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Although in former days, Brett Ashley was almost always labeled a "destructive bitch" or some other narrowly hostile term, since then readers have seen a variety of "Bretts" in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Feminist critics especially have found her a remarkably complex character, a basically positive or at least sympathetic one. For instance, she has been seen as a war victim trying, like the confused Jake Barnes, to find "a way to live in it" (that is, the world) - as the narrator says of himself during one of his dark nights of the soul (Hemingway, Sun Also 148). She is the 1920's New Woman, seeking a place in the postwar age of liberation (Martin 68). As early as 1980, a major Hemingway critic said that reading this emotionally wounded but strong character "as a Hemingway hero is not implausible" (Wagner 43). Another reader sees her as a role model for women in that she has the courage to define her own standards and abide by own "authentic self," and, further, that she is the novel's main character (Willingham 34, 45). Hemingway himself implied that she is the story's foremost character. Before a last-minute deletion of the opening chapterand-a-half, the novel had began "This is the story of a lady" and then followed with Brett's history ("The Sun" 131-33). And in a letter to Owen Wister a few years after it came out, he said that he had tried to "give the destruction of character in the woman Brett - that was the main story and I failed to do it" (qtd. in Lynn, Hemingway 337). Yet we suspect that not only the critics, but also Hemingway himself, may have been somewhat puzzled by the fascinating, ambiguous figure he had created.
As this short list suggests, we can see various Bretts and find support for each in the novel. There is still another. If we stand back from the story, see the canvas at a distance, she comes across as a strong woman surrounded by "boys" - or men who act in many ways like boys around her - and she deals with them much as would a mother with children. Thus, in performative terms, in what we might call the "theater of...