"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is a short story by

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fic ...

, published in the 1925 New York edition of ''

In Our Time In Our Time may refer to: * ''In Our Time'' (1944 film), a film starring Ida Lupino and Paul Henreid * ''In Our Time'' (1982 film), a Taiwanese anthology film featuring director Edward Yang; considered the beginning of the "New Taiwan Cinema" * ''In ...

'', by

Boni & Liveright Boni & Liveright (pronounced "BONE-eye" and "LIV-right") is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Live ...

. The story is the second in the collection to feature Nick Adams, Hemingway’s autobiographical

alter ego An alter ego (Latin for "other I", " doppelgänger") means an alternate self, which is believed to be distinct from a person's normal or true original personality. Finding one's alter ego will require finding one's other self, one with a differen ...

.Tetlow (1992), 65 "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" follows "

Indian Camp "Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine ''Transatlantic Review'' in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of ...

" in the collection, includes elements of the same style and themes, yet is written in

counterpoint In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more musical lines (or voices) which are harmonically interdependent yet independent in rhythm and melodic contour. It has been most commonly identified in the European classical tradi ...

to the first story.

Background and publication

During his youth in Chicago,

's family spent summers at Windemere on

Walloon Lake Walloon Lake is a glacier-formed lake located in Charlevoix and Emmet counties, just southwestward from the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. It is now home to many vacation homes and cottages. Though the end of the west arm of th ...

, near

Petoskey, Michigan Petoskey ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is the county seat and largest city in Emmet County. Part of Northern Michigan, Petoskey is a popular Midwestern resort town, as it sits on the shore of Little Traverse Bay, a bay of La ...

. Hemingway's father, who was a doctor, taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of

Northern Michigan Northern Michigan, also known as Northern Lower Michigan (known colloquially to residents of more southerly parts of the state and summer residents from cities such as Detroit as " Up North"), is a region of the U.S. state of Michigan. A popul ...

as a young boy.Beegel (2000), 63–71 In 1921, Hemingway married

Hadley Richardson Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (November 9, 1891 – January 22, 1979) was the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway. The two married in 1921 after a courtship of less than a year, and moved to Paris within months of being married. In Paris, ...

and was posted to Paris a few months later as international correspondent for ''

The Toronto Star The ''Toronto Star'' is a Canadian English-language broadsheet daily newspaper. The newspaper is the country's largest daily newspaper by circulation. It is owned by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary of Torstar Corporation and part ...

''.Desnoyers, Megan Floyd
"Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy"
JFK Library. Retrieved September 30, 2011 In Paris he befriended

Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris ...

Ezra Pound Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Fascism, fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularize ...

James Joyce James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...

Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford (né Joseph Leopold Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer ( ); 17 December 1873 – 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals ''The English Review'' and ''The Transatlantic Review'' were instrumental in ...

, and

John Dos Passos John Roderigo Dos Passos (; January 14, 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist, most notable for his ''U.S.A.'' trilogy. Born in Chicago, Dos Passos graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He traveled widely as a young man, visit ...

.Reynolds (1995), 36 Pound's influence extended to promoting the young author; in 1923 he commissioned work from Hemingway for the modernist series Pound was editing.Cohen (2003), 107–108 In 1924, during one of Hemingway's most productive periods, he wrote eight short stories, including "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife". The stories were combined with the earlier vignettes produced for Pound, and submitted for publication to

in New York,Mellow (1992), 188 who accepted the work in March 1925.Mellow (1992), 282–283 The story was included in Hemingway's collection ''

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories ''The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories'' is an anthology of writings by Ernest Hemingway published by Scribner's on October 14, 1938. It contains Hemingway's only full-length play, ''The Fifth Column'', and 49 short stories. Many of ...

'' published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, ''

The Nick Adams Stories ''The Nick Adams Stories'' is a volume of short stories written by Ernest Hemingway published in 1972, a decade after the author's death. In the volume, all the stories featuring Nick Adams, published in various collections during Hemingway's li ...

'' (1972) and '' The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition'' (1987).

Plot summary

Nick Adams' father, Dr. Adams, hires a crew of Native Americans to remove the four large beech logs from the lake's

log boom A log boom (sometimes called a log fence or log bag) is a barrier placed in a river, designed to collect and or contain floating logs timbered from nearby forests. The term is also used as a place where logs were collected into booms, as at the ...

that drifted up on his beach. Dick Boulton, his son Eddy, and Billy Tabeshaw, come through the back gate from the woods, bringing

cant hook A cant hook or pike or a hooked pike is a traditional logging tool consisting of a wooden lever handle with a movable metal hook called a dog at one end, used for handling and turning logs and cants, especially in sawmills. A peavey or peavey h ...

s, axes and a

crosscut saw A crosscut saw (thwart saw) is any saw designed for cutting wood perpendicular to (across) the wood grain. Crosscut saws may be small or large, with small teeth close together for fine work like woodworking or large for coarse work like log b ...

to cut the logs into cord wood. Boulton compliments Dr. Adams on the timber he is stealing from the logging company; Dr. Adams asserts that the logs are driftwood. Boulton washes a log in the surf, uncovers its mark and tells the doctor it belongs to White and McNally. The doctor becomes uncomfortable, decides not to saw up the logs, but Boulton says it makes no difference to him who the logs are stolen from. The two men engage in a verbal exchange, and when the doctor threatens Boulton with violence, Boulton mocks him. The doctor leaves the beach in anger, walking back to his cottage. He goes to his bedroom, sits on his bed, and stares with anger at a pile of medical journals still in their wrappers. In the adjacent room his wife lies on her bed with a Bible, a copy of

Mary Baker Eddy Mary Baker Eddy (July 16, 1821 – December 3, 1910) was an American religious leader and author who founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in New England in 1879. She also founded ''The Christian Science Monitor'', a Pulitzer Prize-winning s ...

's '' Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures'', and an issue of the ''

Christian Science Quarterly The ''Christian Science Quarterly'' (Bible Lessons) is a publication of the Christian Science Publishing Society that sets out the Bible lessons for all students of Christian Science. Each lesson serves as the Sunday sermon in church and is st ...

''. She asks whether he is going back to work; he explains that he had an altercation with Boulton. She asks whether he lost his temper and quotes Scripture, while, in the next room, the doctor sits on his bed and cleans his gun, pushing shells in and out of the magazine. When she presses him about the nature of the dispute he tells her Boulton owes for having his wife treated for pneumonia and does not want to have to work for the doctor. She expresses her disbelief of the explanation and the doctor leaves the house. His wife calls after him to send Nick to her. The doctor finds Nick sitting under a tree, reading a book, who tells his father he wants to go with him. Nick suggests they go into the woods to find

black squirrel Black squirrels are a melanistic subgroup of squirrels with black coloration on their fur. The phenomenon occurs with several species of squirrels, although it is most frequent with the eastern gray squirrel (''Sciurus carolinensis'') and the f ...

Writing style

Hemingway was inspired by Ezra Pound's writings and applied the principles of

imagism Imagism was a movement in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is considered to be the first organized modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometim ...

to his own work. Pound's influence can be seen in the stripped-down, minimalist style characteristic in Hemingway's early fiction. Betraying his admiration for the older writer, he admitted that Pound "taught emore about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive". He also learned from James Joyce, who further instilled the idea of stripped down economic prose. Hemingway's short stories from the 1920s adhere to Pound's tight definition of imagism;Benson (1975), 285–287 biographer

Carlos Baker Carlos Baker (May 5, 1909, Biddeford, Maine – April 18, 1987, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American writer, biographer and former Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. He received his B.A. from Dartmouth College and h ...

writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, oprune language, omultiply intensities, otell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth". Hemingway adapted this style into a technique he called his

iceberg theory The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When h ...

: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.Baker (1972), 117

Themes and structure

The story is a companion to "

", the previous story in the collection, which also features Nick Adams and his father Dr. Adams. Unlike "Indian Camp", where Dr. Adams is shown in a position of power, in this story he is a cowardly man who reacts to confrontation with repressed anger.Tetlow (1992), 56 In "Indian Camp" young Nick witnesses his father performing a caesarian; Dr. Adams exposes his young son to childbirth and, unintentionally, to violent death – an experience that causes Nick to equate childbirth with death.Tetlow (1992), 87 Howard Hannum explains the trauma of birth and suicide Hemingway paints in "Indian Camp" rendered a

leitmotif A leitmotif or leitmotiv () is a "short, recurring musical phrase" associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical concepts of ''idée fixe'' or ''motto-theme''. The spelling ''leitmotif'' is an anglici ...

that gave Hemingway a unified framework for the Nick Adams stories and is continued in "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" in direct

to the previous story.Hannum (2001), 92–94 The contrasts and similarities between the two stories are stark. In "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" the family lives in a spacious cottage, whereas in "Indian Camp" a family lives in a cramped shanty. The first is filled with silences, the second with violent screams. In this story, three men come from the Indian camp to the Adams's cottage; in the previous, Dr. Adams, Nick and his uncle visit the Indian camp. The central scenes of both stories occur indoors and involve sick women in bed; both women are married to unhappy, suicidal men (the husband in "Indian Camp" commits suicide in his bed with a razor; Dr. Adams sits on his bed and plays with his gun). Both stories end with Nick and his father leaving – rowing away from the Indian camp in the first, walking into the woods to hunt in this story.Strong (1991), 85-87

References

Sources

* Baker, Carlos (1972). ''Hemingway: The Writer as Artist''. Princeton: Princeton UP. * Benson, Jackson (1975). "Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer". in Benson, Jackson (ed). ''The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays''. Durham NC: Duke University Press. * Benson, Jackson. (1983). "Patterns of Connections and their development in Hemingway's ''In Our Time''". In Reynolds, Michael. (ed). ''Critical essays on Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time''. Boston: G. K. Hall. * Beegel, Susan (2000). "Eye and Heart: Hemingway's Education as a Naturalist". in Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed). ''A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway''. New York: Oxford UP. * Cohen, Milton. (2003). "Who Commissioned ''The Little Reviews 'In Our Time'?". ''The Hemingway Review''. Vol. 23, No. 1. * Hannum, Howard. (2001). "'Scared sick looking at it': A Reading of Nick Adams in the Published Stories". ''Twentieth Century Literature''. Vol. 47, No. 1. 92–113 * Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). ''Hemingway: A Biography''. New York: Macmillan. * Oliver, Charles. (1999). ''Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work''. New York: Checkmark Publishing. * Reynolds, Michael. (1995). ''Hemingway's 'In Our Time': The biography of a Book''. In Kennedy, Gerald J. (ed). ''Modern American Short Story Sequences''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Strong, Paul. (1991). "The First Nick Adams Stories". ''Studies in Short Fiction''. Vol. 28, No. 1. 83–91 * Tetlow, Wendolyn E. (1992). ''Hemingway's "In Our Time": Lyrical Dimensions''. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses.

External links

Hemingway Archives
John F. Kennedy Library {{DEFAULTSORT:Doctor and the Doctor's Wife, The 1925 short stories Short stories by Ernest Hemingway Autobiographical short stories