Gender Roles In Hemingway

Hemingway was born in the developmental period of the women’s movement; female consciousness was increasing. Women’s main task in this period was to push boundaries of natural, physical, moral and intellectual capacity, which were no different with men in that period, so there is no reason that does not give the same status in society as men. Therefore, they imitated men to smoke, drink alcohol; they would enter male-specific areas of activity in order to subvert the traditional gender structure, and then promote the reconstruction of gender roles.

In 19th century, society had divided male fields and female fields, males lived in the competition of the public world, so they needed to have tenacity of emotional and moral behaviours; and female

Jake loves Brett very much, but Brett is a new type of woman, so she has many relationships with men, and this upsets him very much, crying alone for this. And it takes pleading with femininity to maintain their relationship. Jake uses pleading discourse to Brett in the novel, for example, “Don’t you love me?”, “isn’t there anything we can do about it?”

Jake only tolerates Brett to maintain a relationship between them, to exchange Brett’s attachment. This forces him to lose traditional masculinity, and turn to femininity; and the loss of traditional masculinity helps make the love between Jake and Brett more stable and create profound friendship.

Jake loses sexual capacity, which in turn hurts his masculinity, and makes him anxious and confused. His injuries make him not only lose the physically of the traditional male identity, but also makes his emotionally turn to femininity.

“The sun also rises” reveals that the developmental process of gender is fluid and unstable in society. Brett and Jake reflect changing the concept of gender and redefined masculinity and femininity after First World War. In this deconstruction of traditional gender, Jake becomes tolerant of femininity, and Brett develops a decisive