Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants": Abortion and Gender
This essay analyzes Ernest Hemingway's short story "Hills Like White Elephants" through the lens of gender dynamics, reproductive choice, and early twentieth-century American social history. Set at a railroad station between two diverging tracks, the story uses its physical setting as a metaphor for the crossroads facing an unmarried couple confronting an unplanned pregnancy. The essay examines how the man's subtle coercion and the woman Jig's gradual awakening reflect broader debates about birth control, women's liberation, and the shifting role of marriage and religion in modern society. Drawing on the women's liberation movement and contextual scholarship, the essay argues that Hemingway's deceptively simple narrative anticipates feminist discourse about gender power and female agency.
- Setting as Metaphor for a Relationship at a Crossroads: Railroad station symbolizes couple's pivotal life decision
- The Abortion Decision and Gender Power Dynamics: Man's coercion versus woman's passive submission analyzed
- Birth Control, Religion, and Social Change in 1920s America: Interwar debates over contraception and female autonomy
- Jig's Awakening and the Women's Liberation Context: Jig finds her voice amid feminist scholarly context
- Hemingway's Broader Cultural Vision: Hemingway reflects postwar shifts in gender and society
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay grounds its literary analysis in historical context, connecting the story's themes to the early twentieth-century American debate over birth control and contraception, which gives the reading real analytical depth.
- The author reads the physical setting — the railroad station, the hills, the fields of grain, the river — as deliberate symbolic choices rather than mere backdrop, demonstrating close attention to Hemingway's craft.
- Specific textual quotations are woven into the argument naturally, and each one is linked to a broader claim about gender, power, or reproductive agency rather than simply paraphrased.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The essay models contextual literary criticism: it reads a fictional text alongside its historical moment (the interwar birth-control debate, the women's liberation movement, changing gender norms) to show how a seemingly simple domestic story carries significant cultural weight. This move — situating the text within its social and political context — is a foundational skill in literary studies.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by establishing the story's symbolic setting and its central conflict. It then moves to the abortion debate and the gendered power imbalance between the two characters. A middle section historicizes the narrative by examining birth control politics and religious attitudes of the period. The essay then brings in scholarship on the women's liberation movement to frame Jig's emotional arc before closing with a broader claim about Hemingway's cultural awareness and legacy.
Setting as Metaphor for a Relationship at a Crossroads
Two people romantically involved arrive at a crossroad. Hemingway creates the perfect setting for this kind of situation: a small railroad station placed between two rail lines, in a desert-like landscape. A range of big white barren hills that no one could ignore borders one side of the scene. The big city will be their destination if they both decide they should continue their journey together and board the train. The window is small — the train stops there for only two minutes. The girl, as the author calls her at the beginning, is pregnant. A new life would change everything.
The unexpected pregnancy means the baby will add a new dimension to what they had been experiencing together — travelling without a worry about anything or anyone else, but their own happiness and well-being. Nothing new. There are endless rows of couples who go through similar experiences every day. The way they handle it depends on countless factors.
Embarked on their selfish love affair's journey, Hemingway's lovers had expected new experiences, new beverages, new sights, new worlds. They demanded novelty and felt perfectly happy savoring it. They had not prepared for the responsibility of a new life. Human beings like to plan. Human beings have the right to seek happiness, fall in love, enjoy their relationship, and get the best out of it. The unnamed American man in Hemingway's short story did not prepare for the imminent arrival of a baby; therefore, he sought the most convenient way to deal with it: abortion.
The Abortion Decision and Gender Power Dynamics
Abortion was supposed to make everything go back to normal. The girl wants their life to continue unaltered; on the other hand, she is waiting for a sign. She is the passive partner. It is the classical story of men who want to live free and uninhibited, and women who like living free and uninhibited as well — until they face the imminent prospect of becoming mothers and enter the next stage of their relationship.
He speaks as if everything were up to her, when in reality it feels as though she has a gun pointed at her head. One way of looking at things would be to blame the man and treat him as the "bad guy." He is the one in control of their relationship, after all; she is in love, totally submissive, and vulnerable. Another approach, and perhaps a more illuminating one, would be to consider both their positions and analyze their circumstances.
"It's just to let the air in," he tells her (Hemingway, 476), encouraging her to consent to an operation to abort the fetus. The vital source of life — air — becomes its antithesis. "It's not really an operation at all," he continues (Hemingway, 476). He does not want to acknowledge the gravity of such a decision. He does not want to consider the risks of the operation, which were considerable at the time, nor does he wish to assume responsibility for whatever choice she makes. All he is willing to do is to sit by her while the procedure is performed.
Birth Control, Religion, and Social Change in 1920s America
Hemingway's story is set between the two World Wars. The United States was going through tremendous changes in the area of birth control at that time. Some people were demanding reproductive autonomy, hoping to take charge of their own lives by deciding how many children they were willing or able to care for. On the other side, a significant portion of society fiercely opposed the idea of birth control or contraception.
Sexuality has long been one of humanity's most contested social questions. Christianity calls for chastity, and Catholicism asks not only that Mary be a virgin but that she maintain her chastity for the rest of her life. Moreover, Catholicism holds that the Virgin Mary was herself born of an immaculate conception. Sexual relationships are thus effectively removed from the equation by one of the largest religions of the past two millennia.
The contraceptive pill came to symbolize not only freedom but also power for women. Before it, an unplanned pregnancy was sometimes the only leverage a woman had to pressure a man into taking responsibility and marrying her. Once the pill became available, women gained control over every aspect of their lives — including the possibility of postponing marriage indefinitely without having to forgo other pleasures. The birth control debate in America was, at its core, a debate about who held authority over a woman's body and future.
Hemingway must have been perfectly aware of the social and political dimensions of this debate as it played out during the first two decades of the twentieth century. An unplanned pregnancy was a matter of life and death, violently stripping the joy from what had been a carefree relationship. The story of the man and the woman in "Hills Like White Elephants" could be that of almost any young American couple. They sit in the scorching sun — as if dropped from the sky, their laughter still echoing from moments earlier — and are suddenly forced to confront a serious problem.
References
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills Like White Elephants." From Charters, Ann, Ed. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2003.
Dowd, Maureen. "A Farewell to Macho." The New York Times. 2011.
Widmaier Capo, Beth. Textual Contraception: Birth Control and Modern American Fiction. The Ohio State University Press. Columbus.
Becnel, Kim. Bloom's How to Write about Ernest Hemingway. Infobase Publishing, 2008.
Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad, Rosalyn Baxandall, and Linda Gordon. Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement.
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