Ernest Hemingway initially was criticized for his female characters who were either mean, crazy, or evil--occasionally all three. Recently however, critics across the board have looked back on his work and decided that Hemingway deserved more credit than he was due. They found that his works actually took a stand for women--whose relationships with bad men would sometimes (though not always) turn them into bad women. Due to Hemingway's ice-berg style of writing, which calls for short sentences, lack of flowery description, and journalistic tone, many of his sympathies (progressive for his time) went unnoticed. However in two of his posthumous novels, critics note the marked change in his treatment of female characters and his experimentation with the idea of sameness of men and women as well as his interest reversing gender roles for both. Such writing is far more progressive for Hemingway than earlier works leading critics to believe he had undergone some sort of transformation by his mid-life. In "A Matter of Love or Death", Marc Hewson finds, however, that the clues for Hemingway's further evolution can be found in For Whom the Bell Tolls, a novel with very interesting female characters, Pilar and Maria. Through their personal histories and interactions with others--and for Maria, her romance with hero Robert Jordan, in particular--Hemingway provides women who break his traditional "Hemingway women" stereotype, thus flavoring the novel with the feminist sentiment that women are not defenseless and are not to be stuck with the idea of their "victimhood".
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