inkbluesky

celebrating spring 1280×1024 

Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice. Edited by Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland. (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2002

Sinclair further demonstrates how Maria and Pilar, characters who have been largely overlooked in critical commentary on Hemingway’s women, are “not easily reducible, nor should they be, to the traditional polemic extremes critically assigned to Hemingway’s fiction” (108). She argues, in fact, that these two women collectively embody the Hemingway code—”living simply within the confines of one’s circumstances, but acting courageously under those constraints” (97)—a code heretofore understood as almost exclusively male. Similarly, Kathy G. Willingham, in “The Sun Hasn’t Set Yet: Brett Ashley and the Code Hero Debate,” asserts that Hemingway’s most famous female character “provides a model no less significant, important, or romantic than any of the male code heroes who have inspired or influenced countless readers” (34). Several other essays in this section likewise re-read Hemingway’s fictional women, demonstrating how the heroism, depth, and complexity so often attributed to Hemingway’s male protagonists and so often interpreted as the exclusive province of men, are traits shared by many of his female characters. In short, these critics reveal not only how Hemingway deals with the matter of women, but also how the women matter in Hemingway’s oeuvre.

I always thought that Hemingway, especially in the sense of his work should not be dismissed as too old world machismo or filled with misogyny.  Maria and Pilar are two good examples. How could anyone view them as weak or stereotypical. Even Hemingway’s personal life, at least to me was a little more complicated. Did his wife stay with him through all his affairs because she was weak or because she felt that by leaving she would lose the more then she would gain. Personal relationship are strange. People stay together sometimes for reasons that those on the outside looking in don’t understand. We could say that those are sometimes toxic relationships or co-dependent, but there is something there that keeps them together. I can’t begin to personally understand why someone that is emotionally abused would stay in a relationship, but I see it all the time. I really liked this passage from the article,

In the most convincing and impressively researched essay in the volume, “Santiago and the Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in The Old Man and the Sea,” Susan F. Beegel offers a stunning interdisciplinary essay in which she establishes the centrality of the “Eternal Feminine” in Hemingway’s novella. Drawing from a remarkable array of sources—mythology, religion, folklore, marine history, and literature—Beegel argues that the sea itself, “gender[ed] as feminine throughout the text”

The story that should bring down the republican party 

The evidence is mounting at a furious pace.  We have someone (Von Spakovsky) who is linked to voter suppression efforts within the republican party not only put in a position as a civil rights lawyer at the Justice Department, but on the goddamn Federal Elections Commission.

You have Robert Popper – an attorney with a notorious and detailed history of bringing (many times baseless) lawsuits in order to target minority voters and districts as the Voting Rights Section’s Special Litigation Counsel.  You have little to no cases or investigations into voter suppression since 2001, yet numerous suits and investigations into voter rolls that weren’t properly purged.

You have Tim Griffin, a man who was responsible at the Republican National Committee for “caging” activities that suppressed minority voters who were stationed in Iraq, which he is currently under investigation for, promoted (at Karl Rove’s request and hidden from Congressional investigations) to US Attorney.

Just one comment. The title to this post linked from Kos is a bit of hyperbole, trash tends to float back to the surface. There is an old saying in America that those with power and money never suffer the kind of justice they should and it is doubtful that that will change anytime soon.