Rabbit Stew and Blowing Dorothy's Bridges: Love, Aggression, and Fetishism in For Whom the Bell Tolls

Abstract

Then you and me are same, Maria said. She put her hand on his arm and looked in his face. He looked at her brown face and at eyes that, since he had seen them, had never been as young as rest of her face but that now were suddenly hungry and young and wanting. You could be brother and sister by look, [Pilar] said. But I believe it is fortunate that you are not. Now I know why I have felt as I have, Maria said. Now it is clear. Que va, Robert Jordan said and reaching over, he ran his hand over top of her head. He had been wanting to do that all day and now he did it, he could feel his throat swelling. She moved her head under his hand and smiled up at him and he felt thick but silky roughness of cropped head rippling between his fingers. - Ernest Hemingway, For Whom Bell Tolls (67) There is something a little perverse about love at first sight. Powerful and poetically beautiful, such love is nevertheless constituted by a sort of blindness unlike ordinary blindness of dull sublunary lovers' love. The lover who truly loves passionately at first sight somehow fails to see immediate object of his devotion. Instead he recognizes some quality that speaks to him, or him in an almost Althusserian sense; but this quality isn't in object so much as it is projected onto object and then discovered there. is as if unwitting love object had stumbled by chance onto stage of an imaginary drama, long in progress, only to be immediately and unconsciously recognized as a replacement for another object lost in opening scene. The quality in love object that hails lover can't really do so from outside because in other scene subject was formed partly in a dialectical relationship with precisely quality that now appears to hail and subject him from without. Thus, colored by nostalgia from moment of its inception, this love so refined that it knows not what it is takes immediate object of devotion as a countermelancholic replacement for a lost object whose absence cannot be admitted and for whom mourning has long been forbidden? When Maria, lithe and fragile, first steps forth from darkness of cave carrying a big iron cooking platter in For Whom Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan falls in love at first sight. As she sets platter before him, Jordan admires her features - her high cheekbones, her bright smile and eyes, her irises and skin of same golden tawny brown, her full lips, and her small up-tilted breasts showing through her gray shirt - but there is something else, something that clearly hails Jordan and that he immediately recognizes as the strange thing about her: Her hair was golden brown of a grain field that has been burned dark in sun but it was cut all over her head so it was but little longer than fur on a beaver pelt. She smiled in Robert Jordan's face and put her brown hand up and ran it over her head, flattening hair which rose again as hand passed. (22) She'd be beautiful if they hadn't cropped her hair,Jordan muses; yet when his throat swells up so that he can't speak (indicating, perhaps, a swelling elsewhere) it seems fairly obvious that Jordan is moved, and he is moved precisely by Maria's cropped hair. Running her hand over her head, Maria has to remind Jordan not to stare, and to divert him, or perhaps suspecting with prophetic accuracy that way to this man's heart is through his stomach, she tells him to eat. The communal meal that follows bonds Jordan with his new comrades, but dish also establishes a more subtle bond between two lovers: It was rabbit cooked with onions and green peppers and there were chick peas in red wine sauce. was well cooked, rabbit meat flaked off bones, and sauce was delicious (23). As Jordan carefully piles bones to one side of his plate and uses his bread to sop up every last drop of sauce, girl continues to watch him. …