In line with the recent turn to gender issues in Hemingway studies (Comely, Scholes, Eby, Lynn, Moddelmog, Spilka), the subject of this analysis is the negotiation between essentialism and constructivism in the works of anthropologist and public intellectual Elsie Clews Parsons and its application as a lens for literary analysis in the early works of Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, “Hills Like White Elephants”, “Canary for One”). This project seeks to prove the theory that Hemingway texts operate with a range of anti-essentialist paradigms that do not classify his text as a whole, but that show a particular anti-essentialist mode of writing and connectedness to the historical, socio-political context in these works. The application of Parsons makes visible instances of representations of the Progressive, anti-essentialist discourse within the texts by reading fiction and contemporaneous understandings of gender and sexuality and the resulting visions for Progressive reform alongside one another. Therefore, this project mimics recent efforts to trace gender in the Hemingway corpus, but does so by contextualizing female characters and their economic situations and limitations through contemporaneous feminist theory.
This project is a New Historicism project along the guiding principles laid out by Stephen Greenblatt and Michel Foucault. With this historical framework the aim of this project is to describe the formats of representation of the Progressive feminist discourse interested in gender anti-essentialism and the ensuing reform ideas, and to analyze the specific configuration and function it has in my selection of Hemingway texts.