Ernest Hemingway's collection of short stories In Our Time explores ideas about love, passion, and relationships. These topics reveal Hemingway's personal opinions about the complexities of such relationships. Hemingway's use of gender archetypes in the collection is a critical social commentary on society's decided importance of gender roles. In his short stories "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife"" and "Indian Camp,"" Ernest Hemingway uses conventional gender archetypes with some unconventional features to challenge and expose flaws in traditional societal gender roles.
In "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,"" Hemingway portrays a husband and wife. The husband is upset, so his wife questions him as to why he might be upset (Hemingway 25). At first the man ignores his wife, and then he lies to her. The wife gives her husband religious advice, asking that he not lose his temper. The husband largely ignores her advice, assuming that she, being a woman, lacks the intelligence and authority to have valuable input on the situation (Hemingway 26). .
This scenario closely follows a classic literary female archetype. The wife is determined to be unworthy of being answered, unworthy of an opinion, and unworthy of being listened to. To the husband, it is perfectly acceptable to ignore his wife, because, in his mind, as a man it is his right to do so. Although Hemingway asserts a female archetype in his writing, he does not affirm it. In fact, Hemingway challenges the archetype. He does so by bestowing the wife with an untraditional quality: she advises her husband not to lose his temper, citing a religious argument (Hemingway 26). In doing so, the wife effectively challenges her role as a wife. She attempts to break out of her submissive, feminine archetype, and she tries to break her husband from his aggressive, masculine archetype as well. If her husband would have listened, he may have lived more happily.
