Hemingway Family in Oak Park, Illinois
In cooperation with the Special Collections Library at Middlebury College,
this website provides an assortment of photographs from the Ernest Hemingway
Family Collection. The collection in it’s entirety consists of
family correspondence, journals, more than 1400 original letters and
151 scans of Hemingway’s letters, as well as a collection of family
photos.[1] This website focuses on the Hemingway
family photos of children as well as children’s handwritten letters.
Ernest, the second of six children, was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois.
These images show Ernest as a young boy with his four sisters, Marcelline,
Ursula, Madelaine, and Carol, as well as his brother Leicester.
The
period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early-twentieth century
was characterized by indecisive and hesitant parenting methods in the
socialization of boys. As the 19th century emphasized moral rectitude
and self control in boys, there were increased anxieties about rendering
boys effeminate and over civilized. As a result, parenting advisers
like Angelo Patri encouraged greater tolerance of boys’ savage
and distinctly masculine impulses.[2] The
Hemingway girls were representative of young girls during the early
twentieth century. Girls were seen as responsible young women at a young
age, and unlike the boys, were expected to play it safe. According to
Melanie Dawson, author of “The Miniaturizing of Girlhood”,
in the nineteenth century “the association of girlhood with domestic
caretaking and ‘real life’ experiences had a vast potential
to inscribe gendered expectations about measuring maturity.”[3]
The images of the Hemingway family represent the gender conceptions
formed during this time period. For more images of the Hemingway family,
visit Hemingway Family Photographs in Michigan site.
