Lady Brett Ashley Essay Example
Kylie Williams
Professor Christopher Dick
English Composition and Literature
17 January 2013
Lady Brett Ashley To establish an overall opinion of someone based entirely off of another person’s assessment causes misinformed prejudice and mindless ignorance. In literature, often times readers are led to form biased conclusions in regards to certain characters based upon the favor of the narrator. For this reason, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises creates a disguised heroine; Lady Brett Ashley. She is often portrayed in a very negative light due to Jake’s partiality, however, though analysis of the text and collaboration with Hemingway critics, it is plain that Brett is a very complex and realistic character. Her unique characteristics interconnect and overlap, creating a powerful female figure that breaks all stereotypes of the previous roles of women in both literature and society. When Jake’s heartbroken narration is stripped away, Brett Ashley’s role as the “Hemingway Hero” is apparent through her masculine attributes, her outward appearance, her alcoholism, and her insatiable appetite for sexual love affairs. Brett’s masculine tendencies have earned her an unfavorable reputation over the years. During her time, a woman drinking in excess, smoking cigars, participating in promiscuous affairs and attending bullfights would have been unspeakably shameful and offensive to those with pre-war, traditional values. However, Brett transcends the boundaries that set men and women as two separate species, “wearing the pants” better than any man in the novel does. A prime display of this is role reversal with Jake is when she stumbles very drunk into his home and upon realizing it was four thirty in the morning says, “Had no idea what hour it was... I say can a chap sit down?” (Hemingway 40) She not only refers to herself as a “chap,” which is decisively a man’s pronoun, but she also adopts the role of the man in their relationship by going to his home, causing
Professor Christopher Dick
English Composition and Literature
17 January 2013
Lady Brett Ashley To establish an overall opinion of someone based entirely off of another person’s assessment causes misinformed prejudice and mindless ignorance. In literature, often times readers are led to form biased conclusions in regards to certain characters based upon the favor of the narrator. For this reason, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises creates a disguised heroine; Lady Brett Ashley. She is often portrayed in a very negative light due to Jake’s partiality, however, though analysis of the text and collaboration with Hemingway critics, it is plain that Brett is a very complex and realistic character. Her unique characteristics interconnect and overlap, creating a powerful female figure that breaks all stereotypes of the previous roles of women in both literature and society. When Jake’s heartbroken narration is stripped away, Brett Ashley’s role as the “Hemingway Hero” is apparent through her masculine attributes, her outward appearance, her alcoholism, and her insatiable appetite for sexual love affairs. Brett’s masculine tendencies have earned her an unfavorable reputation over the years. During her time, a woman drinking in excess, smoking cigars, participating in promiscuous affairs and attending bullfights would have been unspeakably shameful and offensive to those with pre-war, traditional values. However, Brett transcends the boundaries that set men and women as two separate species, “wearing the pants” better than any man in the novel does. A prime display of this is role reversal with Jake is when she stumbles very drunk into his home and upon realizing it was four thirty in the morning says, “Had no idea what hour it was... I say can a chap sit down?” (Hemingway 40) She not only refers to herself as a “chap,” which is decisively a man’s pronoun, but she also adopts the role of the man in their relationship by going to his home, causing