write a four page paper of an analysis of the story “hills like WHITE ELEPHANTS “, make sure you include how the story impacted you, and compare to the analysis I’ve provided, written in MLA format include citation

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-4961) HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS The hills across the valley of the Ebro’ were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid. “What should we drink?” the girl asked. She had taken off her hat and put it on the table. “It’s pretty hot,” the man said. “Let’s drink beer.” “Dos cervezas,” the man said into the curtain. “Big ones?” a woman asked from the doorway. “Yes. Two big ones.” The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glasses on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry. “They look like white elephants,” she said. “I’ve never seen one,” the man drank his beer. “No, you wouldn’t have.” ” I might have,” the man said. “Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.” The girl looked at the bead curtain. “They’ve painted something on it,” she said. “What does it say?” “Anis del Toro. It’s a drink.” “Could we try it?” The man called “Listen” through the curtain. The woman came out from the bar. “Four reales.” “We want two Anis del Toro.” “With water?” “Do you want it with water?” ” I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?” “It’s all right.” “You want them with water?” asked the woman. 1. River in the north of Spain. Ernest Hemingway 229 “Yes, with water.” ” I t tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down. “That’s the way with everything.” “Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” “Oh, cut it out.” “You started it,” the girl said. ” I was being amused. I was having a fine time.” “Well, let’s try and have a fine time.” “All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” “That was bright.” ” I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” ” I guess so.” The girl looked across at the hills. “They’re lovely hills,” she said. “They don’t really look like white elephants. I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees.” “Should we have another drink?” “All right.” The warm wind blew the bead curtain against the table. “The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said. “It’s lovely,” the girl said. “It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It’s not really an operation at all.” The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. ” I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.” The girl did not say anything. “I’ll go with you and I’ll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it’s all perfectly natural.” “Then what will we do afterward?” “We’ll be fine afterward. Just like we were before.” “What makes you think so?” “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy.” The girl looked at the bead curtain, put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads. “And you think then we’ll be all right and be happy.” ” I know we will. You don’t have to be afraid. I’ve known lots of people that have done it.” “So have I , ” said the girl. “And afterward they were all so happy.” “Well,” the man said, “if you don’t want to you don’t have to. I wouldn’t have you do it if you didn’t want to. But I know it’s perfectly simple.” “And you really want to?” 230 Short Fiction ” I think it’s the best thing to do. But I don’t want you to do it if you don’t really want to.” “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” ” I love you now. You know I love you.” ” I know. But if I do it, then it will be nice again if I say things are like white elephants, and you’ll like it?” “I’ll love it. I love it now but I just can’t think about it. You know how I get when I worry.” ” I f I do it you won’t ever worry?” ” I won’t worry about that because it’s perfectly simple.” “Then I’ll do it. Because I don’t care about me.” “What do you mean?” ” I don’t care about me.” “Well, I care about you.” “Oh, yes. But I don’t care about me. And I’ll do it and then everything will be fine.” ” I don’t want you to do it if you feel that way. ” The girl stood up and walked to the end of the station. Across, on the other side, were fields of grain and trees along the banks of the Ebro. Far away, beyond the river, were mountains. The shadow of a cloud moved across the field of grain and she saw the river through the trees. “And we could have all this,” she said. “And we could have everything and every day we make it more impossible.” “What did you say?” ” I said we could have everything.” “We can have everything.” “No, we can’t.” “We can have the whole world.” “No, we can’t.” “We can go everywhere.” “No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more.” “It’s ours.” “No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back.” “But they haven’t taken it away.” “We’ll wait and see.” “Come on back in the shade,” he said. “You mustn’t feel that way.” ” I don’t feel any way,” the girl said. ” I just know things.” ” I don’t want you to do anything that you don’t want to do—” “Nor that isn’t good for me,” she said. ” I know. Could we have another beer?” “All right. But you’ve got to realize—” ” I realize,” the girl said. “Can’t we maybe stop talking?” They sat down at the table and the girl looked across at the hills on the dry side of the valley and the man looked at her and at the table. “You’ve got to realize,” he said, “that I don’t want you to do it if you Ernest Hemingway 231 don’t want to. I’m perfectly willing to go through with it if it means any-thing to you.” “Doesn’t it mean anything to you? We could get along.” “Of course it does. But I don’t want anybody but you. I don’t want any one else. And I know it’s perfectly simple.” “Yes, you know it’s perfectly simple.” “It’s all right for you to say that, but I do know it.” “Would you do something for me now?” “I’d do anything for you.” “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?” He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights. “But I don’t want you to,” he said, ” I don’t care anything about it.” “I’ll scream,” the girl said. The woman came out through the curtains with two glasses of beer and put them down on the damp felt pads. “The train comes in five minutes,” she said. “What did she say?” asked the girl. “That the train is coming in five minutes.” The girl smiled brightly at the woman, to thank her. “I’d better take the bags over to the other side of the station,” the man said. She smiled at him. “All right. Then come back and we’ll finish the beer.” He picked up the two heavy bags and carried them around the station to the other tracks. He looked up the tracks but could not see the train. Coming back, he walked through the barroom, where people waiting for the train were drinking. He drank an Anis at the bar and looked at the people. They were all waiting reasonably for the train. He went out through the bead curtain. She was sitting at the table and smiled at him. “Do you feel better?” he asked. ” I feel fine,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” 1927 Making Modern Parents in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and Viña Delmar’s Bad Girl Meg Gillette MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 2007, pp. 50-69 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0023 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/213320 Access provided by York College, CUNY (7 May 2018 16:43 GMT) 50 Making Modern Parents f making modern parents in ernest hemingway’s “hills like white elephants” and viña delmar’s bad girl Meg Gillette What kind of parents would the lost generation make? Zelda Fitzgerald’s highly autobiographical novel Save Me the Waltz portrays a generation ill at ease with their ability to parent. The two main characters, Alabama and David Knight, spend their time drinking, dancing, and traveling, and when they discover that Alabama is pregnant, they wonder whether they are equipped to act as good parents. Commenting on their inexperience, David suggests to Alabama that “We should ask somebody” about having a baby, but Alabama, noting their friends’ comparable ineptness, retorts “‘Who’ll we ask?'” As Save Me the Waltz considers, such unpreparedness is endemic of this lost generation: Almost everybody had theories: that the Longacre Pharmacies carried the best gin in town; that anchovies sobered you up; that you could tell wood alcohol by the smell. Everybody knew where to find the blank verse in Cabell and how to get seats for the Yale game, that Mr. Fish inhabited the aquarium, and that there were others besides the sergeant ensconced in the Central Park Police Station—but nobody knew how to have a baby. MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 53 number 1, Spring 2007. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved. Gillette 51 “I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David. “Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.” (48) Unfit parents abound in modern American fiction. Whether it’s the self-seeking Edna Pontellier of The Awakening (1899), the self-pitying Mrs. Compson of The Sound and the Fury (1929), or the selfinvolved Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby (1925), mothers in modern American fiction just don’t lavish the requisite attention on their kids. Fathers, too, get criticized for their inadequate parenting. Some are too distant, like the emotionally unavailable Dr. Adams of the Nick Adams stories or the tyrannical Rabbi Smolinsky of Bread Givers (1925); others are too interfering, like the hanger-on Anse Bundren of As I Lay Dying (1930) or the pimping Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road (1932). Dissatisfied with these parental displays of affection, modern fiction expresses concerns similar to those of the era’s parenting manuals. Parenting grew increasingly self-conscious during the early twentieth century as birth control became more available and reproduction more voluntary. The ability to control whether and when one had babies obliged moderns to reflect increasingly on their own desires and aptitudes to be parents. In the judgment of family experts Ernest R. Groves and Gladys Hoadland Groves, the question “Shall the child come?” was the defining crisis of the modern marriage: “Once this problem was not common, for in most homes the child was expected as a matter of course, whether wanted or not. Now that parenthood is becoming increasingly voluntary, the having or not having a child becomes for many young people the most perplexing question that marriage brings them” (Wholesome Marriage 171). Confronted with this modern reproductive crisis, moderns turned to books for advice. As Groves and Groves (the most prolific of the family experts) observed in 1924, “popular psychology was rivaling fiction in the lists of best-sellers” (Wholesome Childhood xv), and a study by the 1936 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection found that four-fifths of all upper-class mothers had read one or more books on childrearing that year, and that at least half of all middle-class mothers had subscribed to one or more parenting magazines that year (73–80). But parenting manuals and journals weren’t the only texts to offer advice; modern fiction also voiced concerns and ideals for the modern family. The question “Shall the child come?” drives two of the most popular fictional abortion narratives of the 1920s: Ernest Hemingway’s now canonical short story “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) and Viña Delmar’s once extremely popular novel Bad Girl (1928). The two works, published only nine months apart, both 52 Making Modern Parents stage the same conflict: the inability of a pregnant woman and man to reach consensus regarding the desirability of an abortion. In “Hills Like White Elephants,” the conflict proceeds through a series of reversals: when he says yes to the abortion, she says no; when she says yes to the abortion, he says no. Misrecognition produces a similar conflict in Bad Girl: she wants the baby but thinks he wants an abortion; he wants the baby but thinks she wants an abortion. In both, a crisis of communication organizes a crisis of reproduction as the characters’ emotionally awkward speech forestalls the realization of a modern nuclear family. As “Hills Like White Elephants” and Bad Girl propose, modernism’s impersonal aesthetic ideal is modernity’s domestic disaster, and so diagnosed, they seek an alternative literary performance that would transform their New Women into New Mothers, their modernist Bad-Boys into All-American Dads. Belying modernism’s supposed disinterest in feminine, familial concerns, this article finds, in the cases of “Hills Like White Elephants” and Bad Girl, more than an acute interest in the intimate operations of the modern family; it finds, as well, an acute self-consciousness about modern literature’s potential effects on the modern family. During the 1920s, the child assumed unprecedented importance at the center of the American family. As Paula S. Fass has argued, industrialization and urbanization cut the family off from its sources of power in society at large. With its ability to function as a vehicle of social status thus inhibited, the modern family reinvented itself as an emotional haven where the individual could release frustrations and expect understanding (95). With the turn of the century, she explains, this “affectionate” family grew increasingly oriented towards the raising of children (55). Declining birth rates and smaller family sizes allowed parents to lavish more attention on each child, and, as such, the modern family grew increasingly child-centered (90). The profusion of parenting manuals from the mid 1920s through the early 1930s help make visible this repatterning. As Ruth Reed comments in The Modern Family (1929), “In the middle-class homes in America, the family life tends to center about the child to a great extent” (94), and Ernest Mowrer’s The Family: Its Organization and Disorganization (1932) likewise observes that children “tend to dominate the scene, their wishes determining the policy of the family” (275). Explaining the “affectionate” family ideal, Groves and Groves in Wholesome Childhood (1924) assert that “it is by wise guidance of the emotions that parents have their largest opportunity to serve the welfare of their children” (viii, emphasis added), and as Edward B. Reuter observes in his textbook Family: Source Materials for the Study of Family and Personality (1931), the ideal family is one that “would provide the best care for children, furnish a humanely satisfying affectional re- Gillette 53 lationship, and contribute to the personality development of parents and off-spring” (140, emphasis added). This repatterning of the modern family, however, did not occur without debate. While some family experts heralded emotional displays and affectionate bonds as the means of creating happy families, others worried that such emotionalism would weaken children. Family expert John B. Watson argued that children who received too much affection were poorly prepared for the real world, and accordingly he urged parents, unsentimentally, to “Never hug and kiss [your children]. Never let them sit in your lap” (81). Sidney Howard’s popular play and movie The Silver Cord (1927, 1933) likewise questioned the affectionate ideal. The story of an overbearing mother who sabotages one son’s engagement and the other son’s marriage, The Silver Cord depicts the ways that too much attention can, in fact, injure one’s children. For others, the problem with the modern family was not the affectionate ideal itself but, rather, that the modern generation was too unsentimental to realize it. Modern women, in particular, came under fire for being too cold, too uncaring to satisfy the emotional demands of the modern family. Frank Dumont’s one-act play The New Woman’s Husband (1912), for instance, depicts the New Woman as a tyrant who demands that her husband “Cook that dinner—rock the cradle—wash the clothes—bake the biscuits, and scrub the floor before I come back or I’ll give you the worst whipping you ever had in your life” (6). In Beatrice Burton’s novel The Flapper Wife (1925), a young woman nearly destroys her marriage with her uncaring flapper ways: “She put herself on trial. . . . She knew she had done none of the things a good wife ought to do for her husband. She had never taken care of his house. . . never looked after his comfort. She had told him bluntly that she would never give him a family. Children were too great a bother” (300). For The New Woman’s Husband and The Flapper Wife, the problem is not that the New Woman or Flapper would never settle down; rather, the problem for them is that she would. With her superior and uncaring ways, the modern woman, these texts worried, would be the ruin of the modern family. A modernist distrust of sentimentalism, combined with the era’s growing opportunities for women, placed new demands on the modern father. Fearful that the affectionate family would become a mawkish one, modern family experts called on fathers to regulate the amount of affection lavished on their children. In “The Father’s Responsibility in the Training of His Children” (1926), Henry Neumann proposed that though “on the surface, it would seem that what the father brings to the mental and moral nurture of the family is negligible” (222), in fact, “much is gained” by the father’s “special offerings” (224). As 54 Making Modern Parents Neumann elaborates, while the mother is “likely to rate her children more on the promise which she divines” (224–25) in them, the father is more likely to hold them to a “stricter standard” (225) of accomplishment more in keeping with the professional world. The father, Neumann applauds, “is apt to be more direct in his outlook upon life, more immediately practical, less given to the imaginings” (226). As family expert Ruth Reed likewise observes, “Fathers as a rule are less likely than mothers to handicap their children by an undue display of affection” (107–08). And yet, the converse fear that modern mothers would not devote enough attention to their children also fueled early twentieth-century appeals for more involved fathers. In Floyd Dell’s An Unmarried Father (1927), a New Woman puts her daughter up for adoption in order to pursue a career as an artist, and the story details the incredible lengths the father goes to in his efforts to gain custody of his daughter. When the flapper mother dies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” (1931), her daughter goes to live with her aunt and uncle, and the story again develops through the father’s point of view, sympathizing with him in his efforts to regain custody of the little girl. Such paeans to fatherly affection complemented the experts’ appraisals of the father’s “special offerings,” setting forth a paternal ideal that celebrated the father for his ability to feel and control his affection for his children. In the early twentieth century, then, parenting materialized as a struggle over how and when to express emotion. Such concerns re .