46 pages • 1 hour read
Ernest HemingwayThe Garden of Eden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Beach
Catherine and David spend their honeymoon in the south of France. One of the features of the small town in which they stay is a quiet, secluded beach. The privacy of the beach is notable as–unlike in the small towns–they are completely alone when they visit the beach. This degree of privacy allows the newlyweds to escape scrutiny for a short amount of time. They swim and sunbathe in the nude, not feeling obliged to dress. They talk, kiss, and have sex away from the lingering gaze of the public or the hotel owners that marks their life in the towns. The privacy of the beach is different from the hotel (where the owners are watching) and the café (where there are always people). At the beach, they can be free from social expectations, and they no longer feel compelled to play the roles society expects of them. In a literal sense, their inhibitions are stripped away, and they can be the honest, denuded versions of themselves. The beach is a symbol of the couple’s desire for intimate privacy.
The secluded beach allows Catherine and David to perform a symbolic gesture when they befriend Marita. Only when they invite Marita to the beach does she truly become part of their group. The invitation to the beach is symbolic because it moves Marita from the world of the outside observer to the inside participant of the relationship. She becomes part of the narrative because she is permitted to see the couple in their true, denuded form. By welcoming her to the beach, they are inviting her into their private world. David has sex with Marita for the first time at the beach, while Catherine enacts many of the small rituals and gestures which define her relationship with Marita while lying beside her on the sand. Once Marita is invited to the beach, the world grows by half: no longer is the narrative exclusively limited to just two characters. The beach is a symbol of trust, and by inviting Marita to the beach, Catherine and David symbolically show her how much they trust her and how much they are willing to incorporate her into their lives.
At the beach, the characters swim in the sea. If the beach symbolizes comfortable privacy, then the sea symbolizes the unknown. The characters swim far out as they can and then–once they are exhausted–they swim back. They symbolically push themselves as far as they can before they can retreat to the safety of the beach. The beach is the safe comfort zone, and the sea is the dangerous, unwelcoming entity that threatens to break them apart due to how much they push themselves and each other.
Hair
Catherine’s hair symbolizes her desire to challenge traditional gender roles. Early in the novel, she has her hair cut very short. As she explains to David, the purpose behind this haircut is to make herself appear more like a boy. The radical nature of her haircut is illustrated by the fact that she must find a specific hairdresser with whom she can collaborate in this act of defiance. Not every hairdresser is capable of understanding what she wants or why she wants it, and having to explain herself will put her at risk of judgment in a society with strict ideas about gender. Catherine uses her hair (as well as her clothes) to adopt the outward aesthetic of masculinity, which allows her to play the role of a boy. Her hair becomes a symbol of her defiance and her refutation of traditional gender roles.
Though Catherine is pleased with her first haircut, she is soon unsatisfied. She likes to see herself as an iconoclastic force, challenging any social preconceptions and forging a new identity for herself as a radical who blurs the lines of convention. Her first haircut is not enough, and Catherine finds a new, more daring hairdresser who is willing to cut her hair even shorter. This second, shorter haircut is a symbol of how Catherine is not comfortable sitting still. She must drive relentlessly forward, pushing boundaries in new ways to preserve her new identity as a radical. Eventually, however, she hits a barrier when her radical actions become dull and staid. Eventually, her hair can get no shorter so she must look for alternative ways to establish her identity. Her short hair then becomes a symbol of her struggles with constant reinvention.
Catherine is not the only character who changes their hair. She also encourages others to do the same. She makes David visit the same hairdresser so that they can receive matching haircuts. This is Catherine’s attempt to bring her husband along on her journey, helping the stoic, conservative David challenge social conventions at her side. Later, Catherine encourages Marita to have her hair cut in the same way so that all three are brought together in an aesthetic and–she hopes–a romantic sense. But then Marita’s hair grows out, differentiating her from the others, and Catherine asks David to have his hair cut again to match her. This is Catherine’s attempt to symbolically reaffirm their relationship. She wants to demonstrate that they have something that Marita can never have. Hair is the original symbol of their defiance, and she wants to repeat this gesture when their marriage is in danger. This second attempt to make David cut his hair symbolizes regret and a desire to return to their previous state.
Mirrors
In The Garden of Eden, mirrors are an important symbol as they can show characters a reflection of themselves. For a character like Catherine who is perpetually suffering from a crisis of identity, a mirror allows her to view herself as others see her. The mirror reflects only the aesthetics of a person, meaning that her masculine clothes and haircut can reflect an image of Catherine as a boy rather than a girl, reaffirming her new identity. The way Catherine constantly looks into mirrors suggests that she needs constant affirmation about her identity. More than any other character, she talks about and gazes into mirrors. Catherine is almost beholden to her reflection, symbolizing how her character and her actions are beholden to her need to appear special.
Marita notices that the bar in the hotel lacks a mirror and she purchases one which is eventually installed. The bar mirror has two important functions in the novel. Firstly, it is a symbol of Marita’s material wealth. She is rich enough to purchase whimsical objects for a temporary residence, to the point where even Catherine remarks on her lavish spending after the mirror is acquired. This demonstration of wealth places Marita on equal footing with Catherine in terms of ways they can support David, making his decision about which woman to choose slightly more complicated. Secondly, the bar mirror combines Catherine’s need for identity with the issues which complicate the search. The mirror is placed in the bar, in proximity to alcohol. The alcohol loosens the inhibitions of the characters and makes them less certain of their actions. Catherine claims that a bar mirror is the most truthful of all. The mirror in the hotel bar, however, symbolizes how her behavior blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The mirror reflects the artificial identity she has created and David's accelerating alcoholism. The people who are eventually seen in the bar mirror are not the original authentic characters. Rather, they are reflections of what the characters have become and what they have done to one another. That the bar mirror casts a different reflection symbolizes the extent to which the characters have changed one another.
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By Ernest Hemingway
