The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture

Lydia R. Cooper, Lydia R. Cooper

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000504958
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Littérature
• Thema: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Recently, the U.S. has seen a rise in misogynistic and race-based violence perpetrated by men expressing a sense of grievance, from "incels" to alt-right activists. Grounding sociological, historical, political, and economic analyses of masculinity through the lens of cultural narratives in many forms and expressions, The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture suggests that how we examine the stories that shape us in turn shapes our understanding of our current reality and gives us language for imagining better futures.

Masculinity is more than a description of traits associated with particular performances of gender. It is more than a study of gender and social power. It is an examination of the ways in which gender affects our capacity to engage ethically with each other in complex human societies. This volume offers essays from a range of established, global experts in American masculinity as well as new and upcoming scholars in order to explore not just what masculinity once meant, has come to mean, and may mean in the future in the U.S.; it also articulates what is at stake with our conceptions of masculinity.

PART I A Literary and Cultural History of American Masculinity

1 Studying Masculinities in/Through U.S. Literature: Origins, Development, and Future

Josep M. Armengol

DOI: 10.4324/9780367520090-1

This essay offers an overview of studies of literary masculinities in/through U.S. literature. After tracing their origins and development within the broader field of masculinity studies, it continues by illustrating the present applications of masculinity studies to literary criticism, ranging from studies of female to “ethnic” (i.e., both white and non-white) masculinities in literature, among others. The essay concludes by showing that, as in the case of masculinity studies in general, current studies of literary masculinities in U.S. literature could and should continue to draw on critical insights from intersectionality, as illustrated by rereading Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiographical slave narrative from the double viewpoint of both masculinity and whiteness studies.

A Literary Review of American Masculinities in Literature

Even though David Leverenz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989)—his seminal study on representations of masculinity in 1850s U.S. literature—is still considered the foundational text on literary masculinities, research had already begun in the early 1980s and has since continued to thrive. Thus, for example, Alfred Habegger’s Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (1982) explored representations of masculinity in the realist novels of Henry James and William Dean Howells, while Peter Schwenger’s Phallic Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature (1984) analyzed masculinity in the fiction of Mailer, Mishima, and Hemingway. In this latter text, Schwenger also pointed to the interface between sexuality and literary style, subversively claiming that “there is such a thing as a masculine style” (12). Two other influential early texts focusing on literature were Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), which drew on (literary) erotic triangles to undermine the traditional binary between “homoerotic” and “homosocial” desire, and the anthology Men in Feminism (1987), edited by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, which focused on (male) feminism in literature and culture. Equally influential were Wayne Koestenbaum’s Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989) and Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden’s Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism (1990). If the former centered on literary collaboration between male authors,¹ Boone and Cadden’s edition of Engendering Men signaled “several avenues” from which a criticism by men doing feminism might emerge (4).² Andrew P. Williams (1999), for his part, centered on images of masculinity in early modern British literature, whereas David Rosen in The Changing Fictions of Masculinity (1993) had already sketched the first history of masculinity in British literature. Of course, women made equally decisive contributions to the subject from the start. Like Boone and Cadden, Laura Claridge and Elizabeth Langland’s Out of Bounds: Male Writers and Gender(ed) Criticism (1990), for instance, analyzed several male writers to begin to examine the feminist inclination of their works.³ And, if most early studies of literary masculinities had focused on the dominant Anglo-American context, Michael Kane’s Modern Men: Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature, 1880–1930 (1999) set out to reread, from a comparative perspective, some of the canonical works of modernist literature in both English and German with reference to the issues of masculinity, homosociality, and nationalism, while Peter Murphy’s Fictions of Masculinity (1994) used authors like Kafka, Günter Grass, and the Egyptian Mahfouz to compare different constructions of literary masculinities across different cultures.

Since the 1990s, then, the field has just continued to rapidly develop and expand, ranging from Ben Knights’ Writing Masculinities (1999), focused on male narratives in twentieth-century (British) fictions, to Berthold Schoene’s Writing Men (2000), a literary history of masculinities in the UK from Frankenstein to “the New Man.” The latter offered an important corrective to the field’s recurrent heterosexist biases, incorporating several gay authors and fictions.⁴ Amongst the latest additions to the field are Todd W. Reeser’s Masculinities in Theory (2009), one of the first introductions to masculinities from a humanities rather than literary angle, and two studies by Stefan Horlacher, Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages to the Present (2011) and Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice (2015), both focused on British literature.⁵ These have been recently complemented by Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World (2014), edited by Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol, which explores non-dominant models of masculinity in contemporary U.S. culture and literature, and Masculinities and Literary Studies (Armengol et al 2017), which illustrates the intersections between masculinities and U.S. literary studies, as well as some of the latest advances ensuing thereof. Given the growing number of publications on cultural representations of masculinities, it is no wonder that Michael Kimmel has defined this (sub)field as “probably the center” of current masculinity research, which, in his view, has since the 1990s privileged cultural studies of masculinities vis-à-vis the hegemony of psychological, anthropological, and sociological studies of the two previous decades (16).

Current and Future Directions: an Intersectional Analysis of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Slave Narrative

Most recent studies on literary masculinities seem divided between, on the one hand, their emphasis on gendered and ethnic identities and, on the other, the poststructuralist theories on which they often rely, which insist that our identities are far from stable and fixed. As in the social sciences, the most innovative approaches to the discussion in literary and cultural theory are those, I believe, that have been able to synthesize sexual politics and poststructuralist theories in new and productive ways. The work by David L. Eng may be considered a case in point. In the introduction, he insists that his project attempts to interrogate “the commonalities that support, as well as the dissonances that qualify, coalitions among American men” (4). Insisting further, Eng argues that precisely because the feminization of the Asian male in the Western cultural landscape often results in his figuration as feminized or homosexualized, we must take care to explore the theoretical links between queer studies—with its focus on (homo)sexuality and desire—and women’s studies—with its focus on gender and identity—in relation to the production of Asian American male subjectivity (16). Thus, Eng combines feminist sexual politics and queer theory in highly innovative ways. Equally innovative is Jean Bobby Noble’s Masculinities Without Men? (2004), which applies Jack Halberstam’s concept of “female masculinity” to literary texts. While challenging the exclusive association of (literary) masculinity with maleness, however, Noble both draws on and moves beyond Halberstam’s classic study in highly subversive ways. Where Halberstam had established a close connection between female masculinity and lesbian/butch masculinity, Noble avoids it throughout, seeking a fully “post-identity politic and, at times, post-queer, anti-heteronormative but trans-ed materialization of masculinity” (xxxix). And, where Halberstam had distinguished between male and female masculinities, positing them as radically separate, Noble defends their interdependence, redefining them as dialogic rather than opposite concepts. Even though Noble avoids presenting male masculinity as the original and female masculinity as a derivative, she proves her inextricability, insisting that “the argument that female masculinity does not notice, or is not influenced by, or does not reciprocate or return the gaze to male masculinity cannot be supported” (xli). By analyzing the interconnections between male and female masculinity, and by applying these to literary texts such as Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, amongst others, Noble has thus managed to radically innovate the study of literary masculinities, pointing to female masculinity as no doubt one of the field’s most promising present and future research venues.

As in the case of masculinity studies in general, many recent studies of men in literature would thus seem to be characterized by their growing specificity, moving away from previous literary “histories” of masculinity into more specialized topics and case studies, as Eng or Noble’s studies suggest. Thus, for example, if Embodying Masculinities (2013), edited by Armengol, deals with literary representations of the male body in U.S. culture and literature, Greg Forter’s Murdering Masculinities (2000) focuses on the issue of fantasies of gender and violence in the contemporary American crime novel, just as most of the chapters in Masculinities and Literary Studies (2017) deal with U.S. literary representations of the relationship between masculinity and specific topics like transnationalism, affect, fatherhood, ageing, and neoliberalism, amongst others. Moreover, there exists, as has already been noted, an increasing number of specific texts on ethnic literary masculinities, which offers an important corrective to the field’s historical tendency to center on hegemonic (read, white) masculinity as the norm. Yet despite the continued academic interest in “ethnic” (read, non-white) masculinities, one must not forget the growing focus on the study of white masculinity as a specific gendered and ethnic construct, with the intersections of masculinity and whiteness studies constituting one of the field’s latest advances and innovations.⁶

To illustrate the fruitful intersection of masculinity and whiteness studies, as well as their applicability to literary criticism, this essay revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as paradigmatic of the “birth” of whiteness as ideology, which he depicts as being indissolubly linked to concomitant class and gendered discourses. While the association of hegemonic masculinity with whiteness implied the subordination of both women and black men, the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which in fact if not in form ended up transforming them, as we shall see, into virtual “slaves.”

While Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative has often been read as a celebration of Black manhood, with his journey from bondage into freedom as a metaphor for his own remasculinization (see Leak; Bentley; and Leverenz), critics tend to forget that the work revolves, implicitly and explicitly, around whiteness, too. Though focused on the oppression undergone by black (male) slaves, Douglass does recurrently show his sympathy for the plight of his racial “counterparts,” mostly white (working-class) boys. Thus, for example, in chapter seven, right after his mistress Mrs. Sophia Auld is obliged to stop teaching him to read, he starts using several poor white children from Baltimore he meets “in the street” as “teachers,” who agree to help foster his literacy in exchange for some bread. As Douglass himself admits to having been much better fed than many of the poor white children in his neighborhood, he is glad to give them bread while the “poor white children” accept, in return, to provide him with “the more valuable bread of knowledge” (38). Although Douglass avoids giving their names as a testimonial of his “affection” because it is almost an “unpardonable offence” to teach slaves to read, he insists that they always expressed their “liveliest sympathy” for his plight, and used to comfort him with the hope that “something would occur by which I might be free” (38–39).⁷ Thus depicted as an ideal brotherhood, the mutual sympathy between black and (poor) white men does nonetheless seem to disappear completely by chapter ten, when white working-class men are finally revealed as Douglass’s competitors rather than his friends. Indeed, it is when Master Hugh allows Douglass to “hire his time” working extra hours as a ship carpenter that the black slave suddenly discovers the limits of white “solidarity” (39).

In his seminal two-volume work The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997), which focuses on the plantation colonies of Anglo-America during the period from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the cancellation of the original ban on slavery in the colony of Georgia in 1750, the late Theodore W. Allen connected the birth of whiteness to a class conflict between black and white working-class men. There seemed to exist in colonial Anglo-America an increasing class struggle—in the absence of a system of racial oppression—between the plantation elite, on the one hand, and, on the other, the debt-burdened small planters and the vast majority of the economically productive population, the bond-laborers, three-fourths Anglo- and one fourth African-American. Thus, the establishment of whiteness as a form of social control in the continental plantation colonies, signaled by the enactment of the “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (1705), officially consolidated the system of privileges of European-Americans, of even the lowest social class, vis-à-vis any person of any degree of African ancestry. This included not only bond-laborers but free Negroes as well, whether they possessed property or not (Allen 24). Through the invention of “whiteness,”⁸ then, and the related subordination of class to race, southern colonizers were able to diminish the social differences between upper- and lower-class whites.⁹ It was only because “race” consciousness became more relevant than class consciousness that the continental plantation bourgeoisie was able to achieve and maintain the degree of social control necessary for enriching themselves on the basis of chattel bond-labor. Thus, the “white race” was invented as a (racist) system based on the participation of the vast majority of the laboring classes: non-slaveholders, self-employed smallholders, tenants, and laborers. In time, this “white race” social control system begun in Virginia and Maryland would become “the model of social order to each succeeding plantation region of settlement” (Allen 251).

In this context, it is no wonder that Douglass’s attempt to work in Mr. Gardner’s shipyard as a carpenter proves as hard as it was unsuccessful. “Until a very little while after I went there,” he explains, “white and black ship-carpenters worked side by side, and no one seemed to see any impropriety in it. All hands seemed to be very well satisfied” (77). Douglass insists that many of the black carpenters were “free men” and that “things seemed to be going on very well.” All of a sudden, however, the white carpenters “knocked off” and refused to keep working with “free colored workmen,” fearing that black men would soon end up taking control of the shipbuilding business: “Their reason for this, as alleged, ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: A Literary and Cultural History of American Masculinity
• Part II: Current Crises and New Directions
• Part III: War, Violence, and American Masculinity
• Part IV Geographies of Masculinity
• Part V: Representation in Contemporary Literature, Film, TV, and New Media
• Index