An Analysis Of Hemingway's Female Consciousness Reflected In His Works

Ernest Hemingway, the spokesman for the"Lost Generation", winner of Nobel Prize for literature, was one of the most significant writers in American literary history. He developed a clean, terse writing style characterized by short sentences, simple words, and emotional understatement, which gave his novels and short stories distinctive features. His writing style had an immense impact on numerous writers. Hemingway was written into the annals of history for his outstanding contributions to the development of American literature.As a typical representative of American postwar literature in twentieth century, Hemingway's masterpieces revealed his perplexed and contradictory psychology. Hemingway himself was a self-contradicted person. He was generous, but also selfishness; he loved life, but never stopped thinking of death; he was full of bravery and courage, but it was the courage at last ended his life. An epoch creates a writer, and the writer reflected his epoch. Hemingway's novels and short stories emphasized characters'reactions to the cruel, ruthless world. A recurring theme seen throughout Hemingway's stories is that his male characters are men of iron, with indomitable spirit and takes his downfall with a sense of grace and dignity. Thus Hemingway was often stereotyped as a masculine writer. Critics once declared that Hemingway could not depict women images or that he was better at depicting men without women. The criticisms undoubtedly impaired Hemingway's reputation, to some extent. Meanwhile, it re-waked public interests in his works. Consequently, it is acknowledged that Hemingway did not ignore women images. On the contrary, in his works, he depicted many women images with multiple personality and complex psychology, which demonstrated his contradictory and complicated female consciousness.In the context of Hemingway's cultural, historical and biographical experiences, the thesis is intended to analyze women images in his works and his female consciousness based on his three novels The Sun also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly makes a brief summary of the development of Hemingway's female consciousness. By re-examining his personal experiences, relating to the cultural background in his epoch, the thesis has discovered his contradictory and complicated female consciousness reflected by the women images in his three novels.The second part is the main body, which is made up of three chapters:Chapter One mainly gives a brief introduction of Hemingway and his works which provided a model of analysis. As a writer of legendary experience, Hemingway went through wars and many distinctive personal experiences, which play an important role in his life philosophy and in his literary creation. Then, points out that during Hemingway's time, feminist movement grew up and developed rapidly, social gender roles began to change. He sympathized the women who were repressed and discriminated, supported women to gain their rights. He also respected and admired those new women. This indicated his vague female consciousness.Chapter Two mainly deals with the fact that affected by the accumulated influence of patriarchy culture, the rights Hemingway had advocated was limited and confined by men. Here, he tried to create an ideal woman in his heart, who kept all the"cardinal virtue"of traditional women, and possessed courage and abilities which were admired by men. However, he attempted to protect men's dignity and dominant position, and he could not cross the last line of his patriarchal consciousness. Although Hemingway's female consciousness was vague at that time, his concentration on women's living condition, understanding women's feelings, thinking about women's values signified that his female consciousness became stronger and stronger.Chapter Three mainly focuses on Hemingway's contradictory and complicated female consciousness, which is developed over three stages as represented in three of his novels. Hemingway entirely surpassed his own limited parochial masculine viewpoint, and found the best way to solve all the problems. The heroine (Maria) combined power of both sexes. Loving and connecting with hero (Jordan) inseparably, she developed this kind of power and made it balanced, which turned gender equality into reality in the end. Hemingway's female consciousness had turned to be definite and mature then. The last part is conclusion which points out that Hemingway, as a writer with creative power and unique style, was not only an expert in depicting man facing life and death with courage, hope, and wisdom, but a man with full understanding of different categories of women. Even if Hemingway could surpass his own limited parochial masculine viewpoint, his care and thinking for women's living conditions, feelings and values was finite and restricted. Formulated by the influence of the cultural background and life experiences, his contradictory female consciousness had a tremendous influence on his life and artistic creation.