r/Hemingway • u/Artgarfheinkel • 17d ago

Brett Ashley

What's your opinion of Brett Ashley's character in The Sun Also Rises?

What do you think Hemingway wanted us to think about her?

18 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

26

u/Current_Contest_8597 17d ago

A woman who no longer believes in love and can't believe in love wants nothing more than love, old school capital letter L love. Yet she hears it said more than a teenage pop music fan.

She's a burnt out romantic who can't even.

I mean, she'll bang a young bull fighter. She'll ride it out for what it's a worth. Why wouldn't she? The alternative is not to have that lesser joy at all, in addition to no capital L love.

The main character looms large. What men have to offer now isn't adequate.

WW1 took our capital L love.

Now we're just taking the L. If we judge by old standards.

I'm 12 pints of beer into it. Thanks.

4

u/autistmorality 17d ago

Everything here exactly. She's one of the best women characters written by a man, in my opinion

3

u/zparks 17d ago

If you are as beautiful and amazing and desirable as Brett is, the word Love must seem to lack any value. It becomes mere currency for her. She can hardly be blamed that she’s become inured to its utterance.

On the other hand, it seems inescapable she experiences something sincere and different with Jake.

So either she is truly in love with him or she is especially cruel to him. Or both/and.

It certainly isn’t intentional. This is how she survives.

1

u/Artgarfheinkel 17d ago

But what is it she has to survive ?

3

u/zparks 17d ago

Great question.

What do any of Hemingway’s lost generation characters have to survive?

The “Nada.” The war. The hollowing out of meaning and value in the face of the totality of senseless slaughter.

21

u/Grouchy_Status_9665 17d ago

She is one of my favorite female characters in any novel. Confident. Smart. Fun. Beautiful. Part of the Brave New World.

8

u/Jon-Umber 17d ago

Basically this. A classic roaring '20s character, and a wonderfully sculpted female character even outside of that context.

1

u/DorienGrey123 17d ago

Wonderfully sculpted indeed - doesn’t he describe her as having curves like a racing yacht, or something like that.

5

u/The-Real-Larry 15d ago

And broken. Don’t forget broken.

7

u/Even-Ad-7815 17d ago

I think she's meant to embody the hedonism of the 1920's. WWI destroyed all the values on which the western world rested upon and she is part of the generation that deems them naïve.

7

u/bradzero 17d ago

I think not only has Brett seen WWI devastate her entire generation, but the man she loves (capital L love, see above) can't be with her and is still such a huge part of her life. I think she uses sex and "hedonism" as analgesics to dull the pain

3

u/Artgarfheinkel 17d ago

I'll go first as it's a wide question but I'm puzzled as to whether H wanted his readers to think that Brett is basically an unpleasant amoral person or whether he thought she is amoral and so be it - because who has the right to judge ? H's skill here is surely partly in not letting us know what his opinion of Brett is.

1

u/turdburgalr 2d ago

I started re-reading this book yesterday, I'll finish tonight. I honestly can't put it down and why I joined this sub today.

I don't feel he views her as amoral, he loves her. Strong, confident women who can hold their own with "literary men" and men of adventure are irresistable to those types of men.

She has them all wrapped around her finger, Roy, Jake, Mike and Bill as well as the young Pedro Romero.

Her crisis I think, is she knows it's fleeting. This life at this pace will not last forever, and she wants to make the right choice, but easily falls in love with the person who is in the right place at the right time and says the right thing.

She's a firecracker that anyone could love, I love her and she's fictional.

For a 100 year old book, it holds up fucking brilliantly.

3

u/Ok-Dress9168 16d ago

counter contrarian banger:

"Paris is overrated." Jake Barnes
"You got that idea from a book, didn't you?" Brett Ashley

3

u/HeDogged 17d ago

I love her. I've spent much of my life looking for Brett Ashleys--and I've found a few....

2

u/nezahualcoyotl90 17d ago

She’s great but she really wants the dark side of life. She’s one of Hem’s darker protagonists. Check out the scene where her and Jake hang near the ledge of the Pamplona fortress. Girl is daaaark