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Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. By RICHARD FANTINA. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 224. $69.95 (cloth).
Masculinity has arguably always been the central feature of scholarship on Ernest Hemingway; one need only think of the masculine qualities credited to that earliest and most enduring of critical responses to Hemingway's work: the isolated, stoic, brave Hemingway "code hero," who must perform gracefully under pressure. Since the 1990s, with the publication of studies like Mark Spilka's Heminjjway's Quarrel with Androgyny, critical discussions of Hemingway's masculinity have become increasingly complex and often contradictory, in part because they are now almost invariably linked to the issue of his sexuality. Galvanized by an ever-expanding arsenal of gender theories and the brilliant work on masculinity by scholars like Anthony Rotundo and Michael Kimmel, this new wave of scholarship has been largely characterized by an understanding of Hemingway's masculinity as "in crisis." Along the way Hemingway has been the subject of much speculation as scholars have mined the details of his childhood, his relationships, and even his sexual habits and proclivities. In recent years he has been considered (or reconsidered) in light of issues such as latent (or not-so-latent) homosexuality, transvestitism, and sexual role reversal. Although the deeply personal and invasive nature of such work is enough to give even the most stout-hearted critic pause, this scholarship has undoubtedly illuminated enigmatic aspects of Hemingway's life and work that were glossed over by earlier critics. Still, these well-researched, carefully considered theories about Hemingway's motivations for constructing his hypermasculine public image all eventually run aground of the irrefutable realities of that image itself. As a result, we are left with either incommensurable versions of Hemingway's masculinity or an all-too-neat understanding of his public displays of masculinity as a cover for an unconventional private life.
It is onto this busy critical field that Richard Fantina steps with his book Ernest Hemingway: Machismo and Masochism. At first glance the book appears to be another attempt to "charge" Hemingway with yet another form of "unconventional" sexual behavior, but, upon closer inspection, it is in feet a rich, multilayered, and provocative contribution to a difficult discussion, one that, refreshingly, questions some of the most basic assumptions of that discussion to date. In particular, Fantina challenges the idea...