Feminism In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

“Who run the world? Girls”, Beyonce once said. Women around the world are standing up to their beliefs that men and women should have equal rights. They are showing that they are as strong and capable of doing what any man is able to do. This point of view in women was starting to show in the 1920s around the world. Ernest Hemingway portrays this point of view in his book The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway develops and illustrates strong women that show traits that is typical of male characters. Lady Brett Ashley and Frances Clyne are the two strong women characters that represent the start of feminism in the 1920s. The Sun Also Rises finely interprets the solidarity of patriarchal rule under the suggestion of the flexibility of gender roles. The way the male characters seem to carry a feminine quality, while Lady Brett Ashley is often interpreted as having a masculine appearance, is simply …show more content…
Yet, this view merely upholds the false ideas of gender roles. For example, if a functional penis makes one masculine, than bearing children makes one feminine. It is the reliance on biological differences that lead us to uphold that our roles as male or female are “natural,” (Wittig 1907) which they clearly are not. Gender roles and the ideas of masculinity and femininity are founded on the same meaningless relationship as the language used to describe these ideals, as well as the language used to hide the underlying system of patriarchy, as reinforced by capitalism, that is stained into our way of life. While the female characters of the novel may be able to appear deviant to their role as women in society, those appearances are just as false as the roles they ultimately subscribe to. Similarly, the male characters may react to what seems an altered state of gender, but are still superior to women, even if castrated, as long as they have the capital to prove