Swiping Stein: The Ambivalence of Hemingway Parodies

This essay analyzes Hemingway's strategy as a parodist of his sometime mentor, sometime enemy, Gertrude Stein. The conventional view that Hemingway parodied Stein in order to declare his artistic independence from her influential style overlooks the problem of dependence that parody inevitably raises. Hitherto unexplored manuscripts in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library—letters, drafts of parodies, and even an unpublished twist on Stein, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway"—reveal Hemingway's deep ambivalence about achieving independence through imitation.