The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Part 2
"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.
By Christopher Morse
In the first part of this blog, [LINK] the author introduces the possibility that underage incestuousness lies below the surface of the soldier’s relationship with his younger sister. In part 2 the author explores this relationship and its implications in more detail.
In “Soldier’s Home,” the incestuous implications of what is said by the protagonist’s younger sister (Helen) are far from subtle, and they arouse discomfort if read too closely. Most reviewers have chosen to ignore those implications; they remark on Helen’s “sweetness,” her “innocence” and even “purity.” However, there is nothing innocent in what she is actually saying, only in her presumed obliviousness as she says it.
Yet just how oblivious could she be? I’ll assume with you that she knows next to nothing about sex. But she is not a little tyke. Hemingway doesn’t give her age, but she’s old enough to play sports in a serious way, old enough to know about beaus and to know that she wants one. The girl must be aware, at least, that such relationships involve things like kissing and cuddling.
Even if Helen has no idea what her offer implies, the reader does. That so many reviewers protest the girl’s innocence is evidence that the incestuous, pedophilic undertones register at some level and make them uneasy. Krebs would not miss those undertones. Neither, of course, would Hemingway.
“Soldier’s Home” is crafted with the same deliberation and precision as “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” or any of the author’s best. Every word is selected with care, and most phrases carry more than their superficial meaning. When Krebs’s mother sits down to speak with him she removes her glasses. That simple gesture is telling: she wants her son to see her clearly, but she is unwilling to see him. We are told in passing that Krebs’s father rents an office in the First National Bank building and parks his car out front. Doesn’t this suggest a status-conscious Babbitt, slyly maneuvering to be associated with the little town’s most prestigious institution? An author who takes care with such tiny details would not write a whole page of dialogue with no special purpose in mind. The exchange between Krebs and Helen represents hours of careful composition. It is inconceivable that Hemingway could have overlooked the sexual connotations. I believe he fully intended them to be there.
During his early writing life, Hemingway penned what would have been classified as “dirty stories,” “Summer People” being a notable example. Gertrude Stein is said to have scolded the young author for writing what could not be published. But why was such material, featuring consensual sex between a man and a woman, unpublishable? It must have vexed Hemingway to labor for weeks to produce a deeply felt, elegantly crafted story, only to have it rejected on the basis of some editor’s prudery. We may imagine him taking pleasure, then, in publishing a story in which a child offers herself as a girlfriend to her adult brother. He realized that he could get away with it simply by broaching the taboo in plain sight; Helen flirts openly with Krebs at the breakfast table, their mother in the next room. The transgression is overt but filtered such that few readers circa 1925 would have allowed themselves to perceive it plainly.
Even a century later it’s hard to accept what is taking place right before us. But how else to explain this conversation? Why introduce a sister into this story at all? She is best understood as a coda to the theme of Krebs’s sexual unrest; Helen presents a possible answer to the protagonist’s main concern—which is otherwise left unresolved.
Let’s also notice how neatly she matches the specifications of the girl Krebs longs for: a friend, willing and available, uncomplicated, and requiring no courtship, no talking. It may be a plus that Helen is a tomboy, perhaps not unlike the plain girls whom Krebs dated in Germany. Pretty, popular girls, girls like Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises, are hard to get and grueling to maintain. They would only create more trauma for the unsteady Krebs, while plain girls and tomboys offer comfort.
How will Krebs respond to his sister’s naive prompt? He may not be fully aware of receiving it. Yet some new notion may lurk just below the surface of his mind. After the excruciating scene with his mother, Krebs elects to avoid a similar encounter with his father and retreats instead to watch Helen play baseball. Instinctively he is drawn to her as a haven from conflict, much as the girls he slept with in France and Germany provided a haven from the war. And, after all, hasn’t she indicated that coming to her game will demonstrate his love and win hers?
It’s awful to think that he may pursue things further. Perhaps he’ll decide against it—because he just doesn’t want to, or out of concern for consequences, or for fear of harming his sister. Krebs is not malicious. But we can’t know for certain what he will do, for this young man is not operating in the ordinary world. “I’m not in God’s Kingdom,” he tells his mother. The ethical norms he once accepted without question no longer have much hold on him. Krebs went to war, got immersed in the chaos and the cruelty and the unrelenting sin of it. Sexual relations with his little sister lurk as a real possibility given the moral turmoil in which he lives.
About the Author
Christopher Morse is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.