The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Norman Mailer: Playboy Magazine Heavyweight: Difference between revisions

In comparison to some of Hemingway’s fiction in which castrated heroes do not always abide by the code, Mailer’s ''Playboy'' fiction offers a range of masculinity models for readers. According to Robert Caserio’s editorial introduction to the ''Journal of Modern Literature'', Mailer’s later fiction represents a “‘queering’ of his picture of masculinity,” and the novel ''Ancient Evenings'', in particular, suggests a “surrender and uncoupling” of Mailer’s ideas about masculinity and moral bravery.{{sfn|Caserio|2006|p=v, vi}} In comparison to his 1960s works, like ''An American Dream and Why are We in Vietnam?, Ancient Evenings'' deals with homosexuality in “tolerant and even erotic fashion.”{{sfn|Dearborn|2001|p=121}} The novel’s protagonist narrator, a eunuch in a large harem, is anally penetrated and the most politically powerful man in the novel “gave Himself up to the little queens as if He were a woman” (124, April 1983). In an interview with John Whalen-Bridge regarding his later works, Mailer admits that, until ''Ancient Evenings'', he did not recognize homosexuality as “an element in all men” and has since come to understand homosexuality as “a bigger theme than [he] ever gave it credit for being” (vi). This change in views regarding sexuality suggests that Mailer revised his masculinist ideal in his later fiction and the ''Playboy'' excerpt of ''Ancient Evenings'' illustrates this revision. Magazine readers might have expected selections from the 700-page-plus novel to be more in line with ''Playboy''’s heterosexual agenda, but Mailer chose to include scenes that deal with “a spectrum of male motivation leading from homosexuality to machismo.”{{sfn|Lennon|1888|p=331}} Within the ''Playboy'' excerpts of ''Ancient Evenings'', Mailer explores power relationships between men and depicts various masculinity models.