It would be possible to make the case that the present world crisis—for I think we are facing one enormous crisis with many aspects—is a crisis of masculinity. The rising tide of fascism and its cult of violence is a masculine phenomenon, “toxic masculinity” inflated to levels not seen since World War II. That does not mean that women have no part in it. Indeed, the list of toxic women is lengthening: Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, Sarah Palin, Marine Le Pen in France, Giorgia Meloni in Italy. But they play at it, enjoying the thrill of “wearing the pants,” of playing in the boys’ game. And even then they try to hide behind “traditional values” in which the woman is subservient to the man.
However, the actual aggression, the real violence, is almost all men’s, as it always was. The wars, the rapes and sexual harassment, the mass shootings, the police brutality. Say what you will about stereotyping, but women do not rape; there are no female mass shooters to speak of. And nothing drives toxic men to fury more than women who are tough and strong and exercise power without the disguise of traditional-values subservience, as the horrifying attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, violence intended for her, most recently shows. It is the reason for the visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton. If you are old enough, you still remember Rush Limbaugh ranting about “feminazis.”
What is wrong with men? We know that it is not anything innate. All available evidence indicates that “masculinity” is not biological but a social construct. If you are a man appalled by what so many other men do, you take comfort in that: it means that men are human beings; they are not innately evil. Is the cause of dysfunctional male behavior then the result, as is so often said, of a breakdown of role modeling? In part—but perhaps not in the way that people think. I grew up on the old Westerns, which provided a model of traditional manhood. But you know what? The bullies and troublemakers, who started fights in saloons, sexually harassed women, mistreated children and animals, were racist about non-white peoples, whether Latino or Native American, who joined lynch mobs, and were cocky and arrogant so long as they had their guns--those were the bad males, and often as not were put in their place by the good men. The Westerns showed that such men were weak, not tough or strong—they were parodies of manhood, not the real thing. It is an old type, really. The suitors in the Odyssey invade Odysseus’s home while he was gone and refuse to leave, throwing a never-ending party and basically trashing the joint. They are arrogant to Odysseus’s son Telemachus because there are 108 of them while he stands alone. When Odysseus appears disguised as a down-and-out beggar, they bully and abuse him. Odysseus cuts down every last one of them, and we do not care.
The traditional Western heroes were gentlemen, polite and respectful to everyone, most definitely including women. They did not like violence, and only fought, whether with guns or fists, as a last resort. Unlike the troublemakers, they could not be whipped up into a frenzy by wild, stupid claims and accusations made by some fast talker or con artist. I do not think such a role model is entirely outmoded. Such heroes show up well in contrast to the rabble of Proud Boys and other insurrectionists, Internet trolls and incels, tough-guy authoritarians like Putin, Orbán, and DeSantis, not to mention the baby-men who threw tantrums during the pandemic because they had to wear masks, which might have made them look feminine, God forbid.
Sometimes the men admit that they are weak and inadequate. But the blame, they say, should be placed on strong women who have emasculated men. In 1943, Philip Wylie, in his novel A Generation of Vipers, coined the term “momism” for the false worship of mothers who in reality dominated and emasculated men. American mothers refuse to let boys grow up and break the apron strings, and the matriarchal power of the mother is transferred to the wife. American men are what all too many sitcoms of the 50’s and 60’s showed them to be, clueless though amiable boobs. In 1990, the book Iron John by the poet Robert Bly catalyzed the men’s movement by saying that sensitive but soft males needed to recover their warrior fierceness by going out into the woods together, drumming, and howling.
Bly actually cites with approval the episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus draws his sword on Circe and forces her to have sex with him, despite the fact that the episode is tantamount to rape. At least Odysseus was acting on orders from Hermes, who said this act was necessary to break Circe’s magical power. But it remains perhaps the ugliest episode in the Odyssey: just draw your male-shaped object and show her who’s boss and she’ll really adore you for it. Women say they like sensitive men, but they are actually not excited by them. What they really go for are men who have retained their male warrior fierceness. Jordon Peterson is still making a lot of money by telling young male losers that being a strong manly man is a good thing.
The reader will have inferred that I am not exactly sympathetic to this male movement hogwash. In fact—and this is the intuition that prompted this newsletter—I wonder whether the root of the problem is not the opposite of what it is taken to be. From the Iliad forward, literature has idealized the father-son relationship. It is the father-son relationship that enables the son to grow up to be a true man. I have always found this theme tiresome, at least the version of it that holds up some flawed male as a tragic hero, demanding that we admire him despite the fact that he is clearly nothing but a burden to his offspring. The famous example is Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from 1949, precisely the period of the “momism” scare. Since August Wilson’s Fences won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987, I am clearly in the minority when I say I am not fond of it, but to me it seems an African-American clone of Death of a Salesman, a replay in which the father is outright emotionally abusive to his son. Take this as you will: the fact that I had a highly problematic father may well be simply prejudicing me. But when I teach an Introduction to Literature class in spring semester, I will not teach Fences but rather what I think is a much better play by Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982). Ma Rainey was the “mother of the blues,” but in the play she is also a powerful, independent Black woman in a time, the 1920’s, when such a thing was unheard of. She refuses to be either pressured or manipulated by the white record producers, and she looks after her own circle of relatives and musicians. She is contrasted with a blustery, cocky weak male played with brilliance by Chadwick Boseman in the 2020 film version.
To be sure, the bullying blowhard father figure is an equal affliction to his daughters. The best thing to be said about Shakespeare’s King Lear is that he comes to realize, although too late, that he did not deserve the unconditional love given to him by his daughter Cordelia. But our concern at present is with the problems of men. The central insight of Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering (1978), a classic work of psychoanalytic feminist theory, is contained in its title, which is a pun. To oversimplify a complex and searching book, mothers reproduce in their daughters the very patterns which, as feminists, they struggle to break free of, due to the intense unconscious identification between mother and daughter. It seems to me that there is also, in the same sense, a reproduction of fathering. I deserve no great credit here. It is well known that child abusers are very commonly found to have been abused by their own fathers, that toxic males tend to reproduce toxic males as their sons. Donald Trump is a classic example, a monster who was made what he is by an even greater monster, Fred Trump, even as he has produced a mini-me in his son, the aptly named Don, Jr.
There are also the sons who rebel against the father. Freudian theory is supposed to be founded on the unconscious incestuous desire for the mother, but Freud himself seems to have been fixated on the other side of the Oedipus complex pattern, the supposed “death wish” of the sons who rebel against the authority of the father. The history of the psychoanalytic movement is one of heresy and excommunication, as one disciple after another quarreled with the patriarch and was cast out into the darkness and the gnashing of teeth, the quarrel with Jung being the most explosive because Jung was the number one son, whom Freud had been grooming as his eventual successor. Freud’s late work Moses and Monotheism (1939) is not really a work of Biblical scholarship but a conspiracy theory. It speculates that Moses was murdered by his followers, his “sons,” who then dealt with their guilt by revering the dead father and adopting his monotheism. Literary critic Harold Bloom attempted to turn this dynamic inside out. Bloom began as a follower of Northrop Frye, but in mid-career not only repudiated Frye’s literary theory but developed one of his own, the “anxiety of influence,” that attempts an exact reversal of it. Frye sees each new work of literature as a recreation of some mythical or archetypal pattern in a total “order of words.” The new work is figuratively a son that is consubstantial with its mythical father, a pattern that Bloom views as essentially Christian. In Bloom’s heretical theory, each new “strong” poet comes into his own by misreading his poetic precursor, an act of symbolic father-killing. “Strong” is Bloom’s word: it is a power struggle, and a very male one. Nevertheless, rebellion does not achieve freedom: freedom is detachment, whereas antagonism leaves one more obsessed with the father than ever.
In short, I have my doubts whether the problem of masculinity is solved either by finding or by symbolically killing a “strong father figure.” It seems to me that that is the problem, not the solution. To grow up better human beings, boys in our society perhaps need less exposure to masculinity, not more. The root of their problem is that they are cut off from the feminine, and from the types of values, feelings, intuitions, and wisdom that we associate with the feminine. At an early age, boys are pressured to leave their mothers and enter a closed male world. The father is the representative of that male world, but in fact the masculine world is largely collective—the neighborhood peer group, the athletic team, the fraternity, the military, the gang at the bar. On a higher social class level, there is the all-boys’ school, the men’s club from which women are excluded or may only enter by the back door. It is a world of male bonding, but always in groups. I read an article recently about how many men nowadays do not have individual friendships with other men comparable to those that women have with other women but only socialize in male groups. The primary value is not individuality but loyalty to the group, which can be a noble sentiment but can just as easily turn into authoritarianism. The street gang, the KKK, the Mafia all value loyalty among their “blood brothers” above all else. None of this seems like true manhood: it is boys who run in packs because they are not strong enough to stand as individuals. The name of the chief January 6th insurrectionist gang is unconsciously revelatory: the Proud Boys. Once again, the contrast with the older male ideal, with Gary Cooper in High Noon standing alone against the outlaw horde.
The problem is the sequestering. In Beloved, Toni Morrison seems to be implying that a totally closed feminine world would be, not a feminist paradise, but a narcissistic cocoon. The same is true of many the closed worlds of traditional masculinity. Of course many men objectify women, treat them as “other.” They have never once in their lives related to a woman as an individual human being, never gotten to know her personally, and would have no idea how to talk to her given the opportunity. Myth and literature are full of memorable, moving friendships between men: Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, all the way to the latest buddy flick. These individualized relationships help redeem masculinity from the collective mentality of the male peer group. Women sometimes say that friendship between women is difficult because women are conditioned to compete with each other for male attention, but there are still examples like Ruth and Naomi, Thelma and Louise. But I am hard put to think of literary examples of friendship between a man and a woman.
There is Ralph Touchett and Isabel Archer in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and….? A good number of people doubt that it is really possible. Romantic games prevent it in youth, and marital possessiveness and jealousy prevent it later. Women will sometimes form friendships with gay men because there are no romantic-erotic complications to get in the way.
In the past, the only place male-female friendship could happen was within a companionate marriage, in which husband and wife, bound together as an economic and reproductive partnership, also become genuinely fond of each other, like Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey. An accidental improvement in modern life has been a byproduct of women’s entry since the 90’s into the work world. Men now have a chance to work with women as colleagues, get to know them as people rather than objects of desire, and learn how to relate to them. It is potentially a better social set-up than that of ancient Athens, in which wives were so sequestered and uneducated that their capacity for companionship was limited, so that the role of hetaira developed. A hetaira was an educated and intelligent woman of pleasure, whose task was to provide intelligent conversation and companionship as well as sexual favors.
Not only are male-female friendships vanishingly rare in literature, but so are positive mother-son relationships. Instead, the accepted model is the Oedipal one, in which the boy, and then the man, remains distant from the mother even as he may cling to some inadequate father. The relationship with the mother is held to be regressive. All human beings begin, both physically and psychologically, as extensions of the mother. The original bond is so intense that infants exist in a state of fusion with the mother, unable to distinguish themselves clearly as independent beings. Thus children have to break with the mother to be fully born. All children have to do this, even though losing the symbiotic bond with the maternal ground amounts to losing paradise, but boys have to “break the apron strings” more dramatically. However, there is always the unconscious regressive attraction, the yearning to return to the blissful state of unity, of non-differentiation, and that is what the incest taboo is really guarding against, like the angel with the flaming sword set to guard the gates of Eden. Sex with the mother is the means to that end. We find it horrifying that Oedipus has not only had sex with his mother but had children by her. But before the truth comes to light, Jocasta makes a speech to her son saying that many men have dreamed of lying with their mothers. We are repelled on the surface precisely because we are unconsciously attracted to the tabooed object of desire.
As the 60’s satirist Tom Lehrer said in his song “Oedipus Rex,” “Of all ideals they hail as good / The most sublime is motherhood.” But the tale of Oedipus shows how you should keep your mother at a wary distance, “Or you may find yourself with a quite complex complex,” like Oedipus, whose “daughter was his sister and his son was his brother,” thereby throwing the greeting card industry into confusion on Mother’s Day.
So be sweet and kind to mother Now and then have a chat Buy her candy or some flowers Or a brand new hat But maybe you had better let it go at that…
Freud’s follower Ernest Jones wrote a book comparing Hamlet with Oedipus. Why does Hamlet have an unhealthy obsession with his mother’s sexuality, particularly with her marriage to her husband’s brother, which Hamlet sees as quasi-incestuous? Hamlet hates Claudius so viscerally because Claudius has succeeded in doing what Hamlet himself unconsciously wishes to do. He vents his hatred upon his girlfriend Ophelia, who is so dominated by her father that some readers view the relationship as incestuous. In The Origins and History of Consciousness, Jungian theorist Erich Neumann argued, unfortunately to my mind, that the kind of hero myth in which the hero defeats and kills a female monster and, often, makes the world out of her body is a psychological allegory of the heroic ego getting itself born by conquering the unconscious, imaged as a female monster, the “terrible mother,” who attempts to swallow the hero, to engulf him in a kind of love-death. This explains why male dominance and misogyny are so widespread in human history: women are a temptation, luring men with their very existence as embodiments of the pleasure principle but being in reality devouring monsters. It also explains why the power drive is the chief source of evil in human history: it is the phallic sword drawn against the alluring temptation, the sword Odysseus holds to the throat of Circe.
I am no analyst, but I reject this as a paradigm of gender relations. I think it mistakenly accepts a neurotic misinterpretation of the human condition as normative, with potentially tragic results. Human beings, like all of nature, arise from a ground, a matrix, and mythologically that ground has feminine associations because it is the female that conceives, nurtures with her own body, and gives birth. But to be born is not to be cast out and cut off. Plants die if they are uprooted, and the original sin of humanity is the attempt to cut itself off from its own ground. Yes, human beings are not plants, and the umbilical cord is finally severed. But that only means we are, you might say, repotted. Removed from one ground, we are immediately planted in another. Joseph Campbell likes to quote Géza Roheim as saying that culture is a second womb, necessary because human beings, unlike the animals, cannot survive directly in nature. They take longer than any other animal to grow to maturity, and even when mature are not truly autonomous but interdependent. The masculine ideal of being strong, fierce, and solitary is a false ideal, the coping mechanism of lonely, love-deprived boys huddling together in packs to feel strong together.
Is there an alternative to the Oedipal model of masculinity, to the rejection of the mother and the obsession (positive or negative) with the father? The poet Yeats saw that there was. He contrasted Oedipus with Christ, who is the son of his mother but not of his father Joseph. In Milton’s Paradise Regained, which I have been talking about in the Expanding Eyes podcast, Jesus leaves his mother’s house to be tempted in the desert by Satan, and returns to it in the poem’s final lines. I think we should raise boys with another model of masculinity, one in which they do not break the apron strings to run off and play at being free, wild warriors.
I was raised in an alternative way myself, though more by intuition than by some deliberate philosophy of my mother’s. I am a mama’s boy, and thank my lucky stars that I was allowed to grow up that way. Indeed, although this is primarily a tribute to my mother, Wanda Sokowoski Dolzani, I will add that the greatest gift my father gave me was that he never tried to force me to grow up to “be a man,” but allowed me to be simply what I was. Mind you, it would have been a failed attempt—I am not manly material. But that has not stopped other fathers from trying to bully their sons into following the male way. By chance, the children in the neighborhood where I grew up were all girls, so I grew up relating to girls and without being bullied into trying to fit into some boy gang. It was from my mother that I derived my love of the arts. My mom was working class and uneducated: she actually went to a one-room elementary school. But she loved to read, and faithfully read bedtime stories to her two sons every single night. She told me that I was insatiable. She also loved the visual arts, and did crafts of all sorts. I have inherited her beautiful collection of red and milk glass, the symbolic colors of Eros. She loved to dance, and had what I think was a crush on Liberace, the pop classical pianist, who performed on television in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Liberace dressed and acted in a manner that in a later time would have been called flamingly gay—in other words, deliberately non-masculine—and I suspect that was part of the attraction. She also loved to listen to a recording of the tenor Mario Lanza singing excerpts from The Student Prince, which makes me think how Jung liked to remark on how women fell in love with tenors who can hit those high notes. That her tastes were not sophisticated could not matter less to me. Needless to say, it meant the world to her that her bookworm son who never stopped reading became a college professor who taught books, taught the imagination as the home, as the matrix, as the womb of human life.
Jung has a long essay on “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,” which begins with a section on “The Mother-Complex of the Son,” in other words the unconscious tie to the mother, whose effects, he says, may include homosexuality and Don Juanism: in the latter, the man “unconsciously seeks his mother in every woman he meets” (85). I do not know what gay men might think of explaining homosexuality, or at least some homosexuality, as an unconscious bond with the mother, although Marcel Proust must have meant something by beginning the seven-volume fictionalized account of his life in Remembrance of Things Past with the devastating moment in his boyhood when Marcel did not get his mother’s goodnight kiss. But Jung is too great a psychologist to reduce human beings to stereotypical sets of symptoms. All of a sudden, unexpectedly, he produces the following extraordinary passage:
Since a “mother-complex” is a concept borrowed from psychopathology, it is always associated with the idea of injury and illness. But if we take the concept out of its narrow psycho-pathological setting and give it a wider connotation, we can see that it has positive effects as well. Thus a man with a mother-complex may have a finely differentiated Eros instead of, or in addition to, homosexuality. (Something of this sort is suggested by Plato in his Symposium). This gives him a great capacity for friendship, which often creates ties of astonishing tenderness between men and may even rescue friendship between the sexes from the limbo of the impossible. He may have good taste and an aesthetic sense which are fostered by the presence of a feminine streak. Then he may be supremely gifted as a teacher because of his almost feminine insight and tact. He is likely to have a feeling for history, and to be conservative in the best sense and cherish the values of the past. Often he is endowed with a wealth of religious feelings, which help to bring the ecclesia spiritualis into reality; and a spiritual receptivity which makes him responsive to revelation.
In the same way, what in its negative aspect is Don Juanism can appear positively as bold and resolute manliness; ambitious striving after the highest goals; opposition to all stupidity, narrow-mindedness, injustice, and laziness; willingness to make sacrifices for what is regarded as right, sometimes bordering on heroism; perseverance, inflexibility and toughness of will; a curiosity that does not shrink even from the riddles of the universe; and finally, a revolutionary spirit which strives to put a new face upon the world. (86-87)
I have never read a description of ideal manhood that even begins to approach the passionate eloquence of this passage. Compared to it, all the notions of tough guys with their warrior fierceness are shown up as the insecure boyish fantasies that they truly are. I do not for one moment think I measure up to such an ideal, but I am honored even to aspire to it. It captures perfectly the kind of person I would love to be. More importantly, it is a model of the type of man the world needs at the present moment, if only to save it from the nihilistic will to power of those who are only pretending to be men.
References
Jung. C.G. “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype.” In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R.F.C. Hull. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, part 1. Princeton/Bollingen, 2nd edition, 1969. 75-112.
Bravo, Michael. Your conception of the gifts available to the son who transmutes his mother’s love into a manhood uniquely resonant with his native gifts and interests in contrast to the womb-slashing, Circe-raping son who earns his freedom by bloodying his sword called to my mind how vital to psychological and cultural maturity is Frye’s notion of interpenetration.
Clearly, the either/or of the son who either slays his mother or betrays his virility is imaginatively regressive. And even an alternative vision of reconciliation between the maternal and the masculine is something less than maximally creatively fertile, as it implies a prudent paring back of the undiluted expressions of two energies.
So much emotional and spiritual growth seems to me to turn on a mind grasping, or at least intuiting, the idea of interpenetration. And yet, it also seems to me to be a really challenging concept to many people. Perhaps one of the great boons, if not the greatest, of the arts is keeping alive tangible evidence of the more real than the merely real world available to us through metaphorical thinking—and feeling. Frye says as much anyway, again and again.
Your essay here reveals how true that is in a cultural context in which much is at stake in the moment. Let us praise the teachers of literature, like you, whose imaginations interpenetrate with the Word to such inspiring effect.