Marked Men

White Masculinity in Crisis

Sally Robinson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780231500364
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: LGBT Literaturkritik

White men still hold most of the political and economic cards in the United States; yet stories about wounded and traumatized men dominate popular culture. Why are white men jumping on the victim bandwagon? Examining novels by Philip Roth, John Updike, James Dickey, John Irving, and Pat Conroy and such films as Deliverance, Misery, and Dead Poets Society —as well as other writings, including The Closing of the American Mind —Sally Robinson argues that white men are tempted by the possibilities of pain and the surprisingly pleasurable tensions that come from living in crisis.

CHAPTER 1

MARKING MEN, EMBODYING AMERICA

John Updike and the Reconstruction of Middle American Masculinity

In a 1974 self-help book entitled The Male Dilemma: How to Survive the Sexual Revolution, Anne Steinmann and David J. Fox describe the “pain of transition” suffered by ordinary Middle American men attempting to come to terms with the radical changes wrought by the civil rights and sexual liberation movements. Steinmann and Fox draw attention to the forced invisibility of these normative Americans who have been decentered in an era marked by the coming to visibility of others:

Whenever there is a major revolution or change in the power structure of some aspect of society, the outs, the insurgents, the underdogs always become the center of attention and receive the major share of publicity. Thus, in the United States, the activities of racial minorities and youthful rebels are given center stage, while their adversaries, the white, middle-class, middle-age establishment, sink into the shadows. In the sexual revolution, the male has been cast as the adversary, the “enemy.”

(9)

The felt social, cultural, and political marginalization of Middle American white men that Steinmann and Fox allude to here gets most famously articulated through the metaphor of the “silent majority.” Like Richard Lemon’s The Troubled American, in which he laments the American “common man’s” lack of a spokesperson or voice, Steinmann and Fox’s contribution to the portrait of white Middle American male angst represents ordinary American men as the victims of a profound silencing. Whereas for Lemon “Middle American” is mostly defined as white, victimized by civil rights legislation and racially conceived entitlement programs, for Steinmann and Fox the villain is feminism and women: “The publicity surrounding the ‘women’s lib’ movement has been formidable, but rarely, if ever, in the avalanche of words by or about women, has man been mentioned at all. He is told he must move over, but no one has bothered to tell him where or how. Like the establishment, he has become a symbol, a shadow” (9). This avalanche of women’s words literally threatens to suffocate men, who are thus not only silenced but also at risk of injury. Whether traced to the rising voices of women, or the upsurge in black visibility, these texts announce a crisis in white masculinity and, in drawing on a rhetoric of personal and sociocultural injury, make that crisis more real.

Throughout their book, Steinmann and Fox make liberal use of the figure of the “shadow” to describe the paradoxical condition in which white men find themselves vis-à-vis the revolutionary movements of the era: at once invisible behind the “underdogs” who have taken center stage, and newly visible as the “enemies” of change and of liberation, middle-class white men become a shadowy presence-absence on the American scene. White men are but a shadow of their former selves, enjoying but a shadow of their former power and entitlements; but they also cast a dark shadow on the sunny fields of free love, heady protests, and optimistic political claims. The sixties, to recall John Updike’s lament discussed in the introduction, were “no sunny picnic for” Protestant white males who had now become “the root of evil” in a major ideological, symbolic, and cultural shift (Self-Consciousness 146). Such paradoxical utterances—simultaneously claiming power and disempowerment, recognizing might and vulnerability—are a hallmark of texts that attempt to negotiate this moment of crisis. Updike’s Rabbit novels provide the most sustained literary treatment of the paradoxes of (in)visibility as experienced by “average” white men as the twentieth century progresses, and will be my primary focus here. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is not representative of America per se, as some of Updike’s critics have suggested; nor does he exactly stand in for a general American Everyman, as others argue;¹ he is, instead, a figure for middle-class white heterosexual masculinity, and the story of his decline (along with his triumphs) charts the ideological fortunes of that most normative of Americans: the Middle American.

“Middle American” is a term that came into wide public use on the American political and social scene around 1969, the year in which Updike set the second novel in the Rabbit series, Rabbit Redux (1971). In the first section of this chapter, I analyze the emergence of the “Middle American” as white and male, arguing that, paradoxically, this figure is created as the spokesperson for a normative American identity unmarked by gender and race and as a specific gendered and racialized identity. In the second and third sections, I analyze the complex enactments of an identity politics of the dominant found in the middle two Rabbit novels (Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich [1981]). As I argued in my introduction, while most accounts of the rise (and fall) of identity politics in post-liberationist American culture position white men outside the struggles over gender, race, and identity, my reading of the “silent majority,” and Updike’s exploration of it, suggests that such a view misses the vital fact that the meanings of whiteness and of masculinity are just as much at stake in such struggles as are the meanings of blackness or of femininity. While, on the one hand, it is accurate to read in the silent majority a “backlash” against liberation movements, the minority discourses that had become so vocal, and the bodies of women and people of color that had become so visible, it is also the case that the white men who so loudly proclaim their own “silencing” and decentering in post-liberationist American culture are fully participating in the struggles they are supposed to be lashing back against. In other words, in claiming to be deprived of the right both to represent “America” and to enjoy the fruits of a formerly secure entitlement, the spokesmen for Middle America paradoxically draw on the identity politics that were just beginning to emerge as the model of critique within radical thinking and activism. From the pages of Newsweek to the halls of academe, cultural commentators were busily making the Middle American visible—and visible as a victim. This move carries risks as well as payoffs, for in arguing that white men are victimized because they are white men, the spokespersons for the “silent majority” unwittingly corroborate claims that the rewards and punishments of social life in the United States are apportioned based on racial and gender identity, rather than merit or hard work or, simply, citizenship. While this new visibility enables a symbolic reempowerment of white men, now positioned as the “underdogs” of American culture, it also threatens to disempower white men by forcing the recognition that masculinity and whiteness are specific gender and racial categories modifying identity—rather than simply the invisible standard of American identity per se.

The Rabbit novels—spanning the decades from 1969 to 1980—chart the decentering of white masculinity, from its secure position as synecdoche for American identity tout court to its tenuous position as a specific (limited, historically circumscribed, dependent) category of American identity. Rabbit’s story is the story of a shift in the status of white heterosexual masculinity away from its position as the self-evident (and invisible) standard against which all other identities are measured and found to be “different.” It is under cover of this self-evidence that white masculinity has hidden both its claims to universality and its anxieties about its place in a culture that increasingly understands identity as specific, embodied, and marked by gender and race. The unmarked becomes the marked in Updike’s novels, and Rabbit’s engagement with the major historical and political forces of the late twentieth century demonstrates a wide range of reactions to and against this marking.² While the fall of white masculinity into specificity does, indeed, entail a degree of disempowerment, it is also the case that a growing group consciousness of middle American white men makes possible a different type of empowerment, one modeled on the various liberation movements which challenge the self-evident dominance of white masculinity on the American political, social, and sexual scene. That empowerment, paradoxically, is to be found in claims of victimization, and the Rabbit novels exhibit a pull in two contradictory directions: simultaneously dwelling on what might be called a feminizing disempowerment of the masculine and moving toward a recuperation of a fully phallic masculinity, the novels articulate dominant masculinity as structured by the competing attractions of power and vulnerability. It is primarily through changing representations of Rabbit’s body that Updike expresses the condition of white masculinity in contemporary culture, and the crisis the novels narrativize is, thus, a crisis of embodiment. Rabbit is made to bear the marks of his own gendered and racialized identity—his body gets marked by others—but Updike turns this social and political crisis into a much more personal, bodily crisis, as Rabbit’s body comes to signify the wounds to white and male privilege in post-liberationist American culture. Given the weird combination of pleasure and pain that characterizes Updike’s representation of the powerfully vulnerable, vulnerably powerful white man, it comes as no surprise that in the last novel of the series, Rabbit at Rest (1990), Harry owns up to the “masochistic Christian” in himself, the “soldier,” the man who takes pain over the “soft,” “uncritical love” offered by women (64).

While it might appear that Updike makes white masculinity visible in order to disempower it, and could thus be seen as instigating a critique of the privileges that attend invisibility, my reading of the Rabbit novels suggests a far more ambivalent intention and a less clearly recognizable effect. Updike’s novels are symptomatic of a cultural shift in which the visibility of white masculinity is both resisted and welcomed. These fictional texts both reflect and feed the growing crisis in white masculinity announced in the discourses around the discovery of Middle America, and do so by foregrounding the dilemmas of visibility and invisibility studiously suppressed in the nonfictional accounts. But the tension that animates these novels is not the tension between the fictional exposition of a cultural disease and its authoritative diagnosis, or between Rabbit as spokesman of the “silent majority” and Updike as its critic.³ Rather, the tension emerges from the textual enactment of a crisis in white masculinity that is productive of both pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability. The novels, together, represent the state of white masculinity as perpetually in crisis; each of the (eventually) four Rabbit novels is structured around a moment of crisis in Harry’s narrative and in the national narrative, but while isolated, historically discrete crises might get resolved within Updike’s series, the overwhelming narrative impulse is to keep the crisis in suspension—much as masochistic narratives keep warding off the end result of a desire for pleasure in pain.⁴ In fact, each of the novels almost hysterically evades closure. Most spectacularly, Rabbit at Rest leaves Rabbit on the verge of death with no hope for recovery; that Updike doesn’t actually kill him suggests that, despite evidence to the contrary, white masculinity might just survive even the most severe attacks on its authority and centrality. In fact, it might just be the case that male masochism, and the rhetoric of crisis so consonant with it, will lead the way to that survival.

THE “DISCOVERY” OF MIDDLE AMERICA AND THE MARKING OF WHITE MASCULINITY

The discovery of Middle America by the media and political parties in the late 1960s causes a shift in representations of “Americans,” away from the spectacular images of campus and urban unrest, youthful demonstrations against the war and against racist laws and practices; and toward far less sensational images of “workers,” “hardhats,” housewives, and ordinary folk, all white and all middle-aged. The construction of Middle America permeated mainstream culture through what Godfrey Hodgson calls a “complex process of feedback”: popular opinion polls, media representations, and public policy all conspired to elevate Middle Americans into the spotlight and to make civil rights, radical thought and action, and the Vietnam War taboo topics (370). While we might be tempted to argue that these representations simply sought to diagnose an already existing sociocultural disease—and prescribe a cure—it is in fact more accurate to say that, in announcing the dilemma of the silent majority, these discourses actually produced and enacted that crisis in dramatic narrative terms. Because of this, it becomes increasingly clear that, far from resolving that crisis, analyses of the silent majority instead worked to recenter white men as subjects-in-crisis, in a culture that was proving itself to be ever more interested in such subjects. The announcements of crisis thus actually function to ward off a “cure” since it is through dwelling on crisis that the threats to the normativity of white masculinity get managed.

While women are included within the category “Middle American,” the hero/villain who dominates books like Lemon’s The Troubled American, Steinmann and Fox’s The Male Dilemma, Donald Warren’s The Radical Center (1976), and Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg’s The Real Majority (1970) is white, male, heterosexual, and of a vast but hazily defined middle class. The technical inclusion of women does nothing to obstruct the construction of the Middle American as normatively male, and the masculinity at the center of this construction becomes clear in those moments when a commentator poses Middle Americans (ungendered) against Middle American women, or notes that the prevalence of women in the workplace “contributes to the sense of disorientation and alienation” (Lemon 58) that characterizes the Middle American (again ungendered). Women’s liberation, of even the tamest variety, is lumped under the category of “the new moral permissiveness” (Lemon 58) along with pornography, student protests, and loosened sexual mores. At the same time as Middle America is speaking against (or constructed as speaking against) civil rights and social justice, the “average Joe” is represented as speaking for “traditional” (patriarchal) values. “Traditional values” are linked with a white masculinity that escapes the “softness” pervading American culture in the wake of the “permissive” sixties.⁵ An unimpeachably masculine working class, attached to these traditional, virile values, thus, is used to heal over middle-class anxieties about the “feminization” that many saw corrupting American manhood in the sixties. The dominant image of a resurgent machismo in a hard hat is fueled by Spiro Agnew’s widely quoted rhetoric against the national mood of masochism promulgated by that “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” (quoted in Carroll 6). Symbolic constructs of femininity are used in contradistinction to the values of Middle America, and thus Middle America is firmly masculinized.

The normativity of white masculinity is confirmed by the data and testimony offered by Lemon, Scammon and Wattenberg, and Warren.⁶ The factoring out of all but white Americans from the category “Middle American” suggests that nonwhite Americans are the “problem” and white Americans the “victims” of that problem. But the category “white Americans,” and its cognate “Middle Americans,” is not nearly as unified as this conclusion would imply. Scammon and Wattenberg’s The Real Majority and Lemon’s The Troubled American reveal that the “middle” is a slippery and inexact term, meant to signal a homogeneous group defined by negatives: “unyoung, unpoor, unblack.” The homogeneity of the category “Middle American” is dependent upon the erasure of class and gender differences and thus Middle America comes to mean a unified and dissatisfied white America. But it is also dependent on the erasure of individual differences, for the category of “Middle American,” like the category of “white masculinity,” implies a collective, a unified grouping. What unifies this “politically and philosophically varied place, and the one thread that ties all its groups together is resentment” against the gains of the various liberation movements that were loudly claiming rights and restitution (Lemon 26). Ironically, however, it is by joining that chorus of voices that these normative Americans aim to differentiate themselves from the “young, the poor, and the black.”

Middle America comes into wide public view via a discourse that subtly collapses class, gender, and sexual tensions and differences among whites into a polarized debate about race, and thus threatens to erase the individualist values on which the Middle American stakes his normativity.⁷ The blurring of class boundaries in this discourse serves an important purpose in polarizing white against black Americans, but it also, paradoxically, places white men in a marked category that is known not for the differences of its individual members, but for its coherence, its sameness. At the same time, the Middle American comes to occupy the space of “difference,” as he replaces other rebels and takes his place as the hero of what looks an awful lot like a liberationist narrative. It is here that we begin to see that an identity politics of the dominant arises to compete with an identity politics of the marginalized, as voiceless and decentered Middle Americans are irresistibly drawn toward a collectivism that threatens to invalidate the very terms of normativity on which the category “Middle American” would seem to depend. Middle America becomes visible as wounded, weakened, and vulnerable, and while this might compromise the power and position of white masculinity, such a representation also enables white men to lay claim to a newly emerging center: white men, too, can claim civil rights and restitution against their injuries. What defines Middle American white men in this period is a sense that they have lost what was rightfully theirs; they experience a “deep alienation from a social system which, by rights, they ought to dominate” (Lemon 21, emphasis added). Part of that lost entitlement is the power to represent America per se, and to determine the terms of American normativity. It is in this sense that these Middle Americans, so angry at others’ use of the logic of victimization, position themselves as victims.

The degree to which this new discourse on “Middle America” assumes a victimized beleaguered whiteness as its prime identity category is striking, as “Middle America” is defined against civil rights and the fledgling social programs of the 1960s.⁸ A heavily coded discourse on whiteness pervades these studies of “troubled Americans,” in which whiteness hides behind what Updike refers to as “law-abiding conformity” (Self-Consciousness 146) and blackness is coded by “welfare,” “law and order,” “urban decay,” and “crime.” Whiteness takes cover behind the term “Middle American,” and it is a powerful enough, if often silent, signifier that all other differences become meaningless in the face of the racial binary. Scammon and Wattenberg, despite some awareness about “racial coding,” unwittingly paint a picture of a growing obsession with race which defines whiteness in the period. Importantly, though, the racial binary is skewed by the fact that “white” is a normative category and “black” a racial one. By 1974, when Wattenberg publishes The Real America, whiteness has so fully disappeared again into the normative that he can write with sturdy pragmatism and absolutely no self-consciousness: “It has become apparent that ‘law and order’ is [for Middle Am...