![]() Poules (French) literally, hen slang for prostitute. When both Robert Prentiss ("how charmingly you get angry") and Robert Cohn ("You seem all worked up over something?") notice Jake's anger, however, we know just how extreme it must be. In Chapter III of The Sun Also Rises, Jake admits to us that Brett's arrival at the dancehall makes him angry. Once again, dialogue has been used to characterize. They talk in a kind of shorthand, and the fact that so much between them is left unsaid indicates how well they know each other - how intimate they have been. By first reminding us of Madame Bovary and then foiling the expectations that this reference inspires, Hemingway seems to be saying that the old ways of telling stories are no longer adequate.įinally, notice Jake and Brett's dialogue in this chapter, and how much it tells us about their relationship. Chapter III puts Jake Barnes in just such a potentially-erotic situation - with a prostitute, no less, who promptly tries to initiate sex. The famous nineteenth-century novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert contains a scene of a sexual liaison in the back of a horse-drawn cab that was scandalous in its day and remained notorious thereafter. One thing that Modernist artists often do in their work is to remind us of pre-Modern art before rejecting the old approach as outdated, even phony, and Hemingway is no exception. ![]() Written in the early 1920s, The Sun Also Rises is as extreme an example of the Modernist approach to art as the paintings of Picasso or Stravinsky's music. ![]() But as you read on, keep in mind Jake's rebuffing of the prostitute Georgette's physical advances, and his explanation for his indifference to her ("I got hurt in the war") as well as his seemingly irrational anger at the gay men who accompany Brett to the club and then dance with the women. The irony of Jake's condition will soon become clear, though piecing it together can challenge a reader, especially a contemporary reader accustomed to candor and explicitness in regard to matters of sexuality. Far from being indifferent to Brett's allure, our narrator feels a powerful sexual attraction to her. (Hemingway learned this technique from the writer Gertrude Stein, an American expatriate in France who is quoted in one of this novel's epigraphs.) Finally, like his response to Cohn, this reaction characterizes Jake as much as it does the character he describes. (Generally, Hemingway was uninterested in cataloguing the physical appearance of his characters.) Secondly, repetition ("She. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey." Note first of all the sparseness of the writer's description, despite the fact that Brett will occupy the very center of the story to come. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. Regarding his famous style, examine Hemingway's introduction of Brett: "Brett was damned good-looking. The result: We read on eagerly, somewhat confused - but definitely intrigued - by this odd love triangle. Having introduced his narrator/protagonist, the hero's foil (Cohn), and a mysterious woman whom both seem drawn to, Hemingway has arranged the fundamental components of his story. And by chapter's end it is clear (by means of each character's jealousy of the other's companions) that Jake and Brett have a past, yet apparently they are unattached at the moment. The plot gathers steam as Jake's love interest (Brett Ashley) enters the novel. They hail a cab, and Brett tells Jake she has been miserable. (Jake admits to the reader that her arrival with the gay men makes him angry, while Brett seems jealous of Georgette.) Brett suggests to Jake that they leave the club. Cohn is obviously attracted to Brett, who seems to have been involved with Jake at some time in the past. The group goes dancing at a nightclub, where a woman named Brett (also known as Lady Ashley, because she is a titled British aristocrat) appears in the company of a group of homosexual men. Sharing dinner at a restaurant there, Jake and Georgette are discovered by a group of North Americans: Robert Cohn and Frances, Jake's friend Braddocks and his wife, and some others. Sitting in an outdoor café, Jake picks up a prostitute named Georgette and they ride a horse-drawn cab into Paris's Latin Quarter.
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