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The Good and The Dead Woman: Catherine Barkley in A Farewell To Arms
The Good and The Dead Woman: Catherine Barkley in A Farewell To Arms
CHAPTER 3
my reading, Catherine reveals herself to be an independent, strong and heroic individual who
consciously chooses to love Frederic Henry and also teaches him to love her in return.
Catherine has been amalgamated of many women but the chief prototype was
unquestionably Agnes von Kurowsky -— tall, slender, pretty, with blue-grey eyes and chestnut
hair. She, however, resembles Agnes only physically. Hemingway drew on many women for
his heroine. Her Scottish origins came from Duff Twysden and her agonizing past from a co
worker of Agnes called Elsie Jessup. Her pet name Cat was Ernest’s own for Hadley —
Feather Cat, shortened to Cat/Kat. Their idyllic life at Chamby, Switzerland also reflects the
wonderful time that he had spent with Hadley. Bernice Kert states:
Hadley, and the warm August nights on the balcony of the British hospital to
section in Kansas city. Critics have noted that Ernest wrote the death scene of
A Farewell to Arms a month after his wife suffered a long and dangerous
Pauline.1
Agnes had nursed Hemingway back to health after his hospitalisation owing to his war
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wound two weeks before his nineteenth birthday. Hemingway had quickly fallen in love with
his nurse at the Red Cross hospital; with Agnes, he had enjoyed his first serious romance. She
was the one who taught him to accept the care of a woman and the one who lacerated the
young Hemingway with her rejection. The sheer pain of Agnes’s rejection is evident from his
letter, which Hemingway had written to Howell Jenkins on 16 June 1919: “I loved her once
and then she gypped me. And I don’t blame her. But I set out to cauterize out her memory and
I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it’s gone.”2 The pain of
rejection, however, was not gone, as he had claimed; it found representation repeatedly in his
fiction. In “A Very Short Story” Hemingway wrote about their unconsummated affair, the
“boy and girl” (108) romance as Luz puts it and he also turned the jilted lover’s predicament
into a sordid joke by making him enjoy sexual satisfaction and also contract gonorrhoea from
the salesgirl in the Chicago taxicab. The same pattern recurs in Harry’s whoring in an attempt
to kill loneliness and love in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as he fails to “cure himself of
loving” (48) the first woman in his life. Agnes was also partially represented and
Catherine Barkley is provided with a traumatic past just like Brett. She, in her first
encounter with Frederic tells him of her dead fiance lost to the war, her fiance of eight years,
who she could have married or cohabited with. She tells Frederic:
“... You see I didn’t care about the other thing and he could have had it all.
He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have
married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to
war and I didn’t know... I didn’t know about anything then. I thought it would
With Catherine’s grief is coupled a sense of guilt. After her fiance’s death she realizes that in
this war-ridden world, they lacked ‘world enough and time’ and also recognizes her own
coyness to have been a crime. She longs inconsolably for her lover to return. Very soon,
“Yes.”
“Yes”
Catherine herself indulges in this pretence of love voluntarily. Her abnegation begins from
here. One must note that she does not really abnegate herself to Frederic Henry whom she
barely knows at this point but to an idea, a personal one. Ernest Lockridge states:
Motivated by the agonizing grief and loss that she still feels after a year of
the narrator, Frederic Henry, Catherine has temporarily resurrected her fiance
confides to the reader how he initially viewed the relationship as a game. “I knew I did not
love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which
you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge, you had to pretend you were playing for
money or playing for some stakes.” (30-31) Catherine understands his motives and also
startles Frederic by recognizing their rendezvous as “a rotten game” (31). Seeing through the
rotten game, Catherine demands honesty. Since she has been psychologically wounded by the
war, she realizes, even more than Frederic, a lieutenant, the aftermath of death. Rena
Sanderson writes:
After that death, she behaves like someone who has been psychologically
wounded by the war and by the loss of her first love, but she endures and
gradually comes to realize the finality of death and what that implies for the
living. 4
Catherine emerges as a figure typical of Hemingway —■ heroic and stoical. As in the novels of
Faulkner and Steinbeck, the crucible of war coupled with severe personal crisis triggers the
tragic grandeur in the woman. Rosa Millard in Faulkner’s The Unvanquished or Miss
Habersham of Intruder in the Dust show impressive courage. During the Great Depression,
Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath become akin to the earth
mother, and show formidable endurance. Their acts recall Christ’s sacrifice and his service to
humankind. After Tom Joad leaves, Ma Joad becomes both the moral and the psychological
spine. Similarly, Catherine Barkley accepts her pain and tries to begin life afresh. She tries to
achieve psychic wholeness by becoming her own therapist. Like Bronte’s Heathcliff, she too
becomes obsessed with recreating the past. About Heathcliff, William A. Madden has said
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that in his obsession with recreation of the past, he actually responds to what Freud had
illness.5
Heathcliff, however, had wrought onto others the same kind of pain that he himself had been
forced to suffer. Catherine does not inflict pain on anybody. Instead she tries to lessen it by
spreading benevolence, by sharing her love, something she could not share with her fiance.
She also shares her growths and insights with Frederic and thereby decreases her mental pain.
Lisa Tyler writes that Catherine chose, while reliving her trauma, to “relive it constructively
rather than destructively: to try to give Frederic what she had denied her fiance, rather than to
try to inflict on him the pain that she had suffered.” 6 She overcomes her trauma through
transference. Her therapy is of her own devising; she begins with a pretence of loving
Frederic in place of her dead fiance. The young woman, faced with a seemingly loveless and
anarchic universe refuses to give up and be helpless. She imposes order and beauty on her
experiences with Frederic and chooses to take charge of her own life. Such is her courage that
Sandra Whipple Spanier calls her the ‘code heroine’ of A Farewell to Arms. Lisa Tyler quotes
from Spanier:
As much a victim of the war as her boy who was killed... Catherine refuses to
be helpless. She pulls herself together with dignity and grace, defines the limits
of her own existence, and scrupulously acts her part, preferring romance to the
Catherine tries to control destiny, her own and Frederic’s and things begin to change
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gradually but it is Frederic’s war wound that drastically changes the course of events. He
receives a kind of wound that Catherine had envisioned for her fiance: . I remember having
a silly idea he might come to the hospital where I was. With a sabre cut, I suppose, and a
bandage around his head. Or shot through the shoulder. Something picturesque.” (20)
Frederic’s wound enables Catherine to actualise the fantasy of a wounded lover. It also
relieves her of the guilt feelings that she had nurtured for depriving her fiance of her love.
Simultaneously, not only does Frederic’s lust change to love, he also becomes fearful,
vulnerable and psychically dependent on Catherine. Frederic enjoys what his creator had
craved for. Just as she had asked Frederic whether he loved her before allowing him to kiss
her for the first time, Catherine asks the same question, tormenting Frederic now. She yields
to him only after Frederic’s declaration of love. Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes point
out that:
In those days, a declaration of love was the minimum prerequisite for sexual
intercourse between well-bred people. Knowing this, Frederic plays the love
card to win a trick for his desire, which is heightened by his knowledge that
Catherine is a virgin. Afterward she says, “Now do you believe I love you?”
(92), having played the sex card to win a trick for love bestowing the good
girl’s greatest treasure, which is given only when she is sure she’s in love and
O
The union gives them absolute fulfilment, evident in Frederic’s narration of post-coital
satiation. “... The wildness was gone and I felt finer than I had ever felt.” (92). This union is
in stark contrast to that portrayed in the short stoiy “Up in Michigan” where the woman is
nothing but body. Liz’s self is conquered somewhat brutally; the boorish male goes to sleep
on top of her after the sexual conquest. Yet, Liz, erotic and maternal, wriggles out from under
him and covers Jim with the coat before she leaves. The story shows the male’s need to be
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assertive and only the male’s need to be soothed. The union of Catherine and Frederic, on the
other hand, makes both the lovers whole as human beings. Catherine is relieved of her sense
of guilt for not having yielded to her dead fiance and at the same time it comforts Frederic,
crippled and vulnerable, lying alone with night fears on the hospital bed. Michael Reynolds
states that, both “are living for each other’s moment, completely interdependent.”9
In his personal life, Hemingway, cared for first by Agnes in Milan, continued to be
tended to by doting sisters after his return. Ernest’s own wounding at Fossalta left its legacy
for a while in the form of nightmares and insomnia. His favourite sister Ursula comforted him
immensely during this recuperative period. She sometimes slept in his room with the lights
on, to appease his night fears. Hemingway also confided his little secrets to Marcelline and
sometimes to Sunny, the tomboy whom he loved very much. Frederic’s caring, like
Hemingway’s own, comprises of selfless, androgynous love. Hemingway’s wives too had
maternal as well as sisterly traits. All these traits went into the persona of Catherine Barkley,
who in her relationship with Frederic blends with the erotic, the sisterly and the maternal.
Klaus Theweleit points out that one of the pervading male fantasies prevalent in society is that
of sexual relationships with nurses. This pervading male fantasy is what A Farewell to Arms
is based on. Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes quote from Theweleit:
“Equally well known is the fact that nurses refuse to conform to the images
of them projected in male fantasies.... When all is said and done, the patient
doesn’t desire the nurse as a person, but as an incarnation of the caring mother,
the nonerotic sister. Indeed, that may be why nurses are called ‘sister’ in so
many countries.”
impedes his lovemaking ability”. And, with his individual rights taken away,
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the soldier is in effect “reduced to the status of a child” and thus focusses his
“needs for mother-child and sibling relations onto the sister nurses.” 10
It is significant that the young and immature Ernie Hemingway had desired the love of
women considerably older to him in his youth — Agnes, Katy Smith, Hadley, Duff and
Pauline. He had also desired the unquestioning love of his mother Grace whom he had
claimed to be his ‘best girl’ still as he went to the war front for the first time in 1918. After his
return Grace, Katy and Agnes had all shut him out of their lives as had Duff some years later.
Hemingway’s fictional creation, another ‘kid’ enjoys the maternal-erotic lover. In real life,
though Agnes had loved him for some time, she was very much conscious of their age gap of
Throughout [her] letters, in her use of such phrases as bambino mio, mon
enfant, dear boy, and so on, she made clear her self consciousness about the
difference in their ages. Sometimes she even called it directly to his attention,
as when she addressed him as “Ernie, My boy” and then wrote, “it sounds
Now, after a couple of months away from you, I know that I am still very fond
of you, but, it is more as a mother than a sweetheart.... So Kid (still Kid to me,
& always will be) can you forgive me for unwittingly deceiving you?... I am
now and always will be too old, & that’s the truth & I can’t get away from the
10
fact that you’re just a boy — a kid.
All through, in A Farewell to Arms, Frederic’s childlike status keeps on iterating. To his
friend Rinaldi, he is “baby” and Catherine calls him a “good boy”. The childlike status
bestowed on Frederic makes him the Oedipal child-man forever desiring and forever hungry
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to devour his mother-lover. The lovers in the novel enact the fantasies that the author had
This fantasy does not end with Frederic Henry’s recuperation and his return to
the more adult world of the war, for his desire is always to return to the waiting
abdicates from what little self she has to give herself over to his desires. 13
Frederic’s war wound certifies his masculinity and also becomes the mark of his
masculine courage. It also becomes the source of authority as he comes to a hospital as the
one and only male patient and is served by many sister-nurses. He is no longer under the
command of peers. He rules supreme in a hospital which is overstaffed with nurses. The
situation is similar to Hemingway’s own as four sisters too served him just after his return to
Oak Park with the war wound. Mark Spilka remarks that he is nowhere more authoritative
In Henry’s certified passivity, then, lies his greatest power; he has license to
reign from his bed as Grace Hemingway reigned when served breakfast there
passive power.14
Frederic’s war wound eventually leads to what can be termed a kind of a feminisation in bed.
During his affair with Catherine in the hospital bed in his period of recovery, he lies supine, in
missionary position, like a woman. This parallels Ernest and Hadley’s own ways of making
love as implied in A Moveable Feast and Ernest and Mary’s ways as recorded in How it Was.
Hemingway does not explicitly state these secrets, but he implies them nevertheless. He gave
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fullest expression to such feminizations of men in The Garden ofEden and Islands in the
woman in the lovemaking that takes place in the hospital room at night. As no
one has yet bothered to observe, he has to lie on his back to perform properly,
given the nature of his leg wounds, and Catherine has to lie on top of him.15
With Catherine, there is no fear of supreme female dominance however, as is found in The
Garden ofEden. Frederic, the receptive male, remains supine yet masterful and in command.
with strong ethical standards begins to question Frederic on the morning of his operation
about the behaviour of the whores that he has known. She asks him,“... When a man stays
with a girl when does she say how much it costs?... Does she say she loves him?... Does he
say he loves her?” (105) Catherine’s questions do not spew out of idle curiosity. As a nurse
she is forbidden to have sexual relationships with men under her charge. Catherine’s apparent
self-effacement led earlier critics to believe that she is an idealized Hemingway woman but
her conscious decision to be a whore undermines such views. Here the author underscores the
break from such idealization and objectification. Conscious but satisfied with Frederic’s lie
that he has loved no one else before her, Catherine promises him:
“I’ll say just what you wish and I’ll do what you wish and then you’ll never
want any other girls, will you?... I’ll do what you want and say what you want
and then I’ll be a great success, won’t I?... I do anything you want. There isn’t
any me anymore, just what you want.... You see? I’m good. I do what you
want.” (105-106)
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Just as she had indulged in a game of role-playing in the initial stages of their relationship,
here too she indulges in another game in which there is a new role for her to play — that of
the whore, the ‘bad’ woman. As she assumes this role of a whore, she deliberately
transgresses social, moral and cultural constraints — their codes, restrictions and taboos. She
finally transfers absolutely her full affections to a new man after her dead fiance. Becoming
Frederic’s live-in woman, she makes furtive sex possible in spite of her profession. Nancy R.
... he will no longer be her dead soldier-lover, but she will be his live nurse-
whore.. ..Asa “bad girl”, she can learn to enjoy illicit sex in stolen moments.
Switching back to her role as nurse, she becomes the ministering angel, the
modem culture that Frederic Henry, supine on his bed of pain and pleasure,
amply equipped with wine and brandy, is in the ideal position to enjoy.16
Catherine resists marriage simply because she does not want to be separated from
We said to each other that we were married the first day she had come to the
would send her away and if we merely started on the formalities they would
The Red Cross rules specified that a woman could not be simultaneously a sister-nurse and a
wife. Frederic and Catherine become married by love and compatibility, though not by law.
Catherine insists, “I won’t leave you. What good would it do to marry now? We’re really
Catherine’s ways of expressing her love echo Pauline’s letters written to Ernest in
Remember especially that we are the same guy.... I am only half without
you.... these three months [of their separation] I’m hardly even alive.... how
lovely you are, dear dear dear dear dear Ernest.... time without you is
17
useless.
Bronte’s Catherine Eamshaw. The declarations are terrifying in their intensity. Barkley
declares, “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me” (115) This echoes
Catherine passionately declares that she is Frederic Henry. She becomes another incarnation
of her loved one, his double, in other words, she becomes he. Catherine also says:
religion. But I haven’t any religion.... You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve
got.” (115-116)
Like Catherine Eamshaw, Catherine Barkley too renounces conventional religious beliefs.
Hers too becomes a romantic declaration of a marriage of minds and a perfect union of souls.
The lovers, fused in mystic oneness, emerge as tme romantics for whom conventional religion
loses meaning. The lovers keep telling themselves that they are married without the benefit of
religious ceremony. Catherine pronounces love and the loved person to be her new religion.
two souls... .Catherine and Frederic are romantics whose Christianity has
lapsed.... [She] invokes a Romantic heresy, the religion of love, going back to
Catherine tries to carve meaning in life by creating a little mystic world defined by
love amidst the futility of war. Catherine says about their live-in relationship: “Everything we
do seems so innocent and simple. I can’t believe we do anything wrong.” (153) However
innocent they think of the love relationship, it results in her pregnancy and this throws new
light on Frederic’s character. Catherine, upset and taut, breaks to Frederic the news of her
pregnancy and adds apologetically: “I did everything. I took everything but it didn’t make any
difference.” (138) In the early 20th century, no birth control method was as effective as the
contraceptive pill became later in the 1960s. This, however, does not mean that no methods of
contraception were available to Frederic and Catherine. Margaret Sanger had fought for long
to inform the general masses about birth control and promote the understanding of the
methods known and practised in the western world. Michael Reynolds informs us that
Frederic the lieutenant certainly knew about the condom, which used to be available from mid
19th century but was perfected during the First World War. Catherine, to terminate her
pregnancy, says Reynolds, could have used a douche, a sponge, a cervical cap, and a
diaphragm with an effective sparmatocide or an intrauterine devise. Around the 1920s no oral
contraceptives were available but there were certain drugs prescribed in folk pharmacology
which were thought to induce miscarriages. They were quinine and ergot, both of which find
mention in Helen’s passionate outcry in To Have and Have Not just before she leaves her
husband. Frederic emerges as the selfish male who confesses to, “... feel trapped biologically”
(139) though Catherine actually falls into a biological trap because of her unwanted
pregnancy that occurs because of her lover’s lack of responsibility. Reynolds rightly states:
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“That the nurse, Catherine, would have tried to prevent, or even terminate conception is
understandable; that Frederic apparently left the problem to her says a lot about male lack of
For a time, the lovers are fused in a mystic oneness. They retreat from a world ravaged
by war, bid farewell to arms and flee from civilization to a prelapserian state. Their flight
from civilization reminds one of Fluck and Jim’s flight in the Mark Twain classic that
Hemingway immensely admired. The best time that they share in their short, life together is in
the chalet near Montreaux where Ernest and Hadley Hemingway had also resided,
Hemingway had found this place to be an “ideal blend of wilderness and civilization.”21 The
idyllic place becomes all the more beautiful as it becomes a little self-contained world
circumscribed by love. As Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes state: “Together they try to
establish a world of their own, a world of oneness, as they move further from society into a
Catherine soon domesticates Lieutenant Frederic Henry’s wildness. Wherever they are
Frederic and Catherine, like Huck and Jim, improvise and make every place a home for
themselves. Hemingway, in his personal as well as his professional life, detested women who
competed with men — flappers, careerists, social and political revolutionists and thinkers. He,
however, liked contemporary modem women, who as bearers of culture, applied domestic
values to the public sphere. This factor eventually led to the backlash of women into the
private sphere in the 1930s. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway shows Catherine make every
place a ‘home’ for the lovers. Just before Frederic leaves for the front, the hotel room, just
like the hospital room feels like their home (153). Later during their idyllic life in
Switzerland, Catherine muses: “... I have to try and make this room look like something...
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Like our home” (309) With Catherine beside him, Frederic’s world becomes Edenic. Added
to this sense of homeliness, as Joyce Wexler has pointed out, there comes a symbolic parallel
between their home in Switzerland and the landscape of the priest’s home in the Abruzzi.
developed and happy modem love affair.... in it, he gave fullest expression to
Catherine envisions their oneness through the hair-matching motif. The conversation runs:
“How grow?”
“Just grow a little longer.... No, let it grow a little longer and I could cut
mine and we’d be just alike only one of us blonde and the other dark.... It
would be fun. I’m tired of it. It’s an awful nuisance in the bed at night... .It
might be nice short. Then we’d both be alike. Oh, darling, I want you so much
Hemingway practised this kind of hair matching with all his four wives. Grace Hemingway,
who treated the brother-sister pair of Marcelline and Ernest as a pair of twin Dutch dollies
began this motif. As children, they were made to wear the same dresses and sport the same
length of hair for seven summers. This androgynous hair matching first appears in A Farewell
to Arms and keeps recurring in his later novels too, in To Have and Have Not, For Whom the
Bell Tolls and in The Garden ofEden. Catherine’s desire to be all mixed up goes beyond hair
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matching. The two sexes blend in perfect androgynous sexual union. The words of Catherine
Barkley indicate her wish to resort to unconventional ways of making love, and are similar to
those of Catherine Bourne in The Garden ofEden. In spite of this androgynous union,
Catherine Barkley never once becomes a threat to her lover’s essential masculinity as
Catherine Bourne does in the posthumously published text. In A Farewell to Arms, the
masculine and the feminine intermingle also, in the man’s selfless caring for his lover and
keeping with the author’s childhood familiarity with his father’s medical
world, where male and female caring intermix and with his own experience as
a caring Red Cross corpsman who recovered from war wounds in a Milan
hospital.24
All through, Catherine remains a good sport and companion without showing any
mannish traits. Her pregnancy eventually destroys the Edenic love that they share. Frederic
the Oedipal child-man impregnates Catherine but never gets to share his own mother-lover
with a real child. Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes argue that, “in the logic of the
narrative, Catherine’s determination to have the baby is her death warrant. Mother and child
must go, and they do, erasing all vestiges of motherhood.” It is noteworthy that the child
who they refer to as “young Catherine” turns out to be a male child, a son. Through her
pregnancy, Catherine gains the phallus, which entails power in an androcentric world and thus
she poses a threat. The love that she offers, feels Mark Spilka, is so absorbing, that it becomes
threatening. Spilka argues that, “though she dies bravely, like a true Hemingway hero, it may
be that she is sacrificed to male survival.”" Judith Fetterley had charged that the book’s
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message to women readers is that, “the only good woman is a dead one.” Catherine dies
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after a prolonged labour because of her physiological aberrations, her narrow hips and pelvis,
which Spilka identifies as androgynous features. Many critics view her death as a
‘punishment’ for Agnes who had had the courage to refuse him. Jamie Barlowe-Kayes writes:
what might be seen as von Kurowsky’s asserted female subjectivity: her initial
In the hospital, Catherine is reduced to being Frederic’s property. As Catherine fails to deliver
the baby naturally, the doctor suggests a high forceps delivery or a caesarean operation. The
doctor takes Frederic’s permission to act on ‘his woman’, so to say. Michael Reynolds states
that given “the wife-as-property attitude of the period and Catherine’s badly deteriorated
physical condition, not to mention the effects of the nitrous oxide gas, it is understandable that
Catherine is operated on but she dies nevertheless. On 28 June 1928, Pauline had given
birth to Patrick. She had a seventeen-hour labour, a caesarean operation and a slow recovery.
Patrick weighing nine pounds was bom in Kansas City.... They finally had
tight—looks fine and feeling good now but had a near thing ....30
Hemingway must have discussed his wife’s labour, the details and the possibilities of danger
with the obstetrician who operated on Pauline and he used them in his novel, which he
finished just a few weeks after Patrick’s birth. Frederic watches the doctor “sewing up the
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great long, forcep-spread thick-edged wound.... I watched the wound closed into a high-
welted ridge with quick skilful-looking stitches like a cobbler’s and was glad.” (325)
Feminist critics opine that idealization of female characters implies objectification and
a loss of subjectivity. The ending of A Farewell to Arms denies Catherine any female
subjectivity. In this novel of love and war, it is Catherine who teaches Frederic to love and it
is the same Catherine who is equipped with a vicariously acquired knowledge of the dangers
and the horrors of war which she tries to impart to Frederic. Jamie Barlowe-Kayes states that
the critical reading of Catherine Barkley as subject, instead of object, is destabilized by her
willingness to educate Frederic and to subordinate her own desires to his. To quote:
Catherine continues to instruct and educate Frederic even after her death. It is only after she
dies that Frederic understands that his need of her was beyond the physical and the sexual.
The metaphorization of Catherine’s character transcends her death. The final goodbye
underscores the realistic doom that follows their brief but idyllic romance. Frederic writes, f‘It
was like saying good-by to a statue”(332). Through the objectified Catherine, Frederic finally
gains knowledge about death. Bernard Oldsey writes, “This is an independent creation, based
on nothing, which attempts to metaphorize beyond the bounds of knowing, to enclose being
and nothingness.” The love shared between the two, which commenced in one hospital
bed, is terminated in another. Just before dying, Catherine asks for a promise:
“You won’t do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will
you?”
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“Never.”
By transferring her love from her dead fiance to Frederic, Catherine had managed to
overcome her trauma. She worries even in her deathbed that her lover may have to do the
same to overcome his own. Frederic however has much more than her practical ingenuity. He
instinctively comprehends that he would not have to re-enact his relationship with another
person as Catherine had done because he has had his beloved acting throughout as his
“mentor”, as Spanier calls her, “in matters of psychological survival”. Frederic survives a
great calamity — that of love lost. Hemingway had stated in Death in the Afternoon'. “If two
people love each other there can be no happy end to it” (122). A Farewell to Arms also deals
with edenic love but here too the lovers turn out to be ill fated. Hemingway had noted in an
unpublished page of the manuscript of the novel: “the position of the survivor of a great
What is admirable is the manner in which Frederic Henry pulls himself together.
Frederic, who has lost both lover and child, overcomes his trauma by his ordered narrative.
Hemingway, lacerated by the rejection by his first love overcame his immense grief by
transforming his personal calamity into fiction. Philip Young says about Hemingway that he
dealt with his psychic wounds by returning repeatedly and compulsively to the scenes of his
injuries and he concludes by stating that, “It is not the trauma but the use to which he put it
that counts, he harnessed it, and transformed it into art.”35 Surely, a narrative can be used
psychoanalytically. Peter Brooks proposes a model of narrative that has its basis in
psychoanalysis. Brooks suggests that a narrative can first provoke and then bind emotional
energies, just as the repetition compulsion does. Lisa Tyler quotes from Brooks’s Reading for
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the Plot: “Analysis works toward the more precise and orderly recollection of the past, no
retrospective narrative.”
The closing of Frederic Henry’s narrative also deserves attention. A Farewell to Arms
ends with the image of Catherine reduced to a statue, which, of course, reveals a total
objectification of the female. Bernard Oldsey is of the opinion that all novels end in death
because when the book is closed, all of the characters die irrespective of their Active status.
He talks of the magical advantage that literature has over life — as the readers reopen the
The truth is that all novelists create to murder, and in some instances murder to
stone, but an artistically shaped one. The Pygmalion myth is here acted out in
reverse, and then put right again. For out of that “statue” of the penultimate
of
sentence A Farewell to Arms springs the entire warm and loving story that
A
constitutes the novel, a story told years after its occurrence. Out of the dread
nothingness of Catherine’s death, which takes Frederic Henry and the reader to
Catherine is a step ahead of Brett Ashley. Not only is she sexually emancipated, she is
immense mental and moral strength that the character generates, she is, like Brett, denied full
subjectivity but only in the end. When her strength surpasses the man’s strength, Hemingway
reverts to the traditional role-playing between men and women and in the end objectifies the
strong female simply by idealizing her in her role as teacher and mentor that continues beyond
her death.
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WORKS CITED
Ail references to A Farewell to Arms are from New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
All references to Death in the Afternoon are from New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1932.
All references from the short stories are from The Collected Short Stories ofErnest
Hemingway. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Finca Vigia Edition, 1987.
1. Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1983. 219.
2. Baker, Carlos, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961. New York:
3. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s
Criticism. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1998. 153.
Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 181.
5. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s
6. Ibid. 161.
Hemingway Text. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. 36.
89
10. Quoted in Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders. 38.
18. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights (1847). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993
reprint. 100.
20. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the house of love”. 122.
28. Barlowe- Kayes, Jamie. “Re-reading Women: The Example of Catherine Barkley”
29. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the house of love”. 123.
31. Barlowe- Kayes, Jamie. “Re-reading Women: The Example of Catherine Barkley”
179.
32. Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing ofA Farewell to Arms”.
33. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s
36. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s
37. Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing ofA Farewell to Arms”.
90-91.