Hemingway and Anorexia: A New Lens

This essay provides a fresh understanding of Hemingway's overt self-fashioned masculinity expressed in both his life and minimalist writing style. It affirms Leslie Heywood's claim that behind the hard, minimalist aesthetic ideals of late modernism was an "anorexic logic" that ensured the cutting away of the feminine—culture, personality, excess—from the text. Rather than simply adding Hemingway to the list of authors who propagate this logic, however, this essay demonstrates how he was also a victim of a system that compelled him to uphold a predetermined masculine code. His art was formed in an anxiety filled paradox where he was simultaneously perpetrator and victim. It is this paradox, it is argued, that lead Hemingway to have considerable anxieties over his own weight and an unhealthy obsession with hunger.