Victims of patriarchy : failed masculinity in nineteenth-century American literature.

Abstract

The United States was built upon foundations of patriarchy which called for men to demonstrate their masculinity publicly. In the nineteenth-century, as middle- and upper-class Americans began to populate cities, there were less physical and public outlets to prove masculinity, festering insecurity and an increased drive to exhibit masculinity at home, in the marketplace, and with physical prowess. Many men lived in fear of being perceived as feminine, or exhibiting what was thought to be feminine qualities, such as emotion. This anxiety was pervasive in the culture and is demonstrated in literature of the time. A study of works by male writers in the nineteenth-century shows that the male characters attempted to manifest their masculinity in three defined demands: occupation, control over women and men, and physical strength. They accomplish this through diverting, denying, and disguising emotion. Men were often victims of patriarchal expectations, whether they were victims of their own drive to prove themselves, or fell victim to other men's need to demonstrate their masculinity. The societal solution for escaping patriarchal demands is flight to the frontier, both literally, which resulted in the settling of the West, and figuratively, with men living out their fantasies in dime novel Westerns or dreaming of finding an identity on the frontier. This thesis traces evidence for this claim by a study of the male characters in selected works by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Washington Irving.--Abstract.