Changes in Masculinity in A Farewell to Arms For ages, men have traditionally been assigned roles in which they are shown to be strong, independent, bold, daring, and often aggressive. In his 1929 book, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway, at first, paints men with stereotypical roles, but after serious circumstances, the superficial layer of masculinity wears off, and men are reduced to being caring, compassionate, and fearful. The protagonist, Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant who drives an ambulance for the Italian Army, is first introduced as an uncaring man who strives to fulfill his sexual desires, but throughout the novel, he changes to become a calm and concerned individual. In the beginning of the novel, Henry is described at the …show more content…
When Rinaldi asks Henry if he did anything heroic before he was injured in order to help Henry achieve a silver medal for valor, Henry blandly replies “no…I was blown up while we were eating cheese” (Hemingway 63). Henry goes on to say that he “couldn’t carry anybody [because he] couldn’t move” (Hemingway 63). Henry decides to let the veil of masculinity fall and admits he did not do anything extraordinary. Henry starts to realize his love for Catherine and becomes more careful and less foolhardy about his choices. This shows the immense difference developing between Henry and Rinaldi about masculinity: Rinaldi is not affected by the power of love like Henry is, therefore, he still considers war achievements to be a sign of …show more content…
Hemingway shows that events such as love and war can easily remove the thin coat of masculinity that many people associate manhood with. Moreover, Hemingway displays that once an individual has someone or something to live for, he becomes prudent to the point where outside appearance and people’s judgement does not matter. In Henry’s case, he strives to live for Catherine and their future, therefore, he starts to lose his aggressiveness and audacity in exchange for a caring and responsible
We notice, right from the beginning of his life, that Ernest Hemingway was confronted to two opposite ways of thinking, the Manly way, and the Woman way. This will be an important point in his writing and in his personal life, he will show a great interest in this opposition of thinking. In this short story, Hemingway uses simple words, which turn out to become a complex analysis of the male and female minds. With this style of writing, he will show us how different the two sexes’ minds work, by confronting them to each other in a way that we can easily capture their different ways of working. The scene in which the characters are set in is simple, and by the use of the simplicity of the words and of the setting, he is able to put us in-front of this dilemma, he will put us in front of a situation, and we will see it in both sexes point of view, which will lead us to the fundamental question, why are our minds so different?
Hemingway refuses to romanticize his character. Being “tough” people, such as boxers, bullfighters, gangsters, and soldiers, they are depicted as leading a life more or less without thought. The world is full of such people, and it is unrealistic to put sublime thoughts into their heads.
Assadnassab, Sara. "Hemingway´s Depiction of Women in A Farewell to Arms.”. http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1773/2005/117/LTU-CUPP-05117-SE.pdf (accessed April 17, 2013).
Above all, Hemingway wants to make the reader understand how one person’s selfishness and needs can manage to manipulate another one by pretending to care. He also proves how women at times can be easily influenced by the people they love. They are tricked into believing they are everything to them. He shows a couple’s different point of views and their inability to understand and listen one another. For the most part, Hemingway send the message that everything is possible. A woman does not need a man’s approval for anything. Women are successful, strong and can overcome the biggest things in life.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His mother, Grace Hall, was a trained opera singer and later on, a music teacher. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a doctor and an avid naturalist ("Ernest Hemingway: An Inventory”). Just after graduating high school, at the age of eighteen, Hemingway enlisted in the army to fight in World War I ("The Big Read"). After being severely wounded in the war, he moved to Paris in 1921, and devoted himself to writing fiction (Baker). It is said that, “No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway” (Putnam). Hemingway’s book A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, and was based off of the events that happened to him in the war and what happened in his love life. Fredrick Henry, the protagonist, is an American ambulance driver fighting for the allies during World War I. He is introduced to a nurse named Catherine, who he later on falls in love with. Henry was hit by a trench mortar shell and was very badly injured. He is then sent to Milan, where Catherine later on comes to help nurse him to health. The two fall in love and Henry no longer is involved with the war, so they try and have a child, but both Catherine and the child die during labor, and Henry is left alone. Psychoanalytical approach views the psychological motivations of characters, which refer to the dynamics of personality development and behavior based on the unconscious motivations of a person ("Psychoanalytic Theory”). Hemingway’s writing was greatly impacted by his real life tragedies, which consist of witnessing the gruesomeness of war and his discovery and loss of love, this helps exhibi...
"After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain" (332). This last line of the novel gives an understanding of Ernest Hemingway's style and tone. The overall tone of the book is much different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The characters in the book are propelled by outside forces, in this case WWI, where the characters in The Sun Also Rises seemed to have no direction. Frederick's actions are determined by his position until he deserts the army. Floating down the river with barely a hold on a piece of wood his life, he abandons everything except Catherine and lets the river take him to a new life that becomes increasing difficult to understand. Nevertheless, Hemingway's style and tone make A Farewell to Arms one of the great American novels. Critics usually describe Hemingway's style as simple, spare, and journalistic. These are all good words they all apply. Perhaps because of his training as a newspaperman, Hemingway is a master of the declarative, subject-verb-object sentence. His writing has been likened to a boxer's punches--combinations of lefts and rights coming at us without pause. As illustrated on page 145 "She went down the hall. The porter carried the sack. He knew what was in it," one can see that Hemingway's style is to-the-point and easy to understand. The simplicity and the sensory richness flow directly from Hemingway's and his characters' beliefs. The punchy, vivid language has the immediacy of a news bulletin: these are facts, Hemingway is telling us, and they can't be ignored. And just as Frederic Henry comes to distrust abstractions like "patriotism," so does Hemingway distrust them. Instead he seeks the concrete and the tangible. A simple "good" becomes higher praise than another writer's string of decorative adjectives. Hemingway's style changes, too, when it reflects his characters' changing states of mind. Writing from Frederic Henry's point of view, he sometimes uses a modified stream-of-consciousness technique, a method for spilling out on paper the inner thoughts of a character. Usually Henry's thoughts are choppy, staccato, but when he becomes drunk the language does too, as in the passage on page 13, "I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafes and nights when the room whirled and you
Through this brief anecdote, Hemingway presents the readers the social dilemma of male domination over his counterpart. The women's fight for equality changed some "old traditions" but there are still many Jigs in our society that shouldn't be treated as inferiors. Women are the most beautiful beings in life, but they are not to be possessed ,but loved and admired.
"All fiction is autobiographical, no matter how obscure from the author's experience it may be, marks of their life can be detected in any of their tales"(Bell, 17). A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is based largely on Hemingway's own personal experiences. The main character of the novel, Frederic Henry, experiences many of the same situations that Hemingway lived. Some of these similarities are exact, while some are less similar, and some events have a completely different outcome.
Works Cited and Consulted Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Simon & Schuster, Inc.; New York, NY; 1929. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway; edited by Scott Donaldson; Cambridge U. P.; New York, NY; 1996. Mandel, Miriam B.; Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions; The Scarecrow Press, Inc.; Metuchen, NJ; 1995.
Hemingway's novel by harnessing the listener and reader to understand that a man can be
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway, is a story about love and war. Frederic Henry, a young American, works as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I. He falls tragically in love with a beautiful English nurse, Miss Catherine Barkley. This tragedy is reflected by water. Throughout the novel Ernest Hemingway uses water as metaphors. Rivers are used as symbols of rebirth and escape and rain as tragedy and disaster, which show how water plays an important role in the story.
Hemingway characterizes his heroes as people with strength, courage, and bravery, but even heroes have their flaws. For example, Frederic Henry, the protagonist of A Farewell to Arms, survives an artillery bombardment that kills one of his own men and badly injures him. Hemingway shows the strength of this character through his survival of the bombardment and full recovery of his wounds. Hemingway portrays Frederic as a hero through this strength. In addition, Fredric, being fully aware of the dangers from both the enemy and the Italian's, who mistake him and his drivers for German's, kill one of them, and then threaten to execute Frederic, who escapes. In this daring escape, Frederic presents his courage and bravery in a dangerous situation. Hemingway demonstrates that although one of Frederic's men dies, he is still courageous in that his escape was successful. Frederic Henry's potential as a hero is shown by Hemingway's illustration of events that depict Frederic's use of his strength, his courage, and his bravery (Lewis 46).
Hemingway relied mostly on his morals throughout his time in the war, suggesting his dependency on his Superego and the strength of his consciousness. Hemingway acted primarily based on his Superego and moral reasoning, even going as far as volunteering for the war on the Italian front and staying in battle despite an injury that gave him medical leave (Piep). Hemingway created the novel’s main character, Frederic Henry, to embody a large part of his moral standards regarding the war: both Americans volunteering on the Italian front, willingly working as ambulance drivers, and even returning to the war despite threats to their health (Prescott). Despite their similarities in moral standards, Hemingway and Henry are most similar in terms of their large dependencies on their Superego for decision making.
He made him a hero who develops and changes throughout the novel. Henry's relationship with British nurse Catherine Berkeley is based on Hemingway's faded love affair with the beautiful American nurse he met while recovering from his wounds at a Milan hospital, just like his main character Henry. One of the modern features demonstrated by A Farewell to Arms is the style used by Hemingway. His modern style forces the reader to look for hidden truth while reading the text, which contains some unclear and very long passages. The author tries to master the chaos of two worlds: a world of war and a world of love by creating his own, self-sufficient, and symbolic work.
“A Farewell to Arms Essay – A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway.” Twentieth Century Literary Criticism 115 (1929): 121-126. JSTOR. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.