Finding Strength Through Trauma: An Analysis of Hemingway’s Female Characters in A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises
World War I (WWI) impacted various works of Ernest Hemingway. The war was not only a pivotal time in Hemingway’s life but also in those of his characters, as the primary source of trauma. WWI holds great significance within American literature of the nineteen twenties. In the aftermath of the war, socially driven gender began to shift within society; Hemingway notes the shift in the development of his characters. Hemingway challenged antiquated ideals on women in a changing world through his literature. In his fiction, he often portrays strong-willed female protagonists interacting with male counterparts, who represent the new society. In doing so, he illustrates the growth of women in a suppressive society and their influences in a male-dominated world of change. Hemingway displays this feminine growth through two of his famous female leads, Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Brett and Catherine share various similarities but are distinctly different in how they are portrayed. Both women are psychologically damaged by the war, which distinctly changes their perspectives and actions within both of their lives. By detailing how Brett navigates her post WWI life and how Catherine approaches hers within the confines of the war, Hemingway demonstrates how the vastly changing world around his characters reflect the realities of the war-torn society in which he lived. After the loss of her significant other in WWI, Brett indulges in morally questionable behavior as a coping mechanism. Catherine’s loss of her fiancé and service as a nurse in WWI induce psychological trauma; to heal up, she becomes submissive in her new relationship. Although these two leading female characters may appear similar, they are different because of how they change their lifestyle to process these social changes.
Hemingway frames both of his main female characters in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms as products of the traumatic events that they witnessed in World War I. Much like the male counterparts in Hemingway’s novels and the expatriates that Hemingway aligned himself within post-World War I society, both Brett and Catherine have become disillusioned about life and the future. They have become overwhelmed by the devastation that the war has left within them. These two classic Hemingway leading ladies are British and volunteered as nurses during the war. Through their time spent within the confines of WWI, they witness horrendous events that scar their lives and change their perspectives about living forever. To add kindling to the fire of destruction that the war has had on these women, both Brett and Catherine lose the men they love as casualties of the war. The devastation in each woman’s life causes her to become emotionally bankrupt, melancholy about life and the future, and desperate to escape their pain. In each novel, these emotionally damaged women deal with this in different ways and develop coping mechanisms to continue to survive. Through this loss of their significant others and through the disillusionment that the blanket of war has encompassed them in, the contrasting aspects of their characters come to the surface.
Brett is depicted as a shallow character, seeming, because she is illustrated from a male perspective (Hage 3). Hemingway portrays her as fast and loose and has been scathely cast aside by critics as nothing more than a “nymphomaniac” (Kawada 16). She has her hair cut short, and she wears hats, she is unapologetically sexual and wildly promiscuous, she smokes and drinks heavily. She exerts great power over the men around her, as her beauty and charisma seem to charm everyone she meets. She refuses to commit to any one man – even though she is engaged to Mike Campbell throughout the entire novel – preferring to adhere to her ultimate independence. Although Brett is portrayed as being grossly independent, Jake Barnes remarks, “She can’t go anywhere alone” (Ch. 10, 102), which shows how unstable she is without someone new to maintain her attention away from her overwhelming emotional despair.
The character of Catherine Barkley is somewhat the opposite of Brett’s. Hemingway seemingly portrays Catherine as being the more traditional, classic type of woman: “She wore what seemed to [be] a nurse’s uniform, was blonde, had tawny skin and grey eyes” (16), her classic beauty and flowing locks are referenced repeatedly throughout the narrative. Hemingway has often been criticized for creating a one-dimensional leading lady. Critiques argue that Hemingway creates plain characters that are either “goddesses,” lake Catherine, or unhonorable ones, like Brett (Brillhart 1). Catherine comes off as being naive and simple and is submissive in the relationship that is formed between her and Lieutenant Frederic Henry. She continually states that she just wants to do whatever makes Frederic happy and that she and he are one. Her character is portrayed as being a true romantic. She desperately wants to escape her pain and regain the love that she has lost: “I’ll do what you want, and say what you want and then I’ll be a great success, won’t I?” (92). Upon first impressions, Catherine seems to be a character that lacks depth and only desires Frederic’s approval as well as his love.
One can understand the complexity of Hemingway’s Brett Ashley by looking into the traumatic events of her past more closely, as they lay the foundation for her present self. As a nurse during World War I, Brett witnessed gruesome, fatal injuries. During this time, she also lost her love. She then married a man suffering from what was then referred to as ‘shell shock’ and what can now be diagnosed as Post-traumatic stress disorder:
Ashley, chap [Brett] got the title from, was a sailor, you know. Ninth baronet. When he came home, he wouldn’t sleep in a bed. Always made Brett sleep on the floor. Finally, when he got really bad, he used to tell her he’d kill her. Always slept with a loaded service revolver. Brett used to take the shells out when he’d gone to sleep. She hasn’t had an absolutely happy life. (Ch. 17, 203)
Taken together, these events are the underlying traumas from which she suffers. Brett attempts to cope with the trauma when she has casual sex, drinks heavily, avoids beneath the surface commitment, and totes the lines between masculinity and femininity. These qualities are considered unfeminine and often pigeonhole Brett as either masculine or feminine. However, Brett ignores gender binaries. Looking at her past, it becomes apparent that she experienced highly traumatic events, leading to the loss of her old sense of self and, therefore, must try to reinvent herself in the aftermath. She develops androgynous characteristics to recreate her identity from those fragmented pieces and as a way to protect herself from further damage. Seeing Brett in this light shifts her image as a mere shallow character into one who is a strong survivor, capable of challenging societal norms to create her new persona.
Being the survivor that she is, Brett does her best to maintain herself in a post-World War I society. Brett is a strong woman who thrives on her independence. However, her freedom does not make her happy, as she has Post-traumatic stress disorder herself (Sion 240). She frequently complains to Jake about how miserable she is – her life, she claims, is aimless and unsatisfying. Her wandering from relationship to relationship parallels Jake and his ex-patriot friends who wander from bar to bar searching for something that was taken from them during the war. Her subsequent aimlessness, especially in regard to men, can be interpreted as a futile subconscious search for her lost love. Hemingway uses Brett’s personal search as an underlying symbol for the entire Lost Generation’s search for the prewar values of love, hope, and purpose that have been scattered to the wind in post-war society (Roger 74).
In contrast, to see the depth of Hemingway’s Catherine Barkley, one can closely look at her recent past as well as her present. Through the death of her childhood friend turned fiancé, Catherine is left with a shattered sense of the world. Looking back on her engagement, Catherine regrets not giving him her one ultimate gift before he died – herself: “He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known… I know all about it now… But then he wanted to go to war, and I did not know… That was the end of it” (16). The death of her fiancé made Catherine realize what war indeed was, contrary to her previous romantic ideas about it. This shattering of Catherine’s world view, coupled with the horrors of her current situation as a nurse in the throes of WWI, changed her fundamentally (Nolan 106). Unlike Brett, though, Catherine becomes more aware of her sense of self and her needs through her traumas. Catherine’s traumas shattered her world, not herself, like the traumas that Brett went through. Although she is aware that she is psychologically fragile, she is also aware of what needs to be accomplished in order to cope with her current war-torn situation. In this way, Catherine’s character can be looked at as a wiser counterpart to Brett, who does not lose her sense of self in the face of tragedy but figures out what she needs and takes steps to repair herself, even if it means playing submissive to Frederic.
One can examine Catherine’s character through the lens of one of Hemingway’s favorite stylistic features, the iceberg theory, and really look beneath the surface to comprehend the complexity of her character. Seeing that Catherine’s submissiveness and passivity are only the tip of the iceberg, reading her dialogue as ironic makes her self-awareness evident. Catherine is perfectly aware of the fact that Henry is playing a game, and what he says is a lie. It is not enough to say that Catherine is simply aware of this game, she is an active participant: “This is a rotten game we play, isn’t it?… You don’t have to pretend you love me…You see, I’m not mad, and I’m not gone off” (26, 27). Catherine’s involvement in his game is not a sign of her submissiveness but rather a way of her recuperating, repairing herself, and surviving in the tribulations of war. Thus, Catherine uses him for her own purposes. Their relationship proves therapeutic to Catherine, and the development of their affair parallels her recovery from depression as she puts her own shattered pieces back together again.
In breaking the traditional mold of women that were portrayed in American literature, Hemingway creates Brett Ashely and Catherine Barkley to represent the strength and determination of women in a post-World War I society. This is evident in Brett’s androgynous recreation of herself to escape her traumatic past, and the ability of Catherine to grab the reins of her shattered life and go after her only means of solace give new perspectives about the new kinds of women that were coming about during the post-World War I era. The war transformed women from being seen as purely weak creatures to strong, equal counterparts to men. By examining each character’s past, it becomes clear that the impact of the war played a huge part in these women’s developments but did not completely define who they were. In the aftermath of trauma that is so severe that it fundamentally changes who you are, Hemingway demonstrates how powerful the drive to escape the pain can be.
Works Cited
Brillhart, Kelly. ” Women without men: Hemingway’s female characters.” 1994, 1-48, digitalcommons.wku.edu/stu_hon_theses/77
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933.
Hage, Anna. “Men and women: The performance of gender in A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.” 2019, 1-17, su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1365008&dswid=-5205
Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.
Kawada, Eisuke. “The Artificial Incompleteness of Lady Brett Ashley: Magnifying One Modality of Hemingway’s Artistry in The Sun Also Rises.” Handle Proxy, 成蹊大学文学部学会, 1 Mar 2013, hdl.handle.net/10928/356.
Nolan, Charles J., Jr. “A Little Crazy”: Psychiatric Diagnoses of Three Hemingway Women Characters.” The Hemingway Review, vol. 28 no. 2, 2009, p. 105-120. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/hem.0.0034.
Rogers, Allison. “Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s muse of disillusionment” English Department of Theses, 2015, 1-112, hdl.handle.net/10950/279
Sion, Ng Lay. “Embracing Otherness: Mastery of Submission in The Sun Also Rises.” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, June 2017, 233-256., www.ijhcs.com/index.php/ijhcs/article/view/3102.