The Machisimo Myth of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was not the one-dimensional man's man that his reputation makes him out to be. The Nobel Prize winning writer showed his softer, sentimental side in each of his novels, from Garden of Eden to Farewell to Arms and Islands in the Stream.

The short stories of Ernest Hemingway often differ from his novels in one very important way: there is no stand-in, Hemingway character in many of the short stories. However, in each of Hemingway's novel the protagonist is a fairly clear stand-in for the author himself.

In Garden of Eden, the protagonist is a young writer, victoriously struggling through authoring a book of short stories, writing about his father on a hunting expedition. No further details are necessary to make the suggestion that Hemingway's character is based on his own person and his personal history.

The notion of Hemingway appearing as a character in his novel is much less surprising to the potential reader than the details of the protagonist.

He is not a hard-nosed, hard drinking macho-man. He is, quite oppositely, a hard-drinking romantic who is deeply in love with his new wife and deeply disturbed by the first signs of her mental illness. As she shows signs of cracking up, the protagonist suffers agonies of sympathy and powerlessness that are decidedly sentimental and yielding.

An additional mark of Hemingway's character's "softness" in Garden of Eden is shown in the emotional difficulties he faces in writing the hunting story about his father. Contemplating the fact that his father is dead and can no longer guide the bewildered young writer through the metaphorical wilderness of life, the protagonist is hard pressed to finish the work of the story. He only manages to complete the story with the encouragement of his new-found mistress.

This Hemingway is a far cry from the Hemingway of bull fights and boxing. This character happens to be the rule, however, and not the exception, when we look at the protagonists of Ernest Hemingway's other novels.

The protagonists of each For Whom the Bell Tolls and Islands in the Stream display very similar traits of non-macho sentimentality and emotional conflict.

Perhaps the only protagonist of Hemingway's novels that does not clearly demonstrate a sentimentality in opposition to the popular notions of "machisimo" is Jake from The Sun Also Rises.

Jake is attached to his lost love, Brett, but at no point in the narrative do we glimpse the raw state of his emotions as we do in each of the other novels noted.

Hemingway was a great self-promoter, if we are to believe what we've read. But in the course of his expounding and his discourse on writing, Ernest Hemingway set many traps for himself. Contradiction was inevitable after so many definitive statements made in writing and through the press.

This is not necessarily a negative thing. Rightly, we should expect a great artist to be a more complex person than Hemingway's simplified reputation for machisimo would lead us to believe.