Hegemonic Masculinity, Emotional Suppression, and the Crisis of Male Identity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: A Connellian Reading

Abstract

This paper examines the construction of hegemonic masculinity, the mechanisms of emotional suppression, and the resultant crisis of male identity in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Drawing on R.W. Connell’s theoretical framework of hegemonic masculinity, the study analyzes how the novel’s post World War I male protagonists negotiate their sense of selfhood against the backdrop of physical trauma, psychological dislocation, and the dissolution of traditional masculine ideals. The analysis foregrounds Jake Barnes’s war inflicted wound as a complex metaphor for masculine inadequacy, Robert Cohn’s romantic idealism as a subordinated masculinity, and the expatriate milieu of Paris and Pamplona as a space where normative gender scripts are simultaneously performed and subverted. The paper argues that while Hemingway outwardly valorizes stoic emotional control, the novel’s deeper textual layers reveal a profound masculine crisis, one in which hegemonic ideals of strength, potency, and national belonging are irreparably destabilized by the aftermath of modern warfare. This study contributes to Hemingway scholarship and to broader interdisciplinary conversations in gender studies, literary criticism, and cultural history.

Keywords: Hegemonic masculinity, emotional suppression, male identity, Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, R.W. Connell, Lost Generation, postwar trauma, gender studies