Hills Like White Elephants & Essay

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A white elephant, after all, is a false version of something real -- an antique that is worthless is often called a white elephant. When the man and the girl are sitting, trying a new drink together, the girl says that the hills in the distance look like white elephants. However, her language seems to elide the real with the false: "I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees," she says, of the hills, referring to the hills as if they were alive. Within the framework of the story, the confusion of the real with the false or with the metaphor could refer to her confusion as to whether she is pregnant with something that is 'alive' or whether the relationship is 'alive.' Similarly, Gallimard confuses the trappings of femininity with being female itself, and the trappings of another culture with the real essence of the culture -- because a Western construction of China sees Asia as a butterfly, Gallimard assumes that his feminine Butterfly is 'a real woman' even though he is not. While Gallimard's mistress seemingly produces a welcome child, this child is false -- as false and metaphorically if not literally stillborn as the child of the relationship in "Hills Like White Elephants" final textual resonance between the two stories is the love of the exotic evident in both tales.

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While there is no hint of China in the Hemingway story, the man's and also the author's less obvious implied love of Spain, with its references to the Spanish word for beer, for example, and various foreign drinks like absinthe create an aura of the exotic that seems to act as a barrier to creating a real relationship between the man and the girl. When one is a foreigner, either a perpetual traveler like the man, or a permanent foreign resident like Gallimard, one is always a trespasser, learning things through a translation, rather than truly apprehending the culture directly. As a traveler, one cannot even really understand a person from one's own culture, in the case of the man, in a stable, fixed, and permanent fashion, because of the inability to form a true commitment while constantly moving......

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