S. Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: Historical Realism and Historical Symbolism - Essay Example

?Client’s A Farewell to Arms: Historical Realism and Historical Symbolism Introduction The novel, A Farewell to Arms, was written by Ernest Hemingway and was the novel that placed him in the position of an important modern American writer. The novel is based upon his own experiences serving in Italy during World War I. The novel captures the human experience through both the explorations of war and of tragic love. The theme of love is explored through reflections on his own young love affair during World War I. The theme of violence is connected to the action within the war, the human to human hostilities creating a balance between the horrors of mankind and the expressions of love in which he finds emotional challenges. The connection between violence and love, the volatility of feelings that are outside of the control of the individual within the boundaries of the emotion of love and the external conflicts that occur during war, provides context for both experiences within the novel. First published in 1929, the novel has been seen as an example of the finest American writing produced in the 20th century. Though based upon personal experiences, both through the war and through a heartbreaking love affair, the specifics of the novel are reflective rather than autobiographical. The novel is an excellent example of how a literary work can reflect emotions and contexts of events without having to rely on truthfully replicating events in order to examine the nature of human life and the effects of interpersonal relationships within the framework of an historical event. In an examination of love, sex, and violence, Hemingway develops a discourse on the nature of human experience and the volatility of emotions through reflective themes within his novel A Farewell to Arms. Love with Sex A variety of themes are explored within the work of Hemmingway and can be seen repeating between his short stories and his novels. Rama defines the theme of love-and-sex which is always in conflict with war. Rama writes, “Love is found in the gigantic, ruthless arms of war”, suggesting that the nature of love is always associated with the threat of violence (33). He more poetically writes of the work of Hemming way in A Farewell to Arms that “The narrative pattern superimposed upon this theme is like the golden net, in which Hephaestus traps Aphrodite and Ares together, from which they cannot escape (Ramos 33). Hemingway puts love and war together in an inseparable narrative in which the two concepts become divined by each other. The ravages of war is compared to the ravages of love as loss is its eventuality. Ramos continues on his discussion of love and sex in regard to Hemingway and his writing as having four subthemes that relate to the primary theme of love with sex. The four themes are as follows: sex with love, sex without love, the homosexual and the rich, and love with sex. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway focuses on love with sex. In other words, the love is the primary emotional context of the relationship, with the sex being a bi-product of that love. In the theme of sex with love, sex is the focus rather than the connectivity between the characters. One of the relevant themes in the short stories that were written by Hemingway was in the irony that was involved in the emotional bubble of love. Within the novel, Heming way is exploring his own love and the innocence that it held before he was jaded or learned about the bitterness of reality. For Hemingway, this reflected a deep love he had held for a woman who did not, in the end, return that love to him. He reflected the innocence with which he approached love, through his youth and inexperience with such deep emotions, towards an end that would give his characters the same tragic bitterness. According to Donaldson, “On the biographical level, Frederic’s narrative can be construed as Hemingway’s displaced version of his love for Agnes von Kurowsky, the American nurse with whom he fell in love in the Milan hospital after he was wounded on the Italian front during World War I” (110). Through his own experiences, Hemingway draws forth a reflective narrative in which he explores his feelings in light of how the events emerged within his own life. Hemingway experienced heartbreak at a young age during a time when he was immersed in his responsibilities of wartime duty. In the middle of violence and battle, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes, but when he returned home to further explore this love, Agnes rejected him, leaving him emotionally and his body taking on a fever and manifesting his pain in an illness that sent him to his bed (Donaldson 110). Life as a Serious Venture Within the story, the love affair between Catherine and Frederic occurs through three types of stages of love. In the first stage, it is through desire and passions that erupt from within which create a highly volatile set of emotions that they can experience with one another. The experience is about those energies that drive toward unhealthy obsessions and psychological expressions of the human spirit. The second comes from a place of healing, when the two people fall into a contemplative love that is deeper than the base emotions. In the final stage, for the way in which Hemingway presents it, the seriousness of life as it emerges through blood and flesh, the emptiness that loss creates becomes an emergence of reality within the context of love and life. One of the more common interpretations of the nature of love as reflected by Hemingway within the book is that love is defined by the definition that is provided by the character of the priest. The priest defines the love of a man for a woman as the “wish to do things for” (Hemingway 70). In describing this very simplistic view, the priest has defined love as the desire to put one’s own needs aside and focus on the needs of another. For the character, Frederic, this is a new experience, a part of the loss of innocence and the emergence of maturity that he experiences as life and mortality becomes more vibrant and alive within his life. The frivolity of youth passes and an essential maturity and growth emerges through the interactions that Frederic and Catherine have within their blossoming love. The contrasts between the priest and Frederic provide a backdrop against which the growth within Frederic is examined. The priest has not changed. He has not found his life given meaning or radical discovery through his experiences. The priest will go back to his village and continue his life without profound impact from his experiences. However, Frederic has developed a profound set of changes from which the innocence and simplicity of the priest are in high contrast to the complexity of meanings about life that Frederic has come to understand. Where the priest will remain innocent, Frederic has been transformed. This leads to the next level of exploration between the divine love and secular love. The priest also brings to the discussion the nature of the divine in comparison to the nature of secular love, and the place in which the two intersect. On one hand, the nature of love as it is experienced in the beginning between Catherine and Frederic, as seen as a function and effect of lust, can be seen as secular love, without sacrifice and without serious intention. The second level entered into between Frederic and Catherine has the reflection of the relationship that humans develop with God, a feeling of setting aside one’s self in order to serve another. In this same theoretical vein, it might be thought that the third stage, where Catherine gives birth to a still-born child and dies, is the descent into hell, the loss of the divine. Love and War The stages that Frederic and Catherine go through in exploring love can also be compared to through the stages of war. While the interpretations of the stages of war can be very different than this interpretation, this one explains the bleak evolution in which a lack of hope is experienced when what has been destroyed cannot be regained. The first stage of war is the exuberance and belief that is going to be done has a righteous foundation. The energy that is built up towards that end can be compared to lust, a driving force that is somewhat divorced from the emotional truths. The second stage can be seen as the more difficult stage in which the harsh realities of war begin to emerge, the struggle to find footing and to advance. This is the same stage that true love will find as it begins to take on a more important place within one’s life. The third stage is of crucial importance to the discourse on love and war and provides an interesting discussion about how Hemingway sees life. Where some would see the final stage as one of rebuilding, of creating something new from the ashes of destruction, Hemingway presents the idea that at the third stage there is an ending, a definitive loss in which the survivors have no way in which to gain back what was lost. Through the narrative of Hemingway, the loss at the end of love is finite. Hemingway is focusing on the loss of love in the same way that the ravages of war changes and eliminates the enemy. It would be easy to suggest that Hemingway took his experiences in the war and simply reworked them into the novel. The true craft, however, was in taking the externalized conflicts of the war and providing context for the emotional conflict of love through associating the two experiences. Donaldson describes it as not just the “telling of a story, but also as the story of telling” (110). The construction of the story is developed through a system of themes that interlace in order to construct context for the discussions of love and violence. It must be noted, however, that the construction of the context is not done to connect physical violence to love, but to connect emotional violence with the emotional context of external conflict. The conflict of violence is related to the way in which violence causes pain and harm. As well, the nature of violence is that it causes emotional satisfaction and harm in turmoil. The development of the relationship between pain and pleasure, between satisfaction and need, is given voice through the relationship within the story and the nature of war as he re-surfaces culture. It is through the profound changes that both elements cause that Hemingway makes his discussion about love and war. The way in which Hemingway both inserts himself and creates distance is through the narrative that is provided through Frederic. As Frederic is the narrator of the work, he becomes the voice and embodiment of the perspective that Hemingway has on the events that he is reflecting (Norris 259). It must be understood that there is an important difference between Frederic and Catherine. Catherine’s perspective on love has already gone through the stages towards the end that presents her with the inevitable loss that follows. This inevitability is from Hemingway’s perspective. Catherine states “I remember having a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was with a sabre cut, I suppose, and a bandage around his head” as she discusses the loss of her fiance (Hemingway 24). Instead, she experiences the horror of seeing him brought into the hospital blown up, his body ravaged by war, her own sense of maturity brought into stark reality from her romantic notions of how she and her love would find each other during the war. Therefore, Catherine is not finding the same path that Frederic is being led down. She knows about loss, although for Frederic, she will be the object of that loss. Love, Games, and Misogyny The story, like many stories, has the feeling fatalism, that the meanings of life are intentional and undeniable. In the beginning, Frederic is unaware of how the ‘game’ of love that he is playing with Catherine will have such serious consequences. According to Mulvey, “Love, if it means anything to him at all at this point, means gamesmanship, seduction, and self-gratification” (244). However, Catherine understands that things will not always go as expected, her experiences and her loss pouring into her first encounters with Frederic. Catherine is the foreshadowing of the experience that Frederic will have, her own losses and the effects of those losses providing a relationship to the loss that Frederic will feel at the end. Catherine goes from the stability of a future that is known, to one that is unknown, insecure, and without the warmth of love that she had experienced within her relationship with her fiance. Frederic has no concept of what Catherine has experienced. His game is defined by selfishness and self-gratification. Despite the journey that he goes on in the discovery of the meanings of love, once again Hemingway inserts his own misogynistic belief systems while trying to define some sort of transcendent state. While Catherine is pregnant, Hemingway uses his own point of view about the disruption of pregnancy in the objectification and use of the female of a sex object through Catherine’s dialogue. She asks “You aren’t angry, are you darling?” and continues to eventually say “I was afraid because I am big now that maybe I was a bore to you…I know I’m no fun for you darling, I’m like a big flour barrel” (Hemingway 129). According to Meyers, this reflected Hemingway’s feelings about pregnancy and his response to his wife’s pregnancy (121). Even though he describes the feeling of loss, sacrifice and setting aside one’s own self is the key to love, he also maintains his self-absorbed belief systems on the meaning of the female and her role within society. Despite the appearance of transcendence where the character of Frederic is concerned, one has to wonder if a true transcendence is possible when the subject of someone’s love is nothing more than an object. The usability of Catherine in the beginning supports the point of view that she is an object, but once he begins to fall in love with her, as the object of his love, his drives are still selfish. He focuses his sacrifices and his meanings in life on the object of his love, his desire now having moved to a position in which to lose her would cost more than to sacrifice something for her. When taken in comparison to the continuing theme of misogynistic beliefs that pervades all of Hemingway’s work, this idea that he understood love is questionable. Hemingway understood the loss of love, but the meaning of loving someone outside of his own needs is not in evidence within the novel. The word misogyny is used liberally where Hemingway is concerned. Anne Trubek, in discussing her entry as an English major into a university, talks about having built up a true hate for the author because of his point of view on women. However, she also writes that she realized at a point that she knew more about what others had written about him and about his life than she did about what he wrote within his novels. The point of view that she takes is that his misogyny is based upon a historical position of the time period on the place that women should hold within the lives of men. If one reads the novel in order to just discover the development of the character Frederic, it is clear that he is the embodiment of the reputation that the author had within the public sphere. However, in looking at the nature of his life, the depression that he suffered from and the end that his life met when he put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, there is a vulnerability that emerges that can be related to the sadness that is reflected in the fatalistic end of the characters in his story. Despite his ability to discuss his experiences and to relate them through an emotional context, the vulnerable and less developed side of his understandings about life can be seen as he seems to stand in wonder that such things actually occur. It is his ability to write from the male perspective, to describe the lack of emotional development of the misogynistic male who is crippled by his inability to process the feelings that develop, which is presented within his work. Hemingway writes eloquently, masterfully, as he describes the human condition. However, Hemingway writes this novel from his own perspective, rarely fully immersing himself within his other characters as they play their roles within Frederic’s life. It is a fated world that revolves around the male importance, with the nature of Catherine relegated to her usability. In exploring love and in looking at the reasons for his own loss, he displaces that loss into death, rather than to look for the causes that it was lost to him. He blames her pregnancy for taking her life, rather than looking at the reasons that his real life inspiration for the novel may not have been willing to share the life that he was offering to her. Many readers of Hemingway see him as the misogynistic, radically male writer who captures the male experience. His life, despite his depression and suicide, is often interpreted for his serial adventures in which he conquered one male dream after another. However, in light of his sadness and the many suicide attempts, it must also be remembered that the world emotionally perplexed him and that he was locked within a fatalistic world of despair (Trubek70). Conclusion The nature of the novel that Hemingway wrote was to examine the comparative volatility and dire consequences of both love and war. Through a reflective method of exploring his own experiences, he was able to reach into history to support his belief systems and write about his perspectives on how those experiences had impacted his life. A Farewell to Arms allowed Hemingway to explore his own feelings, to put them into context with something that he understood, and to develop a theory on how the ending had occurred. For him, the loss of love was a death, a finality that was irrevocable and he translated that into the death of his female character. In trying to discover what had occurred within his own life, he translated the male experience into reflections of his gender. The novel explores the nature of love and war as they are related, pulling in the divine, and giving context to the experiences through reflective examination. Works Cited Dahiya, Bhim S. Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms: A Critical Study. Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1992. Print. Donaldson, Scott. New Essays on a Farewell to Arms. Cambridge [England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print. Hemmingway, Earnest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Rama, Rao P. G. Ernest Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2007. Print. Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Print. Mulvey, Jim. A Defense of A Farewell to Arms. In Nicholas J Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean, eds. Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, [1950-1985]. Lanham, MD.: the Scarecrow press, 2001. Print. Norris, Margot. Writing War in the Twentieth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Print. Trubek, Anne. A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Print. Read More