Citation

Tyler L. Texas Stud. Lit. Lang. 2006; 48(1): 37-53.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, University of Texas Press)

DOI

10.1353/tsl.2006.0003

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In Our Time is a work about men's responses to violence and their capacity for empathy (and I use the masculine term advisedly). It documents the ways in which what Hemingway later called "dangerous families" can "do terrible things and make intimate harm" ( A Moveable Feast, 108). "Indian Camp," the first short story in Hemingway's best collection of short stories, is a story of the "intimate harm" a father can cause a son. In rereading the story, the feminist theories of Jessica Benjamin, Nancy Chodorow, Robin Morgan, and Sara Ruddick enable us to discover new ways of looking at Nick Adams and to read this paradigmatic male's development differently than we have in the past. I also want to examine what Hemingway has to say about violence and empathy, dominance and submission, war and peace.

"Indian Camp," like several of the vignettes in In Our Time, centers on suffering, and specifically female suffering. 1 Feminist philosopher Carol J. Adams laments our culture's "somatophobia," which she defines as "a shocking hostility to the bodies of disenfranchised others—women, children, non-dominant men, and animals" (70). Hemingway shows the results of violence on precisely these disenfranchised others throughout In Our Time. The victims include the Native American woman in "Indian Camp," the crying "young girl" in chapter II, Nick Adams himself as a boy in "Indian Camp" and "The Battler," the Native American in the upper bunk in "Indian Camp," the Hungarians misidentified as "wops" in chapter VIII, the mules in "On the Quai at Smyrna," and the disemboweled white horse in chapter IX