Lady Brett Ashley: A Hemingway Anachronism

by Ben Ballard

The ‘roaring twenties’ are often seen as the coming of age for women, who were liberated to wassail and flaunt their sexuality. Despite its contrasting intentions, the Prohibition era in the United States saw the transformation of women across the United States; the 1920s woman smoked, drank, voted and cut her own hair. However, this salvation of female sensuality became only another reason for 1920s men to condemn the nature of women to the core. These notions of misogyny were inherited by contemporary popular culture and particularly by the male-dominated field of literature. Critically-acclaimed authors such as T.S Eliot, Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald harnessed a wide range of ‘femme fatale’ or just simply ‘bitch’ female characters in their work to express their misogynistic views but no author epitomised this era of chauvinist literature quite like Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway, who held a preference for French and German women because ‘there wasn’t all this talking’, articulated his own troubles with women (he had four wives) into a series of misogynistic characters. There are themes that appear a lot in Hemingway’s work: war, death and emasculation to name but a few, but nothing materializes on the pages of his books quite like a stock misogynistic character. In ‘A Very Short Story’, there are various female characters that are portrayed in a dastardly light and the whole tale largely serves as a vehicle through which Hemingway expresses his distrust for women and the lack of emotional capacity that they possess. Margot Macomber from ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is an adulterous murderess and she epitomises the offensively haughty and conceited construct of a character that Hemingway was trying to create with these women. Characters like these were the means by which Hemingway communicated his own deficient relationships and perpetual frustration with women.

Armed with the aforementioned facts, it is almost surreal to read Hemingway’s 1926 novel ‘The Sun Also Rises’ and inspect the character development of the mysterious Lady Brett Ashley. Brett is introduced in the novel as Jake Barnes’ (the narrator) love interest, although she is portrayed sexually pursuing a variety of the male characters throughout the book. In fact, Brett is shamelessly promiscuous and flaunts her sexuality in a way similar to that of many ‘Flapper’ characters of the era Hemingway is written in. But in stark contrast to those contemporary characters – such as The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan – Hemingway has assigned her a jaunty and unabashed demeanour, which coupled with her clear intellectual capabilities, make her far more complex and tangible than a traditionally misogynistic female character. Brett seemingly has no female friends and is very much one of the ‘chaps’ – as she often refers to her male counterparts – she even cuts her hair short and yet to everyone she meets, she is attractively feminine. As a result, the majority of the male characters in the book end up falling in love with her but unlike a traditional ‘femme fatale’ character, she does not revel in this, in fact, it seems to cause her a deep unhappiness and she often tells Jake that ‘she is miserable’. Brett tells men that she won’t grow her hair long and wears clothes that are neither delicate nor dainty; she engages in male-dominated, foreign practices and possesses a loose freedom to defy men that was unheard of in a female Hemingway character.

‘The Sun’ that is referenced in the title of the novel is plausibly even a reference to Brett’s character; she is the centrepiece around which the rest of the characters orbit and this is a shockingly flattering portrayal when accounted that it is the composition of the famously sexist Ernest Hemingway. The character of Lady Brett Ashley is a sexual enigma that was common of 1920s literature but her incredible emotional depth, in addition to a wildly brazen attitude, assigns her a persona that is not unlike a modern-day liberated woman. While many critics label Brett as merely another one of Hemingway’s ‘bitch women’ and accredit Brett’s character traits to Hemingway’s fears of a female emancipation, there is a composure and an intricacy on which her character is built that is anachronistically feminist.