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3 Consuming Manhood The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920 You can’t have a firm will without firm muscles. —G. Stanley Hall I t’s a psychoanalytic commonplace that what we lose in reality we recreate in fantasy. Those objects, relationships, and experiences that give life meaning, that make us feel full, satisfied, secure, are snatched from us, leaving us insecure, frightened, and desperate. Part of our normal, garden-variety neurosis is the creation of a stockpile of symbols that remind us of those lost qualities, a secret symbolic treasure chest we can occasionally raid to recreate earlier moments of fulfillment. American men have been searching for their lost manhood since the middle of the 19th century. Plagued by chronic anxiety that our masculinity is constantly being tested, American men have raided that cultural treasure chest for symbolic objects that might restore this lost manhood. At times such raids exhibit neurotic tendencies of psychic retreat to earlier mythic times of gender identity security; at other times, though, men have been subject to more serious breaks with reality and the effort to live in that symbolic fantasy world. This essay will examine some of those efforts to rescue and retrieve masculinity during a pivotal moment of historical transition during which masculinity was widely perceived as in crisis and in radical need of such restoration. First, I will describe the ways that a secure sense of masculinity was gradually destabilized in the first few decades of the 19th century, and describe some of the mechanisms that men employed to reground their eroding sense of manhood. These included increasing restrictions on the male body through proscriptions of sexuality; the exclusion of all “others” such as women, nonnative born whites, men of color, and, later in the century, homosexuals from the increasingly problematic public area; and fantasies of escape. I’ll also explore the rediscovery of the male body at the turn of the century as a gen37 dered testing ground, a site of demonstration of masculinity, especially in consumerist fantasies of physical prowess. The Terrors of the Self-Made Man At the turn of the 19th century, the term “manhood” was synonymous with the term “adulthood,” the opposite of childhood. Virility was counterposed to puerility, not femininity. To be manly was to accept adult responsibilities as a provider, producer, and protector of a family. Manhood was grounded in property ownership whether of landed estates or of the workingman’s physical body, which was his to deploy as he saw fit. Two models of manhood prevailed. The term “Genteel Patriarch” describes the manhood of the landed gentry: refined, elegant, and given to casual sensuousness, he was a devoted father who spent his time on his estate with his family. Urban craftsmen and shopkeepers subscribed to a model of “Heroic Artisan,” who embodied the physical strength and republican virtue of the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer and independent artisan . Also a devoted father, the Heroic Artisan taught his sons his craft, supporting them through ritual apprenticeship to master status, as his father had earlier initiated him. An economic liberal who cherished his workplace autonomy , he was also a democrat, delighting in the participatory democracy of the town meeting. By the 1830s, a new version of masculinity emerged in the eastern cities. “Marketplace Manhood” describes this “new man” who derived his identity entirely from success in the capitalist marketplace, from his accumulated wealth, power, and capital. The manhood of the urban entrepreneur, the businessman , was restless, agitated, devoted to his work in the homosocial public arena. He was thus an absentee landlord at home and an absent father to his children. When Henry Clay called America “a nation of self-made men,” it was of Marketplace Man that he was speaking. The frenzy for self-making spelled the historic doom of both Heroic Artisans and Genteel Patriarchs. Even today, once-heroic artisans fight against being transformed into faceless proletarians, which means the loss of workplace autonomy, small-town communal political power, and domestic patriarchy, while the gentility of the old gentry is now ridiculed as the effeminacy of the urban dandy and fop. The triumph of marketplace masculinity pushed these two remnants of the old regime into the realms of the non-men. For Marketplace Man himself, the psychological consequences of selfmaking were striking, and immediately evident to the sensitive eye. As manhood became dislodged from traditional moorings, it was thrown into constant question in the unstable world of economic...

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