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The Beard, Masculinity, and Otherness in the Contemporary American Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2016

PETER FERRY
PETER FERRY*
Affiliation:
School of English, Drama, and Film, University College Dublin. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article identifies the humble beard as a device used in twenty-first-century American literature to examine the contemporary condition of American masculinity. Drawing on readings from key writers of post-9/11 fiction, such as John Updike, Moshin Hamid, and Don DeLillo, the article calls for the need to move on from the reductive rendering of the beard as an irrefutable representation of Otherness to see the beard as a device used to explore the construction of masculinities in relation to key issues such as racialization, sexuality and the queering of the Other, and nationhood in the globalized and globalizing arena of the United States. Reading Amy Waldman's nuanced engagement with the beard in The Submission (2011) alongside key works on hegemonic masculinity, whiteness, and globalized masculinities, the article underlines the power of the beard in the contradictions and complexities of a changing American masculinity now performed beyond the physical borders of “the nation” on the global stage.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 163 - 182
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

1 Quoted in Jon Michaud, “The History of the American Beard,” New Yorker, 28 July 2011, at www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/the-history-of-the-american-beard.

2 Gannett lists these bearded fellows as Balboa and Magellan and Sebastian Cabot, Cotes, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon, and De Soto, Champlain and Cartier, Hawkins and Drake, Captain John Smith, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Winthrop, and the first Lord Baltimore. Lewis Garnett, “Onward & Upward with the Arts,” New Yorker, 15 Oct. 1938, at www.newyorker.com/magazine/1938/10/15/onward-upward-with-the-arts-2.

3 Allan D. Peterkin, One Thousand Beards: A Cultural History of Facial Hair (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2001), 37.

4 As the legend goes, Lincoln decided to grow a beard after receiving a letter from eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, New York, who suggested that her brothers would vote for Lincoln if he grew one. While the fact that Lincoln received this letter is not disputed, the type of facial hair that Lincoln was sporting at the time remains a point of debate, and goes further to underline the nuances that underpin the wearing of the beard in American society.

5 Sean Trainor, “The Beard That Wasn't: Abe Lincoln's Whiskers,” The Appendix, 2, 2 (April 2014), at http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/abe-lincolns-whiskers. Sherrow makes the further point that Lincoln's facial hair denoted “wisdom and respectability.” Victoria Sherrow, Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006), 59.

6 Adam Goodheart, “Lincoln: A Beard Is Born,” New York Times, 24 Nov. 2010, at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/lincoln-a-beard-is-born/?_r=0.

7 Raewyn Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005; first published 1995), 77. For critiques of Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity see Whitehead, Stephen, “Hegemonic Masculinity Revisited,” Gender, Work, and Organization, 6, 1 (1999), 58–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Demetriou, Demetrakis Z., “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society, 30, 3 (June 2001), 337–61Google Scholar; Hearn, Jeff, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men,” Feminist Theory, 5, 1 (2004), 49–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, Raewyn and Messerschmidt, James W., “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society, 19, 6 (Dec. 2005), 829–59Google Scholar; Richard Howson, Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006); Moller, Michael, “Exploiting Patterns: A Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Gender Studies, 16, 3 (2007), 263–76Google Scholar; and Messerschmidt, James, “Engendering Gendered Knowledge: Assessing the Academic Appropriation of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Men and Masculinities, 15, 1 (2012), 56–76 Google Scholar.

8 See Connell; Connell and Messerschmidt.

9 Connell, xx. Esther Ngan-Ling Chow develops this further, succinctly stating, “Much of the theorizing about globalization is either gender-neutral or gender-blind, ignoring how globalization shapes gender relationships and people's lives materially, politically, socially and culturally at all levels and treating its differential effects on women and men as similar. Gender is basically taken for granted, as if it does not matter.” Chow, Esther Ngan-Ling, “Gender Matters: Studying Globalization and Social Change in the 21st Century,” International Sociology, 18, 3 (2003), 443–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 444.

10 Connell, xxiii.

11 Connell and Messerschmidt, 849.

12 Hamilton Carroll, Affirmative Reaction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3. Further key readings on the study of whiteness include David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1997; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press) 1997; and Wiegman, Robyn, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” Boundary 2, 26, 3 (1999), 115–50Google Scholar.

13 Further key writings on masculinities and globalization include David L. Collinson, and Jeff Hearn, eds., Men as Managers, Managers as Men: Critical Perspectives on Men, Masculinities and Managements (London: Sage, 1996); Raewyn Connell, “Globalization, Imperialism, and Masculinities,” in Michael S. Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and Raewyn Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 71–89; Connell, Raewyn, “Men, Masculinities, and Gender Equality in the Global Arena,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30, 3 (2005), 1801–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, Raewyn and Wood, Julian, “Globalization and Business Masculinities,” Men and Masculinities, 7, 4 (2005), 347–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jeff Hearn, ed., Rethinking Transnational Men: Beyond, between and within Nations (New York: Routledge, 2013).

14 Carroll, 7. Also see Kimmel, Michael, “Invisible Masculinity,” Society 30, 6 (1993), 28–35 Google Scholar.

15 Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11 (London: John Wiley, 2011), 65.

16 Rothberg, Michael, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (2009), 152–58Google Scholar, 154.

17 Gray, Richard, “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (2009), 128–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 134.

18 Ibid.

19 Morley, Catherine, “‘How Do We Write about This?’ The Domestic and the Global in the Post-9/11 Novel,” Journal of American Studies, 45, 4 (2011), 717–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Gray, After the Fall, 65.

21 This image first appeared in Tony Judt, “America and the War,” New York Review of Books, 15 Nov. 2001, at www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/11/15/america-and-the-war. It also appeared in Thomas Powers, “Secrets of September 11,” New York Review of Books, 10 Oct. 2002, at www.nybooks.com/articles/2002/10/10/secrets-of-september-11; Avishai Margalit, “The Wrong War,” York Review of Books, 13 March 2003, at www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/03/13/the-wrong-war; and Max Rodenback, “The Truth About Jihad,” New York Review of Books, 11 Aug. 2005, at www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/08/11/the-truth-about-jihad.

22 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xxiii.

23 Ibid., xxiv.

24 Ibid., 38. See also Rustom Bharucha, Terrorism and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2014), 82.

25 See James Wood's review of Terrorist in James Wood, “Jihad and the Novel,” New Republic, 3 July 2006, at www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/jihad-and-the-novel.

26 Puar, 10.

27 Ibid., xii.

28 Ibid., xii.

29 Ibid., 35.

30 Ibid., 38.

31 John Updike, Terrorist (New York: Knopf, 2006), 14.

32 Ibid., 96.

33 Ibid., 163.

34 Ibid., 163.

35 Ibid., 163.

36 Ibid., 142.

37 Puar, 38.

38 Updike, 76.

39 Ibid., 76.

40 Ibid., 77.

41 Ibid., 145.

42 Ibid., 266.

43 Ibid., 271.

44 See Baelo-Allué, Sonia, “9/11 and the Psychic Trauma Novel: Don DeLillo's Falling Man,” Atlantis, 34, 1 (June 2012), 63–79 Google Scholar, for a particularly useful analysis of Falling Man as a psychic-trauma novel rather than a cultural-trauma novel.

45 See Don DeLillo, “In The Ruins of the Future,” Harpers Magazine, Dec. 2001, 33–40.

46 Gray, After the Fall, 28.

47 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007), 79.

48 Ibid., 82.

49 Ibid., 83.

50 Kimmel, Michael, “Globalization and its Mal(e)Contents: The Gendered Moral and Political Economy of Terrorism,” International Sociology, 18, 3 (2003), 603–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 616.

51 Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (San Diego: Harcourt, 2007), 167–68.

52 Julie Newman, Fictions of America: Narratives of Global Empire (London: Routledge, 2007).

53 Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, and Paul Jenner, The Contemporary American Novel in Context (London: Continuum, 2011).

54 Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).

55 Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U. S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (Literature Now) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

56 Ibid., 194.

57 Demetriou, “Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity,” 341.

58 Ibid., 345.

59 Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 848.

60 Gray, After the Fall, 61.

61 Ilott, Sarah, “Generic frameworks and active readership in The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50, 5 (2014), 571–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 573.

62 Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, 1.

63 Ibid., 26.

64 Ibid., 53.

65 Ibid., 32.

66 Ibid., 48.

67 Ibid., 131.

68 Ibid., 130.

69 Ibid., 130.

70 Cara Cilano, “Manipulative Fictions: Democratic Futures in Pakistan,” in Cilano, ed., From Solidarity to Schisms: 9/11 and After in Fiction and Film from Outside the US (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 211.

71 Hamid, 160.

72 Ibid., 130.

73 Rothberg, “A Failure of the Imagination,” 158.

74 Hamid, 118, original emphasis.

75 Ibid., 148, original emphasis.

76 Amy Waldman, The Submission (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 96.

77 Ibid., 28.

78 Ibid., 28.

79 Ibid., 49.

80 Ibid., 61.

81 Ibid., 62.

82 Ibid., 62.

83 Ibid., 172.

84 Ibid., 172.

85 Ibid., 173.

86 Ibid., 174.

87 Ibid., 64.

88 Ibid., 286.

89 Ibid., 126.

90 Ibid., 114.

91 Ibid., 114.

92 Ibid., 177.

93 Ibid., 177.

94 See Douglas W. Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Quincy T. Mills, Cutting along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

95 Waldman, 212.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid., 213.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Ibid., 240.

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 8–9.