Hemingway Drunk: A Study of Prohibition, Medico-Legal Rhetoric, and The Autonomy of Masculinity

This thesis uses a combination of medical humanities, queer public theory, and literary analysis to showcase the uniquely American connections between alcoholism and masculinity in the literature of Ernest Hemingway. By situating both Hemingway and his characters within the medico-legal rhetoric of modernism’s famous Parisian Jazz-age, which occurred at the same time as American prohibition, I reveal changes in white American men’s relationships with gender, bodily autonomy, and the patriarchy that are often overlooked due to Hemingway’s publicly constructed masculine persona. My work provides new queer interpretations of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and the posthumous Garden of Eden (1986) divorced from Hemingway’s masculine persona and critical of how celebrity and scholarship impacted the public reception of these novels and American masculinity as a whole. Through my analysis, I forward a new, uniquely American concept in the masculine gender performance I call the autonomy of masculinity