Every romantic relationship hits a point where what we want to be true about the relationship runs squarely into what is actually true in that relationship. At that point is generally the crisis that determines whether the relationship will survive or not. If the relationship does not survive, we often end up heading out looking for another one, wanting what we wanted to be true to be real in the next relationship. This is often why so many men, single once again in middle age, end up trying to date someone much younger to see if they can relive that fantasy once again with a different result. In both “Hills Like White Elephants” and “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” one of the themes at work is the idea that the men in the relationship hit a point where what they want in the relationship is no longer going to work, and they have to decide whether to change their approach or remain frustrated by the same old situations repeating themselves, over and over, down the road.
In “Hills Like White Elephants,” the man and the woman are living the life that Ernest Hemingway and the rest of the Lost Generation tried on for size in the years after the Great War. They are carousing around Europe, from way station to way station, trying new drinks and living as perpetual tourists. On this particular day, the two of them are sitting at a bar looking at hills that the woman describes as looking “like white elephants” (Hemingway, web). A white elephant, of course, is something of a surprise that you really do not want, and over the course of the story, the reader learns that the man and the woman have had a surprise that they do not really want. Their life to this point has involved nothing but fun, nothing but carousing, but it appears that she has become pregnant during their time together, and now they face a clock that is slowly ticking.
It is fairly clear that this clock is wearing at the fabric of the fine relationship they have cobbled together for themselves. That is why the man has to make an effort to “try and have a fine time,” (Hemingway, web) or the two of them have to try together to enjoy things. She points out that “all [they] do [is] look at things and try new drinks” (Hemingway, web). At this point, the conversation is either going to lead to a fight or simply break down, so the man picks up what seems to have been a longstanding trope for him: “It’s really an awfully simple operation. It’s not really an operation at all” (Hemingway, web). The idea, of course, is for her to have an abortion so that they will not have to have any complication. He uses the euphemism of letting air in to describe how the procedure works. It is fairly clear that the woman is still uncertain, though, because eventually she asks him to “please please please please please please please stop talking” (Hemingway, web). She has not reached a point of resolution about the procedure, and it is clear that there is a part of her that wants the man to want the baby too. The repetition here indicates the depths to which this unease has reached inside her.
So the white elephants is the fetus slowly growing inside the woman, but it is also the relationship from the man’s perspective. He thought he would be able to travel around Europe indefinitely, going from place to place and trying new things with a woman keeping him company and sharing his bed. Even now, in an age of 99% effective birth control, occasionally unplanned pregnancies will take place. In Hemingway’s age, when there were so many people who still thought birth control was immoral, this sort of thing was even more common than it is now, and it brought many dalliances like this either to an end or to a new phase. At the end of the story, the woman has reset herself to the point where she says, “I feel fineThere’s nothing wrong with me. I feel fine” (Hemingway, web). As any man who has been in a relationship can tell you, there is no more dangerous word from a woman’s mouth than “fine” in a situation like this, because the truth is likely going to be the exact opposite.
In “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie,” it is fairly clear that the narrative point of view is from someone who has gone further down the road of cynicism than the man in “Hills Like White Elephants,” because he has reduced women to items that one might find in a curiosity shop and separated them on the basis of their ethnicity. Even the form of the story itself takes on the cynicism that the narrator has adopted, because it is written like an instructional manual, with different sections about how to date women from different ethnic groups and different socioeconomic classes. The purpose, then, is to guide the reader toward the best way to get laid with one of those women. Of course, there is nothing in the manual about finding emotional intimacy or actual closeness in any of these relationships. Instead, it is all about getting what you want, as quickly as you want, with as little fuss as possible.
As one might expect, a central part of having one’s way with a woman, according to this manual, involves hiding anything that might present the man in a negative light. One of these tips involves squirreling away the “government cheese” that one has in an invisible corner of one’s refrigerator (Diaz, web). Of course, “government cheese” is what one gets when one is on one of those food benefit programs that limits what one can get to a certain set of products, even more restrictive than the welfare debit card. The idea is that there are no women who will sleep with a man who has to buy that sort of cheese, because she will feel like she will always be living in poverty with that man, and one thing that is certain (according to this manual) is that women will only choose situations that are upwardly mobile.
An interesting section of the story has to do with the expectations of the behavior of women according to their class and ethnicity. The story does not just instruct the man on how to act with women from different ethnic groups; it also puts assumptions out there about how women will act from those groups. Some of these assumptions include things like “a whitegirl might just give it up right then” or “a local girl may have hips and a thick ass but she won’t be quick about letting you touch” (Diaz, web). These assumptions serve to color what one can expect to happen on a date – and what a guy will be willing to go through in order to get what he wants.
Obviously, Diaz is using a great deal of irony to make a point about the difference between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy, and how the assumptions we make about each other keep us from achieving a sense of emotional closeness. However, the whole point of the manual is both ironic and accurate at the same time. If you spend any time looking at online dating sites, you can see that the process of finding relationships has become much like shopping for other things online. You scroll from profile to profile, seeing if you can find something you like while looking for things you want to avoid, as though looking for three or four criteria is going to keep you from hitting challenges down the road. Of course, when the challenges come, there are plenty of other options online, and one of those has to be perfect, right?
The two stories under consideration in this paper both have as a central theme the idea that people enter relationships with illusions about how what things will be like for us, and when something happens to threaten those illusions, the relationship hits a point where the people either change with the relationship or they go back to the drawing board and try to make their illusion real again.
Works Cited
Diaz, Junot. “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie.” n.d. Web. 5
May 2016.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” n.d. Web. 5 May 2016.
