Self-sculpting in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden
Self-sculpting in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden

Summary/Abstract: Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published novel The Garden of Eden features arguably the strongest and most transgressive heroine in the writer’s work. Catherine Bourne replays a fear present in other novels by Hemingway and in his view of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage: she is the rich and controlling wife of a writer, whose masculinity is threatened by her financial position. Additionally, Catherine starts a series of experiments connected to gender and sexuality, testing her and her husband’s limits, and ultimately putting at risk their relationship. The paper discusses Catherine’s gender-bending practices as a form of self-expression and self-sculpting, looking for an identity beyond the limitations imposed on her by society. Her transgression is analyzed both as an aim in itself and as a means in the process of self-fashioning, in which Catherine is more determined not only than Hemingway’s other female protagonists but also than her husband David

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