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.