand? (232)
Here we should notice that what is under attack in the above quotation is not only
the hypocritical double standard of M. Loches, who blames others for the act that hehimself is not free of, but also the “prudery” of refraining from articulating the wordsyphilis in public.
The original text carries a brief letter to Fournier as a preface to the play, excludedin the English translation: “I believe, with you, that syphilis will lose much of its
gravity when one dares to speak openly of a sickness [mal] that is not a shame nor
a punishment [. . . ]”(qtd. in Leavy 161).7 In Brieux’s conception, the absence of theword “syphilis,” or the lack of appropriate sex education gives rise to the diseased
state of society and, thus, the best way of preventing the disease is openly to articulate
the word. As George Dupont admits, the newspaper owned by his father has never“printed that word” (198), lest it should lose its readers. This reluctance to speakof the disease, according to the doctor in the play, produces the rueful condition ofsociety. There is a subtle yet well recognizable landslide under way about the causeof the present disaster: that is, the current familial misery is caused not by sexualintercourse that brought on infection (because few are free of the vice) but by the actof imparting the sense of shame to the biological disease — by unanimous silence ofsociety. To look at the disease itself (to achieve, in Sontag’s words, “the healthiest
way of being ill”), according to Brieux, one has to deprive syphilis of the mysterious
silence haunting the mere physical state. In short, the arch-villain is the act of silence.
According to Leavy, taking the place of the medical profession in his play, “Thewriter becomes healer, and — conversely — the doctor as literary character becomes
one who uses words rather than dispenses medicines to heal private and public disease” (161, emphasis is original). This treatment of the writer-healer dispensing theeﬀective remedy of words to the public reminds us of Hemingway’s incessant employment of prurient words. It is possible that, by using vulgar language, he not
only conveys the actuality of the sexually liberated age but also attempts to cure thesocial disease by articulating the forbidden words. The similarity between this playand “One Reader Writes,” which shall be detailed below, seems well to support thispossibility.
The story is one of the most neglected ones written by Hemingway,8 and thereason for this disregard might be explained in the oﬀhand easiness of its composition. The story was composed from a letter originally sent to Logan Clendening,a Kansas City doctor and a friend of Hemingway’s. According to Carlos Baker,“Ernest edited the letter slightly, changing the date and the place-name, and adding ashort introduction and conclusion. The result was ‘One Reader Writes’ — probably
the easiest short story he had ever devised” (227). In my view, however, this story
needs more attention all the more for this peculiar composition history, since how

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Hemingway dealt with the letter reveals his attitude toward the general perceptionof syphilis. Some scholars have criticized Clendening for giving those six letters to
Hemingway as well as the writer for making use of an innocent woman’s plight towrite a story. Paul Smith, however, objects to these sentiments and maintains that,given the doctor’s concern for human suﬀering and his anger at those religious beliefs that approve the existence of such suﬀerings, “Hemingway shared that concern
and anger; and one simple and eﬀective way to express what he and the doctor felt
was to reprint the woman’s letter and end it with an appeal, not to the ministers ofher day but to ‘My Christ’ ” (“The Doctor” 38). What we should see in the text is not
the author’s oﬀhandedness in composing the story nor the small quantity of his own
writing, but what he wanted to present by using the letter almost as it is.
The story begins with a short introduction composed by Hemingway, which describes a woman who decides to seek advice from a medical column in a newspaper
and who writes the letter consisting of the major part of the story. And the shortconclusion attached to the letter describes the wife’s pitiful prayer to Christ: “It’ssuch a long time though. It’s a long time. And it’s been a long time. My Christ, it’s
been a long time” (CSS 321). Afraid of the dreadful disease, she wishes desperatelythat she and her husband can reunite after the treatment. She has been waiting forher husband for a long time, yet it is very likely, from his infection with syphilis,that he gratified his lust by having intercourse with prostitutes during military service in Shanghai. This scheme is typically seen in the nineteenth-century syphilitic
literature, in which syphilis is a punishment for lust, “the most unforgivable of thesins of the fathers” and as “a punishment unjustly shared by innocent women andchildren” (Showalter, “Syphilis” 88). Here, we can recognize that Hemingway retains the clearly established norm about sexuality: to present a female writing as it
is without the intrusion of a male voice cannot help functioning as a censure of theVictorian double standard.
Yet, of greater importance is the very composition of the letter. Though thecontent of the letter might be too lengthy to be fully cited, it nevertheless needs ourfull attention.
May I write you for some very important advice — I have a decision to
make and don’t know just whom to trust most I dare not ask my parents —and so I come to you — and only because I need not see you, can I confide
in you even. Now here is the situation — I married a man in U. S. service
in 1929 and that same year he was sent to China, Shanghai — he staid three
years — and came home — he was discharged from the service some few
months ago — and went to his mother’s home in Helena, Arkansas. He
wrote for me to come home — I went, and found he is taking a course of
injections and I naturally ask, and found he is being treated for I don’t know
how to spell the word but it sound like this “sifilus” — Do you know what
I mean — now tell me will it ever be safe for me to live with him again —Countering Victorian Normalization

73

I did not come in close contact with him at any time since his return from
China. He assures me he will be O K after this doctor finishes with him —Do you think it right — I often heard my Father say one could well wish
themselves dead if once they became a victim of that malady — I believe
my Father but want to believe my Husband most — Please, please tell me
what to do — I have a daughter born while her Father was in China — (CSS320)
Her misspelling of the word “syphilis” suggests that she might hardly have heard thename of the disease spoken around her, or at least never seen it in the printed form.
Yet she knows the problematical aspects of the disease partly because of her father’s
instruction: “one could well wish themselves dead if once they became a victim ofthat malady.” This guilt-laden perception of the disease, like that of M. Loches in
Damaged Goods, is transmitted to the daughter, who also imbues the disease withthe sense of shame. She is, as it were, an exemplar of commonplace prudery about
sexual matters in that she seems rather reluctant to broach the subject of the diseaseand continues lengthy explanations up until the middle of the letter; that she attempts
to hide her husband’s disease from everyone around her — even from the local doctor; that she cannot articulate straightforward expressions about sexual matters andthereby employs euphemisms such as “live with him,” and “come in close contact
with him” to mean “have sexual intercourse with her husband.” One of the mostremarkable aspects of the letter is that, even to a person without any relationshipto her real life, she thus falters in articulating the problem. The wife’s misspellingof “sifilus” for “syphilis” symbolizes the society’s complicity of silence9 about thevenereal problem, the complicity which is severely attacked in Damaged Goods. The
incorrect transcription of the word not only indicates the public ignorance about the
problem but also embodies the silence surrounding the disease and its patients, thesilence leading to tacit consent to avert their eyes from the disease itself.
Yet the conclusion attached to the end of the story informs us that she vaguelyknows the cause of the disease — that the disease is sexually transmitted: “I don’tcare what he did to get it” (CSS 321). Partial knowledge as acquired by the wifein this story, however, necessarily entails much worse psychological eﬀects on a patient’s family. In spite of her husband’s insistence that “he will be O K after this
doctor finishes with him,” she cannot fully believe in his healthy state, assumedly
because of the hideous imagery implanted by her father. This is caused not by proper
medical knowledge but by the groundless public belief about the disease, the belief
which inflamed M. Loches in Damaged Goods. All these details of the story, with atint of irony and pathos, accentuate the scheme, as seen in Brieux’s play, the schemethat prudery about sexual matters and the lack of education lead to the useless condemnation against venereal patients and bring about the needless familial disastermuch worsened by the sense of shame on the part of each member of the family.10
Taking into account the above mentioned, we should consider that the relation-

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

ship between Hemingway, the author of this story, and Logan Clendening, the original recipient of the letter, is very much similar to that between the playwright Brieux
and the famous syphilologist Fournier. As Brieux theoretically based his play upon
Fournier’s medical opinion, Hemingway was more or less aﬀected by Clendening’s
best-selling books (Smith, Reader’s Guide 298-99). Usurping the authority of thedoctor as Brieux did in his play, Hemingway attempts to give an appropriate solution
to the letter on behalf of the original recipient; by showing the woman’s plight, hedispenses words to cure the public ignorance producing worse eﬀects on people’s
minds than the disease itself does. Though by no means presenting any eﬀectual
solution to her, he shows that the root cause of the tragedy of the disease is her very
attitude of prudery, silence, and ignorance. In one sense, by publishing this story, hedispenses a cure to society as a whole rather than to the wife as a person.
Hemingway’s repeated attempts to resist social restrictions against vulgar language — especially concerning sexual matters — seem at a glance defiant of public
morality; yet, though he himself might have believed so, under the surface of expression he sustained such morality as we have seen above. His alliance with physicians— unwittingly with Parran and openly with Clendening — provides us with a newperspective on his works: Hemingway attempted to strip oﬀ the shameful investment— or metaphor in Sontag’s word — from venereal patients; in that sense, they wereboth predecessors of Sontag, who tried to eliminate the psychological stigma from,in her case, cancer. There being no evidence of their contracting venereal disease unlike the case of Sontag, they somehow needed to do this de-metaphorization. Playing
the role of a doctor, and attempting to extenuate the immorality of the husband who
committed the sin of promiscuity, Hemingway in this story tried to convert religious
immorality into a simple mistake in its secular sense.

Notes
1

First published in 1923 by Three Mountains Press in Three Stories and Ten Poems in limited
edition.

2

Hemingway wrote a letter to Horace Liveright about “Up in Michigan”: “As for obscenities you
and Mr. Smith [his editor] being on the spot know what is and what is not unpublishably obscenemuch better than I do” (SL 155).

3

Brandt records a lecture delivered to American soldiers in World War I: “the man who comes tohis bride as clean and as pure as he expects that she will come to him will find the most perfect joy
in the married state” (64, emphases are mine).

4

See Petry 353. “Unusually for Hemingway, the story is told essentially from Liz’s point of view
rather than from that of the main male character, Jim Gilmore.”

5“Boston Police Bar Scribner’s Magazine,” New York Times, 21 June 1929. Emphasis is mine.

6

For the circumstances around the play before the war, see Brandt 47. Quétel also states that “in1913 it [Damaged Goods] was staged on Broadway after a ‘Sociological Fund’ created for theCountering Victorian Normalization75

purpose had collected the necessary monies to put on this militant play. There was even a special
performance in Washington before President Wilson and the members of Congress — a political
act intended to make an oﬃcial break with the conspiracy of silence deplored by the American
medical profession” (158). As to the period during the war, the note to the fourth edition of Three
Plays by Brieux published in 1917, which contains this play, records that “the ban of the Censor
has been removed from two of [the plays included in the volume].” And this is “because the war[. . . ] has given the most urgent importance to Brieux’s subject-matter in the case of Damaged
Goods [sic], which has been performed nightly for many months in London, and is still running at
the St. Martin’s Theatre as I write” (viiia).
7

Translation and the bracketed annotation is Leavy’s.

8

According to Paul Smith, “The only extended analysis of the story is Mark Edelson’s” (Reader’s
Guide 299).

9

Edelson maintains that “The story’s theme is communication — and more especially noncommunication — between people” (Edelson 330). This non-communication, recurrent motif in
Hemingway’s works, can be enlarged from the personal problem as viewed by Edelson to that of
the society as a whole, since the prudery and ignorance of the wife were typical of the ordinary
people in those days.

10

In spite of the claim both by the doctor who treats the husband in “One Reader Writes” and by
the doctor in Damaged Goods, syphilis had been incurable until penicillin was put to use in 1942.
However, Brieux and Hemingway believed the contrary — that the disease was much more slightthan it really was, following the theory of, respectively, Fournier and Clendening.

Chapter 8
That Awful Lust

W

e have seen in the previous two chapters that, while assuming the appearance of a libertine, Hemingway actually retained a deep-seated puritanicalmorality concerning sexuality. His challenge against the social code for
acceptability of vulgar language, indeed provocative for some people, was in fact
invalidated by his underlying morality implanted in his childhood. Though he isextremely infamous for his braggadocio about his own sexual experiences, most ofwhich were actually disproved by material evidence, critics have reached a consensus
about his attitude toward women and sexuality that he mostly led a life of puritanicalrigidity. But if in his actual life Hemingway did lead a life according to such morality, we shall come upon two questions: the first is why he had to wear the mask ofa libertine; and the second is why he was so much obsessed by the topic of venereal disease, especially in the form of a challenge against censorship. We shall, atthe beginning of this chapter, posit a possible answer to both of these questions: hehad to mitigate a guilt for his hidden sexual desire regarded by the social norm as“abnormal.”As the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden reveals, Hemingway had
peculiar desires which people with puritanical rigidity would have thought of as abnormal. According to Carl P. Eby’s meticulous study of Hemingway’s sexual preference, the writer had various types of fetishism which had to be hidden from the public
in order to protect his own personality showing oﬀ his manliness. Given his erotic
disposition — as associated with “gender instability, narcissism, erotic attachment tohair, latent homosexuality, castration anxiety, and Oedipus complex” (2) — hidden
under the surface of feigned masculinity; given these sexual drives, he had to reduce
his consciousness of guilt and somehow to justify his sexual urge which could haveotherwise much more agonized his personality nurtured in the puritanical morality.
He, thus, desired to abandon the puritanical trait inherited from his parents, and toacquire a new personality which could tolerate such sexual preferences. In short, he
did want to see himself as a libertine; he did have a wish to view his own desire fromnot the puritanical but the libertine viewpoint. As we have seen in the previous two
chapters, however, he could never escape from the cultural environment in which he
was raised. In this chapter, we shall begin by examining Rinaldi’s behavior after henoticed contracting syphilis in A Farewell to Arms. He is described as a typicallylibertine character in the novel, yet even he has to feel the sense of guilt knowing his
infection.
The quotation below is the scene in which Rinaldi first exposes his anxiety about

77

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

infection:“To hell with you,” Rinaldi said. “They try to get rid of me. Every night
they try to get rid of me. I fight them oﬀ. What if I have it. Everybody has
it. The whole world’s got it. First,” he went on, assuming the manner of alecturer, “it’s a little pimple. Then we notice a rash between the shoulders.
Then we notice nothing at all. We put our faith in mercury.”“Or salvarsan,” the major interrupted quietly.
“A mercurial product,” Rinaldi said. He acted very elated now. “I know
something worth two of that. Good old priest,” he said. “You’ll never get
it. Baby will get it. It’s an industrial accident. It’s a simple industrial
accident.” (175)
His detailed explanation of the condition reveals that he is in an incubation period between the secondary and tertiary stage.1 Diseases having incubation periods, such assyphilis, cause their patients extreme anxiety because they have to endure the possible coming of the next stage not knowing whether they are cured of it or not. Rinaldi
here is under the pressure of such anxiety. In addition, the treatment referred to inthis passage, which was common before the discovery of penicillin, caused venereal
patients inordinate agony: “Massive doses of mercury and iodides of potasium [sic]often led to serious complications: loss of teeth, tongue fissures, and hemorrhagingof the bowel. [. . . ] These therapies [. . . ] also entailed considerable pain, demonstrating the punitive position of the profession regarding diseases communicated in‘immoral congress’ ” (Brandt 12). Rinaldi’s depressed and irritated attitudes might
be the result of these agonized suﬀerings, and, what is more, he himself is at once a
doctor and a patient so that he has to take “the punitive position” over himself. It is
he who is most poignantly aware of the immorality of contracting the disease.
In this passage, moreover, we should notice Rinaldi’s strategy, whereby he attempts to reduce the stigmatic nature of the disease, immoral implication against
himself, or “metaphor” in short. Syphilis has been attached to the notion of moral
violation, the notion of degradation into the realm of depravity. Thus he tries toconsider that “Everybody has it. The whole world’s got it.” For him, syphilis must
be “an industrial accident.” The conception of syphilis as a punishment for moral
violation and thus as the wrath of God is primarily a religious feeling. Rinaldi’s sudden vicious attacking of the priest at the mess can be explained by this association.
The very existence of the priest is, for him, an accusation against his felt sense of
depravity. Before contracting syphilis, he had no antipathy toward the priest; as heonce says, “I like him” (65). However, after the infection, he associates syphilis withreligious conception; he suddenly begins to bully the priest, because he has to defend
himself from the alleged accusation of religious beliefs as represented by the priest.
Hereafter, we shall investigate how this attempt of Rinaldi’s is shaped throughout
the course of the novel. From before he notices his infection to the time of theCountering Victorian Normalization

79

quotation above, we should retrace the steps Rinaldi takes in his changing attitude
toward sexual matters. His preference in women is clearly shown in the following
quotation.
“Tell me [Frederic] about Gorizia. How are the girls?”“There are no girls. For two weeks now they haven’t changed them. I[Rinaldi] don’t go there any more. It is disgraceful. They aren’t girls; they
are old war comrades.”“You don’t go at all?”“I just go to see if there is anything new. I stop by. They all ask for you.
It is a disgrace that they should stay so long that they become friends.”(64-65)
Rinaldi’s desire to have new girls indicates that he requires of prostitutes, as mostsoldiers might do, not psychological communication but mere physical satisfaction;
thus, if they stay in one place long enough to be regarded not as “girls” but as “old war
comrades,” they no longer serve his initial purpose. This view, as we have alreadyseen, contradicts the morality which social hygienists had advocated, for this way ofmaking contact with women was considered as the most dangerous. In spite of thistendency toward women and sexuality, Rinaldi sustains the very evaluation of social
hygienists as well: “I tell you something about your good women. Your goddesses.
There is only one diﬀerence between taking a girl who has always been good anda woman. With a girl it is painful. That’s all I know. [. . . ] And you never know if
the girl will really like it” (66). Here he divides women into two categories: one is“girls” who have no sexual desire, and the other is “women” who have one. Thisis the notion most typical of the Victorian genteel tradition which had been strongly
supported by social hygienists.
These reports of the high rates of infection among prostitutes confirmed
for many the notion of two types of women — good and bad, pure andimpure, innocent and sensual. Venereal epidemiology was socially constructed upon this bifurcation. Accordingly, an ‘innocent’ woman could
only get venereal disease from a ‘sinful’ man. But the man could only get
venereal disease from a ‘fallen woman.’ This uni-directional mode of transmission reflected prevailing attitudes rather than any bacteriologic reality.
(Brandt 31-32)
This stereotypical notion of womanhood not only exposes the Victorian double standard but, at the same time, supports the very male-centered ideology; for “Theseviews make clear the way in which disease functioned metaphorically to define gender roles.” And the women’s role is, for those social hygienists, primarily “motherhood” (Brandt 16). In Rinaldi’s term, “girls” are for childbearing, and “women”
for sexual pleasure. On account of these assumptions, Rinaldi’s advice foreshadows,

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

ominously, his contracting syphilis and, again ominously, Catherine’s pregnancy.
Next, We shall turn to the scene after which Rinaldi has learned of his contracting syphilis. The quotation below depicts Frederic’s returning to the unit after his
recuperation from being wounded.
“Look, baby, this is your [Frederic’s] old tooth-brushing glass. I [Rinaldi] kept it all the time to remind me of you.”“To remind you to brush your teeth.”“No. I have my own too. I kept this to remind me of you trying to brush
away the Villa Rossa [a brothel] from your teeth in the morning, swearing
and eating aspirin and cursing harlots. Every time I see that glass I think of
you trying to clean your conscience with a toothbrush.” He came over tothe bed. “Kiss me once and tell me you’re not serious.”“I never kiss you. You’re an ape.”“I know, you are the fine good Anglo-Saxon boy. I know. You are theremorse boy, I know. I will wait till I see the Anglo-Saxon brushing away
harlotry with a toothbrush.” (168)
We should notice primarily that Rinaldi reveals his conception of going to brothels
as a moral violation by way of bantering with Frederic’s sense of guilt. Rinaldi,
on the face of it, mocks Frederic’s “remorse” which is primarily a religious feelingand attributed by Rinaldi to Frederic’s being “the Anglo-Saxon” (which is repeated
twice in the quotation) or, in this context, to his being a puritan; yet he unwittingly
betrays that he is trapped by this religious conception of the disease. Frederic’s
remorse, which Rinaldi mocks here, is the same emotion as that which Rinaldi felt
when he noticed his infection. Frederic once felt remorse after having intercoursewith prostitutes, while Rinaldi is now feeling the same emotion because of the verysame act yet with a more dreadful result. Rinaldi is a person who, as a doctor, should
regard the disease purely as a biological phenomenon and who, as a patient of thedisease, wants to regard it as deprived of the shameful investment. However, he
not only betrays his entrapment into the value-laden conception of the disease but
thereby emphasizes the fact that he and Frederic were doing the same act — and that
it is unfair that Rinaldi alone had contracted the disease.
Fallen into this agonizing situation, he tries to overestimate the value of debauchery on which he is consequently to stake his own life. “Even with remorse you [Frederic] will have a better time.” In spite of this desperate attempt to mitigate the painful
remorse, he is forced to express a keen regret for his own act. “I am pure [. . . ]. I
am like you, baby. I will get an English girl too. As a matter of fact I knew yourgirl first but she was a little tall for me” (170-71). It is indeed he who approached
Catherine first, but he gave her up for Frederic. And this decision consequently leads
to Rinaldi’s syphilis and to Frederic’s bereavement. As Rinaldi remarks (“I am likeyou”), they are essentially the same kind of people. Frederic had also incessantly

Countering Victorian Normalization

81

been to the brothel, as shown in the quotation, and, what is more, he had even contracted gonorrhea (299) which was regarded as much less dangerous in the age. It
is Catherine who divides them into diﬀerent fates. The men who have intercoursewith “women” contract syphilis, and are punished, or pay for their own moral violation; while the men who have intercourse with “girls” stay out of such peril. Thus,
the social normalization of sexuality functions throughout this novel, for the normative sexual attitudes are strictly established by way of showing both Frederic’s andRinaldi’s diﬀerent fates.
Frederic’s fate with Catherine, however, is also painful; for the story ends inCatherine’s death. Meditating on her impending death, Frederic, in the famous passage, remarks thus:
Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did notknow what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you inand told you the rules and the first time they caught you oﬀ base they killedyou. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis
like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stayaround and they would kill you. (327)Frederic’s anger against the gratuitousness of one’s destiny seems to equate his own
position with Rinaldi’s contracting syphilis. One may conclude that Frederic also
regards Rinaldi’s infection as gratuitous, or as, what Rinaldi calls, “an industrial accident,” which, by definition, means an unexpected result beyond human prevention.
However, Catherine’s death is caused by her pregnancy, and the responsibility forthe pregnancy, at least half of it, rests with Frederic.2 Then, Frederic’s juxtapositionof her death with Rinaldi’s syphilis seems to assume a diﬀerent tone. As Rinaldi
justifies himself by way of regarding syphilis as “an industrial accident,” Frederic
also justifies himself by this juxtaposition: Catherine’s death is also “an industrial
accident.” Frederic must feel responsible for her pregnancy; thus, it is necessary for
him to mitigate his sense of guilt, to think that her death is caused by something otherthan himself, namely, by a “gratuitous” reason.
The concept of “an industrial accident” appears again in another one of Hemingway’s works. In Death in the Afternoon, an essay written three years after A Farewellto Arms, Hemingway writes thus:
Syphilis was the disease of the crusaders in the middle ages. It was supposed to be brought to Europe by them, and it is a disease of all people
who lead lives in which a disregard of consequences dominates. It is anindustrial accident, to be expected by all those who lead irregular sexual
lives and from their habits of mind would rather take chances than use prophylactics, and it is a to-be-expected end, or rather phase, of the life of all
fornicators who continue their careers far enough. (101, emphasis is mine)

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Here Hemingway tries to mitigate the sense of guilt for committing promiscuousintercourse with almost the same strategy as Rinaldi in A Farewell to Arms — syphilis
is an accident. Yet he also maintains that the cause of infection is “irregular sexual
lives.” If such a life causes one to contract syphilis, if one’s own behavior triggers
infection, syphilis cannot be considered merely as an accident. Brought up in thestern Victorian tradition, Hemingway could not conceive of libertine lives as morally
acceptable, whereas he also had a strong desire to be a libertine; thus denouncing
the patients, while, at the same time, mitigating the sense of guilt of leading such
lives. Resisting normative values, Hemingway, like Rinaldi in the story, wanted toregard such moral violators as “the normal.” The environment in which he had beenbrought up and the environment in which he reformed his evaluation in the period of
sexual liberation always conflict with each other in his discourse, and the very conflict
generates an ambivalent attitude toward sexual matters. And this split conception ofsyphilis indicates that he could never obtain the mitigation he desperately longed foras Rinaldi did — that he could never have relieved his sense of guilt about his hidden
sexual desire.
As we have seen above, Hemingway could never escape from his innermost fearof syphilis, from his desire leading to moral violation, and from the received morality
concerning sexual matters. He himself notices his own predicament, since in thedeleted part of “Big Two-Hearted River,” posthumously published under the title,“On Writing,” he states thus: “It was the Madame planted all that asceticism. The
Ghee [a friend of Nick’s] went with girls in houses in Cleveland but he had it, too.
Nick had had it, too. It was all such a fake. You had this fake ideal planted in you
and then you lived your life to it” (NAS 235). While going to a brothel to satisfy
sexual desire, Nick and his friends nevertheless sustain the “asceticism,” which has
been “planted” in them since their boyhood. While disparaging it as “a fake,” they
can never escape from the fake.
Besides “One Reader Writes,” Hemingway wrote another story based on a letter
sent to Clendening — “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” The story provides us with
Hemingway’s attempt to reconcile his deepest desire with the puritanical morality ofthe day. A boy comes to the hospital to be castrated because he cannot accept hisburgeoning sexual desire to which he refers as “that awful lust” and “a sin against
purity” (CSS 299-300). After he asks doctors to perform castration only to be rejected, he cuts oﬀ his own penis with a razor and is dying from excessive bleeding on
Christmas Day. Considering Clendening’s constant charge against the inhuman andabsurd (for the eyes of the scientific age) doctrines of religious institutions, and considering Hemingway’s sympathy with him as well, this story seems a condemnationof anachronistic beliefs in religion in favor of scientific medicine. The boy, in thisline of analysis, is a trapped victim of erroneous piety that goes hand in hand witha lack of sex education, caused by society’s conspiratorial silence about sexual matters or the prudery typical of the puritanical society. Distressed by his uncontrollable
desire, he decides to go to the hospital, not to a confessional.

Countering Victorian Normalization

83

Yet it is a curious fact that the role assigned to the doctors in the story does
not properly function to support the superiority of medicine over religion. Doctor
Wilcox, one of the two doctors, obviously lacks ability as a doctor, since he cannot
get along without “The Young Doctor’s Friend and Guide, which, being consulted
on any given subject, told symptoms and treatment” (CSS 298). His blind relianceon the guidebook without judging the case by himself reminds us not only of his
inability but of the Pharisaic rigidity in obeying the written rules. The boy confesses
his sin not to the priest with the Bible but to the doctor with a guidebook.3 Doc
Fischer, the other doctor, also is powerless in the attempt to persuade the boy of his
naturalness. The boy being about to die, the two doctors endlessly and aimlessly
continue to quarrel as if to blame the boy’s impending death on each other; Doc
Fischer insinuates Doctor Wilcox’s inability in the form of vulgar irony (“he wasunable to find this emergency [the boy’s self-mutilation] listed in his book”), andDoctor Wilcox teases Doc Fischer about his pretending to be a Christian in spite of
the fact that he is actually a Jew, a fact which Doc Fischer refers to as “my achilles
tendon” (CSS 300-301). The boy, as it were, came to a confessional under a religious
opposition between a Pharisee and a Christ-killer disguised as a Christian.4
There exists another character in the scene, when the boy visits the hospital —Horace, a journalist. He is the first person narrator of the tale and complicit withthe silence around sexual matters. When Doc Fischer asks the boy what the problem
is, the boy’s answer is summarized by the narrator thus: “The boy told him” (CSS
299). The boy’s consultation is, even though self-evident for the reader, left to thereader’s imagination. Similarly, the doctor attempts to give sex education to the boy
to dissuade him from the foolish attempt of castration, and the narrator describes
the scene thus: “[. . . ] and he told the boy certain things” (CSS 300). The content
of the “certain things” is not specified. The problem of sexuality is actually spoken
and discussed, yet the narrator leaves it unmentioned in a way which reminds us ofVictorian prudery. Essentially it is the same sort of silence on the part of the societythat results in the tragic misunderstanding of the boy, the misunderstanding which is
caused by the lack of appropriate sex education.
We should consider that this religio-medical image of the doctors and the prudery in sexual matters reflect Hemingway’s father, who was a doctor. In “Fathers
and Sons,” his semi-autobiographical story, the protagonist, reading in the paper asinger’s arrest on charges of mashing, asks his father what “mashing” means.
“It is one of the most heinous of crimes,” his father answered. Nick’s
imagination pictured the great tenor doing something strange, bizarre, andheinous with a potato masher to a beautiful lady who looked like the pictures of Anna Held on the inside of cigar boxes. He resolved, with considerable horror, that when he was old enough he would try mashing at least
once. (CSS 371)

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

This comical passage well captures the painful situation in which silence about sexual matters produces a crooked imagination investing the matter with much charged
implications. Though this conversation might be fictional, the author’s father is ostensibly the model for this typical Victorian character.5 If the boy in “God Rest You
Merry, Gentlemen” is a victim of prudish morality, the problem that aﬄicts the boy
also aﬄicted the author since his boyhood. In light of Hemingway’s fear of violating
the morality of the day, it is very likely that the boy, who desperately wants to deprive
himself of “that awful lust” and who confesses his alleged sin to the priest-doctor,
reflects the author’s hidden sense of guilt for having “that awful lust.” The boy’s
cut-oﬀ penis is a symbol of the author’s forbidden sexual desire, and thus the boy’s
possible death is a vicarious expiation for his lust. Not successful in escaping bothfrom the rigid puritanical morality and from his desire (unlike the boy in the story
who succeeded at the cost of his own life), Hemingway sublimates his substitute intoa victim, a martyr, or a Christ figure.
Though Hemingway declares in the posthumously published “fictional memoir,”
True at First Light, that “I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe
more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to
be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies” (283), it
is doubtful whether he really overcame the fear of syphilis; since the fear is tightly
linked to the fear of his immoral sexual desire, which he could never abandon until
death.6 The description of his medical treatment of venereal patients in an African
village, the description which lasts as many as four pages long, rather betrays theconsiderable fear he once had in the pre-penicillin age. We should surmise that thesudden relief from the fear by the discovery of the antibiotic7 found an outlet for the
suppressed anxiety in the form of the overabundant recording of his treatment and of
the overemphasis of the tractability of the disease. In other words, though the fearof syphilis was removed by the antibiotic, the more fundamental fear that he wasviolating a deep-seated morality inscribed in his body must have remained to prick
his sense of guilt. His desire itself was, as it were, like a crown of thorns on his head,tormenting his inner psyche throughout his life.
Hemingway, all through his lifetime, attempted to be seen as a manly man living
the life of a libertine. Hemingway scholars have hitherto focused either on his licentious aspect that attempted to revolt against the genteel tradition of his hometown
or on his hidden self that was recently discovered to be much more feminine thanthe outward disguise; however, as we have seen, his attitude toward sexuality cannot
simplistically be determined as by previous critics. Rather he wavered all through his
lifetime between his own desire prohibited in the puritanical society on the one handand his inmost fear of the wrath of God as embodied in venereal diseases. Thoughmany of his stories have heretofore been regarded as notoriously male-centered, thesemasculine faces seen in each story are rather his desire and, under the surface structure, they demonstrate that he had always been feeling the sense of guilt in pretending
such faces.

85Countering Victorian Normalization

Notes
1

Normally syphilis is divided into three stages. For the details about each stage, see Quétel 80.

2

In the course of Catherine’s pregnancy, Frederic pays little attention to her condition. In particular,when she confides to Frederic that she is expecting a baby, he reveals his negative reaction to her
pregnancy (137-38). See Part IV for the discussion of Catherine’s pregnancy.

3

We should remember that, at the height of the anti-syphilitic movement at the beginning of thetwentieth century, there was a consensus among doctors that “it is necessary to ‘act as a confessor
to the patient’ in order to reduce [. . . ] ‘the moral pains of syphilis’ ” (Quétel 196). As to thereligious discourse in “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,” see Monteiro.

4

Regarding Hemingway and anti-Semitism, see Wilentz.

5

About the prudery of Hemingway’s father, see Spilka.

6

See Eby for abundant biographical evidence.

7

The industrial production of penicillin began in 1941 in the United States. See Quétel 249.

Part IV

Transgressing the Gender
Boundary:
Representations of Hair

Chapter 9
Pregnancy and SterilizationT

he prescription that women’s hair should be long has been strongly observedin Christian countries since St. Paul’s precept to the Corinthians.
Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it isa shame unto him?
But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given
her for a covering.
But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither
the churches of God. (1 Cor. 11.14-16)“Although there have been many attempts to break away from this dictum of St
Paul’s,” Desmond Morris says in Body Watching, “its influence is still with us tothis day. Despite occasional hirsute rebellions by Cavaliers and Hippies, the shaggy,
long-haired male has remained a rarity, and despite similar rebellions by bobbed andsnipped modern females, the short-haired female has also proved to be a rare species[. . . ].” Given that the length of hair functions as a sign indicating the diﬀerence between both sexes because of the strongly observed prescription about hairstyle, anabundant display of female hair is naturally vested with erotic meanings; thus, “tooprovocative for sexually inhibited societies” (32) such as Victorian America. We canfind a typical example in The Scarlet Letter.
[. . . ] she took oﬀ the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell
upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its
abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. [. . . ] Hersex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what
men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden
hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour.
(Hawthorne 202)
This famous scene, in which Hester Prynne seduces Arthur Dimmesdale by the exposure of her abundant hair, teaches us how enormous an erotic power women’s hair
has: just to display rich flows of female hair functions as an act of sexual temptation. It is almost as if Morris commented on Hawthorne’s romance when he says:“Puritans hated its sensuality, but were unable to demand its cropping because thiswould have made it unfeminine and contrary to the law of God as laid down by
St. Paul” (32). Women cannot cut their hair because the image culturally assigned to

89

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

women strictly prohibits the act, while women must keep hiding their hair because
their ample tresses function as a powerful sexual symbol. In other words, we can understand through representations of women’s hair in the nineteenth century literaturethat femininity itself was at once preserved and feared in the Victorian era.
In the 1920s, however, Western societies witnessed women’s revolution against
the traditional prescription: they cut their hair short as well as exposed it in public.
This widely prevalent popularity of women’s short hair is partly explained as a resultof the radical surge in the women’s liberation movement. Grant McCracken, in his
study of hairstyles, follows this line:
The 1920s were the time of the great bob rebellion. Women threw oﬀ theelaborate hairstyles of the last two centuries. The suﬀragette movement thatswept North America, transforming voting privileges and clothing styles,
also created pressure for a new look, for something that cut away that great
symbol of women’s oppression, her “crowning glory.” Women across thecountry went to men’s barbershops and demanded to have their hair cut
short. (162)
Whatever caused this reactionary craze, women’s bobbed hair would have immensely
aﬀected people’s gender conception in those days, who had taken for granted thatlong hair was natural for women. Being accustomed to seeing short-haired women
today, we might be prevented from understanding fully the impact which people inthose days felt when they first saw this innovative hair style. To begin with, it isnecessary to see the record of this impact. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her
Hair,” written in 1920, is a perfect example. As the title suggests, the story’s central
theme is Bernice’s act of cutting her hair short. When the story begins, Bernice is all
but ignored by boys around her and because of her failure to behave socially in public
she is regarded as a nuisance even by her niece, Marjorie. To find a way out of thismiserable situation, Bernice asks her niece to tell her how to become popular amongboys. The most eﬀective way Marjorie teaches her is to tell them she will bob her
hair. Having never seen a short-haired woman before, boys are fascinated by such an“unmoral” (37) idea; successful at her attempt, Bernice soon becomes the center of
their attention. But there emerges a pang of jealousy on the part of Marjorie, so shetricks Bernice into really cutting her hair.
“I want you to bob my hair.”
The first barber’s mouth slid somewhat open. His cigarette dropped to
the floor.
“Huh?”“My hair — bob it!”
Refusing further preliminaries, Bernice took her seat on high. A man
in the chair next to her turned on his side and gave her a glance, half lather,Transgressing the Gender Boundary91

half amazement. One barber started and spoiled little Willy Schuneman’smonthly haircut. [. . . ]Outside a passer-by stopped and stared; a couple joined him; half adozen small boys’ noses sprang into life, flattened against the glass; andsnatches of conversation borne on the summer breeze drifted in throughthe screen-door. (43)Seeing people’s reactions to Bernice’s act described here, we can clearly understandhow strongly women in those days were prescribed by the traditional assumption towear long hair. After the passage quoted above, Bernice takes revenge by cutting
Marjorie’s hair while she is asleep. In this story, women’s short hair is almost inconceivable, and it is not too much to say that her act is a hideous crime to shock
people around her. Though attracting attention because of its immorality, the actual
cropping of her hair causes Bernice a great pain; thus, the very same act of cutting
Marjorie’s hair is a means to her revenge.
On the other hand, Hemingway’s response to women’s short hair is completely
diﬀerent from Fitzgerald’s. He never showed any repugnance for bobbed hair, but
depicted it as a fascinating practice, which can be seen in the description of BrettAshley’s hair in The Sun Also Rises. It is fairly reasonable to surmise that Hemingway was less bounded by the traditional conception of women’s hair than his contemporaries. He even praises in The Sun Also Rises the iconoclastic novelty of Brett’s
short hair, saying “She started all that” (30). Yet his positive response to women’s
short hair was not rendered from the viewpoint of the women’s liberation movement.
As many critics note,1 Brett Ashley is not so independent a character as assumed at
first sight. She is engaging with Mike Campbell at the beginning of the novel, and,at the closing scene, she is completely helpless without Jake’s help after she leaves
her lover, Pedro Romero. She always needs men to be with her, almost unable tolive without her men. In addition, we are told that she feels a strong repugnancefor her own sexual desire. In Hemingway’s fictional world, there appear quite a few
women cutting their hair short, yet cropped hair is never charged with the notion of“women’s liberation,” except for in one of his last novels, the unfinished The Gardenof Eden. It is very likely that he perceived the newly spread hairstyle of women in adiﬀerent way from his contemporaries.
“Cat in the Rain,” one of the most famous short stories of Hemingway’s early
career, is indispensable in assessing his conception of women’s hair. The story depicts a newlywed American couple staying in an Italian hotel. The wife is introduced
when she is looking out of a window of their room to see the rainy garden of the hotel, while her husband is reading a book paying no attention to his wife. Finding a cat
crouching under a table in the garden for shelter from the rain, she suddenly realizes
that she wants the cat and goes out to obtain it. But when she comes out to the garden, the cat has already disappeared. She comes back to the room fairly distressed,
but her husband shows only an outward concern with her unfulfilled wish. After a

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

brief quarrel between the couple, possibly caused by the husband’s indiﬀerence tohis wife, the story ends with the episode in which the hotelkeeper has a maid bring“a big tortoise-shell cat” for the wife.
There is a persistent dispute among Hemingway scholars over the question ofwhether the symbolical act of her wanting the cat signifies that she wants to have ababy or that she has already been pregnant. A fuller discussion about this problem
lies outside the scope of our discussion, but, for the convenience of proceeding theargument, we shall briefly examine Hemingway’s letter addressed to Fitzgerald:
Cat in the Rain wasnt [sic] about Hadley. I know that you and Zelda always thought it was. When I wrote that we were at Rapallo but Hadley was
4 months pregnant with Bumby. The Inn Keeper was the one at Cortina
D’Ampezzo and the man and the girl were a harvard kid and his wife that
I’d met at Genoa. Hadley never made a speech in her life about wanting ababy because she had been told various things by her doctor and I’d — nouse going into all that. (Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, December 24, 1925. SL 180)
In this letter, Hemingway attempts to make his friend believe that the model of thecouple in the story is not the author and his wife. Because of not a few inconsistentstatements which conflict with biographical fact, opinions are divided among critics
as to the validity of his insistence. Yet, the important point for us is what he oﬀers asa ground for his insistence that his wife is not the model for the American girl in thestory: the fact that his wife has “never made a speech [. . . ] about wanting a baby.”
Then it seems reasonable to suppose that the American girl, in fact, wants to have ababy though not making a speech. And the most intriguing point is, as we will see
below, the subtle relationship between the length of her hair and her desire to have ababy.
Let us look at the text in detail. Throughout the story, we are told that the husband
is indiﬀerent to his wife. At the opening lines of the story, the husband all but ignores
his wife: even when she declares that she will bring the cat in from the rainy garden,
he continues to read his book without so much as looking toward her. It seems that
she has been dissatisfied with such attitudes of her husband. After she returns to
the room unsuccessful in her attempt, he still pays no attention to her in spite of her
profound disappointment. Though he briefly looks away from the book, it is not
to look at his wife but merely to rest his eyes, tired from reading for many hours.
Without listening to his wife’s sudden burst of various complaints about her present
life, he continues to read the book. His indiﬀerence to his wife is well displayed in
the description of his gaze, for he never sees her until the closing scene of the story;
however, after the wife suggests that she will cut her hair, the husband suddenly pays
intense attention to the wife. This sudden change in his attitude toward her strikes us
with the impression that he is in fact obsessed by her hairstyle.

Transgressing the Gender Boundary

93“Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let my hair grow out?”
she asked, looking at her profile again.
George looked up and saw the back of her neck, clipped close like aboy’s.
“I like it the way it is.”“I get so tired of it,” she said. “I get so tired of looking like a boy.”
George shifted his position in the bed. He hadn’t looked away from her
since she started to speak. (CSS 131, emphases are mine)
The husband has theretofore ignored his wife, but as soon as she says that she wants
to grow her hair he suddenly “looked up and saw” her and “hadn’t looked away” fromher. This abrupt attention on the part of the husband deserves much consideration.
We can surmise from the quotation above that it is the wife’s suggestion of changing
her hairstyle, now “clipped close like a boy’s,” that aroused his persistent attention.
Hemingway scholars since Spilka’s influential study have regarded representations ofchanging hairstyles, recurrent in all his works, as manifestations of an androgynous
desire he was alleged to have had — the hidden desire to fuse with female partners
by way of cutting their hair exactly alike. But unlike the description of tonsorial
experiments in The Garden of Eden or For Whom the Bell Tolls, this wife’s desire to
grow her hair in “Cat in the Rain” seems unrelated to such androgynous desire. The
representation of hair, at least in this story, must be rendered with another intent.
If the story depicts the wife’s desire to have a baby, as we have seen above, it isvery likely that her wanting to grow her hair long is a manifestation of her hidden
desire to become pregnant. It is fairly reasonable to surmise that the length of hairin this story indicates the ability of reproduction: her insistence that she wants to“let [her] hair grow out” and wear a more womanly hairstyle than her present style“clipped close like a boy’s” can be interpreted as her desire to become more feminized, to reaﬃrm her identity as a woman, and to recover the ability to be pregnant.
As many anthropologists have investigated, it is almost universally believed, atleast in primitive communities, that hair has mystic powers. A Westerner would bewell acquainted with the famous episode of Samson and Delilah, in which Samson’s
hair is represented as the source of his essential life force. Moreover, James G.
Frazer in The Golden Bough, of which Hemingway had three copies in his library,
devotes fourteen pages to elaborate accounts of symbolic meanings of hair found invarious primitive tribes.2 In addition, an aficionado of bullfighting would never failto think of “coleta” or a matador’s pigtail, about which Hemingway explains in “An
Explanatory Glossary of Certain Words, Terms, and Phrases Used in bullfighting,”
attached to Death in the Afternoon (396). It is natural that Hemingway, who was wellinformed with anthropological knowledge and Frazer’s monumental work,3 assigned
to the length of women’s hair the symbolical function of procreativity.
The schema that the length of female hair indicates the fertility of its wearer
resonates throughout Hemingway’s work. For example, Catherine Barkley in A

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

Farewell to Arms is the only person in his whole body of works who is dissuadedby the protagonist from cutting her hair; and, as is well known, she becomes pregnant and dies when she delivers her baby at the end of the novel. Marie Morgan in
To Have and Have Not once wore long hair when she gave birth to two daughters;
while, in the story, she cuts her hair short and loses the ability to bear children. Helen
Gordon in the same novel, who is a long-haired woman, needs to take contraceptive
pills and undergo abortions over and over because her husband does not want babies:“Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have ababy. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. [. . . ] It’s halfcatheters and half whirling douches” (185-86). Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls
has her hair cut by the Falangists when raped, and the possibility is suggested that
she has lost the ability to become pregnant: “It is possible that I can never bear theeeither a son or a daughter for the Pilar says that if I could it would have happened tome with the things which were done” (354). Catherine in The Garden of Eden also
cuts her hair according to her desire to transgress the gender boundary and believes
that she is sterile: “I thought if I’d be a girl and stay a girl I’d have a baby at least.
Not even that” (71).
Then, in “Cat in the Rain,” the husband’s curious tenacity to oppose the wife’s
suggestion to change her hairstyle oﬀers us an important topic for further investigation: his stubborn adherence to his wife’s short hair, taking into account its symbolic
meaning, should be regarded as his reluctance in accepting his wife’s pregnancy. To
put it more explicitly, by forcing her to cut her hair short, he symbolically attempts to“sterilize” her. In many cultures, cutting one’s hair has been regarded as an important
ritual, as Desmond Morris states: “psychoanalysts have interpreted the cropping ofmale hair as displaced castration” (29). It is very likely that Hemingway appropriatedthis schema to his own end: to cut women’s hair is to sterilize female reproductive
ability.

Notes
1See, for example, Martin.

2

Frazer 193-207.

3

Jeﬀrey Meyers looked over Brasch and Sigman’s Hemingway’s Library: A Composite Record, andlocated not only The Golden Bough but “fifty-seven books on Indians,” and “Sigmund Freud’s
Basic Writings, which included Totem and Taboo (1913)” to conclude that Hemingway “was well
read in anthropology” (304).

Chapter 10
In Pursuit of Femininity

I

f Hemingway considered women’s hair as a symbol of female procreative ability
as we have seen in the previous chapter, men’s hair also must be laden with acertain significance. He frequently depicted scenes in which a man and a woman
attempt to identify with each other by arranging their hairstyle exactly the same.
Considering that he wrote not only about women’s but also about men’s tonsorial
experiments, we should investigate more in detail the cultural background of haircutting to fully understand his deep-seated conception of hair. According to McCracken,
in Western societies only women can be admitted to the realm of expressive power ofhairstyle (37). Men wearing long hair or dying their hair are not a rare species today,
yet those men who are particular about their hairstyle had been despised as unmanly
until half a century ago. Men had to cut their hair uniformly short, showing oﬀ thatthey held no particular interest in their own hairstyle. In short, the primary purposeof cutting their hair short was to deny the rich expressiveness human hair essentiallyhas; and, in so doing, they tried to imply that they did not have any intention of decorating their hair as women do. Hemingway also considered those males who areconscious of their hair as being outside of the male normative value. Homosexuals
appearing in the early part of The Sun Also Rises, for example, are marked by thewhiteness of their skin and their elaborately arranged hair: “I could see their hands
and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. [. . . ] As they went in, under
the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking”(28, emphases are mine). Death in the Afternoon also records an episode, in which aman dyes his hair immediately after being converted to a homosexual.
In Hemingway’s stories, a man who is conscious of his hair is always charged
with (for him) a negative value of being a homosexual. Then when we read thefollowing scene in A Farewell to Arms, we must bear in mind that in Hemingway’s
mind men with long hair primarily deviated from the normative value:“[. . . ] Darling, why don’t you let your hair grow?”“How grow?”“Just grow a little longer.”“It’s long enough now.”“No, let it grow a little longer and I could cut mine and we’d be justalike only one of us blonde and one of us dark.”“I wouldn’t let you cut yours.” (299)

95

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

The tonsorial experiment of cutting a woman’s hair and growing a man’s hair tobe “just alike” is proposed by a female character, and Frederic refuses to do it.1
To protect the masculine image of himself, it is fairly reasonable to suppose that
Hemingway could not encourage his protagonist to deviate from the male normative
hairstyle. Nevertheless, he betrays his fascination with the rich expressiveness of hairby depicting at least the suggestion of a man’s wearing the hairstyle suitable to the
opposite sex.
Hemingway’s attitude toward an attempt to transgress the boundary into femininity gradually began to change at the end of the 1930s, and at the same time thehostile representations of female hair, rendered, in our argument, for the purpose ofsterilizing female procreative ability, also disappeared in this period. Those who are
killed such as Catherine Barkley or those who are forced to abort their children suchas Helen Gordon are no longer found in Hemingway’s works. The turn of the decade
was for Hemingway a period of transition in which he came to terms with femininity
and female procreative ability. For Whom the Bell Tolls, written in this period, includes a motif of tonsorial experiment similar to that of A Farewell to Arms, and tocompare both scenes clarifies the change that occurred in Hemingway’s conceptionof femininity and masculinity in this period:“But in Madrid I [Robert Jordan] thought we could go together to the coiffeur’s and they could cut it neatly on the sides and in the back as they cut
mine and that way it would look better in the town while it is growing out.”“I would look like thee,” she said and held him close to her. “And thenI never would want to change it.” (345)
The scene quoted above is similar to that of A Farewell to Arms, in that a couple
attempt to identify with each other through arranging their hair to look alike. However, the significance the scene conveys to the reader is completely diﬀerent. In A
Farewell to Arms, the tonsorial experiment is proposed by a female character andrefused by a male character; while, on the contrary, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is
Jordan who suggests to Maria that she cut her hair as his own. On the simplest level,
he tells her to arrange her hair neatly that was cropped by the Falangists, yet, as we
can see from his expression (“as they cut mine”) and Maria’s response (“I would look
like thee”), he is well aware of their appearance becoming similar to each other after
the haircutting.
What is more, we should notice that Jordan has long hair: at the beginning of
the story, his superior, General Golz advises him to cut his hair (“you need a haircut”[8]); and, in the middle of the story, Maria suggests cutting his hair (“I will borrow thescissors of Pilar and cut thy hair” [172]). On both occasions, he refuses to cut his hair.
Then a fairly intriguing point to notice is Jordan’s suggestion to cut their hair alike;for it implies that he has his hair cut short, considering the length of Maria’s hair.
In Jordan’s conception, this attempt to cut his hair is not to deny the expressivenessTransgressing the Gender Boundary

97of hair, for he is aware of the eﬀect the haircutting would create. Hemingway had
theretofore negatively responded to such attempts until For Whom the Bell Tolls, andthis is the first time he depicted a male character who transgresses against the malenormative value about hairstyles.
Indeed, in A Farewell to Arms, Catherine expresses repeatedly the desire to identify with Frederic (“There isn’t any me any more” [106]. “There isn’t any me. I’myou. Don’t make up a separate me” [115]. “We really are the same one” [139]), but
he avoids all these appeals. On the other hand, the desire to become united is sharedby both Jordan and Maria. The following quotation starts with Maria’s comment:“Afterwards we will be as one animal of the forest and be so close thatneither one can tell that one of us is one and not the other. Can you not feel
my heart be your heart?”“Yes. There is no diﬀerence.”“Now, feel. I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And I
love thee, oh, I love thee so. Are we not truly one? Canst thou not feel it?”“Yes,” he said. “It is true.”“And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine.”“Nor any other legs, nor feet, nor of the body.” (262)
Unlike in the case of A Farewell to Arms, Jordan responds with ardor to Maria’s desire to become one and the same person. Though still it is a female character who
initiates the topic, Jordan’s response grows gradually more and more eager and ecstatic as he replies to Maria’s suggestion. According to Pilar, from the beginningthey look very similar to each other (“You could be brother and sister by the look”[67]); by cutting their hair exactly alike, they want to encourage further the androgynous fantasy that they are really the same person, the fantasy to become united bytransgressing the gender boundary.
In this context, Gerry Brenner’s analysis of Jordan’s narrative should be fairly
important for us. Brenner argues that a characteristic of his narrative as quoted below
is charged with a feminine quality:
They were having now and before and always and now and now and now.
Oh, now, now, now, the only now, and above all now, and there is no othernow but thou now and now is thy prophet. Now and forever now. Comenow, now, for there is no now but now. Yes, now. Now, please now, only
now, not anything else only this now, and where are you and where am I
and where is the other one, and not why, not ever why, only this now; andon and always please then always now, always now, for now always one
now [. . . ]. (379)
Brenner argues that “the whole passage reads like the semiotic style that Julia
Kristeva associates with women — repetitive, spasmodic, rhythmic, nonstructured”

98

In Pursuit of the Natural Body(137). He also cites the theories of Irigaray and Cixous to insist on a feminine quality in this passage. In this point, Jordan’s narrative sets up a clear distinction fromwhat is generally thought of as characteristics of the Hemingway style — a series ofterse, short, declarative sentences without unnecessary flourishes of adjectives andadverbs.
As we can see from the fact that Jordan obtains feminine narrative characteristics,
to possess femininity, for Hemingway, means to possess female productive ability. In
his mind, the female biological ability of reproduction is simbolically identified withthe creativity of artistic works.2 Since artistic professions are traditionally assigned
to women in Western cultures, Hemingway naturally could not help being awareof the feminine aspect of his profession.3 It seems natural that “hair,” “procreative
ability,” and “creative activities,” all of which are culturally or biologically prescribedas women’s attributes, come to be interconnected with one another in Hemingway’s
mind.
It is, then, worth noting that the role of the best story teller in the novel is assigned
to a female character, Pilar. Fascinated by her tale of the first day of the Spanish Civil
War, Jordan meditates on her skills of vivid representations of actual events:
If that woman could only write. He would try to write it and if he had luckand could remember it perhaps he could get it down as she told it. God,
how she could tell a story. She’s better than Quevedo, he thought. He neverwrote the death of any Don Faustino as well as she told it. I wish I could
write well enough to write that story, he thought. (134)
As we can see from his ardent adoration of her talent, Pilar is presented in this novelas an exemplary model for Jordan who is a would-be writer. After listening to Pilar’stale, he seeks to acquire creativity peculiar to the female. With “her thick curly
black hair [. . . ] twisted into a knot on her neck,” Pilar has this feminine productivity
embodied by her rich hair.4
Jordan’s quest for femininity and his attempt to transgress the gender boundary,however, are suddenly suspended when he realizes his own maleness near the endof the story. On the night before the destruction of the bridge, he and Maria cannot
have sexual intercourse, for Maria cannot accept him because of “a great sorenessand much pain” (341). After that Maria tells him the painful memory of her being raped by the Falangists. Causing Maria the pain during the unfulfilled sexualintercourse, and being told about the rape she suﬀered, he cannot help being awareof the inevitable violent nature of his sex: however highly he appraises femininity
and harbors feminine qualities in his inner psyche; however desperately he wants totransgress the gender boundary, he is faced with the gruesome fact that he and therapists could inflict pain on women through the very same act of sexual intercourse.
In short, Jordan here is forced to identify himself with a rapist.
As she regains her femininity with her hair growing near the end of the story,

Transgressing the Gender Boundary99

the fantasy of their identification with each other beyond the gender boundary canno longer be sustained; and through the course of this disruption of their fantasy,
Jordan grows more and more aware of his masculinity. Hereafter we will see how hisorientation toward femininity is redirected to masculinity.
As Spilka points out (246-47), the relationship between Pablo, the leader of theguerrilla band, and his wife Pilar reflects Hemingway’s father and mother: in bothfamilies, the husband is a coward (or so at least in Hemingway’s eyes) and cannot
confront his wife’s domineering presence in the home; and the wife takes controlof other members in place of her husband. And the contrast between the masculine
duty represented by the father and the feminine creativity represented by the motherin Hemingway’s family is also transplanted into the quasi-family structure of theguerrilla band in the novel.
Once you accept the idea of demolition as a problem it is only a problem.
But there was plenty that was not so good that went with it although God
knows you took it easily enough. There was the constant attempt to approximate the conditions of successful assassination that accompanied thedemolition. Did big words make it more defensible? Did they make killing
any more palatable? [. . . ] But my guess is you will get rid of all that bywriting about it, he said. Once you write it down it is all gone. (165)
While women have the ability to produce, what Jordan, as a man, has to do is a destructive and violent action of blowing up the bridge. This quotation keenly conveys
his doubt about the destruction and slaughter he is going to carry out. And the doubt
can be removed only by the creative activity of “writing about it.”Jordan’s father, like the author’s, has committed suicide, and Jordan regards him
as a coward. Given that he rejects his father and that he refuses to accept Pablo, who
is also a father figure as discussed above, as an obstacle to perform his duty to blow
up the bridge, the first half of the story lays stress more on the feminine values ofcreativity than on the masculine destructive force. At the end of the novel before theattack, however, as is well known, Jordan is reconciled with Pablo, and possibly withhis own father vicariously through this surrogate father figure.
He [Jordan] put his hand out and said, “Suerte, Pablo,” and their two
hands gripped in the dark.
Robert Jordan, when he put his hand out, expected that it would be likegrasping something reptilian or touching a leper. He did not know what
Pablo’s hand would feel like. But in the dark Pablo’s hand gripped his hardand pressed it frankly and he returned the grip. Pablo had a good hand in
the dark and feeling it gave Robert Jordan the strangest feeling he had feltthat morning. (404, emphasis is original)
After this reconciliation, Pilar yields her control of the guerrilla band to her husband,

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

and the patriarchal power relationship in the quasi-familial band is restored.
After all, Jordan cannot transgress the boundary splitting femininity from masculinity. At the closing paragraph of the novel, he is waiting to meet the approachingenemies, staying in the realm of masculine duty and values at the cost of his own
life. Of course he cannot fulfill the promise of tonsorial experiment with Maria. This
ending of the novel tells us that Hemingway, at this stage of his life, could not complete his attempt to come to terms with femininity to the extent to which he could
approach it in The Garden of Eden, which he started to write about six years later.
Hemingway, allegedly a masculine writer, chose at the last instance to remain in therealm of masculinity. However, For Whom the Bell Tolls takes an important position
shifting from the period of misogyny to that of the desire to transgress the genderboundary: in the 1920s and the first two thirds of the 30s, he attempted to sterilize feminine reproductive ability; yet, in the 40s, he strongly desired to acquire thefeminine creative force. This novel should be marked by his first step into feminine
territory.
In The Garden of Eden, the relationship is clearer than in For Whom the BellTolls between tonsorial experiment and artistic creativity. With a man’s hesitant but
steady approaching to femininity and a woman’s desire to obtain masculine prerogative being intermingled with each other, the story goes around the axis of practices of
cutting hair. In the first half of the story, a newly-wed writer and his wife peacefully
enjoy their honeymoon trip. At first, the wife is fairly content with her husband’s
writing about their married life. However, in the middle of the story, David, thewriter, stops writing about them to begin writing “An African Story,” the story of his
youth, in which he is directly opposed to his father about killing an elephant. As he
gradually becomes absorbed in the story, losing interest in Catherine, his wife, shetries by whatever means necessary to attract his attention to her, only in vain. Thisbreach in their conjugal relationship finally drives her into insanity at the end of thestory.
When the story begins, David believes that he is so far getting along with hiswife, and never imagines that his wife in fact secretly harbors discontent for theirmarried life. But one day, when Catherine suddenly wants to bring a change into
their life, David, for the first time has a doubt about her satisfaction: “Now when
they had made love they would eat and drink and make love again. It was a very
simple world and he had never been truly happy in any other. He thought that it must
be the same with her and certainly she acted in that way but today there had been thisthing about the change and the surprise” (14). The “change” and the “surprise” mean
the sexual role reversal, in which Catherine has her hair cropped short like a boy andplays the part of a man in their sexual intercourse. It is clear that she is dissatisfied
by her assigned role of a woman.
Catherine’s dissatisfaction is made clearer in the quarrel with David about bookreviews on his novel. She hates to see that David is deeply immersed in reading thereviews without even noticing that he has drunk the vermouth, and this brings aboutTransgressing the Gender Boundary101

the first quarrel in their married life. We can find in Catherine’s complaint her essential dissatisfaction about her role: while David produces works as a writer, she is
only a housewife without ever producing anything meaningful. The following conversation is exchanged between Catherine and a waiter, who is told that the reviews
David is reading are about his novel:“Magnificent,” said the waiter who was deeply moved. “Is Madame
also a writer?”“No,” the girl [Catherine] said not looking up from the clippings.
“Madame is a housewife.” (24, emphasis is mine)
The term, “housewife” has a negative implication of confining a woman within ahousehold.5 By calling herself a “housewife,” she attempts to emphasize the contrast
between David, who has a career as a writer, and herself, who is just a housewife.
There are numerous signs that indicate Catherine’s discontent about her role as awoman. When David says that he likes her “as a girl,” Catherine tells him that to bea girl is “a god damned bore.”“[. . . ] Do you want me to wrench myself around and tear myself in
two because you can’t make up your mind? Because you won’t stay withanything?”“Would you hold it down?”“Why should I hold it down? You want a girl don’t you? Don’t you
want everything that goes with it? Scenes, hysteria, false accusations, temperament isn’t that it?” (70)
The list of feminine qualities she enumerates is a typical example of the negativeevaluation the male has attributed to femininity. Ernest Hemingway, allegedly amisogynist writer, seems rather sympathetic to women’s gender role in that he consciously has Catherine denounce the from-the-male-viewpoint negative characterization of various feminine aspects. Her statement before she leaves David, “because
I’m married to you [that] doesn’t make me your slave or your chattel” (225), sounds
like a familiar feminist criticism blaming the male dominance over female role in thehousehold, though it is uttered by a half-crazed woman with little reasonable senseof what she is doing.
Moreover, Catherine also feels dissatisfied by her role as a woman in sexualintercourse. As the story develops, we come to see her being in a painful torment
when she has to play the part of a woman though she actually feels herself as a man:“You aren’t really a woman at all,” Marita said.
“I know it,” Catherine said. “I’ve tried to explain it to David often
enough. Isn’t that true, David?”David looked at her and said nothing.

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body
“Didn’t I?”“Yes,” he said.
“I did try and I broke myself in pieces in Madrid to be a girl and all
it did was break me in pieces,” Catherine said. “Now all I am is through.
You’re a girl and a boy both and you really are. You don’t have to change
and it doesn’t kill you and I’m not. And now I’m nothing.” (192)

Marita, who has a homosexual relationship with Catherine, considers that she is not“really a woman.” And blaming David, Catherine states that it is because she had
to try “to be a girl” that she broke herself in pieces. In her opinion, because Davidcan be “a girl and a boy both,” he does not “have to change” into either sex, and toplay the other sex “doesn’t kill” his mental stability unlike in the case of Catherine.
Desiring the social status that is limited to men, and wanting to do sexual acts as
a man, yet being biologically nothing but a woman, Catherine gradually harbors an
envious feeling for David. He has both feminine and masculine privileges — artistic
creativity to produce a work and the social status to publish it, while Catherine has
lost the former and originally lacks the latter.
While David is working on the work of their married life, Catherine does notshow this discontent. Yet, finding that her husband begins to be absorbed in writing
about his younger years in “An African Story,” Catherine suddenly exposes her envy
for his creative ability. In order to attract his attention from the work to her, she attempts to bring a change into their sexual intercourse, cropping her own hair as well
as requesting her husband’s hairstyle be arranged like her own, and changing theirsexual roles in their intercourse. This relationship is a reversal of what is describedin “Cat in the Rain,” in which the husband tries to deprive his wife of her reproductive ability. In this novel, it is Catherine who attempts to deprive her partner of his
creativity by means of cutting his hair. In short, she tries to “sterilize” his creative
energy.
Catherine’s attempt, however, never actually succeeds. To cut her own hair andto imitate the role of a man in order to procure male social status and to usurp her
husband’s ability as a writer goes nowhere, resulting, on the contrary, in losing her
own ability to create a work.
“[. . . ] The whole way here I saw wonderful things to paint and I can’t
paint at all and never could. But I know wonderful things to write and I
can’t even write a letter that isn’t stupid. I never wanted to be a painter nor
a writer until I came to this country. Now it’s just like being hungry all thetime and there’s nothing you can ever do about it.” (53)
Her desire to write grows greater and greater, yet she does not have any means tofulfill the desire. Her hunger forever torments her, and is only vicariously quenchedby seeing her husband write about her in his novel.6 Considering that she cannot
have a baby, Catherine’s short hair symbolizes that she has lost her womb both in a

103Transgressing the Gender Boundary

literal sense and as a metaphor indicating the rich fount of creative energy.7
After arranging his hair like his wife, David, in spite of Catherine’s intention,
seems more and more to acquire creative energy: it is only after doing the tonsorial
experiment that he begins writing “An African Story” with great speed (93). David’s
hairstyle is indeed short yet not to deny the rich expressiveness of hair as every man
did at the time in which the novel was published; for, to match his hairstyle with his
wife’s naturally earns the expressive force implying that he is “a girl and a boy both.”
By means of cutting his hair, by means of transgressing the gender boundary, David
acquires the feminine quality and the creativity peculiar to the female. It is evidenced
by the fact that, near the final stage of the novel, he, who is at a standstill in writing“An African Story,” regains creative energy to complete the work by means of thesecond tonsorial experiment with Catherine.
At the end of the novel, Catherine leaves David and David is united with a morewomanly character, Marita. This ending seems another example of anticlimax like inthe case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, yet it was chosen by an editor, Tom Jenks, among
the possible endings numerously left behind in Hemingway’s unfinished manuscripts.
We can never know how Hemingway was actually going to end the novel.

Notes
1

Actually what Frederic grows in the novel is not hair but a beard, a typical symbol of masculinity.

2

Biographical evidence confirms this hypothesis. In his family, creative activities were always associated with femininity: Hemingway’s mother, Grace was an opera singer, and instructed herchildren in music and literature. She represented artistic activities in Hemingway’s household. On
the other hand, his father, Clarence, teaching his sons how they should behave in hunting and fishing, represented masculine responsibility and values. The chapter entitled “Arts and Sciences” inCarlos Baker’s biography describes the newly built house of the Hemingways in 1907 as reflecting
the opposite aspects of the mother’s artistic talent and the father’s scientific personality as a doctor.
The role assignment of his father’s labor and his mother’s artistic activity would have infiltrated
young Hemingway’s mind. And the contrast between the Oak Park home, which was dominatedby the mother’s influence, and the Michigan cottage, in which Hemingway learned the skill offishing and hunting from the father also implanted the notion that artistic activities were attributed
to women’s role. See C. Baker 8-17.

3For example, Marilyn Elkins states thus: “Certainly, America’s greatest public writer has always
had to be male, a man’s man who was easily recognizable as a fearless sportsman and bon vivant,for Americans have a well-established idea that culture is not useful and that artists and writers
are ineﬀectual. Therefore, Americans view culture as feminine and the men who deal in it aseﬀeminate and unimportant to the ‘real world.’ From Walt Whitman to Norman Mailer, Americancrossover writers — those who have appealed to consumers of both low and high culture — havedisplayed the guises of masculinity, regardless of their private practices” (94-95).

4

Considering that she is a bisexual, she has both feminine creativity to produce artistic works on the
one hand and the masculine social status to open her works to the public on the other. Catherine
Borne, as we will see below, does not have this latter condition to publish her work.

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

5

According to the Random House Unabridged Dictionary “HOUSEWIFE is oﬀensive to some,perhaps because of an implied contrast with career woman (just a housewife) and perhaps because
it defines an occupation in terms of a woman’s relation to a man.”

6

Catherine repeatedly insists in the novel that she cannot write a work: “I can’t write things, David.
You know that” (222), “But I can’t write things, David” (223), to cite only two. About Catherine’s
wish to produce artistic works, various critics have argued. See, for example, Burwell 112-18.

7

See Showalter, “Feminist” 250-51.

ConclusionT

he general views of the body have greatly changed since the First World War.
Advanced technology made it possible completely to shatter the bodies of soldiers by means of weapons of mass murder; while, at the same time, it oﬀered
medical science the vast possibility to “fix” those bodies and to retrieve the original
shape at least to a certain degree. Watching scenes of butchery and reconstruction of
the bodies on an unprecedentedly vast scale gave rise to a new mode of understanding the human body, a new conception of the body in which each bodily part could
be divided, fixed, and reunited to the whole.
As we have seen above, Ernest Hemingway was greatly influenced by this social
upheaval as to the view of the body, and his works eloquently reflect this confusion.
This is partly because, as anyone at the time was, he was tormented by the conflict
between the new set of values and the old traditional view of the body in which he
was raised in his childhood. As Allen argues in his famous study of 1920s American
culture, everyone felt uneasiness about this rapidly changing morality.
A time of revolution, however, is an uneasy time to live in. It is easier totear down a code than to put a new one in its place, and meanwhile there isbound to be more or less wear and tear and general unpleasantness. People
who have been brought up to think that it is sinful for women to smoke ordrink, and scandalous for sex to be discussed across the luncheon table, andunthinkable for a young girl to countenance strictly dishonorable attentions
from a man, cannot all at once forget the admonitions of their childhood.
It takes longer to hard-boil a man or a woman than an egg. Some of theapostles of the new freedom appeared to imagine that habits of thought
could be changed overnight [. . . ]. But it couldn’t be done. (102)
Like “the apostles of the new freedom” described above, Hemingway, on the surface, celebrated iconoclastic values after the war, yet he also could not “all at once
forget the admonitions of [his] childhood.” He himself probably believed that he wasin pursuit of these newly established ideas about the body — that were, basically,
carnal rather than spiritual; libertine rather than puritan; hyperaesthetic rather thananaesthetic; ambiguous about the gender boundary rather than fixed. Yet, at the sametime, his inner self that was forged in the stern Victorian tradition by his parents
always resisted this desire.
This thesis is intended to show four diﬀerent aspects of Hemingway’s view of the
body. In part I, we have seen his representations of wounded soldiers that reflect thesocial confusion after the war and that, at the same time, betray his ambivalent atti-

105

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body

tude toward the technological view of the body. His ambivalence toward technology
has been further discussed in the second part, in which we have taken up the motifof anaesthesia in his stories. The third and fourth parts have argued that the postwar cultural mode totally diﬀered from the pre-war traditional morality. We haveseen that Hemingway sublimated this confusion and his inner conflict caused by it
into works of fiction and attempted to overcome his own diﬃculties when facing thischaotic disorder of morality.
On the road to the natural body, he could not get rid of the older values, andthe ambivalent feelings toward the body are found at the very core of his literature,functioning as the driving force of his artistic achievement. His struggle with theseconflicting values, especially his struggle in his writing of fiction, as it were, createdthe primary momentum for the genesis of many stories as well as the major forceof his literary tension. The literature of Ernest Hemingway mirrors in his artistic
mastery vivid reflections of the confusion that everyone must have keenly sensed
when the dynamic change in the view of the body took place after the war.

Appendix
A Chronology of Hemingway’s Works
This chronology is based on Paul Smith’s remarkable study of Hemingway’s short stories, A
Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway and Charles M. Oliver’s “Appendix III:
Hemingway Chronology and Dateline” included in Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference
to the LIfe and Work.
The parenthetical date after titles shows the period in which the story was written. Every title isplaced in order of publication, but stories included in a collection are put in the same order as thecollection as well as in order of publication.

1922“A Divine Gesture” (Summer 1921) in the Double Dealer (May)

1923

Three Stories and Ten Poems published by Contact Publishing Co., Paris (nodate, but later July / early August)
1. “Up in Michigan” (Fall 1921; February 1922)
2. “My Old Man” (July – September 1922)
3. “Out of Season” (April 1923)

1924“Indian Camp” (November 1923 – February 1924) in transatlantic review(April issue)
in our time published by Three Mountains Press in Paris (no date, but probably mid March)“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (March – April 1924) in transatlantic
review (November)“Cross-Country Snow” (April 1924) in Der Querschnitt (December)

1925“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” (April 1924) in The Little Review (Autumn – Winterissue, 1924 – 1925)“Big Two-Hearted River” (May – November 1924) in This Quarter (Mayissue)“The Undefeated” (September – November 1924) in Der Querschnitt in German translation (June); in This Quarter (Autumn – Winter issue, 1925 –1926)
In Our Time published by Boni and Liveright in New York (October 5)
1. “Indian Camp”
2. “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”
3. “The End of Something” (March 1924)
4. “The Three-Day Blow (March 1924)
5. “The Battler” (December 1924 – March 1925)
6. “A Very Short Story” (June – July 1923)
7. “Soldier’s Home” (April 1924)
8. “The Revolutionist” (June – July 1923)
9. “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”
10. “Cat in the Rain” (February 1923 – March 1924)
11. “Out of Season”

107

108

1926

1927

1929

1930

1931
1932
1933

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
12. “Cross-Country Snow”
13. “My Old Man”
14. “Big Two-Hearted River”
The Torrents of Spring published by Scribner’s (May 28)“Banal Story” (January – February 1925) in The Little Review (Spring –Summer issue)
Today Is Friday published by The As Stable Publications (Summer)
The Sun Also Rises published by Scribner’s (October 22)“The Killers” (September 1925 – May 1926) in Scribner’s Magazine (Marchissue)“In Another Country” (September – November 1926) in Scribner’s Magazine(April issue)“A Canary for One” (August – September 1926) in Scribner’s Magazine(April issue)“Fifty Grand” (January 1924 – November 1925) in Atlantic Monthly (Julyissue)“Hills Like White Elephant” (May 1927) in transition (August issue)
Men Without Women published by Scribner’s (October 14)
1. “The Undefeated”
2. “In Another Country”
3. “Hills Like White Elephant”
4. “The Killers”
5. “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” (April – May 1927)
6. “Fifty Grand”
7. “A Simple Enquiry” (November 1926 – February 1927)
8. “Ten Indians” (September 1925 – May 1927)
9. “A Canary for One”
10. “An Alpine Idyll” (April 1926)
11. “A Pursuit Race” (November 1926 – February 1927)
12. “Today Is Friday” (May 1926)
13. “Banal Story”
14. “Now I Lay Me” (November – December 1926)
A Farewell to Arms serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (May, June, July,
August, September, October issues); published in book form by Scribner’s(September 27)
Kiki of Montparnasse with “Introduction” by EH; published by Black
Manikin Press (January 22)“Wine of Wyoming” (October 1928 – May 1930) in Scribner’s Magazine(August issue)“The Sea Change” (January 1930 – June 1931) in This Quarter (December
issue)“After the Storm” (April 1928 – June 1932) in Cosmopolitan (May issue)
Death in the Afternoon published by Scribner’s (September 23)“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (Fall 1932) in Scribner’s Magazine (Marchissue)

Appendix

1934
1935

1936

1937
1938

1939

109

“Homage to Switzerland” (March – June 1932) in Scribner’s Magazine(April issue)“The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” (Summer 1931 – Fall 1932) in Scribner’s Magazine (May issue) by the title of “Give Us a Prescription, Doctor”“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” (February – December 1932) by Houseof Books (mid April)
Winner Take Nothing published by Scribner’s (October 27)
1. “After the Storm”
2. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”
3. “The Light of the World” (May – July 1932)
4. “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”
5. “The Sea Change”
6. “A Way You’ll Never Be” (May – November 1932)
7. “The Mother of a Queen” (Fall 1931 – August 1932)
8. “One Reader Writes” (February 1932 – February 1933)
9. “Homage to Switzerland”
10. “A Day’s Wait” (March – July 1933)
11. “A Natural History of the Dead” (January 1929 – August 1931)
12. “Wine of Wyoming”
13. “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio”
14. “Fathers and Sons” (November 1932 – August 1933)“One Trip Across” (Later became a part of To Have and Have Not) in Cosmopolitan (April issue)
Green Hills of Africa serialized in Scribner’s Magazine (May, June, July,
August, September, October, November issues); published in book form by
Scribner’s (October 25)“The Tradesman’s Return” (Later became a part of To Have and Have Not)in Esquire (February issue)“The Capital of the World” (November 1935 – February 1936) in Esquire(June issue) by the title of “The Horns of the Bull”“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (February – April 1936) in Esquire (August
issue)“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (November 1934 – April
1936) in Cosmopolitan (September issue)
To Have and Have Not published by Scribner’s (October 15)“Old Man at the Bridge” (April 1938) in Ken (May 19)
The Spanish Earth (transcript of EH’s narration of the film of the same title)
published by The J. B. Savage Co. in Cleveland (June 15)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories published by Scribner’s(October 14)“The Denunciation” (May – September 1938) in Esquire (November issue)“The Butterfly and the Tank” (July – September 1938) in Esquire (December
issue)“Night Before Battle” (September – October 1938) in Esquire (February issue)

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In Pursuit of the Natural Body
“Nobody Ever Dies (October – November 1938) in Cosmopolitan (Marchissue)“Under the Ridge” (February 1939) in Cosmopolitan (October issue)

1940

For Whom the Bell Tolls published by Scribner’s (October 21)

1942

Men at War edited with “Introduction” by EH; published by Crown Publishers (October 22)

1944

The Viking Portable LIbrary: Hemingway edited by Malcolm Cowley; published by Viking Press (September 18)

1950

Across the River and Into the Trees serialized in Cosmopolitan (February,
March, April, May, June issues); published in book form by Scribner’s(September 7)

1951“The Good Lion” in Holiday (March issue)“The Faithful Bull” (early 1950) in Holiday (March issue)

1952

The Old Man and the Sea in Life (September 1 issue); published in bookform by Scribner’s (September 8)

1957“A Man of the World” (May – June 1957) in Atlantic (November issue)“Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog” (March 1954 – July 1956) in Atlantic (November
issue)

1960

The Dangerous Summer serialized in Life (September 5 and September 19
issues)1961

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Othe Stories published by Scribner’s (January)

1962

The Wild Years, an anthology of newspaper articles for The Toronto Star,
edited by Gene A. Hanrahan; published by Dell Publishing Co. (December)

1964

A Moveable Feast published by Scribner’s (May 5)

1967

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway, an anthology of newspaper articles, edited byWilliam White; published by Scribner’s (May 8)

1969

The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War published by
Scribner’s (August 13)

1970

Ernest Hemingway: Cub Reporter, an anthology of newspaper articles for
The Kansas City Star, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; published by University of Pittsburgh Press (May 4)
Island in the Stream published by Scribner’s (October 6)

1971

Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship, an anthology of writings in EH’s highschool days, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; published by Microcard Editions(July 2)1972

The Nick Adams Stories edited by Philip Young; published by Scribner’s(April 17)

1974

The Enduring Hemingway, an anthology, edited by Charles Scribner, Jr.;
published by Scribner’s

1979

Ernest Hemingway: Complete Poems edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis; published by University of Nebraska Press

Appendix

111

1981

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917 – 1961 selected and edited by
Carlos Baker; published by Scribner’s

1984

Ernest Hemingway on Writing selected and edited by Larry W. Phillips; published by Scribner’s

1985

The Dangerous Summer published in book form by Scribner’s (June 24)
Ernest Hemingway: Dateline Toronto, an anthology of newspaper articles for
Toronto Star edited by William White; published by Scribner’s (November
18)

1986

The Garden of Eden published by Scribner’s (May 28)

1987

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigı́a Edition
published by Scribner’s (December 2)

1993

Hemingway at Oak Park High: The High School Writings of Ernest Hemingway, 1916 – 1917 edited by Cynthia Maziarka and Donald Vogel, Jr.;
published by Oak Park and River Forest High School

1999

True at First Light edited by Patrick Hemingway; published by Scribners(July 21)

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Index
Adair, William, 40
Allen, Frederick Louis, 105
Armstrong, Tim, 17, 20
Azevedo, Carlos, 57

Haiken, Elizabeth, 17–18, 29
Hemingway, Clarence Edmonds, 67,
103
Hemingway, Ernest
BOOKS:
Across the River and Into theTrees, 26–27, 28, 29
Death in the Afternoon, ix, 10, 54,
64, 81–82, 93, 95
A Farewell to Arms, x, 9–16, 19,
36, 37–39, 40, 44–45, 67, 69,
77–82, 93–94, 95–97
For Whom the Bell Tolls, 93, 94,
96–100, 103
The Garden of Eden, 77, 91, 93,
94, 100–103, 104
Green Hills of Africa, 54
In Our Time, 46, 54
in our time, 66
A Moveable Feast, 20, 67–68
The Old Man and the Sea, 27–28
The Sun Also Rises, 47–50, 69,
91, 95Three Stories and Ten Poems, 74
To Have and Have Not, 29–30,
54, 58, 94
The Torrents of Spring, 8True at First Light, 84
Winner Take Nothing, 54

Baker, Carlos, 66, 71, 103
Baker, Sheridan, 29
Bell, Michael, 36–37“Bernice Bobs Her Hair”, 90–91
Bierce, Ambrose, 3–4
Brandt, Allan M., 62, 64, 65, 67, 74,
78, 79Brasch, James D., 94
Brenner, Gerry, 97–98
Brice, Fanny, 17–18, 19
Brieux, Eugene, 70–74
Burwell, Rose Marie, 104“Chickamauga”, 3–4
Clendening, Logan, 71–72, 74, 75, 82
Comley, Nancy, 63, 65
Cooperman, Stanley, xi
Crane, Stephen, 6
Dalrymple, Helen, 29
Damaged Goods: A Play in Three
Acts, 70–74
DeFalco, Joseph, 24, 29, 65
DiMaggio, Joe, 27–28
Donaldson, Scott, xi, 63, 66
Dubliners, 41

SHORT STORIES:“Big Two-Hearted River”, 34, 82“Cat in the Rain”, 91–93, 94, 102“The End of Something”, 46“Fathers and Sons”, 55, 64, 83–
84“The Gambler, the Nun, and theRadio”, 50–54, 58“God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”, 82–84“In Another Country”, 13–14,
19–22, 23“Indian Camp”, x, 33, 34–37“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”, 63–65“A Natural History of the Dead”,
10–11, 43–44“Now I Lay Me”, 12–13“One Reader Writes”, 70–74, 82“On the Quai at Smyrna”, 43–44,
55

Eby, Carl P., 77, 85
Edelson, Mark, 75
Eliot, T. S., 42
Elkins, Marilyn, 103
Ellman, Richard, 57“Eveline”, 41
Faulkner, William, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 43, 90–91, 92
Fournier, Alfred, 70, 74, 75“The Fourteenth at Gettysburg”, 6
Frazer, James G., 93, 94
Freud, Sigmund, 94
The Golden Bough, 93, 94
Goodrum, Charles, 29
Grebstein, Sheldon Norman, 22–23,
29
Green, Harvey, 21

119

120
“On Writing”, 34, 82“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, 54–
57“Soldier’s Home”, viii, 18, 45–46“The Three-Day Blow”, 46–47,
48“Up in Michigan”, 67–69“A Very Short Story”, 65–66“A Way You’ll Never Be”, 22–26
Hemingway, Grace Hall, 103
Hemingway, Hadley, 64
Hemingway, Marcelline, see Sanford,
Marcelline Hemingway
Hemingway, Pauline, 29Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 35–36
Homage to Catalonia, 10“In the ‘Libey’ ”, 4Johnny Got His Gun, 6–7, 8
Joyce, James, 41
Kashkin, Ivan, 58
Kendall, Elizabeth, xi
Kern, Stephen, vii–viii, 3, 8, 36, 61–
62, 66
Kert, Bernice, 29, 65
Kurowsky, Agnes von, 65
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 8, 13, 42, 51,
58
Lawrence, D. H., 8, 42
Leavy, Barbara Fass, 71, 75
Leiter, Louis H., 43
Liveright, Horace, 74
Lynn, Kenneth, 40, 69
Marchand, Roland, 29
Martin, Wendy, 94
Marx, Carl, 53
McCracken, Grant, xi, 90, 95
Meyers, Jeﬀrey, 36–37, 94
Mitcham, Carl, 40Monteiro, George, 85
Morris, David B., 40
Morris, Desmond, 89, 94
Morse, Janice M., 40
Morton, William T. G., 35–36
Nagel, James, 16, 65
Orwell, George, 10
Parran, Thomas, Jr., 67, 69, 70
Petry, Alice Hall, 68, 74

In Pursuit of the Natural Body
Pfeiﬀer, Pauline, see Hemingway,
PaulineQuétel, Claude, 61, 74–75, 85
Quick, Paul S., 29“Rebel Cruelty”, 4
The Red Badge of Courage, 6
Reynolds, Michael, viii–ix, 16, 58, 64,
67
Richards, Thomas, 29
Richardson, Elizabeth Hadley, see
Hemingway, Hadley
Rothman, Barbara Katz, 33, 35
Rovit, Earl, 29, 58
Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway, 34,
67
The Scarlet Letter, 89
Scarry, Elaine, 40
Scholes, Robert, 63, 65
Showalter, Elaine, 61, 66, 72, 104
Sigman, Joseph, 94“The Sisters”, 41
Slade, Joseph, 21
Smith, Paul, 22, 72, 74, 75
Sneden, Robert Knox, 5Soldiers’ Pay, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16
Sons and Lovers, 42
Sontag, Susan, 62, 74
Spilka, Mark, 99
Stein, Gertrude, 67–68
Stone, Edward, 58“The Swimmers”, 43
Tate, Trudi, xi, 5Totem and Taboo, 94
Trumbo, Dalton, 6–7, 8
Twilight Sleep, 43
Villard, Henry S., 65
Waldhorn, Arthur, 29
Wertz, Dorothy C., 33
Wertz, Richard W., 33
Wharton, Edith, 43
Whitman, Walt, 4Wilentz, Gay, 85“The Yellow Wall Paper”, 56