Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by Ernest Hemingway
2003; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2161-8178
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoAlthough I am not suggesting we attempt again to read literature as the New Critics asked us to (but could not themselves do)-that is, divorced from any consideration of the history and culture influenced the work, I do like to teach works of literature run counter to authors' reputations and thus remind us not to jump to conclusions about a work based on biographical knowledge (or pseudo-knowledge) of its creator. For example, in order to help students understand why they cannot assume the first-person persona of a poem is the poet herself, I read Emily Dickinson's Wild Nights, then ask students to contrast the poem's speaker with the poet, as her reclusive, apparently celibate life is described in their anthology's introduction.Two of my favorite Ernest Hemingway stories are Indian Camp and Hills Like White Elephants. I teach these stories in spite of reputation as a misogynist and my own sensibilities. I teach them not only because I recognize genius with the craft of the short story, but also to show students they should not make assumptions about a writer's work based on some vague impression they have of the author's character. For example, I've had students insist Edgar Allan Poe wrote some fantastic story we were discussing while on a drug-induced trip or William Faulkner's rambling, page-long sentences are a result of writing while intoxicated. Similarly, their image of Hemingway as some macho hunter, drinker, womanizer, and misogynist often blinds them to any positive reading of his female characters.In the introduction to his 1999 book on Hemingway, Carl P. Eby points out [f]or the past two decades, Hemingway criticism has been dominated by a reconsideration of the role of gender in his work; therefore, Eby contends, Hemingway's reign as the hairy-chested icon of American masculinity is coming to an end. However, Eby quickly qualifies this statement:[T]his message hasn't yet filtered down to the general reading public. In the popular imagination, Ernest the monovocally masculine bullfight aficionado, boxer, hunter, deep-sea fisherman, and pitchman for Ballantine Ale and khaki pants still looms over the American literary horizon like a testosterone-crazed colossus. Neither has the message filtered down to many academic departments, where opinions like those expressed by Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader [1978] (i.e., Hemingway was merely a male chauvinist-pig) are as often as not still in vogue. (Eby 1999, 3)1Such was the attitude toward Hemingway I detected as a graduate student listening to other graduate students and some professors who seemed puzzled as to why I, presumably a scholar, would include a chapter on him in my dissertation; such has been my experience, as I've already indicated, as a professor introducing Hemingway to students with preconceived notions about Ernest Hemingway the man (and thus regarding his depiction of women). Consequently, I agree with such scholars as Stephen P. Clifford that the myth of misogyny, at least in his fiction, is itself a construct created by his readers (1998, 177).2Therefore, when I teach these two Hemingway stories in particular, I approach them from a feminist perspective, ironically in the tradition of Judith Fetterley (ironic since Fetterley incorporated her 1977 article condemning characterization of Catherine Barkley into her book, The Resisting Reader3). I agree with and here employ the reading method Fetterley promotes in her book-re-examining male-centered texts from the woman's perspective-even as I disagree with her perception of characterization of women. Thus, I am a resisting reader, but what I resist is pre-judging the work based on the author's reputation.Linda Patterson Miller poses several questions regarding reader responses to female characters as in character and weak as characters. …
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