You ask, why would a “girl” be interested in reading Ernest Hemingway, sexist bastard that he is. Don’t patronize us girls. We know who he is. We know that there are others like him, just as sexist, right here in 2021. It does not hurt for us to be reminded. And anyway, we don’t need to like everything about a guy to like some things about him.
Hemingway is as much the subject of his fiction as he is of his life. He portrays the manly man, the tough, craggy guy who can get through the worst life can throw at you and come out the other side, not as a hero but as a survivor.
In our politically correct, namby-pamby world, we’re all supposed to speak jargony newspeak or pablum. But life isn’t like the modern studies department at your university. Life is rougher than that, a lot rougher.
Sometimes even us girls need examples of people who can get through it without crumbling, who can take our hits and still get up the next morning, aching and cold but alive! Do you get it? Alive. Not pretty, wounded even, full of piss and vinegar and gallows humor, but still kicking, breathing, and willing to try again.
Hemingway is the guy who won’t give up, who can’t give up, until of course, he does. And on that day, he goes by his own hand on his own terms.
We postmoderns thinks we’re above life, the shitty side of life, the impossible side, the side where quite literally things are blowing up around us. We think we can live our clean, perfect lives and think clean, perfect thoughts and do nothing but good in this sanitized and sterile world.
Wrong! Wait til the flood hits you, the war, the disease, the catastrophic job loss, what have you, and then check your thoughts and language and see how perfect you are then. Ever think how good it feels, not all the time but on very awful, special occasions, to say fuck it and NOT be polite?
Hemingway shows that even if you are a fallible human being in ways that might offend others, you can still survive, and in fact, the very things that make you offensive may also be the factors that enable you to stay on your feet. Survival takes more than using the right pronouns or pronouncing “Latino” correctly. Once you reach a certain point, survival is primal, rules be damned.
As students of life, not just literature, we need Hemingway, and most of us are grown-up enough to know how to use him.
That’s all I got to say. And I’m a girl.
