68

CHAPTER 3

THE GOOD AND THE DEAD WOMAN:

CATHERINE BARKLEY IN A FAREWELL TO ARMS

Catherine Barkley, the romantic heroine in A Farewell to Arms was considered by

earlier critics to be an ideal Hemingway woman — docile, submissive and self-effacing. In

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:

If Catherine’s rootlessness belongs to Duff Twysden, the swiss Alps setting to

Hadley, and the warm August nights on the balcony of the British hospital to

Agnes, this heroine’s tragic death is clearly related to Pauline’s Caesarean

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

labor,... when he wrote A Farewell to Arms, he was... basing his portrait on

Pauline.1

Agnes had nursed Hemingway back to health after his hospitalisation owing to his war
 69

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

metaphorized as Hemingway reshaped reality when he wrote A Farewell to Arms.

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

be worse for him. ..”(19)

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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,

Catherine allows or rather insists Frederic to launch a pretence of love:

She looked at me, “And you do love me?”

“Yes.”

“You did say you loved me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied. “I love you.” I had not said it before.

“And you call me Catherine?”

“Catherine.” We walked on a way and were stopped under a tree.

“Say, “I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.” ”

“I’ve come back to Catherine in the night.”

“Oh, darling, you have come back, haven’t you?”

“Yes”

“I love you so and it’s been awful. You won’t go away?”

“No. I’ll always come back.” (30)

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

mourning, Catherine Barkley is acting out through the narrator a one-sided

therapeutic game of “pretend”... Through willed, deliberate projection upon

the narrator, Frederic Henry, Catherine has temporarily resurrected her fiance

of eight years, blown “all to bits” (20) on the Somme.3

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The basis of Frederic’s attraction for Catherine is purely sexual at first. He

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

discovery and display of admirable qualities of strength, resourcefulness, independence and

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
 72

that in his obsession with recreation of the past, he actually responds to what Freud had

termed a ‘repetition compulsion’. Lisa Tyler quotes from Madden:

The psyche, disturbed by a shock, which it cannot absorb or surmount,

is unable to achieve psychic wholeness until the subject relives and

retrospectively binds the excess of emotion that is the cause of his

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

theater of the absurd. 7

Catherine tries to control destiny, her own and Frederic’s and things begin to change
 73

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

believes that her young man is in love with her.

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
 74

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.”

Where soldiers are concerned, the hospital situation is “highly conducive to

that fantasized (non) love situation” because a person’s wound “usually

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.

Such past disappoints are overshadowed in A Farewell to Arms by a delectable fantasy, as

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

seven years. In the words of Bernice Kert:

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

rather patronizing, but I meant it as proprietory.” 11

Another of her letters said to Ernest:

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
 76

to devour his mother-lover. The lovers in the novel enact the fantasies that the author had

nurtured in his youth. Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes state:

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

Catherine, the faithful and loving mother-mistress.... Catherine willingly

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

than the hospital, lying wounded and supine. Spilka writes:

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

by her husband Clarence — or as Joyce’s Molly reigned when served by

Leopold Bloom. In effect, he has finally arrived at something like a woman’s

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
 77

fullest expression to such feminizations of men in The Garden ofEden and Islands in the

Stream, both published posthumously. Spilka states:

[Frederic] is tenderized by love, made to care like the caring Catherine in

whom his selfhood is immediately invested.... More crucially, he is like a

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.

Catherine — financially independent, responsible, monogamous, loyal, principled, and

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.

Comley and Robert Scholes state:

... 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

mother-Madonna, the body slave, thus enacting a primal male fantasy of

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

Frederic. The narrator states:

We said to each other that we were married the first day she had come to the

hospital... I wanted to be really married but Catherine said if we were they

would send her away and if we merely started on the formalities they would

watch her and would break us up. (114)

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

married. I couldn’t be any more married.” (115)

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Catherine’s ways of expressing her love echo Pauline’s letters written to Ernest in

1926. She wrote:

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.

Catherine Barkley’s pronouncements of love also sound uncannily similar to those of

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

Eamshaw’s declaration: “Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a

pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being... ” 18

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:

“There’s no way to be married except by church or state. We are married

privately. You see, darling, it would mean everything to me if I had any

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.

Mark Spilka writes:

Her declaration, like Catherine Eamshaw’s famous pronouncement — “I am

Heathcliff’ — is a time honored Christian-Romantic version of the union of

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two souls... .Catherine and Frederic are romantics whose Christianity has

lapsed.... [She] invokes a Romantic heresy, the religion of love, going back to

the eleventh century.19

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:
 81

“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

responsibility at that time.”20

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

life centered in the womblike projection of a Swiss featherbed.”22

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...
 82

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.

Rena Sanderson states:

The parallel hints that their “oneness” signals a loss of self-consciousness

comparable to that of a mystical spiritual experience. With the right woman, so

the novel seems to say, paradise may be regained.

A Farewell to Arms is the only book by Hemingway that centers on a fully

developed and happy modem love affair.... in it, he gave fullest expression to

his fantasy of paradise on earth.

Catherine envisions their oneness through the hair-matching motif. The conversation runs:

“... Darling, why don’t you let your hair grow?”

“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

I want to be you too.... I want us to be all mixed up.” (299-300)

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
 83

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

mate. Mark Spilka writes:

Their selfless love is formed in one hospital... and dissolved in another, in

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
97
message to women readers is that, “the only good woman is a dead one.” Catherine dies
 84

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:

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is at least in part his re-reading of von

Kurowsky’s rejection of him, Barkley’s objectification functions to negate

what might be seen as von Kurowsky’s asserted female subjectivity: her initial

rejection of Hemingway and her continuing desire to distance herself from

association with Catherine Barkley.

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

the doctor would require Frederic’s consent.” 29

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.

Hemingway wrote to Hickok on 27 July 1928:

Patrick weighing nine pounds was bom in Kansas City.... They finally had

to open Pauline up like a picador’s horse to lift out Patrick.

...Nearly killed Pauline...Pauline is o.k. after the cesaerian (sic)—scar

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:

whatever subjectivity might seem to be implied in her articulation of the text’s

privileged information is instead undermined when she is re-read as

Hemingway’s version of an attractive puppet who speaks knowingly about

•5 1

what he does not allow her to know.

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.”

“I want you to have girls, though.”

“I don’t want them.” (331)

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

calamity is seldom admirable.”34

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
 87

the Plot: “Analysis works toward the more precise and orderly recollection of the past, no

longer compulsively repeated, insistently reproduced in the present, but ordered as a

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

book, the characters spring back to life again. Oldsey states:

The truth is that all novelists create to murder, and in some instances murder to

create. Hemingway reduces Catherine Barkley to the level of a cold piece of

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

the edge of the abyss, is fashioned “what-is-in-totality” the novel.37

Catherine is a step ahead of Brett Ashley. Not only is she sexually emancipated, she is

simultaneously financially independent, responsible, strong and heroic. In spite of the

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.
 88

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:

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. 25.

3. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s

Retelling of Wuthering Heights” (1995). Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of

Criticism. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,

1998. 153.

4. Sanderson, Rena. “Hemingway and gender history”. The Cambridge Companion to

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

Retelling of Wuthering Heights”. 161.

6. Ibid. 161.

7. Quoted ibid. 162.

8. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the

Hemingway Text. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. 36.
 89

9. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the house of love”. The

Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Ed. Scott Donaldson. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1996. 121.

10. Quoted in Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders. 38.

11. Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. 62-63.

12. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. 35.

13. Ibid. 39.

14. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit”. American

Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleischmann. Boston:

G.K. Hall & Co., 1982. 354-355.

15. Ibid. 355.

16. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. 37-38.

17. Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. 219.

18. Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights (1847). Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993

reprint. 100.

19. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit”. 356.

20. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the house of love”. 122.

21. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit”. 356.

22. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. 39.

23. Sanderson, Rena. “Hemingway and gender history”. 182.

24. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit”. 356.

25. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. 39.

26. Spilka, Mark. “Hemingway and Fauntleroy: An Androgynous Pursuit”. 357.

27. Quoted in Sanderson, Rena. “Hemingway and gender history”. 182.

 90

28. Barlowe- Kayes, Jamie. “Re-reading Women: The Example of Catherine Barkley”

(1993). Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. Ed. Linda Wagner-Martin.

East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. 180.

29. Reynolds, Michael. “A Farewell to Arms: Doctors in the house of love”. 123.

30. Baker, Carlos, ed. Selected Letters. 280-281.

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”.

University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. 90.

33. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s

Retelling of Wuthering Heights". 162.

34. Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway’s Genders. 39.

35. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: Pennsylvania

State University Press, 1966. 171.

36. Quoted in Tyler, Lisa. “Passion and Grief in A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway’s

Retelling of Wuthering Heights”. 163.

37. Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing ofA Farewell to Arms”.

90-91.