The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: A Failed Lion Hunt and Its Consequences

A crowd of natives has just carried Francis Macomber triumphantly into camp. Macomber, a good-looking athletic type, has just blown it on a lion hunting adventure and now everyone knows he's a coward. Macomber's wife can't contain her resentment and humiliation about her husband's breakdown on the hunt. This is not a proud moment for the Macombers. Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Shmoop. com. Shmoop University, Inc. , 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Hemingway's Short Stories By Ernest Hemingway Summary and Analysis "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"" Hemingway's Short Stories: Summary and Analysis: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" Wiley Publishing, n. d. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Hemingway, Ernest. "FAST-US-1 Intro to American English Reference File. " FAST-US-1 Intro to American English Reference File. Charles Scribner's Sons, 7 May 2010. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. " Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 04 Nov. 013. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. Gaillard, Theodore L. "JSTOR. " The English Journal. Vol. 60. N. p. : National Council of Teachers of English, 1971. 31-35. The English Journal. Web. 12 Apr. 2013. I. Francis Macomber and his wife Margaret (usually referred to as "Margot"), are on a big-game safari in Africa, guided by professional hunter Robert Wilson. Earlier, Francis had panicked when a wounded lion charged him. Margot mocks Macomber for this act of cowardice, and it is implied that she sleeps with Wilson.

The next day they hunt buffalo. When they find the buffalo, it charges Macomber. Francis, faced with a buffalo, suddenly becomes a man of courage, but his shots are too high. Wilson fires at the beast as well, but it keeps charging. Macomber kills the buffalo at the last second. At the same time, Margot had also fired a shot from the car, which instead hits Macomber in the skull and kills him. For once, they are both on the same side, shooting at the same bull, but tragically she kills the man she was trying to save.

In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway uses his famously sparse prose style and villains with the moral make-up of animals to demonstrate the ironic truth that happiness is fleeting and had better not depend upon others. II. The narrator furnishes details, nothing more, but packs in those details is all the psychological nuance of a session with a psychoanalyst. In "The Short Happy Life," a numerous basic actions can go a great distance. The sentences are certainly not fancy, but they reveal a ton about the characters.

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For example: "The mess boy had started them already, lifting the bottles out of the canvas cooling bags that sweated wet in the wind that blew through the trees that shaded the tents" (p. 1). Here, Hemingway speaks volumes in one sentence: the feeling in the air is apparent, he sets the visual scene, and he conveys ideas of class and environment. Readers know where they are, and what kind of people they are dealing with. Hemingway also lets the dialogue do a lot of the work. That way readers get to know the characters through what they say instead of having Hemingway tell them what to think.

At the story's opening, for example, Margot says, "I'll have a gimlet too. I need something" (p. 1). This unadorned expression gives the reader their initial impression of Margot: She will drink because she needs something – but something for what? Something, readers soon find out, to dull the rage and disappointment over Macomber's failure and something as in "my husband gave me nothing, so give me something. " Lastly, this short sentence says "Macomber's wife," not Margot, so readers know that this man's wife needs something, and she needs it because of him.

That's a whole lot of meaning for eight short words. He omits things because he trusts the readers to be active, and to understand what he is saying indirectly. Hemingway packs a lot of unsaid things into the actual words on the page. III Animals: A technique that emerges as one of the most impressively effective is Hemingway’s use of animals, for behind the scenes of the five-act tragedy that constitutes “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” stalks a troupe of inhuman supporting actors whose effect on the understanding of Hemingway’s story is crucial.

Wether in the from of a charging lion or, more subtly, in Margot Macomber’s back-handed reference to those “big cowy things that jump like hares” (p. 9), Hemingway uses his animal menagerie as a standard against which to measure and evaluate his human actors. Francis Macomber’s safari turns out to be quite different from a romantic adventure out of Martin Johnson’s storybook; Macomber’s adversaries are a far cry from “Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the elephant” (p. 22) and the Natural History Museum that the columnist describes.

Hemingway suggests here that Macomber has emerged from the fairytale world of high society into the real world of tooth and claw. It is in conjunction with the animals they themselves hunt that readers can best evaluate Robert Wilson, Francis Macomber, and his wife. Wilson emerges as “the professional. ” He is self-confident and almost detached from the jungle world of his employers. From Margaret’s point of view he seems a killer, but his “flat, blue, machine gunner’s eyes” (p. 8) ironically seem to raise Wilson into a position of dominance over the brutal struggle for supremacy that he witnesses.

Margot Macomber, on the other hand, is deeply enmeshed in this struggle. Her husband labels her “a bitch” (p. 22) after her return from Wilson’s tent and refers to her “bitchery” (p. 10) elsewhere in the story, but more specific than this implicitly negative criticism of Macomber is Hemingway’s explicit use of animals as a verbal weapon in the mouth of Margot. To Francis’ self-punishment Margot adds criticism of her own. When Francis passes her some cooked eland he shot, she scoffs at his offering with the comment: “They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they? (p. 9). Rubbing salt into his wounded ego, she facetiously asks, “They’re not dangerous, are they? ” (p. 9). All Francis has been able to shoot by this point in the safari are relatively harmless animals, and he has proved himself a coward in the face of the only dangerous game he has encountered. Although Hemingway links Margot with no specific animal, she does materialize as the condensation of all the most dangerous qualities of female carnivores. To Robert Wilson she is a typical American woman, one of the “hardest in the world: the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory, nd the most attractive” (p. 8). Externally she is so “enameled in that American female cruelty” (p. 9) that she seems even more insensitive than Robert Wilson. While she is seen as cruel and predatory, her husband is compared with a rabbit and is at the end linked with the lion whose head is blown off by Wilson. Hemingway’s subtle identification of Macomber with the lion he is hunting serves a far more important purpose than symbolically to foreshadow his death at the hands of his wife.

Indeed, it is through Macomber’s links with both the lion and the buffalo that readers become aware of his transition from emotional adolescence to manhood. Initially, the lion’s bravery and determination are used strictly as a contrast to Macomber’s rabbit-like trembling. In his struggle for survival the lion with half his head shot away kept “crawling on toward the crashing, blasting thing that had destroyed him” (p. 21). He stared defiantly with “yellow eyes, narrowed with hate” (p. 19); similarly, “Francis Macomber found that, of all the many men that he had hated, he hated Robert Wilson the most” (p. 3). Momentarily facing the challenge posed by the lion, Macomber feels “sick at his stomach” (p. 16) and cannot control his shaking. “The fear was still there like a cold, slimy hollowin all the emptiness where once his confidence had been and it made him feel sick” (p. 11). The difference between Macomber and the lionis suggested by the nature of their respective wounds. Macomber’s psyvchological “wound” can be traced ultimately to his overall weakness and, more recently, to the effects of his “huntress” wife. But the lion’s wound is more a “red badge of courage” incurred in combat.

Instead of fear, a . 30-06 220 grain solid bullet causes the “sudden hot scalding nausea” (p. 15) in the lion’s stomach. In contrast, the nausea of fear experienced by Macomber is one of nothingness. The lion is broken down and fights his fate to the end, whereas Macomber has collasped internally, “gone to pieces nervously” (p. 8). Macomber bolts like a rabbit, where in the lion “all of him, pain, sickness, hatred and all of his remaining strength, was tightening into an absolute concentration for a rush” (p. 19) directly at his attackers.

In death he becomes almost human. Macomber becomes, by his own admission, a rabbit. But Macomber changes. His metamorphosis from “rabbit” and “laddy-buck” occurs after the second crossing of the stream that separates the camp from the hunting ground. Just as we view the initial conflict through the lion’s stream-of-consciousness as he watched Macomber dismount from the car, so we now see Macomber observe “three huge, black animals looking almost cylindrical in their long heaviness, like big black tank cars” (p,27). The situation has been inverted.

Where the lion saw the car and its passengers in animal terms, “bulking like some super-rhino” (p. 15), Macomber sees the animal in car terms. Hemingway’s inversion of style implies the conversion of Macomber to a lion-like figure and foreshadows his courageous birth into his all-too-short “happy life. ” The hunter becomes the hunted; the man with newly achieved lion-like qualities falls prey to the predatory wife who has seen the change in her husband (p. 33) and herself has become white and ill with fear at what it portends.

In Macomber’s death he is subtly linked with his own last victim, the buffalo: “Francis Macomber lay now, face down, not two yards from where the buffalo lay on his side.. ” (p. 36). Linked with the buffalo both in the manner of death and by physical proximity, Macomber has, at last, achieved the transition from “rabbit” to lion, to bull, and to manhood. Hemingway’s subtle use of animals as an evaluative device has helped to turn what would have been a story of pitiableness into one that approaches tragedy.

Hemingway is very careful with these details so that the reader can fully explore the extent to which Macomber has sunk. (margot dominant)In addition to Macomber’s embarrassed cowardice, he watches as Margot kisses Wilson on the mouth, calling him “the beautiful red-faced Mr. Wilson. ” After Margot returns from sleeping with Wilson, readers learn about the reasoning for her marriage to Frances. She is too beautiful for Francis to divorce her, and Francis has too much money for her to ever leave him. When Macomber reminds Margot the there “wasn’t going to be any of that.

You promised there wouldn’t be,” readers realize that this deceit has been going on for a long time. In years past Macomber has never been enough for his wife, but being here, on the safari, was supposed to change all that. Yet Margo’s betrayal is so open and executed in such defiance that Macomber gets to know how very much his cowardice has changed everything. Margot will continue to press her advantage until the end, when she notices that Macomber is gaining courage and a strong sense of his own manhood.

The shooting of the first buffalo marks the beginning of the tremendous change in Macomber. In all of his life, he has never felt so remarkable. On the other hand, Margot sits “very white faced. ” She realizes that Macomber is changing, and she fears this change. She fears this change because she is losing psychological control over Macomber. She knows that if Macomber finally gains a sense of manhood, he will have the strength to leave her. She tries to taunt him, but he is oblivious to her existence. She now knows that his future does not include her.

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