Date of Defense

4-23-2026

Date of Graduation

5-2026

Department

English

First Advisor

Jonathan Bush

Second Advisor

Adrienne Redding

Abstract

Recent scholarship in disability studies and queer theory (2007-2024) reveals that Jake Barnes's war wound in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises functions as something more complex than tragic loss. This paper argues that Jake's swimming and fishing scenes constitute moments of gender euphoria, a term borrowed from contemporary transgender studies, enabled specifically by aquatic embodiment. In these scenes, water functions as the physical and symbolic medium through which Jake's war-wounded body transcends the performative demands of 1920s heteronormative masculinity. Building on Michael Anesko's provocative reading of Jake as "accidentally transgendered" (Literature and Medicine, 2015) and Martina Kübler's argument that impotence can "foster non-normative ways of knowing, being, and experiencing the world" (White Male Disability in Modernist Literature, 2023), this paper performs close readings of the Burguete fishing chapters and San Sebastian swimming scene. These analyses demonstrate how water spaces enable Jake to experience what he cannot in social space: purposeful embodiment without sexual performance anxiety, intimate male friendship freed from homophobic surveillance, and most significantly, the euphoric sensation that in water he "could never sink," a direct contrast to the constant weight of inadequacy he bears in heteronormative Parisian society.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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