Hemingway’s Gender Training

Abstract From 1899, the year that Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, until 1961, when he died by his own hand, public discussions of gender issues were as commonplace as they are now in the last years of the twentieth century. Anachronistically, many scholars and critics have read and interpreted the past as without gender conflict, thus homogenizing, even silencing, the contentious debates of the mid-to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and replacing actual conditions with a nostalgic picture of the past. Other scholars have offered a portrait of the past in which women did not assume the right to contest social norms, thus diminishing not only the nature and extent of the public conflict, but also the history of all the women who, like Hemingway’s grandmother, mother, third wife, and two of his mothers-in-law, were vocal and active. In such a sanitized version of the past, then, particular individuals who challenged or resisted the gendered social norms have been ignored, renamed as emasculators, or recategorized as exceptions to general rules—and blamed—rather than seen as part of the complexly structured social conditions.