Hemingway, the Eco-Feminist

Robin Allison
Professor Knight
ENG 113 OM4
1 December 2013
Hemingway, the Eco-Feminist
Ernest Hemingway, a world-renowned author considered by many to be a master of the short story, has been often criticized as being sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal, or anti-ecological in his mindset. In fact, although he probably did inherit many of these pervasive traits from the culture in which he was born, his writing taken at face value paints a picture of a man who, rather than enforce these ideologies, forced himself and his readers to examine and evaluate them. As a man born in the pre-dawn of the twentieth century, Hemingway grew up in a culture in which the superiority of men to women was generally accepted as a given fact. Also, the prevailing attitude regarding the natural world was that the products of the natural world were infinite, and their value was only that which could benefit mankind in terms of profit or possibly recreation. The natural world, the Earth, was not seen as having any inherent value as is. Rather than accept these beliefs as gospel, however, Hemingway’s work reveals a man who thought deeply about male/female power issues and the impending desecration of the natural world he loved so much.
Literature, like any other well-executed artistic medium, causes people to think, and therefore talk about, what they have seen, heard, or read. As Hemingway has clearly caused people to think about issues of gender and ecological sustainability, it begs the likelihood that he intentionally designed his work to have such an effect. One cannot logically say in one breath that Hemingway was a master of dialogue and a short story, and in the other that he was blind to the fact that some of his male characters came across as immature and insensitive toward women. If he wrote stories about immature males, the most obvious conclusion would be that he intended to write stories about immature males. He also made frequent references to the beauty and serenity of the natural landscape, and the reader can clearly see his sorrow as he relates the destruction of the forests and streams he once loved.
In a keynote address given by the novelist Andre Dubus III, Dubus recognizes Hemingway’s pioneering realistic style in the era of modernist and post-modernist writers. He goes on to appreciate Hemingway for his choice to dispense with excessive adjectives and descriptive phrases in favor of allowing room for the reader to use his or her life experience to interpret his writing. Instead of overburdening the reader with Hemingway’s own interpretation of Hemingway’s story, he chooses to pare down his story, as much as he is able, to allow the reader to see the story through his or her own eyes. According to Dubus, Hemingway’s “. . .sustained discipline to find and then convey those details which will then give the experience fully to the reader is one of the more generous and responsible creative acts in the history of American literature” (11).
Hemingway, though he has been criticized as being one-sided – a patriarch and misogynist – actually conveys quite a considerable insight into the nature of male-female relations for his time. In his writing, he relates his own concerns and inadequacies in his dealings with the women he loves – this is apparent after a cursory examination of “The End of Something,” or The Sun Also Rises, to name only two of his works. He chose to convey what he felt to be understandable to the average human; a difficult task to ask of any writer. His main characters, rather than the chauvinistic buffoons some critics might expect, display a great deal of compassion and inner turmoil.
Critics take issue with Hemingway’s notorious drinking and “womanizing.” However, the available data indicate that the only parties involved were consenting adults. Regardless of his aversion to sobriety and his overly romantic attitude toward the fairer sex, Hemingway continued to try his best to bring his authentic experience as a human to his writing. Rather than spell out in great detail his own interpretation of circumstances, he respectfully trusts the reader to come to his or her own conclusions. This is what set him apart from his peers. “His influence on public discourse was and still is considerable, and one of the aspects that have anchored his life and his fiction in our collective imagination is his search for an authentic life” (Müller 30-31). Müller, an author and genetic researcher, also believes that Hemingway wanted to feel he wrote well much more than he wanted to feel wealthy or famous. He cites Hemingway’s protagonist in The Snows of Kilimanjaro as antithesis to Hemingway’s core incentives:
If the reading public … is basically fickle and ungrateful, if it doesn’t appreciate authentic writing, then writers have to resort to inauthentic writing to sell their books and become famous. Harry is an example of this type of writer. Writing well is secondary for him, a vaguely desirable achievement postponed to old age; his primary motivations are fame and money. To please the masses, he has presumably resorted to ornamentation and embellishment, to hook and crook, to all the stylistic strategies Hemingway rejects as false. (Müller 39)
In essence, he is saying that Hemingway chose realism over sensationalism; chose free and authentic expression over market value; chose art over money.
Here are examples of literary critics showing that Hemingway chose to paint as realistic as possible a picture of life as he saw it; and that he wanted the reader to examine and assess their own reactions to his portrayals of life in his time.
Some contemporary critics, such as Yan Yu, have issues with Hemingway’s love of hunting, and some even go so far as to say that he disrespects the Earth simply by being a hunter. While some of his earlier writing does describe wanton slaughter of fish, most of his works show a great deal of inner consideration toward the life and attitude of the animal being hunted. As he explains in “The Shot,” “The author of this article . . . believes that it is a sin to kill any non-dangerous game animal except for meat” (Hemingway, qtd. by Douglas).
Carey Voeller, Ph.D, an assistant professor of English, saliently notes Hemingway’s attitude toward the death of the marauding lion in True at First Light “[I] then lay down by the lion and talked to him very softly in Spanish and begged his pardon for us having killed him...” (qtd. in Voeller 73). This is clearly not the voice of a man who is purely callous toward the animals he hunts – even though this particular animal was responsible for the deaths of many tribespeople, including children, who lived in the area where Hemingway was camped at the time. He goes on: “I was happy that before he died he had lain in the high yellow rounded mound with his tail down and his great paws forward and looked off across his country to the blue forest and the high white snows of the big Mountain” (qtd. in Voeller 73). Hemingway is telling us about the sorrow he faced when encountered with the death of an animal – but not just any animal but a lion, representative of the grandeur of the natural world at its wildest and most fecund.
In his essay “The Call of the Wild: an Ecocritical Reading of The Old Man and the Sea,” Yan Yu analyzes Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea from an ecocritical stance. It is clear that Yu is not a native speaker of English, but his assessment appears to be somewhat well thought out and fairly astute. However, as an ecologically-minded individual, the present author finds philosophical errors to be apparent throughout Yu’s text.
In order to define ecocriticism, Yu quotes Wang Nuo:
As a kind of literary and civilization criticism, ecocriticism has the primary task which can demonstrates (sic) its intrinsic trait and peculiar value, that is, reexamining the culture of human (sic) to carry on cultural criticism, namely, probing into the problem of how did human theology, culture and the code of social development influence, even determine human being's (sic) attitude and behavior toward nature, and how did they bring about the deterioration of environment and the crisis of ecology (qtd. in Yu 170).
By Yu’s own definition, Hemingway is an ecocritic: his work does indeed probe into the problem of how humanity’s behaviors bring about the deterioration of the environment – his work entices the reader to consider the impact that humanity’s short-sighted actions have had on the once-grand, but now denuded Earth.
In one of his examples, Yu claims that Hemingway’s prose shows that his “feeling about nature does not go beyond [his] needs” (171). He illustrates this with the following excerpt from The Old Man and the Sea:
He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water, and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again, and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea. (qtd. in Yu 171)
His evaluation of this passage is that Hemingway does not value the sea intrinsically; rather, he only appreciates it because it helps him feel that he is not alone. This seems like quite a stretch for the reader. Logically speaking, the fact that Hemingway’s character Santiago appreciated nature’s beauty and felt less lonely does not imply that he does not appreciate nature’s intrinsic value. It does not even necessarily mean that the realization was caused by the view of sea and birds. Indeed, the fact that Hemingway included the description at all could be construed to mean that he did in fact have a deep appreciation for nature and its intrinsic worth. Correlation cannot imply causation, in either direction.
In his short story “The End of Something,” Hemingway describes the decimation of his childhood virgin forests in Michigan, and draws a corollary to the ending of Nick Adams’s relationship with his girlfriend Marjorie. This tale describes a young man hopelessly lost in his understanding of male-female relationships, who through his emotional immaturity destroys what appears to be a promising companionship with a loving woman (Hemingway 79-82). As Lisa Tyler notes, “Hemingway judged Nick – and very likely himself, as Nick is autobiographical – much more harshly than some Hemingway critics would like” (65).
Ferrero makes an interesting point here by reversing the genders of the speakers:
Nikki looked at the moon, coming up over the hills.
"It isn't fun anymore."
She was afraid to look at Mark. Then she looked at him. He sat there with his back toward her. She looked at his back. "It isn't any fun anymore. Not any of it."
He didn't say anything. She went on. "I feel as though everything was gone to hell inside of me. I don't know Mark. I don't know what to say."
She looked on at his back.
"Isn't love any fun?" Mark said.
"No," Nikki said. Mark stood up. Nikki sat there with her head in her hands.
"I'm going to take the boat," Mark called out to her. "You can walk back to the point."
"All right," Nikki said. "I'll push the boat off for you." (Ferrero 20).
This short piece illustrates the intellectual disconnect that many well-intentioned feminists experience when trying to criticize Hemingway and other authors. It would be unlikely for anyone to describe Nikki as being chauvinistic to Mark, yet Nick, in the original text, is often criticized as acting insensitive or chauvinistic toward Marjorie.
In an essay by Margaret Bauer, a feminist author and professor of English, Bauer examines two more of his short stories: “Hills like White Elephants” and “Indian Camp.” She defends Hemingway against critics who pre-assume that he is no more than a chauvinist or misogynist.
In her assessment of “Indian Camp” she makes it clear that, while the woman in labor is indeed simply the author’s prop to propel the story, the story itself is about Nick Adams and his journey coming of age. It is not about the woman screaming in a difficult labor; it is about a boy whose tough and somewhat callous father opens his eyes to realities of life that are difficult to embrace, especially for one so young. This counters the arguments of critics who attest that Hemingway’s description of the woman are somehow misogynistic. Rather, the story logically leads to Nick Adams’s concern about his father’s callous treatment of, and lack of compassion for, this woman. Bauer also points out that the woman in labor survives a caesarean-section delivery without anesthesia, while her husband commits suicide “. . . because he can’t bear her pain” (Bauer’s emphasis) (127).
Concerning “Hills like White Elephants”, Bauer states that Hemingway’s depiction of the pregnant woman “. . . undermines his misogynistic reputation” (129). The man, referred to as “the American,” comes off as short-sighted and somewhat juvenile, while the woman is represented as much more intelligent, and somewhat sarcastic, by her dialogue. As a male feminist, the present author concedes that the use of the term ‘girl’ to describe a woman of child-bearing age (Hemingway 211-14) can be construed as a deprecation of women. This word choice may simply be a sign of the times in which this story was written; but considering Hemingway’s reputation as a master of the short story, it would seem more likely to have been a deliberate act by Hemingway to sarcastically illustrate the plain fact that the male in this story is the weaker of mind, while the female is more mature. Once again, this undermines the myth of Hemingway as a misogynist – he portrayed the woman as strong and kind, and the man as alcoholic and narcissistic.
Bauer quotes Stephen P. Clifford: “. . . the myth of Hemingway’s misogyny, at least in his fiction, is itself a construct created by his readers” (qtd. in Bauer 125). What she is saying, ultimately, is that Hemingway is a genius with a short story, and that his male characters sometimes come off as immature jerks. If an intelligent reader takes the two points as equally valid, he or she is left with the conclusion that Hemingway intended these characters to appear in exactly that way.
Most likely, Hemingway would indeed be considered misogynistic and to have little care for the environment – if he lived in our present-day culture. But in his time, he did the literary world justice by not being as conditioned as his peers; rather than accept gender biases as the norm, or regard the natural world as an infinite resource existing only to serve the needs of humankind, he wrote in such a way as to bring about questions in the reader’s mind. As shown in the abovementioned works, Hemingway wrote in such a way as to excite his readers about these topics and entice them to think and speak about them.
The intelligent reader is left with the conclusion that Hemingway was neither a saint nor a megalomaniac, but simply a human who somehow figured out how to write honestly and succinctly about the world as he experienced it. His influence on contemporary public discourse has been immense. Not only did he write well, but he wrote in such a way as to invoke controversy about which side he took on the social and environmental problems dearest to his heart. He did this so well that he was able to keep some four generations – and counting – talking about the issues he himself was thinking about when he was in his prime.

Works Cited
Bauer, Margaret D. "Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by Ernest Hemingway." College Literature 30.3 (2003): 124. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Oct. 2013.
Dubus, III, Andre. "Ernest Hemingway: Why His Work Matters Now More Than Ever, A Love Letter From The Digital World." Hemingway Review 32.1 (2012): 7-15. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Oct. 2013.
Ferrero, David J. "Nikki Adams and the Limits of Gender Criticism." Hemingway Review 17.2 (1998): 18. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. “The End of Something” The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Macmillan, 1987. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Tu Rex Gloriae, Christe." Weblog post. “The Shot”. Brian Stanley Douglas, 30 Sept. 2012. Web. 06 Dec. 2013. .
Müller, Timo. "The Uses Of Authenticity: Hemingway And The Literary Field, 1926-1936." Journal Of Modern Literature 33.1 (2009): 28-42. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Oct. 2013.
Tyler, Lisa. "How Beautiful The Virgin Forests Were Before The Loggers Came": An Ecofeminist Reading Of Hemingway's "The End Of Something." Hemingway Review 27.2 (2008): 60-73. Academic Search Complete. Web. 17 Nov. 2013.
Voeller, Carey. "He Only Looked Sad The Same Way I Felt": The Textual Confessions Of Hemingway's Hunters." Hemingway Review 25.1 (2005): 63-76. Academic Search Complete. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.
Yu, Yan. "The Call Of The Wild: An Eco-Critical Reading Of The Old Man And The Sea." Canadian Social Science 7.3 (2011): 167-175. Academic Search Complete. Web. 27 Oct. 2013.