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One also wonders whether, somewhere in his prodigious mind, Hemingway was recalling Mark Twain’s 1882 detective story, ‘ The Stolen White Elephant’, in which the elephant turns out to have been in the original spot all along. The spare style exposes the uncomfortable nature of the couple’s relationship (despite his repeated exhortations that she shouldn’t go through with ‘it’ unless she wants to, he is clearly trying to persuade her to have the abortion for his sake) the directness of the dialogue masks the failure of the two characters to have a frank conversation about ‘it’ and the Spanish landscape is not mere backdrop but a detail that is brought into the story only because the girl is finding it hard to address the momentous subject she knows she must eventually face.Īnd that leads us to wonder whether there might not be another meaning playing around that title, ‘Hills Like White Elephants’: the so-called ‘elephant in the room’, the idiom (prominent in the United States by the early twentieth century) denoting a conspicuous and important issue which nobody wants to discuss. And yet all three of these things can be said to work against, or be in tension with, the story’s subject-matter. 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 stateuntil it likely falls apart completely.‘Hills Like White Elephants’ contains many of the most representative elements of Hemingway’s fiction: the spare style, the plain and direct dialogue, and the Spanish landscape which he often wrote about. 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. The man, though, is unwilling even to entertain these notions, and yet he phrases his refu sal 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. 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 seeks to control both the girl’s actions and intentions as though she were a child, a deeply unhealthy and damaging pattern of behavior.Īt first the girl is resistant to the man’s emotional manipulation. For the man,it is not enough for her to do what he wants, but she must also want what he wants.
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He wants the girl to seekan abortion in order to maintain the freedom he enjoys, but he wants it to be her decision. The man is domineering in all his interactions, andthough he pays lip service to wanting to make the girl happy, his decisions are ultimately guided by his own desires. However, as the story illustrates, such a power dynamic is fundamentally flawed and destructive.
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In this gender framework, the man makes the decisions and the female complies. In this sense, the man and girl represent stereotypes of male and female roles: the male as active and the female as passive. 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.