A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway by Wagner-Martin Linda;

Author:Wagner-Martin, Linda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195121513
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-04-03T10:11:03+00:00

Grace Hall-Hemingway

Hemingway viewed his mother’s independence, activism, and successes as evidence of her desire to dominate and emasculate, and he spent a lifetime not working out the conflict between his intense desire for her approval and his often articulated hatred of her. For many men of the first two decades of the twentieth century, the social issues raised by women reformers and activists, and their insistence on the right to vote and function as citizens under the Constitution, were considered unfeminine. As Mark Spilka argues, “Grace brought a sense of personal and professional worth [to marriage and motherhood] which… critics have variously characterized as utter selfishness, a grande-dame manner, monstrous willfulness and self-delusion, frustrated careerism, and castrating Victorian momism” (25).

Grace Hemingway was not only an independent woman, singer, music teacher, and suffragist, but she was also a composer; some of her musical compositions were published by the Oliver Ditson Company in Chicago and Summy Company in New York (Young Hemingway 107). As Bernice Kert explains, even before Grace’s marriage—but shortly after the death of her mother—she was determined to follow her career in music. The “renowned opera coach, Madame Louisa Cappianni… believed that Grace possessed a remarkable voice. She arranged an audition for her pupil with the authorities at the Metropolitan Opera and there was the possibility of a contract for Grace” (24–25). In order to pay for her lessons with Madame Cappianni, Grace used the proceeds from a concert she gave in Madison Square Garden in 1896 (which received good press notices), after which she accepted her father’s invitation to go with him to Europe for the summer. By October of that year she had made a decision not to pursue a career in music but to marry Clarence Edmonds “Ed” Hemingway (Kert 25).

Pam Boker describes Grace as “an intensely ambitious woman who gave up her professional singing career to become a wife and mother” and argues further that “it is possible that Grace pushed her children to achieve the recognition that would make up for her own lost feeling of importance” (173). Rose Marie Burwell indicts Grace more severely, viewing her as “living her [own] mother’s unfulfilled desire for a musical career” and as “far too self-involved to have provided the atmosphere in which [Ernest] could develop a self not contingent upon being the child she wanted him to be” and drawing attention to the fact that “Grace always identified herself as ‘Grace Hall-Hemingway,’ at a time when most married women dropped their maiden names” (25–26), although more than forty years earlier, in 1855, Lucy Stone had begun the practice of keeping her own name after she married. Reynolds relates that Grace was one of only three Oak Park women whose names appeared hyphenated in the newspaper; the other two were “Dr. Anna Blount, who led the suffragist movement in Oak Park and Illinois, and made contributions at the national level in the fight for the vote; and Belle Watson-Melville, a performer on the national Chautauqua circuit” (Young Hemingway 106–7).

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