Gender Analysis in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

Through Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the author provided readers with a new, or complementary, definition of men, assigning personality traits like, as mentioned in class, stoicism and existentialism, or in other words the type of man that refuses to display emotions, and especially with Jake’s character, being that his war wound has left him impotent, severely, and that he’s considered to have “given more than [his] life” (39), one can only imagine the amount of personal pain, yet even with condition, continues to constantly act as the glue for the rest of the characters throughout the novel. But of course, to talk about Jake’s war wound would only segue into discussing his relationship with Lady Brett, a certainly complex one, which Jake sums up near perfectly after the end of the bullfights in Pamplona when she sends for him, this also being after when Romero, the young bullfighter Brett was so smitten with that Jake purposely introduces the two during the fiesta, departs: “That seemed to handle. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back” (243). Of course, this is after Jake would watch Brett go off to San Sebastian with Robert Cohn, the somewhat opposite of Jake, as well as with Michael Campbell, who for most of the novel, had plans with Brett to marry. I should note, simply, that nearly all the men in their group, except Bill, had these classic intentions with Brett, who, unfortunately for them, was a “new woman” of the 1920s, and “sexually peripatetic” (Onderdonk). Onderdonk also mentions that around Brett, men are seemingly supposed to be powerless around her due to her bold personality of the time, hence the usage of phrases referencing Cohn and Jake’s “behavior,” that is, whether they would succumb to her, despite whether she has any interest in them or not — playing to her nicer “expectations” would be considered “good behavior.” Even she mentions that at one point that Cohn “had a chance to behave so well” (185). Other things should be noted too about Brett other than her promiscuity. In the story, she is the only prominent female, and especially during multiple lines of unlabeled dialogue, Brett easily blends into the conversation with the rest of the men, and one can understand that she’s not at all different, yet, at the end of the novel it seems that it may be her that may find it harder to have the capacity to change, from the cycle of indifference that she continues to live through, just like the rest of them had during the story.
What’s interesting to note is that in Book I of the novel, Jake mentions that only bullfighters live their lives to the fullest, and despite a week of understanding Jake’s aficion for the sport, there’s a stubbornness to their indifference, there’s barely a time for reconsidering themselves, except the slight potential of self-realization for Jake, which we see in the final scene in the car with Brett.


Onderdonk, Todd. ""Bitched": Feminization, Identity, and the Hemingwayesque in The Sun Also Rises." Twentieth Century Literature 52.1 (2006): 61-91. Web. 25 Sep 2009. .

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Scribner Edition. New York: Scribner, 2006.

The Scarlet Letter: Romanticism & Realism

American Romanticism in literature, deemed by the Puritan-influenced society at the time (prior to 1875), would probably best be known as what some would call “classic” storytelling: a clear and obvious contest of Good and Evil with a moralistic purpose and catalytic guidance from the divine and other supernatural forces. In what would be my guess as an appeasement to the reader (being that the written language used was more complex than anyone was speaking back then), the story would be set somewhere exotic, in The Scarlet Letter for instance, the story takes place in “the wilderness,” a small town surrounded by the woods. In fact, it’s in these symbolic woods where the Devil exists, referred to in the novel as “The Black Man,” our prime supernatural being in the story. But when compared to Realism, which Hawthorne shows traces of with this novel, the morals are blurred, the focus is steered more towards the characters, with less dynamic plot turns and a closer look at everyday life.
And though The Scarlet Letter lies somewhat in between these two genres, there are more instances in the book that proves the case that this novel is much closer to Romantic literature. Mentioned earlier was the use of symbolism through nature, which is dominantly used in the forest for this story. Though there is the example in the very first chapter, of the rosebush by the jail house, the only good thing described in this scene, it almost seems as if it’s the only colorful thing, with the description of the surrounding gray and dirty atmosphere (36). The multiple forest references include all the major characters, for it’s where Hester lives on the outside of town (56), where her husband Chillingworth comes from just in time to see her get punished on the scaffold (53), and the only place where Dimmesdale feels safe and as himself, for he is the father of the “child of sin,” Hester’s daughter Pearl, a secret he hides until just before his death (126). But there is also many supernatural references as well, especially in the first twelve chapters of the novel (as where the latter half expounds more on the characters’ flaws in a “realistic” manner) (Rowe, 1208). Including moments when Chillingworth transforms in his anger toward Hester showing that the Devil is truly inside of him, for not cooperating with him as an aide (111), or when the great “A” appears in the sky at one of the end of Dimmesdale’s vigils (105). These examples set a clear example of what Romantic literature was/is like, elements like these, due to Westward Expansion and industrialization.
What’s important to notice is that the end of the novel doesn’t have a clear moral to tell. Despite what the rules were dictating at the time, unless is the story was referred to as “true” (i.e. “The Custom House”), certain things like shedding those high in the church in a negative or dark light as it was surely done in The Scarlet Letter.


1. Rowe, John Carlos. The Internal Conflict of Romantic Narrative: Hegel's Phenomenology and Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. MLN, Vol. 95, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1980), pp. 1203-1231. Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906489

2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 2005. Published by: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.