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Book Review
| Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. By James Gilbert. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. x, 269 pp. $39.00, ISBN 0-226-29324-6.)Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture. By Rachel Devlin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xii, 254 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2946-3. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5605-3.)
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| James Gilbert's Men in the Middle speaks perceptively to issues raised in the growing literature of masculinity studies. Gilbert highlights six iconic male figures—the sociologist David Riesman, the television dad Ozzie Nelson, the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, the playwright Tennessee Williams, the revivalist Billy Graham, and the Playboy editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky—and frames portraits of these men around an essay on modern masculinity that proves essential reading for scholars in the field. Did the arrival of modernity in the nineteenth century really bring a masculinity crisis? Gilbert asks. What constitutes a crisis, anyway? Did masculine icons—Tarzan, Theodore Roosevelt, or John Wayne—really mean to their audience what they mean to scholars today? |
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Gilbert reminds us that the crisis-of-masculinity trope was created in the 1950s by male writers who saw a decline of masculinity in their time and projected it backward to the late nineteenth century (current gender scholars accept this crisis and periodization). He sees an unusual (though not unique) preoccupation with masculinity in the 1950s but objects to scholars who elevate it to a panic or assume a universally agreed-upon masculine ideal. Each profile here offers a singular dimension of masculinity and its social context in the 1950s. Like other scholars, Gilbert reads Riesman's famous study of character types, The Lonely Crowd (1950), as a male declension narrative, one that was hijacked by popular critics. Yet he extricates its intersections with the midcentury mass culture debate and also ponders Riesman's legacy to the historical profession. It may be too much to say that "Riesman substituted an account of implicit masculinity crisis for the principal contours of American history," but Gilbert's point that Riesman's work "strengthened gendered values as an undercurrent of historical narrative" is astute (p. 59). Ozzie Nelson's TV character looks like a comic version of Riesman's other-directed man adjusting to the role of domesticated husband and dad while struggling to maintain an outmoded paternal pose. Gilbert thoughtfully considers Kinsey's contribution to the masculinity discourse: in divorcing socially defined norms of masculinity from sexual behavior, Kinsey's study revealed the malleability of male sexuality, which unintentionally elevated concerns about a rising homosexuality. That masculinity is, in essence, a role to be performed was the crucial insight of Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Gilbert suggests, which helps explain Cat's resonance in the fifties. While Graham's muscular Christianity sought to lure men into the ranks of believers and neutralize the femininity that Godly submission implied, Spectorsky's Playboy sought frisky male converts to high culture, thereby neutralizing the effeminacy that intellectual sophistication implied. No pandemic crisis appears here; cumulatively Gilbert's portraits illustrate the multilayered origins, novel dilemmas, and idiosyncratic expressions of the 1950s search for masculinity. |
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If Gilbert is attuned to the problem of attributing excessive power to popular images, Rachel Devlin is not. Her original, provocative, and overheated book, Relative Intimacy, argues that the father-daughter relationship was eroticized in psychiatric literature, plays, films, advertisements, and elsewhere in 1940s and 1950s popular culture. Assuming that female adolescents depended on the sexual approval of fathers for healthy psychic development (juvenile delinquents lacked such approval), psychiatric professionals declared the necessity of female adolescent oedipal desire, relinquished caution about its dangers, left troubling questions about its resolution unanswered, and displayed a "benign" or "normalizing" attitude toward father-daughter incest (pp. 22, 39). Devlin shows how father-daughter eroticism appeared in magazines such as Seventeen and plays such as Joseph Fields's Junior Miss (1945), which depicted fathers as participants in their daughter's makeup and clothing selections while supporting—financially, emotionally, and sexually—their sexual maturation into women. This was the "erotic/economic exchange that was constantly imagined as existing at the center of postwar economic growth and social change" (p. 13). |
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