Rachel Best
Ms. Robinson
Honors English III
November 15, 2007
There is No Me: Catherine Barkley
Perhaps because he was slighted by his fiancée earlier in his life, Ernest Hemingway’s book A Farewell to Arms has a marked lack of strong
female characters. The most obviously weak female is Catherine Barkley, the protagonist’s love interest. Hemingway uses Catherine as a
symbol for the modern, “independent” woman, and how she loses her sense of self in a relationship by showing how Catherine acts in relation to
other characters and occurrences. Catherine should be a strong character, but, like many women today, her need for love drives her to
suppress her individuality in order to please Frederic Henry, her lover.
Given her background and lifestyle, Catherine Barkley should be a character who stands on her own and doesn’t need to hide behind others. She is, as Rinaldi says, a “beautiful English girl,” and one of the nurses on the Italian front during World War I (13). She seems to have her own place in the nurses’ hierarchy, and she has even made a few friends, like Helen Ferguson, “her sweet Fergy” (248). Catherine left her own family back in England to take care of the soldiers injured on the front lines of battle. She is a lone female, in a country where she does not speak the language. It would be conceivable for her to be nervous, having no one familiar in the entire country, but she has completely adapted to her circumstances. Where most women, to help the war effort, would have grown gardens, bought war bonds, sewn clothes for the soldiers, or even worked in factories, she completely uprooted herself, and went to Italy. This is not the action of someone who is weak and only worries about the opinions of other people, so, given this background, her later actions are extremely surprising.
Throughout the book, there are examples of Catherine suppressing her own desires and her own individuality to please Henry. During their second meeting, Henry tries to kiss her, and although she at first slaps him back, she later says to him, “You are a dear. I’d be glad to kiss you if you don’t mind.” (27). Instead of sticking to what she originally wanted, she changes her own feelings to please Henry. Although she knows that he is often with other girls and army prostitutes, and that he does not really love her, she completely disregards this. She begs him to “keep on lying” to her (105). She would rather him tell her a lie than hear the unpleasant truth. Not too long after, she tells him, “I want what you want. There isn’t any me any more. Just what you want.” (106). Now, not only does she disregard her desires in favor of his, she says that she has no desires whatsoever, and she only feels the things he feels, and wants what he wants. Even as she lays dying, she reassures Henry, calling him a “poor darling,” and telling him that she will “come to stay with him nights.” (331). Even dying she is not worried for herself – she has been completely eclipsed by her relationship with Henry.
It is difficult to understand what could induce Catherine to lose her independence and sense of self so completely. There are, in fact, only two significant reasons for this drastic change in personality. The first is that, as a younger woman, she had a fiancée who “was killed in the Somme” (18). She wouldn’t marry him before he left, and wanted to wait until after the war. Catherine tells Henry that she was “a fool not to. I could have given him that anyway […] He could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn’t know” (19). She is afraid that by asserting herself, she lost the man she loved. She thinks that if she had just married him, and just done whatever he wanted, he would still be alive, and they would be married and happy. Her guilt over supposedly having something to do with his death contributes to her later doing whatever she can to please Henry, her new lover, and keep him in her life.
Like many women at the time of World War I, Catherine probably thinks that she needs a man in her life to love her. “I’ll love you in the rain and in the snow and in the hail… I’ll love you no matter how it is,” she tells Henry (126). She believes that if she tries to be her own person she won’t be pleasing Henry, and he will leave her. For example, while at the race track she constantly checks to see that Henry is pleased and happy, telling him, “Don’t let me spoil your fun, darling. I’ll go back whenever you want” (132). She has lost her independence so much by the time A Farewell to Arms begins that the first relationship she enters consumes her life completely.
Sadly, I see this all too often today. Vivacious women who know their own minds commence a relationship, and don’t really know what they want anymore, only what he wants. They no longer care that they are not happy, because they have “love.” They are completely twisted up, suppressed individuals, and nothing you can say can make them understand this. If they used to spend time with their friends, doing things that they enjoy, they are now spending time only with him. They no longer participate in the same activities, passing them up in favor of this boy. Much like Catherine, they should be independent. The women’s rights movement has come and supposedly left its mark, so where is it? Why are these women still afraid to be themselves?
In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s Catherine is an extremely apt symbol for the women of today. Unfortunately, we can see traces of Catherine nearly everywhere we look. Sadly, Hemingway’s ironic portrayal of women was all too accurate then as it is now. It is difficult to understand how a book written so many years ago can contain such a “backwards” example of a woman, and yet still have so much relevance for women today. Depressing as this situation is, it is a mark of a good author to have their book still relatable to society 68 years after it was written, and I suppose Ernest Hemingway would be chuckling if he know how right he is even now.
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