Inspirational Quotes Leading Back to Hemingway & Society

"In Shakespeare's tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And if I magnify Shakespeare, it is not so much for what he did do, as for what he did not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a sacred white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,--even though it be covertly, and by mere snatches"
-Herman Melville from "The Art of Telling the Truth" p. 53
Tales, Poems, and Other Writings

God loves the foolish things of this world to confound the wise

Even though things may seem or look chaotic in your eyes, God is in control.

Wed Sep 16

This blog is dedicated to my research on The Sun Also Rises. I hope to explore Hemingway's novel as an exploration of gender androgyny after the Great War. The Sun Also Rises is an "easy" book to read in that it is only 244 pages long, the vocabulary is simple and straight forward like journalistic writing. While it is easy to read, it is still incredibly complex. Hemingway's style has been likened to an iceberg in that 9/10s of what is really taking place happens beneath the water, in the murky subtext between the lines. The novel draws you to question what each character is really feeling when they talk to one another. A great first read for anyone interested in Hemingway.




"You are a lost generation."
-GERTRUDE STEIN

This epitaph describes the hopelessness of a shell shocked society after WW1. Stein was Hemingway's literary mentor. During the modernist movement, universal truths such as love, heaven, truth, and patriotism lost their value and were sublimated with individual philosophies. Much of modernist art during this period recognizes the loss of universal truths. Consider the poems "The Hollow Men" by TS Eliot, or "Dulce Et Dicorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, or Hemingway's Short Story, "A Clean Well-Lighted Place."

"One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever...The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose...The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits...All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come tither they return again."

-Ecclesiastes


This epitaph describes the modernist perspective that life is something you have to endure; you gotta learn to "take it like a man," regardless of your gender. Every day comes just like the next and most likely it isn't going to get any easier. The only real thing you can count on is that tomorrow will come. Hemingway models Solomon's melancholy via his construction of parallel scenes, as if history keeps repeating itself with only subtle differences as the novel "progresses".






The two pictures represented here are thought to be publicity shots of Hemingway taken for The Sun Also Rises.












1. Reference
2. Terms
3. Link to The Sun Also Rises
4. Excerpt from the Reference
5. Your Thoughts
6. Link to other References
7. What you would like to know more about

1. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex by Gayle Rubin
taken from Toward an Anthropology of Women edited by Rayna R. Reiter (p. 157-210)

2. eugenics: a science that deals with the improvement (as by control of human mating) of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

“sex/ gender system”: As a preliminary definition, a “sex/gender system” is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.

Capitalism: is a set of social relations—forms of property, and so forth—in which production takes the form of turning money, things, and people into capital. (p. 161)

Capital: a quantity of goods or money which, when exchanged for labor, reproduces and augments itself by extracting unpaid labor, or surplus value, from labor and into itself. (p.161)

4.
p. 159:
[Freud and Levi Strauss] are in some ways analogous to Ricardo and Smith: They see neither the implications of what they are saying, nor the implicit critique which their work can generate when subjected to a feminist eye. Nevertheless, they provide conceptual tools with which is the locus of the oppression of women, of sexual minorities, and of certain aspects of human personality within individuals. I call that part of social life the ‘sex/gender system,’ for lack of a more elegant term. As a preliminary definition, a “sex/gender system” is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.

p. 169:
Kingship systems are and do many things. But they are made up of, and reproduce, concrete forms of socially organized sexuality. Kinship systems are observable and empirical forms of sex/gender systems.

p. 170:
Levi-Strauss' The Elementary Structures of Kinship is the boldest twentieth-century version of the nineteenth-century project to understand human marriage. It is a book in which kinship is explicitly conceived of as an imposition upon the facts of biological procreation. It is presented with an awareness of the importance of sexuality in human society...[Levi-Strauss] constructs a complex chess game in which two chess pieces are particularly relevant to women--the "gift" and the incest taboo, whose dual articulation adds up to his concept of the exchange of women.

(summarized in the last chapter of Elementary Structures)

p. 171:
The Elementary Structures of Kinship
p. 172
"Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams that you have piled up, you may not eat. Other people's mothers, other people's sisters, other people's pigs other people's yams that they have piled up, you may eat" (cited in Levi-Strauss, 1969: 27)

p. 172
Mauss proposed that the significance of gift giving is that it expresses, affirms, or creates a social link between the partners of an exchange. Gift giving confers upon its participants a special relationship of trust, solidarity, and mutual aid. One can solicit a friendly relationship in the offer of a gift; acceptance implies a willingness to return a gift and a confirmation of the relationship.

p.172
Although both Mauss and Lewi-Strauss emphasize the solidarity aspects of gift exchange, the other purposes served by gift giving only strengthen the point that it is an ubiquitous means of social commerce. Mauss proposed that gifts were the threads of social discourse, the means by which such societies were held together in the absence of specialized governmental institutions. "The gift is the primitive way of achieving the peace that in civil society is secured by the state...Composing society, the gift was the liberation of culture" (Sahlins, 1972)

p. 173
Levi-Strauss adds to the theory of primitive reciprocity the idea that marriages are the most basic form of gift exchange, in which it is women who are the most precious gifts. He argues that argues that the incest taboo should best be understood as a mechanism to insure that such exchanges take place between families and between groups.

p. 173
The result of the gift is more profound than the result of other gift transactions, because the relationship thus established is not just one of reciprocity, but of kinship. The exchange patterns have become affines, and their ascendents will be related in blood: "Two people may meet in friendship and exchange gifts and yet quarrel and fight in later times, but intermarriage connects them in a permanent manner" (Best, cited in Levi-Strauss, 1969: 481)

p. 173-174
Nevertheless, in a general sense the argument is that the taboo on incest results in a wide network of relations, a set of people whose connections with one another are a kinship structure. All other levels, amounts, and directions of exchange--including hostile ones--are ordered by this structure. The marriage ceremonies recorded in the eetnographic literature are moments in a ceaseless and ordered procession in which women, children, shells, words, cattle names, fish, ancestors, whale's teeth, ...ect, pass from hand to hand, leaving as their tracks the ties that bind. Kinship is organization, and organization gives power. But who is organized?

* There is evidence in primitive cultures of wealth and status allowing for an individual to buy a wife: regardless of that person's sex. A female husband can switch gender roles due to "his" wealth and status after taking part in an ordered ritual. Similarly, men can become "wives" if a similar ritual is performed.

*generally, however, this "sex-gender system" is evidence to the fact that men are organized into male hierarchies. Further, it is typically women who become "trophy wives" while men are the subjects that possess them.

p. 174
If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner in it.

p. 174
If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage.

* how does this type of sex exchange system work in a marriage market economy where women are aware of these rules and manipulate marriages in their best economic interest. Who becomes the subject then? Woman in the classical sense is the pray upon which the male subject feeds, however if the woman is aware of this chase, and the rules that prescribe it, can the hunted become the hunter?

p. 174
As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is the men who are the beneficiaries of the product of exchanges--social organization.

p. 174
"The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners...This remains true even when the girl's feelings are taken into consideration, as, moreover, is usually the case. In acquiescing to the proposed union, she precipitates or allows the exchange to take place, she cannot alter its nature...(Levi Strauss in ibid...115)
To enter into a gift exchange as a partner, one must have something to give. If women are for men to dispose of, they are in no position to give themselves away.

* What if they have acquired wealth via blood linage? What is they have wealth from a previous marriage, or the promised wealth of an impending marriage? What if they have the wealth of a title, or wealth in their physical beauty? Why is it impossible to assume that women cannot offer collateral for the exchange process to take place? And what if women who are already wealthy (with collateral) are amassing men to gain greater wealth using the same political antics as their male predecessors?

P. 175
The "exchange of women" is a seductive and powerful concept. It is attractive in that it places the oppression of women within social systems, rather than in biology. Moreover, it suggests that we look for the ultimate locus of women's oppression within the traffic of women, rather than within the traffic in merchandise.

* Has it occurred to anyone that perhaps women are already privy to this "trafficking of themselves" as property, and that this trafficking is an exchange of males' need to assume authority via the exchange of collateral. However, how does this dynamic shift when intelligent, and physically alluring women consciously traffic themselves? They become active rather than passive objects of exchange. Furthermore, they exchange men to amass greater wealth in the collecting of them. Does this mean then, that male oppression can also be linked to a traffic in merchandise as their emotions are being toyed with in order that a woman may make use of the objectified male for his higher status and wealth before moving on to feed off another? If parasites and prostitutes live this way, doesn't it flout the original thesis that men are the ones empowered by a male hierarchy?

P.176
And if men have been sexual subjects--exchangers--and women sexual semi-objects--gifts--for much of human history, then many customs, clinches, and personality traits make a great deal of sense (among others, the curious custom by which a father gives away the bride).
The "exchange of women" is also a problematic concept. Since Levi-Strauss argues that the incest taboo and the results of its application constitute the origin of culture, it can be deduced that the world historical defeat of women occurred with the origin of culture, and is a prerequisite of culture. If his analysis is adopted in its pure form, the feminist program must include a task even more onerous than the extermination of men; it must attempt to get rid of culture and substitute some entirely new phenomena on the face of the earth.

* What if women's choice to take on the active object role is their feeble attempts at dismantling a currently male-dominated sadistic hierarchy in place of an alternative not currently known.

p.177
If Levi-Strauss is seeing the exchange of women as a fundamental principle of kinship, the subordination of women can be seen as a product of the relationships by which sex and gender are organized and produced. The economic oppression of women is derivative and secondary.

p. 178 "...the sexual division of labor is nothing else than a devise to institute a reciprocal state of dependency between the sexes." (Levi-Strauss, 1971)
The division of labor by sex can therefore be seen as a "taboo": a taboo against the sameness of men and women, a taboo dividing the sexes into two mutually exclusive categories, a taboo which exacerbates the biological differences between the sexes and thereby creates gender.

p. 179
It is of interest to carry this kind of deductive enterprise even further than Levi-Strauss does, and to explicate the logical structure which underlies his entire analysis of kinship. At the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality.
Gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes. It is a product of the social relations of sexuality. Kinship systems rest upon marriage. They therefore transform males and females into "men" and "women," each an incomplete half which can only find wholeness when united with the other.

*This logic assumes that wholeness can be found with another person. The modernists believe that wholeness is never found (essentialism vs. existentialism). Perhaps Hemingway is aware of these theories, at least peripherally and flouting them via his modernist text. How are issues of gender raise and complicated via Hemingway's depiction of a property of exchange that assumes a male role in the gendered hierarchy. What happens when you provide an example of a female sexuality that is unrestrained?

P. 179-180
But the idea that men and women are two mutually exclusive categories must arise out of something other than a nonexistent "natural" opposition. Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of "feminine" traits; in women, of the local definition of "masculine" traits. The division of the sexes has the effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually everyone, men and women. The same social system which oppresses women in its relations of exchange, oppresses everyone in its insistence upon a rigid division of personality.

*Perhaps this gender crisis is what Hemingway was subconsciously displaying in his novel. Jake (and the other male characters) are unable to express their emotions--particularly their pain openly. Instead this must sublimate their pain (which is a womanly emotion) by hiding, running away, drinking, or cracking jokes. Later in the novel they will project their own self-loathing upon their scapegoat, Robert Cohn. Robert Cohn looks like a boy, he has feminine qualities such as the need to be 'taken in hand'. He is shy, nice, polite and needs to make friends like a steer. He is castrated like a steer by Brett and is also impotent via the inability to write or marry. The repression of all things feminine is just as frighteningly depicted in this book as the novel introduction of gender androgynous behavior such as Brett dressing and acting like a man.

Talking about the 'insistence upon a rigid definition of personality, Bill Gordon says to Jake Barnes that he loves him and thinks he's a hell of a guy. He also states that he couldn't tell Jake that in the states, it would mean he was a fag. It goes back the the video clip incorporated in this blog about the modern American depiction of masculinity as being something minstrel-like. The ideal American male is a Marborrow man, a John Wayne, a Clint Eastwood. A violent, silent, ubermasculine male who rejects all feminine traits within himself--100% testosterone. However what happens when the world of romance is broken? Can a real man live under those constraints, those pressure to realize idealized masculinity as our media depicts it? Does the American ideal of masculinity act as a detriment to male members of its own culture? Jake Barnes as the everyman tries desperately to live up to these ideals only to secretly cry himself to sleep, knowing that this ideal can never be realized in himself.

Deuteronomy 22:5
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the LORD thy God.

In the end times, the women shall act like men and the men like women.

p. 180
Moreover,the incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. A prohibition against some heterosexual unions assumes a taboo against non-heterosexual unions. Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex...The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals, is therefore a product of the same system whose rules and relations oppress women.

* There is a strand of critics who believe that Jake Barnes is repressing elements of his character than are homosexual. Barnes expresses homophobic behaviors via his disgust at seeing Brett enter the Cafe Select amidst a crowd of gay sailors. He notices their hear, their clothes, and their behavior with acute detail although he never engages with them except to express his anger inwardly (so that the reader can gaze into him). Other subliminal expressions of homoerotic behavior are masked as homosocial behaviors between Bill and Jake in Burgette. When they get drunk together and during a finishing trip that exemplifies the peace found in 'men without women' both Bill and Jake become 'cock-eyed' and reconcile the situation by sleeping in the same bed.

p.181
On the other hand, the very complexities of a kinship system may result in particular forms of institutionalized homosexuality. In many New Guinea groups, men and women are considered to be so inimical to one another that the period spent by a male child in utero negates his maleness. Since male life force is thought to reside in semen, the boy can overcome the malevolent effects of his fetal history by obtaining and consuming semen. He does so through a homosexual partnership with an older male kinsman.
In kinship systems where bridewealth determines the statuses of husband and wife, the simple prerequisites of marriage and gender may be overridden. Among the Azande, women are monopolized by older men. A young man of means may, however, take a boy as his wife while he waits to come of age. He simply pays a bridewealth (in spears) for the boy, who is thereby turned into a wife. In Dahomey, a woman could turn herself into a husband if she possessed the necessary bridewealth.
The institutionalized "transvesticism" of the Mohave permitted a person to change from one sex to the other. An anatomical man could become a woman by means of a special ceremony, and an anatomical woman could in the same way become a man. The transvestite then took a wife or husband of her/his own anatomical sex. These marriages, which we would label homosexual, were heterosexual ones by Mohave standards, unions of the opposite socially defined sexes. By comparison with our society, this whole arrangement permitted a great deal of freedom.

p. 182
However, a person was not permitted to be some of both genders--he/she could be either male or female, but not a little of each.

P.182
But it can be deduced from The Elementary Structures of Kinship that more constraint is applied to females when they are pressed into the service of kinship than to males. If women are exchanged, in whatever sense we take the term, marital debts are reckoned in female flesh. A woman must become the sexual partner of some man to whom she is owed as return on a previous marriage... It would be in the interests of the smooth and continuous operation of such a system if the woman in question did not have too many ideas of her own about whom she might want to sleep with. From the standpoint of the system, the preferred female sexuality would be one which responded to the desire of others, rather than one which actively desired and sought a response.

* What do you do when women do seek out whom to sleep with? How does that disrupt this system of commerce?

p.183
Each new generation must learn and become its sexual destiny, each person must be encoded with its appropriate status within the system.

p.184
Transforming moral law into scientific law, clinical practice has acted to enforce sexual convention upon unruly participants. In this sense, psychoanalysis has often become more than a theory of the mechanisms of the reproduction of sexual arrangements; it has been one of those mechanisms. Since the aim of the feminist and gay revolts is to dismantle the apparatus of sexual enforcement, a critique of psychoanalysis has been in order.

*Perhaps you can critique psychoanalysis and then use it to read The Sun Also Rises according to some of the theories postulated by psychoanalysis.

p.184
Nowhere are the effects on women of male dominated social systems better documented than within the clinical literature. According to Freudian orthodoxy, the attainment of "normal" femininity extracts severe costs from women. The theory of gender acquisition could have been the basis of a critique of sex roles.

* Maybe we can look at The Sun Also Rises as a case study (a piece of clinical literature) about a mentally unstable female (and males) who do not understand their sex roles.

p.184-185
Psychoanalysis contains a unique set of concepts for understanding men, women, and sexuality. It is a theory of sexuality in human society. Most importantly, psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual, androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls.

p. 190
[Lecan] makes a radical distinction between the "function of the father" and a particular father who embodies this function. In the same way, he makes a radical distinction between the penis and the "phallus," between organ and information. The phallus is a set of meanings conferred upon the penis. The differentiation between phallus and penis in contemporary French psychoanalytic terminology emphasizes the idea that the penis could not and does not play the role attributed to it in the classical terminology of the castration complex.

p. 190-191
"The theory of the castration complex amounts to having the male organ play a dominant role--this is a symbol--to the extent that its absence or presence transforms an anatomical difference into a major classification of humans, and to the extent that, for each subject, this presence or absence is not taken for granted, is not reduced purely and simply to a given, but is the problematical result of an intra- and intersubjective process (the subject's assumption of his own sex)" (Laplanche and Pontalis, in Mehlman, 1972: 198-99, my italics)

p.191
Castration is not having the (symbolic) phallus. Castration is not a real "lack," but a meaning conferred upon the genitals of a woman: "Castration may derive support from...the apprehension in the Real of the absence of the penis in women-but even this supposes a symbolization of the object, since the Real is full, and "lacks" nothing. Insofar as one finds castration in the genesis of neurosis, it is never real by symbolic" (Lecan, 1968: 271).

p. 191
The phallus is, as it were, a distinctive feature differentiating "castrated" and "noncastrated." The presence or absence of the phallus carries the differences between two sexual statuses, "man" and "woman". Since these are not equal, the phallus also carries a meaning of the dominance of men over women, and it may be inferred that "penis envy" is a recognition thereof. Moreover, as long as men have rights in women which women do not have in themselves, the phallus also carries the meaning of the difference between "exchanger" and "exchanged," gift and giver...we still live in a phallic culture.

p. 192
In the cycle of exchange manifested by the Oedipal complex, the phallus passes through the medium of women from one man to another--from father to son, from mother's brother to sister's son, and so forth. In this family Kula ring, women go one way, the phallus the other. It is where we aren't. In this sense, the phallus is more than a feature which distinguishes the sexes: it is the embodiment of the male status, to which men accede, and in which certain rights inhere--among them, the right to a woman. It is an expression of the transmission of male dominance. It passes through women and settles upon men.

* Marshall Sahlins (personal communication) once suggested that the reason women are so often defined as stupid, polluting, disorderly, silly, profane, or whatever, is that such categorizations define women as 'incapable' of possessing the power which must be transferred through them.

The tracks which it leaves include gender identity, the division of the sexes. But it leaves more than this. It leaves "penis envy," which acquires a rich meaning of the disquietude of women in a phallic culture.

**disquietude: agony, agitation

Commentary: The men in The Sun Also Rises suffer from penis envy just as much (if not more so,) than Brett does. As a woman, Brett suffers from penis envy, which is why she dresses like a boy and spills ashes on the ground. She also consistently drinks like a man, and screws like a man(with whomever she chooses). However, like a woman, Brett is seeking out the phallus which she is denied as a woman. What is striking is that she takes on her phallus-seeking journey an entourage of castrated men. Jake has been physically castrated during a war-time crisis. Robert Cohn is castrated through his inability to write his novel (to birth it) or to marry, which are in themselves acts of male social impotence. He is treated like a boy, and in turn, taken "in hand" by women as a result of his neurosis. On page 44, Harvey Stone regards Cohn as a moron, and later as a case of arrested development. He refuses to grow-up. He doesn't seek-out women to obtain; he is a boy, and women seek him out as prey, or as a project to be nursed. Next, we have Mike Campbell, who is a bankrupt, although affiliated with a wealthy family line. Also notice the impotence of the prior Lord Ashley, who although not a key figure in the novel is represented as a shell-shocked war veteran. Brett takes part in a journey of sexual exploits, traveling from man to man in search of the phallus. However, in this "lost generation," to use Lecanian language, the signifiers don't carry a signified, these men are not bearers of romance or love; they are shells without the pallus, just as Brett is without the phallus. However, in being the nurturing woman that she is, Brett validates the eunuchs in her entourage by keeping them as friends. This is in keeping with Brett's profession as a war-time nurse. Superficially, this may seem a barbaric act, the act of a Circe (as quoted by Robert Cohn.) Such a criticism is validated due to the narrator's depiction of Cohn's loss of tennis "Game" after his affair with Brett. However, what is really going on is that these eunuchs (psychologically/ physically castrated men) are receiving some type of validation as males by being in propinquity to the Alpha Male in their party. Not to sound to National Geographic about it all, but this entire brigade is like a pride of lions. This extended metaphor is appropriate to a Hemingway text, as Hemingway was a big game hunter in Africa from 1933-1935. The lioness (Brett goes out to hunt) in support of the group while the alpha lion mates with the lioness and in turn validates the other male lions in his pride. The other lions are naturally jealous of the alpa male, however they also respect him and revere him, until his power is overturned by an opposer. Brett travels from alpha male to alpha male in search of someone to defend her pride. She is seeking a phallus, and someone to validate the broken phalluses of her comrades. The phallus does pass through Brett because she is a woman. However, she also acts as the fulcrum upon which the entire group turns. Brett is the bridge that binds the majority of these males characters together as "friends". She willingly perceives herself as a property of exchange, and in doing so, is temporarily satisfied as are the men in her council. Despite the pain this temporary treatment inflicts, Brett's friends are enlivened and their phalluses validated as members of the pride, as being members associates them with the alpha male, or 'real man.'





** The picture above reveals that Hemingway loved hunting big game (like this lion,) on foot. To read more about Hemingway and hunting, check-out Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa, which explores his fascination with hunting big game animals against the backdrop of the majestic African landscape. Other readings on this, and similar topics may include: 1. Hemingway on Hunting. Ed. by Sean Hemingway, with an introduction by Patrick Hemingway. 2. "Hunting, Fishing, and the Cramp of Ethics in Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa, and Under Kilimanjaro" by Ryan Hediger. Found in: The Hemingway Review> Vol. 27, No.2, Spring 2008 pp.35-59.


Scene in the novel attributed to this commentary:

1. Brett entering the novel amongst the throng of gay men:

p. 20: A crowd of young men, some in jerseys and some in their shirt-sleeves, got out. I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. They came in. As they went in, under the light I saw white hands, wavy hair, white faces, grimacing, gesturing, talking. With them was Brett. She looked very lovely and she was very much with them... I was angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.


*Commentary: Perhaps Brett is not only literally 'with' these gay men because they entered the Bal. together and Brett is a socialite, but also because these men and Brett both recognize themselves as castrated entities. The gay brigade is castrated/ cutt-off from the heterosexual desire to possess a woman sexually, therefore placing themselves in a disenfranchised position on the fringes of society. They are gendered female by failing to adhere to the standard Oedipal structure. Jake, a psychologically functioning male with a broken male faculty is jealous of these men who can be in the company of Brett, with functioning prostates and still not desire her. He is infuriated that they could possess her, and yet will not. This observation reveals more about Jake than the crowd in that he desires to possess Brett, and yet cannot.

2. Brett posing as a Man: (drinks)
p. 22: "Hello Brett," I said. "Why aren't you tight?"
"Never going to get tight any more. I say, give a chap a brandy and soda."

3. Brett posing as a Man: (sleeps with whomever she wants)
p. 22: "You've made a new one there," I said to her.
"Don't talk about it. Poor chap. I never knew it till just now."
"Oh, well," I said. "I suppose you like to add them up."
"Don't talk like a fool."
"You do."
"Oh, well. What if I do?"

4. Brett as a Nurse: (taking up social service/ hunter for the pride)
p. 83: "How are Jake?"
"Fine."
Brett looked at me. "I say," she said, "is Robert Cohn going on this trip?"
"Yes. Why?"
"Don't you think it will be a bit rough on him?"
"Why should it?"
"Who do you think I went to San Sabastian with?"
"Congratulations," I said
..."He behaved rather well, too. He gets a little dull."
"Does he?"
"I rather thought it would be good for him."
"You might take up social service."
"Don't be nasty."
"I won't."

*Commentary: When Jake suggests that Brett 'take up social service, he is essentially saying that she should sleep with multiple men, as a prostitute would. She rebukes him by imploring that he 'not be nasty' because she knows this is a cutting and sarcastic comment. However, Jake is later critiqued in the novel, and knocked-out by Robert Cohn for acting as a pimp. He also looses his friendship with Montoya for introducing Brett to Pedro Romero. However, as aforementioned in my earlier commentary, Brett actually does sleep with multiple men as a social service to herself and the fragmented men with whom she associates. That makes this piece of dialogue ironic. Jake's brash remark castigating Brett's sexuality is an example of verbal irony, yet the fact that neither Brett nor Jake fully understand that Brett sleeps with men for her own, and others' welfare is an example of situational irony, as is the fact that Jake will later be criticized and shunted by the afictionados as an American pimp.

5. Brett posing as a Man: (dresses like a man-- boy's hair/man's felt hat)
p. 22 "...her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that."

p.28 "When the taxi stopped I got out and paid. Brett came out putting on her hat. She gave me her hand as she stepped down. Her hand was shaky. "I say, do I look too much of a mess?" She pulled her men's felt hat down and started in for the bar."

p. "I say, she is a lovely piece. You are a lovely lady, Brett. Where did you get that hat?"
"Chap bought it for me. Don't you like it?"
"It's a dreadful hat. Do get a good hat."

6. Brett posing like a Man: (smokes)
p. 58: The count was looking at Brett across the table under the gas light. She was smoking a cigarette and flicking the ashes on the rug. She saw me notice it. "I say, Jake, I don't want to ruin your rug. Can't you give a chap an ash tray?"

7. Cohn as an example of social male impotence: (can't get married)
p. 12: I went out into the other room and there was Robert Cohn asleep in the big chair. He was asleep with his head on his arms. I did not like to wake him up, but I wanted to lock the office and shove off. I put my hand on his shoulder. He shook his head. "I can't do it," he said, and put his head deeper into his arms. "I can't do it. Nothing will make me do it."

8. Cohn as an example of social male impotence(can't birth/ejaculate his book)
p. 37: "How's the writing going?"
"Rotten. I can't get this second book going."
"That happens to everybody."
"Oh, I'm sure of that. It gets me worried, though."

p. 45: "Write this afternoon?"
"No. I couldn't get it going. It's harder to do than my first book. I'm having a hard time handling it."

9. Cohn as an example of social male impotence (he lost his "Game" after Brett)
p. 45: [Cohn]He had a nice, boyish sort of cheerfulness that had never been trained out of him, and I probably have not brought it out. He loved to win at tennis. He probably loved to win as much as Lenglen, for instance. On the other hand, he was not angry at being beaten. When he fell in love with Brett his tennis game went all to pieces. People beat him who had never had a chance with him. He was very nice about it.

10. Brett as a Circe:
p.143-144: "Look, Brett. Tell Jake what Robert calls you. That is perfect, you know."
"Oh, no. I can't."
"Go on. We're all friends. Aren't we all friends, Jake?"
"I'll tell him."
"He calls her Circe," Mike said. "He claims she turns men into swine. Damn good. I wish I were one of those literary chaps."

11. Robert Cohn insinuating that he has had Brett:
p. 95: He did not know whether we knew Brett had been with him at San Sabastian, and it made him rather awkward.
"Well," I said, "Brett and Mike ought to get in to-night."
"I'm not sure they'll come," Cohn said.
"Why not?" Bill said. "Of course they'll come."
"They're always late," I said.
"I rather think they're not coming," Robert Cohn said.
He said it with an air of superior knowledge that irritated both of us.

p. 99: Why I felt that impulse to devil him [Cohn] I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivably jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. I did not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch-that and when he went through all that barbering. So I put the telegram in my pocket. The telegram came to me, anyway.

12. Jake admitting that he loves Brett (women as friends)
p. 148: To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley. Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis for friendship. I had been having Brett as a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on. I thought I had paid for everything. Not like a woman pays and pays and pays.

Key elements to consider: collective phallus (group/ pride), Networking, Envy, Propinquity to the Phallus (castrated men and women), Status (Validation)

...
[The Traffic in Women cont.]

p. 193
The children discover the differences between the sexes, and that each child must become one or the other gender. They also discover the incest taboo, and that some sexuality is prohibited--in this case, the mother is unavailable to either child because she "belongs" to the father. Lastly, they discover that the two genders do not have the same sexual "rights" or futures.

*Commentary: The novel can by read through a psychoanalytic lens as it traces the development of Brett and her surrogate children/ eunuch friends through the Oedipal crisis as they are infatuated by her beauty. She also provides them with some nurturing through the physical or psychological affirmation she grants. Furthermore, she acts as a hunter in that she (like the lioness) Brett seeks out the phallus and brings it to these men by way of association. Despite these testaments in her favor, Brett is not fully self-actualized as a female character. Although she does come to the conclusion that she is "...not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children," she has not yet realized that because she is female, she does not have the same sexual "rights" or futures as men (Hemingway 243). She must learn to belong to a man, to be possessed by a male figure in order to submit to the Oedipal system. Brett consistently rejects the barbarism this system entails. However, she still longs for a romance that thus far, because of the confines of the sex/gender system, cannot be realized.

p. 193
What happens to the girl is more complex. She like the boy, discovers the taboo against incest and the division of the sexes. She also discovers some unpleasant information about the gender to which she is being assigned. For the boy, the taboo on incest is a taboo on certain women. For the girl, it is a taboo on all women. Since she is in a heterosexual position vis-a-vis the mother, the rule of heterosexuality which dominates the scenario makes her position excruciatingly untenable. The mother, and all women by extension, can only be properly beloved by someone "with a penis" (phallus). Since the girl has no "phallus," she has no "right" to love her mother or another woman, since she herself is destined to some man.

p. 194
If Freud's wording of this moment of the female Oedipal crisis is ambiguous, Lampl de Groot's formulation makes the context which confers meaning upon the genitals explicit: "if the little girl comes to the conclusion that such an organ is really indispensable to the possession of the mother, she experiences in addition to the narcissistic insults common to both sexes still another blow, namely a feeling of inferiority about her genitals. (Lampl de Grott, 1933: 497; my italics). The girl concludes that the "penis" is indispensable for the possession of the mother because only those who possess the phallus have a "right" to a woman, and the token of exchange. She does not come to her conclusion because of the natural superiority of the penis either in and of itself, or as an instrument for making love. The hierarchical arrangement of the male and female genitals is a result of the definitions of the situation--the rule of obligatory heterosexuality and the regulation of women (those without the phallus, castrated) to men (those with the phallus).



*Commentary: The New Woman
Not the Victorian Woman & Not a Man

As a New Woman, Brett does not look-up to her Victorian mother because she denied the mother according to the Oedipal crisis. Furthermore, the sex/gender system denies her too many liberties during the Victorian age. She does not submit to the Sex-Gender system because doing so we confine her. As such, she lets go of her association with her mother. Additionally, Brett must learn that rebuking her womanly inheritance is not enough to allow her to pose (and be treated) as a man because she still lives in the interstices of both gender cultures. She is detached from all other women in the novel but Brett also encapsulates a brand of woman that is new and living on the brink of society. She is able to dress like a flapper woman (scandalously according to Victorian standards: bobbed hair brushed back, no stockings, jersey form-fitting yet loose attire) She is an object of sexual desire like a woman, and she is able to live comfortably off the wealth of her male solicitors as women do. Yet, like a man Brett is allowed to traverse the public sphere, engage in sexual exploits whenever and with whomever she wants, she can drink, smoke, and dress like a man. However, she has no place within either gender-system. This leaves Brett ultimately alone in a society that has not yet caught up with her modern outlook. Thus, according to the Oedipal crisis, Brett cannot associate with the Mother or the Father. She rejects the mother, and she cannot access the phallus belonging to the father.

* Quotes from The Sun Also Rises prevalent to the aforementioned Commentary:

On Dressing like a Flapper (no stockings)
p.78
Bill had gone into the bar. He was standing talking to Brett, who was sitting on a high stool, he legs crossed. She had no stockings on.

On Lady Brett Ashley's Pedigree (the value system of the Victorian period on Pedigree amidst the Upper Class)
p. 76
"Is she really Lady something or other?" Bill asked in the taxi on our way down to the Ille Saint Louis.
"Oh yes. In the stud-book and everything."

Being a New Woman & the Moral System (Ethics in a New Age)
p. 61-62
[The Count] "You see Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don't you find it like that?"
"Yes. Absolutely."
"I know," said the count. "That is the secret. You must get to know the values."
"Doesn't anything ever happen to your values?" Brett asked.
"No. Not anymore."
"Never fall in love?"
"Always," said the count. "I am always in love."
"What does that do to your values?"
"That, too has got a place in my values."
"You haven't any values. You're dead that's all."

* Commentary: Brett retaliates against the Count's discussion of his post-war values because as a man he can support his ability to create his own value structure. He holds the symbolic phallus that allows him to do so. Brett, however, is always held-up against society as an open marker for criticism due to her refusal of the current sex-gender system. This system is too strong for her to escape, and she can only find covert ways of dodging its implications. She realizes, at this moment that 1.) her rights and future is different from the real men (gendered male)at the table. She cannot initiate her own socially allowed system because she does not possess the phallus to do so. 2.) That so long as she fails to adhere to the current sex-gender system, she has no true place in society and is figuratively in a wasteland with nowhere to go. She feels dead, and projects these feelings onto the Count.

*add divorce of Moka women p. 207 & contrast with 1st world (US hegemony)

...
Excellent Informative Blogs

A Character Analysis of Robert Cohn as an Outsider and a Scapegoat:
http://www.davidgagne.net/2001/11/12/the-sun-also-rises

On the Role of Women in Victorian England:
https://honorsbrit.wikispaces.com/Women

Mon Sep 14 Journaling Process

1. Reference
2. Terms
3. Link to The Sun Also Rises
4. Excerpt from the Reference
5. Your Thoughts
6. Link to other References
7. What you would like to know more about


1. Violence and the Sacred by René Girald--Chapter 1: Sacrifice

2. scapegoat: one that bears the blame for others b : one that is the object of irrational hostility.

sacrifice (transitive verb): 1. to offer as a sacrifice. 2 : to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief, or end.


3. John Bishop (asso. professor at U.C. Berkeley) referenced this book in his lecture when discussing Robert Cohn as a scapegoat. Allegedly, this book discusses how all civilzations are bound together in an "us" versus "them" mentality where "the Other" is sapegoated and sacraficed in order to maintain peace. This concept reminds me of "The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson. In this short story one person is sacrificed each year to maintain the status quo of a quaint town. One can also consider America's solidarity after 9/11. In the wake of 9/11, Americans bound together in a time of war to kill "the Other;" those persons being Islamic terrorists.

The link that scapegoating has to The Sun Also Rises (SAR,) is that Robert Cohn is scapegoated. Robert Cohn represents the romantic hero in this book, and is often villanized as such. His thoughts are virtuous, but misguided in a modern world. These modern characters are not Prince Charmings, nor do they see the need for fairy tales, or religion, or any other mytic backing. Robert Cohn believes that he loves Brett, and that she returns his affection although evidence points to the contrary. As seen in a conversation between Jake and Cohn on page 38-39 of SAR: Cohn's Quioxitic character cannot allow himself to believe the journalistic facts given to him about Brett Ashley.

What do you know about Lady Brett Ashley Jake,?
...There's a certain quality about her, a certain fineness. She seeems to be absolutely fine and straight...I suppose it's breeding.
You sound as though you liked her pretty well.
I do. I shouldn't wonder if I were in love with her.
She's a drunk I said. She's in love with with Mike Campbell, and she's going to marry him. He's going to be rich as hell someday.
...I was just trying to give you the facts.
I don't believe she would marry anybody she didn't love.
Well, I said. She's done it twice.

Other evidence that supports the argument that Robert Cohn is a romantic hero, and therefore not as self-actualized as his colleagues include the denigrating imagery employed in Chapter 1 of SAR: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton" (3). He isn't referred to by what he is currently, but by what he once was. Further, what he once was was not great, but only mediocre--he wasn't a heavyweight boxing champion, but a middleweight at a posh, Ivy League (PANSY) school. The descriptions of Robert Cohn become more and more derisive as the chapter continues:

-he's "shy and nice" only fights in the gym
-a Jew
-Spider Kelly taught his young gentlemen to box like featherweights (TWINKLE TOES)
-wears glasses
-"was married" (passive voice to represent Cohn's character)
- his 1st wife left him for a miniture painter
-"had been taken in hand" by Francis (LITTLE BOY)
-all the knowledge he possess is from books rather than experience

The scapegoating of Robert Cohn is apparent; however one must question why he poses such a threat to the group. The answer is that he displays he feelings as a romantic would, rather than silently carrying his grief and true identity within himself as the survivors of war have learned to do. Brett, Mike and Jake have first-hand with war afflictions and have learned to sublimate romance with stoicism. They have learned (regardless of gender, to take things like a man). Taking things like a man is contrasted to Cohn's boyish looks and character. He wears the clothes he wore in prep school, he's taken in hand by women, and he takes frequent naps because he cannot handle his liquor.
The concept of a scapegoat is further heightened by the bullfighting imagery employed throughout the novel, but especially in Book 2 at the bullfighting arena: (Ch. 13, p. 133 & 139-142)

p.133 of SAR:

"It's pretty good," I said. "They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have steers in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in at the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down.

Do they ever gore the steers?

Sure. Sometimes they go right after them and kill them.

Can't the steers do anything?

No. They're trying to make friends.


p.139-140 of SAR:

He charged straight for the steers and the two men ran out from behind the planks and shouted, to turn him.He did not change his direction and the men shouted: "Hah! Hah! Toro!" and waved their arms; the two steers turned sideways to take the shock, and the bull drove into one of the steers...The steer was down now, his neck stretched out, his head twisted, he lay the way he had fallen. Suddenly the bull left off and made for the other steer...The steer who had been gored had gotten to his feet and stood against the stone wall. None of the bulls came near him, and he did not attempt to join the herd.


p.141 of SAR:
Mike:

"I would have thought that you'd loved being a steer, Robert...Do say something. Don't just sit there...Is Robert Cohn going to follow Brett around like a steer all the time?"


The bloodletting of the first steer is a foreshadowing of the bloodshed that takes place between Cohn and Jake/Mike/Pedro Romero. Also, the ostracizing of the gored steer is likened to the exile of Robert Cohn from the group. Although he leaves willingly, the group is violent toward him via their scapegoating of him and their unwillingness to forgive him and to let him rejoin the herd.

4A. Violence and the Sacred by Girard: p. 3-4
Fieldwork and subsequent theoretical speculation lead us back to the hypothesis of substitution as the basis for the practice of sacrifice...Joseph de Maistre takes the view that the ritual victim is an "innocent" creature who pays a dept for the "guilty" party. I propose a hypothesis that does away with the moral distinction. As I see it, the relationship between the potential victim and the actual victim cannot be defined in terms of innocence or guilt. There is no question of "expiation." Rather, a society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a "sacrificable" victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.

5A. Basically what Girard is saying is that in order for justice and peace to take place in any society (even an animal society) one group must tyrannize "the outsider" in order to keep from bullying its own. This is Darwin at its fundamental level. A trail may be enforced within the confines of a society to prove a moral truth that a party is either guilty or innocent. However, the outcome in this situation is arbitrary. Rather, what Girard proposes is that in order for humans to feel civilized they must take part in rituals where they can enact "justice" whether or not the party they incarcerate is guilty. Thus, scapegoats help us to feel safe because we can hurt them and not ourselves. I would like to expand on this argument by saying that there is a reason why certain scapegoats are made. The relationship between victims and victimizes is not arbitrary; there are certain markers that distinguish these two hosts from one another. In the case of SAR, Robert Cohn is victimized because of his annoying ability to candidly reveal his emotions amidst a group of stoics. The frustrations felt toward Cohn as a Romantic figure indicate the cultural divide between the courtship ideals of the Victorian Era, which were traditionally gender coded, to a modern era which commenced with WWI. The modern era is a response to WW1. Men responded by going to war and being traumatized by an unprecedented amount of carnage, while women responded by entering the public sphere once prohibited to them in order to compensate for the depletion in the workforce. Rosie the Riveter acted as a catalyst to a suffragist movement that birthed the "New Woman," the flapper now codified by Brett's presence within the novel. The romantic entanglements represented in SAR signify this societal shift. Thus, the grand narrative of the Victorian Age is being gored through the sacrifice of Robert Cohn in order for Hemingway to represent the new turmoils of his own Modern Age; specifically the contractions felt by a society now living amidst the ambiguities of gender androgyny.

4B. Violence and the Sacred by Girard: p.4
Violence is not to be denied, but it can be diverted to another object, something it can sink its teeth into. Such, perhaps, is one of the meanings of the story of Cain and Abel. The Bible offers us no background on the two brothers except the bare fact that Cain is a tiler of the soil who gives the fruits of his labor to God, whereas Abel is a shepherd who regularly sacrifices the first-born of his herds. One of the brothers kills the other, and the murderer is the one who does not have the violence-outlet of animal sacrifice at his disposal.

5B. Girard is taking the Bible out of context here. I read the KJV and the NIV in order to reacquaint myself with the story. Genesis 4:2-6 discusses the differences between the intents of the givers, and God's reaction to their gifts:

(NIV): Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3 In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. 4 But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5 but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast.

The Bible states that "in the course of time Cain brought some fruits of the soil as an offering". This is different from Abel who consistently brought not just "some" fruits on occasion, but the fat portions from the firstborn of his flock. This means that Abel sacrificed regularly and that he also sacrificed the first fruits of his labor. He gave God the best of what he had to offer, whereas Cain only brought to God what he cared to dismiss. The difference between the two is in the sincerity of the rendered gift and the joy felt by the giver. Cain offered what he had to out of obligation, whereas Abel offered what he felt would please the Lord, and he did so with a happy heart. Thus, I take issue with Girard's argument that: "The difference between sacrificial and nonsacrifical cults determines, in effect, God's judgment in favor of Abel. To say that God accedes to Abel's sacrificial offerings but rejects the offerings of Cain is simply another way of saying--from the viewpoint of the divinity--that Cain is a murderer, whereas his brother is not" (4). There is a moral to this myth; that what you have of offer is arbitrary so long as it is sincerely given. Further, that once a gift is bestowed, the giver should not live in fear or jealousy that another's gift is superior to his own. This shifts the gaze from the gift and its recipient back to the giver, which is a vain and selfish act.






4C. Violence and the Sacred by Girard: p.8
The victim is not a substitute for some particularly endangered individual, nor is it offered up to some individual of particularly bloodthirsty temperament. Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

5C. The stoics that comprise the main characters of the SAR have accepted the "realities" of the modernist world. Mainly that all universal signifies including love, gender, peace and religion no longer carry any weight. As modernists, they follow individual rather than universal philosophies to cope with these losses after WW1. Jake discusses the need to keep his register.

p.30 of SAR:

There was a light in the conceierge's room and I knocked on the door and she gave me my mail. I wished her good night and went up-stairs. There were two letters and some papers. I looked at them under the gas-light in the dinning room. The letters were from the States. One was a bank statement. It showed a balance of $2432.60. I got out my check-book and deducted four checks drawn since the first of the month, and discovered that I had a balance of $1832.60.

p.148 of SAR:

I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the things you could count on. I thought I had paid for everything. Not like a woman who pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punnishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It all seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Other examples of Jake's attention to finances:
-He leaves a fifty-franc not for Georgette to get home: p. 23
-He gives a two-franc piece in Krum's hand for the taxi cab: p. 37
-Jake goes to France and over tips to make friends: p. 233

Examples of other characters' philosophies in terms of exchange:

the count:
p.59 of SAR:
"I'm not joking you. I never joke people. Joke people and you make enemies. That's what I always say."
p.60 of SAR:
"You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You loose the taste."
p.61 of SAR:
"You see, Mr. Barnes, it is because I have lived very much that now I can enjoy everything so well. Don't you find it like that? ..."I know," said the count. "That is the secret. You must get to know the values."

The count's philosophy is one of the connoisseur. He enjoys with discrimination and appreciation of subtleties of fine wines, aged brandy, and a fine cigar. Price is no object to him and he has learned to appreciate the simple values of honest goodness in these things and in people.

Bill's philosophy:
Like Jake's philosophy of exchange, Bill's philosophy follows a similar premise of monetary exchange as he is willing to covert to Catholicism for a sandwich on the train to Burgette. His conception of the world is that it is "stuffed" like the Modernist world depicted in TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men." Consider the dark humorousness of Bill's banter on exchange in a meaningless, stuffed world:

p.72-73 of SAR:

"Just one stuffed dog. I can take 'em or leave 'em alone. But listen, Jake. Just one stuffed dog...Mean everything to you after you bought it. Simple exchange of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog...Alright, have it your own way. Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs. Not my fault."

Brett's philosophy involves using men as properties of exchange, while intermittently confiding in Jake as her only true friend. More on this philosophy in later posts.

As demonstrated, each character has developed his or her own personal philosophy to cope in a modernist world. For lack of a better pun, all the characters in this novel are trying to negotiate how to 'take it like a man," regardless of their gender; hence the mass stoicism depicted by all characters with the exception of Robert Cohn. Robert Cohn is an example of a past world. In having the other characters recall the Romantic Age in which meaning via universal signifies: Love,Peace, Religion were intact, he badgers the group with recollections of a world and a time they can no longer access. The characters are all in some way deficient when compared with the Romantic ideal of masculinity or femininity . Brett feels herself as being 'such a bitch', Jake is traumatized by his mythical castration and impotence as a result of physical traumas that took place during WW1. Mike is stigmatized by his drunkenness,bankruptcy, as well as by Brett's flagrant adultery. Bill is lonely and longs for female companionship. These characters are self conscious and Cohn's Romantic impulse to constantly share his feelings cause his audience to recall the void within themselves which they repress by being 'hard boiled' in public.

Thus, a group violence is already in play before Cohn's scapegoating. It is a violence that each member inflicts upon himself while projecting an aire of indifference, a tough guise. In addition to the inward struggles these characters experience, but seldom express for fear of being viewed as a wimp or a pussy, they also poke fun at one another's deficiencies as a way of moderating violence in the form of self-hatred. However, once Robert Cohn presents himself as a threat to the group's already tottering emotional stability, it can then retaliate by projecting upon the character of Robert Cohn all of the deficiencies they hate within themselves. Doing so, allows, at least temporary, a reprieve from an otherwise consistent pain. He acts as a sacraficial outlet, and in damning and exiling Robert Cohn, the group experiences a momentary cathartic experience in which they banish what they most hate in themselves.

Hence the enactment of sacrifice and its ability to create solidarity in the community via violence/murder as stated by Girard on p. 8

Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.

Girard goes on to say (also on p. 8):

There is a common denominator that determines the efficacy of all sacrifices and that becomes increasingly apparent as the institution grows in vigor. This common denominator is internal violence--all the dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that.

6. It is interesting that when I spoke to Prof. John Bishop (Berkeley) on the subject of R. Cohn's scapegoating as resulting from the shifting in social views from Romance to Modernism, he said: it's interesting that the word community community derives from the root "mun" as in munitions, meaning weaponry.