Post-World War II Masculinities in British and American Literature and Culture

Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies

Stefan Horlacher, Kevin Floyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317077107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Analyzing literary texts, plays, films and photographs within a transatlantic framework, this volume explores the inseparable and mutually influential relationship between different forms of national identity in Great Britain and the United States and the construction of masculinity in each country. The contributors take up issues related to how certain kinds of nationally specific masculine identifications are produced, how these change over time, and how literature and other forms of cultural representation eventually question and deconstruct their own myths of masculinity. Focusing on the period from the end of World War II to the 1980s, the essays each take up a topic with particular cultural and historical resonance, whether it is hypermasculinity in early cold war films; the articulation of male anxieties in plays by Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Sam Shepard; the evolution of photographic depictions of masculinity from the 1960s to the 1980s; or the representations of masculinity in the fiction of American and British writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Richard Yates, John Braine, Martin Amis, Evan S. Connell, James Dickey, John Berger, Philip Roth, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston. The editors and contributors make a case for the importance of understanding the larger context for the emergence of more pluralistic, culturally differentiated and ultimately transnational masculinities, arguing that it is possible to conceptualize and emphasize difference and commonality simultaneously.

Chapter 1
Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies: On the Interdependence of National Identity and the Construction of Masculinity

Stefan Horlacher

In a widely discussed article on the concept of masculinity published in 2005, two prominent scholars, Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, called for a more sustained geographical consideration of masculinities; that is, for an analysis that can account for the ways in which masculinities are defined simultaneously in local, national, and global terms. Thus, masculinities should be studied at a number of different analytical levels, ranging from the most narrowly location-oriented and culturally specific to the most global. If Connell and Messerschmidt’s article is an important call for scholarly movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the field of masculinity studies and moves past it, towards a larger, comparative analysis, this is exactly the direction which the research project “Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies: A Transatlantic Analysis of the Literary Production of National Masculinities in Great Britain and the United States,” of which this volume is one of the first results, has taken right from the start.1

Obviously, the articles offered in this collection can only be the very first step towards the overall goal of creating a larger analytical framework within which it is possible to understand the wider contexts not only for the intense cultural differentiation of masculinities but also for their commonalities. If masculinity is by no means a singular phenomenon, this does not mean that there are no features that at least some of these highly varied masculinities share. But even in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia, where research in this area is most advanced, any sustained dialectical sense that differences and commonalities exist simultaneously, intersecting the multiple proliferating masculinities, remains absent. Since Connell has remarked that “the most popular books” that engage these questions “are packed with muddled thinking which either ignores or distorts the results of the growing research on the issues” (1995, ix), one should emphasize that any masculinity studies approach that automatically prioritizes differences while ignoring shared features that transverse differences—as has been the norm for well over a decade now—is as one-sided as the long-outdated monolithic notion of masculinity.

Therefore, it is necessary to take seriously the general emphasis on similarities or (generic) correspondences in early masculinity studies, while also accounting for multicultural or hybrid masculinities, precisely in order to move beyond—to build upon rather than simply diverge from—the relentlessly particularizing focus of so much recent research in this area. These culturally differentiated masculinities should not be understood as simply incommensurate with each other, but as operating in relation to each other, so that difference and commonality should be thought of together and a method developed that can account for both. Across the wide plurality of differentiated masculinities, there are important common denominators which should be taken into account, such as, to name but a few, masculinity’s status as an identity that takes a narrative or textual form, as a specific subject position in relation to the symbolic order, as a psychic or mental structure, and as a form or structure of experience and possibility (Ermöglichungsstruktur) that is culturally conditioned, distinctly embodied but not essentialist (cf. Merleau-Ponty 94).2

The aim of the articles presented in this volume is to offer at least a first step towards a critical transatlantic analysis of the literary and cultural production of national masculinities in the United States and Great Britain, comparing the ways in which (not only) hegemonic masculinities have to be understood in relation to their varied national and transnational Others between World War II and the late 1980s under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. While most of the research already done in the field of masculinity studies has tended to focus either indiscriminately on masculinities in general, on masculinities in a national context, or on masculinities in the context of the works of canonized authors,3 the articles gathered here attempt to examine the ways in which, in Great Britain and the United States, the cultural and especially literary production of masculinities is mediated, among other things, by the national, in other words, how masculine identity and national identity mutually inform each other. The choice of these poles of comparison is determined by the fact that in Great Britain and the United States the proliferation of differentiated masculinities has become increasingly evident during the post-World War II period for specifically national and transnational reasons, for example global patterns of migration and the emergence of ‘new’ subaltern subjects demanding social, cultural, and political recognition. By understanding the larger context for the emergence of more plural, culturally differentiated and ultimately transnational masculinities, and by highlighting the mediating factor of national difference within this broader horizon, we intend to overcome the deficits of traditional masculinity studies and to conceptualize and emphasize difference and commonality simultaneously. This emphasis is particularly important where masculinity is viewed as having a largely discursive, textual or narrative relational identity and as consisting of a complex and dynamic subject position that has a specific relation to patriarchal power structures and to the symbolic order (cf. Horlacher 2006a, 25–126, and 2010, 195–238).

This volume examines not only how different forms of national identity in Great Britain and the United States have influenced the construction of masculinity in these countries, but also how (often alternative) constructions of masculinity have influenced the very construction of national identity itself, potentially leading to a renegotiation of what it means to be English, British or American. While emphasizing the centrality of racial and ethnic differences to this project, it is also necessary to ask how colonial and postcolonial histories inform the literary production of masculinity in the form of national identity, a form of identity that underwent parallel, though not identical, crises in Great Britain and the United States in the decades following World War II. How, one should ask, do new, post-World War II forms of national and masculine identities in Great Britain and the United States reconstruct imagined national pasts (cf. Assmann; Anderson; Hobsbawm) in ways which retain force in the distinctive environment in which global hegemony appears to have passed from Great Britain to the United States?

Central to this research project is (a) the material inseparability of two categories which must, at the same time, be analytically separated—that is, masculine identity and national identity—as well as (b) the premise that textual narrative (in its widest sense) has to be understood as pivotal to the very formation of identity itself and that any production of narrative identity is always also a performance of that identity. It seems that in a situation in which frames of reference constantly change, a coherent concept of self can, over time, only be accomplished through discourse and, specifically, with the help of narrative forms (cf. Kimminich xv–xvi; Schmidt 378–97). Moreover, identity should be regarded as fluid (cf. Kristeva; Ermarth; Braidotti) and as adapting to diachronic changes by constantly reinterpreting past events in view of the future.

If John R. Gillis argues that “[i]dentities and memories are not things we think about, but things we think with” (5), it is important to realize that both are subject to unconscious narrative frames which do not answer to truth but primarily control the coherence of stories (cf. Rusch 374; Schmidt 388), making sure that these function as assurances of consistent concepts of self. From this it follows that the formation of identity should be understood as “the results of negotiations which are intended to create some kind of coherence despite inherent fragmentariness, discontinuity and difference” (Korte and Müller 15; see also Anderson 11f.).

On a collective and more abstract level, these allegedly homogeneous identities function as a continual historic remembrance and repetition of seemingly timeless traditions and myths in order to create a bulwark against relentless historical changes (cf. Kimminich xvf.; Glomb 21). This is especially so in the case of national identity, given that one of the central tenets unifying the otherwise highly diverse scholarship on this topic (cf. Gellner; Hobsbawm; Nairn; Lloyd; Berlant) is that the emergence of novels, and print media more generally, has been central to the formation of modern national identity. If, for Benedict Anderson, the emergence of the print newspaper and novel genres, which share a distinctly narrative form, is central to the emergence of national identification as “an imagined community,” for Etienne Balibar, more recently, nationalism is the product of a certain normalized, distinctly textual articulation of ethnic identity, a form of linguistic standardization imposed through schooling, for example.

An understanding of the concept of nation as a narrative form which transforms “fatality into continuity” and “contingency into meaning” (Anderson 11) makes it possible to emphasize the structural affinities between national and gendered identity on the one hand (cf. Horlacher 2006b, 48ff.), and literature and imagination on the other (cf. Taylor 213; Freiburg 225). As masculinity has also been widely understood in the scholarly literature as a set of cultural and textual practices that normalize the body and psyche as masculine, one of the aims of this volume is to inquire how literary texts produce and perform gender identity as much as they produce national identity. One could therefore ask whether the production by literary texts of national and masculine identity together is not one of the defining characteristics of the post-war literary landscape in Great Britain and the United States. After all, national identity is formed within the novel (as a genre par excellence of individual, subjective interiority) with reference to individual protagonists who negotiate national identification as always potentially in conflict with their own distinctive, individual experience (cf. Brennan). Moreover, the identification with—or, in Lacanian terms, misrecognition of—nationally accepted forms of masculinity (such as empire builders, self-made men or frontiersmen) allows individuals to flee their individuality, i.e. the burden of taking responsibility by constructing their own identity.

Even if the problematization of national identity premised on masculine agency through the consecutive emergence of class, gender, and ethnic discourses provides the broad pattern in the post-war period in both Great Britain and the United States, literary discourses still remain a privileged site for registering patriarchy’s “loss of legitimacy” and how “different groups of men are now negotiating this loss in very different ways” (Connell 2002, 257). Critics such as Mark Stein have even argued that Black British texts, for example, have a special performative function, i.e. that they not only portray the ‘coming of age’ (in the sense of the bildungsroman) of their second- or third-generation immigrant male protagonists, but also influence and shape the very culture and country they are part of. Novels such as Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) or Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1996) do not merely reflect, but actively intervene in the transformation of a contemporary British culture increasingly under the influence of ‘outsiders within’. This performative function of literature allows for a variety of new male subject positions which become available through their very conception while the novels themselves serve as “machine[s] of cultural … re-production” leading via “a crucial literary stocktaking from new perspectives” to “the redefinition of ‘Britishness’ and the modification of the image of Britain by way of the novel” (Stein 94).

Therefore, this volume proposes to examine the ways in which national masculinity is produced through narrative in at least two different but closely related senses. First, in order to develop, both gendered and national identity assume an imagined, retrospectively posited narrative form: a founding myth (cf. Assmann; Hobsbawm) in the sense of a coherent cultural and/or ethnic past, powerful enough to unify otherwise different, even divergent, social subjects under the umbrella of national identity (see Julian Barnes’s novel England, England). Second, both of these forms of identity are themselves the distinctly modern product of the emergence of entirely new narrative forms, the novel form in particular, but also other art and media forms.4

Thus the production of national identity takes a persistently narrative form, while also being itself the historically specific product of distinct kinds of narrative texts; important examples would include texts that take unified national or masculine narratives for granted, such as the powerful US narrative of the open frontier, of the so-called settlement of the West. This retrospectively posited story of national unity, which ideologically reunifies divergent and dispersed social subjects within an “imagined community” of national manhood, must constantly be reproduced within entirely new historical and media contexts.5 However, if narrative texts actively contribute to the ongoing cultural norm of a coherent, stable sense of national masculinity, it is also the privilege of literature to closely question and deconstruct these very concepts in order to testify to their fluidity and mutability. To give just one example of the transitoriness of these concepts: if already in the first place there was “no smooth acceptance of the Empire as an integral part of English national identity,” and if “the fiction of the true-born Englishman had to be exchanged for the fiction of the British imperialist” (Nünning 220), the breaking up of the Empire, decolonization, the ‘voyage in’ and devolution have led to the re-emergence of old as well as to the creation of new and different types or concepts of national manhood. These range from the yuppies of the Thatcher era and the post-feminist concept of the “New Man” (cf. Schoene-Harwood 157) via New Lad culture and Lad Lit as the “masterly examination of male identity in contemporary Britain” (Showalter 60), all the way to Black British writing.

Although research on the literary and cultural production of masculinity in Great Britain and the United States has been relatively rich, so far hardly any comparative analysis has been undertaken for these two countries whose recent histories simultaneously converge and diverge so suggestively. These diverse, plural masculinities still need to be contextualized in relation to broader, national, and indeed global trends. As a matter of fact, in focusing in a comparative fashion on this clearly demarcated place and time, the aim of this volume, in addition to its underlying research project in general, is to move beyond what might be called the ‘underdevelopment of comparative masculinity studies’. As the emphasis of masculinity studies has moved from its initial, universalizing claims toward its more recent, particularizing ones (for this dialectic see Horlacher 2011), the problems imposed by the lack of precisely this kind of comparative analysis have only become more evident. In the context of increasing globalizati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• 1 Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies: On the Interdependence of National Identity and the Construction of Masculinity
• 2 The Early Cold Warrior on Screen: An All-Purpose Signifier?
• 3 The Flexible Mr. Ripley: Noir Historicism and Post-War Transnational Masculinity in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley
• 4 “And I Mean Is It Any Wonder All the Men End up Emasculated?” Post-War Masculinities in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and John Braine’s Room at the Top
• 5 The Colors of Masculinity: Gender and the Camera from Sixties Street Photographers to Paul Graham and Martin Parr
• 6 Accounting for a Crisis—A Transatlantic Analysis of Male First-Person Narratives: Martin Amis’s Money versus Evan S. Connell’s The Diary of a Rapist
• 7 Anxious Men: Male Friendships and Domesticity in James Dickey’s Deliverance
• 8 ‘Cubism’ as Intersectionalism: John Berger’s Figures of Masculinity
• 9 “It’s One Hell of a Mess in Here”: Masculinity, the Myth of the Frontier, and the Renunciation of the Mother in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, David Mamet’s American Buffalo, and Sam Shepard’s True West
• 10 Constructions of Masculinity in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman, and Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada
• 11 Gendered and Racialized: Reclaiming Chinese American Masculinities since the 1970s
• Index