Screaming through silence: the violence of race in "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife."(short stories by Ernest Hemingway)

Strong, Amy Lovell

IN HER RECENT WORK of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison calls our attention to the way critics have ignored an abiding Africanist presence that weaves its way through the works of white American authors:

There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars

that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of

white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power

are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence

of black people in the United States.... The contemplation of this

black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature

and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary

imagination. (5)

While my focus in this essay will be on the lack of an Indian (rather than Africanist) presence, I will explore the ways Hemingway negotiates the matter of "race" and racial difference in two short stories from In Our Time. Like recent readings of Hemingway's fiction which have begun to outline issues of "gender trouble,"(1) my work will center on two of his earliest short stories, "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," to examine how Hemingway represents the instability of racial identity. In the first story, he presents race simply as a biological feature, but then in the second revises this model to create a complex, shifting depiction of race that anticipates the essentialist/constructionist debates Waged today.(2) Secondarily, I hope this study might begin to uncover the ways his work has interrogated power relations built on racial identity, and even exposed the instability of power based on such a system of inequality.

Critics have long been aware of the Edenic and, more specifically, Adamic longings to be found in Hemingway's work, longings he shares with American writers such as Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville. The Nick Adams stories, with their obvious gesture toward this tradition, have generated a number of comments on the symbolism of the name "Adams," but most critics seem to have internalized R.W.B. Lewis's formulation in The American Adam that to be Adamic is to efface racial history.(3) Quoting from an 1839 Democratic Review, Lewis defines the Adamic myth: "Our national birth was the beginning of a new history ... which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only" (5). Traditionally, "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" have been read as tales of initiation, focusing heavily on the final scene in "Indian Camp" and Nick's musing that "he felt quite sure that he would never die" (19), and/or on the unity between father and son in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" when they choose to seek out black squirrels together.(4) To be sure, the Indians in these stories have been characterized, often as symbols of darkness and primitivism, but even this characterization functions primarily to offset Nick's character. My argument is not specifically with the way critics have characterized the Indians (although that racial subtext should be examined). It is rather that Hemingway's stories do, in fact, present an Adamic figure whose identity cannot be fully understood without historicizing his relation to these Indians--a relation based on racial domination. What takes place within these two stories is a male-male rivalry, white male against Indian male, where the endangered territory returns to eerily familiar historical subjects/catalysts for violence: the woman's body and the land. In the opening scene of "Indian Camp,' we find Nick, Dr. Adams, and Uncle George being ferried across a lake through a gloomy, misty darkness. Joseph DeFalco points out that "the classical parallel is too obvious to overlook, for the two Indians function in a Charon-like fashion in transporting Nick, his father, and his uncle from their own sophisticated and civilized world of the white man into the dark and primitive world of the camp" (161). The Hades metaphor not only seems "too obvious to overlook,' but other details add further support to his reading, such as the dogs "rushing out" at the men once they reach the other side of the lake."A dog came out barking.... More dogs rushed out at them" (IOT 16). This seemingly gratuitous appearance recalls Cerberus, the many-headed dog who challenged spirits trying to enter or leave Hades. Furthermore, if a Charon-like figure ferries the men across the lake, we may imagine the river Styx, but as the men return, now with Dr. Adams at the oars, we may be reminded of another famous river in Hades. Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, works well in this context for two reasons: it helps illuminate Nick's final thoughts of immortality at the end of the story, and it implicates both father and son in a larger historical pattern of forgetting. At the end of "Indian Camp," Nick and his father have a brief, but pointed catechistic interchange about death, and because we have just witnessed Nick's "initiation" into the world of pain and death, his final thought surprises some readers. Trailing his hand in the water as his father rowed them back across, Nick "felt quite sure that he would never die" (19). Even if we abandon the mythic elements here and simply see a boy being rowed across the lake by his father, we must admit some element of willful forgetfulness and an enormous amount of psychical distancing from his experience at the Indian camp. The goal of this particular reading is not meant to encourage discussion of Hemingway's familiarity with Orphic mythology, or even to presume that he was referring to Greek myth in "Indian Camp." Rather, it serves as a metaphor for the ways Hemingway's story has been read; readers have also trailed their hands in the river of forgetfulness, overlooking the Indians' role not only in this story, but in the making of American identity. I believe we have not fully engaged with "Indian Camp" or "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" unless we come to terms with the way the identities of Nick and his father are constructed in relation to the Indians' presence, and vice versa.

One of the most perplexing issues in "Indian Camp" springs from the moment when Dr. Adams has successfully completed his crude operation on the Indian woman and reaches up into the bunk to check on the father, only to find--to his undisguised horror--that the Indian has slit his throat "from ear to ear" (18). We may simply wish to accept the explanation given by Dr. Adams: "He couldn't stand things, I guess" (19). It does seem true that the Indian "couldn't stand things" but does this simply mean he couldn't stand his wife's physical pain? However astounding the woman's pain, the doctor has arrived, and the two days of pain should be alleviated very soon. Which then raises a different question: is it the doctor's presence that drives the Indian husband to suicide? I believe "Indian Camp" tells a different kind of initiation story, one that, like the Orphic myth, shows how a purified and initiated identity cannot be constructed without the binary opposition of unpurified and fallen selves.

The imagery surrounding Dr. Adams, Uncle George, and Nick's entry into the opposing camp is permeated by structures of domination. Once across the lake, Uncle George's first action is to offer cigars to the Indians who have rowed them across. It is not clear why Uncle George gives the Indians two cigars; it would not be a form of payment for rowing them across, because the doctor is obviously doing the Indian family a favor. It must be a gift, either in the form of a traditional `peace' offering, or as a congratulatory gesture for the newborn baby. We have no signs, however, that the Indians will give any gift in return. Gayle Rubin's work explains that "gifts were the threads of social discourse, the means by which ... societies were held together in the absence of specialized governmental institutions" (172). She further suggests that "gift exchange may also be the idiom of competition and rivalry" (172), using the example of the "Big Man" who humiliates another by giving more than can be reciprocated. This first form of exchange between cultures establishes a subtle, unequal dynamic of dominator/dominated.

Jurgen C. Wolter's article, "Caesareans in an Indian Camp" describes the word Caesarean as "highly ambiguous; in addition to being a technical term in surgery, it connotes authority, imperialism, assumption of power, and even tyrannical dictatorship" (92). After introducing this formulation, however, Wolter reverts to the familiar theme of the father-son relationship: "through the unintentionally violent (Caesarean) initiation of his son, the pompous and omniscient Caesar-doctor is reborn as a responsible and humanly imperfect father" (93). Despite this gesture toward metaphoric imperialism, Wolter reiterates the same story of initiation, adding the Caesarean component to complicate our reading of Nick's father. But the "violent" Caesarean is not performed on the doctor's son; it is performed, without anesthetic, on a screaming Indian woman. And while the location of this story may alleviate a severe condemnation of the doctor and his methods per se, because he saves the life of mother and child in an Indian camp distant from "civilization" (where, for example, anesthetic would be available) it is precisely the story's location that highlights the racial inequality between the two cultures with its insistent juxtaposition of light/dark, civilization/wilderness, clean/dirty. Dr. Adams's "Caesarean" assumption of power implicates both father and son in a violent history with relevance far beyond the realm of familial bonds. As Hemingway draws the scene, the doctor appears to be the only person who can remain oblivious to the Indian woman's screams. All others who do not have to assist in the operation have moved up the road out of earshot. When Nick asks his father to quiet her screams, he responds:"But her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important" (16). Some have read this as callousness, others as professional distance; either way, Dr. Adams psychically distances himself from the woman to the point that she loses her markers of humanity (this psychical distancing is repeated in Nick's belief that he will never die). Dr. Adams chooses to envision her body as a territory without agency or voice, a kind of uninhabited land he takes possession of and must get under control (what Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvelous Possessions, refers to as "terrae nullius" (60)). Once the doctor begins working on the Indian woman, her pain is so great--"Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still" (17)--she bites Uncle George on the arm, resisting, fighting back. This image echoes a scene from another Hemingway story, "A Way You'll Never Be," which provides a visual and psychological analogue for the Indian woman's experience at the hands of Dr. Adams:

propaganda postcards showing a soldier in Austrian uniform bending a

woman backward over a bed; the figures were impressionistically

drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual

rape in which the woman's skirts are pulled over her head to

smother her, one comrade sometimes sitting upon the head. (SS 402-3)

A woman, reduced to nothing but screams and biting at the men who hold her down, must submit as they perform an act over which she has no control. Certainly we cannot say that "Indian Camp" here depicts a rape; the doctor and the men holding this woman down are attempting to deliver a baby and save the mother's life. But what we can see, and perhaps more importantly, what the Indian husband sees, is a woman's body as a territory under complete control of white men.5 The Indian husband, we must not forget, had endured the most painful part of his wife's suffering, when she had been attended by "all the old women in the camp" (16). His suicide comes later, when the Indian women mysteriously leave the birthing to be replaced by three Indian men, Uncle George, Nick, and Dr. Adams.(6)

When Dr. Adams finishes the operation, he feels "exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game" (18).

"That's one for the medical journal, George," he said. "Doing a Caesarian

with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders."

(18)

Uncle George's sarcastic response, "Oh, you're a great man, all right" (18), not only reinforces the insidious connection between Dr. Adams and Caesar ("a great man"), but the doctor's immediate desire to have the operation written down in the medical journals recalls Stephen Greenblatt's research on ways explorers conquered the "new world" In Marvelous Possessions, Greenblatt explains that early settlers of the "new world" established themselves and gained property almost exclusively by means of speech acts: "For Columbus taking possession is principally the performance of a set of linguistic acts: declaring, witnessing, recording. The acts are public and official" (57). In addition to the verbal testimony, the speaker would take care that "everything would be written down and consequently have greater authority" (57). These documents would then provide both `truth' and `legality' for the procedure, "ensuring that the memory of the encounter is fixed, ensuring that there are not competing versions of what happened" (57). After the Caesarean, Dr. Adams feels "exalted," a word that not only means elated, but also connotates a rise in "status, dignity, power, honor, wealth" (Webster's New World Dictionary). He is "talkative," defining and declaring his accomplishment before witnesses. Dr. Adams feels like a "football player in the dressing room after a game,' and when we consider football as a sanctioned form of violence between men, the dressing room represents a space where the winning team revels in a victory. Finally, there is Dr. Adams's wish to have this event written down in a medical journal. His medical journals represent an ultimate authority: a removed, consecrated sign of medical, legal, and institutional power, not unlike the proclamations sent back to the crown by Columbus as a form of institutional domination over the colonies.

Greenblatt further points out that Indians were unable to contradict the colonizers' proclamations, "because only linguistic competence, the ability to understand and to speak, would enable one to fill in the sign" (60)."Indian Camp" does not offer a single Indian voice, only the pregnant Indian woman's screams. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain explains the way extreme physical pain will "bring about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned" (4). The Indian woman loses her ability to make sense through language, and she is ultimately rendered altogether senseless: "She did not know what had become of the baby or anything" (18); moreover, when her screams are acknowledged in this story, we find that the men have purposefully devised ways to screen them out. First, we find that the Indian men "moved off up the road ... out of range of the noise she made" (16), specifically removing to a place where they need not hear her screams. Second, when Nick asks his father to quiet her screams, Dr. Adams instructs his son outright that he does not hear them. Third, as suggested earlier, we cannot definitively assert that even the Indian husband is directly reacting to his wife's screams, because he must know that after enduring them for so much time, they will soon cease. Hemingway's juxtaposition of Dr. Adams's insistent discourse and the woman's pre-literate or illiterate state shows how her body becomes her only identity. Her body literally gets hollowed out in this story; the figurative metaphor of terrae nullius has become a reality in the hands of Dr. Adams, much like Greenblatt's description of early settlers and their official claims for territory in the "new world":

[Y]ou shall make before a notary public and the greatest possible number

of witnesses, and the best known ones, an act of possession in our

name, cutting trees and boughs, and digging or making, if there be an

opportunity, some small building. (56)

Dr. Adams has cut into the woman, like the early settlers leaving a gash in a tree, and her scar will serve as a marker (just as the scaler's mark of "White and McNally" signifies ownership of the logs in the second story). Because "Indian Camp" offers no anesthetic, offers a jack-knife rather than a scalpel, offers biting and screams of pain, the line between healing and violence becomes blurred. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" also carries themes of gendered violence and bodily pain into a racially charged context. The opening scene hints at connections with"Indian Camp"both in the representation of landscape and similarity in themes:

Dick Boulton came from the Indian camp to cut up logs for Nick's father.

He brought his son Eddy and another Indian named Billy Tabeshaw

with him. They came in through the back gate out of the woods,

Eddy carrying the long cross-cut saw....

He turned and shut the gate. The others went on ahead of him

down to the lake shore where the logs were buried in the sand. (italics

mine, IOT 23)

The allusions to "Indian Camp" are impossible to overlook. Again, we have an Indian camp, a father and son pair, a cross-cutting saw, an entry-way, the woods, the lake. Paul Strong's article, "First Nick Adams Stories" offers a clear and startling summary of parallels between the two stories:

"Doc" arrives at the Indian camp with his jack-knife to deliver a baby

trapped in its mother's womb; unless he is successful, it will probably

die. "Dick" arrives at the Adamses' with cant-hooks to free up logs

trapped in the sand; unless he does, the wood will probably rot. "Doc"

heats water, washes his hands, delivers the baby and announces its

identity--"it's a boy." Eddie and Billy Tabeshaw deliver a log, wash it,

and "Dick" determines its identity--"It belongs to White and McNally."

The Caesarean ends with "Doc.... sewing it up"; because of the

set-to,"Dick" never does "saw it up." (86)

"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" almost serves as a reply to the doctor's Caesarian hubris in "Indian Camp" for here the roles between the white man and the Indian have reversed. In this story, the doctor now needs the Indian men to help him dislodge the logs and saw them up. Here one Indian speaks--has the last word, in fact while the doctor is silenced, though the Indians "could see from his back how angry he was" (25). Dr. Adams's verbal threat,"If you call me Doc once again, I'll knock your eye teeth down your throat" is returned with "Oh, no, you won't, Doc" (25). Not only does Dick Boulton make the doctor back down, but he uses Ojibway, a language unfamiliar to Dr. Adams, to mock him. This scene presents an utter reversal of power relations, where the dominant language, or, the language of dominance, has lost its force. The threat of violence centers on the half-buried logs that lie along the lake's shore. One is reminded again of Kolodny's work, which shows a clear link between the land (virgin woods) and the female body as a primary site of contestation. Dick Boulton, described as a "half-breed" dares to accuse Dr. Adams of stealing the logs.

"Well, Doc,"he said, "that's a nice lot of timber you've stolen."

"Don't talk that way, Dick," the doctor said. "It's driftwood." (24)

Dr. Adams chooses to re-name the wood, altering its status from "timber"which entails value and ownership, to "driftwood,' implying a freedom from the rules of legal possession. Dick counters this with a kind of textual evidence, the ultimate source of"truth" and "legality."

"Wash it off. Clean off the sand on account of the saw. I want to see

who it belongs to,' Dick said.

The log was just awash in the lake. Eddy and Billy Tabeshaw leaned

on their cant-hooks sweating in the sun. Dick kneeled down in the

sand and looked at the mark of the scaler's hammer in the wood at the

end of the log.

"It belongs to White and McNally," he said, standing up and brushing

off his trousers' knees.

The doctor was very uncomfortable. (24)

Just as the doctor's mark was left on the Indian woman's body and could later be further consecrated in the medical journals, the log in this scene bears the mark of its possessor--White and McNally. The symbolic value of the name, White, should not be lost in our reading. Thomas Strychacz's article "Dramatizations of Manhood in Hemingway's In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises" offers a useful reading of the scene's significance:

The mark of the scaler's hammer in the log shows that it belongs to

"White" and McNally. In the same way, the fence around the white doctor's

garden marks the extent of his domain in the forest, the Indian's

traditional space, from which the three Indians appear and into which

they disappear. The recognition that the land is stolen as well as the

logs deepens the significance of the doctor's shame--it becomes his

culture's shame too--and begins to explain why he fails to protect the

integrity of his space. The doctor has no ground to stand on because

the ground is, morally speaking, not his; the fence around the garden is

as morally indefensible as stealing the logs. (250)

Thus Dick Boulton uses a "textual" reference, the institutional imprint of a company's legal right, to support his shaming attack on Dr. Adams, and if we think back to "Indian Camp,' Dick's success should not take us by surprise. When Dr. Adams wished to applaud his achievement in performing the Caesarean section under such primitive conditions, he immediately exclaimed that the procedure would be "one for the medical journal" (18). So when Dick Boulton refers to the text for his authority, the doctor can only back down. This may also explain the doctor's subsequent irritation when he re-enters the cottage: "In the cottage the doctor, sitting on the bed in his room, saw a pile of medical journals on the floor by the bureau. They were still in their wrappers unopened. It irritated him" (25). These same journals had once been the textual representation and affirmation of his great power, but in this scene they lie on the floor, unread, impotent and useless to him.

The "Big Man" dynamic described earlier is also reversed here. In "Indian Camp," Uncle George distributes cigars, a gift that does not get reciprocated; but in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," when the confrontation begins, we find that "Dick was a big man. He knew how big a man he was" (24). The previously sanctioned forms of competition and rivalry have at last given way to overt threats and potential violence. For if we read these two stories as a unit, then the progression of violence from "Indian Camp" to "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" moves from the obscured to the overt; "Doc" sits on his bed cleaning a shotgun: "he pushed the magazine full of the heavy yellow shells and pumped them out again. They were scattered on the bed" (26). Strychacz has pointed out that "the rifle ... signifies the technological superiority that hastened the appropriation of the Indian lands" ("Trophy-Hunting" 36). More obviously, we can easily decode the sexual metaphor of shells pumped through a shaft and then left scattered on the bed, wasted and impotent. The scene where violent, sexual, and racial markers all coincide most completely is during the climactic confrontation between "Dick" and "Doc":

"If you think the logs are stolen, leave them alone and take your

tools back to the camp," the doctor said. His face was red.

"Don't go off at half-cock, Doc," Dick said. (24)

This scene contains not only a sexual, but also a racial metaphor that finally dislodges the most stubborn racial marker of all--skin color. During the confrontation, the doctor's face, presumably because of his embarrassment and anger, has turned red. A fight, ostensibly between Dick, the Indian, and Doc, the white man, must also be read in reverse: as a confrontation between Dick, "many of the farmers around the lake really believed he was a white man,' and Doc, whose "face was red" (italics mine, 24). A climactic scene between the "great man" and the "big man" forces social relations into the realm of violence, at once exposing and challenging the artificiality of power relations based on essentialist notions of racial difference, like those presented in "Indian Camp." Here, in the second story, the racial markers continually shift, and we in turn must shift our perceptions of race in Hemingway's stories.

Borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant, I would suggest that Hemingway's stories represent race as an "unstable and `decentered' complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle" (55). "Indian Camp" does present a biologically based view of racial difference and implies almost unwavering success for power relations that rely on white male dominance. The only crack in the veneer comes with Uncle George's sarcasm, which deflates Dr. Adams's self-aggrandizement, but George's remark loses its force in the wake of Nick's final musing that he will never die. Returning once again to Nick's final words in "Indian Camp," George Monteiro has suggested that the words reflect a belief he will never die "that way" (155), as the Indian has died. This reading again foregrounds Nick's extreme psychical distancing between self and other, a pattern of distancing he learned from his father, to whom the woman's screams are "not important." But "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" seriously complicates Nick's hyper-essentialist notion (that we are so different, even the ultimate leveler of humanity--death--divides the races). Dick defies racial categorization, co-opts forms of literacy valued by Dr. Adams, challenges him based on the law, and therefore reverses the power relations based in an authority ordinarily accessible only to whites. All of this simultaneously highlights the social constructedness of racial difference, undoing the hierarchy of power in "Indian Camp," and creating overt parallels between Dick/Doc, and to some extent, between Dr. Adams and the Indian husband.

The brief interchange in the cottage between Dr. Adams and his nameless wife serves as yet another reference to the doctor's earlier authority in "Indian Camp":

"Remember, that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that

taketh a city," said his wife. She was a Christian Scientist. Her Bible,

her copy of Science and Health and her Quarterly were on a table beside her

bed in the darkened room. (25-26)

The depiction of the doctor's wife, in pain, lying in a room described twice as "darkened" and twice as "with the blinds drawn;' may at first seem to present another helpless, colonized woman, whose nameless identity stems from her role as wife and mother. But her religion relies on divine law in times of sickness, disregarding medical means of healing. Almost a direct attack on the value of medical journals, her textual authority comes in the form of a Bible, Science and Health, and the Quarterly, books entirely devoted to a faith which "denies the necessity of [Dr. Adams's] professional function" (DeFalco 165). Furthermore, her quote from scripture draws a stark contrast between the Caesar-doctor of "Indian Camp" ("he that taketh a city") and the diminutive"Doc"who turns his back on a petty fight ("he who ruleth his spirit"); the husband's power is productive here only when directed inward. Of course, this form of power is the only kind afforded to the Indian husband as well.

As Dana Nelson has written, drawing on Foucault, "it is wrong to see power as only oppressive. It can be productive and progressive--both by the intentions of those who exercise it, and unintentionally, in the gaps left by its constant failure to create a total, seamless system" (xii). For power to be total, or invulnerable, the object of that power would have to remain static and silent. While "Indian Camp" gives the impression of total domination, the seams begin to show even within that story (Uncle George's sarcasm, the Indian woman's biting back, Nick's tenuous immunity from death). In the second story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," the forms of domination in the first story come back to be co-opted and reinscribed by Dick, a man whose racial markings will not hold. The non-speaking have become bilingual; those without access to institutionalized literacy now rely on legal fine print; the woman's body has been colonized by a higher power; the doctor cannot control even the color of his skin. The conflict between Dick and Dr. Adams becomes an almost entirely discursive one, implying yet again that power relations depend on the social or cultural construction of "race;' a construction that must remain variable, in flux. But Hemingway's stories do not allow such a simplified resolution, and if we take up Joyce A. Joyce's charge that to deconstruct race is to diminish or negate black identity (341), we cut to the heart of my interest in these two stories as a unit, because Hemingway does not deny the essentialist notion that some kind of inherent racial identity remains lodged in the body. The jack-knife cuts a woman's womb open; the razor slits a man's throat from ear to ear. These bodies are real; pain has marked them.

Without denying the corporeal reality of lived racial experience, these stories also demonstrate that individuals can slide back and forth between the larger categories of race. In the first story, racial essentialism comes from the fact that characters are clearly defined as white or Indian, and their roles do not shift or change in any way. White dominates and the Indian remains silent, passive, and under control of the whites. The only hint of role reversal comes when the Indian woman bites Uncle George's arm and the other Indian laughs at him, conscious of the incongruity and unexpectedness of her act. This laugh, however, is translated in the second story into outright mockery. The roles have been reversed, but in order to represent this, Hemingway actually has his characters' faces change color--to be humiliated is to be red and to be victor is to be white. In this scenario, then, the tag "race" remains stable, because "white" equates with power and "red" equates with submission, but the individuals move fluidly between these markers.

In an interview with George Plimpton in the Paris Review, Hemingway spoke of a writer's "unexplained knowledge which could come from forgotten racial or family experience" (italics mine, 85). His stories may have been spurred by an autobiographical"family experience,"but we cannot ignore their relation to a larger "forgotten racial experience" in American history. What happens in the confrontation between Dick and Doc represents nothing less than a crisis of authority that betrays the unstable foundation upon which the white man has built his power. When relying on the institutional authority of the medical profession, Dr. Adams works on stable ground. But in the second story, his power rests on the speech act, a threat, and Dick derails its authority with the simple but devastating retort, "Oh, no, you won't." The beauty of this reply is that it not only offers an implicit counter-threat, but it exposes the creaky machinery behind the doctor's earlier dominance. Stripped of institutional authority, textual authority, or witnesses, the doctor's standard mechanisms of power are laid bare: without complicity, power cannot be effective. And this brings us full circle, because that, I believe, is the moral of Toni Morrison's story as well. The "more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars" (5) requires a complicity that, despite its hold on our literary imagination, can be controverted.

NOTES

(1.) The term is taken from Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. For readings that explore the instability of gender categories, see J. Gerald Kennedy, "Hemingway's Gender Trouble"; Debra Moddelmog, "Reconstructing Hemingway's Identity: Sexual Politics, the Author, and the Multicultural Classroom"; Mark Spilka, Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny; and Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes, Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text.

(2.) Diana Fuss outlines the parameters of this debate in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. Chapter Six, "`Race' Under Erasure? Poststructuralist Afro-American Literary Theory," specifically focuses on the category of race, questioning whether racial identity can be seen as either a "question of morphology, of anatomical or genetic characteristics" or as a "psychological, historical, anthropological, sociological, legal" construct (73). Fuss argues that the essentialist/constructionist opposition is "largely artificial" (119) because the two categories depend on each other for meaning, and we will see that Hemingway's stories sustain exactly this tension between the two categories in a way that destabilizes our grasp of racial identity.

(3.) See R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam, for "the first tentative outlines of a native American mythology" (1), covering the period between 1820 and 1860, where "Adamic imagery is altogether central and controlling" (6). By "native American," Lewis does not refer to Indians; on the contrary, he refers to the "birth in America of a clear conscience unsullied by the past" (7).

(4.) I am indebted to readings by Paul Smith, A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Joseph M. Flora's Hemingway's Nick Adams, Philip Young's Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration, and Joseph DeFalco's The Hero in Hemingway's Short Stories. Young highlights "Nick's initiation to pain, and to the violence of birth and death" in "Indian Camp," while "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" "teaches Nick something about the solidarity of the male sex" (32, 33); Joseph DeFalco asserts that "the major focus of ["Indian Camp"] is Nick's reaction to these events," and "the central conflict that emerges [in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"] reveals a further step in the learning process that Nick undergoes" (28, 34).

(5.) See Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Kolodny outlines the American metaphor of "the land as woman" and its attendant imagery of "eroticism, penetration, raping, embrace, enclosure, and nurture, to cite only a few" (150).

(6.) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale explains that traditionally, childbirth had three distinct stages, "defined in social rather than biological terms, each marked by the summons and arrival of attendants--first, the midwife, then the neighborhood circle of women, finally the afternurse" (183). Ulrich's work outlines how the growth of medical societies and "changing notions of womanhood" (254) in the nineteenth century gradually allowed physicians, as a professionalized and exclusive group, to replace midwives. In this historical context, for all the women in "Indian Camp" to be replaced by the men (with the exception of the afternurse who should arrive the next day) offers an interesting symbolic representation of the way that a female-dominated craft lost its power to the more advanced, institutionalized (male-dominated) medical profession.

WORKS CITED

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Comley, Nancy C. and Robert Scholes. Hemingway's Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

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--. "Initiation (`Indian Camp' and `The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife')." The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Ed. Jackson J. Benson. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975.159-67.

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AMY STRONG University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill