Mary Hudson and The Chief

Oddly enough, the topic of Mary and The Chief's relationship has been plaguing my mind since we finished reading and discussing "The Laughing Man". So, what exactly even happened? There are so many vague clues that I didn't even notice the first time reading it. When Elissa brought up the baby carriage thing in class was the first time I even thought of that as some sort of clue. Maybe I'm just not a very detail oriented reader. Anyway, what in the world happened to this relationship?
Their relationship never really seemed completely healthy to me. From The Chief (do we know his real name?) insisting that Mary Hudson not play in the baseball game, despite her instance that she wanted to, to the whole "dentist" thing, it seemed a bit odd. This book is older, published in 1948, and back then the notion of a woman's happiness tended to rely more on her spouses than her own. So shouldn't Mary just be happy to be with The Chief? Especially if it's only a few times a month? Maybe that's saying more about Mary than The Chief.
This has been a lot of rambling, basically my thoughts going straight into this blog post. Still though, we have the unanswered question of, what happened to their relationship? Was it just destined to end? Well, I've come up with a possible list of reasons Mary and The Chief broke things off. Read my ramblings ahead:

• Mary was cheating on The Chief (hence the "dentist" thing) 
• The Chief was cheating on Mary (hence the "dentist" thing) 
• Mary was pregnant with The Chief's child, but he didn't believe it was his. 
• Mary was pregnant with another man's child, but fooled The Chief into believing it was his. 
• Mary was pregnant with The Chief's child, and he just didn't want to have kids with her. 
• Mary was pregnant, but had an abortion without telling The Chief (hence why The Chief killed off The Laughing Man maybe) 
• Their relationship wasn't working, due to The Chief's busy schedule with the Comanche Club. 
• Mary was jealous of how much time The Chief spent with the Comanche boys versus with her. 
• The Chief didn't trust Mary when she went back to the city. 
• Mary didn't like The Chief controlling her. 
• The Chief didn't like Mary not listening to her. 
• They didn't see each other enough (Comanche Club and "dentist") 

Those are just some I've been thinking about. I'd love to hear more ideas, though. Stories with questions left unanswered always leave my brain spinning for days after. It's an interesting tactic of Salinger's to make the story from a young boy's perspective, instead of Mary or The Chief, and leaves the reader with a lot of questions. What happened? Why did The Chief kill The Laughing Man? And many more. 

Women in "In Our Time"

Is Ernest Hemingway's depiction of women in “In Our Time” indicative of the time period the stories were written in (1920s to 1930s) or of his relationships with women? A constant theme throughout the book “In Our Time” is women being seen as nothing more than “wives” or “mothers”. We especially see this in the story “Cat in the Rain”. This short story involves two characters; a young woman, labelled only as “the American wife”, not given a name, and her presumed husband George. In the story, they are the only two American people staying at a hotel in Italy. One evening the “American wife” sees a cat outside of their hotel room. Excitedly, she goes out in the rain in an effort to find the cat and bring it back to her hotel room.

As her efforts prove unsuccessful, we see more and more qualities of a Hemingway women conveyed. She is very timid, as seen when she agrees to go back inside from the rain with the maid even when she wants to find the cat, on page 92. Even when the woman is out of context with her husband, she is still only known as the American “girl”. Not even woman. Hemingway’s use of only these two terms for her seems to be a very poignant effort to keep her at arms distance. It seems as though he doesn’t really value her as a character, or some might go as far as to say he doesn’t truly value her as a person because of her status as a woman. The use of her name to constantly remind the readers that she is one, female, and two, a wife. Two things that back then probably, sadly, did define a person. It seems odd though that George got a name, and his wife, the main character didn’t.

Another theme in Hemingway’s writing is the classic “man gets annoyed with girl and usually says something rude” situation. In “Cat in the Rain”, George tells his wife, “Oh shut up and get something to read”, when she continues to ask questions and talk about the cat. Though in most relationships there are aspects of irritation and aggravation, the high number of occurrences of this very specific situation throughout “In Our Time” show a deeper theme about women.

So this leaves us with the question; is Hemingway writing like this from experience, or is that just how women were treated in the 1920s?