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Helen is Harry’s wealthy wife and his companion on their safari in Africa. Like Harry, Helen had a previous marriage. Her first husband was a man who never bored her, and who, based on the minimal details given in the text, she genuinely loved. He dies when she’s still relatively young, and his absence affects Helen deeply. To numb her grief, she takes a string of lovers, but none can live up to her late husband. When one of her adult children dies in a plane crash, Helen sinks further into grief and alcoholism. Harry, however, represents an opportunity for Helen to start anew. Helen believes that Harry is an independent, secure, and fully developed person, traits she craves in a partner. However, Helen seems blind to Harry’s faults, which are exposed over the course of the short story.
Helen ultimately spends much of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in denial as to the true nature of her marriage. She insists upon her love for Harry, her enjoyment of Africa, and her belief that Harry’s leg will heal and the rescue plane will arrive, all while the sham of their marriage and the inevitability of Harry’s death become increasingly clear. Despite Harry mentioning multiple times that he does not truly love Helen, that he’s unhappy, and that he’s dying, Helen chooses to ignore these warnings. In fact, she actively asks Harry not to speak his mind, so as not to destroy the facade of contentment that they have built in their marriage. The text does not explore Helen’s inner monologue, but her conversations with Harry suggest that she is living with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. There are many signs that her marriage is loveless and that Harry has fabricated his affection, but she explicitly demands that these truths remain hidden. Her reasoning is understandable—she has already been destroyed by the loss of her husband and child, and to accept that her second marriage is a farce, and that Harry has essentially used her for money, would be yet another emotional blow she is not capable of absorbing. Still, Helen’s refusal to hear or accept Harry’s true feelings presents a difficulty for Harry, who knows that he is dying and wants to be honest with himself in his final days.
Helen’s character also operates as a physical manifestation of symbolic concepts like wealth and womanhood, which Hemingway himself believed could be detrimental to the work of the male writer. Harry, whose happiest and most vital memories often revolve around experiences associated with traditional masculinity, such as war, sex, fighting, and uninhibited time in untouched natural landscapes, feels that Helen’s luxurious lifestyle and nurturing personality—a trait often associated with traditional femininity—has turned him soft and weak. When Harry looks at Helen, he often is overcome with the sense that death is near, which shows that Harry associates Helen with the decline of his life force, whether that be in a literal or metaphorical sense. Much of the criticism of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” agrees that there are misogynistic and chauvinistic tones in Helen’s characterization, a critique that is often applied to Hemingway’s female characters across his body of work. However, the text also grapples with the idea that, despite his best attempts to side-step responsibility, Harry is ultimately at fault for his own failures. In this sense, Helen becomes a figure through which Harry—and perhaps Hemingway—examines the limitations and falsehoods of his chauvinistic worldview.
