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Female characters in Hemingways stories

海明威笔下的女性

1. Introduction

1.1 research background:

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is a famous American writer and he was born on 21st July to Clarence Hemingway and Grace Hemingway at Oak Park near Chicago, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas city at the age of seventeen. After the United states was involved into the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospital. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution. He used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war as the background for his most ambitious novels. Many scholars regarded Ernest Hemingways colorful life as a war correspondent, big game hunter, angler, writer, and world celebrity, as well as of the 1954 Nobel Prize in literature. Here I analyze the female characters in Hemingways story through four stories by the author.

I choose the four stories because these females are classical, and they represent different several types of characteristics in the American society.

1.1.1 Up in Michigan

This story mainly tells us a simple, naive and innocent young servant girl Liz, who loved a short, black and full-beard man Jim Gilmore, and at the end of the story, was rudely occupied by this man. Throughout the whole story, we could see that it is just an one-side love from Liz, and Hemingway used so many words to reveal her inner thoughts. This is the clue of the whole story.

1.1.2 Cat in the rain

It tells us a simple story, it is about a young American couple. They spent their holiday in Italy without any trivial matters and boring routines disturbing. After a period of time, there were little conversation between them; days seemed to be so boring. In a rainy day, the madam stood by the window looking outside. All of a sudden, she found a cat under the green desk in the rain. Probably out of sympathy, she decided to come downstairs to catch it, but her husband seemed to have no interest for that and just kept reading instead of taking much notice of her. When she went past the office of the hotel, she had a brief conversation with the shopkeeper about some household words and she started to appreciate the man. After that, she continued to catch the rain cat with an umbrella and a maid appointed by the hotel owner. However, the cat has already disappeared. Therefore, the madam failed to find the cat when she went to the green desk. Then she returned back to her room depressingly, and spoke to her husband that she would like to pull her hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back, she wanted a kitty, and so forth. But the husband did not agree with her, even pay little attention to her. At the moment, the door was knocked by someone, and the maid stood in the doorway with the cat.