The Sun Also Rises Gender Roles Essay

When gender roles are swapped, whose heart, and sanity, will still survive? All through Hemingway’s childhood and his life he was described as a man’s man and he was the big tough guy, but that’s not the case in his novels. Throughout Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway shows, through the characters of Lady Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes, that the pre-war gender roles are not entirely true anymore. Even Jennifer Blanch, the author of “Gender Identity and the Modern Condition in The Sun Also Rises”, thinks Hemingway has a more in depth thought about the whole pre-war/post-war ideals. Blanch stated, “It raises questions about identity, challenging conventional definitions of manhood and womanhood, and ruminates on the bounds of human nature, asking which part of oneself, if any, may remain unchanged and how loss can affect one’s core identity.” (pp. 2) This quote shows the reader that Jennifer Blanch thought that Hemingway raised questions, through the novel, about the changing ideas of man and womanhood, and how the loss of oneself’s part, in this
Although she is described with these masculine qualities, most men still find her very alluring. Through the quote on page 30, Lady Brett is described as, “damn good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with the curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.” This quote tells the reader that even with her “curves like the hull of a racing yacht” she was still good-looking. Even authors like Stephanie LaCava, of the article on the Paris Review “Character Studies: Lady Brett Ashley”, describe Brett as an “enduring siren” and goes into depth about the first time she was introduced to the character and how she felt Lady Brett was seductive yet