Skip to main content

Book Review: Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway

Up in Michigan by Ernest Hemingway is a short story which in it has infatuation as the central theme. Other concurrent themes support this main theme are gender typecast, unequal romance, and social inferiority.

The story starts with an introduction of a man and a city to which he comes as a new immigrant. The man is Jim Gilmore, and the city is Horton's Bay in Michigan. Jim takes a blacksmith's shop as a settlement provision and often visits Smiths for meals, especially for dinner and drinks. There aren’t many houses where he lives. So, for company he acquaintances with D.J. Smith and Charley Wyman.
Liz Coates works in the kitchen of Smiths and is considered a neat beautiful girl with noticeable neat hair in the views of Mrs. Smith. On the other hand, Jim being a blacksmith is an impressive personality having substantial semblance of manhood.

Liz, inside her heart, thinks about him, and anticipates a lot about him. In fact, she becomes a keen observer of him. Ironically, Jim sees her with neutral gusto. He is not so deep about her feelings.

When Jim and other men go for fall deer hunting. Mrs Smith prepares a lot of food for them, and that time Liz thinks of preparing a special meal for Jim but she neither has resources nor the courage to ask for anything from Mrs. Smith. This shows how inferior she feels to express his love for him before others. Also, her status of a waitress keeps her tethered.
 
In a sense, she had chosen to be silent but at the same time craves for a strong and romantic telepathy with Jim. She profoundly misses him when he is out for deer hunting. When the men came back, she expected something special for herself from him. However, nothing such-like event happened. Clearly, the man does not see her as something of special value, but every man wants to have a woman above all.

It happens when one evening Jim is drunk and takes her for a walk at the dock. There he plays with her body. She vapidly tries to stop him but one part of her mind and heart wanted that. Hence, she renders herself to him. After copulation, Jim falls in the realms of deadly sleep.

She loses her virginity much contrastingly to the imago and the anticipation she held about him. She tries to shake him but he gives no response. Probably too tired to her hear. She cries, being felt exploited. The night is extremely cold; hence she lays her coat over him and returns to her room to go to bed.

It is sad to note that her love hope gets crushed underneath the typecast gender discrimination. Jim showing no interest of love for her indicates that their story was romantically unequal.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Poem Summary: Where The Mind Is Without Fear by Rabindranath Tagore

Poem by Rabindranath Tagore: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. Short Summary: This poem is written by Rabindranath Tagore during pre-independence days, when India was a colony of the British. The underlying theme of the poem is absolute freedom; the poet wants the citizens of his country to be living in a free state. According to the poem, we see that the poet is expressing his views there should be a country, like where people live without any sort of fear and with pure dignity…they should

Book Review: The Blue Umbrella by Ruskin Bond

Among all Ruskin Bond books, The Blue Umbrella has, so far, gathered immense applaud from readers and critics alike.  This is a short novel, but the kind of moral lessons it teaches to us are simply overwhelming. This is a story of Binya, a poor little girl living with her mother and an elder brother, Bijju, in a small hilly village of Garhwal. One day while herding her two cows back home, she stumbles upon some city people enjoying the picnic in the valley. She is enthralled to see them well-groomed and rich. She craves to be one like them and among many other things of their, a blue frilly umbrella catches her attention. She begins craving for it. On the other hand, the city people get attracted by her innocent beauty and the pendant in her neck. The pendant consists of leopard’s claw – which is considered a mascot widely in the hills. Binya trades her pendant off with the blue umbrella. The blue umbrella is so much beautiful that soon it becomes a topic of conversation fo

Poem Summary: Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias is a short poem of fourteen lines written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The concurrent theme of the poem is that nothing remains intact and same forever in this world. Even the brightest of metal, one day decays with passage of time. The throne name of Egyptian King Ramesses is Ozymandias. It was his dearest desire to preserve himself forever by building a huge statue that he thought would never tumble down. Stanza 1: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; Summary: The poet narrates the poem through the eyes of a traveler who seems to have come back from a remote and far-away land, referring to Egypt. The traveler r