American Impotence: Narratives of National Manhood in Postwar U.S

American Impotence: Narratives of National Manhood in Postwar U.S. Literature by Colin Loughran A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Colin Loughran (2011) American Impotence: Narratives of National Manhood in Postwar U.S. Literature Colin Loughran Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2011 Abstract ―American Impotence‖ investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man, John Updike‘s Couples, Robert Coover‘s The Public Burning, Joan Didion‘s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis‘s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of ―imperilled masculinity‖ that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word ―potency,‖ I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison‘s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike‘s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood ii manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion‘s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation could not have happened without the support of my friends, my family, and my colleagues at the University of Toronto. I owe a great deal to the faculty at the University of Toronto, especially my committee (Dana Seitler, Greig Henderson) and my supervisor, Michael Cobb, whose advice and gentle prodding frequently prompted me to challenge the orthodoxy of my own thinking. My thanks as well to Andrew Dubois, Scott Herring, Heather Murray, and Alexie Tcheuyap for their valuable commentary on the finished project and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding my research. Whether they know it or not, other faculty members at the University of Toronto who influenced this study on some level include Alan Ackerman, Nick Mount, Andrea Most, Mari Ruti, Christopher Warley, and Sarah Wilson. I owe a personal thank you to the reading group that quickly transformed into a circle of friends for the threat they posed to my sometimes impenetrable misanthropy and for the hours spent in debating the merits and frustrations of literature and criticism. The survivors are Glenn Clifton, Kai Hainer (my best proof-reader), Daniel Harney, and Brandon McFarlane. I also owe a special debt to Emily Taylor, whose academic savvy helped make the final two years of my doctoral candidacy a distinct pleasure. iv Table of Contents Introduction The Politics of Potency ....................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Ralph Ellison and the Aesthetics of Protest ...................................................................... 32 Chapter 2 John Updike‘s Couples: Politics in the ―Garden of Private Life‖..................................... 70 Chapter 3 Uncle Sam‘s Two Bodies in Robert Coover‘s The Public Burning ............................... 112 Chapter 4 Joan Didion, Masculinity, and the Frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine ............................ 152 Chapter 5 Civics Lessons from Bret Easton Ellis‘s American Psycho ............................................ 185 Coda The Impotence of Criticism ............................................................................................ 224 Works Consulted .......................................................................................................... 232 v Introduction The Politics of Potency This dissertation concerns itself principally with manhood as political metaphor or, more precisely, with that metaphor‘s complicated articulation in American fiction from the second half of the twentieth century. By reading iconic masculinity together with politics in the works of five postwar novelists, it investigates the mimetic centrality of a masculine value system to democratic practice and the exercise of power in the United States more generally. The authors examined in this study—Ralph Ellison, John Updike, Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis—engage in an ongoing debate about the relationship between men and the nation during the years of the Cold War. In a variety of ways, and from a variety of perspectives, they reproduce, scrutinize, and often challenge the persistent patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made, rugged individualist, characterized by such manly virtues as dominance, toughness, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. In short, these novelists contend with the ever-potent male, a symbolic Adam1 whose sexual, economic, and creative energies together seem to 1 E. Anthony Rotundo speculates about the genesis of these values when he points out that ―when influential thinkers of the late eighteenth century pondered the growing claims of the self, they thought 1 2 define and delimit the shape of national identity for all citizens. More precisely, my argument in what follows assumes the unliveable nature of such an idealized subject position to be axiomatic. I focus on the manner in which the very iconicity of normative manhood helps sustain a narrative of ―imperilled masculinity‖ that at once privileges an impossible social identity—situated as the representative nucleus of postwar liberal democracy—and forecloses other possible modalities of political agency. If this study of American literature has a polemical or proscriptive edge, it lies in an assertion that the intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, ―American Impotence: Narratives of National Manhood in Postwar U.S. Literature‖ seeks to consider impotence as a mode of dissensus that detaches itself from the anxiety-driven mandates of masculinist political values. ―National manhood‖ is Dana Nelson‘s term. In the context of her monograph about gender, race, and nation from the early days of the republic to the mid-nineteenth century, she argues that ―the antidemocratic structure of national manhood‖ produces an ideological impasse that ―blocks white men from being able efficiently to identify socioeconomic inequality as structural rather than individual failure‖ and, moreover, that such an impasse ―entails a series of affective foreclosures that block those men‘s more heterogeneous democratic identifications and energies‖ (ix). From the beginning of the revolutionary period onward, compulsory membership in a nationalized brotherhood of white men brings about the internal fragmentation and self-division of white masculine identity, which Nelson claims results in the need to assert ―stability through multiple, only of the male self. From the start, individualism was a gendered issue.‖ In an early American context, this led to conditions in which ―American men erected a new political system in which power flowed upward from the individual man‖ (17) and, moreover, in which ―[t]he dominant concerns were the concerns of the self—self-improvement, self-control, self-interest, self-advancement‖ (20). 3 multiplying calculations of otherness‖ (63). According to Nelson, this is the case because iconic manhood represents ―an impossible identity—impossible in the sense that it is an always-agonistic position, making it difficult for any human to fit into a full sense of compatibility with its ideal construction‖ (28). The vicious circularity of this form of masculinity lies in the fact that powerlessness results in the abdication of democratic responsibility by way of perpetual societal re-investment in the symbols and values of white masculinity—these investments in turn leave citizens more disempowered and more likely to further displace their political agency onto the idealized American Adam. Tracing this pattern of democratic practice to contemporary representations of the American presidency in Hollywood films like Air Force One and Contact, for instance, her afterword suggests that ―[a]s we look to [the figure of the President] to provide for us a cleaned up, unifying, safely virtualized sensation of democratic contact,

Load more