| dc.description.abstract | What do Ernest Hemingway's characters and their relationships signify about their author's romantic life? This thesis will explain how several of his works return to the beginnings and endings of his first three marriages to Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, and Martha Gellhorn. Through his novels, he interrogates his ideas on marriage, particularly on power-dynamics in a marriage, and on female control. Throughout Hemingway's works, he examines what makes relationships appealing at first, and then their dissolution inevitable. And while his pieces are not direct biographical, one-to-one comparisons, many of his characters treat questions he himself had yet to answer before his death. The works treated in this research are:The Sun Also Rises, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," "Hills like White Elephants," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Nobody Ever Dies," Garden of Eden andA Moveable Feast.Hemingway attempts to justify and understand why his relationships fall apart--particularly his romantic ones--through his novels. He uses his fictional characters to interrogate how one partner can "keep," the other, or hold them back from reaching his or her potential. He also uses his novels as a way to examine his own fear of the woman holding or maintaining power in a relationship, through pregnancy, money or unintentionally through marriageitself as an institution. | |
