“Black and Red Laughter”: Subverting Whiteness in Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring

Abstract:This essay examines how Ernest Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring satirizes the primitivist movement and subverts racial, national and gender stereotypes in his depiction of White Americans and Native Americans. It argues that Hemingway challenges the purported supremacy of Whiteness and stability of a normative national identity, while also undercutting generalized assumptions about Native Americans. It moreover probes the connection between David Garnett’s A Man in the Zoo and Hemingway’s novella to show Hemingway’s early inversions of the male gaze in relation to performances of manhood and Whiteness. It concludes that The Torrents of Spring is not a simple parody of the primitivist movement, but a complex and nuanced satire that reflects the author’s early engagement with the formation and subversion of dominant ideas about national identity in the modernist era.