Title
Rewriting the Self Against the National Text: Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden
Document Type
Article
Annotation
Interrogates the sexual and racial transformations of David and Catherine, stressing the complications leading to Catherine’s failed attempt at identity construction. Tellefsen explores the “modernist confusion of Art with God” and the desire of both characters to define themselves according to their own creations. Discusses each character’s relationship to the American myth, and the implications of David’s African past for his identity conception. Ultimately reads the novel as the couple’s opportunity, and eventual failure, to write a new American identity.
Published in
Papers on Language and Literature
Volume
36
Issue
1
Date
Winter 2000
Pages
58-92
COinS
Citation
Tellefsen, Blythe. “Rewriting the Self Against the National Text: Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden.” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 58-92.