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

{{MR09}}

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?