Drinking in Italy.

Rhetorically speaking, drinking was an opportunity for Hemingway to probe into gender. His younger alter ego Frederic Henry, the drinking lieutenant in A Farewell to Arms could thus envisage the personality of the 'mother-nurse' who will have inhabited the dream-phantasies of soldier-patients in World War I; his older alter ego Cantwell, the drinking colonel in Across the River and into the Trees, could thus draw the contours, if rather flimsy, of the 'daughter-whore,' submissive and forever willing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]