"Dangerous families" and "intimate harm" in Hemingway's "Indian Camp".(Ernest Hemingway)(Critical essay)

In Our Time is a work about men's responses to violence and their capacity for empathy (and I use the masculine term advisedly). It documents the ways in which what Hemingway later called "dangerous families" can "do terrible things and make intimate harm" (A Moveable Feast, 108). "Indian Camp," the first short story in Hemingway's best collection of short stories, is a story of the "intimate harm" a father can cause a son. In rereading the story, the feminist theories of Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Robin Morgan, and Sara Ruddick enable us to discover new ways of looking at Nick Adams and to read this paradigmatic male's development differently than we have in the past. I also want to examine what Hemingway has to say about violence and empathy, dominance and submission, war and peace.

"Indian Camp," like several of the vignettes in In Our Time, centers on suffering, and specifically female suffering. (1) Feminist philosopher Carol J. Adams laments our culture's "somatophobia," which she defines as "a shocking hostility to the bodies of disenfranchised others--women, children, non-dominant men, and animals" (70). Hemingway shows the results of violence on precisely these disenfranchised others throughout In Our Time. The victims include the Native American woman in "Indian Camp," the crying "young girl" in chapter II, Nick Adams himself as a boy in "Indian Camp" and "The Battler," the Native American in the upper bunk in "Indian Camp," the Hungarians misidentified as "wops" in chapter VIII, the mules in "On the Quai at Smyrna," and the disemboweled white horse in chapter IX. As the aptly named Adams explains, "Instead of the glorification of anonymous death in massive numbers that we encounter in heroic war writings, the connections between the abuse of animals and the abuse of women remind us of the specific embodiedness and agonizing painfulness of every single death" (79).

What Hemingway seems to be suggesting in In Our Time is that men's characters are determined, in part, by their responses to human and animal suffering, and (in "Indian Camp") especially women's suffering, a conviction that many feminists share. Such a sensibility to suffering is also, of course, biblical and Judeo-Christian: "[R]ighteousness [in the sight of God] is consistently defined by the prophets, and in the psalms and gospels, as a willingness to care for the most vulnerable people in a culture, characterized in ancient Israel as orphans, widows, resident aliens, and the poor" (Norris, 96). In Hemingway's twentieth-century world, one's responses to the suffering of women (and, perhaps, to the suffering of children, war refugees, and animals, images of which are closely linked in his writings to the suffering of women (2)) similarly reveal one's capacity for humanity.

"Indian Camp," which Hemingway himself rightly rated as one of the best in the collection, dramatizes what is apparently the young Nick Adams's first confrontation with profound personal suffering. He witnesses his physician father successfully perform a makeshift Caesarean section, with neither anesthesia nor proper equipment, on a Native American woman whose labor is no longer progressing because her unborn child is in a breech position. Nick then accidentally witnesses the discovery of her husband's abrupt and unexpected suicide when the doctor belatedly checks on the father.

The story thus presents Nick with two alternatives for responding to women's suffering--and the suffering in this story is once again clearly gendered suffering. The first alternative is to empathize with the woman--specifically, with the (literal) mother--as the Indian's husband chooses to do. He empathizes with her so thoroughly that he can no longer bear her pain and ends his life. (3) Hemingway makes it quite clear that it is her suffering that troubles the man. Nick asks whether the doctor could give her something to make her stop screaming, and the husband's last movement in the story occurs immediately after the doctor's response:

 
  "No. I haven't any anaesthetic," his father said. "But her screams are 
  not important. I don't hear them because they are not important." The 
  husband in the upper bunk rolled over against the wall. (IOT, 16) 

Like Nick himself, who later in In Our Time tends to say nothing when he disagrees with what he is being told, (4) the Indian makes his disagreement with the white doctor subtly clear. As her husband and (arguably) the father of the unborn child, he, at least, believes her screams are important; so, too, do the other men of his community, who find them significant enough to avoid: "The men had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made" (IOT, 16).