Ernest Hemingway uses The Sun Also Rises as a brilliant display of masculinity vs. femininity. But, the character who displays the most masculine traits is quite the curve ball. Lady Brett Ashley contains all of the necessary qualities to make up one of the most masculine, manly men this side of the 20th Century.
Brett is arguably the most sexually promiscuous character. She sleeps with more men throughout the course of this novel than many girls will do in a lifetime, and yet I love her for it. She sleeps with her fiancé's friend and then tells his other friend, who she says she's in love with, all about it! And what's worse is, she actually gets away with a it! Also, let's not forget the fact that Brett knows a thing or two about manipulation. The entire time Cohn is chasing her around Spain, she may say she's annoyed, but it takes over 200 pages before she actually does anything about it. Clearly she enjoys the attention.
But let's talk masculinity. Aside from her sexual promiscuity, Brett gives off the overall vibe that she just-doesn't-care, a masculine trait I believe all of us women have seen a time or two from the opposite sex.
Oh, Jake, have I been leading you on and using you whenever I need a quick self confidence booster throughout the course of an entire novel? Yep.
Did I really just use Jake to hook me up with the hot, younger, Spanish bull fighter? Yep, again!
Brett may occasionally try to play the "crushed woman" role, but it is clear to any reader that she is out for Number One the entire time. Let's be serious, she won't even give Jake a chance, a man she tells she loves, because he can't have sex with her. That thought itself just oozes manhood. How many girls have been turned down because they didn't want to sleep with their date? I would bet the number greatly outweighs the opposite.
Perhaps the most seemingly feminine, but in my opinion purely masculine, thing that Brett does in the entire book occurs during the closing scene. Let me preface this by asking: Ladies, how many times have you had "a talk" with your boyfriend that has ended with him going on and on (..and on..) about how much he is going to change? Now answer me this -- has he ever done it? No! Brett is the exact same way. If anyone reading this book believes that at the end of Book III, Brett's bullfighter-breakup epiphany somehow changed her life, you are both sheltered and sorely mistaken.
Brett is who she is, and that is not your typical woman. She won't change because she doesn't want to change. Why should she? She has gone through her entire life getting what she wants, when she wants. Now what man can say he doesn't want that?
