SOURCE: Moddelmog, Debra A. “Queer Families in Hemingway's Fiction.” In Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, edited by Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland, pp. 173-89. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Moddelmog examines In Our Time, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and The Garden of Eden through the lens of queer theory to argue that although Hemingway did not depict many stereotypical nuclear families, his fiction is nevertheless deeply concerned with kinship.

… even when you have learned not to look at families nor listen to them and have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Over the years, a number of critics have noted the lack of traditional families and stable home life in Hemingway's fiction.¹ As Frank Shelton put it as early as 1974, “Hemingway's books...