Melancholy Modernism: Gender and the Politics of Mourning in The Sun Also Rises

The sense of loss so central to Hemingway's work inscribes a social rupture with autonomous and potent masculinity—and in this sense his work responds to the crisis in gender in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Hemingway responded to this crisis, along with a dominant strain of American modernism, in a melancholic manner. He sought to keep psychically alive what he insisted had become socially impossible. The Sun Also Rises enacts this process with particular complexity, staging Hemingway's identification with two incompatible and lost forms of manhood—the sentimental and the invulnerable—neither of which he is able to relinquish for a masculinity more currently viable.