"Bitched": feminization, identity, and the Hemingwayesque in The Sun Also Rises

In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald after the publication of Tender Is the Night in 1934, Ernest Hemingway urged his friend to take a more objective approach to his writing:

    Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and
    you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write
    seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with
    it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist. (Letters 408)

Though Hemingway implies, a paragraph later, that his friend is literally "bitched" in having married Zelda Sayre, "someone who was jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you," to be "bitched" here signifies more broadly that one is, in some cultural or existential way, dogged, wounded, even castrated "from the start." This could be a more general human problem, but the term bitched seems to narrow the field by half in implying that the condition it names is--that bad thing--to be feminized.

While feminization is not a word Hemingway himself uses, the metaphorical representation of men acting or being treated "like a woman"--that is, adopting or being forced into states of shameful passivity or disempowerment--is a central concern of many of his works. Consider the narrator's father in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," impotently loading and unloading his shotgun after a humiliating encounter with a local Indian man, and then apologizing to his wife for slamming the door; or the shell-shocked protagonist of "Big Two-Hearted River," his "terrible panic," in Malcolm Cowley's words, "just barely under control" as he declines the "tragic adventure" of fishing in the swamp where the truly big trout are (qtd. in Kenner 150); or Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms, fleeing, not participating in the war on the Italian front, and powerless before the events that rob him of his wife and child; or To Have and Have Not's virile but doomed Henry Morgan, who, as his self-reliance fails him in Depression-ravaged Key West, laments "One man alone ... ain't got no bloody fucking chance" (225). Even if Hemingway, in his advice to Fitzgerald, meant only to name suffering and impotence as the human condition, the word bitched evokes modernist despair in just the gendered way that many male-produced modernisms do: as a loss of an ostensibly masculine autonomy and certainty to what is seen as a feminizing modernity. Far from denying this humiliating circumstance, however, Hemingway seems to embrace it as the very condition of "serious" literary artistry--a surprising move for an author who is still deemed the twentieth century's preeminent "man's man."

I will argue here for the centrality of the issue of feminization to understanding Hemingway's first novel The Sun Also Rises. With its seeming focus on "bulls, balls, and booze," that work might be said to have initiated the cult of cojones that is Hemingway's popular legacy (Crowley 43), but close inspection of this text reveals a proliferation of male humiliations and tender masculine intimacies, repeated transgressions of this cojonic image. Narrator Jake Barnes is impotent due to a war wound, and he faces intense humiliations at the hands of the sexually peripatetic "new woman," Lady Brett Ashley. He even takes a beating over her at the hands of the novel's much-deprecated Robert Cohn. At the same time, like Nick Adams, Frederic Henry, or Robert Jordan of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Jake--named Hem in drafts until the final stages of the novel's composition--is a patently Hemingwayesque figure: like his creator, he served in the war and is a journalist, outdoorsman, tennis amateur, and bullfighting aficionado. How do we square, then, this sensitive, socially passive observer, given to tears and quiet resignation, with the public and private legend of machismo that was already developing around Hemingway at this time? (1)

To understand these contradictions we should start with the notion of male authorship that Hemingway exhorts Fitzgerald to adopt, which demands a male subject who must first be wounded in order to "write seriously." Seriousness, indeed, was a matter of deep concern to male modernist authors for whom the "literary" evoked a cluster of stigmatizing associations with femininity, including the ostensibly female-penned popular novel and its largely female readership, the sexual "decadence" of Wildean aestheticism, and the perceived domestication and gentility of the literary establishment at the turn of the century. (2) Moreover, Hemingway and his generation grew up admiring the frontier ideals of "rough rider" and imperialist Theodore Roosevelt, who, in advocating a doctrine of "the strenuous life, the life of effort, of labor and strife" in a speech in 1899, promoted a widely influential template for proper American manhood. "We do not admire the man of timid peace," Roosevelt asserted. "We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life." Roosevelt's "victories," however, come at a steep price in labor and male suffering: the "strife" of "danger ... hardship [and] bitter toil." Thus a profession in which men do not toil and suffer is unmanly, and the man of letters might appear to live what Roosevelt would describe as "a life of slothful ease."