Boys Don't Cry?

Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S.

Milette Shamir, Jennifer Travis, Milette Shamir, Jennifer Travis

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9780231506342
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

We take for granted the idea that white, middle-class, straight masculinity connotes total control of emotions, emotional inexpressivity, and emotional isolation. That men repress their feelings as they seek their fortunes in the competitive worlds of business and politics seems to be a given. This collection of essays by prominent literary and cultural critics rethinks such commonly held views by addressing the history and politics of emotion in prevailing narratives about masculinity. How did the story of the emotionally stifled U.S. male come into being? What are its political stakes? Will the "release" of straight, white, middle-class masculine emotion remake existing forms of power or reinforce them? This collection forcefully challenges our most entrenched ideas about male emotion. Through readings of works by Thoreau, Lowell, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and of twentieth century authors such as Hemingway and Kerouac, this book questions the persistence of the emotionally alienated male in narratives of white middle-class masculinity and addresses the political and social implications of male emotional release.

1

What Feels an American?

Evident Selves and Alienable Emotions in the New Man’s World

EVAN CARTON

The plain Truth is, an enlightened Mind, not raised Affections, ought always to be the guide of those who call themselves Men.

—Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion, 1743

To the European, the American is first and foremost a dollar-fiend. We tend to forget the emotional heritage of Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. We tend to disbelieve, for example, in Woodrow Wilson’s wrung heart and wet hanky. Yet surely these are real enough. Aren’t they?

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923

The struggle for American political independence, as Jay Fliegelman has observed, coincided with and made use of “a new affective understanding of the operations of language, one that reconceives all expression as a form of self-expression, as an opportunity as well as an imperative to externalize the self, to become self-evident.”¹ For Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid and other prominent eighteenth-century intellectuals, this “natural language” of feeling—an expression not of words “but of all the muscles of the body”—substantiated its author, evidenced his essential self, even in the case (writing) of his physical absence.² Reciprocally, the self thus evidenced authenticated the feelings and language that gave it expression.

The Declaration of Independence is just such a reciprocal linguistic operation in which a represented state of feeling and a represented state of the self authorize and naturalize one another. It is, in Jefferson’s opening sentence, the felt “[necessity] for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another” that constitutes Americans as “one people” in the first place and warrants their assumption of “the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s god entitle them.”³ In turn, this expression of national entitlement, of “separate & equal” identity, certifies that the felt necessity of separation from Britain is no vagary or artifice but rather an inevitable and unerring “affective understanding” (in Fliegelman’s phrase) of “the laws of nature and of nature’s god.” Thus, ingeniously, the feeling and the fact of Americanness declare one another here and affirm one another to be united, natural, evident—ingeniously, because outside the constitutive circuit of this declaration, neither the affective nor the political state of The United States fits any of these descriptions.

The special appeal to eighteenth-century Americans of natural language theory’s understanding of verbal expression “as an opportunity as well as an imperative to externalize the self, to become self-evident,” arose from their experience of personal identity—let alone, in the revolutionary years, of national identity—as anything but stably grounded or securely possessed. That is why, for many, the promise of natural self-expression seemed not only opportune but, as Fliegelman writes, “imperative,” a chance “to become self-evident.” Both in their respective internal conflicts and in their relational dialectic, the careers and writings of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, those most expressive of colonial Americans, lay out many of the grounds of ontological instability for men of this time and place. Was selfhood given or made, founded in the family or forged in the marketplace, discovered in community and in faithful subjection or invented in autonomous and experimental subjectivity, realized in seasons when one is deeply moved or plotted across spaces that one deftly moves through? (As passages of especial poignancy in both Edwards and Franklin intimate, each of these alternative models of identity may confer upon its adherent both a felt plenitude and a felt lack of being.)

The very alienation or alienability of identity at a moment when its traditional anchors—religion, family structure, local community, economic system, nationality—seemed shifting and insecure gave rise to the massive and multifaceted effort of eighteenth-century writers and thinkers to anchor the self in the ostensible immediacy and inalienability of feeling. Indeed, such an effort, as Claudia Johnson puts it, represented a “commanding imaginative response to a world riven with crisis.”⁴ Yet, in various ways that literary historians continue to map, feeling’s self in this period was also riven.⁵ One particular rift in feeling provides the occasion for this essay: it is feeling’s double identification on the one hand as a property and a characterological signature of individuals and, on the other, as a site of resistance not only to secure personal possession but to the very establishment of a regime of individual autonomy.

In her recent study, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen, Adela Pinch describes this tension as follows: “If feelings at times seem to be their own evidence and proof, and to belong infallibly to the self, they often seem at times impossible to know or to claim as one’s own.”⁶ Eighteenth-century writers, Pinch argues, are concerned “to pin feelings down,” to account for their origins and essences; yet they tend to find, with Hume, that “feelings spread about freely and fluidly,” that “they do not know the boundaries of individuals,” and, most unsettlingly, that these “alien influences” raise the question whether “the claims of individuals are subordinate to the feelings that visit them from without.”⁷ Thus emotions, crucial exhibits of the self’s case and intimate agents of its externalization, are at once, scandalously, “alien influences” that undermine the individual’s claim to self-possession. In its circumvention of the will and its transportation of foreign affairs into the deepest precincts of the individual, sensibility, commonly understood as one’s “natural and involuntary ability … to be responsive to the pain, pleasures, and needs of other[s],” alienates the very self it evidences.⁸

By the middle of the nineteenth century, this identity crisis had been eased, at a cost that we continue to tally and pay, through the ideological and organizational separation of gendered spheres. Emotion, involuntary response, and other-directedness were enshrined as the evidence—and the condition—of female identity. This revisionist containment of the transgender “cult of sensibility” as “the cult of true womanhood” putatively freed “the man of feeling” to become “the self-made man.” And this independent and proprietary individualist is (stereo)typically invoked by historians and critics in response to the question that Michel-Guillaume (also known as J. Hector St. John) de Crevecoeur asked at American identity’s moment of truth, which is to say American manhood’s and American nationhood’s moment of fabrication: “What is an American?”

A project of this volume, however, is to indicate how the gendered containment of emotion in America failed; where men as well as women resisted or transgressed the conventional bounds of feeling; and what encumbrances upon men the cult of insensibility entailed—among them, the burden that Tocqueville, surveying American individualism in 1831, described as “a strange melancholy which often haunts the inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of their abundance.”⁹ In inaugurating this collective project, I wish to return to the cultural, political, and affective context in which Crevecoeur posed his question–-that is, to a moment that precedes, or occurs at the outset of, feeling’s binding and gendering—in order to challenge its answer’s (anachronistic) self-evidence. Indeed, to return to Crevecoeur’s question in this context is to consider American (male and national) identity before it became “self-evident” precisely through its alienation, and feminization, of emotion. This essay proposes to effect such a return in order, first, to trace the process of such self-becoming and, second, to explore its internal resistances and perhaps to gather their residues. I attempt the former by means of a preliminary comparison of Jonathan Edwards’s and Benjamin Franklin’s personal encounters with the celebrated revivalist, George Whitefield, and a brief return to Jefferson’s Declaration; I pursue the latter in a reading of Crevecoeur’s Letter from an American Farmer that is more affected than most modern readings are (willing to be) by Crevecoeur’s narrator’s self-designation as “the farmer of feelings.”¹⁰

Learning early in 1740 of George Whitefield’s plan to tour the American colonies that fall, Jonathan Edwards sent the young English revivalist a humble and beseeching letter. “I apprehend, from what I have heard, that you are one who has the blessing of heaven attending you wherever you go,” Edwards wrote to the newly famous twenty-five-year-old, “and I have a great desire, if it may be the will of God, that such a blessing as attends your person & labors may descend on this town, and may enter mine own house, and that I may receive it in my own soul.”¹¹ At thirty-six, Edwards himself could reasonably lay claim to preeminence among American ministers, having increased the congregation and perhaps even eclipsed the reputation of his magisterial grandfather, Solomon Stoddard, in the decade since he had succeeded “the Pope of the Connecticut Valley” as pastor at Northampton. Moreover, Edwards’s leadership and stirring account of the Northampton religious awakening of 1735–36 had won him international renown and helped energize the English Nonconformist movement that produced Whitefield. Yet Edwards approaches the younger man as a supplicant, entreating him—if not to visit—at least to pray “for me among others,” and closes: “I am, reverend sir, unworthy to be called your fellow laborer, Jonathan Edwards.”¹²

When Whitefield preached in Boston some months later, he left his crowds of twenty to thirty thousand “affected and drenched in tears,” according to contemporary witnesses, “like persons that were hungering and thirsting after righteousness.”¹³ Whitefield’s histrionic, free-form sermons little resembled the more controlled, text-centered discourses that Edwards preached and preferred. Even in his first authenticating account of Northampton’s recent awakening, a 1735 letter to the Boston minister Benjamin Colman, Edwards had expressed uneasiness about the workings of mass psychology and about the susceptibility of some, under the sway of powerful feelings, to mistake these for conversion. Still, subordinating whatever personal preferences or reservations he may have had, Edwards welcomed the revivalist that October into his home and church; indeed, a member of the Northampton congregation reported that, when Whitefield presided there, “dear Mr. Edwards wept during almost the whole time of the exercise.”¹⁴

Soon afterward, and almost as eagerly as Edwards had done, colonial America’s other representative man seized his opportunity to experience Whitefield’s presence. Benjamin Franklin, however, did not weep. “The Multitudes of all Sects and Denominations that attended his Sermons were enormous,” Franklin reports, in the first of a surprisingly extended series of encounters between himself and Whitefield that he does not just mention but stages in The Autobiography, “and it was matter of Speculation to me who was one of the Number, to observe the extraordinary Influence of his Oratory on his Hearers.”¹⁵ Here, Franklin establishes the paradigmatic form and purpose of all his contacts with Whitefield: amidst “Multitudes” engaged in affective communion, in the ecstatic erasure or transcendence of the boundaries of their individual (and mortal) selves under Whitefield’s “extraordinary Influence,” Franklin stands in detached “Speculation,” performing a private exercise.

Were this merely an exercise in sociological curiosity or in religious indifference, it doubtless would have sufficed Franklin to perform it once. But Franklin’s insistence that he “often” attended Whitefield’s sermons and his dramatization of his mode of attendance suggest that, for him, these were ritual occasions to test, protect, and refortify the boundaries of personal identity by resisting the collective emotion that threatened them, by refusing receptivity and sensation in favor of productivity and calculation.¹⁶ Such a purpose is discernible throughout Franklin’s treatment of Whitefield in The Autobiography, but it is exemplified in the extraordinary image of himself among the rapt congregation that Franklin evokes in the following passage:

He preach’d one Evening from the Top of the Court House Steps, which are in the Middle of Market Street, and on the West Side of Second Street which crosses it at right angles. Both Streets were fill’d with his Hearers to a considerable Distance. Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the Curiosity to learn how far he could be heard, by retiring backwards down the Street towards the River, and I found his Voice distinct till I came near Front Street, when some Noise in that Street obscur’d it. Imagining then a Semicircle, of which my Distance should be the Radius, and that it were fill’d with Auditors, to each of whom I allow’d two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than Thirty Thousand.¹⁷

In their respective encounters with Whitefield, Edwards and Franklin both confront the vexed relationship between affect and identity that Pinch’s book describes. Edwards, working within the logic and vocabulary of Christian identity-in-communion, embraces a subjectivity not only compatible with but dependent on “alien influences,”¹⁸ “involuntary … responsive[ness],”¹⁹ and transgression of “the boundaries of individuals”²⁰—a subjectivity, indeed, neither freestanding nor self-evident but predicated on a kind of self-alienation. Franklin, by contrast, takes Whitefield and the “strange fits of passion” that his preaching elicited “as an opportunity as well as an imperative to externalize the self, to become self-evident,” an opportunity that for him entails the alienation of emotion.

As the word itself suggests, emotion—a moving out of or away from (the self)—offers Edwards a means of overcoming the “lust for selfhood”²¹ to which, in Edwards’s view, the Arminian tendency of eighteenth-century American religion and the commercial and entrepreneurial tendencies of eighteenth-century American society pandered. For Edwards, the most authentic of human emotions are those “affections of the soul”²² that, in Eliza New’s elegant summary of his position, “affiance us to Being at the expense of self-love.”²³ Such affections, Edwards indicates, are both alien and intimate, involuntary and desired, self-decentering and self-defining: “effects of God’s Spirit which … are entirely above nature, altogether of a different kind from anything that men find within themselves by nature,”²⁴ they nonetheless comprise “actings of the will and inclination of the soul.”²⁵

Thus, at its most sublime, feeling is the vehicle by which one may discover and exercise a wi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What Feels an American? Evident Selves and Alienable Emotions in the New Man’s World
• 2. Loving with a Vengeance: Wieland, Familicide and the Crisis of Masculinity in the Early Nation
• 3. “The Manliest Relations to Men”: Thoreau on Privacy, Intimacy, and Writing
• 4. Manly Tears: Men’s Elegies for Children in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
• 5. How to Be a (Sentimental) Race Man: Mourning and Passing in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk
• 6. The Law of the Heart: Emotional Injury and Its Fictions
• 7. “The Sort of Thing You Should Not Admit”: Ernest Hemingway’s Aesthetic of Emotional Restraint
• 8. Road Work: Rereading Kerouac’s Midcentury Melodrama of Beset Sonhood
• 9. Men’s Tears and the Roles of Melodrama
• 10. Men’s Liberation, Men’s Wounds: Emotion, Sexuality, and the Reconstruction of Masculinity in the 1970s
• 11. The Politics of Feeling: Men, Masculinity, and Mourning on the Capital Mall
• Bibliography
• Index