12.
Title: [Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917]
Author: Gail Bederman
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 3
Date Completed: February 20, 2016
Rating: ***1/2


The concluding remark of Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization is thus: “This study suggests that neither sexism nor racism will be rooted out unless both sexism and racism are rooted out together” (239), articulating the thesis which connects the previous readings of Ida B. Wells, G. Stewart Hall, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, T. Roosevelt, and Tarzan. These rhetor’s, Bederman asserts in her introduction, articulate the various “remakings” of masculinity in America at the turn of the century, each considering the role of civilization, race, and gender in defining ideological manhood. Central to the text is the interconnectivity of race and gender, echoing the “othering” likewise central to Kimmel, and the class divide demonstrated by MPs in Griffin.

Bederman’s introduction begins with a literal fight, between Jack Johnson and the “white hope” Jim Jeffries, and the cultural and journalistic violence that erupts when Johnson wins the heavyweight match. Johnson’s performances illustrate warring masculinities, and well introduces Ida B. Wells’ efforts against lynching culture and the figure of the primal rapist, which becomes central to the entire volume. Writes Bederman, “Lynching, as whites understood it, was necessary because black men were uncivilized, unmanly rapists, unable to control their sexual desires” (46).

Chapter one on “Remaking Manhood” defines expectations of manhood versus masculinity at the turn of the century, detailing the struggles between men and feminizing civilization, the women’s movement, and savages. Biology and evolutionary theory are used to argue that Anglo-Saxons are more evolved, and therefore better suited to power and gender constructions; “savage” races lack strong gender distinctions, therefore marking their inferiority. The White City and the World’s Fair become a strong backdrop for their historic construction, as races and gender are strictly and literally regulated in the organization of the event; to add to this history I’d like to bring up H. H. Holmes, the “first” American serial killer who took advantage of the spectacle of the fair as he murdered women and sold their remains as skeletal medical specimens.

The second chapter details the efforts of Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching campaign, in which she rejected the horrific image of the “Negro rapist” (48). In her campaign, Wells compellingly asserts that white lynchers are less evolved and less mainly for their savage violence, proving their black victims are superior in gender and culture (58, 59, 73). Gender is crucial to both sides of this discourse, as definitions of manliness are at stake, in direct relation to the violation or protection of femininity (specifically, white womanhood).

Unfortunately, Wells’ efforts fail, as chapter three and the discussion of G. Stanley Hall demonstrates. As a researcher in education, Hall advocates for savage boyhood as a cure for the white cultural ailment of neurasthenia. Hall subscribes to the belief of recapitulations, and his work seeks out the “super-man” – he who demonstrates the cultural and intellectual superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, and draws on the physical health and strength that comes from a “Savage” youth encouraged in violence and untamed physical exertion. In Bederman’s reading of Hall I see Kimmel’s aggressive American masculinity, and the prizing of the capacity for brutality that continues today.

Though the writing is highly repetitive, I find these first chapters to be thoughtful and compelling, and can well place Bederman’s reading in larger gender discourses of which I’m aware. The following chapter on Gilman though, is deeply problematic. Specifically, Bederman’s readings of Gilman’s experiences with Dr. Mitchell and the rest cure. According to Bederman, Gilman is diagnosed with neurasthenia following her marriage, for which Dr. Mitchell prescribes the infamous rest-cure. Bederman forces this history into her own narrative, failing to identify the malady as post-partum depression, Gilman’s maternal experiences, her violent rejection of the treatment, and her literary attacks on Dr. Mitchell, to whom she sends a copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  This short story goes far in discrediting the rest cure, but does not fit Bederman’s readings of neurasthenia, and so is left out. From my perspective this feels careless, and leads me to question conclusions about which I am less familiar. That said, the racial/gender binaries which Gilman forwards are both shocking and historically grounded, and she thus serves as a persuasive example of American feminism’s contentious relationship with racial minorities.

The conclusion, focusing on Tarzan and drawing on Roosevelt’s performative masculinity from chapter five, marries each of these chapters to show they are not disparate ideas, but a larger rewriting of turn-of-the-century masculinity. And it is here that most of my discussion points focus, as I’d like to consider Tarzan of the book, Tarzan as a Disney character, and manhood as performed for contemporary children. I’d also like to go back and think of Jack Johnson in light of the development of the whole, and H. H. Holmes of Devil in the White City.

11.
Title: [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest]
Author: Ken Kesey
Genre: Fiction
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: February 10, 2016
Rating: *****

Last spring, I concluded my Kesey lectures offering a defense of Nurse Ratched, suggesting that gender politics and perspective potentially color her unfairly; this semester my current studies in Masculinity inspired me to take another look at Dale Harding, and I spent a wonderfully heated morning discussing with students whether or not Harding may be the true antagonist.  I'm not sure if I won everyone over, but it was a fantastic exercise, both for the gender studies potential, and to encourage students to push back and become active participants in discourse, especially when they disagree with the rhetorical "authority" figure.

Now, on to [North and South], [Manliness and Civilization], and [We Have Always Lived in the Castle].

10.
Title: [The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights]
Author: Ben Griffin
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 2
Date Completed: February 5, 2016
Rating: ****

The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain takes for its subject the culture of gender in the Victorian Parliament, seeking to understand the negotiations of masculinity and feminisms to consider how the established patriarchy supported, opposed, and legitimized early feminist movements as a law-making body. Griffin forwards that “the gendered identities of politicians shaped particular legislative outcomes” (7), and that “an anatomy of a patriarchal state” may help breach artificial limitations of research in historical feminism which, while not incorrect, “hermetically seal[s]} the subject from other cultural contexts (8). Griffin’s efforts are to place feminist history more broadly in Victorian culture by examining patriarchal responses to suffragists, feminists, and the changing cultural space in which they operate. Griffin’s project is achieved through an examination of Parliamentary reports published in three reputable newspapers, which were themselves the early sources of Parliamentary records.  These papers serve as efficient cultural artifacts, having preserved the discourses essentially in real time, without the editorial efforts of Parliamentary secretaries.

“Why did so many men change their minds about women’s suffrage?” Griffin asks, as he outlines his project (17). The answers, he posits, help break the isolation and aggregation of traditional feminist studies by examining the culture at large through the study of the ruling body of wealthy white men.  “…[D]ebates about women’s rights were often also debates about masculinity, and … politicians’ actions were fundamentally shaped by the identities that they constructed as men” (309). Like Kimmel, Griffin identifies a shift in gendered culture with the American Revolution; as Kimmel describes early American masculinity forming as a rejection of the oppressive father, British masculinity retreated into the home, seeking to reestablish the patriarchy through the authority of the family unit.  In chapter two, Griffin discusses “The domestic ideology of Victorian patriarchy,” and the gendered spheres of the Victorians which are largely familiar.  Griffin states, however, that these separate spheres do not provide a space of power for women; rather, one’s domestic authority (largely related to property rights and the financial maintenance of the family) is a performance of one’s masculinity, and thus greater political authority.  Questions of marital unity, and the definition thereof, are discussed, with their cultural and religious definitions.  This leads directly to two major points of discourse in the Victorian parliament, and Griffin’s study: domestic abuse and property rights.  For nineteenth-century MPs, the two become inherently linked.

The question of how and why a powerful body would relinquish control of a marginalized class is a significant one, especially as even partial liberation requires and acknowledgment of failure on the part of the rulers. This is initially achieved through the vilification of working class men; Griffin recounts that the earliest acquiescence are allowed when MPs consider the plight of honest working-class women being victimized by drunken scoundrel husbands.  By law, these women are without protection, and Parliament recognizes that a husband’s rule may in face be detrimental when the husband in question is willing to, say, beat his pregnant wife in order to take the money she’s saved for her confinement, for drink. Chapter three examines the class lines of masculinity, and how the characterization of lower class “tyrannical” (88) husbands as drunken and bestial allow MPs to artificially divorce their own masculinity from these brutes, and pass laws chivalrously protecting women of lower classes by allowing them to control their own incomes, while retaining their own household authority and preserving the myth that domestic abuse and moral lapse are conditions of the poor.   

Chapter four shifts to a reading of religious changes in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century which challenge the earlier understanding of women as “naturally” (i.e. Biblically) subservient to men, who are made to serve as the ruling class. Changes in religious thought, such as the belief that the Bible cannot actually be taken as a word-for-word historically-accurate text, allow for Victorians to challenge assumptions of sex. St. Paul, who is often cited by anti-suffragists, is now read as a product of his times rather than a direct guide to gendered expectations forwarded by the church, and the masculinity is redefined to include necessitous care and compassion for wives, as opposed to draconian control.

These cultural tug-of-wars continue throughout the book, and Griffin demonstrates how lawmakers wade through evolving cultural and religious beliefs to acknowledge cases of necessitous female autonomy (in property rights, maternal rights, etc). For my own research purposes, I found chapters five and six most interesting – those concerning paternal rights (which concerns the “natural” parenting qualities of women) and the performance of masculinity within Parliament itself (especially dress, mannerisms, and self-control).

Recommended for anyone interested in legal and cultural history, feminism, masculinity, and/or the Victorians. 

9.
Title: [Jack Sheppard]
Author: William Harrison Ainsworth
Genre: Nineteenth Century
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 3
Date Completed: February 1, 2016
Rating: *****

Murder, revenge, daring escapes, and a fashionable anti-hero: an indulgent recipe for not just movies and comic books, but a nineteenth-century "Newgate novel" that fictionally recounts the history of a notorious eighteenth-century thief.  Jack Sheppard, published serially by William Aisnworth between January 1839 and February 1840, capitalizes on the sensational reputation of an historical figure, presenting to the Victorian audience an escape artist and "master housebreaker" caught in over twenty years of revenge and mistaken identities. The novel is grand in its style, for all of its melodrama, and perfectly delicious (especially for those who are likewise inclined).

As a character, Jack is highly romantic, identifying his turn to crime as a response to the denial of affection in his youth, but maintaining a marginal loyalty to all in the household that extends to the novel's conclusion.  Within the novel Jack is as desirable a character as he must have seemed to his nineteenth century readers - well dressed and well groomed, his attractive features win him the admiration of women, and his daring escapades win him the respect of lower-class men. Ainsworth portrays him as a victim of fate and criminal machinations, offering readers the excuse for sympathy and fondness which would otherwise be denied a notorious criminal. For my own part, of course, I am endlessly fascinated to the attention to material details - the extent to which Ainsworth describes the physical features, and dress, of particular characters (i.e. not all receive the same attention). This one is certainly a keeper.

Enjoy stories of heists or cowboys or pirates or other adventuring sorts?  Then this one is for you.