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Compare And Contrast The Indian Camp And The Doctor's Wife

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Ernest Hemingway was a writer who captured the spirit of his generation. Hemingway wrote “The Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife”. Indian Camp is a story about a boy named Nick and his father who went to the Indian Camp to help deliver the baby. While there they witnessed the baby’s father commit suicide. This sparked Nick’s curiosity with death. Both stories detail Nick’s coming of age into adulthood. In the Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife Nick’s father wants Dick, Eddy, and Billy to go cut up the wood that is on the beach but Dick tries to tell him that it would by considered stealing because the logs belong to the Magic crew. Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp” and “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” exhibits Nick Adams’ …show more content…

An Indian woman had been in labor for 2 days, and was in pain and screaming. While the woman helped her the men went off. “The man had moved off up the road to sit in the dark and smoke out of range of the noise she made.” (92) This is sexism because they left the women to care for the Indian woman that was having a baby. They think it is for women to care for her and did not help at all. Instead they tried to go far away so they didn’t even have to listen to her pain. Also sexism is in the article Forget the Legend and Read the Work by Margaret Bauer. “Therefore not only do I not dispute the opinion that the woman in labor is a mere prop in Indian Camp, but also I defend Hemingway’s using her as a vehicle toward Nick’s potential development and a means of revealing Nick’s fathers callousness. Discussing the issue that women in much of Hemingway’s work are not very important of and by themselves” (Bauer 2). In the Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, sexism is portrayed by Hemingway when he describes the interaction between the wife and the doctor. He leaves her without answering her questions and goes off to hunt with his son. Hemingway can be determined as a sexist by the way he portrays the women in his stories as weak and inferior to men. Some people believe that sexism was part of Hemingway’s life because he was married 4 times and had many mistresses and because of this and the way that he writes he is viewed as a sexist. An example of masculinity versus femininity in the Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife is shown when the doctor is cleaning his shot gun and the wife says “you didn’t say anything to anger him did you?” and the doctor replies “no”. This implies that the wife is weak because she does not want a confrontation. Nick chooses to go with his father because he wants to be seen as a man and like his father. The doctor wants to feel like a tough man but walks away from Dick’s

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