“Nothing Can Touch You as Long as You Work”: Love and Work in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and For Whom the Bell Tolls

Abstract

Hemingway’s entire oeuvre—and many of the biographical examinations of his life—can be read in terms of the tension between love and work. Although much has been written on sexuality, androgyny, and gender identification in Hemingway’s fiction, the theme of work and the relationship between work and romance have been largely neglected. This essay focuses on two novels that center on their protagonists’ work, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Garden of Eden, and suggests that the dynamics between male-female relationships and work are essential for understanding Hemingway’s imagination of the male artist. The essay investigates why the protagonists devote themselves to their work and explains how the relationship of the protagonists’ love interests to their work helps define them. The “work” of these novels differs, but in both cases it is an art that substantiates the protagonists’ masculinity in part by forming meaningful, lasting connections with other people; this is true even in the case of Robert Jordan, whose art is destruction by design. Exploring the ironies of work, Hemingway shows that the artist must separate himself from those closest to him in order to execute his work and, through that work, inspire others. The Garden of Eden has received a great deal of critical attention due to its undermining of traditional gender roles, but reading the novel alongside For Whom the Bell Tolls suggests that it further characterizes Hemingway’s depiction of the male artist by showing the importance of his relationships to his humanistic pursuit.