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WHITE MAN’S BURDEN: AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE 1960s AND THE SUBJECT OF PRIVILEGE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Emma Perry Loss, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2002 Dissertation Committee: Professor Debra Moddelmog, Adviser Professor John Hellmann Professor Valerie Lee Approved by Professor Marlene Longenecker Adviser O English Graduate Program Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3049080 ___ __® UMI UMI Microform 3049080 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT My dissertation reclaims for the progressive legacy of the 1960s American literary texts from that decade responding to the impossible ideals and promised privileges of white manhood. Refuting recent notions of a white male crisis traceable simply to challenges posed by 60s political movements, I argue this "crisis" has coordinates in ongoing yet historically transforming anxieties about race, gender, and American democracy and the advent of subjectivity itself. I begin with a major mid century manifestation of these anxieties in discourse surrounding the "adjustment" of American soldiers, an event demonstrating white male ambivalence toward normative manhood at an historical moment—the 1950s—when whiteness and masculinity seemingly reigned. Having begun to display the destructive structural and historical failure of white masculinity to realize its impossible demands, I turn to four significant 60s texts as-yet unrecognized for their staging of these tensions. First examining John Updike's Rabbit, Run (1960), I show how the rebellion enacted by Rabbit's flight from postwar normativity exemplifies resistant white masculinity's foundations in a melancholia that animates but potentially compromises its efficacy as political protest. Next analyzing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), I read Ken Kese/s novel as instantiating the counterculture's renegotiation of American manhood, whereby the "Indian” is made to ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stand for an originary primitiveness appearing to free white masculinity of modem demands while bearing an entitled, identity-affirming connection to the land. In Michael Herr's writings on Vietnam, from late-60s magazine pieces to Dispatches (1977), I trace the way one writer comes to disrupt the fantasy of American manhood through his dramatization of white masculinity's simultaneous seductiveness and violence. I conclude by interpreting Mario Puzo'sThe Godfather (1969) within the context of early 1970s neoconservativism and cultural pluralism, finding a reactionary allure that bespeaks post-60s white male American crisis but also reveals the long- entrenched pathologies of individualism and capitalism informing normative manhood. This study thus insists that unmasking white masculinity as an impossibility marked by its failed, often violent, performances is a vital project for an American literary discipline infused by critical race and gender studies and seeking to unearth the national imaginary ever more fully. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedicated to little Lilia iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I first wish to thank my committee members for the feedback and support they provided dining my completion of this project. Special thanks is due both to my adviser, Debra Moddelmog, for her ever close and careful readings of my work, and to Marlene Longenecker, for her consistent enthusiasm and encouragement. I must next thank my graduate school compatriots, whose friendship and intellectual engagement has also made this project possible. In particular, I thank the various members of what I simply think of as my "diss group,'' especially its founder, Janet Badia, and its most loyal members: Tara Pauliny, Kristin Risley, and Lisa Tatonetti. I also thank my parents, Archie and Suzanne Loss, for their aid, small and large, in my graduate school endeavor. Finally, I wish to thank the person most responsible for helping me see this dissertation through to its end—Paul Eisenstein. Without the emotional and intellectual sustenance he provided, this document and the ideas its contains are simply unimaginable. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VITA March 29,1969.................................. Born — Bellefonte, Pennsylvania 1996....................................................M.A. English, Ohio State University 199 1.................................................... B.A. English, Pennsylvania State University 1992 - 1994........................................ Secondary English Substitute Teacher, Erie, Pennsylvania Summer 1993 and 1994 Writing Support Teacher, Johns' Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, Summer Program Sites in Los Angeles, California and Saratoga Springs, New York 1994 - present..................................... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio PUBLICATIONS 1. Loss, Emma Perry. The First-Year Writing Handbook. Co-written and co edited with Janet Badia and Michael Lohre. Ohio State University, 1996. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract...........................................................................................................................ii Dedication.....................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgments........................................................................................................... v Vita.................................................................................................................................vi Chapters: 1. Introduction...........................................................................................................1 Rereading the 1960s Through the Lens of American Manhood ......................... 8 The 1950s and (White) Masculinity Gone Awry: ’"Gentlemen: You are Mad!'".. ............................................................................................................................17 2. Melancholia, Hysteria, and the Resistant White Male Subject: The Case of John Updike's Rabbit, Run................................................................................46 "Against Some Enemy Behind": Fleeing American Manhood ......................... 51 Motions of Love, Notions of Self......................................................................76 3. Rejecting the Establishment, Resurrecting (Primitive) American Manhood: Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as Countercultural................ 90 Red Man's Burden: The Narrative Role of Chief Brom den.............................93 Meeting Man to Man, or The Fraternal C o n ...................................................102 '"Who wawz that'er masked man?"': Pursuing the Big White Male ................114 4. Making a Spectacle of Man at War With Himself: Michael Herr's Writing on Vietnam from Esquire to D ispatches............................................................. 132 The General and Michael Herr ........................................................................ 140 Illuminating the Fantasy

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