Title: Beyond the heroic "I" : reading Lawrence, Hemingway, and "masculinity" /
Authors: Clifford, Stephen P., 1962-
Publisher: Bucknell University Press,
Year: 1998
Subjects: Lawrence, D. H. Characters Men.; Hemingway, Ernest, Characters Heroes.; Masculinity in literature.; Heroes in literature; Narration (Rhetoric); Self in literature.; Men in literature; Narration (Rhetoric) History
Abstract: Through narrative and gender theories, this study deconstructs the gender-based assumptions we make in reading narratives, and Clifford focuses by way of example on the critical responses that have narrowly defined the fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway during the past 60 years. Hemingway and Lawrence have been rigidly defined by formalists and feminists alike as overbearingly "masculine," and as a result, many critical readers dismiss their fiction as rather finite in its interpretive possibilities. In addressing the gender-based assumptions made by readers of these modernist writers, this study re-evaluates the narrative desire of characters like Brett Ashley and Frederic Henry, Ursula Brangwen and Connie Chatterley, as they respond to the heroic centers of their narratives - whether those centers are characters who inhabit the novel or critical readers who enforce limited reading strategies. By responding to the critical legacy surrounding these modernist texts, he reveals ways in which these novels and stories actually deny the limitations of a codified, heroic narrative.
Contents: Noli me tangere: dodging the heroic "I" in the narratives of Lawrence and Hemingway -- "All women must have a husband": revising gender, marriage, and the narrative covenant in D.H. Lawrence's The rainbow -- Getting rid of "the exclusiveness of married love": questioning constructs of masculinity in Women in love -- "She liked it ... she wanted it ... she had to have it ... ": desire and the narrative gaps of In our time -- "We could have had such a damned good time together [if only you had a penis]": critical phallocentrism and The sun also rises -- "You always feel trapped biologically": masculiniity and narrative entrapment in Hemingway's A farewell to arms -- "The centre of all womanhood": the economy of rape fantasy in Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's lover.