Comparing The Paris Wife By: Paula McClain and The Sun Also Rises By: Earnest Hemmingway
Both The Paris Wife and The Sun Also Rises provide a perspective of what it was like for Earnest Hemmingway and his wife at the time to be living in Paris during the 1920's. I purposely chose to read both of these books sequentially because I knew that they would provide a thorough and interesting picture of the topic that I chose considering one was written from the perspective of Hemmingway and the other was written from the perspective of his wife.
One aspect of their live that was clearly portrayed in both books was how they would regularly attend bull fights. In the book written from the wife’s perspective, the bullfights are portrayed simplistically and stated matter-of-fact without any kind of canalization of them at all. In Hemmingway’s book, he thinks far more in depth about the bull fights and describes in a more romantic way what happens and the meaning of it all. There is a scene in the book where the wife is handed the ear of a bull by the matador as a small sign of affection which from her perspective, she thinks nothing of, but when this scene is portrayed in Hemmingway’s novel, which follows his real life very closely, it is described more dramatically in a way that it sounds almost as though Hemmingway is over-exaggerating or making a big deal out of what really happened according to the wife.
Throughout both novels, both from the wife’s and Hemmingway’s perspective’s they reference meetings with their friends which consisted of the other members of “the lost generation”. The lost generation was a group of writers during the 1920’s that consisted of authors such as Earnest Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Others who were the lost generation were, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald. The term is suiting because it was during a time when the adopted idea that was held that if you do good things, good things would come of it had been completely crushed after young soldiers who had gone away to war were either coming back handicapped or not coming back at all so this generation was therefore “lost”.
Both novels also gave a very descriptive account of what the café culture was like in Paris in the 1920’s. Cafes are and have been for many years, not just a place to eat and drink but also a cultural place. People (such as Hemmingway) would do their work, have their meetings, write, or simply socialize in the cafes of Paris. As mentioned in The Paris Wife people also lived above the many cafes in Paris and would simply walk downstairs for a nice meal of place to relax and socialize.
The food that they described they ate in both novels was a large part of the Parisian culture in the 1920’s. For example, in The Paris Wife, there is a part when Earnest Hemingway rushed home to describe to Hadley that he had just had "the best fish he'd ever eaten" which was described in the book as being a, "perfectly crisped river trout stuffed with fried ham and onions" and that he was taking her to that cafe to try it right then. Hemmingway’s writing includes several references to food as well. It portraits a Parisians life during the 1920’s to revolve around café life and eating and drinking.
After reading both of the novels, The Paris Wife by: Paula Mclain and The Sun Also Rises by: Earnest Hemmingway several similarities came to my attention, but one main question also surfaced. After reading these two novels I began to wonder if Hadley Richardson (Earnest Hemmingway’s wife at the time of writing The Sun Also Rises) ever read The Sun Also Rises and if she therefore knew that it was about her and Hemmingway’s life together in Paris. It was clear to me after reading both books that the story of The Paris Wife was almost exactly similar to Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which is supposedly fiction.
Both novels provided me with a better understanding of what it would have been like to live in Paris during the 1920’s. They each described how life was for Earnest Hemmingway and his wife Hadley Richardson during the historical time period, rich with culture especially literature in Paris.
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