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

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.