Farewell+Feminist+Approach

__Fun Activity!!!...__ A fun game of Bingo!!! A bingo card will be given to each person in the group and clues will be given relating to the words in the boxes on the cards. The group can work together if they are not sure which word the clues belong to. The first person to get three-in-a-row on their bingo card will receive a prize. The rest of the clues that were not reached will be said to get everyone thinking about the topics of the day from a feminist approach.

__Literary Criticism Overview…__
 * 1) Hemingway’s style of writing can be partially due to “modernist masculinity”
 * 2) This leads to the observation that medicine is a “technology of gender”
 * 3) Henry’s illness is a physical illness from the shelling but he has a mental illness of masculinity (common in World War I soldiers)
 * 4) Hemingway feels the need to tell his war experiences like watching his comrades die and his own wound as well, but he never explains them in great detail because it would go against the “code of manliness” such as complaining or weeping
 * 5) “The men willingly suspend valid but invalidated emotions…The gender codes, then, appear to the gendered subject was more legitimate than the private feelings they eclipse in the service of upholding compulsory masculinity.”
 * 6) Hemingway writes in a masculine style that may appeal to one of women’s problems---silence (may arouse emotion in female readers…)
 * 7) Drinking is a self-medication for Henry that helps him be even more silent
 * 8) Wartime masculinity could be seen as destructive/ it relates to the whole concept of self-inflicted wounds
 * 9) Henry’s self-inflicted wounds could assure the reader of his masculinity or it could be saying the wartime masculinity is a self-inflicted wound itself…
 * 10) Many men go into war in hope to become a hero and to show their masculinity on the front dying for a cause
 * 11) Henry, however, is just an ambulance driver and spends most of his time waiting and not in the action
 * 12) Sandra Gilbert has said that in World War one, “ the apocalypse of masculinism…the war to which so many men had gone in hope of becoming heroes ended up emasculating them…confining them as closely as any Victorian woman had been confined”
 * 13) Hemingway shuts down heroes, and thus, masculinity
 * 14) Henry deals with the issue of masculinity as he must chooses between his love for Catherine and masculinity of warfare
 * 15) Hemingway does not focus on detail about pain etc…. “we see Frederic’s repeated silences as constituting a notion of masculinity as numbness, as lack of feeling, as a kind of dissociation from self.”
 * 16) Medicine, the wartime hospitals etc. is meant to remake the men into fighting machines yet Pat Barker argues that, “ constructions of masculinity colonizes men’s subjectivity in ways that, especially in wartime, prove oppressive, repressive, and wholly brutal in their effects on the male psyche.”
 * 17) Hemingway’s masculine writing style includes stories of medicine, like recovering from his wounds, and narrated masculinity (keeping quiet about his suffering)
 * 18) Being a silent sufferer was the ideal for the military and modernist medicine
 * 19) Medicine makes a man who he is in wartime…no longer claiming his body as his own; no longer his own man
 * 20) Masculinity becomes anaesthetized

For the full literary criticisms over Ernest Hemingway’s //Farewell to Arms…//visit these sites below: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3786/is_200110/ai_n8962044/pg_10 and __http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3786/is_200304/ai_n9235345____

Questions for Discussion:__ Created By: Bailey B
 * Feminists argue that gender determines everything or that gender determines nothing and gender differences are only present because society has imposed these differences. Does Hemingway believe in gender difference? If yes, how so and are they obvious differences or not? How does the setting in //Farewell to Arms// change these gender differences?
 * The summary of the literary criticism above argues that medicine in this novel functions as a “technology of gender.” What does this mean? Through medicine, is Hemingway arguing that one race is stronger than the other? If so, which one and why?
 * Henry describes only vaguely his pain and emotions concerned with his wounds and others in the hospital. From a feminist standpoint (who believe that women should live in the //female stage// of independence and self-confidence), is this “silence” a strength or a weakness? Is Hemingway supporting this masculine trait or not? (//refer to #15 in the literary criticism section…)//
 * The topic of self-inflicted wounds comes up numerous times in this novel in several dialogues etc. What is Hemingway’s stance on self-inflicted wounds? Is he reassuring us of Henry’s masculinity or something else? Feminists feel they are just as strong as men. What would you, as a feminist, think about self-inflicted wounds? Why?
 * Hemingway lived through the 1920’s; a time of change in the roles of women. The literary overview above also suggests that Hemingway writes with the idea of a “crisis of masculinity” in the soldiers. How do theses ideas parallel? Does Hemingway show the change in the role of women in his novel? How? To a small or large degree?
 * Ultimately, a feminist would argue that the soldiers in //Farewell to Arms// actually fulfill the traditional, weaker stereotype that women have held. Are you a feminist according to this viewpoint? Did Hemingway believe male or female was the stronger sex and why?