Discovering Eden: Rain, Cats and Women in Hemingway’s Garden

The publication of The Garden of Eden in 1986 opened the gates of Hemingway’s exegesis to gender criticism, the result being a re-evaluation of the female presence in a traditional literary work devoted to the literary traditions of the personality and adventurous life of the writer that challenged the previous four decades of critical appraisal that insisted on what Broer and Holland called “superficial or misguided interpretations of Hemingway’s treatment of women and gender”. Our essay demonstrates this new approach to Hemingway’s work, with examples from “Cat in the Rain” and The Garden of Eden.