Gender Identity in Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden”

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Ernest Hemingway emerged as one of America’s more colorful writers in the early to mid-1900s, presenting himself as the ultimate man’s man, worldly traveler, mighty hunter, and hard-drinking spinner of tales. Within a short span of time, 1925-1929, he had established himself as having produced some of the most important literary fiction in his century. His short stories focused on the virtues held by men a generation or two earlier than him as well as the effects and aftereffects of war. Yet each story contained a deeper message within the lines if the reader felt the desire to go searching for it. He believed in omitting extra details as a way of strengthening his stories. He compared this to an iceberg. Just like only the top 1/8th of an iceberg can be seen above the water with the rest remaining below the surface providing it with its momentum and dignity, Hemingway believed his stories should follow the same structure. Although some critics loved him, others said his stories were shallow. “He had no sympathy for women, they said, portraying them either as manhood-destroying bitches or as mere objects of sexual domination” (Lynn 10). His novels built off of these approaches, developing from a strong autobiographical background heavily influenced by the people he knew, some of which remained unpublished until well after his death to protect the character originals. Hemingway reportedly spent 15 years working on one such novel, Garden of Eden in between his other activities and writing, beginning in 1946 and leaving it unfinished when he died (Doctorow, 1986). While it is widely known that Hemingway had a very definite idea regarding what constituted a ‘real man, this novel reveals that he was also well aware of the fluidity of gender identity between the sexes. Throughout the novel, Hemingway uses the characters of Catherine, David, and Marita to criticize the fluidity of gender identity and the unhappiness it causes when traditional lines are crossed.

Main body

The relationship between Catherine and David is fundamentally flawed because of Catherine’s lack of conviction within her sexual role. Catherine crosses the gender boundary on an emotional level when she begins to exhibit the very un-feminine emotion of jealousy over her husband’s success. A traditional ‘true’ woman was expected to be properly submissive to her husband and supportive in all that he does, realizing that his success was her own even if she remains unrecognized for her part. When the press clippings come regarding David’s warm literary reception in America, Catherine reveals this intense jealousy to be of tremendous depth. She tells him, “How can we be us and have the things we have and do what we do and you be this that’s in the clippings?” (Hemingway 24). She asserts that the man in the newspaper is a different man than the one she is married to because the one she is married to could never dream of being mentioned anywhere without having his wife equally and completely recognized as his partner. “Although Catherine evinces a desire to further her husband’s career, she is only expressing a willingness to help him so that she may somehow be a part of his work. She is envious of his abilities to write and because she does not share that part of his life, she retaliates with violent and harmful force” (Bogdan-Andrei, 2008). When David tells her he wants to begin another novel, her response is one of frustrated rejection and angry impotence: “Then write, stupid. You didn’t say you wouldn’t write. Nobody said anything about worrying if you wrote. Did they?” (Hemingway 27). When David fails to take the hint implicit in her tone and completes this next book, Catherine takes a masculine hand in destroying his manuscript and every indication that he has a life outside of her in a way that she cannot have outside of him.

Catherine wants to be recognized, idolized, and loved for her contributions to the world, but remains convinced she cannot do so as a girl, which is brilliantly illustrated through her symbolic hairstyle acquired within the first chapter. Catherine’s big surprise for her husband on their honeymoon is not a new negligee or something that further defines her as feminine or takes into consideration his desires. Instead, she has cut her hair to a boy’s style, telling David, her husband, “That’s the surprise. I’m a girl. But now I’m a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything” (Hemingway 15). Demonstrating a clear desire for gender reversal, Catherine has even insisted on going to the same haircutter that styled David’s hair so that she can get the exact same cut. However, she still does not manage to find equality even in this bold gesture as David, attempting to be supportive of her decision, tells her, “I like it … And you have such a beautifully shaped head that it is very beautiful with the lovely bones of your face” (16). Hemingway throws his own narrative comment in regarding this symbolic move on her part through the reaction of the villagers: “No decent girls had ever had their hair cut short like that in this part of the country and even in Paris it was rare and strange and could be beautiful or could be very bad. It could mean too much or it could only mean showing the beautiful shape of a head that could never be shown as well” (17). The role reversal becomes complete that evening as they are in bed and Catherine insists that David has now become Catherine while she herself has become Peter.

For his part, David is willing to allow Catherine her equality to a certain extent. As is already mentioned, he shows his support and acceptance of her new hairstyle, playfully referring to her as a boy and brother during dinner and reluctantly going along with her that night. However, with her playacting, David becomes strongly disturbed, mentally and emotionally telling his wife goodbye at the same time as he realizes that he is not capable, regardless of how hard he tries, of playing the role of the woman. He says goodbye to her at this point and adopts a passive-resistant attitude toward her from that point forward. When Catherine brings a girl into the relationship, his initial reaction is full of justifiable rage and feelings of betrayal, but these begin to change as Catherine expresses her intent that David sleeps with Marita as well.

The arrival of Marita signals another significant change in the couple’s relationship as Catherine becomes better able to alternate her gender identities – one day a male with Marita, the next day a female with David. This is again a sign of Catherine attempting to achieve equal status along gender lines. If she is sleeping with the same woman that David is sleeping with, she can maintain her fiction that she is a male in the relationship. In terms of David’s reaction, however, Catherine has inadvertently provided him with the female support person he had been looking for in Catherine. Because Marita doesn’t force him to adore her, thus taking up a ‘proper’ feminine role within the relationship, she is able to provide just the kind of support and help David needs to overcome his losses brought about as the result of Catherine’s jealous fits. At the same time, Catherine’s gender confusion is seen as the primary cause of her distress and the distress she brings about for others.

There are several suggestions within the text that indicate Catherine is supposed to emerge as the cause of social unrest. Within their first recorded conversation, Catherine tells David, “I’m the destructive type … And I’m going to destroy you” (Hemingway 6). While this can be interpreted in terms of playful threats and sexual innuendo, it can also be seen, through retrospectives at the end of the novel, as an early indication of Catherine’s true nature and ultimate effect. Her jealous guardianship of David’s time and attention prevents him from working on material with greater literary merit than what she would have him write about while his refusal to do so results in her destruction of his work. “Catherine comes across as an impetuous, castrating man-hater, who’s on the verge of cracking up” (Kakutani, 1986) and indeed, disappears at the end of the novel on a convenient business trip that takes her completely out of the story, still unhappy, confused and incapable of finding an answer. In Catherine, Hemingway demonstrates the common perception, particularly of males of the time, of the emerging ‘New Woman’ and feminist crowd and illustrates the inevitable unhappiness and destruction they bring about because of their refusal to fall into line with traditional gender roles.

At the same time, David seems to find the most common answer to Catherine’s problem when he mentions, “You are too sleepy to be dangerous” (Hemingway 6), as if by keeping her tired and sexually satisfied he will keep her out of mischief. This hyper-male attitude that the best way to appease a dissatisfied woman is in the bedroom suggests that Catherine is simply over-enthused about her recent married status and must merely find a means of settling down into her appropriate married role. In the meantime, David’s responsibility is simply to humor her until her foolishness has run its course and things begin to return to a more normal routine. The introduction of Marita into the relationship, however, provides Catherine with more rest for trouble and more material over which to be jealous, adding fuel to an already too-hot fire. It also exacerbates the destruction of the marriage as Catherine’s role as the wife is slowly usurped by the woman she herself brought in and the role of the husband is already occupied by David himself.

Conclusion

By the end of the story, Hemingway has permitted his characters to undergo a strange and somewhat philosophic journey through their fluctuating gender identities to finally establish a ‘proper’ world order. At the beginning of the story, a man and a woman are seen in their proper roles as a married couple, with a few modern quirks such as Catherine’s tendency to wear shorts rather than skirts. However, the falsity of this traditional scene is quickly exposed as Catherine asserts her masculinity and David displays, through his reluctant acceptance of her experimentation, a more feminine nature. In an attempt to meet everyone’s needs, Catherine brings in Marita as a means for both Catherine and David to express their masculinity without wishing to relinquish her exclusive hold on David’s heart and mind. While Catherine’s more masculine stance compared to David is seen as threatening and non-productive, Marita’s presence is very feminine and comforting to the young author, who quickly finds himself inspired to write a very good collection of short stories. By the novel’s end, Catherine has unhappily disappeared into the sunset while David and Marita adopt their socially proscribed roles as male and female respectively. Through this sequence of events, Hemingway conveys the idea that only by adhering to the traditional definitions and constraints of established gender roles can individuals find any measure of true happiness.

Works Cited

Bogdan-Andrei, Gavrila. “Envy: A Pitfall of Marriage in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” Referate. 2008. Web.

Doctorow, E.L. “Braver Than We Thought.” New York Times. (1986). 2008. Web.

Hemingway, Ernest. Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner, 1995.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times: The Garden of Eden.” New York Times. (1986). 2008. Web.

Lynn, Kenneth S. Hemingway. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.

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Gender Identity in Hemingway’s “Garden of Eden”

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