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What Are Gender Roles In The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber

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Gender roles are important for people, they make life easier for many because of their simplicity: a man has to be strong, and a woman has to be beautiful. But if this order is not kept, then things will go wrong. Or so are you led to believe when you read “The Short Happy Life Of Francis Macomber” by Ernest Hemingway. The story revolves around Francis Macomber, his wife Margot and a safari guide called Robert Wilson. Francis and Margot are on a trip in Africa and here they have hired a safari guide to help them hunt. And in Africa, it seems, we are back to the days before the emergence of civilization. If you want to live you have to fight for it; you have to kill animals if you want any nourishment. And if you want to attract the opposite sex as a male, you have to show courage. And this is where Francis Macomber fails. Right from the beginning we get a description of each character’s outward appearence. We are told that Margot is very beautiful, Wilson has a very red face, and Francis is very well-built and fit. We are also told that the relationship between Francis and Margot is merely superficial: “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money …show more content…

He was living in a time when women began to fight for more freedom and self-determination in their lives. And so Margot is a product of her time, she is a woman trying to control her own life, and her way of doing it is partly by ”repressing” her husband. That is also why she ends up shooting her own husband, we do not know if it was intentional, but it seems like it was. That is by the way also why the story is named ”The short happy life of Francis Macomber”. His whole life is not happy, except near the end of the plot. He is only happy the moment he overcomes his fears, and finally becomes a “real” man, but that is only going to last for a few

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