After a brief introduction to the experiences that Hemingway drew on in writing A Farewell to Arms, this account approaches the novel through a summary of its structure and a consideration of the following themes and ideas:
- War and heroism;
- Love and sex (sex as defiance–of convention and oppressive morality);
- Relative importance given to men and women (the treatment of gender);
- Definitions of masculinity, including relationships among men and masculine sensitivities.
Hemingway’s Biography and the Writing of A Farewell to Arms
The novels and stories of Ernest Hemingway helped to shape twentieth-century concepts of war, patriotism, masculinity and sexual love. The following websites, which include paintings and photographs, discuss his life and influence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway#World_War_I_until_the_Spanish_Civil_War; http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/hemingway/ess-index2.htm;
http://www.jfklibrary.org/hemingway_menu.html (“A Storyteller’s Legacy”)
A Farewell to Arms was first published in 1929 when Hemingway was thirty. This biography is limited to his relevant early life experiences.
Hemingway grew up in Illinois, and while attending school frequently hunted and fished with his father Clarence in northern Michigan. After leaving school, he worked briefly on The Kansas City Star, where reporters were taught the following rules: Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. Hemingway frequently referred to this advice in later life.
When World War I broke out he tried to enlist in the American army, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. When the USA joined the war a call went out for Americans to volunteer as ambulance drivers for the Red Cross. The eighteen-year-old Hemingway signed on, because “I wanted to go…My country needed me, and I went and did whatever I was told.” On 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded in Italy while delivering supplies to soldiers in the field. His publisher and friend, Charles Scribner, Jr., described what happened:
After a stint of more or less routine ambulance driving, [Hemingway] contrived to be assigned to an emergency canteen at Fossalta on the front facing the Austrians. There, only a month after his arrival in Italy, he was badly wounded in both legs at a forward post one night; first by an Austrian mortar shell and almost immediately afterwards by machine-gun fire while he was in the act of carrying a wounded Italian soldier to safety. After a temporary operation on his legs at a distribution centre, five days in a field hospital, and a gruelling train trip to Milan, he was taken to an American Red Cross hospital for further treatment.
The mortar shell left fragments in both his legs, and he was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valour (medaglia d’argento) by the Italian government. Newspaper reports in the States made Hemingway a hero—“the first American to be wounded in the War.”
While convalescing in Milan, he was nursed by the tall, beautiful Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, who was seven years his senior. They fell in love, although the relationship may not have been consummated physically. After being hospitalised for five months, Hemingway returned home as a war hero. In March 1919 Agnes broke off their relationship by letter.
Hemingway’s lifestyle after the war diverged sharply from the expectations of his strictly Protestant mother. Determined to become a writer, he moved to Chicago. In September 1921 he married Hadley Richardson, who was eight years older. This was the first of what were to be Hemingway’s four marriages. With income from Hadley’s trust fund, and a commission to write a series of European articles for the Toronto Star, the couple moved to Paris, where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound were engaged in creating a literary renaissance. Mutual influences are apparent in works by this group, which soon welcomed Hemingway as a member.
In Paris he published two collections of short stories which already exhibited the stylistic techniques and attitudes that were to make him famous. As a spokesman for the post-war generation Hemingway’s early fiction expressed the disillusionment, loss of faith and hope and the collapse of values that the war had caused, but did not encourage active resistance to the people and policies that had caused the catastrophe. Instead it is pervaded by a deadening despair stemming from exhaustion and bewilderment. His first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which characters wander through Europe unemployed and at a loss, is based on Hemingway’s life in Paris with his writer and artist friends. The preface quotes Stein’s comment on the Paris expatriates, “You are all a lost generation.” The Sun Also Rises defined Hemingway as a leading representative of this generation.
In 1925 Hemingway and Hadley met Pauline Pfeiffer, a stylish, wealthy young woman from St. Louis who worked for the Paris edition of Vogue. Pauline and Hadley became friends, and Hemingway and Pauline soon became secret lovers. In January 1927 Hemingway and Hadley divorced, and in May Pauline and Hemingway married. After travelling in Europe they returned to the States, and took a house in Key West, Florida, where in June 1928 their son Patrick was born. Pauline’s labour pains inspired Catherine’s agonising labour in A Farewell to Arms, which Hemingway was writing at the time. His father’s suicide by gunshot shortly before Christmas further contributed to the bleak world-view of his new novel. When A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929, it was a popular and critical success which made Hemingway financially independent. He went on to write major novels and short stories, some of which were based on big-game safaris to Africa, and bull-fights in Spain. In 1937 Hemingway travelled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. His longest novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is based on an incident in this war.
As Hemingway matured and partly recovered from his despair over the slaughter and sufferings associated with World War I, he searched for a solution to social problems in ideas for collective action. The thesis of For Whom the Bell Tolls is that a loss of liberty in one place means a loss of liberty everywhere. Hemingway’s last major literary accomplishment was his 1952 novella, “The Old Man and the Sea,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and won its author the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. Hemingway’s health had been undermined by drinking and by safari accidents that included plane crashes and a bush fire, so that he was too ill to travel to Sweden to receive the Prize in person. Suffering from depression and paranoia in his later years, he received electric shock treatment and published little. He died in 1961, like his father from a self-inflicted gun wound.
Hemingway did not invent his fiction’s plots and characters, but developed them through imaginative engagement with his lived experience. Biographers and critics have searched diligently for both the truth buried in his fiction, and the fiction buried in stories about himself that he presented as fact. A Farewell to Arms draws on his World War I experience in Italy and love affair with Agnes von Kurowsky. The real-life Kitty Cannell inspired the fictional Helen Ferguson; the priest was based on Don Giuseppe Bianchi, padre of the 69th and 70th regiments of the Brigata Ancona; the inspiration for the Fred’s friend Rinaldi remains a mystery.
Shakespearean Contrasts
You have only to open the first pages of A Farewell to Arms to realise the contrast that this novel makes with Shakespeare’s Henry V. (See the introduction to Henry V on this site: cherylmtaylor.com/2017/04/05/shakespeares-hen…ductory-lectures/.) Shakespeare is wide-ranging in his representation, and endlessly creative in his exploration of possible human attitudes to the same themes that we find in A Farewell to Arms–heroism, war, manhood, sexual love, loyalty to friends, and death. By contrast, Hemingway’s novel begins and ends with the assumption, which became usual in his era, that all war is a crime. He is credited with saying: “They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.” Wilfrid Owen’s poetry from the trenches of World War I is a bitter assertion of this same realisation, which Hemingway’s fiction helped to popularise in the post-war era.
In Henry V Shakespeare both entertains and evokes in his audiences a wide range of emotions that include patriotism, pride, humour and joy. By contrast the characters in A Farewell to Arms are habitually unhappy, hardly ever confident or joyful, and a bleak view of human life itself predominates. The most that Hemingway’s men and women hope for is a few hours of love and fulfillment, which they steal from a mad, miserable and murderous world, before disaster intervenes and tragedy descends again. Hemingway said that happiness was never, or almost never, found by intelligent people.
Much is to be learned by briefly comparing the writing styles of Shakespeare and Hemingway. Where Shakespeare uses the full resources of English, creating vibrant and powerful poetry and a long list of characters who identify themselves partly by distinctive ways of speaking, Hemingway’s linguistic range is deliberately narrow. Rather than exploiting language’s inexhaustible resources, he pares words away, so that an intense and powerful simplicity results. He stated: “I always try to write on the principal of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.” Luckily, we as readers are not obliged to choose between Shakespeare’s abundance and Hemingway’s sparseness. We can enjoy the work of both writers for the different gifts they offer.
Structure of A Farewell to Arms
Book I : Chapters 1-12, pp. 3-72
Autumn and Winter: Lieutenant Frederic Henry is fighting with the Italian army at Gorizia in north-eastern Italy;
he meets nurse Catherine Barkley, is wounded and transported to hospital in Milan.
Book II: Chapters 13-24, pp. 75-144
Summer: Fred and Catherine consummate their love while he is convalescing in Milan.
Book III: Chapters 25-32, pp. 147-207
Autumn: Fred returns to Gorizia; Italian army retreats after the battle of Caporetto.
Book IV: Chapters 33-37, pp. 211-54
Fred meets Catherine in Stresa, on the Italian side of Lake Maggiore; they flee across the lakes to Switzerland.
Book V: Chapters 38-41, pp. 257-93
Winter: the mountains near Montreux, on Lake Geneva; Catherine and their baby die in Lausanne.
(Page references are to the 1997 Penguin edition of A Farewell to Arms.)
Themes of A Farewell to Arms
1.THE REALITY OF WAR AND THE HEROIC IDEAL
Feelings of hopelessness, anxiety and depression caused by war pervade A Farewell to Arms. They colour every description, every event, every decision, and every action before Fred and Catherine escape to Switzerland in Book IV.
The novel’s opening description of the soldiers’ night march embodies their experience of war in symbols of dust, falling leaves and grey, muted shades. Hemingway’s restrained prose contrasts with the energetic, imaginative war poetry of Henry V. The despair that weighs down the novel’s opening contrasts with the early Choruses’ optimism and praise of Henry in of Henry V. The repetition that is a notable feature of Hemingway’s prose style may imply that human life is mostly monotonous and predictable. Henry’s visit to his men before Agincourt reassures as to the causes of the battle and the leader’s motives, but in Hemingway the soldiers act and suffer and often die in ignorance.
The dusty grey hues of the opening of A Farewell to Arms are followed by a description of mud and wetness which is equally if not more hopeless and painful. The only simile is striking, because it eclipses the men’s masculinity: “the troops…marched as if they were six months gone with child” (40). This invites comparison with Wilfred Owen’s World War I poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which opens by comparing an exhausted troop in the same war to sick women, “coughing like hags.”
Why did Fred, an American, join the Italian army?
Although A Farewell to Arms sometimes seems to be about to answer this question, in fact it never does. When Catherine asks Fred why he joined the Italian army, he replies: “I was in Italy…and I spoke Italian.” Much later, when trolling the lake with his barman friend, the friend asks: “Why do you go to war?” Fred replies: “I don’t know. I was a fool” (227). The unanswered question suggests that the war is a catastrophe without meaning, undertaken without a plan, and for no reason that words can express.
The heroic ideal: Is Fred a Hero?
Fred is not wounded while fighting. Instead the trench mortar shell lands while he is eating macaroni with his men. Before this, the men’s conversation has dwelt on grimly realistic, anti-heroic aspects of the war, such as the shooting of every tenth Grenadier when their company refused to attack (46), and the subsequent removal of civil rights from the families of the executed men (46-47). The wastefulness and tragedy of war are underlined when Passini, the most rebellious and articulate of Fred’s men, dies horribly with his legs blown off.
However Fred responds to the wounds and death produced by the shell with admirable care for his men, and it is clear from his actions and orders that he is a good officer, whom his men respect and like. Badly wounded himself, only semi-conscious, he does his best to help Passini. Perhaps this demonstrates the way the circumstances imposed by war limit people’s ability to act, effectively removing their freedom. Sane people of good will nevertheless do their best to take responsibility, and to care for others. Irony nevertheless surrounds the awarding to Fred of the silver medal for valour, since his actions do not match of story-book heroism—-the rescue of a comrade under fire, a successful attack against the odds, so many of the enemy killed, etc.
The reality of wounds and death in battle
The insane destructiveness of war is most clearly conveyed in Fred’s experience following his wounding in Book I. As a patient Fred suffers degradation, pain, boredom and helplessness. His treatment at the dressing station shows that his wounds are severe, yet he is far from being the most badly wounded of the soldiers (55). He unheroically but humanly seizes an opportunity of earlier and better treatment when it is offered. The most gruesome—almost surreal—episode is when he is trapped on a stretcher in the ambulance transporting him to the field hospital, and the man on the stretcher above him bleeds to death (57). The gruesome realities of wounds and death distinguish Hemingway’s treatment of these inevitable results of war from Henry V, where these realities are softened by poetry, dramatic distance, camaraderie, comedy, and above all by ultimate victory and the victor’s rewards.
Another insight that emerges from A Farewell to Arms is war’s uncertainty. Fred is intelligent enough to reject the advice of the doctors (rank of captain) who advise waiting for six months before operating on his knee. He saves himself prolonged pain by asking for a second opinion and by finding Major Dr. Valentini. Events associated with the St. Anthony medal that Catherine gives Fred for protection (see p. 41) demonstrate that in war sheer chance prevails, independently of planning by generals or a just God’s supposed rule over a rational universe. Warfare in A Farewell to Arms gives unlimited scope to fate or irrational chance. By contrast, in Henry V the triumph of the good and the just (the English) maintains the possibility of just outcomes, though with reservations (see the discussion of Henry V on this site).
The theme of war in Book III
Book III begins when Fred returns to Gorizia. The opening description in Chapter 25, of wet, mud and mist, recalls the beginning Chapter 1, but with the change that the Italian army has now been beaten, is short of food, and is on the point of retreating. Rain, a recurring motif in Book III, is falling. Catherine sees it as predicting her death (see pp. 175-76), and indeed the rain that falls after Catherine’s death in Book V externalises Fred’s despair. Rinaldi is exhausted from operating, and the priest receives more respect since the men who baited him have left. He and Fred discuss the significance of victory and defeat (160-61), and Fred meditates on glory and sacrifice (165). He returns to Bainsizza, past the point where he was wounded.
During the Italian army’s retreat, the first violent event involves the two sergeants, who are literally along only for the ride. The comic horror of the first sergeant’s execution is another of the novel’s grotesque commentaries on war. The execution is followed by Aymo’s death: “He was hit low in the back of the neck and the bullet had ranged upward and come out under the right eye. He died while I was stopping the two holes” (190). Further war realism appears in Bonello’s desertion. The culminating tragedy of Book III is the shooting of officers by the Italian carabinieri on the assumption that they are all deserters. The old lieutenant colonel dies bravely (199), but his heroism is unappreciated and in a way misplaced; since it is not directed against the enemy, it is yet another instance of the confusion and futility generated by war.
2. LOVE AND SEX
In Gorizia the officers and men visit prostitutes nightly. Encouraged, and, many would say, justified, by the uncertainty of survival, the men’s frequent visits are an artifact of life in a war zone. Their goal is fun and frolics, not continuity or commitment, and Rinaldi confides his disgust to Fred when the same prostitutes stay so long that they’re in danger of being seen as old friends (60). Before he meets Catherine Fred joins Rinaldi and the other officers in these sexual adventures. They all believe that for men likely to die soon, sexual fulfillment is their unquestionable right. Rinaldi even insists with bravado that there is no difference between a “good” girl (meaning a virgin) and a bad woman, except that “with a girl it is painful” (62). But in his love for Catherine, Fred shows a contrasting sensitivity as he does also in his friendship with the Priest, whom the other officers tease for his celibacy.
Always attracted to Catherine’s tall blonde beauty, Fred discovers almost by accident, in hospital in Milan, that he is in love with her—that he returns the love that she has already acknowledged. See the description of Fred’s falling in love, p. 84. The early stages of Fred’s and Catherine’s relationship maintain an external formality and decorum that is far removed from the twenty-first century norm in Western countries. The reality of Fred and Catherine’s love for each other, expressed in their simple, natural dialogues free from mannerisms, is one of the strengths of A Farewell to Arms. Fred’s intense love, the joy he finds in Catherine’s company, and their shared sexual happiness are the antithesis that opposes this novel’s thesis, which is the unbearable reality of war. The clash between love and war is what drives the narrative.
3. GENDER
This is a controversial issue, affecting present readers’ responses to the novel. A Farewell to Arms enshrines assumptions about gender that were current in Western societies in the early twentieth century, but which many people have now come to question.
Gender can be defined as the set of assumptions, expectations and roles that a given culture builds around the assumed existence of two biological sexes. While there are many individuals whose biological sex and/or gender orientation are not clearly defined, gendering is a habit of mind that we all share to some degree. Some people are more aware than others of how gender creates differences of power and privilege in culture and society. The gendered view of the world assumes the existence of two polarized positions, one labelled “masculine” and the other “feminine”. These are called binary oppositions. Examples are:
- women are emotional; men are rational;
- women are nurturers; men are bread-winners;
- women uphold morality; men break moral rules.
Binary oppositions ignore the obvious truth that because of their widely varying characteristics each man and each woman will occupy a point on a continuum that stretches between two (theoretical) extreme masculine/feminine points. Traditionally, gendered ways of thinking see the masculine as normal, and the feminine as diverging from the norm. They assume superiority for the masculine and inferiority for the feminine.
These insights, which have influenced the way men and women are currently regarded in Western societies, were developed by feminist theorists from the late 1960s in a movement known as “Second Wave Feminism.” (The late nineteenth-century suffragette movement was the “First Wave.” The Third Wave began in the 1990s in protest against what were seen as the failures of the Second Wave, as well as in response to the backlash against the Second Wave.) The ideas of of Second Wave Feminism were not available to Hemingway in the 1920s and ’30s, but considering how A Farewell to Arms stands in relation to some of them may show how assumptions about gender have changed over the intervening decades, and/or how they have remained the same. We’ll approach the issue through the female characters, especially Catherine.
In this novel, where the first-person narrator is a young man, the female characters are mostly defined by their relationship to men. In a conversation already mentioned, Rinaldi divides women into good girls (virgins) and bad women (prostitutes). As a binary opposition, such an idea is fundamental to a gendered outlook, and the Madonna and the whore are recognized female stereotypes. Such a simple division ignores women’s complex humanity and the many different ways in which individuals express their sexuality. As distinct from the prostitutes who are the first women we hear about in A Farewell for Arms, Catherine and her friend Helen fall into the category of “good girls.” One reason for this is that they are nurses (nurturers) to male patients, wounded soldiers. A question worth asking is, how far (if at all) do Catherine and Helen escape from such stereotypes and from male-based definitions?
My own feeling is that Catherine is a rounded and attractive figure, but that her characterisation is limited to what Fred can see of her, and that Fred sees her exclusively in relation to himself. She is the archetypal passionate woman, whose emotional survival depends on her relationship with men. When we first meet her she is devastated because her young fiancé, her childhood sweetheart, has been killed on the Somme. For as long as she is not in love with Fred, who is courting her, she possesses the power of refusal. However after she succumbs to him, which happens before he falls in love with her, her whole existence revolves around him. Her aim is to be a “good girl” to Fred; this comes out in several of their dialogues, such as when she tells him that she’s pregnant: “I know I’ve made trouble now. But haven’t I been a good girl until now?” (124).
What are we as readers to make of such exchanges? Decades before the invention of the contraceptive pill, Catherine takes on herself the full responsibility for having fallen pregnant. In the lovers’ conversations she acts out the fiction of being Fred’s wife. This is because for much of the twentieth century the foundation of women’s status—their respectability—was their wifehood. Being pregnant outside of marriage was regarded as a shameful betrayal of a woman’s duty.
Helen Ferguson and other nurses, such as Nurse Gage and Miss Van Campen, offer a divergent commentary as outsiders on the love affair. Helen considers the prospect of Catherine’s and Fred’s marriage and the probability of a tragic ending (98); and defends Catherine against possible exploitation by Fred (220-21). A function in the novel of Helen and the other nurses is to ground the love story in the practicalities of a war-torn world.
Catherine is a convincing and rounded character, and the reader relates to the strength of Fred’s and Catherine’s love and to the tragedy of her final loss. In the context of wounds and imminent death the lovers’ play-acting and hopes for a future wedding are tragic (260-61). Their passionate love and its tragic ending are what the novel primarily offers to its readers. A Farewell to Arms embodies Hemingway’s profound intuition of the beauty and tragedy of wartime love.
4. MASCULINITY
Externally, Fred conforms to the Hemingway model for the masculine gender: he is a soldier (like Henry V); he drinks too much; he enjoys sex unrelated to feelings of love or commitment, and actively seeks it out as a right; he fishes; and he knows about guns (27-28). He also fulfils the responsibilities traditionally attached to manhood—as an officer he takes care of his men and he does his duty in looking after trucks and equipment. As far as a real war allows, Fred behaves as a brave soldier.
Above all perhaps, Fred shows great powers of endurance, an aspect of heroism that, both before and during the Battle of Agincourt, the English soldiers in Henry V also demonstrate. Fred shows a stoic courage when he is wounded in Book I and during the retreat of the Italian army in Book III, especially after he enters the river to avoid being shot. He shows this same quality in rowing himself and Catherine across Lake Maggiore to reach Locarno in Switzerland (Book IV, Chapter 37). In “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) Hemingway continues to define manhood by this quality of endurance.
A Man among Men
Another way in which Fred embodies Hemingway’s masculine ideal is that he is a man whom other men respect. A Farewell to Arms validates male camaraderie and friendship as one of the joys of life. The distinction between camaraderie and friendship is clear: Fred enjoys camaraderie with his drinking, whoring and fishing companions. He enjoys potential friendship with the men he leads in Book I and Book III. But he enjoys deep friendship with the Priest, with Rinaldi, and with Count Greffi. This group is important, because it adds a depth to Fred’s characterisation that goes beyond the masculine stereotypes that A Farewell to Arms also endorses. Fred displays his sensitivity in these three deeper friendships, which overturn expectations in a number of ways.
Priest: Although Fred does not share the Priest’s Christian beliefs, he admires him as a man who endures a hard life without complaint. Fred’s sensitivity in this friendship appears when he later makes it up with the Priest when he fails to visit the Priest’s family in Abruzzi while on leave in Book I. The Priest repays Fred’s care by visiting Fred in hospital. Since Fred’s fellow-officers treat the Priest with contempt, Fred’s sensitivity shows his willingness to stand out from the masculine norm.
Rinaldi: Fred’s relationship with Rinaldi survives their early rivalry over Catherine and Fred’s success. This relationship is extremely close, humorous, and based on mutual respect. In addressing Fred as “baby,” in attempting to kiss and embrace him; and in insisting on examining his knee (out of professional interest) Rinaldi challenges the limits of what gender stereotyping prescribed for relationships between men in the early twentieth century. Fred is the one who maintains these boundaries, by holding off Rinaldi when he wants to kiss him.
Count Greffi: (see p. 226 for initial description). Fred plays billiards—another defining masculine pursuit—and drinks with Count Greffi in Chapter 35. The Count is a model of bravery and dignity in extreme old age. Fred’s dialogue with him is touchingly supportive and nurturing, as it is also with the Priest and with Rinaldi.
Fred’s sensitivity in these three relationships seems closer to the feminine than to the masculine gender stereotype, and it distinguishes Fred from other male characters in the novel. Beyond this, Fred’s love for Catherine, which occupies him more than anything else, is a final distinguishing feature in a novel where most male characters are preoccupied only with war and survival.
The portrait of Fred resonates with Hemingway’s biography. The intensity with which Hemingway lived up to stereotypes of outward-going masculinity that included fishing, shooting, attending bullfights and going on safaris, suggests that he suffered from an unspoken fear that he did not fit these stereotypes naturally. The sensitivity and emotional depth characteristic of Hemingway’s fiction, such as A Farewell to Arms, can in fact be understood as a product of the author’s struggle to conform with his era’s prescriptive definitions of masculinity.
Discussion Topics: A Farewell to Arms
- Describe Fred Henry’s relationships with other men: try to recall as many men as possible, e.g. Rinaldi, the Priest, the soldiers Fred leads before he is wounded, Piani, Aymo, Bonello, and Count Greffi. How successful is Fred in living up to the expectation that he will be “a man among men”?
- “Despite the novel’s debunking of romantic ideas about war, some of Fred’s adventures in wartime are exciting to read about, so that something of the glamour of war remains in this work.” Is this true? How exciting and interesting in themselves are Fred’s wartime adventures?
- “A Farewell to Arms creates a strong sense of Fred’s and Catherine’s mutual love, but Catherine’s character is weakly drawn.” How far do you agree? Catherine is beautiful and loving, a perfect woman for a man to relate to, but does the novel grant her individuality and personal concerns beyond Fred? For example, how important to her is her impending motherhood?
- Which events in this novel challenge the notion that war is an opportunity for men to prove their manhood with heroic deeds?