Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin (Contemporary American Literature)

153 Pages·2014·1.184 MB·English

by  Josef Benson

Hypermasculinities in the
Contemporary Novel
Contemporary American Literature
Series Editor: Bob Batchelor
Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel, by Bob Batchelor, 2013.
Michael Chabon’s America: Magical Words, Secret Worlds, and Sacred Spaces,
edited by Jesse Kavadlo and Bob Batchelor, 2014.
Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison,
and James Baldwin, by Josef Benson, 2014.
Hypermasculinities in the
Contemporary Novel
Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin
Josef Benson
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Benson, Josef, 1974– author.
Hypermasculinities in the contemporary novel : Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin / by Josef
Benson.
pages cm. – (Contemporary American Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-3760-5 (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4422-3761-2 (ebook)
1. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. Men in literature. 4. McCarthy,
Cormac, 1933—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Morrison, Toni–Criticism and interpretation. 6. Baldwin, James,
1924–1987–Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS374.M37B46 2014
813'.509353–dc32
2014010281
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For my son, Lazarus Jude Benson, who was present as I wrote, both literally and
figuratively.
Acknowledgments
Writing is a collaborative process. Writing and publishing a book, not unlike life
itself, is a downright team effort. With that in mind, I’d like to thank a cadre of folks
who’ve helped me with this book and with life itself. They are the following: Jose
Aparicio, Brenda Arnett, Bob Batchelor, Barry Benson, Cory Benson, Mark Benson,
Sally Benson, Lawrence Broer, Katy Conard, Lauren Cook, Lee Davidson, Elizabeth
Hirsh, Gary Lemons, Carole Reese, Gary Reese, Salvador Torres Martinez, Matt
McBride, Jay Mccroy, Susan Mooney, Clancy Parks, Renj Reichert, Stephen Ryan,
Phillip Sipiora, and Scott Stormzand.
Introduction
We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant
logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique.
—Judith Halberstam[1]
AMERICAN HYPERMASCULINITIES
African American and white hypermasculinities exist as seductive stereotypes. There
remains a certain amount of power and intimidation over other men in projecting
oneself as hypermasculine and hypersexual, but this power simultaneously diminishes
one’s humanity and compromises one’s intellectual capability in the eyes of others.
Further, valuing hypermasculinity and its attendant qualities primes men and women
as agents for mass destruction on a global scale, possibly leading to the extinction of
the human race. Current American hypermasculinities predicated on violence,
recklessness, racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia have vitiated Americans’
notions of the masculine self, causing widespread destruction. Masculine identity has
devolved into what Donald K. Meisenheimer Jr. calls a “phallicization, a calcification
that makes life itself impossible.”[2] Paradoxically, engaging in any self-preserving act
marks the hypermasculine man as a sissy. Marilyn C. Wesley points out that as of
1978 “the United States was, without even a close contender, the most violent
industrialized nation in the world.”[3] This violence stems from ideologies privileging the
sword over the pen, brute strength over intellect, and men over women.
Hypermasculinities posits a narrative of American hypermasculinity that courses
through Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian (1985) and All the Pretty Horses
(1992), as well as Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and James Baldwin’s
Another Country (1960). Michael S. Kimmel defines hypermasculinity as a form of
American masculinity based on racism, sexism, and homophobia and marked by
violent rapaciousness.[4] Riki Wilchins equates hypermasculinity with “emotional
toughness and sexual virility.”[5] Charles P. Toombs notes, “super-masculinity” stems
from “the dominant culture’s superficial and inauthentic definitions of manhood and
masculinity,” resulting in “a lack of tolerance, respect, or acceptance of difference.”[6]
I employ the umbrella term “hypermasculinity” in referring to and critiquing a multitude
of hypermasculine images in these texts embodied in the frontiersman, the cowboy,
and the primarily urban black man. My selected authors explore American
masculinities that are frequently excrescent and hypermasculine, inviting readings,
such as mine, that identify and critique the forces that lead to the hypermasculine
performances of the characters as well as the sometimes deadly ramifications of the
performances themselves. In part, this study attempts to locate and redefine positive
masculinity as failure to perpetuate several different hypermasculinities.
One of my central claims is that selected contemporary African American literary
texts suggest that some hypermasculine African American men may exist as direct
cultural descendants of white frontiersmen and a particular type of southern rural
American white man. Hugh Campbell suggests, “masculinity is, in considerable
measure, constructed out of rural masculinity. The ‘real man’ of many currently
hegemonic forms of masculinity is . . . a rural man.”[7] The archetype of the American
cowboy, reflected in many John Wayne characters, has become to many white men
the image of a quintessential man. As Meisenheimer argues, “Static both personally
and racially, cowboy masculinity [hypermasculinity] thus embodies impulses that are,
at base, anti-revolutionary. Obviously a deep-seated contradiction exists in a genre—
or gender—which promises ‘new consciousness’ and universal transformation
(change) through a totalized stasis (no change at all).”[8] American hypermasculine
rural man sprang from the myth of manifest destiny, which suggested Americans had
a divine right to all lands west of the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. Villainous men,
like the judge from McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, imposed an androcentric code
of violence and racial purity on the erstwhile palimpsest of the West. For men
interested in capitalizing on their white patriarchal privilege, a willingness to wage
violence on anyone not white and male develops in Blood Meridian as the definition of
hypermasculinity the judge oversees as a self-proclaimed suzerain.
Hollywood cinema then appropriated the mythical figure of the cowboy from dime
novels and romantic notions of the frontiersman, presenting him as a masculine icon
and answer to America’s ambivalence about itself after World War II. A sense of
disillusionment pervaded the American psyche after the massive technological death
caused by the atom bombs and the Jewish Holocaust proved humanity capable of
destroying itself. Hollywood capitalized on America’s uncertainty, offering a pre–World
War II vision of the world rooted in simple, romantic notions of the old West.
American boys, like the character John Grady Cole in McCarthy’s All the Pretty
Horses, internalized not only the mythical cowboy figure but also the historically
revised West from which he supposedly arose. Toward the end of the nineteenth
century, the American South replaced the West as the symbolic space occupied by
men who embodied prevailing definitions of hypermasculinity. Consequently, the baser
qualities of the frontiersman, including his penchant for violence, sexism, racism, and
recklessness, transformed into a (hyper)masculinity embraced by many southern rural
American men. The power of this southern rural man depended on his ability to
maintain white supremacy in a region where his wealth depended on the systematic
oppression and enslavement of African Americans.
As slavery unraveled, the rural man’s ability to maintain his power and
hypermasculinity proved threatened. In an effort to maintain his white patriarchal
privilege in the postbellum South, he constructed the myth of the black rapist as an
excuse for the brutal killing of African American men. In creating the myth, this white
southern man inadvertently created a figure more hypermasculine than himself,
imputing to the black male body all his hidden desires and taboos. Scores of black
men subsequently embraced the myth of the black rapist, as well as the baser
patriarchal aspects of white southern male power, such as violence, sexism, and
materialism. In Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon, the characters Guitar and Macon
Dead II embody violent and materialistic identities that parody whiteness. Guitar and
his group, the Seven Days, literally copy white violence enacted on black people by
victimizing a white person in the exact manner that a black person was victimized.
Macon Dead II exploits his own community as a slumlord, mimicking rigid white
capitalists.
A variant of black hypermasculinity became the perfect American
hypermasculinity exemplified in the mythical figure of Staggerlee, a black man who
shot and killed another black man in cold blood for pilfering his Stetson hat. The
Stetson cowboy hat evokes the cowboy hypermasculinity from which black
hypermasculinity emerged. As Michael K. Johnson notes, “Frontier is an alien word to
black America both because blacks were excluded from participation in frontier
opportunities and because the role African Americans have played in the history of
the American West has been erased. In the wake of the Civil War, movement
westward marked the first mass migration by free African Americans.”[9] According to
Johnson, masking the fact that American frontier masculinity developed among whites
and blacks initially ensured the exclusion of blacks in definitions of U.S. masculinity.
Johnson points out that African American authors such as Nat Love, Oscar Micheaux,
and Pauline Hopkins writing about black men on the frontier “often [repeat]
problematic elements of the dominant culture’s masculine ideal without much critical
self-reflection. Thus, an often violent and patriarchal masculine ideal has remained
central to the ways these writers have constructed black manhood.”[10] Black authors
writing about frontier masculinity, rather than signifying upon white frontier masculinity
as a means of resistance, merely mimic it. Henry Louis Gates Jr. says of African
American literature, “To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no
matter how pale they might seem. To rename is to revise, and to revise is to
Signify.”[11] According to Gates, these black writers misemploy the black literary
tradition of signification, opting for pastiche rather than parody.
Part of the reason some black men quickly embraced the dominant society’s
hypermasculine notions of self was to redress their thorough emasculation by white
America before, during, and after slavery. Black/cowboy hypermasculinity resulted in
large part from white oppression, transforming into a version of blackness used to
oppress African Americans. Ultimately, black maleness developed into the very
essence of American masculinity by which large numbers of men measure one
another. Cornel West points out, “white youth . . . [imitate] and [emulate] black male
styles of walking, talking, dressing and gesticulating . . . One irony of our present
moment is that just as young black men are murdered, maimed and imprisoned in
record numbers, their styles have become disproportionately influential in shaping
popular culture.”[12] While blackness predicated on violence, homophobia, sexism, and
materialism may operate for some as revolutionary redress for hundreds of years of
emasculation by whites, it is still the primary justification for white supremacy. This