Notes
Introduction 1. We do not mean to slight the pioneering efforts of such obviously important male critics as Carl Eby, Mark Spilka, Gerry Brenner, and Robert Scholes in reevaluating the role of women and gender in Hemingway’s ¤ction. Our essayists recognize the inestimable contributions of these and other male scholars in encouraging closer, more sensitive treatment of issues pertinent to women readers. 2. We intend the work of the notable scholars represented here to re®ect the contributions of Hemingway’s female critics in general, many of whom appear in our bibliography. 3. While the connotation of loving Hemingway may confound readers, we suggest that the idea of love as used in Miller’s essay does not refer naively or sentimentally to the writer’s relationship to her subject but refers to the personal identi¤cation with Hemingway that some women (and men) readers have always felt. This is as important a response to the Hemingway canon as the formally academic ones more characteristic of this collection. Many readers respond personally to Hemingway as surely as they answer to his art. They applaud the vitality that underlies the elemental intensity of his work. In other words, caught and held by that intensity, men and women alike will fall “in love” with Hemingway. Miller’s acknowledgments of Hemingway ’s personal failings and the fact that female readers feel a bit betrayed by Hemingway ’s inability to sustain relationships—his driving women to bitchery—move her observations as a whole to objectivity. Chapter 1 1. I presented earlier versions of this essay as talks at the Michigan Hemingway Society “Hemingway in Michigan Weekend,” (Petoskey, Michigan, 20 October Notes 1996), and at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as part of their symposium “Hemingway at 100,” (22–24 July 1999). 2. See my earlier essay, “Hemingway’s Women: A Reassessment,” for further discussion of the possible causes for a misreading over time of Hemingway’s women. 3. Since the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, readers and critics have derogated Brett Ashley as Hemingway’s ultimate bitch. Whether labeling her a drunkard, a nymphomaniac, or a modern-day Circe who turns men into swine, these interpretations ignore the complexity of Brett’s character and the intricate role she plays in the novel, particularly with regard to her beauty. “Take Brett out” of the novel, says critic Harold Bloom, “and vitality would depart.” He adds that only when the critic puts aside “the vision of Hemingway’s heroine as a Circe” will he discover “there is more inwardness to Lady Brett” (Introduction 1–2). That many critics still do not see beyond that “vision” helps to illustrate Brett’s dilemma as a beautiful woman whose appearance both identi¤es and traps her. Bloom’s 1991 collection of reprinted articles focuses on Brett and attempts to redress some of the critical neglect and malignment of Hemingway’s heroines. When critics have not dismissed Hemingway ’s female characters as less interesting or less complex than their male counterparts , they have tended to categorize them as either goddesses, such as Catherine Barkley, or bitches, such as Brett Ashley. Edmund Wilson, in The Wound and the Bow, describes Brett as “an exclusively destructive force” (238) and is usually credited with initiating what Roger Whitlow calls in Cassandra’s Daughters the “Brett-thebitch ” school of criticism (51). Whitlow provides an excellent overview of the critical reaction to Hemingway’s women, including Brett (10–15). He focuses more directly on Brett as a character and the critical reaction to her in his chapter called “Bitches and Other Simplistic Assumptions” (Cassandra’s 49–58). Whitlow believes that critics “almost to a person . . . rely on Brett’s own pronouncements for their interpretation , particularly the assertion that Brett makes to Jake after she leaves Romero: “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch” (51). The 1980s marked a signi¤cant shift in Hemingway criticism, as scholars began to reassess Hemingway’s ¤ctional treatment of women, particularly in the short stories. Wagner -Martin’s groundbreaking article “‘Proud and Friendly and Gently’: Women in Hemingway’s Early Fiction” argues that Hemingway’s female characters demonstrate a greater complexity and strength of character than their weaker male counterparts , thus overshadowing them (63–71). Charles J. Nolan Jr. continues this revisionist trend in his “Hemingway’s Women’s Movement,” pointing out the degree to which “Hemingway the writer is much more sympathetic to women and their plight...
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