The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway Essay

CitedDonnel, Sean M.. Hemingway's Short Fiction and the Crisis of Middle Class Masculinity. [Online] Available http://www.elcamino.edu/Faculty/sdonnell/hemingway's_ masculinity.htm , May 12, 2006.

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

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

Throughout his years, various women had walked into the famous writer Ernest Hemingway’s life. Yet these same women never remained with Hemingway for long and soon enough walked out on him, with the exception of his last and final wife. Thus the love life of Ernest Hemingway proved to be a complex one. However the time each woman had spent with Hemingway did not simply end with their break-ups; instead the women’s brief relationship with Hemingway served to be a great source of inspiration for the famous writer. As a result, Hemingway's depiction of women in his literary works was influenced and inspired by these various women in his life.

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

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

Hemingway often made his females characters manipulating, unpleasant, and just plain callous. Hemingway despised the idea of femininity and all things that surrounded it. Hemingway was disgusted with the post-World War I era youth and society of America. He felt that women and men where blurring the lines of gender roles in this era. In Hemingway’s stories he often gave men, feminine and women, masculine characteristics.

In the The Sun Also Rises there are many characters, the majority of which are men. Each of the men have one thing, or rather one person in common, Lady Brett Ashley. Each of the gentlemen introduced in the story have, in some way, a relationship with Lady Brett Ashley. The character of Lady Brett Ashley, in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, is indicative of the Modern Woman’s inability to truly love.

Hemingway once said, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There's nothing to it” (p. 19). Cohn, like the other characters in the novel, wanted to find a place of self satisfaction and worldly value. In Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, inescapable struggle, pain and worthlessness are evident throughout the novel. Based in the early 1920’s not long after the war, everyone had seen more than what they had hoped for. They longed to see and feel calm and peace with life situations and themselves. In her article, “Character Studies: Lady Brett Ashley,” published in the Paris Review, LaCava noted, “How heavenly to not worry what anyone thought, to engage in the forbidden pleasures of alcohol and sex” (para. 8). This is how the majority of people portrayed life at this time, but there were more underlying feelings. War injuries, feelings of masculine inferiority, and longing to find the perfect prince charming, plague the characters. Drinking and being

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

Hemingway’s first important work was The Sun Also Rises, it is about a young, promiscuous girl, Brett Ashley. Ashley has bobbed hair, and has had many love affairs. Showing a tone of hopeless love and hope for the “lost generation”, this book was an encouragement and influential novel. When the book was released, American adolescents responded. Young women cut their hair and changed clothing, imitated the tone of hopeless love, and young men thought of themselves as the aftermath of the war, but found hope (Ernest Hemingway, 1989, 95). If The Sun Also Rises were released now, what would the reaction be? Promiscuity? More than likely, no. Girls and guys alike are very promiscuous today. It’s not uncommon for someone to hook up casually with someone or have a friend with benefits. Today, people would not be shocked by the promiscuity in The Sun Also Rises. Would young women bob their hair? Look at any modern magazine and you see actresses and supermodels with bobbed hair. The influence of the book most likely would not increase the rate of girls deciding to bob their hair. What makes the reaction so different? Why would it have such an influence on a generation eighty years ago and not have a similar impact today? Today, morals are very different than they were in the

Throughout Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises many themes are seen. Among them being Drinking, nature, the lost generation, masculinity, and sexuality. Probably the most important out of these would be that of sexuality. Within the book it is simply seen as a means to an end, the relationships are not usually well thought out or meaningful. Rather they simply serve a purpose of showing that one can be in one without being committed to anything at the same time. One of the biggest parts that shows of this is how relationships are in constant flux throughout the entire novel.

The high-minded ideas of their elders were not to be trusted; the only reality was truth and that was harsh. Life was futile and often meaningless. According to "President Harding's 'back to normalcy' policy, subject seemed to its members(the lost generation) to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren"(“Lost Generation” 487). This demonstrates why this generation was in search of its own values. "The moral hypocrisy of Prohibition that so irritated Hemingway's generation produced exactly the reaction that Hemingway documents in his novel"(Reynolds 62).

In the first chapters of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, we start to look into what is to be considered to be the New Woman in the 1920s. Young woman with bobbed hair and short skirts who drank, smoked and said “unladylike” things, in addition to being more sexually free than previous generations. “This later New Woman pushed past the example of the preceding generation by infringing on the masculine in her physical appearance as well as in her level of education and career choice by combining masculine and feminine traits” (Yu). In the first chapters of this novel Hemingway emphasizes the New Woman and their social culture. He does this by his portrayal of Brett. Brett in the novel is the perfect example of the New Woman in her apperance, the role she plays, and how she uses sexuality.

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