Masculinity at War - Ghent...
Transcript of Masculinity at War - Ghent...
Ghent University
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Masculinity at War An Analysis of Frederic Henry and Robert Jordan,
Masculine War Protagonists in Ernest Hemingway’s
Work
Supervisor: Prof. Ilka Saal
2009 - 2010
Paper submitted in partial
fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
of “Master in de Taal- en
Letterkunde: Nederlands –
Engels” by Nick Delafontaine
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Acknowledgements
A mighty thanks to the following people, without whom this dissertation could not have
been written:
First of all, I want to thank my supervisor, Professor Ilka Saal, for her very helpful
remarks, extensive emails with advise and invaluable comments. Thanks also to Dr.
Ruben De Baerdemaeker, for the time and energy he put in this project, and for all the
proofreading he did. I owe Ruben very much.
I am also grateful to the friends who also proofread, over and over again. Many thanks
to Mien Stoffels, Tom Van Steendam, Benoît Lagae, Robin Willems, Stavros Kelepouris
and Max Dedulle.
Last but not least, I thank An Willems for the support and advice she gave me
throughout this project.
And finally, a big thanks to my parents, for giving me the chance to do this.
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Contents
1 Introduction 4
2 Female Emancipation and the Masculine Ideal in a Modern World 9
2.1 A Reason for Masculinity 9
2.2 Masculinity before World War I: Men on the Run 9
2.3 Theodore Roosevelt: The Apotheosis of Revitalized Masculinity 13
2.4 The Post-War Period: Tramps Like Us 15
3 The Borders of Masculinity in a Political Turmoil: The Sun Also Rises 19
3.1 Homosexuality at the Borders of Masculinity 19
3.2 Semitism as a mere Archetype 26
3.3 Hemingway’s Intentions 30
4 The Bankruptcy of Masculinity: A Farewell To Arms 33
4.1 The Strive towards the Masculine 33
4.2 A Lost Generation 40
4.3 Conclusion: No Future 47
5 Masculinity and the Code of Honour: For Whom The Bell Tolls 49
5.1 Masculinity in War: Robert Jordan 50
5.2 Political Expectations Countered by Idealism 56
5.3 The Difference Between Two War Protagonists 61
6 Conclusion 64
7 Works Cited 69
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1 Introduction
The early twentieth century in general and the years between 1910 and 1940 in
particular are characterized by both political and social changes in society. Politically
seen, it was an age wherein several European countries had difficult relationships, a
problem that would culminate in World War I. It was in this same age that Western
society saw a female struggle for emancipation, a struggle that meant masculine ideals
had to be redefined. Although masculinity did not vanish, it changed, and it had to find
its place in a renewed society already before and definitely after World War I. In the
interwar period, when masculinity was finally finding its place in the modern age, Europe
saw a new conflict rising. A fascist ideology became popular, threatening ideals such as
liberalism and freedom. Yet again, the conflict between left and right in society,
culminated in a world war.
It is in this moment in history - the interwar period - that Ernest Hemingway set
the three novels I deal with in this dissertation. However, as will be clear from my
analysis, the political turmoil of the age in which Hemingway wrote is not the main
theme in his work. It may be present as a subtext in for example For Whom The Bell
Tolls, but to this dissertation Hemingway’s focus on themes such as idealism and
masculinity is much more interesting than a focus on politics. It is for this reason that the
main research question of this dissertation is what reasons the protagonists of A
Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls have to be present in respectively World
War I and the Spanish Civil War, at the eve of World War II. To be able to focus on both
Frederic Henry and Robert Jordan, I shall analyze the main social change society
underwent in that period, a change that, as will be clear in the respective chapters,
applies very much to both Frederic and Robert. This change was the start of female
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emancipation and a new way for men to cope with their role in society. In addition to
this, I shall focus on The Sun Also Rises, another novel by Ernest Hemingway. It is this
novel that has received a lot of attention regarding alleged political motives the author
may have had when he discusses issues such as homosexuality and Semitism. To be able
to focus on non-political themes in an age that is defined by its political turmoil, it is
necessary to make clear what importance political motivation did or did not have in the
work of Ernest Hemingway. Only then, a true analysis of the reasons why Frederic and
Robert were present in respectively World War I and the Spanish Civil War can start.
In an introductory theoretical and historical chapter, I shall explain how
masculinity evolved in American society before and after World War I, as masculinity is
one of the major themes in both A Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls.
Although eleven years lie between both novels, the same theme returns. In my analysis,
I will research how different Robert Jordan perceives this notion more than a decade
after Frederic Henry dealt with it. In my introductory chapter, I will discuss the historical
evolutions that caused masculinity to change, and the way men at that time coped with
that change. To do this, I will focus on three main areas; firstly, I will explain how the
situation was before World War I, how men controlled the public sphere and women the
private sphere and which effects this had on the education of children. I will discuss how
this new generation of men, raised by women who had total control of the private
sphere, had to find their place in society, and the difficulties that went hand in hand with
that search. In the second part of my introductory chapter, I will focus on Theodore
Roosevelt and the important role he played for masculinity in an age in which that
notion was redefined. The presence of Roosevelt is especially important because both
Frederic in A Farewell To Arms and Robert in For Whom The Bell Tolls are influenced by
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his thoughts and ideology. In the last part of this theoretical and – historical chapter, I
shall explain how the situation came to be after World War I, and what the place of war
veterans was in a society that had evolved during their absence. Again, this evolution
will be of major importance to the analysis of both Frederic and Robert and to the
reasons they had to be present in respectively World War I and the Spanish Civil War.
Although the main theme of this dissertation is the comparison between the
reasons Frederic and Robert have to go to war, and thus between A Farewell To Arms
and For Whom The Bell Tolls, I will discuss The Sun Also Rises in a shorter chapter before
I get to the two main novels of this dissertation. As I said earlier in this introduction, this
is necessary to explain the importance of political themes in Hemingway’s interwar
writing. The Sun Also Rises is an important novel in that discussion, as hot topics like
homosexuality and Semitism are discussed in it, and have attracted a lot of attention
from scholars. I will discuss these topics, and will also explain which goal they serve if
not a political one. It will not come as a surprise that the masculine ideal which I shall
address in my discussion of both A Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls is also
present in the discussion of The Sun Also Rises.
The focus of this dissertation will however be on the last two chapters, which deal
with the actual presence of Frederic Henry and Robert Jordan in respectively World War
I and the Spanish Civil War. In the chapter on Frederic and A Farewell To Arms I shall
discuss what the reasons for Frederic’s presence in World War I could be, as it is odd - to
say the least - that an American soldier is fighting in the Italian army against the
Austrians. In the chapter on Frederic, I will discuss two main topics; firstly, I shall analyse
how the idea of a changing masculinity in American society influences Frederic to go to
war. The role of war as a projection of masculinity will be compared to the family life in
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which the American man lost his patriarchal role. It will be clear how Frederic perceives
these two different notions of masculinity, and which of the two eventually applies most
to him. Secondly, the reasons why Frederic both celebrates and criticizes the war will
form a main topic of discussion. The theme of disillusionment and the presence of the
Lost Generation will both be defining topics in that part of the analysis. Eventually, I shall
explain what reasons Frederic Henry has to go to war, what reasons he has to leave the
war again, and how and why his character suffers from disillusionments with each
decision that he makes. It will be the search for masculinity in a world in which women
start to become emancipated, the hope to find an answer to that search in World War I,
and the eventual disillusionments that come with going to and leaving the war that will
serve as main topics of analysis in this chapter.
In the last chapter, in which I will focus on For Whom The Bell Tolls and its
protagonist Robert Jordan, I will discuss how the same values Frederic cherished return
in the character of Robert. It will be important to see how masculinity has evolved in
these eleven years, and what place Robert gives it. In the chapter on Robert and For
Whom The Bell Tolls, I will discuss which reasons Robert has to go to war and to stay in
the war. I shall compare these reasons with Frederic’s motivation. It will be immediately
clear that the difference between Frederic who leaves the army and Robert who remains
in it will be a major difference. Further on, I shall analyse if Ernest Hemingway had a set
of values which return in the characterization of his two wartime protagonists, or if the
two are totally different. The analysis of Robert will consist of two parts; firstly, I shall
again discuss the topic of masculinity and the place Robert gives it. It will be interesting
to which extent this differs from Frederic’s perception of it, and to discuss what the
reasons for the difference between the two characters are. Secondly, my focus will be
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on Robert’s idealism in a time when the battle between communist and fascist ideas was
topic of discussion. I shall make clear how Robert is influenced by that battle, which
stance he has and what reasons he has to make the choices he makes. Although Robert
Jordan may be no political activist, he has his reasons to fight the fascists. It is very
interesting to discuss what these reasons are, how they change throughout the novel,
and why Robert eventually takes his decisions.
Overall, this dissertation will focus on the difference between the masculine ideal
Frederic Henry has in World War I, and the one Robert Jordan has at the eve of World
War II. It will be clear that the eleven year chronological gap that lies between A
Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls partly defines that difference. It is only
logical that an era in which men saw how their power position in society weakened
through a changing masculine ideal is perceived differently than a time in which the
relation between the sexes was again stabilised. It is also logical that political themes are
more present in a novel published at the eve of World War II than in a novel published in
the middle of the interwar period. Nevertheless the question remains what links there
are between the two novels and their protagonists, regarding both perception of
masculinity and idealism. It will be both the differences between Frederic and Robert
and the things they have in common that will make up the answer to the main question
of this MA thesis, namely which specific reasons both Frederic and Robert have to go to
war.
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2 Female Emancipation and the Masculine Ideal in a Modern
World
2.1 A Reason for Masculinity
Both A Farewell To Arms (1929) and For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) were written in the
interwar period, yet, eleven years lie between these novels. While the former is set in
the middle of World War I, the latter, set in the Spanish Civil War, already echoes the
ideologies that will define World War II. Although both novels deal with a similar theme
– the presence of an American expatriate in a European war – and although the
questions about that presence may seem similar, the historical context of both novels
differs. In this theoretical and historical chapter I shall analyse what historical evolutions
influenced the various themes the novels deal with. For A Farewell To Arms, the stress
will be on masculinity at the eve of and after World War I, a theme that is also present in
The Sun Also Rises (1926). It will be shown that masculine ideals were threatened by
women who started to control the private sphere and intervene in the public sphere in
society. This feeling of a lost masculine patriarchal idea returns in my analyses of both A
Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls.
2.2 Masculinity before World War I: Men on the Run
It had become very hard for men to prove their masculinity in the early twentieth
century. The world in which social dominance was in the hands of the most masculine,
strongest men was changing into a society in which the public sphere became
competitive on an intellectual level. According to Michael Kimmel, many thought
mothers were raising a new generation of what Kimmel calls “whiny little mama’s boys”,
children who had lost their manhood (105). Although men attempted to save their boys
from that future, they thwarted their own battle by keeping their women at home, thus
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giving them full responsibility for the education of the children. By keeping women at
home in society, men gave the private sphere away to them and thus shaped what
Kimmel calls “an ideology of feminine domestic” (105). By the time men realised they
were giving away the private sphere and thus created a feminine rebellion in the mind of
women, they could not both return to the private sphere and keep their masculinity
anymore. Women started educating the boys and thus started to take their rightful place
in what would eventually become an emancipated society. According to Kimmel, “the
three principal institutions that dominate early childhood socialization – family, religion
and education – were completely staffed and run by women” (105).
Although men still went out working and women still stayed at home to raise the
kids, according to Anthony Rotundo the patriarchal role of the father was reduced as he
spent more time in the public sphere (32). Because household products went through an
evolution and were modernized, it can be said that women started to run their own
factory, being the household. At that time, due to the de facto separation between men
and women in society, the number of divorces increased and women were obliged to
create a role of their own in society. This created yet another evolution towards a
society in which women needed a feminist ideology as a way to become independent.
As men started to realize they were creating a generation of independent and
powerful women, they started to participate in the household and in the education of
their children. According to Kimmel, however, this cannot be read as a male evolution
away from masculinity:
They focussed on their wives, but they felt on surer ground with their sons.
Domesticity was incorporated in to the concept of manliness, as men became
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convinced that in order to have their sons grow up to be “manly”, they should
involve themselves more substantially in their children’s upbringing (Kimmel, 107).
It is in this light that the need for Frederic – the protagonist in A Farewell To Arms -
to prove his masculinity in society should be seen. He leaves the army in order to be able
to become a patriarchal figure to the family he hopes to start, a role he had lost before
he enlisted. It was a struggle men already fought before World War I. As fathers at the
beginning of the 20th
century focussed mainly on the education of their boys, boys and
girls were more separated than they ever were later during that century. Men wanted to
educate their boys to be masculine. Kimmel writes “a boy with no interest in fighting
was unnatural” (107). Frederic perfectly fits that pattern. As a man who realizes he
needs to regain his masculinity in society, he goes to a war for which he has no reason
but to do the most masculine a man can do at that time: fight.
It was in the same era Lord Baden Powell founded the boy scouts in England. At
school, boys were educated by women, and Baden Powell wanted them to learn some
virile ideals as well when growing up. After all, it was Baden Powell who said “manliness
can only be taught by men, and not by those who are half men, half old women”
(Kimmel, 105). The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) went even further and made boys re-act
battles like the ones against the Native Americans and the conquest of the frontier. It
was those same Boy Scouts that loathed the urban industrial society that stood for
“money grubbing machine politics, degrading sports, cigarettes, false ideals, moral laxity
and lessening Church power – in a word: City rot” (Seton, qtd. in Keller, 161). The ideal
of a society in which manpower and freedom are still valuable goods, as opposed to a
industrialized, modern society often returns in Hemingway’s characters at that time.
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In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert clearly fits this pattern, which can be read in the
descriptions of nature.
He felt comfortable and sleepy now from the wine and lying back on the floor of
the forest he saw through the tree tops the small afternoon clouds of the
mountains moving slowly in the high Spanish sky (Hemingway, For Whom the Bell
Tolls, 28-29).
The masculine men around the Boy Scouts clearly promoted a life of play and
nature, whereas modernised city life promoted inertness and softness for modern boys.
Even universities promoted very masculine sports and an environment of male bonding,
partly out of xenophobia – it was seen as a way to keep women and Jews1 out of the
homosocial society – but definitely also to keep their men masculine.
However, the main question remains what would become of these boys after their
childhood. This was the first generation of men who were educated in a society in which
men had to struggle to keep their paternal role. It was also the first generation of men
that grew up in a modernized society, and the first generation that had to start working
in an environment that was less masculine than the one in which the generations before
them worked. Fraternal organizations such as the Freemasons boomed, and men were,
as Kimmel says, able to “experience the pleasures and comforts of each other’s company
and of cultural and domestic life without feeling feminized” (114). In these fraternal
organizations, men were initiated by means of a ritual that meant rebirth after death in
1 Men wanted to retain a white world in a ‘rapidly diversifying collegiate environment, shielding
“traditional” students from women, blacks, and non-Protestants (especially Jews) who now sought
admission’ (Kimmel, 113). It was one of the last attempts of men to keep power in the hands of the so-
called WASP’s (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).
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the less and less masculine society. As Kimmel points out correctly, it was not, as Freud
said, women who envied men, but men who envied women in the modernised society
(115). After 1925, fraternalism would lose its importance, as men would start accepting
the changing world and start to form their own organisations within the work world. It is
due to this acceptance of the changed situation that Robert Jordan, as we will see,
would have fewer issues with defining his manhood than Frederic Henry had with it in A
Farewell To Arms.
2.3 Theodore Roosevelt: The Apotheosis of Revitalized Masculinity
In the person of Theodore Roosevelt, both the modern age of intellectual ambition and
the old age of masculinity were brought together. As president of the United States,
hunter, explorer and soldier, he was the ultimate incarnation of the Self-Made Man.
Roosevelt’s life reads like a Hollywood film; his story from asthmatic young boy to he-
man is the ultimate manifestation of the path men had to follow. Because the American
press even compared him to Oscar Wilde and called him, according to Kimmel “Jane
Dandy” (120), he realized he had to emphasize his masculinity if he wanted to make it as
a politician. Just like Frederic Henry may be realizing in A Farewell To Arms that he has
to go to war to redefine his masculinity, Roosevelt went to fight in the Dakota territory
in April 1885. It may be clear that the main reason Frederic had to go to the Italian-
Austrian front was that he wanted to fit in that very American ideal of creating one’s
own masculinity, an ideal that came to be identified with Theodore Roosevelt. It is this
same Roosevelt who can be compared to Robert in For Whom The Bell Tolls. When
Roosevelt was laughed at for his slim and weak appearance, he persevered. This ideal of
not giving up and remaining true to the causes one initially chooses to fight for is one of
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the main reasons why Robert remains in the Spanish Civil War when he realizes the
ideals he fought for were not present anymore.
Roosevelt went further than his own life story, and started to personify an image
of The Strenuous Life, which was also the title of his most famous speech addressing the
issue. Roosevelt loathed ‘the cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues’ saying:
I preach to you then, my countrymen, that our country calls not for the life of
ease, but for the life of the strenuous endeavor. The twentieth century looms
before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely
swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests
where men must win at hazard of their lives and at risk of all they hold dear, then
the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the
domination of the world (Roosevelt, 331).
It is this spirit of a masculinity proven by a life of virility that applies very much to
both Robert Jordan and – initially – Frederic Henry. Especially to Frederic, this answer
that Roosevelt and eventually a whole society of men who want to redefine their
masculinity give to what they perceive as the feminine threat forms the main reason to
go to war. It would only be in the middle of the war that he would realize that a life with
Catherine provides a different, more fitting answer to his need to redefine his
masculinity. Especially because Roosevelt promoted this attitude for individuals
(Kimmel, 123), the most likely reason for Frederic to go to war was that he answered
Roosevelt’s call to reshape masculinity.
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Additionally, Roosevelt also created national parks and wildlife refuges to hail
nature as the arena of manly life. The same love of nature returns in the descriptions
Frederic and the narrator in For Whom The Bell Tolls give. Both their way of defining
their masculinity and their love for a manly natural life instead of a modernized society
have their roots in the ideology of Theodore Roosevelt. According to Kimmel, Roosevelt
gave a nation that grew to adolescence the rites it needed to create a new manhood
(124), an image that was “enormously attractive to men who feared their own
impotence in an increasingly complex world” (Parker,34). However, American
masculinity still had to face its biggest challenge.
2.4 The Post-War Period: Tramps Like Us
World War I had to be the ultimate manifestation of masculinity for the young American
men who went to Europe to fight. As the Freudian Ernest Jones said in 1915:
[War] brings the man a little closer to the realities of existence, destroying shams
and remoulding values. It forces him to discover what are the things that really
matter in the end, what are the things for which he is willing to risk life itself. It can
make life as a whole greater, richer, fuller, stronger and sometimes nobler (Jones,
qtd. in Showalter, 169).
However, if Elaine Showalter says that “The Great War was a crisis of masculinity
and a trial of the Victorian masculine ideal”, she may be a lot closer to the truth. Men at
the front experienced such grotesque feelings of fear it led to shell shock. Men were
diagnosed as being hysterical, war veterans were unable to find jobs, and most of them
lost all hope and aspirations in life. Their worldview became pessimistic and dark, and
the lasting absence of women, according to Showalter (171), brought up feelings for
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other men. It is a view that is only confirmed by the homosocial environment in A
Farewell To Arms in general and through the characterization of Rinaldi in particular. If
Jones argues the reason for men to enlist might be “the homosexual desire to be in close
relation with masses of men” (Jones, qtd. in Showalter, 171), he might be exaggerating a
bit, but it is clear that the very masculine reasons men had to go to war led to disillusion.
Instead of being a culmination of masculinity, World War I undermined that very notion.
Not only were masculine weaknesses stressed during the harsh conditions in the war,
when they returned home, the return to normalcy president Warren Harding wanted to
achieve after the war appeared to be impossible. The initial war victories that had
“rescued a threatened sense of manhood’ was replaced by ‘new restiveness” (Kimmel,
127). Not only had men shown themselves sensitive to psychiatric injuries, the vacant
jobs men who went to fight had left, were taken by women, who thus finally managed to
enter the public sphere. Men felt their manhood dramatically weakened when it was
women who started providing for the families. It is in this light that Frederic’s choice in
A Farewell To Arms has to be seen. When he chose to flee the war to provide for his
soon-to-be wife and their child, he rescues his manhood. If he had remained in the war,
he might have become the victim of what happened to thousands of returning soldiers:
the inability to provide for their families. When Frederic eventually realizes his life is
hopeless, he echoes the Lost Generation feeling of World War I veterans. However idyllic
Roosevelt’s adventurous life may have appeared, reality showed men’s lives were very
uncertain after the war, even before the Great Depression.
Business life tried to revitalize the masculine ideal by shaping male-only jobs, but it
was to little or no avail. According to Kimmel, “the chief problem seemed to be women,
both at work and at home” (Kimmel, 131). The workplace was definitively feminized.
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Male interwar fiction also dealt with these themes. To Kimmel, although
Hemingway “eschewed the upper-class gentility into which he had been born and
embraced a rough-hewn artisanal manhood”, his novels show the vulnerability of
masculinity after World War I (141). Max Beerbohm’s And Even Now describes how a
male narrator “flings a woman writer’s novel into a fireplace but cannot seem to burn up
the book” (Gilbert, Gubar, 126). World War I had decisively opened every echelon of
society to women.
To summarize: it is clear that the time between roughly the turn of the century
and the Great Depression meant an enormous change in the masculine ideal in
American society. With the turn of the century came a change in lifestyle. The paternal
society became a more complex world in which intellect started to replace manpower.
And although the private and the public sphere were still separated, women gained
power through their education of the children. When men realized the separation of
spheres caused a society in which masculinity was changing, it was already too late to
halt the evolution that had started. Despite the education men gave their sons to
become very masculine, and despite the formation of the Boy Scouts that stressed
values such as manliness and a natural life, the new generation of boys sought fruitlessly
for a new masculine ideal. It was only when Theodore Roosevelt rose as the ultimate
manifestation of masculinity in the modern man that men eventually found a new ideal
to follow. It is in this light that both Frederic (A Farewell To Arms) and Robert (For
Whom The Bell Tolls) have to be seen. Through his life story, Roosevelt influenced a
generation of masculine men, among whom Frederic, who answers Roosevelt’s call to go
and find his masculinity, and Robert who does not give up, even when he realizes the
cause he fights for is no longer the one he initially fought for. However, not until after
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World War I would it be definitively clear that the masculine patriarchal society in which
America had entered the 20th
century did not exist anymore. Not only did World War I
turn out to be a crushing blow to masculinity, as soldiers had become psychiatric
patients and thus showed signs of masculine weakness; even more important is the
changed society to which the war veterans returned. They would find a society in which
there was no place for them anymore. The workplace had become more feminine, and
just like Frederic Henry personifies, World War I veterans returned after the war to a
society in which they were lost.
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3 The Borders of Masculinity in a Political Turmoil:
The Sun Also Rises
When asking the question what intention or aim a protagonist has in war novels, one of
the first ideas that comes to the surface is a political one. Although Ernest Hemingway’s
protagonists do not have the critical reputation of serving a political goal, given the era
in which both A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls were published, the idea
of political intention cannot be neglected. The time I am dealing with is roughly the
period 1925-1940, an era in which fascism came to rise in Europe, and thus also an era in
which tolerance towards people or (ethnic) groups that were different became more
and more problematic. In this introductory chapter to A Farewell to Arms and For Whom
the Bell Tolls, I will deal with ethical issues such as homosexuality and (Anti-)Semitism.
To do this, I will discuss The Sun Also Rises, a novel which is set in the aftermath of World
War I and which proves that a Hemingway protagonist in that era does not necessarily
have political intentions because ethical issues are discussed. By doing so, I will be able
to focus on the true intentions Ernest Hemingway had with his protagonists in the two
war novels, without the latent presence of politics when matters such as communism,
fascism or reasons for warfare are addressed.
3.1 Homosexuality at the Borders of Masculinity
The presence and the importance of masculinity in the works Ernest Hemingway wrote
in the interwar period will be one of the main themes of this dissertation in the chapters
on A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But to which extent was it
Hemingway’s purpose to bring a political message with that theme, or, how tolerant was
Hemingway politically of the ‘not so masculine’ men in society? Hemingway clearly deals
with this theme in The Sun Also Rises, a novel set after World War I. Both the physical
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and mental pain the characters suffer is still tangible. This offers a beautiful and
interesting case study for masculinity in an era in which Western men had difficulties to
stress their masculinity.2
When Jake Barnes returns from war with an injury that causes him to be
impotent,3 the least that can be said is that his masculinity is doubted. Especially
because it concerns a war wound, and thus a wound caused by heroic deeds, it must be
clear that Jake’s masculinity is questioned. By doing so, in an era in which masculinity is
defined less and less easily, the hero is made physically non-heroic, and is losing his
manhood. It was in this age that very masculine men had the need to find their position
in society again. For a Hemingway protagonist, Jake is strikingly non-heroic, and thus
linked to the weaker men in a society wherein men looked for their masculinity. Jake
may be intentionally heroic as someone who goes to war but turns out eventually to be
non-heroic, a sexually disabled hero who is unable to have sexual intercourse while
homosexuals inside a ‘bal musette’ and less ‘manly’ men like Robert Cohn can. As I will
explain hereafter, this idea of men behaving very feminine was in that time a bigger
issue than their homosexuality itself.
Ira Elliott sees Jake’s comments on homosexuals throughout the novel as a sign
that Hemingway fears other competitors in his game. This presence of fear is not
entirely improbable, when one takes into account what Ernest Hemingway said of the
1924 Glenway Wescottnovel The Apple of the Eye. On this subject, he famously
remarked “as a boy in Kewaskum, Wisconsin, Glenway Wescott had wept over the
2 “The optimism ushered in by the Roaring Twenties was ushered out by the Great Depression and
widespread unemployment in the 1930s. Never before had American men experienced such a massive
and system-wide shock to their ability to prove manhood by providing for their families.
Even before the economic collapse of 1929, though, men’s work was increasingly unreliable proving
ground” (Kimmel, 128). 3 Although he says himself he is not impotent, he just had an accident (The Sun Also Rises, 115).
21
novels of Henry James4 and acquired speech mannerisms that were more girlish than his
sisters” (Lynn, 237). This is clearly not the most tolerant of remarks, one that can be read
as at least a slight aversion towards less manly men, although even here, the idea that
Hemingway was no more than witty in his choice of words cannot be excluded. If we
deny this possibility and read the remark as at least a sign of light intolerance towards
less manly men - only for the sake of this argument – Jake’s injury can be seen as a
subtle way of poking fun at homosexuals, non-heroic men who are not able to copulate.
But is this the right conclusion? The historical time in which Ernest Hemingway
was raised can provide us with answers to that question. Although homosexuality was
not very prominent in the United States in which Hemingway grew up (Lynn, 319) – Oak
Park, Michigan, Kansas, New York - the evolving society in the late 19th
century
definitely helped to form the ideas Hemingway had on the matter.
By the time Ernest Hemingway first left home, at age eighteen in October 1917 to
work for three months for the Kansas City Star newspaper, and then in early 1918,
to go to Italy to drive Red Cross ambulances, his general and particularized notions
on gender were both skewed and solidified. His general notions included his
society’s and community’s ideas and conflicts about masculinity and femininity,
maleness and femaleness, and socially constructed gender roles and codes. [...] All
of the immense amount of thinking and rethinking Hemingway did for the rest of
his life about these issues, both in his fiction and in his personal circumstances,
was trapped in those early perceptions (Barlowe, qtd. in Wagner-Martin, 129).
4 James was one of Hemingway’s favourite authors (Houston, 42-43), but Hemingway’s relation towards
the less masculine James has always been one of ambivalence. The scene in which Jake’s war wound is
discussed (The Sun Also Rises, 115) also deals with an alleged injury that caused James to have sexual
problems.
22
Barlowe speaks of a time in which middle class men were given more chances
and started to have their own interests and lifestyle. Men who were different, were
immediately seen as abnormal. This prejudice worsened as women started working, and
men had to be afraid to lose their jobs, upon which they directed their hatred towards
the men who were seen as a threat to masculinity: the homosexuals. Much more than
they loathed them for their sexuality, they despised homosexuals for their social
appearance. One of the reasons why masculinity was a hot topic in the era of
Hemingway’s early writing may have been that men felt their identity weakened. It is
possible that Hemingway disliked homosexuality to stress his love for heroism and
masculinity, but the novelist was in for quite a surprise when he saw how Europe was
much more tolerant of homosexuals. Having grown up in a middleclass family in a
suburb in America and moving to a metropolis in Europe, Hemingway is the perfect
example of the evolution I draw here. And just as the importance of his early years in his
middleclass American education cannot be denied, neither can the change his thoughts
underwent when he came to Europe. Hemingway became more tolerant in the matter.
According to Warren Bennett (227), when he was under the influence of European
thoughts towards the matter, sexuality and its diverse appearances became subjects
Hemingway could use in his fiction.
But can the characterization of Jake and the addressing of the issue of
homosexuality be seen as ideological statements? I do not think so. Homosexuality also
occurs in Mr. And Mrs. Elliot, a story collected in In Our Time - a collection of short
stories - published one year prior to The Sun Also Rises. In the story, the protagonist is a
reactionary puritan who remained virgin until he was 25, when he met his wife. Before
he was together with her, he had however already learned the art of kissing from
23
another man. Here Hemingway approaches homosexuality from a totally different point
of view, situating it in a whole other setting. Yet there are similarities, as the couple is
unable to have children, and as Ms. Elliot has an abnormal lack of sexual appetite. Again,
the character with homosexual connotations is portrayed as the one who is unable to
have a normal sex life. But the reason for dealing with this theme is, in my opinion, not
hate towards homosexuals, neither is it a deep ideological feeling of intolerance towards
them. Ernest Hemingway is merely a child of his age here. An age in which - as I
explained earlier in this chapter - homosexuality has to be linked firmly to the social and
economical evolution. As men saw women as a threat to their power position both at
home – as women started earning money – and at work – as they started becoming
rivals for the same jobs – they vented their envy of the men who were less masculine,
being the homosexuals. I already explained how Hemingway can be seen as a prototype
figure of this generation, as he comes from a background typical for the undercurrent in
which a light aversion against homosexuals was tangible. I do stress the fact that the
aversion was light, as there was definitely no ideology of fierce hatred towards
homosexuals, but rather a perceived threat to the dominant position of men.
Yet Ira Elliott doubts that Hemingway did not intend to give a sexual message
through Jake. Elliott does not see the comparison between the homosexual gang, who
have their sexual preference “written all over their faces”, inside the bal-musette (Elliott,
79) and the sexual handicap Jake has as clearly as I do. To him the difference between
sexuality and gender is of major importance. Jake’s perception rather deals with the
24
latter5,6
– he is irritated by men behaving unmanly, so the argument would remain
invalid. I do not agree with Elliott on this point, as I think he hides behind a vague
difference in word choice, which does not necessarily correspond to a difference in
meaning. The fact that Hemingway shows these homosexual men dressed in a not very
masculine way may be an indication of his gender preferences, but still does not deny
the difference between them and Jake on sexual grounds. Elliott further states that Jake
is more annoyed with the men’s clothing than he is with their sexuality. This can be read
as a clear statement that Hemingway’s pro-masculinity choice does not necessarily go
hand in hand with an aversion to homosexuality. It is highly likely that Hemingway
introduced this scene especially to show he is definitely not committed to an anti-
homosexuality cause.
So if Jake’s injury does not even begin to serve to make a statement against
homosexuality, what may be the reason of its presence? One of the answers to the
question why Jake has this humiliating injury, and the reason why the wounded hero is
compared with the men whose characteristics he despises most of all (i.e. the not very
manly acting men in the ‘bal musette’) may very well be that he wants to give a fierce
comment on war, the very thing that shaped Jake’s masculinity in the first place. It will
be clear in my chapter on For Whom the Bell Tolls that Ernest Hemingway was not per se
5 Although one may argue Barnes’ gender issues are caused by his sexual injury, and that sexuality is thus
as important as gender, to me, his sexual problem only serves to strengthen his dislike of men who behave
not very manly – a question of gender. Although Barnes’ problem is in the first place sexual, its presence
gives voice to his opinions on gender issues. This forms an interesting comparison between the depiction
of the men inside the bal musette and the impact Barnes’ injury has on his masculinity. 6 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar also link Barnes’ sexual handicap to the gender issues men had in that
age when they write in No Man’s Land: “But that men feared they were losing such contests [that modern
war between the sexes] is plain even in a number of texts which do not explicitly deal with sexual battles.
Images of impotence recur with unnerving frequency in the most canonical male modernist novels and
poems. […] From the betrayed and passive narrator of Ford’s Good Soldier to cuckolded Leopold Bloom in
Joyce’s Ulysses and the wounded Fisher King in Eliot’s The Waste Land to the eunuch Jake Barnes in
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises…” (35-36).
25
a big supporter of war and all its characteristics, and that his characters always had
underlying reasons to go to war. In this light, Jake’s impotence serves more as a symbol
to show the atrocities of war than as a comment on homosexuality. Jake as a character,
and his impossibility to be together with Brett, go to show the impact such a war has on
the people who fight in it and how it defines the rest of their lives. Jake here becomes
the perfect example of the idea of a Lost Generation, both physically and mentally:
“Have you known her a long time?”
“Yes, I said.” She was a V.A.D. in a hospital I was in during the war.”
“She must have been just a kid then.”
“She’s thirty-four now.”
“When did she marry Ashley?”
“During the war. Her own true love had just kicked off with the dysentery.”
“You talk sort of bitter.”
[...]
“Oh, go to hell.”
[...]
“Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff” (Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 46-47).
Thus, the characterization of Jake as, at least in this scene, an irascible man with
a severe war injury shows how war changes people, and it shows Hemingway as both a
man who is obsessed with the devastating power of war and one who is disgusted with
its consequences. That Jake’s handicap is exactly the one that, metaphorically speaking,
takes his masculinity away after a deed (i.e.: going to war) that itself is the exact
definition of masculinity has to be read as a fierce critique on the consequences of that
26
war. That Ernest Hemingway belittles his protagonist to a man who is even less manly
than those who were loathed for their femininity only shows how severely the Lost
Generation mantra echoes through this novel. It is in that context that homosexuality as
a theme has to be read.
It must be clear now that Ernest Hemingway took no ideological stance when it
comes to homosexuality in The Sun Also Rises. I shall now investigate whether or not
Hemingway wanted to give a political opinion in a time when Europe was caught
between two wars. I will do this by addressing one of the major controversies at that
time, the position of the Jew, a theme which returns in The Sun Also Rises through the
character of Robert Cohn.
3.2 Semitism as a mere Archetype
In the same era in which Anthony Patch, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and
Damned, detected something sinister in the faces of Semitic New Yorkers and T.S.Eliot
defined the universalist Jew in terms of “A saggy bending of the knees/And elbows, with
the palms turned out,/Chicago Semite Viennese,” Hemingway found it easy to revile
Jewish acquaintances with anti-Semitic epithets, especially those he hated, like Lincoln
Steffen’s new wife, Ella Winter (Lynn, 236-237).
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway addresses Robert Cohn’s Jewishness. He does
not mock it, but makes abstraction of it when he says “No one had ever made him feel
he was a Jew, and hence any different from anybody else [...] he was a nice boy, a
friendly boy, and very shy” (The Sun Also Rises, 66). The characterization of Robert Cohn
can be seen as the most anti-Semitic Hemingway wrote down. Jeremy Kaye even
compares him to “those damned Jews or yitts” in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (The “whine” of
Jewish manhood: re-reading Hemingway’s anti-Semitism, reimagining Robert Cohn.). It is
27
widely known that Pound himself cherished fascist ideas. Freedman goes on to claim
Robert Cohn to be situated in a tradition of Jews as female men, but this may only go to
show again how Hemingway was influenced by his time at that point, and how he saw
these ‘female men’ as a threat to his own kind of men. Throughout history, the Jewish
race has always had the perception of being a race that excels in intelligence rather than
in muscular strength. Ernest Hemingway, however, was no intellectual with a long
academic career but rather an apostle of masculinity. The image of the Jew as fishy
boxer fits in the same pattern, as the Jew is here the person who is unable to succeed in
a masculine world. However, a quote attributed to Hemingway during a dinner party
seems to turn perception upside down again. Hemingway stated “I’m putting everyone
in and that kike Loeb is the villain” (Wilentz, 186-193). Harold Loeb then is the real-life
figure on whom the character of Robert Cohn was based. Gay Wilentz researches why
Hemingway chose a ‘kike’ as the villain, and has some intriguing ideas on the case
(Wilentz 186-193). Is it not possible that the choice for a Jew as the villain was rather a
choice to stress the masculinity of Jake than one to humiliate the Jews through Robert
Cohn? Secondly, Wilentz also questions the choice Hemingway makes for a world in
which nature is the central issue, and in which manforce still is a valuable power, instead
of a capitalist world where money calls the shots and where the Jewish race so often has
a leading role. In this view again, Cohn is as a Jew rather the personalization of elements
Hemingway loathes than of a race he despises. It can be compared to a cheering crowd
in a football stadium. The fans of a football team often refer to their opponents as Jews,
not because they hate that particular race, but because the opposing team is the richer
one. That does of course not make it politically correct to do, but it explains that the
28
initial motive is not racism. It is only one of many examples in society where a certain
race plays a metaphorical role more than a racial one.
But there is more to Cohn being Jewish than a representation of a culture
Hemingway rebukes. As Wilentz points out, Cohn is Jake’s foil, someone who is able to
access certain advantages Jake cannot - having sexual intercourse with Brett Ashley to
name one, because of his war wounds that are humiliations to his masculinity (Wilentz,
186-193). But why is it so necessary to keep on stressing Cohn’s Jewishness in such a
grotesque way that Hemingway repeatedly uses the word “Jew(ish)”? He makes such a
caricature of Cohn, the boxer who won a title not because he loved boxing but only
because he strove after victory, that it seems impossible that Hemingway does it from
an anti-Semitic point of view. As someone who is known to be so strongly committed to
the art of writing, it seems highly unlikely he decays into cliché propagandistic characters
as The Bad Jew. It seems much more logical that Cohn is in this way an example of the
person who does not belong to Hemingway’s group of Lost Generation expatriates. He
so desperately tries to hang on to them that he becomes both pitiable and laughable,
hence the irony Hemingway put into the character. The choice for a Jewish character
was not taken haphazardly, as the characteristics Wilentz addressed do fit the
stereotypical view of the Jew at that time. It also needs to be taken into account that
The Sun Also Rises has been written in a time when anti-Semitism was still on the rise,
and did not yet have such a negative perception as it has today. The characterization of
Robert Cohn may look like racism nowadays, and a present-day writer might choose to
characterize Cohn differently, but Cohn has to be read as a mere literary technique to
strengthen the contrast between the he-man Jake intentionally is, even despite his war
wound, and his foil Robert Cohn.
29
As Wilentz stresses (186-193), the major theme in the novel is the idea that the
patriotism and spirit of living life to the full have been brutally torn apart by World War I.
The old world of possibilities and freedom had become one of political turmoil and
gruesome darkness. In Hemingway’s worldview, male bonding and friendship are
quintessential, but Robert Cohn is usually the one who does not belong:
As the novel is structured, Cohn could not have taken the trip because he is
isolated from men’s friendships in Hemingway’s terms. Even earlier, Cohn sleeps
while Jake and Bill enjoy the landscape. By choosing to wait for Brett, Cohn not
only separates himself from the other men but also sets his own fate (Wilentz,186-
193).
When Hemingway makes his protagonist say: “And for this Robert Cohn..., he
makes me sick and he can go to hell, and I’m damned glad he’s staying here so we won’t
have him fishing with us.”(The Sun Also Rises, 102), it is clear that he is scolding the idea
of someone personifying the changing era rather than despising Cohn for being Jewish.
A last important notion to this case may yet again be the impotence of Jake. The
fact that the unmanly Robert Cohn is able to have sex with the woman Jake loves, is
referred to as “the last blow to his weakened manhood”7 by Wilentz (186-193). He links
the tradition of the Jew as the antithesis of the Christian with Cohn who exemplifies the
shifting time and values after World War I. The rumour that the Jews were responsible
for that war was a familiar one in expatriate circles, which again draws me to the
conclusion I hinted at earlier in this text, namely that it is more plausible that
7 This does not negate his intentional masculinity. Even in spite of his war injury, Barnes still very much
wants to be the ultimate manifestation of masculinity, hence the euphemism he uses for the fact that he
has no penis anymore.
30
Hemingway was a child of his time, than a fierce anti-Semite. Much more than loathing
the Jews for their Jewishness, he hated the changing climate in the “most difficult
country on earth” (Wilentz, 189), the United States. That a Jew represented that
metaphorical figure has to be accredited to the time in which Hemingway lived and the
clichés concerning Jews that were still fashionable then.
3.3 Hemingway’s Intentions
It is clear that Hemingway, although discussing politically interesting themes, never has
an entirely political intention with these themes. The choice of the themes is only made
because they fit his very own ideology, his way of thinking. When Hemingway addresses
homosexuality and uses it to discuss the opposite of the themes of heroism and
masculinity he cherished in that period, it cannot be read as a statement of intolerance
towards homosexuals, but as a comment on his time. This happens in three ways. First,
Hemingway saw that masculinity was under pressure, and that men had to find new
ways to express their manhood in a time in which homosexuality slowly became more
and more tolerated. It was the same time in which women left their houses and sought
the same jobs men did. William Wellman’s film Heroes For Sale beautifully shows how
hard it is for a World War I veteran to find a job. Michael Kimmel explains the cause of
this problem:
The chief problem seemed to be women, both at home and at work, as coworker,
as mother, and as symbol. Everywhere men looked, there were women. Work
itself was seen as increasingly feminized, with more women employed in
increasingly feminine offices – hardly the world of real men at all. The enactment
31
of woman suffrage in 1920 accelerated women’s entry into the public sphere. By
1920 about one-half of all college students and one-third of all employed
Americans were women (Kimmel, 131).
To protect his own breed, Hemingway chooses the side of masculinity.
The second reason Hemingway addresses homosexuality is to give a fierce
comment on World War I. As he was a member of the Lost Generation, this does not
come as a surprise. World War I ruined hopes and aspirations for millions of young
people who lost their lives or their future in trenches far from home. Jake is a perfect
example of a victim of war atrocities. As a very masculine character he has the one injury
that undermines the characteristic that defines him. If he is portrayed as less manly than
people who are clearly homosexual, or than the fraudulent Jew Robert Cohn, it only
goes to show how devastating World War I was.
The last reason why the way Hemingway writes about homosexuality cannot be
read as a political statement is because his perception of that notion is totally different
from the one we have now. Hemingway grew up in a time and space in which
homosexuality was a threat to the power position of men, a youth that partly shaped his
way of thinking. Nevertheless, the characterization of Jake cannot be seen as a fictional
account of his education, as his European years made him much more tolerant
concerning people who thought differently. But even if he carries this education with
him to some extent, the way he treats homosexuality is not intolerant. It only opposes
the masculinity he fights for.
The reasons why Hemingway portrays the Jew Robert Cohn are also in the first
place to strengthen Jake’s claim to masculinity. Although anti-Semitism was already
32
widely spread in the late twenties, Hemingway should not be seen as an anti-Semite.
The reason why he portrays Robert Cohn, the antagonist of Jake, as a fraudulent Jew is
only because he defends masculinity in that way. The masculine man Jake has already
had to take some blows, but it remains clear that Hemingway’s sympathy lies with him.
It is, however, Robert Cohn who is able to have sexual intercourse with Brett Ashley. The
characterization of Cohn shows how war can turn a world upside down, and how very
masculine men like Jake can eventually turn out to be literally less masculine than
people like Robert Cohn, Jews who are known for their intelligence and wit, but not for
their masculinity. The fact that the Jewish race is stereotypically less masculine is the
only reason why Ernest Hemingway wrote the Jewish archetype into the novel,
according to the evidence I provided. This may nowadays be read as a form of anti-
Semitism, but given the spirit of the age and the reasons Hemingway did portray Robert
Cohn as he did, accusing him of anti-Semitism is too strong a claim.
It is clear from this introductory chapter that Ernest Hemingway had no political
intentions with his writing between the two World Wars. There are other themes, such
as masculinity, the gruesome character of war and the conflict between these two that
Ernest Hemingway favours much more. It will be these themes that return in the
chapters on both A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls and in the question
which intentions Hemingway had with his protagonists in this novel.
33
4 The Bankruptcy of Masculinity: A Farewell To Arms
What could be the reason an American lieutenant wants to fight on a sinister battlefield
deep in Europe, in a war his country has no particular reason to be involved in? He
speaks Italian, but not fluently (A Farewell To Arms, 7) and he is regarded as a foreigner
throughout the novel. It is clear that the reasons for Frederic Henry’s presence at the
Italian front are not the most obvious. In this chapter, I will analyse two main
components of the novel. Firstly, I will address the notion of masculinity in the novel,
and both the historical and ideological reasons why this notion is so important with
regard to this particular novel by Ernest Hemingway. Subsequently, my focus will be on
the clear fact that Frederic Henry does not only celebrate the war as a prime example of
masculinity, but also criticizes it and comments on the search for a renewed masculinity
through his choices and realizations. The search for masculinity in a new world after
female emancipation and the masculine struggle before World War I, and the disillusions
that came with it will serve as a good reason for Frederic Henry’s presence in the Italian
army.
4.1 The Strive towards the Masculine
That the 1920s were a difficult era for manhood I already explained in the introductory
historical chapter. It was the time in which women obtained suffrage and started to take
over the work place – or at least started to be present in it. Men felt they had to re-
establish their role in society,8 and as Ernest Hemingway cherished masculinity, it does
not come as a surprise that this theme of reshaping masculinity is present in his work.
Already in his first novel The Sun Also Rises (if we consider The Torrents of Spring as a
8 “The Depression had forced many men to abandon their faith in the marketplace as certain to confirm
their manhood. Masculinity had to be reconceived so that any man could achieve it and pass it on reliably
to his sons” (Kimmel, 136).
34
parody) the theme of masculinity is present in the fishing and bullfighting the characters
are practicing or watching, and in the latent presence of World War I. But it would not
be until A Farewell To Arms that war – and what can be more masculine – would really
become the general theme in a novel by Hemingway.9
The next year, there were many victories. The mountain that was beyond the
valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured and there
were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south and we crossed the
river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many thick
shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of the house.
Now the fighting was in the next mountain beyond and was not a mile away (A
Farewell To Arms, 5).
The above passage clearly shows how Frederic initially sees war as a beautiful
thing. Frederic mixes its presence with a loving description of the European landscape
Hemingway-protagonists so often love. This only goes to show how war seems to offer
an escape from the female presence in the evolving society. This idea is even clearer
when one takes into account how a war situation can be seen as a gathering of men, a
place where the absence of women offers a unique brotherhood. But the line between
brotherhood and sexuality in a situation where only men are present is fickle.10
I already
explained how Ernest Hemingway cannot be seen as anti-homosexual in my chapter on
The Sun Also Rises and political motives in Hemingway’s work, but that he does see the
evolution towards a society in which homosexuality can be experienced in the open as a
9 Some of the stories and many of the vignettes in In Our Time already dealt with war, but not until A
Farewell To Arms would it become the main theme of a novel. 10
Even today, homosexuality remains a difficult issue in for example the sports world.
35
threat to men’s identity. When Peter Cohen argues in his essay “”I Won’t Kiss You.... I’ll
Send your English girl”: Homoerotic desire in A Farewell To Arms” that the
characterization of Lieutenant Rinaldi may be at least to some extent sexual, it is already
in the first scene of the novel that the masculinity of the army is questioned (51). The
army and its brotherhood seem, as Ruben De Baerdemaeker says in his chapter “A
Farewell To Stable Genders”, rather an unstable foundation upon which Ernest
Hemingway builds Frederic’s masculinity at that moment in the novel (101).
It would not be the last time Ernest Hemingway would provide us with an image of
the army as a beacon of failed masculinity. When two other sergeants flee when their
car is stuck in the mud, Frederic shoots at them because they do not follow his orders,
although he is not their superior:
‘Halt,’ I said. They kept on down the muddy road, the hedge on either side. ‘I order
you to halt,’ I called. They went a little faster. I opened up my holster, took the
pistol aimed at the one who had talked the most, and fired. I missed and they both
started to run. I shot three times and dropped one. The other went through the
hedge as he ran across the field. The pistol clicked empty and I put in another clip.
I saw it was too far to shoot at the second sergeant. He was far across the field
running, his head held low. I commenced to reload the empty clip. Bonello came
up. ‘Let me go finish him,’ he said.
I handed him the pistol and he walked down to where the sergeant of engineers
lay face down across the road. Bonello leaned over, put the pistol against the
man’s head and pulled the trigger. The pistol did not fire.
‘ You have to cock it,’ I said. He cocked it and fired twice (A Farewell To Arms, 182).
36
Aside from the interesting fact that Frederic shoots at fleeing soldiers, thus doing
what can be expected in the army - although he would later do the same thing - it is
clear that this passage cannot be seen as heroic. It may be mandatory to shoot at
cowards in a war, the way in which Frederic misses one of them at his first attempt and
has to let Bonello finish the job is clumsy and raises questions about war heroism.
Throughout the novel, the feeling exists that heroism and masculinity have to be found
in Frederic himself instead of in the war. This is immediately one of the main reasons
why Hemingway puts his protagonist in a war in which one wonders what an American
sergeant is doing there. In this way the war as a setting gives Frederic the chance to be a
masculine hero. The above passage makes clear that heroism does not necessarily have
to be sought in the war itself. This idea reappears through the numerous, very humorous
passages in which Frederic laughs at the war decoration he receives for being injured.
‘Because you are gravely wounded. They say if you can prove you did any heroic
act you can get the silver. Otherwise it will be the bronze. Tell me exactly what
happened. Did you do any heroic act?’
‘No’, I said. ‘I was blown up while we were eating cheese.’
‘Be serious. You must have done something heroic either before or after.
Remember carefully.’
‘I did not.’
‘Didn’t you carry anybody on your back? Gordini says you carried several people
on your back but the medical major at the first post declares it is impossible. He
had to sign the proposition for the citation.’
‘I didn’t carry anybody. I couldn’t move.’ (A Farewell To Arms, 59).
37
The humour in this scene goes to show how relative the heroic aspect of war is to
Frederic. The same feeling of relativism returns when Frederic says “How many had I
killed? I had not killed any but I was anxious to please – and I said I had killed plenty” (A
Farewell To Arms 86) or “He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we
did not know it. We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it. The last country
to realize they were cooked would win the war. We had another drink” (A Farewell To
Arms, 120). One cannot accuse Frederic he is too committed to the outcome of the war
in the latter scene.
The most heroic act Frederic commits during the novel may very well take place
when he flees from the Italian carabinieri when he is on the verge of being executed.
Ironically, his escape can also be seen as an act of grave cowardice he condemned
earlier, as he is a sergeant who flees the army and thus the war.
I looked at the carabinieri. They were looking at the newcomers. The others were
looking at the colonel. I ducked down, pushed between two men, and ran for the
river, my head down, I tripped at the edge and went in with a splash. The water
was very cold and I stayed under as long as I could. I could feel the current swirl
me and I stayed under until I thought I could never come up. The minute I came up
I took a breath and went down again. [...] There where shots when I ran and shots
when I came up the first time. I heard them when I was almost above water (A
Farewell To Arms, 200).
38
This is the moment the story changes. The masculine he-man in Frederic returns
once more when he takes up boxing (A Farewell To Arms 275), but from now on
Frederic’s place is with the woman he loves and who is soon to become the mother of
his child. Thus, his masculinity can be found in the responsibility he takes for her. By
going to his pregnant girlfriend, Frederic is in a situation where he is able to take
responsibility for his family. Now he can bear the patriarchal role in the family. This is
exactly the role men had lost when women even before the war already started to
organize society. It was the women who educated the children and who taught them at
school. Men feared their sons would turn out to be “mama’s boys” (Kimmel, 105). In this
way, the choice to leave the masculine environment of the army and its brotherhood
becomes a choice for responsibility and regaining masculinity in a new setting. Even in
his relationship with Catherine, Frederic has become the patient lover. Earlier in the
novel when he met Catherine, he seemed to be one of the boys rather than the caring
soon-to-be-husband. Even when he briefly returns to the army – after his injury - before
he finally flees it he is never again the careless boy among the other boys.
In “’The Real Story of Ernest Hemingway’, Cixous, Gender, and A Farewell to
Arms”, Marc Hewson applies the theories of French Feminist Hélène Cixous to A
Farewell to Arms. The focus is similar to the one I deal with, namely how the treatment
of gender in Hemingway’s time affected the character of Frederic. Belgian feminist Luce
Irigaray already said that in a patriarchal culture, men “often feel to prove themselves
militarily to claim their masculine birthright” (Irigaray, qtd. in Whitford 11), which is
exactly what Frederic does. Because he feels the American society in which he lives is
evolving, he has to redefine his masculinity. And what place is better to do that than a
war situation? Ira Elliott called Frederic’s presence in the war “a means of self-definition
39
(Elliott, qtd. in Hewson, 52) and it can indeed be seen as the ultimate aim at masculinity:
enlisting oneself in a dangerous situation, in a brotherhood of heroism. Up to that point,
I fully agree with the conclusions Hewson draws when comparing Elliott on the one hand
and the theories of Irigaray and Cixous on the other hand with the novel itself.
However, when Frederic eventually leaves the army and chooses a life with
Catherine, Hewson calls it “a need to move beyond the cultural models available to him,
creating a story of possibility” (Hewson, 52). Further on, Hewson compares the worlds of
war and love, and sees the former as masculine and the latter as feminine. The idea that
Frederic overcomes his adolescent behaviour towards Catherine to fall truly in love with
her is, to Hewson, the proof that he steps away from “a phallocentric way of thinking”,
an opinion I do not share (Hewson, 52). Exactly the decision to leave the war may be
Frederic’s biggest step towards masculinity. By leaving, he takes matters into his own
hands, leaves the army that was not so virile and masculine after all – as the
characterization of Rinaldi proves – and takes responsibility for his girlfriend and unborn
son. Thus, he creates a phallocentric idea of the man guarding the family. It was this
exact ideology that was threatened in the United States, and that may well have been
Frederic’s main reason to go to war in the first place. His decision to leave the army is
not, as Hewson calls it, a “tempering of a masculine vision of love and gender identity”,
but the exact opposite. If Hewson addresses the setting in Switzerland as a reason to
presume Hemingway creates a feminine world (53), he offers an enlightening insight –
Switzerland is an important metaphor in the novel – but draws the wrong conclusion.
The neutrality of Switzerland does not serve to show how Frederic and Catherine are
“mutually committed lovers”, but exactly to explain how the neutrality returns in
40
Frederic’s ideals. By coming to Switzerland, his ideological hierarchy is restored, as is his
masculinity.
To summarize, it is clear that Frederic’s masculinity undergoes changes in the
novel. Although the opening of the novel seems to invoke a war setting to show
Frederic’s masculinity as the fighting soldier, fond of war, the setting becomes only the
screen on which Frederic is able to project his masculinity. This is only possible because
he assumes a certain distance from the war and the brotherhood of the army. The war
gives him the chance to become a hero by leaving it. This is already clear when he
returns as a more mature man after his injury, and culminates when he flees from the
carabinieri. His true place is with his pregnant girlfriend, for whom he now cares deeply.
This offers the possibility for Frederic to become a responsible family man, and someone
who is able to take care for his family, a stereotypical male role men perceived to be
under threat.
4.2 A Lost Generation
As Ernest Hemingway was one of the key figures of the Lost Generation, the presence of
a theme such as disillusionment in a post World War I novel by his hand does not come
as a surprise. In his non-academic essay “The Theme of Disillusionment in A Farewell To
Arms”, R. Moore compares Ray B. West Jr.’s viewpoint that the novel is “a parable of
twentieth-century man’s disgust and disillusionment at the failure of civilization to
achieve the ideals it had been promising throughout the nineteenth century”, to Carlos
Baker’s more moderate interpretation of the novel as a comparison between a life in the
chaos of war and the peace of a family.
Moore’s analysis starts with the idea that Ernest Hemingway does not give much
background information on Frederic. To him, Frederic’s process of disillusionment only
41
starts after he is wounded and unable to perform any further action. Although it is an
interesting idea to see the time Frederic is confined to his bed as a moment of reflection,
it is not fully correct to read Frederic’s disillusionment as initially triggered by his
inability to fight. The reason why Frederic is in Italy to fight in this sinister war already
derives in itself from an intense feeling of disillusionment with an American society that
loses its archetypal role of the masculine man as a cornerstone of society. There may, of
course, be other reasons why Frederic goes to Italy – I will address Hemingway’s love of
Europe later in this chapter – but the search for a new form of masculinity is definitely
the most important one. The love and passion with which Frederic switches from a
description of war to that of a landscape and back, show how Frederic initially seems to
have found an answer to an American society that has lost him.
When I came back to the front we still lived in that town. There were many more
guns in the country around and the spring had come. The fields were green and
there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small
leaves and a breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old
castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains
with a little green on their slopes. In the town there were more guns, there were
some new hospitals, you met British men and sometimes women on the street,
and a few more houses had been hit by shell fire (A Farewell To Arms, 10).
Moore further on discusses how the trips Frederic makes with Catherine are a
possibility of freedom war does not offer:
42
For his stay in the hospital with the proximity to Catherine, the eventual freedom
to go out to the races and on small trips with her, contrasts sharply with the
brutality of the war (The Theme of Disillusionment in A Farewell To Arms).
But are the war and the camaraderie in itself not an attempt at the direction of
freedom? It seems likely that Frederic goes to Italy to fight in a war in which he has no
personal interests, to escape the society where men were losing their freedom, and
thus, to regain freedom. It is definitely true that Frederic is fond of the possibility of
enjoying these moments with Catherine, and it is also true that Frederic changes after
his injury, and returns to the army as a more mature and almost reborn man. But it is
not correct to say that he enjoys the freedom he has so desperately been longing for
when he goes on these trips, as the exact choice of being enlisted in the Italian army
already was a giant leap towards being freed from the metaphorical chains in which
society held him.
Of course his stay in the hospital opens his eyes and he realizes the Italian front is
not the place he wants to be. But to say that his disillusionment with the war starts there
is not entirely correct. Much more than a disillusionment with that war, he desires a
different life, one with Catherine. If Moore argues that his return to the war is the
ultimate proof of his honour, he is partly correct and even offers an interesting insight.
But Frederic’s return is in my opinion less of a clear choice to return to the war against
his will. Frederic is still partly trapped in an army dogma, and Frederic experiences two
opposite feelings. On the one hand, he wants to stay with Catherine, but on the other,
he feels an obligation to return to the front. This obligation is much stronger than what
Moore calls the proof of his honour. It is not really a choice he makes, Frederic just feels
43
obliged to return. It is much more correct when Moore states that Frederic’s return is
caused by “a traditional and conservative side to Frederick” (The Theme of
Disillusionment in A Farewell To Arms). This conservatism urges him to return to the
front, as it seems ‘the right thing to do’ – a sergeant does not quit his army – but it is not
a question of honour. As it is the Lost Generation to which Frederic definitely belongs
that questioned values such as honour, it would be very odd to find honour as Frederic’s
main motive to return to the war.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the
names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain
dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have
them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow
were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the
names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he
said things that separated us sometimes (A Farewell To Arms, 165).
In this scene, Frederic’s ambivalence about war is shown very clearly. Gino, as a
patriot, talks about willing to die for his sacred fatherland whereas Frederic rather sees
these big words as empty holes when he sees the destruction around him. Talking about
war is to him talking about the facts and the people instead of discussing big words
without much content.
Even when Frederic returns to the front after being injured, it is already
abundantly clear that Frederic’s place is with his girlfriend, and that his true masculinity
44
and responsibility lie there. The true honourable deed Frederic performs is the moment
when he dives into the Taglimento.
Yet the most striking moments of disillusionment only occur after Frederic has left
the army. When Frederic realizes the true place to regain his masculinity is with
Catherine, Hemingway could easily have ended the novel by showing how it all works
out perfectly and how they live happily ever after. It would be the ultimate
manifestation of the difference between the ugliness of war and the possibilities of
family life, even for a masculine man as Frederic. But Hemingway does not. Moore
notices that “disillusionment with the moral and political situation in the war spreads
into his personal relationship with Catherine” (The Theme of Disillusionment in A
Farewell To Arms), but he does not link this to the Lost Generation of which Hemingway
was one of the major members. Only in his final paragraph Moore says “The reader of
this novel easily understands Gertrude Stein’s comment that Hemingway and his friends
were members of and were writing about a ‘lost generation’” (The Theme of
Disillusionment in A Farewell To Arms). It reads as if Moore felt obliged to write down
the term ‘Lost Generation’, but he does not cover it in-depth. This is a pity, as the
disillusionment after Frederic’s reunification is entirely due to that feeling of loss and
emptiness after World War I that was so characteristic for the Lost Generation.
I sat down on the chair in front of a table where there were nurses’ reports hung
on clips at the side and looked out of the window. I could see nothing but the dark
and the rain falling across the light from the window. So that was it. The baby was
dead. That was why the doctor looked so tired. But why had they acted the way
they did in the room with him? They supposed he would come around and start
45
breathing probably. I had no religion but I knew he ought to have been baptized.
But what if he never breathed at all? He hadn’t. He had never been alive. Except in
Catherine. I’d felt him kick there often enough. But I hadn’t for a week. Maybe he
was choked all that time. Poor little kid. I wished the hell I’d been choked like that.
No I didn’t. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine
would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about.
You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first
time they caught you off the base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously
like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You
could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you ( A Farewell To Arms,
289).
This disillusionment with life Frederic shows can easily be compared to the way in
which Jake perceives life in The Sun Also Rises. It is the same feeling of a meaningless life
in a universe that destroys everything in the end. With a succession of short sentences
and one-syllable words Ernest Hemingway beautifully sketches the difficulty with which
Frederic deals with the cruelness of life. He seems unable to understand why everything
that happens to him happens. This quote that shows Frederic’s despair and his loss of
hope links him to the Lost Generation. It creates a feeling Moore eventually describes as
“not based only upon the horrors of war but also upon the absurdity of the universe”
(The Theme of Disillusionment in A Farewell To Arms).
To Helene Cixous, however, A Farewell To Arms is a novel of reparation and
healing rather than a novel of separation (Hewson, 53). In this light, Hemingway wrestles
against the eventual outcome, a thought which is supported by the knowledge that
46
Hemingway kept on rewriting the ending of A Farewell To Arms. It is a very interesting
thought, although it deals rather with autobiographical study of the author than with
character study of the protagonist. It is definitely possible that Hemingway wanted to
stand up against an outcome in which his place as a Lost Generation novelist is only
confirmed, especially since we know that Hemingway was not very fond of Gertrude
Stein’s phrase, especially in connection to himself.11
On the level of the text – which is
here by far the most important level – it can however not be doubted that the eventual
outcome of the story is a depressing one. Frederic flees the army and the war to regain
his masculinity in a happy family life, but loses everything he has when both his unborn
child and his girlfriend die. Whether Ernest Hemingway himself wanted to show the
impossibility of happiness after World War I, thus personifying the exact definition of a
Lost Generation or whether he wanted to “wrestle such an outcome” as Hewson says
(54) remains unclear and is perhaps not the most important question one might raise.
On the level of the text it is clear that Frederic looks in vain for a way to regain his
hierarchical position and happiness in life, and that it eventually turns out he does not
realize how lost he is.
It can be concluded that Frederic’s disillusionment almost reads like a play in three
acts; initially he enlists in the Italian army because the society in which he grew up has
evolved and has become less masculine. He-men such as Frederic are losing their social
position, threatened by the aspects I dealt with in the subchapter on masculinity. To
him, fighting in a war that is far away from home and in which he is not personally
involved is a way of showing his true masculinity. But when Frederic meets Catherine, he
starts to realize true masculinity is not found in a war situation, in a homosocial
11
When Stein called his generation a ‘”lost generation”, Hemingway answered “The hell with her lost-
generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels” (Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 18).
47
environment, but has to be sought in taking up responsibility for his soon-to-be family.
Thus, Frederic does the exact thing he could no longer do in the United States. It takes
some time before Frederic realizes this, and after he longs for Catherine when he is in
the hospital, he goes back to fight - not out of a feeling of duty towards his honour, but
because that is what men do. Frederic does not yet fully realize at that moment that
taking care of his girlfriend and unborn child can also be ‘what men do’. He will,
however, realize it when he finally flees the army, although in army terms this is seen as
the biggest possible act of cowardice. But Hemingway, shows how there is no such thing
as a peaceful life for people who got involved in World War I. When Catherine eventually
dies, Frederic cannot grasp how his life is lost and without hope, and only on the last
pages realizes there is no hope for a World War I veteran such as himself.
4.3 Conclusion: No Future
In a time in which the evolutions in Western society threaten conventional masculinity
and the social monopoly of men, Frederic goes to war in Italy to regain his masculinity.
Although he initially sees the war as a beautiful thing, he very soon realizes that
masculinity cannot be found in the homosocial environment of the Italian army, neither
is army life the place where one finds his masculinity in performing heroic deeds. The
war only offers a blank screen upon which Frederic projects his masculine ideals. It is
through the presence of the war and Frederic’s eventual choice to leave it that he shows
true heroism. When he is healed, he is not yet ready to turn his back on the army. This
happens more out of a feeling of duty and obligation than because he wants to perform
an honourable deed. But when he eventually does, he is finally able to realize that his
true masculinity lies in the responsibility of taking care of his family, a responsibility he
had lost in American society before he left for Italy.
48
However, Frederic’s search for his masculinity and a purpose in life is filled with
disillusionment. It is a feeling of disillusion with a society that does not seem to want
him anymore which makes him leave for Italy in the first place. But very soon Frederic
realizes that the army life is not the solution. Disillusioned with the army, he leaves as a
coward, but at the same time performs the most heroic deed of the novel; he flees the
war to start a new, civilized life with Catherine. Eventually his aspirations to lead a happy
life with Catherine and his child turn out to be the biggest disillusion of all. Only in the
last pages of A Farewell To Arms does Frederic realize that he is not going to find hope
for a better future.
In the character of Frederic, Ernest Hemingway bundled both the battle for
masculinity an early 20th
century man undergoes and the lack of hope a Lost Generation
character finds when looking for it. It is in the deep disappointment and surprise
Frederic feels when he yet again has not found what he is looking for that Hemingway
puts his true intentions with creating the character of Frederic. Frederic symbolizes both
the masculinity Hemingway missed in the new world, and the difficulty a World War I
veteran and member of the Lost Generation has in redefining his place in an evolved
society. Frederic is the ultimate proof that the world of hope and freedom and the
possibility of leading a happy life, living up to a masculine ideal, is not possible anymore
for the Lost Generation after World War I.
49
5 Masculinity and the Code of Honour:
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Eleven years after A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway published For Whom the Bell
Tolls, his second major war novel. This time, the setting is the Spanish Civil War, at the
eve of World War II. The political battle that would become World War II is already
present.12
Fascism was on the rise and threw a dark veil over the European continent. It
is in this setting that Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls, fights the
Nationalist troops of Francisco Franco. But what could be the reasons for Robert to fight
in this Spanish Civil War? In this chapter, I will research to what extent they are the same
as the reasons Frederic Henry has for fighting in the Italian Army during World War I,
and to what extent they differ from the latter. It may be likely that Ernest Hemingway
had a set of values which he wanted to discuss in writing war novels, but the difference
between World War I and the Spanish Civil War and the chronological hiatus between
1929 and 1940 cannot be neglected. Further on, it is very interesting to research
whether the characterization of Robert is influenced by the battle against a fairly new
political ideology such as fascism, an ideology characterized by its strongly led organic
community and its collective identity. The main question of this chapter thus will be to
which extent Robert as a character in another war in another era than Frederic will differ
from the latter, and what reasons Robert may have for being present in the Spanish Civil
War.
12
Many fascist allies of Franco saw the Spanish Civil War as a good exercise for their own plans in what
would become World War II.
50
5.1 Masculinity in War: Robert Jordan
In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry seeks a way to redefine his masculinity and to
regain his role in society. It is clear that Frederic is a forlorn man, who seeks but does not
find, and eventually loses all aspirations. Robert differs very much from Frederic. Robert
is permanently in control of the situation and knows very well what he wants. He is not
looking for a way to define his masculinity and seems to portray a kind of code that fits
masculinity as Hemingway wants to see it defined. The knowledge that he might not
survive the war in which he fights gives him a serenity Frederic could only dream of. He
has accepted that he may very well die in his attempt to blow up the bridge, and does
not fear this death. The only negative feeling he has toward this probable outcome is
that he will not be able to spend a lifetime with Maria, but he does not fear death itself.
Robert’s ability to still seize the day is shown very clearly in Hemingway’s loving
descriptions of the countryside where the novel is set. It is Hemingway’s love for the
European continent that returns when his characters seem to be at peace with
themselves. It can also be found in Frederic when he initially thinks he has found a way
to be a real man again in joining the army. Frederic then combines his description of the
war with remarks on the beauty of the landscape. Both times, nature offers an escape
from the chains which shackle the characters. Frederic is freed from a society that treats
men like him as an extinct race that belongs in a museum whereas Robert finds an
escape from the harsh conditions of war in idyllic thoughts. It is a joie de vivre that even
in the darkest times comes to the surface.
He felt comfortable and sleepy now from the wine and lying back on the floor of
the forest he saw through the tree tops the small afternoon clouds of the
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mountains moving slowly in the high Spanish sky (Hemingway, For Whom the Bell
Tolls, 28-29).
Robert’s knowledge that he will probably die in the next few days creates an unseen
masculinity. He falls in love with Maria, and wants to live a life that means as much as a
whole lifespan in the next 72 hours. The difference to Frederic could not be bigger.
Throughout A Farewell To Arms, Frederic keeps looking for a way to redefine his
masculinity, a search that eventually culminates at the end of the novel in the realization
that hope and aspirations are idle thoughts for World War I veterans. Robert knows he
will die, but still attempts the impossible: to give meaning to his life. Thus, the war
setting serves as a similar context as the one in A Farewell To Arms. Here again, it is the
war background that offers the protagonist a blank screen upon which to project his
masculinity. But different from A Farewell To Arms, Robert’s masculinity is found exactly
in the war and in the sacrifices one has to make to be the exact definition of masculinity,
whereas Frederic fulfils his most masculine deed by fleeing the battlefield.
However, just because Hemingway puts his protagonists in war situations and thus
gives them the blank screen upon which they can project their masculine ideals does not
mean that he can be read as a fierce celebrator of war. The old and wise character
Anselmo, a strong defender of his loyalist ideals, stresses how he loathes war:
‘You have killed?’ Robert Jordan asked in the intimacy of the dark and of their day
together.
‘Yes. Several times. But not with pleasure. To me it is a sin to kill a man. Even
fascists whom we must kill. To me there is a great difference between the bear
52
and the man and I do not believe the wizardry of the gypsies about the
brotherhood with animals. No. I am against all killing of men.’
[...]
‘I would kill the sentry. Yes. Certainly and with a clear heart considering our task.
But not with pleasure’ (Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls, 44-45).
Together with Anselmo, Robert stands for wisdom in the novel. And although
Anselmo is emotionally involved in the battle, both he and Robert still regard killing
enemies as a severe wrongdoing. That this does not affect the masculine ideal of the
Loyalist soldiers is clear from the loving description Andrés gives of bullfighting:
He loved the bullbaiting when he was a boy and he looked forward to it and to the
moment when he would be in the square in the hot sun and the dust with the
carts ranged all around to close the exits and to make a closed place into which
the bull would come, sliding out of his box, braking with all four feet, when they
pulled the end-gate up. He looked forward with excitement, delight and sweating
fear to the moment when, in the square, he would hear the clatter of the bull’s
horns knocking against the wood of his travelling box, and then the sight of him as
he came, sliding, braking out into the square, his head up, his nostrils wide, his
ears twitching, dust in the sheen of his black hide, dried crut splashed on his
flanks, watching his eyes set wide apart, unblinking eyes under the wide-spread
horns as smooth and solid as driftwood polished by the sand, the sharp tips
uptilted so that to see them did something to your heart (For Whom the Bell Tolls,
380).
53
This adoring description of the bullfighting13
as an almost noble art goes on for
four pages, in which Andrés describes all stages of the fight as seen through the eyes of
all its possible participants. What is especially striking about this, however, is the
devastating difference between his love for a sport in which killing is a central notion,
and his hate for all killing of humans in a war situation. Here it is clearly shown where
the borders of Robert and his comrades’ masculine ideology are laid down. Their loyalty
lies in the love for nature and good old fashioned manpower, the eagerness of wanting
to fight for a cause or for friends, but definitely not in killing human beings for the sake
of killing. Or as Anselmo says of Robert himself: “He must have killed much, but he
shows no signs of liking it. In those who like it, there is always a rottenness” (For Whom
The Bell Tolls, 206).
Biographically, a letter Ernest Hemingway wrote to Max Perkins on September,
26, 1936 clearly shows how the writer himself was eager to go to the Spanish front
(Lynn, 411). It is an eagerness that is only partly shared by Robert. He initially enlists out
of ideological reasons, such as his love for Spain and the Spanish people, and because
the fascist ideology threatens his liberal idealism. However, Robert quickly learns
atrocities are committed by both sides, and only stays in the war despite his growing
scepticism, out of a sense of honourable duty to his comrades and the cause he fights
for. Again, here Robert differs from Frederic. After his injury, Frederic only returns to the
battlefield because he feels obliged, and eventually flees it, thus finding his masculinity
in the family life he depicts for himself. Robert, though, like Frederic, also situated in a
world that lacks meaning, remains faithful to his comrades and fights until the bitter
13
Bullfighting is a theme that occurs frequently in Hemingway’s interwar work. It is one of the major
topics in The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, and it is the main theme of the non-fiction book Death In
The Afternoon, published in 1932. The book deals with the history and what Hemingway perceives as the
magic of bullfighting.
54
end. Frederic eventually escapes the army and ends up alone and disillusioned with life.
The life in which the character Robert is put is the army life and the life of a war in which
he has lost all confidence as well. But unlike Frederic, his faithlessness gives him a
certain dignity in the bitter end which Frederic does not have. It is definitely not right to
say Frederic has lost all dignity, but the force with which the eventual disillusion comes
as a surprise to him differs from the control Robert maintains even when he decides not
to commit suicide to help the cause he by then shall almost certainly die for.
The masculine ideal Hemingway portrays in the two novels differs when it comes
to the army life, but the difference is not that surprising when one takes into account
the eleven years which span the two novels. For Whom The Bell Tolls is set in an era in
which the ideological battle against fascism is inevitable, even for an author who does
not have the reputation of writing with political intentions. It is thus much more logical
that the war setting plays a bigger role in a time in which liberal values are questioned,
whereas in A Farewell To Arms, the war setting only serves as a beacon of masculinity,
which is the central theme of the novel in an age in which masculinity was a troubled
ideal. Frederick eventually regains his masculinity when he leaves the war. Robert finds
the ultimate proof of his masculinity exactly in staying in the war and in the heroism he
performs there, although he has lost his belief in humanity and hope. The key difference
lies in the scene in which Frederic flees the army by diving into the Taglimento river. In
army terms, this can be seen as the biggest act of cowardice, an act Robert would
condemn but which is exactly the most heroic and necessary one Frederic commits, as it
offers him the possibility to regain his family life and, thus, his masculine position in
society. To Robert, in an age in which the battle against fascism is more present than the
battle for masculinity in society, true heroism exists in staying loyal to the cause one
55
fights for, even at the cost of his own death. The atrocities both sides commit during the
war make Robert realize sense and meaning cannot be found in this world, and Robert is
as much a member of the Lost Generation as Frederic is. But the difference in time and
topics on which was focussed makes both characters take other decisions. Frederic, too,
prefers action over doing nothing which may well be the reason he joined the army – the
true reason he gives was that he spoke Italian and that he was in Italy – and the reason
he left it. Just because he left the place where the action is, does not mean that he is a
man who does not know what to do; he just makes other choices. Robert and Frederic
are similar in their decision to take action and in their determination to do what they
decided, no matter what the consequences may be.
A last interesting notion concerning masculinity may be the presence of both
Maria and Catherine. It is clear in both novels that salvation cannot be expected from
war. Frederic leaves the army disillusioned with the lack of true masculinity he had
hoped to find, and Robert loses his idealism when he sees the atrocities both sides
commit, and eventually dies. Nonetheless, to both men the presence of the women
means a rebirth of their masculinity.
While Frederic Henry is ambiguously reborn in his crossing of the Tagliamento but
then loses all with the death of Catherine Barkley, Robert Jordan surely will be
reborn through his love for Maria and through his act of responsibility for the
members of the guerrilla band (Svoboda, qtd. in Wagner-Martin, 165).
Both men regain their purpose in life through the woman they love. For Frederic,
the presence of Catherine gives meaning to his masculine ideals, and thus gives him a
reason to live. Robert is disillusioned with the war and the way the Loyalists behave as
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well, but finds a reason to stay true to the cause in protecting Maria. She is his reason
not to commit suicide and to win time. Eventually she even fulfils his main aim in the
novel as Robert wants to make his life worth living in the last 72 hours he has got. It is in
his comrades he defends, and in the love Maria feels for him, that he will live on.
Although he dies, Robert gives meaning to his life.
Although they are radically different, both Frederic and Robert make the choices
they make and remain true to these ideals. In both cases, these choices go hand in hand
with a strengthening of what used to be called Hemingway’s Code Hero14
: the disillusion
in life caused by the war shapes the true masculine ideals both Frederic and Robert fight
for. And although these ideals are different, as the two novels are set in a different era,
in the end the masculinity of both protagonists remains.
5.2 Political Expectations Countered by Idealism
In the chapter on The Sun Also Rises, I explained how Ernest Hemingway cannot be seen
as a political author, although he wrote some of his most famous works in the political
turmoil of the interwar period. For Whom the Bell Tolls was published at the very end of
that period, and deals with a war in which the battle between Loyalists and Nationalists
soon also became a battle between Communists and Fascists. In this light, it is a valid
question to ask what Robert’s main reasons to go to war may have been and which
ideals he held in high esteem.
At the time in which Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, and even earlier,
there was a tendency towards “committed” literature. Many – often communist -
literary critics such as Michael Gold and novelists such as Alvah Bessie wanted authors to
take a political stance and to create characters who made clear which side they were on
14
A term coined by Philip Young, one of the earliest and most influential Hemingway scholars.
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and how they propagated their ideals. Bessie rebukes Hemingway for not writing more
of a pamphlet in favour of the Spanish people (Bessie, qtd. in Christadler, Hansen, 346).
He does state that Hemingway is clearly supporting the Communists against the Fascists
– something which is portrayed through Robert who fights with the Communists – but
begrudges Hemingway for not taking the chance to write at full length about “a
motivating power, a driving, emotional, passional force in this story” (Bessie, qtd. in
Christadler, Hansen, 346). Bessie’s disappointment is honest and logical given his
communist point of view, but it is not entirely valid, as Hemingway never intended to
write a pamphlet in which he praises the merits of communism, or to portray Robert as a
communist activist. On the contrary, Hemingway was always too committed to the craft
of writing to use his art solely for a political cause. It is for this reason that For Whom the
Bell Tolls undeniably has a political subtext – it would have been impossible to exclude
all politics in a war novel published in 1940 - but nevertheless should not be seen as a
political novel. Yet, Bessie thinks Hemingway should write for the cause and that Robert
should thus be a convinced Communist, as the novel speaks about the people he is so
committed to, being the Spanish. Bessie even sees it as a shortcoming for Hemingway as
a novelist that he did not include the bigger picture in the individual story of Robert. To
me, this discussion is not the most important one, as Robert has no affinity with
communism. Ernest Hemingway never intended to write the story Bessie so desperately
wanted. The themes Ernest Hemingway wanted to address were always the atrocities of
war, the beauty of camaraderie and friendship in desperate times and the chance it gave
to men to strengthen their masculinity in these harsh conditions. It is in this
characterization that Robert fits.
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Bessie goes on to say that Hemingway did not explain the Russian stance on the
Spanish Civil War, although he, according to Bessie, must have been familiar with it
(Bessie, qtd. in Christadler, Hansen, 347). He may well have been, but the difference
between knowing and using remains the same: Hemingway just did not want to use that
knowledge for the novel he intended to write with For Whom the Bell Tolls. The
argument that Hemingway in this way missed a chance to explain the Russian stance and
to clarify that the Russians played a major role in the conflict does not stand up for the
same reason: For Whom the Bell Tolls is not a history book, it is a novel, and not even a
political one at that.
What then may have been the reasons for Robert to fight with the Loyalists if a
strong love for the communist ideals is not one of them? Initially, he joins the Loyalists
because he loves the Spanish people and because the Nationalists threaten his liberal
ideals.
He fought now in this war because it had started in a country that he loved and he
believed in the Republic and that if it were destroyed life would be unbearable for
all the those people who believed in it. He was under Communist discipline for the
duration of the war. Here in Spain, the Communists offered the best discipline and
the soundest and sanest for the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the
war, they were the only party whose program and whose discipline he could
respect. (For Whom the Bell Tolls, 170)
Yet, when he sees the atrocities both sides commit, and hears both Loyalists and
Russian Communists plot for their own good, his loyalty comes under pressure. Robert
finds himself in a world of distrust and betrayal, a world in which the values he holds in
59
such high esteem seem lost. It is at that moment that Robert is most clearly a Lost
Generation character as Frederic is. But Robert has the possibility to make the situation
positive and to find idealism in the cause he fights for. Instead of supporting the ideals
the Communists would like him to support, his only reason to keep on fighting is to
protect Maria, his unborn child and his comrades.
The scene in which Pilar tells Robert about the slaughter of a group of Fascists is
one of the moments in which Robert realizes the cruelties of his own side. In this scene,
the Loyalists are portrayed as barbarians and drunks without hinting at a possible feeling
of pity for the Fascists. Robert sees how the Spanish people, which form the main reason
for him to fight, enjoy slaughtering. The Fascists are, however, still portrayed as greedy
cowards, rich boys without any achievements in life or any ideology to live up to. But it is
at this moment Robert learns that the truth in the Spanish Civil War is different from
what he thought it was, and that both sides are guilty of barbarous atrocities.
Two men had fallen down and lay on their backs in the middle of the square and
were passing a bottle back and forth between them. One would take a drink and
then shout, “Viva la Anarquia!” lying on his back and shouting as though he were a
madman. He had a red-black handkerchief around his neck. The other shouted,
“Viva la Libertad!” and kicked his feet in the air and then bellowed “Viva la
Libertad!” again. He had a red-and-black handkerchief too and he waved it in one
hand and waved the bottle with the other.
[...]
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Just then, one of the drunkards got to his feet and raised both arms with his fists
clenched over his head and shouted “Long live Anarchy and Liberty and I obscenity
in the milk of the Republic!” (For Whom The Bell Tolls, 126).
Yet Robert keeps fighting with the Loyalists and does not lose his idealism. The
matter is no longer that the Fascists stand for everything he hates. He no longer fights
for the Spanish people or their freedom in the first place, as he has seen what
barbarisms they are capable of. Robert remains in the war to stay true to the people he
has learned to love. Yet, the characterization of the Spanish people differs in one aspect
from that of the Fascists in the church scene. The Fascists are cowards – and thus
opposed to the kind of man Robert is – and choose a life of profit and theft, while the
Loyalists and their supporters are drunks and people lost for society who know of
nothing better. Although Robert learns of the atrocities his side commits, he still hears
the Fascists are the cowards, and perceives the Loyalists as the men he has the most
affinity with. It is clear that his respect for the Loyalists and the cause he fights for has
diminished, but it is unclear to which extent it remains a reason for Robert to stay
faithful to the cause. However, the main reason to fight changes throughout the novel
and becomes his fidelity towards his comrades and Maria, and the meaning he gives to
his life in doing so.
To summarize: driven by idealism and by a love for the Spanish people as well as
fierce hatred towards the Fascists who threaten the ideals he stands for, Robert enters
the Spanish Civil War. He quickly learns, however, how his own side also commits fierce
and unnecessary atrocities, and how some of his allies are in the war for their own good,
rather than to fight for the greater good. Thus, Robert loses his idealism and although he
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still dislikes the ideology of the Fascists, his main reason to keep on fighting is to protect
his friends and to give meaning to his own life by doing so. When he eventually decides
not to commit suicide when he is on the verge of being killed, this is his last deed of
heroism to protect his group. It would make no difference for the eventual outcome of
the war. By doing this, Robert’s idealism clearly shifted from the general cause to his
own idealism. Through this last heroic act, the people he loves can survive. By giving
them that chance, Robert eventually succeeds in giving meaning to his life.
5.3 The Difference Between Two War Protagonists
As Robert is an American university instructor who goes to fight in the Spanish Civil War,
the initial difference with Frederic as an American sergeant who goes to the Italian-
Austrian front in A Farewell To Arms does not seem that big. However, Robert appears
to be a totally different man than Frederic. Whereas Frederic is a man who anxiously
looks for a confirmation of his masculinity and who turns out to have lost everything in
the end, Robert has an air of being in control of the situation at all times. That difference
between the two is especially striking as they are both members of a Lost Generation, a
generation to whom society is unkind, and to whom going to war or staying in the war
seems to offer the chance to recreate themselves. Here again, the ideals of war and
killing are not portrayed as examples to follow, and both Robert and Anselmo, the wise
characters in the novel, stress that being in a war situation is not a license to kill. As is
also the case in A Farewell To Arms, the war setting rather offers a blank screen upon
which Robert is able to project his masculinity. But unlike Frederic, Robert does not
oppose that masculine ideal to the war and finds his own masculinity by staying true to
the ideals for which he went to the front in the first place. Although Robert learns how
the Loyalists are also guilty of huge atrocities, and even when he hears that men on his
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side are only there for their own benefits, he chooses to remain in the war that very
probably will mean his death. Although he is very disillusioned with the causes he
initially chose to go to war for, he remains faithful to his duty of honour – the exact thing
Frederic does not do – and chooses to protect his comrades and the woman he loves. It
is a very different manifestation of the masculine ideal than the one Frederic offers in A
Farewell To Arms but this does not come as a surprise. In 1940, the year in which For
Whom The Bell Tolls was published, the difficulties men had with their position in society
after World War I were mainly over. This does not mean Robert is less of a Lost
Generation character than Frederic is – he also realizes this life is not one of hope and
aspirations when he sees how brutal and fraudulent his allies are, it only goes to show
how he chooses another way to stress his masculine ideals than Frederic does. To
Frederic, Catherine is the woman he wants to live for while Maria is to Robert the
woman for whom he wants to die. Both women are the catalysts that trigger Frederic
and Robert to make the decisions they make. To Frederic this is leaving the army and
becoming a paternal figure to his family again whereas to Robert it is sacrificing his own
life to keep Maria safe.
It is abundantly clear from the way Robert speaks of the Communists that his
ideals in the Spanish Civil War are not similar to the ones people like Alvah Bessie
advocated. Whereas they saw communism as an answer to the fascist threat, Robert’s
initial ideals are his love for the Spanish people and the threat Fascism posed to his
liberal ideals. He cooperates with the Communists for pragmatic reasons, not because
he has the same ideals. His love for the Spanish people will nevertheless be questioned
soon when he realizes which atrocities they are capable of. Robert is the ultimate
manifestation of a Lost Generation character when his eyes are opened and when he
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learns how the ideals he fights for are lost in the modern world. He remains, however,
faithful to his own ideals when he stays in the war and even refuses to commit suicide
when he is certain he is going to die. By doing this, he is able to save his comrades and
Maria. At that moment Robert’s reason to fight on is not his battle for the Spanish
people anymore, although the Fascists are clearly portrayed as cowards without
idealism, but only his own idealism and code of honour. These are the ideals that
eventually give meaning to his life. Thus, Robert can be seen as a character who
eventually escapes the dogma that he is part of a Lost Generation whereas Frederic
cannot.
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6 Conclusion
While it is sure Frederic and Robert are two very different characters, set in another age
and dealing with other problems, the themes that trouble them are very much the same.
First of all, it is clear these themes are not politically motivated. Although politically
interesting themes show up in Hemingway’s work, his reason to discuss them is never to
take a political stance. If he, for example, addresses homosexuality or Semitism in The
Sun Also Rises, these topics only serve the subject Hemingway discusses. They cannot be
read as an intolerant statement towards certain groups of people in society, but are
merely comments on his time. Here, the homosexual, for instance, has to be read as the
opposite of the very heroic, masculine man, who goes fighting and who attracts women
precisely because of his manhood. The idea of homosexuality shows how it had become
more difficult for masculinity to find its place in society, as the novel is set in the same
post World War I era in which women started to take over the jobs men used to occupy
before the World War. This idea further gives a fierce comment on the effects of World
War I on the people who were involved in it. Jake is on the one hand the prime example
of masculinity, but this idea is doubted as he has lost his penis through a war accident,
thus giving him the one injury that questions his male identity. By comparing the
inability of an ultimate he-man to have sexual intercourse with women to the men who
are not interested in sexual intercourse with the opposite gender, Hemingway
comments on the effects of World War I rather than commenting on homosexuality.
The reasons to portray the Jew Robert Cohn are also to strengthen Jake’s
masculine claim, and thus in fact serve the same cause the portrayal of Jake serves. It is
Robert, a fraudulent Jew who never really belongs to Jake’s gang, who is eventually able
to have sexual intercourse with Brett Ashley, Jake’s true love. Through this inversion of
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masculinity, Hemingway again shows how war can cause very masculine men as Jake to
become eventually less masculine than Robert. The fact that Robert is a Jewish character
only serves to explain how he, as a Jew, may be very intelligent, but is not the most
masculine man, if that notion is applied to physical strength. Although this
characterization may be regarded with scepticism nowadays - in a post-Holocaust era in
which people are much more careful with comments that may be interpreted as
intolerant or racist - Ernest Hemingway had, in my opinion, no racist intentions with his
portrayal of Robert Cohn, neither did he have sexist intentions with his portrayal of Jake.
Both characters only serve to comment on a masculine ideal that was under pressure in
a changing society. It is for this reason that I have focussed on that masculine ideal
throughout this MA thesis.
The comparison between Frederic Henry and Robert Jordan is a very interesting
one. The same themes as those present in A Farewell To Arms occur in For Whom The
Bell Tolls, a novel that was published eleven years later and that is set in another war.
Frederic, the protagonist of A Farewell To Arms, goes to war in Europe in an era in which
his masculinity was troubled in the United States. He answers Theodore Roosevelt’s call
to find a new masculinity in a modern age. It is in World War I that Frederic hopes to
perform heroic deeds and thus to find his true masculine ideal back. However, Frederic
soon realizes that the war setting is no more than a blank screen upon which he is able
to project his masculinity. He sees how the army is a homosocial environment in which
feelings of tenderness have to be directed at other men. It is only when he meets
Catherine that he realizes his masculinity lies elsewhere. Frederic needed the war setting
to realize it is only in society that he is able to give proof of his true masculinity. When
he flees the army, it can ironically be seen as a step towards that masculine ideal. His
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choice for the family he wants to build with Catherine is a choice for responsibility.
Frederic claims the patriarchal role he had lost in American society - the role that made
him go to war in the first place.
Yet, A Farewell To Arms is in essence a novel of disillusionment. To Frederic, it is
disillusionment in a society in which he feels himself not needed anymore that makes
him go to war in the first place. He goes to fight to prove his masculinity again, but ends
up realizing he is not going to find his masculinity in the homosocial environment of the
army. When he meets Catherine, he leaves the war to build a family with her – although
he initially returns because in his mind, a sergeant is obliged to stay true to the army.
This hope would, however, turn out to be the biggest disillusionment of all. Through the
death of Catherine and his unborn child, Frederic finally realizes there is no hope for a
better future for his generation of men. The image of a Lost Generation is very strong in
this eventual realization.
In For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan deals with the same issues as Frederic
Henry, although he is a totally different man. Throughout the novel, Frederic is searching
for his masculinity, a family life, hope and happiness. Robert, on the other hand, is
permanently in control of the situation. Although they are both members of a Lost
Generation, Robert realizes his fate, and acts accordingly. He is not seeking for an
outcome, but lives up to his masculine ideal, even if he realizes the only hope he has
may be the aspiration of happiness in his last days. Yet, as is the case in A Farewell To
Arms, the war setting offers Robert a blank screen upon which he is able to project his
masculine ideals. But different than Frederic, he does this not by leaving the army.
Robert finds his masculinity by remaining true to the ideals for which he initially enlisted.
Even when he realizes these ideals are corrupted when he sees how some of his allies
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only fight in the war to help their own, often political, cause, or when he hears how the
Spanish people are also guilty of enormous atrocities, he finds a motivation to fulfil his
goal. This manifestation of masculinity differs from the way Frederic perceived it. The
difference between Frederic and Robert can be explained by the different time in which
they act. To Frederic, masculinity is an ideal he has to fight for. At the eve of World War
I, masculinity was changing in America, a change Frederic perceived as a threat. For
Whom The Bell Tolls is set 22 years later, in the Spanish Civil War instead of in World
War I, in an age in which men did not feel their masculinity threatened anymore. Thus,
he is able to be what Philip Young would call a Hemingway Code Hero. Due to his
realization that the old values and beliefs were unable to prevent World War I, he only
wants to live up to his own expectations and do what he is in the war for. By remaining
true to these ideals, no matter what happens, Robert as much as Frederic answers
Roosevelt’s call.
In the middle of a war between Nationalists, supported by foreign Fascists, and
Loyalists, supported by foreign Communists, Robert finds himself defending his own
ideals. It is because of these ideals Robert went to war, and although he fights with the
Loyalists, he does not fight for the communist ideas some of his allies do. The ideals he
fights for are liberalism and his love for the Spanish people, both threatened by the
Nationalists. When Robert learns that his side is also guilty of severe atrocities, he sees
the main reason for his presence in the war undermined. He is at that moment as much
a Lost Generation character as Frederic is in A Farewell To Arms. But unlike Frederic,
Robert is able to overcome his loss of hope as he fights on to defend his comrades and
girlfriend.
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Although Frederic and Robert share many characteristics, and although they both
belong to a Lost Generation, the difference between the two characters is clear. Frederic
finds himself in an age in which he actively has to redefine his masculinity. And even
though he finally realizes he is not going to find it in the war, he does not find hope or
salvation in his attempt to regain his masculine place in society. He goes from one
disillusion to another, and ends up lost and devastated. Robert, on the other hand, is
also lost when he realizes that the initial causes he fights for are corrupted. But unlike
Frederic, he is able to find a purpose in the war, and fights to keep his friends safe. By
doing so, Robert is able to overcome the Lost Generation feeling of hopelessness and
thus gives meaning to his life in its final moments. The war then can be seen as a
metaphor for hope. While Frederic hopes to find a purpose in life by leaving it, but
eventually fails, Robert finds his purpose by remaining faithful to the people he fought
with and the causes he enlisted for, thus holding on to Roosevelt’s ideal of never giving
up.
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