Notes Introduction: Masculinity, Modernism, and the West 1. My argument about masculinity here and throughout is influenced by Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on masculinity, which separates masculinity from a binary relationship with femininity. See Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1–55; and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990; New York: Routledge, 1999), 163–80; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!,” Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 11–20. The growing body of scholarship on masculinity has been usefully anthologized in a handful of volumes, including Rachel Adams and David Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies Reader (New York: Blackwell, 2002); Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson, eds., Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia UP, 2002). 2. Frederick Jackson Turner begins his “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Does the Frontier Make America Exceptional?, ed. Richard Etulain (Boston: Bedford, 1999), 18–43) by citing the 1890 census as evidence of the closing of the frontier and, therefore, as a moment of crisis for American nationalism and American masculinity. 3. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, “Introduction,” Male Trouble, ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993), xviii. 4. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995), 42. 5. For further treatments of manhood and nineteenth- century America, see Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham: Duke UP, 1998); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (1990; New York: Verso, 2003); and Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 2002). 6. There is a growing body of scholarship that looks closely at nineteenth-century male sentimentalism, a complex phenomenon that has been overlooked by the public/private distinction’s mapping out of gender roles. This body of 152 NOTES scholarship provides a valuable backdrop to my work here in its interrogation of the supposedly rational, public manhood of the nineteenth century. See Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler, eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999); David Greven, Men beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth- Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001); Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis, eds., Boys Don’t Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. (New York: Columbia UP, 2002); and Jennifer Travis, Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005). For a critique of the public/private distinction and its gendered connotations, see Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds., No More Separate Spheres!: A Next Wave American Studies Reader (Durham: Duke UP, 2002). 7. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 2. 8. Along with Halberstam, Jean Bobby Noble’s Masculinities Without Men?: Female Masculinity in Twentieth- Century Fictions (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2004). has also influenced my thinking here. Like Halberstam’s Female Masculinity, Noble’s work is concerned with masculinities that are not male. 9. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 187. 10. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1995), 167. 11. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 122. 12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), 102. 13. Ibid., 286. 14. The high/low divide is often thought to be constituted in part on the mascu- line/feminine binary. The influential account of the high/low divide’s gen- dering is Andreas Huyssen’s “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other” in Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 44–62. 15. Sedgwick, “Gosh, Boy George . ,” 15. 16. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 114. 17. For example, Aaron Jaffe analyzes the marketing and celebrity- making devices of writers, publishers, and editors, yet these structures are held separate from culture more broadly defined. See Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Cambridge UP, 2005). Other works that seek to analyze modernism’s mode of production include Loren Glass, Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York UP, 2004); Lawrence Rainey, The Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998); and Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003). 18. Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 11. 19. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 144. 20. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123.3 (May 2008), 737. NOTES 153 21. Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism?,” The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (1989; New York: Verso, 2007), 35. 22. E. E. Cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s,” 100 Selected Poems (New York: Grove P, 1994), 7. I regret that I can only quote two lines from this poem due to copy- right restrictions. 23. For accounts of the divisions between high and low, the avant- garde and the bourgeois, and other binaries for approaching modernist art and its tensions with mass culture, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984); Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant- Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1987); and Huyssen, After the Great Divide. 24. For a cultural history of Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show, see Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000). 25. For an account of American masculinity that focuses on emasculation as a product of modernity, see Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America (New York: Free P, 1996). For theories of masculinity that focus on wounded- ness, see David Savran, Taking it Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993). 26. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1964), lines 69–76. 27. For a very convincing reading of “Stetson” in The Waste Land as a refer- ence to the Western hat, see Donald J. Childs, “Stetson in The Waste Land,” Essays in Criticism 38.2 (April 1988): 131–48. Childs’s reading makes this link explicit by pointing out that Australian soldiers were known for wearing Stetson hats and that this reference would have linked the “Stetson” figure to the Gallipoli Campaign, where Eliot’s close friend Jean Verdenal was killed. “Stetson” then signifies loss and homosocial affection, and those affects are relayed through a sign—the Stetson hat—that connotes the American West. 28. For a recent critical treatment of heteronormativity and polemical endorse- ment of queerness as alternative to “reproductive futurity,” see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004). 29. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Collier, 1992), 184. 30. Michael T. Gilmore, Surface and Depth: The Quest for Legibility in American Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 2003), 139. 31. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; New York: Vintage, 1990), 111–12. 32. Ibid., 112. 33. For a reading of the importance of pulp and popular magazines to modern- ism, see David M. Earle, Re- Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009). 34. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003), 3. 35. Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé,” Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. Sharon O’Brien (New York: Library of America, 1992), 834; and Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (1932; New York: Touchstone, 1996), 191. 154 NOTES 36. I was initially drawn to dime novels by Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents. Denning’s interest in class, in both Mechanic Accents and The Cultural Front, seemed to occlude the fact that in both works activism was explicitly gendered masculine. This study, in a way, is an attempt to account for why masculinity is so crucial to the American Left and provides, I hope, a kind of connec- tive tissue between Denning’s two studies. See Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working- Class Culture in America (1987; New