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Stilley2017.Pdf This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction (1969-1977) Harriet Stilley PhD English Literature University of Edinburgh 2017 Declaration: This is to certify that the work contained within this thesis has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. Any secondary criticism used has been properly referenced throughout. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Signed: Harriet P. Stilley Contents Thesis Abstract vii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 Chapter One: 35 “The land that he saw looked like a paradise. It was not, he knew”: Suburbia and the Maladjusted American Male in John Cheever’s Bullet Park Chapter Two: 77 “This-here river don’t go nowhere.” Fraudulent Frontiers and the Failure of the Adamic Archetype in James Dickey’s Deliverance Chapter Three: 117 “With a violence born of total helplessness”: Jane, Dick, and the Deterministic Denial of the Black American Male in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Chapter Four: 165 “White pussy is nothin but trouble”: Hypermasculine Hysteria and the Displacement of the Feminine Body in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God Chapter Five: 195 “They were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be?” Martial Camouflage, Containment, and Castration in Michael Herr’s Dispatches Conclusion: 231 “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT” American Masculinity Since 1977 Works Cited 245 Thesis Abstract There has long been a critical consensus that the presiding mood of America in the late sixties and early seventies was one of pervasive social upheaval, with perpetual ‘crisis’ seeming in many ways the narrative rule. Contemporaneous critics such as Erich Fromm, David Riesman, and William Whyte, together with late-twentieth century writers, Michael Kimmel, Sally Robinson, and David Savran, congruently agree that the post-war American epoch connoted one of expeditious adjustment for white, middle-class men in particular. The specific aim of this thesis is, thus, to elucidate the ways in which the literary fiction of this period by authors John Cheever, James Dickey, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and new journalist, Michael Herr, reflects a significantly increased concern for such alterations in the values and attitudes of contemporary cultural life through representations of modern American masculinities. Multiple liberation struggles, including Civil Rights, Feminism, and sexual politics, converged with core economic shifts that transformed the US from an industrial based to a consumerist model. For hegemonic masculinity, this is a transferal from ‘masculine’ industrial labour and the physically expressive body to ‘feminine’ consumerism. This study will first of all underline the extent to which fiction in this period registers those changes through the lens of a fraying of what was once a fortified fabric from which white, patriarchal power was normatively fashioned. What is most disrupted by the paradigm shifts of the era will appear, then, to be a monolithic, coherently bounded American masculinity. However, by way of an interrelated interpretation of contemporaneous feminist and Marxist theory, my research will subsequently show that, rather than being negated, the fabric of that dominant masculinity regenerated and reasserted itself, primarily through the fraught revival of a violent and mythologized hypermasculinity in mainstream US culture. Whether it is through the suburban maladjustment of Eliot Nailles and Paul Hammer, the fraudulent frontier ethic of Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock, or the more perverse pugnacity of Lester Ballard and internalised racism of Cholly Breedlove, this thesis argues that, by the mid- seventies, numerous American novelists had sought to artistically magnify the ways in which fundamental changes in the patterns of national life were occurring – changes which are represented more often than not as damaging to the normative model of masculinity and the experiential consciousness of men. vii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh for all their support throughout both my undergraduate and postgraduate studies. I am especially indebted to the following members of staff for their invaluable help and advice over the years: Paul Crosthwaite, Keith Hughes, Aaron Kelly, Lee Spinks, and Andrew Taylor. In particular, I am deeply grateful to my PhD supervisor, Kenneth Millard. It has been the greatest privilege to work with Ken during the writing of this thesis, and I am eternally thankful for his guidance and patience. He has made the completion of this project an incredibly rewarding and enjoyable experience, and his knowledge and passion for modern American fiction continues to inspire my research. I am similarly appreciative of Professor Stacey Peebles, editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal, together with Associate Professor Marek Paryż, editor of the European Journal of American Studies, for their assistance in the publication of select chapters of this thesis. For all their continual encouragement and companionship, I am equally beholden to the following friends and family: Caroline Elias, Amy Glasgow, Nicole Gordon, Beth Hayworth, Lorna Hayworth, Marika Koike, Tsuneko Koike, Becca Lawrie, Ali Lindsay, Kirsty Lyons, Linda Lyons, Cissy Mayo, Ellen McCafferty, Emma Millar, Iona Murphy, Eiko Nishiyama, Keiko Nishiyama, Iris Peng, Johanna Presly, Kira Roberts, Ruaridh Robertson, Victoria Robertson, Ciara Taggert, and Sarah Tellwright. I would also like to pay special thanks to my parents, Hamish and Hisako Stilley, without whom none of this would have been possible. I will never be able to repay you for all you have done for me, and this work, along with all future endeavours, is a meagre humble token of my love and gratitude. Finally, this study is dedicated with complete love and respect to the memory of my late grandmother, Dr Dores Stilley (1920-2013). ix Introduction “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum the most varied of morbid phenomena appear.” Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1971 33) “It was: it was not, the beginning of the end – some end” (28). This is the prefatory phrase with which Tommy Wilhelm, the indigent and impotent ‘fall guy’ of Saul Bellow’s 1956 novel, Seize the Day, discloses a contemporaneous psychological angst that would inevitably characterise the predicament of post-war American masculinity. Indeed, amidst the various social, economic, political, and demographic changes that had been accelerated by the Second World War and continued to alter the American landscape through the fifties and sixties, apprehension over what may or may not be at “some end,” or rather, “whose end” was, in 1956, arguably beginning, reflects the transition from a manufacture-based economy to a late capitalist information-based market. This economic transmutation, from industrial production to service assistance, typified the waning of traditional sources of masculine identity rooted in physical labour and free enterprise, together with a waxing in the disparately more middle-class, white-collar, consumerist, and symbolically ‘feminine’ values of corporate capitalism. Driven by this burgeoning bureaucratic, mass-market economy, wherein “everyone was supposed to have money” - that is, where “they’d be ashamed not to have it” – consumerism became conjugated with social status, and hence the necessary motivational and material resource for an emerging managerial, service-based mode of masculinity (Bellow 30; emphasis added). With “no sales” and “no income” (13), however, Tommy Wilhelm significantly has “no position” (4), and fears he may, as such, “never more be a man” (97). Through explicitly equating Wilhelm’s manhood with that of his (lack of) commercial remuneration, Bellow in effect foregrounds the period as one of socio-economic maladjustment, in which “former expectations” or accepted normative assumptions of masculinity based on corporal agency and creative individuality, were “feverishly” and “fruitlessly” in flux (30, 57). Forsaken in a paradoxical “state of arrest” whereby Wilhelm “didn’t seem to know what he should do 1 next,” Bellow furthermore accentuates a submissive dependency and psychic stagnation of the individual as the emasculating fare of the modern American male’s interrelated obligatory economic and social imperatives (42). The fact Wilhelm “could not keep this up much longer,” declaring that, “today he was afraid” - that, today, “his routine was about to break up” and a “huge trouble long presaged but till now formless was due” (4) – consequently exemplifies the manner in which fundamental concerns regarding
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