Senselessness, Indeterminacy, and Sexual Ideology in Hemingway’s “The Sea Change”

Abstract

“The Sea Change” is a somewhat anomalous entry in the Hemingway oeuvre. The story tells of the separation between a man and a woman at a bar. ‘The girl,’ we learn, is leaving ‘the man’ for another woman, at which the man condemns her other relationship as ‘vice’ and ‘perversion.’ Ironically, the man likely himself harbors homosexual desires, and at the promptings of the girl, comes to accept his non-normative sexuality. While many critics have attempted determinate readings of ‘The Sea Change,’ in this paper I show that its very evasion of determinacy is central to its thematic and narrative construction. In the first section, I treat a statement that the man makes – ‘I’ll kill her’ – in which I find a typology illuminative of the man’s ideological stance. In the following two sections, I give a detailed linguistic treatment to two conversations which, crucially, are constituted by indexicals. I find that naming is of central import in the two conversations and that sense is paired with a normative heterosexual ideology and senselessness is paired with a sexually non-normative ideology. In the final section, I treat the last act of the story in which the man undergoes his sea change. Indeterminacy and paradox, analogous to the senselessness of the two analyzed conversations, accompany the man’s metamorphosis, suggesting that his sea change was one in which he detaches from a heterosexual ideology and acquires a sexually non-normative ideology, as the girl presently has.