Power, Love and Self: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Power, Love and Self: Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

Shu-Yu Yang
Abstract
This paper bases on the Foucauldian power and technology of self to examine
the fluidity of power and the aesthetic of existence of the heroine, Brett Ashley, of
Earnest Hemingway’s superb novel The Sun Also Rises. While the war smashes
moral system of human world, mankind lives in the universe with wrecked value.
Brett Ashley, owing to her strong, largely independent personality and charisma, is
once tagged with “bitch” or as “Circe” or with positive view, as a “new woman”.
Her lingering among her lovers makes her break the “normalization” in conventional
masculine society. She exercises her womanly power over those men and makes
herself not a docile body normalized by manly world. However, power cannot be
possessed, in Foucauldian language. While a woman is in love, the Victorian spirits
gradually haunt her body; while woman’s is haunting, man tends to exercise his
patriarchy power to reconstruct his woman. This paper intends to discuss the
Foucauldian power that goes between man and woman and study the new woman’s
technique of self while facing the patriarchy power of reconstructing the Victorian
woman in a new woman’s body.
Keywords: Foucauldian power, technology, aesthetic of existence, technique of
self, normalization, Victorian woman
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Introduction
The Sun Also Rises, one of Hemingway’s early novels, is often interpreted as a
picture of lives of the post-war people, riddled with aimlessness, anomie and nihility.
While the First World War crumbled everything, morality and social value that used to keep the human society functional was also out of order. As result, in many a critic’s eyes, Brett Ashley, is considered as a purely “destructive force1” and living as an “eccentric”2 or a “non-womanly” woman. After being seen as "an exclusively
destructive force" (238), by Edmund Wilson, Lady Ashley cannot get rid of this tag
and Wilson’s perception, for the most part, remained...