1st Edition
Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Selected Works
Ernest Hemingway and the Fluidity of Gender presents fresh insight into the gender issues and sexual ambiguities that have always been present in Hemingway’s work, utilising a variety of historical, socio-cultural and biographical contexts. Offering a close analysis of the gender issues and sexual ambiguities present in Hemingway’s work, this book provides insight into the position of white middle-class women in America from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, illuminating Hemingway’s androgynous impulses and the attitudinal changes that occurred during Ernest Hemingway’s lifetime. Women and gender were Hemingway’s steady concern; his fictional females are drawn with the same kind of complexity and individuality like his fictional males, manifesting endurance, stoic courage and grace under pressure. This volume highlights Hemingway’s textual world’s resistance of patriarchal phallocratism and his abolition of the binaries of masculinity/femininity, passivity/activity and the like, dismantling binary oppositions involving gender and sexuality. Exploring the metamorphosis of American social and cultural history, this volume unravels the stereotypical myths associated with womanhood and the complexity of women in Ernest Hemingway’s novels.
Tania Chakravertty is the Dean of Students’ Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. Chakravertty has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University on “Gender Representations in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway”. Chakravertty visited the US to participate in the academic group project “Strengthening and Widening the Scope of American Studies: The U.S. Experience” in 2010 as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her monographs have appeared in national and international journals.
Introduction
Chapter 1
Women and Ernest Hemingway’s World: A General Survey of White Middle Class American Women and their Socio- Cultural Milieu from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century
Chapter 2
Reformulations of Gender Roles in The Sun Also Rises
Chapter 3
The Heroic and Stoical Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms
Chapter 4
Gendered Conflicts in Selected Short Stories
Chapter 5
Marital Relations in To Have and Have Not
Chapter 6
The Question of Woman and Consent in For Whom the Bell Tolls
Chapter 7
Across the River and Into the Trees: Yet another tale of war and death and of a love like no other
Chapter 8
Transgressions in The Garden of Eden
Chapter 9
Conclusion: Ernest Hemingway, Androgyny and Mergers of the Masculine-Feminine Status Quo
Biography
Tania Chakravertty is the Dean of Students’ Welfare, Diamond Harbour Women’s University, West Bengal, India. Chakravertty has a Ph.D. from Calcutta University on "Gender Representations in the Fiction of Ernest Hemingway". Chakravertty visited the US to participate in the academic group project, "Strengthening and Widening the Scope of American Studies: The U.S. Experience" in 2010 as part of the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program. Her areas of academic interest include Gender Studies, American Literature and Literature of the Diaspora. Her monographs have appeared in national and international journals.
"Breaking free from the essentialized 20th century literary criticism that focussed on Ernest Hemingway as a macho male writer who actively participated in the two world wars and yet claimed ‘a separate peace’, Tania Chakravertty's book will compel evaluative engagement and deep reading of the often elided and ignored factors that dispense crucial evidences of gender fluidity in Hemingway's novels. Chakravertty's scholarly and critical reassessments provide an intensive analytical reading of Ernest Hemingway's novels that engage nonbinary identities and the complexities of alternative sexual orientations. Such a holistic approach opens up new windows of perception about Ernest Hemingway’s timeless fictional narratives."
— Prof. Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Department of English and Former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University.
