Hemingway Gender Roles

Hemingway presents his continual themes in all of his stories. They all somehow connect in one way or another. “Cat in the Rain”, “Hills like White Elephants”, and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” all focus on the concept of failing relationships and the roles that men and women play in it. Because of his traditional notion of gender roles, Hemingway often delineated themes of masculinity and femininity through his stories of conflicted male-female relationships. One of the techniques Hemingway employs to manifest these gender roles is to unname and rename the female characters. Coleman’s article “Hemingway’s Girls: Unnaming and Renaming Hemingway’s Female Characters” confers about the female characters in Hemingway’s stories and why he prefers to name them a certain way. It begins with general information about Hemingway’s love stories and how most of them are hindered by complications and failures. Hemingway has this particular style on how he calls the women in his stories, and by doing so he reveals their roles in the relationships and who they are.

and Mrs. Elliot” explores the idea of masculinity and femininity in Hubert and Cornelia’s relationship. In the majority of situations, the female possesses feminine characteristics and the male is masculine, but it is not the case in this story. Hubert is lacking the masculinity that many of Hemingway’s male characters possess, and Cornelia does not fit the social norms for women for back then.
Hemingway writes their relationship as a troubling one to accentuate that if people did not live their lives in their specific roles, things can get conflicted. Hubert was much more feminine than Cornelia was; he lacked experience and could have been the reason why the relationship failed. It is reveled early in the story that Mr. and Mrs. Elliot was trying to conceive a baby “as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it” (Hemingway 123), which demonstrates that Mrs. Elliot was not truthfully satisfied in the