Masculinity and the Jazz Age
Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises watches several expatriates struggle with love and relationships, while maintaining nonchalant 1920s personas. The narrator, Jake, presents only a tailored version of himself to the reader, and hides most of his vulnerability within his thoughts and at night, when the audience to his story holds fewer watching eyes. His masculinity and capacity for emotion is the focus of the novel as he navigates a post WWI Europe. In 1920s Europe, sexual liberation and rights for women were the furthest developed for the time, and often considered completely equal. Women had taken up wartime jobs -although not to the extent as seen in WWII- as nurses, clerks, radio operators, truck drivers or other previously male-dominated occupations (Gilkison, 9). In The Sun Also Rises, we learn that Lady Brett Ashley had worked as a nurse in the war, and tended to the soldiers (Hemingway, 46). This was incredibly masculine and new - a woman working in a man's r...