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2 Born to Run Fantasies of Male Escape from Rip Van Winkle to Robert Bly The man began to run: now he had not run far from his own door, when his wife and children, perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying Life, Life, eternal Life! So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain. —John Bunyon, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Feminization and Its Discontents I n the last lines of the novel that bears his name, Huckleberry Finn anxiously plans his escape. “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” Since the early 19th century, the quest for manhood has revolved around a flight from women, a relentless effort to avoid all behaviors that might remotely hint of the feminine. Women signified constraints on manhood—temperance, Christian piety, sober responsibility, sexual fidelity. Women set the tone of those institutions that restrained masculine excess—schoolroom, parlor, church. Women meant, first, mother, with her incessant efforts to curtail boyish rambunctiousness; and later, wife, with her incessant efforts to keep men in harness as responsible and respectable workers, fathers, and husbands. Thus women represented responsibility—marriage, fatherhood, workplace stability . It is from the perceived clutches of “woman,” this collection of constraints and responsibilities, as much as real live women, that American men have been escaping for the past 200 years. And American men have devised a rich and varied collection of escape hatches. Contemporary mythopoetic men may believe they have created these retreats from examining other cultures; a bit of historical perspective on their own culture 19 might prove far more revealing. In both real life and in the dreams that populate American fiction, men have run away to join the army, been kidnapped or abandoned on desert islands, gone west, or, as today, run off to the woods for an all-male retreat. In this essay, I want to discuss a few moments of masculinist retreat from feminization in 19th-century America. By feminization I refer both to real women, whose feminizing clutches as teachers, mothers, and Sunday School teachers were seen as threatening to turn robust boyhood into emasculated little pipsqueaks, and also to an increasingly urban and industrial culture, a culture which increasingly denied men the opportunities for manly adventure and a sense of connectedness with their work. At the end of the 19th century, this latter tendency was best expressed by Henry James, in The Bostonians, as the dashing Basil Ransome, displaced southern beau, rails against modern society (and suggests his position on women in the process): The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is . . . that is what I want to preserve, or rather . . . recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what becomes of you ladies while I make the attempt. (p. 293) Here was the critique of the feminization of American culture in condensed form. Something had happened to American society that had led to a loss of cultural vitality, of national virility. And ever since the first few decades of the 19th century, men have been running away—off to the frontier, the mountains, the forests, the high seas, the battlegrounds, outer space—to retrieve what they feel like they’ve lost: some deep, essential part of themselves , their identity, their manhood. Part of the struggle was simply to get out of the house. The separation of spheres had transformed the 19th-century middle-class home into a virtual feminine theme park—where well-mannered and well-dressed children played quietly in heavily draped and carpeted parlors, and adults chatted amiably over tea served from porcelain services. This delightful contrast with the frantic and aggressive business world made men feel uneasy in their own homes...

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