LAUSR

Critics have had much to say about Catherine Bourne and the complex sexual and gender experiments that she conducts with her husband David in the Scribner version of Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novel, The Garden of Eden. Curiously, however, apart from a handful of reviews that have either panned or condemned screenwriter James Scott Linville’s and director John Irvin’s adaptation of the novel—Jesse Cataldo stated that the film is a “turgid, unsatisfying rendering of the author’s risqu e uncompleted opus—relatively few critical analyses of Catherine (played by Mena Suvari) and her relationship with David Bourne (played by Jack Huston) have appeared since the movie’s release in late 2010. Ronnie Scheib has observed that Irvin’s Garden is about a “young writer’s sexual experiences at the hands of his rich, spoiled, emotionally unstable bride.” Stephen Holden’s assessment of Ms. Bourne is even more severe, in that she is “so unrelentingly cruel to her husband... that the now-frowned-upon adjective ‘castrating’ is the most appropriate printable word to describe her.” Candace Grissom also fails to find anything benign about the film’s central female character,” noting that Suvari “plays the character as a purely evil, self-centered, and smugly manipulative individual.” In this essay, however, I will argue that Catherine, in compensation for the psychological devastation that she had sustained during her youth, attempts to deflate the masculinity of her husband, an individual whose male identity had already been traumatized during the Great War, in order that she may participate in, and thereby find fulfillment in, her spouse’s literary achievements. I will contend as well that David manages to preserve his masculinity against his wife’s attacks in a variety of ways, but principally through his employment of what I call the inner strength of the male self, an energy source that the young man discovers deep within himself. In the early scenes of Act I, Irvin presents the two principal challenges to Bourne’s masculinity: post-war trauma and Catherine. Like many World War I veterans, David had evidently been devastated psychologically by his participation in a conflict that, as Sandra Gilbert has explained, constituted “the apocalypse of masculinism,” in that, “paradoxically... the war to which so many men had gone in hope of becoming heroes ended up emasculating them.” Irvin emphasizes the