Masculinity In The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway

During the post-war modernism era writers portray the gender compound in interesting and unique ways. The book follows a group of Americans as they travel around Europe soon after World War One. In Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece The Sun Also Rises the narrator, Jake Barnes, and the other main character’s gender characterization is unique in that the main character’s gender traits juxtapose each other throughout the novel.

Masculinity has become a vague term, but when people think of the word they think of the qualities generally associated with men. Well so did Ernest Hemingway back in 1962 when he wrote The Sun Also Rises. Ernest Hemingway was an amazing writer and he was one of the people who believed that guys should be masculine and girls should be feminine. His novel The Sun Also rises is a good example of this. In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway shows us what he thought the definition of masculinity was by having his characters show us the many things that would make you masculine in his eyes, such as being in a war, getting really drunk, and bullfighting. This was his way of showing us through his characters how he believed men and women should

Ernest Hemingway, a literary icon of the early twentieth century, challenged the typical lengthy and detailed prose of authors before him by pioneering a stylistic revolution centered around heavy dialogue and minimalistic details. More specifically, “Hemingway used a journalistic style and unadorned prose to capture the everyday lives of men and women caught up in history’s most momentous events,” without wasting pages establishing the setting or background within a work like most authors of the nineteenth century (The Letters… 442). Often, the mood, setting, and emotion within Hemingway’s stories are established through symbolism and constant dialogue. Hemingway expertly implements his unconventional and unique authorial style to convey the disparity in gender communication and perspectives and its effects on relationships in his 1927 short story, Hills Like White Elephants.

A Proverb once stated, “Opposites attract.” Scientist, chemist, doctors, and even matchmakers around the world know this statement to be true. However in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the relationship between Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn proves this statement wrong. Throughout the novel, Lady Brett has many types of relationships with a variety of people, most of whom are men. Some of these men include Jake Barnes, the narrator of the story, Mike Campbell, her supposed husband, and Pedro Romero. Lady Brett’s laid back, independent, and rather promiscuous life style creates many

In this short story by J.D. Salinger, masculinity with war time behavior is embodied through Franklin Graff’s life. During this time period any man away at war is considered a real man. Franklin is not able to become a soldier due to a bad heart. This results in him being flirted with from the same sex and losing the special girl in his life. He now struggles with being emasculated in his every day activities and lifestyle.

1.) The people in the novel The Sun Also Rises are lost in more ways than one. The men all throughout the novel would struggle with the idea of masculinity. For instance Romero is wanting to marry Brett. Although, he wants Brett to conform to the traditional, feminine woman. Brett confides into Jake saying how "He said it would make me more womanly. I'd look a fright," (246). This connects to the idea of masculinity and how it is hard for men in that time period to obtain it. That is because one of the many ways masculinity was obtained wat through women. If he could control Brett how he wanted, and marry her, he would become more manly. Another way in which the people in the novel are lost is that they feel a need to be accepted. Cohn was

There is a feel of harassment, competition, rivalry, and arguments caused by the men’s challenged masculinity. Jake exemplifies insecurity in the novel as well as Brett. Hemingway models “The Sun Also Rises” after his own insecurities, concepts of masculinity, and life events. When Hemingway turned eighteen he attempted to enlist in the army, however, he was denied at first because of his poor eyesight and became an ambulance

Women of the 1920’s compared to women today are seen as very passive and were usually domestic wives whose main responsibility was to take care of the house and children. But throughout this decade, women were starting to slowly modernize and become more independent. In The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Lady Brett Ashley is somewhat portrayed as “the admirable new woman” of the 1920’s-the woman who openly flaunts accepted conventions of the passive, dependent female role in society and emerges as a positive, inspiring, and risk-taking figure in Paris, Pamplona, and Madrid among the male expatriate artists. In the novel, we see Brett as a modern and somewhat inspiring woman through characterization and the analysis of specific moments

The outcome and brutality of the Great War causes the change and promotion of many things in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises. Some of the most evident changes the Great War causes are the changes in the traditional roles of men and women and in the promotion in the use of alcohol. Hemingway expresses these changes through the actions of some of the books main characters, most notably Jake and Brett. The novel’s characters perform these taboo and abnormal actions in response to the Great War and the war’s impact on the characters.

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

Hemingway’s works for almost a century have been deemed sexist under the scrutinizing eyes of some readers. They stake their claims around examples such as: shorter scene length and tension in dialogue with women compared to more generous length and easier-going conversations with men, protagonist comfort level between men versus women, and sentence flow when women are involved. Critics rebuke said statements by saying although there are definitely sections of text that contain these accusations, there are other examples that show equality between men and women. Hemingway was not gender biased, but his life experiences and personality greatly affected his works, which makes sense due to his personal lack of connection and uneasiness with women (Torma).

Also, Hemingway was considered to be “vitally concerned with re-establishing what he felt were the proper rules of man and women in their relationship to each other” (Fiedler, 305). This is shown in his portrayal of women in

In two of Hemingway’s novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises, the male protagonists differ completely regarding their masculinity. Hemingway’s rhetorical use of vivid imagery

In the short story “Indian Camp”, by Ernest Hemingway, many controversies arise about the idea of feminism in the text. Feminism is a general term used to describe advocating women’s rights socially, politically, and making equal rights to those of men. Feminist criticism is looked through a “lens” along the line of gender roles in literature, the value of female characters within the text, and interpreting the perspective from which the text is written. Many of Hemingway’s female characters display anti-feminist attributes due to the role that women play or how they are referred to within a text by him or other characters. There are many assumptions that go along with the

Literary essay: the effects of World War I on the characters of Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta: The Sun also Rises