Wray1 Jami Wray Eng 564 Professor Fisher 8 July 2022 Superficial Silence in Hemingway’sIn Our Time Readers familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s reputation experience no surprise when first encountering the landscape of his short story collectionIn Our Time,a world in which guns, alcohol, fishing rods, war, and other artifacts of the traditional male experience serve as common diversions and substitutions for authentic and open expression. The text (and its masculine world), however, is not a reflection of the author’s own misogyny but rather his testament to the implications of an existence in which femininity gives way to male dominance. Through separation and omission, Hemingway reveals the weight of a world in which women are excluded, disregarded, and ignored. The stories that compriseIn Our Timefeature predominantlymale voices, whether that of Hemingway’s semi-autobiographical Nick Adams or the “series of veiled avatars” of stories later in the collection (Wyatt 487). In Nick and the other male characters, we encounter a world in which emotions are shunned and masculinity is defined by malaise, distraction, and detachment. In “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” Nick’s father Henry responds to his wife’s questioning with one- or two-word sentences: in just over a page, he utters “No” four times, and also answers with “Yes,” “Sorry,” and “Nothing much” (25-26). Mrs. Adams’ attempts to uncover the source of her husband’s anguish are futile, as he silently cleans his gun and remains monosyllabic. In “The End of Something,” Nick is similarly unresponsive to Marjorie’s attempt to connect and explore his emotions. “What’s really the matter?” she asks, to which he responds “I don’t know. Wray2 [...] It isn’t fun any more” (34). Again, the male and female experiences remain distinct, with no authentic dialogue occurring between genders. “Cat in the Rain,” “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” “A Very Short Story,” and “Out of Season” all feature men and women who fail to connect, who misunderstand each other, or who simply lie or ignore to avoid authentic expression. When the subject of feelings or emotions is broached, either between women and men or between two men, the responses are dismissive, including (quite frequently) “No,” “I don’t know,” and even “[G]o away!” (75, 111, 35). When women do appear in Hemingway’s stories, they exist in the context of motherhood, marriage, or traditional coupling. These roles, while overlapping in the lived experiences of women in the non-fictional world, are isolated and simplified inIn Our Time. Mothers are mothers, wives are wives, and female characters are reduced to sound bytes in the broader masculine landscape. The mothers of the first stories in the collection exist against a backdrop of violence, loss, and death that call to mind Anne Carson’s “disturbing din of women’s voices” (122). In “On the Quai at Smyrna,” the “women with dead babies” who “[scream] every night at midnight” are “[t]he worst” (11). Dedication to procreative purpose is all-consuming, instinctive, and primal, as women with “babies dead for six days” refuse to give them up. Mothers are animalistic: an “old woman [is] lying on a sort of litter,” holding vigil over her dead offspring like a bitch with her puppies. There is a vast distance between the first-person narrator and the mothers in this story, and in the shift to second person, the narrator says to his intimate audience, “You remember [...]. You didn’t mind the women who were having babies as you did those with the dead ones. [...] You just covered them over with something and let them go to it. They’d always pick out the Wray3 darkest place in the hold to have them” (12). Childbearing, observed by two (intimate, friendly, male characters) from a distance, takes place under cover and in the dark. “Indian Camp” offers an even starker illustration of what Carson describes in “The Gender of Sound” as “the male abhorrence of female sound” (128). The story depicts what Carson calls the “disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound” (126) when a young Nick begs his father to “give her something to make her stop screaming” (16). The physical separation of the Indian woman and her husband, he on the top bunk with back turned while she labors on the bottom, is an obvious manifestation the inside and outside worlds Carson explores in her essay: in the tragic final moments of the story, the “verbalcontinence [that] is an essential feature of the masculine virtue ofsophrosyne” (Carson 126) seemsto lead to the husband’s suicide. While his wife physically expresses the forbidden inner world, biting, crying, and shrieking in pain, the husband makes no sound and merely “roll[s] over against the wall” (Hemingway 16). The cries of the forbidden feminine, the audible expression of sex and the violence of childbirth, leave the woman “quiet” and “pale” yet intact at the end, in contrast to her dead husband. Furthermore, her experiences are distinct and separate from that of all the men in the room, particularly Nick, whose questions are answered with succinct declarative sentences from his father, who ultimately asserts that dying is “pretty easy” (19). The Indian woman is clearly, as David Wyatt asserts, the “gendered and racial other” (498). With deliberate and careful separation and omission of the female, Hemingway offers rich commentary on the implications of the lopsided masculinity he has come to embody. Like the iceberg metaphor so aptly conveys, the power in his writing lies in what isnotpresent. I have to imagine Hemingway would agree with Anne Carson, who “wonder[s] about [the] concept of self-control and whether it really is [...] an answer to most questions of human goodness and Wray4 dilemmas of civility” (Carson 136). His stories powerfully and deliberately omit authentic female presence, building a world in which superficial diversions ultimately fail to conceal just how much the sounds of women are needed to drown out the silence. As David Wyatt asserts, Hemingway “takes upon himself the cost of the performance of being male” (487). Wray5 Works Cited Carson, Anne.Glass, Irony, and God. Edited by GuyDavenport, New Directions Book, 1995. Hemingway, Ernest.In Our Time. Scribner PaperbackFiction, 1996. Wyatt, David. “Hemingway's Secret Histories.”TheHopkins Review, vol. 2, no. 4, 2009, pp. 485-504.Project Muse. Accessed 7 July 2019.
