The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

Ready-Made Boys:
A Collision of Food and Gender in Ernest
Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”

Eijun SENAHA*

INTRODUCTION: FOOD CULTURE vs BOY CULTURE ON ICE
The rise of the food industry and the widespread “boy culture” of theearly twentieth century collide in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 short story“Big Two-Hearted River,” signaling the end of the myth of masculinity,
even when manhood was most strongly needed during the world war.
The turn of the century witnessed a dramatic change in American foodculture due to the new innovative food industry. With the resultant lightening of household duties, women became more socially available andinvolved, threatening the preeminence of men. As a way to reassert their
manhood, men turned to cooking. Through camping and outdoor cooking, boys could prove their manhood, preferably without depending on
preserved and/or processed foods, thereby approximating the “idealman.”“Big Two-Hearted River,” a prime example of Hemingway’s “iceberg
principle” in practice, is also a prime exempliﬁer of both boy culture andfood culture of the period. It has received a multitude of interpretations.
These include studies of its role as the ﬁnal story in his collection of

Copyright © 2010 Eijun Senaha. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Hokkaido University

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interconnected short stories, In Our Time; the maturing of protagonist,
Nick Adams; and studies from biographical perspectives. As a result, thestory has become one of Hemingway’s most acclaimed pieces. Despite
this attention, the culinary aspects in this story have received surprisingly little notice. “Nick was hungry. He didn’t believe he had ever been
hungrier” (139). This phrase suggests that Nick’s appetite is central to
the story, evoking themes of attachment to life and the possibility ofrebirth. These themes seemingly feed into Nick’s ostensible reason for
traveling to the Big Two-Hearted River—to trout ﬁsh. Nick does indeed
catch and clean trout, but within the story, Nick does not eat the ﬁsh.
Instead, Hemingway focuses on the other foods in Nick’s camping
endeavor. Nick begins by opening and cooking cans of spaghetti andpork and beans. He makes coffee according to the technique of his lostfriend, Hopkins. Then he makes buckwheat pancakes and, ﬁnally, onion
sandwiches.
Belonging to the genre of “fact ﬁction,” this short story is a uniquetext that negotiates the border between the imagined and the actual, andone may notice that it is no creative coincidence that the central axis forthe boy and food cultures was in Chicago, a neighboring metropolis of
Oak Park, Hemingway’s hometown. “Big Two-Hearted River” runs
through rising and declining cultural ideals of the early twentieth century and creates Hemingway’s ﬁctional world that illustrates food as a
metaphor for a boy negotiating a path toward ideal manhood.
I.

A CRITICAL HISTORY: NONFOOD-BASED FLAVORS“Big Two-Hearted River” has provided various ﬂavors of interpretations: genetic, textual, psychoanalytical, new critical, narratological, andgenre based. In addition to Hemingway’s own comments and letters, various sources have been used to identify actual locations, characters, andincidents. The fact that Ernest Hemingway left for a trip to the town of
Seney in September 1919 led to the ﬁrst biographical approach. Twenty
years old at the time, Hemingway was accompanied by two of his
friends.1 In “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway converts this reallife ﬁshing trip of three into a solo trip by Nick Adams. Paul Smith’s
study of this short story’s genesis and critical history in 1977 is now
thought to be the classic gloss of the text:

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51

The story originated in a ﬁshing trip in the late summer of 1919 with Al
Walker and Jock Pentecost to the Fox River in the upper Peninsula, enthusiastically described in a letter to Howell Jenkins. Sheridan Baker was the ﬁrst
to identify the river, the town of Seney, and the terrain the three must havewalked to have ﬁshed, as Hemingway reported, the two branches of the Fox
some ﬁfteen miles south of Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior. (87)

In the story, Nick Adams arrives at Seney by train, only to ﬁnd a “burnedover country” where “even the surface had been burned off the ground”(133). However, the real-world town of Seney was not burned.2 In May
1924, Hemingway began writing “Big Two-Hearted River.” It was initially conceived as a single piece. In his letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice
Toklas dated August 15, 1924, Hemingway states jubilantly that he has
written about one hundred pages in which “nothing happens” in thestory.3 After this letter he trimmed the story, probably due to Stein’s suggestions, with the version published in This Quarter in May 1925 numbering only twenty-nine pages. Moreover, nine of the pages cut from theinitial manuscript were later included in another short story, “On
Writing.” The single piece published in This Quarter was republished in
October 1925 as the concluding story of In Our Time, divided into two
separate chapters (Smith 85–86). This edition of In Our Time sold only
1,335 copies, but when it was republished by Scribners after the huge
success of The Sun Also Rises (1926), In Our Time received enormous
acclaim because it was thought to be the genesis of Hemingway’s uniquestyle.
Trimmed down to its essence, “Big Two-Hearted River” exempliﬁed
Hemingway’s theory of omission. He later established this idea as the“iceberg principle,” in which in his writing only a small portion appearson the surface, with enormous meaning hidden beneath.4 The responseto this story at the time of its publication was at two extremes. F. Scott
Fitzgerald assessed the piece negatively in 1926 as James Nagel reports:
A year later, after reading the story in the magazine This Quarter, F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Christian Gauss accused Hemingway—“half in fun, half inseriousness”—of “ ‘having written a story in which nothing happened,’ withthe result that it was ‘lacking in human interest.’ (147)

On the other hand, Allen Tate, who later became the leader of the New
Criticism movement at Vanderbilt University, provided a more positive
review in the same year:

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Most typical of Mr. Hemingway’s precise economical method is the story“Big Two-Hearted River,” where the time is one evening to the next afternoon
and the single character, a trout ﬁsherman who makes his camp-ﬁre, sleeps allnight, gets up and catches a few trout, then starts home; that is all . . . the mostcompletely realized naturalistic ﬁction of the age.” (160–62)

In the 1930s, as a sort of combination of the iceberg principle and symbolist criticism, the New Critics begin interpreting elements such as the“hearts,” “river,” “grasshopper,” “trout,” and “swamp” in the context ofa story where “nothing happens.”
The ﬁrst interpretation to appear emphasized the story’s position as
the closing piece in In Our Time. As is shown in the opening story “Onthe Quai at Smyrna,” the central theme of In Our Time is chaos—thequestion of how to survive in the chaotic world at the turn of the twentieth century. The river becomes a symbol of this era in its entirety, andthe swamp Nick discovers represents chaos. As the ﬁnal story in a book
depicting the chaos of the early twentieth century, “Big Two-Hearted
River” is a story that implies both the continuance of chaos and the enduring struggle to overcome it, hence the ambiguous ending: “There wereplenty of days coming when he could ﬁsh the swamp” (156). In this ending, which has both positive and negative connotations, the continuanceof chaos is embodied.
Previously considered ﬂavorless, “Big Two-Hearted River” was interpreted as a dramatic story by such prominent critics as Edmund Wilson,
Malcolm Cowley, and Philip Young. The message of the story was seen
as revolving around Nick Adams’s recuperative trip on his return fromwar:
Malcolm Cowley, drawing upon Edmund Wilson’s insight in a 1940 essay,
offered the ﬁrst major interpretation of Hemingway’s ﬁshing story as a postwar parable of trauma. Cowley was followed by Philip Young, who applied
his idea that deep-seated memories of a “wound” lay at the heart of Hemingway’s truest ﬁction.5

Although readers at that time paid little attention to Wilson, Cowley, andYoung, it should be noted that in 1953, Hemingway himself afﬁrmed
their direction of interpretation, as he mentions in a letter to the editor,
Charles Poore, in 1953:

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I can’t tell you when Big Two Hearted River was written exactly but it was
before The Sun Rises when we still lived at Rue Notre Dame des Champs
over the saw mill. I used to write it there and . . . I suppose you know it; but
it is a story about a boy who has come back from the war. The war was nevermentioned though as far as I can remember. This may be one of the things
that helps it. (798)

Although one can never be sure of the underlying intent of a writer’s
statement, Hemingway does conﬁrm the connection between Nick andthe war. In Philip Young’s The Nick Adams Stories, “Big Two-Hearted
River” has obvious connections to the war and appears in the chapter“Soldier Home.” Nick is injured in the war and attempts to survive inthe chasm between life and death. On one side of his torn heart there isfear, on the other, hope. On one side there is life, and death on the other.
In this way, an extremely dramatic interpretation of “Big Two-Hearted
River” is born, as a tale of emotional recovery.
In “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” details such as Nick’s recoveryof his sharp vision, depicted through his gradual perception of the trout
in the water; and his recovery of his vigor, through sweating, hunger,
and lack of sleep, implies that Nick is in the process of recovery or
rebirth. The ﬁnal scene of “Part I,” where Nick is wrapped in a blanket,
resembles the image of a baby in his mother’s womb. As if to emphasize this point, “Part II” begins with Nick leaving the tent (womb) andcrawling into the hot, damp grass—a clear allusion to childbirth. The
recovering Nick heads steadily toward life. But the newly born Nick, likea newborn baby, does not yet possess the strength to survive alone. This
is why he decides not to venture into the dangerous swamp. The story
ends with Nick heading toward recovery, gaining more and morestrength, the process itself depicted as being slow and devoid of turbulence.
Furthermore, the fact that Nick is repeatedly injured during battle in
Hemingway’s other stories opens the path for biographical interpretations. There are those who argue that this story is a symbolic representation of the author’s own injury in Italy in 1918. There are critics whointerpret Nick’s encounter with the burnt grasshopper as Hemingway’s
projection of his own injury in the war.
Recently, however, there have been new attempts to assess the piecefrom the viewpoint of genre criticism. George Monteiro, for example,
argues that this story belongs to the genre of “ﬁshing guides.” According

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to Monteiro, The Compleat Angler (1653) by Izaak Walton is the “ﬁrstmanuscript of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ ” (154).6 Replicating The
Compleat Angler, Monteiro continues, “Big Two-Hearted River” offers“instruction all the way from securing bait and baiting a hook to eviscerating the catch” (156). Monteiro also introduces John Cooper’s genetic reading, arguing that “Big Two-Hearted River” has its roots in
Virgil’s Georgics:
A quarter of a century ago Cooper suggested in passing that “Big TwoHearted River” be considered within the tradition of the piscatorial georgic.
Obviously familiar with the Wilson-Cowley-Young theory of the warwound, Cooper wrote “In Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River,’ a major
georgic theme is presented against a background of war and disillusion.”7

If this is true, although Monteiro does not say this, there should be a transcendentalist genealogy to locate Hawthorne and Emerson in between
Hemingway and Virgil.8
Hemingway has been assessed from numerous points of view, and“Big Two-Hearted River” has been utilized by the critics to prove various critical theories. Therefore, one may think that not much is left toanalyze in this story.
II.

BOY CULTURE: PRESERVED, THEN PROCESSED

More is left in “Big Two-Hearted River.” It is a story of a boy. The
protagonist may be twenty years old, but he has not established himself
as an independent, courageous man: “There were plenty of days coming
when he could ﬁsh the swamp” (156). The unpreparedness of young men
had been a national concern since the late Victorian era (Kidd 66–67).
A militarized version of boy culture was beginning to take form:
In the late nineteenth century, a wide variety of organizations began to workwith boys. The churches started organizations like the Knights of King
Arthur, while outdoor groups like the Sons of Daniel Boone and the Woodcraft Indians proliferated, and YMCA plunged energetically into activities
for boys. The ultimate organization, of course, was the Boy Scouts ofAmerica, which was founded somewhat later in 1910. These organizations
meant to introduce coddled boys to the wilderness, to competition, to hardy
play and strenuous virtue. In these boys’ groups as at boarding schools, menwere intervening to provide “boyish” experiences so that boys would not lose
touch with the sources of manhood. (Rotundo 258)

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55

The YMCA was established in London in 1844, ostensibly to support
young men suffering from the stresses of urban life, regardless of theirreligious beliefs. In 1851 the YMCA was founded in America.
In 1885, from the belief that camping was an excellent way to relieve
the exhaustion of urban life, the YMCA began introducing camping as
an important method of training. Then in 1910, William Boyce, aChicago publisher, established the Boy Scouts of America:
The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) was founded as an organized youth movement to revitalize American manhood. Based on a philosophy of “Muscular
Christianity,” the group created a practical program of activities meant todevelop the young man’s physical, mental, and moral ﬁtness. At the beginning of the twentieth century, devastating economic cycles, immigration, andurbanization generated anxiety among white middle-class men about the
future of American manhood. Just as the military hero Lord Robert S. S.
Baden-Powell created the Boy Scouts in England in 1908 to toughen young
British men in physical ﬁtness and moral character, so the men who founded
the BSA worried that an increasingly urban, industrial civilization was distancing men from positive effects of the more primitive wilderness. (Carroll
68)

At the dawn of the boy culture movement, Chicago, a metropolis nine
miles from Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway’s birthplace and hometownfor his ﬁrst eighteen years, became a major “hub” of this movement.
Edgar Robinson, who was an ofﬁce worker at the Chicago YMCA, leftthe YMCA to become the ﬁrst director of the Boy Scouts of America.
The Hemingway family did have connections with such movements,
especially with the YMCA. Anson Hemingway, Hemingway’s paternal
grandfather, became heavily involved in the Chicago YMCA. Referring
to Anson Hemingway’s tenure as secretary of the Chicago YMCA
(1878–88), Nagel mentions:
During its formative years the Chicago YMCA was deeply inﬂuenced byAnson’s friend and spiritual mentor, evangelist Dwight E. Moody. In later
years, as more Chicago businessmen became involved in the governance ofthe program, a crisis of mission beset the “Y.” Anson favoured the old mission that had seen the ﬁrst purpose to be the salvation of young men, not theirsocialization. As the Chicago “Y” became more and more a social center andless and less a revival tent, Anson left it for a real estate career in Oak Park.
His three sons, it should be noted, cut their religious teeth during his
Moody/YMCA days . . ; a third, Clarence, Ernest Hemingway’s father,

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became an Oak Park doctor who ran his practice like the missionary he sometimes thought he should have become. Like his brother, George, Clarence
was a member of the Third Congregational Church, at least from 1903 to
1919. (46)

Furthermore, Ernest’s father “formed a local Agassiz Club as a YMCA
activity” (Buske n. pag.), and Ernest “joined the local branch of theAgassiz Club, a nature-study group organized by his father” (Baker 13).
Linda Wagner-Martin describes a group photograph including the young
Hemingway: “The Oak Park Agassiz Club. Under the leadership of his
father, Dr. Clarence Hemingway, Oak Park boys could participate in oneof the many Agassiz clubs. Named for the pioneering naturalist Louis
Agassiz, the club introduced young boys to the scientiﬁc study of thenatural world. The young Ernest is second from the left” (197).
Hemingway was inﬂuenced indirectly, if not directly, by the culturalenvironment of his hometown, which included the YMCA and the Boy
Scouts.
For boys, outdoor activity became essential to proving their manhood.
The twenty-sixth U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, was the vicechairman of the Boy Scouts of America. Baden-Powell introduces
Roosevelt in his Scouting for Boys (1908) by saying that “Mr. Roosevelt,
the President of the USA (1901– 09) also is one who believe in outdoorlife” (173), and so as the vice chairman, coupled with his nineteenth-century belief that healthy minds reside in healthy bodies, the emphasis on
outdoor activity was born. Baden-Powell quotes President Roosevelt’s
message in this guidebook:
I believe in outdoor games, and I do not mind in the least that they are roughgames, or that those who take part in them are occasionally injured, I haveno sympathy with the overwrought sentiment which would keep a young man
in cotton wool. The out-of-doors man must always prove the better in life’scontest. When you play, play hard; and when you work, work hard. But do
not let your play and your sport interfere with your study. (174)Camping became a national sport for boys, supported by the YMCA andthe Boy Scouts. Children who were not members of these associations
also camped. As David I. Macleod wrote in Building Character in theAmerican Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–
1920:

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57

Early enthusiasts touted camping as a cure for the enervation, nervousness,and fears of effeminacy which distressed the late nineteenth-century urban
middle class. Along these lines, William H. H. “Adirondack” Murray, a
Boston clergyman, popularized camp life as a cure for exhaustion. . . .
Similarly, John Muir prescribed life in the wilds as the perfect balm for nervous strain brought on by city life. Promotional literature for camps applied
this argument to city boys whose robust growth seemed problematic—theprosperous because of schoolroom pressures and parental pampering, thepoor because of deprivation. (234)As evidenced by Hemingway and his character, Nick, boys liked camping. The number of boys who participated in camps in 1900 was 3,459.
In 1915 this number jumped to 16,690. The rise in participants shows
the increasing popularity of camping. A survey conducted in Cleveland,Ohio, at that time found that 25 percent of Cleveland children had camping experience, and 45 percent had hiking experience, while only 3 percent of all children surveyed were members of the Boy Scouts (Macleod
235–36). It is clear that the boyish culture of camping and hiking, whichbegan in the nineteenth century, was taking root. In 1924, at the time
“Big Two-Hearted River” was being written, 713 private camps wereoperating in New England. There were 535 camp companies involvedin these camps. Therefore, while a modern reading of “Big Two-Hearted
River” may lead one to regard Nick’s camping as an isolated activity, in
actuality, camping was an essential part of the boy culture of the time.
The actual activities the YMCA and Boy Scouts promoted were often
far from play. In fact, these organizations offered rather serious survivaloriented programs. Examples include procedures to take if you encountera harmful animal, how to deal with snakebites, how to pitch a tent, hunting skills, and, of course, how to cook outdoors. According to Scouting
for Boys, “Every scout must, of course, know how to cook his own meatand vegetables and make bread for himself without regular cooking utensils” (164). Cooking had to start from raw materials.9 Uncompromising,as well as detailed, cooking instructions were regarded as a way to moldboys into the image portrayed in the romantic masculine myth. With procedures more ceremonial than practical, the recreation of camping
became the re-creation of American boyhood.
The realities of the boy culture, however, were not as romantic as thosein the conduct books. According to Macleod, those who went on camping trips were children who could not adapt to life in the wilderness.
Macleod details the miseries experienced by some campers:

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B. F. Skinner, who was a Boy Scout in the mid-1910s and generally liked
camps, wrote home from one that went wrong: “We aren’t having a very goodtime after all. All day today the wind has blown very hard and one of the tents
fell in. . . . My stomach is all out of order and yesterday I vomited twice andlast night we had a circus. I woke up in the night and heard Raphael Miller
vomiting outside the tent. That started Bob Perrine’s. . . . Then I started
again. . . . They haven’t given us a full meal since we’ve been here. Today,
they had half boiled potatoes, weak coffee and bread. . . . If I had a good
excuse I’d come home but I don’t want them to think I’m homesick. . . ” No
wonder BSA manuals harped on sanitation. (242)

Early campers were unaccustomed to biting insects, rough food, andbeing away from home:
In the end, most camps hired a cook. Caution sometimes verged on alarmism;
for example, Dr. Fisher warned not to let boys swim twice a day because lossof heat was loss of life. In that context Boy Scouts were viewed as vulnerable
adolescents rather than hardy savages. On the other hand, some Scoutmasters
did demand too much. “A foot-weary, muscle-tired, and temper-tried, hungry group of boys surely not desirable,” warned the YMCA’s H. W. Gibson
in the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook. (241)

Although “by 1920, as council camps multiplied, almost 45 percent of
all Boy Scouts, 167,677 boys, spent a week in camping” (242), it wasquestionable whether all this outdoor activity was strengthening boys.
Initial camp organizers adhered to the orthodoxy of the instructions, but,in the end, hired cooks were taken along to the camps: children were far
from what the YMCA and BSA envisioned as “boys.” They saw camping as an extension of play as they enjoyed the campﬁre and having theirmeals cooked for them. In the end, as Macleod states, “Boy Scouts wereviewed as vulnerable adolescents rather than hardy savages” (241). The
urban boys, who were overly protected and preserved at home, were thenprocessed for an ideal manhood, only to fail.
III.

FOOD CULTURE: PRESERVED AND PROCESSED“Big Two-Hearted River” showcases the rising food industry throughthe extensive variety of foods appearing in the story. “Part I” mentions
seven types of food and three in “Part II.” None of this food, however,READY-MADE BOYS59

can be called fresh. There is no fresh meat and no fresh vegetable except
an onion. Incredibly, all other food items are either preserved or processed. There are the processed and canned pork and beans, spaghetti,
apricots, and condensed milk. The buckwheat pancakes and bread, madefrom milled ﬂour, can also be categorized as processed food. Even thecoffee, having been roasted and ground, is in a way a processed food.
From the 1830s on, the U.S. ﬂour-milling industry began to expand.
With the prairies of the Midwest opening to grain production and milling,
Chicago became the center of this expansion. Food companies such as
Washburn-Crosby (the forerunner of General Mills) and Pillsbury wereborn. By 1900 most of the ﬂour-milling companies and their associates
were, in addition to milling, further processing the ﬂour, even to the pointof making biscuits. The processing and distribution of these foods
became new ﬁelds of business. As a result, the food-processing industry
grew to constitute 20 percent of the country’s economy. By 1920 General
Foods and Standard Brands established norms for the industry, becoming the center of the food industry (Gabaccia 56). Later, they expanded
into the grocery store, supermarket, wholesale, and distribution businesses.
In Hemingway’s story, products such as buckwheat ﬂour and bread in
the form of simple onion sandwiches are introduced. Bread is one of themost common processed foods found throughout Western history, being
made out of grain that is ground, kneaded, baked, and packaged. In
Nick’s time, due to the ﬂour-milling industry, bread was a processed foodmuch more easily available through purchase than by baking it oneself.
Nick ignores this convenience and follows the traditional instructions assuggested in Scouting for Boys, as if his resistance indicates ambivalence
about the new technology.
Buckwheat was a common crop in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the Northeast. Nick cooks his pancakes from the ﬂour as
instructed in Scouting for Boys and the Boy Scout Handbook. In the ﬁrst
edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, published in 1911, this recipe forgriddle-cakes is suggested for hiking and camping trips:
Beat one egg, table spoonful of sugar, one cup diluted condensed milk or new
milk. Mix enough self-raising ﬂour to make a thick cream batter. Grease thegriddle with rind or slices of bacon for each batch of cakes. Be sure to havethe griddle hot. (149–50)

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As if paying respect to New England, where much of “American” history started, though without an egg, Nick cooks the buckwheat pancakes
in a ceremonial fashion:
Rapidly he mixed some buckwheat ﬂour with water and stirred it smooth,
one cup of ﬂour, one cup of water. . . . On the smoking skillet he poured
smoothly the buckwheat batter. It spread like lava, the grease spitting sharply.
Around the edges the buckwheat cake began to ﬁrm, then brown, then crisp.
The surface was bubbling slowly to porousness. Nick pushed under thebrowned under surface with a fresh pine chip. He shook the skillet sideways
and the cake was loose on the surface. I won’t try and ﬂop it, he thought. He
slid the chip of clean wood all the way under the cake, and ﬂopped it over
onto its surface. It sputtered in the pan. (146)Then he spreads apple butter on his ﬂapjacks, eating two, folding andstoring the third for later. Coffee is also made according to detailed instructions, so detailed it again appears ceremonial. Jeffrey Meyers ﬁnds
meaning in this: “In this story Hemingway uses characteristically shortwords and simple sentences as well as effective repetition. He shows
how the shell shocked Nick Adams, his appetite intensiﬁed by the smellof the food, tries to hold himself together, and prevent another crack-up,
through the rituals of cooking and ﬁshing in the healing wilderness”(428). Making pancakes as if he were following the instructions in the
Boy Scout Handbook and coffee according to his lost friend Hopkins is
a nostalgic as well as memorial process that suggests an initiation story.
Unfortunately, the rising food industry appears to overwhelm the individual’s effort to be a man. The canning industry also took off at the endof the nineteenth century. Canning itself developed from 1799 to 1818
during the Napoleonic Wars as nonperishable food for the military. This
preserving technique spread with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
Pork and beans stewed with tomatoes is a nineteenth-century development, and canned pork and beans was the ﬁrst convenience food,sold by Frank Van de Camp to the U.S. Army during the American Civil
War (Wikipedia, “Pork and Beans”).10 According to foodreference.com,“Commercially canned pork and beans were ﬁrst sold in the 1880s, but
did not become very popular until H. J. Heinz came out with their version in 1895,” which pushed the canning industry forward.
In the story, there are also a can of apricots and a can of condensed
milk. At the same time, the Franco-American Company (since acquired

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by the Campbell Soup Company and phased out), through their innovations in canning technology, produced canned spaghetti, meat, beans,and vegetables. This technology appealed to the immature, naive Nick.
As the narrator says, “Nick liked to open cans” (141).
Spaghetti was another popular dish made from processed food. At theend of the 1800s it was offered in restaurants as Spaghetti Italienne.
Ketchup was also a new processed condiment that was advertised as a“Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household.”(Wikipedia, “Ketchup”)11 The birth of the dish had its genesis in thechange in food culture sparked by the increasing number of Italian immigrants. From 1880 to 1921, Italians made up the largest group of immigrants to the United States. As a result, Italian food became hugely
popular. At the end of the century, spaghetti became an essential part ofthe menu in every American restaurant. With the huge impact that Italianfood had at the time, this Italian processed food is not just a minor detailof the story; it represents the societal trends of the time.
It is entirely possible that the food in “Big Two-Hearted River” hassymbolic meanings related to life and nutrition, but when viewed in thecontext of the American food industry in the early twentieth century, theinﬂuence of new immigrants, new culture, and new industries becomesapparent. As Sherri Inness mentions in her Kitchen Culture in America,“How we eat, what we eat, and who prepares and serves our meals are
all issues that shape society” (5).
Before the actual camping story begins, on arriving at St. Ignace
Station, Nick has already had “a cup of coffee and a ham sandwich inthe station restaurant” (140). It was at that moment that Nick starts his
tour of the contemporary food culture. In the burned-down old town of
Seney, what Nick ate was the traditional American preserved/processedfood and drink—ham, bread, and coffee—indicating that real, raw, andfresh food had been extinguished by the twentieth century and Nick was
only able to consume the unreal. The new technology of food culture
was contributing to the creation of a clumsy yet accessible manhood,much like the boy culture.
CONCLUSION: READY-MADE BOYS
“Big Two-Hearted River” depicts the relationship between the rise of
the modern food culture and the weakening of boy culture. As Glenn
Sheldon asserts, “The reception of food is continually inﬂuenced by

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greater social trends, marketing strategies, and overarching economic
factors” (564). Nick, in “his khaki shirt” resembling that of a boy scout,goes camping in order to ﬁsh, but cooks processed food instead of ﬁsh.
His cooking is not in the style introduced in scouting guidebooks promoting the traditional good-old American culinary fashion. Rather, it is
supported by the novel food culture created by immigrants who arrived
in the early twentieth century. Hence, although Nick seems to be enacting the boy myth, in reality he is one of the many boys in America whoare weak and lack proper coping strategies; they are the “new boys” incontrast to the “new women” of that age. The failure to negotiate theclassic boy in the age of modern food culture represents the twentiethcentury paradox of the inability of men to justify their masculinity
through war.
Though little attention has been given to the food references in “Big
Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway himself was known as a man who
loved to eat and drink. Boreth Craig published The Hemingway Cookbook
in 1998, calling the author “a tremendous eater and drinker” (xiii). In
Dining with Hemingway, William P. Moore introduces nearly ﬁfty
dishes described in Hemingway’s stories. In academia, Kelley Dupuis’s“Papa’s ‘Good Eats’ Cafe” and Redd Grifﬁn’s “Hemingway on Food”
are only a few of the studies of Hemingway as a food writer. None ofthem, however, contain references to “Big Two-Hearted River.”Through his iceberg principle, Hemingway depicts this cultural representation in a vague, laconic fashion, sublimating Nick into the embodiment of the aesthetics of the defeated. Hemingway therefore succeededin his attempt at literary negotiation, clearly marking him as a modernist
who witnessed a collision of the rising food industry and the widespreading boy culture in the early twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, the wilderness had gone out of cooking and boy culture,and one can sniff, beyond the beauty of “Big Two-Hearted River,” thepreserved and/or processed foods that provided boys like Nick Adams
with a fragile, ready-made manhood.
NOTES
1Hemingway wrote to Howell Jenkins on September 15, 1919, “Jock and Al Walker
and I just got back from Seney. The Fox was priceless” (Hemingway, Selected Letters,
28).
2
Jobst introduces the actual town visited by Hemingway: “Forest ﬁres were also common, especially after the pine ran out in the 1890s. Occasionally one reached Seney

READY-MADE BOYS

63

itself. Chronicles differ on how often this occurred, but most agree that it was unusual,perhaps happening only once, around the turn of the century. In the story ‘Big TwoHearted River,’ Hemingway’s narrator, Nick Adams, tells of a ﬁre that destroyed thetown, but this never happened. By 1919 the countless acres of pine were gone and thetown had shrunk to only a few buildings. Only one building was burned, although not
because of a forest ﬁre” (2).
3
Hemingway writes in the letter, “I have ﬁnished two long short stories, one of themnot much good and ﬁnished the longer one I worked on before I went to Spain [“BigTwo-Hearted River”] where I’m trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hellof a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing
happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out
the way it ought to, it is swell about the ﬁsh, but isn’t writing a hard job though?”(Hemingway, Selected Letters, 122).
4
Mellow mentions, “It was a story in which Hemingway deliberately set out to test
his mettle as a writer and one in which he proved a critical theory that the best stories
were those in which what the writer omitted was as important as what the writer put in.
He was determined to show that in Hemingway country, there would be no need for a
message. Hemingway’s own explication of “Big Two-Hearted River” in the essay “TheArt of the Short Story” remains the best: “So the war, all mention of the war, anything
about the war, is omitted. The river was the Fox River, by Seney, Michigan, not the Big
Two-Hearted. The change of the name was made purposely, not from ignorance nor
carelessness but because Big Two-Hearted River is poetry” (102).
5
Nagel introduces the arguments of Malcolm Cowley, R. W. B. Lewis, Kenneth
Lynn, Sanford Pinsker, and Edmund Wilson (147).
6
Monteiro states, “Izaak Walton, writing in the seventeenth century, ﬁshes in thesame ‘regular trout river,’ whatever name it bears in his narrative. The Compleat Angler
is seldom featured in Hemingway studies. Yet, Walton’s popular book, which by 1983
had achieved nearly four hundred editions, reprints, and translations, is an importantsource for the two-part story with which Hemingway chose to conclude In Our Time”(148).
7
Nagel 150. See also Cooper 75–76.
8
Smith has pointed out the literary inﬂuences on the text, including Kipling, Spender
Byron, Henry James, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Thoreau, Frost, Twain, Descartes,
Bunyan, Houseman, Crane, Joyce, and both the Old and New Testaments (88).
9Baden-Powell instructs thusly: “To make a bread, the usual way is for a scout totake off his coat, spread it on the ground, with the inside uppermost (so that any messhe makes in it will not show outwardly when he wears his coat afterwards); then hemakes a pile of ﬂour on the coat and scoops out the centre until it forms a cup for water
which he then pours in hot; he then mixes the dough with a pinch or two of salt, and of
baking-powder or of Eno’s Fruit Salt, and kneads and mixes it well together until it forms
a lump of well-mixed dough. Then with a little fresh ﬂour sprinkled over the hands toprevent the dough sticking to them, he pats it and makes it into the shape of a large bunor several buns. Then he puts it on a gridiron over hot ashes, or sweeps part of the ﬁreto one side, and on the hot ground left there he puts his dough, and piles hot ashes round
it and lets it bake itself” (167).
10
Also see Conagra Foods. 10 April 2009 <http://www.conagrafoods.com/index2.jsp>.

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