“The Gallantry of the Aging Machine”: Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Cantwell and Masculine Aging in Modernist Literature
“The Gallantry of the Aging Machine”: Ernest Hemingway’s Colonel Cantwell and Masculine Aging in Modernist Literature

Summary/Abstract: Age, like race and gender, is a socially constructed category, and in the 20th century, American society constructed aging as a process of inevitable natural decline, typically from age fifty or so. In Ernest Hemingway’s 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees, the semi-autobiographical protagonist expresses ambivalence about his aging body and perceived mental decline in ways that echo the anxieties the author expressed privately about his own aging as well as his accompanying fear that literary modernism had also already peaked. The ageism evident in reviews of Across the River and into the Trees suggests that Hemingway was justified in his anxieties about the perceived obsolescence of literary modernism. Struggling to articulate a more positive vision of aging while simultaneously acknowledging the more negative popular view, Hemingway tries in Across the River and into the Trees to teach his readers what it feels like emotionally to grow older in a youth culture.

• Details
• Contents