Gender Conventions In Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms

Playwright John Guare once said, “We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state.When did history become a bad word?” This relates to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, due to its main characters’ goal of suppressing memory and their breaking of traditional archetypes. This novel tells the story of Catherine Barkley, a British army nurse, and Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver (in the Italian army), in World War I. When they embark on a relationship that they seem committed to, Catherine suffers from the death of her to be husband and Henry looks for a break from the war. After their relationship stabilizes, Henry deserts the army, and he and Catherine elope to Switzerland. Catherine soon dies bearing a stillborn

child. This melancholy storyline sets a stage for Hemingway to discuss love and its conventions.

In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway depicts love as an escape from the horrors of war and challenges the pertaining gender conventions with Catherine and Henry’s respective uses of their relationship and consequent breakings of the aforementioned conventions.

Catherine uses Henry to fill in the pain caused by the death of her fiance, breaking the convention that only males treat their partners as mere utilities. At the beginning of her relationship with Henry, she makes him role play as her former lover, with her saying “Say ‘I’ve come back to Catherine in the night,’” to which Henry obediently responds, “I’ve come back to Catherine in the night,” and Catherine rejoices, “Oh darling, you have come back, haven’t you?” (Hemingway 30). Catherine demonstrates that she does not possess true love for Henry. To her, Henry’s role playing is but a Nepenthe for the death of her late fiance. Later in the novel, when she seems to truly love Henry, she betrays her true intentions: “‘Don’t touch me,’she said. I let go of her hand.

She smiled. ‘Poor darling. You touch me all you want’” (Hemingway 330). Briefly, she reveals her lack of care for Henry by her rejection of Henry’s tactile advance, suggesting that she does not find Henry’s company reassuring. When Henry does retract his hand, Catherine lets him touch her in pity, as evidenced by her address of “Poor darling,” Catherine uses, rather than loves, Henry because she has a “strategy for surviving in a world where conventional ideas once accepted as true have become shaky ground for creating a sense of self” (Traber). In her time of a male dominated society, males usually use or abuse females. Catherine turns this around, using Henry as a pain suppressant against her grief. Conventionally, Catherine would be property and part of her male lover, as she is for her fiance. Hence, her identity , or “sense of self,” dies with her fiance. Catherine’s “strategy” resurrects, via Henry, her late lover, relegating Henry to the role of a mere tool or vehicle, rather than a person of his own right. Just as Catherine uses Henry, Henry uses Catherine without truly loving her.
Henry uses his relationship with Catherine to distract him from the war, breaking the convention of a heroic male lover.

At first, Henry only lusts for Catherine, saying, “I know I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game” (Hemingway 30). To Henry, his relationship with Catherine a farce, in his words, “a game,” by which he could have sex with Catherine. Henry endeavors to woo Catherine, a long term investment of emotion, instead of hiring a prostitute like his fellow soldiers, a short term foray into sexual pleasure, to further distract him from the war he is fighting. Henry reveals more when Catherine dies. “It was like saying goodbye to a statue. After a while, I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain”(Hemingway 332). Immediately after Catherine dies, Henry continues pretending that he is in love with her, out of habit, as evidenced by his description of her as a “statue.” Catherine, to Henry is more useful as a static vehicle in the narrative of his life, rather than as a person he should truly care about. Therefore, he leaves in the very next sentence of the same paragraph, since he has no need for a dead woman to feel sorrow for--he already has a war with millions of casualties to serve that end. The novel further portrays Henry’s apathy for Catherine by “[ending] with [Henry’s] surrender of narration”(Herndl). This sheds light on how Henry lacks enough care for Catherine to express his grief for

her, making him more of a cold and distant figure than a heroic and warm one. This cements his abandonment of her, discarding her as soon as she stops giving him the pleasure of being in a relationship to escape a war, akin to a drug addict abandoning cigarettes for pure nicotine shots once cigarettes no longer have the same effect per dose.
Thus, Hemingway’s depiction of love produces both willful dependent amnesiacs, Catherine and Henry, and broken social norms, male dominance and heroic love. Catherine sees Henry as a medium through which she can interact with her late lover and Henry sees Catherine as a medium through which he can ignore his experiences in the Great War. This echoes the sentiment embodied by Guare’s words of amnesia as a “wished-for state” and history as a “bad word.” World War I shows how traumatizing events can compel the traumatized to seek erasing the pertaining events from their identity and how social conventions can break under apocalyptic situations.