Distancing Language - Hemingway Hills Like White Elephants

Distancing Language - Hemingway Hills Like White Elephants

Distancing Language
Like many of Ernest Hemingway’s works, “Hills Like White Elephants” is deceptive in its simplicity. Very little seems to take place in the short story at all. A couple sits at a train station in a small town in Spain waiting for the train to come and take them to Madrid. They talk and drink, and then the story ends before the train even arrives. Yet within this simple setting is a story about moral struggle and love. The unspoken reason for their trip to Madrid, an abortion, poisons and taints every word. Hemingway does not morally judge the social taboo of an abortion with this story, but rather he comments on the cold-hearted, hedonistic, selfishness of the man who was unable to hear the young woman’s voice and desire.
The story opens as the couple sits in the shade of the station cafe, deciding on what to drink to cool them down from the overbearing heat. The young woman looks across the valley at the dry, isolated hills, and comments that they look like “white elephants.” It is this initial line that suggests trouble between the couple. “The white elephant has long been a symbol of a thing that has become useless and burdensome and is an apt metaphor for their relationship” (Lid 32). The hills like white elephants also serve to remind us of the couple's conflicting views on abortion. A white elephant, in one meaning of the term, is anything rare, expensive, and difficult to keep. It is a “property requiring much care and expense and yielding little profit” (Bloom 56). This is basically how the man feels about the unwanted child. The woman’s respect for this life is captured by this meaning of the phrase. Instead of the man acknowledging her imaginative view of the hills, he instead ignores her creativeness which sparks an argument between the two. What the woman is doing is indirectly remarking that everything she has longed for seems the same and is ruined.
After their initial argument, the woman changes the subject by asking about the...