Lady Brett Ashley, wife of a wealthy aristocrat, Lord Ashley, is the chief female character who symbolizes the field nurse that Hemingway fell in love with during the war (Egri 112). Within The Sun Also Rises, the reader, at first, does not realize that Lady Ashley is married, but quite the opposite. The reader is led to believe that Lady Ashley is the type of woman that comes to the bar with one man and leaves with another. Fortunately for the reader, there is more to her character than what is depicted by Barnes. Depression and loneliness are significant aspects of her life that emerge whenever she is alone with Barnes. The reader is aware that Barnes and Lady Ashley have a connection that goes beyond the friendship that they both desire. The love they share allows her to show who she is to both Barnes and the reader. She has an uncontrollable need to feel wanted, and she uses the men she meets to fill this need. The reader can see Lady Ashley’s inner self when Hemingway introduces them to Pedro Romero, the young and undiluted matador (Egri 112). The two share fascinating similarities around how they achieve their goals. Lady Ashley appears to be like a bullfighter, in the way she smoothly manipulates men with her sexuality without ever losing the power that she wields. The same effortless manipulation of influence flows off of every action that Romero chooses to make while fighting. By including descriptive language and intentional comparison, Hemingway is showing the
To begin, Tom and Myrtle’s affair proves truthful to the lack of respect for women in the 1920’s. Myrtle’s possessiveness over Tom cause him to lose respect for her. He becomes
Fitzgerald further complicates the story when he introduces us to Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, and her attempt to use him to climb the social ladder. Myrtle and her husband, Wilson, live in the valley of ashes, “a certain desolate area of land” (23). The valley of ashes is a particularly run down stretch of land between West Egg and New York City, mostly inhabited by people from the lower working class. Tom is good friends with Wilson, but is simultaneously having an affair with his wife. Fitzgerald shows us that Myrtle is unhappy with Wilson and seeks a better life when she cries, “The only crazy I was was when I married [Wilson]. I knew right away I made a mistake.
3. Through Hemingway’s Multi-part claim and the changing of different perspectives to show how Margaret is characterized as a manipulative women.
Tom pursues Myrtle Wilson, a poor woman living in the industrialized ‘Valley of Ashes’ with her struggling mechanic husband. Myrtle, dissatisfied with her position in society, gladly spends Tom’s money and follows him wherever he goes. Following an attempt by Myrtle to rebel by saying Daisy’s name, Tom punches her in the face to prove that he has control. Myrtle is resigned to accept this abuse in order to get what she wants out of the relationship because she knows that anyone could easily take her place. In addition, Daisy begins seeing her former flame Jay Gatsby once she rediscovers his existence in West Egg. Gatsby, absolutely enamored with Daisy, claims to have earned all of his money and risen to the top just for her. Despite Daisy’s renewed interest in Gatsby, she dislikes his extravagant parties and West Egg, disgusted by ‘the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing’ (114). Daisy’s distaste for the ‘new money’ crowd sends Gatsby into a panic, and he immediately attempts to rectify his ‘mistake’ by eliminating the parties entirely, proving that Daisy is able to control him by her pretentious whims
Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises has always been regarded as one of Ernest Hemingway’s most hated characters. Both critics and readers have seen her simply as a bitch, and do not view her as a likeable or relatable character in any way. Her alcoholism, her use and abuse of men, and her seeming indifference to Jake Barnes’s love are just a few reasons why Hemingway’s readers have not been able to stand Brett, and do not give her a fair chance. It is clear that Jake is biased in his narration, but no one wants to question his opinions and judgments of Brett; in fact, since the book was
Through choice of detail and diction, Edith Wharton justifies Frome’s adultery by juxtaposing the warm, charismatic nature of Mattie to the cold, barren one of Zeena. While his wife speaks in a “monotonous” (129) “flat whine” (32) her cousin’s “suffuse[s] him with joy” (44). Despite the fact that both women are frail and sickly, Zeena’s “puckered throat” and “protruding wrists” (47) disgusts Ethan, while Mattie is so “small and weak-looking that…it wr[i]ng[s] his heart” (106). Throughout the novel, Wharton’s choice of detail drastically contrasts the two women, one a vivacious, vigorous beauty, the other a walking, whining corpse. From their physical looks alone, Zeena is hard to love—sterile and dark—while Mattie—fertile and warm—is easy to. The author intentionally feeds this bias, allowing the readers to feel the same temptation that Frome has in the novel. However, he
The author presents the Valley of Ashes in chapter two, in which readers also meet Myrtle, Tom’s mistress. Myrtle's physical appearance reveals the sensuous and the impureness of her character and foreshadows her future death. Fitzgerald introduces Myrtle
There are many hidden and sub-surface meanings in life. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises is no exception to that fact. As the title of the novel suggests, the novel is about the rise of a new generation that breaks away from the societal conventions of the previous generation. Though The Sun Also Rises seems to be simply about the rise of a new generation, a closer look at the relationship between Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley suggests a queer relationship produced out of gender role nonconformity. Their relationship enables one to see the blurring of the lines that divide the conventional gender roles.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “Life isn’t hard to manage when you’ve nothing to lose” (Ernest Hemingway). Perhaps this is the reason 1920’s new woman Lady Brett Ashley was able to control her life with such ease. She had never been tied down to a man, therefore she had no real love to lose. She was free. As the novel progresses so does Brett’s outlook on love. Lady Brett Ashley is very much her own person. The character she depicts is placed in this story to strongly emphasize the hypermasculinity of women in the 1920’s. Brett was written by Hemingway as the complete opposite of Frances, married housewife, who was the ideal woman before the new era was brought upon by the 20’s.
Though women are visibly inferior to men, we find more consciousness, freedom and deceitful attitude in female characters. Myrtle’s secret relationship with Tom is one of the instances of cheating on Wilson. Daisy also cheats on her husband Tom with resuming her love with Gatsby. So freedom of making of love in disguise tells the changing nature of the society.
Myrtle and George, were married for twelve years, are strikingly two different people. While Mmyrtle is outgoing , George is shy and bland, his physical description takes just a couple of sentences while Myrtle has a paragraph long introduction. Although there is a hint of what drew Myrtle to him all those years ago, a “faint” attractiveness, Nick emphasizes George’s weighed-down, damp, "spiritless" affect. In fact, he is explicitly tied to the Valley of Ashes, the bleak industrial part of Queens where he and Myrtle live.
James' manipulation of appearances in Daisy Miller as well as other character's notions of these appearances provides us with a novella of enigmatic and fascinating characters. Daisy, the most complicated of these ambiguities, is as mysterious as she is flirtatious. James gives her a carefully constructed enigmatic quality that leaves the reader wondering what her motivations were and who she truly was. He structures the novella in such a way as to stress the insights that the supporting characters provide into Daisy's character, weather accurate or erroneous. Despite their questionable reliability, they allow James to make commentary on both European and American cultures and social class.
Ernest Hemingway and Jamaica Kincaid both hold similarities and differences in their tone and style. A notable difference between Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” and Kincaid’s “Girl” is the structure of each literary work. Hemingway writes with short, concise sentences. He heavily relies on dialogue to carry the story of his characters. Kincaid wrote “Girl” in one long sentence, combining ideas with semi colons and commas. In Kincaid’s writing, the narrator is given two lines from their point of view, and is represented in italics. The italicized phrases are almost like a response to the comments made to the narrator: “but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school” and “but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?” (Kincaid). Each response is questioning the statement that preceded it. Due to Hemingway’s journalist background, his writing is edited and thought out. This is much different from Kincaid’s writing style, as she simply writes what she is thinking and does not edit it. As told in her speech during the Chicago Humanities Festival, Kincaid realized that what she was thinking is what she should write. In addition, Kincaid utilizes
Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises has his male characters struggling with what it means to be a man in the post-war world. With this struggle one the major themes in the novel emits, masculine identity. Many of these “Lost Generation” men returned from that war in dissatisfaction with their life, the main characters of Hemingway’s novel are found among them. His main characters find themselves drifting, roaming around France and Spain, at a loss for something meaningful in their lives. The characters relate to each other in completely shallow ways, often ambiguously saying one thing, while meaning another. The Sun Also Rises first person narration offers few clues to the real meaning of his characters’ interactions with each other. The
In conclusion, part of what makes Hemingway's style so unique is that he simply shows, without much telling. The matador scene in chapter 18 is rich because it provides penetrating insight with it's symbolism; Lady Brett with her elusive nature with men is captured through Romero's matador technique. The fact that Romero penetrates the bull with his sword accentuates the inherent masculinity that Brett displays—a sort of role reversal. Chapter 18 also highlights the character of Cohn, and his role as a foil and it's parallels to Belmonte's traditional