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Accidentally Progressive Misogynists
It’s no secret that I’m a feminist, but I also grew up reading and adoring the words of Dead White Men, as they’re often referred to now. Today, however, I want to focus my gaze on two peculiar bedfellows: Hemingway and H.P. Lovecraft.
When I first read Hemingway — for school, surprisingly enough; most other authors of “Great Literature,” I sought out on my own — I was struck by the female protagonist’s ferocious personality. In Matilda, Roald Dahl’s main character comments to the kindly librarian that she “doesn’t understand some of the things he says sometimes about men and women.” That stuck with me, and when I got to Hemingway’s books years later — For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms — I definitely expected them to be, well, more offensive.
Hemingway’s women are often scrappy, tough, and give as good as they get — and frankly, the men in his stories are often a pretty ragged, sorry, rather troubled lot. A femme fatale dame may be seen as death walking on a long set of legs, but the fact that she even poses a threat to Man and the Natural Order implies something very interesting about this so-called and imagined “rightness.” But let’s stick a pin in that discussion of “rightness” and quickly mention my other target: Lovecraft.
