Brett's Iceberg

Throughout The Sun Also Rises, Brett’s love life is defined by a repeating pattern of events: a man falls for her, they have a fling together, and she inevitably breaks away from them to find someone new. She seems to move through life leaving a trail of destruction in her wake, and she at times acting cruelly towards the various men who love her to satisfy her own desires. In a harsh, but perhaps apt metaphor, Cohn compares her to Circe: just as men are reduced to pigs by her presence, a stream of suitors are left in ruin after their time with Brett has ended. Mike becomes a bitter, jealous drunk as he watches his wife-to-be pursue other men; Cohn, the champion of chivalry and pre-war ideals, stoops to fist-fighting with his friends over her; and the young, pure Romero is corrupted by her, costing Jake his relationship with Montoya. There’s a sense (at least from Brett’s own perspective) that these destructive patterns are simply part of her nature—at several points, she justifies her actions as out of her own control. For example, despite understanding the consequences of entering a relationship with Romero, she seeks Jake’s approval on the matter, telling him, “I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”

At the same time, though, Brett’s character is often quite sympathetic. It’s not entirely clear how aware she is of the pain she causes Jake (especially given their tendency to “talk around” anything too deep or vulnerable), but there are moments when she does genuinely seem to care for him, and to long for a life where they could be together. And notably, she never seems to be having a particularly enjoyable time in her exploits, drowning her emotions in copious amounts of alcohol and expressing her misery to Jake almost every time they talk privately.

In this vein, I think that one potentially more sympathetic way of understanding Brett is that, like many of the other characters in the book, her worldview and relationships have been profoundly shaped by an “iceberg” of trauma that she doesn’t often acknowledge. Like the rest of their group, she has served in the war, and (if we trust what Jake says to Cohn) lost “her own true love” to dysentery. We’re also told, in a brief aside by Mike, that Brett’s first husband became profoundly abusive after returning from the war, threatening to kill her and sleeping each night with a loaded gun. It’s easy to imagine that, with this intensely traumatic experience in her past, it would be crucial to Brett to maintain control and freedom in her romantic relationships. We can see her insistence on pulling away whenever men want her too much, or try to “tame” her and pin her down (as Romero does), as a means of protecting herself, rather than simply discarding them for someone more interesting. And in this sense, perhaps a more charitable reading of Brett’s relationship with Jake is that she is able to stay close to and become vulnerable with him because she feels safe with him. Because of Jake’s unique situation, Brett doesn’t have to fear that he’ll end up possessing her in this way, and she understands that she is able to maintain control in their relationship.