The Portrayal of Lady Brett Ashley as the Modern Woman of the 1920s in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

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

In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, we are taken back to the 1920’s, accompanied by the “Lost Generation.” During this time, prohibition was occurring in America. Hemingway uses alcohol as an obstacle that causes distresses between the main character, Jake and his life. Along with alcohol, promiscuity is prevalent throughout the novel. The heroine of the novel, Brett, displays the theme of promiscuity throughout the novel. She uses her sheer beauty and charming personality to lure men into her lonely life. The themes of alcohol and promiscuity intertwine with the Lost Generation in this classic love saga.

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.

Brett loves a good time and is not shy about pursuing her desires. Perhaps it's unfortunate that she now desires Jake, but his very inaccessibility could be irresistable to her. Who wouldn't sympathize with Jake? His dilemma is agonizing and yet he maintains some dignity, most of the time anyway. When he cries in the night, "[feeling] like hell again" (Hemingway, 34), he is truly the victim of cruel fate, isn't he?

His coward actions in Spain are motivated by the desire to possess Brett, but all men in this novel, except for Cohn himself, seem to have understood that she is cannot be possessed. This leads to a complete self destructive and uncontrolled anger which forces Cohn to leave Pamplona and be excluded from the group. It is also pride and control over himself that Cohn has lost to Brett, a display of his loss of masculinity. Finally, this perception of an emasculating woman can be pushed further to one that is seen as a goddess. While in the fiesta in Pamplona, a group of dancers, astonished by her beauty stop and dance around Brett, a scene that resembles many dances of devotions to different gods : “ Brett want to dance but they did not want want her to. They wanted her as an image to dance around. When the song ended with the sharp riau-riau! They rushed us into a wine-shop” (159).

Monica Milbut Ms. Stonikinis Honors English III 6 March 2015 Emotional Disconnection in The Sun Also Rises The Sun Also Rises is a novel that narrates the life of a group of friends after World War I. It communicates both the physical and emotional tolls that war has on both humans and society. War changes people usually for the worse. In my analysis I will delve into many of the characters pasts with major focus on Lady Brett’s.

She was unlike anything they had ever seen or would ever get to see again. She was different, but in a good way. She was one of them. Mike once compared her to circe, a character in a Greek myth who lured in men and then she transformed them into animals. Brett just wants sex without love, instead of the other way around like Jake.

At first glance, Ernest Hemingway’s The  Sun Also Rises is an over-dramatized love story of bohemian characters, but with further analysis, the book provides a crucial insight into the effects of World War I on the generation who participated in it. Hemingway’s novel follows a group of expatriates as they travel Europe and experience the post war age of the early 1900’s. The protagonist is Jake Barnes, an American war veteran who lives in Paris and is working as a journalist. Jake was injured during the War and has remained impotent ever since. His love interest, Lady Brett Ashley, is an alcoholic englishwoman with severe promiscuity, which is representative of women and the sexual freedom that emerged during the Progressive Era. Jake and Brett

Hemingway presented Jake and Brett to portray people with lost believes and nothingness. Both of them accepted their lives as it was and did not try to change anything. Hemingway is not optimistic about the future, for him and his characters the meaning of life is lost. Similarly to Hemingway, Kerouac shows readers how people wanted to escape reality, as to forget about war young people traveled across the country in order to find the lost meaning of the life and have fun. Kerouac chooses a different path and describes the characters of the

In the book The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Brett Ashley stirs trouble and causes lots of jealousy due to her yearning to be with every man she meets. The theme of love can be seen in almost every chapter of this novel, yet most of the time it is not mutual and Brett Ashley is the one to blame for that. She jumps around to many different men in the book making them all love her, but the next day she has moved on and the boy is stuck with unrequited feelings. For instance, Brett was engaged to be married with Mike. She meets a man called Romero though and swears that she has fallen in love with him. Brett discusses with Jake as she usually does describing her dilemma in chapter XVI. Brett says that when she meets a boy that she likes

Accordingly, this fiasco of the fun happens the night Brett rejects Jake as if she thinks it’s the worst thing to be in physical contact with him because he is incapable of having sexual intercourse “We’d better keep away from each other.” She detests as she looks into his eyes (Hemingway 34). Though having rights of her own in which every relationship her part chooses, she always seems to reject hers and Jake’s feelings for the fear that love in her case is the “…hell on earth”(Hemingway 35) . Though she dislikes it, she contradicts herself with

If you ask anyone in the world of literature about Ernest Hemingway, they will all most likely tell you that he was more of a man’s man, but yet he single-handedly created the character of Lady Brett Ashley. She was partially based off of his friend Lady Duff Twysden, but much of the creativity aspect goes to Hemingway. Her looks and charm were on par with that of a lady during the Roaring Twenties. She also had quite a few other aspects which made her stand apart from the rest of the women in her time period. Her affinity for short hair was paired with the clothing taste of a flapper, and men were swooning over her. It was not hard to see why Jacob Barnes had fallen in love with her to begin with. He actually believed that if it wasn’t for

All women in the 1920s were more passive and obeying compared to women today with a few exceptions, with Lady Brett being one of them. Meeting her for the first time, hemingway described her as, “damned good-looking”, not just pretty, but “damned good looking” This is probably why all the men were so attracted to her, but the main reason is because she was so different. Her short hair, no stockings, showing her curves through a loose-knitted sweater shows how she differentiated herself from other women. She also had multiple affairs, having sexual intercourse with many different men, which was more typical for men than women.

Brett demonstrates her physical apperance to be a similar to the New Woman as Hemingway describes her both as a bit of a boy with “her hair! -brushed back like boys” and as a woman with curves like “hull of a racing yacht” (Hemingway 30). Here, it is Brett’s hair that most clearly suggests the masculine, especially considering the time frame of this period to the earlier Victorian era where long hair symbolized a woman. The novel itself is then mindful of the significance of Brett's hair style as an image of the New Woman going up against manly qualities through its note that “She [Brett] started all that” (Hemingway 30). This thought Brett began bobbed hair styles puts her

To others, Jake’s dedication to the bullfight is evident. When Jake and Bill arrive at Pamplona, the hotelkeeper, Montoya, decides that Bill is “not aficionado like [Jake] is” (Hemingway 136). Going on to describe aficionado as “one who is passionate about the bull-fights”,