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Wednesday, 25 October 2017

Paper- 10 Santiago and Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in ‘The Old Man and Sea’

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Prepared by    : Komal Shahedapuri

Roll No             : 14

Paper -10       : The American Literature

M.A (English):  Sem -3

Enrollment No: 2069108420170027

Batch                :  2016-18

Email     ID        : komaltara1311@gmail.com

Submitted to   :  Smt .S. B Gardi , Department of  English,
                             M.K Bhavnagar  University                                                                                                                                                                   
Topic:  Santiago and Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in ‘The Old Man and Sea’                                                                                          
                                                                                                By Susan F. Beegel
Preface
      
            Earnest Hemingway was an American novelist, short story writer and journalist. He produced most of his work between the mid- 1920s and mid-1950s, won Nobel Prize in literature in 1954 , it was for “his mastery  of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ and  before two years  he won Pulitzer Prize in 1952. He published seven novels, six short stories collections and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American Literature. His writing style was shaped ‘in reaction to experience of world war’. After WWI he and other modernists “lost faith in the central institutions of western civilization” by reacting against the elaborate style of 19th century writers and by creating a style “in which meaning is established through dialogue, through action and silences, a fiction in which nothing crucial. Hemingway called his style the Iceberg Theory, the facts float above the water, supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight. (wikipedia)

The Old Man and the Sea
                           
                                                       Related image
         
                      Hemingway has written this novella (short novel) in 1951 and published in 1952. It was last major work of fiction that was published during his lifetime, it was one of his most famous works which tells the story of Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba. (Wikipedia)

Eco-Feminism

                                           Image result for eco feminism
   
          Any of a wide range of theories, some of which argue that feminism is no longer relevant to today’s society or that feminism needs to be extended to fit the changing expectations and experiences of women since feminism’s inception. Eco- Feminism is a special lance of viewing Feminism. The earth is matriarchal and Nature also called Mother Nature, a word ‘Her’ used for Nature. However the society is driven by Men. While in agriculture women are backbone of  the development of rural and national economics. In Africa, 80% of the agricultural production comes from small farmers, who are mostly rural women. Though, phallic symbol that Farmer (men) known as Father or Old Man(destroyer), Earth consider as  mother and farmer(men) destroy the land or Marlin here.(women)

‘Eco-Feminism is a philosophical and political  theory and movement which combines with feminist ones, regarding both as resulting from male domination of society.’  

Nature and Femininity

       Eco-feminism was a term coined in the 1970s that links feminism with ecology. Its advocates say that paternalistic/capitalistic society has led to a harmful split between Nature and Culture. Early eco-feminists propagated that split can only be healed by the feminine instinct for nurture and holistic knowledge of nature’s processes. Modern Eco feminism focuses more on international questions, such as how the nature-culture split enables the oppression of female and nonhuman bodies. There is one article on this, ‘Is Female to male as Nature is to Culture?’ by Sherry Ortner, in which she offers us an explanation to why women have been universally considered to be second-rate to men throughout the history, by arguing that women’s subordinate status is a result of the human mindset that human culture is superior to nature, that culture subduing nature. Ortner theorizes that women’s body and psychology are perceived as symbolically identifiable with nature, while men are more associated with culture, thus resulting in the women being considered inferior to men.  

Image result for Santiago and Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in ‘The Old Man and Sea’ Image result for Santiago and Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in ‘The Old Man and Sea’
Santiago and Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar

              This is written in a form of an article by Susan, begins with what Leslie A. Fiedler wrote that “Hemingway is always less embarrassing when he is not attempting to deal with women” and he returns with relief to that “safe” American Romance of the boy and old man. Like Leslie, most of the critics of this novella overlook the fact that The Old Man and the Sea has powerful feminine persona in a title role. Hemingway always tells us that Santiago “always thought of the sea as La Mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometime those who love her say bad things of her but they always said as though she were a woman.”  If the novella is an ‘American Romance’, it is not the love story of the Old man and Manolin but of the Old man and the Sea.

        In The Old Man and the Sea, sea possesses powerful female qualities. Upon reading the novella, it noted the strong relationship that Santiago had with the sea and, in a work with few central characters, the sea stood out not only as a setting but as a character as well. The sea functions as a home for Santiago as well as a companion while he sets out on the long voyage to bring the marlin back to the shores. The sea and Santiago form a special bond, which Hemingway captures in the strongest piece of textual evidence that I could find confirming the sea as having a female gender. (Zabala)
                 The Old Man and the Sea (1952) reveal the masculine anxieties that Santiago experience respectively. The relationship between a gender indeterminate sea and the Santiago highlights the man’s anxieties about masculinity due to the strict gender binaries imposed by society. He although described by many critics as “stoic” and the “classic Hemingway hero,” display discomfort by having to ascribe to a masculine ideal of tough, sexual, aggressive, bread-winner, etc. The multi-gendered sea reveals Santiago’s anxiety about masculinity in that he tailor the sea’s gender according to their experiences at sea. Hemingway has a multi-gendered sea as a character in his works because Hemingway’s characters refer to the sea as both male and female. Beegel is a thoughtful argument as to why the sea could be gendered female, but she exclusively labels the sea as female. Beegel indicates that Hemingway “genders the sea as feminine throughout the text”. By contrast, Thomas Strychacz remarks that a masculine sea provides Santiago with a challenge Hemingway’s Theater of Masculinity, which provides an equally powerful argument, but he, like Beegel, assumes a reductive understanding of gender. Santiago associates himself with the sea. In calling the marlin brother, Santiago notes that the sea does have a masculine quality. (Zabala)

       But Beegel in this article gendered sea as female, when we see sea as the character equal to Santiago, we see how Hemingway using the rich tapestry of images drawn from mythology, religion, folklore, marine natural history and literature that genders sea as feminine throughout the text which raising the key question about right relationship between man and nature. Hemingway argues that the true sin is masculinizing nature. Examining the role played by feminine sea in this story reveal that it has strong ecological ethic. (Beegel)
      
          Santiago genders sea early in the novella by saying that ‘she is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly’, this moment can say that Santiago always thought of sea as La Mar. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. Sea’s connection to a spiritual and biological principle of the Eternal Feminine. He invokes the ancient personification of the moon as a feminine principle in nature, the monthly lunar changes affecting both the tides of the sea and the woman’s cycle of fecundity or menstruation period. Santiago knows the maternal, womblike space the fisherman call “the great well”. He also experience the sea as matrix when he looks at plankton and feels happy because it means fish:
          
                    The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple.
                    As he looked down into it he saw the red sifting of the plankton
                    in the dark water and feels happy so much because it means fish.
            
           The sea, Herman Melville reminds us in Moby-Dick, has its ‘submarine bridal chambers, Santiago is well aware. To him “a great island of Sargasso weed  that heed and swung in the light sea” looks “as though the ocean were making love with something under a blanket.
            
         Asked in a class how Hemingway’s seemingly simple and objective prose could achieve such a poetic quality in The Old Man and the Sea, woman student gave this explanation: “it’s the difference between a man taking a photograph of a woman and a man taking a photograph a woman he loves.”Throughout the novella, the images selected to represents la mar establish that she is indeed ‘very beautiful’ and that Santiago is a lover, engaged in what marlin not only his brother , but suffers as Santiago himself suffers.
      
        Ethical Killing, Santiago kills marlin because it is the source of fool as he said ‘it is bread of children so long as the killing is followed by eating, the act of communication, of sharing the blood of life. The Old Man and the Sea lacks a fully developed ecological ethic, because Santiago perceives some creatures of the sea, such as sharks and poisonous jellyfish as ‘enemies’.    
         
      Hemingway’s work “is deeply imbued with a theatrical fashioning of manhood,” as he too focuses on Santiago’s treatment of the sea before his encounter with the marlin . Prior to Santiago’s meeting with the marlin, Santiago notices a creature floating in the water known as the Portuguese Man-of-War. At this time, Santiago alters the sea and all “her” parts as feminine, as he does not exhibit any anxiety. As Santiago describes the creature, the audience learns that Santiago holds much disdain for the creature as he equates the creature with a “whore” and calls it “the falsest thing in the sea” (Hemingway 35-6). Obviously, his “chest pounding masculinity” comes in to play as Santiago uses a misogynist term to refer to a portion of the sea. (Zabala)

      Santiago rejects those who masculinizing the sea. But against his view of Mother Sea as a beautiful, kindly and generous feminine provider/giver, he sets an opposing view of feminine nature as cruel and chaotic. Here we see that Santiago includes the feminine principles of “women” and “wife” with “storms” and “great fish”. When Santiago thinks “the moon affects her as it does a woman”, he betrays male fear of female power, of the menstruous or monstrous woman whose wildness and wickedness challenges his rationalism and control, and whose cruelty provokes his attempts at dominance.
        
      Santiago believes that in his great love for and understanding of la mar, he has accepted    “everything that goes with” her femininity. The text violates Santiago’s sin is both unnecessary and direct result of the “masculine” thinking. The arrival of Mako (powerful shark) as a grim reminder that marlin, shark, and man all predators are brothers, children of the same mother. Yet ‘the shadow of the shark is the shadow of the death”, as Peter Matthiessen has observed that when Santiago sees the Mako, he curses the mother – ‘Dentuso, he thought bad luck to your mother’ and who is the Mother of Sharks if not la mar? Santiago assaults the shadow of death “without hope but with resolution and complete malignancy”. His rebellion against death  from the start of the novella , underlain his quest for the marlin.

Cyclical nature

         If Santiago believes in the sea as both friend and enemy, cradle and grave, life and death and accepts her cycles, the he may partake in the natural consolation of Ecclesiastes revised; “One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the abideth forever”. The pagan and the naturalist both draw spiritual comfort from material immorality in the Eternal Feminine. Claire Rosenfeld calls a “spiritual kinship”, the sea as wife and mother joins them (old man and Manolin) as father and son.

        Hemingway highlights Santiago’s failure as a fisherman as Santiago returns with nothing but the marlin’s skeleton in the end ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. As a fisherman, Santiago must be successful at fishing in order to fulfill his role in society. It shows his dominance over the feminine sea by using misogynist terminology.  

Works Cited

Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Hemingway>.
Wikipedia. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea>.
Beegel, Susan F. "Santiago and the Eternal Feminine : Gendering La Mar in The Old Man and he Sea."
Zabala, Kemen. "Hemingway: A Study in Gender and." Senior Honors Thesis (n.d.).

 


 








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