A Reflection on Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"

As long as humanity has existed, the males of the species have been, unintentionally or otherwise, getting the females pregnant, and despite its technological advances, the 20th century was no exception. Hemingway's 1927 story "Hills Like White Elephants" captures just such a situation. The story takes the form mostly of a dialogue, though it begins with a note describing "this side" of the valley of the Ebro River in Spain. On "this side", in the patio of a bar at a railway junction, an American and a girl whom he has nicknamed "Jig" argue about something that appears to be bothering both of them a good deal. Through the skillful withholding of information in combination with its sparing provision, Hemingway gradually allows the reader to understand that what the man and his girlfriend are fighting over is the fate of the unborn child within the womb of the girl, and just as much, the quality and kind of their relationship. Essentially, the man wants his partner to have an abortion, alluded to in the setting on this side of the valley, a side on which nothing lives and grows.

The girl, however, has eyes for the other side of the valley, a place bristling with the symbols of fertility: grain, trees, and rainclouds. She has the imagination to envision a happy future as the wife of the man she loves, and as the mother of his child. While the man looks at her, she looks to the fertile side of the valley and pleads for a family life with the man she has loved.

This man is not portrayed sympathetically. He is spiritually short-sighted and near-sighted, as well as highly manipulative. The man looks up the tracks, the narrator reports, but cannot see the train. He sees only the dry side of the valley, not the fertile side. It may be that he has never even tried to understand what the pregnancy has meant to his girlfriend. Worst of all, his no pressure pressure that he exerts on her in order to manipulate her into having an abortion against her wishes loses almost all the respect of the reader. It may be that the man has good reasons for desiring an abortion, but Hemingway's description of him infers that he is a villain, though an accidental one; he not an evil man, but is nonetheless so self-centered that he cannot see forest, much less the leaves. In the end, the man will both win and lose: the girl will have the abortion, but having seen how selfish the man is, she will break up with him and be the wiser and the stronger for it.

The story was controversial in 1927, but for contemporary readers, the story remains a disquieting one. At the most basic level, the way the man treats the girl is revolting. But the readers of western countries today have another problem, for most of them are likely to see abortion not as the killing of an unborn child, but as an important tool for women's health and reproductive freedom. Furthermore, unlike the Catholic Church, once dominant in Spain, most would agree that sex nowadays serves primarily a recreational or relational rather than procreational function. Thus, the man's advocating of abortion is actually the means that will save the woman from what would obviously have been a disastrous marriage.

And so we come full-circle: human life in most cultures has never been free of the problems associated with reproducing babies and maintaining social status. It is easy for us to criticize the man for knocking up the girl and getting her pregnant without the slightest intention of marrying her. Similarly, it is possible to criticize the girl for being too trusting, and too accepting of an archaic code of moral conduct. Yet while Hemingway permits us to criticize the two characters--in fact, he invites us to do so--in describing them he holds up to us a mirror in which we see ourselves. The deliberately-unnamed characters are Everyman and Everywoman, you and I, in fact, caught in an ageless predicament. In a bright new era of latex condoms and morning-after pills, it would be wrong for us to simply condemn the two characters and put our hopes solely in advanced reproductive technologies. These are valuable, but let us value at least as much as these, if not more, empathy, truth, and mutual respect--three properties that no relationship can have too much of. That, and only that, is the path towards what one pop song once called "sexual healing."