Hiding in Plain Sight: the Vanishing Male Figure in Gone with the Wind.” Emmeline Gros
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”Hiding in Plain Sight: The Vanishing Male Figure in Gone With the Wind.” Emmeline Gros To cite this version: Emmeline Gros. ”Hiding in Plain Sight: The Vanishing Male Figure in Gone With the Wind.”. Dixie Matters: New Perspectives on Southern Femininities and Masculinities. Ed. Urszula Niewiadomska- Flis. Studies in Literature and Culture. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL (KUL Publishers) 10 (2013): 173-95., 2013. hal-01816142 HAL Id: hal-01816142 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01816142 Submitted on 12 Sep 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. H IDING IN P LAIN S IG H T : T H E V ANI sh ING M ALE F IGURE IN G ONE W ITH THE W IND E mm ELINE GRO S UNI V ER S ITÉ V ER S AILLE S S T QUENTIN EN Y V ELINE S ET UNI V ER S ITÉ TOULON - V AR , F RANCE “It is precisely because the Southern aristocracy (was) at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, [a] dying culture that (its) members were held to increasingly rigid definitions of gentility. The codes that governed their social worlds had to be laid bare so that they could be more easily adhered to and enforced. However, when such codes are so clearly articulated, aristocratic power becomes demystified and therefore vulnerable; class-and/or race-based ascendancy, when exposed as artifice, can no longer claim its power is a product of natural or moral order. In short, when you make a social code hard and fast, social roles become command performances. The script becomes both more readable and more reproducible— and a greater temptation for rule-breakers and rebels” — (CROWELL 19). While Judith Butler’s observation that “gender is an identity tenuously constructed in time … through a stylized repetition of acts” (2501) has been widely discussed, the extent to which the performative nature of gender identities may be addressed in a “masculine” context has received less attention. In the field of southern stud- ies in particular, representations of masculinity have, it seems, (until the last few years or so), attracted far less commentary than studies dealing with slaves or free blacks or with representations of rebel(le)s and jezebels, perhaps because, as the edi- tors of Constructing Masculinity put it, “[w]hite heterosexual masculinity has tradition- ally been structured as the normative gender and thus taken for granted” (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 2). It is in this sense, John Mayfield suggests, that “we know 176— HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT quite a bit about [southern] women by looking at how they defined themselves in relation to men [and] we know much about slaves and free blacks based upon how they defined themselves in relation to white men,” while deploring that patriarchy“ serves almost as a mathematical constant here, something by which other points can be calculated” (xiv).1 Not surprisingly maybe, much work on theorizing and analyzing white hegem- onic masculinity takes it as a starting point that hegemonic masculinity and white- ness have retained their powers as signifiers and normative practices because they are invisible. As Sally Robinson explains, the argument goes “one cannot question, let alone dismantle, what remains invisible from view” (1). Such a theoretical ap- proach, of course, not only naturalizes men, but also contributes to the replication of a specific ideology of gender; one that relies on clearly-established (if not always stable) gender roles, differences and binaries and that allows for the markedness— and thus scrutinization—of some categories (women, blacks, black rapists, etc.) while encouraging the crystallization of others. In the plantation South, “beaux,” “cavaliers,” “patriarchs,” planters, or gentlemen came to be emulated as the ideal of manhood. The assumption that a white man represented a universal, ahistori- cal, and disembodied model of manhood obviously froze the meaning of southern white masculinity; in turn enshrining, as McPherson notes, “certain Souths and certain southerners while forgetting others” (5). Southern men (like so many men elsewhere), to use Kimmel’s formulation, have thus remained the “invisible gender. Ubiquitous in positions of power, men are invisible to themselves” (The History of Men 5). Of course, “(race and gender) invisibility is … a luxury. Only white people in our society have the luxury not to have to think about race every minute of their lives. And only men have the luxury to pretend that gender does not matter” (Kimmel, Gendered 7). As David Savran notes, far from being universal, “masculinity and femi- ninity are always historically contingent, always in the process of being reimagined and redefined according to changing material conditions” (8). Accordingly, he adds, gendered identity, precisely because it is so susceptible to change, is “of all identifi- cations the one most subject to intensive social pressures, the most anxiety-ridden, the most consistently imbricated in social, political, and economic negotiations, and thus the most sensitive barometer of culture” (8). Gender, in other words, matters and it is thus necessary to observe masculinity—like femininity—in action as per- formance, for “gender, like time and space, is continually negotiated, continually in the act of becoming …” (Cohen & Wheeler xiii).2 177— Heeding Kimmel’s caution, my line of argument will attempt to problematize this doxa of invisible/visible masculinity, using the Civil War in the South as an identity-shattering “marker” that, I believe, can make masculinity “visible” in ways that can be both progressive and reactionary. In other words, and rather than ap- proaching masculinity as the norm that “goes unanalyzed and therefore, operates implicitly and oppressively” (Dinshaw 72), the present study will set out to revisit southern men’s experiences from a gendered perspective and to offer a discussion of gender that will proceed to a (de)construction of white, invisible, normative mascu- linities, trying to uncover what Michael Kimmel has called “invisible,” or “gender- less,” masculinity, and study men “as men.” Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind provides a particularly fruitful ground for gender analysis, especially as both the time of the narrative (pre-Civil War times) and the time of composition (1936) appealed to strong imageries of masculinity, i.e. the effective display of “visible” masculine qualities, such as honor, courage, self- control, mastery, etc. Of course, to wonder why Southern plantations emerged as the regretted lost Garden of Eden or to ask why the confederate hero of the South was translated into such mythic status is to enter vexed territory. The simplest explana- tion, however, may involve the collective response to the new rugged individualism and capitalism of the era. With the “shifting cultural and intellectual climate of the 1890s” and later, the transition to an urban economy and the pressures of a newly modernized society—which Nina Silber described in terms of a “masculinity crisis in America” (166) and Amy Kaplan defined as the reconstruction of masculinity that took place at the turn of the century and beyond—the allure of a more stable patriarchal order is not hard to imagine, perhaps especially since the South had been defeated and had come to seem forever lost. The Civil War veteran in particular fit- ted the role perfectly. As critic Maurice Thompson explains, “the return to romance is simply a young, strong, virile generation pushing aside a flabby one. The little war we had with Spain did not do so much for us; the thing was already done by our schools, churches, gymnasiums, out-door sports; the war acted simply as a faucet through which our vigor began to act … a return to a healthier, more authentic American past” (1920). It is thus not too difficult to imagine why such figures of masculinity (the veter- an, the chivalric hero, or the gentleman) would unconsciously or consciously present vectors of optimism by proposing a reassuring worldview when circumstances on the home front (and abroad) were not so clement. Such tales, by depicting an illusory time when manners were seen as being more refined and more civilized linked the 178— HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT private psyche of the listener/reader to the public enthusiasm for tales of heroism and virile manhood in an age that offered little possibility for heroism, honor, and respectability.3 Predictably, critics have attributed the immense success of the novel to GWW’s assistance in the maintenance and endurance of the Old South’s ideologi- cal structure, encouraging readers and viewers alike to look away from the changes of the South and to find refuge in the fantasy of “fair ladies and cavaliers” as the in- troductory lines to the film adaptation would put it. Emulating the hegemonic ideal of manhood and eschewing the ambiguity that is to be found in the narrative, critics have therefore often posited men (like women)—Ashley and Rhett in particular— on either side of a masculine spectrum, pitting the Confederate soldier against the Carpetbagger, the rascal against the queer, the new order against the old order, or as Nina Silber puts it, categorizing men along the lines of asexuality or bestial sexuality. Soft vs. hard masculinity, home vs. battlefront, here are some of the divisions that maintain the rightful order of southern society—or so it seems.