UW ENGL 635: Hemingway and Faulkner

By Chelsea Hultman

            Power, gender, and sexuality have been a central conflict in the books we have read this semester. Hemmingway often argues that the best relationships allow the line between the two genders to blur. Faulkner complicates this by questioning whether men should ever gain a full understanding of women’s sexuality. By highlighting the mysteries of the other gender, Hemingway and Faulkner are able to show the problems associated with men trying to control women’s sexuality. This ultimately illuminates that the perfect relationships are where the man allows the woman to be in control of her sexuality and the lack of this leads to the conflicts central to these stories.

By Alex Riegert

Hunger is prevalent in Ernest Hemingway’s A Movable Feast. It is seen in the title of the work and characters reference hunger and food multiple times throughout the text. In the introduction to the work, Patrick Hemingway gives some important details about the term “a movable feast” that should be noted. Patrick Hemingway states that, “the idea of a movable feast for Hemingway became something very much like what King Harry wanted St. Crispin’s Feast Day to be for ‘we happy few’: a memory or even a state of being that had become a part of you, a thing that you could have always with you, no matter where you went or how you lived forever after, that you could never lose.” For Ernest Hemingway, Paris in the 20’s was a movable feast. It contained memories and experiences that he would carry for the rest of his life. They were memories that he could feed off of even though they were only distant memories. As Patrick Hemingway alludes to in the introduction, electric shock therapy was performed on Ernest Hemingway late in his life and it caused it to lose his memories and struggle to write the way he used to. This loss of memory must have felt to him like his sustenance was evaporating before his very eyes with each treatment.

     Hemingway and Faulkner have both showcased women in the texts we’ve examined this semester that are indefinable in the sense that they embody diverse characteristics of humanity:  devotion, cruelty, sensuality, deviance… the list could go on and on.  After reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and taking into consideration Hemingway’s account of both his wife Hadley and Zelda Fitzgerald in his memoir, it is important to go back and examine the impact these real-life women may have had on Hemingway’s work.  In the case of Faulkner, it is intriguing to consider how the women in his texts function as mothers (e.g. Caddy and Charlotte) compared to Hemingway’s portrayal of womanhood and female sexuality.  Ultimately, women appear to make both Hemingway and Faulkner uncomfortable as is evident in their writing.  It is therefore important to consider how motherhood and sensual abnormality contribute to Hemingway and Faulkner’s portrayal of women in their texts.  In Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, we are introduced to the character of Charlotte who suffers physical illness and eventually death after the abortion her lover performs goes awry.  The theme of abortion also appears in Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants”, suggesting that abortion as a taboo and female-centered issue (men can’t bare children) interests both writers.  Issues and controversy specific to women in both writer’s text may suggest that because neither writer is in fact a woman, they are most interested in the sexuality and gender roles that they can’t possibly fully comprehend.  Making their writing that much more intriguing especially due to Hemingway’s famous quote:  “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” There is no possible way for Hemingway or Faulkner to truly know what it means to be woman, making their ability to write a “true” sentence about womanhood, female sexuality, or virginity really bizarre and strange to consider. However it is true that both Hemingway and Faulkner were surrounded with many exceptional examples of women in their lives (e.g. Hemingway’s many wives, interactions with Zelda, and Faulkner’s family-life where he is ultimately surrounded by women). 

Word Count:  367 

      The city of Paris, France in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast becomes its own character as the writers, people, and places Hemingway visits and encounters becomes wrapped up in the enthralling vigor of the city.  In an article entitled “Papa’s Paris Still Shines” writer James Brady highlights why the city is so important to Hemingway and why it continues to attract the amount of writers and creators that it does:  “Paris has been there in the Ile-de-France dating back to the Romans, and there have always been Parisians. But until Hemingway, Paris itself hadn’t (not in English lit) come so alive” (Brady, Crain’s New York Business).  The city holds it’s own persona and place in literature thanks to Hemingway’s success with The Sun Also Rises, but Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast actually details a more personal adventure by Hemingway in the city of lights.  In the memoir, Hemingway writes of Hadley and his own attachment to the city:  “We looked and there it all was:  our river and our city and the island of our city.  ‘We’re too lucky,’ she said […]” (47).  Paris becomes its own character and person in A Moveable Feast, suggesting that Hemingway’s connection to the city ran deeper than many of the real-life relationships with friends and writers he describes throughout the memoir. 

I really liked your post because it confronts some of the short-comings of these two giants of American Literature. As you brought up in your post, both writers were interested in discovering “truth” in the world around them. Being men it must have been incredibly frustrating for both Hemingway and Faulkner to have limited access to this female worldview. I don’t think either man fully understood or respected women as their equals, especially Hemingway. I think much of the difficulties the characters in the texts face when dealing with the women of the story is that on a fundamental level they don’t understand them. Despite their best efforts the characters are incapable of cracking the female worldview. This stems from EH and WF’s lack of understanding of women.

By Amber Krushas

Moving from one Hemingway male character to the next, a seeming pattern ascends. He has molded his standard male character to be one of masculinity, bravery, and emotional silence; along with this, his characters won honor and nobility. Throughout the narratives A Farewell to Arms and The Garden of Eden, the male characters Frederick Henry and David Bourne embody this mold.  Due to Hemingway’s consistent creation of this character, it is easy to imagine Hemingway himself to fit this description. However, in analyzing his memoir, Hemingway’s true characteristics appear to stray from this character. By examining Hemingway’s later depiction of himself in comparison to his characters, readers are able to see Hemingway’s ideal self in these characters, something he aspired to be. 

I think you bring up a really complex and interesting problem that seems to follow Hemingway: how much of the author’s personal life is transferred into the characters he creates, especially the male characters. This seems to be a question that comes up often with modernist writers. Your post argues that Hemingway created an ideal version of himself in A Movable Feast and I really like that reading of it, but I think he’s also trying to complicate things for the reader. The Hemingway reader often goes into the text expecting to get the macho male character like you mentioned with Fredrick in A Farewell to Arms, but I think with A Movable Feast Hemingway is forcing the reader to rethink how they viewed previous characters and the Hemingway-esque traits that people associated with them.

The last chapter of A Moveable Feast entitled “There is Never Any End to Paris” may at first seem counter-intuitive in that in the chapter, Hemingway describes leaving Paris and spending time up in the Vorarlberg. However, I think that Hemingway uses this chapter to show that one may leave Paris, but it always draws one back.

You bring up some great ideas in your comment especially about how Paris seemed to have a draw that pulls people back to it. I think this was a very special time for all the famous artists and writers that called Paris home in the 20’s. Through all the difficulties each of the prominent authors and artists faced during their stint in Paris they all seemed to understand how important what they were doing was. I think the aspect of competition often gets overlooked when people think about Paris during this time period. As we all know by now, Hemingway was not one to back down from a challenge, whether it be physical or a race to write the best texts possible before Fitzgerald or Ford or Joyce.

by Alex Riegert

An Edenic Opening

What struck me most about the section for class on Tuesday was the opening and the connections that Hemingway is making between David and Catherine’s relationship during their honeymoon with that of prelapsarian Eden and the dynamic between Adam and Eve.  It is no coincidence that Hemingway began the story in the fashion he did while titling the work The Garden of Eden. He is deliberately drawing connections between the main characters in the opening pages only to heighten the sense of divergence in the subsequent chapters. It is through this juxtaposition that Hemingway’s explores the main themes and ideas in the novel. But before he can jump into his story, he must first “retell” a story and that is what my post will be chiefly concerned with.

            I really appreciate the idea that Hemingway has an inside and an outside world in his writing, and this theme carries across all his novels that we have studied so far in the semester. David and Catherine Bourne defy the outside world’s religious laws by Catherine brandishing her shorts and her boyish haircut, and by having a third partner within their marriage. Marita is not presented to the reader in a sinful way, but by the reactions of the housekeeper, Madame, and her husband, the modern day readership is able to understand how truly horrifying this concept was at the time. Other reactions, such as from the priest, as mentioned by Alex, show the modern day readers without outright telling them how bizarre and confusing the Bourne’s behavior and appearances were. The Bourne’s also drink…a lot, and Catherine drives their extremely expensive car up and down the mountains with very little care. Although the Bourne’s routinely visit in town to get a bite to eat, aspects of their relationship such as Catherin’s skin color and David’s matching hair, plus the presence of Marita are so trivial to the Bourne’s, yet they should be embarrassed and ashamed.

[Post by Morgan Anderson]

In the final section of Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, the author intimately exposes personal aspects of both of his relationships with Hadley and Pauline, but more prominently, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s relationship with his troubled wife, Zelda. Hemingway’s representations of these women within his memoir offer distinct correlations and similarities to Catherine Bourne within his novel The Garden of Eden. Through examining how Ernest Hemingway’s personal relationships permeate the lives and personalities of his fictional female characters, the noticeable correlations support the author’s belief that women and love, although admirable and important, may prevent one from attaining significant success and artistic credibility as a writer. 

            I think the strongest argument in this post is the idea that Hemingway supports love and marriage (one to be married four times), but he also personally believed that women held men back from attaining “significant success and artistic credibility as writer[s].” This idea can be found also with Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley as Frederic deserts the army and Catherine leaves the hospital so the two of them can escape to Sweden and live out their short affair in an Eden of their own. Both members of the couple have quit their jobs, and although the couple pretends they are married, ultimately their pregnancy out of wedlock means they must live a faux life, where no one knows of their sin. In a way, Catherine’s pregnancy can be seen as a symbolically holding the couple down within the relationship just as Zelda and Catherine Bourne’s mental illness do the same.

        When Sean Hemingway decided to re-edit and release a “new and updated” version of A Moveable Feast, he made the important decision to include sketches and chapters that Ernest Hemingway had written that were either left out of the first book because they were incomplete or dealt with subjects that would have tarnished Hemingway’s image and stature in the annals of American literature—for example, in the section “Birth of a New School,” Hemingway comes off as a jerk and a very temperamental writer who was interested in no one except himself and Hadley and only had his work in mind. Another section dealt with another series of events that would have changed America’s vision of Hemingway if released at the time of the 1964 edition of A Moveable Feast—“Secret Pleasures.” In this section, Hemingway speaks constantly of growing his hair just like Hadley’s and of doing something mysterious with her that he only writes about doing “something secret” after the couple is done discussing their haircuts. If readers take Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast as a piece of nonfiction work that actually occurred to him, they can reasonably infer that this peculiar recollection of Hemingway’s experiences while defying cultural norms had a direct influence on the same man while he was crafting The Garden of Eden during the later years of his life. This section gives readers explicit clues about Hemingway’s personal life, and I would argue it gives them enough to argue that The Garden of Eden was a semi-autobiographical novel in response to the events that are depicted in this section of A Moveable Feast.

The last chapter of A Moveable Feast entitled “There is Never Any End to Paris” may at first seem counter-intuitive in that in the chapter, Hemingway describes leaving Paris and spending time up in the Vorarlberg. However, I think that Hemingway uses this chapter to show that one may leave Paris, but it always draws one back.