Masculinity In Hemingway's A River Runs Through It

Often when one thinks of the standard father-son relationship, rather stereotypically there’s an essence of rigidity. Masculinity and the stubborn adherence to its tight standards in how men should behave, how they should talk, or how they should even feel about other men, even in their own families. Even the simplest “I love you,” or any variation is replaced between men with awkward or utterly empty silences, censoring the feelings of familial or brotherly or friendly affection between them, even if they are strongly there. In A River Runs Through It, throughout lies a demonstration of such omission of actual feelings about many ranges of feelings and thoughts- which also is a reflection of how often men as individuals who are socialized in certain societies submit to ideas of

This is emphasized in the passage, the son speaks on his father, saying that “He was about the only man I ever knew who used the word “beautiful” as a natural form of speech…” In western culture there is a true pressure and strain for men to behave a certain way, down to the very words that come out of their mouth. For the son to hear this word from his own father and repeat it multiple times about multiple things, including his brother, might have been socially jarring to some. In A River Runs Through It, however, this language is casual to the son and his father, and how they use a word that is constantly deemed much to ‘feminine’ for many men, this was not the case for the family in the passage. To say such a word as beautiful and mean it is a true defiance of the societal norm, though still obviously to be secure in their masculinity is something the author is trying to speak on – there shouldn’t be such a need for this filter, for a censoring of words in this