Hemingway's War Themes: A Survey of Critical Perspectives

Introduction: Hemingway's Enduring Legacy

Ernest Hemingway was a prolific writer, but it is unlikely that he could have imagined that fifty years after his death there would be hundreds — perhaps thousands — of critiques, reviews, and scholarly assessments of his books. There is no doubt that Hemingway knew his best works would remain popular and in the public eye, but could he have projected that his writing would continue to generate the critical stir it does today?

The tone and themes of the vast variety of assessments and critiques of Hemingway's novels and short stories — especially those where war is the central theme — vary wildly and interestingly, and are the subject of this paper. What most scholars and English majors studying his novels might not know is that Hemingway also dabbled in real-world politics. Ron Capshaw writes that while Hemingway helped raise money for communist revolutionary Luis Quintanilla, he also gave speeches in the 1930s that "warned against Hitler" at the very same time the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA) was "dismissing the Nazis" (Capshaw, 2002, p. 1).

Gender and Masculinity in War-Themed Fiction

An example of the extraordinarily diverse themes found in war-related Hemingway scholarship appears in Richard Fantina's critique, in which he asserts that few scholars are willing to address the fact that Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises "lacks a full complement of male genitalia" (Fantina, 2003, p. 2). Fantina finds it "more remarkable today" than when The Sun Also Rises was first published that an author so closely identified with "traditional masculinity" as Hemingway could create a character who actually lacks "a complete penis," even as other heroes in his books "rarely make use of that organ in lovemaking" (Fantina, p. 1). Barnes was wounded in World War I, and his injury sits at the heart of the novel's meditation on masculinity, desire, and loss.

A Farewell to Arms: Love, War, and Gender Roles

Many critics believe the best novel Hemingway ever wrote is A Farewell to Arms. Written in 1929, it "solidified Hemingway's reputation as one of the greatest writers of his generation" (Timeless Hemingway/FAQs). Critic Marc Hewson offers an interesting reading of the novel, asserting that it is not a typical masculine war story but rather a love story that "grows out of" the death and destruction on the Italian war front (Hewson, 2003, p. 2). The WWI setting allowed Hemingway to "expose the difficulties that rigid gender roles imposed on both sexes," Hewson explains. Whether Hemingway intended it or not, by "juxtaposing the worlds of war and love" in A Farewell to Arms, he managed to imagine a world beyond early twentieth-century "social values" (Hewson, p. 2).

Conclusion

The critics and scholars who have mused, speculated, postulated, and poked at Hemingway's many war-themed books and stories have not yet run out of approaches or ideas within that genre. Because of the large volume of writing by Hemingway that embraces armed conflict — and because so many of his characters are transformed by that conflict — there will never be an end to the critical possibilities his work presents. This paper has presented only a small selection of the approaches taken to Hemingway's war-themed fiction and drama, but even this brief survey demonstrates that the variety of critical angles available continues to offer fresh interest and value to readers and scholars alike.

Works Cited

Capshaw, Ron. "Hemingway: A Static Figure Amidst the Red Decade Shifts." Partisan Review, 69(3), 2002, p. 441.

Fantina, Richard. "Hemingway's Masochism, Sodomy, and the Dominant Woman." The Hemingway Review, 23(1), 2003, p. 84.

Hewson, Marc. "'The Real Story of Ernest Hemingway': Cixous, Gender, and 'A Farewell to Arms.'" The Hemingway Review, 22(2), 2003, p. 51.

Oliver, Charles M. "Hemingway and the OED." The Hemingway Review, 26(2), 2007, p. 105.

Owens-Murphy, Katie. "Hemingway's Pragmatism: Truth, Utility, and Concrete Particulars in A Farewell to Arms." The Hemingway Review, 29(1), 2009, p. 87.

Timeless Hemingway. "Ernest Hemingway FAQ." 2010. Retrieved June 6, 2011, from http://www.timelesshemingway.com.

Valis, Noel. "Hemingway's The Fifth Column, Fifth Columnism, and the Spanish Civil War." The Hemingway Review, 28(1), 2008, p. 19.

Washington, Gene. "Hemingway, The Fifth Column, and the 'Dead Angle.'" The Hemingway Review, 28(2), 2009, p. 127.