Women viewed by Hemingway and Achebe.

Probably, only by reading these two surnames, you will know a little about these important authors background and legacy that they left it the world literature. Ernest Hemingway was an American Nobel-prize winner author and journalist famous by his particular style in writing. The other writer, Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist best known for having written one of the most important books in the African modern literature. Both of them had an impact in their respective cultures and had several notable works but I would like to focus in a particular point of view expressed in some of their work: the way they look women as their role in these writers’ work.

At the moment of reading Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” -- a short story about abortion -- I thought his style and how he developed the story was impressive. Being honest I really liked and enjoyed it. However, I did some research and I actually read some critics like this one that shows off how in the most of Hemingway’s work, women have been portrait as “ignorant” and even “submissive”. Actually, giving the short story another read, I agreed that the role of the woman is completely dominated by this man who is persuading her to commit an abortion. The content is there, but for some reason it is overshadowed and made it less important that actually it is.

In order to understand more Hemingway’s view on women here is one famous quote:

“A woman ruined Scott [Fitzgerald]. It wasn’t just Scott ruining himself. But why couldn’t he have told her to go to hell? Because she was sick. It’s being sick makes them act so bloody awful usually and it’s because they’re sick you can’t treat them as you should. The first great gift for a man is to be healthy and the second, maybe greater, is to fall [in] with healthy women. You can always trade one healthy woman in on another. But start with a sick woman and see where you get. Sick in the head or sick anywhere. But sick anywhere and in a little while they are sick in the head. If they locked up all the women who were crazy — but why speculate — I’ve known goddamned good ones; but take as good a woman as Pauline — a hell of a wonderful woman — and once she turns mean. Although, of course, it is your own actions that turn her mean. Mine I mean. Not yours. Anyway let’s leave the subject. If you leave a woman, though, you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end even if they hanged you.”
— Hemingway to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, 1943

On the other hand, Chinua Achebe’s perspective of women is not as direct as Hemingway’s. For example, as reading Things Falling Apart you may blame the society of the book for exploiting and relegating women to domestic housework. Men are clearly superior than any woman a they can marry the times they might wish. The women in the story tend to be always weak and inferior. It is understood the story is fictional but why this reality that Achebe shows us must be pretty similar to the real world? However, in Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Achebe portrays a woman as one of the most important characters of this story by creating her independent and with a feminist view.

In my opinion, fictional literature should always try to cover topics without stereotypes or discrimination. By keep writing or ignoring the way women were considered by that time is a manner of perpetuating discrimination eternally, just I did even notice it while reading “Hills like White Elephants”.

Interest Links: 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3186323/Macho-author-Ernest-Hemingway-s-mother-raised-little-girl-twin-older-sister-stunning-photos-prove.html

Marginalization of Women in Chinua Achebe's Things falling apart