The Extra 261
I can imagine at least two objections to what I have been doing. One is that nothing is at issue here byt my quarrel with two specific interpretations. The second is that Fetterley and Scholes are simply two feminist critics among many. I can only say that I take the Fetterly and Scholes readings to be representative. Scholes is justly considered one of the most distinguished contemporary critics. Like most of us, Fetterly is less known, but I myself think that The Resisting Reader is a powerful book, especially in its readings of Anderson’s “I Want to Know Why,” Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and James’s The Bostonians. I do not think that Scholes and Fetterly read Hemingway as they do because they are human and therefore err; I think their feminist approach leads them to “see” what is not there. It is very hard to submit oneself to the intentions of another. If one is fully committed to an ideological position, it may be impossible.
At this point a feminist would want to assert that the reader’s ideological bias is precisely what she has been trying to point out all along. While admitting that such bias is real, I would still argue that it does not need to dominate critical reading as it dominates Fetterley’s and Scholes’s interpretations. I might add that I hardly take Hemingway to be “clean” so far as sexism is concerned. Readers of the Hemingway to be “clean” so far as sexism is concerned. Readers of the Hemingway biographies and especially his letters know there is ample evidence of his racism, anti-Semitism, and male chauvinism. Identifying these strains in his work is still a complex matter, however. Consider, for example, his use of anti-Semitism to expose Mike Campbell and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, or his extremely sympathetic treatment of the women’s point of view in “Cat in the Rain” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” A feminist might reply that Hemingway exposes Campbell’s and Gorton’s prejudice but seems uncritical of Jake Barnes’s milder version of the same disease, and that a couple of stories do not make much of a balance against the predominantly “male” Hemingway canon. Such a reply, carefully worked out in some detail, might well lead to
It may seem odd to refer to Scholes as a feminist critic. Indeed, he employs other critical methods throughout the rest of his commentary on Hemingway in Textual Power. Is it an accident that his non-feminist critiques are uniformly excellent, whereas his brief venture into literary feminism seems so dubious?