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Male-Female Relationships in 3 Novels

This study will examine and compare the views of male-female relationships and marriage in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (Brett and Romero), Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa and Richard), and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth and Darcy). The study will show that the Brett-Romero relationship is the most passionate, shallow and brief, while the Elizabeth-Darcy and Clarissa-Richard relationships are relatively without passion and yet will probably survive precisely because both partners seek a long-term union with stability and security rather than short-term passion. In all three relationships, the more fascinating and more fully examined member is the woman, with each reflecting a different level of passion, liberation, and self-knowledge.

Hemingway portrays the brief and sexually charged relationship between the often drunken Brett and the brave young bullfighter as one in which she seeks refuge from her aimless and meaningless existence and he seeks what he believes to be a powerful love to which he is willing to commit himself. Brett is blatant in the declaration of her lust for the bullfighter. Her first comment about him reveals this physical attraction: "Oh, isn't he lovely. . . . And those green trousers" (Hemingway 169).

Her attraction to the bullfighter remains little more than physical. She does seem to learn something about herself in the relationship, brief as it is, but that lesson is simply that she is not as bad a person as she feared. When Jake asks her if she is "a sadist," after she "couldn't look away" from the goring of the horses at the bullfight, she says, "Hope not" (170). Perhaps she fears she is not merely a drunken, jaded member of the lost generation, but is something even more desperate. Perhaps her fear that she is a sadist after all is what forces her to let the bullfighter go, lest she become "one of these bitches that ruins children" (Hemingway 247). Her fear of being ...

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Male-Female Relationships in 3 Novels. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 10:56, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692070.html