Masculinity In The Works Of Ernest Hemingway

With the growing number feminist movements and equality promoting campaigns, which are saying that women are inferior to men in many aspects, even going as far as to say they have less privileges than men. It is clear that masculinity is not seen or portrayed the way it once was. Since ancient times it has been clearly shown that men have always had to be the gender that is superior in the sense that they must be strong and must know how to handle whatever it is they need to do. The Hebrew Bible declares that King David of Israel told his son to “be strong, and be a man”, before David died. Men have always needed to have that extra mile to go in order to be men. Men have always been considered those who provide the family with meals, shelter and protection, whereas women have to take care of the young. This is a very primal and animalistic aspect that still remains in today’s society, but is fading away gradually as there are an increasing number of women who now have the same opportunities that only men could benefit from many years ago. However, the kind of masculinity that Hemingway describes in his works is that of a ‘Man’s man’, who is strong, independent and has a sense of honor and duty that exceeds the boundaries of just patriotism or some sort of societal norm. Anybody can easily spot a steady trend in Hemingway’s novels, the depiction and respect he gives to a certain kind of man, one that is, authoritarian, skilled, and intensely mannish. A kind of man that many of us today have thought our fathers are or were. In “A Farewell to Arms”, Hemingway has included a significant number of flat characters that show various aspects of virility and machismo. Clear examples of this are Dr. Valentini is an excellent surgeon who is the alpha male in his career, Bonello, the violent soldier who killed a soldier because of his lack of loyalty to his comrades and Rinaldi who’s a flirt,

Honor is assumed to mean loyalty to one’s moral principles. The amount of someone’s honor is reliant on on the tenure of a sum of other virtues, such as honesty, duty, courage and patriarchy. However, the main character, as honorable as he was once shown to be, deserts his army to seek his love interest. He feels remorse at this fact because he could have stayed and fought with his country, but it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He felt as if honor wasn’t part of who he was, and instead chose what would make him happier, running away to Catherine. What Hemingway is trying to convey is that masculinity, duty and honor all go hand in hand. Even in other novels, Hemingway heavily reflects on how being masculine can lead to an increased sense of courage, honor and duty. In his other novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, he demonstrates more acts of courageousness through the father and grandfather of the main character who fulfill their duties as a man should. “I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it." Hemingway wrote this after he served in World War I. He realized that duty and honor go hand in hand. He explains war as something that other men have already been through, and his own ego tells him that he can go through with his military duties, just like others have done so before him, and just like they will after him. ‘A Farewell to Arms’ can be seen as Hemingway’s semi-autobiography, which makes it more visible to us what Hemingway must have been going through in his early 20s, as an ambulance driver in Italy, continuously facing his own mortality again and again. Hemingway’s own personality heavily influences Henry, which is then easily agreed upon by whoever reads it. By having gone through all this trouble in war, Hemingway clearly gained