A Discipline of Sentiments: Masculinity in Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon

Abstract

In the epigraph, D. A. Miller elegantly posits style as a refuge for “the unheterosexual” and “the spinster” within Jane Austen’s novels.¹ For Miller, style is a way of articulating difference while remaining beyond the logic of normativity. This seems like an unlikely epigraph to a chapter on Ernest Hemingway’s masculinity, which appears at first glance to be anything but the style of someone “with almost no place to go.” Yet, it will be my contention here that Hemingway’s masculine style does in fact push masculinity beyond socially recognizable embodiment, particularly by casting ideal masculinity as the end result of fashioning the self into an aesthetic object. Hemingway’s stylized masculinity strives to turn subjectivity into a pure surface, giving the disruptive masculine bodies in dime-novel Westerns a central position within modernist aesthetics. While Cather’s masculine heroines ultimately dissolve into nature or submerge within patriarchal norms, Hemingway’s prose attempts to transform masculinity into a style that foregoes social norms entirely by becoming an aesthetic object.²

Style, the utopia of those with almost no place to go.

—D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style