Journal of the Ochanomizu University English Society

No. 2（2011）

Melancholia in Ernest Hemingway’s Works:

From the Stories of Nick Adams

Eri Tamura

Synopsis

Although most of Ernest Hemingway’s protagonists undoubtedly have a sense of loss from the beginning,
they seem to be unable to recognize its definite source. This study regards this sense of loss as a kind
of melancholia in the Freudian sense and investigates the relationship between the sense of loss felt by
Hemingway’s protagonists and the concept of “melancholia” described in Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and
Melancholia” primarily through examining the stories of Nick Adams.
Sexual inhibitions for Nick Adams apply especially in his family relationships. We can ascertain Nick’s
concealed sexual desire for Littless, his younger sister, in “The Last Good Country ,” supported by an
examination of Hemingway’s other works such as The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The
Garden of Eden, in which the relationship between the couples often reminds us of that between a brother and
his sister.
Nick’s stories can be seen to be about his struggle for liberation from sexual melancholia resulting from
his incestuous desire for his sister. In “The Battler” we can see Nick’s fantasy about the punishment he would
expect from transgressing the incest taboo. Although the stories of Nick Adams tend to be regarded as a series
of Bildungsroman about an innocent boy, the boy Nick already appears to have some sense of loss and is too
gloomy to be innocent. So it seems to be reasonable to see the stories as those of a man suffering from sexual
melancholia resulting from the incest taboo and his struggle for release from it.
Examining how he manages to resolve his sexual melancholia makes us aware that Nick’s sense of loss
is grounded in a separate melancholia, which is linguistic in nature. From a few scenes showing a relatively
cheerful Nick, it can be argued that Indians contribute to his liberation from his sexual melancholia. In
“Fathers and Sons,” Nick, who has already become a father, recalls his boyhood sexual experience with an
Indian brother and sister, Billy and Trudy. Taking into consideration the possibility of sex between the Indian
siblings, the familial taboo against incest found in Nick Adams’ family does not seem to bother the Indians. If
so, with them Nick can be liberated from the sexual melancholia which comes from his suppressed incestuous
desire.

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At least in the texts, the Indians are situated outside the mastership of language. The Indian women
who make Nick happy rarely speak or, if they do, their words are uttered as short broken English sentences.
They do not have linguistic proficiency. Here we can see the other melancholia; one about language. Using
the terms of Jacques Lacan, for Nick, his mastership of language, that is, his entrance into the symbolic, is
central to his personality, and the root cause of his melancholia. His chronic sense of loss might be rooted in
his entry into this symbolic world of language although he seems to be unaware of what he has lost and even
when it started. It is one of the important characteristics of Hemingway’s works that linguistic melancholia is
presented as closely related to sexual melancholia.
In Hemingway’s works the protagonists’ sense of loss seems to be rooted in their being bound by
language and dream of fleeing temporarily “outside” the ream of language. Interestingly, it should be noted
that in order to be liberated from his sense of loss, Nick, who becomes a writer, appears to have recourse to
language, which must have also triggered his sense of loss. This contradiction itself shows that this sense of
loss is melancholia.

1. Introduction

Most of Ernest Hemingway’s protagonists undoubtedly have a sense of loss from the beginning of the
stories. For example, Edward Engelberg points out that Frederic Henry, in A Farewell to Arms, “suffers
from what any good family doctor could diagnose as severe depression” (196) and stresses the centrality
of his depression as follows:
Frederic’s depression, his sadness, is a given state from the first pages of the novel. The war,
the retreat, the desertion, the flight to Switzerland, Catherine’s death ― none of these seems to
develop Frederic’s inherent melancholy: they merely confirm it. (196)

Although here Engelberg does not seem to use the word melancholy in the Freudian sense, the depressive
tendency seen in the protagonists in Hemingway’s stories is reminiscent of Freudian melancholia as most
of them are unable to recognize a definite source of their distress. For example, in spite of admitting
to his sister that he is “too morbid” (Complete 573) for his young age, Nick Adams in “The Last Good
Country” does not understand what John Packard means when he says Nick had original sin and is going
to have things to repent (Complete 580). In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the concept
of melancholia is defined as follows:
In one set of cases it is evident that melancholia too may be the reaction to the loss of a loved
object. . . . In yet other cases one feels justified in maintaining the belief that a loss of this
kind has occurred, but one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more
reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. (245)

It seems worth investigating the relationship between the sense of loss felt by Hemingway’s
protagonists and Freudian melancholia because this can give us insight into Hemingway’s seemingly

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inconsistent, antinomic attitude toward language and writing. To this end we will primarily examine the
Nick Adams stories as no other character’s life is portrayed for such a long period among Hemingway’s
protagonists.
To demonstrate how melancholia works in Hemingway’s stories, we will examine the following;
first, Nick’s melancholia resulting from his incestuous desire for his sister and its close connection to the
characterization of other heroines in Hemingway’s stories. It is proposed that Nick’s stories are about his
struggle for liberation from his sexual melancholia. Then, by focusing on his relationship with his Indian1
girlfriends, it is shown that Nick’s sexual melancholia is closely connected to his linguistic melancholia.

2. Nick’s Sexual Melancholia

To show that Nick has a kind of melancholia connected with the familial taboo, let us consider the
relationship between him and his family. The Nick Adams stories are filled with his complex emotions
toward his father. As well as having a sympathetic attitude toward his father, Nick also appears to be
ashamed of his father.2 On the other hand, Nick’s mother only receives her son’s unreserved hostility and
in this sense, she seems to be more simply portrayed than her husband. A son’s particular interest in his
father and hostility toward his mother naturally brings to our minds the “more complete Oedipus complex,
which is twofold, positive and negative” (33) described in Freud’s The Ego and the Id, in which it is
explained as follows:
[A] boy has not merely an ambivalent attitudes towards his father and an affectionate object-
choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an
affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his
mother. (33)

Also it is clear that sexual inhibitions for Nick work especially in his family relationships. In “Fathers and
Sons” Dr. Adams (Nick’s father) restricts the sexual behavior of his son by linking the words “bugger”
and “mashing” to crimes (Complete 371). In addition, according to Nicholas Gerogiannis, an unpublished
part of “The Last Good Country” has a scene in which Littless, Nick’s sister, tells him that “a member of
the family” told her it was dirty for a brother and sister to love each other (185).
Nick’s sister catches our imagination in the matter of incest. In the published version of “The Last
Good Country,” Littless, Nick’s younger sister, attempts to incestuously seduce him. The most remarkable
scene is the one in which she tells him her desire to become his common-law wife and have a couple
of children while she is a minor (Collected 597). Critics’ attitudes toward this close relationship vary to
a great extent. David R. Johnson, Mark Spilka and Sandra Whipple Spanier do not find the incestuous
connotation in it. Johnson regards “the sibling love of Littless and Nick” as “asexual” (318). Spilka
is critical about the reviewers who read an incestuous tone into this story and assures them that their
affections are “healthy” (222) and categorizes them as “the sensual closeness of friends and relations” (222)
which should be distinguished from “the sexual closeness of lovers” (222). Focusing on the similarity
of the brother-sister relationships between this story and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, that is,

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between Nick and Littless and between Holden Caulfield and Phoebe, Spanier says that both of them are
“innocent” and “pure” (38). On the other hand, for those who seriously read the sexual undertones in the
description of this brother and sister’s relationship, such closeness has much more importance. Kenneth
Lynn is one of the most sensitive to the sexual connotations of this close relationship. He says that “[t]he
further they [Nick and Littless] retreat from civilization, the more incestuous they become” (57). Although
Gerogiannis and Debra Moddelmog show less sensitivity than Lynn, they still seem to be very conscious
of the potential danger in the relationship between Nick and Littless. Gerogiannis explains that the
published version of “The Last Good Country” deals centrally with Nick’s “incest-like relationship with
sister” (184) and also points out that “material omitted from the published version reinforces the meaning
of the incest theme to this story and to Nick’s life” (184).3 Moddelmog also reads “the potential incest”
(187) in their relationship and goes on to say that the queerness she finds in their relationship centers
rather on the fact that Nick and Littless admit to their incestuous desire and “expect to avoid acting on it”
(187).4
But here we must examine Nick’s side ― of his desire for his sister. It is always Littless who raises
the topic of incest and Nick who rejects it. When she suggests their marriage, the serious tone of his
refusal strikingly contrasts to his sister’s cheerful and mischievous one. However, we cannot conclude that
he does not have any sexual desire for his sister. Lynn reacts especially to Nick’s desire for Littless and
further concludes that he “gets an erection” (57) when she sits on his lap.5 Although Lynn perhaps over-
eroticizes their relationship, still we can presume Nick’s desire for Littless. It seems to be helpful to add
an examination of incestuous implications in Hemingway’s other works. In “The Last Good Country,”
Littless cuts her hair like a boy and says “Now I’m your sister but I’m a boy, too” (Collected 590). Such
boyish hairstyles are also shown in the heroines of The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and
The Garden of Eden.6 Nick and Littless probably look much alike after she cuts her hair because, as she
says, they “have the same shoulders and the same kind of legs” (Collected 592). Such similarity in the
appearance between a male and a female can also be seen in the couples of For Whom the Bell Tolls
and The Garden of Eden. That is to say, in Hemingway’s works the relationship between the couples
often reminds us of the one between a brother and his sister. To put it bluntly, in Hemingway’s works
the relationship between a brother and his sister can contain the same sexual desire as found in couples.
Therefore it is not unreasonable to suppose that Nick may harbor some concealed sexual desire for
Littless.
Critics may argue, since an androgynous appearance was the fashion for young women during the
1920s, as mentioned in “Soldier’s Home” (Complete 112), that it is dangerous to attribute the similarity in
the appearance between couples in all of the Hemingway’s works solely to incestuous desire. Furthermore,
there is the potential for same-sex desire or for narcissism. In fact, many characters in Hemingway’s
works such as Nick Adams, Frederic Henry, David Bourne in The Garden of Eden demonstrate
narcissistic tendencies.7 Also Hemingway’s interest in the range and diversity of sexual relationships can
be seen in later works such as The Garden of Eden. Surely, the intermingled influences of androgyny,
incestuous desire, same-sex attraction and the narcissistic tendency on the similarity of appearance
between couples in Hemingway’s works needs to be reconsidered in another study. However, since the

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brother-sister relationship is a repeated theme in his writing, from early work such as “The Battler,” which
we will discuss later, through For Whom the Bell Tolls in which Pilar says to Robert Jordan that “You [he
and Maria] could be brother and sister by the look” (67), and also in later unfinished manuscripts such as
“The Last Good Country,” it is fair to say that incestuous desire seems to be the strongest undercurrent in
Hemingway’s works. In The Garden of Eden Catherine repeatedly tells her husband David of her wish to
become a boy or his brother, underlining the nuance of incestuous desire.8 However, comparing this with
“The Last Good Country” written in overlapping periods,9 in which Littless tells her brother Nick of the
same wish, we can see that for Hemingway a wife (Catherine Bourne) and a sister (Littless) overlap, as do
a wife and her husband or a sister and her brother.
Considering earlier works than these two, we also have many stories which show special closeness in
brother-sister relationships such as “Soldier’s Home,” “Nobody Ever Dies,” and “Fathers and Sons.” In
“Fathers and Sons,” which is also Nick Adams’ story, the exceptionality of a sister’s existence is stressed
as it says “[t]here was only one person in his [Nick’s] family that he liked the smell of; one sister. All the
others he avoided all contact with.” (Complete 375) When not limited to brother-sister relationships, in
A Farewell to Arms we can find representations of two mysterious pairings of relatives. Frederic hears
that Count Greffi, whom he is going to meet at a billiard room in Stresa, is staying at the hotel with his
niece (254). After Frederic and Catherine enter Switzerland in a boat, he pretends that Catherine is his
cousin in the custom house (280). Moreover, it is important to note Hemingway’s biographical aspect. As
pointed out by Lynn (40-42) and in many other biographies, it is a well-known fact that he and his sister
Marcelline had been dressed as girls and treated like twins of the same sex until he entered kindergarten.
This experience would undoubtedly have some influence on the similarity in appearance between the
couples in his works, so it is reasonable to stress the incestuous aspect of it.
Here, the unique structure of melancholia in Hemingway’s works can be seen. Although in the Nick
Adams stories the protagonist’s sexual desire for his sister is never made explicit because of his repression
of the incestuous desire, in Hemingway’s other stories this incestuous desire appears more directly in the
texts. It is not unreasonable to assume that the “chronic” sense of loss experienced by Nick is caused by
his incestuous desire for his sister, a melancholia of the familial taboo.
Then, what punishment would he expect from a transgression of the familial taboo? In “The
Battler” we can see Nick’s fantasy about it. In this story the tragedy of Ad Francis is closely connected
to the incestuous taboo. From his companion, Bugs, the boy Nick hears that his mental disorder has
been triggered by gossip which asserts an incestuous relationship between him and his wife. Although
Bugs tells Nick that “[o]f course they [Ad and his wife] wasn’t brother and sister no more than a rabbit”
(Complete 103), it was also added that Ad’s wife “looks enough like him to be his own twin” (Complete
103). Here we must pay attention to the fact that for Nick this man’s tragedy is closely related to incest.
Seeing Ad’s face and head which look busted and misshapen in the firelight, Nick is embarrassed and gets
a little sick (Complete 99). For him Ad’s mutilated and uncanny figure is connected to the transgression of
the familial taboo. In considering the relationship between Nick’s two stories, “The Battler” and “The Last
Good Country,” Gerogiannis infers that in the former story “Nick’s relationship with his sister is certainly
concealed in his heart” (186) while he is listening to the Ad’s tragedy and this seems to be a reasonable

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argument.
George Monteiro considers the Nick who looks at the pair of Ad and Bugs to be “innocent” (226).
Also Gerogiannis probably regards Nick as an innocent boy because he interprets that from Nick’s eyes
Bugs could be a “dangerous” person (181) and Bug’s long and mysterious speech describing Ad’s tragedy
“hustles Nick out of camp” (182) in the end. Beyond that, the Nick’s stories themselves are often seen as
a series of Bildungsroman of an American innocent boy. However, such a tendency seems to be strange
because Nick is too gloomy to be innocent. In his early childhood, seen in stories like “Three Shots”
and “Indian Camp,” he already appears to have some sense of loss proper to many of the protagonists
of Hemingway’s stories. If so, can’t we view the Nick Adams stories as ones of a man who has a sexual
melancholia resulting from the familial taboo and his struggle for release from it?

3. Nick’s Linguistic Melancholia

If Nick’s fear of the familial taboo is the cause of his sexual melancholia, then how does he manage to
resolve it? Examining this matter would make us aware of the fact that Nick’s sense of loss is grounded
in another melancholia as well. From a few scenes showing a relatively cheerful Nick, it is naturally
supposed that Indians contribute to his liberation from his sexual melancholia. With them his suppressed
desire to transgress the sexual taboo seems to be forgiven and released. Looking back on his boyhood
in the Indian Camp in “Fathers and Sons,” Nick, who has already become a father, recalls his sexual
experience with an Indian brother and sister, Billy and Trudy:
. . . they three [Nick, Billy, and Trudy] lay against the trunk of a hemlock wider than two beds
are long, with the breeze high in the tops and the cool light that came in patches, and Billy said:
“You want Trudy again?”
“You want to?”
“Un Huh.”
“Come on.”
“No, here.”
“But Billy ― ”
“I no mind Billy. He my brother.” (Complete 372)

Although Robert W. Lewis explains this conversation fragment by adding “[Nick]” before “‘You want
to?’” and “[Trudy]” before “‘Un Huh.’” (205), we cannot decide which phrase is spoken by whom. Here
Ann Edwards Boutelle sees the incestuous implications as follows:
The two beds reconfirm the rightness of what we had been led to expect (two lovers) and the
strangeness of what we discover (three). . . . The stumbling reader, getting there at last, is aware
that Nick and Trudy are having sex, while Billy, Trudy’s brother watches. But we are still unclear
as to whether Billy himself has previously had sex with Trudy. Is “You want to?” addressed by
Nick to Billy? Or by Nick to Trudy? Is the “Un huh” an acceptance or a refusal? Whatever is
the case, the atmosphere is disturbing and incestuous, passing wonderful. (143-144)

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Taking into consideration the possibility of sex between Billy and Trudy here, for this Indian brother and
sister incestuous acts cannot be something shameful which must be hidden from others. If so, with them
Nick can be liberated from the sexual melancholia which comes from his suppressed incestuous desire for
his sister.
Why then, can Indians have such liberating power for him? This seems to have much to do with the
matter of linguistic mastership. The Indian women in Nick’s stories rarely speak or, if they do, their words
are uttered as short broken English sentences such as Trudy’s. Moreover, in “The End of Something”
Nick’s Indian girlfriend Marjorie who fluently speaks English no longer has the power to liberate Nick.
Nick tells her as follows: “ . . . You know everything. That’s the trouble. . . .” . . . “I’ve taught you
everything. . . .” . . . “It isn’t fun any more” (Complete 81). Here his words clearly show the close relation
between the matter of linguistic mastership and his sense of loss. Women can only make him happy while
they do not have linguistic proficiency.
In fact, a similar linguistic relationship is also seen in an African woman in Hemingway’s African
story. In his uncompleted manuscript titled “The African Book,” the words of an African Kamba girl
Debba, the protagonist Hemingway’s girl, are seen in the text very infrequently and most are repetitions
of short phrases. In the text this is in great contrast with the talkativeness of his wife, Mary. Also we can
see that in this story Debba is situated in a world far from language in the scene where Mary says that she
is pleased to know that Debba cannot read or write and so does not know that her husband is a writer (Under
Kilimanjaro 30).10 Interestingly, Debba, who can be seen as a kind of present for Hemingway from her
family, has a brother like Trudy, Nick’s Indian girlfriend in his boyhood; she is also a presented sister.
Concerning the relation between the African world and the Indian one for Hemingway, the former
might have gradually replaced the latter as an embodiment of his dream world as pointed out by Lewis. As
he says (201), the Indians in Nick’s stories remind us of vanishing wild America because they gradually
disappear from Nick’s world as he grows up in spite of their great influence on his boyhood. Hemingway’s
nostalgia for it might have led to his zeal for hunting and adventure in African safari. Hence it is no
wonder that the Indian women and an African woman share certain similarities in their wordlessness in
Hemingway’s works.
However, this does not mean that Hemingway’s protagonists find special identification with the
wordless Indian or African women. Rather, they know that they need the other world, that is, the world
outside their own to be liberated. In “The Three-Day Blow” Nick’s close friend Bill says to Nick that he
was very wise to break up with his Indian girlfriend Marjorie, saying that, “Now she can marry somebody
of her own sort and settle down and be happy. You can’t mix oil and water and you can’t mix that sort
of thing any more than if I’d marry Ida that works for Strattons” (Complete 90-91). To this Nick says
“nothing” (Complete 91) and we can see that he somehow admits that Marjorie is not one of his “own
sort” as Bill says. Nick knows the liberation his Indian girlfriends can give is temporary as well as
fascinating. Although he eagerly seeks such liberation in his relationships with his Indian girlfriends, he
does not really intend them to last. Hemingway also implies this inconsistency in Nick’s attitudes in the
following conversation between Nick and Bill:
“We weren’t engaged,” Nick said.

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“It was all around you were.”

“I can’t help it,” Nick said. “We weren’t.”
“Weren’t you going to get married?” Bill asked.
“Yes. But we weren’t engaged,” Nick said.
“What’s the difference?” Bill asked judicially.
“I don’t know. There’s a difference.”
“I don’t see it,” said Bill. (Complete 91)

In any case, it is obvious that in Hemingway’s works the “sisters” of other races who release the
protagonists from their sexual melancholia are far from having any mastership of language, at least in
the texts. So in Nick’s sexual melancholia we can see another melancholia; one about language. Using
Lacanian terms, this can be expressed as follows: for Nick Adams, his mastership of language, that is,
his entrance into the symbolic, is central to his personality, and the cause of his melancholia. His chronic
sense of loss might be rooted in his entry into this symbolic world of language although he seems to
be unaware of what he has lost and even when it started. It is one of the important characteristics of
Hemingway’s works that linguistic melancholia is presented as closely related to sexual melancholia.
As for the close connection between sex and language John Maynard states the following in his
comment about Michel Foucault:
Foucault reminds us, brilliantly and shockingly, of the obvious fact of sex: it is not discourse but
some literally unspeakable play of “bodies and pleasures.” (18)
If the matter of sex is out of the realm of language, that is, reminds us of the world “before” our entrance
into the linguistic world, it might be reasonable to see the melancholia of the world “before” language in
the context of sexual melancholia.

4. Conclusion

The familial taboo against incest found in Nick Adams’ family does not seem to bother the Indians. At the
same time, at least in the written texts, the Indians are situated outside the mastership of language, in other
words, they are not intervened by language. From this it is reasonable to suppose that in Hemingway’s
works the protagonists’ sense of loss is rooted in their being bound by language and dream of fleeing
temporarily “outside” the realm of language. Interestingly, it should be noted that in order to be liberated
from his sense of loss, Nick, who becomes a writer and even shows an obsessional attitude towards
telling stories based on his adolescent experiences with Indians,11 appears to have recourse to language,
which must have also triggered his sense of loss. This contradiction itself shows that this sense of loss is
melancholia. He does not recognize exactly what he has lost, nor why; therefore he can set himself down
to the paradoxical challenge of making up for his sense of loss by using its cause, language.

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Notes
*This paper is a revised version of my presentation at the 45th general meeting of the American Literature Society of Japan
on October 13, 2007, at Hiroshima Keizai University.
1 This study calls Native Americans “Indians” as Hemingway did in his works.
2 In For Whom the Bell Tolls Robert Jordan, thinking about his father who also killed himself just as Nick’s father, feels that
“[h]e understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him” (340).
3 Gerogiannis regards Nick’s relative quietness as a sign which shows that there is great seriousness beneath the close
relationship between him and Littless and says that the reader of this story “must begin to feel that unless Nick and
Littless go home soon, all of the playfulness and petting could turn into the real thing” (185).
4 Moddelmog says that “Nick and Littless do seem to recognize that consummating their incestuous feelings would be a
mistake” (187).
5 Donald Junkins regards this as “a massive misreading” (150) and severely criticize “the psycho-sensationalizings” (148)
of Lynn’s reading.
6 In A Farewell to Arms Catherine Barkley also tells Frederic of her wish to make their hairstyle be alike (266).
7 In The Garden of Eden Catherine Bourne reproaches David for carrying around the clippings which are about him and
says that, “I think he reads them by himself and is unfaithful to me with them. In a wastebasket probably” (215). Here
we can see implied David’s autoeroticism as well as his narcissism.
8 Regarding the matter of incest, the relationship between the same-sex siblings ought not to be excluded.
9 The manuscript of The Garden of Eden was written from 1946 to 1958 and “The Last Good Country” from 1952 to 1958.
10 The uncompleted manuscript of “The African Book” was first published as “African Journal” in an American weekly
journal, Sports Illustrated serially for three times from 1971 to 1972, in True at First Light in 1999 and in Under
Kilimanjaro in 2005. Although each of these was edited and cut, this study quotes from Under Kilimanjaro because it is
the longest version.
11 In “On Writing,” we can see that the story “My Old Man” was written by Nick himself and suggested that he has also
written a story of seeing an Indian woman having a baby (The Nick Adams Stories 238). It reminds us of “Indian Camp,”
which was published together with “My Old Man” in In Our Time and from this Hemingway’s stories of Nick Adams
can be read also as the works of Nick himself.

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