SOURCE: Ferrero, David J. “Nikki Adams and the Limits of Gender Criticism.” The Hemingway Review 17, no. 2 (spring 1998): 18-30.

In the following essay, Ferrero explores the usefulness of gender criticism in Hemingway's short fiction.

Hemingway is the perfect straw man for feminist critics. And in many ways he was asking for it. Witness his sometimes self-parodic machismo; his preoccupation with war, boxing, hunting and bullfighting; his string of divorces; his celebration of the masculine in much of his writing after 1930. Yet this view distorts our understanding of much Hemingway fiction. This is especially true of the Nick Adams stories from In Our Time. I am thinking in particular of “The End of Something” and “The Three-Day Blow,” which concern Nick's efforts to define and negotiate relationships with men and women, and “Cross-Country Snow,” which explores Nick's attempt to come to terms with the demands of paternity within the institution...