"How Beautiful the Virgin Forests Were Before the Loggers Came": An Ecofeminist Reading of Hemingway's "The End of Something"

Civilised Man says: I am Self, I am Master, all the rest is Other—outside, below, underneath, subservient. I own, I use, I explore, I exploit, I control. What I do is what matters. What I want is what matter is for. I am that I am, and the rest is women and wilderness, to be used as I see fit.

—Ursula K. LeGuin (45)

As the Marvelously Polemical Epigraph above from Ursula K. LeGuin would suggest, ecofeminists argue that the domination of women and the domination of the environment are parallel if not in many ways identical. As Catherine Roach observes, in more formal terms than LeGuin's, "Women are perceived to merge with nature, to be part of the nonhuman surround and only semihuman. Similarly, nature is perceived as female, as virgin resource to be exploited or raped, as sharing in woman's semihuman quality" (56).¹ More recently, in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood has articulated the philosophical underpinnings of this stance. She contends that in Western culture, a white, largely male elite, which she terms the "master model," dominates and excludes both nature and women. As with women, nature and the environment are valuable to this "master model" only insofar as they are resources available for the master's use—a philosophy she calls "instrumentalism."As Plumwood goes on to explain:

Instrumentalism is a mode of use which does not respect the other's independence or fullness of being, or acknowledge their agency. Its aim is to subdue the other maximally within the sphere of the user's own agency. It recognises no residue or autonomy in the instrumentalised other, and strives to deny or negate that other as a limit on the self and as a center of resistance.

(142)

Plumwood further associates instrumentalism with "the individual who stands apart from an alien other and denies his own relationship to and dependency on this other" (142).

In Ernest Hemingway's short story "The End of Something," the long introductory passage describing the demise of Hortons Bay as a logging town establishes an implicit parallel with the romantic breakup at the heart of the story,² a parallel that illustrates what Plumwood has described as the master model's instrumentalism of women and nature. Thus, the loggers in the story have used the forest until it can no longer provide them with anything they can exploit for profit. They reject the denuded land they have left behind as if they stand apart from it and as if denying their relationship to it will somehow cancel their dependence upon it for subsistence. Similarly, Nick, arguably the protagonist of "The End of Something," rejects Marjorie because she "isn't any fun any more" (SS 110)—she is no longer useful in providing him with entertainment.³ He rejects her as if he stands apart from her and as if denying their relationship will somehow cancel his emotional dependence on her—a false hope, as his later misery over their breakup indicates.

Hemingway critic Horst H. Kruse, who has paid the story more attention than almost anyone else, goes so far as to say of the story's problematic introduction: "In that it is taken from nature it implies that the course which Nick's love for Marjorie has taken is a natural one and as relentless as it is inevitable" (214). He concludes, "all things run their natural course, and submission and acceptance are the only sensible responses" (214).⁴ But logging a forested area until "there were no more logs to make lumber" is hardly a natural course.

Sheldon Grebstein makes a similar point but defines "nature" rather differently than most readers might. Grebstein contends that Hortons Bay becomes "a paradigm for the romance of Nick and Marjorie, once-thriving like Horton's Bay yet now about to perish"—so far, so good. "It will appear that it, too, has fallen victim to nature," he then explains rather illogically, offering a peculiar elaboration that nature means...