Themes
Talking versus Communicating
Although
“Hills Like White Elephants” is primarily a conversation between the American
man and his girlfriend, neither of the speakers truly communicates with the
other, highlighting the rift between the two. Both talk, but neither listens or
understands the other’s point of view. Frustrated and placating, the American
man will say almost anything to convince his girlfriend to have the operation,
which, although never mentioned by name, is understood to be an abortion. He
tells her he loves her, for example, and that everything between them will go
back to the way it used to be. The girl, meanwhile, waffles indecisively, at
one point conceding that she’ll have the abortion just to shut him up. When the
man persists, she finally begs him to “please, please, please, please, please,
please” stop talking, realizing the futility of their conversation. In fact,
the girl’s nickname, “Jig,” subtly indicates that the two characters merely
dance around each other and the issue at hand without ever saying anything
meaningful. The girl’s inability to speak Spanish with the bartender, moreover,
not only illustrates her dependence on the American but also the difficulty she
has expressing herself to others.
As in most of
his fiction, Hemingway is interested in where language breaks down between
individuals and how what is unsaid or what is unspeakable can define and divide
individuals. At a purely stylistic level, Hemingway exposes the inadequacy of
language through his use of unnamed characters and minimalist, stripped-down
sentences. Without using details to describe how “the man”
or “the girl”
look or sound, Hemingway instead chooses to focus almost exclusively on the
dialogue between the two characters to suggest the growing alienation between
them. The story’s very title of “Hills Like White Elephants,” with its use of
simile to gesture at the story’s underlying tension of a pregnancy neither
character feels able to directly mention, reflects the characters’ critical
loss for words.
Beyond narrative style, the conversation between “the man” and
“the girl” hinges on the inadequacy of what they can say or not say to one
another. The man continually misunderstands or contradicts the girl, to the
point that the girl begs him to stop talking at all. Though they mirror each
other’s language, repeating the same words, the effect is as of an echo
chamber—words repeated meaninglessly without actual communication. Finally, the
looming decision that drives the whole story—whether the girl will get an
abortion—goes unnamed by either character. They both allude to it but seem
unable to discuss it directly, allowing the conversation to lapse into silences
or angry outbursts instead.
An added layer to the issue of the failure of language in this story is the fact that the events are unfolding between two English-speaking tourists in Spain. Throughout the story, as the characters drink, the waitress intermittently enters the scene, speaking in Spanish, which the man must translate for the girl. This situation draws attention to the idea of translation, and yet also underscores how, ironically, even though they speak the same language, it is the man and girl who are in the most need of a translator.
Choice
Significantly,
this story unfolds as the man and the girl wait
at a station for
a train to Madrid. The heat is oppressive and the two are forced to wait, drinking away
the afternoon till the train arrives. This sense of agonizing waiting permeates
the story from the setting itself—a hot, dry river valley at a literal
crossroads—to the crucial decision the couple is trying to make: whether or not
to have an abortion.
To
leave or to stay, to embrace parenthood or to reject it, to give up one’s own
desires for the desires of another, are key decisions at play here. The delayed
resolution of these decisions forms the driving action of the story.
Freedom vs Family
As the story
makes clear from the beginning, both the man and the girl are
accustomed to a free, uncommitted lifestyle. When the man looks at their
combined luggage, it is covered with “labels…from all the hotels where they had
spent nights.” The two of them have spent a long time traveling together, going
wherever they wanted without restriction. The decision to carry through with
the girl’s pregnancy and create a family would completely alter the nature of
their relationship. They would have to settle down. Rather than spending nights
in hotel after hotel, they would have to build a home of their own. The man
very definitively doesn’t want to “settle down” in this way and thinks it will
be easy not to. He is firm in his conviction that this pregnancy is “the only
thing that’s made us unhappy” and that getting the abortion will be “perfectly
simple” and “perfectly natural.” In a sense, he thinks that the pregnancy is
something they can just leave behind the way they would leave a hotel they’d
already stayed in.
The
girl, on the other hand, maintains a wholly different attitude toward her
pregnancy. To her, having a child with her partner promises a world where “we
could have everything,” an altogether different definition of freedom.
Ultimately, however, she tentatively agrees to the procedure, surrendering her
own freedom of choice to a different sort of idea of “family,” as she hopes
that doing so will restore the man’s love for her. The story implies, though,
through the girl’s initial resistance and then her perhaps too-strong statement
that nothing is wrong, that the girl will not be able to so “freely” move on
from the pregnancy, and that the man’s insistence on maintaining his definition
of freedom has impinged on the girl’s own freedom.
Men, Women, and Relationships
At the heart
of “Hills Like White Elephants” is Hemingway’s examination of the Man and girl’s
deeply flawed relationship, a relationship that champions “freedom” at the cost
of honesty, respect, and commitment. In this sense, the man and girl represent
stereotypes of male and female roles: the male as active and the female as
passive. In this gender framework, the man makes the decisions and the female
complies. However, as the story illustrates, such a power dynamic is
fundamentally flawed and destructive. The man is domineering in all his
interactions, and though he pays lip service to want to make the girl happy,
his decisions are ultimately guided by his own desires. He wants the girl to seek an abortion in order to maintain the freedom he enjoys, but he wants it to
be her decision. For the man, it is not enough for her to do what he wants, but
she must also want what
he wants. The man seeks to control both the girl’s actions and intentions as
though she were a child, a deeply unhealthy and damaging pattern of behavior.
At
first, the girl is resistant to the man’s emotional manipulation. She attempts
to paint a picture of the future life she and the man could have together if
they were to have a child. The man, though, is unwilling even to entertain
these notions, and yet he phrases his refusal in the
manipulative language of love, claiming that “I don’t want anybody but you.”
Eventually, the girl acquiesces to the man’s overbearing insistence,
surrendering her personal freedom to his wishes. At the story’s conclusion,
when he asks her if she feels better, the girl’s stiff reply reveals her true
feelings: “I feel fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine.” This final
act of concealment and self-suppression suggests that this relationship, so
representative of the traditional dynamic between men and women at the
time, will remain stalled in its present unhealthy state until it likely falls
apart completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment