Blurring the Lines

In today's society, the roles of men and women are interchangeable. Women are no longer restrained to their sphere. They have their own careers, some not starting a family until they are well into their thirties. Men can stay at home with the children. They can be nurses, secretaries, and house maids. Conversely, women can fight in the armed forces, be doctors, lawyers, judges of the Supreme Court, hold high office, etc. The roles are very blended. Hemingway wrote in a similar light. While he didn't have the women doing the jobs of the men, he certainly had the women acting manly while many of his men were impotent. This portrayal is best shown in his novel The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway makes Brett Ashley a much more manly woman, and makes Jake partake in very manly man activities yet emasculates him time after time.

Brett Ashley is first introduced to us as she approaches a bar, not a very feminine thing to do. She then orders a drink not typically had by women. What surprises the reader the first time around is how calmly she reacts to people around her. She laughs off insults and continues on her way. Brett is described as having hair "brushed back like a boy's" (pg 30) and she is "build with curves like the hull of a racing yacht" (pg 30). She is clearly not making herself up to be feminine but rather to try and come off as one of the guys. Throughout the entire novel, Brett is drinking and sleeping around, not the typical actions of a lady in this time. She acts more like a man, unattached and carefree from both responsibility and life itself. She acts in a polar opposite from Jake.

Another aspect which Hemingway is famous for and exemplifies in Jake is the impotency. Hemingway himself suffered a war wound and both of the characters in his biggest novels, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls are unable to do certain things which many men like to do. In the early chapters, Jake tells Georgette that he's "sick" (pg 23) and later on says that he "got hurt in the war" (pg 24). He has to embarrass himself to tell other people that he can't have sex because it doesn't work. This is something Hemingway had to deal with and projected upon his male characters. Hemingway, like Jake, tries to make up for this by partaking in masculine activities.

Jake is very emasculated yet Hemingway tries to make up for this by making Jake do very manly things. To understand the manly things Jake does, we must first take a look at the things Hemingway considered most masculine. In some of his other works, namely the Nick Adams stories, Hemingway has his main characters fish and hunt. In Big Two-Hearted River, one of Hemingway's best known Nick Adams stories, Nick spends the majority of the time fishing on his own. In all of Heminway's stories involving fishing, there is a significant amount of male bonding going on. This is considered a time when men can be men and have uninterrupted time together to bond. In the Nick Adams stories, Nick and his friend, Bill, are still debated to be gay lovers. In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has Jake go bull fighting, a sport Hemingway believes is only for the manliest of men. He also has Jake fish and try to compensate for his disability.

Clearly, sexuality is skewed in this novel. Hemingway didn't fully understand gender roles and neither do any of his characters. Jake is more of a girlfriend to Brett than a lover, even if their love making is insinuated. Hemingway blurs the lines between man and woman very well, which makes him a modern author remembered nearly ninety years after first coming on to the scene.

Works Cited

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner, 2006. New York, New York.
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