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Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and a Man in Full Bailey Player

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Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and a Man in Full Bailey Player Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2006 "The True Male Animals": Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and a Man in Full Bailey Player Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES “THE TRUE MALE ANIMALS”: CHANGING REPRESENTATIONS OF MASCULINITY IN LONESOME DOVE, BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, FIGHT CLUB, AND A MAN IN FULL By BAILEY PLAYER A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2006 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Bailey Player defended on June 30, 2006. Leigh Edwards Professor Directing Thesis Mark Cooper Committee Member Barry Faulk Committee Member Approved: Hunt Hawkins, Chair, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii For mom and dad. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Naturally, it is difficult to thank all of those who make a project like this possible, but it seems proper to start with my major professor, Leigh Edwards, who opened my eyes to new ways of understanding various representations of popular culture. Her insightful advice has helped me significantly develop the ideas presented in this thesis and her sincere encouragement over the past two years has helped me significantly develop my own understanding of myself as a student and an academic. Amber Brock’s counsel and friendship has kept me grounded in my ventures, this most recent one included, and I thank her for her invaluable support. The guidance of my fellow graduate students, Amber Pearson, Jordan Dominy, and Alejandro Nodarse has also proved to be indispensable, as has their companionship. I am also indebted to Mark Cooper and Barry Faulk for their helpful feedback and participation on my thesis committee. Their help and support throughout my career as a graduate student has been inestimable. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank my mother, my father, and God, without whom nothing in this life would be possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………....................................................................................................…………. vi Introduction: Reading Like a Man in the Modern American Novel………………………. 1 “You Men and Your Promises”: Lonesome Dove and the Ride out from Civilization……………………………….. 17 “Show Me but Ten Who Are Stout Hearted Men”: Insulation, Pleasure Seeking, and Public Masculinity in Bonfire of the Vanities........................................………. 32 A Father is Being Beaten: Decomodifying the Male Body in Fight Club…….…………... 49 “This Damned Machine”: Masculinity Faces of Against Technology in A Man in Full………………………. 66 Conclusion: Manhood in the Twenty-First Century…………………………........………. 83 Footnotes…………………………………………………………………………….……... 94 References…………………………………………………………………………….……. 99 Biographical Sketch…………………………………………………………………….….. 107 v ABSTRACT This study is an attempt to trace changing perceptions of masculinity as expressed by popular literature in the late twentieth century. In this thesis I argue that masculinity is a process and, as such, can be understood differently at different times. Employing Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove (1985), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998), I examine the ways in which these popular novels might be understood as expressing and mediating concerns surrounding masculinity at the time of their publication. By investigating these literary works, we might be able to more fully appreciate the fears and desires linked with a fluctuating hegemonic masculinity in America. Specifically within each text, I look at how the main male characters maintain and/or are denied separation from an encroaching and feminizing civilization and how these struggles for secession correspond to modern anxieties influencing hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, by studying literary works popularized under the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations, we can observe how traditional perceptions of masculinity as stoic, tough, and hard-boiled (a la Reagan) have been largely destabilized and softer, more docile forms of masculinity (a la Clinton) have become increasingly accepted and even normalized. As a result of enhanced and prevalent modes of technology, jobs that require muscular strength have decreased significantly in the last century, and so it has become increasingly unnecessary for men to define themselves in terms of their strength or toughness. Each of the novels considered in this thesis wrestle with these concerns. Finally, I extrapolate from these twentieth century works into the twenty-first century in an attempt to gauge what anxieties have been resolved and what remains to be reconciled. Overall, this thesis is an attempt to enter into a critical conversation with gender theorists such as Michael Kimmel who have suggested there is at least as much to discover about the constructedness of masculinity as femininity. vi INTRODUCTION: READING LIKE A MAN IN THE MODERN AMERICAN NOVEL No, when the fight begins within himself A man’s worth something. – Robert Browning In Susan Bordo’s theoretical treatise The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private, she compares the male legacy in modern society to an odd practice performed by her dog: [I] view men’s “inheritance” as equivalent to my little Jack Russell’s inability to stop trying to bury that bone in places where it simply can’t be buried – like a leather sofa. The poor little fellow just simply keeps pushing his nose over that smooth surface as though it is a pile of dirt that can be dislodged. Finally, I just have to take the bone away from him in pity. I adore my little dog. But as smart as I think he is – for a dog – human brains have evolved to be much more adaptable to their environment than his has. (262- 63) Implications of this statement, as I understand it, are two-fold: first, the old-type masculinity – that aggressive, leering, brute posture – is becoming (or, perhaps, has become) not only outdated, but meaningless; and, second, that hope lies in the notion that humans are adaptable creatures and that men can find new ways to express themselves in a contemporary society beyond burying their proverbial bones in the cushions of societal leather sofas (so to speak). Growing up, boys are repeatedly told to “act like a man” – often even before they would be generally considered as “men.” Traditionally this has meant that the male child should “suck it up,” “deal with it,” “play through the pain.” The male is conditioned in these moments to deny 1 his body, to come to understand pain, and even sentiment, as something Others experience. The very phrase “act like a man” though implies masculinity’s own performance. The boy is instructed that he must establish himself constantly and consistently as strong, tough, and dominant before the audience of society so that he might not only be considered “a man” but also “manly.” Within the past century, and particularly within the past fifty years, much has been made of the difference between what is natural in men and women and what is learned, a difference that has been demarcated as the difference between sex and gender. Simply put, sex is the distinctive “equipment” men and women are given at birth which distinguishes one from the other while gender represents the roles that we perform in accordance contemporary society.1 Conventionally this has meant that men should be assertive, active and laboring while women should be reserved, passive and domestic. Beyond these simple definitions though, feminist theorists, beginning with Simon de Beauvoir, have suggested that there is, in fact, only one sex: female. As Judith Butler explains, “Beauvoir contends that the female body is marked within masculine discourse, whereby the masculine body, in its conflation with the universal, remains unmarked” (17). Monique Wittig nicely sums this argument as well, stating “[T]here are not two genders. There is only one, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general” (64).2 It is within this “generality,” this panoptical station of viewing and not being viewed, of marking while remaining unmarked, that men have existed, it is argued, for centuries. This privileged position began to be challenged in the 1950s though, and, with the rise of feminism, men have become increasingly more “visible” and “increasingly” less universal. Within this transition, there has also been a further move away from the basic sex/gender binary towards and understanding of the constant genderings of individuals that occur throughout history and the multiplicity that these genderings imply. “Gender,” as Butler defines it, “is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender Trouble 44). I would go even further to suggest here that these “repeated acts” in fact never congeal, and that each moment of gender expression is a (re)negotiation of how one understands societal norms and distortions and, consequently, how one desires to be perceived within these public structures of the body. Thus, just as Beauvoir has so famously remarked that “one is not born a women, but, rather, becomes one” (301), so too have men increasing come to recognize that one 2 is not born a man, but, rather, becomes one (and must work each day at maintaining this achievement). Yet even these divisions of “man” and “woman” have begun to disintegrate in the past half-century. The French feminist Luce Irigaray has written (in the vein of Beauvoir) that woman is “the sex that is not one,” implying that woman is multiply referenced and referential insofar as “woman has sex organs just about everywhere,” while “man” has only one true sex organ, the penis, and is referential of the privileged signifier, the phallus.
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