Hemingway Response ( not assignment).

I didn’t read any other people’s essays online as I want to have my own opinions about the two stories. I think I am not a very optimistic person, and I always love to read stories that have very sad endings; that is the main reason why Hemingway’s stories engage me very deeply. Hemingway’s life attitude is very much affected by his four unsuccessful marriages. When he was 61 years old, he committed suicide; obviously, even the last marriage didn’t seem to be a successful one, either. From both stories “ Hills Like White Elephants” and “ Cat In the Rain”, we can see that the conversations are not pleasant; we can feel that there is a kind of very bitter loneliness in them—the female characters are not physically alone, but emotionally lonely.

In my opinion, according to all those unsuccessful marriages, probably Hemingway is a misogynist. However, in both stories we read, I think he put his own lonely feelings in both female characters, so in the stories, he is sympathetic towards women.

In “Hills Like White Elephants”, Hemingway portrays a young and inexperienced loving girl who is trying to decide whether she should do an abortion or not with her American boy friend. The girl loves the man and she wants to have the baby and a future with the man, but the man says that he doesn’t want anyone else but her. He is afraid of their future with the baby. He is older but not mature enough. He says that “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig.”(Line 42) It means that he doesn’t care about the girl’s feelings at all. Through their short conversation, the girl gets disappointed, and she finally realizes that they won’t have a happy future anyway; even if she doesn’t do the abortion, she will suffer more. When she says “I don’t care about me”( Line 66), she is actually saying the man doesn’t care about her. I think she becomes stronger in the end when the climax takes place—“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”(Line 98).

In “Cat In the Rain”, the woman is lonely and demanding. Her husband George shows no interest in their conversation, so even the woman is with her husband in a very comfortable hotel room, she still feels lonely. She wants a cat so badly. She says “I don’t know why I wanted it so much. I want that poor kitty. It isn’t any fun to be a poor kitty out in the rain.” The cat is a symbol of the woman. She is a poor character suffering a terrible marriage. She wants to be saved or to be loved the way she wants the cat to be saved. Reading this story, I got a very bitter feeling to see how the woman feel when her husband says “Shut up”. She is strong inside; she has her own desires and she craves them. However, she is also overwhelmed because of this unsuccessful marriage.

To sum up, I liked the way Hemingway portrays women. He does feel sympathy for women in both stories; however, this is because he put his image into the two female characters. In real life, I don’t think he was always sympathetic towards women as we can see that from Hemingway’s another piece of work “A Very Short Story”, in which he portrays the woman as a very loose one.