Hemingway and GenderBiography Revisited

Resumen

This article reviews a number of biographies on Hemingway with the aim of revisiting the issue of gender and its relationship to life writing. Since biography has been defined as the best arena in which to fight unexamined assumptions and prejudiced notions, postmodernist biographical research into Hemingway has invariably pursued the explosion of the myth of masculinity by asserting that the writer’s gender identity, the source of his psychological conflicts, was androgynous. Androgyny, a key word in gender-bending, implies the negation of a watertight system of binaries. Biography has thus not only pioneered the disruption of the writer as an icon of monolithic masculinity and allowed literary criticism to read his texts as containing a plurality of crosscutting gender identities. By using Hemingway as a case example, it has also been pivotal in helping us overcome the rigidity and inconsistencies of the dual system.