Male Beauty

Postwar Masculinity in Theater, Film, and Physique Magazines

Kenneth Krauss

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781438450001, 9781438450018
• eBook ISBN: 9781438450025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Social Sciences

In the decades that followed World War II, Americans searched for and often founds signs of a new masculinity that was younger, sensitive, and sexually ambivalent. Male Beauty examines the theater, film, and magazines of the time in order to illuminate how each one put forward a version of male gendering that deliberately contrasted, and often clashed with, previous constructs. This new postwar masculinity was in large part a product of the war itself. The need to include those males who fought the war as men—many of whom were far younger than what traditional male gender definitions would accept as "manly"—extended the range of what could and should be thought of as masculine. Kenneth Krauss adds to this analysis one of the first in-depth examinations of how males who were sexually attracted to other males discovered this emerging concept of manliness via physique magazines.

CHAPTER 1

Seeing Through The Glass Menagerie

The Emerging Specter of Male Beauty

Re-readings

In Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, written and first produced before World War II had ended, the figure of the defiant, nonconformist young male, which would haunt American culture during the late 1940s and through the 1950s, first appears on stage; presciently, Williams creates a character who will dominate much of the literature of the postwar period. The young man who escapes the traditional, approved social and sexual norms and attempts, through his alienation, to thwart the middle-class rules that impose themselves on the individual, remains a romantic emblem of youthful defiance in an oppressive and repressive era. Tom, the narrator of the play and a character in it, and his father, in whose footsteps he follows and whose likeness he bears, anticipate a long line of angry young men that would give meaning to a generation struggling through the age of conformity.

In the midst of this drama, is the image of the handsome, grinning man, the attractive but dangerous icon around whose memory Tom and his family live their lives. The handsome face of the escapee, of the absent yet present father, whose image hangs on the wall in an enlarged photograph, becomes central to the play. Thus, the notion of male beauty is introduced as not merely attractive but dangerous as well.

Tom’s gender and sexuality in the context of the culture surrounding him are especially radical in this wartime work. In The Glass Menagerie, connections and disconnections between gender and sexuality play out in a complex and sometimes ambiguous way. Although his later works would more overtly portray the interplay between these two separate but related constructs, Williams’s first Broadway success quietly but seriously questions how men and women become who and what they are. If the writing seems more implicit and less controversial in The Glass Menagerie than in those later, often sensational plays, it is nonetheless highly revealing here: Our inner desires and our performances of them for the outer world combine in an uneasy alliance, the latter striving to hide and shield the former, the former seeking fulfillment in spite of the latter.

The Glass Menagerie may at first glance seem a strange place to look for evidence of a questioning of gender and sexuality, for the traditions of watching and reading that have surrounded this text have helped shape generations of responses to it that rarely lead to such a question. As Michael Paller puts it in Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Broadway, the “perception of The Glass Menagerie as a pleasant, non-threatening affair stems from the reactions of the newspaper and magazine critics who witnessed the first production. …” At the same time, readers of what Paller calls Williams’s “nice play” (33) seem to miss the references that would lead them to an understanding of how the play comments on what at the time were considered not-so-nice subjects. The apparent understatement in both the play’s dialogue and visual elements is, in fact, a careful encoding of issues that Williams wished to explore. These wary inquiries, about sex and the objects and practices of sexuality and about the nature of masculine and feminine behavior, were intended to communicate to audiences—perhaps specifically to important subgroups within those audiences—in a time when any serious interrogation of gender and sexuality was, at least on stage, usually taboo.

The same may be said for readers: Mark Lilly, for example, suggests that “gay readers can see the various meanings … in a way unperceived by heterosexuals …” (153). In any case, initial reactions to the play and subsequent reception of additional stagings, along with readings of the scripts, helped create the myth that this script was, despite the playwright’s subsequent career, somehow innocent of the rather adult themes that characterized his subsequent oeuvre.

Indeed, according to one late twentieth-century literary critic’s reckoning, “Williams’s first Broadway success, The Glass Menagerie (1944),¹ is rare among his works in that the sexuality of his characters is not a significant factor” (Fisher 15). Such a statement conforms to the long-time practice of how this script is interpreted. In reality, however, not only are the sexuality and the gender of the characters in The Glass Menagerie a significant factor, but also as in all Williams’s work, they probably constitute the significant factor. That they and their importance are not immediately obvious to many make them perhaps even more significant.

Any discussion of the play’s dramatic, as well as theatrical, text is complicated by the fact that there are two “official” versions, both printed within a year of the play’s Broadway premiere, a “reading” text prepared by Williams in 1945, in which he attempted to restore many of the cuts and changes made by the first production, and a “performance” text from the same year, which reflects the changes made to and also the original direction of the premiere production.² Choosing between the two is difficult, for the reading text includes many of the innovative stage techniques Williams had first envisioned in composing the work; the performance text incorporates many of the alterations made by Williams and others before the play first opened in New York. Most who have read the play know it from the reading version; most who have seen the play know it from the performance edition.

Because my intention is to discuss The Glass Menagerie not merely as a text assigned to students but rather as the basis of stage performances, I rely on the performance text. This version of the script is very close to the reading version. Where the two coincide, I first note the page number for the performance version, then for the reading version. Where the two diverge, I will indicate any significant inconsistencies parenthetically.

In examining the written text(s) of this play, I attempt to locate (as most critics try to do) certain signs, some linguistic, some visual, some nonverbal, to support my thesis. Nonetheless, there remains one sign that is conspicuous not because of its presence but because of its absence. This forbidden topic, the great unmentionable, is appropriately signaled by an apparent lack of signs, and this lack has been traditionally read to point to something left indeterminate. This absence, still, is telling. Indeed, in an earlier work, Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, a prolonged lack of sound that is dramatized in the form of a whispered conversation between two characters whom the audience cannot hear, serves to name the particular perversity from which two other characters allegedly suffer. Similarly, in The Glass Menagerie, “the love that dare not speak its name” echoes through the artifice of euphemism and the profound silence that inevitably and unavoidably name it. For Hellman, such silence was a matter of taste and tact—she was able to “name” the characters’ supposed “crime against nature” without offending anyone; for Williams, however, this silence is part of an ongoing defensive strategy in an era when homosexuality was almost universally despised.

For more than half a century, then, the prevailing method of interpreting The Glass Menagerie was to preclude that which is unspoken and unseen. “If Williams had wanted us to know what Tom does when he goes out at night, he would have told us or showed us,” goes the self-fulfilling explanation. Yet much of the play is clearly devoted to the meaning of absence and to the presence of that which is not there. Even if we would like to stand by Lear’s assertion that “nothing will come of nothing,” we cannot avoid the fact that “nothing” is certainly capable of signifying “something.”

If Tom’s rebelliousness is due, at least in large part, to the conflict between his feelings about his sexuality and his attempt to “perform” a “masculine” role, much the same may be said of Williams himself, whose ambivalence and marginalization as a homosexually identified male cast him, certainly in his own eyes, as an outsider. Nonetheless, neither he nor the character is the gay liberator who would emerge in the late 1960s. Williams firmly believed, in contrast to the identity politics that would later gain currency, that one should not be identified by one’s sexuality because sexuality was highly private, even idiosyncratic, and peculiar to oneself.

Chez Wingfield

The first act or part (act in the performance version, part in the reading text) of The Glass Menagerie follows life inside the apartment of the Wingfield family in Saint Louis. Amanda, a former Southern belle who has been abandoned by her alcoholic husband some years earlier, is striving to take care of her two grown children, Tom, who fancies himself a poet but currently clerks in a shoe warehouse, and Laura, a sickly, desperately shy girl with a limp. As scene follows scene into the intermission—in the performance version, Scenes 1 to 6, in the reading version Scenes 1 to 5—the principal action builds from Amanda’s realization that Laura is incapable of earning her own living to Amanda’s plan to try to marry her off; Amanda hints to Tom, whose unhappiness at home and work becomes increasingly observable, that once Laura has secured a husband, he may leave.

In the second act or part of the play, Tom brings home to dinner a work acquaintance, who turns out to be the very young man with whom Laura was once infatuated in high school. The meeting ultimately turns disastrous when Jim, Laura’s would-be gentleman caller, reveals that he is already engaged.

This summation necessarily excludes the better part of the play, which is dramatized in a somewhat fragmented way and with the device of Tom, at a later age, telling the story. George W. Crandell asserts that “[t]he success of … [this narration] depends upon willing subjects, viewers who will permit the fictional character, Tom Wingfield, to define the spectators’ point of view” (6). Yet others, such as Brian Richardson (683) and Nancy Anne Cluck (84), remind us that, as Williams himself cautions, “The narrator is an undisguised convention of the play. He takes whatever license with dramatic convention is convenient to his purposes.”³ The self-conscious monologue that sets up the opening scene is addressed directly to the audience:

I have tricks in my pocket—I have things up my sleeve—but I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. (Performance 11; Reading 144, with slight variations)

This comparison of a magician’s routine with a dramatic performance, which implies that traditional stage realism is nothing more than a set of illusions that give the impression of reality and that reality itself is highly illusory, is continued later in the play, when Tom speaks to Laura about a stage magician, Malvolio, whom he has just come from seeing; however, coming as they do at the beginning of the play, of course, these lines seem enigmatic, and the succeeding information does little to clarify them: Tom speaks of the play being set in “that quaint period,” the Great Depression, “when the large middle class of America was matriculating from a school for the blind” (11; 145, with “huge” instead of “large” and the period described as “the thirties”). Tom makes references to the Spanish Civil War and to American labor conflicts, and declares, “This is the social background of the play” (11; 145). “The play is memory,” he announces, and relates the dim lighting, the sentimentality, the lack of realism, and the music, which has just begun to be heard, as stage conventions consistent with memory. He then introduces himself and the three other characters, Amanda, Laura, and Jim, calling the audience’s attention to “a fifth character who doesn’t appear other than in a photograph hanging on the wall” (11; 145).

The picture, an oversized portrait of Tom’s father, “is the face of a very handsome young man in a doughboy’s First World War cap” (10; 144), the stage directions tell us. The father, who “left us a long time ago” (11; 145), will reemerge metaphorically in the context of the stage magician. Mr. Wingfield’s “vanishing act” will become the one trick that Tom wishes Malvolio would teach him—that is, how to disappear without harming anyone or anything. Such a feat is, in real life, impossible, Tom suggests, and his “very handsome” father⁴ has come to symbolize just how hurtful escape can be to those left behind.

As rambling as the opening monologue may sound, a central trope does emerge as the speech unwinds. The whole idea of hiding tricks in one’s pocket and things up one’s sleeve refers to the illusion of sudden “magical” manifestation, pretending to conjure what is absent into something that is present. The middle class had “matriculated from a school for the blind,” but its sightless members were “having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy” (11; 145); in other words, the experience of trying to read the invisible but decipherable signs of the truth is painful and difficult. The violent visual image of “revolution” in Spain (11; 145, the name Guernica is also invoked) and of the less horrific but analogous “shouting and confusion” in Midwestern cities, amplifies the “fire” of the “Braille alphabet.” The summation of characters, both those who are present and the one who is absent, and the ironic description of the vanishing father—“He was a telephone man who fell in love with long distance” (11; 145, distances)—set the tone for the father’s non-presence: His last communication was “a picture-postcard from the Pacific Coast of Mexico, containing a message of two words: ‘Hello—Good-bye!’ and no address” (11; 145, adds “from Mazatlan, on the Pacific Coast …”). Thus, from the play’s first moments, the spectators are asked to consider what they can and cannot see, to question the reality of what is and is not present, and to separate themselves from the conventions of stage realism that attempt to reconstruct an empirical reality that is less true than the one depicted by this play.

In the original production, the photograph of the father was of Eddie Dowling, the actor who played Tom. This use of Dowling is evident from stills from the original production and from the promptbook, which specifies,

THIS IS VERY
IMPORTANT
| The actor who |
plays Tom, poses for
the father’s photograph,
with his widest grin.
The photo should be
very large, for
when it lights up,
the play gets some
of it’s [sic] laughs

(Promptbook, The Glass Menagerie, 1–2)⁵

From the beginning, then, the audience is asked to see Tom as his “handsome” father and vice versa. This coincidence of imagery serves as a sign during the play to suggest that Tom and the absent man are one and the same, and that with their first glimpse of Tom on stage, “dressed as a merchant sailor” (10; 144), he has already become a man who has disappeared. So Tom is twice present on stage and, eventually, twice absent.

In the short scene that follows the monologue, Amanda harangues Tom over dinner, suggesting that his eating habits verge on the bestial: “Animals have secretions in their stomachs which enable them to digest their food without mastication, but human beings must chew their food before they swallow it down” (12; 146). References to animals abound throughout the play—the very title The Glass Menagerie assures that such imagery is germane—but Amanda’s differentiation of human from animal behavior is especially meaningful. Later in this act (Scene 4 in Performance; Scene 5 in Reading), she proclaims, “Instinct is something that people have got away from! It belongs to animals! … Only animals have to satisfy instincts!” (30; 174) In the role of mother, Amanda repeatedly instructs her now-grown children on how to sublimate their “animalistic” feelings so they can construct what she would call “human” personas. In the first segment of the play, she attempts to correct, along with Tom’s eating habits, his posture (22; cut), his reading material (23; 161), and his tendency to spend his nights elsewhere (23–24; 163–164).

But the real object of Amanda’s pedagogy becomes Laura rather than Tom. Even in this early scene, before she finds out that Laura has dropped out of the business school in which Amanda had enrolled her, she instructs her daughter on how to “be the lady” (13; 147) and to await her “gentlemen callers” (13–15; 147–150). In reminiscing about her own beaux from decades past, Amanda reveals her Southern, middle-class background, describing what a young woman was expected to be: “It wasn’t enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure—although I wasn’t slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions” (13; 148). This gender construct, which Amanda, despite the decades that have followed her career as a belle, still plays out, is precisely modeled by the mother for the daughter through role-playing; in the next scene, the pressure to fit Laura into this g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Seeing Through The Glass Menagerie!: The Emerging Specter of Male Beauty
• Chapter 2: Dangerous Male Beauty and the Masculine Style: Regular and Irregular Guys in Tea and Sympathy
• Chapter 3: Albee’s Untold Story: The Aftermath of Male Youth and Beauty
• Chapter 4: Complicated Masculinity: The Beauty of Montgomery Clift
• Chapter 5: Doing and Undoing Masculinity: The Early Performances of Marlon Brando
• Chapter 6: Beauty Forever Young: The Brief Career of James Dean
• Chapter 7: All About Dick: Physique Magazines and the Career of Richard Harrison
• Chapter 8: As Beauty Does: The Retreating Dr. Bishop
• Chapter 9: Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Male Sex, Sexuality, and Gender
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover