Jake and BDE
I think
there is a connection to be drawn between the way that Hemingway depicts Jake’s
injury and modern concept of BDE. For anyone who doesn’t know BDE is an acronym
that stands for Big D**k Energy, which Urban Dictionary defines as “having
confidence without cockiness”. It’s supposed to be a healthy, lowkey way of
feeling yourself. In essence, it means that you’re secure in yourself. While
one doesn’t have to be well endowed or even have a penis at all to have BDE,
the basis behind the term being named that is pretty self-evident. As a
society, we conflate this feeling of confidence with masculinity. There’s a
reason that we make reference to a penis in a term whose meaning doesn’t imply a
gender.
This brings
us to Jake. To the outside, Jake seems like the most masculine person there is.
He is interested in things like fishing, boxing, and bullfighting. He barely ever
shows an emotion and spends much of his day hard drinking. Jake seems confident
in himself to everyone around him. That confidence, however, is a just a front.
When Jake is alone, he cries himself to sleep and it’s implied that this isn’t something
atypical of him to do. He says that “it’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything
during the daytime, but at night it is another thing”. This confidence is a façade
and by the definition above, Jake doesn’t have BDE.
The book
never really goes into what Jake was like before the war but the overtly
masculine way that Jake portrays himself to the public can seem to suggest that
he’s compensating for something. I feel like Jake probably at least amped up
these qualities after his injury. Jake appears to conflate his lack of manhood
with a lack of manhood. Jake’s need to act super masculine and the concept of
BDE can both be seen as a reflection of our society’s intertwining of the ideas
of having confidence and masculinity.
I like to think of Jake's masculinity as a balance with two sides: his *injured body part* and his outward personality. I think because of his injury and his lack of "manliness" he has to make up for it with a manly personality, even if very few people know about his injury. Perhaps his facade is even a way of hiding his injury.
ReplyDeleteI really like how you connect Jake's weird masculinity complex to our modern concept of BDE. It's strange that BDE is supposed to be a gender-neutral descriptor, but it's built on the idea that people with large penises are more confident.
ReplyDeleteIf "BDE" (a phrase I'm not particularly fond of) is a kind of mindset that a person assumes--picture talking to yourself in the mirror to get psyched up before appearing in public--I'm not sure we can say Jake's version is any less "genuine" than anyone else's. We know that he has this deep-seated reason for insecurity in this area, and he admits that (like all of us?) he has to consciously assemble a "hard-boiled" facade to present to the world, when at night and alone he feels differently. His masculinity is largely a performance--just like everyone else's gender identity. The only difference is that, remarkably, he is aware and willing to acknowledge the degree to which it's a performance. That doesn't make it any less "real." Jake *is* in many ways a confident, authoritative, knowledgeable, insightful narrator, and he truly does know a lot about fishing and bullfighting and boxing. Those aspects of himself aren't "fake" simply because he admits that he's also got feelings.
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