[In the following essay, Bauer analyzes Hemingway's influence on Gilchrist's work, especially her story cycle and her use of a composite personality.]

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”

It was Ernest Hemingway’s new book, and it had come from the book club the day she left North Carolina. She had been waiting for it to come for weeks. Now she opened it to the first page, holding it up to her nose and giving it a smell … “This is going to be a good one. I can tell.”

Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

In Gilchrist’s “1957, a Romance,” as Rhoda Manning begins to read Across the River and into the Trees, she tells her father that Ernest Hemingway is her “favorite writer” (In the Land of Dreamy Dreams 85; hereafter cited as LDD). In light of this detail about Gilchrist’s admittedly most autobiographical character, it is not as surprising as it might otherwise be to find that a contemporary southern woman writer’s story cycles have been created in the tradition of the story cycles of Ernest Hemingway and that her prototypical character Rhoda Manning has much in common with Hemingway’s Nick Adams. However, the allusions to and parallels with works by Hemingway throughout Gilchrist’s work reveal, in addition to Gilchrist’s development of story cycles and composite personalities in the tradition of Hemingway, the deconstruction of the Hemingway hero.

Writing of Hemingway’s first story cycle, Clinton S. Burhans, Jr., argues that “In Our Time is indeed a consciously unified work … containing the careful artistry and the central vision of the world and the human condition which characterize Hemingway’s writing from beginning to end. As such, In Our Time is not only the first of Hemingway’s major works but also the best introduction to his thought and art in the rest” (88). Similarly, Gilchrist’s first collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, provides several avenues of introduction into her canon. First of all, the collection is a well-crafted short story cycle, a medium with which Gilchrist continues to experiment. Second, in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Gilchrist begins to develop a composite female personality, which she will continue to draw on in creating other female protagonists for her later stories. Third, this collection introduces two of the major recurring characters of her fiction: Rhoda Manning and Nora Jane Whittington. Fourth, within many of the stories of this volume, one can find the genesis for still other works and characters. And finally, the themes developed in these stories—particularly those concerning issues of class, race, gender, and people’s unwillingness to face truths about themselves or others—are all themes Gilchrist will return to again and again in her fiction.

Like In Our Time, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams is a rendition of a particular kind of short story collection, what Carl Wood calls “a fragmentary novel” and what other critics have termed a short story cycle. Whichever term one prefers, Wood’s definition, which he applied to In Our Time, can be used to describe In the Land of Dreamy Dreams: “a collection of short stories which are unified, not merely by a common theme or subject matter, but also by a discernible plot development dealing with a single character or a single personality type represented in several characters” (725). It seems, therefore, that Gilchrist has written her first collection in the same form with which Hemingway began.

As Hemingway did with Nick Adams, then, Gilchrist placed at the center of several of her stories in this collection a single character who ultimately emerges as the prototype for the other characters in the collection, as well as for most of the protagonists of Gilchrist’s entire body of fiction. Susan Garland Mann feels that Nick’s “presence is almost continuously felt” throughout In Our Time. The unnamed protagonists, for example, “so closely resemble [Nick] Adams that many readers assume he is the character involved. Also, some of the other [named] protagonists … remind us to Nick because even if they differ from him in some important ways, they still resemble him since they share similar experiences, personality traits, and family or social backgrounds” (Mann 75). Therefore, Mann concludes from Hemingway’s use of a “composite personality,” “the reader is almost always in the presence of Nick or someone who invites a comparison with Nick” (75). The same can be said of Rhoda Manning. Her presence in four of the fourteen stories in this collection catches the reader’s attention. Her character is reinforced each time she appears. The comparisons between Rhoda and many of the other stories’ main characters thereby become more significant, and the reader recognizes the unity of the collection. The stories repeatedly show a type of person who resists maturity and reality. In the stories featuring a child protagonist, the reader can either see or infer the consequences of such resistance in whatever circumstances the protagonist finds herself. In the stories featuring an adult protagonist, Gilchrist depicts the inevitable fate of this type of character.

Illustrating how the adult protagonists of several of the stories of In Our Time share a single personality, Carl Wood describes them all as “drifting and disillusioned member[s] of the lost generation who [are] unhappily married and whiling away [their] time in Europe” (722). He then notes that “when Nick appears in an identical situation in …‘Cross Country Snow,’ the cycle of alternative versions of the same personality is complete” (722). Not only are Gilchrist’s characters similar in nature, but also, in the stories with adult protagonists in her first collection, one can see that she, too, has created almost “interchangeable characters in a narrative of the development of a single central personality” (C. Wood 722). Lelia of “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” Alisha of “There’s a Garden of Eden,” Nora Jane of “The Famous Poll at Jody’s Bar,” LaGrande of “In the Land of Dreamy Dreams,” and Melissa’s mother (unnamed) of “Indignities” anticipate the prototype Rhoda Manning, who will be introduced to the reader as an adult in the story “1957, a Romance.” Even closer in character to Rhoda, particularly the child Rhoda who is the central character of the three other Rhoda stories from this collection—“Revenge,” “1944,” and “Perils of the Nile”—are the young girls Helen of ““Rich,” Margaret of “Generous Pieces,” LeLe of “Traveler,” and Matille of “Summer, an Elegy.” As Wood says of the resemblance of Hemingway’s Harold Krebs to Nick Adams in “background and predicament,” these girls and women “may [each] be regarded in some sense as an alternate version of the personality Nick [or, in this case, Rhoda] represents” (721).

Although the development of a composite personality in the course of these two story cycles is similar, the two authors’ arrangement of the stories in these volumes is exactly opposite. Susan Mann points out that the stories of In Our Time “are arranged so that the composite protagonist gradually grows older” (10). In In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, on the other hand, the protagonists of the first half of the stories are adults, while the protagonists of the second half are children. Reading the two works intertextually, then, illuminates via contrast what Gilchrist achieves by ordering her stories as she does. Hemingway’s order shows the gradual development of a personality type out of the character’s experiences from childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Gilchrist chooses, rather, to present the shocking adult personalities first and then to illustrate how these women are products of their common upbringing. In this way, Gilchrist emphasizes the sinister role that society (the same social system that tortures her adult protagonists) plays in the development of her child protagonists.

In comparison, both authors interrupt the chronological progression forward (in Hemingway’s case) or backward (in Gilchrist’s). Hemingway places “My Old Man,” with its adolescent protagonist, toward the end of his collection, surrounded by adult Nick Adams stories. Positioning this story of the boy Joe Butler in between these Nick Adams stories, Hemingway recalls to the reader’s mind the boy Nick of the early stories, thereby reminding the reader of the early experiences that contributed to the development of the adult personality. In the first two stories of Gilchrist’s collection, “Rich” and “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” the narration diverges briefly from the adult protagonists’ points of view to their children’s perspectives. Similar to what Hemingway has done, Gilchrist is thereby reminding the reader that the adults of these stories were once children growing up within the same social setting, a fact which seems to contribute significantly to their present state of mind. Even more in keeping with Hemingway’s interruption of his adult stories with “My Old Man,” after the first story with a protagonist based on the child Rhoda prototype, Gilchrist interrupts the (again, backward) progression (or regression, one might say) with a final story with an adult protagonist who looks back on her childhood, during which she suffered “Indignities” (the story’s title) similar to those the children in the surrounding stories are suffering. The placement of “Indignities” again reminds the reader that the little girl in the preceding story and those who will appear in the next stories, Rhoda included, will grow up and continue to be affected by the events of their childhoods.

Clinton Burhans notes of In Our Time that, as well as through the use of either the recurring character Nick Adams or “a central character like him in all but name” and the almost consistent chronological order of the stories, unity is achieved by “themes introduced and developed” throughout the collection, by Hemingway’s “pattern of alternating locales” (90), and by the vignettes that focus “even more specifically on various ways in which men immediately threatened by [the] human condition respond to it. … Together, these vignettes show men responding to harsh experience with fear, drunkenness, disillusion, hypocritical prayer, and dissociation” (92). Gilchrist’s collection is also unified by its composite personality, as pointed out by Jeanie Thompson and Anita Miller Garner: “In gathering for the reader a whole cast of female characters in various stages of life, with the character Rhoda appearing by name in four of the stories, Gilchrist achieves a kind of coherence of style and voice that is absent from many first collections of short fiction” (104–5). I would add that this unity is enhanced through the employment of all three of the additional methods that Hemingway uses to achieve unity. Gilchrist develops several recurring themes, including class consciousness and familial discord. The stories in the opening section are all set in New Orleans, and after that, most of them are either set in the South or center around southerners living outside the South. Finally, one can find in these stories all of the responses to the human condition that Burhans lists, though most of the characters whose “respon[ses] to harsh experience” are the focus of Gilchrist stories are women. Gilchrist thereby shows that male and female reactions to the “human condition” are not necessarily distinctive.

As already mentioned, Susan Mann explains Hemingway’s accomplishment with In Our Time’s recurring character and character type: a “composite personality” at the center of a collection that includes several different protagonists. Mann explains that “with Nick Adams, Hemingway provides a substantial, psychologically complex protagonist; and since most of the other major characters closely resemble Nick, the author also successfully creates a composite personality: the Middle American who is wounded in battle and has difficulty readjusting after the war is over” (71). Hemingway’s development of a composite personality illuminates the common experiences and attitudes of the male members of the generation of World War I. Upon recognizing that Gilchrist develops a Hemingway-like composite personality in her own collection, the reader should then note how she even draws upon and then transforms his characterization of his composite personality to suit her own purposes. To start, one might note that many of Gilchrist’s stories with child protagonists, including several of the Rhoda stories in this first and the later collections, are set during World War II. Although Gilchrist alludes to the war going on in Europe and Asia, she is more concerned with those who stayed at home: the children and wives of soldiers. In her short story ““Revenge,” for example, Rhoda is staying at her grandmother’s house while her father is overseas; her consequential sense of displacement is aggravated by being the only girl among several male cousins. Furthermore, she is confused by the discrepancy between women being in charge now that most of the men are away and yet nothing changing in her favor; she is still marginalized and limited because of her sex. In this story, as well as in “1944” from this same collection, “Victory over Japan” from the next, and the novel The Annunciation, Gilchrist alludes to war widows (those who are temporary widows while their husbands are overseas and those who are made widows permanently by the war), though they are not the works’ central characters. Still, the child protagonists see the effect of the war on these women; therefore, these women’s reactions to their losses are also part of the children’s own war experiences.

Also as in Hemingway, then, many of the adult protagonists in Gilchrist’s stories who are members of Rhoda’s generation have the experience of a world war, though in their case World War II and not combat experience, as part of their implied pasts—which Hemingway would refer to as the part of the iceberg underwater. Of “Big Two-Hearted River,” for example, Hemingway explains in A Moveable Feast, “The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it” (MF 76), though in this case it is a part of the iceberg that would not have concerned him. His view of women during war is confined to the women his soldier characters meet during their adventures or who are not able to understand their veteran sons’, husbands’, or lovers’ angst following the war.

Hemingway elaborates upon his method of omission in Death in the Afternoon: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (DA 192). Gilchrist also employs the iceberg theory. Consequently, the reader must recognize from the tip of the iceberg provided in a single story that there is much more beneath the surface of that story, which will aid in understanding her characters and their actions. As Sally Helgesen explains in her review of Victory over Japan, Gilchrist’s stories seek to answer the question asked by her character Traceleen, “How come they went and did that way?” (Victory over Japan 223; hereafter cited as VJ). Helgesen writes, “Gilchrist has found a perfect vehicle for answering this question. Characters from one story meet characters from another, destinies cross, and random events are later seen to make sense” (55). Thus, much of the iceberg beneath the surface of a single Gilchrist story is the material found in other Gilchrist stories. However, just as in “Big Two-Hearted River” one does not have to know that Nick has recently returned from fighting in World War I to appreciate much of what the story does, neither does one have to have read Gilchrist’s earlier fiction to understand a later work. On the other hand, just as realizing the historical intertext of Hemingway’s story does enhance one’s appreciation of it, so too does knowledge of the events that have occurred to a Gilchrist protagonist in an earlier work enhance one’s reading of a later one.

Recognition of Gilchrist’s entire canon as an organic story cycle provides further evidence that she is writing in the tradition of Hemingway, for Hemingway’s prototype also continues to develop with each of his books. Joseph DeFalco explains, “The complete journey of Nick Adams is not contained in a full cycle of stories; rather his ultimate destiny is involved with that of the other characters. All are to some extent victims of the same plight, and Nick’s fate can be judged according to the reactions of characters with a similar background” (3). The similar development of Gilchrist’s Rhoda Manning prototype should be assessed, therefore, not only by her experiences within the stories in which she appears but also by the author’s development of her prototype as it is manifested in each new character she creates. As Jeanie Thompson and Anita Garner point out in their discussion of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Gilchrist “invites us to compare these women with each other and determine whether or not the sum of their experiences adds up to more than just their individual lives” (105).

In subsequent works Gilchrist transforms this Hemingway technique as the character of her later manifestations of the prototype evolves. In contrast, Hemingway’s prototype does not evolve. Perhaps Hemingway was happy with his initial development of the prototype’s personality; he did, after all, focus most of his criticism outward on the causes of the character’s conflicts (the demands of his parents, the war, women upon him). His protagonists turn inward for the strength to deal with their troubles. Hemingway offers, via their actions, a mode of behavior—always to exercise grace under pressure—for men. Gilchrist’s development of her characters’ conflicts also reveals society’s role as antagonist; however, she makes clear her protagonists’ responsibility for what befalls them as well. As her later characters recognize their own culpability, they are able to learn from their mistakes and grow from their experiences. Gilchrist seems, therefore, more interested than Hemingway in having an individual recognize what she can do to improve rather than merely “gracefully” endure her life.

As she allows her prototype to evolve—from Rhoda to Anna Hand—Gilchrist undermines the Hemingway hero’s philosophizing about life and death. In her first two novels, The Annunciation and The Anna Papers the central characters echo the older waiter of Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” in Winner Take Nothing. Alluding to Hemingway in these works, Gilchrist mocks his character’s fear of death in the face of no danger, reducing it to being afraid of the dark. Kenneth G. Johnston explains that at the end of the Hemingway story, the old waiter’s “reluctan[ce] to leave the well-lighted café” is due to his lack of a “comforting belief in God, the protecting Father and Shepherd,” a lack Johnston sees reflected in the old waiter’s parody of the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary effected by his “substitut[ing] nada for every important word in the prayers” (163). At the end of The Annunciation, Amanda, too, transforms the Lord’s Prayer to reflect her own state of mind—not at the end of an ordinary day’s labor but after the labor of childbirth. Feeling empowered and awed by the experience of giving birth, she changes the words of this patriarchal prayer to “My will be done. … My life on my terms, my daughter, my son. My life leading to my lands forever and ever and ever, hallowed be my name, goddammit, my kingdom come, my will be done, amen, so be it, Amanda” (A 353). This is, however, neither parody nor blasphemy. Like the old waiter, Amanda does not believe in God, but unlike him, she does have another source of strength: her faith in herself. She, an evolved manifestation of the Rhoda prototype, achieves this feeling of self-worth by the end of her novel. She has decided to have this baby by herself and for herself and is thus empowered rather than entrapped and endangered by pregnancy and childbirth. Thus, her development reflects an evolutionary step in the development of the prototype.

In a less uplifting echo of the old waiter, Anna Hand leaves a doctor/friend’s office at the beginning of The Anna Papers after refusing an examination to find out what is wrong with her. She thinks, “No doctors. … No checkups. No hospitals, no operating rooms, no chemicals, no nothing. Nada, de nada, de nada. …You are not sick. There is nothing wrong with you” (AP 20). However, there is something very much wrong with her—not the fact that she is going to die “someday,” which is at the root of what troubles Hemingway’s protagonist, but that she is going to die soon. In Hemingway’s story, the older waiter tells the younger waiter, “I have never had confidence and I am not young” (WTN 22). If one substitutes the word “faith” for “confidence,” which is an appropriate substitution given his later ruminations that “it was all a nothing and a man was nothing too” (WTN 23), and then notes his reference to his age, one understands that his insomnia reflects his fear of dying and the “nada” which follows. In contrast to the old waiter, who may have many years still ahead of him, Anna has cancer, and no amount of positive thinking is going to stop it from growing within her. But like Amanda, Anna has “confidence”—not in a religious faith but in herself and in the order of things in the universe. She will accept her death as part of that order. In fact, she will walk right into it—committing suicide by stepping off a pier with a cyanide tablet in her mouth—rather than try to hide from it in lighted rooms (in her case operating rooms) as the old waiter does in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” She is both much like Rhoda—a redhead, a writer, a reader of Hemingway, an overbearing personality, in conflict with her father and brother—and yet an evolution of Rhoda and, even, of Amanda. At the start of her novel, she has achieved the self-acceptance that Amanda reaches only at the end of hers.

PARALLELS BETWEEN PROTOTYPES

In spite of this significant contrast in the authors’ development—and lack thereof—of their prototypes, something else beneath the surface of Gilchrist’s stories is the similarities between the personalities of the original prototypes Nick Adams and Rhoda Manning. Recognizing the parallels prepares the reader for the conflicts that burden the Gilchrist protagonists, though as already suggested, Gilchrist ultimately transforms the Hemingway hero into a more positive heroine. Susan Mann provides three characteristics of the protagonists of In Our Time: “they are generally expatriates, committed to some sport, and unhappily married or unhappy in some other relationship” (75). The Gilchrist protagonists in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams share at least two of these characteristics, the first and third: they are often outsiders, in attitude if not in actuality, and they suffer in unhappy relationships. Ironically, their communal conflicts and failed relationships are a result of the very kind of male-centered society that Hemingway lauded in his fiction. Perhaps to emphasize this connection, Gilchrist draws upon the second characteristic of Hemingway’s protagonists that Mann mentions. In several of the stories of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, some sport plays a significant role: tennis in “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society” and “In the Land of Dreamy Dreams,” both of which take place among the New Orleans upper class; swimming in “1957, a Romance” and “Traveler,” both of which are set in the Deep South in the summer, the latter in the Mississippi Delta; and pole-vaulting in “Revenge,” a story in which the end of World War II is prematurely anticipated so that the characters look forward to the 1944 Olympic Games.

Since three of the Rhoda stories in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams take place when Rhoda is a child, and half of the stories in this collection also focus on children (or more than half when one includes “Rich” and “The President of the Louisiana Live Oak Society,” which have both child and adult protagonists), it is not surprising that a recurring plot line of these stories involves initiation. This unifying element is another significant point of comparison between In the Land of Dreamy Dreams and In Our Time, an exploration of which leads the Gilchrist reader to recognize the recurrent failure of her child characters to learn a lesson from their experiences. Susan Mann explains that “the process of initiation is so centrally important in In Our Time that it almost overshadows the knowledge that should result from the test” (72). She attributes this characteristic to the ironic handling of “the epiphanies or moments of recognition that end many of the … stories” (72). Mann calls these “parodies of Joycean epiphanies”: “Nick at the conclusion of ‘Indian Camp’ comforts himself with the thought that he will never die. Similarly, at the end of ‘Soldier’s Home,’ Harold Krebs convinces himself that he can escape his adjustment problems by leaving home for Kansas City” (72).

“Revenge” ends with an ironic epiphany much like the ones Susan Mann points to in the stories of In Our Time. As previously mentioned, at the end of this story, Rhoda accomplishes her desire to pole-vault like her brother and male cousins. Everyone is there to see it—including her brother, who earlier denied her access to their “broad jump pit” because of her sex. However, her triumph is paradoxically transformed into defeat by the last sentence of the story: “Sometimes I think whatever has happened since has been of no real interest to me” (LDD 124). This sentence foreshadows the stasis of Rhoda’s character in later stories. She is only ten years old when this event occurs, and yet apparently at times she thinks of it as the highlight of her life. One gets the sense from this final comment that she has not had many such victories over the oppressive patriarchal society from which she comes. Reviewer Susan Wood suggests that “Revenge” … would have been better without this last sentence” (13). Rather, it would have been different. Without the last sentence, the story would have ended with a sense of triumph. The last sentence undermines Rhoda’s triumph, which is central to Gilchrist’s point regarding the perpetual influence of the patriarchy.

The recurring initiation theme in both collections illuminates the fact that in the four Rhoda stories in this collection, as well as most of the Rhoda stories throughout Gilchrist’s canon, Rhoda resists growth. Indeed, Mann’s assessment of Hemingway’s protagonists—that they “cannot tolerate too much truth … [and] often sidestep the difficulties that confront them at the ends of the stories” (72)—applies well to Gilchrist’s initial prototype for her composite personality. Again, though, Gilchrist is not so ambiguous as Hemingway: her character may resist the truths facing her, but her readers can’t miss them. In contrast, as Mann points out, Hemingway’s stories “are riddled with ambiguity, because with Hemingway it is often impossible to distinguish between escapism and the kind of temporary retreat [which Hemingway seems to be suggesting] one needs in order to regain a sense of equilibrium” (72, emphasis added). In further contrast, the comic elements of Gilchrist’s stories lead the reader to laugh with her at her character’s foibles even as we sympathize with her dilemmas, while Hemingway’s serious tone fails to suggest that any such mockery is due his character.

As Kenneth Johnston says of Nick Adams, “Nick will suffer through the painful lessons of boyhood and adolescence only to discover the even more terrifying insecurities of adult life” (58), so it will be for Rhoda Manning. Unfortunately, women are less likely to get away with acting according to the Hemingway code of conduct, and this compounds their alienation within and conflict with the patriarchal community. For example, the southern lady is revered for enduring, not escaping, the conflicts she faces. Looking ahead only as far as Rhoda at nineteen, in “1957, a Romance,” one finds that she is considered more stubborn than stoic as she resists her “duties” as wife and mother, and furthermore, although she is able to get the abortion she seeks, Gilchrist’s novel Net of Jewels, which continues this episode in Rhoda’s life, shows that this same act may free her from having another child, but it also binds her more tightly to her father, whom she tries unsuccessfully throughout the novel to escape.

“1957, a Romance,” which concerns primarily Rhoda’s abortion, can be viewed as a deconstruction of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (from Men without Women), at the center of which is also the subject of abortion. In this first Rhoda story in Gilchrist’s first book (thus the story in which she introduces her prototype), Gilchrist establishes Rhoda’s connection with the Hemingway prototype. Rhoda’s view of her pregnancy is surprisingly similar to the male character’s view in “Hills Like White Elephants”—who, unnamed in the story, could easily be Nick Adams; he shares, in any case, the composite personality of which Nick is the prototype. As Kenneth Johnston assesses him, he is an “eternal adolescent who refuses to put down roots, or to shoulder the responsibilities which are rightfully his” (129).

Like Hemingway’s male character, Rhoda does not want to have the baby, and one can infer, too, that, like the woman in Hemingway’s story, Rhoda’s husband would have a different opinion on the subject, if he knew about it. Thus, in her story, Gilchrist has reversed the attitudes of her characters toward having a baby, thereby undermining any gendered stereotype regarding distinctions between male and female responses to pregnancy or babies. She is not retelling the worn-out story of a man trying to convince a woman to get rid of a baby (found also, for example, in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy). Gilchrist recognizes that women are often just as likely not to be enthusiastic about unplanned pregnancies as their lovers and that many such women would willingly abort their unwanted babies if not for the the risks to their health. Her limited focus on Rhoda, in contrast to the way Hemingway deals with this conflict from both the man’s and the woman’s perspectives, suggests her belief, during the current period of so much conflict over the morality of abortion, in a woman’s rights regarding her own body. The morality of the issue was not so much a social concern during the period in which Hemingway wrote his story. Hemingway alludes to the health risks merely in order to develop the selfishness of his male character, who is willing to risk his lover’s life in order to remain unencumbered by a child. His story takes no stand regarding whether abortion is murder. Although Gilchrist apparently does not consider abortion to be murder either, writing her story post-Roe v. Wade, she does propose the opposite view of abortion in contemporary times—that it is a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy if she does not wish to have a baby.

In further contrast to Hemingway’s story, from the beginning of Gilchrist’s story the female protagonist is shown to be a strong-willed individual: she wants an abortion and goes to significant lengths to get one without concerning herself with her husband’s wishes. Her characterization, however, may again put one in mind of the man in “Hills Like White Elephants,” whose desire that his lover get an abortion reflects his wish to get rid of a problem rather than take responsibility for his actions. Later stories will reveal that this kind of action is typical of Rhoda, as it is of other Gilchrist female characters: more often than not, Gilchrist’s heroines use their strengths to shirk rather than to take responsibility for their actions.

In spite of Rhoda’s immaturity and irresponsibility, one does not totally blame her for her decision to terminate her pregnancy. Only nineteen years old, she already has two children, both of whom were delivered by cesarean section, a detail that, given the Hemingway connections already noted, might remind the reader of “Indian Camp,” the first Nick Adams story in In Our Time. Rhoda’s very difficult and terrifying first pregnancy is described in “Adoration,” a Rhoda story in Drunk with Love. In that story, Rhoda’s husband Malcolm, like the husband of the woman suffering through labor in “Indian Camp,” is unable to deal with the complications of her pregnancy: “He was scared to death of Rhoda’s terrible blood” (DL 58). Although Malcolm does not commit suicide like the Indian husband, he does turn Rhoda over to the care of her parents by bringing her to a hospital in the town where they live; and he is not seen again in the story until after the crisis has passed.

The Indian father does not behave well, according to the Hemingway code. He is one of the negative examples from whom Nick should learn a lesson. Susan Mann notes of Hemingway’s characters that “what is most important is the manner in which they are able to meet present challenges. Therefore, the actual test in the present tense—whether it is breaking off a relationship that isn’t fun anymore or trying to maintain one’s equilibrium as chaos threatens—is the heart of each story, its major plot and purpose” (72). Applying Mann’s view of the important element in Hemingway’s stories to Gilchrist’s “1957, a Romance,” one can see that Rhoda responds to her “test” by lying, which also goes against Hemingway’s honor codes. In this way, Gilchrist uses her protagonist, rather than a minor character, as a negative example.

Here again Gilchrist’s objectivity toward her characters is evident. She may limit her concern to Rhoda’s dilemma, but she explores this dilemma from all sides. She risks losing the reader’s sympathy for Rhoda by having her lie about and cast the blame elsewhere for her plight. For instance, Gilchrist’s narrator reveals that the explanation for her pregnancy Rhoda gives her father—that her husband “got [her] pregnant on purpose … because he knew [she] was going to leave him”—is untrue: “She always believed her own stories as soon as she told them” (LDD 82). This narrative comment casts suspicion upon Rhoda’s later stories about her husband’s recent behavior, which, in essence, accuse him of raping her to produce this child. Furthermore, Rhoda’s explanation to the doctor as to why she wants an abortion is different from the one she gives her father: to convince the doctor of the necessity of the abortion, she asks, “What would happen to my babies if I died?”—that is, if she were not to survive her next cesarean (LDD 90). Her stories explaining her pregnancy and telling of the problems with her marriage, including an accusation that her husband wants to kill her, become less believable as further evidence of her irresponsible behavior toward her husband and children is revealed by the narrator. The narrator explains, for example, that “this was the third time in two years that Rhoda had run away from her husband and come home to live” (LDD 84). Rhoda’s mother attributes Rhoda’s returns to her wanting someone to take care of her children rather than to problems in her marriage. Mrs. Manning says to Rhoda’s father, “she has to learn to accept some responsibility for something” (LDD 84). Further development of the story, however, brings the reader back around to Rhoda’s side once the reader understands her past, including being spoiled by a Hemingway-like father and living in a patriarchal society, the limitations of which extend even to what she can and cannot do with her own body.

Rhoda’s choice of accomplice in her plan to get an abortion—her father—reveals one condition of her background that somewhat lessens her responsibility for her actions in this story: her upbringing. Her father admits he has “spoiled her rotten” (LDD 82). His prayer promising “a stained-glass window with nobody’s name on it, or a new roof for the vestry” if God will help them get through this ordeal successfully suggests that he believes, and has probably taught Rhoda, that money can buy anything (LDD 82). It also recalls one of the responses from Clinton Burhans’s list of how Hemingway’s characters deal with “harsh experience”—hypocritical prayer. This echo thereby supports my view that Gilchrist’s protagonists were raised by Hemingway-like men who shaped their characters, which in turn explains their own likenesses to the Hemingway hero. Recall again the parallel between Rhoda’s reaction to her pregnancy and that of the man to his lover’s in “Hills Like White Elephants.”

Applying Susan Mann’s assessment of the Hemingway prototype unable to “tolerate too much truth” and “sidestep[ping] the difficulties that confront them at the end of the stories” (72), one can find another parallel between Rhoda and Nick in the ending to “1957, a Romance.” Joseph DeFalco notes of “the infantile and illusory attitudes expressed” at the end of “Indian Camp,” “This is not adjustment to the experience—a necessary step toward development; it is a direct denial of the implications of that experience. Poised on the threshold of illumination, Nick takes a step backward. He is not capable of crossing the threshold into more vital experiences as yet” (48). Neither does Rhoda, although several years older than Nick, gain insight from her ordeal in “1957, a Romance,” in spite of its serious nature. Here, too, her father is partly to blame for her ability to dismiss so easily her experience: after her abortion, “whenever she woke up he was there beside her and nothing could harm her ever as long as he lived. No one could harm her or have power over her or make her do anything as long as he lived” (LDD 92). He takes such good care of her, in fact, that, feeling completely safe, Rhoda has “a dreamless sleep” (LDD 92). She suffers no nightmares from which one could infer subconscious guilt or regret for choosing to terminate her pregnancy. Furthermore, the next day, as she thinks about what she has accomplished, she reduces her abortion to the fact that she will not “have to have any more babies this year” (LDD 92). Regarding her future handling of possible pregnancies, she decides, “All I have to do is have one more and they’ll give me a tubal ligation. … It would be worth having another baby for that. Oh well … at least I don’t have to worry about it anymore for now” (LDD 92). She has just had an abortion and she is already thinking about having a baby, just so the doctor will tie her tubes and she will thereafter no longer have to worry about unplanned pregnancies. Rhoda misses the irony of her future plans entirely. She turns calmly to her book—a Hemingway novel—and falls asleep to dream, not of babies but of “leaning across a table staring into Ernest Hemingway’s eyes” (LDD 93).

It is significant that Rhoda is reading a Hemingway novel during the time of her ordeal, not only because of her inability to gain insight about herself from her experiences but also because of her attitude toward pregnancy, which she would find corroborated in Hemingway’s fiction. Debra A. Moddelmog traces Hemingway’s depiction of pregnancy and childbirth throughout In Our Time and concludes that “nowhere … are the joys of pregnancy and young children described. Whenever mentioned, children and having babies are associated with suffering, unhappiness, an end of freedom and innocence, even death” (“Unifying” 28). More recently, Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes have discussed the “number of [Hemingway’s] finest early stories [with] a male protagonist … who resists fatherhood in one way or another” (13), the reason being, they argue, that “evidence in the larger Hemingway Text indicated that to father a son is to write your own death warrant” (15). With this characteristic of Hemingway’s fiction in mind, one can see that, after her abortion and because of the memory of her first bloody pregnancy, Rhoda might find in Hemingway’s books validation of the rightness of her choice to terminate her pregnancy.

It is also particularly appropriate that the Hemingway novel Rhoda is reading is Across the River and into the Trees, in which, as Richard B. Hovey puts it, “Hemingway … takes us into the dream world of adolescence” (179). Surprisingly, given this assessment, Across the River and into the Trees is a novel about an aging and dying American colonel who has never grown up—and neither will Rhoda have matured by the time she has reached the colonel’s age (in Gilchrist’s “Mexico” of Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, in the preface and coda to her novel Net of Jewels, and in “A Statue of Aphrodite” of The Age of Miracles). Certainly her lightheartedness about having an abortion reflects her current immaturity. At the end of “1957, a Romance,” looking at herself in a mirror, Rhoda exults in her appearance in her new bathing suit and laughs “clear abandoned laughter … at the wild excited face in the bright mirror” (LDD 95). One could use Joseph DeFalco’s description of the final view of Nick given in “Indian Camp” to describe Rhoda’s attitude here: “infantile optimism” (49). There is no mention of either any guilt for her actions or plans to divorce the husband whom she has described as being such a dangerous bully. Rather, she luxuriates in the false sense of freedom that the abortion has given her and responds with generous goodwill to the members of her family gathered for Fourth of July festivities.

In another Rhoda story in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, “Perils of the Nile,” Rhoda is given another chance to learn a truth about life but rejects it by turning to one of humanity’s sources of comfort: religion. Upon losing her new ring, Rhoda prays for its recovery—although “usually Rhoda wasn’t much on praying” (LDD 133). She has earlier in her life associated religion with death and thus has not found the comfort in it that others do:

When she said her prayers at night all she thought about was Jesus coming to get her in a chariot filled with angels. She didn’t want Jesus to come get her. She didn’t want to be lying in a box like Jerry Hollister, who was run over in his driveway. …

Rhoda didn’t want anything to do with that. She didn’t want anything to do with Jesus or religion or little boys lying on their dining room tables with their eyes closed.

… She didn’t want anything to do with God and Jesus and dead people and people nailed up on crosses or eaten by lions or tortured by Romans.

(LDD 133–34)

Rhoda is apparently repelled by the violence that has been directed historically toward those who profess to be Christians, and she has associated this violence with the death of her young friend. However, faced with personal “tragedy” (the loss of her ring), she seeks the comfort that faith provides—or at least the sense that she is doing something, praying in this case, toward rectifying the disagreeable situation. Therefore, as do many people—like her father in “1957, a Romance” and like the soldier (who might be Nick Adams) in the vignette of chapter 7 of In Our Time—Rhoda makes a deal with God: “If you will get it back to me I promise I’ll start believing in you. … If you’ll help me find it I’ll be nice to everyone from now on. … I’ll quit lying so much. … I’ll do everything you want from now on. I’ll even go overseas and be a missionary if that’s what you want” (LDD 134–35).

Not only are such deals with God too common for the reader to entertain the idea that Rhoda will keep her promises after Bebber brings the ring back, but Rhoda also undermines her promise immediately by getting caught up in another egocentric fantasy, which she builds around the thought of herself as a missionary: “She could see herself standing on a distant seashore handing out bright fabrics to the childlike natives. Rhoda was beginning to feel quite holy. She was beginning to like talking to Jesus” (LDD 135). She concludes her prayer, then, by lying about her devotion and qualifying it at the same time: “To tell the truth I have always believed in you. And I’ll be going to Sunday school all the time now if I get my ring back” (LDD 135, emphasis added). She is comforted by her prayer, since she has placed the responsibility for finding the ring in someone else’s hands, and she is distracted from her misfortune by her fantasies. Since the reader knows by story’s end that Rhoda’s ring will be returned, one can see that once again Rhoda has evaded a harsh truth about life: that things do not always go one’s way.

In the Hemingway vignette just mentioned, the soldier prays, “Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell every one in the world that you are the only one that matters. Please please dear jesus” (IOT 67). Like Rhoda’s, the soldier’s prayer is “answered”: he is not killed. Using In Our Time as an intertext of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, one can find in the soldier’s actions support for the argument that Rhoda does not follow through on her promises to God: “The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody” (67). If this young man’s life has been spared and yet he fails to live up to his end of the bargain he made with God, then it is not difficult to surmise that Rhoda, too, who was never in such real danger, will not feel compelled to hold up her end of her bargain.

Although their situations are so completely different, one is reminded by the comparable response to “crisis” of the similarities between the prototypes, a result, perhaps, of the Gilchrist character’s Hemingway-like father, who has had such a strong influence upon the development of his daughter’s personality. Indeed, one might recall Dudley Manning’s own bargain with God in “1957, a Romance.” Rhoda resists her father’s influence in the story “Music” in Victory over Japan, in which her father takes her on a trip to get her to stop smoking, to be more respectful to her parents, and to calm her overall demeanor and behavior. Furthermore, during their journey he tries to impress upon her an appreciation of the beauty and wonder of God’s world; but Rhoda does not share her father’s values. She does not believe in God and resists her father’s attempts to force his cosmic view on her as much as she resists his social view. She is frustrated in her inability to support her theories of evolution against her father’s creation theories and strikes out at him by trying to get another man’s approval and thus a man’s validation of her worth—the consequence of which is the loss of her virginity.

Like the Nick Adams story “Ten Indians” in Men without Women, “Music” centers on the protagonist’s relationship with her father as well as her first sexual experience. However, in contrast, whereas Dr. Adams comforts Nick after his Indian girlfriend has been seen with another boy, Mr. Manning’s harsh treatment of Rhoda drives her to her sexual encounter with a stranger. This time, the comparison has led to an analysis of the point of its ceasing, for the men react quite differently to their children’s bittersweet introductions to sex. It should not be surprising that, while the young man’s father would not be too upset by his son’s emerging sexuality and thus can concentrate on his son’s feelings about being cuckolded by his “first love,” the young woman’s father is so distressed by the idea of his daughter as a sexual being that he does not consider her probably tumultuous emotions after her sexual encounter as he rages about her affair.

“Music” also recalls the earlier Hemingway story “Indian Camp” in that both stories begin with the protagonist and his or her father setting off on a journey, during which the protagonist is initiated into adulthood: Nick observes both birth and death, and Rhoda participates in sexual relations. In “Indian Camp,” the characterization of Dr. Adams is much less positive than in “Ten Indians”: he is less nurturing of Nick, determined as he is to “make a man of” his son. In his reading of “Indian Camp,” Kenneth Johnston argues that

Nick’s father must bear much of the blame for the failure of the initiation. In his attempt to educate Nick in the facts of life—the lesson will get out of hand and will include the facts of death, too—he thrusts his son into a situation, brutal and shocking, from which he can not escape. … As one recalls, the journey began with Dr. Adams’ protecting Nick from the cold world with his cradling arm and his euphemistic language. Actually, Dr. Adams is not well prepared for his dual role of medicine man and moral guide.

(53)

Comparably, one realizes that in “Music” Rhoda’s father takes her to the site of her deflowering. This turn of events becomes even more ironic when one realizes that, as Nick’s father intended to make a man out of his son, Rhoda’s father’s intention upon deciding to take her on this trip with him was to make her behave more in line with his concept of a young lady. Johnston’s assessment of Nick’s experience in “Indian Camp” can be applied to Rhoda’s experience in “Music”: “The initiation has miscarried. Nick Adams has not been matured by the experience; rather, he has regressed toward childhood, comforted by an illusion which the events of the night should have destroyed” (51). After Rhoda’s sexual encounter, she is seen lost in a fantasy in which some young man—either her current love interest back home or the young man who has just used her or the pilot who is, while Rhoda is fantasizing, flying her back home—stands at a bookstore window in which he sees her latest book, which is dedicated to him. In her fantasy, he is “crying and broken-hearted because Rhoda was lost to him forever, this famous author, who could have been his, lost to him forever” (VJ 50).

“Music” ends years later when Rhoda receives a letter from her father saying, “Take my name off that book. … Imagine a girl with your advantages writing a book like that. Your mother is so ashamed of you” (VJ 51). Like Nick Adams, Rhoda has become a writer. But a more interesting parallel between this Rhoda story and Hemingway himself can be found in Philip Young’s report of Hemingway’s father returning six copies of in our time (an earlier version of In Our Time) to his son. Young quotes Hemingway as saying that his own father “would not tolerate such filth in his home” (18). Young continues on the subject of Hemingway’s father: “Later on when his son was becoming famous he is known to have answered sadly the question of how the boy was making out: ‘Ernest’s written another dirty book’” (18). I will leave it to the Hemingway scholars to analyze his father’s influence upon his life, work, and apparently his death. Turning to Gilchrist, then, the reader will find that she, too, has commented outside her fiction upon her relationship with her own father: “There is an old gorgeous man living right here in Jackson, Mississippi, that I have been loving and fighting with and showing off for since I was born. … My father” (FS 155). Gilchrist’s conflict with her father has influenced much of her fiction. Since this is not a biographical study, a discussion of the influence of this relationship upon her life is not appropriate, though I will add that she suggests in the same journal entry that the conflict is resolving itself—“My father and I have almost stopped arguing now that he is seventy-seven and I am fifty-one” (FS 155)—given its apparent effect on her writing. She has since allowed her prototype to experience a similar beginning of the end of her conflict with her father. In the first story of The Age of Miracles, “A Statue of Aphrodite,” a “pushing sixty”-year-old Rhoda, who introduces herself as an established writer, explains that she decided to move to Jackson some years back (when she was around fifty) “to make my peace with my old man. ‘The finest man I’ve ever known,’ as I wrote in the dedication to a book of poems [which explains how his name got on her book, as indicated by the lines quoted from “Music”]. I don’t think he ever read them” (AM 3). Even while perceiving the possibility of resolution, then, the reader is reminded of the earlier story, which suggests in turn that at some level the conflict will always be present. She can forgive and learn to get along with her father, but how can she forget his earlier rejection of her work?

Although several of Hemingway’s stories do focus on father-son relationships, Richard Hovey notes that it is Hemingway’s mother characters who “regularly appear as domineering over their families; as destroyers, actual or potential, of their children; as champions of respectability and defenders of cruel sentimentalities and false values” (43)—all of which roles are demonstrated in “Soldier’s Home” of In Our Time and “A Canary for One” and “Now I Lay Me” of Men without Women. He calls the fathers “weak … men on whom sons dare not wholly rely” (43), as is also demonstrated in “Soldier’s Home” and “Now I Lay Me,” as well as in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” and “My Old Man” of In Our Time. It is not surprising that a male author (Hemingway) would portray sons set against domineering mothers while a female author (Gilchrist) would portray daughters set against domineering fathers. Besides Rhoda, whose tumultuous relationship with her father is the central conflict of “1957, a Romance,” “Music,” and the novel Net of Jewels, Gilchrist’s Anna Hand has a domineering father whom she loves and fights her whole life. Neither Gilchrist’s female protagonists nor Hemingway’s male protagonists receive much help from the parent of their own sex in their battles against the will of the other parent. Most of the mothers in Gilchrist’s fiction support the patriarchy, as in “Revenge,” accept its double standards, as in “A Wedding in Jackson”; and do not understand their daughters who struggle for independence, as in “1957, a Romance.”

As the fathers in Hemingway’s fiction are often employed as negative examples of dealing with confrontation, Gilchrist’s mother-characters are certainly not role models for their daughters. Indeed, Gilchrist’s little girls and young women have as much difficulty with their mothers as do Hemingway’s boys and young men (though, again, these are not likely to be central conflicts in their lives as their mothers are easily ignored). These Hemingway and Gilchrist mothers are products of similar environments, the same environment that is trying to turn Gilchrist’s characters into their mothers—and these girls and young women do not find their mothers any more likable than Nick or Krebs find theirs. Once the nature of the mother-daughter relationship is recognized, Rhoda’s choice of parent—her father—to turn to for help with her abortion is less surprising. Rhoda knows who has the power in her society. Therefore, the reader should not be surprised to find that, like Nick Adams and Joe Butler, Gilchrist’s young girl characters have more significant relationships with their fathers than with their mothers. Their fathers may not have the best characters, but they are more positive role models than their weak mothers.

Neither Hemingway nor Gilchrist heeds chronology in telling his or her prototype’s story, although in In Our Time the stories are arranged almost chronologically. The first four Nick Adams stories proceed in order from his childhood to his adolescence. The vignette of chapter 6, which takes place in the middle of battle, is the next time Nick is mentioned by name; and then the last two Nick Adams stories occur after the war. Similarly, in Gilchrist’s second collection, Victory over Japan, the reader is given one story each, from Rhoda’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. However, in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Gilchrist ignores chronology entirely in her arrangement of the Rhoda stories, introducing Rhoda in this first collection at the age of nineteen in “1957, a Romance,” then portraying in the story “Revenge” a ten-year-old Rhoda. In the third Rhoda story, entitled “1944,”she is eight, and in the last Rhoda story in this collection, “Perils of the Nile,” she is twelve. Thus, Gilchrist has arranged the Rhoda Manning stories in her first collection more like Hemingway’s arrangement of the Nick Adams stories in Men without Women, where Nick first appears as a soldier, then as a younger man, the next time as an adolescent, and finally as a soldier again (counting only the stories that refer to the protagonist by the name Nick Adams).

Noting the connection to this later Hemingway collection may lead one to ponder its significance and realize that many of the Rhoda stories in one way or another focus on “women without men.” Although Rhoda’s father plays a significant role in “1957, a Romance,” she herself has left her husband; furthermore, she has made her decision to have an abortion without consulting him. In “Revenge” and “1944,” Rhoda experiences and witnesses, respectively, part of the effects of her country’s involvement in a world war: men like her father had to leave their families for a while, and their families had to get along without them during this period; some of these men, husbands of people she knew, did not return after the war was over, and their wives had to learn to get along without them forever. On the other hand, as these Gilchrist stories reveal, even in these situations of “women without men,” the influence of the patriarchy continues. In “Revenge,” for example, Rhoda’s father writes to his son from Europe, where he is serving during World War II, “to take good care of [Rhoda] as [she] was [her] father’s own dear sweet little girl” (LDD 112). Rhoda’s brother, Dudley, Jr., interprets the letter to mean that Rhoda is not to participate in their “Olympic training” in spite of the fact that the Rhoda he is in conflict with throughout the story is no “dear sweet little girl.” Surprisingly, no one on the plantation overrides young Dudley’s edict that “this is only for boys” (LDD 112), even though Rhoda’s grandmother is the voice of authority on the place at this time. Rather than admonish the boys for excluding Rhoda from their games and force them to let her play, their grandmother and the housekeeper suggest to Rhoda other forms of amusement that are more suitable for girls: playing with a little girl at a neighboring plantation and learning to dance.

MORE ECHOES OF HEMINGWAY

Tom and Letty Wilson were rich in everything. They were rich in friends because Tom was a vice-president of the Whitney Bank of New Orleans and liked doing business with his friends, and because Letty was vice-president of the Junior League of New Orleans and had her picture in Town and Country every year at the Symphony Ball.

The Wilsons were rich in knowing exactly who they were because every year from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday they flew the beautiful green and gold and purple flag outside their house that meant that Letty had been queen of the Mardi Gras the year she was a debutante. Not that Letty was foolish enough to take the flag seriously.

(LDD 3)

This passage, from Gilchrist’s “Rich,” unmistakably echoes the tone of the opening of Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”:

Mr. and Mrs. Elliot tried very hard to have a baby. They tried as often as Mrs. Elliot could stand it. They tried in Boston after they were married and they tried coming over on the boat. They did not try very often on the boat because Mrs. Elliot was quite sick. She was sick and when she was sick she was sick as Southern women are sick. That is women from the Southern part of the United States. Like all Southern women Mrs. Elliot disintegrated very quickly under sea sickness.

(IOT 85)

Regarding the content of the Hemingway passage and the two stories as a whole, there are parallels as well. Both couples are southern, and the Wilsons have difficulty conceiving, too. In point of contrast, Gilchrist’s female character is not a stereotypical swooning southern lady. In the course of this story she will withstand several tragedies, including the violent deaths of two of her children and her husband. Echoing the tone of this particular Hemingway story—reputed to be Hemingway’s way of parodying T. S. Eliot, whom he supposedly did not consider much of a “man”—Gilchrist calls attention from the very first story in her first book of fiction to one of the accomplishments of her writing: her parodying and thereby re-visioning of Hemingway’s depiction of women.

Gilchrist echoes “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” again in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams within the story “Suicides.” Comparing these stories, one finds that the two authors are more sympathetic toward the character of their own sex: Hemingway toward Mr. Elliot (even as he employs the character to mock the “unmanly man”), Gilchrist toward Janet Treadway. In both stories, a person of the opposite sex to these two characters intrudes upon the marriage: Mrs. Elliot’s girlfriend and Philip Treadway’s dead brother. Finally, in both stories a baby is seen as an answer to the couples’ problems—but fails to be so: the Elliots are unsuccessful in their attempts to have a baby; Philip and Janet do have one, but, if anything, the baby serves to loosen further Philip’s tenuous hold on his sanity. Given these parallels and Philip’s suicide, Gilchrist’s story seems once again to deconstruct Hemingway’s promulgation, in his fiction and his life, of escaping life’s “pressures” via any means necessary, even suicide if that is the only way. Indeed, Gilchrist emphasizes with her character’s death that there is sometimes nothing “graceful” about suicide.

In contrast, in her story “Indignities,” also in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Gilchrist seems to suggest that the Hemingway code of grace under pressure might in some situations be put to good use. In this story, too, she introduces a motif that will recur throughout her canon: cancer. Once characters are struck with the disease or face it in a loved one, the focus of their story is on their reactions, the grace and courage with which they deal with the situation. One might compare Gilchrist’s development of this conflict with the recurrent war wounds suffered by Hemingway’s protagonists and his focus on how each man deals with the wound. However, although Gilchrist may make incredible heroes out of her cancer victims, she never romanticizes the disease the way that Hemingway romanticizes war. The victim of cancer in this story has just had a mastectomy when “Indignities” opens, and she dies before its close.

I mentioned previously the role of cancer in The Anna Papers as a much more real threat than the waiter’s fear of the dark in Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” Another parallel with Hemingway can be found in this novel. Like Hemingway, Gilchrist identifies very closely with her protagonists, and both writers often have their protagonists be writers. Speaking through the thoughts of his prototype in “On Writing,” a Nick Adams sketch that at one time concluded “Big Two-Hearted River,” Hemingway explains how he transforms fact into fiction: “Of course he’d never seen an Indian woman having a baby. … He’d seen a woman have a baby on the road to Karagatch and tried to help her. That was the way it was” (NAS 238). Gilchrist, too, speaks through a character to explain how she transforms fact into fiction. In The Anna Papers, Anna tells her lover that he has inspired her to write a love story and that he will “be in it” (AP 112). However, she explains, she will transform him into “a Chinese graduate student who meets a girl at dawn on a bridge” (AP 112). The story she is planning here appears in Gilchrist’s next book of fiction, Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. Also like Nick when he refers in his thoughts to Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” Anna claims her creator’s work as her own when she describes two other stories she will write, both of which appear in Gilchrist’s collection of novellas, I Cannot Get You Close Enough.

Indeed, Gilchrist’s fiction is becoming increasingly metafictional in this way. Net of Jewels begins with Rhoda introducing herself to the reader, comparing herself to Anna (“I’m not a great writer like my cousin Anna Hand, but I’m not bad either” [NJ 3]), and explaining how the novel came to be: “I meant this as a book of short stories and I started writing it that way. Then the stories started to bleed into each other and I decided to go on and let them bleed” (NJ 3). This explanation seems to sum up how Gilchrist’s organic story cycle developed. Other metafictional instances of this type can be found in the Rhoda stories of The Age of Miracles. In “A Wedding in Jackson,” Rhoda remarks that she “once killed a character in a novel on that road” and later “brought him back to life in a short story” (AM 37), which events can be found in Gilchrist’s The Annunciation and one of its sequel short stories in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. In “Joyce” (also in The Age of Miracles), she tells about the acceptance of her first stories for publication in Prairie Schooner and Intro, magazines in which Gilchrist also published early stories.

While the metafictional elements in Gilchrist’s fiction remind the reader of her kinship with Hemingway—like him, she has difficulty divorcing her own ego from her fiction—two of the most interesting allusions to Hemingway in Gilchrist’s fiction (in the short story “Traceleen, She’s Still Talking” in Victory over Japan and in the novella “Mexico” in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle) illuminate, perhaps best, how Gilchrist ultimately questions this model. In her essay on intertextual readings for Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis’s Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, Thaïs Morgan argues that Julia Kristeva’s “most valuable contribution to the debate on intertextuality” is “the idea that an intertextual citation is never innocent or direct, but always transformed, distorted, displaced, condensed, or edited in some way in order to suit the speaking subject’s value system” (Morgan 260, emphasis added). Reading Gilchrist intertextually with Hemingway, for example, shows how Gilchrist has both “transformed” Hemingway’s masculine prototype into a quite feminine character type and “distorted” the reader’s perception of the original Hemingway hero by refocusing the reader’s attention onto the effects of the ultramacho character’s actions upon the women around him. In the characterization of Rhoda, the prototype for all of Gilchrist’s protagonists, the small detail that Hemingway is her favorite writer illuminates what is perhaps the central conflict for all of Gilchrist’s female characters, most particularly Rhoda and her cousin Crystal. They have been raised by and alongside and are repeatedly attracted to men who would qualify as Hemingway heroes. Consequently, these women follow the examples of their fathers, brothers, and other male relatives to become Hemingway heroes themselves—“they can wisecrack and drink as hard as their male counterparts,” as one reviewer says of Gilchrist’s “New South heroines” (Carper 5)—while at the same time they strive to be less strong-willed and more dependent in order to be the kind of woman such men would find appealing. Their personalities are unable to reconcile with their desires, and therein lies the conflict of many of Gilchrist’s stories.

Returning briefly to “Perils of the Nile,” for example, one realizes that although Bebber Dyson seems to admire Rhoda’s unique and brazen personality, he is more attracted to her soft-spoken, less self-centered mother: “Bebber thought about Rhoda’s mother a lot. She was very beautiful and had looked straight at him out of sad blue eyes while he talked about himself” (LDD 131, emphasis added). Consequently, in spite of the anguish he knows Rhoda is experiencing over the loss of her ring, he withholds it from her to present it to her mother.

“Traceleen, She’s Still Talking” reaches its climax during a parody of a Hemingwayesque safari, a sport Hemingway expects his reader to accept as a serious test of “manhood.” Crystal’s brother Phelan imports wild game from various countries and sets up “safaris” on his Texas ranch for businessmen too busy to go to Africa. In the course of the narration of this hilarious story, Gilchrist mocks the safaris in Hemingway’s stories by emphasizing their falseness. One of the characters explains the way Phelan’s “safari” works:

“Now the boys will let ’em wait a while and get all hot and bothered. Then they’ll let one of the boars go. … Then Mr. Phelan’ll let somebody shoot and he’ll shoot too in case they miss and then they’ll keep letting them loose till everybody that paid gets to shoot one. Then they’ll be through and Rainey’ll put the boars in a tarp and take them off to be stuffed unless somebody wants to drive home with it tied to the hood of the jeep.”

(VJ 270)

The reader might remember from Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” the safari guide’s various thoughts alluding to how the African safaris are similarly set up. Part of his job, too, is to back up the shooting of the paying participants, and there are natives on hand to take care of the kill for them. The description of the safari in Gilchrist’s story also reminds the reader that although Francis Macomber supposedly finally behaves courageously when he hunts the buffalo, Robert Wilson was there to back him up. Thus, Gilchrist’s story is not as much of a parody as it at first seems, recognition of which undermines Francis Macomber’s achievement of “manhood” before his death.

In Gilchrist’s story, no one is killed or even hurt and, not surprising, Gilchrist’s female character is much more sympathetically drawn. Crystal’s conflict with her macho brother does not end in her shooting him in order to maintain the power in their relationship. Indeed, she has no such power; their conflict, in fact, involves her desire to share power with him: to be allowed to control her half of their inheritance so that all of it is not thrown away on such schemes as this one. Instead of killing him, then, she drives his Mercedes Benz, only just imported from Germany, right into the middle of the set-up chase for a boar and then into the cages where other “wild” animals are kept. Here again, Gilchrist reminds the reader of the Hemingway story and undermines its protagonist’s development, for Francis begins shooting at the buffalo from their car. Beneath this parody—or perhaps comic deconstruction—of Hemingway is a serious complaint against the macho hero he lauded, for this is the type of man Crystal grew up with and keeps marrying, according to the other Crystal stories of Victory over Japan, Drunk with Love, The Age of Miracles, and the novella “Summer in Maine” in I Cannot Get You Close Enough. Crystal is repeatedly hurt by such men. Unlike Amanda and Anna, Crystal does not develop beyond Rhoda in recognition of her abilities and in utilization of them for purposes other than attracting a man’s attention.

Rhoda, the reader of Hemingway, not only finds herself confronted time and again with this same type of man but also admires such men. She marries her first husband because of his physical appeal to her, and in “Mexico,” which takes place when she is fifty-three, she is still measuring her own value according to the opinions held of her by macho men. Even more Hemingwayesque than Rhoda’s brother and cousin in this story is Rhoda’s behavior at a bullfight. Her repeated reference to bull-fighting as “Death in the Afternoon” reflects her consciousness of her chance, finally, to live a Hemingway novel—as she dreamed of doing in “1957, a Romance” when she fell asleep after reading Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees. At the bullfight in Mexico, she, like Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises, attracts the attention of a young matador. She does not, however, possess the same scruples that keep Brett from continuing her affair and thus “ruining” the bullfighter’s career. In order to keep Rhoda from her rendezvous, her brother and cousin must ply her with alcohol all afternoon so that she is too drunk to meet the young man. It is not that they are concerned with the bullfighter’s career either, however. Rather, they are worried about Rhoda’s meeting and having an affair with a strange Mexican. In this story, as in the Crystal story, then, Gilchrist finally mocks not safaris and bullfights but bored Americans—like Hemingway’s heroes—who are chasing after such thrills because of their own empty lives.

Returning to In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, one finds, in the story “There’s a Garden of Eden,” another character seeking adventure to fill the boredom of her seemingly Edenic life: “Scores of men, including an ex-governor and the owner of a football team, consider Alisha Terrebone to be the most beautiful woman in the state of Louisiana. If she is unhappy what hope is there for ordinary mortals? Yet here is Alisha, cold and bored and lonely, smoking in bed” (LDD 38). The narrator’s tone is clearly ironic, mocking those who presume that a beautiful, wealthy woman is without problems. But Alisha is dissatisfied with her empty life, not content to be a trophy wife or sex object. She longs for love, not just lovers, and her beauty and wealth apparently attract the wrong men.

The image of Alisha presented in this opening, together with the pouring rain outside, which emphasizes her entrapment, might call to mind the young woman in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain.” Alisha’s story, then, provides the reader another focus on Hemingway’s female character, a more fully developed view of the inner turmoil of this whiny woman who is seemingly close to becoming hysterical over a wet cat. Although this is one of Hemingway’s more sympathetic depictions of women, his central concern is still the consequences of World War I. The woman’s husband is apparently another member of the Lost Generation who is unable to face returning to the United States and starting a home and family.

To be fair, Hemingway does show in this story the consequential suffering of the veteran’s wife as she must wander around with this man to whom she is committed. But reading the two stories together, one realizes more fully the woman’s entrapment. As a middle-class American woman, she has been raised to one occupation, homemaker. Her value system and sense of social order has not been upset by firsthand experiences of a world war, so how is she to understand her husband’s refusal to allow her to fulfill her role in life? And, given the time difference between this story and Alisha’s, one realizes that she doesn’t even really have the option, which Alisha has exercised repeatedly, of divorcing her husband in hopes of finding a more satisfying relationship.

Returning to Gilchrist’s story, however, one realizes that although Alisha’s options seem to be more open than this woman’s, her chances of fulfillment are not much better. She has had three disappointing marriages. Consequently, she has since insulated herself within her home, choosing tedium over the hurt of disappointment, until the day she takes a risk by having an affair with a young carpenter whom she has called to do some repairs around her home. Sexual relations with this man, whose occupation recalls that of Christ, seem to give Alisha new life, just when she “was going to stop dying [her] hair” (LDD 47)—that is, just when she was going to resign herself to old age. But his role in the story as an apparent savior is undermined by an earlier exchange between Alisha and her maid. When the maid reports that the carpenter has arrived, Alisha asks, “Which carpenter?” (LDD 39). The maid’s answer, “Now it’s going to be blue-collar workers,” suggests that she knows why Alisha is asking—because Alisha will get up and dress to speak with the carpenter if he is “the young one”—and that this is not the first time that Alisha has taken a lover so spontaneously (LDD 39). The probability of other impulsive affairs deflates Alisha’s later romantic idealizing of her affair with the carpenter. Looking back into the story provides a second point compromising its seemingly optimistic ending. Alisha’s and her lover’s thoughts reveal that they both fantasize during their lovemaking; thus, they are not making love to each other but rather to ideas they have of each other, and they are simultaneously creating false images of themselves: “Then Alisha closed her eyes and pretended she was an Indian princess lying in a tent deep in a forest, dressed in a long white deerskin robe, waiting for Jeff Chandler to come and claim her for his bride. … Then Michael closed his eyes and pretended he was a millionaire going to bed with a beautiful, sad old actress” (LDD 44). Not even Michael, who leads Alisha out of her false paradise at the end of the story, can rescue her if she chooses fantasy over reality. Furthermore, Michael’s potential to be Alisha’s savior is undermined by his desire for wealth, apparent in his fantasy; he seems to want to share Alisha’s lifestyle rather than help her to escape it.

Also calling to mind the young wife of “Cat in the Rain,” Margaret of “Generous Pieces” (and Rhoda in later stories) longs for a real home. Her family, like Hemingway’s couple, moves around a lot. With their most recent move, the stability of Margaret’s life has been further threatened by her friend’s mother, with whom, Margaret has discovered, her father is having an affair. Still, Margaret clings to her father’s promise that “this time we are going to stay put” (LDD 97). She tries “not to think about Christina’s mother … how she leans over my father’s chair handing him things when they have dinner at our house” (LDD 100); she concentrates, rather, on her friendship with Christina and the security it offers of being part of the popular crowd at school (another concern she shares with Rhoda, thus reminding the reader of Gilchrist’s female composite personality).

The story’s climax reveals that Margaret is finally unable to dispel completely her fears that her family, the one constant in her life, will be torn apart by her father’s affair. Walking home late one day, she is chased by a group of boys who throw clods of dirt at her. This somewhat typical incident of boys trying to get a little girl’s attention terrifies Margaret. Even after they are gone, she continues to run, feeling suddenly “afraid of falling down, afraid of every shadow, afraid to look up, afraid of the trees, afraid of the moon” (LDD 101). As is the case for the woman in “Cat in the Rain,” who is unduly upset over not finding the cat she has seen outside her hotel window, the true reason for Margaret’s seemingly exaggerated dismay over having dirt thrown at her by some strange boys is her precarious family life. With the cat, Hemingway’s protagonist could pretend for a while that her hotel room is a home, which, one can see by the list of her desires, is what she really wants: “I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. … I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty” (IOT 94). Similarly, what Margaret is really afraid of is finding herself in another strange place, this time without both of her parents there to protect her. Both the young wife and Margaret are thwarted in their desire for a stable home by a dominating male—the woman’s husband and Margaret’s father.

Such a comparison serves to undermine somewhat Hemingway’s reputation for being misogynous in his characterization of women, for reading “Cat in the Rain” intertextually with “Generous Pieces” can lead to an understanding of Hemingway’s female character’s desires. “Generous Pieces” concludes with no resolution to Margaret’s terror, which is “watching [her] with cold eyes from the mirror on [her] father’s dresser” (LDD 102). This lack of resolution, taken together with the connection between this story and Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” emphasizes the absence of any resolution to that story’s protagonist’s problem: although the woman finally gets the cat, the reader knows that this temporary consolation will not solve her conflict. Thus, reading these works intertextually allows the reader a deeper sympathy for Hemingway’s character than his characterization of her by itself might otherwise elicit.

Reading the two works together also brings up another point of contrast between the two writers—in the role of food in their works. In “Generous Pieces,” Margaret refuses to try on the skirt Mrs. Carver has made for her, not because she is angry with Mrs. Carver for having an affair with her father but because of her own self-consciousness about “how big [her] waist is” (LDD 99). A concern with weight is expressed by several of the characters throughout Gilchrist’s canon, young girls to middle-aged women, who share the composite personality. Eating is, according to Joseph Flora, “an important literary motif in most of the Nick Adams stories,” too (Hemingway’s 161). In contrast to eating in Gilchrist’s fiction, in Hemingway’s it is not associated with guilt. Indeed, in a Hemingway scene involving food, the characters are most often enjoying their meal. Furthermore, Hemingway gives much more leisurely descriptions of the process of preparing meals and eating than does Gilchrist. Her characters are most often driven to food by frustration; thus, they are usually eating in a frenzy, sometimes right out of the refrigerator, as LeLe does in “Traveler” (also in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams).

One notable example of the contrasting role of food in the work of these two authors is that whereas Nick’s father comforts his son with food in “Ten Indians” (MWW 102), Rhoda’s mother insists that Rhoda go on a diet in Net of Jewels (NJ 21). This difference is not so surprising, of course, given the different sexes of their protagonists: Hemingway’s protagonists are usually male and thus not as likely to be concerned about their weight as are Gilchrist’s female protagonists. In this contrast one sees another instance of the double standard for men and women regarding weight, which Gilchrist alludes to directly in “Rich” when Letty Wilson attempts to help her daughter Helen curb her appetite, telling her, “You’re so pretty … we don’t want you to get too fat,” while she says nothing to her husband about his weight gain (LDD 12). In “Traveler,” LeLe’s friend Fielding also mixes a compliment in with his well-intentioned advice about her weight: “You would be a really beautiful girl if you lost ten pounds” (LDD 147). The reader is thoroughly disgusted when he follows this statement up with “I’m only saying this because we’ve gotten to be such good friends” (LDD 147), but sadly, his rude comments do not diminish his appeal to LeLe. Instead of telling him off, she lies to him, offering a medical excuse for her weight: “I’m not really this fat. … I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my thyroid” (LDD 147).

The central plot of “Traveler” involves LeLe’s desire to attract the attention of this young man in spite of his rude comment about her weight. Her attraction to an undeserving male is common in the characters who share the composite personality. LeLe ultimately swims five miles across a lake—quite an endeavor, though it is important to her only in that it involves “a first-rate boy … coming to take [her] somewhere” (LDD 85).

As in “Revenge,” the climax of “Traveler” occurs when LeLe accomplishes this feat thus far allowed only to boys, for when LeLe suggests to Fielding that she swim across the lake with him, her cousin Baby Gwen says, “Girls don’t ever swim across the lake” (LDD 149). In the water, though, LeLe feels empowered, “beautiful,” “perfect,” and thin (LDD 150). Her swim is a baptismal experience, a chance to start over and honestly earn the reputation she has sought via manipulation since arriving in Mississippi. Gilchrist uses water in this and other stories in much the same way that Hemingway does in such stories as “Out of Season” and “Big Two-Hearted River” in In Our Time: as representative of the source of life, of cleansing, rejuvenation, and second chances.

The ending to Hemingway’s “Out of Season” is ambiguous; indeed, the whole story is. Many readers infer from the story’s events that at issue is whether the young gentleman and his wife will have a child or abort their child, much as in “Hills Like White Elephants.” The gentleman’s apparent decision at the story’s end not to fish out of season after all suggests that, just as he will not risk taking the life of a spawning fish, neither will he allow anyone to terminate his wife’s pregnancy (or, if the issue is not abortion but merely whether they should have a child or not, not to do anything that would keep her from conceiving).

Just as “Out of Season” reminds the reader of “Hills Like White Elephants,” but with a more positive, though ambiguous ending, so, too, does “Traveler” remind the reader of “Revenge.” As in “Revenge,” the ending of “Traveler” undermines somewhat the sense of LeLe’s triumph. Although the reader does not know if LeLe’s success remains as important to her as Rhoda’s pole vault does to her (there are no final comments from an older LeLe), clearly it is a profound experience in her life, for she is striving to recall it in detail when the story closes: “I was dreaming of the lake, trying to remember how the water turned into diamonds in my hands” (LDD 153). Like Rhoda’s triumph over gender roles, which the reader understands to be only a momentary one, LeLe’s memory of her achievements is described in terms of illusion—the water as diamonds—which brings the reader back to the reality of LeLe’s life: it is for the most part based on illusions she creates about herself. Consequently, she probably will not sustain the true empowerment she achieved in the water. Indeed, by the end of the story, her travels have come full circle, returning her to Indiana where she continues to tell exaggerated versions of the truth, if not outright lies. One is reminded by this falsely positive ending that Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” after “Out of Season.” He, too, seems to have had second thoughts about the positive ending to his earlier story—the young gentleman’s decision to bring a new life into the world. In the later story, the young man is not yet ready for such a responsibility and encourages his lover to abort their baby.

Gilchrist again uses water as a central symbol in the last story of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. “Summer, an Elegy” ends with Matille staring down into the river, calling to mind one last time the story cycle on which Gilchrist seems to have modeled her own first collection, Hemingway’s In Our Time, which ends with Nick Adams staring into the swamp in “Big Two-Hearted River.” Again, however, one cannot help but notice the differences between the two protagonists. Besides the obvious differences of sex, age, and recent experiences with death there is the distinct contrast in their attitudes toward the futures they are contemplating in these last scenes: Nick’s one-day-at-a-time caution versus Matille’s joie de vivre impatience. Of course this distinction is not surprising given the difference in kind between their recent tragic experiences—Nick has been to war while Matille has merely learned that her playmate/cousin has died—which is exactly why, although Hemingway’s work serves well as a model of the craft of writing the short story and organizing the short story cycle, Gilchrist would have to turn to other writers to find someone simpatico with her subject matter.