The History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities

Notes

231 231 Notes 2. Born to Run: Fantasies of Male Escape from Rip Van Winkle to Robert Bly 1. Brownson converted to Catholicism because he felt it to be more manly and patriarchal. 2. Although I will treat only the West in any detail here, there were other forms of masculinist resistance to cultural feminization. For example, much of the early 19th-century commune movement, from Fourierist phalanxes to Oneida, Brook Farm, and New Harmony, were efforts to restore manly dignity to men’s work, to return men to the land, from which all integrity sprang. 3. See also M. Meyer, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 139. 4. Webber wrote that “[t]he primitive virtues of a heroic manhood are all sufficient, and they care nothing for reverences, forms, duties, etc., as civilization has them, but respect each other’s rights and recognize the awful presence of a benignant God in the still grandeur of mountain, forest, valley, plain, and river, through, among, and over which they pass.” Such men, Webber wrote, “do not look back to society except with disgust”(p. 311). 5. See Walden, pp. 216 and 66. Businessmen “come tamely home at night only from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again,” he wrote, while workers “are so occupied with the factitious care and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” As a result, “[t]he laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine” (pp. 142, 9). 6. No wonder Bly calls Thoreau one of his heroes. In a recent poem, Bly praises Thoreau for living so “extravagantly alone . . . keeping company with his handsome language.” Robert Bly, “The Insatiable Soul,” poetry reading at Scottish Rite Temple, San Francisco, 30 January 1993. 7. See Henry Nash Smith (1950), Turner, The Frontier in American History , John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), esp. pp. 6, 29, 66, 327–28. All three men were, as Yale President Theodore Dwight wrote, “impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality”; the pioneer despises the “dull uniformity and monotony” of civilized life when “compared in his mind with the stirring scenes of wild western adventure” wrote David Coyner, in his fictionalized 1847 biography of Carson, The Lost Trappers, cited in Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 251. All were fiercely anti-intellectual; Boone, for example , “rather eschewed books, parchment deeds, and clerky contrivances as forms of evil,” as his biographer Timothy Flint put it, cited in Dubbert, A Man’s Place, p. 35. 8. Ever since Rip, writes Leslie Fiedler, “the typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest or out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’ which is to say, the confrontation of a man and a woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility.” Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 26. 9. Recent versions of this cross-race male bonding require the absence of any hint of sexual contact between the two men, and so one of them—usually the white man—is transformed into an overtly sexualized—and heterosexual —character. Thus do the movies like Last of the Mohicans, Lethal Weapon, and Dances with Wolves stress Natty’s, Riggs’s, and Lt. Dunbar’s love interests. The man of color as spirit guide remains relatively desexualized. 10. “The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderies of the locker room and ball park, the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip, a kind of passionless passion, at once gross and delicate, homoerotic in the boy’s sense, possessing an innocence above suspicion.” Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 143. 11. See also Henry Nash Smith, Wilderness, p. 256; Cawelti, Apostles of the Self Made Man, p. 78. 12. Bumppo returns to this theme of anti-intellectualism, and the feminizing qualities of women throughout the novel. 13. But Hawkeye’s escape requires that he exchange clothes with David, the bespeckeled bookworm. “Are you much given to cowardice?” Hawkeye asks him. “My pursuits are...