title: The Torments of Spring: Jake Barnes's Phantom Limb inThe Sun Also Rises.
abstract: While critics recently have found The Sun Also Rises a fruitful text for reexamining issues of gender and sexuality in Hemingway's work, a significant aspect of Jake Barnes's genital wounding has been overlooked. At least from the time of the American Civil War, a diverse body of medical literature has documented the psychosomatic reality of phantom genitalia in traumatically injured men. Revisiting the novel from this perspective-imagining that Jake Barnes is haunted by a penile ghost-allows us to see this character as something more than a victim of disability. Instead, we might think of Jake's material self as figuratively masculine but accidentally transgendered: a body that others can desire and that still can choose, or not, to reciprocate sexual feeling.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Anesko
mesh_terms: D000671:Amputation, Surgical / Q000266:history; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D008297:Male; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D010591:Phantom Limb / Q000266:history*; D014857:Warfare