Teaching Hemingway and Gender , livre ebook

Teaching Hemingway and Gender
TEACHING HEMINGWAY
Mark P. Ott, Editor
Susan F. Beegel, Founding Editor
Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
EDITED BY PETER L. HAYS
Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
EDITED BY LISA TYLER
Teaching Hemingway and Modernism
EDITED BY JOSEPH FRUSCIONE
Teaching Hemingway and War
EDITED BY ALEX VERNON
Teaching Hemingway and Gender
EDITED BY VERNA KALE
Teaching Hemingway and Gender
Edited by Verna Kale
The Kent State University Press       Kent, Ohio
Copyright © 2016 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2016007534
ISBN 978-1-60635-279-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kale, Verna, editor.
Title: Teaching Hemingway and gender / edited by Verna Kale.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, 2016. | Series: Teaching Hemingway | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007534| ISBN 9781606352793 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞ | ISBN 9781631012518 (epdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961--Study and teaching. | Masculinity in literature. | Men in literature. | Sex in literature. | Women in literature. | Gender identity in literature.
Classification: LCC PS3515.E37 Z89165 2016 | DDC 813/.52--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007534
20  19  18  17  16              5  4  3  2  1
for Sandra Spanier and Susan Beegel with appreciation
V.K.
Contents
Foreword
MARK P. OTT
Acknowledgments
Introduction
VERNA KALE
State of the Field: Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Hemingway
DEBRA A. MODDELMOG
Part One: Hemingway and Gender
In Our Time and American Modernisms: Interpreting and Writing the Complexities of Gender and Culture
JOSEPH FRUSCIONE
“The Garden of Cultural Acceptability”: Gender in The Garden of Eden , Then and Now
PAMELA L. CAUGHIE AND ERIN HOLLIDAY-KARRE
Redeeming Hemingway and His Women: Periodicals as Sites of Change in the Literature Classroom
BELINDA WHEELER
It Is Pretty to Think So: Domestic Relationships in the Nick Adams Stories
JOHN FENSTERMAKER
Nick Adams and the Construction of Masculinity
SARAH B. HARDY
A Very Complicated Negotiation: Teaching Hemingway to Second Language Learners of English
DOUGLAS SHELDON
Part Two: Hemingway and Sexuality
“Aficion Means Passion”: Sexuality and Religion in The Sun Also Rises
JOSHUA WEISS
Reading Hemingway Backwards: Teaching A Farewell to Arms in Light of The Garden of Eden
CARL P. EBY
Economic Power and the Female Expatriate Consumer Artist in The Garden of Eden
CATHERINE R. MINTLER
Part Three: Hemingway and Women
Hemingway and the Modern Woman: Brett Ashley and the Flapper Tradition
CRYSTAL GORHAM DOSS
Men Without Women?: Can Hemingway and Women Writers Coexist in the Classroom?
SARA KOSIBA
Katie and the Pink Highlighter: Teaching Post-“Hemingway” Hemingway
HILARY KOVAR JUSTICE
Appendixes
Works Cited
Selected Bibliography and Suggestions for Further Reading
Contributors
Index
Foreword
Mark P. Ott
How should the work of Ernest Hemingway be taught in the twenty-first century? Although the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s have faded, Hemingway’s place in the curriculum continues to inspire discussion among writers and scholars about the lasting value of his work. To readers of this volume, his life and writing remain vital, meaningful, and still culturally resonant for today’s students.
Books in the Teaching Hemingway series build on the excellent work of founding series editor Susan F. Beegel, who guided into publication the first two volumes of this series, Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, edited by Lisa Tyler (2008), and Teaching Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, edited by Peter L. Hays (2008). To promote their usefulness to instructors and professors—from high schools, community colleges, and universities—the newest volumes in this series are organized thematically, rather than around a single text. This shift attempts to open up Hemingway’s work to more interdisciplinary strategies of instruction through divergent theories, fresh juxtapositions, and ethical inquiries, and to the employment of emergent technology to explore media beyond the text.
Teaching Hemingway and Gender , edited by Verna Kale, speaks to issues that continue to be of intense interest to students and scholars today: gender, sexuality, and “the Hemingway text.” The expertise and insight Kale brought to her highly regarded biography Ernest Hemingway (2016) and her work on modernism, gender studies, and feminist theory is manifest throughout this volume. These far-ranging essays exploring Hemingway’s fiction through the lens of gender and sexuality demonstrate that in today’s classrooms and lecture halls Hemingway’s work is being taught in more thoughtful and innovative ways than ever before. The essays showcase the creativity, wisdom, and insight from authors of varied backgrounds that are united in their passion for sharing Hemingway’s modernist texts to twenty-first-century students and scholars.
Acknowledgments
Verna Kale
Teaching is always a collaborative process, and thus the list of individuals deserving to be thanked here is much too long to publish. That said, I’d like to acknowledge the following people in particular for their help in bringing this project to completion.
First and foremost, I wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their hard work and perseverance and for sharing their experience and creativity. I am grateful to Mark P. Ott, series editor, for asking me to take the lead on this volume; Joyce Harrison and Mary Young at Kent State University Press for easing this book through the gauntlet of academic publishing; and Rebekah Cotton for her careful editing of the manuscript. I am also grateful to Lisa Tyler, editor of Teaching Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (Kent State 2008), for helping me sort through some of the trickier behind-the-scenes questions that arise when editing a collection, and to the anonymous reviewers who offered valuable constructive criticism. I am grateful to the provost and dean of faculty and my colleagues at Hampden-Sydney College for supporting this project with a summer research grant and other funding, the librarians at Bortz Library for their tireless assistance, and Jane Holland for her administrative support. And, as always, I offer my most heartfelt thanks and love to my family: Steele, Betty, and Julian.
The greatest debt, however, is surely to the scholars who have blazed a trail (and tolerated what Hilary Kovar Justice calls, in the essay that closes out this volume, “The Question”): the smart, imaginative, and dauntless women and men who, instead of closing the book on Hemingway, decided to help rewrite it. That list is long, and so, instead, I direct readers to Debra A. Moddelmog’s Selected Bibliography.
Two of the most influential women in Hemingway studies—Susan Beegel, former editor of the Hemingway Review , who accepted my first scholarly publication, and Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, who took me on as her research assistant and has supported my professional endeavors ever since—have also been the most influential mentors in my career, and it is to them that this collection is dedicated, with appreciation.
Introduction
Verna Kale
The purpose of this book seems straightforward enough: Teaching Hemingway and Gender explores themes relating to gender and sexuality in Hemingway’s work, and it provides a selection of approaches to teaching these themes in the secondary, post-secondary, and graduate classrooms. Immediately, however, the challenge of such a task asserts itself: to what problems does this book offer a corrective? Is Hemingway—whose reputation as “AMERICA’S No. 1 HE-MAN” still precedes him—in need of recovery? 1 Can such work be done in a way that does not turn the instructor into an apologist for the predominantly white, predominantly male ethos that so long defined “the moderns” (and the academy that canonized them)? Conversely, if Hemingway has never really left us—and his ubiquitous presence in literature anthologies and the continued scholarly interest in his work suggests that his pervasiveness is in fact the case—how can we elucidate the study of these masculinist, modernist texts to twenty-first-century students (and scholars)?
The conversation Leslie Fiedler sparked in 1960 with his famous proclamation that there are “no women ” in Hemingway’s texts (emphasis Fiedler’s) spanned decades, survived the canon wars, and carries on today (316). Other critics declared that in Hemingway’s works “the only good woman is a dead one, and even then there are questions” (Fetterley, Resisting Reader 71) and suggested that women “are not likely to see [them]selves in Hemingway’s encoding of subjectivity” (Westling 100). Not yet ready to give up on Hemingway, Ann Putnam has asked, “How do female readers who have always been moved by Hemingway’s works … negotiate theories that insist upon the exclusionary quality of the Hemingway world? How does the female reader locate herself in a landscape where there are no women?” (110). More recently, as Nancy R. Comley notes, scholars have reconsidered Hemingway’s female characters as “finely drawn figures, frustrated and limited by their social roles and one-dimensional relationship to the men in their lives.” Comley suggests that the perennial view of Brett the “bitch” originates with critics rather than with Hemingway. Instead, she argues, a strong female character like Brett “demonstrates not only the social freedom accruing to women … but also the pressures and difficulties of women in the postwar period” (“Women” 412–13). Furthermore, as scholars now recognize, there is no single heroic code in Hemingway’s work but rather an “endless concern with varieties of male e