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  • The Sun Also Rises:Mother Brett
  • William Adair (bio)

Although in former days, Brett Ashley was almost always labeled a "destructive bitch" or some other narrowly hostile term, since then readers have seen a variety of "Bretts" in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Feminist critics especially have found her a remarkably complex character, a basically positive or at least sympathetic one. For instance, she has been seen as a war victim trying, like the confused Jake Barnes, to find "a way to live in it" (that is, the world)—as the narrator says of himself during one of his dark nights of the soul (Hemingway, Sun Also 148). She is the 1920's New Woman, seeking a place in the postwar age of liberation (Martin 68). As early as 1980, a major Hemingway critic said that reading this emotionally wounded but strong character "as a Hemingway hero is not implausible" (Wagner 43). Another reader sees her as a role model for women in that she has the courage to define her own standards and abide by own "authentic self," and, further, that she is the novel's main character (Willingham 34, 45). Hemingway himself implied that she is the story's foremost character. Before a last-minute deletion of the opening chapter-and-a-half, the novel had began "This is the story of a lady" and then followed with Brett's history ("The Sun" 131-33). And in a letter to Owen Wister a few years after it came out, he said that he had tried to "give the destruction of character in the woman Brett—that was the main story and I failed to do it" (qtd. in Lynn, Hemingway 337). Yet we suspect that not [End Page 189] only the critics, but also Hemingway himself, may have been somewhat puzzled by the fascinating, ambiguous figure he had created.

As this short list suggests, we can see various Bretts and find support for each in the novel. There is still another. If we stand back from the story, see the canvas at a distance, she comes across as a strong woman surrounded by "boys"—or men who act in many ways like boys around her—and she deals with them much as would a mother with children. Thus, in performative terms, in what we might call the "theater of femininity," or perhaps the "family theater," she seems a mother figure. As the domineering Pilar (For Whom the Bell Tolls) has been seen as one kind of mother figure and Catherine (A Farewell to Arms), a loving-protecting maternal presence, as another, so Brett, the loving-rejecting Brett Ashley, is still another kind of mother figure. In fact, she may the first and most complex of them all. Jake Barnes is the principal "son," and so we must give equal time to him.

We want to make four points here. First, after seeking few a hints in Hemingway's biography, we want to discuss Brett as a projection of what Jung would have called Jake's (and Hemingway's) Anima. The second section argues that she can be regarded as a personification of the wounded "orphan" Jake's unconscious longing for mother-love. The third section below discusses Jake's relationship with Brett in oedipal terms. The final section considers Brett in the performative terms mentioned above.

1. Some Biographical Hints, With Notes on Projection

Below its restrained surface, The Sun Also Rises is a Romance novel, and as in most Romance fiction, hero Jake Barnes tends to be a projection of the author. As we know, Hemingway's postwar conflicts with his parents reached a dramatic climax during the summer of 1920, when, on his twenty-first birthday, his parents kicked him out of the family summer home. In his mother's eviction letter, she accused him of being an overgrown boy who had not yet come into his "manhood" (qtd. in Lynn, Hemingway 118). Hemingway seems to have turned this departure from home to good fictional use: in his fantasy life, he apparently nurtured an "orphan's" grievance that he had been rejected and put on the road. In his early fiction especially, we find...

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