To be clear from the beginning, the operation being discussed in Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” is an abortion. Maybe you grasped this by the end of the story, but maybe you didn’t. The American man calls the procedure an “awfully simple operation” “just to let the air in.” His description of the procedure is most likely a euphemism to describe his limited understanding of exactly what an abortion entails. Historically, there have been many ways to end a pregnancy, and one of them was to introduce air into the uterus, thus aborting the pregnancy.
If you didn’t automatically recognize this clue and follow it to its conclusion, you are not alone! Most modern readers don’t naturally recognize the meaning of the operation in this story because the procedure alluded to seems archaic. Your job is to read and interpret stories beyond the surface level. As you analyze a short story, you must be part reader and part detective to more fully appreciate literature.
In an interview with George Plimpton in the Spring 1958 issue of The Paris Review, Hemingway describes his style of writing, now referred to as the “Iceberg Theory”:
INTERVIEWER
How do you name your characters?
HEMINGWAY
The best I can.
INTERVIEWER
Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?
HEMINGWAY
No. I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.
INTERVIEWER
And you do this even with a story whose title is supplied from the text—“Hills Like White Elephants,” for example?
HEMINGWAY
Yes. The title comes afterwards. I met a girl in Prunier where I’d gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew she’d had an abortion. I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home I thought of the story, skipped lunch, and spent that afternoon writing it.
INTERVIEWER
So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.
HEMINGWAY
Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story. (Plimpton)
One of the easiest ways to better understand a story’s meaning is to analyze the symbols in a story. Let me be clear: symbolism is not, nor should it be, the only thing you analyze in a story! Symbols are, however, readily seen in most stories.
According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, a symbol is “[s]omething that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible.” In Literary and Literary Critical Terms, the Collins English Dictionary defines symbol as “an object, person, idea, etc., used in a literary work, film, etc., to stand for or suggest something else with which it is associated either explicitly or in some more subtle way.”
In “Hills Like White Elephants,” the symbols can be grouped and explored (in no particular order) according to characters and their actions, imagination, natural landscape, the station, and time. Analyzing these elements can help you better understand the story as a whole. The following is a brief description of each element and its possible symbolic meaning(s).
Characters and Their Actions
The man is named as the “American man.” As the story was written in 1927, after WWI but before the Great Depression, the man seems to possess wealth, travel to many places, “look at things and try new drinks,” and have a life of leisure. His tone is antagonistic and he seems manipulative. He can speak Spanish, which implies he is educated in one form or another, whether through schooling or travel.
The girl is not named until roughly 1/3 of the way into the story. Her “name” is Jig, which, according to The Free Dictionary, can mean a “lively dance…in triple time”; “music for such a dance”; “A joke or trick,” as “in the phrase The jig is up”; a “metal fishing lure with one or more hooks, usually deployed with a jiggling motion on or near the bottom”; or a “device for guiding a tool or for holding machine work in place.” She is not described as a woman, wife, or American, however. She also does not speak or understand even basic Spanish, which implies she is not from Spain (or possibly other countries that speak Romance languages, as Spanish, French, and Italian, for example, share similar roots).
Both the man and Jig drink—a lot. They consume beer and liqueur (Anis del Toro [Bull’s Anisette], which is an anise-flavored liqueur). Over the course of the story, which lasts less than 40 minutes in the heat of the day, the man drinks three big beers and two Anis del Toro, while Jig drinks three big beers and one Anis del Toro. How would this much alcohol, consumed this quickly in the heat, make you feel, think, and react?
Their conversation is, at best, antagonistic. He relies on “the man knows best” approach, while she uses irony and sarcasm to make her points. His description of the abortion—“just to let the air in,” “perfectly simple”—shows his disconnect from her feelings and reaction—and desire. He implies the pregnancy is “the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy,” but the unraveling of their relationship seems to go deeper than that.
Imagination
Jig’s imagination is key to the story, as she seems to see and want more than what she has. The concept of the hills looking like white elephants is a poignant image, for, as the Oxford Dictionary states, a white elephant is “a possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of.” This meaning comes “from the story that the kings of Siam gave such animals as a gift to courtiers they disliked, in order to ruin the recipient by the great expense incurred in maintaining the animal.” The hills being described as white elephants may also bring to mind the image of a pregnant belly.
Jig states the Anis tastes “like liquorice,” to which the man replies, “That’s the way with everything.”
“‘Yes,’ said the girl. ‘Everything tastes of liquorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.’” This line shows some sense of anticipation, longing, for candy, alcohol, and, metaphorically, a baby. Absinthe also had intoxicating and hallucinogenic effects, which doubles the impact the alcohol has on this couple and their decision-making capabilities.
Natural Landscape
There is a definite split in the lay of the land in the story.
Jig is described as sitting on “this side of the station,” with its white hills and brown, dry country. This side lacks “life,” as it appears dead.
When she stands up and moves to “the other side of the station,” she sees fields of grain, trees along the banks of the Ebro River, and mountains beyond the river. This side is obviously full of life.
A shadow of a cloud moves across the field of grain, which could symbolize the decision she faces, the brief negativity (considering an abortion) in what could be a positive choice (keeping the baby). She sees “the river through the trees,” however, which implies she can grasp the life, the beauty, seemingly just beyond her grasp.
The heat is also a consideration. Rarely does one make good decisions when oppressed by heat.
The Station
The station has many elements to explore. The station sits “between two lines of rails.” Presumably, just up the track and just down the track from the station, the two lines of rails merge into one; therefore, the station is like an island in a stream. If viewed from above, the station would seem to be enclosed by tracks, just like a child would be contained within a mother.
The couple is sitting at a table (which rests on the ground, stable and solid, unlike their relationship) in the shade of the station. The shade offers a temporary respite from the sun, much as waiting for a train is a respite from the journey (or a break from a conversation most likely had many time before).
A bamboo-beaded curtain hangs in the doorway to the bar to keep out flies (unwanted pests). The immediacy of their conversation is on the platform, while other people were in the bar “waiting reasonably for the train.” This implies that Jig is unreasonable. Bamboo is also hollow, so if a cross section of bamboo is examined, it is a ring. This could represent the womb, empty. But if a string is run through bamboo, it is “filled,” much like a pregnant belly would be. The curtain had Anis del Toro painted on it as decoration, much like this couple’s reality would appear different to an outside observer. The curtain blows against the table, as if it is a reminder to Jig of the decision she must make. At one point, “The girl…put her hand out and took hold of two of the strings of beads.” This is a conscious choice on Hemingway’s part—could the two strands represent Jig and the man after she has an abortion, or do they represent Jig and her child? Could the two strands simply represent the duality of her situation?
When the first of three rounds of beer are placed on the table by the waitress, it is set on felt pads. These pads act as coasters, whose goal is to keep moisture away from the table. Because it is so hot outside, the glasses sweat. By the time the third round of beer is delivered, the coasters are damp. They have failed to prevent the moisture from touching the table. This could be symbolic of contraception failing, but instead of just a table getting wet, Jig becomes pregnant.
The couple’s bags, covered with labels “from all the hotels where they had spent nights,” are sitting on the platform. The bags are described as heavy, which is symbolic of the concept of the “baggage” in their relationship.
Time
Time is another interesting concept to analyze in this story. When the story begins, the train is arriving from Barcelona in 40 minutes, it stops at the station for 2 minutes, and then it heads to Madrid. We have no idea how long the couple sits at the train station before the story begins, but at the end of the story, the waitress states that the train will arrive in five minutes. The man takes their bags to the other side of the station, looks up the tracks (implying they will go down the track, to Madrid), then goes into the bar for another Anis before coming out to talk to Jig, who is still seated, indicating the train has not yet arrived. The entire story, on the page, occurs in roughly 38-40 minutes. When I teach this story in face-to-face classes, I have students read it aloud. The entire story, narration and all, usually takes 20 minutes to read. The dialogue is approximately 85% of the story, so that’s about 17 minutes. This means that approximately 21-23 minutes of this story take place in silence. What does this mean to your interpretation of the story?
That Barcelona is in the east of Spain and Madrid is to the west could represent the course of a day—the morning is past and the evening (the end?) is in the future, just as their relationship or the life of their child may be charting its course as well.
In this time frame, the drinks are ordered and immediately consumed. There is no time for sipping here, which, of course, affects their decision making.
On a larger scale, think of the era and location the story takes place in—Spain, no later than 1927. Spain is a Catholic country (over 92% of the population is baptized today) and abortion, let alone contraception, was not readily available in 1927. (In Spain, contraceptives were banned until roughly 1975 and abortion was illegal until 1985.) The couple may have been traveling to Madrid for an illegal abortion because the capital offered a better chance of locating one. Ask yourself these questions:
- If Jig left the man (or the man left her), with no money and no language skills, how would she terminate her pregnancy?
- If she left the man but planned to keep the baby, again with no money or language skills, how far would an unmarried mother make it in Spain?
The outlook for Jig is bleak, at best.
Based on the above interpretation of symbolic meaning, the story may be clearer. The questions to ask now are:
- What does this story show us about men and women, then and now?
- What does this story show us about relationships / communication / mutual respect?
- What does this story show us about ourselves?
Try this level of analysis on the other stories in this unit to see what you uncover. Essay 2 is a literary analysis, much like what you just read, only in essay form. You can choose any of the other 17 stories to analyze for Essay 2, but you may not analyze “Hills Like White Elephants.”
Works Cited
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” The Story
and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. 6th ed.,
edited by Ann Charters, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
Plimpton, George. “Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction
No. 21.” The Paris Review, no. 18, Spring 1958,
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/
the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway.
Accessed 23 Oct. 2016.
pacific northwest writing 