Francis Macomber

A crowd of natives has just carried Francis Macomber triumphantly into camp. Macomber, a good-looking athletic type, has just blown it on a lion hunting adventure and now everyone knows he's a coward. Macomber's wife can't contain her resentment and humiliation about her husband's breakdown on the hunt. This is not a proud moment for the Macombers.

Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.

"Hemingway's Short Stories By Ernest Hemingway Summary and Analysis "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"" Hemingway's Short Stories: Summary and Analysis: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Wiley Publishing, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.

Hemingway,
Her husband labels her “a bitch” (p. 22) after her return from Wilson’s tent and refers to her “bitchery” (p.10) elsewhere in the story, but more specific than this implicitly negative criticism of Macomber is Hemingway’s explicit use of animals as a verbal weapon in the mouth of Margot. To Francis’ self-punishment Margot adds criticism of her own. When Francis passes her some cooked eland he shot, she scoffs at his offering with the comment: “They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they?” (p. 9). Rubbing salt into his wounded ego, she facetiously asks, “They’re not dangerous, are they?” (p.9). All Francis has been able to shoot by this point in the safari are relatively harmless animals, and he has proved himself a coward in the face of the only dangerous game he has encountered. Although Hemingway links Margot with no specific animal, she does materialize as the condensation of all the most dangerous qualities of female carnivores. To Robert Wilson she is a typical American woman, one of the “hardest in the world: the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory, and the most attractive” (p.8). Externally she is so “enameled in that American female cruelty” (p.9) that she seems even more insensitive than Robert Wilson. While she is seen as cruel and predatory, her husband is compared with a rabbit and is at the end linked with the lion whose head is blown off by Wilson.
Initially, the lion’s bravery and determination are used strictly as a contrast to Macomber’s rabbit-like trembling. In his struggle for survival the lion with half his head shot away kept “crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him” (p.21). He stared defiantly with “yellow eyes, narrowed with hate” (p.19); similarly, “Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most” (p.23). Momentarily facing the challenge posed by the lion, Macomber feels “sick at his stomach” (p.16) and cannot control his shaking. “The fear was still there like a cold, slimy hollowin all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick” (p.11). The difference between Macomber and the lionis suggested by the nature of their respective wounds. Macomber’s psyvchological “wound” can be traced ultimately to his overall weakness and, more recently, to the effects of his “huntress” wife. But the lion’s wound is more a “red badge of courage” incurred in combat. Instead of fear, a .30-06 220 grain solid bullet causes the “sudden hot scalding nausea” (p.15) in the lion’s stomach. In contrast, the nausea of fear experienced by Macomber is one of nothingness. The lion is broken down and fights his fate to the end, whereas Macomber has collasped