#OPENIN SCENE OF THE SUN ALSO RISES SERIES#
He cannot live with her or be comforted without her.Īfter a series of frustrating encounters with Brett, Jake finally decides to take a five day fishing trip to Burguete, Spain with his war buddy Bill. In Jake’s way of distorted thinking, he has no other choice. In their “jazz age” relationship, a woman (Brett) established the rules, and the man (Jake) must go along with what she says. She says that if she committed to Jake, she would make him miserable because she would need to cheat on him all the time. However, providing emotional support has previously been considered a female role that women provide to strong men. Presumably, she is telling him that he can provide her the much needed emotional support she needs to continue her endless sexual conquests of men. In her way, she thinks she can make Jake feel better by assuring him that sex “is not all that you know.” Hemingway leaves it to Jake’s and the reader’s imaginations to try to understand what else she thinks that Jake knows that can help her.
She says, bluntly, that she needs constant sexual intimacy from men. Although Brett often states that she loves Jake, she cannot commit to him. Jake would like to make Brett commit to him and to marry or live together. None of the male American expatriates, called the “Lost Generation” by Gertrude Stein, meet these high ideals. By establishing Jake as sexually impotent, Hemingway presents readers with an androgynous male who, by definition, cannot live up to the high ideals he establishes as throughout the novel as meeting the almost unreachable standards of the ideal masculine code. At least temporarily, Hemingway likely experienced enough of this impotent condition to credibly incorporate it into the character who speaks for his beliefs-Jake Barnes. By reading about Hemingway’s war experiences, we know that he returned from the war injured from the waist down. In their first of several taxicab rides together, we learn that Jake has been injured in the war and cannot perform sexually with any women. After a short time of gaiety, Brett asks Jake to take her away from the scene.
Jake tries to come to terms with Brett’s friends, but cannot fully accept them or their views. She is also stared at by all the “straight” men in the story.
Her sexuality is so powerful, that it attracts even non-masculine men. All of the gay men put her at the center of their dancing and celebrating. In her first introduction, she is the life of the party. She has a short, “bob” hairstyle and her name, Brett, suggests that she may be somewhat androgynous. When we are first introduced to Lady Brett, she arrives by taxicab with a large group of blonde and wavy hair gay men. They go on to discuss that the war has destroyed the positive values that were accepted by many earlier generations. She replies that everyone around here “is sick” after the war. She asks, “You sick?” He responds that he is. This interaction established the fact that Jake is sexually attracted to women, but cannot perform with them. Jake’s effort to pick up Georgette, a prostitute is undermined when she makes sexual advances to him that he cannot fulfill. Using the settings of Paris and Spain in the 1920’s helps readers to establish a sense of defamiliarization and to temporarily suspend their assumptions about how men and women should act in the early twentieth century. In his novel, he continually presents male and female characters whose sexual identities are blurred along the lines of the masculine and feminine identities that he introduces through his main male character, Jake Barnes, and his dominant female character, Lady Brett Ashley. Although Hemingway gives lip service to his masculine and feminine codes, his characters in The Sun Also Rises seldom live up to his ideals. Such assumptions were prevalent in much of nineteenth and early twentieth-century society and were often reflected in literature. An extension of this thinking implies that men should be strong enough to dominate women and that women should act feminine and be willing to be dominated by strong and silent men.
#OPENIN SCENE OF THE SUN ALSO RISES CODE#
His masculine code dictates that men should be brave, fearless, athletically powerful, and face all fears and obstacles (including death) with grace under pressure. Ernest Hemingway questions many of the deeply entrenched Pre-World War I concepts of masculine and feminine sexual identity in his novel, The Sun Also Rises.
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