258 American Literature
Well as in his dislike for Miss Van Campen, the head of the hospital in Milan (p. 54). The second example is arguable, I suppose, though I think that most readers trace his dislike for Van Campen to her chilly legalism, not the fact she is a woman who occupies a position of authority, as Fetterly argues. But the first example is truly stunning: has any reader before Fetterly responded in this way to Frederic’s final efforts to be alone with Catherine? Elsewhere, Fetterley claims that the “knowledge” he shares with the priest is that “sex is a dangerous and wasteful commodity and the best world is one of men without women” (p. 52). This is conceivably what the priest thinks, and it is a possible reading of what Frederic believes early in the novel; but it is remarkably misleading as a statement of what he believes at any point after he falls in love with Catherine despite his to avoid entangling alliances of any kind. It is the misleading statement of someone who believes that the priest represents the novel’s ideal (p. 69). The priest gets this label because he knows that “the only good woman is a dead one” (Fetterley’s grim summary of the novel’s “message,” p. 71); Frederic’s “hostilities” are unconscious, and he only belatedly comes to share the priest’s Hemingwayesque wisdom.
Joyce Wexler has already objected to Fetterley’s failure to acknowledge the differences between the early Frederic and the later Frederic. As Wexler says, the affair between Frederic and Catherine begins in a cynical disillusionment but ends in personal commitment, a form of romantic love that Hemingway would have us see as the one real value in an otherwise catastrophic world. To deny that this love is real and meaningful is to deny that the novel’s conclusion is tragic, precisely what Hemingway said it was. For Fetterley, Catherine’s death is “the fulfillment of [Frederic’s] own unconscious wish, his need to kill her lest she kill him” (p. 53). For Hemingway and for most of his readers (male and female alike), this “unconscious wish” is Fetterley’s creation.
I do not mean to argue that Hemingway has totally realized his intention in A Farewell to Arms. Fetterley is not the first reader to complain about Catherine’s insubstantiality, Frederic’s
See Wexler, pp. 112, 118
See Ernest Hemingway, “Introduction,” A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribners, 1948), pp. vii-viii