"What exile from himself can flee?" : a study of the archetype of exile in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun also rises and Canto One of Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Date
1992
Authors
Stubbs, Neil Edward
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Abstract
As writers who chose voluntarily to live in exile, Ernest Hemingway and Lord Byron were sensitive to the archetypal nature of exile experience. They articulated this experience in their first major works, The Sun Also Rises and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Chapter One of this study develops the line of thought advanced by such early twentieth-century critics as Clifton Fadiman and Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet, who noticed the relationship, both biographical and literary, between Byron and Hemingway, as typified by their common fascination with foreign travel, artistic isolation, and acts of heroism. These biographical and literary aspects will be considered along with the notions of exile that have been advanced by other critics, such as Charles Zwingmann and Maria Pfister-Ammende, Michael Seidel, and John Hagopian, whose combined concepts will be distilled in order to produce a definition of the exile archetype.
Chapter 2 of this study offers an examination of the notions of exile that are articulated in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and in the First Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In these works, the Hemingway hero and his Byronic counterpart share a common exilic experience: they respond to conflicts (whether socially or psychologically induced) by removing themselves from their homelands. This impulse to relocate is often connected to a kind of loss, which may be compensated by the heightened sense of place and greater self-awareness gained in exile.
Chapter 3 examines the relationship between the exile archetype and the quest motif. In both The Sun Also Rises and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the exile figure is induced to undergo a quest in order to regain a lost idealism; both authors chose to make Iberia the initial destination for these spiritual pilgrimages. While the exile figure may come to identify with saints and martyrs (who undergo a kind of spiritual exile), the questing impulse may lead him to take on the role of a chivalric hero or a warrior. In some instances, where the questing figure suffers failure or defeat, the result may be self-annihilation. This final metamorphosis of the exile figures is especially relevant to the lives of the authors, but its destructive overtones are counterbalanced by the more productive activities of the exile as artist.
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UN SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions