Abstract
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes casually defines “a good place,” as somewhere where “there’s a lot of liquor” (19). “A lot of liquor” flows through much of Hemingway’s fiction, and it always produces powerful results, whether it improves social relations and brings people together or exacerbates social rifts and endangers lives. Despite the prevalence of alcohol and its importance to the characters who drink, or refuse to drink, previous literary criticism has viewed alcohol monolithically. In his 1967 publication, “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes proposes a shift in literary criticism away from biographical analysis. Yet to this day, Ernest Hemingway’s fiction continues to be haunted by criticism that is fascinated, even obsessed with his biography, especially with regard to alcohol. Almost universally, critics connect the alcohol consumed in his fiction with the alcohol he consumed during his lifetime. This pervasive biographical lens has led many critics to draw limiting conclusions in which they equate Hemingway, the man, with his fictional protagonists, without taking into account their rich complexities and motivations for drinking. In contrast, this thesis takes a cultural critical look at the role of alcohol in three of Hemingway’s novels: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, looking, in particular, at alcohol and its consumption as a form of power, using Michel Foucault’s definition of power as fluid and productive, rather than static and limiting. Alcohol signals to the reader what personal, social, and cultural power is circulating within the novel’s setting. This project also draws on a variety of historical and medical texts to better understand the constantly changing role of alcohol in the United States and abroad during the twentieth century. By observing how alcohol functions in Hemingway’s fiction and examining the culture from which each novel sprang, readers can better understand how the novels helped to define a generation, even as the novels themselves were influenced by fluctuating cultural values.