32.
Title: Student Research Papers
Length: Over 215 pages
Date Completed: April 21, 2016


33.
Title: [The Island of Doctor Moreau]
Author: H.G. Wells
Genre: Scientifc Romance
Medium: Penguin Paperback
Acquisition: Work Text
Date Completed: April 25, 2016
Rating: *****


34.
Title: Selections from [A Question of Manhood]
Author: Various
Genre: History/Masculinities
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Final Reading
Date Completed: April 24, 2016
Rating: ****

My chapter choices from A Question of Manhood were directed by personal interest, potential use value for my present project, or the possibility of importance for my ever-looming dissertation. They cover several areas of interest relating to my work, including law and gender, courtship, cultural history, and bodily performance.  The first, “For Justice and a Fee: James Milton Turner and the Cherokee Freedmen,” considers an historical conflict of which I knew literally nothing – a dispute over land and tribal rights for the freed African American slaves held by the Cherokee Nation.  In this chapter, Gary Kremer tells of a nation within a nation, governed by four social contracts and two governing bodies, and negotiating a system of rights with no precedent.  The Cherokee Freedmen want tribal rights and a fair share of land and monies given by the government; the Cherokees who once held the slaves deny their rights to either, and James Turner, an outsider, takes up their mantle and fights with the federal government for their intervention.  The whole political and social conflict is nuanced and downright messy, and each decision as the potential to set dangerous precedent.

“Black Policemen in New Orleans During Reconstruction” by Dennis Rousey shares the history of just this – African American men serving in a professional police force at a time when arming their community causes alarm and authority between races is tenuous. Rousey asserts that “The Crescent City’s antebellum tradition in race relation was probably unique,” citing legal circumvention supported by white “employers, policemen, grogshop keepers and professional criminals” for their own purposes and a large Northern population influencing race relations (98). Rousey acknowledges that it is striking to have black officers at all, and further surprising to see them given authority over white citizens, and to see them armed, but that “it became important for the police force to become a microcosm of the whole … community” (99). \

“The African Derivation of the Black Fraternal Orders in the United States,” was not quite what I expected it to be, but rather an explication of the practices and organization of the Independent Order of St. Luke as compared to the social organizations of the Efik and the Igbo of West Africa, justifying the comparison by drawing connections between the American slave trade and these African communities.  The chapter itself is a methodical point-by-point analysis of rituals and cultural symbolism, with the goal of breaking the assumption of European heritage in fraternal orders, and illustrating how this American order can in fact be connected to the African communities from which members (or their forefathers) were taken.

Of greatest personal interest were the chapters on courtship and Jackson.  In “The Courtship Letters of an African American Couple,” Vicki Howard turns to primary correspondence to evaluate the negotiation of marriage between nineteenth-century African American couples, as they negotiate their roles according to both their own communities (what Howard calls “Black Victoria) and the nineteenth-century cult of Womanhood. The project itself is problematic for its one-sidedness, and the constant necessity of assumption that comes into play when looking at only half of a correspondence (Lucia’s letters have not been saved, while she kept the letters she received from Calvin).  A source of discord between the courting couple is Lucia’s desire to continue her education as a teacher, and then to exercise that education professionally; Calvin, also a teacher, initially rejects both desires in deference to the Victorian middle-class cult of womanhood, but eventually yields to Lucia’s desires in order to secure her hand in marriage.  Howard speaks of power in this relationship, showing how most belongs to Lucia before they are married, and how Calvin is quick to negotiate when he believes there is a contest for Lucia’s hand.  For Lucia’s part, Howard identifies her assertions and desires as exemplary of Black Victoria – a moral but industrious woman who finds fulfillment not just in the home, but in actual occupation that in turn helps to build and support the community.

The final chapter, “Peter Jackson and the Elusive Heavyweight Championship: A Black Athlete’s Struggle Against the Late Nineteenth Century Color-Line” follows the professional career of Peter Jackson from his youth as a sailor to his success as a boxer, and the difficulties he faces in his professional progress due to his race.  A superior athlete who first makes his name in Australia, Jackson travels to the United States in order to challenge the title-holder of Heavyweight Champion of the World; John L. Sullivan refuses to cross the color line and meet Jackson in the ring, as do all of the subsequent challengers, literally blocking Jackson from even the chance of gaining the title for himself.  David Wiggins details Jackson’s failures with his successes in the ring, narrating his constant and easy successes  - and illustrating just why white boxers were afraid to fight him. None wanted to be the champion to lose the belt to him.  That Jackson is powerful, skilled, and practiced is never drawn in to question; rather, each rejection is clearly articulated as an upholding of the color-line.  Jackson’s failure to achieve the title is not his own, but rather the last front against which these white athletes can uphold their artificial sense of superiority.

26.
Title: [Batman #1]
Author: Bob Kane
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Primary Source
Date Completed: April 9, 2016
Rating: ****

To support my research, and to serve as a primary source, I sought out the very first introduction of The Joker, which happens to be in the 1940s Batman #1, when Batman earns his own book outside of Detective Comics.  The mystery begins when a strange voice over the radio predicts the death of a wealthy citizen, and the theft of his property; this prophecy is fulfilled to the letter, despite police presence and protection.  The mystery continues when a second ominous message is relayed, and again fulfilled, though through slightly different methods.  The perpetrator gains the attention of police and criminals alike - the police for their bafflement, and the criminal underworld for this man's usurpation of heists unofficially claimed by other thieves. Of course, Batman is needed to apprehend this unusual figure - before one gang or another is able to take him out.  The premise of this book is as the later rewriting has promised, to an extent - ominous predictions of death and theft, and even the methods of execution.  The original text, though, takes more time in the explication of the crimes, and thus offers a portrait of the Joker not as a madman bent on wreaking havoc, but as a calculating and cunning thief with an unusual calling card.  The Joker's costume is as much a performance as Batman's himself, and the two appear to be on much more even footing.  This is what strikes me most about his first appearance - the Joker is not yet the madman of modern narrative, but a stealthy (and relatively traditional) criminal whose motives are capitalistically understood.

25.
Title: [From Hell]
Author: Alan Moore
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Primary Source
Date Completed: April 8, 2016
Rating: ***

I am of two minds about this Ripper conspiracy theory from comics behemoth Alan Moore, and my rating reflects only half of that mind.  The divide comes from its purpose and use-value: as a popular text intended to entertain, titillate, and thrill, and as a cultural object of study that reflects and forwards theories and perspectives useful for a continuing discourse on social, political, and values.

From Hell is Moore's foray into what is (actually!) known as Ripperology - the study of Jack the Ripper and the infamous Whitechapel murders of 1888, which remain officially unsolved to this day.  From the time of their act to now the spectacular case has drawn a great deal of interest, and serves as a modern whodunnit which holds the real-world promise of a spectacular resolution, if only someone finds, reads, and understands the right clues. The brutality of the crimes, the development of modern detection, and the sensationalism of nineteenth-century newspapers all add to the fervor, and from these real brutal slayings has come mountains of scholarship of varying levels of credibility, performance, art, and literature.

Moore's book forwards one particular conspiracy theory, based on his own reading of Ripperologists and historical research.  The solution offered defies nearly all logic and reason, but such is often the case with conspiracy theories, and this isn't something I hold against Moore.* Ultimately, however, I did not find the book to be entertaining.  Despite the sensational subject material, the plot is plodding, and long chapters seem extraneous to the movement of the narrative; though I understand why the author may have included such prolonged ravings and devoted espousals, they weigh down the text as opposed to building tension and anxious incredulity or curiosity.  In short, I found Ripper himself to be exceptionally dull, as are nearly all of the characters revolving around him, and the actions at hand.  An observation contrary to this criticism: one consistent trope in Moore's books, which seemed particularly successful in this text, is his explicit illustration of sex and sexuality. While I've found it unnecessarily gratuitous in other works (i.e. external to the plot), I thought the attention to human intimacy and sex to be compelling and forthright, and very well represented.

Despite my boredom with the graphic novel as a work of entertainment, I believe it is a useful, compelling, and thoughtful artifact which clearly articulates cultural values and systems worthy (and in need of ) deeper introspection.  For my present purpose, I found From Hell to represent a constant negotiation of gender, particularly masculinities, illustrating conventions, beliefs, and ramifications, both as these definitions are upheld and as they are challenged.  It promises to be a fascinating object of study, and so I am actually very excited to continue working with it.




* I don't really wish to spoil anything, but the fact that certain people would feel themselves completely powerless against the person who is Ripper is literally inconceivable; the ultimate end the murderer finds could have been implemented after the first death, with similar success.  That the instigator would not recall commands goes against all historical demonstration and documentation of character, decision, and action, and the final conclusion that it doesn't really work shows the frivolity of it all.

24.
Title: Batman/Houdini: [The Devil's Workshop]
Author: Howard Chaykin
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition:
Date Completed: April 7, 2016
Rating: **

The only thing redeeming this ridiculous comic is the visual representation of a Joker-like character, which happens to be beautiful and eerie.  The story is flat, the characters are useless, and the whole thing was really a dud.  It doesn't in any way live up to the legends of Houdini or Batman.

Great cover, though.

23.

Title: [Batman Detective Comics: Faces of Death]

Author: Tony S. Daniel

Genre: Comics

Medium: Paperback

Acquisition: Primary Source for IS

Date Completed: April 2, 2016

Rating: *****

This is the comic I was looking for - the pivotal moment when Joker has his face removed by the Dollmaker at which point they both proclaim they are "reborn."  Though the Joker himself plays a minimal active role in the book, this specific moment is a catalyst for the arc to come, and for my own reading of his masculinity.  The artwork is stunning.  

22.

Title: [The Hobbit]

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Genre: Fantasy

Medium: Paperback

Acquisition: Teaching Text

Date Completed: April 5, 2016

Rating: *****

21.
Title: [Manning the Race]: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Author: Marlon B. Ross
Genre: Masculinity, Sexual Cultures
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 7
Date Completed: April 1, 2016
Rating: ***1/2

I told my adviser that I'm afraid I'm missing the forest for the trees. I found Ross’ writing difficult to follow at times, especially in his introductions; he favors long “if not…., then …..” statements, and I often came to the conclusion of an assertion forgetting how it began. I mention this as a bit of a caveat, because I do not fully trust my understanding of the project. This is not to say that I didn’t gain anything from the reading – I found here a perspective I was looking for in an otherwise grand-narrative-dominated reading list – but that I don’t yet think I have the whole picture.

Manning the Race is an examination of the cultural and rhetorical ways African American men seek to assert a position of masculinity during Jim Crow bigotry as an infallible mark of cultural progress; a kind of racial re-branding used to humanize men of color, and reject the notion of their evolutionary inferiority.  Ross seeks cultural texts such as albums and anthologies, literary narratives, intellectual discourse, autobiography, and the men themselves to serve as representations of the myriad ways in which intelligent and creative individuals sought to become (or were named as) patrons of the race, cultivating their own achievements while bolstering the whole to stand against charges of racial adolescence.

Central to Ross’ reading is movement and migration. People move from rural to urban, South to North, and between expressive arts seeking something better, and confronting assumptions and cultural hurdles all the while. Leaders within the African American community seek to move out from under the “inferior place” to which Jim Crow assigns them (93), establishing and embracing normativity and masculinity as symbols of personhood.

In selecting this book I was hoping to find another voice to counter the white patriarchal narrative of anxiety and othering in the definition and maintenance of manliness, and Ross offers just that in what seems to be a consistent idea throughout the text: leadership, and patronage.  Many of the texts we’ve read this term forward examples of desirable masculinity in the form of isolated representations: Roosevelt, post-ranch; Tarzan; Atlas and/or Sandow; the cowboy.  These individuals glory in their representations of masculinity, holding themselves as superior to “lesser” men for their own possession of superior characteristics, and allowing others to attempt to replicate their manliness.  There is an inherentness that seems to follow most of these characters (Roosevelt had to find his manhood on a ranch, and Atlas had to develop a routine, but they both show gumption and drive to do so), and an antagonistic other against which they can be measured.

Ross’ narrative paints a far different picture – a desire to uplift/uphold/encourage a racial majority to their own improvement so that it may better reflect on the whole.  White men are obsessed with their own sense of superiority, but the singular examples held up perform a kind of anxious individual assertion of self – an anxiety that sets members within against one another, and then against the ultimate other. Ross’ leaders, however, are invest in modernity, progressive cultural shifts, and the man as part of a whole who can either continue to upward migration, or condemn communities to a fall. I’m not sure I’m articulating clearly the difference that I see, and this is something that I’d like to try to talk through – the relationship of the representative to the populace.

Similarly, I was very interested in the idea of the “cool post” – a deviant and dangerous phenomenon which must brought under control (92), but which also signifies (or is read as) a performance and a mask. It is a shadow threat onto which the fearful may project their anxieties, but one the text suggests is an appropriation of the figure so often identified in readings of American manliness – the cowboy.

19.
Title: [Batman: The Man Who Laughs]
Author: Ed Brubaker
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Research
Date Completed: March 21, 2016
Rating: ****

One of the constant draws of The Joker is the uncertainty of his past; though narratives are offered from time to time (*cough*AlanMoore*cough*), even these "definitive" stories are challenged by the ambiguity of the character himself: he is literally not to be trusted. Ever. Even in the naming of his own past. This is one of the characteristics which makes him a memorable, and lasting, antagonist.  The Man Who Laughs is purportedly a re-telling (re-inking, re-publishing?) of the original 1940 comic, which saw the introduction of a strange jester.  I say "purportedly" only because I have not yet managed to read Batman #1, though I will.  In his first introduction, the Joker is all chaos - and nameless, given his famous moniker by the press as he mysteriously poisons Gotham elite (and anyone else who is inconveniently placed).  Arkham Asylum has not yet opened when the Joker first murders a reporter and cameraman in front of its gates, leaving an impression inside and out before he ever takes up residence.

As a story, it is a bit lackluster, given all the Joker will come to do.  As an origin, it's successful, providing the first and only really trustworthy beginning point of the villain who becomes Batman's mirror.

I'm not sure what counts as spoilers for comics readers; I tend to treat them like Shakespeare and other classic literature, in which the conclusion is already widely known, even by those who haven't actually read the book.  I don't think I've "given away" anything extraordinary here, but my apologies to any who disagree.

18.
Title: [Death of the Family]
Author: Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo
Genre: Comics
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Research
Date Completed: March 20, 2016
Rating: *****

I'm finding it difficult to review this book casually; every time I begin writing I come to conclusions and observations I wish to save for the paper I'm crafting, and so I come back to square one.  The basics are straight forward: this New 52 title is a play on its predecessor, Death in the Family in which the Joker violently beats Jason Todd to death (at the encouragement of fans who voted, if I'm not mistaken).  Though this may read, and in the moment does, as a hugely significant narrative moment, for the Joker death is just another day at work, and play.  His history is tumultuous, with a few constants: mayhem, Arkham Asylum, and Batman.

In this new arc the Joker escapes one and uses another in order to achieve the full attention of the third, targeting the "Bat family" in the belief that they have sentimentalized Batman, and therefore made him weak, and thus less of a capable adversary. For an antagonist who identifies so intensely with his protagonist, this holds serious implications, and a year after disappearing from the asylum he sets out to "right" their dynamic through exceptional violence worthy of the most psychotic Joker arcs.

I sought out this book specifically looking for a moment of violence - when the Joker has his face removed by the Dollmaker, leaving it on a wall as a bloody calling card; this is apparently viewed as a moment of "rebirth" for the figure, and it's pertinent to my current research to think about what this means.  This moment proceeds the current book, but that doesn't detract from its interest. One point of contention I have is a major missing story - that of Catwoman. Though the Joker singles her out as a member of the "family," she is suspiciously missing from the final reunion.

Most of my conclusions and observations will (hopefully) end up in a paper this term, so I'll just end simply: I liked it.  More so, I think, than The Killing Joke, and certainly more than Death in the Family.

17.
Title: [Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature: Duelling with Danger]
Author: Emelyne Godfrey
Genre: Masculinity, Victtorian, History
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 6
Date Completed: March 19, 2016
Rating: ****

In Masculinity, Crime, and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature, Emelyn Godfrey approaches shifting cultural values of manliness and the reading of violent reaction to crime through an examination of communicative cultural objects – the literature, plays, newspapers, and commercial advertisements which both reflect and direct the responses of the audience. For Godfrey’s project, manliness is particularly defined by gentlemanliness, recalling the restraint and abhorrence of violence described by Ben Griffin in The Politics of Gender. The principles of the “savage” and the “natural” violence of men, so often cited as a conscious interest for Victorians, is acknowledged as the “other” against which gentlemen are defined – they who have morally evolved past such brutishness to restrained morality.  This dichotomy is reflected in the “blood men” – i.e. those who respond violently – and their more thoughtful counterparts (Holmes is a strong example used by Godfrey). But what of chivalry and manliness? Of self-defense? Godfrey’s work details how such necessary violence is defined by Victorians in response to the uncivilized brutes (i.e. criminal lower classes, or “blood men”), and whether or not self-defense and even retaliation are manly.

I admit that I find myself a bit distracted by Godfrey’s source material – specifically the material goods offered to promote the successful manliness of gentlemen, and their reversal of symbolism as they fall out of favor (handguns, for example). I’ve long worked with the material construction of identity of female characters in literature, and Godfrey’s accoutrements offer tantalizing possibilities to carry this over to masculine characters (oh, the anti-garroting collars! Life-preservers! The “monstrous fashion” for handguns! p.119).

In a more broad sense, Godfrey’s work on the “average” (i.e. white, middle-class, male) citizen offers a lens through which one can read popular vigilante heroes in novels, media, comics, and our own sensationalized news.

I really enjoyed this book for both its methods, and its histories.  While the readings of the Whitechapel Murders were pointedly shallow and seemingly insignificant to the project, tangentially related for being of a time and sensationalized in the press, the readings of literature as reflective of a reaction to the perception of criminal threat were pointed and thoughtful, offering strong conclusions and suggesting areas of further research.

13.
Title: [Victorian Masculinities]: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art
Author: Herbert Sussman
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 4
Date Completed: March 4, 2016
Rating: ***1/2

A driving concern of Herbert Sussman’s account of early Victorian artistic grappling with gender is the recognition of a spectrum of masculinity, even within the confines of white bourgeois normativity. In introducing his primary representative symbol, Sussman suggests that “the monk becomes the extreme or limit case of the central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity … the figure through whom Victorian men in a mode of historicized psychology could argue their widely varied views about self-discipline, the management of male sexuality, and the function of repression” (3), and through subsequent chapters illustrates the myriad of readings of this symbol by early Victorian artists as they articulate their own anxieties and definitions of manliness and its cultural/social/biological constructions. More important than these individual readings is what Sussman endeavors to show as  whole: that, though prevalent, “compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory matrimony” as touted by the moral middle class is not the only estimation of Victorian manliness, and that even this normativity is “exceedingly difficult to maintain” (13).

Like Kimmel, griffin, and Bederman before, Sussman begins by identifying tensions and anxieties which necessitate an Othering, in order to affirm a sense of selfhood and positive identity. But unlike these other texts, Sussman does not seem to forward a grand narrative of masculinity for his chosen object (the early Victorian white bourgeois man), and instead demonstrates variance which illuminates cultural uncertainty. Sussman is taking Kimmel’s pervasive homosociality, and perhaps the heroic artisan, and broadening its scope.


Topics of interest:
On page 82 Sussman cites the fears of poets such as Browning that their literary work, though definitively masculine in the nineteenth century, is somehow still “women’ work,” and that they are in fact feminizing themselves through their interiority – by staying within their own heads.  This “within” reminds me of Griffin’s descriptions of the Victorian household, and the contentious space of the home in Kimmel: that man should be the ruler of the domestic space, but that this space ultimately threatens his masculinity. I am interested in the potential connection here to the earlier argument that “For Browning, pornography exemplifies the driving of male desire into the inner cloister of the mind, the warping of virility by the puritanical constrains of bourgeois England” (75). Body versus mind (neurasthenia? – Bederman 84), industry versus domesticity.


14.
Title: [Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man]: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
Author: John F. Kasson
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 5
Date Completed: March 4, 2016
Rating: ****

First, I’ll just say that I really enjoyed the narratives offered by Kasson; Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs are engaging representations of nineteenth-century popular culture, and the biographic attention to each was certainly entertaining. However, I hesitate to agree with the lavish praise Linda K. Kerber gives on the book’s cover.

John K. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man explores the bodily construction of late-nineteenth century American masculinity, forwarding Kimmel’s readings of bodily control and construction and reading the performances of manhood in both the acts and flesh of three exemplary popular figures. The book purports to “help us understand more about how the shift to an advancing technological civilization was communicated to an apprehended by publics in North America and abroad. They tell us about how modernity was understood in terms of the body…” (19), but is more intimately concerned with the white male body in popular culture, and how manliness was constricted by others than just Roosevelet (moving beyond Bederman to the “Othered” class of Kimmelian self-made middle class men). Kasson’s text is either too short, or too long; extensive biographies could be trimmed to become a strong lecture, or the accounts could be more fully developed to link the reader’s gaze to the larger gestures made in the introduction to modernity and technology.

The chapters on Sandow, Houdini, and Tarzan each offer the stripped bodies of performing men to represent linear constructions of manhood in struggle – against self, against institutions, against biology and race. That two invite bodily contact – and even penetration/invasion – as assertions of their value raises interesting implications; that they likewise manipulate and make use of popular culture to forward their careers demonstrates a kind of masculinity which moves beyond strong white bodies.

In thinking of the popular culture of the strong white male body, I find myself connecting Sandow to freak shows, and Houdini as a anachronistic reminder of the entertaining deviant – the acceptable vigilante who upholds his own moral bounds and flirts with the destruction of institutions (jail breaking and mad-house escaping, and, ok, Batman – and I’ve just ordered The Devil’s Workshop).

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.

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. 

7.
Title: [Manhood in America: A Cultural History]
Author: Michael Kimmel
Genre: Masculinity
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Masculinity IS Book 1
Date Completed: January 22, 2016
Rating: ***


In the introduction to Manhood in America: A Cultural Study, Michael Kimmel outlines the work of his book as seeking “how the definition of masculinity has changed over time” and how those definitions and experiences have “shaped the activities of American men” (1).  He admittedly focuses on the definitions and assertions of “straight white men” as “the dominant version” of manhood in order to forward an understanding of just one of many masculinities (4-5).  In this way, Kimmel’s book is a broad, informative, and flawed text, articulating the historical anxiety of dominant white male masculinity without nuance or great insight. Kimmel’s research is both extensive and limited – he well-documents masculine definitions and demonstrations from significant and varied primary sources, but with an eye towards the extreme expostulations and anecdotal that (I believe) ultimately detract from his ethos.  The project seeks to generate a history of dominant American manhood, and does so by moving between historical periods, and finding the “real men” in each period’s cultural artifacts.


8.
Title: [Lady Susan]
Author: Jane Austen
Genre: Nineteenth Century
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: Victorian IS Book 2
Date Completed: January 25, 2016
Rating: *****

Lady Susan is a manuscript work from Jane Austen, published posthumously by her family. A short epistolary novel, Lady Susan follows the actions (and reprisals) of the titular character, who becomes a widow just before the novel's opening, and is unapologetically and thoroughly a Flirt, much to the approbation of society and family, save the approval of one friend.

Lady Susan's letters to her dear friend Alicia fully demonstrate her true character, as much as her letters to family and suitors demonstrate her dedication to social manipulation.  Lady Susan, and Alicia, not only accept the label of "Flirt," but revel in it, and glory in their ability to influence, gain hearts, and destroy proposals.  Lady Susan woos men not for true interest, but because she believes she should be adored, and figuratively collects the hearts of her lovers not unlike Margaret of Valois.

The novel clearly tries to present Lady Susan as repugnant for her social faux pas and her maternal failings, but I think there's something more to be said about a woman of her confidence and beauty, in the time and society in which she's found. It's a delightful romp, and certainly one for any who enjoy Austen.