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Article Excerpt
In Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, Dorothy Hollis is more than just another lonely, sexually troubled soul among the "haves" in Key West's yacht basin. Hemingway's choice of the last name "Hollis" for Dorothy is the tip of a little iceberg--at once an inside joke, a sign of Hemingway's deteriorating relationship with his second wife, Pauline, and a bitterly ironic commentary on one of the novel's most important themes: the plight of one man--or one woman--alone.
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TOWARD THE END OF To Have and Have Not, as the narrative pans across Key West's yacht basin--past the quarrelling homosexuals, past the impotent old industrialist, and past the innocent, dull, rich family and the wandering Estonians--we eventually find ourselves in the mind of the "extraordinarily pretty" Dorothy Hollis. Hemingway's choice of the last name "Hollis" for Dorothy is the tip of a little iceberg--at once an inside joke, a sign of Hemingway's deteriorating relationship with his second wife, Pauline, and a bitterly ironic commentary on one of the novel's most important themes: the plight of one man--or one woman--alone.
Sitting before her mirror, Dorothy carefully brushes her hair one hundred strokes, musing about her lover, Eddie, "a professional son-in-law of the very rich," and her husband, John, "a highly paid Hollywood director" whose "brain is in the process of outlasting his liver" and other organs, all now "too corroded" to be saved (THHN 241). As the long bristled brush sweeps through Dorothy's lovely hair, Eddie lies snoring in another cabin, having passed out in a drunken stupor. Finishing her hundred strokes, Dorothy thinks, "I love to brush my hair. It's almost the only thing you do that's good for you that's fun. I mean by yourself" (243). And with her husband distant and presumably impotent and her lover incapacitated, we soon see what other things she must do for herself. Her masturbatory hairbrushing soon gives way to the real thing:
Damn Eddie, really. He shouldn't have gotten so tight. It isn't fair, really.... If I lie here all night and can't sleep I'll go crazy and if I take too much of that damned [luminol] I'll feel awfully all day tomorrow.... Oh, well, I might as well. I hate to but what can you do? What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn't, I'm sweet, yes you are, you're lovely, oh, you're so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn't want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he's not, he's not even here, I'm here, I'm always here and I'm the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. And you're me. So that's it. So that's the way it is.... All over now. All right. I don't care. What difference does it make? It isn't wrong if I don't feel badly. And I don't. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I'll do it again before I'm really awake. (246-47)
Given Hemingway's erotic attraction to women's hair in his life and fiction, we should hardly be surprised that he aligns obsessive hair brushing with masturbation (Eby 160). And given his much-criticized use of what he considered sexual dysfunction as the dominant metaphor for social dysfunction in To Have and Have Not, we should hardly...
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