Brett the Bitch Jennifer Phillips

The destruction of WWI disillusioned an entire generation and accelerated the evolution of modernism --- a culture that was ostensibly enlightened, irredeemable and confused. The emergence of 1920's modernism allowed for a resurgence of feminist thinking, which moved away from the patriarchal Victorian standards of womanhood to the bawdy, irreverently empowered "new woman." The "new woman's" aversion to prudish inhibition abetted in the growing sense of uncertainty, conflict, and the erosion of society. Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises typifies this insecurity procured from the ideological divergence between patriarchy and feminism --- a symptomatic component of the cultural confusion of modernism. Hemingway's ideologically conflicted portrayal of Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises both reinforces and subverts the traditional conceptions of patriarchy.

Lady Brett Ashley highlights patriarchal ideology by perpetuating certain fundamental characteristics of traditional gender roles. She is irrational, nurturing, and weak from her dependence upon men, which allows them to distinguish her as property. She exemplifies her imprudence by impulsive emotion --- she marries two different men...