260 American Literature
Terest in him.” Scholes’s commentary includes the following observations: “Mr. Elliot keeps making the same mistake over and over again. His mistake, of course, is based upon a moral code that valorizes ‘straightness’ or sexual innocence and denigrates sexual experience…This code is held up to ridicule by being measured against another code, valorized by the text itself, the code of a worldly wisdom that grounds itself in ‘reference’ and ‘truth.’ This code says that women may be accorded the place of innocence in American culture but, at bottom they are sexual creatures and want only men who are sexually experienced enough to please them…What women ‘really’ want is confirmed by a kind of behavioral test or opinion poll: ‘Nearly all the girls’ prefer what the text will call in the next sentence ‘rotters’…To appreciate the humor we must accept, at least provisionally, the cultural code of the text: its knowing leer and its opinion of ‘girls’” (pp. 60-61).
Scholes proceeds to attack this code, as well he might. But I would question whether any such “code” is embedded in the quotation from Hemingway’s story. Why do all the girls lose interest in Mr. Eliot? Is it because they are sexual creatures who want only men who are sexually experienced, as Scholes suggests? Or is it because they quickly come to see Mr. Elliot as insufferably smug, complacently insisting on his “cleanliness” while warning them (two sentences later) against other man who are “rotters” (his term for the unclean)? Just where is the knowing male leer in this paragraph? Rather than leer at the story’s “girls,” we are invited to share their point of view. After all, we all come to adopt a satirical perspective toward the egregious Mr. Elliot. Perhaps we are all to blame for this, and perhaps Hemingway is to lame for writing such a “bitchy” story (as Scholes quite accurately labels it). But this is not a story about a good clean Christian who does not fit into a fallen modern world; rather, it is a story about a hypocritical prig who must finally endure his wife’s affair with another woman. The “assumed audience” here is not “clearly male,” as Scholes asserts (p. 61), but anyone who relishes the exposure and debasement of a fool.
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, “The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribners, 1938), p. 159.