How interesting that, according to David Leverenz, "[Male] Writers used American manhood for fresh subject material" (350), when this very writing seemed to make them feel less, for lack of a better word, manly in the first place. It makes me wonder if male writers were in fact using their own sense of American emasculation--not American manhood--for fresh subject material. Using such material, however, with the intent of transforming it into something that came to have a more masculine connotation.
And maybe that's part of the reason why these men kept writing? I mean, the impetus to give up was there. It was hard to make money, hard to do the things that made one a bona fide man in early America--own property, have a wife, have children. Clearly there was something of the revolutionary spirit in these writers. They didn't stop. They may have felt emasculated, or that they were pursuing something that seemed more womanly, but they kept at it. And it was only through keeping at it that they were able to help the profession evolve into something that they (men) deemed as having a masculine connotation. Was that the dream all along, then?
Of course, the anonymity factor continued to play a role here. Poor Nathanial Hawthorne, who used his real name only to have it supposed to be a fictitious label. (What's that do to a writer's ego?)
But, as I talked about last week, what's in a label anyway? Hawthorne, among many others, were patrons of the U.S. government. What impact does getting paid by America have on what you write about? Does being a patron of the country brand a different label onto your writing? Or was the (masculine) reputation more important than the content anyway?
It seems to me that the writing itself and the writer's reputation were both important. Perhaps having to juggle and attempt to balance the two was a cause of the "flux of contrary moods and potential depressions" written about and felt by male writers (361).
If nothing else, the aura of vitality combined with volatility, as Leverenz puts it, was an aura that certainly continued to co-exist with male authorship in America. Does it still exist now? I'm not sure. Things seem far more fragmented to me, and I'm not comfortable with making such a judgment. If I owned some property, maybe I'd be willing to take a more assertive stance.
Hi Melissa, I love the irony that you started out with--male writers writing about manhood in order to mask their own unmanly inadequacies. True enough. But I think Leverenz overstates their concern for manhood, especially Hawthorne's. He write about so much more. Yet all of these authors use the universal "he" when writing about an individual, and they indeed celebrated "manly" features such as self-reliance, courage, and industry. A curious age. dw
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