Representations of Masculinity in the Novels of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Tim O'brien
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PALACKÝ UNIVERSITY OLOMOUC FACULTY OF ARTS DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES Representations of Masculinity in the Novels of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Tim O’Brien Doctoral Dissertation Author: Mgr. Marian Siedloczek, M.A. Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Josef Jařab, CSc. Olomouc 2019 1 I officially declare that this dissertation is my own work except where otherwise stated. Several passages were published in two articles of mine, namely in “Utrpení bílého muže. Mýtus o šťastných padesátých letech a jiné úvahy o americkém mužství” (Host, 2012) and “Digging till the End of Love: Male Anxiety in Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age” (Interdisciplinary Views on the English Language, Literature, and Culture, 2018). ................................ …………….………….. date signature 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Josef Jařab for his encouragement and support. Without his patience, understanding, and occasional prodding, this doctoral dissertation would not have been completed. 3 ABSTRACT The goal of this dissertation is examine the representation of masculinity in the novels of Ern- est Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Tim O’Brien. The starting point is that masculinity is defined culturally trough countless daily transactions. What comes across as manly has to be thus analyzed in the context of a relevant discourse on masculinity. Since the early days of the republic, American masculinity has always been viewed as being in danger of emascula- tion and various strategies of boosting it up have been devised by an array of social commen- tators. Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer are among the most prominent American writ- ers whose work is driven by the idea that masculinity has to be constantly proven in a heroic fight against a hostile world, which requires a great degree of self-control and discipline. Tim O’Brien’s novels, on the other hand, show the negative consequences of the obsession with control and emphasize the importance of communication with the feminine world. Key words: masculinity, gender, American culture, violence, war literature ABSTRAKT Tato práce se zaměřuje na obraz maskulinity ve vybraných románech Ernesta Hemingwaye, Normana Mailera a Tima O’Briena. Jejím výchozím bodem je chápání maskulinity coby vý- sledku každodenní lidské interakce. To, co je vnímáno jako projev mužnosti, je třeba analy- zovat v historickém kontextu daného diskurzu maskulinity. Od raných dob nezávislosti byla americká maskulinita vykreslována jako ohrožená a celá řada společenských komentátorů se věnovala otázce posílení pravých mužských vlastností. Ernest Hemingway a Norman Mailer patří k těm významným americkým autorům, jejichž tvorba je nesena myšlenkou, že praví muži musí neustále prokazovat svou mužnost v boji proti nepřátelskému světu, což vyžaduje notnou dávku sebeovládání a disciplíny. Romány Tima O’Briena oproti tomu poukazují na negativní dopady mužské posedlosti ovládáním sebe a druhých a zdůrazňují nutnost komuni- kace s ženským světem. Klíčová slova: maskulinita, gender, americká kultura, násilí, válečná literatura 4 Contents INTRODUCTION: The Problem with American Writers: Leslie Fiedler’s Reading of the American Literary Canon 6 I. Chapter 1: ERNEST HEMINGWAY 13 I.1 Not Manly Enough Until Proven Otherwise: American Manhood and the Continuous Threat of Effeminacy 13 I.2 One Boy’s Lonely Fight: Uncertain Manfulness in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage 23 I.3 When a Woman Wears Britches: Masculine Trouble in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises 27 I.4 Love in the Time of War: A Male Melodrama in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms 35 II. Chapter 2: NORMAN MAILER 43 II.1 Beyond the Propaganda of the Concerted War Effort: Conflicting Masculinities in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead 43 II.2 Searching for a Firm Footing in a Society of Abundance: Masculine Anxiety in Postwar America 54 II.3 Murder as Assertion of Manly Will: The Failure of Hypermasculinity in Norman Mailer’s An American Dream 70 III. Chapter 3: TIM O’BRIEN 79 III.1 What Price Manliness: Turmoil and Anguish of the Vietnam War Era 79 III.2 In Search of New Answers: Tim O’Brien’s Critique of Unreflective Masculinity in If I Die in a Combat Zone and Northern Lights 88 III.3 Imagination Dangerously Unbound: Masculinity Crisis in Tim O’Brien’s The Nuclear Age 104 III.4 The Depths Beckon: Obsession and Violence in Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods 113 CONCLUSION: What We Can Learn from Westerns: American Masculinity as a Search for an Unattainable Ideal 121 Works Cited 127 5 The Problem with American Writers: Leslie Fiedler’s Reading of the American Literary Canon One of the first critics who analyzed American literature on its own merits was D. H. Lawrence, whose Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) laid grounds for further serious criticism devoted to American writers. Commenting on the nature of American society that American literary works reflected, Lawrence pointed out that American men were too possessed by various inner demons to be truly free. According to Lawrence, Americans cannot learn about what genuine freedom means because “they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom” (12). This line of thought was further developed by Leslie Fiedler whose equally breakthrough study, Love and Death in American Literature (1960), made a bold claim that the problem with American writers is their reluctance to deal with mature subject matters. In comparison to their European counterparts, American novels are according to Fiedler “not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile” (xviii). They cannot be otherwise because their authors, even the greatest among them, are “experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror,” and their expertise on dark aspects of life skews them away from “treating the passionate encounter of a man and woman, which we expect at the center of the novel” (xix). This particular focus exhibited in major American novels is reflected, among other things, in the shallowness and insignificance of female characters. As Fielder claims, American writers “shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality” (xix). Since horror fills the pages of one American novel after another, the most striking characteristic of the American novelist inevitably turns out to be “his obsession with violence and his embarrassment before love” (xxiii). 6 Fiedler’s observations on American literature represent also a commentary on American masculinity. His assessment of the American literary canon is based on the notion that from the early days of the republic, American men were exposed to different ideas than men in Europe. With the fear of femininity haunting the American imagination, it is no accident that the protagonist in American novels tends to be “a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid “civilization,” which is to say, the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall of sex, marriage, and responsibility” (xx-xxi). According to Fiedler, the squeamishness in sexual matters exhibited by American writers stems from the fact that Puritan legacy continues to shape gender relations: “Perhaps the whole odd shape of American fiction arises simply . because there is no real sexuality in American life and therefore there cannot very well be any in American art. What we cannot achieve in our relations with each other it would be vain to ask our writers to portray or even our critics to miss” (xxv). The most outrageous observation in Love and Death in the American Novel, at least in the eyes of many contemporary critics, was Fiedler’s assertion that American literature is characterized by the “archetypical image . in which a white and a colored American male flee from civilization into each other’s arms” (x). What carries the utmost importance then is what happens between men of two different races, “pure marriage of males—sexless and holy, a kind of counter-matrimony, in which the white refugee from society and the dark-skinned primitive are joined till death do them apart” (209). As Mark Royden Winchell puts it, Fiedler is talking here about a male bonding in which a white man fleeing from civilization is “symbolically joined to that alien other who has always . been a renegade” (50). Fiedler’s reading of major American novels offers many valuable insights, yet it is meant to be, as he himself admits, “a literary rather than a scientific work, a labor of love rather than one of patience” (vii). A considerable limitation of his approach is that it is 7 largely ahistorical: focusing on the repetition of the same specific images in American novels from Charles Brockden Brown to Saul Bellow, Fiedler’s analysis ignores important historical developments that have to be taken into consideration when analyzing individual literary works in greater detail. As a result, his portrayal of masculinity as impervious to change suggests that there is such a category as an essential, unvarying American manhood. This dissertation aims to counter this assumption by taking a different approach: while discussing men’s obsession with violence as well as their uneasy relationships with women, it attempts to ground its analysis in various contemporary discourses on masculinity. In other words, while attention is paid to the recurring patterns of representation, these patterns are not considered without looking at how ideals of masculinity are being discussed in a given time period. The underlying methodological premise behind this work is that since essential masculinity is a fantasy rather than a reality, ideas about proper manly conduct is not something men are born with but something they gradually learn.