Teaching Hemingway and Gender ed. by Verna Kale (review)

Teaching Hemingway and Gender, the latest title in the Teaching Hemingway series from Kent State University Press, gives the impression that the Bad Old Days may have passed, but they are not far behind us. Editor Verna Kale writes in her introduction: "Our job now as feminist critics (and at this point we are all, I hope, feminist critics) is to be aware of how the gaze—Hemingway's and our own—assumes … a host of subject positions," as well as "how considerations of gender and sexuality in Hemingway's work might revise our understandings not only of Hemingway but of modernism, authorship, the literary marketplace, popular culture, gender theory, queer theory, men's studies, and other modes of inquiry" (3). Kale thereby sets a wide-ranging agenda for these thirteen chapters—divided into sections on gender, sexuality, and women—which the authors then cover with depth and personality. To the ever-growing body of scholarship focused on this intersection, Teaching Hemingway and Gender contributes clear evidence of the many ways that Hemingway studies and gender studies complement one another and, moreover, that teachers at all levels can take up this work in their classrooms—whether for a semester, a unit, an assignment, or even a single class meeting.

In service to this overarching message, the essays by Debra A. Moddelmog and Hilary Kovar Justice form impeccable bookends to the collection. These two essays, alone, make an important contribution to Hemingway studies, though they also do well to provide context and coherence to the range of topics addressed between them.

Moddelmog's chapter, "State of the Field: Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Hemingway," delivers exactly what its title suggests. Starting with the March 1934 Vanity Fair article that included a cave-man paper-doll cutout of Hemingway, Moddelmog tracks more than eight decades of a persistent, consistent popular and scholarly interest in the themes of masculinity, sexuality, and gendered interactions. Moddelmog also deftly illustrates how this history has been shaped by developments in the fields of gender, sexuality, and queer studies, as well as by publication of Hemingway's unfinished works and increased scholarly attention to their archives. Moddelmog demonstrates exactly why this intersection is "one of the most interesting, lively, and often controversial areas of research in Hemingway studies" (11), and she provides a primer that covers all the bases without taking sides or tangling up the details.

At the end of the collection, Justice's "Katie and the Pink Highlighter: Teaching Post-'Hemingway' Hemingway" takes a more anecdotal approach, offering fellow feminist scholars both commiseration and ammunition—ultimately, a toolkit for navigating difficult professional conversations and for bringing into the fold those students who "HATE. HEMINGWAY" (158). Justice's conversational, richly detailed, and—dare I say—"relatable" chapter brings the book to a close in a way that is no less conceptually weighty than it is stylistically lighthearted.

Indeed, these essays (and not exclusively those by women) make clear that both in the classroom and in scholarly communities, normative gender expectations and even prejudicial assumptions are an unavoidable reality of Hemingway studies. Though many such references in the collection are subtle, their repetition echoes powerfully enough: Justice's essay, as the collection's conclusion, brings together those hints, passing moments, and idiosyncratic experiences. This final chapter is a cogent and direct confrontation with too-long-held stereotypes, as well as a celebration of what can happen when we lead ourselves and our students beyond them.

In this collection, an important part of moving beyond those stereotypes is incorporating approaches and lessons plans not exclusively designed for advanced literature courses. For instance, Douglas Sheldon ("A Very Complicated Negotiation: Teaching Hemingway to Second Language Learners of English") describes ways that in his ESL classes Hemingway's fiction begins to stand in for not only American language but also American culture and values. Conversely, Belinda Wheeler ("Redeeming Hemingway and His Women: Periodicals as Sites of Change in the Literature Classroom") describes at length an in...