Abstract
The paper discusses Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Mr. and Mrs. Elliott” (In our time. Simon & Schuster, New York, pp. 85–88, 1996/1925) as a representation of a failed romantic union of two Americans. The initial sections give an outline of selected elements of narratology, Cognitive Poetics, and the Romantic philosophy of love, which form the methodological foundation of the analysis. They are followed by a description of the successive stages of the narrative and how—by representing a movement from disunity through attempted unity and back into disunity—it renders the failure of the relationship culminating in the inversion of the Romantic pattern of love. Further sections show how metaphors and metonymies underlying the circular plot, the settings, and the characters of the story express the idea of a failed romance. Final sections briefly explain the possible connection of the story with the social and political context of Europe after the end of World War I and the Americans living in France at that time, as well as with Hemingway’s personal relations with T. S. Eliot.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Abrams, M. H. (1973). Natural supernaturalism: Tradition and revolution in romantic literature. New York: Norton.
Anderson, C. R. (1994). Hemingway’s other style. In G. Montero (Ed.), Critical essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A farewell to arms (pp. 109–116). New York: G. H. Hall.
Bradstreet, A. (1986). To my dear and loving husband. In N. Baym (Ed.), The Norton anthology of American iterature (p. 49). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1678).
Brontë, E. J. (1986). Wuthering heights. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. (Original work published 1847).
Campbell, J. E. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Conrad, J. (1978). Heart of darkness. In R. V. Cassill (Ed.), The Norton anthology of shorter fiction: A shorter edition (pp. 120–191). New York: Norton. (Original work published 1902).
Crisp, P. (2003). Conceptual metaphor and its expressions. In J. Gavins & G. Steen (Eds.), Cognitive poetics in practice (pp. 99–113). London: Routledge.
Hemingway, E. (1996). Mr. and Mrs. Elliot. In In our time (pp. 85–88). New York: Simon & Schuster. (Original work published 1925).
Hogan, P. C. (2003). The mind and its stories: Narrative universals and human emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hogan, P. C. (2011). What literature teaches us about emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Horton, R. W., & Edwards, H. W. (1967). Backgrounds of American literary thought. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Jameson, F. (1972). The prison-house of language: A critical account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kövecses, Z. (1986). Metaphors of anger, pride, and love: A lexical approach to the structure of concepts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kövecses, Z. (2002). Metaphor: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kövecses, Z. (2006). Language, mind, and culture: A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, H. (1965). Observations on the style of Ernest Hemingway. In C. Baker (Ed.), Hemingway and his critics: An international anthology (pp. 93–115). New York: Hill and Wang.
Mr. and Mrs. Elliot summary. (2017). http://www.enotes.com. Study guides. Accessed June 24, 2017.
Propp, V. (1968). The morphology of the folktale (L. Scott. Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1928).
Radden, G., & Kövecses, Z. (1999). Towards a theory of metonymy. In K.-U. Panther & G. Radden (Eds.), Metonymy in language and thought (pp. 17–59). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Shklovsky, V. (1965). Art as technique. In Russian formalist criticism: Four essays (pp. 3–24). (L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis. Ed. and Trans.). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1917).
Sweester, E. E. (1990). From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yeats, W. B. (1984). In memory of Major Robert Gregory. In A. N. Jeffares (Ed.), Poems of W. B. Yeats: A new selection (pp. 49–52). London: Macmillan. (Original work published 1918).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kosecki, K. (2019). Ernest Hemingway’s “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot”: A Case of Inversion of the Romantic Philosophy of Love. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (eds) Contacts and Contrasts in Cultures and Languages. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04981-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04981-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04980-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04981-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)