Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: Hemingway and Toxic Masculinity
When I was an undergrad at K-State in the early Nineties, it was already fashionable to blast Ernest Hemingway for being an overly macho, chauvinistic writer: the template for toxic masculinity. Although his literary style dominated my creative writing workshops, in the critical fields, Feminist critics were pushing him to the margins either with aggressive criticism or simply passing him over in favor of previously marginalized writers.
For my second survey course on American literature, I ended up taking the class from a professor whom, it was said, always took the week off when the Modernists and Hemingway were discussed. And, sure enough, when Hemingway came up, our professor was gone, and my advisor, Professor Tim Dayton, whose area of interest was American Modernism, stepped in to give the lecture.
For me, this may have gone by with little more than some eye-rolling if it hadn’t been for a few other things that were going on at the time. During the late 80s and early 90s, the idea of a “mens movement” was starting to resurface, and a therapist I was working with at the time directed me to a book called Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991)by Sam Keen. By the time I took the survey course, I was deeply engaged with Keen’s approach to analyzing and understanding my expression of masculinity. I was also exploring the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac outside of class. So, I was primed to stage a defense of Hemingway based on Sam Keen’s book.
The 90s Mens Movement I encountered had actually begun in the early 70s as “men’s liberation.” It was seen by its early proponents as a positive companion to Feminism. Its aims were to get men to start talking about the way Patriarchal expectations damaged and limited them, and then open them up to a gentler, more tolerant, less toxic way of being men. By the time I was in college, there were two styles, as I saw it. There was the Robert Bly style, which revolved around his book Iron John (1990), and which sometimes, rather comically (in my opinion), involved “wildman retreats” into the woods (various groups are still holding similar retreats today). One such retreat I read about involved a 50-foot wooden penis that the “wildmen” — an assortment of dentists, accountants, business analysts, programmers, etc., — danced around while naked in the woods. The other style was more philosophical and revolved around Sam Keen’s book. Sam was friends with Joseph Campbell and had interviewed Ernest Becker on his deathbed, and those connections, I think, lead to a more thoughtful, and meaningful analysis. When Keen wrote about men coming together to discuss their ideas around masculinity it was always in small intimate friend groups, and not in for-profit mass retreats in the woods with strangers wearing loincloths and face paint.
It was at that time that I first tinkered with the idea that Hemingway was, in fact, being critical of masculinity and not, as the Feminist literary critics argued, reinforcing and glorifying a toxic patriarchal system of violence, sexism, and racism.
In the years since, I’ve seen other writers wrestle with Hemingway: a writer they acknowledge as technically brilliant but at the same time one they recoil from because of his seemingly worshipful attention to violence and inattention to women. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking and reading about masculinity to better understand what it means to be a man, and avoid perpetuating the toxicity in my own life and which has come to define American manhood in general.
One of the things I’ve notice recently is a similarity in my interpretation of Hemingway’s writing through the filter of Sam Keen, and my perception of the sad arc (and failure) of the Men’s Movement as it traversed the rest of the 1990s and into this century. I’ll start with a quick reading of Hemingway as a critic of toxic masculinity, rather than a champion.
For me, the story Fathers and Sons (first published in 1933) is key to understanding Hemingway as an early but severely imperfect critic of American masculinity. In the story, Nick Adams, often seen as the most direct fictional stand-in for Hemingway himself, is returning from a hunting trip with his young son. As Nick drives, and his son sleeps, Nick reminisces about his boyhood and his father. The pivotal memory is one where Nick receives a pair of hand-me-down underwear from his father. Nick tries to refuse them, but his father insists they’re clean and the boy is forced to wear them. Ashamed and disgusted by this, he takes them off and hides them under a rock. When this is discovered, Nick is beaten. Afterwards, he hides in an outhouse with a shotgun and fantasizes about killing his father.
Now, consider how intimate that article of clothing is compared to a shirt, or a pair of trousers. Shirts and pants are items we present to the world, a coded uniform that can be removed when needed, or treated ironically if it’s not acceptable to remove it. But underwear is hidden underneath the uniform. It’s foundational, and it’s also the article of clothing closest to the genitals — the most obvious symbol of maleness.
The hand-me-down underwear represents the unattractive hand-me-down masculinity of Nick’s father. Nick is expected to be his father’s son so deeply that he must wear the same underwear — be the same man, essentially. So, when Nick rejects the underwear, he’s not simply rejecting his father’s clothing, he’s rejecting an internal, foundational symbol of the man his father expects him to be.
At this point in the story, Nick’s son wakes up and asks about his grandfather and why Nick has never taken him to pray at his grandfather’s grave. Nick agrees it is time to take his son to his grandfather’s grave and this is where we see Nick’s (and Hemingway’s) inability to break away from the masculinity he received from his father. No son is raised in isolation from the rest of society. As a son moves through the world, he’ll encounter other ways of being a man. Some will be positive, some, sadly, will be unexamined and threadbare facsimiles of manhood. Still others will be toxic. Nick’s son, not yet twelve, must already be feeling pressure, albeit subconsciously, to decide what kind of man he will be, which is why he’s curious about his grandfather and desires this symbolic ritual of praying at his grave.
Compared to Nick’s interactions with his father, Nick’s interactions with his son are an improvement, but not by much. Where Nick’s father was curt, dismissive, and abusive, Nick appears to be patient and warm with his son, yet he gives in to his son’s request. Like all men, Nick is in a patriarchal catch-22. He wants to reject his father’s version of manhood, but as his son grows up and begins to search for a sense of himself as a man, Nick and his son are caught in the constricting and silent world of men that the dead father represents.
It’s only been in the half century since Hemingway’s death that we have seen men really struggle, publicly, to break away from the old models of masculinity and, at the same time, seen other men charge headlong into ever more toxic expressions of masculinity in a kind of desperate rear guard action against the supposedly “softening” of the American male.
This is where I see the similarities to the rise and fall of the so-called “Men’s Movement.”
At the same time that Robert Bly and Sam Keen were laying out their ideas for a version of manhood that would be something new, something more adaptable to our modern world, University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney was founding The Promise Keepers.
In part, both the Mens Movement of Robert Bly and Sam Keen and The Promise Keepers were a response to the upheaval in the culture at that time. The Cold War was ending and there was this legitimate question about what we were going to do now that there wasn’t a big-bad enemy out there to fight. We didn’t seem to need the old model of manhood that focused on violent and combative competition.
On one side, we had the secular Mens Movement philosophers with their defused, self-focused, inward looking contemplation on the future of manhood. On the other side was The Promise Keepers with their sports stadium centered prayer-a-thons where men were told the answer was to embrace a “muscular,” biblical masculinity.
Of course, biblical masculinity is, at its core, the same old patriarchy with a touch of “Kumbaya, My Lord” sentimentality and an emphasis on benevolent sexism. As a patriarchal defense strategy, it allowed men to show some sensitivity and some nurturing by graciously allowing women to more fully participate in society, even while taking the position that men were still in charge and women should obey, be help-mates, and defer to their husbands or fathers. By reinforcing their “inherent” primacy, it made a tiny concession, allowing men small window in which to feel comfortable doing the one thing they’d heard was desired of them: crying. But it had to be done in a crowd of fifty-thousand while facing a stage peopled with preachers and sports figures telling them to take charge of their women.
Even back in the 90s, without much of an internet, we knew there was a core of irony, if not outright hypocrisy, to that aspect of the Promise Keepers and the philosophies that would later spin off from it (men’s rights groups and those creepy father-daughter purity rituals, especially). Here was Bill McCartney, founder and leader of the Promise Keepers, telling men that the cure to the problems of our society were for men to take charge of their families again while he himself couldn’t seem to manage his own daughter (he has two grandsons fathered by different CU football players he coached). However, despite that, Promise Keepers set the model for a kind of neo-patriarchy. A “kinder, gentler” patriarchy to borrow from George H. W. Bush’s early 90s slogan, and it opened the doors for other similar ideas to flourish. Everything from the Men’s Rights Movement to the self-described chauvinist Proud Boys.
In much the same way American racism alters the mechanism of its enforcement as marginalized communities gain new levels of access and acceptance, American patriarchy changes its mechanisms of enforcement as American manhood is forced to respond to the growing power and influence of women and gay men. Relentless media attention and marketing, not to mention the massive rallies in sports stadiums, quickly made The Promise Keepers the thing people thought of when someone mentioned the “Mens Movement.” It also opened the door for those ever more toxic interpretations.
The one commonality all these organizations and philosophies have, whether they are the current incarnation of Bly’s “wildmen,” or the authoritarian chauvinists calling themselves The Proud Boys, is that they believe men’s status in America (especially white men’s status) is tarnished in some way. The core difference is that one group wants to further dismantle the current status quo and create a new, non-toxic masculinity, and the other wants to return more fully to the old style, reinforce it, and build defenses against the encroaching “softness” that frightens them.
Because of that, change is excessively slow, almost in stasis. The progressive model can’t get past the regressive model, especially while the regressive model is still, ostensibly, in charge and willing to do violence.
Violence is the hallmark of toxic masculinity. It’s the cudgel, knife, and gun that maintains male-centered power, and keeps men silent about its pain. If men attempt to break out of the model, they will either be beaten into submission, cut off from their peer groups, or killed. We see this pattern most obviously with every gay or trans person who is beaten, kicked out of the family home, or killed, but we don’t often recognize it when it happens to non-conforming straight men because they are ostensibly “rewarded” for their silent acquiescence by having all that power and privilege, even if, in the end, their conformity engenders remorse, depression, alcoholism, and a self-destruction and cruelty that cripples their humanity.
That is the very dilemma that Hemingway’s fiction wrestled with and couldn’t resolve.
It’s easy to look at Hemingway’s work, see that toxicity, and leave it at that. His novels and stories are about men, usually engaged in violence or enduring violence of some kind. Same-old, Same-old, and Christ, we’re sick of it, especially after the latest mass shooting (I dare not mention a specific one because by the time anyone reads this, it won’t be the most recent). However, the so-called “flaws” of violence and sexism in Hemingway’s fiction are there because they are the very same flaws present in the culture of his day, and, sadly, they’re still present today.
For example, the argument that Hemingway’s women are not full people is not something we can exclusively attribute to Hemingway’s personal beliefs. Dehumanizing women is a central tenet of American patriarchy in general. Seeing women as less-than, and in need of benevolent male protection, ensures the human characteristics that have been designated as “feminine” are undesirable and even embarrassing in men, and so, to be “men” those traits must be shunned, rejected, feared, diminished, or marginalized.
To loosely paraphrase the great Toni Morrison from an essay titled “Disturbing Nurses and The Kindness of Sharks,” which appears in her book Playing in The Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, Hemingway wrote about being a white male, and that meant he couldn’t help but bring into those stories all the elements that define white maleness. Being dismissive of those texts for that alone ignores their complexity. Morrison was specifically writing about racism, but it also applies to gender and anything else we might identify as a component of toxic American masculinity.
Hemingway prided himself on the truth of his fiction, and he demanded that his fiction reflect reality. So, on one hand, it is fair to recognize and comment upon the toxic masculinity that is present in Hemingway’s work. It’s there in the fiction because it was, and is, present in the culture he was writing about and the era he was writing in. But we should also consider and talk about the way patriarchy appears to trap and paralyze the men in Hemingway’s fiction as well as men in the real world.
American manhood in Hemingway’s fiction — and in our society today — feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Hemingway, either consciously or subconsciously, recognized that. It is why nearly every hero in Hemingway’s major works, either dies or is punished in some way for trying to live up to, or for rejecting, those masculine ideals. Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls, lives up to those masculine ideals, and dies at the end making a sacrifice of himself. Frederic Henry, at the end of A Farewell To Arms, deserts the army and escapes the war, choosing love over duty, but ends up alone when Catherine and their child die during birth. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises appears to be living up to all masculine expectations, except his war wound has made it impossible for him to consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley who, because of his emasculated condition, rejects him. Only the old man in The Old Man and The Sea, survives his masculinity test without any apparent diminishment to his perceived manhood, but he is old and expected to be lesser from the beginning.
Long ago in that survey class, I felt the need to defend Hemingway against those Feminist critics I felt were being dismissive of a struggle that all men endure, and that Hemingway illustrated in his fiction even if he couldn’t see a way out of it.
When someone is not the beneficiary of white male patriarchal structures, it’s easy, even logical, to fight against that power structure, and to desire a share of the privileges and advantages that come with being at the top. In that way, patriarchy respects the fight even if it doesn’t respect the fighter. However, patriarchy’s very nature makes stepping down from the pinnacle, giving up that power, and displaying those unacceptable — i.e. “feminine” — aspects of one’s humanity, an incredibly risky and fraught endeavor.
The violence, both verbal and physical, that certain men direct at women, gay men, and trans people is also directed at those straight men who fail to live up to all those mysterious unwritten standards and requirements of American manhood. For those fighting to gain a comparable version of the power and privilege afforded men, the reward is obvious: equality, access, and freedom (but at a cost of course). But what is the reward for stepping down or away from that power when the patriarchal system still refuses to value those human traits that are seen as unmanly?
The very things that Robert Bly, Sam Keen, and others like them tried to encourage men to do: be sensitive, nurturing, compassionate, and vulnerable are the very things that open up men to brutality from other men. Then, often, in the wake of that brutality, the brutalized men are derided for not having defended themselves like men, or for not being strong enough to endure it silently. This is the conundrum I see in all of Hemingway’s work: men trapped in a brutal system that has so over-valued their capacity for violence that the only reward they see for stepping away from that model of violence is more violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We want men to be gentler, softer, but we provide them no gentle or soft landing when they leap down from their pedestal.
Leap man, but don’t act like a girl while doing it.
