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Life unworthy of life? Masculinity, disability, and guilt in The Sun Also Rises.

Article Excerpt
This essay re-evaluates the character of Jake Barnes from a disability studies perspective. Previous interpretations that treat Barnes's trauma realistically still tend to reinforce traditional stereotypes about disabled men, including the notion that Jake may "turn" gay because of his injury. However, the text suggests Hemingway's awareness that cultural narratives make disability more than a personal problem; one of the biggest obstacles to Jake's rehabilitation is a "medical model" of disability that pathologizes any impairment and compels disabled people to continually "prove" they are "normal."

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AS MICHAEL S. REYNOLDS and others have noted, the intense campaign of persona-building that Hemingway engaged in after being wounded in World War I makes it difficult to assess his level of anxiety over degeneration through disability. Even so, the cultural research of Joanna Bourke and Betsy L. Nies suggests that this fear would have been more than "in the air" for a wounded man returning from Europe. Bourke, for instance, notes that an increase of pension claims sensitized Britain to the literal costs of war-related disability and helped to re-energize debates over which veterans "deserved" charity and which did not (63-75). Nies, in turn, describes how similar financial concerns and the popularization of eugenic theories in the United States combined to make the war-wounded body a site for particularly intense fears about "degeneration." (1)

In addition to this body-obsessed cultural milieu, a seemingly minor incident during Hemingway's recuperation in Italy may have helped cement connections between disability and moral/physical breakdown in his mind. Quoting from the writer's correspondence, biographer James Mellow reports that not long after Hemingway's arrival at the hospital in Milan, "one of [his] newly-acquired friends proved to be a problem" (70). The friend was the wealthy Mr. Englefield, "an Englishman in his fifties, brother to one of the Lords of the Admiralty":

Mr. Englefield, who had been "younger sonning it in Italy for about twenty years," had adopted him, visited him often, made a practice of bringing him gifts--everything from eau de cologne to the London papers and bottles of Marsala. Later in life, however, Hemingway would remember Mr. Englefield in an acid sketch in a letter to a friend. On his visits to the hospital, Mr. Englefield, it seems, "got wet about wanting to see my wounds dressed. At the time I didn't know well-brought-up people were like that. I thought it was only tramps. I explained to him that I was not that way and that he couldn't come to the hospital anymore and that I couldn't take his Marsala" (Mellow 70)

This incident has been interpreted as contributing in a general way to Hemingway's awareness of sexual behaviors not acknowledged by his Midwestern home town (Vernon 39). Critics such as Eby and Elliot concur that such an incident would heighten Hemingway's interest in the idea of erotic variations and help to move him past thinking about sexual desire in binary terms. Yet while they recognize this subsequent interest in sexual variety, these readings do not stray far beyond binarism themselves, ultimately situating Hemingway's fascination within a familiar spectrum of either homosexual or heterosexual behavior signified through a socially constructed gender. (This is arguably true even in Eby's case, where Hemingway's hair fetish is tied to his fascination with "effeminate" men and "boyish" women).

If, however, Englefield's lapse of sexual decorum was indeed triggered by arguments over seeing Hemingway's "wounds dressed" it also serves as the young writer's introduction to a wider range of beliefs specifically tied to sexuality and disability. Mr. Englefield could, for instance, have been what disability researchers call a "devotee"--a species of fetishist whose erotic desires are triggered by the sight of people with disabilities. There exists today, for instance, a large community of devotees who seek out partners with amputations; others, however, are aroused by simply associating with disabled people (Bruno 1-10). The rapidly expanding field of disability studies has done much to create a fuller understanding of this kind of fetishism, as part of its wider research on the ways cultural stereotypes intersect with the realms of myth, psychology, pseudoscience, and medicine to impact the daily lives of people with physical and mental impairments.

The Sun Also Rises articulates ideas currently debated within the field of disability studies, especially those related to the concept of the "disabled identity" (Linton 8-32). An examination of these new concepts, in turn, allows a re-evaluation of Hemingway's attitudes toward wounds and masculinity. Specifically, the experiences of emasculated war hero Jake Barnes reflect Hemingway's awareness of what researchers call a "medical model" of disability--a worldview that equates disability with pathology and that forces disabled people continually to "prove" to the world at large that they are completely "cured" and therefore "normal." (2) The novel's downbeat ending suggests that a philosophy that continually denies bodily realities can be as physically and mentally destructive as a literal wound. In the end, Jake will never achieve the psychological stability he craves because he finally accepts prevailing social and medical philosophies about his injury-and these ideas, in turn, will always leave him vulnerable to the fear that he will "degenerate" into an invalid or a "pervert." The encounter with Englefield may have alerted Hemingway to the fact that merely having a disability made one vulnerable to a new range of sexual stereotypes and cultural assumptions--and especially to the idea that disability "turns" men into homosexuals or childlike, asexual beings (Shakespeare 10, 63-65).

The specters of the eunuch and the "queer" haunt Jake Barnes and drive his search for a viable identity. In the novel, Jake's struggle to define himself as a disabled man plays out in what Thomas Strychacz calls "theatrical representations," in...

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