What's most remarkable about Brett, Jake Barnes's love interest in The Sun Also Rises, is her utter modernity. In her book Terrible Honesty, the writer Ann Douglas points out that the 1920s is the earliest decade that seems modern or contemporary to us. Hemingway's Brett is proof of that. She is not the least bit old-fashioned. If she were made real and somehow transported to high-society Paris, London, or New York of the present day, she would fit right in.
Brett parties hard. She is unapologetically sexual and aggressively promiscuous. She even wears her hair cut short, like a man. She's one of the boys (she refers to everyone she knows as "chaps"), whether the boys are the group of gay men in whose company Brett is first seen, or Jake, Cohn, Mike, Romero, and the Count, all of whom she has attempted affairs with. And yet she strikes all those who meet her, even Bill Gorton, as attractively feminine. Notably, Brett seems not to have any female friends; she is a "man's woman." As a result, nearly all the men in the book fall in love with her: not just Jake and Cohn, but Mike, Romero, the Count, and even the drummer in the Paris nightclub and the Basque peasants who see her on the streets of Pamplona. Jake and Mike love Brett so passionately, in fact, that they are willing to allow (and in Jake's case, encourage) the object of their affection to pursue affairs with other men.
Yet Brett's breezy style and the way in which she is game for any experience (remember that she doesn't flinch at the carnage in the bullring) hardly indicate personal happiness, much less inner peace. She often tells Jake that she's miserable. Also, Brett seems to feel dirty, as evinced by the number of baths she takes during the story; indeed, she may be attracted to Jake partly because he is "clean" — that is, asexual. Romero may be "clean" in another way, a virgin. After all, he is only a teenager, in a very conservative society.
