The Sun Also Rises Masculinity

During the 1920’s, in most relationships, men had full control. In The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway illustrates a reversal of roles in the relationships throughout the novel. In the novel, the lack of masculinity is shown through characters like Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn. They spend their days getting drunk and being pushed around by the few women in their lives. Jake Barnes would drop everything to take orders from Lady Brett Ashley. Women characters, like Lady Brett Ashley, show a very strong sense of masculinity. The way that she displays herself, the way she acts, and the people she hangs out with give off a vibe of masculinity. The Sun Also Rises is about the lives of a group of expatriates who spend their post-war days getting

The second that Jake sees the men, he becomes very frustrated with them. He is very angry at the fact that she would rather spend her time with a group of gay men, than with him. Since Jake is impotent and he can not be with his one true love, he does not really have any other relationships throughout the novel. Other than his attraction to Brett and a small thing he had for a woman named Georgette that ended very quickly. So we wonder, does Jake question his own sexuality or is Jake frustrated because he feels that he is the same as the other men but lacks masculinity? Another question to think about would also be, to what extent does Jake realize that he lacks in masculinity, if any? According to Ira Elliot in “Performance Art: Jake Barnes and "Masculine" Signification in The Sun Also” (2011) “Jake objects not so much to homosexual behavior (which is unseen) but to "femininity" expressed through the "wrong" body. Gender Crossing is what troubles Jake; the rupture between a culturally-determined signifier (the male body) and signified (the female gender) disrupts the male/female binary.”(pg. 5). Jake understands that his injury from the war has the probability to leave him without love for the rest of his life. His injury causes him to have cultural similarities with the homosexual community, in the sense that he is unable to have sex. Jake struggles to come

Most people would view a middleweight boxing champion as a tough guy and very masculine. Robert Cohn is the exact opposite of a tough guy. In fact, Cohn does not even find boxing to be appealing, but he does it to rectify his feelings of inadequacy and insecurity. At Princeton, Cohn was satirized for being a Jew, so he tried to use boxing to help with the feelings of being oppressed. According to J. Goldman in “ New Edition, Old Problems: On Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises” (2017) “ this text, famous for defining the “lost generation,” starts out with a passage rich in thinly veiled anti-semitism. (The broken proboscis that Cohn suffers in a boxing match is said to ““improve”” his nose. We get it.)” Throughout the article, Goldman talks about the racism in the novel and how the men are trying to live their lives perfectly, but instead spend their days drunk and chasing after women they can not have. To quote J. Goldman in “ New Edition, Old Problems: On Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises” (2017) “The Sun Also Rises, its author’s first novel, crystallizes elements of the Hemingway canon: boozy expatriate Parisian lifestyle, delight in homosociality, bullfighting and bull running in Pamplona, how to fish correctly, how to write correctly, how to do anything correctly.” They spend their days trying to make sure they know how to do everything the