Up in Michigan
Up in Michigan (Original title: Up in Michigan) is an early short story by the American writer Ernest Hemingway , written in Paris in 1921/22 and published in the summer of 1923 in the Three Stories and Ten Poems collection edited by Robert McAlmon . It is about the young girl Liz Coates and her disillusionment with love.
content
The story takes place in the north of the USA in the state of Michigan in the small town of Hortons Bay. Liz Coates works in the kitchen at a small diner and raves about Jim Gilmore, who came from Canada and who recently bought a forge in town. She falls in love with his looks and with all the things that she says make him stand out, and she wants him to speak to her. One evening Gilmore and Liz's employer, DJ Smith, go hunting and when they return that evening they drink together to celebrate their hunting success. When Liz and Gilmore are alone, Gilmore attacks them by grabbing them and openly announcing his interest in the young woman. They go for a walk together and, at a fishing spot, they finally have sex. Whether it is a rape has been discussed in the literary world with pleasure and often since the story was first published, because despite her initial crushes for Gilmore, she tries to stop him and tells him that he should n't , but despite her requests Gilmore continues. After it happens he falls asleep and she starts crying because she wants to go home. In the end she covers him with the jacket and goes home alone.
interpretation
For Liz, her romantic ideals of love collapse as a result of this incident, as her crush was only interested in her sexually and did not respect her personal wishes. The love thus presents it as pure selfishness . At the same time, their childish, naive fantasies of romance are disenchanted by sexual assault and literally dragged into the dirt. There can be no talk of love anyway, as Liz's crush on Gilmore was only related to his appearance and was therefore not linked to inner values. Her meeting with Gilmore is consequently not only a discovery for her, but also a milestone in her development from girl to woman.
Impact history
When Hemingway presented this short story to colleagues and friends in Paris in 1922, it was warmly praised by Gertrude Stein , but described as unpublishable . She then appeared in Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1923. The inclusion in the 1925 collection In Our Time failed due to objections from the publisher Horace Liveright. It was later published in many of the author's other anthologies, including The First Forty-Nine Stories in 1939 , and is now one of his well-known short stories.
Web links
- Table of contents and further interpretations
- English full text
- Gertrude Stein's opinion on the story