[On November
26, 1942 the great Casablanca premiered in New York. So
this week I’ll AmericanStudy that film and four other wartime romances!]
On two important
elements beyond the autobiographical in Hemingway’s war romance.
Ernest
Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), the tale
of an American serving with the Italian ambulance corps during World War I who is
injured and falls in love with his English nurse, has frequently been read as
an autobiographical novel of Hemingway’s own experiences as an American serving
with the Italian ambulance corps during World War I, getting injured, and
falling in love with his American nurse. The parallels are so clear that In Love and War (1996), the film adaptation of the novel which
gives this week’s series its name, stars Chris O’Donnell as none other than
Ernest Hemingway and Sandra Bullock as the American nurse with whom he falls
in—you get the idea. While there are of course differences between Hemingway’s
story and that of the novel’s narrator and male protagonist Frederic Henry—most
notably in the outcome of their respective war romances—I’m not going to argue
that the book wasn’t clearly and centrally inspired by the author’s personal life
and identity.
Even the most
autobiographical novels are works of fiction with other layers and elements
beyond the life experiences, though, and A
Farewell to Arms has a couple of particularly significant ones. For one
thing, I think Hemingway creates a pretty nuanced portrayal of his female
protagonist, Catherine Barkley. I know Hemingway’s general reputation when it
comes to depictions
of women, and I may have even contributed a bit to that narrative (while
also trying to challenge it) in parts of this
prior post. But while Farewell is
certainly Frederic’s story (he is the narrator, after all), his narration and
the novel still do justice to some central aspects of Catherine’s identity: her
wartime
work as a nurse, her status as (like Frederic) an expatriate working in
Italy, and especially her experiences of the possibilities and dangers of
pregnancy and childbirth. Those last subjects are most overtly outside of the autobiographical
experiences of a male author, and while Hemingway again filters them through
Frederic’s perspective he still depicts them in complex and thoughtful ways.
More directly
part of Frederic’s perspective, but also importantly separate from and bigger
than him (or any one character), is the novel’s portrayal of war. Again this element
at least somewhat belies Hemingway’s reputation as a man’s man obsessed with
machismo, an image bolstered by his inclusion of numerous violent
activities and sports in many of his works, from boxing to bullfighting to
big-game hunting. Yet as that hyperlinked post suggests, Hemingway could
critique such activities at the same time that he certainly could and did
celebrate them, and the portrayal of war in Farewell
is far more critical than celebratory. The title alone suggests Frederic’s
eventual desertion from his duties and comrades, an action often portrayed in
war literature as the height of cowardice but treated far more sympathetically
in Hemingway’s novel. Indeed, the nonsense and atrocities Frederic faces from those
supposedly on the same “side” as him feel at times much more along the lines of
a wartime satire like Catch-22 than
any idealization, heroic depiction of war. One more element that makes Hemingway’s
most autobiographical novel also one of his very best.
Last romance
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other wartime romances you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment