SOURCE: Beegel, Susan F. “Santiago and the Eternal Feminine: Gendering La Mar in The Old Man and the Sea.” In Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice, edited by Lawrence R. Broer and Gloria Holland, pp. 131-156. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Beegel draws upon Catholic iconography, the work of environmentalist Rachel Carson and others, and the writings of Herman Melville to consider the ways in which the sea takes on a complex, gendered persona in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

“Hemingway is always less embarrassing when he is not attempting to deal with women,” Leslie A. Fiedler writes, with some smugness, of The Old Man and the Sea, “and he returns with relief (with what we as readers at least feel as relief) to that ‘safe’ American Romance of the boy and the old man” (“Adolescence” 108). Like Fiedler...