text: "Can we try it?" The reader must interpret their dialogue and body language to infer their backgrounds and their attitudes with respect to the situation at hand, and their attitudes toward one another. From the outset of the story, the contentious nature of the couple's conversation indicates resentment and unease. Some critics have written that the dialogue is a distillation of the contrasts between stereotypical male and female relationship roles: in the excerpt above, for instance, the woman draws the comparison with white elephants, but the hyper-rational male immediately denies it, dissolving the bit of poetry into objective realism with "I've never seen one." By saying, "No, you wouldn't have" she implies he hadn't had a child before, or hadn't allowed birth in the past. She also asks his permission to order a drink. Throughout the story, the woman is distant; the American is rational. There may be more serious problems with the relationship than the purely circumstantial. Though the immediate problem is the unwanted pregnancy, the experience has revealed that the relationship is a shallow one. While most critics have espoused relatively straightforward interpretations of the dialogue, a few have argued for alternate scenarios.
  Reception
  "Hills Like White Elephants" has been criticized for being anti-feminist; it has also been interpreted as being pro-feminist. The anti-feminist perspective emphasizes the notion that the man dominates the woman in the story, and she ultimately succumbs to his will by getting the abortion. Frederick Busch asserts that the woman "'buries her way of seeing as she will bury her child.'" However, critics also argue that the female character makes her own decision in the end, and the story is actually pro-feminist. Stanley Renner claims that "Hills Like White Elephants" is primarily empathetic towards the female character: "So firmly does the story's sympathy side with the girl and her values, so strong is her repugnance toward the idea of abortion, and so critical is the story of the male's self-serving reluctance to shoulder the responsibility of the child he has begotten that the reading I have proposed seems the most logical resolution to its conflict." However, Doris Lanier describes the drink that the woman has as "absinthe," a narcotic that the man uses to influence the woman's mind.