Dissertation

Suffering Masculinity Like an Illness: Gender Fictions and Cultural Traumas, 1880–1950

Champion, Jared Neil

2013

Overview

My dissertation uses an interdisciplinary American Studies approach that blends literary and historical analysis to investigate social mechanisms that position white, straight, affluent men atop the American social hierarchy. Each chapter complicates myths about white American manhood, namely that hegemonic masculinity is (or ever was) a stable marker of privilege. Instead, I treat masculinity as a form of anxiety–creating panic. The project examines a series of historical moments when myths of manhood collapse.Chapter One situates the writing of William Dean Howells as the product of anxious manhood following the Civil War. Previous models of manhood, specifically those of Thomas Jefferson, exclude African–American men from manhood by denying citizenship. Rather than citizenship, Howells turns to Darwinian evolution to argue that white American men are an entirely new species. In Chapter Two, I discuss Theodore Roosevelt’s oscillation between Darwinian evolution—“survival of the fittest”—and Lamarkian evolution, which contends that characteristics shaped by individual experience can be passed down from one generation to the next. Chapter Three examines the rhetoric of Benton Mackaye, the founder of the Appalachian Trail, and Stephen Mather, first director of the National Park Service, to show two distinctly different attempts to salvage agrarian manhood during American urbanization. Mackaye suggested a “barbarian invasion” of cities, and Mather paved the way for spiritually restorative auto–tours of the national parks. Chapter Four juxtaposes John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath with Dorothea Lange’s photograph, “Migrant Mother.” While Congress debated whether Steinbeck’s Depression–era novel was true, Lange’s photograph was immediately placed in the national archives as an example of documented reality, despite its having been carefully staged. Steinbeck's novel undercuts patriarchal authority while Lange’s renders it temporarily short–circuited, a dynamic that accounts for drastic differences in reception. Finally, Chapter Five places John Cheever’s satirical take on 1950s gender in the short story, “The Country Husband,” against the iconic post–WWII photograph, “War's End Kiss.” The story challenges white American male authority and shows manhood as inherently contradictory and unstable in the post–war period, while the photograph seeks to restabilize masculinity.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: American literature / American studies / Gender studies / Mental health
• ISBN: 9798383123676