Why does Mother Elliot cry? Cornelia's sexuality in "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot".

Stewart, Matthew

Critics have tended to view "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" as either a personal attack or a satire. Reading the story as a satire requires the reader to posit a clear, stable, authorial point of view. However, "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" retains too many unstable and ambiguous elements to be viewed strictly as a satire. While it is possible to see Hubert as the object of ridicule, it is impossible to declare the author's attitude toward Cornelia with any certainty. Her sexuality and the author's judgments about her behavior are open to multiple interpretations.

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IN LIGHT OF THE SURGE OF INTEREST in Hemingway and gender issues over the past two decades, "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" now presents itself as a more complex and attention-worthy story than it seemed to previous generations of critics, who either glossed over it or concentrated on identifying the real-life prototypes of the fictional characters targeted for satire. (1) Indeed, the story has almost invariably been discussed as a satire, whether by biographically-oriented critics looking for the real-life counterparts of the fictional targets or by textually-oriented critics parsing the story to infer the stand of its author on various evident themes: the writer's vocation, the behavior of American expatriates, the "spoiled" rich, and human sexual identity.

To label a fiction as satire involves a critical judgment that implies a great deal of certainty on the critic's part that he or she knows where the author (whether real or "implied") stands on the issues in question. Satire depends upon the reader's ability to distinguish between the author's apparent attitude towards the objects of satire and the actual values held to be true or worthy by the author. If the author's attitude towards his material is not sufficiently clear or stable, the piece drifts towards some other mode--perhaps ironic comedy, perhaps travesty, perhaps farce, but not true satire with its evident stance made possible only by a marked moral surety and stability on the part of the author. However, consistent with the "iceberg principle" that Hemingway was developing as he wrote the fictions collated in In Our Time (1925)--"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" deliberately leaves much for the reader to determine. Thus certain elements of the text are stable enough to be categorized as satire, but other elements are highly unstable. The question of Cornelia's sexuality is prominent amongst these equivocal aspects of the text and is a more ambiguous subject than even the story's recent, post-Garden Garden of Eden professional readers have acknowledged.

For example, in an important 1990 article that treats the story as a satire--Marjorie Perloff regards Cornelia's sexual identity as fixed and certain. In this intertextual study, the author skillfully demonstrates Hemingway's indebtedness to Gertrude Stein's earlier short story "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene," enumerating both the similarities and differences to be found between the two stories. Perloff's ultimate goal is to spell out the divergent versions of modernism suggested by the two authorial methods that she sees the stories as typifying. The Steinian version is superior, she concludes, because it is more "open to interpretation, [and makes] the reader work." Hemingway, on the other hand, uses "loaded phrases: there is only one way to understand them." Likewise, she concludes that "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" is "a narrative that 'prevails' on us," so that the "the reader's response is entirely controlled." Although granting that his mode of writing may be subtle, Perloff concludes that Hemingway's story "makes no allowances for the sort of irreducible difference we find in a text like Miss Furr and Miss Skeene." Naturally, this view of a highly determined text leads Perloff to conclude that "the object of Hemingway's satire is quite plain." He is out to lampoon homosexuals, especially the effeminate and effete sort represented by Hubert Elliot, but also Cornelia who, she concludes "is equally despicable in Hemingway's view." Perloff sees Cornelia as a lesbian looking for a set-up that will provide cover for her relationship with her girlfriend: "Cornelia sizes up Hubert as a man who will leave her alone and provide her with legitimacy." While this reading of Cornelia is clearly quite plausible, it is not air-tight, and it is not the only reasonable interpretation suggested by the text. As I shall demonstrate, there are a number of plausible situations that could be inferred from Hemingway's elusive and ambiguous story.

In their recent book, Nancy Comley and Robert Scholes discuss "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" in relationship to what they term the American Puritan sexual code (sex solely as a means of reproduction) and explore the possibility of viewing Hubert Elliot as an alter-ego for Ernest Hemingway. One of the few critical pieces not to focus on the work as an ad hominem satire, their essay nonetheless joins Perloff's in seeming to take for granted that Cornelia is and always has been a lesbian ("She simply does not find [sexual pleasure] in heterosexual intercourse"), and asserts "that the more obvious and powerful codes active in this text are those deployed by the knowing narrator, who shares the macho confidence usually attributed to the author" (82, my emphasis; 84). Comley and Scholes, supple critics that they are, seem more interested in analyzing Hubert, but to my mind he is considerably more determined by the text than his wife, whose behavior and motivations remain more mysterious and manage to elude the "knowing narrator's" control.

If an issue as fundamental as a character's motivation remains open to interpretation (as I hope to show), it is difficult to agree with Perloff's assessment of Hemingway's story as cut-and-dried, a quality which her essay ascribes to the entirety of Hemingway's oeuvre. Likewise, the narrator's "knowing tone," does not necessarily transform itself into certain knowledge on the part of the reader. It seems as if the satirical targets and intent are more open to question than even hip critics are prepared to acknowledge. Such questioning of satirical intent in turn raises the more general issue about whether the sort of elliptical, writerly fictions often produced by the iceberg method can ever be turned to purely satirical purpose.

Hemingway's narrator is clearly snide and mocking in some passages, but he is also coy at key moments, thus planting several mysteries for the reader to solve. One such mystery involves the precise reason(s) why Hubert's mother cries upon learning of his marriage. The pertinent passage reads: "His mother cried when he brought Cornelia home after their marriage but brightened very much when she learned they were going to live abroad" (IOT 86). Hemingway the creator may well have known just why Mother Elliot cries, but his narrator is not allowed to tell' us: another instance of information withheld. Various possibilities present themselves, some of which have little to do with the question of sexual practices. Mother Elliot's tears may signify that Hubert is a Mama's Boy whom Mama can't stand seeing with another girl. (2) Perhaps Hubert's old-money, Yankee-society mother is a snob, upset over his having married beneath him by settling for a too-much older and unattractive Southerner. Mother Elliot may dislike the prospect of being around Cornelia (or Hubert, or both of them), so that what really bothers her is not the marriage per se but the prospect of their moving hi with her. Along these lines, we do not see Mother Elliot cry until Hubert "brought Cornelia home after the marriage" and subsequently she "brightened very much when she learned they were going to live abroad" (86). This short passage is in itself ambiguous, revealing nothing about the circumstances of the wedding ceremony. Was it secret, thereby catching Mother Elliot completely by surprise in all particulars? Or was it only the fact of their coming to live with her that upset her? The latter possibility seems more likely, but the former is not beyond reasonable inference. Finally, Hubert's mother may discern what Hubert does not: that he has married a lesbian who has entrapped him in a marriage of convenience. Obviously, these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and the last possibility depends upon the reader accepting a version of Cornelia's sexuality which is itself open to a variety of interpretations.

Hubert is less open to interpretation than Cornelia. Naive and willfully inexperienced (and therefore gullible), undersexed and over-privileged, prudish and priggish, perhaps latently homosexual (although there is not a great deal of purely textual evidence to support this possibility), he is a man capable only of sublimating his weak sexuality into the creation of long bad poems, which he labors over at night and publishes at his own expense. Worst of all, according to the author's own values Hubert mistakes his dilettantism for true artistic achievement. He has just enough libidinal drive to become temporarily frustrated, which he takes out on Cornelia by scolding her for the mistakes she makes when typing his poetry manuscripts. She cannot "have a baby" with Hubert nor can she type his poems (despite the fact that she tries to learn "the touch system"). Still, in the end, the narrator reports, "they were all very happy" (IOT 88). While this pronouncement also works as a piece of sarcasm, it is not an instance of unmistakable, straightforward irony. If it were, one would simply conclude that the three expatriates were not actually all very happy. But the intention of the narrator seems more sophisticated than that. A more likely interpretation of the line would be that after some initial disappointments and frustrations, they really were all happy. The sarcasm enters in the implication that though they are truly "happy," they should not be (enter here the "knowing narrator" described by Comley and Scholes). No "real" man should be content with such a situation, and therefore Hubert is worthy of derision.

As the primary object of satire, Hubert's character, then, remains relatively fixed for the reader. To what degree he reflects Chard Powers Smith, T.S. Eliot, or an alter-ego of Hemingway himself, is an interesting question discussed well by other critics but not germane to this essay. Cornelia, however, is a considerably more ambiguous character, especially in regards to her sexual identity and history. It is possible--see Perloff and Comley and Scholes--that Cornelia is a lesbian, that she is content to be so, and that she has married Hubert to gain the cover of respectability. Hubert may be desirable as an instrument for fathering a child, thus enhancing Cornelia's cover of respectability and strengthening her hold on him. However, it is also plausible to see her as essentially bisexual, as having courted Hubert to pursue heterosexual inclinations that she truly does feel. It is even possible that she wishes to try to "get over" her lesbianism by "going straight," and thus singles out the mild and virginal Hubert with whom to make this effort. While a present-day audience might dismiss this possibility as retrograde thinking about the nature of human sexuality, it would not have been an uncommon line of thought even among educated people in the 1920s. One might make oneself "normal" by the proper combination of will power and living arrangements.

All of the above interpretations are consistent with the assumption that Cornelia's desire to have a baby is sincere. Because Hubert is so clearly an object of satire, the Cornelia-as-lesbian reading stands out because in this scenario Hubert is painted as the ultimate dupe. Yet Hubert can still be very much the object of satire in any of the above scenarios; furthermore, the ambiguity of the text's language should be fully acknowledged. Nor does Hemingway's satire of Hubert's low-grade libido and (possibly) of his latent homosexuality necessarily imply that Hemingway is also (or equally) satirizing Cornelia for her lesbianism. There is plenty of biographical evidence, as well as evidence in the oeuvre, that Hemingway's attitude towards lesbians was more complicated, more sympathetic, and far less vehement than his attitude toward male homosexuals. It is not difficult to trace instances wherein he sought out the company of lesbians, including some that he found attractive.

The reader may infer that Cornelia and her girlfriend had a sexual relationship before the marriage, but this issue is also beyond conclusive proof. While Cornelia's enjoyment of her post-marital relationship with her old girl friend is beyond doubt, certain passages can be interpreted to indicate that Cornelia is bisexual rather than strictly lesbian. One's reading of these passages depends upon whether they are taken straightforwardly or ironically. If read straightforwardly they indicate sexual desire stirred in her by Hubert: "Cornelia was pure too. 'Kiss me again like that,' she said" (IOT 86). This passage seems to indicate a genuine sexual excitement derived from Hubert, and therefore marks itself as one of the strongest arguments against the Cornelia-is-obviously-a-lesbian school of thought. However, the word pure, at least lightly satirical, may actually have a paradoxical quality here, such that it refers straightforwardly to Cornelia's lack of heterosexual experience but simultaneously and ironically to her already experienced state vis-a-vis lesbianism. This latter reading would emphasize Hubert's naivete in regards to the already active lesbian life Cornelia has led prior to meeting him.

The excitement she expresses over his kiss is equally indeterminate. It could be genuine or feigned, a part of her plan to entrap him in a marriage of convenience. The possibility of entrapment is actually set out in the story's first paragraph, before the question of Cornelia's sexual identity arises: "Other people who knew they were married believed she was going to have a baby" (IOT 85). The phrase "going to have" is ambiguous here and could mean either "is already pregnant" or "intends to become pregnant soon." "Other people," searching for some reason that Hubert would marry the much-older Cornelia, might deduce that he "had to," and might mistake her sea-sickness for morning sickness. In such a reading the joke is once again on Hubert, who has kept himself so pure that he cannot even consummate his marriage when his wedding night finally arrives. And, because the sexual life of Hubert and Cornelia ends before it can be said to have begun, the second possible interpretation of the phrase ("intends to become pregnant") likewise reads as a sneering joke at wilting Hubert's expense. Moreover, taken in this way, the phrase also suggests that Cornelia stakes a claim to Hubert not only as husband, but also as father of her child. She's going to have a baby and then have her husband just where she wants him--cornered.

The subsequent pun about male erections is also critical to the interpretation of Cornelia's sexuality. Before they were married "Cornelia would ask him to tell her again that he had kept himself really straight for her. The declaration always set her off again" (IOT 86). This passage would seem straightforwardly to assert an authentic, heterosexually-charged response from Cornelia, and can be taken as another example countering Cornelia's clear and "simple" lesbianism. On the other hand, the pun is delivered as an inside joke from the narrator to the reader, who must at least acknowledge the possibility that everything Cornelia says and does may be a tactical maneuver in her planned entrapment of Hubert. It may be that her delight comes not so much from the straightening effect her kisses have on him, but from the fact that she has met a sexual milquetoast whom she can beguile into a marriage of convenience. This reading is bolstered by the fact that Cornelia's girlfriend is in the shop on the night when she induces Hubert to kiss her: "and then one day in the little back room of the shop they had been dancing to the gramophone while her girl friend was in the front of the shop and she had looked up into his eyes and he had kissed her." The subsequent sentence likewise is filtered through the seemingly incognizant Hubert's dopey point of view: "He could never remember just when it was decided that they were to be married" (86). Later, once settled in Touraine, Cornelia "prevail[s] upon him to send over to Boston for her girl friend who had been ill the tea shop" (87).

Finally there is the passage describing their honeymoon night when Hubert is apparently unable to perform: "They were both disappointed but finally Cornelia went to sleep" (IOT 86). Of the three ambiguous passages, this one seems the most straightforward and unarguable token of Cornelia's heterosexual desires. It does not fit in well with a version of Cornelia as "simply" lesbian. If one wishes to build a version of Cornelia as bisexual or even as a woman "trying to go straight," then it must be that she is genuinely disappointed that Hubert cannot perform, and his low-grade sexuality is the reason why she quickly begins to avoid sexual contact with him and brings her girlfriend back into the picture. Heterosexual activity with Hubert is too great a disappointment to bear. In this reading, he disappoints her budding desire to try out a new sexual identity. Or it could be that Cornelia desires a baby and is disappointed either with Hubert's performance or the act involved in creating a child. Still another possibility, if one wishes to see Cornelia as sexually inexperienced, is that the pun about Hubert's erection is aimed at skewering her own long-intact chastity, just as the story satirizes the still-virgin Hubert for the sheer fact of his self-willed inexperience. In this interpretation, Hubert and Cornelia are both over-privileged, undersexed upper-class dopes.

Alternatively, even the wedding night disappointment can be seen as a sham (hence Cornelia's ability to fall asleep while Hubert is out pacing in the hotel, getting excited by the pairs of shoes left in the hallway). This interpretation strains the text, since the narrator, who is sarcastic and ambiguous but not unreliable, seems to be speaking straightforwardly of both characters in the passage. However, if the reader wishes to build upon an already-formulated version of Cornelia as lesbian, it would be possible to claim that the wedding night is the last performance she intends to put on for him; once on board the ship to Europe, once his money and her trip abroad are secured, Cornelia will feel free to abstain from sex with her newlywed husband and to get her old girlfriend into her new household at the earliest opportunity. Readers who surmise that Cornelia and her girlfriend were sexually active prior to the honeymoon trip to France will in turn use that surmise as more evidence that the marriage was a set-up on Cornelia's part all along. When the girlfriend does arrive in France, Cornelia calls her "Honey," and immediately upon her arrival, "Mrs. Elliot became much brighter"--the same phrase used of the other Mrs. Elliot, Hubert's mother, when she learned that the couple would be setting off for Europe (IOT 87).

The story, then, serves as a reminder that even with an author whose life is as well-known as Hemingway's, full play of the text itself must be acknowledged. If elements of a text remain unstable, it may not be possible to conceive of those elements as satire in any strict sense of that word. Recent criticism of "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" seems to show that even with the emergence of the "new" Hemingway, readers' conceptions of what the author's attitude towards the sexes and sexual identity "must have been" still play a heavy role in determining critical interpretation. As we have seen, "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" forbids any easily arrived-at, closed conclusions about Cornelia's sexual identity and therefore about the author's point of view in regards to her. However, the story maintains its predominantly mocking tone, and no matter how Cornelia is characterized, Hubert's gullibility and sexual ignorance appear boundless, so that the satire directed at him is the clearest element of authorial intention intact in the story: "He could never remember just when it was decided that they were to be married. But they were married" (IOT 86).

NOTES

(1.) Writing in 1989, Paul Smith summarized the reception of the story thus: "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" has been both more and less neglected that it deserves to be. One might wish that those biographers who found in it yet another instance of Hemingway's bad taste, callous contempt, and occasional stylistic infelicity had neglected the story altogether; while one might also wish for a larger company of critics who thought of it as, possibly, a short story. Never a story to attract much critical notice, once the object of the story's satire was revealed, there was little more to say except to regret its triviality. (123-124)

Richard B. Hovey can be taken to exemplify those few early critics who devoted more than a passing sentence or two to the story: "In Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" the moralist takes over completely. The result is caricature and heavy-handed satire...." (13). Smith's appreciative essay actually retains the usual emphasis on explicating the ad hominem targets, working in a thorough case for T.S. Eliot, and, even more interestingly, of Hemingway himself, whose 1920s life and thought Smith sees partially reflected in Hubert. See also Roger Casey's note.

(2.) Comley and Scholes have written interestingly about the theme of mother as best-girl in Hemingway, and In Our Time also includes "Soldier's Home," a story wherein Harold Krebs's "Mummy" clings to her adult son in such a way that he finds himself literally nauseated, in "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" the narrator makes a point of remarking that "Many of the people on the boat look her [Cornelia] for Elliot's mother" (IOT 85).

WORKS CITED

Casey, Roger. "Hemingway's El(l)iot: Parallels between In Our Time and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." ANQ 4:4 (October 1991): 189-193.

Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

Hemingway, Ernest. In Our Time. 1925, 1930. New York: Scribner's, 1970.

Hovey, Richard B. Hemingway: The Inward Terrain. Seattle: U Washington P, 1968.

Perloff, Marjorie. "Ninety-Percent Rotarian: Gertrude Stein's Hemingway." American Literature 62 (1990): 668-682.

Smith, Paul. "From the Waste Land to the Garden with the Elliots." In Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction: New Perspectives. Ed. Susan F. Beegel. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. 123-129.

MATTHEW STEWART

Boston University