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

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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