Cassandra’s Daughters: The Women in Hemingway

Roger Whitlow demonstrates that the negative criticism about the women characters in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction is often misguided, perhaps entirely wrong. He argues that most of Hemingway’s female characters have strengths that have been consistently overlooked by critics prejudiced by earlier Hemingway criticism or influenced in their evaluations by the male characters with whom Hemingway’s women often associate. For example, Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms and Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls have been uniformly typed passive sex kittens, when, in fact, each is engaged in a serious struggle to retain her mental balance. Whitlow reexamines Hemingway’s critically acclaimed bitches such as Brett Ashley and Margot Macomber. He ends his reassessment with a chapter devoted to the minor women in Hemingway’s Up in Michigan series and other short stories.