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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
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).
Nick's second choice, of course, is to identify with his father and deem her screams unimportant. While the former choice damns him to a death of the self in endless empathy, the second choice damns him to a cold isolation and instrumental rationality in which other human beings are regarded as objects rather than subjects in their own right: "You can't be mister-cool 'her screams are not important' deliverer of babies except at the cost of your own humanity" (Mansell, 148).
Nick makes his choice, of course: He will not choose to empathize with women and die, as the Indian husband did; he will reject empathy and triumph, as his father did: "In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die" (IOT, 19). In making this choice, he makes the choice that most men of his generation have made: "The story of Nick's education, so far as we have it, differs in no essential way from that of almost any middle-class American male who started life at the beginning of the present century or even with the generation of 1920" (Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, 131). After all, as Sara Ruddick points out, "The ticket to staying with men on the right side of power was objectivity, self-control, and detachment" (6). (5) But Nick pays a terrible psychological price for his decision--a price that is perhaps suggested by the fact that "in no Nick story does Hemingway show us Nick in the presence of his mother" (Flora, Hemingway's, 43).
In order to understand the cost of Nick's decision, it is first perhaps necessary to understand its psychological underpinnings. In Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, Jessica Benjamin revises Freudian psychology, which she sees as almost exclusively "intra-psychic," to offer what she terms a theory of intersubjectivity. She suggests that all human beings experience a desire for recognition--a desire for other people to recognize one's subjectivity, one's difference from them: "In the ideal balance, a person is able...
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