Hills Like White Elephant Feminist Analysis

One of the defining features of Hemingway’s proto-minimalist short story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” is the skeletal framework of dialog that runs throughout its length. With the sparing use of dialog tags as well as minute physical action present in the short story, Hemingway instead uses the voices of his characters to drive the plot both narratively and thematically. Pamela Smiley, a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, claims that the manner in which the American and Jig interact and speak with one another is done so in ways that is distinctly gender specific, something she describes as “gender-marked language”(1-2). Meaning that, where the American is “precise and to the point… [as well as] declarative”