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The Dangers of Losing Yourself to Love
In Ernest Hemmingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms Henry and Cathy both suffer from the loss of identity. These characters are in love throughout the novel, and change from an original personality, into what the other person wants or what they perceive the other person wants. They love each other so deeply and completely that they lose their identity, their sense of self, because of their love. There is also a resulting lose of self because of the situations they are in, both of the war and of Cathy’s pregnancy. From the characterization of Henry and Cathy you can see how they have lost themselves to their love, and to the war. Whether it is Cathy’s obsession for Henry, Henry’s love for Cathy, or the situations they have found themselves in, they lose themselves entirely.
Henry and Cathy lose their sense of self first to the circumstances their love has caused them to be in. When Cathy is found out to be pregnant, Henry leaves the war for her. Before Henry leaves the war, though, he also loses himself to the enthusiasm of it. When He is injured during the war, and in a hospital, one of the doctors asks him how many he had killed. Since he is only an ambulance driver, he couldn’t have reasonably killed anyone. He was not at the front line but he is, “anxious to please” (94). He wants to look good for the doctors, and says, “I had killed plenty” (95). He wants to appear as a fighter, and has lost his true identity as an ambulance driver to what could best be called shallowness. After Cathy reveals to Henry that she is pregnant, he flees the army to be with her. Since Henry is an American in the Italian army, he is an outsider. He has no feeling or care for the war and no pride in what he is doing. Now outside of the army, though, he feels less himself than when he was in the army. He feels like a “masquerader in civilian clothes” (243). The word choice here is important to Henry’s loss of identity. As a masquerader, he is hiding his identity from the world. If no one knows who you are, you are hiding yourself, and you also have no identity. Henry was an outsider in the army, but he didn’t have an identity outside of the army, either. As for Cathy, she is most affected by her pregnancy rather than the war. In a case where she should feel maternal instinct and love for her child, she would rather remove the baby, the situation she is in, all together. This is also a result of her love for Henry, but it wouldn’t have been an issue had the pregnancy not occurred. Cathy nearly hits herself in the stomach with an oar, and when Henry tells her to be careful, she replies by saying, “life might be much simpler,” (275) if she did hit herself with the oar. She loses her identity as a mother both because of the pregnancy, and because of her love for Henry.
The greatest factor in Henry’s loss of identity is his love for Cathy and the affect that she has on him. At the beginning Henry says, “…I had not wanted to fall in love…” (93) and from there he has already lost himself to love. It isn’t yet his love for Cathy that has caused him to lose himself, but only love. Already early into their relationship, love catches hold of Henry and doesn’t let him go. We already know that Henry will do something to please others, as seen through his lie about killing people, and he does the same for Cathy. She wants him to grow a beard, and he does. He does not want to keep the beard because he says, “it looked so strange to see a man with a bear boxing” (311). Henry reasons with himself, and also says, “but Catherine did not want me to [take it off]” (311). He has become submissive to make her happy. If Henry cannot be assertive in his opinions and do what he wants, he has lost himself. His own identity starts to fade, and he becomes what Cathy wants of him. Just as Cathy lost her feeling of motherhood, Henry also lost his paternal feelings towards the child. He feels nothing for it and, “felt no feeling of fatherhood” (325). While Cathy is in labor, she struggles to give birth and almost dies. When the baby is born dead, Henry hates the child and sees it only as something that could have killed the person he loves. Paternal instinct would say that he should be just as sad for the death of the child as he would be for Cathy, but he is blinded by his love.
Throughout most of the novel, Cathy is obsessed with Henry and what she thinks he wants. Early in, she says that Henry is her religion, and she uses that exact word. Here, again, word choice is important. Religion has the connotation of complete devotion and worship for Henry. Without Henry, she cannot be happy and her life is incomplete. She has already lost herself entirely to her love. Besides her love for Henry, she is obsessed with being perfect for him. A better observation of this is that she wants to be the perfect image of a female, more specifically, not pregnant. When Cathy first reveals to Henry that she is pregnant, she feels guilty and is sorry for having made trouble for Henry. She pleads with him, as if Henry might leave her for this, by saying, “Haven’t I been a good girl until now?” (138). For a long while afterwards, she is concerned with Henry’s opinion of her. She is incapable of making opinions about herself, and instead needs Henry’s opinions. If Henry isn’t happy with her, she isn’t happy with herself. Subtly, Henry shows that he doesn’t like that she is pregnant. As a result, she sees it as a horrible thing that she is pregnant. Really, though, if Henry would have been overjoyed with her pregnancy, she too would be. Cathy removes herself of any of her own feelings and emotions so that she can be only what Henry wants. She continues to think she isn’t what he wants, saying that she is, “something very ungainly that you’ve married,” (309) but to this Henry disagrees. She has the need to make herself below what Henry knows she is so that she can gain his acceptance and reassurance of her beauty. Cathy cannot conceive that she is what Henry wants because to her she shouldn’t be pregnant at all and the pregnancy makes her ugly. Again, it is her vision of the ideal woman. Henry sees beyond that, or rather, tolerates it, and loves her anyway. Cathy is the character that suffers from the loss of identity the most. She says to him, in her deepest moment without herself, “I want you so much I want to be you too” (299). She wishes to cut her hair short, which Henry doesn’t even want, just so she can look just like him. She admires him so much, she can only think of herself as beautiful if she is like him. This is a complete loss of self because it is as though she doesn’t have a self—she is all Henry. To be without her own identity and to want to be Henry is not only an affect of her love, but a result of her psychological imbalance. It is evident from the novel that Cathy did have psychological problems due to her first boyfriend’s death. Because of that, she will do anything she can not to lose Henry. Some of this is love, but it is also from her need to have someone with her, someone who loves her. Loving someone to the point that you want to be them is a great extreme for anyone, and to see this in Cathy only proves that she is not right in mind. True, she loses her identity to love, but she also loses her identity to her need for someone else.
Love can be a good thing, but like anything else it should be used and felt in moderation. For Cathy and Henry, their love is so extreme that they lose themselves to it. The love makes them one entity, together because of their love. To see them as two separate characters is almost impossible, and it is better to look at them and ask, “Where does one character end, and the other begin?” Because their actions are influenced by the other person, the situations are brought on because of their love, everything about them eventually whittles down to a result of their love for each other. Cathy’s loss of identity makes it hard to think of her as anything but Henry’s Lover, and the same for Henry. The ultimate loss of identity through the whole book was Henry’s loss of Cathy. Without his lover, he is nothing, and this is where we see how strong love took away their sense of identity. If you cannot be a person, an identity, without your lover, you are no one on your own.
Just some notes, it's in MLA style, and it needs to be in present tense (if I am talking about the book). I think I'll have missed the present tense in some places, I'm not sure if I thought about it while writing it. #_# Thanks all!