It would be naive to say that The Sun Also Rises is a joyous book, or even a hopeful one; it is, of course, neither. Most often interpreted as a picture of post-war aimlessness and anomie, Hemingway’s 1926 novel is usually said to be the bible of the Lost Generation, a modern-day courtesy book on how to behave in the waste land Europe had become after the Great War. However valid this interpretation may be, it is limiting and unduly pessimistic. It necessitates a particularly negative reading of the characters in the book and undervalues Hemingway’s intuitive awareness of cultural and historical forces and the impact they have on personal relationships. Most damaging of all, the consensual interpretation fosters the harmful propagation of sexist stereotypes and ignores Hemingway’s knowledge of and respect for the New Woman. Instead of reading The Sun Also Rises as the death of love,1 we can read it as a story about the cautious belief in the survival of the two most basic components of any human relationship: love and friendship. Examined this way, the novel is a rather extraordinary document that unites the two separate sexual spheres of the nineteenth century and in so doing breaks away from the moral imperatives of the Victorian age while demonstrating the possibility of love’s survival in the more realistic but nihilist twentieth century.

The coaxial themes of love and friendship inform this book in such subtle ways that they are easily overlooked even though they are the forces which motivate the characters’ behavior. In the case of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley they form the basis of their relationship. Too often this relationship is laid waste by stereotypical thinking. The cliché runs like this: Jake, unmanned in the war, is not only physically but spiritually impotent and allows himself to be debased by Brett, that “non-woman,” that “purely destructive force.” Such critical abuse is understandable when we realize that Brett is considered part of that long American tradition of the dark-haired, bad woman. She must be termed “promiscuous” and a “nymphomaniac” if her sexual behavior is to be explained at all. The mainspring of such a tradition is that “nice girls don’t do it.” But we’ve already seen in the short stories that Hemingway refuses to bind his female characters to such strictures. His women do “do it,” and with relish.

Hemingway seems to take for granted that Brett is a sexually active woman. And though he did not consciously set out to create the New Woman, Hemingway’s Brett is a fine example of one. Before examining Brett’s character in terms of the love/friendship theme of the novel let us briefly examine the milieu from which she emerged.

* * *

The modern woman did not suddenly rise up from the rubble of 1918. On both sides of the Atlantic Brett’s predecessors had for some time rebelled against personal circumstances and societal restrictions. Though it is agreed that the so-called New Woman emerged as a type during the “naughty nineties,” as William Wasserstrom points out, “After 1860 Americans of even the straightest gentility preferred girls with spunk.”2 It was well known in Europe how independent and free-wheeling American girls were; Henry James founded his literary career on such types. By European standards American ladies had great freedom of movement. Frances Kemble remarked on unescorted teenage girls “lounging about in the streets” of New York.3 Before 1860 chaperonage of unmarried women was neither enforced nor required, and though this practice was reintroduced in 1880, it was popular only with the upwardly mobile.4

In both America and England the rise of industry and business brought men and women into close proximity. Though American women entered the clerical occupations before their British sisters, by the end of the nineteenth century the business office had been sexually integrated in both countries. The combination of more women leaving the home and women working closely with men moved to create a different mode of female behavior—women were perceived as beginning to “act like men.” As K. G. Wells remarked in 1880, “Instead of grace, there has come in many women an affectation of mannishness as is shown in hats, jackets, long strides, and a healthful swinging of the arms in walking.”5 More radical behavior included smoking, drinking, living alone (“latch-key girls”), and sexual activity. The dissemination and use of birth control increased. Though such “liberated” activity was often frowned upon, it was alluring for many people, at least on an unconscious level. Trilby, George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel, was wildly popular and took America by storm. Leading a bohemian existence, earning a living as an artist’s model, dressing like a man when she felt like it, the title character defied the stupidity and insidiousness of Victorian propriety. Five years later in London, the 1889 premiere of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House ushered in the decade of the New Woman with a more somber but nonetheless resounding bang. The New Woman had entered the imagination of Western society.

Non-fictional modes of female behavior which had a liberating effect swept over America in the form of the British Blondes, a burlesque troupe which began its American tour in the 1870s. These British imports struck a new standard of feminine beauty. Even so proprietary a critic as William Dean Howells admired the “new buxom image of beauty they represented.”6 By the 1890s, this buxomness, a lower class trait, softened, elongated, and moved up to a more respectable rung of the social ladder and became the Gibson Girl. By 1913 the “hipless, waistless, boneless” (and, we must not forget, breastless) flapper appeared.7 It seems, indeed, that women were becoming “mannish,” as the de-emphasis of breasts implies.

But more important than how female these women looked was how they behaved. All three types of women, the British Blondes, the Gibson Girl, and the flapper, had the ability to be “pals” with men, to sustain friendships as opposed to courtships. This ability helped to break down long existing gender boundaries. Actresses and dancers, because they travelled with male actors and musicians, were not bound to conventional, sexually segregated behavior; their necessarily intimate living conditions worked against the Victorian fetish for modesty. Though such Broadway behavior earned actresses the reputation of being loose, it also promoted a free and easy exchange between male and female, a healthy demystification of “the opposite sex.” In the case of the Gibson Girl, her behavior was more circumspect but still high-spirited and modern. She was more elegant than voluptuous, very athletic and healthy, progressive and college-educated. Though not overtly sexual, she was not without sensuality. The Gibson Girl was the representative woman for the novelists of the Progressive Era.8 She was not dependent on men, yet valued their friendship; she would not hesitate to marry the “right one.”

The flapper, by 1913 “the preeminent model of female appearance,”9 not only looked but behaved like a man. She smoked, drank, drove, slept around, and earned a living. Her arrival coincided with “Sex o’clock in America.”10 Her behavior was “assertive, and independent, she experimented with intimate dancing, permissive favors, and casual courtships or affairs. She joined men as comrades, and the differences in behavior of the sexes were narrowed.”11 Her live-for-today attitude was announced in Owen Johnson’s 1914 novel The Salamander and later immortalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was destined to become part of Hemingway’s lost generation.12

As expected, the push for female freedom, whether advanced by fashion, birth control or the vote, met with strong opposition. As women became more militant in their demands for equality, what were once only implications of female inferiority became flat pronouncements. While the British Blondes were showing their legs, male obstetricians virtually took over the birth process in America.13 By pronouncing “the truth” about women’s bodies men attempted to effect control over those bodies. In 1873, Anthony Comstock successfully lobbied Congress to prohibit the dissemination of birth control information. A year earlier Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an organization successful in shutting down Broadway productions and banning selected novels from the mails. The extent of Comstock’s influence is best gauged by remembering that in 1915 then President Wilson appointed him as delegate to an International Purity Conference. It is a measure of how virulent and persistent the original Moral Majority was when we recognize that Comstock’s campaign against vice spanned those same years in which women made the greatest strides in sexual and political freedom.

Of course, any loosening of the social strictures for women represented an assault on male omnipotence. The nineteenth-century demarcation of gender roles was fiercely guarded. The myth of the self-made man conspired with the Cinderella myth to make women hostages of the home and men absentee husbands and fathers pursuing the higher calling of business. A book such as The Awakening is a good index of how ignorant many men probably were of the inner lives of women.

This emotional segregation of women and men had obvious consequences. It accounts for the intense relationships between female friends as well as the sad and deplorable conditions of many Victorian marriages.14 It burdened women with the preservation of all morals and manners, while it forced men to do homage to the unbending demands of progress. It safeguarded the male ego by denying that “nice” women had erotic drives, thereby insuring male sexual adequacy. It interpreted any change in female behavior as a threat to male dominance; the new mannish behavior was particularly threatening because it called into question heretofore supposedly self-evident gender distinctions. Fear of women was, as Peter Gay points out, an international preoccupation of the nineteenth century.15

But however fearful and discouraged at first, this mannish behavior of women had positive results. It helped to bring the two worlds of men and women closer together. And such bringing together had to be undertaken by women and actualized through a transformation of their behavior because it is less frightening for a woman to be masculinized than it is for a man to be feminized. Theron Ware discovered that the emergence of a man’s sensual nature leaves him open to emotional and physical collapse, but Brett Ashley’s deviant temperament gives her strength, determination, and resilience. The genius of Brett Ashley lies not in Hemingway’s ability to create the Great American Bitch but in his ability to create woman as Friend.

* * *

The Sun Also Rises reflects the changing sex role patterns prevalent in Western society during the thirty years before its publication. In many ways this first novel is Hemingway’s goodbye kiss to the Victorian ethos under which he was raised. As an expatriate, as a World War I veteran, as a young husband and father, and as an artist, Hemingway, since the age of eighteen, had lived an unconventional life. Living as he did in Europe he saw firsthand the shifting social structures that transformed the old order into the new. His sensibilities were equally attuned to both pre- and post-World War I mores. He was not so ignorant as to believe that 1918 had changed everything; it certainly had not changed Robert Cohn, the traditional, romantic, chivalric, and backward-looking character we meet when the book opens.

Cohn, of course, is a bridge figure. He lives in the waste land but does not adhere to its values. He represents the dual concepts of manly adventure and romantic love so important in the nineteenth century.16 When we meet him he is engaged to Frances Clyne, a woman with “the absolute determination that he [Cohn] should marry her.”17 Though he wants to venture to South America and asks Jake Barnes, the book’s narrator, to go with him, he physically silences Jake when Jake suggests in front of Frances that he and Cohn take a weekend trip to nearby Strasbourg. Frances, it seems, is the jealous type.

By focusing the first two chapters on Cohn and the dual concerns of romantic love and adventure, Hemingway establishes a backdrop against which the rest of the book is played. That backdrop becomes, as Cohn’s daydream of South America fades, the conventional theme of courtship and marriage—in other words, the typical theme of the Victorian novel. Of course, conventional marriage does little to erode the rigid boundaries between men and women, and Robert and Frances act out scenes which accentuate, in a progressively negative manner, the worst attributes of both sexes. She becomes a nasty woman tremendously afraid of not being married, and he becomes a chump willing to take her verbal abuse lest he break into tears, as he habitually does whenever they “have a scene.” The demise of this relationship is nothing less than a wicked parody of the engagement/marriage ritual itself. Fifty pages into the novel we see already that the old way offers nothing but anger and humiliation.

In Chapter II another Victorian ritual is enacted, but with a twist: Jake gets a prostitute but does not sexually use her. As he explains, “I had picked her up because of a vague sentimental idea that it would be nice to eat with some one” (16). Jake’s motive is not sexual fulfillment or an escape from a dull marriage bed, but companionship. Prostitute or not, Georgette is recognized by Jake as a fellow human being, not as a mere commodity to buy and discard. But however kindly Jake treats Georgette his actions still reflect the rigid gender roles of the nineteenth century. The underbelly of the conventional Victorian marriage was, after all, prostitution; the erotic restrictions placed on wives encouraged husbands to use whores for sexual release, experimentation, and erotic delight. Coming as it does after the parody of Victorian marriage that Robert Cohn and Frances Clyne represent, this chapter enacts the inevitable decline of such a relationship were it to go on. When Jake introduces Georgette to some acquaintances as his “fiancée” the connection between marriage and prostitution becomes unmistakable.

So far the male-female relationships fall within the scope of the typical Victorian ethos of courtship/marriage, and customer/prostitute. With the entrance of Lady Brett Ashley the focus shifts. Brett’s arrival in Chapter III trumpets a new set of relationships. Since Brett is neither a wife nor a prostitute, it is fitting that she emerge from an environment alien to these two opposites; hence she arrives with a group of homosexual men. Her mannishness is thus established through this group, but since she quickly leaves that group and bonds with Jake we learn that her inclinations are orthodox and acceptable. We know that she is not a lesbian, and that her association with male homosexuals, instead of being a detriment, enhances her attractiveness.

As soon as Brett and Jake begin talking we realize theirs is no conventional relationship. Their dialogue bristles with familiarity. Jake asks, “Why aren’t you tight?” and Brett answers by ordering a drink. The jabs continue:

The “it,” of course, refers to Georgette. As this exchange indicates, Brett and Jake share a public language (remember that Cohn is with them) that includes mild insult and sarcasm. It is a language in which the indefinite pronouns need not be identified. The verbal volley continues on the dance floor and in the taxi, where, alone at last, Brett confesses to Jake, “Oh, darling, I’ve been so miserable.”

What we know so far about Brett’s and Jake’s relationship is this. First, as the dialogue reveals, Jake and Brett are friends. No matter what else their relationship may be it has a solid base in friendship; such benign verbal ribbing only takes place between friends. Secondly, they share a history. Reference to Brett’s drinking habits and how out of character it is for Jake to pick up a whore indicate a more than superficial knowledge of each other’s habits. Thirdly, Brett has control. She neatly declines two dances with Cohn and instigates her and Jake’s departure. And fourthly, there seem to be two languages operating for them: public and private. It is by the latter that the truth is revealed.

And the truth isn’t pretty. They are in love with each other but because of Jake’s wound that love cannot be sexually fulfilled. They have tried making love but failed: “I don’t want to go through that hell again” (26). Love is “hell on earth” but they continue to see each other. There is a sense of things being out of control; at the end of the taxi ride Brett is shaky, and later when Jake returns alone to his apartment he cries himself to sleep. When Jake leaves Brett it is at another bar and in the company of another man.

This pattern of public/private behavior shapes Brett’s and Jake’s relationship in an important way. Jake accepts Brett’s need for public display, her need to breeze around Paris with as many men as possible. He also accepts her need to tell him about it privately. After she interrupts his sleep to recap her night’s adventure with the Count, Jake comments to himself, “This was Brett, that I had felt like crying about” (34). Though there is probably disgust in his voice at this point, there is also resignation, resignation that the woman he loves acts in such peculiar and unstable ways.

The ability to listen, the capacity to care, are not faculties belonging to Jake alone. Brett is also tender and solicitous in private moments. During her second visit to Jake with Count Mippipopolous, when she sees that Jake is a bit shaky, she sends the Count off to get champagne. As Jake lies face down on the bed Brett gently strokes his head. “Poor old darling… . Do you feel better, darling? … Lie quiet” (55). Though her actions are kind and genuine, Brett does not allow this moment to blunt the truth. When Jake, perhaps succumbing to her touch, to her motherly devotion, asks, “Couldn’t we live together, Brett? Couldn’t we just live together?” she answers the only way she knows how:

When the count returns with the champagne all three go out and Jake and Brett talk once more in their public manner until out on the dance floor. Brett, in the privacy of Jake’s arms, recites again what is fast becoming her litany, thus closing Book I: “Oh, darling, … I’m so miserable” (64).

These two small scenes are interesting for what they tell us about how easily Brett and Jake merge the traditional sex roles. The two qualities of granting freedom and lending an ear that Jake exhibits in the first scene clash with the stereotypical image of the muscle-bound, closed-mouth husband/boyfriend who “doesn’t want to hear about it.” If Jake’s attentiveness and meekness in the face of Brett’s gallivanting seem in some ways feminine (Jake as the suffering wife?), then in the second scene Brett reenacts a particularly masculine ritual, characterized by the “line”: “I love you babe, but I can’t stay tied to one woman. I’m just that kind of man.” Brett’s version of this “line” is not delivered with any hint of bravado or cruelty as it has been delivered by men to countless women in books and movies, but as an assessment of, almost as an apology for her personality. What is striking about these role reversals is how easily and naturally they appear and reappear throughout the couple’s interactions. Brett’s behavior, especially, flows back and forth between being soft and caring, and hard and straightforward. Jake has the ability to snap back after a painful relapse. Such flexibility is unthinkable in traditional relationships where sex roles are rigid. Robert Cohn and Frances Clyne do not have this kind of flexibility. One reason Brett leaves Romero at the end of the novel is that he demands that she conform to the rigid traditional female role.

If I over-emphasize that Jake’s and Brett’s departure from stereotypical male-female behavior is a positive dimension of their relationship, I do so because so many critics judge the couple’s behavior in a negative way when measured against those stereotypes. Mark Spilka is one critic who is most ungenerous. In his essay “The Death of Love in The Sun Also Rises,” Spilka sees Jake as emotionally impotent, as an emotional adolescent, and as a man of little integrity; according to Spilka, Jake has defaulted on his maleness. Brett fares no better. She is “the freewheeling equal of any man” who engages in the “male prerogatives of drink and promiscuity.” She is a woman who allows her “natural warmth” to be replaced with “masculine freedom and mobility.” Under such conditions, “there can be no serious love.”18 Obviously Spilka identifies “serious love” with traditional male-female gender roles. Though he acknowledges the general damage to love wrought by World War I, he points specifically to the damage done when woman “steps off the romantic pedestal [and] moves freely through the bars of Paris, and stands confidently there beside her newfound equals.”19 Such narrow-minded thinking not only oversimplifies a very complicated novel but blinds the reader to what demonstration of “serious love” there is in the book.20

Hemingway has a much broader definition of love than Spilka does, and he examines it in many types of relationships and under many different conditions. Such early stories as “The End of Something,” “My Old Man,” and “The Battler,” indicate that Hemingway was less concerned with the outward form of a relationship and whether it conformed to the standard perception of a love relationship—heterosexual love that ends in marriage—than with the inner workings of such relationships. “The Battler” especially supports the suspicion that for some years before he wrote The Sun Also Rises Hemingway was interested in couples who deviated from the standard sex roles. Generally perceived as a story about homosexuality, as of course it is, “The Battler” is also a story about marriage roles, therefore a story about male-female behavior.

There is no reason why Brett’s and Jake’s behavior should be gauged by traditional gender roles since those roles have been modified to suit the couple’s needs. Brett is, after all, the New Woman, and her claim to sexual freedom, though irksome to the critics, is both attractive and perplexing to her fellow characters. Jake cannot be the traditional man because he is impotent. Freed from the pressure to prove his worth through sexual intercourse, Jake must develop other means of asserting his personality.

Both Brett and Jake expect little of each other and have a relationship in which they agree to accept each other as they are. Early in the book Jake describes Brett’s two worst habits to Robert Cohn: “She’s a drunk” (38), and “She’s done it twice” (39), referring to Brett’s marrying men “she didn’t love.” Brett gives a clear self-assessment when she speaks of her intention to return to Mike: “He’s so damned nice and he’s so awful. He’s my sort of thing” (243). Because Jake accepts Brett as she is he has been able to maintain their relationship for as long as he has. We should remember that Cohn and Pedro Romero do not accept Brett as she is and therefore lose her. Brett, too, accepts Jake as he is. They can never be completely, physically united, and for a woman as sexually alive as Brett this loss is deep and sad.

At the end of Book I the boundaries have been drawn. Brett and Jake, the New Woman and the shattered veteran, conduct a relationship based on the honest assessment of each other’s failings. In any other arms Brett’s lament of “darling I’m so miserable” could pass for a comment on the progress of a particular night’s activities, but in Jake’s arms it is properly received for what it is: a statement about Brett’s soul. This kind of emotional shorthand conveyed in private moments through a private language is the backbone of Jake’s and Brett’s relationship and a testament to its strength. Though imperfect, their friendship is imbued with the survival mechanisms of honesty, shared histories, and serious love.

Book II begins by depicting male-male friendships, first in Paris and then in Spain. In many aspects Jake’s friendship with Bill Gorton is similar to his with Brett. Though they are frequently separated, the two men can quickly restore intimacy. Bill’s retelling of his experiences in Vienna is not only some of the best dialogue Hemingway ever wrote, but a wonderful example of that familiar speech we first heard between Jake and Brett. For instance, there is the shared knowledge of each other’s drinking habits:

Then there’s the flippant talk about values: “’Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog.’ ’We’ll get one on the way back’” (72); and the personal litany, in this case Bill’s “Never be daunted. Secret of my success. Never been daunted. Never been daunted in public” (73).

Once Bill and Jake leave Paris they become more intimate; the pastoral Spanish setting invokes an even more private speech which allows them to discuss religion, literature, and personal problems such as Jake’s impotency. (Though Jake’s problems are not discussed at any length, and though his answers are frequently evasive or non-committal, the subject is mentioned often enough in a number of dialogues to warrant being designated a topic of conversation.) Physical closeness is established by the freedom of movement between each other’s rooms and by Jake watching Bill shave and dress. At one point, Bill even declares his love for Jake:

Other examples of intense male interaction are the scenes with Wilson-Harris, the English angler Bill and Jake meet in Burguete, and with the aficionados in Pamplona. Wilson-Harris is very candid about how much he likes Bill and Jake. The sheer joy of buying his friends drinks almost overcomes him. At one point he says, “I say Barnes. You don’t know what this all means to me” (129). When Jake and Bill leave to return to Pamplona, Wilson-Harris gives them each a present, a valentine of hand-tied fishing flies.

Not all male-male relationships are as successful as this. Once the characters are in Spain, Robert Cohn’s presence grates on both Jake and Bill. Jake, of course, has reason to dislike Cohn because he recently vacationed with Brett. Jake is very forthright about his resentment:

Bill’s dislike seems rooted in prejudice: “Well, let him not get superior and Jewish” (96). But even Jake and Bill cannot hold on to their hatred of Cohn for too long. Bill says to Jake:

This assessment of Robert Cohn is so similar to Brett’s assessment of Mike (“He’s so damned nice and he’s so awful”) that the parallel should not be overlooked. Appearing when they do, these assessments frame the events at Pamplona. They remind us that friendship holds both the promise of betrayal as well as of forgiveness.

Carlos Baker21 and others often divide the novel’s characters into two groups: those who are solid, and those who are neurotic. Baker puts Jake, Bill, and Romero in the former category, and Cohn, Brett, and Mike in the latter. As fair as this division may seem on the surface, it belies the truth of human interaction and negates the web of friendship in which all the characters, at one time or another, are enmeshed. And what a complicated web it is. Throughout the fiesta the characters form new pairs or groups as they partake of the festivities. Everyone at one time or another shares the other’s company. Of all the characters Brett seems most in control of choosing her companions. She maneuvers it so that, with one exception, she is never alone with Cohn. In contrast, she frequently asks Jake to go off with her alone, by now a rather predictable action.

Though Brett may behave consistently with Jake, she demonstrates new facets of her personality while interacting with others in the group. When we first see her in Pamplona she seems to have lost all patience with Cohn. “What rot … What rot … What rot” (134) she keeps repeating in response to his self-aggrandizement. She is sufficiently irked to put aside the charm that was so evident in Book I. A few pages later, however, she’s protecting Cohn from Mike’s drunken barbs. “Come off it, Michael. You’re drunk… . Shut up, Michael. Try and show a little breeding” (141). The next day at dinner Brett once again runs interference between Cohn and Mike; this time her refrain is, “Pipe down, Mike… . Oh, pipe down, Mike, for Christ’s sake!” (177). But even Brett has her limits as, a few pages later, she purposely scorns Cohn in order to make him go away: “For God’s sake, go off somewhere. Can’t you see Jake and I want to talk? … If you’re tight, go to bed. Go on to bed” (181). Knowing that such an outburst is out of character, Brett checks with Jake to see if she’s done the impolite, but necessary thing: “Was I rude enough to him? … My God! I’m so sick of him!” (181).

Jake says at one point to Brett, “Everybody behaves badly… . Give them the proper chance” (181). Not only does this foreshadow Jake’s own bad behavior when he arranges for Brett to meet Romero, but it explains everyone else’s bad behavior as well. However, it does not excuse that behavior. When a critic such as Baker defines the moral norm of the novel as “the healthy and almost boyish innocence of spirit … carried by Jake Barnes, Bill Gorton, and Pedro Romero,”22 he conveniently releases these three, already identified as the “solids,” from responsibility for their actions. But if we look at the histories and current behavior of Jake, Bill, and Romero, we see that it is anything but boyish and innocent. There is nothing boyish about being in war and being wounded; nothing innocent about picking up whores, being blind drunk in Vienna, and defiling the code of the bullfighters by running off with an engaged woman. It is, however, boyish to think that one can get away with such things. But even boys discover there are consequences to such actions. Jake, for instance, suffers for pimping for Brett. Bill, who is good at bailing out strange boxers, is nowhere in sight when Cohn knocks out Mike and Jake. And it is doubtful that Pedro Romero can ever completely earn back Montoya’s respect. Keeping these facts in mind, one reasonably concludes that the so-called “neurotics” behave in a better manner because they do not uphold false values and then act against them. Instead, they are consistent: Mike is consistently a drunk, so awful, so nice; Brett consistently exercises her right to sleep with whomever she wants and remains open and honest about it; and Cohn consistently acts like a “wounded steer,” a sobriquet he earned early in the novel.

The separation of the group into two factions creates barriers if not as visible, surely, at least, as damaging as those erected between the sexes. Such barriers highlight how friends betray but not how they forgive one another. And in Brett’s case, because she is grouped with the neurotics, she suffers under a double onus: she becomes the neurotic female, the “bitch,” the “nymphomaniac.” Clearly, it is the double standard and nothing else that permits the critics, both male and female, to criticize Brett for sleeping with Cohn and Romero while not criticizing Cohn and Romero for the same act. But Hemingway is not interested in erecting barriers but in destroying them. He does not see behavior as either male or female. Nor does he see passion as something solely inter-sexual. In The Sun Also Rises, bonding and passion occur in mysterious ways. There is no difference in the intensity of what Wilson-Harris feels for Jake and Bill and what Brett feels for Romero. Brett, however, is allowed the sexual expression of her intensity whereas Wilson-Harris would not be, even if his feelings were sexual. The bond that Jake establishes with Montoya is special because it is validated both by intensity and physical touch. Though this touch is not overtly sexual it certainly suggests sexuality because it is the symbol of a shared passion, just as the touching of sexual partners represents mutual passion.23

The above relationships, considering their brevity, their passion, and the intensity of mutual attraction between their participants, would be like one-night stands or casual affairs, were they to exist in the sexual dimension. I am not suggesting that we belittle the effects of sexual union, or that Brett’s escapade with Romero is as inconsequential as Wilson-Harris’s fishing trip. What I am suggesting is that there are parallels between male bonding and heterosexual bonding which should not be overlooked, and that both forms of bonding are as easily established as they are destroyed. By removing the sexual barriers which unduly place the burden of bad behavior on sexually active women (as Jake points out the woman pays and pays and pays), we see that Brett’s transgression is no worse than Jake’s; in fact, Brett’s may have fewer repercussions. We can assume with good reason that Mike will take Brett back after her fling with Romero, but we are not as certain about a reconciliation between Jake and Montoya. True to form, Hemingway remains aloof in making clear any moral certainties. But one thing for certain is that Hemingway wants us to look at all the characters’ behavior and not just Brett’s. The structural parallels in the novel are too clear to ignore.

What seems to be more important than who does what to whom and why is the acceptance of the mysteries of behavior, and of bonding in particular. Those characters who survive the best are the ones who have cultivated a certain sense of negative capability. The ability to accept simultaneously two opposing ideas or modes of behavior becomes a means of survival. Those characters who do not have this capability end up exiled from the web of relationships established at Pamplona. Hence it is Cohn and Romero, those representatives of the traditional male role, who are ultimately excluded from any relationship with Brett, the object of their desires. Rigidity of values and, since these two men were Brett’s lovers, a corresponding rigidity of erectile tissue are not what keeps Brett. Jake, it seems, wins again.

Book III opens with Jake’s observation that “it was all over” (227). Ostensibly referring to the fiesta, Jake’s statement is also an assessment of the condition of the web of relationships woven in the previous two hundred pages. It is in shreds. Brett has taken off with Romero. Cohn has left in disgrace, Jake is blind drunk for the first time in the novel, and Mike, as we presently discover, is penniless. Book III is, initially, a book of departures, but by the close of the book Jake and Brett have reunited, thus reconstructing the web. Jake and Brett have no parting scene; her departure with Romero, like Cohn’s departure, takes place under cloak of night. We do see, however, the partings of Mike and Bill. Each has a different destination: Mike for Saint Jean de Luz, Bill for Paris and points west, and Jake for San Sebastian. We have no clue as to when these gentlemen will meet again, if at all.

Both Bill and Jake are visibly irritated at Mike for deceiving them into thinking he had money. When he learns that Mike is broke, “Bill’s face sort of changed” (229). And after learning from Mike that Brett paid his hotel bill, Jake questions him repeatedly about Brett’s financial well-being: “She hasn’t any money with her? … Hasn’t she any at all with her?” (230). Clearly, Mike has become persona non grata. We’re less sure on what terms Bill and Jake part. Their relationship has always been catch-as-catch-can, each going his separate way then reuniting in a burst of intimacy. Their parting words still exude that good-old-boy camaraderie first heard during their reunion at the beginning of Book II, but something is curiously missing from this final good-bye. As they part in private, neither of them knowing when they will meet again, neither man mentions past events. Bill, who very consciously encourages Jake to get drunk at the end of Book II in order to “Get over your damn depression” (223), now has nothing to say. No words of encouragement, compassion, or advice, though he knows full well the extent of Jake’s involvement with Brett and therefore the pain he must be suffering. Clearly, Bill makes no attempt at intimacy as a departing gesture. Unfortunately, Hemingway is predictably silent about how Bill’s behavior impresses Jake. We are not told, either overtly or by facial expression, how Jake feels when Bill tells him “I have to sail on the 17th” and will not be in Paris when Jake returns. We are not told if Jake or Bill waves as the train pulls out, only that “Bill was at one of the windows” (231). We can not know if this scene represents the ordinary way two male friends say good-bye, or if it represents a deeper rent in their friendship. What we do know, however, is that once Jake is alone his thoughts turn to friendship. He likes France because money will buy friends; in France “No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason” (233).

But we also know by now that such thoughts are only partial truths. Jake, perhaps more than any other character, knows how obscure and unfathomable friendship can be. He knows that few situations and even fewer relationships offer up a fixed set of truths; as he states halfway through the book: “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it” (148).

In San Sebastian Jake takes long, solitary swims, and hides behind irony and sarcasm in an attempt to recover from the events at Pamplona. We realize how damaged Jake has been by these events through his attitude towards others. Not only does he put friendship on a monetary basis by deciding which waiters he wants for “friends,” but he discourages any form of bonding with men of his own station. He purposely snubs the bicycle team manager. This uncharacteristic but telling action is a good measure of Jake’s suffering when we recall how easily and eagerly he bonded with Wilson-Harris and Montoya. Now, not even the purely masculine comradeship between fellow sportsmen appeals to Jake.

But the habit of loving is a most difficult one to break. Though Jake responds to Brett’s telegram with his by now characteristic sarcasm, he nonetheless reserves a seat on the Sud Express and whisks off to Madrid. Their reunion exhibits all the tenderness and caring one wishes Bill had exhibited at his departure. Jake not only physically comforts Brett by holding and kissing her, but he solicits her words: “Tell me about it,” he says. And when Brett rambles on with her story despite her refrain of “let’s not talk about it,” Jake is still attentive and caring. Though his answers are one word responses this does not necessarily indicate a lack of concern on Jake’s part, but rather an instinct that less is more. When one friend is hurting, sometimes the best thing another friend can do is listen. Jake does exactly this. But not without a price.

Involvement, of course, means pain. Jake could have just as easily wired Brett some money; he knew already she was broke. But their friendship cannot be measured in monetary terms. Later at the bar and the restaurant, Jake begins to show the effects of his rescue mission. When Brett once more brings up the matter of Romero, he responds, “I thought you weren’t going to ever talk about it” (245). The amount of food and alcohol he consumes seems to keep his mouth full so he won’t have to talk, to speak what’s on his mind. When Brett admonishes him that he doesn’t have to get drunk, Jake replies, “How do you know” (246). She backs off, he finishes one more glass and they go for a taxi ride.

In effect they are back at the beginning when they took their first taxi ride together. But however similar the two scenes seem, something has changed. The web has begun to mend. Friendship is renewed. Jake, by rescuing Brett, reaffirms his love for her, and Brett, by recognizing her own faults and deciding not to be a bitch, recognizes the danger of passion for passion’s sake. This realization, taking place as it does outside the narrator’s scope of vision, can only be measured by its after effects. Brett’s tears, her trembling, her sudden smallness, her hesitation in feeling proud for deciding not to be “one of these bitches that ruins children” (243), are completely believable, as is her heretofore uncharacteristic refusal of alcohol at dinner. Her concern at dinner that Jake not get drunk is genuine, almost motherly, what any good friend would do.

* * *

Hemingway has said that the more applicable epigraph for his novel is the one from Ecclesiastes and not the one attributed to Gertrude Stein. We must take the author’s word on some things; the very title bears this out. If this novel exhibits traits of Stein’s lost generation, it also exhibits the cyclical nature of friendship, its rhythm of disintegration and renewal. Brett’s and Jake’s relationship may have been dealt a cruel blow by fate or the First World War, but it is anything but lost, sadistic, and sick. It, and the bullfights, are the only lasting things in the book. Contrary to what many readers believe, Brett Ashley is a positive force, a determined yet vulnerable woman who makes an attempt to live honestly. Her struggle in choosing to marry one man while loving another strangely coincides with Hemingway’s own dilemma. For a year before the novel’s publication he wrestled with whether or not to divorce Hadley Richardson, his first wife, and marry Pauline Pfeiffer.

Hemingway broke with convention by creating a brilliant example of the New Woman and dismantled nineteenth century gender lines by uniting love with friendship. His masculine ego did not suffer one iota in the process. He, unlike many of his critics, believes as Jake Barnes does: “In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship” (148).

Source

From Arizona Quarterly 44, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 76-97. Copyright © 1988 by University of Arizona. Reprinted with permission of University of Arizona.

Notes