"There Was a Woman Having a Kid"—From Her Point of View: An Unpublished Draft of In Our Time's Chapter II

Chapter II of In Our Time is celebrated for its coolly detached depiction of civilian suffering. But Hemingway originally planned to present the Greek evacuation from the perspective of the "woman having a kid." In this unpublished draft, entitled "Exodus," we see and feel only what "Helene" does, riding in the back of a cart: her labor pains, the jolting cart, the camel's manure-matted rump bobbing up and down, her vomiting. This draft joins other early stories that empathize with women or depict childbirth, but its unsubtle, allegorical references clashed with the interchapters' matter-of-fact realism.