Author Archives: Lauren Catone

Once you’re immersed in a relationship, it’s difficult to fathom being alone again.  People forget what to do with their free time, how to sleep by themselves.  Stereotypically, this happens more often to females, who are depicted as prisoners of their own emotions, unable to escape a bad situation because they can’t bear the thought of “losing” someone. In Ernest Hemingway’s controversial short story “Hills Like White Elephants” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s twisted “The Birth Mark”, we meet two female characters whose happiness is entirely reliant upon the approval that their partners provide, and two men who pray on this need.
Jig, Hemingway’s lost girl, seems apprehensive and nervous about the abortion her boyfriend is pushing her to get.  However, she is put somewhat at ease when he promises her that he will love her afterward, that they can pick up from where they left off.  He tells her that he will start appreciating her anecdotes, her quirky comments again once the situation is taken care of.  Jig realizes that in order to keep him from leaving her, she has to go through with it, even saying that she “doesn’t care” about herself or what she wants.  She wishes that they could have it all-a family, a life together-but recognizes that he doesn’t want that with her.  The reader is able to detect the incredible melancholy of the day,  how the characters are numbing themselves with alcohol in the oppressive heat.  From my perspective, this abortion is the turning point in their relationship.  Jig, perhaps for the first time, understands that the situation is real, that her feelings are not reciprocated, that this child is something else she is going to sacrifice for someone who will never understand, and never try.  “The American” the nameless, faceless impregnator, can sense her desperation and anguish and exploits it.  He knows what she needs to hear-that he loves her, that the operation is quick and safe, that the choice is hers.  What he really means is “you have a choice-either this baby or me”.  Plying her with alcohol before she makes the final decision whether to go through with the procedure is a really suave move, too.
In Hawthorne’s tale of love and obsession, Georgiana  is so influenced by her husband, Alymer, that she dies at his hand trying to reach his idea of perfection.  Having no prior issues with her appearance, Georgiana so respects her husband’s opinion that she, too, grows disgusted by the benign crimson hand.  Although both characters seem to know that there is something strange and deep rooted about her birth mark, he makes her feel so unworthy of love, so broken, that says she would rather die than live with her perceived “flaw”.  Alymer seems to want Georgiana to be a “marble statue” and not a wife, a monument to his own scientific genius.  He cuts away at her very humanity and destroys her self worth mercilessly.  Alymer is fully aware that there are “risks” to the surgery and as his dream foreshadows, has a hunch that she will die.  However, like The American, he manipulates his woman into unnecessary medical procedures for his own selfish reasons.
The women in these stories make me sad.  Their idea of “happiness” is so inherently tied to their relationship status that they are willing to sacrifice everything to keep their partners from leaving them.  The men can sense this weakness and desire to be loved and, subconsciously or not, use this to get their own way.  I feel disgusted by the selfish behavior of the males, who think nothing of risking the psychological or physical health of their mates, and want to shake Jig and Georgiana by the shoulders for being so pathetic.  Apparently, happiness for women is forgetting who you are and allowing a man to make all major life decisions for you.

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag famously writes, “the modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” What is Sontag saying about how we read?
Immediately after hearing the Susan Sontag quote from “Against Interpretation” I thought of “deconstruction” as defined by Derrida and practiced for literary analysis purposes throughout the intellectual community.  I think that Sontag is talking about this kind of approach to understanding and absorbing a text by taking it apart and examining the pieces.
When you read a text very closely, you begin to interpret meaning in every word choice.  Because the author of the piece is unlikely to be at hand or potentially even in a better place, the reader is left to scrutinize their words at their leisure.  It is impossible to know what the author intended the symbolic meaning to be, and virtually anything can be inferred.  Once a piece has been reduced to its lowest common denominator, the audience is free to claim that the writer means whatever they themselves are imposing upon it.  I think that the danger of this is that a text can be mutilated and dissected to the point that it is rendered completely meaningless and hollow.
I have read several of Hemmingway’s short stories.  I wrote a paper about “Hills Like White Elephants” and what I thought all the “sub-text” was behind the dialogue and imagery.  We discussed the meaning of the “white elephants” in terms of the girl’s eminent abortion, as the proverbial “elephant in the room”.   I wrote about the barren, dry landscape in juxtaposition with the banks on the other side of the Ebro that were lush and fertile, and how this represented her two options, the two paths her life could take from here.  Should she choose to continue living this shallow life of travel, drinks, and voyeurism, or should she start a family and settle down, look for something real?
The story is ripe with symbolism and is a great text to break down.  You can easily defend many different interpretations of the “true” story between the lines.