Comparing Hills Like White Elephants And The Girls In Their Summer Dresses

Hills Like White Elephants and The Girls in Their Summer Dresses: The Couples

Hills Like White Elephants, written by Ernest Hemingway, and Irwin Shaw’s The Girls in Their Summer Dresses are quite similar in the fact that they both depict a couple’s conversation. Even though the two conversations aren’t about the same thing, they both are the result or the expression of tensions felt by the characters. However, the characters’ reactions and the future that we can imagine for the couples are different in each short story.

To begin with, the two conversations detailed in the short stories deal with sensitive subjects for the characters. In the short story Hills Like White Elephants, a man and a woman, “Jig”, are debating whether or not they should get an abortion. They have been traveling, but the unexpected pregnancy puts a term to their freedom. In The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, Frances confronts her husband, Michael, about his tendency to look at women, everywhere they go. Both Frances and the man from Hills Like White Elephants feel like they can’t go on without discussing those subjects, but their partners are reluctant and feel like they should go on ignoring their problems. The two couples are also quite similar in the fact that they both attempt to mitigate the apparent gravity of their conversation with drinks and off topic remarks.
Nonetheless, the couples are also quite different in their reactions to the topics discussed.
In Irwin Shaw’s The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, when Frances confronts Michael on his bad habit, he gets angry and actually hurts his wife’s feeling. This reaction implies that he’s hurt and that he wishes he could say otherwise, but still, in Hills Like White Elephants, the characters never try to hurt each other. They both seem to want what’s best for the other. Of course, Jig eventually really wishes they could end the conversation, but it’s only because thinking of the pregnancy is making her
uncomfortable.

Finally, the future that we could imagine for each couple, based on the turn their conversations take, is different. In The Girls in Their Summer Dresses, the husband finally admits that he doesn’t think he’ll always be able to control himself when it comes to women and adultery. His wife is shaken by these revelations, but in the end, she asks him to never share again his thoughts on other women and they go back to their original plans for the weekend. This end suggests that they will try and continue to live their lives as if nothing had happened. In Hills Like White Elephants, however, the characters can’t just ignore their situation: they’ll have to make their decision sooner than later on if they are keeping their baby or not. Even though throughout the story the man reassures the girl that he’ll accept whatever she chooses, he puts so much emphasis on the simplicity of the operation that it suggests he really doesn’t want to keep the baby. If she chose to keep it, he would probably leave her…

To conclude, the couples in Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and in Irwin Shaw’s The Girls in Their Summer Dresses are similar in the fact that they both have conversations about sensitive subjects, but they can be compared on their reactions and on their future that suggests the end of the stories. Of course, it is undeniable that, in both cases, the conversation symbolizes something that has changed forever between the two pairs…