“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

OMG! “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” was probably the best short story that I have read in this class. Although a little long, I was engaged the entire time that I was reading it. There were such strong emotional undercurrents in everything that they talked about or did. It was also fascinating to watch the different power plays and how the power shifted over time. It really illustrated the relationship between power, the courage to use that power, and the resulting happiness.

Margot is such a bitch (pardon my French). She thinks so little of her husband and recently she has thought even worse of him because he was not “man enough” in her eyes to kill a lion. She is constantly making jibes at his masculinity. When I first read the story, I thought Margot was crying because she was sad for the lion that her husband had hunted but the more that I learned about her, the more I came to believe that she was crying less for the lion and more for herself and her husband’s shame. Margot constantly refers back to the fact that Francis could not shoot the lion. It is even worse because she witnessed his shame and insists on coming with him on their next few hunts to continue observing. She constantly pushes her boundaries but in the end she goes too far. During the hunt of the buffalo she starts to feel her husband becoming more confident and begins to believe that he will leave her (the fact that they cannot leave each other due to different reasons is also a common topic of conversation throughout the piece) so she ends up shooting him as he shoots the last buffalo. After this, the power shifts drastically. Wilson (the professional hunter with whom she recently slept with and just witnessed this “accident”) starts to tell her what to do and she is compliant. It even goes to the point that he praises her, as if she is a child, for saying please.

I also found it slightly disturbing but still fascinating how Hemingway entered the reader into the mind of the animal just as they were dying. The juxtaposition between Margot’s haughtiness, Francis’s cowardice, Wilson’s pride, and the animal’s pain heightened the stakes and took the reader through an amazing rollercoaster. It also brought a lack of humanity to the piece. The story had a major theme of power and it portrayed humans in a very callous light. It constantly referred to the fact the humans knew nothing of the animal’s pain. This also relates to their interactions between each other.