Forget the Legend and Read the Work: Teaching Two Stories by Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

This essay discusses the writer's strategies and experiences teaching two stories by Ernest Hemingway: "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants." Bauer uses these stories as an opportunity to show students that they should not make assumptions about a writer's work based on some vague impression they have of the author's character. An image of Hemingway as some macho hunter, drinker, womanizer, and misogynist, for example, could blind the reader to any positive reading of his female characters. Bauer's reading of "Indian Camp" takes on criticism that condemns Hemingway for his focus on male characters and use of women as mere props in the story; Bauer defends the author's right to tell whoever's story he chooses and points out that Hemingway may be focusing on the men in this story, but he is not valorizing them or approving of their treatment of the Indian woman in labor. And Bauer employs "Hills Like White Elephants" to show that, not only is this more the woman's story, but also that she is much more positively characterized than her lover.