Hypermasculinity in the Contemporary American Novel Josef D
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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2012 Failed Heroes: Hypermasculinity in the Contemporary American Novel Josef D. Benson University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Scholar Commons Citation Benson, Josef D., "Failed Heroes: Hypermasculinity in the Contemporary American Novel" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/3975 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Failed Heroes: Hypermasculinity in the Contemporary American Novel by Josef Benson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences Major Professor: Susan Mooney, Ph.D. Lawrence Broer, Ph.D. Elizabeth Hirsh, Ph.D. Gary Lemons, Ph.D. Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 28, 2012 Keywords: Failure, Masculinity, McCarthy, Morrison, Baldwin Copyright © 2012, Josef Benson Dedication For Lauren and Laz Acknowledgements Most of all I would like to recognize and profoundly thank Dr. Susan Mooney for her support and expert guidance. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to work with her and am certain that I am a better writer, thinker, and human being because of it. I would also like to thank my dad, Barry Benson, for his excellent editorial comments and suggestions throughout this entire process. I would like to thank my wife Lauren for her daily assistance with all aspects of the manuscript and for her patience. I would like to thank my committee, Drs. Broer, Hirsh, Lemons, and Sipiora, for their valuable comments and suggestions, as well as the many graduate students at USF who have helped and encouraged me along the way. Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction: 1 1. U.S. American Hypermasculinity 1 2. Ironic Failed Heroism 8 3. Aesthetics as Critique 15 Chapter One: An Ironic Contention: The Heroic Failure of the Kid in Blood Meridian 20 1. The Origins of American Hypermasculinity 24 2. Hypermasculinity on the Frontier 26 3. The Judge as Narrative Force 36 4. Images of Dead Children 38 5. Christian Imagery 40 6. The Kid as Ironic Hero 40 Chapter Two: A Hero by Default: John Grady Cole as Hypermasculine Heroic Failure in All the Pretty Horses 51 1. Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses 54 2. Cowboy Hypermasculinity 56 3. The Tenuousness of Identities Based on Myth 58 4. An America with No Room for a Cowboy 69 5. Mexican Context 73 6. Homosexuality 80 7. Failed Heroism 87 Chapter Three: Black Masculinities and Cultural Incest in Song of Solomon 93 1. American Context 96 2. Blackness as an Invention of Whites 101 3. Black Masculinity 104 4. Aesthetics: Flight toward Orality 112 5. Pilate as Failed Hero 118 6. The Trafficking of Women and the Incest Taboo 121 7. A Politics of Failure 130 Chapter Four: Staggerlee in the Closet: Rufus Scott as Failed Ironic Hero in Another Country 137 1. Morrison, Baldwin, and Family 139 i 2. Staggerlee as Embodied Black Hypermasculinity 141 3. Politics of Failure 152 4. American Context: Baldwin, Cleaver, and Mailer 154 5. Closeted Sexualities 163 6. Blackness Defined by Whites 167 7. Sex, Race, and Heroic Failure 170 Conclusion: Masculinity as Abjection 178 References Cited 187 ii Abstract My study highlights a link of U.S. American hypermasculinity running through Cormac McCarthy’s two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), and James Baldwin’s Another Country (1960). My literary interpretations of these texts suggest that U.S. American hypermasculine man originated in the American frontier and transformed into a definition of hegemonic masculinity embraced by many southern rural American men. These southern rural American men then concocted the myth of the black rapist in order to justify the mass murder of African American men after Reconstruction, inadvertently creating a figure more hypermasculine than themselves. Many black men embraced the myth of the black rapist as well as the baser patriarchal aspects of white male southern power. Consequently, black hypermasculinity evolved into the paragon of American hypermasculinity. Failed Heroes further argues that some protagonists in postwar American literature heroically fail in order not to perpetuate hypermasculinities. Continuing a modernist trend of anti-heroism, the selected protagonists develop into marginalized men due to their failure to live up to hypermasculine societal expectations. The protagonists’ failure to perpetuate hypermasculinities proves heroic since it illustrates the destructiveness of these sensibilities; as a result, a sense of ironic heroism emerges from the narratives. iii In Blood Meridian , set in the mid-nineteenth century U.S. American West, the kid fails heroically to construct a masculine identity outside of the textual order of the judge, indicting the hypermasculine philosophies of the judge and calling into question the book’s violence. In no way is the kid a classic hero; rather, his collapse exists as a direct critique of the judge’s destructive philosophies. In All the Pretty Horses , set in the mid-twentieth century U.S. American South, John Grady fails to actualize his cowboy fantasy, but proves heroic in exposing its danger and destructiveness. At the end of the novel he vanishes into the countryside a failure, but unlike the mythic cowboy, he assumes the role of heroic failure because his narrative contributes to the relinquishment of a destructive male myth. In Song of Solomon , set in Ohio and Virginia during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements, Milkman Dead functions as a black man who has the opportunity to break free from choking definitions of black masculinity. In the end he fails to break free and flies to Africa, leaving his family and his only hope at real freedom, his aunt Pilate, to die. Continuing a cycle of male flight at the expense of his family, community, and cultural guide renders him a failure. Morrison’s final critique of hypermasculinity positions Pilate as the failed hero and shifts the emphasis of the novel to the women who represent victims of kinship systems and the incest taboo. The incest in the novel functions as a metaphor for Pilate’s philosophy that black identity ought to come from black culture, a notion I call cultural incest. Another Country, set in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s, details the plight of an urban African American man struggling to reconcile his homosexual desire iv with the black hypermasculine cool pose he dons as overcompensation. Rufus Scott’s death proves heroic as a critique of the rigid definitions of urban black masculinity. African Americans, and by extension all Americans, might employ their U.S. American history of oppression as a platform for a new vision of masculinity based on heteronormative failure and queerness. The association of blackness with oppression, and as a result non-normative sexuality, presents an opportunity to redefine blackness as abjection. The very failure of African Americans in measuring up to destructive notions of hypermasculinity might exist as a new definition of blackness and masculinity for all Americans. v Introduction: We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique . --Judith Halberstam1 1. U.S. American Hypermasculinity Failed Heroes posits a narrative of U.S. American hypermasculinity that courses through Cormac McCarthy’s two novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992), as well as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and James Baldwin’s Another Country (1960). Michael S. Kimmel defines hypermasculinity as a form of U.S. American masculinity based on racism, sexism, and homophobia and marked by violent rapaciousness (191-92). Riki Wilchins equates hypermasculinity with “emotional toughness and sexual virility” (114). Charles P. Toombs notes, “super-masculinity” stems from “the dominant culture’s superficial and inauthentic definitions of manhood and masculinity,” resulting in “a lack of tolerance, respect, or acceptance of difference” (109-10). I employ the term, hypermasculinity, in referring to and critiquing the hypermasculine images in these texts embodied in the frontiersman, the cowboy, and the primarily urban black man. My selected authors explore American masculinities that are frequently excrescent and hyper masculine, inviting readings, such as mine, that identify 1 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke UP, 2011), 88. 1 and critique the forces that lead to the hypermasculine performances of the characters as well as the sometimes deadly ramifications of the performances themselves. In part, this study attempts to locate and redefine positive masculinity as failure to perpetuate hypermasculinities. One of my central claims is that some contemporary African American literature suggests that the figure of the hypermasculine African American man exists as a direct descendant of white frontiersmen and some southern rural American white men. Hugh Campbell suggests, “masculinity is, in considerable measure, constructed out of rural masculinity. The ‘real man’ of many currently hegemonic forms of masculinity is . a rural man” (19). The archetype of the American cowboy, reflected in many John Wayne characters, has become to many white men the image of a quintessential man. As Meisenheimer argues, “static both personally and racially, cowboy masculinity [hypermasculinity] thus embodies impulses that are, at base, anti-revolutionary. Obviously a deep-seated contradiction exists in a genre—or gender—which promises ‘new consciousness’ and universal transformation (change) through a totalized stasis (no change at all)” (446).