Title
The Sun Also Rises and "Mobilization Wounds": Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas
Document Type
Essay
Annotation
Reads the novel within its historical contexts of mobilization and sexual revolution. Argues that the sense of loss and woundedness found in The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) stems not from these authors’ horrific experiences in World War I but rather from their rejection by the U.S. military. Posits that their inability to fully participate in the war affected their social status by excluding them from mobilization and ushering them into a new meritocratic army, which included ethnic Americans. Cites Ettore Moretti passages from A Farewell to Arms to support his contention that The Sun Also Rises reflects Hemingway’s feelings of rivalry with ethnic minorities. Sees Jake’s “wound as a symbol of diminished manhood in the face of an implicit rejection or underappreciation by the armed forces—the tyrannical arbiter of masculinity in the era.” Concludes that while Jake rejects the army’s egalitarian teachings regarding ethnic Americans, he accepts them regarding the egalitarian treatment of women. Frequently compares The Sun Also Rises to The Great Gatsby.
Published in
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization
Date
2008
Pages
123-150
Citation
Gandal, Keith. “The Sun Also Rises and ‘Mobilization Wounds’: Emasculation, Joke Fronts, Military School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas.” In The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization, 123-50. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.