The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities Gender Affect and Ethics in Modern World Narratives Susan Mooney Full Chapter

The Making and Mirroring of Masculine
Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and

Ethics in Modern World Narratives
Susan Mooney
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-making-and-mirroring-of-masculine-subjectivities-
gender-affect-and-ethics-in-modern-world-narratives-susan-mooney/
The Making and
Mirroring of Masculine
Subjectivities
Gender, Affect, and Ethics in
Modern World Narratives
Susan Mooney
The Making and Mirroring of Masculine
Subjectivities
“Dr. Susan Mooney’s narrative explorations in The Making and Mirroring of

Masculine Subjectivities are not only visionary but critically ground-breaking. This
trailblazing study makes an innovative contribution to transnational BIPOC liter-
ary studies focused on the complex subject matter of gender and masculinity.”
—Gary L. Lemons, Professor of English, University of South Florida
“The study makes an innovative contribution to the field, as it brings together

masculinity studies and affect theory, especially through the lens of gendered eth-
ics … [It] makes a case that, despite white male privilege, both literature and film
question how male-identifying people confront their split subjectivity, their sense
of lack and agency, and their relationship with the other. In so doing, this book
brilliantly illustrates how authors of color, Black authors, and Indigenous authors
have written narratives exploring men’s marginalized positions in relation to hege-
monic masculinity, thus questioning patriarchy, too.”
—Josep M. Armengol, Professor of US Literature and Gender Studies,
University of Castilla-La Mancha
Susan Mooney
The Making and

Mirroring of
Masculine
Subjectivities
Gender, Affect, and Ethics in Modern
World Narratives
Susan Mooney
Department of English
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-99145-6 ISBN 978-3-030-99146-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99146-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
When Jacques Lacan told us the phallus does not equate the penis, and
that neither is necessary to enact masculinity and manhood, he was lifting
the veil of the illusion that men are naturally endowed to be in charge.
And yet.
“Be a man.” “Man up.” “You the man.” “Lil’ man.”
It seems that we have always known that masculinity is a complex per-
formance, both obvious and elusive. However, our modern and contem-
porary eras have experienced dramatic changes in expectations of what it
means to be a man, while leaning on early modern narrative frameworks of
the knight and gentleman. Many modern men define themselves first and
foremost by their occupation. While this is a limited view of the self, we
can see how men’s labor has transformed in the past 120 years or so. As
enslavement, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism, technology,
medicine, war, colonization and decolonization, Indigenous rights, white
supremacy and civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, disability
rights, and globalization have shaped our world and relationships, men’s
work and lack of work continue to be central to men defining themselves.
And yet.
Critical novelists and filmmakers have been on the front lines of con-
templating these world changes, and considering what these mean for
humanity, mean for men and boys. What these authors show us, though,
is not primarily men’s employment and their roles defined by labor. While
work may be featured in modern world novels and films, it is actually male
subjectivity that takes center stage: a feeling male person engaged in
v
vi PREFACE
ethical relationships. In a sense, the narratives in this book all address vul-
nerability: the very aspect of masculinity not usually cultivated or esteemed
in various societies. And yet vulnerability, interdependence, and intersub-
jectivity are keys to men’s, boys’, and everyone’s survival and even
blossoming.
This book emerges from years of contemplation on feminist questions
of how to build a more inclusive, equitable society; such a new world
would mean changes in masculinity. While developing my work, doctors
and sociologists have been confirming ever more bleakly what a deep and
prolonged health crisis men are in—physical and mental. For this reason
alone, patriarchal structures are harmful to men and boys. While wom-
en’s and LGBTQIA+’s activism can make a difference, healing change
will not happen without dedicated involvement from men and male-
identified people.
Like Camus, I believe a writer’s purpose is “to keep civilization from
destroying itself.” As we will see, novelists and filmmakers have been at
the forefront, exploring masculine subjectivities, experimenting with
narrative voice, person, and modes of interiority to delve into complex
feelings and relationships. If we understand these subjectivities better in
their nuances and multiplicities, we might have more ways to cultivate
and encourage more diverse and healthier masculinities beyond patriar-
chal heteronormativity.
Tampa, FL Susan Mooney

Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to the help and support of diverse people and groups. I’ve
had the privilege to reflect on masculinities specifically—and sexuality,
gender, and literature more broadly—in various undergraduate and grad-
uate courses at the University of South Florida. My students’ engagement
in questions of masculinities and ethics has helped to drive my own con-
templations and connections. I thank an array of colleagues and friends in
the overlapping fields of narratology, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis,
English, French, Spanish, and Russian literatures: Jean-Michel Rabaté,
Gary Lemons, Linda Hutcheon, Garry Leonard, Stan Gontarski, Jim
Phelan, Suzette Henke, Julia Kristeva, Wendy Knepper, José Antonio
Giménez-Micó, Ger Zielinski, and Annick Farina. Heartfelt thanks post-
humously go to bell hooks, Brandy Kershner, Juan Marsé, and Juan
Goytisolo. A special thanks goes to the anonymous readers when this work
was in manuscript: your feedback elevated this study. The interlibrary loan
staff at USF Library has tirelessly provided me with almost every item I
have needed to consult, and for that I am so grateful.
This work is especially dedicated to my family—Kees Boterbloem,
Duncan Mooney, and Saskia Mooney—whose love, help, and support
have made it possible.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction:
Feeling Men—Emotional Masculine
Subjectivities, Ethics, and the Postpaternal 1
Part I Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine

Subjectivities 59
2 Narrative
Ethics of Care: Folding Fathers, Gifts Given,
Subjectivity Beyond Mastery 61
3 Ethics
of Creation: Copy of the Copy: Sons’ Narratives
of Feeling of Selfhood117
Part II The Gentleman Deconstructed 187
4 Ethics
of Honor: Postgentlemen’s Narratives and
Affects of Alterity189
ix
x Contents
5 Ethics of Proximity: Lack and Dispossession261
6 Conclusion:
Masculinities of Feeling at Matrixial
Borderspaces331
Index343
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Los abrazos rotos: Mateo, no longer the “self-made man,” as
collaborative father 80
Fig. 2.2 Smoke Signals: Arnold catching baby Thomas; postcolonial
Indigenous father: collapsing tropes of the hero, the
Indigenous father, the savior from a ruin by white settlers;
the sons arise from these ashes 100
Fig. 2.3 Smoke Signals: Arnold as father as lack, his ashes scattered
at the falls; no longer a question of a copy, but rather of
forgiveness102
Fig. 2.4 The Last Picture Show: Sam the Lion: caring symbolic
father and transgressive lover: law and lawlessness combined:
the impossibly heroic embodied in iconic cowboy actor Ben
Johnson103
Fig. 2.5 Billy Elliot: the gaze of the father: the close-up of Jackie’s
look shows his astonishment and pleasure 107
Fig. 3.1 The Return: sons Andrei and Vanya encounter the old
photograph of their younger selves with the twice lost
father: the father is missing in this shot, functioning as lack 142
Fig. 3.2 The Return’s final take is a snapshot of the father looking
bemused at his baby son Vanya 142
Fig. 3.3 Moonlight: Juan provides a fatherly mirror of love for the
young Chiron; later, we see the adult Chiron as a copy
of Juan, whose identity as a tough drug dealer is idealized
as a replacement for Chiron’s gay identity 143
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 3.4 Atanarjuat: the son’s violent overthrow of the father: the
unjust son; at this crucial moment, director Kunuk disrupts
the gaze of mastery (of father and son) by showing the
necklace over Panipak’s face 151
Fig. 4.1 Barry Lyndon: Kubrick reveals the lacking gentleman’s
body: Barry makes his way to the carriage, his leg amputated
after the duel with his stepson, his fall from aristocracy
complete, on his way to life in the shadows and marking the
“end of the gentleman” 221
Fig. 4.2 Boys Don’t Cry: Brandon’s self construction: This 3-shot
sandwiches Brandon between the hypermasculine antagonists
John and Tom, and sutures him as the gentleman to Lana’s
gaze of desire 252
Fig. 5.1 Brokeback Mountain: Lee captures the gay lover’s gaze
of self and other, embedded in the nested, bloodied shirts 293
Fig. 5.2 Y tu mamá también: Cuarón deconstructs the male gaze:
Tenoch sees himself seen, in a moment of naked vulnerability 300
Fig. 5.3 Los abrazos rotos: When the gaze is blind, it is guided by
touch and sound to the place of the loved one; mastery
replaced with collectivity 304
Fig. 5.4 Moonlight: Jenkins’s two-shot statement on relational Black
masculinity, away from the self-loathing and policing haunting
Chiron and Kevin, ending on a note of love, acceptance, and
possibility308
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Feeling Men—Emotional

Masculine Subjectivities, Ethics,
and the Postpaternal
There is an intrigue of the other in the same which does not amount to
an openness of the other to the same.
—Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, 25
Despising his one son for not wanting to become the strong silent type
(my brother loved to talk, tell jokes, and make us happy), our father let
him know early on that he was no son to him, real sons wanted to be like
their fathers. Made to feel inadequate, less than male in his childhood,
one boy in a house full of six sisters, he became forever haunted by the
idea of patriarchal masculinity. All that he had questioned in his
childhood was sought after in his early adult life in order to become a
man’s man—phallocentric, patriarchal, and masculine. In traditional
black communities when one tells a grown male to “be a man,” one is
urging him to aspire to a masculine identity rooted in the
patriarchal ideal.
—bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
Literature, written by men, abounds with men (and boys), awash in emo-
tions. Men in and out of love, men in or outside of power, fearful, raging,
anxious, at the crossroads, through the rings of hell and back, men under-
ground and bird men, third men and first men and second-best. Men feel-
ing and sensing beyond emotions with a name: pre-linguistic affects to
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
S. Mooney, The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99146-3_1
2 S. MOONEY
shared moments of feeling.1 Men of color. White men. Invisible men. Men
in the trenches, hardboiled men, warriors, poet-scholars, monks, emperors,
loners, lost boys, comics, orphans, artists, wanderers, pícaros, adventurers,
explorers, inventors. Laborers. Prisoners. Quixotic or Faustian. Queer guys
and transmen. Lovers, conformists, rebels. Idlers. Fathers. Sons. Grandsons.
These are just a few of the cultural roles and social constructions of mascu-
linity we encounter in narratives and lives. This book suggests that one of
the central concerns of the modern world novel and film,2 as modern nar-
ratives by diverse authors (even cis white male ones, not necessarily feminist
in outlook), has been to contest the dominant ideologies of maleness (and
not to confirm patriarchal norms). While maleness in many societies may
seem self-evident, reinforced as it is in myriad social practices and cultural
representations, many critical novelists and filmmakers question how we
come to agree on certain notions of masculinity as dominant or not. And
the more we think about it, the less certain we are about masculinities’
foundations; “foundations” may not even be the right term.
As Connell and Messerschmidt point out, “Masculinity is not a fixed
entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals.
Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social
action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a
1
Freud, drawing from a German philosophical tradition, uses “affect” to “designate a state
that is pleasant or unpleasant along the pleasure-unpleasure axis” (Soler 2016, 1); affects
might appear as symptoms connected to a malaise, or seem to emanate from the body, or the
imagination, or from someone or something outside oneself. In this study, I use somewhat
interchangeably the terms “feeling,” “emotion,” and affect.” There is an ongoing debate
about the specificity of these terms, and my study is interested in both named and unnamed
feelings, personal, shared, ambiguous, all pertaining to male-identified narrators and charac-
ters. Generally, when I refer to affect, I’m sometimes indicating a form of shared feeling
among two or more people (Ahmed 2004) or a prelinguistic sensation. That said, over a long
period Jacques Lacan dedicated some of his thought to affects, which he could name and
identify as prelinguistic (these were not mutually exclusive). Lacan’s 1962–1963 seminar
Angoisse (1962; Anguish, 2015) marks his first major foray into the study of affect. In addi-
tion to Lacan, see Colette Soler’s exploration of Lacan’s contributions to affect studies from
Angoisse and other seminars, which I draw upon here in this book. For further diverse views
of affect, see Ahmed (2004), Jaggar (1983), Breitenberg (1996), Reeser and Gottzén
(2018), Knaller (2017), Korkaleainen (2010), Language and the Politics of Emotion (1990),
and Roberts and Goldenberg (2007), for some of the differences among emotion and affect.
2
By “world” novel and film, I do not pretend with this study to be exhaustive and com-
prehensive of all possible languages, cultures, traditions, and peoples. Rather, in the spirit of
David Damrosch’s How to Read World Literature (2003), my selections come from areas of
my specializations, linguistic knowledge, and diverse, intersectional teaching, and depend on
modern narratives that speak both to their own immediate social point of reference, reader-
ship, and context and to others in communities beyond.
1 INTRODUCTION: FEELING MEN—EMOTIONAL MASCULINE… 3
particular social setting” (836); and further, these configurations happen

and change over time. Feminists and womanists have long recognized
how maleness is taken for granted as power, mastery, logic, and these
qualities are indeed associated with hegemonic masculinity in many societ-
ies (e.g., Adams and Savran 2002; Bederman 1995; Brittan 1989; Brod
1987; Brod and Kaufman 1994; Colmeiro 2017; de Beauvoir 1964; Doty
1993; Gilbert and Gubar 1979; Irigaray 1993; Sifuentes-Jáuregui 2002).3
Scientists and others in authority have used a male point of view as the
universal or supposedly neutral one. But more recently, we have realized
that although we can recognize the patriarchy, not all men fit into it in the
same way, nor benefit from it equally (e.g., Antone 2015; Awkward 2001;
Bordo 1999; Butler 1990; Connell 1987; 2005; Curry 2017; Gardiner
2013; Halberstam 1998; 2018; Kimmel 2018; Namaste 2009; Rubin
2003; Ryan and Corbalán 2016; Sifuentes-Jáuregui 2002; Silverman
1992). Many men don’t benefit from patriarchal systems at all. As incon-
sistent as it may seem, gay and transgender men, white men and men of
color, working-class men and middle-class and elite men may or may not
support counterhegemonic positions (Brickman 2017; hooks 2004,
2014a, b; Crenshaw 1991; Moller 2007; Gherovici 2017; Butler 1990;
Halberstam 1998; 2018).
This book explores how many modern world narratives are deeply con-
cerned with men’s ethics—presented as troubled emotional relationships
with power and agency. Across cultural and ethnic differences, many critically
3
My study is indebted to previous scholars’ crucial work on masculinities, including
Antone (2015), Awkward (2001), Baker (2006), Balbus (2002), Bordo (1999), Bourdieu
(2001), Brittan (1989), Cheung (2002), Connell (1987, 2000, 2005), Connell and
Messerschmidt (2005), Corbett (2009), Curry (2017), Gardiner (2002, 2013), Glapka and
Braid (2018), Halberstam (1998, 2018), Hatty (2000), Hobson (2002), hooks (2004,
2014a, b), Horrocks (1994), Howson (2006), Indigenous Men and Masculinities (2003),
Kane (1999), Kimmel (2018), Kloppenberg (2015), Knights (1999), Lehman (1993,
2001), Magennis (2010), Magennis and Mullen (2011), Marriot (2000), Masculinities
(2006), May (1998), McCallum (2018), Middleton (1992), Mosse (1996), Muñoz (1999),
Nagel (2001), Plain (2006), Plank (2019), Presentations of Gender (1985), Reader (2006),
Reeser and Gottzén (2018), Rotundo (1993), Rubin (2003), Ryan and Corbalán (2016),
Savran (1998), Schehr (2009), Schwalbe (1992), Scott (1999), Sedgwick (1990), Seidler
(2006), Silverman (1992), Singleton (2010), Snyder (1999), Stoller and Herdt (1982),
Target and Fonagy (2002), Valente (2011), Maurice Wallace (2002), Walsh (2010), Cornel
West (1993), Wojtaszek (2019), Wright et al. (1989). This book takes up some of the ques-
tions in the conclusion to Mooney (2008); also, I developed early thought for this book in
Mooney (2006–2007, 2010, 2017).
4 S. MOONEY
grounded world narratives4 highlight gendered ethics together with affective

exchanges. The selected narratives here emphasize how intensely and
diversely men feel and how they respond to the ethical dynamics of their
particular worlds. The upcoming chapters focus on paternal subjectivities in
narratives; filial subjectivities in narratives; narratives of the postgentleman’s
subjectivity; narratives of postpaternal subjectivities in close ethical relations
with diverse others. Authors and filmmakers question how male-identified
people confront their split subjectivity, their sense of lack and agency, their
relationship with the other, despite living in societies that nonetheless func-
tion to men’s relative advantage. Authors of color, Black authors, and
Indigenous authors create intersectional narratives that contend with some
of these issues keeping in mind some men’s marginalized positions in relation
to hegemonic masculinity. In these stories of male-identified narrators, char-
acters, plots, and protagonists’ relationships with various others (women,
children, other men), a myriad of writers and filmmakers expose the male
subject as a problematic person in relation to patriarchy, and not just as a
straightforward patriarchal being (e.g., the master in a master narrative).
With the aim to provide a panoramic (but not all-encompassing) worldview
and sampling of modern narratives, this study includes more than thirty
diverse works of fiction and film emphasizing masculine subjects and subjec-
tivities ranging across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and
ranging in authorship from Indigenous, African American, Latin American,
Canadian, and American to diverse European (Irish, French, Spanish, and
Russian). Authors in this study include Joyce (1916; 1922; 1986; 2006),
Beckett (1951; 2006), Woolf (2005), Rhys (1966; 1999), Lawrence (2001),
Ellison (1989), Benet (1967; 1985; 1996), Marsé (1973; 1979; 1980),
Atwood (2004), Nabokov (1955; 1991), Coetzee (1982), Houellebecq
(2005; 2007), McCarthy (2006), DeLillo (1998), Sartre (1938; 1964), and
Platonov (1999; 2008). Filmmakers include Zacharias Kunuk (2000), Eyre
(1998), Almodóvar (2009), Bogdanovich (1971), Ang Lee (2006), Peirce
(1999), Daldry (2000), Cuarón (2001), Zviagintsev (2003), Sciamma
(2011), Jenkins (2016a; 2016b), and Kubrick (1975; 2001).
4
There has been much scholarly work on surveying masculinities in the popular cultural
products in which men are superheroes, spies, cowboys, space explorers, war heroes, star ath-
letes, and the like. For example, Brian Baker (2006). Martín considers the masculine role of the
villain as figure of patriarchal excess (2019). By contrast, my book examines critically acclaimed
narratives that emphasize various masculinities beyond these standardized roles, adventure and
conquest plots, and narrative types; in my study, the selected novels and films may or may not
have had a broader popular echo. There is so much masculinity beyond patriarchal ideals, and
our artists have been contemplating this gap and these alternatives profoundly.
This selection stems from my own areas of specialization and recognizes

that no study of “world literature” can wholly encompass a global view (nor
might we want it to). My study creates encounters and dialogues, using the
elements of first- and third-person narrative to organize discussions, along
with grouping texts according to character types, such as sons, fathers, gen-
tlemen, and nomads, and the feelings (both named and indeterminate), and
ethics expressed by these. By using narrative components to organize chap-
ters, I contribute some methods for narratological study as well.5 First-person
narratives tend to have an emotional immediacy and psychological complex-
ity: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Beckett’s trilogy are some of the most
urgent and anguished statements on masculinity for our age, for their respec-
tive communities of readers. This is not to say that third-person narratives do
not deliver deep insights into men’s subjectivity: take, for example, Joyce’s
Ulysses and McCarthy’s The Road. Balancing out the selected texts that obvi-
ously foreground subjectivity in narratives, I also explore male subjectivity in
narratives that appear opaquer and involve strategies of distancing and com-
plexly layered fragments, such as Platonov’s “Soul” and Marsé’s Si te dicen
que caí. Thus, this array of narratives offers multiple views of masculine sub-
jectivities, with some surprising common features of lack, anguish, and
shame; they tend to emphasize ethical situations and conflicts together with
emotions connected to varying aspects of masculinity.6
We have a desire to know about ourselves and others both via signs of
identity and beyond them. As Kabesh writes in her study of postcolonial
masculinities, looking across Egyptian and British texts and cultures, the
very discourse of the clash of civilizations can be problematic; she instead
examines how subjectivities in Western and Arab societies are intertwined,
operating through envy of the other and the desire to be at once the same
5
Bal (1997), Chatman (1980), Genette (1980, 1988), Herman (2007), Keen (2007,
2011, 2013), Lanser (1986, 1992, 2010), Martin (1987), Mezei (1996), Phelan (2005,
2007, 2008), Rimmon-Kenan (2002), Vizenor (1993, 1998), Warhol (1989), Weedon
(1988), and H. Wallace (2000) are some of my main touchstones on theory on narrators. My
innovation with prose narrative is to single out masculine first- and third-person narrators in
terms of masculine roles (starting with fathers and sons) to make narrator a primary marker
of comparison. In narrative film, rather than only use narrator narrowly as an extradiegetic
voice over or other such obvious nod to literary narrative (as in Barry Lyndon), I rely on the
concept of suture to account for the presence and lack of the subject on screen (see Heath
1976; Metz 1974); I use focalization in a film to determine the narrative emphasis of subjec-
tivity on one or more masculine characters; for example, in certain films such as Atanarjuat,
The Return, Y tu mamá también, and Smoke Signals, where there is a filial story as well as a
paternal one, with subjectivities of varying depth and detail developed for each.
6
For discussions of gendered emotions in literature and more generally in society, see Lutz
(1990), Nye (2014), Shields (2000), Strange and Cribb (2014).
6 S. MOONEY
and yet fundamentally separate. While I share Kabesh’s methodical empha-

sis on subjectivities as a way to investigate literary imagined masculinities
comparatively across cultures and identities, my study does not center on a
specific postcolonial relationship (for her, Egypt and Great Britain). Rather,
by casting even wider and ranging from narratives of Inuit, Russians,
British, Irish, African Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, Spaniards, French,
and more, my study aims to deprivilege binary structures and to create a
more inclusive imaginary space to explore how narrative maleness is
expressed through emotions and ethics in the modern narrative.
The selected authors suggest emotions and ethics are what makes a
person who they are, in all the messy aspects this implies. Modern narra-
tives tend to study problems in human life in messier ways than, say, phi-
losophy. When novels magnify a masculine or male-presenting person,
they are calling to our attention how that person has come into being or
why that would be significant; there is a wonder and a defensiveness about
some of this, as many male characters are connected in some way to power,
and many writers identify as male.
In suggesting that masculinities are very much constructed—invented—
and mirrored (with the implication of copies, desire, and affective relation-
ships), and that the dual key to that making and mirroring is ethical and
affective, I argue for a feminist masculinity, which includes cis and trans
men and boys, two-spirit and non-binary, that prioritizes feeling and eth-
ics. As bell hooks notes in reflecting on her childhood that there were
many Black men who did not seek to fulfill patriarchal ideals, I note how
these kinds of resistances hold true across many cultures and people.
In selected critical world works by the authors discussed in this book,
the central male figure’s relationships with others are distinguished by
problematic ethics and affective intersubjectivity, and the difficulty of
achieving a satisfactory ethical and affective outcome. These narratives fea-
turing prominently male characters’ subjectivities emphasize masculine fail-
ure, imperfection, weakness, love, ambiguity, fear, and shame—qualities
typically shunned or downplayed in conventional heroic figures and stories
of mastery. I argue that the narratives selected for this study uncover deep
cracks in the patriarchy, and at times a lack of desire to continue to fuel its
forces. On my conscious part, the selected authors and filmmakers are
hardly a homogeneous group in ideological terms; for example, Atwood’s
progressive feminist standpoint contrasts clearly with Houellebecq’s more
libertarian stance. However, despite the authors’ diverse ideological alli-
ances and influences, their narratives tend to critique ways of reproducing
or reinventing manhood, whether through acts of fatherhood or male
institutions in the world, such as the knight or his modern counterpart, the
gentleman. These narratives often present a negative resolution; the few
narratives that present a guardedly hopeful resolution must generally depart
from traditional male models or examples (e.g., Joyce’s Ulysses, Jenkins’s
Moonlight). Otherwise, there is almost no way to emerge as a “good man.”
The modern narrative form itself helps to bring the protagonist into this
conflict. In studies of modern world narratives, conflict and resolution (or
lack thereof) tend to provide the shape; when this conflictual plot pattern is
considered in relation to masculinity, we can see it in a constant disagreement
with itself. I show how certain literature and cinema can disrupt classical
tendencies of heroism and mastery in philosophical and psychoanalytic
thought about the masculine subject. Already, we have recognized how
modernist narrative shifted its emphasis away from plot (Matz 2004, 38).
These selected narratives explore ethical and affective states as embedded in
specific local social contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, rather
than emphasizing a universal human subject. As critics such as DuPlessis and
Lanser (1986, 1992) have noted, women have been afforded fewer types of
literary plots in correspondence with their historical lack of agency in the
public sphere, whereas more forms of action have been available to a wider
array of men. However, with modernization, growing forms of capitalism
and globalization, and widening suffrage, writers such as Dostoevsky (2008),
Joyce, Ellison, and Woolf have recognized in their respective societies a dis-
connection of the male subject from systems of power at a time in which he
might have anticipated better access to it.7 This trend, I argue, continues
through the last century and into the twenty-first. And thus, so-called male
plots and characterization come under scrutiny as writers and filmmakers
seek to make sense of masculinity through possible stories and storyworlds.
In my study, the selected world narratives range in portrayals of cultur-
ally specific masculine subjectivities, foregrounding how diverse male
characters think, act, and have emotions about relationships with others.
Plot and characterization bring the protagonist into a confrontation with
the other and the self. Father-son narratives (whether conflictual or cohe-
sive, tragically, ironically, ambivalently, or harmoniously resolved) and
hero narratives have long shaped social understanding of men and their
emotions and ethics since at least classical times across many cultures and
societies. In the twentieth century and contemporary era, modern
7
Beck’s Risk Society (1992) examines the impact of capitalism on labor, including gender
role division of labor. See also Bourdieu (1997, 2001), Bradley (1996), Di Stefano (1991),
Foucault (1974, 1990), Gay (1984), Lyotard (1984, 1993), Jameson (1984).
8 S. MOONEY
narratives critical of their society often feature one or more central male
subjects who in turn depart from straightforward singular heroic narrative
models. Thus we see examples of the non-heroic, aheroic, and anti-heroic,
as well as alternative and collaborative heroic–all responses to the weighty
demands of the heroic, which embraces lofty and often unattainable ideals,
such as strength, independence, stoicism, nobility, and power (political,
institutional, monetary, or otherwise). The father, traditional head of the
family in most of the cultures surveyed here, has a fraught relationship
with both the heroic narrative and the demands of dominant masculinity
in his culture. The postpaternal narrative is one that uncovers the failures
and weaknesses of fathers, including their abuses of strength and power,
their faulty adherence to or deviations from norms. The postpaternal nar-
rative also explores what happens “after the father”: (1) filial narratives,
(2) narratives of men without or moving beyond their fathers, and (3)
narratives of masculinity with only symbolic reference to paternal
influence.8
Further, this book will show how literature and film can disrupt ten-
dencies of philosophical and psychoanalytic thought about the masculine
subject. Rather than promoting visions of a “universal” human subject,
these selected narratives prioritize ethical and affective states that interrupt
specific local social contexts.
We need to attend to these texts’ critiques of masculinities and aware-
ness of specific stories and how male identity diverges or coheres to
engrained social paths because the quality of our human relations is at
stake. Whereas other related studies recognize the actuality of gendered
narratives (Knights 1999; Felski 1995; Mezei 1996; DuPlessis 1985;
Warhol 1989; Out of Bounds 1990), or gendered affect (Pateman 1989),
or ethics (Irigaray 1993; Cixous 1986, 1988; Gibson 1999; Copjec 2002;
Cornell 2015; Guenther 2006), I identify these three—gender, ethics,
affects—as intricately entwined and indeed inseparable. Until recently,
emotions have been taken almost for granted in literature and movies;
when we slow down to notice how prominently emotions are highlighted
in boys’ and men’s lives in modern world texts as diverse as James Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, we
can see how these are connected to ethical relations with others. In the
8
For diverse thought on fathers, see Etchegoyen (2002), Hobson (2002), Johansson
(2017), Kristeva (2018c), Marie (1985), Oliver (1998), Target and Fonagy (2002).
twentieth century through to today, many men encounter engrained social

paths and scripts that put the demands of fatherhood competing with
social and professional pressures of maleness equating power, strength,
stoicism, and individualism. I contest the stance of thinkers such as Charles
Taylor (1989, 1991), who tends to elide or downplay gender when theo-
rizing the modern subject’s identity and ethics and concept of the narrative
self. While Taylor may seem to be outdated for 2022, his take on modern
identity is important for this study as he proposes a (white) male-inflected
subject as universal and narrative as a structure for individuals to imagine
their lives and selves. In narrative studies, ethics is strongly related to nar-
rative (Boothroyd 2013; McGee 1997; Booth 1988). In our modern age,
narrative forms are related to actual lived identities, and the nuanced
experimentations with focalization and first- and third-person narrators
have been central to the urgency in twentieth-century and recent world
novels. As Britton and Baxter (1999) (among many others) have shown,
“the discourse of the reflexive self, which is so central to recent sociological
accounts of modernity, and which is assumed to be gender-neutral, is in
fact based on male experience and ignores key aspects of women’s under-
standing of selfhood” (180). Modernist and modern narratives tend to
stress the modern self “is not something that is given … but something
that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of
the individual” (Giddens 2013, p. 52). Peter Middleton has examined the
gendered aspect of male modernist introspection; he connects this trend
with the historical context of World War I (WWI), men’s growing aware-
ness of social inequalities and of the women’s movement, and men’s own
position in a world that prioritizes men. George C. Rosenwald and Richard
L. Ochberg, in their edited collection Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of
Self-Understanding (1992), relate life experiences to narrative forms. Keen
(2007, 2011), Phelan (2005, 2007, 2008), Nash (2013), Hutcheon
(1996, 2005), Booth (1988), and Vermeule (2011) demonstrated how
ethics are embedded in narrative form.
Critical world narratives expand our understanding of masculinities in
the shadow of and beyond the paternal and heroic models. Masculinities
emerge as reflexive practices by men and male-identified people across
colors and classes. Authors of narrative fiction portray these reflexive prac-
tices in a variety of ways, indicating critiques of the status quo for mascu-
linity as well as suggested ways beyond patriarchal normative demands
through self-fashioning and imagining. My interpretations in this book
contribute to an intersectional feminist narratology with a focus on
10 S. MOONEY
masculinity; my narratological approaches are inspired by Susan Lanser

(1986, 1992, 2010), Robyn Warhol (1989), Rachel Blau DuPlessis
(1985), bell hooks (2004, 2014a, b), Nancy K. Miller (1981), Kaja
Silverman (1992), Narrative Theory Unbound (2015), Linda Hutcheon
(1996, 2005), Claudia Tate (1998), and more generally to narrative ethics
as explored by Nash (2013), James Phelan (2005, 2007, 2008), and
Wayne Booth (1988).
As Schwalbe (1992) points out regarding men’s relation to power
structures, “Any strategy for the maintenance of power is likely to involve
a dehumanizing of other groups and a corresponding withering of empa-
thy and emotional relatedness within the self” (29–30); Schwalbe goes on
to note, “Because of what the masculinist self needs to survive, it resists
the demands of responsible moral action” (40).9 If certain male-centered
narratives highlight affective relationships, then how might these relate to
a possible alternative masculine ethic of care?10 Like King-Kok Cheung
(who explores alternative masculinities in Chinese American literature), I
am interested in how diverse novelists and filmmakers contemplate a gen-
dered ethics of care (and other ethics) with masculine subjects. Some of
my ethical companions for this journey include Emmanuel Lévinas and
Jacques Derrida as well as feminist ethicists Hélène Cixous (1981, 1986,
1988), Lisa Guenther (2006), Alenka Zupančič (2000, 2003), Drucilla
Cornell (2015), bell hooks (2004, 2014a, b), Dawne McCance (1996),
and Rosi Braidotti (1994). Similar to Roderick Ferguson, I aim for an
intersectional inquiry that includes queer of color considerations; Ferguson
(2004) explains this approach as an “interrogat[ion] of social formations
as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular
interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from
nationalist ideals and practices. Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous
enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, post-
structuralist theory, and queer critique” (149).
9
Schwalbe (1992) calls for a pragmatic ethics that widens the overly narrow masculinist
self he sees culturally and socially reinforced in many men: “Many men have seen the prob-
lems created by masculinist selves: the alienation that arises when status, power, and wealth
are recognized as meaningless goals for a human life; early disability and death from stress-
related diseases; the inability to maintain satisfying relationships with women; the loneliness
that comes from fear of other men; the emptiness and lack of energy that come from living an
unfeeling life” (48, my emphasis).
10
Carol Gilligan (1982) and Nel Noddings (in her 2nd edition of Caring: A Relational
Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2013) make a case for women’s encultured identi-
ties linked to an ethic of care.
Gendered Narratives of Emotions and Ethics:

The Postpaternal
Following extensive research confirming that gender is heavily socialized
and performed in relation to a subject’s nearby models, in this first half
of this book, I distinguish certain critical twentieth-century and contem-
porary masculine narratives as they emerge from familial relations (espe-
cially those between fathers and sons) and male relations in the world
that emphasize love, lack, loss, and self-loathing; the separation from the
mother and other caregivers that is so often stressed becomes both a defin-
ing feature of dominant masculinity (independence) and its undercurrents
of loss, sadness, shame, sense of lack, and lovelessness. Thus, I initially
focus on the paternal, filial, and maternal.
The second half of this book explores the mirroring and mirages of
masculinities in world prose fiction and film narratives of the (post)gentle-
man. An array of world authors and filmmakers integrate an increasing
wariness of and anxiety about the heroic figure (his permutations include
the knight, the gentleman, the nobleman, the cowboy, and certain kinds
of Everyman who are honor bound). While readers and audiences arrive
with presuppositions about the hero and heroic, the narrative works I
analyze cast critical doubt on the viability of masculinity to sustain the
heroic role, while not losing sight entirely of that ethical promise to do
good or do the right thing. Further, these narratives model an ethics of
ambiguity about the good life and honor. If masculinity no longer can
embody the good (or did it ever?), what are the alternatives?
Modern world literary and film narratives that highlight a masculine
protagonist or relationship reveal a surprising authorial emphasis on gen-
dered emotions and ethics, regardless of the texts’ authors’ explicit align-
ment with feminism or not. This book’s comparative analysis of the
emotions and ethical relations involving masculinities ranging from fathers,
sons, the gentleman, and the post-heroic figure shows that there is (1) a
connection between affective expressions and ethical decisions and rela-
tionships involving male-identified figures, contesting the universalizing
and often gender-blind approaches seen in ethics and affect studies; (2)
despite the superficial characterization of dominant masculinity in North
America and Europe as stoic and devoid or concealing emotion, critical
fictional narratives actually highlight the urgency to examine men’s feel-
ings. This urgency is underlined by narratives connecting feelings with eth-
ics. It is possible that the twentieth century’s historical emphasis on selective
12 S. MOONEY
aspects of existentialism as well as a cultural prioritizing of male viewpoints

as objective and universalizing, even during the modernist and post-World
War II (WWII) eras when ostensibly authors cast doubt on our human abil-
ity to master and represent knowledge and relationships “objectively.”11
My study of the ethics and affects of masculinity in twentieth-century
and contemporary world narrative literature and film focuses on character-
izations and plots of diverse male-identified protagonists and their rela-
tionships with various others. I examine how an array of narratives explores
the male subject not as a simple straightforward patriarchal being, but
rather, by focusing on his subjectivity, as a conflicted or problematic per-
son in relation to patriarchy. Critical literary authors and filmmakers
emphasize individual men’s or boys’ relationships with others, thus high-
lighting for audiences the priority of ethics and affective intersubjectivity
and the difficulty of achieving a satisfactory ethical and affective outcome
(by “satisfactory,” I mean promoting the ethical good life in some way or
form, not just individual pleasure).
This selection of texts by these authors and filmmakers is based on how
they portray prominently and problematize masculine figures; I’ve looked
for fictional men and boys portrayed in trouble or at a loss with revelations
of their subjectivities in order to examine their feelings, their sense of the
other, and any obligation or ethical sense of their relation to the other, and
the works are abundant.
In my interest in determining how we tell stories about the cultivation
of certain masculinities, I select many diverse narratives that foreground
a paternal and/or filial figure. Thus, these narratives call for a revision of
how masculinity through changes in fathering and through the son’s
desire to copy or compete with or rebel from the paternal. Many
twentieth-century and contemporary critically acclaimed narratives sug-
gest there is a reproduction of fathering, or of maleness, in ways that we
have been convinced about the (social) reproduction of mothering. While
I understand that this “reproduction” is a learned behavior that can be
changed, it is also notable that certain practices of masculinities have been
passed along over centuries; “reproduction” does not have to entail
11
Freud (1915, 1958a, b), Lacan (1977, 1991, 1997, 1998), Foucault (1974), Deleuze
and Guattari (1986), and others have variously explored aspects of the unconscious and
repressed areas of our mental life, indicating the impossibility to achieve an idealized objec-
tivity: they show how our experience of subjectivity is not wholly conscious. Frosh (1994)
explores some of the implications of psychoanalysis for masculinity; see also Gergen (1992).
heteronormative biological practices, although it is often understood in

modern cultures in this way; the narrative examples of non-binary, trans,
and gay masculinities discussed later in this book are approached by the
authors as non-pathological, although other characters in a narrative set-
ting may think of the masculine other in deprecating or pathologi-
cal ways.12
Furthermore, by analyzing the concepts of masculinities in these narra-
tives, I seek to know whether feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and trans gen-
der and race theories (e.g., Bederman 1995; Brickman 2017; Cheng 2000;
Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013; Crenshaw 1991; Curry 2017; Dyer
1982, 1997; Fanon 1994; Gordon 1997; Mauer 2006; Morrison 1992;
Nagel 2000, 2001; Tate 1998; C. West 1993; Zeiner 2013) can help us to
think more openly about the masculine so that it is no longer a question of
either/or: straight/queer, cis/trans, masculine/feminine, strong/weak,
rational/irrational, white/non-white, and so on. We could arrive at a more
nuanced understanding of the ethics and affects of masculinity through the
critical visions of writers and filmmakers who contemplate a more fluid mas-
culinity. Heretofore some of these narratives have been read more flatly and
unproblematically as depicting maleness as straight and masterful, even
when, lying right under our nose, are the questions of the ethical premise of
male power and superiority and the emotional vulnerability of trying to be
a man. I notice this “new” vulnerability in modernists like Joyce, Lawrence,
and Woolf, who in their different stylistic ways bring men’s feelings to the
fore, to such a degree that in some landmark novels, such as Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), one might say that Stephen Dedalus’s feel-
ings—so sensitive, varied, and attuned to all the happenings in his life—
replace plot and characterization. His feelings are the happening; they shape
what he does and does not do. They fill his fantasies, relationships, and
future plans. In many ways, modernist and modern narratives centering on
men have continued to foreground affect. In the same era, D. H. Lawrence’s
prose fiction foregrounds men’s affective and emotional lives heavily.
Whereas in non-fictional writing men might have been stereotyped as
12
Corbett (2009) reasons how “reproduction” should not be assumed as “natural” nor
heteronormative. He writes, “Male traits are linked with the desire for female traits, in keep-
ing with the model of heterosexual complementarity, and so it goes. Social order, it is claimed,
rests on the reproduction of this masculine-feminine gender complementarity. Boys become
boys through the reproduction of fathering, which is presumed to follow on heterosexual
desire. It is presumed that a life lived off the rungs of this normative ladder—nonhetero-
sexual, nonmatrimonial, non-child rearing, nonbinary—follows on pathology, and will result
in despair.” (91, Corbett’s emphasis)
14 S. MOONEY
“objective” (code for “not emotional like women”), in narrative fiction in

modernism and notable works thereafter, men’s feelings have structured the
core of revelatory truth and ethical relationships.
I draw on recent feminist ethics and theories of emotion as they relate
to narrative. Along with other feminist ethicists such as Lisa Guenther
(2006), I build on the discussion of the need in ethics for a gendered sub-
ject, challenging philosophers’ ideas of a supposedly gender-neutral human
subject in ethics. Expanding on the work by Katherine Saunders Nash in
Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form (2013) and
Amal Treacher Kabesh and her Postcolonial Masculinities: Emotions,
Histories, and Ethics (2013), I offer a way to see masculinity at work in
narrative ethics and vice versa. Nash analyzes how rhetorical techniques
can prompt readers of novels to reconsider their ethical convictions about
women’s rights.13
By contrast, I start with male-identified characters and narrators and
consider how their intersubjectivity is explored via affect and their ethical
positions and acts in narratives; as a result, these works allow readers to be
engaged in masculine explorations that take them beyond familiar coded
meanings of the man as heroic, powerful, independent, and stoic. The
diverse narrative works studied here do not offer easy solutions or alterna-
tives, but they do tend to show how patriarchal structures do not offer
fruitful, fulfilling ethical nor affective outcomes for male and non-male
subjects alike. Kabesh’s study compares Egyptian and British literature,
whereas the scope of my project, which makes no claim to be universalist
nor comprehensive, is broader, considering, and at times comparing, sev-
eral different linguistic and cultural traditions in the Americas and Europe.
Like Kabesh, I include masculine subjects of color; in her study, the sub-
jects are Egyptian; in mine, they range from Inuit and Native American to
African American, Latino, and Mexican (Indigenous and other). My sur-
vey includes disabled male subjects (in Almodóvar’s film), working-class
(Billy Elliot 2000; Moonlight 2016), and gay and transgender (Moonlight;
Los abrazos rotos 2009; Tomboy 2011; Boys Don’t Cry 1999).
Additionally, I suggest that the ethical should be understood together
with the affective; many critical modernist and postmodernist works create
character zones of ambiguous ethical positions and explore masculine
affects beyond standard notions of mastery and lack of emotion as related
13
Additionally helpful for thinking ethics through postmodernist literature has been
Gibson (1999), Giddens (2013).
to power.14 Affects of anxiety, anguish, desire, fear, anger, self-loathing,

and melancholy are some of the prominent states explored as they pertain
to ethical moments in relationships and decision-making related to mascu-
line identities and values attached to these.15
The narratives studied here emphasize anxiety, failure, imperfection,
weakness, love, ambiguity, fear, self-loathing, and shame: emotions and
qualities typically shunned (or overlooked) in the heroic masculine figure.
The stories include fatherhood, filial relationships, the gentleman and
related figures, and the unheroic or anti-heroic male figure that becomes
more prominent in the twentieth century. I argue that these narratives
(most by authors without an explicitly feminist profile) uncover deep
cracks in the patriarchy, compulsory heteronormativity, and rigid mascu-
line models, and at times an individual’s lack of desire to continue to fuel
or identify with patriarchy’s forces.
Clearly, these narratives critique and explore ways of refashioning man-
hood through profound affective relationships. How do men and male-
identified people (and women)16 “become” masculine? How are masculine
subjectivities cultivated through fatherhood, childhood and adult experi-
ences and rituals, male institutions in the world? Turning to masculine
experiences of adulthood in narratives, we observe the narrative tradition
of the heroic knight, with his multivalent aspects of service and individu-
alistic deeds and desires, and his modern counterpart, the gentleman (and
later countercultural alienated middle-class man). How does this narrative
tradition come to inform masculine identities? Some narratives analyzed in
this book offer a negative resolution; the few narratives that present a
hopeful resolution generally depart from dominant masculine models and
patterns. Given the preponderance of negative and moodily ambivalent
14
Bakhtin (1981) devised the narrative term “character zone” to address the diverse ways
a modern novel can qualify a character; the zone includes everything from time and place to
dialogue and plot as related to a specific character. This more holistic way of viewing a char-
acter should embrace his feelings.
15
For studies considering affect and emotions without the emphasis on gender, see Flatley
(2008), Frijda and Scherer (2014), Goldie (2000, 2012), Gross (2006), Herman (2007),
Hogan (2003, 2011), Ingeborg (2017), Tan (1996).
16
See, for example, Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as a Masquerade” (1929/1999), Lacan’s
(1998) “The Meaning of the Phallus” (1956) and more recently Jack Halberstam’s Female
Masculinity (1998). Adler’s early psychoanalytic work on the “masculine protest” proposed
some masculine anxiety, a psychological condition he then opened up to all genders (1956).
16 S. MOONEY
endings, I suggest the authors and filmmakers under study here are signal-
ing a strong communal need for change in how we in our communities
cultivate and reinforce certain forms of masculinities. These questions and
issues will be addressed through the coming chapters.
The narrative form itself helps to bring the protagonist into this conver-
gence of pressures. The heroic narrative has long shaped our understand-
ing of men’s relation to communal needs, individualism, the ethical good,
and power since the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and various Ancient
Greek epics and dramas. In the twentieth century and contemporary era,
modern world literary and cinematic works critical of their respective soci-
eties often feature one or more central male subjects who in turn depart
from heroic narrative models. Thus, we see emerging from examples of
the non-heroic, aheroic, and anti-heroic, all responses to the weighty
demands of the heroic, which embraces lofty ideals or ambivalent ethical
values, such as strength, independence, subservience, stoicism, nobility,
and power (political, monetary, or otherwise). Modern writers and film-
makers adapt emplotment to echo older heroic forms, such as the nomadic,
while changing situation, interactions, and outcomes; male characteriza-
tion, too, contains traces of the old heroic, while not fulfilling it. Authors’
infusion of emotions as well as complications of narrative, such as decep-
tion, paradox, and empuzzlement, work to refresh narratives of masculine
subjectivity and suggest an ethical problematizing of it.
The father, traditional head of the family in most of the cultures sur-
veyed here, has a fraught relationship with both the heroic narrative and
the demands of dominant masculinity in his culture. What I term as the
postpaternal narrative is one that uncovers the failures and weaknesses of
fathers, including their abuses of strength and power, their faulty adher-
ence to or deviations from norms. The postpaternal narrative also explores
what happens “after the father”: (i) filial narratives, (ii) narratives of men
without or moving beyond their fathers, and (iii) narratives of masculinity
with only symbolic reference to paternal influence. I interpret how the
concept of the filial rejection of the paternal copy as well as the Lacanian
mirror stage for the male child’s vision of illusory wholeness present sur-
prising resistances to paternal structures.
Further, this book shows how literature and film can disrupt trends in
philosophical and psychoanalytic thought about the masculine subject.
Rather than promoting visions of a “universal” human subject, these
selected literary and film narratives prioritize ethical and affective states of
gendered subjects embedded in specific local social contexts.
“Structure of Feeling”: Gendered Narratives

of Emotions and Ethics
This book expands our understanding of the ethical and affective dimen-
sions of the masculine subject as narrated in twentieth-century and con-
temporary world literature and film beyond notions of the heroic. Often
in fictional narratives, a male protagonist is taken as a default universal
human subject. Even if we know very well that the subject is male and thus
has particular social avenues open to him that female protagonists histori-
cally have not had, we have a tendency to misread narratives, glossing over
local particularity of the specifically male subject in time and place. The
Bildungsroman, for example, carries no extra specification that it is a
“male” Bildungsroman; the male subject is taken for granted (Castle
2006). By contrast, the female Bildungsroman, a more recent develop-
ment of the genre, is purposively qualified.
If we are more attentive to modernist and contemporary narratives’
emotional and ethical markers in relation to gender, we can see how these
narratives critically shape and evaluate male subjects and their place in the
patriarchy. Narrative often highlights both affective and ethical relation-
ships through characterization and crucial plot points, even in modernist
works that tend to minimize plot schemes. For example, one of the few
major plot points of Ulysses is Molly Bloom’s adultery (an event only
alluded to). Her husband Leopold decides not to react to this event as the
offended party. His purposive inaction or absence of plot, a central feature
threaded through the entire novel, shows his ethical decision of allowing
his wife sexual freedom, even if he feels a maze of emotions from shame to
desire; further, he does not feel prompted to seek revenge to maintain his
honor, seeing such move as immature and ineffective. Bloom’s inaction
concludes the novel as the best ethical choice given the couple’s personal
nuanced circumstances; he and Molly will remain in their imperfect mar-
riage and perhaps face new challenges ahead. Joyce thus emphasizes the
simultaneous intertwining of affect and ethics, even though there is a
divergence in outcome (all of Bloom’s private worries, insecurities, nostal-
gia, love and sexual desire for his wife comingle while in action he side-
steps actual confrontation with his wife or lover). That Joyce creates an
erotic and empathetic tension around this nodal point and sustains it
through most of the narrative indicates to what high degree affect and
ethics can characterize and shape masculinity, given that traditionally a
European husband’s “honor” is connected to his wife’s.
18 S. MOONEY
Narratives would seem the ideal form to develop what Raymond

Williams (1977) has called the “structure of feeling.” As Flatley writes, this
“structure of feeling” is “useful because it enables us […] to describe those
structures that mediate between the social and the personal that are more
ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies or institutions” (25). My
study shows how an array of modernist and contemporary world writers
and filmmakers foregrounds structurally in their narratives the subject’s
gendered, affective state as a male-identified person with ethics. Drawing
on Williams’s terms for studying the “structure of feeling” as enmeshed in
thought processes, I attend to the masculine subject’s “specifically affective
elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought,
but thought as felt and feeling as thought” (Williams, 132). The characters
Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses offer prime examples of
this entwining of thought and feeling, structured in the free indirect dis-
course favored by high modernist narratives. The novel’s episodes both
encapsulate and expand different aspects of the two men’s subjectivities
and modes of consciousness (and unconscious). I will show how many
other narratives, modernist and later, in a variety of self-reflective, self-con-
scious ways, also explore masculinities as affective and ethical, and as more
gender fluid and open to conceiving of masculinities on a broad and inter-
sectional spectrum. In analyzing feelings, I draw on Lacan’s exploration of
affects in relation to the psychoanalytic subject; Soler (2016) has gathered
together Lacan’s major discussions of affects, which in turn aid me in some
analyses of shame, fear, and other affects dealt with prominently in these
narratives.
In considering affect, emotions, and feelings, I’m aware of the various
distinctions different scholars have made. I use the term “emotions” to
signal feelings that seem to arise from within subjectivity. For “affect,” I
understand this to be a more intersubjective feeling. Teresa Brennan’s The
Transmission of Affect (2004) explains affect’s shared space and experience
among more than one human subject. Several theorists of affect have
argued similarly: from Deleuze and Guattari (1986) to Altieri (2003) and
Frijda and Scherer (2014). The term “feeling” I use a more generalized
way to discuss emotions and affects. As we shall see, narratives suggest in
their structure whether a feeling should be thought of as more contained
within a human subject or more intersubjective. But these are gradations
of emotional experience.
While Goldie’s (2012) idea of a narrative self has been observed by oth-
ers (Ochberg 1994; Nünning 2017; Tedlock 2009; Vitoux 2005), his
definition of the narrative self as located in time appears too reductive. He

writes, “The narrative sense of self is a quite simple notion. It is the sense
that one has of oneself in narrative thinking, as having a past, a present,
and a future. I emphasize the ‘sense’ in the expression ‘narrative sense of
self’, for it is, according to me, a way of thinking of oneself, or of others,
in narrative thinking” (Goldie, The Mess Inside, 118). While I agree that
the subject’s temporal dimensions are important, the narrative subject’s
primary way of thinking is in relation to the other. Across a wide variety of
cultural and social contexts, the narratives I’ve selected examine the illu-
sory isolation of the feeling (male) subject and the permutations of his
affective relations. Even such lonely male characters as one finds in novels
by such distinct writers as Beckett, DeLillo, and Houellebecq generate
feelings that relate intersubjectively to others. The fictional male subject
has a grasp of himself through the other feelingly: this for me is the narra-
tive sense of masculine self. This is a feminist assertion, in that feelings
have often been dismissed as the domain of women. And yet, my assertion
that modern masculinities in literature and film tend to be determined
through affective and ethical relations is further finding echo in current
feminist social awakenings of actual contemporary men.17
My critical conception of masculine subjectivity within narrative com-
plements some of Lévinas’s understanding of the self and the other and
some of what Bracha Ettinger (2006) has described as the “matrixial bor-
derspace.” This is not to say that some narratives involving male subjects
don’t portray stoic, emotionally contained characters, reflective of what
psychologist Jansz (2000) has termed “restrictive emotionality” in his
research on masculinity. Some of the selected narratives in my study por-
tray that restrictiveness and go beyond it in their characterizations of male-
identified protagonists (e.g., the Magistrate in Coetzee’s Waiting for the
Barbarians; Mr. Ramsay in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse; Laure/Mikael in
Tomboy). Lyytikäinen (2017) examines “emotion effects” in Edgar Allan
Poe’s narrative; while this is useful, I see a need to go further than identi-
fication of emotion in literature. Emotions connect in narrative and psy-
chological ways with ethics, which in turn have crucial outcomes for the
masculine subject and others around him. It is possible that in recognizing
17
See, for example, The Man Enough Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/iq/podcast/
the-man-enough-podcast/) hosted by Liz Plank, Jamey Heath, and Justin Baldoni, author
of the book Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity (2021). The 2022 podcast features a
variety of compelling diverse men’s voices considering fatherhood, disrupting power struc-
tures, and more.
20 S. MOONEY
the literary and cinematic character as a nexus of gender, affects, and ethics
we can relate this to Alex Woloch’s (2003) narratological concept of “the
character-system” (13–14).
Following numerous theorists’ findings that gender is heavily socialized
and performed in relation to a subject’s nearby models, I distinguish cer-
tain twentieth-century and contemporary masculine narratives as they
emerge from familial relations (especially those between fathers and sons)
and male relations in the world that emphasize love, lack, loss, and self-
loathing. The separation from the mother and other caregivers that is so
often stressed in diverse North American and European narratives becomes
both a defining feature of dominant masculinity (independence) and its
undercurrents of loss, sadness, sense of lack, and lovelessness. The indi-
vidualized gentleman (his permutations include the knight, the nobleman,
the intellectual, the writer, the cowboy, and certain kinds of Everyman) is
developed as an ethical and affective compass in various modernist works
and beyond, although not necessarily as a source for guidance. We can
further note how critical authors and filmmakers, from James Joyce to
Margaret Atwood, become wary of and anxious about the heroic figure
and his relation to power, hierarchies, and institutions.
A Feminist Ethics for Masculinities

These narratives model a masculine ethics of ambiguity about the good
life. Thus, in some regards, these narratives centered on male subjects
break from or subvert traditional or widely accepted male narratives of
becoming (i.e., the heroic, or tales of mastery, achieving honor, reaching
solutions, etc.). Many of the selected narratives in this book arguably write
“beyond the ending” in the way that Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1985) sug-
gests in her study of gendered disruptions of traditional closure in novels.
This book examines how narratives tend to be gendered and relate
them to the ethical subject as perceived by Lévinas (1969, 1987, 1989,
1998), Cixous (1986, 1987, 1991), Irigaray (1993), Kristeva (1980a, b),
Derrida (2008), Guenther (2006), Zupančič (2000, 2003), Drucilla
Cornell (2015), and Oliver (1998). Guenther’s and Fryer’s explorations
of Lévinas’s thought and Soler’s explications of Lacan’s work on affect
lend crucial ideas to the understanding of the subject and its relation to
the other, and the subject’s relation to narratives. The psychoanalytic
paternal subject has been revised in recent years (Etchegoyen 2002; Target
and Fonagy 2002). While understandings of the paternal can relate to
Freud’s discussion of the primal scene and Oedipalization and Lacan’s

nom du père, and we can see some of those conceptualizations at work in
certain authors’ narratives, more contemporary psychoanalytic thought
takes into account wider variations of modern fathering. I contribute to
developing that discussion of the father in the realm of narrative ethics and
affects by suggesting how Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace might
relate to masculinity and fathering. Furthermore, I suggest masculinity
studies can benefit from including the connective potential of Simone de
Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, as well as Cixous’s idea of generosity,
Irigaray’s caress, and Derrida’s and Guenther’s concepts of the gift. Some
of these concepts might be used to include some men, and not just female-
identified subjects. In the second half of the book, I develop more on the
male subject’s relation to the other, considering the thought of Lacan,
Lévinas, and Zupančič, among others.
Masculinities: Becoming Men, Yet How?

Like Kabesh, Etchegoyen, and others, I base some of my understanding of
masculinity in the male child subject’s experience of early lack and differ-
ence that occurs in infancy and early developmental years, his identifica-
tion with his parents, his separation from his mother and rivalry or
dissociation or attachment with his father and other care givers who, along
with their culture and community, provide reinforcement for ways to be
masculine; the male child may or may not be biologically male (this posi-
tion allows for the transgender child identifying as male).18
In addition to Freud and Lacan, other researchers have more recently
offered insight into the processes of fathering and filial identities. Duindam
and Spruit (2002) contemplate how contemporary fathering may be
reproduced through a male-identified child’s experience with his father;
the child learns how to father from his father. Could it be that fatherhood
is reproduced much like mothering is copied by daughters as has been so
18
I look to recent transgender theories and discussions as related to psychoanalytic
thought; Gherovici (2017) is one of the leading scholars in this area. See also Cavanagh
(2016) (who relates Ettinger’s theory of the matrixial to the transgender subject); Gardiner
(2013), Georgis (2018), Kloppenberg (2015), Rubin (2003). Additionally, Halberstam
(2018), Marks (2002), Sifuentes-Jáuregui (2002), Vaccaro (2014) provide insights into the
transgender subject.
22 S. MOONEY
convincingly argued by Nancy Chodorow in her landmark Reproduction

of Mothering (1978)? Duindam and Spruit’s findings are still mixed and
inconclusive. Somewhat surprisingly, fatherhood, despite being a central
relational concept and identity for humankind, has been understudied in
psychology and psychoanalysis. Ken Corbett has noted this lack of theori-
zation of masculinity at the heart of psychoanalysis: a curious paradox.
Corbett rightly observes how much has been “presumed” about masculin-
ity: how “a boy becomes a boy through biological expression intertwined
with desire for his mother and identifying with his father, in time becom-
ing a father himself” (5). In the 1960s, Robert Stoller argued for a way to
see masculinity as more than identifying with the father: boys developed as
boys through their separation from their mothers; in the twenty-first cen-
tury, more recent studies have returned to boys’ attachments to their
fathers. Yet, as Corbett notes, the basic heteronormative narrative of mas-
culine becoming, with its conflation of anatomy and gender, has remained
largely unchanged. We can better understand masculinities and its modes
of becoming in boyhood the more we relax from overbearing binaries and
determinisms; Corbett suggests that psychoanalysts not dismiss the body,
but rather reconsider it in its potential variations along with fantasy and
narratives beyond solely the Oedipal one. I might add that in many of the
narratives I’ve selected for this present study, the authors and filmmakers
have done just that: move beyond one overly deterministic idea of father-
ing, being a son, becoming a man.
Additionally, I suggest that the ethical should be understood together
with the affective; many critical modernist and postmodernist works create
narrative zones of ambiguous ethical positions and explore masculine
affects beyond standard notions of mastery and lack of emotion as related
to power. Affects of anxiety, anguish, desire, fear, anger, self-loathing, and
melancholy are some of the prominent states explored.
Gendered Ethics and Gentlemanly Ambivalence

In studies of masculine narrative, ethics are not often related to affect. So
some questions that arise include: are there certain affects associated more
with male characters? In many societies, one dominant aspect of masculin-
ity is a reserved countenance or effacement of emotional expression. While
my study includes stoicism, it aims to look beyond this defensive façade to
other types of emotions, ranging from anxiety, fear, and anger to hope,
curiosity, and love. Furthermore, novels and other narrative art forms have
long served as a source for discussing relationships, the emotions and

responsibilities and faults they generate, all in relation to gender, not in a
vacuum without reference to gender, as can be the case with traditional
ethics. It is just that more often feelings and relationships have been asso-
ciated with the domain of women and girls.
In considering how the human subject relates to the other, Emmanuel
Lévinas, one of our era’s leading voices in ethics, has offered the tantaliz-
ing and difficult prospect of the self facing the unknowable other, which
involves impersonality and a resistance to the solipsistic ego. His explora-
tion of subjectivity in certain regards complements the Lacanian psycho-
analytic concepts of the barred Subject and the other.19 Lévinas writes of
subjectivity:
The same has to do with the other before the other appears in any way to a
consciousness. Subjectivity is structured as the other in the same, but in a
way different from that of consciousness. … The way subjectivity is struc-
tured as the other in the same differs from that of consciousness, which is
consciousness of being, however indirect, tenuous and inconsistent this rela-
tionship between consciousness and its theme “placed” before it may be.
(Otherwise than Being, 25)
Lévinas’s point that subjectivity intimately involves alterity is key to my

own discussions of narrated masculine subjectivities in this book. These
subjectivities rely on otherness for their structure; also, this relationship
with the other is not wholly consciousness and intentional. It is not com-
parable with the exchange a person might have with, say, an interlocutor
with whom one is in agreement.
While Lévinas’s ethics drive my study of masculine subjectivity and the
responsibility of the subject for the other (or as Lévinas puts it, “a respon-
sibility of the same for the other,” 25), I am also interested in his (and
other male philosophers’) tendency to use the masculine form as a univer-
sal person. Lévinas uses gendered terms for subject (male) and female
(other) and claims to use them symbolically, not as actual gendered desig-
nations; feminist philosophers have questioned these terms.20 If we read
19
Fryer (2004) illuminates many overlapping elements in Lévinas’s and Lacan’s thought.
20
Stella Sandford (2006) takes on the issue of gender through Lévinas work, particularly
in his 1961 Totality and Infinity, when he decided to the make the feminine a central meta-
phorical part of his discussion. The feminine as other is related to the welcome and the habi-
tus, as well as the erotic other.
24 S. MOONEY
Lévinas’s ethics as gendered, it can have further resonance for gendered

relations and affects in narrative. For support, in addition to considering
the feminist work of Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, I turn to Lisa
Guenther’s The Gift of the Other: Lévinas and the Politics of Reproduction.
Guenther shows how Lévinas’s ethics are gendered with the subject as
masculine and the other as feminine. The feminine Other is the one who
makes my dwelling possible; she creates the welcoming space for the work-
ing (male) subject:
The self who dwells in a home has control over the terms of its existence to
the degree that it can distinguish between inside and outside, now and later,
mine and not-yet-mine. The laboring self does not merely consume or “use
up” the element; it puts the element to use […] The feminine Other makes
this economy of dwelling possible by welcoming the self into an interior
space that she creates by withdrawing herself, by remaining “discrete” and
unimposing. (Guenther 60, explicating gendered sections of Lévinas’s
Totality and Infinity)
Some feminists, such as Ettinger, have seen some advantage in relating

Lévinas’s concept of different and alterity as feminine, although the case
of making feminist Lévinas’s uses of the feminine may be asking for
too much.
Let us consider some of the domestic qualities Lévinas uses to qualify
the feminine other: dwelling, interior space, the welcome. In using these
terms, Lévinas suggests a particular kind of masculine subject who looks
for this welcome; in this way, it seems to me the other is in the place of
performing the ethical welcome for the masculine subject. His responsibil-
ity toward this feminine other is not recognized.
In the tradition of phenomenology, as Kelly Oliver in Family Values
(1997) has noted, “The virile subject relates to itself and its world as its
property; virility is defined in terms of ownership and ownness” (119). It
is possible that Lévinas evokes a masculine subject who does not carry out
an ethical imperative. This is reserved for another other he writes of, and
this other is not knowable. I believe we can consider two registers of the
other in Lévinas, awkwardly not equating. The unknowable other, the one
for whom we are nonetheless responsible, can be whatever gender.
My work develops these observations further, exploring the aspects of
virility that operate beyond or differently from a supposed conceptual
model of the virile subject; I suggest that the masculine subject offers gifts,
albeit perhaps not entirely like those possible of the reproducing mother;
further, while many of the authors in this book are not generally perceived
as feminists, they end up contributing to a feminist vision with their own
pessimism of the twentieth-century masculine subject’s claim to power.
This pessimism helps to erode the naturalized idea of the virile subject as
master and owner.
In most societies, most men do not occupy wholly a position of power
and mastery on a daily basis. However, given their society’s investments in
masculine narratives of becoming and mastery, seemingly independent of
nurturing, community, and support, men both benefit and suffer. With
increasing yet racially limited social mobility and expansion of the vote
since the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, there arises an
unofficial sense, yet culturally broad presupposition, that any man can
make his way in the world. The myth of the self-made man comes to func-
tion throughout many modern communities, taking the place of the ser-
vice model of the warrior/knight/gentleman which is carried out through
medieval time and examined with keen interest through various myths,
legends, and narratives.
Norbert Elias (2000) and Christopher Forth (2008; and Honour 2014)
have examined the ambivalence of the knight who occupies a liminal posi-
tion between service and leisure, corporeal dedication and refined prac-
tices. The knight’s ambiguity has only deepened over time, with modern
men becoming increasingly disconnected from relying on bodily strengths
and skills for survival and sense of self-worth. Furthermore, we can observe
how the knight’s identity unfolds in relation to the uncouth other. Elias
analyzes the medieval art of courtly life to show that the laboring classes
form an indispensable part of
the landscape of knightly existence. The lord lives in their midst. … [I]t is
an integral part of his self-esteem to have these other people moving about
him who are not like him, whose master he is … Whether he rides, hunts,
loves or dances, whatever the lord does is noble and courtois, whatever the
servants and peasants do coarse and uncouth. … It was gratifying for the
nobles to know themselves different from others. The sight of contrasts
heightened joy in living. (176)
Elias notes how the medieval courtois develops into the early modern
and modern “civilized.” Increasingly, an affective sense of being “cour-
tois” or “civilized” becomes an integral aspect of bourgeois masculine
26 S. MOONEY
consciousness. The affective transformation of masculinity into the mod-

ern age involves both an ennobling of individuality and an erosion of com-
munal effort and reliance. The heroic can carry on in the guise of
self-reliance and meritocracy, yet there is always already a hole in that
heroism in that rationally anyone can recognize that “no man is an island.”
In this study, I examine more of the diffusion of the knight in his mod-
ern and contemporary ambivalent permutations; I relate his nomadism or
errancy ethically to other (at times nomadic) human subjects. The nomad
is a transcultural figure who embodies potentially positive ethical and
affective qualities. The nomad often has double consciousness. As eth-
nologist Barbara Tedlock explains, “‘double consciousness’ is a both/and
equilibristic construction of identity which stresses the performativity of a
nomadic subject. By endlessly citing the conventions of the social world
around us, we perform and produce our reality through speech acts
including language and gesture” (24). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti (1994)
has argued for a feminist use of nomadism, in recognizing the false male
universal model of subjectivity; she conceives of identity as “relational, in
that it requires a bond with the ‘other’; it is retrospective, in that it is fixed
through memories and recollections, in a genealogical process. Last, but
not least, identity is made of successive identifications, that is to say uncon-
scious internalized images that escape rational control” (166). Nomadism
is involved in subjectivity:
By placing all the emphasis on nomadic shifts, I mean to stress the impor-
tance of not excluding any one of the levels that constitute the map of female
feminist subjectivity … The nomadic subject I am proposing is a figuration
that emphasizes the need for action both at the level of identity, of subjectiv-
ity, and of differences among women. … In order to sustain this process, a
feminist must start from the recognition of herself as not-one; as a subject
that is split time and time again, over multiple axes of differentia-
tion. (170–71)
Braidotti’s use of nomadism to reconceive feminist subjectivity can be

applied to masculinity as well. She writes that nomadism is “sexual differ-
ence as providing shifting locations for multiple female feminist embodied
voices” (172). I see this concept of nomadism as a way to recognize fluid
multiple and shifting masculinities.
The narrative of the Eurocentric self-made man influences non-white,
non-Eurocentric experiences because of neighboring and competing sys-
tems of thought (i.e., Indigenous communities have had racist values of
white settlers imposed on them, a violence that is itself masculinized). The

rise of the Bildungsroman as an aesthetic way to address the narrative
development of the male subject who will find a harmonious balance
between his individual desires and talents and his society’s needs and rules
synthesizes with a more generalized European and white North American
nineteenth-century social move toward an idealized “authentic” (male)
self (Castle 2006). In modernist literature, these narrative models start to
be tested with new permutations of the Bildungsroman, as seen in James
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce’s novel dramatically
refuses to settle for a male harmonization with the community (Non ser-
viam!), but rather celebrates the rebellious forging of a masculine, indi-
vidualized yet transcendent, and nomadic poet-subject and rejects the
credo and ethos of the gentleman, itself shown to be an impossible end-
game in colonial Ireland. With the alienated, over-individualized self-made
male protagonist in many modernist narratives comes a heavier conse-
quence of failure, inertia, opting out, or acting in opposition. Joyce’s
Portrait draws a line and presents the nomadic alternative to masculine
subjectivity. Certain other modernists will also develop male protagonists
who likewise question their own investment in their societies’ power struc-
tures and opt for various kinds of nomadism.
Masculine Narrative Ethics

This study starts with the premise that narratives tend to be gendered.
From there, many narratives tend to speculate ethical interactions
with others.
In this observation, I build on the work set out by Wayne Booth, James
Phelan, and Katherine Saunders Nash, among others. Nash writes,
Taking Wayne C. Booth’s work in The Company We Keep as a model, rhe-

torical theorists posit three dimensions of narrative ethics, including the eth-
ics of rhetorical purpose (the ethical quality of the final, complete work, as
well as ethics in a larger sense: an assessment of how narrative literature
contributes to humanist progress), the ethics of the told (ethics as dramatized
in the story by characters and events) and the ethics of the telling (the values
endorsed by narrator and/or implied author in the act of narrative trans-
mission). (4)
In my work, I suggest at least four contexts for the ethics of the told and
ethics of the telling: by analyzing first-person, third-person, and community
28 S. MOONEY
narratives across cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and geopolitical borders, I

interpret ethical and affective relationships based on the narrative position
of the protagonist, spread across four prominent aspects of masculinity
that involve particular ties to the community and thus responsibilities: (1)
the father (Chap. 2), (2) the son (Chap. 3), (3) the gentleman and post-
gentleman (and his predecessors the warrior and knight; Chap. 4), and (4)
the unheroic man (Chap. 5: the alternative man, standing in place of the
hero, variously as non-heroic, aheroic, or anti-heroic).
Narratives of the paternal imagine an ethics of care: responsibility, the
copy, the law, and the gift. Narratives of the filial often involve an ethics of
creation. The ethics of honor is explored in narratives of the gentleman,
while the ethics of proximity emerges as that functioning for the unheroic
male protagonist. Notably, in these twentieth-century and contemporary
narratives, the authors tend to question or doubt stories of progress; the
Enlightenment narrative of progress is not only splintered into Lyotard’s
petits récits (little stories; 1984). It is repositioned and reconfigured as a
contemplation of the lack of mastery and thus lack in versions of mascu-
linities themselves.
Since the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth century, we can see
the modern novel of realism and naturalism move away from heroic narra-
tives in order to address pressing social concerns and a complex sense of
the psychology of the individual. By the modernist period starting in the
late nineteenth century and continuing into the post-WWII years, many
novelists have shifted masculine-driven plots and characterizations to
involve the aheroic, non-heroic, and anti-heroic. These narratives do not
propose to single out an eccentric’s existence; the stories relate to broader
cultural, ethnic, and national narratives of men in a way that rarely gets
captured in women’s stories.
The selected authors and films in this study often propose a nomadic or
perturbatory narrative signaling a break from older national stories. These
texts often feature an alienated male protagonist: the modern British novel
is preoccupied with class rigidity and social justice; the Irish novel, likewise
as well as political justice; the modern French novel from Proust onward
combines ethical, existential, and anti-establishment concerns; the Spanish
post-Civil War novel explores commitment and national definitions; the
Russian novel examines the Soviet destruction of the family and its recu-
peration; and the American narrative examines the American dream and
the self-made man; the African American narrative explores a version of
the self-made man, the “not-Man,” and the “more than a man.” In the
Mexican narrative, the postcolonial male subject is buoyed by the patriar-

chy and multi-national capitalism; the road narrative only returns to the
center of power, where the young man is a pawn. In Indigenous narrative,
male characters rely on grounding female (and some male) characters to
signify home, stability, safety, survival, possible re-creation, and the earth
itself; the heroic is remodeled as a last resort that doesn’t exactly save the
community, but does work collectively to safeguard it.
Narrative Connections of Affects and Ethics

Affects in narratives can serve in diverse ways, as has been noted by Pirjo
Lyytikäinen (2017). She recognizes how the
variety of narrative devices by which elements of the storyworld are imbued

with affective power or denied that power even if they are somehow “natu-
rally” prone to have this kind of power. Literary texts build on the “natural”
frames but also manipulate the audience’s feelings by attaching valences or
affective values to objects and settings. In literary works, any object or phe-
nomenon described tends to function as an emotion-trigger. (Lyytikäinen
254, my emphasis)
In narratives that foreground masculinity, we can note how frequently

masculinity and ethics together are related in affective ways; for example,
a troubled father-son relationship shows how deeply disturbing this can be
for the son in terms of his sense of self-worth and ability to do things in
life. A transsubjective sense of the self is suggested. Affect often serves as a
precedent to an ethical decision or outcome. But to say that affect pre-
cedes the ethical is overly simplistic, for we can also see that affects are the
results of ethical decisions and acts, such as the choices a father makes
consciously or not to be cruel, dismissive, or inattentive toward a son who
disappoints the father in some way, in some perceived lack that relates back
to the father’s own sense of masculinity and notions of integrity or worth.
In this example, it is clearly hard to separate the affective from the ethical
at any point. The father’s emotional response is at once an ethical one.
And both the affective and ethical relate to the masculine in ways that are
not typically addressed in ethics.
Narratives exploring masculinity can further be understood as making
emotional sense for the audience beyond simplistic notions of maleness.
Lyytikäinen writes more generally of emotions in narratives:
30 S. MOONEY
At another level, we may focus on the discourses of emotion and concepts

and metaphors connected to emotions that come up in literary works.
Literary subjects present judgements and “information” relating to emo-
tions and use comparisons and metaphors or other tropes (involving con-
ceptual blending and including affective trope-worlds). All this serves not
only to give the audience food for thought or information about the
thoughts of fictional subjects, but also to provide elements in constructing
the affective make-up of the text. (254, my emphasis)
Readers become attentive to this affective make-up of the text, as we

look for relations among characters. We often reflect on the relative cool-
ness, dryness, lyricism, or empassioned aspects of writing. Lyytikäinen
expands on this point:
Furthermore, the authorial audience is, in various ways, induced into affec-
tive states by the lexical choices, linguistic registers and the like. The politics
of using or not using emotion words produces quite different emotional
textscapes. Emotions can be named, but the most powerful devices to evoke
them do not necessarily even include naming emotions. For example,
descriptions and narration attributing emotions to characters encompass
psychonarration, narrated monologue, interior monologue, and speech
expressions by characters that possibly only imply their emotions (or show
them without telling). Style, rhythm, points of view, distance as well as many
other elements and their combinations have affective value without requir-
ing the explicit mention of emotions or the use of emotion words. (254,
my emphasis)
Chapter Overview
This study proposes intersectional comparisons through the chapters,
which are organized by ethical models for a diverse range of narrative
characters. While no study can be exhaustive, this study attempts to pres-
ent many small groupings of comparative affective, ethical narratives in
order to generate more ideas about how diverse masculinities are struc-
tured within and on the margins of patriarchal cultures.
Part I: Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine
Subjectivities
Chapter 2: Narrative Ethics of Care: Folding Fathers, Gifts Given,
Subjectivity Beyond Mastery
Chapter 2 applies ideas about gender, ethics, and affect to diverse world
narratives’ male-identified subjects as fathers and paternal relationships.
Foucault writes of the “ethical subject” as one “produced by a folding of
thought,” “the fold of thought is auto-affection.” The concept of the fold
compares with a particular kind of mirror-like affect regarding how fathers
reflect off their children. This aspect of the self and other is carried out in
literary and cinematic fictions through first- and third-person narrations or
character focalizations, in various positionings of the male subject as think-
ing of himself thinking, and how he thinks about himself in relation to his
children, and what ethical and affective relations come to the fore in this
hetero-affection. The father might impart to his child a gift in the affective
form of anxious or generous love. This gift differs from that of the moth-
er’s selfless gift, as the father’s gift is bound to patriarchal order and ties,
relations and understanding of reciprocation. The father’s gift has hidden
conditions. The affects of fatherhood include anxiety, arrogance, pride,
insecurity, weakness, passion, sentimentality, tears, love, anger, fear of
commitment and loss and inadequacy, resentment, ambivalence, exhaus-
tion, and ambiguity. Affects of fatherhood recycle previous affects experi-
enced by the father when he was a boy. The child develops a sense of self
in relation to his caregiver.
Isaac D. Balbus writes in “Masculinity and the (M)Other” of variations
of Nancy Chodorow’s theory of the reproduction of mothering that need
to assess fathers.
The literary works and films for discussion in this chapter range from
early twentieth-century portraits of fathers (Simon Dedalus, Leopold
Bloom, Rudolph Bloom and Virag in James Joyce’s Portrait (1916) and
Ulysses (1922); Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf)
to mid-century reflections (Jacques Moran in Beckett’s Molloy (1951)) to
contemporary portraits (Jack Gladney in Don DeLillo’s White Noise
(1998); the father in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)) to an array of
contemporary film portraits of father figures by American Indigenous,
British, Spanish, Russian, and American filmmakers (Smoke Signals [1998];
Billy Elliot [2000]; Abrazos rotos [2009]; The Return [2003]; and The Last
Picture Show [1971]). This selection, while not exhaustive, aims to offer
specific and comparative interpretations across temporal, ethnic, and geo-
political borders in order to examine the narrative ethics of masculinity in
the form of fatherhood and its folds.
I divide this chapter study of eleven narratives into two groups with two
subsets: the two main categories are narratives that feature the paternal
32 S. MOONEY
character in his subjectivity, usually involving first-person narration. The

other category contains portrayals of a paternal character from a third-
person perspective. Within these two categories, first- and third-person
narration, there is another division: in the first group, the father is held up
at times as an image to emulate or reflect oneself in, whether for better or
worse. In the second, the father is incongruent with a child’s self-image;
the non-image of the father prevails. In carrying out these comparisons,
we can examine masculine ethics and affects through masculine narra-
tions—whether from the subjective standpoint of the paternal character
himself or from the standpoint of a child or other third-person narrator.
To understand the father and auto-affection more deeply, I compare this
figure across different cultural traditions.
As one common feature of parenting is the use of the parent’s image to
help the child develop his/her/their own image and sense of subjectivity,
this chapter interprets the rendering of the paternal image for the care of
the son; hence, one sense of “mirroring.” As that paternal image is the one
gift that only the father can give or withhold, and as symbolically mascu-
linity derives much of its strengths in basic myths about the father, from
his pervasive influence even from a distance or in absence, such as in the
myth of Ulysses, a father who is absent from his family’s home for twenty
years while having a multitude of mythical adventures. By the twentieth
century, in many cultures, the father’s role has been domesticated into the
role of provider and man in the world as breadwinner and part-time par-
ent; the occasional father appears nurturing of his children and a more
equal partner with his spouse, but the more recently expanded nurturing
role (yet still fairly limited) is treated with deep ambiguity (White Noise) or
apocalyptic exaggeration (The Road).
This study reconsiders Charles Taylor’s assertion in Sources of the Self
(1989) that the modern identity involves being “a human agent: the
senses of inwardness, freedom, individuality, and being embedded in
nature … in the modern West” (ix). Taylor produces a history of the mod-
ern subject with little or no reference to gender, although his account of
the “human agent” resonates with the qualities of dominant masculinity
(Connell 2005); in enumerating the “affirmation of daily life,” he recog-
nizes the value of being a father and thus part of a “productive family.”
This is part of the modern transition from the Aristotelian “good life” (a
citizen ethic which carries on the value of the life of the warrior and man
of honor which prevails in Europe through the seventeenth century); then
this “special range of higher activities becomes displaced and gets
repositioned within ‘life’ itself. The full human life is now defined in terms
of labour and production, on one hand, and marriage and family life, on
the other” (213). Taylor sees the rise of the bourgeois ethic in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries upend the older orders of honor. He fails
to account for the persistence of honor narrative and ethics, coded both in
fictions and laws and political systems. He avoids mention of how women
figure in this web of relations, nor how they contribute to the dialogue
(Hannah Arendt is his sole reference to a female philosopher, scholar, or
writer in his book naming over 200 men). He also ignores racial and eth-
nic identities, conveniently glossing over colonialism, the slave trade and
its long aftermath into the present era, settler violence, indigeneity,
migrant diasporas, and his selection of only a few male modernists to
explore (from Proust, Eliot to Pound) is surprising for a contemporary
philosopher writing in the late twentieth century.
Fatherhood involves the look of love. But it also involves failed or
incomplete looks, the lack in fathers (despite an illusory promise of whole-
ness), absent fathers and the fatherless. Fathers derive their authority from
the law which they themselves create. The death of the father paradoxi-
cally suggests one of the most transitional phases of life for the son. When
the look is no longer involved, the father as mirror disappears. While the
death of the father can be understood literally (as inevitable in the life
cycle) and symbolically, writers and filmmakers link it to the opportunity
to analyze the father and seek alternative ways of being. The ideologies
and desires caught up with narratives that conclude with the death of the
father suggest a troubled judgment of the paternal.
Chapter 3: Ethics of Creation: Copy of the Copy: Sons’ Narratives
of Feeling of Selfhood
In the family romance, less has been written about the possible romance
of the son with the father, the son’s desire for the father, the father as
object of desire. After all, aren’t sons out to conquer and kill off their
fathers, literally or metaphorically? That Oedipal reduction is challenged
by a diverse array of narratives across cultural and ethnic boundaries.
Indigenous, African American, white American, Irish, British, French, and
Russian narratives in prose and film explore filial relations while question-
ing the Oedipal relationship or exploring alternative familial
configurations.
In this chapter, the narratives are sorted into three groups: those
emphasizing a son’s identification with his father, those emphasizing a
son’s difference from his father, and finally those doing both, or
34 S. MOONEY
presenting these relations more ambiguously. I suggest that there can be

found a deep fascination with, and desire for, the father as well as mother
for the developing son. Further, the son’s relationship to his father helps
to fashion his own masculinity, and his relationship to male power in soci-
ety as he comes of age. With perhaps the exception of the Inuit commu-
nity portrayed in Atanarjuat, the selected narratives examine cultures
structured by patriarchal systems, in which men tend to have the advan-
tage in law and relationships, although, as we shall see, this advantage is
undercut by class and race.
In this study of masculinities, we can see how this promise of power
might influence the formation of the son. At the same time, we see how
the son’s development is deeply affected by his father’s presence and way
of relating to others and the community. The affects in question in this
chapter are particularly those of shame, love, hate, and anxiety.
In narratives of the son, the parental relationship is foregrounded, and
then consequently, mirroring motifs of the copy/new/difference, self/
same, transcendence are emphasized. As already established in the previ-
ous chapter on fathers, fathers tend to be understudied; their symbolic
role as provider and stoic warden tends to be taken for granted, even when
real-life evidence does not corroborate these presuppositions. In many
narratives, sons’ feelings are part of the main events. In the selected texts
for this study, I suggest that fathers and sons display emotion and ethics,
including the ethics of how they negotiate power.
I consider such questions: what happens to the sons’ desires to gain
power, influence, and create when they are thwarted or blocked? What
happens to non-binary or non-Eurocentric male identities, such as the
queer man or trans boy or the Indigenous teenager, when looking for
paths of self-realization with the help of, or in spite of, the father? From a
sociological standpoint, there is a presupposition that boys somehow must
attain a public identity, a social one, to carry out life in the community
(Britton and Baxter 1999). Fictional narratives about men often mirror
this social set of norms; the selected narratives in this study often shift the
emphasis of the becoming of a self from the public to a more private or
interpersonal domain. Some public and private roles, such as that of the
writer, artist, or hunter, serve also as metaphors. The son’s relationship
with his parents, in terms of mirroring or refracting, in some ways relates
to metonymy and metaphor. In some of the selected narratives, there
moments in the text that point to ethical relationships that define the son
and his masculinity, almost in spite of himself. As just one example, The
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Feci in modo di poter mettere le mani su Percy Layton, un giovine
uscito dall’Università, che voleva far carriera nel giornalismo come
corrispondente del più autorevole dei tre quotidiani. Egli sorrise
quando gli chiesi perchè i giornali avessero soppresso ogni allusione
a Jackson ed al suo processo.
— Politica editoriale, — disse. — Non ne sappiamo nulla, noi: sono
affari del Direttore.
— Ma perchè questa politica?
— Noi formiamo un gruppo compatto con le corporazioni. Anche
pagando il prezzo di un annuncio, anche pagando dieci volte tanto la
tariffa ordinaria, non potrete fare pubblicare quella informazione su
nessun giornale; l’impiegato che volesse farla passare di nascosto,
perderebbe il posto.
— E se si parlasse della vostra politica? Mi sembra che la vostra
funzione sia di deformare la verità, secondo gli ordini dei vostri
padroni, che, alla loro volta, ubbidiscono ai capricci delle
corporazioni.
— Non ho niente a che vedere in ciò...
Sembrò sulle spine per un istante, poi il suo viso si rischiarò: aveva
trovato una scappatoia.
— Personalmente, non scrivo mai nulla che non sia vero. Sono in
regola colla mia coscienza. Naturalmente capitano molte cose
ripugnanti nel corso di una giornata di lavoro, ma, tutto ciò, capirete,
fa parte della monotonia solita, quotidiana, — concluse con logica
infantile.
— Però, sperate di assidervi, in seguito, su un seggio direttoriale e
seguire una politica, non è vero?
— Allora, sarò indurito.
— Poichè non siete ancora indurito, ditemi che cosa pensate, ora,
della politica editoriale in genere.
— Non penso nulla. — rispose con vivacità. — Non bisogna dare
calci di traverso, se si vuole riuscire nel giornalismo. Ho sempre
imparato ciò, se non altro. — E alzò la testa con aria di saggezza
giovanile.
— Ma dove mettete voi la rettitudine?
— Voi non capite il trucco del mestiere. Tutti sono naturalmente
corretti, perchè tutto finisce sempre bene; non è vero?
— È molto incerta la vostra asserzione, molto indefinita, —
mormorai.
Ma il mio cuore sanguinava per quella giovinezza, e avrei voluto
invocare soccorso e scoppiare in lagrime. Cominciavo a rompere le
apparenze superficiali di quella società nella quale ero sempre
vissuta, e scoprivo la terribile realtà nascosta. Una tacita
cospirazione era stata ordita contro Jackson, e sentivo un fremito di
simpatia perfino per l’avvocato piagnucolone che aveva sostenuto in
modo così miserevole la causa.
E quella tacita organizzazione era singolarmente estesa, e non
mirava solo contro Jackson: era diretta contro tutti gli operai mutilati
nella filanda. E, se così era, perchè non contro tutti gli operai di tutte
le officine e delle industrie in genere?
Se le cose stavano così, la società era bugiarda. Mi ritraevo
inorridita davanti alle mie stesse conclusioni. Era troppo
abominevole, troppo terribile, per essere vero. Eppure erano veri
Jackson e il suo braccio, e quel sangue che colava dal mio tetto e
macchiava il mio abito. E c’erano molti Jackson, ce n’erano centinaia
nella filanda, com’egli stesso aveva detto. Il braccio fantasma non mi
lasciava più in pace.
Andai a trovare il signor Wickson e il signor Pertonwaithe, i due
maggiori azionisti, ma, come gli operai, al loro servizio, non riuscii a
commuoverli. Mi accorsi che professavano un’etica superiore agli
altri, che si potrebbe chiamare la morale aristocratica, la morale dei
padroni [32]. Parlavano in termini larghi della loro politica, della loro
capacità, che identificavano con la probità. Si rivolgevano a me con
un tono paterno, con delle arie protettrici rivolte alla mia giovinezza
inesperta.
Di tutti coloro che avevo avvicinato nel corso della mia inchiesta,
questi erano i più immorali e i più incurabili. E rimanevano
convintissimi della giustizia della loro condotta; non c’era nè dubbio
nè discussione possibile su questo soggetto. Si credevano i salvatori
della società, convinti di formare la felicità della massa;
rappresentavano un quadro patetico delle sofferenze che la classe
operaia avrebbe subito senza gli impieghi che essi stessi, essi soli,
potevano loro procurare.
Uscita dalla casa dei due padroni, incontrai Ernesto e gli raccontai
quanto avevo esperimentato. Mi guardò con un’aria soddisfatta.
— Benissimo, — disse. — Cominciate a scoprire la verità da voi
stessa. Le vostre conclusioni, dedotte dal generalizzare le vostre
esperienze, sono esatte. Nel meccanismo industriale nessuno è
libero delle proprie azioni, eccettuato il grosso capitalista, e ancora
non lo è completamente se si può adoperare questo giro di frase
irlandese [33]. I padroni, lo vedete, sono perfettamente sicuri di avere
ragione agendo come fanno. Questa è l’assurdità che corona tutto
l’edificio. Sono così legati dalla loro natura umana, che non possono
fare una cosa senza crederla buona. Abbisognano di una sanzione
per le loro azioni. Quando vogliono intraprendere qualsiasi cosa, di
affari, s’intende, devono aspettare che nasca nel loro cervello una
specie di concezione religiosa, filosofica o morale della bontà di
questa cosa. Allora la realizzano senza accorgersi che il desiderio è
padre del pensiero avuto. E così finiscono per sanzionare qualsiasi
progetto. Sono casisti superficiali, gesuiti sono. Si sentono perfino
giustificati di fare il male purchè ne risulti un bene. Uno dei più
ridicoli dei loro assiomi, è che si proclamano superiori al resto
dell’umanità, per saggezza ed efficacia. Partendo da questo punto di
vista, si arrogano il diritto di ripartire pane e companatico a tutto il
genere umano. Hanno perfino risuscitata la teoria del diritto divino
dei re, dei re del commercio in modo speciale [34].
«Il punto debole della loro posizione consiste nel fatto che sono
semplicemente uomini d’affari. Essi non sono filosofi, non sono dei
biologi nè sociologi: se lo fossero, tutto procederebbe meglio,
naturalmente. Un uomo d’affari che fosse, nello stesso tempo,
versato in queste due scienze, sarebbe approssimativamente ciò
che occorre all’umanità. Ma anche tolte dal loro dominio
commerciale, queste genti sono stupide. Conoscono solo gli affari.
Non comprendono nè il genere umano, nè il mondo, e non pertanto
si erigono arbitri della sorte di milioni di affamati e di tutta la massa
umana. La storia, un giorno, farà a loro spese una risata omerica.
Preparata com’ero ad affrontare la signora Wickson e la signora
Pertonwaithe, la conversazione che ebbi con esse non mi riserbò
alcuna sorpresa. Erano signore della migliore società [35].
Abitavano in sontuosi palazzi e avevano parecchie altre residenze,
un po’ dappertutto: in campagna, in montagna, sulle rive dei laghi e
del mare. Una vera folla di servitori si affaccendava attorno a loro, e
la loro attività sociale era straordinaria. Patrocinavano le università e
le Chiese, e i pastori, particolarmente, erano pronti a piegare le
ginocchia davanti ad esse. [36] Quelle due donne erano due vere
potenze, con tutto quel danaro a loro disposizione. Esse
possedevano a un grado considerevole il potere di sovvenzionare il
pensiero, come dovetti capire ben presto, grazie agli insegnamenti di
Ernesto.
Imitavano i loro mariti, e parlavano con gli stessi termini generali
della politica da seguire, dei doveri e delle responsabilità che
incombono ai ricchi. Si lasciavano governare dalla stessa etica dei
loro mariti, dalla morale di classe, e ripetevano certe frasi
sensazionali che non capivano neppure.
Inoltre, si irritarono quando dipinsi loro la deplorevole condizione
della famiglia di Jackson; e siccome mi stupii perchè non avevano
fissato un fondo di riserva in suo favore, esse dichiararono che non
avevano bisogno che si insegnasse loro i doveri sociali; quando
chiesi, poi, apertamente di soccorrerlo, rifiutarono non meno
apertamente. Il più strano si è che espressero il loro rifiuto con
parole quasi uguali, benchè fossi andata da loro separatamente, e
l’una ignorasse che ero andata dall’altra. La loro comune risposta fu,
che esse erano felici di avere l’occasione di dimostrare, una volta
per sempre, che non avrebbero mai concesso delle sovvenzioni alla
negligenza e che non volevano, pagando le disgrazie, spingere i
poveri a ferirsi volontariamente [37].
Ed erano sincere quelle signore. Il doppio convincimento della loro
superiorità di classe e della loro autorità personale, le inebriava.
Trovavano nella loro morale di casta una sanzione per tutte le azioni
che compivano.
Ritornata in carrozza alla porta dello splendido palazzo della signora
Pertonwaithe, mi voltai per contemplarlo, e ricordai la frase di
Ernesto: che anche quelle donne erano avvinte alla macchina, ma in
modo tale che sedevano proprio in cima.
CAPITOLO V.
GLI AMICI DELLO STUDIO.
Ernesto veniva spesso a casa mia, attiratovi non solo dal babbo, e
dai pranzi con dispute. Sin d’allora, mi lusingavo di entrarci un poco
anch’io in quella attrattiva, e non tardai molto ad esserne sicura.
Perchè non ci fu mai al mondo un innamorato come Ernesto
Everhard. Di giorno in giorno, il suo sguardo e la sua stretta di mano
si fecero più sicuri, se è possibile, e la interrogazione che avevo
visto spuntare nei suoi occhi diventò sempre più imperativa.
La mia prima impressione era stata sfavorevole, ma poi mi ero
sentita attirata. Era seguìto poi un moto di repulsione il giorno in cui
aveva insultato la mia classe e me stessa, con sì poco riguardo, ma
ben presto mi ero resa conto che egli non aveva per niente
calunniato il mondo in cui vivevo, che tutto quanto aveva detto di
duro e di amaro era vero; e più che mai mi avvicinai a lui. Diventava
il mio oracolo. Secondo me, egli strappava la maschera alla società,
e mi lasciava intravedere certe verità tanto incontestabili quanto
spiacevoli.
No, non ci fu mai innamorato simile. Una signorina non può vivere
sino a ventiquattro anni in una Città Universitaria, senza che le si
faccia la corte. Ero stata corteggiata da imberbi studenti del secondo
anno, e da professori canuti, senza contare gli atleti della boxe e i
giganti del foot-ball. Ma nessuno aveva condotto l’assalto come
Ernesto. Mi aveva stretta fra le sue braccia prima che me ne
accorgessi, e le sue labbra si erano posate sulle mie prima che
avessi avuto il tempo di protestare o di resistergli. Davanti alla
sincerità del suo ardore, la dignità convenzionale, e la riservatezza
verginale parevano ridicole. Perdevo terreno davanti al suo attacco
superbo e irresistibile. Non mi fece nessuna dichiarazione nè
impegno formale: mi prese fra le braccia, e considerò come certo il
fatto che sarei stata sua moglie. Non ci fu nessuna contestazione in
proposito: una sola discussione sorse più tardi, circa la data del
matrimonio.
Era inaudito, inverosimile, pertanto; le cose procedevano come il suo
spirito di verità; ed io gli confidai la mia vita, e non ebbi a
pentirmene. Però, durante i primi giorni del nostro amore,
m’impensieriva un po’ l’impetuosità della sua galanteria. Ma erano
timori infondati; nessuna donna ebbe la fortuna di avere un uomo più
dolce e più tenero. Dolcezza e violenza si confondevano
stranamente nella sua passione, con sicurezza e goffaggine nel suo
modo di fare. Da quella leggera goffaggine nell’atteggiamento non si
liberò mai, ed era grazioso! Egli si comportava nel nostro salotto
come un toro che facesse una passeggiata prudente in una bottega
di porcellane [38].
Se avevo, talvolta, un ultimo dubbio sulla profondità reale dei miei
sentimenti a suo riguardo, era per una titubanza sub-cosciente, che
svanì precisamente in quel tempo.
Al Circolo degli «Amici dello Studio», in una notte di battaglia
magnifica in cui Ernesto affrontò i padroni del giorno, nel loro rifugio,
ebbi la rivelazione del mio amore in tutta la sua pienezza. Il Circolo
degli «Amici dello Studio» era il migliore che esistesse sulla costa
del Pacifico. Era una fondazione di Miss Brentwood, vecchia zitella,
favolosamente ricca, per la quale il circolo faceva le veci del marito,
della famiglia e dei divertimenti. I suoi soci erano i più ricchi della
società, e le menti più capaci fra i ricchi, compreso, naturalmente, un
numero esiguo di uomini di scienza, per dare all’insieme
un’apparenza intellettuale.
Il Circolo degli «Amici dello Studio» non possedeva un locale
apposito: era un circolo speciale, i cui membri si riunivano una volta
al mese, in casa di uno di loro, per sentire una conferenza. Gli
oratori erano di solito pagati, ma non sempre. Quando un chimico di
New-York aveva fatto una scoperta sul radium, per esempio, gli
rimborsavano tutte le spese di un viaggio attraverso il continente
americano, e gli davano inoltre una forte somma per indennizzarlo
del tempo perduto, e così facevano coll’esploratore che ritornava
dalle regioni artiche, e con i nuovi astri della letteratura e dell’arte.
Nessun estraneo era ammesso a quelle riunioni, e «Gli Amici dello
Studio» si erano proposti di non lasciar trasparire nulla delle loro
discussioni, nella stampa, in modo che perfino gli uomini di Stato, se
fossero intervenuti, e ce n’erano stati, e dei più grandi, avrebbero
potuto esporre liberamente il loro pensiero.
Ho aperta, qui davanti, la lettera un po’ sciupata che Ernesto mi
scrisse vent’anni or sono, dalla quale trascrivo il brano seguente:
«Siccome vostro padre è membro del Circolo «Gli Amici dello
Studio», e voi pure potete entrarvi, venite all’adunanza di martedì
sera. Vi assicuro che passerete uno dei momenti migliori della vostra
vita. Nei vostri recenti incontri coi padroni del giorno, non siete
riuscita a smuoverli; io li scuoterò per voi. Li farò ringhiare come lupi.
Voi vi siete accontentata di toccare la loro moralità, ma finchè la loro
onestà è contestata, essi rimangono alteri e superbi, e assumono
delle arie di superiorità e di soddisfazione. Io li minaccerò nella
borsa, e ne rimarranno scossi sin nelle radici più profonde della loro
natura primitiva. Se verrete, vedrete l’uomo delle caverne, in abito di
società, difendere coi denti, con tutte le forze, il suo osso. Vi
assicuro un vero pandemonio, e la vista edificante della natura della
bestia.
«Mi hanno invitato per demolirmi. L’idea è stata della signorina
Brentwood, ma ha commesso la dabbenaggine di lasciarmelo
capire, invitandomi. La loro gioia massima è di domare qualche
riformatore dall’animo dolce e fidente. La vecchia zitella crede che io
assocî all’innocenza d’un gattino, la bontà e la stupidità di un
animale colle corna. E devo confessare che ho fatto del mio meglio
per convincerla sempre più. Dopo avere prudentemente tastato
terreno, ha finito per indovinare il mio carattere docile. Avrò un buon
compenso: duecentocinquanta dollari, quanto cioè avrebbero dato a
un radicale che avesse posto la sua candidatura al seggio di
Governatore. Inoltre, l’abito di società è di rigore: in vita mia non mi
sono mai camuffato così, e bisognerà che ne prenda uno a nolo. Ma
farò ancora di più per essere sicuro di entrare fra «Gli Amici dello
Studio»».
Fu scelta, fra i luoghi possibili per quella riunione, la casa della
famiglia Personwaithe. Avevano portato un supplemento di seggiole
nella grande sala, e c’erano, di sicuro, duecento «Amici» per sentire
Ernesto. Erano i veri principi della buona società. Mi divertii a
calcolare mentalmente il totale delle ricchezze che rappresentavano:
un centinaio di milioni. E i proprietari non erano di quei ricchi che
vivono nell’ozio, ma uomini d’affari che avevano parte
importantissima ed attiva nella vita industriale e politica.
Stavamo tutti seduti, quando la signorina Brentwood introdusse
Ernesto. Essi andarono subito all’estremità della sala dove egli
doveva parlare. Era in abito da sera, ed aveva un portamento
meraviglioso, con le sue larghe spalle e la testa regale, e, sempre,
quell’inimitabile sfumatura di goffaggine nei suoi movimenti.
Credo che l’avrei amato anche solo per quello. Al solo guardarlo,
provavo una grande gioia. Mi sembrava di sentire il battito del suo
polso nello stringermi la mano, il contatto delle sue labbra sulle mie.
Ed ero così orgogliosa di lui, che ebbi il desiderio di alzarmi e gridare
a tutta l’assemblea: «È mio, mi ha stretta fra le sue braccia, e
occupo quella mente agitata da sì alti pensieri.»
La signorina Brentwood, giunta in fondo alla sala, lo presentò al
colonnello Van Gilbert, al quale, sapevo ch’era assegnata la
presidenza della riunione. Il colonnello era un grande avvocato di
società anonime; inoltre, era immensamente ricco. Il più piccolo
onorario che si degnasse di accettare, era di centomila dollari. Era
un Maestro in materia giuridica. La legge era come un burattino di
cui egli teneva tutti i fili; e la plasmava come argilla; la torceva e la
deformava con un giuoco di pazienza cinese, a seconda dei proprii
disegni. I suoi modi e il suo eloquio erano un po’ di vecchio stile, ma
la immaginazione, le cognizioni, le risorse, erano a livello degli statuti
più recenti. La sua celebrità datava dal giorno in cui aveva fatto
annullare il testamento di Skardwell [39]. Solo per questo aveva avuto
cinquecentomila dollari, e da quel tempo la sua ascesa era stata
rapida come quella di un razzo. Lo si considerava spesso come il
primo avvocato del paese, avvocato di società anonime, ben inteso:
e tale che non c’era chi non lo considerasse come uno dei tre più
grandi avvocati degli Stati Uniti.
Egli si alzò e cominciò col presentare Ernesto, con frasi scelte, che
lasciavano intravedere una leggera ironia sottintesa. Certamente vi
era una sottile facezia nella presentazione che il colonnello Gilbert
faceva di quel riformatore sociale, membro della classe operaia.
Scorsi parecchi sorrisetti nell’uditorio, e ne fui urtata. Guardai
Ernesto e sentii crescere la mia irritazione. Sembrava che non
sentisse risentimento alcuno per quelle punture, anzi, peggio, pareva
non accorgersene neppure. Stava seduto, tranquillo, calmo, mezzo
assonnato. Aveva veramente un’aria stupida. Un’idea rapida mi
attraversò la mente: si lasciava forse intimidire da quello sfoggio
imponente di prestigio monetario e cerebrale? Poi sorrisi. Non mi
avrebbe ingannata, no: ingannava gli altri, come aveva ingannato la
signorina Brentwood.
Costei era seduta in una poltrona, in prima fila, e più volte aveva
voltato la testa verso l’una o l’altra delle sue conoscenze per
confermare, con un sorriso, le allusioni dell’oratore.
Quando il colonnello ebbe finito, Ernesto si alzò e cominciò a
parlare. Cominciò a voce bassa, con frasi semplici e staccate,
intramezzate da lunghe pause, con evidente imbarazzo. Narrò della
sua nascita nella classe operaia, della sua infanzia trascorsa in un
ambiente misero, dove lo spirito e la carne erano ugualmente
affamati e tormentati. Descrisse le ambizioni e l’ideale della sua
giovinezza, e la sua concezione del paradiso, dove vivevano solo gli
uomini delle classi superiori.
— Sapevo, — disse, — che al disopra di me regnava uno spirito di
altruismo, un pensiero puro e nobile, una vita altamente intellettuale.
Sapevo tutto ciò perchè avevo letto i romanzi della Biblioteca dei
bagni di mare [40], in cui tutti gli uomini e tutte le donne, eccettuati il
traditore e la avventuriera, pensano cose nobili e parlano un bel
linguaggio, e compiono atti gloriosi. Colla stessa fede che mi faceva
credere al sorgere del sole, ero certo che sopra di me stava quanto
di bello, di nobile e di generoso è al mondo. Ciò che conferiva onore
e decenza alla vita, ciò che la rendeva degna di essere vissuta, ciò
che compensava gli uomini di tanto lavoro e di tanta miseria.
Parlava in seguito, della sua vita alla filanda, del suo noviziato come
maniscalco e del suo incontro, infine, coi socialisti. Aveva scoperto,
nelle loro file, delle vere intelligenze e menti superiori, e numerosi
ministri del Vangelo, destituiti perchè il loro cristianesimo era troppo
generoso in una società di adoratori del vitello d’oro; vi aveva trovato
professori fiaccati dalla crudele servitù universitaria alle classi
dominanti. Definì i socialisti come rivoluzionari che lottano per
rovesciare la società nazionale odierna, per costruire sulle sue
rovine la società nazionale dell’avvenire. E disse tante e tante cose
che sarebbe troppo lungo trascrivere; ma non dimenticherò mai il
modo col quale descrisse la sua vita fra i rivoluzionari. Dal suo
eloquio era sparita ogni titubanza: la voce s’elevava forte e fiduciosa,
si affermava, splendeva come lui stesso, come i pensieri che
versava a fiotti.
— In quei rivoltosi trovai pure una fede ardente nell’umanità, un
caldo idealismo, la voluttà dell’altruismo, rinuncia e martirio; tutte le
splendide realtà dello spirito, insomma. E la loro vita era pura,
nobile, e sentita. Ero in contatto con anime grandi che esaltavano la
carne e lo spirito al di sopra dei dollari e dei cents, e per le quali il
fioco lamento del bimbo sofferente nei tugurii ha maggiore
importanza di tutto il pomposo armamentario dell’espansione
commerciale, e dell’impero del mondo. Vedevo ovunque, intorno a
me, la nobiltà dello scopo, e l’eroismo della lotta, e le mie giornate
erano piene di sole, e le notti stellate. Vivevo nel fuoco e nella
rugiada, e davanti ai miei occhi fiammeggiava incessantemente il
Santo Graal, il sangue palpitante e umano di Cristo, pegno di
soccorso e di salvezza, dopo lunga sofferenza e maltrattamenti.
L’aveva già visto trasfigurato, e questa volta mi parve tale. La sua
fronte splendeva della sua divinità interiore, e gli occhi lucevano
ancor più in mezzo all’aureola radiosa da cui sembrava avvolto. Ma
gli altri non vedevano questa luce, cosicchè attribuii la mia visione
alle lacrime di gioia e d’amore che mi riempivano gli occhi.
In ogni modo, il signor Wiekson, che era dietro a me, non appariva,
certo, commosso, perchè gli sentii lanciare, con tono ironico, l’epiteto
di: «Utopista» [41].
Tuttavia, Ernesto raccontava come si era inalzato nella società, al
punto di mettersi in contatto con le classi superiori e di avvicinare
uomini aventi alte cariche. Allora era sopravvenuta in lui la
delusione, ch’egli espresse con termini poco lusinghieri per l’uditorio.
La vita fra loro non gli pareva più nobile e generosa; era spaventato
dall’egoismo che incontrava ovunque. Ciò che lo stupiva ancora di
più, era l’assenza di vitalità intellettuale. Egli, che aveva
abbandonato i suoi amici rivoluzionarii, si sentiva colpito dalla
stupidità della classe dominante. Inoltre aveva scoperto che
malgrado le loro chiese magnifiche, e i loro predicatori
munificamente pagati, quei padroni, uomini e donne, erano esseri
volgarmente materialisti. Parlavano bene del loro piccolo ideale,
della loro cara piccola morale, ma tolta questa vuota verbosità, il
male fondamentale delle loro idee era materialista. Erano privi della
moralità vera, della moralità che Cristo aveva predicato e che non si
insegna più al giorno di oggi.
— Ho incontrato uomini che nelle loro diatribe contro la guerra
invocavano il nome del Dio della pace, mentre distribuivano fucili
nelle mani dei Pinkertons [42] per abbattere gli scioperanti nelle
officine stesse. Ho conosciuto persone che inveivano contro la
brutalità degli assalti di boxe, ma che erano complici di frodi
alimentari per le quali muoiono, ogni anno, più innocenti di quanti
massacrò Erode dalle mani arrossate di sangue. Ho visto gente
autorevole, colonne della Chiesa, che sottoscrivevano somme
ingenti a favore delle Missioni straniere, ma che facevano lavorare
dieci ore al giorno, nelle loro officine, le giovanette, compensandole
con salarii irrisori, incoraggiando, in tal modo, la prostituzione.
«Il tale rispettabile signore, dai lineamenti aristocratici, non era che
un fantoccio che dava il suo nome a società il cui scopo segreto era
di spogliare la vedova e l’orfanello; il tale altro, che parlava
seriamente e posatamente della bellezza dell’idealismo e della bontà
di Dio, aveva trascinato e tradito i suoi soci in un grosso affare. Un
altro che dotava di nuove cattedre le Università e contribuiva alla
costruzione di magnifiche cappelle votive, non esitava a giurare il
falso davanti ai tribunali, per questioni di danaro. Tale magnate delle
ferrovie rinnegava senza vergogna la parola data come cittadino,
come uomo d’onore e come cristiano, concedendo storni segreti... e
ne concedeva spesso! Il direttore di quel giornale che pubblicava
l’annuncio di rimedii brevettati, mi trattò di demagogo perchè lo sfidai
a pubblicare un articolo che dicesse la verità circa quel ritrovato [43].
E quel collezionista di belle edizioni che prendeva a cuore le sorti
della letteratura pagava intere botti di vino al reggitore brutale e
illetterato d’un’amministrazione municipale. Il tale senatore [44] era lo
strumento, lo schiavo, il burattino di un capo politicante dalle folte
sopracciglia e dalla bocca enorme; lo stesso accadeva del
governatore Caio, e del giudice Tizio alla Corte Suprema. Tutti e tre
godevano di viaggi gratuiti in ferrovia; inoltre, quel tale capitalista
dalla pelle lucida, untuosa, era il vero padrone della macchina
politica, perchè padrone del padrone della macchina politica e delle
ferrovie, che concedevano i lascia-passare.
«In questo modo, invece di un paradiso, scoprii l’arido deserto del
commercialismo. Non vi trovai che stupidaggine, tranne in ciò che
riguarda gli affari. Non incontrai una persona onesta, nobile, attiva,
se non della vitalità di cui brulica il marciume. Non trovai altro che un
egoismo smisurato di gente senza cuore, e un materialismo gretto e
ingordo praticato e pratico.»
Ernesto disse loro molte altre verità riguardanti sia essi che le sue
delusioni. Essi l’avevano intellettualmente annoiato; moralmente e
spiritualmente disgustato a tal punto, che ritornò con gioia ai suoi
rivoluzionarii, che almeno erano retti, nobili, sensibili, che erano tutto
ciò che i capitalisti non sono.
Ma devo pur dire che questo terribile atto di accusa li aveva lasciati
freddi. Esaminai i loro volti e vidi che conservavano un’aria di
superiorità soddisfatta. Ricordai che Ernesto mi aveva avvertita:
«Qualunque accusa contro la loro moralità non li potrà scuotere».
Ma osservai però che l’ardire del suo linguaggio aveva colpito la
signorina Brentwood, che mostrava un’aria seccata ed inquieta.
— Ed ora vi parlerò di questa rivoluzione.
E cominciò col descrivere l’esercito proletario, e quando espose la
cifra delle forze che lo componevano, secondo i risultati ufficiali dello
scrutinio nei diversi paesi, l’assemblea cominciò ad agitarsi.
Un’espressione di viva attenzione fissò i loro sguardi, e le loro labbra
si strinsero. Il guanto di sfida era stato gettato.
Egli descrisse l’organizzazione internazionale che univa un milione e
mezzo di socialisti degli Stati Uniti ai ventitrè milioni e mezzo di
socialisti sparsi nel resto del mondo.
— Tale esercito della rivoluzione, forte di ventitrè milioni di uomini,
può svegliare e tener desta l’attenzione delle classi dominanti. Il
grido di questo esercito è: nessuna tregua. Dobbiamo avere ciò che
voi possedete. Non ci accontenteremo di meno, assolutamente.
Vogliamo prendere le redini del potere, e avere in mano noi il destino
del genere umano. Ecco le nostre mani, le nostre forti mani. Vi
toglieranno il governo, i palazzi e tutti i vostri comodi dorati, e verrà
giorno in cui dovrete lavorare con le vostre mani per guadagnarvi il
pane, come fa il contadino nei campi, o il commesso nelle vostre
metropoli. Ecco le nostre mani; guardatele: hanno i pugni solidi.
E mentre diceva queste parole, mostrava le sue spalle robuste e
allungava le sue grandi braccia, e i suoi pugni di fabbro fendevano
l’aria come artigli d’aquila. Sembrava il simbolo del lavoro trionfante,
con le mani tese per schiacciare e distruggere i suoi sfruttatori.
Scorsi nell’uditorio un movimento d’indietreggiamento, quasi
impercettibile, davanti a quella pittura della rivoluzione, così
evidente, possente e minacciosa. Certo le donne sussultarono, e la
paura apparve sui loro volti. Per gli uomini non fu la stessa cosa:
uscì dalle loro gole un grugnito profondo, che vibrò nell’aria un
istante, poi tacque. Era il prodromo del ringhio che avrei sentito più
volte in quella sera, la manifestazione del bruto che si svegliava
nell’uomo e dell’uomo stesso nella sincerità delle sue passioni
primitive. E non avevano coscienza di questo loro mormorio, tra il
rombo dell’ora, l’espressione e la dimostrazione riflessa di
quell’istinto. In quel momento, vedendo i loro volti irrigidirsi, e il
lampo della lotta brillare nei loro occhi, capii che non si sarebbero
lasciati strappare facilmente il dominio del mondo.
Ernesto continuò il suo attacco; giustificò l’esistenza d’un milione e
mezzo di rivoluzionari negli Stati Uniti, accusando di mal governo la
classe capitalista. Dopo aver accennato allo stato economico
dell’uomo primitivo e dei popoli selvaggi dei nostri giorni, che non
avevano nè utensili nè macchine, e possedevano solo mezzi naturali
di produzione, espose in sintesi lo sviluppo dell’industria e
dell’organizzazione fino allo stato attuale, in cui, il potere produttivo
dell’individuo incivilito è mille volte maggiore di quello del selvaggio.
— Bastano cinque uomini, oggi, per produrre il pane per un migliaio
di persone. Un uomo solo può produrre tessuti di cotone per
duecentocinquanta persone, maglierie per trecento, calzature per
mille. Si sarebbe tentati di conchiudere che, con una buona
amministrazione della società, l’uomo incivilito moderno, dovrebbe
essere in condizioni molto migliori dell’uomo preistorico. Così è
infatti? Esaminiamo la questione: Ci sono oggi negli Stati Uniti,
quindici milioni di uomini [45] che vivono in povertà, e per povertà
intendo quella condizione in cui, per mancanza di nutrimento e di
ricovero conveniente, non può essere mantenuta la capacità di
lavoro. Oggi, negli Stati Uniti, nonostante le pretese della vostra
legislazione del lavoro, sono tre milioni i fanciulli che lavorano come
operai [46]. Il loro numero è raddoppiato in dodici anni.
Incidentalmente, domando perchè voi, gestori della società, non
avete pubblicato le cifre del censimento del 1910? E rispondo per
voi: perchè quelle cifre vi hanno spaventati. La statistica della
miseria avrebbe potuto affrettare la rivoluzione che si prepara.
«Ma ritorno alla mia accusa: se il potere di produzione dell’uomo
moderno è mille volte superiore a quello dell’uomo primitivo, perchè
mai ci sono attualmente negli Stati Uniti quindici milioni di persone
che non sono nutrite e alloggiate convenientemente, e tre milioni di
fanciulli che lavorano? È un’accusa seria. La classe capitalistica si è
resa colpevole di una cattiva amministrazione. Di fronte al fatto che
l’uomo moderno vive più miseramente del suo antenato selvaggio,
mentre il suo potere produttivo è mille volte maggiore, non è
possibile altra conclusione diversa da questa: che la classe
capitalista ha mal governato; che voi siete cattivi amministratori,
cattivi padroni, e che la vostra cattiva gestione è imputabile al vostro
egoismo. E su questo punto, questa sera, a faccia a faccia, non
potete rispondere a me, come la vostra antica classe non può
rispondere al milione e mezzo di rivoluzionarii degli Stati Uniti. Non
potete confutarmi, lo scommetto. Ed oso dire, fin d’ora, che non
risponderete neppure quando avrò finito di parlare. Su questo
argomento la vostra lingua è legata, per quanto agile possa essere,
quando tratta di soggetti diversi da questo.
«Voi avete dato prove d’essere incapaci di amministrare; avete fatto
della civiltà una bottega da macellaio; avete avuto, e avete tuttora
l’audacia di alzarvi, nelle vostre camere legislative, per dichiarare
che sarebbe impossibile fare guadagnare senza il lavoro dei fanciulli,
dei bimbi. Oh! non crediate perchè ve lo dico io: tutto questo è
scritto, registrato contro di voi. Avete addormentato la vostra
coscienza con delle chiacchiere sull’ideale, secondo la vostra cara
morale. Ed eccovi gonfi di potenza e di ricchezza, inebriati del
successo! Ebbene, contro di noi non avete speranza di vittoria
maggiore di quanta ne abbiano i calabroni riuniti intorno all’alveare,
quando le api operaie si lanciano loro addosso per porre fine a una
sazia vita. Avete errato nel guidare la società, e la direzione vi sarà
tolta. Un milione e mezzo di uomini della classe operaia sono sicuri
di attirare alla loro causa il resto delle masse lavoratrici, e di
strapparvi il dominio del mondo. Ecco la rivoluzione, signori:
arrestatela se lo potete!
Per un po’, l’eco della sua voce risuonò nella gran sala; poi il
profondo mormorio, già sentito prima, si gonfiò, e parecchi uomini si
alzarono, urlando e gesticolando per attrarre l’attenzione del
Presidente.
Osservai che le spalle della signorina Brentwood si agitavano
convulsivamente, e provai un attimo di irritazione, credendo che
ridesse di Ernesto. Poi capii che non si trattava di un accesso di riso,
ma di nervi. Era terrorizzata di quanto aveva fatto gettando quella
torcia ardente in mezzo al suo caro circolo de «Gli Amici dello
Studio».
Il colonnello Van Gilbert non si curava degli uomini, che, stravolti
dalla collera, volevano che egli concedesse loro la parola; egli
stesso si struggeva dalla rabbia. Si alzò di scatto agitando un
braccio, e per un momento non potè proferire che suoni inarticolati;
poi una grande verbosità scaturì dalla sua bocca. Ma non era il
linguaggio dell’avvocato dì centomila dollari, dalla rettorica un po’
antiquata.
— Errore su errore, — esclamò. — In vita mia non ho mai sentito
tanti errori in così poco tempo. Inoltre, giovanotto, non avete detto
niente di nuovo. Ho imparato tutto ciò in collegio, prima della vostra
nascita. E sono già quasi due secoli, dacchè Gian Giacomo
Rousseau ha enunciato la vostra teoria socialista. Il ritorno alla
terra? Peuh! Una revisione? La nostra biologia ne dimostra
l’assurdità. Si ha proprio ragione di dire che una mezza cultura è
nociva, e voi ne avete dato una prova questa sera con le vostre
teorie sventate! Errore su errore! Non sono mai stato in vita mia così
disgustato d’un simile rigurgito di errori! Ecco, guardate come io
consideri le vostre affrettate generalizzazioni e i vostri discorsi
infantili. — E fece schioccare i pollici con aria di sprezzo, e accennò
a sedersi.
L’approvazione delle donne si manifestò con esclamazioni acute, e
quella degli uomini con suoni rauchi. Quasi tutti, candidati della
difesa, si misero a parlare insieme. Era una confusione
indescrivibile, una torre di Babele.
Il vasto appartamento della signora Pertonwaithe non aveva mai
veduto simile scena. Come? le fredde menti del mondo industriale, il
fior fiore della bella società, erano costituite da quella banda di
selvaggi rumorosi e tumultuosi? Per certo, Ernesto li aveva scossi,
stendendo le mani verso i loro portafogli, quelle mani, che, agli occhi
loro, rappresentavano gli artigli di un milione e mezzo di
rivoluzionarii.
Ma egli non perdeva la testa mai, in nessun caso. Prima che il
colonnello riuscisse a sedersi, Ernesto fu in piedi e fece un passo
avanti.
— Uno per volta! — gridò con tutte le sue forze.
Il grido dei suoi ampi polmoni dominò la tempesta umana, e la
semplice forza della personalità di lui impose il silenzio.
— Uno solo per volta, — ripetè con tono più calmo. — Lasciatemi
rispondere al colonnello Van Gilbert. Dopo, altri potranno attaccarmi,
ma uno per volta, ricordate. Non siamo qui come su un campo di
foot-ball.
— Quanto a voi, — continuò rivolgendosi al colonnello, — non avete
confutato nulla di ciò che ho detto. Avete semplicemente espresso
alcuni apprezzamenti eccitati e dogmatici sul mio equilibrio mentale.
È un modo che potrà esservi utile negli affari, ma con me non vale
quel tono. Non sono un operaio venuto a chiedervi, col cappello in
mano, di aumentare il mio salario o di proteggermi contro la
macchina alla quale lavoro. Finchè avrete a che fare con me, non
potrete prendere le vostre arie dogmatiche contro la verità. Serbatele
nei rapporti coi vostri schiavi salariati che non osano rispondervi
perchè avete in vostra mano il loro pane, la loro vita.
«Quanto al ritorno alla Natura di cui pretendete aver avuto sentore in
collegio, prima della mia nascita, permettetemi di farvi osservare che
sembra non abbiate imparato altro, dopo. Il Socialismo non ha nulla
in comune con lo stato di natura, così come il calcolo differenziale
non ha rapporti col catechismo! Avevo denunciato la mancanza
d’intelligenza della vostra classe, tranne nella trattazione degli affari;
voi mi avete fornito, signore, un edificante esempio a sostegno della
mia tesi.
Questa terribile lezione fatta al caro avvocato da centomila dollari,
superò ogni prova di sopportazione della signorina Brentwood. Il suo
accesso isterico raddoppiò di violenza, così che dovettero trascinarla
fuori della sala, mentre piangeva e rideva contemporaneamente. Ed
era ancora poco, perchè il peggio doveva accadere poi.
— Non credete alla mia parola, — riprese Ernesto dopo questa
interruzione. — Le vostre stesse autorità, a voce unanime,
riconosceranno la vostra assoluta mancanza d’intelligenza. Gli stessi
vostri fornitori di scienza vi diranno che siete nell’errore. Consultate il
più umile dei vostri sociologi e chiedetegli la differenza che passa fra
la teoria di Rousseau e quella del socialismo. Interrogate i vostri
migliori economisti e borghesi, cercate in qualsiasi manuale
dormente negli scaffali delle vostre biblioteche sovvenzionate, e da
ogni parte vi verrà risposto che non c’è nessun nesso fra il ritorno
alla natura e il socialismo, ma che, al contrario, le due teorie sono
diametralmente opposte. Vi ripeto, non credete alla mia parola! La
prova della vostra mancanza d’intelligenza è là, nei libri, in quei libri
che voi non leggete mai. E per quanto si riferisce a questa
mancanza di intelligenza, voi siete, avvocato, un campione della
vostra classe.
«Siete molto valente in diritto e negli affari, signor colonnello Van
Gilbert. Meglio di ogni altro sapete accogliere una sfida e aumentare
i dividendi, interpretando a modo vostro la legge. Benissimo;
accontentatevi di questa funzione importante. Siete un eccellente
avvocato, ma un pessimo storico. Non conoscete l’alfabeto della
sociologia, e, in fatto di biologia, sembrate contemporaneo di Plinio il
Vecchio.»
Il colonnello si dimenava sulla poltrona; nella sala regnava un
silenzio assoluto: tutti gli uditori erano affascinati, erano come di
sasso. Quel trattamento fatto al famoso colonnello Van Gilbert era
cosa inaudita, inimmaginabile; trattandosi di persona davanti alla
quale i giudici tremavano quando si alzava per parlare in tribunale.
Ma Ernesto non dava tregua al nemico.
— Questo, naturalmente, non è un biasimo per voi, — aggiunse. —
A ciascuno il suo mestiere. Voi fate il vostro, ed io farò il mio. Voi
siete specializzato. Quando ai tratta di conoscere le leggi, di trovare
il mezzo migliore per sfuggire loro, o di farne delle nuove, in
vantaggio delle classi spoliatrici, sono ai vostri piedi, nella polvere.
Ma quando si tratta di sociologia, che è materia del mio mestiere,
tocca a voi, a vostra volta, giacere ai miei piedi, nella polvere.
Ricordatevelo. E ricordate pure che la vostra legge è materia
effimera, e che voi non siete esperto nelle materie che durano più
d’un giorno. Per conseguenza, le vostre affermazioni dogmatiche e
le vostre imprudenti generalizzazioni, sopra soggetti storici e
sociologici, non valgono il fiato che sprecate per enunciarle.
Ernesto fece una pausa, e osservò con aria pensosa quel viso
oscurato e stravolto dalla collera, quel petto ansante, quel corpo che
si agitava, quelle mani che si aprivano e chiudevano convulsamente.
Poi continuò:
— Ma giacchè sembra che abbiate fiato da sprecare, vi offro
l’occasione di sprecarlo. Ho incolpato la vostra classe: dimostratemi
che la mia accusa è falsa. Vi ho fatto osservare la condizione
disperata dell’uomo moderno (tre milioni di fanciulli schiavi negli Stati
Uniti, senza il lavoro dei quali ogni guadagno sarebbe impossibile; e
quindici milioni di persone mal nutrite, mal vestite e peggio
alloggiate); vi ho fatto osservare come, mediante l’organizzazione
moderna e l’organizzazione sociale e l’impiego delle macchine, il
potere produttivo dell’uomo civile d’oggi sia mille volte superiore a
quello del selvaggio abitatore di caverne; ed ho affermato che da
questo doppio fatto non si poteva trarre altra conclusione se non
questa: il malgoverno della classe capitalista. Di questo vi ho

The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities Gender Affect and Ethics in Modern World Narratives Susan Mooney Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Making and Mirroring of Masculine Subjectivities Gender Affect and Ethics in Modern World Narratives Susan Mooney Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Making and Mirroring of Masculine

Subjectivities: Gender, Affect, and

“Dr. Susan Mooney’s narrative explorations in The Making and Mirroring of

“The study makes an innovative contribution to the field, as it brings together

The Making and

ISBN 978-3-030-99145-6 ISBN 978-3-030-99146-3 (eBook)

Cover illustration: EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo

Tampa, FL Susan Mooney

Part I Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine

Part II The Gentleman Deconstructed 187

5 Ethics of Proximity: Lack and Dispossession261

Introduction: Feeling Men—Emotional

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

particular social setting” (836); and further, these configurations happen

grounded world narratives4 highlight gendered ethics together with affective

This selection stems from my own areas of specialization and recognizes

and yet fundamentally separate. While I share Kabesh’s methodical empha-

twentieth century through to today, many men encounter engrained social

masculinity; my narratological approaches are inspired by Susan Lanser

Gendered Narratives of Emotions and Ethics:

aspects of existentialism as well as a cultural prioritizing of male viewpoints

heteronormative biological practices, although it is often understood in

“objective” (code for “not emotional like women”), in narrative fiction in

to power.14 Affects of anxiety, anguish, desire, fear, anger, self-loathing,

“Structure of Feeling”: Gendered Narratives

Narratives would seem the ideal form to develop what Raymond

definition of the narrative self as located in time appears too reductive. He

A Feminist Ethics for Masculinities

Freud’s discussion of the primal scene and Oedipalization and Lacan’s

Masculinities: Becoming Men, Yet How?

convincingly argued by Nancy Chodorow in her landmark Reproduction

Gendered Ethics and Gentlemanly Ambivalence

long served as a source for discussing relationships, the emotions and

Lévinas’s point that subjectivity intimately involves alterity is key to my

Lévinas’s ethics as gendered, it can have further resonance for gendered

Some feminists, such as Ettinger, have seen some advantage in relating

consciousness. The affective transformation of masculinity into the mod-

Braidotti’s use of nomadism to reconceive feminist subjectivity can be

white settlers imposed on them, a violence that is itself masculinized). The

Masculine Narrative Ethics

Taking Wayne C. Booth’s work in The Company We Keep as a model, rhe-

narratives across cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and geopolitical borders, I

Mexican narrative, the postcolonial male subject is buoyed by the patriar-

Narrative Connections of Affects and Ethics

variety of narrative devices by which elements of the storyworld are imbued

In narratives that foreground masculinity, we can note how frequently

At another level, we may focus on the discourses of emotion and concepts

Readers become attentive to this affective make-up of the text, as we

character in his subjectivity, usually involving first-person narration. The

presenting these relations more ambiguously. I suggest that there can be

You might also like

Tampa, FL Susan Mooney

Part I Fathers and Sons: Mirroring, Lack, and Masculine

Part II The Gentleman Deconstructed 187

5 Ethics of Proximity: Lack and Dispossession261