Male Armor
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Male Armor

The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Culture

Jon Robert Adams

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Male Armor

The Soldier-Hero in Contemporary American Culture

Jon Robert Adams

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There is no shortage of iconic masculine imagery of the soldier in American film and literature—one only has to think of George C. Scott as Patton in front of a giant American flag, Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, or Burt Lancaster rolling around in the surf in From Here to Eternity. In Male Armor, Jon Robert Adams examines the ways in which novels, plays, and films about America's late-twentieth-century wars reflect altering perceptions of masculinity in the culture at large. He highlights the gap between the cultural conception of masculinity and the individual experience of it, and exposes the myth of war as an experience that verifies manhood.

Drawing on a wide range of work, from the war novels of Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller to David Rabe's play Streamers and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead, Adams examines the evolving image of the soldier from World War I to Operation Desert Storm. In discussing these changing perceptions of masculinity, he reveals how works about war in the late twentieth century attempt to eradicate inconsistencies among American civilian conceptions of war, the military's expectations of the soldier, and the soldier's experience of combat. Adams argues that these inconsistencies are largely responsible not only for continuing support of the war enterprise but also for the soldiers' difficulty in reintegration to civilian society upon their return. He intends Male Armor to provide a corrective to the public's continued investment in the war enterprise as a guarantor both of masculinity and, by extension, of the nation.

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CHAPTER 1

“THE GREAT GENERAL WAS A HAS-BEEN”

The World War II Hero in 1950s Conformist Culture

Ernest Hemingway, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Enervation of America's War Heroes

In his 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway introduced his American reading audience to the term salao, which means the “worst form of unlucky” (9). Hemingway attributes the term to his protagonist, Santiago, and describes him as “thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck” (9). “Many of the fisherman” who reside in Santiago's village “made fun” of him, but “he was not angry” (11). Santiago and Manolin, the village boy who befriends him, construct fictions to ease their daily labor for food. They talk of a net they no longer own, of a pot of yellow rice and fish they do not have to eat, and of American baseball games they will never see. When alone, Santiago occupies his time dreaming of Africa “and the long golden beaches and the white beaches, so white they hurt your eyes,” that he visited as a boy and where now, in dreams, “he lived…every night” (24). Santiago also recalls his day-long wrestling match, which “started on a Sunday morning and ended on a Monday morning” (70). He triumphed, and “for a long time after that everyone had called him The Champion” (70). But despite Santiago's pride in these reminiscences, the preeminent personality trait Hemingway grants Santiago is humility: “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility. But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of true pride” (13–14). Santiago counterbalances the physical effects of age, which threaten to steal away his livelihood, with mental comfort in recollections of his past and faith in his “many tricks” and “resolution” (23).
The novella depicts in detail Santiago's solitary fishing venture on his eighty-fifth day without a catch. Not long after setting out, the old man hooks the largest fish of his career and spends nearly two days trying to overcome its amazing strength. The duel becomes more a test of will and endurance than of skill, and as Santiago battles the giant fish, the reader revisits ideas about what makes a man, long established in Hemingway's corpus and publicly associated with the author himself. Santiago thinks, “Pain does not matter to a man” (84). He is grateful that he “know[s] how to suffer like a man” (92). Eventually, Santiago conquers the will of his fish, kills it, and lashes it to the side of his small boat. A Hemingway hero once again appears to triumph on the hunt, until sharks besiege Santiago's craft. Santiago musters every ounce of strength at his disposal and improvises every weapon he can in order to stave off the frenzy, but he returns to port with nothing but a skeleton as testament to his achievement. But the skeleton proves inadequate to garnering Santiago the valorization that Hemingway masculinity requires, as only Manolin talks to Santiago once he returns.1 All appears to be lost for this hero, who becomes dependent upon the boy. Manolin brings the old man food he begs off local villagers and encourages Santiago to rest and recover. Manolin insists that “there is much that [he] can learn” (126) from Santiago. So the old man falls asleep to dream of lions in Africa, knowing he still has uses, even though he is salao.
The Old Man and the Sea was an instant success, pleasing readers and critics alike, garnering Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize, and securing for him, in the minds of many, the Nobel Prize in Literature. After a series of rather dismal, unsuccessful novels, it appeared that Papa was back on top of his game.2 But the din of the encomiums obscured some of the realities of a text that clearly expresses not only its author's fears of his own uselessness but a startling redefinition of the hero and the notions of manliness hitherto identified with Hemingway. Santiago is an old man, no longer good at his craft, his tricks and resolution nullified by his aging and by forces of nature he cannot control. Moreover, the old man realizes his uselessness, accepts it with humility, and founders in memories of childhood places far away. Santiago's salao image and his dependence upon Manolin must have resonated incongruously with the Hemingway man as the American public had come to perceive him, but the public loved the hero anyway. So why was the book so admired? Why did critics and readers laud the “return” of Papa Hemingway?
This chapter explores the curious nature of 1950s public adulation of anachronistic models of masculinity, such as that Hemingway experienced with Santiago, and explains that admiration in terms of altering perceptions of successful manhood following World War II. It registers the locus of the disjunction between civilian ideals of heroic manhood and authorial presentation of alternative masculinities in governmental manipulation of public knowledge during World War II. The following analyses of World War II novels by Norman Mailer, James Jones, Gore Vidal, and James Barr reveal that these veteran-novelists present their images of masculinity as both a corrective to civilian disinformation and an anodyne to the rise of conformist masculinity in 1950s domestic consumer society. These novels, as I read them, force a reimagination of masculinity through either the specter of homoerotic desire or the presentation of homosexual identity, all within a military environment—hence the novels’ use of a World War II setting. The emergence of the feminine signified by homoerotic desire or homosexuality seems surprising as an alternative to masculinity, but this must be understood as the most readily recognizable spoiler of masculinity for a civilian public uncertain of precisely how to define manhood. As the novels attempt to reimagine masculinity via the suppressed form of the male/female binary, they simultaneously suggest that the public's understanding of war is incomplete, ill informed, or off base. Thus, the following examination of masculinity in several World War II novels delineates Male Armor’s theme of the persistent gap between civilian understanding and soldierly experience of war.
Perhaps Hemingway's cognizance of civilian disinformation about war informed his presentation of Santiago, as his literary career featured numerous examples of his attempt to rectify the gap between civilian understanding and soldierly experience.3 The fisherman's stoic acceptance of his fate, and his inability to attract accolades for his deed, certainly aren't unusual results in a Hemingway novel. That the public would laud them nonetheless prompts Hemingway biographer Kenneth Lynn to comment that “people give up on their heroes reluctantly” (566). In reassessing The Old Man and the Sea, Lynn asserts that “today there is only one question worth asking about The Old Man.” Specifically, “how could a book that lapses repeatedly into lachrymose sentimentality and is relentlessly pseudo-Biblical, that mixes cute talk about baseball with crucifixion symbolism of the most appalling crudity, have evoked such a storm of applause from highbrows and middlebrows alike—and in such overwhelming numbers?” (566). Clearly, Lynn locates the success of The Old Man and the Sea in the public's confusion between Ernest Hemingway's persona and his work, the latter signifying less in face of the former.4 What the public and critics refused to see was that the persona had changed as well.
Lynn places this transformation of the Hemingway hero within a set of specific historical events and attitudes that both influence and undergird the arguments proffered in this chapter. Post–World War II America's introduction to Cold War exigencies coincided, according to Lynn, with the “nation's vanished sense of illimitable power” (566), for although the United States was in possession of the most powerful weaponry known to mankind, use of that power offered mass extinction as its purchase. Moreover, a nation on constant guard against the ills of Communism, which threatened to overrun world governments and pervade the fibers of American society, could never be a nation confidently at ease with its status as a world power. The Cold War presented Americans with something they had not experienced since the Civil War: an enemy lodged on their own soil, perhaps in the hearts and minds of their neighbors.
This newly perceived threat enervated the heroes of America's past, for constraining it demanded approaches previously unimagined. Old rules no longer applied. Never was this so clearly brought to the attention of Americans than when President Harry Truman fired America's great World War II general Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. After his victory at the battle of Inchon, MacArthur had attempted to carry on the traditional military strategy of attack and subdue. Truman, however, feared that the full-frontal push suggested by MacArthur might lead to a nuclear rebuff by the Communists and commanded MacArthur not to execute such a push. When the general protested, he was promptly fired. In the nuclear age, Truman's actions suggested, military business was no longer business as usual; a compromising diplomacy would have to replace brute displays of force. MacArthur's return to the United States was heralded as the coming home of a great war hero, but, as Lynn claims, “the citizens who cheered him on curbsides in 1951 and who named boulevards, causeways, and high schools in his honor knew that he stood for an outdated philosophy of international conduct. The great general was a has-been” (568). So too was Hemingway's Santiago, who like MacArthur was lauded by a reading public that ought to have known better.
The change in America's military policies evidenced by the dismissal of MacArthur heralded an epistemological crisis in American minds, for the removal of America's heroes necessitated reassessments of what victory meant both for individual men and for the United States as a nation. Lynn summarizes these attitudes and attempts to explain them: “The American hero was perceived to have changed. Somehow he had lost something…. It wasn't his prowess. It wasn't his resourcefulness. And by and large it wasn't his belief in himself, although the pangs of self-doubt were not unfamiliar to him…. There was no longer any common agreement about what the meaning of winning was, so that no victory ever brought unalloyed satisfaction” (568).
To the historical observer the radical nature of the definitional changes Lynn recounts, as well as the misgivings they prompted, may be difficult to perceive, but the stories of MacArthur and of Hemingway's Old Man presage at least some of the alteration American ideals were undergoing. A generation earlier, Americans had entered World War I convinced of the notion that whatever forces threatened American notions of masculinity, and hence of heroism, could be thwarted by participation in a war. America's victory in World War I assuaged masculine doubts until the arrival of the Depression, which sufficed to unman many Americans. But heady optimism, coupled with governmental propaganda, once again triumphed as the United States entered World War II with the expectation of victory and of the resultant renewal of masculinity, via soldierly and economic invigoration. When that victory was achieved late in 1945, expectations of the primacy of the American man should have been realized. Susan Faludi catalogs these expectations in Stiffed, her study of men who came of age in the baby-boom generation. Faludi states that “the United States came out of World War II with a sense of itself as a masculine nation, our ‘boys’ ready to assume the mantle of national authority and international leadership. The nation claimed an ascendancy over the world, men an ascendancy over the nation, and a male persona of a certain type ascendancy over men” (16). Everything, in other words, that Americans believed about the war effort and the changes it had wrought at home convinced American men that the world was their oyster.
But the promise Faludi summarizes also contained the seeds of what would become male revolt in the 1950s, replacing, and thus glossing, individual experience with a national narrative. The idea that returning veterans were “our boys,” owned by a nation that would speak for them, created a distinction between the civilian view of the men and the perspective of the men themselves. Veterans’ perspectives would only become part of the American experience of World War II once these men began to recount their experiences, and the stories they told differed from civilian belief. After the parades ended, veterans encountered not ascendancy, but a confining expectation of domestic manhood that contradicted the masculinist military values they had gone to the war to uphold. MacArthur's replacement and Santiago's superfluity were also theirs. David Buchbinder recounts veterans’ reaction to transformations in civilian society: “The men…feared that their strengths and skills as men might no longer be required; that, indeed, they had been emasculated by the very practice—war—which had traditionally allowed men to display masculine qualities such as courage, fortitude, endurance, stoicism and sheer physical strength” (8). Hemingway's Santiago claims these attributes for himself. The narrative, however, disallows him the benefit of possessing them, and what may be perceived as a metaphor for the author can be construed for returning veterans as well. The prewar optimism over American masculine regeneration was betrayed postwar by the knowledge that victory had wrought yet another, more insidious war. This knowledge sufficed to countermand the previous notion that war produced men, replacing the promise of soldierly masculinity for veterans with misgivings about heroism, misgivings that would permeate stories written of the war.
The dissolution of formerly held notions of heroism and masculinity precipitated the formulation of new ideas about what it meant to be a man in America. Postwar prosperity turned American minds to the creation of new images of heroic behaviors and manliness consistent with economic growth. The American propaganda machine promulgated attitudes about what men would do and be in 1950s America, attitudes aimed directly at returning veterans finding it difficult to assimilate into postwar society. Advertising culture showed how soldiers could still benefit their country by contributing to its newfound prosperity and by submitting their individual wills to the larger project of societal growth and betterment. Hence, as Joe Dubbert argues, the notion of the 1950s conformist man was born and disseminated: “What came to be recognized as the ‘normal social groove’ after the war and in the fifties,” Dubbert contends, “was the absorption of many individuals into very large organizations, business, industries, and colleges. Individuals were expected to accept the company line because the company, with all of its collective wisdom, really knew what was best. What followed was a further erosion of individualism and the establishment of a conforming and standardizing atmosphere” (242).
Coupled with the insistence that men conform to notions of public behavior through their social interrelations was the suggestion that men's private behaviors correspond to the veneer of conformity as well. As a result, the image of the breadwinner became the masculine ideal for the 1950s and the home his new kingdom. Rowena Chapman summarizes the civilian expectations that would ironically begin to define masculinity through the domestic sphere: “Men were encouraged to marry early (average age 23) and to take on the sole support of a wife and family. A whole panoply of professionals were enlisted to persuade men that the breadwinner ethic was the only state for an adult male, and that the achievement of maturity necessitated the successful completion of a number of ‘life tasks’ namely marriage and fatherhood. Failure to complete these tasks was incompatible with adult masculinity; those who failed were characterised as either not fully adult, or not fully masculine” (233).
In defining “adult masculinity” via the nuclear family and the domestic sphere, 1950s conformist culture completely reversed the late-Victorian fears of emasculation that World War I was supposed to assuage. Moreover, adherence to the ideal nuclear family buttressed prodigious economic growth because it also enlisted men in the acquisition of the numerous domestic gadgets that the revved-up war economy began to produce postwar. In his study of Cold War America, Robert J. Corber notes that “men were no longer encouraged to show initiative or to exert their independence from the domestic sphere. Rather, they were expected to define themselves through their identities as consumers” (5–6). Thus, new expectations of men were aligned with America's transition to postwar production and consumption of domestic goods, and these expectations were among those that contributed to veterans’ difficulty in reintegrating into civilian society postwar.
But how could the civilian public have developed views of men's duties, desires, and functions that were so radically different from those the returning veterans held themselves?
I'd like to suggest that the nature of civilian America's experience of World War II enabled these diverging views of masculinity that, at most, veteran authors may have wished to amend and, at least, informs their portrayals of soldiers and the war. Civilian experience of World War II was predominantly shaped by the Office of War Information's iron-fisted control over images viewed by civilians. In his book The Censored War, George Roeder describes the policies adopted by the newly constructed Pentagon to maintain public support of the war's execution and management by limiting what the public saw. Roeder's central purpose in outlining this development parallels the investigation Male Armor makes into war literature: Roeder insists that a radical disjuncture between civilian visual experience and veteran combat experience permeated the postwar atmosphere, creating “the possibilities of misunderstandings” (123) that the present study locates in representations of war. Roeder traces the origin of this gap to what Americans were allowed to see throughout the duration of the war and to the attitudes such controls germinated, claiming that “during the war the U.S. government, with extensive support from other public and private organizations, made the most systematic and far-reaching effort in its history to shape the visual experience of the citizenry” (2). Roeder delineates some of these restrictions: government officials forbade “publication not only of photographs of those maimed in combat but also of pictures of racial conflicts on military bases, violent confrontations between G.I.s and their foreign allies, and other evidence of disunity within their own camp. They suppressed photographs of shell-shocked G.I.s, of those killed in jeep accidents, and of victims of Allied bombing raids and U.S. chemical warfare experiments” (3).
Additionally, the government censored any “photographs of American soldiers who died in training accidents, who shot themselves, and who were killed or wounded by ‘friendly fire’” (24). Roeder further claims that “official images never showed soldiers crying” (24) and that, throughout the war, “military authorities remained alert for sexually ambivalent images” (49). He also cites “a rule maintained throughout the war” that “forbade publication of any photograph revealing identifiable features of the American dead” and asserts that “censors kept emotionally wounded Americans out of sight throughout the war” (16).
Images that the Office of War Information (OWI) did allow Americans to view were part of a massive propaganda campaign meant “to create reassuring visual comparisons of military and home front activities” (Roeder 59).5 Americans were led to believe not only that soldiers were performing duties similar to those of civilians but that every action taken at home contributed to the overall well-being of the nation. But Roeder also notes that “even as the government flattered civilians with images comparing home front and combat activities, it told soldiers that what they were going through was different from anything stay-at-homes could imagine” (51)—in effect, further widening the gap. Whereas combat soldiers may have witnessed death first-hand daily, Roeder charts only a gradual increase in the violent content of the images civilians viewed over the entirety of the war and little that would suggest American soldiers suffered violent injury or death themselves. He relates that “during America's first year in the war only a few published photographs…acknowledged the costs of American involvement, such as one of a Marine in agony from wounds suffered at Guadalcanal” (10). “By September 1943,” he continues, “concerns about public complacency led officials to release from this grim archive [the Pentagon's ‘Chamber of Horrors’] photographs that showed death, but not yet bloody death” (1). This public complacency, “indicated by worker absenteeism, job switching, strikes and decreases in voluntary enlistments” (Roeder 15), was thought to be remediable through depictions of American soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice. But despite increasing images of American dead released to buffer civilian support, it was not until the “spring of 1945, amid celebrations marking the end of World War II in Europe,” that “the blood of an American soldier was first shed on the pages of Life magazine” (Roeder 1).
Roeder also recounts how the Hollywood film industry contributed to the gap between the public perception of war and veterans’ experience of it. Though less reticent to depict American dead than official government publications were, movies consistently idealized the manner of their dying: “Americans saw fictional counterparts of their country's soldiers die on the nation's seventeen thousand movie screens soon after Pearl Harbor, nearly two years before the release of photographs and newsreels of actual death. But in these early films American deaths, always portrayed as heroic and meaningful, never hinted at the capacity of the machinery of modern warfare to mutilate the human body” (Roeder 21).
Paul Fussell expresses a similar opinion about the nobility of death in these films and shows how, like the Office of War Information, Hollywood also gradually escalated the realism of its portrayals of death: “By [the 1944 release of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo] even a Hollywood film could go so far as to suggest that wounded men scream and cry and that men losing limbs experience severe shock, but as always there is a silver lining: at home salvation awaits, for their women will comfort them. In all these films…good triumphs, which means that the success story, Hollywood's dominant narrative model, was easily accommodated to the demands of wartime moral meaning” (Wartime 191). Even though the “success story” Fussell describes coincides with the United States’ moral justification for participating in the war in the first place, the stories of individual veterans, especially those returning with debilitating wounds, could not be entirely contained within the success model.
In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman examines World War II films that attempt realistic depictions of soldiers returning to civilian life, and her ...

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