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Theme Of Gender Roles In The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway

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Lydia Linden
Professor Wilson
How to Tell a True War Story
October 12 2017
Gender Roles
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway, is about the growing emergence of a new type of woman that comes about in the early twentieth century. In the novel Hemingway creates new models for strong American women that had not been used before in literature. Hemingway’s main female character, Lady Ashley Brett has even less regard for her absence of conformity with the societal expectations of her era than any female character that precedes her in American literature. Hemingway uses the character of Brett to reconsider the preexisting gender roles for women and men in the twentieth century by revealing that manly, alcoholic, and emotionally careless women can still be loveable, but in doing so Hemingway emphasizes the ‘code’ system of gender that his character Lady Ashely Brett is trying to escape from.
Lady Ashley Brett has many manly qualities that in the nineteenth century would have made her unattractive to most men, but in the twenty first century her qualities only add to her sex appeal. Lady Ashley Brett’s qualities include her short hair and the manly wardrobe. The men don’t mind her masculine appearance as Hemingway writes, “Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey”

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