Unity in Love: Hemingway’s Ideals and Critiques of Love Relationships

A Critical Essay

Hemingway presents the love relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria in his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as more authentic than that of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in the earlier novel A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929. Both love stories begin and develop during the war, with constant risk of injury or death and with very little opportunity for seeking a different partner. The war acts as a catalyst for romance in both novels, since it isolates the couple in each story from other potential partners and other possible occupations, and the two couples share several other surrounding circumstances. Both stories feature a rapid development of the relationship, a male protagonist who has never believed in love before, a female love interest who is recovering from deep emotional disturbance, and the fusion of two separate people through love. Whereas he endorses the union between Robert Jordan and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway criticizes the idea of love as fusion in A Farewell to Arms, where Frederic and Catherine surrender themselves to become each other. While Hemingway creates the two love stories out of similar situations, he employs dialogue, diction, and the inclusion of the main character’s thoughts in each story to display the beautiful authenticity of a mutually exclusive love in For Whom the Bell Tolls and the unsettling shallow nature of a fearfully possessive love in A Farewell to Arms.

During the first entrance of Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway emphasizes the connectedness and natural attraction between Maria and Robert Jordan through the unlimited third-person point of view. Immediately, Robert Jordan notices “the strange thing about her” (22), her short cropped hair, and thinks: “She has a beautiful face…. She’d be beautiful if they hadn’t cropped her hair” (22). Next, Maria responds, “That is the way I comb it” (22). The very first interaction they have is unspoken: she understands that he notices her hair. Throughout this first meeting, both Maria and Robert Jordan are apparently self-conscious yet curious and eager to continue making contact with each other:

The girl watched him all through the meal. Every one else was watching his food and eating. Robert Jordan wiped up the last of the sauce in front of him with a piece of bread, piled the rabbit bones to one side, wiped the spot where they had been for sauce, then wiped his fork clean with the bread, wiped his knife and put it away and ate the bread. He leaned over and dipped his cup full of wine and the girl still watched him.

Robert Jordan drank half the cup of wine but the thickness still came in his throat when he spoke to the girl….

He looked at her hair, that was as thick and short and rippling when she passed her hand over it, now in embarrassment, as a grain field in the wind on a hillside. “It was shaved,” she said. (23)

Hemingway’s choice to detail Robert Jordan’s tedious actions during the meal emphasizes Maria’s choice to watch him perform the actions. Further, it suggests that Robert Jordan knows Maria watches him. By fixing his attention on his own dull activity, Robert Jordan reveals to the reader his attempts to act routinely in front of the new girl who excites him, just as earlier he is “careful not to stare and not to look away” (22) when she first appears. In this passage, it also appears that Robert Jordan drinks the wine in an effort to clear the effects Maria has on his body: he drinks the wine, “but the thickness still came in his throat when he spoke to the girl.” While carefully maintaining Robert Jordan’s perspective, Hemingway showcases Maria’s similar self-consciousness and her efforts to normalize the situation from the awkwardness they both feel. She passes her hand over her head “now in embarrassment” and tries to compensate for her lack of hair by explaining what happened to it. Hemingway crafts this meeting scene to subtly show how each person is affected by the other at first sight yet also how each feels very self-aware in the other’s presence.

The sense of unity between Robert Jordan and Maria is so encapsulating and exclusive that when Anselmo breaks into the conversation between them to thank Maria for a compliment, “Robert Jordan realized suddenly that he and the girl were not alone and he realized too that it was hard for him to look at her because it made his voice change so” (24). Hemingway depicts an aura of attraction so strong that it enables Robert Jordan, a “Very scientific” (7), “serious” (7) man who is “very preoccupied with [his] work” (91), to lose awareness of his surroundings and focus only on his interactions with Maria. Robert Jordan then purposely decides to abandon one of the principles by which he usually works: “He was violating the second rule of the two rules…; give the men tobacco and leave the women alone; and he realized, very suddenly, that he did not care” (24). Robert Jordan continues to, quite forwardly, compliment Maria’s beauty and question her availability and role in the band. Hemingway has already depicted Robert Jordan as a serious, driven dynamiter; by compromising his working values to exhibit his interest in Maria, Robert Jordan indicates that simply meeting Maria has imposed a change on him. Robert Jordan’s body and mindset respond to Maria.

Hemingway’s use of dialogue clarifies that Robert Jordan is not motivated by sex in his advances towards Maria but, rather, that he feels a direct attraction to her in some larger sense:

“Whose woman are you?” Robert Jordan asked, trying not to pull out of it. “Are you Pablo’s?”

She looked at him and laughed, then slapped him on the knee.

“Of no one,” the gypsy said….

“Really of no one?” Robert Jordan asked her.

“Of no one. No one. Neither in joke nor in seriousness. Nor of thee either.”

“No?…Good. I have no time for any woman. That is true.”

“Not fifteen minutes?” the gypsy asked teasingly. “Not a quarter of an hour?” Robert Jordan did not answer. He looked at the girl, Maria, and his throat felt too thick for him to trust himself to speak.

Maria looked at him and laughed, then blushed suddenly but kept on looking at him.

“You are blushing,” Robert Jordan said to her. “Do you blush much?”

“Never.”

“You are blushing now.”

“Then I will go into the cave.” (24-25)

Robert Jordan concentrates on Maria, “trying not to pull out of it” when the gypsy Rafael tries to lighten the conversation with jokes. This phrase also suggests a thick physical connection that both partners experience; he could “pull out of” the aura that exists between them but chooses to stay in it with her. Rafael interjects again to suggest that Robert Jordan only needs “fifteen minutes” or “a quarter of an hour” for a sexual experience with Maria, but Robert Jordan retains his concentration and looks at her without interruption or relief from his direct connection with her. Both Maria and Robert Jordan express verbally their disinterest in a formal relationship with each other. She clarifies that she is not his woman, and he asserts that he cannot have a woman; however, despite their sensible hesitance, they both emotionally and physically cannot keep the love from developing. Hemingway demonstrates a natural, uncontrollable love beyond human control through the irrepressible physical effects on the partners’ bodies; Robert Jordan’s thickness in the throat keeps him from speaking, and Maria exits for her inability to keep from blushing.

By granting the reader access to Robert Jordan’s thoughts, Hemingway aims to highlight the presence of Maria as a powerful force on him; even just thinking about her effectuates difficult physical sensations. While walking with Anselmo, Robert Jordan uses Maria to keep himself from worrying. After telling himself to “Think about something else” (43), he thinks about her:

Smooth it would be, all of her body smooth, and she moved awkwardly as though there were something of her and about her that embarrassed her as though it were visible, though it was not, but only in her mind. And she blushed when he looked at her, and she sitting, her hands clasped around her knees and the shirt open at the throat, the cup of her breasts uptilted against the shirt, and as he thought of her, his throat was choky and there was a difficulty in walking and he and Anselmo spoke no more…. (44)

Robert Jordan considers physical aspects of Maria that could be sexually alluring, such as “her body smooth” and her “breasts uptilted against the shirt,” as well as qualities linked to her personality, character, and past experiences. He considers, for instance, her awkward movements and attributes them to “something of her and about her that embarrassed her”; he is interested in her past and how she sees herself. He also thinks of the way “she blushed when he looked at her,” which signifies his effect on her; this thought reveals Robert Jordan’s consideration of Maria’s feelings towards him. The idea that Maria is affected and excited by him, too, further excites Robert Jordan.

Likewise, Frederic Henry, in A Farewell to Arms, contemplates his love interest Catherine Barkley, but Hemingway’s exposition of Frederic’s thoughts uncovers his sexually motivated, shallow desire for Catherine. He thinks about visiting her after supper one night, which starts him on a series of thoughts about potential plans with her:

I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like to…go to the hotel with Catherine Barkley. Maybe she would…pretend that I was her boy that was killed and we would go in the front door…and the [hotel service] boy would knock and I would say leave it outside the door please. Because we would not wear any clothes because it was so hot and the window open…and the door locked and it hot and only a sheet and the whole night and we would both love each other all night in the hot night in Milan. That was how it ought to be. (37-38)

Frederic’s wishes for an ideal future with Catherine—“how it ought to be”—are no more than an erotic dream; he visualizes no clothes but “only a sheet” and loving “each other all night.” Perversely, part of this ideal night is Catherine’s “pretend[ing]” that he is the fiancée she has lost in the war. Hemingway exhibits Frederic’s lack of concern about Catherine’s love for him to suggest Frederic’s own lack of preference for Catherine. More importantly, the author distances himself from Frederic through his disturbing ideal; Hemingway includes passages such as this to expose the corrupt relationship and to alert readers to be wary of Frederic and Catherine’s later professed love. Each partner fills a void in the other’s life; however, far from completing each other, Frederic and Catherine almost randomly select each other to occupy that space.

Since the reader cannot view Catherine’s thoughts, Hemingway exposes Catherine’s similarly strange, perverse attachment to Frederic through dialogue and diction suggestive of her mental instability. The second time Frederic meets Catherine, after he first accompanies Rinaldi on a visit to see her, Frederic compares his time with her to “a chess game” (26), continuously planning “the moves” (26) and trying “to open her lips” (27). While he clearly focuses on his sexual aims, disregarding “what the stakes were” (31), Catherine conveys her long-term plans with him: “‘You will [be good to me], won’t you?’ She looked up at me. ‘Because we’re going to have a strange life’” (27). Hemingway places Catherine’s foreboding message too early in the relationship for it to seem endearing or genuine; instead, the message that they will “have a strange life” confuses and perturbs Frederic, as he thinks: “What the hell” (27) in response, a loaded phrase that can be interpreted two ways. Frederic’s reaction could also signify his willingness to continue seeing a woman who “was probably a little crazy” (30). The exchange of feelings in this scene evokes unsettling feelings about the relationship in general, not just about Catherine, to the reader.

Hemingway presents the reader with Catherine’s impossible wish to replace her deceased fiancée with Frederic to indicate that she, like Frederic, is interested in filling a selfish need but not necessarily invested in the other person holistically. Catherine asks Frederic on their second visit to say scripted sentences about returning to her, which, upon first reading, could seem to refer to Frederic’s return for a second date. Later in the conversation, however, Catherine’s return “from wherever she had been” (31) mentally allows Hemingway to communicate the true meaning of her requests: “I had a very fine little show and I’m all right now. You see I’m not mad and I’m not gone off. It’s only a little sometimes…. It sounds very funny now—Catherine. You don’t pronounce it very much alike” (31). She openly compares Frederic’s pronunciation of her name to the way her late lover said it. She also admits to having “a little [madness] sometimes.” Strangely, this episode does not bother Frederic; he thinks, “It was all right if she was [crazy]…. This was better than going every evening to the house for officers” (31) for sexual satisfaction. Through Frederic’s thoughts and Catherine’s ramblings, Hemingway exhibits the self-motivated desires of both partners in this early stage of their relationship.

Although Frederic reflects, “I knew I did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her” (31) during their initial courtship, he proclaims his true love for her when she first arrives at the hospital where he is wounded; Hemingway suggests that, while Frederic seems to believe in his love’s validity, Frederic deceives himself in thinking he loves Catherine, just as Catherine more blatantly deceives herself into loving Frederic in place of her lost fiancée. After losing the ability to walk indefinitely and nearly losing his leg, Frederic is in an unfamiliar place with no support. Just before Catherine enters, Frederic “bitterly” (91) mocks the porter for finding humor in a barber who just shaved Frederic mistakenly thinking Frederic was on the enemy’s side in the war—the barber wanted to kill Frederic while holding a razor to his throat, which Frederic did not find funny at all. Hemingway presents Catherine’s entrance directly after this angering and embittering incident to underline the contrast Catherine offers to Frederic from his otherwise pitiful fate in the hospital. He admits to being “crazy about her” (93) and immediately pleads for sexual contact. Hemingway’s dialogue in this scene highlights the selfishness of Frederic’s love for Catherine, as she refuses several times before appeasing him. In addition, the word choice of “crazy” to express Frederic’s new, intense passion links his love for Catherine with insanity, just as Catherine’s love for him stems from her mental instability. Frederic feels love for the way Catherine can satisfy him, sexually or even simply by transferring to his hospital to care for him; he does not feel love for her character.

After establishing their reciprocated love, Hemingway characterizes the relationship between Frederic and Catherine through jealousy, possessiveness, and fear of losing each other to exhibit the self-concern of both partners; although each partner seems to believe these fears stem from love, Hemingway frames the lovers to be primarily concerned with their possession of each other. Frederic worries about Catherine’s ability to sustain her love for him, asking if she will ever leave him “for some one else” (116) and even mentioning her deceased lover as evidence for her potential to love others. Hemingway shows us, through Frederic’s falling in love with Catherine after nearly losing his leg, that Frederic worries about her love for him ending because he fears loss ever since his injury. He is concerned about retaining possession more than about being with someone whom he values. Moreover, Catherine gets “furious if [the other nurses] touch” (103) Frederic, and she prefers that he lie to her about his past to keep even the thoughts of other women out of the relationship: “‘How many have you—how do you say it?—stayed with?’ / ‘None.’ / ‘You’re lying to me.’ / ‘Yes.’ / ‘It’s all right. Keep right on lying to me. That’s what I want you to do’” (104-05). Catherine prefers to delude herself—by pretending that Frederic is her long-term boyfriend reincarnated and that Frederic has had no other romantic experiences—to maintain comfort in the relationship, while Frederic commands loyalty, repeatedly questioning whether she will leave him and requesting that she “Come to the bed again” (106).

Hemingway criticizes the notion of love as fusion through Frederic and Catherine’s abandonment of their own identities in an effort to become one in each other. When Frederic discusses marriage with Catherine, she contends that marriage is unnecessary because they “couldn’t be any more married” (115) already: “There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me” (115). Marriage is the physical and social representation of a union between two people, but Catherine’s argument goes beyond union into a bizarre loss of her own self. Hemingway hints at Catherine’s mental instability again as she insists that she is Frederic. Later, she calls him her “religion” (116), which is similarly so intense that it suggests a distorted dependency rather than a wholesome admiration. Frederic submits to this manner of thinking about their relationship as it develops further throughout the novel. After abandoning his duties in the war and escaping with Catherine to Switzerland, he acknowledges to her, “We’re the same one” (299). He also admits to having lost sense of his identity apart from her: “I’m no good when you’re not there. I haven’t any life at all anymore” (300). Hemingway connects the idea of love as fusion with desolation and separation from the rest of the world, which causes the pitiful reliance on each other.

Nevertheless, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway complicates the idea of love as fusion to display an ideal union between two lovers, very much unlike the unsettling dependency in A Farewell to Arms. As Robert Jordan and Maria walk through the mountain meadow, they engage in an intimate activity that Hemingway describes implicitly:

He…kissed her…and felt her breasts against his chest through the two khaki shirts, …and he reached and undid the buttons on her shirt and bent and kissed her and she stood shivering…. Then she dropped her chin to his head and then he felt her hands holding his head and rocking it against her….

She…slipped her hand inside of his shirt and he felt her undoing the shirt buttons and she said, “You, too. I want to kiss, too.”

“No, little rabbit.”

“Yes. Yes. Everything as you.”

“Nay. That is an impossibility.” (158-59)

Hemingway’s description implies that Frederic kisses Maria’s breasts. Maria desires to reciprocate the action by kissing Frederic’s chest, which would signify more than simply reciprocation but an interchangeability of sexual roles. Hemingway does not allow these two lovers to swap roles or become each other, as Frederic and Catherine try to do. Instead, Robert Jordan draws a boundary, calling Maria’s desire to kiss his chest “an impossibility.” Later, Maria confesses, “I would be thee because I love thee so” (263) to Robert Jordan. Again, Hemingway has Robert Jordan restrict this type of thinking: “It is better to be one and each one to be the one he is” (263). In the ideal relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria, Hemingway presents a oneness in which each partner retains a separate identity; he suggests that healthy love requires the joining of two different beings, much unlike the abandoning of self that Frederic and Catherine exemplify.

The emotional union between Robert Jordan and Maria occurs before their first sexual involvement, which bespeaks its sincerity. After Robert Jordan discloses that his father committed suicide, Maria believes that he and she have a special connection. She explains that they “are the same” (68) and believes “it is clear” (68) now why she has felt connected—her father was shot for being a “Republican” (350) mayor by “Falangists” (353). Robert Jordan, though he does not respond verbally to this idea of union, runs “his hand over the top of her head…. Then his hand was on her neck and then he dropped it” (68). Robert Jordan plays his part in the emotional union by physically joining his hand to her head and neck. In case the reader misinterprets this physical action as purely sexually driven and lustful contact, Hemingway offers Pilar’s reaction to viewing it: “I am expected to watch all this? I am expected not to be moved? One cannot” (68). Her words carry a sense of the union that is already occurring between Robert Jordan and Maria, a union so powerful that it can “move” an onlooker and cause Maria, just as it has previously caused Robert Jordan, to take “no notice” (68) of bystanders.

Surrounding characters take notice of the relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria, both enabling and supporting it; Hemingway communicates a healthy, sound love in For Whom the Bell Tolls through this openness of the relationship to outsiders. The two lovers lose sense of their surroundings when they are near each other, openly displaying their affection for one another:

[Maria] watched him come toward her, her eyes bright, the blush again on her cheeks and throat.

“Hello, little rabbit,” he said and kissed her on the mouth. She held him tight to her and looked in his face and said, “Hello. Oh, hello. Hello.”

Fernando, still sitting at the table smoking a cigarette, stood up, shook his head and walked out, picking up his carbine from where it leaned against the wall.

“It is very unformal,: he said to Pilar. “And I do not like it. You should take care of the girl.”

“I am,” said Pilar. “That comrade is her novio.”

“Oh,” said Fernando. “In that case, since they are engaged, I encounter it to be perfectly normal.” (92)

Robert Jordan no longer worries about how he might appear to the Spanish people for engaging with one of their women; he loves Maria purely and cannot let his manners or principles obstruct his love for her. Fernando initially disapproves, mistaking Robert Jordan’s actions as corruptive, as he tells Pilar to “take care of” her. However, after Pilar endorses the relationship as courtship, Fernando supports their behavior, as she does, as “perfectly normal.” Robert Jordan feels anger and is “as full of hate as any man could be” (353) when he hears about the men who violated Maria, and Maria questions Robert Jordan about his sexual history with other women, but Hemingway portrays the two as having no room for jealousy in their relationship: Maria acknowledges that Robert Jordan “must have known very many [women]” (344), but Robert Jordan reminds her, “Not to love them” (344). Each is too focused on the love for the other that neither can stop to fear outsiders breaking them up. Of course, there is minimal competition for either partner in their present situation, being isolated with the small band of guerillas; either way, Hemingway presents this blindness to, or lack of, competitors as an aspect of an ideal relationship.

Hemingway furnishes the first sexual encounter between Robert Jordan and Maria primarily through dialogue, stressing the interchange and equality between the two characters, but also through abstract, stream-of-consciousness-style description; in doing so, Hemingway allows the reader to witness the strange, complex, sometimes contradictory feelings Robert Jordan experiences. Once Maria enters the robe to join Robert Jordan, the two calmly and gently argue about making further physical contact, until Maria says, “I must not. If thou dost not love me” (69). He professes to love her, but Robert Jordan’s point of view evidences the profession. With their nakedness, “all that before had been shielded was unshielded” (70), leading Robert Jordan to feel a Maria’s body, “cool outside and warm within, long and light and closely holding, closely held, lonely, hollow-making with contours, happy-making, young and loving…with a hollowing, chest-aching, tight-held loneliness that was such that…he could not stand it” (70). He is overwhelmed by sensations—both “warm” and “cool,” “hollow-making” and “happy-making.” Hemingway offers these confusing descriptions of Maria to convey the overpowering effect she has on Robert Jordan. Likewise, Robert Jordan’s sensations of “closely holding, closely held” show his acknowledgment of his actions on Maria and of Maria’s actions on him. Hemingway emphasizes the reciprocation between them.

Further, a shift occurs in Robert Jordan during this first sexual scene that strengthens the meaning of their sexual unity. Robert Jordan’s overwhelming sensations abruptly halt when Maria confesses, “But things were done to me” (71); after telling Robert Jordan this, “something…happened to him and she knew it” (71). Hemingway allows Robert Jordan to hesitate in his love for Maria: the reference to Maria’s past sexual abuse draws him out of his passion for her and forces him to view her in her entirety, as a wounded and recovering victim, instead of as an object for himself. He attests to his love for her and that “no one has done anything” (71) to her—that “they cannot touch” (71) and that “No one has touched” (71) her. Hemingway provides this pause in the love scene to enforce the authenticity of the love. Rather than quick and shallow, it is tested, slowed, and verified: “and then, suddenly, holding her against him, he was happier than he had ever been, lightly, lovingly, exultingly, innerly happy and unthinking and untired and unworried and only feeling a great delight” (72). This sudden discovery of inner happiness marks Robert Jordan’s full recognition of his love for Maria. The two are united, and the sexual intercourse that follows is almost an afterthought to their union: “‘And now let us do quickly what it is we do so that the other is all gone.’ / ‘You want?’ / ‘Yes,’ she said almost fiercely. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’” (73). They consummate their relationship in order to erase Maria’s traumatic past. At this moment, unlike the outset of the scene, both partners are equally eager to make sexual contact, which joins them emotionally while they connect physically.

Ernest Hemingway’s employment of dialogue, diction, and the main character’s thoughts illuminate the credibility and stability of Robert Jordan and Maria’s love relationship in For Whom the Bell Tolls while exposing his criticism of the possessive, deluded love between Frederic and Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. The two novels share many plot characteristics, such as the setting in war, the rapid development of the love relationship, a male protagonist who initially has no belief in love, and a traumatized female lover. Hemingway addresses the idea of love as fusion, advocating for the union of two people who retain separate identities and admire each other, and censuring the melding of two people into each other by surrendering their separate identities. Robert Jordan and Maria represent Hemingway’s ideal romantic relationship, one in which each partner affects and esteems the other but remains independent, while Frederic and Catherine exemplify the disorder and delusion of a possessive, selfish love. These two novels exhibit the nuances of Hemingway’s ideas about unity and love between people. Even for one author, opinions on these complicated ideas seem to vary greatly from 1929 to 1940.