![]() Since the strategy here, as throughout Love and Death is to foreground the theme of male companionship in American literature, Fiedler’s verdict on the women in Hemingwa’s fiction is hyperbolic, but that, perhaps, is a price worth paying for the perception that ‘the West’ in Hemingway is not limited to the geographical West of the United States but is a ‘world of male companionship and sport, an anti-civilization’ whether in the mountains of Spain or the hills of Africa. ![]() Hemingway, he believed, was much addicted to describing the sexual act in his fictions - it is the ‘symbolic center of his work’ 1 - but since he did not succeed in making his females human, the sexual encounters described in his writings are either ridiculous or horrible the ‘women’ are fantasy figures whose function is to gratify the men’s desires, and the act is nothing more than a wish-fulfilment or, in Fiedler’s brutally frank words, a wet dream. The ‘however’ was central to Fiedler’s argument. ![]() ![]() ‘There are, however, no women in his books!’ wrote Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). ![]()
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