Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1993 Rewriting the Masculine: The aN tional Subject in Modern American Drama. Francis Granger Babcock Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Babcock, Francis Granger, "Rewriting the Masculine: The aN tional Subject in Modern American Drama." (1993). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5557. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5557 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9405383 Rewriting the masculine: The national subject in modern American drama Babcock, Francis Granger, Ph.D. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col., 1993 Copyright ©1993 by Babcock, Francis Granger. All rights reserved. 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Rewriting the Masculine: The National Subject in Modern American Drama A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Granger Babcock B.A., Hamilton College, 1981 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1985 August 1993 Dedication Because they believed in and supported my education, this dissertation is dedicated to my mother Gloria Sternicki (1932-1982) and my father Harry Babcock. Acknowledgments This dissertation would never have been completed without the support and encouragement of many people. I would like to thank Patrick McGee for his inspiration and labor— without him this was impossible. I would like to thank William Demastes for his patience and considerable skills as an editor and as an advisor. I would also like to thank Anthony Barthelemy for his support and encouragement and his talents as a reader and Dana Nelson for reading and commenting on early drafts. Thanks also to Mary Jane Smith for her advice oh readings in American history. Thanks to my friends Leslie Stratyner, Doris Macdonald, and Connie Porter, who were always supportive. Thanks also to Kevin Milliman, Phil Atteberry, Joanna Newman, and Patrick McGee for financial aid in times of need. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Joan Espy McGee for her support and kindness and great food. Lastly, more recent thanks are due to Eve Perry and Norma Jenckes. Table of Contents Dedication and Acknowledgments ................... ii Table of Contents ..................................iii Abstract .............. .............................iv Chapter One: The Autonomy of the National Subject: An Overview .............................. 1 Chapter Two: Formations and Reformations of the National Subject .......... ........................ 26 Chapter Three: Eugene O'Neill and the Liminality of the National Subject ........................... 76 Chapter Four: Tennessee Williams and the Instrumentality of Reason ........................ 135 Chapter Five: "What's the Secret?": Willy Loman as Desiring Machine ............................... 195 Works Cited ........................................ 243 Vita ................................................ 256 iii Abstract This dissertation traces the development of an American masculinity, using the concept of the national subject (borrowed from Frantz Fanon), through three different stages of the American capitalism: mercantile, or market, monopoly, and corporate, or late-capitalism. It constructs a genealogy of American maleness and then examines how this genealogy was altered and reconstituted during times of economic crisis and technological innovation. It argues that successive technological revolutions in the symbolic apparatus of American culture allowed elite political and economic interests to gain consensus by deploying the national subject using various media. In the early national period Franklin and Crevecoeur used the national subject to encourage immigration and expansion; in the Jacksonian era, Jackson and his supporters used the national subject to sanction Manifest Destiny; and in the late 1880s, Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger, Jr. used the national subject to valorize the practices of industrial capitalism. In the forties, the national subject was resurrected to sanction the emergent structure of corporate capitalism, or what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called late-capitalism. The final three chapters of this dissertation examine the relationship between the writings of Eugene The final three chapters of this dissertation examine the relationship between the writings of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller and the advent of late-capitalism. Specifically, I examine how O'Neill, Williams, and Miller challenge the dominant version of the national subject by offering a counter­ discourse to the consumerism and nationalism advocated by popular conceptions of American masculinity. Using the writings of Jacques Lacan and the Frankfurt School, I attempt to situate the drama of O'Neill, Williams, and Miller in a broader historical context, a context which has thus far been either ignored or repressed. v Chapter One The Autonomy of the National Subject: An Overview At 4:00 p.m. on January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight #90 took off from Washington's National Airport in a snowstorm. Approximently twenty seconds later the Boeing 737 skidded across the 14th Street Bridge and crashed into the Potomac River. Seventy-seven people died instantly. Investigators later discovered that the plane had not been properly de-iced. In the hours that followed the crash, Washington and a national television audience watched as volunteers, park rangers, and police and firemen struggled to rescue six survivors floating in the icy water. Five would live. The dramatic images of Martin "Lenny" Skutnik diving into the water to save Patricia Tirado made him an instant celebrity. The footage of helicopter pilot Donald Usher and paramedic Gene Windsor hovering over the water and dragging the survivors to safety also made them instant heroes. In the days that followed the tragedy, the Washington media reported that the five survivors— Kelly Duncan, a flight attendant, Joe Stiley, a business executive, Patricia Felch, Stiley's secretary, Bert Hamilton, also a businessman, and Patricia Tirado, who lost her husband and child in the crash— were just "ordinary" Americans who had miraculously survived. 1 Two years later, on April 1, 1984, NBC aired a "docudrama" called Flight #90; Disaster on the Potomac. The movie starred Richard Masur and Dinah Manoff and was advertised as a "realistic dramatization" and a "fact- based account" of the Air Florida crash. According to the producers of the show, John McGreevey's teleplay was based on a 137-page federal report on the accident. In a review in The Washington Post on the same day, media critic Tom Shales called the movie "a loathsome, ghoulish production" filled with "third-rate Hollywood actors" (L:7). In the same review, Shales argued that "absolutely nothing in this pathetic recreation...can equal the impact or challenge the memory of the unforgetable news tape of the real rescue attempts and the aftermath of the crash" (L:7). Watching Disaster on the Potomac that night, one couldn't help but agree with Shales. Nothing in the movie represented my recollections of that day in Washington; nothing in the movie conveyed the sense of shock and loss I felt as I watched the crash coverage on local television. A blizzard had made travel in the city nearly impossible, but when the Air Florida jet crashed at the beginning of the afternoon rush hour— and a subway train crashed a half an hour later— the city was almost paralyzed. It took weeks for