Politics of Gender Roles, Sexuality and Androgyne in the Early Works of Ernest Hemingway Critical Reassessment

The shift in Hemingway's studies away from traditional biography, gender and textual studies has enabled new critical responses over the past thirty years to focus on several new and disparate approaches which reflect the broader evolution in literary criticism. Hemingway’s novels The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), once considered critically exhausted, are being rejuvenated by a rising generation of scholars utilizing a variety of perspectives to deal with man-woman relationship through critical and theoretical lenses. Though Hemingway died 57 years ago he remains very much alive in the minds of readers and critics around the world. New dimensions of his work are discovered and explored, proving to each successive generation of readers ample scope to critically examine new perspectives about man-woman relationships in his early fictional works. Literary criticism has been changing in the wake of reader response and feminist criticism with its emphasis on sexuality and gender. Critics have not only reevaluated Hemingway’s ideas about gender and sexuality but also the female characters throughout his oeuvre. Earlier Hemingway criticism had been largely “the province of male critics with overly simplistic views of Hemingway’s female characters. For example, Catherine Barkley of A Farewell to Arms was praised for being an utterly compliant woman, while her strengths and departures from conventional gender roles were completely ignored” (Comely 416). Brett Ashley the female protagonist of The Sun Also Rises was excoriated for being just the opposite, while her trauma as an abused wife was glossed over by critics. In the wake of feminist criticism in the 1970s, more attention has been paid not only to the complexity of Hemingway’s female characters but also to Hemingway as a more complex and interesting writer capable of registering subtleties about man-woman relationships and sexuality that defy easy or simple categorizations.