“Are you actually reading that?”
Mitchell looked up to find Claire staring at him from the bed.
“Hemingway?” she said dubiously.
“I thought it would be good for Paris.”
She rolled her eyes and went back to her book. And Mitchell went back to his. Or tried. Except that now all he could do was stare at the page.
He was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals. Mitchell thought this was an instance of tarring with too wide a brush. If he was to argue this with Claire, however, he ran the risk of being labeled a misogynist himself. More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him?
Rereading Hemingway’s sentences, Mitchell recognized that they were, indeed, implicitly addressed to the male reader.
He crossed and uncrossed his legs, trying to concentrate on his book. He felt embarrased to be reading Hemingway and angry about being made to feel embarrassed. It wasn’t as if Hemingway was even his favorite writer! He’d hardly read any Hemingway!
Fortunately, a little while later, Larry announced that dinner was served.
- from The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
