Hemingway, Trauma and Masculinity by Stephen Gilbert Brown

Author:Stephen Gilbert Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030192303
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Littless’ “straight” legs trope on the “strips of bacon” laid on the hot “skillet,” in a signifying chain of phallic images soon to be joined by the “trout” “throbbing, jerking” on the end of his fishing rod. Nick’s trout fishing allegorizes the return of erotic desire, displaced onto the pole, which had a “heavy firmness” in his hand.

Their forest camp is the site of their gender role-reversals, which are an essential part of their androgynous courtship ritual. Nick adopts the part of the passive domestic “girl” to his sister’s romantically aggressive “boy, preparing the meals in the make-shift” kitchen, before resuming the part of “husband” and provider in the field, gun in hand—as if cast in the role of an hermaphrodite frontier scout, his every move watched and admired by the “boy” with close-cropped hair and an air of gallant ribaldry. Throughout “LGC,” the siblings take turns reversing passive-aggressive roles: Nick taking the initiative as the male in woodcraft, hunting, and fishing, while assuming a more submissive role relative to his sister’s performance of masculinity around camp.

When Nick returns from fishing, eroticized by the capture of the trout, the androgynous fetish (Littless’ cut hair) further excites his desire. “I cut it off … with a scissors,” his sister boldly announces (531). The roles Littless assumes as “whore’s assistant,” “wild boy of Borneo,” and Nick’s “brother” trope on the host of roles she plays during the course of their fugitive flight.

Deep in the forest, Nick and Littless are refashioning their identities along androgynous lines, their flight reprising the mobility of their identity formation, as it shapeshifts between masculine and feminine polarities—as do the identities of Ernest and Mary in the African bush.

Under the impetus of the criminal, the sexual, the natural, and the theatrical, their malleable identities boldly explore new shapes and subject positions, moving toward an ideal of sibling Eros forbidden everywhere but in the forest. In this, Littless embodies Hemingway’s romantic ideal, which is not merely for an “adolescent fusion,” as Spilka asserts, but for an adolescent fusion that is always and already androgynous: which finds its ideal in the trope of the androgynous “twin sister”—and in her absence, in a series of fictional and material surrogate “twin sisters”: whether named Prudence Mitchell or Prudy Boulton, Trudy Gilby or Catherine Bourne, Hadley Richardson or Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn or Mary Walsh. In her memoir, Marcelline, perhaps unwittingly, lends further credence to the incestuous overtones of Hemingway’s sibling relationships: As part of their father’s “lifesaving drills,”we learned to undress in water over our heads, and Dad would time us to see how quickly we could take off our clothing and tennis shoes and get to shore. We were keen to compete in these races…. Sometimes as a special treat, we would be allowed to go into the water without bathing suits in the evening. This we called “Secret Society.” We felt so free as the water slid past our naked bodies. Even in our teens our parents let us swim this way on hot nights.

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