Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity: In the Garden of the Uncanny by Stephen Gilbert Brown (review)

Drawing on bountiful criticism in various disciplines, Stephen Gilbert Brown examines the connection between Hemingway's early relationship with his family to solidify assertions that the wounds of emasculation—well-explored critically in terms of war and romantic experiences—are equally impacted by Hemingway's childhood trauma of androgyny. Hemingway's primary coping mechanisms for post-traumatic survival—nature and narration—are key defensive solutions to gender anxiety.

Brown describes Hemingway's childhood gender as "non-conforming" and "transgender" detailing his mother's confounding decision to impose a female identity upon him while encouraging his father's particular brand of naturalistic masculinity (58). Brown connects these traumas to a pattern of cross-gendered personas in his life and writing. "For Hemingway, maleness was a birthright stolen in infancy which had to be reasserted, reclaimed—through acts of imaginative volition" (58). This book offers compelling arguments supporting Debra Moddelmog's claim that Hemingway's work and life are at the "crux of gender and sexuality debates" (qtd. in Brown 6).

Brown divides his book along Hemingway's "twin desires": The Love Chase and the Blood Chase, allowing for a wide range of readings about identity and naturalism. In Chapter 1, Brown introduces both early and posthumous works as trauma narratives considering contemporary queer and trauma theory, Freud's theory of The Uncanny, and Otto Rank's work on the artist's creative urges and personality development.

Chapter 2 establishes the Love Chase in Hemingway's African camps with his fourth wife, Mary, where tropes of seeking home with an androgynous twin inspire and yet threaten the sense of self in the form of nightmares and threats of death from the natural world. Much like Nick Adams's search for the safety of his Edenic camp in "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway's safari camp reveals "transformative and traumatic realities" (Brown 24). Brown explains that "Hemingway uses nature for a searching exploration of the post-traumatic Self—in which nature and narration repair, if only partially, the breach of the self's defenses by trauma. The wound is a Beast that comes calling in the African darkness" (Brown 31).

Chapter 3 draws on psychoanalytic theory to present Hemingway's various personas as traumatic responses to a fragmented identity stemming from his mother's creation of the cross-dressing "summer girl." His later personas include "frontier scout," the "Old Brute," the "Great Hemingstein," and the cross-gendered "Papa-Catherine" persona—all of whom Brown reads as indications of Hemingway's "reinvention of the self through art" (50). Brown connects generations of hereditary determinism of androgyny and transgender behavior in the Hemingway family.

Chapter 4 builds on persona theories with Hemingway's coping mechanism of relying on romantic relationships for identity formation. "What [Hemingway] most desired in a lover was an intimate facsimile of the sisterly twin—to fulfill a compulsive merger-hunger (with incestuous overtones) instilled in infancy" (97). However, while this combats his separation anxiety, it "threatened to subsume his own identity" (what Brown calls "identity cannibalism") leading to his tendency to sever relationships, sometimes viciously (Brown 83, 95). Brown reads The Garden of Eden as a representation of these tensions between partner and enemy wherein childhood sibling desire is "displaced into the amorous dynamic of the David-Catherine-Marita triad" (Brown 61). Hemingway's tantalizing but dangerous desire for a sisterly twin/lover is grounded in Michigan's forests, where Ernest often lost his father's challenges of strength and outdoorsmanship to his older sister Marceline. "Hemingway's enjoyment of nature is from earliest childhood informed by the overshadowing presence of a sisterly twin, engendering a desire not only for a sisterly beloved, but for a more submissive version of [Marceline]—fulfilled first by Sunny and Ursula, and subsequently by Hadley, Pauline, and Mary" (77). Thus, creatively, "Nature furnishes and narrative fashions the elbow room he so compulsively seeks: two realms that repair the wounds to his...