Hemingway's Fetishism

by Carl P. Eby

In Hemingway's Fetishism, Carl Eby demonstrates in painstaking detail and with stunning new archival evidence how fetishism was crucial to the construction and negotiation of identity and gender in both Hemingway's life and his fiction. Critics have long acknowledged Hemingway's lifelong erotic obsession with hair, but this book is the first to explain in a theoretically coherent manner why Hemingway was a fetishist and why we should care. Without reducing Hemingway's art to his psychosexuality, Eby demonstrates that when the fetish appears in Hemingway's fiction, it always does so with a retinue of attendant fantasies, themes, and symbols that are among the most prominent and important in Hemingway's work.