The Feminine Principle in Hemingway

Abstract

<p>I suggest that Hemingway's prose works externalize his fear of the feminine principle in the world and that Hemingway's heroes, projections of the author, himself, are in flight away from the feminine principle originating in the Dark Mother. First, I examine the hero's attempts to escape the biological cycle of birth-procreation-death and to seek refuge on his own terms in an Eden-like Moment with a woman. But the Edenic Moment is subject to Time, Flesh, and a sexually-based Invidia, and as an actual experience is transitory. Second, I examine the Hemingway man's escape into self-fulfillment through work as an effort to maintain his masculine individuality. But progressively throughout the works, the Hemingway man loses his ability -to cope with the forces which disrupt his work, and the nature of the forces opposing man's successful escape into work is seen as feminine •. And finally, I relate the elemental forces bent on the destruction of the Hemingway man's autonomy and on the bending of him to their will to Woman as Dark Mother. Woman is associated with desire, with mutability, and - ultimately with death and decay in the cyclical renewal of nature. Nothing is permanent in such a world. In the increasing association of the artist-figure with mutability, one can conjecture that even art, for Hemingway, came increasingly under the all-pervading influence of the Great Mother, and perhaps provides an insight into his final despair.</p>