short happy life of francis macomber essay

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A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is a popular Ernest Hemingway story with a decidedly atypical un-Hemingwayesque protagonist. First published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1936, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is about a married American couple on safari in Africa with their English guide. The husband has a failure of nerve when faced with a lion during one of their hunts, and his wife loses respect for him.

Hemingway’s story doesn’t have the quintessential Hemingway hero at the centre: Francis Macomber is a weaker, more introspective figure than many of Hemingway’s male protagonists. Before we dig down into an analysis of the story, here’s a reminder of the plot, which includes a lengthy flashback.

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’: plot summary

The story is set in Africa, where a married couple, Francis and Margaret (Margot) Macomber, are on safari, accompanied by Robert Wilson, an English professional hunter acting as their guide. The couple are preparing for lunch, and discuss their morning’s hunting with Wilson. It emerges that during the morning’s hunt, Francis panicked when he was stalking a lion and ran away. His wife mocks him for his cowardice.

In the afternoon, Francis goes hunting again, with Wilson accompanying him. He shoots and kills an impala, but it’s clear that he’s still ashamed of running from the lion earlier. That night, he lies in bed and thinks back to the lion hunt, with a substantial portion of the story being devoted to a long flashback in which he remembers the event in detail.

We learn that hearing the lion roar the night before had made Francis nervous even before they set off on the morning’s hunt, and he had admitted as much over breakfast, questioning Wilson about how best to kill a lion. When they had spotted a lion while driving around in their car, they had stopped and approached it. Francis had shot the animal, which had run away, but he was reluctant to kill it. When they approached the lion, with Wilson offering to shoot it, the lion charged them and Francis had run away, leaving Wilson to kill the lion.

On their way back to the car, Margot had kissed Wilson, and Francis believes he has lost his wife’s respect and admiration. However, we are led to believe that Margot is too beautiful for Francis to give her up, and Francis is too rich for Margot to leave him. They have been married for eleven years and their marriage has endured other tests before this.

We return to Francis Macomber lying awake, the flashback of the previous morning’s events over. He falls asleep, but has a nightmare about the lion, and then realises his wife is not asleep beside him. She returns a couple of hours later, having been with Wilson. At breakfast the next morning, Wilson can tell that Francis knows what has happened, but he doesn’t show any remorse.

After breakfast, the three of them go out to hunt buffalo. Francis is so filled with rage towards Wilson that he forgets all of his fear, charging after the buffalo and killing the biggest one that crosses their path. He also kills another which Wilson has brought down but only wounded. Buoyed by his success, Francis starts to behave differently, and Margot is unnerved by this.

They pursue the other buffalo that got away, wounded. As the buffalo charges towards Francis, he prepares to shoot it, but Margot shoots him in the head, killing him. There is some ambiguity surrounding whether she was trying to save her husband (she was aiming for the charging buffalo attacking her husband, but hit him instead) or whether, as Wilson believes, she deliberately aimed her shot at Francis all along.

Wilson comforts the sobbing Margot, reassuring her that people will chalk up her husband’s death to an accident, though he tells her that he believes she meant to kill him.

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’: analysis

Despite the clearness of his prose, many critics have argued that Hemingway ends ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ on an ambiguous note, leaving us to make up our own minds about whether Margot deliberately shot her husband or if she was genuinely trying to save him from a charging bull buffalo.

There is a third option, of course, which is that she was consciously aiming for the buffalo but a part of her subconscious wanted to kill Francis, so she could be rid of him, inherit his fortune, and have relationships with men like Wilson, free from guilt or secrecy.

Of course, one objection to the argument that Margot deliberately shoots at her husband with the intention of ridding him from her life is the fact that, if she wanted him dead, she could simply have stood by and let the buffalo do the honours for her. It is, after all, charging straight for him.

Weighed against this argument is the observation that Francis has recently proved his mettle and, as it were, recovered his manhood since the incident of cowardice involving the lion. If he defends himself against the buffalo and survives, Margot is stuck with him. We might argue that she saw her chance to kill him ‘innocently’ and took it.

Of course, in killing her husband, he is also robbed of the chance of knowing whether he could ‘take’ the buffalo: whether he, or it, would have emerged victorious from their showdown.

Certainly, her character is not exactly a sympathetic one in the rest of the story. She loses her respect for her husband when he runs from the lion, and supposedly goes to bed with another man as a result of this. There’s an implication that she’s only (or at least largely) with her husband at all because of his money.

And she seems confused and worried by his sudden regaining of his courage and manhood at the end of the story. How we should ‘read’ Margot has perplexed and divided critics ever since ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ was first published.

If she does deliberately choose to kill her husband, what is Margot’s motivation? It’s clear that she has lost respect for him following his behaviour in front of the lion, but at the end of the story he appears to have regained his courage. Does she feel threatened by this? Perhaps, after bedding Wilson, she cannot bear to think of her husband as anything but a coward. She actually wants him to be like that, because she can feel superior to him: indeed, more ‘manly’ than he is.

Alternatively, it’s possible that she feared, not being stuck with Francis, but the opposite: that now he has recovered his courage, he will not be content to remain with her and will seek to divorce her and take his wealth elsewhere.

She does not seem to be overly enamoured of Wilson, either, criticising his obsession with blowing the heads off things and turning her sarcasm on him. She is prepared to sleep with him, but she seems to be as critical of him as she is of her husband. In many ways, Hemingway’s story presents two very different and contrasting versions of manhood, but implies that both are insufficient in themselves. Wilson is the man of action but lacks heart, while Francis lacks the hardened resolve which she detects in their English guide.

Courage and cowardice are central, mutually complementary themes in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. The story is framed by Francis’ initial failure of nerve, although Hemingway chooses to begin the story in the aftermath of this event, and then reveal what happened to us only later, during a flashback.

This means that we cannot judge what happened ourselves, at least initially, and first have to get to know the personalities of Francis and Margot as the dynamic of their marriage is slowly revealed to us.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 14, 2021

In the story by Ernest Hemingway, the setting is Africa, where Margot and Francis Macomber have hired the English guide Robert Wilson to take them on a big-game hunt. The Macomber marriage is on shaky ground, but “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.” The narrative begins at lunch, after Francis has shown himself to be a coward by running from a wounded lion. The narrative flashes back through Francis’s memory of the lion hunt and even into the lion’s sensibility, showing the hunt from the lion’s point of view.

The next scene occurs early the following morning, when Francis encounters Margot returning to their tent after a presumably sexual interlude with Wilson, who carries a double cot for just such occasions. The next morning all three characters go out in a car to hunt buffalo. Macomber bags his buffalo and begins to feel good about himself, as his cheerful, confident behavior clearly indicates. Wilson sees the change in him. Margot is discomfitted by the whole episode. When a wounded bull charges them, Macomber stands his ground to shoot him but is killed by his wife when she shoots at the buffalo “with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber.” Wilson seems to accuse Margot of murdering her husband, asking, “Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.” But he also assures her that he and the gun bearers will testify that it was an accident.

Ernest Hemingway/Life

A central theme is the importance of courage. Wilson quotes Shakespeare: “A man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will; he that dies this year is quit for the next.” The implication of these lines fits into the Hemingway code: Since a man has only one chance to face death, he should do so with dignity and grace. Hemingway’s title indicates that without courage a man is less than a man. In that “short” period preceding Macomber’s death, he has behaved courageously and become a man. Therefore, he is “happy.” Wilson, however, categorizes Francis as a soft, great American boy-man. Wilson’s manly character, in contrast to his description of Macomber’s, is outwardly that of a man who fearlessly and competently kills the game he pursues. Yet he is more predator than gallant hunter, cuckolding Francis and then describing his conquest, Margot, as hard, cruel, and dominating. In Macomber and Wilson, Hemingway embodies two definitions of male behavior.

Only one character, however, represents female behavior. Did Margot Macomber shoot her husband on purpose because she feared losing him, given his newfound self-assurance, or was she trying to save his life, accidentally hitting him as she shot at the charging buffalo? Controversy has raged since the story was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in September 1936, not unaided by the author himself, who wrote: “No, I don’t know whether she shot him on purpose any more than you do.” “Macomber” is a highly elusive text, open to endless reinterpretations, the most recent informed by both a heightened environmentalism, which views big-game hunting in an unfavorable light, and by feminist criticism, which is mindful of sexist standards in the evaluation of women’s behavior.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baym, Nina. “Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Lion.” In New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, edited by Jackson J. Benson, 112–120. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

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In one of his most acclaimed short stories, Hemingway wrestles with his usual conceptual suspects: wounded heroes, false idols, deception within relationships, inventing new reasons to drink, deciphering between paranoia and perception, hunting, and the desire to hurt the people you love (and who love you).

Set in Africa, the title character, his wife, a safari guide, and his aides are big game hunting when Macomber shows a bit of fear and can’t bring himself to kill a lion. The remainder of the story displays the psychological processes Macomber uses to cope with the event, and how the other characters impact the “recovery” of his manhood.

Gregory Peck starred in the story’s 1947 translation to film, “The Macomber Affair.”

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Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

By ernest hemingway, short stories of ernest hemingway summary and analysis of "the short happy life of francis macomber".

Hemingway introduces the three principal characters, Francis Macomber , his wife Margot, and their safari guide Richard Wilson, over cocktails in the afternoon on the African plain following a morning of hunting. Macomber and his wife are wealthy Americans hoping to revitalize their sometimes-foundering marriage with a romantic African safari and Wilson is a jaded Englishman who runs safaris for wealthy tourists for a living. As the three drink gimlets, they dance around the topic of Macomber’s display of cowardice earlier that day as he ran away from a wounded lion and left Wilson to shoot it.

As Macomber becomes apologetic toward Wilson, Margot loses her composure and runs off to cry out of shame on her husband’s behalf. Macomber expresses his embarrassment to Wilson once more and asks Wilson not to mention his cowardice to mutual acquaintances. This is too much for Wilson, who insults Macomber in an attempt to estrange himself from husband and wife and set up an atmosphere of professional coolness for the remainder of the safari. Macomber is too friendly, however, and Wilson ends up both liking and pitying him.

Margot returns to the table and begins a campaign of “bitchery” against her husband, referring obliquely and ironically to the topics of fear, lions, and hunting both to needle Macomber and impress Wilson. Wilson’s sympathy for Macomber deepens.

In the late afternoon, Macomber and Wilson go off together and shoot impala while Margot stays behind in camp looking, as Wilson puts it, like an English rose (though she is American). Macomber successfully shoots an impala.

That night after dinner, Macomber lies in his bunk and meditates on his loss of confidence and the cowardice that replaced his self-assurance. He relives the incident beginning with his attempt at sleep 24 hours earlier, which was when he first heard the roaring of the lion and became afraid of it. The day of the incident, he discussed shooting the lion with Wilson over breakfast, then the three drove off in a car to find it. Once it appeared, Wilson encouraged Macomber to get out and shoot it, which he did, alone, after hesitating and missing a good shot. Gut-shot, the lion slunk into the bush and Wilson announced they were going in after it to finish it off. Macomber, terrified but unable to appear so, accompanied Wilson into the bush and promptly ran when the wounded lion leaped at him. Wilson shot it and Margot witnessed the whole incident from the car. When the men return to the car, Margot kisses Wilson.

Macomber also meditates on the fact that his marriage had been on the rocks before but that he was sure his wife would not leave him because he was too rich. He was equally sure he would never leave her because she was too beautiful. He then falls asleep, waking to find his wife gone. After two hours, Margot returns to the tent and it becomes clear that she has slept with Wilson. She refuses to discuss the matter with Macomber.

The next morning, the atmosphere is strained. Wilson absolves himself of blame by mentally rubbishing Macomber and explaining to the reader that he sleeps with many of the wives of his clients, who feel that they are not getting their money’s worth unless they share his cot at some point during the expedition. Presently, husband, wife, and guide start off in the car in search of buffalo. They find three and chase them in their car. Macomber and Wilson fire a volley of shots and bring down all three. The chase and the shootings are fast-paced and exciting, and leave Macomber with a sense of elation and a new confidence, which Wilson likens to a “coming of age.” Margot is clearly uneasy about this development, which seems to foreshadow a power shift in her relationship with her husband.

One of the gun-bearers then comes limping up to the car to announce that the first buffalo Macomber shot was not killed but wounded, and has crawled off into the brush. The car is driven back to the shooting site, and Macomber and Wilson walk into the brush in search of the buffalo, which charges Macomber. Macomber stands his ground in front of the charging animal and both he and Wilson shoot it. As it is about to hit Macomber, Margot fires from the car, shooting Macomber in the back of the head and killing him.

Wilson sarcastically assures Margot that she will not be convicted of her husband’s murder, though he says Macomber “would have left you too.” Margot is hysterical, and it is left unclear whether she hit her husband accidentally or is a cold-blooded murderess.

Hemingway’s themes in this story are masculinity and its foil, cowardice, and the “coming of age” that is possible through exposure to nature and by overcoming the challenges of the great outdoors. Francis Macomber is described as a handsome man who is “good at court games” and “had a number of big-game fishing records,” and whose safari clothes are, significantly, “new.” He is a typical international jet setter who lives in a suburban or perhaps big-city setting and has had no real exposure to a raw, unadulterated natural environment, though he is considered athletic. As such, Hemingway portrays him as weak, subservient to his wife, cowardly and frustrated. Once he conquers his fears and guns down three buffalo, he becomes empowered, emboldened, and elated. By conquering nature, he has become a man. As Robert Wilson puts it, “It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber…Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.”

Hemingway was a great believer in the power of nature to improve one’s quality of life. He was a lifelong outdoorsman; he went hunting, fishing, camping, and boating in places as diverse as Europe, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. In fact, he wrote this short story following a 10-week safari in East Africa. This story summarizes the importance Hemingway placed on outdoor activities, especially for men. The character of Macomber comes into his own masculinity through a few seconds of shooting buffalo; the activity of hunting not only provides entertainment, excitement, and physical fitness, but it completely transforms his character and revolutionizes his relationships with others.

Hemingway’s masculine ideal in this story seems to be Wilson, the “white hunter” who lives, works, shoots, and kills in the great outdoors, and whose stock-in-trade is ruggedness and physical courage. Margot and the reader are invited to compare Macomber to Wilson, and certainly, Wilson comes out on top in that comparison. However, at the end of the story Wilson breaks the code he purports to live by as he hunts down buffalo in a car, a certainly unsportsmanlike, possibly cowardly, and indisputably illegal act. Wilson may be a paragon of manly virtues after the Hemingway school of masculinity, but he is by no means perfect.

Macomber emphasizes masculinity not only by contrast to cowardice but also to femininity, specifically through the character of Margot, who is central to the story’s plot. Hemingway’s treatment of women in his fiction has long been, and continues to be, the subject of debate among critics. The accepted wisdom is that Hemingway was a chauvinist and possibly a misogynist; women in his stories are obstacles to their male counterparts rather than positive contributors to the action. Many critics have challenged this view, arguing that Hemingway’s portrayal of women is more nuanced and his general attitude more complex than the traditional view suggests.

There is little debate, however, that Margot Macomber is one of Hemingway’s “bitch goddess” characters; she is grasping, cruel, contemptible, unfaithful, opportunistic, and possibly murderous. In general, Hemingway treats Margot as a necessary evil in this story, as an inconvenient but essential component of the existence of his male characters. Wilson calls women “a nuisance” on safari, and indeed, Margot’s only function in this story is to drive Wilson and Macomber apart in spite of their often-mutual desire to be friendly or at least cordial with each other. In addition, Wilson makes a number of sweeping and unflattering generalizations about American women of the jet set using Margot as a case study. In spite of his attraction to her, he calls her “enameled in that American female cruelty” and refers to her sarcasm at Macomber’s expense after the lion incident “damn terrorism.” Margot is portrayed as a thorough harpy; her only redeeming quality appears to be her beauty, as Wilson recognizes the morning after he sleeps with her. As for Macomber, he considers Margot’s beauty to be the only thing that gives her value; it is the only reason he married her and the only reason he will never leave her. He recognizes that “His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa, but she was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it.” Margot’s beauty is her only stock-in-trade.

The lingering question of the story, of course, is whether Margot felt threatened enough by Macomber’s emancipation to murder him at the end, or whether she was merely trying to kill the buffalo. Scholars have come down on both sides of the question. The traditional reading of the story teaches that Margot is a thoroughly grasping and cruel character who shoots to kill, but more revisionist interpretations point out that, when she pulls the trigger, it is unnecessary for her to be shooting to kill her husband because the buffalo will run him down in a few seconds anyway. In addition, the accusations of murder that Wilson levels at her may be motivated by a desire to blackmail her into silence about the fact that he hunted the buffalo from a car, an illegal practice. According to many scholars, Hemingway himself used to hint that Macomber’s death was murder.

Another lingering question among Hemingway scholars is whether Macomber and Margot are modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Fitzgerald was a friend-turned-bitter-rival of Hemingway’s and some critics argue that Hemingway created Macomber as an incarnation of all the qualities Hemingway most disliked in his nemesis. Hemingway certainly mentioned Fitzgerald by name in some of his other stories. Proponents of this theory point to the fact that Hemingway chose to name Macomber “Francis,” which was also Fitzgerald’s first name. However, critics point out that this choice was more likely a reference to Francis Feeble, a character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV who served as the original speaker of the quotation Wilson offers about death toward the end of the story.

The narration of this story is in the third person with an omniscient narrator; Hemingway tells the story from the points of view of Macomber, Wilson, Margot and the lion from which Macomber flees. As the plot is driven by interpersonal relationships, this technique is effective at revealing each character’s motivations and the reasons for their behavior. The points of view most often adopted by the narrator are Macomber’s and Wilson’s, a trend that is consistent with Hemingway’s marginalization of Margot.

Two literary techniques are in play throughout the story that enliven the action and embellish Hemingway’s otherwise minimal descriptive passages. The first is onomatopoeia, and is best exemplified by “whunk,” the noise Macomber’s bullet makes as it hits the lion (p. 22, 33), and “carawong,” the noise Wilson’s high-velocity “big gun” makes as it fires at game (p. 26, 34). Hemingway’s usage of these terms helps the reader imagine the noises and brutality of the hunt.

The second technique Hemingway employs is simile and metaphor. The most notable example occurs in Wilson’s thoughts when Macomber suggests they leave the wounded lion: “Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful” (p. 24). This simile demonstrates Wilson’s shock at hearing Macomber voice such cowardly sentiments; Macomber would rather leave the lion to suffer or risk someone else running into the lion and possibly being killed than face up to hunting it down and finishing what he started.

One of the most prominent metaphors in the story is soon after this passage and describes the appearance of the gun-bearers who have to accompany Macomber and Wilson into the brush to search for the wounded lion: “[Wilson] spoke in Swahili to the two gun-bearers who looked the picture of gloom” (p. 25).

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is a story about one man’s “coming of age” with the help of the African flatlands, a rifle, and a friendship with another man, and about how his emancipation was possibly forestalled by a selfish wife.

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Questions and Answers

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Study Guide for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway study guide contains a biography of Ernest Hemingway, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Ernest Hemingway's short stories.

• Contrasting American and European Responses to WWI in In Another Country
• Death and Art in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Simply Powerful: Hemingway's Technique in Writing Dialogue
• Hemingway and Woolf: Different Faces of Modernism
• Life is Meaningless: Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

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Analysis: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

The title foreshadows the story’s conclusion, making it clear that Francis Macomber will die. However, suspense and character development arise from questions of why his life is both short and happy. Initially, Macomber lacks the courage to make his life happier, just as he lacks the courage to confront the lion.

Despite the great wealth that permits him to fund his safaris, Macomber is initially depicted as emasculated, timid, and inadequate. His money can hire a huntsman and staff to manage his safari, but it cannot provide courage, his wife's respect, or security in his manhood. His wife, Margot, controls and belittles him. She tells Wilson that her husband’s “face is never red” (117); as implied in the subtext, unlike Wilson, Macomber obeys his wife's orders and wears his hat to keep the sun off his face. He is not sunburned because he is not rugged or adventurous, but sheltered, compliant, and cautious.

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Introduction

Critics seem to agree that "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is one of Ernest Hemingway 's best short stories. That's nothing to sniff at for an author who wrote a lot of really good shorts. This story has even been called "perfect." Now we're talking.

What exactly is so perfect about it? Frankly, it has just about everything you could want in a good page-turner: psychological drama, interpersonal scandals, and, of course, guns. But in addition to the theatrics, it is also an excellent demonstration of Hemingway's famously sparse prose style. The narrator gives us the details, nothing more, but packed in those details is all the psychological nuance of a session with Freud. Oh, and just so you know, "The Short Happy Life" was one of Hemingway's favorites.

"The Short Happy Life" was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, along with " The Snows of Kilimanjaro ," another one of Hem's best. (FYI: those in the know refer to him as "Hem" or "Papa" – just choose your favorite.) Hemingway himself referred to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" as his African stories because, well, they take place in Africa. But it's also part of a massive body of work that helped to earn Hemingway the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Over the years, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" has been adapted to both radio and film, with a fair degree of popular success. At the time, having stories dramatized over the radio was a great way to reach a mass audience that didn't yet have televisions. "The Short Happy Life" was broadcast from NBC in Hollywood in 1948, and had an impressive one million listeners. Eventually, the story also became a movie, with a much more John Grisham title, The Macomber Affair .

It's also worth noting that many of Hemingway's novels and stories are based on people and experiences from his own life, and "The Short Happy Life" is no exception. In addition to the fact that Hemingway went on his own safari in the thirties, it's also possible the characters are based on friends of his – author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda . The pair had a notoriously stormy marriage, and Margot has some eerie similarities to Zelda. Though we can't prove that the Scotts were Hem's inspiration, the parallels can't be denied.

Frankly, though, Hem did not have to go far to find an example of a disastrous marriage. He was smack dab in the middle of one, himself, with a woman named Pauline. Whatever the case, it's clear that marriage and all its drama (with which Hem was utterly familiar) are at the heart of "The Short Happy Life." Get ready for some serious spats on this safari, readers. This is not a tale of marital bliss.

What is The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber About and Why Should I Care?

Ever had a grand plan that simply didn't work out? Totally disappointing, right? Well there might just be a chance to reclaim your dignity. We're not suggesting that hunting big animals will save your rep. No, we're merely pointing out that facing your fears doesn't hurt quite as much as you might suspect. Let us explain.

Ernest Hemingway , our author here, was a really macho guy. Impressing other people by accomplishing daring and physical feats mattered a lot to him, and it matters a lot to title character Francis Macomber, too. Unfortunately, Macomber doesn't really have a great support network. His wife is hardly steadfast, and failing to kill that lion gives his lady an opportunity to jump all over him, in a bad way. It doesn't help that Wilson, paragon of manliness is watching it all go down.

Still, that does not stop Macomber. Does he let a hypercritical, cheating wife, a contemptuous mentor, and scornful locals get him down? Nope. He keeps right on going (after moping for a bit), and gets back out on the horse, or, we should say, the hunt.

Hemingway loves men who are working against the odds. "Underdog" might be too strong a word here, but we think you get our point. In Hemingway's world, men must always prove themselves. In Macomber, Hem gives us a model of persistence. He may have mucked it all up on his first attempt at the hunt, but he makes up for it the next day.

So the moral is if you can't shoot a lion, then go shoot a buffalo. In other words, if one challenge proves to be too much, choose another one (we're not about to recommend that you go big game hunting in Africa just to raise your rep). There will always be another challenge to bump up against, and you'll always have another shot at proving yourself. Just remember that in the end, Macomber finds happiness against the odds because he proves his worth to himself.

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A Collection Of Essays

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: Analysis

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” first published in 1936, remains noteworthy for several reasons. It is particularly well known for the debate it has generated concerning its characters and their motivations. It also is significant as an exploration of themes that appear frequently in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction and as a superior example of the art of short-story writing. 

Many critics and readers have debated whether Margot Macomber kills her husband intentionally or accidentally. How one answers this question depends largely on how negatively or positively one views the story’s three primary characters. Numerous scholars have held up Margot Macomber as an example of one of Hemingway’s most hateful female characters—as a dominating woman who undermines her husband’s masculinity, and who is so threatened when he starts to become a real man that she kills him. These critics commonly hold that the change in Francis after he kills the buffalo is a positive one and that Robert Wilson is the story’s voice of morality, the person who exemplifies Hemingway’s “code” of proper conduct. Some others, however, have put forth a more sympathetic, even feminist, view of Margot, a more complicated view of Francis, and a highly negative view of Wilson. These critics usually consider Margot’s killing of her husband an obvious accident. 

That “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” has generated such debate is due in great part to its complexity. On the surface, the story appears to be simple. Its action takes place over just twenty-four hours, and its pace is swift. Macomber first fails and then succeeds in hunting, grows in self-respect, but has his life ended just when it begins to be happy. But the story’s omniscient narrator reveals the thoughts and feelings of Wilson, Francis, Margot (to a lesser extent), and even the lion, and Hemingway’s carefully crafted dialogue offers further insights into each character. The sum of this is that the story is not as simple as it seems. 

How one interprets the story depends greatly on one’s opinion of Wilson. The narrator discloses Wilson’s thoughts more often than those of the other characters, and many readers take Wilson to be the spokesman for Hemingway. Wilson lives an active, outdoor life in which physical courage is important—and this way of life, and this type of courage, were much admired by Hemingway, a big-game hunter himself. Wilson believes in a code of conduct in which one must not shrink from danger and must bear one’s sufferings or disappointments without complaint; this is Hemingway’s code, which comes up often in his writings. Wilson disdains the soft life lived by wealthy Americans such as Francis Macomber and dislikes women who dominate men; these factors, he thinks, have made Macomber less than a whole man. Hemingway, although he certainly counted strong, independent women among his lovers, friends, and fictional characters, appears to have believed that the proper relationship between the sexes is one in which the man has the upper hand. 

Another view of Wilson, though, is either that his standards are faulty or that he does not live up to them. He and Macomber chase after the buffalo in the car rather than on foot even though it gives them an unfair advantage over the animals, and Wilson could lose his license if this infraction of hunting rules became known; but Wilson rationalizes this by saying that riding in a car over the rough terrain is more dangerous than walking or running over it. Furthermore, Wilson punishes his African aides by illegal whippings; he bullies the Macombers; and he is not troubled by the morality of affairs with married women—he sees no reason to turn down Margot’s overtures, as he believes she sleeps with him because Francis is not man enough to “keep her where she belongs.” Critic Virgil Hutton asserts in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays, that Hemingway does not intend for Wilson to be considered a hero. Instead, Hutton says, Wilson is an object of satire—a symbol of British imperialism, with its arrogant assumption of the right to rule the world, and “an unwitting hypocrite who harshly judges others on the basis of various strict and false codes that he himself does not follow.” 

Whatever one thinks of Wilson, the change in Francis Macomber comes when he becomes like Wilson. The question is whether this is, as Carlos Baker puts it in Hemingway: The Writer as Artist, rising toward a standard of manhood, or adopting a not very admirable set of values that depend on breaking the rules of hunting and lording it over his wife and other people. Yet another interpretation of Macomber’s metamorphosis, though, comes from scholar Warren Beck, who suggests in “The Shorter, Happy Life of Mrs. Macomber,” that Macomber is emulating what is admirable in Wilson, such as physical courage, but will reject what is not admirable, such as emotional detachment. Macomber, Beck asserts, will not try to suppress his wife, but will try to build a stronger partnership with her—something that will create a challenge to her as well. The view of Margot Macomber also depends on the extent to which one sees Wilson’s opinion of her as valid. Wilson hates her outspokenness and sarcasm, and blames her for Francis’s weakness. Perhaps, though, Wilson resents the degree to which she sees through him. Snatches of dialogue can be read as Margot’s questioning of Wilson’s values. She tells him he is “lovely” at hunting, “That is, if blowing things’ heads off is lovely.” She chides Wilson and Francis for their car-chase of the buffalo: “It seemed very unfair to me.” Her virulent verbal attacks on her husband are hard to justify, but the omniscient narrator points out that neither she nor Francis is wholly to blame for their troubled marriage: “She had done the best she could for many years back and the way they were together now was no one person’s fault.” Feminist scholar Nina Baym offers the opinion in New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway that Margot exercises no real power over Francis; like the lion, she is thought of as dangerous, but is in fact helpless because men hold the power in the world. The story’s narrator tells us that Margot is “very afraid of something” after Francis gains such confidence from killing the first buffalo; perhaps she is not afraid of Francis becoming a so-called “real man,” but afraid of him becoming the kind of man who will find it easy to oppress her. Or, if one accepts Beck’s opinion of the change in Francis, perhaps what Margot really fears is the emotional evolution necessary to maintain a solid relationship. 

Those who see Wilson as a heroic figure judge Margot guilty of her husband’s murder. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who calls Margot “the real villain” of the story, points out that Hemingway once gave an interview in which he endorsed the Margot-as-murderer interpretation. Others note that Hemingway made varied statements about the story, and that his all-knowing narrator says explicitly that Margot “had shot at the buffalo.” They also argue that if Margot wanted her husband to die, she merely could have let the buffalo kill him. Beck, who definitely considers Margot’s gunshot an attempt to save Francis, sees her as trying to raise herself morally and to atone for her infidelities and other cruelties toward him. Wilson, Beck asserts, is unable to understand Margot’s complexity—to see that she does sometimes try to be supportive of her husband, that her cruelty is a defense mechanism, or that she has been frustrated in her efforts to improve their marriage. Wilson also cannot believe, Beck says, that Margot is capable of trying to become a better person than she is. 

The story also is useful for its delineation of the Hemingway code—or, in the alternate view, a satire of the code—and for its portrait of an individual going through a life-changing experience. Many of Hemingway’s stories deal with such experiences. However, even though there is much physical action in his stories, the life-changing events usually do not take the form of such action; Francis Macomber’s story is exceptional in this regard. This situation, though, also lends itself to debate. Macomber is a man from an industrialized society, accustomed to the comforts of wealth; he is placed in a situation where he must deal with the natural—some would say “primitive”—world. Does Macomber’s becoming a brave and accomplished hunter show him learning to deal with this natural world where physical courage is all that matters? Would he have been able to translate his physical courage into moral courage, and is the real tragedy of the story the fact that he was denied this opportunity? Or did he merely figure out how to use technology and wealth to destroy nature? After all, he would not be able to kill animals without his advanced weapons and the expert guidance of Wilson, who commands a large fee for his services. The peek into the lion’s thoughts gives rise to a consideration of the morality of hunting, as does the narrator’s comment that Macomber “had not thought how the lion felt.” This appears to be a call, at the very least, for the hunter to show some respect for the hunted, and perhaps Macomber’s subsequent nightmare of “the bloody-headed lion standing over him” shows him beginning to feel such respect. A hunter who respects and understands his prey could become a more skillful hunter; on the other hand, he could become a more humane individual and give up shooting animals. 

The fact that one can find all these points for discussion is evidence that “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is, quite simply, a wonderfully well-written story. It is evident that Hemingway chose each word carefully, even though the same words can be interpreted in various ways. For instance, the description of Wilson’s eyes as “cold” and “flat” indicates that he is not an emotional person. Is this lack of emotion something positive, showing that Wilson has the strength to withstand life’s pains and sorrows, as one who lives up to the Hemingway code? Or is it something negative, showing that Wilson has taken the code too far and lost all compassion for his fellow human beings? Hemingway’s craft also shows in his delineation of the story’s action. The lion hunt and the buffalo hunt proceed in similar fashion; because something shocking—Francis’s act of cowardice—happens at the end of the lion hunt, the reader expects something shocking to happen at the end of the buffalo hunt. The suspense generated by this expectation keeps the reader turning pages, and even after many readings, it’s still possible to be shocked by Francis Macomber’s death, which is, memorably, shown from Francis’s point of view: “He felt a sudden white-hot, blinding flash explode inside his head and that was all he ever felt.” The story’s use of flashback is another technique that holds the reader’s interest. The opening, with the Macombers and Wilson at lunch and discussing the morning’s lion hunt, makes the reader want to know more about the hunt, as does the portrait of Macomber becoming fearful at the lion’s roar the night before. Noteworthy, too, is the vivid portrayal of each hunt; during the pursuit of the buffalo, one can almost feel the motion as Hemingway describes the Macomber car “rocking swayingly over the uneven ground, drawing up on the steady, plunging, heavy-necked, straight-moving gallop of the bull.” This also underlines the advantage the car gives the hunters over the buffalo. 

All told, the story’s many nuances and complications make it subject to a variety of interpretations, which are likely to cause debate for many years to come. Moreover, it is still highly entertaining. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is one of those stories that becomes richer with each reading. 

Source Credits:

Kathleen Wilson (Editor), Short Stories for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, Volume 1, Ernest Hemingway, Published by Gale, 1997.

Trudy Ring, for Short Stories for Students, Gale Research, 1997

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Theme of Manhood in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Ernest hemingway.

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A hotly-pursued African lion in “The Short Life of Francis Macomber,” one of Hemingway’s most famous and controversial works, roars “in a deep-chested moaning, suddenly guttural,” unsettling his would-be hunter, Francis Macomber . Macomber’s subsequent, panicked flight from the animal causes his hunting party—which includes his bitter wife Margot and leader Robert Wilson —to deem him a coward. Only upon later successfully standing his ground against a charging buffalo is Macomber able to reassert his manhood—to transform himself, in Wilson’s words, from one of the “great American boy-men” into “a man.” In specifically linking masculinity to courage and dominance, Hemingway suggests that only by exerting power over both the natural world and women does one truly become a man. However, even as the story presents this stereotypical (and what modern readers would certainly deem sexist) vision of gender—a common trope in Hemingway’s works—the tale’s tragic ending undermines the validity of such a narrow conception of manhood.

Hemingway initially presents Francis Macomber as a sort of man-child, evidenced by both his failure to prove himself in the African savannah and to stand up to his apparently domineering wife. After fleeing from the charging lion, Macomber must be carried back to his tent—further underscoring his lack of “manly” self-reliance. Macomber’s boyishness is made all the more pathetic for its contrast with Wilson’s stoic masculinity. Wilson is the archetypal self-made man, rugged and disinterested. He is repeatedly referred to as “the white hunter,” a moniker that suggests dominance over the world around him. His cool demeanor and expertise contrasts with the nervous Macomber, whose inelegant, panicked shooting leads to his fateful encounter with the lion in the first place by wounding rather than killing it. In the purview of the story, Macomber comes across as a pathetic figure, at fault for his own misfortune because he fails to boldly assert his dominance.

Francis’s lack of masculine virality is further reflected by his wife Margot, who displays distinct disdain for her husband following—and, it’s implied, before—his “cowardly” retreat from the lion. Real men, at least in the confines of Hemingway’s story, control the women in their lives—making Margot’s taunting behavior all the more emasculating. Though seemingly hypersexual and cruel, however, it’s important to note that Margot may not be as villainous and domineering as Wilson and Macomber believe her to be—not least because she receives far less dimension and description as a character than do Wilson and Macomber, both of whose internal monologues dominate the story. For all of Margot’s lurid and unabashed flirtations with Wilson, Macomber knows that his wife is “not a great enough beauty any more […] to be able to leave him and better herself.” Without Macomber, Margot is powerless, possibly destitute. Yet she persistently flirts with the notion of leaving—and thereby emasculating—him, and he provides her with a degree of sexual freedom by tacitly permitting her affairs. Of course, this “permission” is also reflective of his inability to assert himself as the man—and thus, in the world of the story, the leader—of their marriage.

Yet Macomber is given a crucial opportunity to confront fear—in the form of the menacing buffalo at the story’s end—and prove himself as strong and virile as his rival Wilson. By standing his ground against the buffalo, Macomber earns the latter’s respect, and Macomber’s transformation is notably defined by both courage and dominance: upon observing the change, Wilson thinks to himself, “Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man […] No bloody fear.” Wilson notably believes this means “the end of cuckholdry too.” Indeed, Margot suddenly becomes “very afraid,” something Wilson attributes to her awareness that she can no longer exert independence from and control over her husband. It is left up to the reader to decide if Margot, threatened by Macomber’s apparent transformation from cuckold to man of action, kills her husband in order to demonstrate her ultimate power over him (and, symbolically, over masculinity). It is also possible that Margot intended to kill the buffalo charging at Macomber, either because she hoped to protect her husband—whom she may have come to recognize as a “true man”—or to prove to the men around her that she, too, can wield violent force.

Regardless, Macomber’s pivotal transformation to “true manhood” is fleeting. Though Wilson sees Macomber’s sudden acquisition of courage and confidence as a belated “coming to age,” a rebirth, Hemingway’s title reminds us, crucially, that this new life is both “happy” and “short.” Macomber does not live long enough to experience much more than a few of moments of euphoria, and Margot (quiet and “bitter” at the scene of the hunt) refuses to openly acknowledge the change, never validating his newfound masculine prowess. Additionally, in the shootout that ensues at the narrative’s climax, the buffalo’s killer is left ambiguous. In spite of his development, then, Macomber may not have accomplished, or conquered, anything. His death might therefore be seen as tragic and meaningless, not freeing or glorious. The story, then, implicitly questions the same masculinity its characters value. Perhaps standing in the path of a wild animal is folly, rather than courage; and perhaps attempting to dominate the world leads only to bitterness and destruction.

In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway suggests that masculinity is intimately tied to power, using the safari as a site where this connection is explored and borne out. Yet because Macomber’s “new life” is tragically cut short, Hemingway seems to conclude that masculine fortitude may not lead to triumph or freedom. Even though the narrative initially upholds patriarchal conventions about relationships between men and women—and between masculinity, dominance, and violence—its shocking, deadly ending upsets these conventions by intimating that male power and “courage” can have dangerous, undesirable ends.

Masculinity, Dominance, and Courage ThemeTracker

Masculinity, Dominance, and Courage Quotes in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

One, Wilson, the white hunter, she knew she had never truly seen before. He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white wrinkles at the comers that grooved merrily when he smiled. He smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots and back to his red face again.

They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened. Or is it that they pick men they can handle? They can't know that much at the age they marry, he thought. He was grateful that he had gone through his education on American women before now because this was a very attractive one.

But that night after dinner and a whisky and soda by the fire before going to bed, as Francis Macomber lay on his cot with the mosquito bar over him and listened to the night noises it was not all over. It was neither all over nor was it beginning. It was there exactly as it happened with some parts of it indelibly emphasized and he was miserably ashamed at it. But more than shame he felt cold, hollow fear in him. The fear was still there like a cold slimy hollow in all the emptiness where once his confi­dence had been and it made him feel sick. It was still there with him now.

All in all they were known as a comparatively happily married couple, one of those whose disruption is often rumored but never occurs, and as the society columnist put it, they were adding more than a spice of adventure to their much envied and ever-enduring Romance by a Safari in what was known as Darkest Africa until the Martin Johnsons lighted it on so many silver screens where they were pursuing Old Simba the lion, the buffalo, Tembo the elephant and as well collecting specimens for the Museum of Natural History.

"If you make a scene I'll leave you, darling," Margot said quietly.

"No, you won't."

"You can try it and see."

"You won't leave me."

"No," she said. "I won't leave you and you'll behave yourself."

"Behave myself? That's a way to talk. Behave myself."

"Yes. Behave yourself."

"Why don't you try behaving?"

"I've tried it so long. So very long."

Their figures stay boyish when they're fifty. The great American boy-men. Damned strange people. But he liked this Macomber now. Damned strange fellow, probably meant the end of cuckoldry too. Well, that would be a damned good thing. Damned good thing. Beggar had probably been afraid all his life. Don't know what started it. But over now. Hadn't had time to be afraid with the buff.

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