'The silver cord': male labours in Hemingway

This thesis considers Hemingway’s engagement with childbirth in three separate but interrelated ways. The first is imitation of the ordeal, which he most closely enacts in his ritual engagement with fishing. The second is the interaction of male characters with actual childbirth, and how male characters, specifically doctors and fathers, react to birthing mothers and try to control the event. By managing the pain and the consciousness birthing mothers feel, male interference distorts the significance of the event for the mother. The third chapter considers Hemingway’s metaphorical identification as a birthing mother in his conception of his own writing process. Writers have traditionally referred to their books as ‘brainchildren,’ and using the method of examining colloquial metaphors proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff [1980] 2003), we witness the extension of the metaphor to the writing and editing process by Hemingway. Fishing was more than an escape from writing for Hemingway – it was a vital part of his writing process. Fishing becomes a ritualistic engagement with the metaphor of birth, and birth becomes a metaphorical perspective of his writing process, and Hemingway engages continuously in both throughout his writing career.