The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis: Difference between revisions

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When I first read Norman Mailer’s ''An American Dream'', I was surprised by my own reaction to the novel. At the time only vaguely aware of Mailer’s former reputation, particularly among Second-Wave Feminist critics, I had expected to feel somewhat ambivalent about the book. Instead, I was intrigued by Mailer’s unique ability to fashion a protagonist who is violent and seemingly misogynistic yet simultaneously sympathetic and vulnerable, who seems alternately sure of his masculine prowess and crushed beneath the weight of his masculine anxiety. Curious about the critical conversation surrounding the work, I delved into the scholarship surrounding the novel and was surprised to discover that while ''An American Dream'' had received much attention at the time of its publication, little had been written about the novel’s intersecting representation of gender and violence in the past forty years.{{efn|Notable exceptions include Mike Meloy’s “Tales of the ‘Great Bitch’: Murder and the Release of Virile Desire in ''An American Dream'',” Warren Rosenberg’s ''Legacy of Rage'', and Daniel Fuchs’s ''The Limits of Ferocity''.}} The question I asked myself then was: Now that decades have passed and, to some degree, American cultural attitudes about gendered conflict have shifted (though have certainly not been resolved), what new perspective might we have of this work? In particular, what now can be said about the novel’s depiction of the shaping of masculine identity?

Thus, while Stephen Rojack envisions and subsequently practices a kind of existential violence to counteract perceived threats to his masculinity (the female other, the racial other, the totalitarian hierarchy of society), Herzog (like Bellow himself) is more overtly skeptical of a liberatory existentialist doctrine that requires such violence.{{efn|In “A World Too Much With Us” (1975), for instance, Bellow says, “Murderers are not improved by murdering. Unchecked, they murder more and become more brutish . . . It may do more for manhood to feed one’s hungry children than to make corpses.”{{sfn|Bellow|1975|p=5}} }} Still, both novels still demonstrate the immense pressure placed upon men to use aggression as a means for “proving” masculinity and relieving gendered anxiety. Moreover, both illustrate the various manners in which such a tactic can ultimately backfire, leaving men mired in anger and regret, bereft of redemption or love. Such a conundrum is all too familiar in today’s 21st century society, where embedded ideas of masculine authority still often determine who is given a voice and who has access to power, and where models of aggressive masculinity continue to play a significant role in both perpetuating gendered oppressions. Mailer and Bellow’s novels not only illustrate the longstanding, deeply rooted nature of these definitions of masculinity in America, but — more hopefully — they also help us to articulate the source and repercussions of these definitions, providing us with the tools to interrogate and resist such problematic gendered ideals.

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==Works Cited==

* {{cite book |last=Bellow |first=Saul |date=1964 |title=Herzog |url= |location=Greenwich, CT |publisher=Fawcett Publications, Inc. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Bellow |first=Saul |authormask=1 |date=Autumn 1975 |title=A World Too Much With Us |url= |journal=Critical Inquiry |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=1–9 |access-date= |ref=harv }}

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