47 pages • 1-hour read
Perfect Strangers
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Symbols & Motifs
Ernest Hemingway
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness, illness, violence, sexual content, and cursing.
Hemingway is a motif throughout the novel, most fundamentally in the fact that each of the four parts of the novel begins with a Hemingway quote, and the narrative uses him to question stereotypical gender representations, particularly masculinity. In the psychiatric center, Kelly reads Ernest Hemingway to Olivia and concludes, “[B]abe, he was one sad individual. All the obsession with war and death? Blech. And don’t get me started on the whole bullfighting thing. That’s just toxic masculinity, right there” (480). Kelly advances a typical image of Hemingway, whose work regularly reinforces attitudes about gender that modern society finds problematic.
In the Paris reality, Olivia shares Kelly’s view, telling James, “I can’t believe you like Hemingway! He’s so unbearably macho” (113). As an assertive assassin, James, too, is “macho,” but his characterization undercuts the assumptions about the stereotype. When he and Olivia have sex, he always ensures her consent. Once Olivia becomes pregnant, James further disrupts these gender norms by hinting that he’d like to be the parent who stays home. More so, the repeated Hemingway quote—“I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other. And feel now. Thou hast no heart but mine” (168, 482, 541)”—centers on emotion, not a stereotypical “macho” trait. The book presents Hemingway as “toxic” only to show that his legacy is more complicated than that, mirroring how James is more complex than his stereotypical male lead characterization.
The “I am thee” quote comes from Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, but the Hemingway novel that arguably has the most relevance to the psychiatric center Olivia is The Sun Also Rises (1926). Olivia has no sexual life at the center, paralleling Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, the novel’s main character, who has a physical condition that rules out sex. While Olivia creates a James to compensate for the absence of sex, Jake has an intense romantic interest, Brett Ashley. At the psychiatric center Olivia doesn’t wind up with James, and Jake and Brett, due to his condition, can’t be together. The plot of Sun erodes Hemingway’s “macho” image. Like the psychiatric center Olivia, Jake is vulnerable, not an emblem of stereotypical manly strength.
The Wall Calendar
When James brings home the wall calendar, which is sponsored by the Rockland Psychiatric Center, its appearance ends Olivia’s fantasy and brings her back to the psychiatric hospital. In the moment, the center represents Olivia’s true reality. Though the Epilogue reveals that both the Paris reality and psychiatric center reality are products of Olivia’s novel, the center reality remains true since it represents a stark departure from Olivia’s exaggerated French world. The gritty Rockland Psychiatric Center opposes Olivia’s dramatically romanticized Paris; the two can’t coexist. The calendar is a material item, so Olivia can’t swipe it away or turn it off as she could with a digital calendar. Presumably, Olivia could have immediately thrown out the calendar, but it’d still be there in the trash. As with reality, the calendar has an irrepressible presence. Olivia can’t avoid it.
The wall calendar also highlights the passage of time. Dr. Chevalier says, “No one can offer you proof of reality, not even Einstein himself. But just because it can’t be proven doesn’t mean the sun won’t rise tomorrow. It will” (515). The quote reinforces the symbolic importance of the calendar. Olivia attributes the disruption of her fantasy to reading “the name of the group who sponsored the calendar. Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York” (478). Yet the words gain power due to their connection to the material calendar, which, in turn, summons the physical center. As with the rising sun, Olivia can’t deny the palpable reality that the calendar confronts her with.
Fields
Fields are a motif that is threaded throughout the narrative and supports the theme of Exploring the Intersection of Feminism and Sexual Desire. James and Olivia repeat a quote from the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi that appears in The Essential Rumi (1995): “There exists a field, beyond all notions of right and wrong. I will meet you there” (432; 536-38). For them, sexual desire becomes a field, a space in which Olivia experiments with James and sets aside “notions of right and wrong.” She learns to embrace the openness of sex and not see individual sex acts as a direct reflection of her moral character. She can enjoy spanking, objectification, and “dirty talk” without sacrificing her feminist values.
The idea of fields also applies to The Pleasure of Mystery and Shaping Reality Through Storytelling. The restriction on personal details turns Olivia and James into metaphorical open spaces. They become fields for each other, and they explore each other with relative abandon as their respective ambiguity does away with the boundaries that specific information creates. Reality, too, functions as a field, as it is also a space that Olivia manipulates. First, she turns the field into a thriller Parisian romance. Next, she transforms the field into a gritty world of mental and physical illness. In the Epilogue, the story forces the reader to confront that they were in a field all along, so everything they read was a constructed space or make-believe.
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