Earnest Hemingway: Jordan's relationship with Maria
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A: Maria, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, is the daughter of a Republican Mayer in a small town and she is raped by the Fascists earlier. She had been rescued by Pilar but even though the physical wounds had healed the psychic wound is still painful.
Robert and Maria were attracted each other. Pilar, the gipsy woman, because of her sixth sense realizes that Robert Jordan’s time is running and he does not have much time to live. She instigates Maria to go to Robert Jordan’s sleeping bag at night. Their meeting and love - making heal Maria’s psychic wounds. The intensity of love that Robert Jordan and Maria experience is enthralled in Hemingway elsewhere because it has a mystic quality in it.
She becomes for Robert Jordan a symbol of Spain and this concrete symbol is far better than the abstractions that had confused Robert Jordan before. When Robert Jordan is highly confused in his loyalties he returns to Maria for giving sustenance to his befogged political loyalty. It is for her he decides to die and it is in her that he hopes to live after death.
Robert Jordan’s anti – fascism draws Maria to him because in him she sees the messiah who can avenge her parents’ death and her suffering. Jordan’s love breaks the shell into which Maria had withdrawn after the death of her parents and her rape. She discloses to him what she has suffered from and being a Roman Catholic her confession wipes away the pleasant memory of those tragic events in her life, in a manner of speaking. Jordan’s love restores her self respect and dignity. In her love for Jordan there is a strong element of worship for the savior because in giving her love to Jordan she is seeking revenge for what she has suffered. She tells Jordan: ‘I want to go to hold the legs of the gun and while it speaks love thee all in the same moment.’ She wants to make her small contribution to the destruction of the Fascists.
As for Jordan, his love for Maria and his task of blowing up the bridge became one, in fact. He has to blow up the bridge for Russian General as well as for the Republic, which has been raped, like Maria, by the Fascists. Fighting for the Republic becomes more concrete because in his mind the Republic and Spain and Maria become one. It is this impulse that makes his lie in the pine-needle- covered floor at the end of the novel waiting for the Fascist lieutenant and thus helps Pablo and his band to retreat into the Gredos hills. His loyalty becomes the personal loyalty and he is just a husband covering the retreat of his wife whom he loves.
At the close of the story, Maria and Jordan’s relationship is, in their own words, much deeper than simple attraction and need.
In the opinion of certain critics when such momentous issue as democracy, fascism, human freedom, communism- in fact, the destiny of man- are being debated in the novel there is no room for an erotic relationship between Robert Jordon and Maria. They think that it is an interpolation.