The Hemingway Review

Amy L. Strong’s Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction, a part of Palgrave Macmillan’s series “American Literature Readings in the 21^st Century,” is a self-proclaimed “revisionist” reading of Hemingway’s work. One of Strong’s primary ideas is that Hemingway wrote about race and sexual identity throughout his career and that posthumously published works have provided a catalyst for scholars to acknowledge the fact. Hemingway scholarship, Strong maintains, has for too long focused on themes such as courage, love, and war, while not enough has been said about issues such as gender difference and white male dominance.

In her preface and first chapter, Strong positions herself as an irreverent member of a contingent of scholars willing to challenge “traditional” Hemingway critics. She then segues into three chapters on race and sexual identity in some of Hemingway’s most well-known short fiction, tales such as “Indian Camp,” “The Battler,” and “Ten Indians.” Strong’s reading of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” for example, suggests that the story is a colonialist allegory, with Wilson representing British imperialistic tendencies. The white hunter’s goal, Strong argues, is to initiate Macomber into his own imperialist notions. The section on “The Short Happy Life” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is perhaps the best in the book. Strong’s remarks about the importance of the setting in these stories are compelling and informative. The final chapters include a well-written discussion of Catherine and Marita from The Garden of Eden and of Hemingway’s complex trans-cultural experiences in Under Kilimanjaro.

The most controversial move Strong makes in the book is her division of critics into two camps. At the outset, she positions herself among “progressive” Hemingway scholars such as Carl Eby and Mark Spilka; her criticism is openly aggressive towards those perceived to be in the “opposition.” In the first chapter, “Joining the Tribe,” Strong labels scholars such as Philip Young, Robert Lewis, Peter Hays “paternalistic” because they allegedly relegate Hemingway’s Native American and African characters to [End Page 142] the background (6–7). A recurring theme in Strong’s book is that traditional scholars have consistently ignored any character who is not a white heterosexual: “The critical response to issues of race in Hemingway’s works, beginning with the early biographies and ending with the most recent critical essays on native [sic] Americans and African American characters, reveals patterns of marginalization, disavowal, and outright dismissal” (4). Strong’s Derridean impulse to draw attention to characters on the “fringes” is interesting, but she seems to operate under the assumption that the validity of her readings is dependent upon her ability to disparage the critics who preceded her. Her critique of James Nagel’s article “The Hunting Story in The Garden of Eden” is not particularly well-conceived, in large part because she does not recognize that she and Nagel ultimately make the same point: that the romance plot, the dissolution of the Bournes’ marriage, and David’s writing of “The Hunting Story” are intertwined. While Strong’s echoing of Toni Morrison’s call to scholars to pay more attention to matters of race in “canonical” works is appropriate, I am not convinced that it is beneficial to insist that scholars increase their attentiveness to characters in a work of fiction only because they are non-white or non-heterosexual. It strikes me as unfair to imply that those who choose to focus on issues other than setting, sexuality, and race should be branded as derelict at best, racist or homophobic at worst.

But perhaps the greatest irony is that Strong does not actually spend much time talking about characters who are marginalized because of their race. Given the ambitious thesis she establishes for herself, I looked forward to nuanced readings of non-white personae in some of Hemingway’s most oft-studied stories. I was disappointed not to be presented with new insights about characters such as Dick Boulton and the Native American...