MANHOOD

John Wayne embodies a powerful myth of American manhood, a towering and graceful figure bearing a rifle. Potential rivals instinctively defer to his centered and invulnerable self-reliance or choose the suicidal path of resistance. He is a white man, and he rules over men of color with the natural ease with which he rules over women. To its devotees, this myth seems an eternal truth, simple and self-evident; but it came to the center of American culture during the 1820s under specific historical circumstances, and by the end of the Civil War its complexities had been explored in powerful works of literature. Major writers celebrated this emerging style of manhood but also exposed its destructive potential and came to challenge its dominance, envisioning a rich democratic culture that recognizes a range of valid masculinities rather than granting a monopoly to any single model.

A classic exemplar of the dominant ideal was created in 1823 when James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) published The Pioneers, featuring Natty Bumppo—nicknamed Leatherstocking—who lives in a shack outside a rapidly growing frontier town in upstate New York. Bumppo so fascinated readers that Cooper wrote four more novels about him in the series now famous as the Leatherstocking Tales.

In The Pioneers, Bumppo is an aging frontiersman who lives on his own in the woods, having arrived long before the town began to grow. He is disgusted by the waste and destructiveness of the new settlers, who befoul the woodlands by clogging streams, unnecessarily hewing down trees, and by slaughtering wildlife far in excess of their need for food. The settlers kill passenger pigeons for fun, using long poles to knock them down, as well as rifles, pistols, and small cannon. Leatherstocking sees this as a wicked and shocking sacrilege against God's creation, and he also despises the settlers because they cannot shoot well enough to bring down single birds. His own sharpshooting—through all the novels about him—is uncannily accurate. Bumppo's communion with nature includes a sacred bond to his rifle.

Judge Marmaduke Temple, the patriarch of the town, establishes game laws in order to protect the wildlife, and it soon happens that Bumppo, needing meat for the table, goes hunting out of season. When a deputy arrives to arrest Bumppo for poaching, the enraged old man kicks him down the hill, and a charge of resisting arrest is added to his indictment. Cooper thus deftly unfolds the drama that defines Bumppo's character and the tradition of manhood he inaugurates.

Leatherstocking is a man of natural piety and absolute self-command. If all men were like him there would be no need for game laws or indeed any laws at all. Without him there would be no frontier town, because he scouted the wilderness and made possible the settlement that followed. Yet he cannot live within the lawful community and soon must leave for unsettled territory westward. "He had gone far towards the setting sun," Cooper says of his departure, "the foremost in that band of pioneers who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent" (p. 436).

A state of lawlessness, seen as prior to social order, is Bumppo's natural habitat. Bumppo enacts the classic

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American drama of "regeneration through violence," as described by Richard Slotkin, in which the male hero facing bewildering social complexities makes a sharp discrimination between good and evil and, taking the law into his own hands, rescues the good and vanquishes the evil. D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) provides a classic statement of the internal psychology that matches Bumppo's social role: he represents the "essential American soul," Lawrence says: "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer" (quoted in Slotkin, p. 466).

Many conventions of masculinity flourished across North America when The Pioneers was written. Zuni and Navajo cultures in the Southwest celebrated male heroes in pairs, as primordial "hero twins," and Native American communities elsewhere initiated growing boys in widely diverse cultural traditions. The imported folkways of British culture, David Hackett Fischer has shown, sponsored four distinct traditions of gender and family life, with a distinct version of masculinity belonging to each. The traditions of masculinity brought by African slaves resisted the crushing pressure of violent subordination that enforced their enslavement to whites, and waves of immigration from Ireland and the continent of Europe brought their own versions and styles.

Despite such alternatives, the manhood dramatized in Leatherstocking soon became dominant within the national culture, partly because it informed the mythology through which westward expansion was celebrated. When The Pioneers was published, only the states of Missouri and Louisiana lay west of the Mississippi; all the remaining territories were added in the next four decades, in a sweeping conquest that was officially proclaimed as the nation's "Manifest Destiny." The legendary heroes of that conquest—Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Kit Carson—were seen to possess the manly virtues of Leatherstocking.

SELF-RELIANT MANHOOD IN URBAN AMERICA

Cooper's imagined frontier corresponds poorly to actual frontier conditions, and frontier settlers did not provide much of a market for novels. Instead, Leatherstocking found his devotees in the metropolitan centers that burgeoned in the Northeast, in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where an emerging culture of middle-class economic competition was swiftly becoming dominant. Dana Nelson has traced the contours of the urban white male fraternity that laid claim to the Leatherstocking virtues of solitary self-reliance, from which African American men and Native American men as well as women were excluded. This style of manhood, serving a leadership class of elite males, was fused with the national character itself, claiming an exclusive title to be called "American."

Powerful new conditions shaped the social environment of the 1820s for white men of the emerging middle class. The small-scale networks of community life that drew Americans together in rural hamlets and market towns were broken up by new opportunities for trade and manufacture along the eastern seaboard by increasing waves of immigration and by prospects for taking up new land in the West. Men who came to the cities to make their fortunes found themselves in "a world of strangers," the anonymous downtowns where making a favorable first impression became an essential survival skill. Herman Melville's (1819–1891) The Confidence-Man (1857) bitterly satirizes the systematic deception that came to pervade commercial relations in this era.

Before this transformation gained momentum, David Leverenz has shown, there were three well-recognized forms of Anglo masculinity: "patricians" maintained a style suited to their birthright of wealth and public leadership, while "artisans" found manliness in skills as master craftsmen and in their management of household enterprises like shoemaking, blacksmithing, cooperage, printing, and family farming. But the rapidly enlarging urban centers favored the development of a third style, that of "entrepreneurs" who incessantly pursued opportunities for profit, seeking new markets and new ways to finance and manage business enterprises.

As face-to-face communities of status and obligation were swept aside, entrepreneurs struggled against fierce competitors, relying on their own shrewdness and unstinting efforts. They cultivated a sacred bond to their own brave and self-sufficient proficiency, like that of Natty Bumppo with his unerring long rifle. And they envisioned "nature" and "the wilderness" as the environment best suited to their gifts, conceiving the inevitable obstructions to their self-directed ambition—arising from family obligations, religious traditions, legal requirements, and government regulation—as the noxious entanglements of "society." This powerful myth obscured the realities of privilege, making it virtually impossible to recognize that "self-reliance" is an option reserved for the fortunate. Men handicapped by race or other misfortune were held personally answerable for failure, scorned by "self-made men" as lazy, shiftless, and irresponsible.

The new capitalist economy was turbulent, and the business cycle was ill understood, so that periods of rapid economic expansion were followed in 1818–1819 and 1837–1838 by shattering collapses that brought bewilderment as well as ruin to the unfortunate. Nor did the new economic order equally reward the hardworking and self-disciplined. A study of the men most successful during this era shows that a large percentage of them were well-off at birth, yet unlike their fathers these men were not exempted from the constant struggle. Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the paradox of men enjoying unprecedented economic abundance yet haunted by melancholy, and he traced it to ceaseless competition among the affluent and insecure.

The ideal of manly self-reliance shone like a beacon over these troubled and confusing waters. Middle-class white men yearning to maintain their self-respect and their chances for success could hardly do better than embrace the manhood enshrined in Natty Bumppo, whose piety attached itself not to social institutions but to a god of nature beyond them, whose self-possession was never shaken by emergencies, and whose combat proficiency enabled him to survive in a trackless wilderness. Thus the frontier dream was taken to heart, as it is still taken to heart, by American men vexed by the difficulties facing them in a complex urban society.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL QUEST FOR SPIRITUAL INTEGRITY

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) organized his philosophy of transcendentalism around the sharp dichotomy between "nature" and "society" found in Bumppo's view of the world. In Nature, the 1836 essay inaugurating his career as a major American writer, Emerson scolds those who take their bearings from the history and social relations into which they are born, announcing that each man should establish his own unique and direct relationship to the universe. Compared to the eternal essences of nature, Emerson taught, the historical and social textures of human existence are trivial. True manliness is impaired by conformity to social requirements; a proper communion with nature, by contrast, enables a man to place an absolute trust in himself and to build his own world by ordering his life to match the vision of truth in his mind.

The competitive moneymaking scramble of the 1830s disgusted Emerson. He himself was descended from a Boston social elite whose economic position was increasingly precarious, and he came to believe that fundamental human self-respect was threatened in the world of profit and sale. "Men are become of no account," he remarked: "men in the world of today, are bugs, are spawn, and are called 'the mass' and 'the herd'" (p. 75). Rather than distracting himself with the latest commercial innovations and the vicissitudes of an ever-changing market economy, a man should commune with the sacred integrity of his own mind, as it is renewed and refreshed by nature.

Yet even as he denounced the incessant scrimmage of self-reliant striving, Emerson became a classic spokesman for its guiding ideology. The self-trust of the self-reliant man prepares the ground for profit and social acclaim: "If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide," Emerson declares, "the huge world will come round to him" (p. 79).

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) likewise sought spiritual integrity, in defiance of the competitive struggle for financial well-being that forced men to lead a denatured life remote from their own true selves. Men lead "mean and sneaking lives," he remarked, "trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt . . . always promising to pay, promising to pay . . . seeking to curry favor, to get custom" (pp. 3–4). Escape from the enslavement scarcely seemed imaginable for most, so that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," victims of "a stereotyped but unconscious despair" (p. 4).

Thoreau's quest for a solution lay out of doors, in his hut on the shore of Walden Pond outside the town of Concord, like Natty Bumppo in his shack. There Thoreau lived alone in communion with nature, seeking to determine what was truly necessary to a self-respecting life and what could be set aside. But the turbulent new economy generated a more conventional solution to the spiritual desolation inflicted upon men, namely the middle-class home. A new ideal of domesticity became conventional during the 1840s and 1850s which assigned to women the task of providing men spiritual redemption by performing new roles as wife and mother.

THE WORLDLY WARRIOR AT HOME

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) felt obligated to fulfill the obligations of self-sufficient manhood, and in "The Custom-House" introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850) he fears that receiving a government salary will sap his soul of its "courage and consistency . . . its self-reliance, and all that gives the emphasis to manly character" (p. 39). Yet he was also haunted by the spiritual degradation resulting from the greedy struggles of the world, and he celebrated his marriage to Sophia Hawthorne as a sanctuary where his own true existence could be sustained through her selfless love. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the love and marriage of Holgrave and Phoebe Pyncheon dramatize the salvation that the domestic angel works upon the soul of the self-made man. Holgrave is a paragon of Emersonian self-reliance, who has jauntily pursued a series of ad hoc enterprises—as schoolmaster, salesman, newspaper editor, peddler, and now as daguerreotypist. He "had never violated the innermost man," Hawthorne tells us, in "putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be soon shifted for a third" (p. 177). But at the crisis of the novel Holgrave's self-certainty collapses, his world becomes a nightmare of unrealities, and he turns to Phoebe to save his soul.

Phoebe possesses redemptive power by virtue of her divine purity. She was "a Religion in herself," Hawthorne declares,

like a prayer, offered up in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was Phoebe, moreover, and airy and sweet in her apparel; as if nothing she wore—neither her gown, nor her small straw bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy stockings—had ever been put on, before; or, if worn, were all the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain among the rosebuds. (P. 168)

MANHOOD AND SELF-RELIANCE

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." With this famous observation, Thoreau located a turbulence at the heart of America's dominant tradition of manhood, and he built his cabin at Walden Pond in order to live with dignity and full self-reliance. The ruling American ideal of manhood demands that men be self-reliant in an economic and political order of relentless competition in which true self-reliance is impossible. But it is necessary to remain quiet about the resultant desperation, because confessing to it would appear "unmanly," a competitive disadvantage. Powerful mythologies of manhood in America have sought to manage this turbulence, to envision ways of being masculine in which dignity becomes possible.

Essential to Phoebe's redemptive power is her body, which is magically free of sweat or menstrual discharges. She possesses a physical presence so intensely pure that it cleanses her garments from within. Hawthorne does not say that Phoebe is sexually pure: she embodies a divine purity that could only be defiled by the mention of sexuality.

THE SEXUAL ANXIETIES OF SELF-MADE MEN

The sexual purity demanded of the domestic angel mirrors sexual anxieties that became endemic to the lives of self-made men in the new social order. Men now left the home in order to make a living, rather than managing an economic enterprise centered in the family. Large numbers of children, once an asset because they could be put to work at an early age, now became an economic liability. The stoical self-reliant masculinity that was required for survival in the competitive floundering worldly turmoil was not laid aside when the man escaped his disconcerting relations to other men and came home to his wife. On the contrary, his domestic existence was arranged so as to reinforce the necessary worldly virtues, not least because the failure to exercise these virtues at home could destroy the family's prospect of entering the middle class or of remaining within it. Middle-class couples perforce became "prudent procreators" in Mary Ryan's memorable phrase, because having too many children could overwhelm a family's finances (p. 180). In the absence of reliable contraceptive techniques, marital abstinence became the only reliable strategy for limiting the number of births.

A number of cultural developments testify to the upsurge in male sexual anxiety. The novels of George Lippard and John Neal exemplify the new genre of pornographic fiction, which stressed the ravages of male lust amid a murky atmosphere of guilty fascination. A rapidly proliferating literature of "male hygiene" enjoined vigorous exercise, cold showers, and a bland diet as strategies for maintaining male purity, and a similarly vital new anti-masturbation literature issued fearful warnings against the mental and moral debilitation that were sure to follow from indulgence in the "secret vice."

Women recruited into the task of allaying male sexual anxieties had to confront the "whore-angel dichotomy," the choice between stainless purity and the life of a "fallen woman," stained by sexual sin. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is centered on exactly such a woman, Hester Prynne, around whom the male characters form a pattern that probes deeply into male sexual dilemmas. Hester's husband is Roger Chillingworth, whose sexuality has been repressed by his fierce adherence to the ideal of manly self-possession and now takes the form of sadistic vengeance against Arthur Dimmesdale, her remorseful lover. Arthur only fitfully attains self-command, and his life is ravaged by emotional impulses and sexual impulses that humiliate and exhaust him.

The core ideal of self-contained and self-controlling masculinity threatens to split into incompatible components under the pressure of sexual desire, which like hunger and drowsiness chronically resists conscious control. Roger and Arthur dramatize this dichotomy, itself gendered "masculine" and "feminine." Roger is an emotionless, self-contained, hypermasculine moral-ist; Arthur is effeminate and artistic. The two men are inseparably paired in the novel: they spend more time with each other than either spends with Hester; they live together, and they die together.

Hester offers a challenge to this self-alienated masculinity not only by reason of her sexual vitality but also because of her powerful desire to attain moral and financial independence. The Scarlet Letter was published two years after the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, at which women gathered to declare the democratic principle that all men and women are created equal and to demand that systems of male dominance be dismantled. Another powerful influence upon Hawthorne's presentation of Hester came from Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) challenged men to learn a new masculinity grounded on recognition of women's moral and intellectual autonomy rather than requiring subordination to men. Though Hester broods deeply over these liberatory visions and dreams of becoming a prophetess to proclaim them, Hawthorne arranges the conclusion of the novel to vindicate the domestic ideal. Hester decides that she is too "stained with sin" to take a public role, and redemption is allocated once again to a "pure" womanhood. Hawthorne insists that the psychic and social torments suffered in the name of self-reliant manhood can only be assuaged within the middle-class home, where "sacred love" is dispensed by domestic angels (p. 263).

WOUNDED MANHOOD AND CHARISMATIC REVENGE

Herman Melville (1819–1891) treats the maladies of self-reliant manhood as they take form in the world of men. Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) depict the beach-comber life of male rovers in Polynesia; Redburn (1849) concerns a voyage to mercantile Liverpool; White-Jacket (1850) takes place on an American warship; and Moby-Dick (1851) explores the inner meanings of masculinity amid the complex world of nineteenth-century whaling, an enterprise combining exotic travel, military reconnaissance, merchant shipping, and industrial production.

Like Natty Bumppo, Captain Ahab is a famous hunter who pursues his quarry into a world outside society, into "the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north," where he has received "all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary and confiding breast" (p. 71). Yet communion with nature has not permitted Ahab to attain Bumppo's spiritual serenity or the worldly distinction that Emerson promised. Instead, Ahab is full of rage at the manifold worldly violations of an "immaculate manliness" (p. 104) that he claims as an inalienable right and whose source and guarantor, Melville declares, is "the great democratic God" (p. 105).

Ahab's resentment resembles that of Hester Prynne; it results from an awareness of inherent rights violated and abused. The ideal of masculine self-reliance was restricted to middle-class white males like Captain Ahab, but as Thoreau recognized, even such fortunate free men end up living like slaves, driven by the relentless competitive pressures of the workplace. Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville all focus on the vexations that men suffered as the American nation, founded with proclamations of democratic equality, developed a bourgeois society in the early nineteenth century in which class, gender, and race oppression were perpetuated and even middle-class men felt themselves subtly and pervasively enslaved.

When Ahab's leg is torn off by Moby-Dick, his stifled misery crystallizes into vengeful rage: he envisions the whale as the "monomaniac incarnation" of "all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations" (p. 160). The whale "unmans" Ahab: felt as a castration, the loss of his leg serves as a culmination of the myriad traducements and assaults that have affronted his masculine dignity. Ahab's subordinates—the mates and crew of the Pequod—are likewise consumed by unfocused resentment at the mischances and injustices of their lot. Ahab's visibly wounded manhood becomes an emblem of the wounded manhood in each of them; they are stirred by his rage and soon identify themselves with his insane quest for vengeance. Ahab becomes a charismatic demagogue leading his community against the forces of "evil"—a figure for regeneration through violence gone completely mad—and the result is death and destruction for the ship and crew together.

Ahab solicits and exploits Ishmael's loyalty as well. Ishmael too suffers from the bafflements of an abortive manhood and for a time projects all his miseries onto the hated whale. But Ishmael also explores an alternative masculinity not addicted to solitary and competitive self-reliance. Readers meet him as a penniless young man walking the streets of New Bedford in hopes of finding a place among the multiracial and economically exploited "mongrel renegades and cast-aways" (p. 162) that make up the crews of whaling vessels. For Ishmael, the dignity grounded in the great democratic God is not restricted to privileged white males but also appears in the workingman's self-respect. He sees it "shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike" (p. 104) and in the spiritual serenity of the Polynesian islander Queequeg, with whom he forms an intense loving relationship.

Natty Bumppo had lived comfortably with a non-white companion, an elderly Native American named John Mohegan. Yet between Cooper's pioneers in 1823 and Moby-Dick in 1851, the culture of self-made masculinity had developed a phobic abhorrence of same-sex desire. Personal intimacy between men awakened the anxieties evident in the anti-masturbation mania as well as being stigmatized because it could lead to competitive disadvantage in an environment of incessant rivalry. Melville's adventures aboard ship and in Polynesia had introduced him to male cultures in which the Christian prohibition against sodomy was absent or ignored. But the "bosom" friendship that flowers between Ishmael and Queequeg, like the "Squeeze of the Hand" chapter, mocks the sexual phobias that had arisen to police the newly dominant style of masculinity. Ishmael survives the wreck of the Pequod to tell the tale, in a form suggesting that the democratic ideal should support multiple masculinities rather than being monopolized by white heterosexual men proclaiming the virtues of competitive self-reliance.

ENLARGING THE CHARTER OF DEMOCRACY

Hester Prynne speaks for a tradition in the early nineteenth century that invoked the democratic principle of equality in claiming new legal entitlements and social options for women. Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) were male writers who likewise worked to enlarge the democratic charter on behalf of new possibilities for men. For Whitman the "sign of democracy" was a primary motive force of his entire poetic project, and it entailed seeking to articulate the "many long dumb voices," those rendered voiceless by antidemocratic systems of social and economic oppression: "Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves . . . and of the rights of them the others are down upon." Whitman spoke also on behalf of himself, as a man animated by sexual attraction to other men and determined to affirm his desire as healthy and right:

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured.

(P. 44)

The poems of same-sex love that he published in Calamus and the Children of Adam cost Whitman the friendship and strategic support that Emerson had offered and consigned him to a long career in the shadows of public disapproval. By the end of his life Whitman lived out a painful paradox, the champion of the common man now celebrated by a tiny handful of enthusiastic sophisticates. Yet Whitman's example emerged as a source of inspiration in the mid-twentieth century as a major influence on the poet Allen Ginsberg and on the broad evolution in the gay community that entered a new period of self-confidence in the 1960s and continues to work for democratic reforms.

Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) of his escape from slavery likewise emphasizes "manhood" as a condition from which African American men are wrongfully excluded. He outlines the strategies by which southern slave masters kept him in subjection through the denial of literacy and through seeking to persuade him that slavery is right. He correspondingly learns to read and write and learns to see through the moral and religious deceptions justifying slavery. The central drama arrives when he confronts the slave-holders' use of direct force. "You have seen how a man was made a slave," Douglass remarks; "you shall see how a slave was made a man" (p. 97).

Douglass attains this manhood before he attains his freedom. He is sent to Mr. Covey, a "slave-breaker" who augments his income by taking rebellious and disobedient slaves under his control and brutalizing them until they capitulate. Thus "broken" to submissiveness, the slave could be returned to his owner, presumably to live out his days in peaceful obedience. Douglass resists the beatings inflicted by Covey and fights him to a draw when the two of them finally battle it out, whereupon Covey ceases to abuse him. "This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood" (pp. 104–105).

Douglass's experience forms an instructive contrast against the convention of "regeneration through violence" that informs the dominant tradition of white masculinity. Douglass does not enjoy a mystical ascendancy resulting from his communion with nature, nor are his fighting skills supernaturally awesome. He does not defeat Covey outright, and the stalemate he achieves does not regenerate the social order: Covey remains a free white slave owner and Douglass an enslaved black man.

Douglass points out, in fact, that successful physical resistance was not the master key to his victory, since Covey could easily have had him punished by the constable. What gives Douglass the victory is Covey's need to preserve the reputation as a "slave-breaker" that would have been lost had he sent Douglass, then a boy of about sixteen, to the public whipping post.

Douglass's achievement of manhood does not depend on the power of "nature" to equip a man to control "society." It is the story of a man enmeshed in social relations, born into slavery yet emboldened to seek his freedom, who comes to the crucial turning point of his quest when he is able to play a slave breaker's reputation against him. Douglass represents a manhood rooted in tangible immediate needs and options, not ratified by an antisocial ideology of "nature" that restricts masculine dignity to a leadership class within the elite. For this reason, however, Douglass's achievement of manhood is all the more formidable and inspiring and fills Douglass himself with profound respect for himself and with contempt for "cruel but cowardly" (p. 83) slaveholder males who masquerade as nature's gentlemen, performing gestures of a presumptively God-given command while lacking the inner qualities that deserve respect.

Douglass's example is a reminder that certain traditional virtues of the dominant ideal descending from Cooper's Leatherstocking are indeed virtues, even as the literary explorations of 1820–1870 aid one in recognizing this ideal's power to guide American men, and the nation as a whole, into calamitous self-defeating folly and to search for more constructive and more democratic possibilities.

See alsoHonor; Individualism and Community; Leatherstocking Tales; Leaves of Grass;Moby-Dick;Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass;Same-Sex Love; The Scarlet Letter;"Self-Reliance"; Sexuality and the Body; Slavery; Transcendentalism; Wilderness

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T. Walter Herbert