Gender Roles In Hemingway

During the early twentieth century and World War I, men and women in the United States were treated very differently. Each gender had their stereotypes and was not to stray from them. Men were to do masculine things and women were to do feminine things. It was very odd to find someone of either gender slip away from the stereotypes of their particular gender because they would be looked upon as “different” and “different” wasn’t usually accepted in the society. This is something Ernest Hemingway struggled with in his lifetime: the absolute masculinity men were to follow during their life. Marc Hewson wrote that since Hemingway struggled to stay with the masculine stereotype, instead of showing it in his real, personal life, he wrote about it.
The reason it is uncertain whether these protagonists are based on himself is that Hemingway goes a step further by creating other characters that break the stereotypes and moral codes that society has instilled upon each gender. This is epitomized in A Farwell to Arms where Hemingway creates two main characters, Lieutenant Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley, who put a gap between themselves and the stereotypes that the civilization has placed on each gender and on human nature in general. The way Hemingway does this is by giving the main characters a sense of pragmatism in the way they go about things, a sense of homosexuality and a sense of objection of the norm for the genders by actions of these
What Frederic finds as obscene is the fact that he cannot physically see things like glory and sacredness. Frederic would rather orient himself around concrete things such as numbers, geographic markers, and dates (Hemingway’s Pragmatism). To Frederic, it is more logical and practical to think like this rather than to think based on ambiguity. Although Frederic narrates this story based on his experiences during the war, James Phelan notes him as “more of a recorder rather than a reflector.” Part of the reason this statement is true is because whenever someone asks him about the war, he claims he physically cannot recall his experiences; he can only recall what he