“I wanted to be humanish: manly, a man”: Morality, Shame, and Masculinity in Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man

Peter Tarnopol of Roth’s My Life as a Man (1974) spends much of the novel wondering how he might “ever get to be what is described in literature as a man” (299). As he strives to achieve a specific masculine ideal, Tarnopol often finds himself torn between a desire to reject the definitions of manhood operative within American society at large and an impulse to embrace this homogenous masculine image, instead discarding what he views as the restrictive definitions of manhood defined by his Jewish heritage. This essay examines the ways in which Tarnopol’s attempts to perform a specific version of masculinity are often undermined by the violence he uses to reconcile these contradictory impulses, which can in turn can be understood as arising from his internal struggle with competing notions of shame and morality.