The rhetoric of masculinity
Description
The Rhetoric Of Masculinity argues that the discourse of male American expatriate novelists in the first half of the twentieth century is shaped by their reaction to an American public that feminizes writing and expatriation. These novelists---Henry James in his late phase, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Bowles---inherit the same relationship with their audience as a writer like Howells, but their reaction is more overtly rhetorical than the realism Howells advocates to prove the writer's masculinity. Howells responds to the writer's feminization by advocating 'masculine realism.' The American writer, in Michael Bell's reading of Howells, proves his masculinity by representing reality as his readers know it and by locating himself, as Howells did when he moved from Boston to New York, at the center of that reality. From this perspective, the expatriate writer is seen as marginalizing himself geographically and denying himself an active and therefore masculine role in the cultural construction of American realism. In 'The Art of Fiction' James argues for the globalization of realism. But in his later work, The Ambassadors, he dramatizes both his American audience's refusal to accept such globalization and the damage the artist does to himself when he attempts to conform to that audience's constructions of masculinity. In The Sun Also Rises Hemingway abandons realism for authenticity. Jake Barnes performs his masculinity not by representing reality as his audience knows it but by distinguishing between his authenticity and the lack of authenticity in his expatriate surroundings. Finally in The Sheltering Sky Bowles assaults the psychic and cultural structures that determine masculinity. Port Moresby is one of several of Bowles's characters who are psychologically emasculated or whose literal emasculation dramatizes that psychological state. Bowles's work lashes out against the source of such emasculation: in psychoanalytic terms, the father; in social terms, his native culture. Port travels to rid himself of his culture, but the novel's intimations of incest and homosexuality and its validation of silence over speech suggest a more radical rebellion against culture, namely a violation of the Oedipal taboos and a refusal of the language on which culture is built