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The Fallacy of Postmodernist Queering

In Response to “Hemingway and Gender: Biography Revisited”
http://www.scribd.com/doc/26366749/Hemingway-and-gender

Major Winston Thomas

B.S. Finance Troy University
bigttommy@comcast.net

In Hemingway and Gender the author has “the aim of revisiting the issue of
gender and its relationship to life writing,” bringing to bear the evanescent
and fleeting scholarship of “postmodernist biographical research” in order to
explode “the myth of masculinity by asserting that the writer’s gender
identity, the source of his psychological conflicts, was androgynous,” all in
an attempt to achieve the goals of the postmodernist desire to deconstruct
and deride western civilization, while attempting to normalize the
homosexual point of view.

The most striking aspect of the postmodernist attack on Hemingway is

their assumption that his very manliness; a life long love of hunting, fishing
and camping, “passion for outdoor adventure,” sports in school including
boxing, football, and track, volunteering to drive an ambulance for the Red
Cross in Italy in 1918, received the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery for
carrying a wounded soldier from the front though he was injured himself in
both legs from shrapnel, fell in love with a woman in Milan while he was
recovering, the one who broke his heart as described in “A Very Short
Story,” also of note “Big Two Hearted River” has nothing in common with
Brokeback Mountain, continued a life long habit of having affairs while
married as a result of being hurt during that love affair in Italy, a safari to
Africa, wrote from the front during the Spanish Civil war, present at D-Day
landing and the liberation of Paris, receiving a Bronze Star at war’s end, four
marriages; is flippantly dismissed as “gender roles are cultural constructs
that one is taught and trained to perform” and so begins the assault upon
reality.

Turning to his works, “A Natural History of the Dead” is used to

advance the theory that here he reveals he was becoming confused about
gender because women are among the dead bodies at a munitions factory
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where his unit was assigned to clean up after an explosion. It is a gruesome

depiction of gathering the “complete dead” then going after the body
fragments. His writing on women being among the dead and the absence of
long hair does not a homosexual make. He is simply describing the scene
and his shock at seeing the women dead and mangled just like the men. It is
war and it is terrible, but it is not “gender based clues that have fled to the
wings,” it is the misinterpretation of the post modernist who wants to
deconstruct reality to foster their agenda of multicultural imaginings and
homoerotic fantasy. Consider the shock to young Hemingway of seeing all
these dead and dismembered bodies, many of them women, to which I must
add he would be just as shocked to see this construct purporting he was
confused and at this time “groping for a fixed defining feature of
womanhood, but with nothing to grasp.” He writes of the short hair simply
as fact, nothing more nothing less. It added to the shock of the moment, not
to confusion about whether he is a man or a woman himself, this androgyny
that is simply a figment of imagination. Also he is disturbed to see that
these women had to cut their hair to work in the factory, the loss of life and
femininity, that is the key, not that he can longer see a difference between
men and women. Does anyone think he should have been more graphic in
his portrayal, perhaps depicting a severed torso, say an upper one with a
breast or two yet attached? I think not, as that would have been obscene and
pointless as his simplistic writing style got the point across without being
overly descriptive of the carnage.

At this point it is suggested “If gender is a changing cultural construct,

nothing remains stable” and “the line between masculine and feminine gets
suspended or canceled,” then reaching further afield claiming “we can
choose to break down the dichotomy masculine\feminine with the aim of
denaturalizing gender,” and so we enter the realm of academic macabre. To
begin gender is not a changing construct and for sure nothing would be
stable in a world where gender is held in question. It would be a disaster
which is where suspending or canceling normal relations between men and
women leads. But to get into this world of make believe its necessary to
have the “aim of denaturalizing gender,” which to be clear means to make
what is natural become unnatural, to reverse the roles. We can also choose
not to go against nature as the differences between male and female are not a
dichotomy but simply the way we were created from the beginning, male
and female. To subvert the natural use of one for the other, or in this case to
claim that a person can be neither or both, is an exercise in futility and
perversity that leads off the map into a dark world of fantastically unreal
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archetypes resulting in various neurosis. I am not addressing lifestyle here.

What is addressed is an essay on a respected author, using as its basis
psychological analysis with a homosexual slant, suggesting what is
abnormal to be normal, reversing the roles of what is for what is not. Karl
Marx and Charles Darwin would be proud as their influence is pervasive in
the postmodernist movement.

By this point in the essay Hemingway and all men have allegedly lost
their virility as women are so strong that they have “regendered society,” not
needing men anymore, resulting in “a modern world dominated by the
inversion of gender roles and therefore…sterility.” Supposedly its “the
growing masculinization of women” brought on by WWI that results in “the
emasculation of men,” and Hemingway is beside himself with confusion as
his world is lost to modern times, not to the war(Reynolds). To support this
utter swill we go back to his childhood in Oak Park, Illinois, now listed as “a
synonym of morality and traditional values,” while claiming “It was his first
world, the world he lost, not to the war, but to modern times.”

So Hemingway lost his connection with the old world values at home
to modern times? The women with short hair were more powerful images
and had greater effect on the great author than the fierceness of war, being
exposed to swollen and bloated bodies on a battlefield, daily death and
destruction, seeing severed limbs and bloody mangled bodies? It is
suggested that all this pales in comparison to women having short hair which
somehow catapulted poor Ernest into limbo concerning gender and his own
identity. These suggestions and the opinions they represent are totally false
and ignore the horrible consequences and multiple effects of war, while
substituting a minor point in a story to attempt to convince others of
Hemingway’s androgyny and confusion. If it were true it would be terrible
as now we supposedly have a world of emasculated, sterile men who are not
sure of their gender. This supposition is outrageous at best and has no
supporting evidence

Upon his death criticism began in earnest after a period when

Faulkner and Fitzgerald were more celebrated and analyzed and here is
introduced the next point of attack by writing that Carlos Baker’s biography
was written before Hemingway’s posthumous papers were available. Fair
enough, but perhaps Baker did not write of “cross-dressing, inversion of
sexual roles, or erotic fantasies” because there was no need to and there was
no basis of fact upon which to write until the post modernist subjected
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institutions of higher learning to their perverted craft and

conservatives(realist if you will) faded into the background either from
laziness or cowardice. Baker did write of the fact that Grace Hemingway
dressed son and daughter alike, in Victorian fashion, but he did not suggest
it was to make sure her son was a homosexual or so he would be confused
about his gender or sexuality for all time. Baker did not write about it
because it would be pure fantasy to do so, as only those who would foster
their desires and gender confusion upon society would dare stretch and
tweak and push and pull at the edges of reality until they have something
like this present essay that has impressed me enough to write a response that
at the very least says no, please stop with the asinine permutations of gender
confusion.

Somehow all this gender confusion coalesced and forced him to write
of manly topics instead of writing about home, where allegedly his father
“Ed is nervous, weak, cowardly and insecure,” while “Grace is firm, strong,
daring and domineering.” He and his father have been emasculated by this
womanly power so Hemingway lashed out and did stuff that men do, not
because he is a manly man, but because he is confused about gender and
actually wants to be homosexual? At this point I wonder if I am making it
up. Haven’t I really read an essay that in all honesty was well written and
researched and documented to the hilt with proper footnotes and sources?
Yes I have and it is, but I find myself questioning how many of the authors
of the cited works are gay, if you will, as all this transgender material is new
and confusing to me and the word homosexual is becoming tiresome. But
the point is that “biographies play a key role in helping a nation understand
itself and its identity, and “”to reinforce its own structure and values.”” In
the present case the form of biography has been used to redress(not cross
dress) the essay’s author and sources’ life style by fostering it upon an
American great, meaning his body of work not how he lived, and therefore
negating the sublimations they so desperately desire. Perhaps we could call
these sources reverse sublimations in the psychological sense, leaving that
for which is its natural use, which may sound familiar to those so versed.

I will skip some of the other points concerning Ruskin and Ellis
because I do not think they warrant refutation other than the purely turgid
and horridly filthy conception that “Rain, urine and semen share a unique
origin(Ellis), an idea that must have been lurking behind the writing of a
story like “Cat in the Rain.”” The only thing lurking here is a small group of
intellectuals of the homosexual bent, trying to gender bend where there is
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nothing to work with. That story is simply about a failed relationship, the
girl sees herself as a cat in the rain, that is the crux, no piss and absolutely no
semen, just rain and a failed relationship. This attack on “Cat in the Rain” is
perversity in all its glory, reaching into the hinterlands of unsoundness of
mind and beyond.

The insanity continues as a fine story, “The Last Good Country,” is

sacrificed and picked apart by the culture vultures who will stop at nothing
to promote their agenda and grind their axes. Here Hemingway goes from
queer to incestuous, according to these authorities of “androgynous motifs.”
I admit that upon first reading I also thought, my God, incest, what is going
on here. So I read it a few more times to ascertain the author’s intent, to find
out by effort and perseverance what Hemingway might mean by this tale. I
believe the sister worships her brother like a hero, and being 9 or 10 she
certainly has little or no concept of marriage beyond the loving bond she has
with her brother. It is not in any way shape form or fashion a profession of
sexual desire, nor is her speaking of cutting her hair anything more than a
young girl wanting to fit in, Tomboy we call it here in the states. “They
become incestuous…young girl’s fantasies?” So Littless is having sexual
fantasies at 10 years old, about her brother no less, and of course wanting to
cut her hair comes back to that main premise of Hemingway’s “drama of
sexual confusion.” My God it gets even worse as the paragraph ends with
“Eby(who I would bet is a big time homosexual no doubt) suggests
interpreting the story as the seminal expression of Hemingway’s fetishistic
fantasies: the girl’s tonsorial experiments anticipate the erotic fascination
with the androgynous nature of Littless who becomes both a sister and a
brother.” I cannot find the words to address this nugget of waste water other
than to cast it out as again the premise behind the original essay was to turn
Hemingway into what they want him to be.

Almost done but not quite as the next assault comes with the subtlety
of a grenade blast as we read “Yet the story does not easily yield to one-
sided interpretation on the basis of Hemingway’s complex perversions.” I
must pause to here to overcome the shell shock, as now he has exhibited
perversions to the perverts! I do agree the story does not yield itself to one
sided interpretation, but I will say I see zero evidence of the perversity
claimed, and must say it is only fostered in the minds of those who wish for
a world awash in filth. The next premise is that Nick is Apollo and Littless
is Artemis who was created from, you guessed it, an androgynous figure.
“Wuthering Heights” is a fine choice for a young girl but of course she
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needs her brother to read it to her, yes we see the connection with Catherine
and Heathcliff, but it is hardly tormented love there in the forest. The
parallel is not there in a sexual sense as in the book by Emily Bronte.

The author then concludes by hammering home the premise once

again that there is a “blurring of gender binaries,” and that in the above story
he and his sister are escaping from “the burdens of the gender system,” and
finally “thus, his narrative opens the window on a new ideological horizon
which favors values and practices at odds with oppressive heterosexual
normativity.” Let it be clear that they are not escaping the gender system,
Nick is hiding from the game warden who is going to arrest him. So now
accordingly they want to reevaluate this great author’s oeuvre from a strictly
gender bending analysis and fight back against the oppression of
heterosexuals. Its all new to me, though the battle is why I wrote this short
essay, as I can not stand to see an author’s body of work attacked like this.
Do these analyses on Henry James or Maugham or someone you know had a
homosexual experience and quit picking at every letter written and every
sentence trying to find your justification for turning the world upside down,
which in fact is what this gender binary study is about. There are plenty of
homosexual writers to study, so go to those fertile fields and quit sowing
seed on rocky ground and fantasizing about every great author who is not.
The use of queer characters by Hemingway does not indicate nor suggest
that he was confused. It is in line with his writings that they all retain a
certain realistic approach based upon life experiences, people he met or
observed, and to suggest that they are in a story because he is not sure if he
is a man or woman is quite simply preposterous.

Major T 2-10-2010