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Copyright by Joseph Paul Moser 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Joseph Paul Moser certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Interrogating Masculinity in Irish Film Committee: ____________________________ Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Co-Supervisor ____________________________ Neville Hoad, Co-Supervisor ____________________________ Alan W. Friedman ____________________________ James N. Loehlin ____________________________ Charles Ramírez Berg Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Interrogating Masculinity in Irish Film by Joseph Paul Moser, M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2008 For my wife, Jennifer, who has given me love, support, and the freedom to be myself Acknowledgments I owe many people a huge debt for helping me complete this dissertation. Neville Hoad gave me a crash course in critical theory on gender; James Loehlin offered great feedback on the overall structure of the study; and Alan Friedman’s meticulous editing improved my writing immeasurably. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to study with Charles Ramírez Berg, who is as great a teacher and person as he is a scholar. He played a crucial role in shaping the chapters on John Ford and my overall understanding of film narrative, representation, and genre. By the same token, I am fortunate to have worked with Elizabeth Cullingford, who has been a great mentor. Her humility, wit, and generosity, as well as her brilliance and tenacity, have been a continual source of inspiration. I am grateful for all her guidance and support these past seven years. I want to thank all my great friends and colleagues here at the University of Texas, particularly Wooseong Yeom, Lacey Donohue, and Gregory and Patricia Foran. I would also like to thank my parents, Colleen and Gary Moser, for their unconditional support. My sisters, Kate and Jill, and my brother, Matt, along with their spouses, have always helped and encouraged me. Additionally, my grandmother, Iris Cromett, who passed away in March, was wonderful to me my whole life. Finally, my thanks and love to my wife and partner, Jennifer Heller. She has been patient and kind even when times were hardest. v Abstract Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Interrogating Masculinity in Irish Film Joseph Paul Moser, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisors: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Neville Hoad Examining representations of gender from a postcolonial feminist perspective, Patriarchs, Pugilists, and Peacemakers: Masculinity in Irish Film analyzes select works of three popular filmmakers whose careers, taken together, span the period from 1939 to the present. 1 I argue that these three artists—John Ford, Jim Sheridan, and Paul Greengrass—explore fundamental questions about patriarchy and violence within Irish and Irish-American contexts, and that, in the process, they upset conventional notions of masculine authority. Investigating alternative conceptions of manhood presented in these films, as well as these filmmakers’ complex engagement with Hollywood film genres, I offer a fuller understanding of their subtle critiques of patriarchy. I contend that their illustrations of socially sanctioned male dominance in the lives of women, as well as their 1 Ford directed his first film in 1917, but I focus almost exclusively on his work from 1939 onward, since many critics agree that his best and most characteristic works began appearing in that year. vi portrayals of male and female resistance to patriarchy, constitute a subversive challenge to traditional order. In the process, I address gendered archetypes that are prevalent in Irish and American cinemas and analyze the ways in which Ford, Sheridan, and Greengrass employ and critique these masculine types through their portrayals of fathers, sons, boxers and pacifists. Ultimately, I argue that the recent Irish films of Sheridan and Greengrass gesture toward future modes of manhood that completely disavow patriarchy and violence. In sum, this project plots a trajectory of Irish cinema during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, charting a progression from ambivalent critique of patriarchy (in the films of John Ford) to outright rejection of patriarchal masculinity (in Jim Sheridan’s work) to reconceptualization of manhood and the family (in the Irish films of Sheridan and Paul Greengrass). vii Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: A Fragile Liberalism: Gender in John Ford’s Pre-World War II Cinema .......................................................................................................................34 Ford and the Hollywood Aesthetic ...............................................................37 Whitewash at Fort Apache............................................................................40 Before the Fall: Female Agency and Enlightened Masculinity in How Green Was My Valley .....................................................................................45 Drums Along the Mohawk : Negotiating Gender Identity on the Frontier ...49 Oedipal Romance and Spiritual Paternity in The Grapes of Wrath ..............57 Ford and Fonda: Interrogating Violent Masculinity ....................................71 Ford's Good-bye to All That .........................................................................77 Chapter 2: The Persistence of Patriarchy: Gender and Politics in John Ford’s Later Films .............................................................................................................82 The Quiet Man : The Assimilation of the Prodigal Son and the Fiery Spinster ..............................................................................................................88 The Rugged Individualist Embracing the Status Quo: John Wayne’s Star Image ............................................................................................................113 Ford's Cold War Concessions.....................................................................120 Chapter 3: Assimilation, Integration, Continuity and Critique: Gender and Genre in the Hollywood Irish Cinemas of John Ford and Jim Sheridan ...................140 Archetypes of Manhood in the Films of John Ford ....................................142 Female Archetypes in Ford Films...............................................................150 Ford and Sheridan: Dramas of Assimilation and Integration ....................152 My Left Foot : Mother Love and the Dark Side of the Working Class Patriarch ............................................................................................................156 In America : Embracing Matriarchy, Androgyny, and the Magical ...........172 Ford and Sheridan: Mirror Opposites ........................................................187 viii Chapter 4: Jim Sheridan: Reconstructing the Family, Redefining the Nation...192 Revision, Myth, and Ill-Fated Coming-of-Age in The Field...................... 196 In the Name of the Father : Weighing Terrorism, Pacifism, and Justice....201 Hardman Versus Gunman: The Boxer and “Fighting Within the Rules” ..208 Sheridan’s Personal, Political Cinema........................................................236 Chapter 5: Striving for Peace, Reviving the Future: Alternative Masculinity and Irish Historical Trauma in Bloody Sunday and Omagh .......................................238 Questions of Genre and Terminology.........................................................239 Bloody Sunday : A Chronicle of a Peacemaker’s Courageous Failure.......244 Facing Atrocity and Its Victims: Omagh ’s Demystification of Political Violence ......................................................................................................269 Conclusion ...........................................................................................................286 Works Cited .........................................................................................................298 Vita .....................................................................................................................313 ix Introduction Over two semesters in 2004-05 I taught a course on film and literary representations of gender at the University of Texas, focusing on examples of alternative masculinity within the context of popular genres. At the time I was consistently amazed by my students’ tendency to use terms and expressions like “masculinity,” “manliness,” and “real man” completely unselfconsciously. And yet this should not have surprised me at all. Like me, these young men and women had been conditioned to take their defining ideas of gender for granted. For them, identifying what is not, or fails to be, “manly” was much easier than giving a compelling description of what they believed a man is . In dealing with various kinds of texts and representations—fiction, essays, drama, film—most of my students found men who cry or show strong emotion other than anger, who are hesitant or indecisive about committing violent acts, or who are sexually ambiguous, to be less than “what a man should be.” These students, however, were not especially regressive in their ideas about gender. In fact, they almost all agreed that we continue to