What Is Hemingway's View Of Bullfighting

Bullfighting has existed for thousands of years and it has been popular in Spain for nearly a millennium. Its cultural, economic and social impact to the Spanish culture is undeniable, but it is a theme that has encountered a very heated debate over the past years. Anti-taurine claim that bullfighting is indecent, unnecessary and barbaric, but their arguments are often unsubstantiated. The aggressive and bloody nature of this spectacle has always created extreme positioning among people on whether being in favor or not.

In both competitions, Santiago demonstrates a great sense of will power and perseverance. For example, the arm wrestling match was also a test of endurance, just like his battle with the marlin: “They had gone one day and one night with their elbows on a chalk line…the odds would change back and forth all night…but [Santiago would] raise his hand up to dead even again” (70). Similarly, he fights the fish for three long days and does not give up. After this twenty-four hour arm wrestling game, “everyone called him The Champion” (70). This defeat was important for Santiago because it proved that Santiago once had enough strength to beat the strongest man on the docks, who is implicitly compared to the marlin. It is also interesting to note that during this part of the narrative, Santiago also remembers another worthy opponent: Joe DiMaggio, another hero who shows an amazing strength of will that helps him overcome adversity. With this flashback, then, Hemingway establishes a sense of heroic virtues as spiritual rather than physical qualities.

The reason why I invited you all to come here to Madrid, is to discuss some critical ideas thoroughly, clarify different aspects that have been misinterpreted by the media, and reach a compromise solution towards our debate for today. Being gathered all around one table, I would like to take the opportunity to discuss with you one of the very controversial topics, which is bullfighting in Spain. I am not here to impose my thoughts, but rather explain my opinions and exchange them with you objectively in order to be able to find an answer to this converse question, “Should bullfighting be banned in Spain?”.

The artwork of bullfighting by Edouard Manet is an interesting historic event that goes into depth about the Spanish culture and cruelty of animals. It made me question whether or not bullfighting is really a cultural aspect or animal cruelty. Therefore, this paper will be focused on the tradition of bullfighting and the cruelty aspect of it. In the Spanish culture, there are three stages during a bullfight. It involves men (toreros), horses, and bulls. The event takes place in an arena and begins with a beautiful entrance with the participants wearing a traditional costume with vibrant colors. The toreros practice the art of bullfighting and pick up their own style of movements that are easily identified in the ring. The crowd can then identify the style of fighting the torero learns, by the movements he makes during his performance (pet news). Many people are critical of bullfighting and condemn it as a cruel, bloody sport, but in Spain, bullfighting is seemed as a test of bravery, skill, and grace. Bull fighting in Spain has been a cultural tradition, however, it is becoming increasingly less popular due to the fact that people realize it is inhumane for murder to be entertainment.

The title is a huge focus throughout this feature because Hemingway layers it into his work in

The setting in which the story takes place emphasizes the relationship of the man and the woman in the story. Hemingway writes:

In the Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Jake Barnes, Lady Brett, and their fellow drinking buddies go to Spain to watch the unloading of the bulls. In bullfighting the three main components are the bulls, steers, and matadors. Each part of the bullfight symbolizes different human characteristics, but every piece is just as important in order to have a bullfight. Barnes, Lady Brett, Cohn, and Romero are all counterparts to the bullfight. The dangerous and wild bullfighting in Spain parallels human behavior.

Hemingway uses Pedro Romero, a young, burgeoning bullfighter, as the model for masculinity. Only nineteen years old, Romero experienced the war

Romero’s status as bull-fighter suggests that, unlike the novel’s other male characters, he is capable of passionate love and sex. Although Cohn clings to an illusion of love for Brett, he is repelled initially by the bull-fights as boring, then later as gruesome. These means, in the more-than-slightly messed up world that Hemingway has created, that he's not a manly man.

Bullfighting is a sport in which a bull is baited and killed as a public demonstration in an arena. The sport has already been banned in various countries all across the world including America, Australia and Britain, however, it is still as popular as ever in countries such as Spain, France, Portugal and India. Is the tradition just an unjustifiable inhumane act, or are the benefits too vast to pass up?

The matador is a figure both of masculinity in his strength and gender, and femininity in his passivity, dress, and manipulation of desire. The passivity of the feminized matador “becomes her strength … against the man who goes ‘straight to the point’” (Schwartz 65). This question of “going straight to the point” is questioned in the text and is analogous to the loudness and failed performances of masculinity and men like Cohn are further likened to a bull. While figures of androgyny exercise great power in the book and failed male figures, the bulls and the men Brett controls fall to the figure of androgyny, Hemingway complicates the power of the androgynous figure through his masculine figure, Jake. Jake in unable to go “straight to the point” as he is impotent. Instead Jake’s position involves a triangulation of the desire manipulated in a bullfight and he represents an observer. He both observes the object of his affection Brett manipulate the desires of men and he watches the figure of a matador manipulate the desires of the bull, suggesting a

According to Seufert, by the first half of the 1700s bullfighting became "extremely popular and produced its first professional of historic significance, Francisco Romero" (p. 4). Romero was a shoemaker who was born in Roda in southern Spain and reportedly he was first to use

The origins of bullfighting can be traced back to prehistoric times. The Greeks sacrificed bulls for religious reasons, but in its earliest forms, bullfighting did not even involve humans. The bull was often put into a small enclosure with another predatory animal, such as a tiger or lion, and the beasts fought to the death. The spectacle eventually evolved into a struggle between man and bull gaining similarities with what we know today as bullfighting. Along with these changes came the spectacle and formalities that are now an integral part of the corrida de toros. Arguably, the first of the modern bullfight took place in Vera, Logroño, Spain in 1133. The modern bullfight evolved from rejoneo, which

     “Raging Bull” (1980) is not a so much a film about boxing but more of a story about a psychotically jealous, sexually insecure borderline homosexual, caged animal of a man, who encourages pain and suffering in his life as almost a form of reparation. Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of a film drags you down into the seedy filth stenched world of former middleweight boxing champion Jake “The Bronx Bull” LaMotta. Masterfully he paints the picture of a beast whose sole drive is not boxing but an insatiable obsessive jealously over his wife and his fear of his own underling sexuality. The movie broke new ground with its brutal unadulterated no-holds-bard look at the vicious sport of boxing by bringing the camera

In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway writes “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters” (100). Spoken by Jake, this line exemplifies the importance that bullfighting plays in the novel. It's not only portrayed as a sport, but rather as a complex, mathematical art in the form of a dance between the bull and fighter. The matador scene in chapter 18 is perhaps one of the richest in the novel due to it's use of symbols. The choreography between Romero and the bull is reflective not only of the characterization of Brett and Jake, but of the relationship between Brett, her masculinity, and her