Jake's Epiphany Regarding His Emasculation

The Sun Also Rises “His black hair shone under the electric light. He wore a white linen shirt and the sword-handler finished his sash and stood up and stepped back. Pedro Romero nodded, seeming very far away and dignified when we shook hands. Montoya said something about what great aficionados we were, and that we wanted to wish him luck. Romero listened very seriously. Then he turned to me. He was the best-looking boy I have ever seen.” (Hemingway 167)

Much of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises implies the emasculation of men after World War I. In previous wars, soldiers gained a sense of nobility through fighting; in this war, however, the use of new technology such as artillery shells forced soldiers to huddle together in fear of death, often leaving survival up to chance. This deprived most soldiers their sense of dignity and made them feel like lesser men, for their success in the war had little to do with bravery or physical strength. In the above quote, Jake Barnes is having an epiphany in finally realizing the insecurities about his masculinity by admiring the bullfighter Pedro Romero. Romero, just nineteen years old, is “the best-looking boy [Barnes has] ever seen.” Barnes sees him as a great, passionate aficionado who is able to look death in the eyes through his dangerous sport. He is physically beautiful.

After this realization, Barnes begins to have a sort of obsession with the young bullfighter. Romero forces Barnes to acknowledge his insecurities by so obviously being his foil. While Romero is able to face death, Barnes runs away from even the smallest of discomforts, forcing him to constantly move throughout Europe as to avoid staying in one place long enough to face any hardships. Perhaps most importantly, Brett has an obvious attraction to Romero, which she acts upon. Barnes is in love with Brett, but she refuses to be with him due to his impotency that was caused by an “accident” during the war. This, obviously, compares Romero’s masculinity to Barnes’ lack thereof. Although Barnes never states this directly, his admiration of Romero in the quote above quite clearly implies Barnes’ realization. Barnes has this epiphany because he is the narrator.

In actually, any of the male characters in the story could have had the same realization, because they all struggle with insecurities about their masculinity. Robert Cohn, for example, lets his girlfriend Frances Clyne walk all over him, and has little control whatsoever in their relationship. Bill Gorton, another friend of Barnes, tells him, “I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot” (121). Many passages throughout the novel hint at Gorton’s possible homosexuality, once again lessening his sense of masculinity. To further show the men’s weakness and unmanliness, Hemingway created his female character Brett to be more masculine than most of the men, particularly Barnes. She has short, boyish hair, often wears men’s hats, and can hold her liquor like a man. All of these components of the novel hint at the war’s emasculating of soldiers, an issue that Barnes does not acknowledge until he is in the presence of Romero. Through his epiphany regarding his lack of manliness, Barnes perhaps realizes what forces him to travel as much as he and his friends do. In order to avoid thinking about the war and what it has done to their masculinity (for example making Barnes impotent), the characters simply move from place to place and drink absurd amounts of alcohol. One can infer that at this moment, Barnes is realizing the emptiness of his traveling, and perhaps the fact that he uses it as a self-defense mechanism.