Hemingway's manufactured masculinity



This originally started out as a casual remark on Twitter, but I think long tweet chains are silly especially when you have a blog you are devoted to. So I am doing some of my reading for school, which right now is almost entirely ten-minute plays, when I see "Hills Like White Elephants," a short story by Ernest Hemingway has been included. You know my feelings on Hemingway by now, I assume, which I sum up with the pithy criticism that he reads like a drunken telegram. His prose always leaves me cold, though I guess somebody must enjoy it, and I dislike his cardboard-cutout-cookie-cutter main characters. I can understand why he is enjoyed, I suppose, though I don't really see why he has attained classic status. The only thing I can think of is that people have decided to accept Hemingway into the canon as one of the major bards of masculinity in a way few other writers do. I think he appealed to men struggling to feel masculine who used him as an interpreter, believing he explains what they're missing, supplying them both with a notion of a manly identity as well art that reflected it. But I really don't think that Hemingway really HAD a sense of what "true manhood" was, nor do I think he failed to recognize that. His work is his attempt to reconstruct masculinity, to figure out what it really was. The manhood represented in his work is an educated guess at best. But lots of men read it and, lacking their own sense of what masculinity was and the ability to evaluate the truth of Hemingway's portrayal, allowed the work to tell them what they thought was the answer to their question. They took Hemingway's word for it, unaware that he wasn't actually an authority.

I think my opinion of Hemingway's work is deeply influenced by the fact that I don't like his postulation on the nature of masculinity. I think he got it very, if not totally, wrong. I think his construction of manhood consists of taking his own problems like drinking too much and not being able to get along with any of his wives and calling them "manly things" to make them justifiable. Men want to be masculine, it's a good thing for men, so under this model he's not dysfunctional, he's just manly, which is what he is supposed to be. And I think that spoke to all the men who wanted to be real men but had those same stupid problems. They were happy to hear those problems weren't problem after all, just signs that they were real men. That's an over-generalization, of course, but I think there's something to it.