Abstract
In his book Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, James Penner offers an illuminating, if decidedly uneven, addition to the already-crowded field of studies in mid-century American masculinities. Taking his primary cues from current masculinity and gender studies scholars such as K. A. Cuordileone and David Savran, Penner’s project also relies heavily on the work of Depression-era Marxist literary critic Michael Gold who in the early 1930s created a “literary virility test” based on a “hard/soft” binary. According to Penner, Gold’s dichotomy is sketched along social class lines, such that “hard” masculinity is “personified in the working-class male who performs hard labor and possesses robust vitality” while the “soft” male is exemplified by a “man of the leisure classes” who “rarely works with his hands and does not perform ‘real’ labor” (p. 2). Penner threads Gold’s dichotomy decade-by-decade beginning in the 1930s and terminating in the early 1970s in order to chart the permutations of hard and soft American masculinities occurring across an expansive array of texts. In addition, given the ever-increasing visibility of gays and lesbians during this time period, Penner embeds a particular focus on changing sociocultural perceptions of heterosexual and homosexual men that progressed coterminous with the shifting terrains of American literary culture.
Not surprisingly, this interweaving of Gold’s dichotomy works far better in some decades than others, particularly in chapters dealing with texts appearing in the 1930s and 1940s, during which Gold’s influence as a literary critic was most prominently exerted. Penner’s explications of Depression-era novels by James M. Cain, for example, are well thought-out and deftly executed. Cain, whose novels included The Postman Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), built and cultivated his reputation as a “tough-guy” novelist whose protagonists exemplified “hard” masculinity. Interestingly enough, however, Cain soon grew uncomfortable with this univocal masculinist view and, in what Penner calls Cain’s “exotic novel” Serenade (1937), attempted to shake his “hard-boiled” label and turn to explorations of “soft” masculinity by way of incorporating homosexuality into his work. Given when it was published, Serenade of course in no way valorizes homosexuality and, indeed, evinces a pronounced homophobia. Yet, in spite of Cain’s uniformly negative portrayal of “soft” masculinity, Serenade’s tough guy narrator John Sharp is hardly a sine qua non “hard” man. In fact, Sharp is an operatic tenor who loses both his voice and his heterosexual virility as a result of sleeping with operatic director Winston Hawes. Employing an unexpected gender-bending twist, Cain reveals that only after forcefully making love to Juana (a sexually ambiguous Mexican prostitute) can Sharp’s heteronormativity be fully reclaimed and, as a result, he can once again become a “productive and responsible member of society” (p. 57).
Penner’s interpretation of problematic masculinity fissures is admirable but, unfortunately, his interpretive mien soon falters. His chapter on the counterculture and the “masculine Kulturkampf” of the 1960s, for instance, includes a deeply troubling consideration of Timothy Leary’s advocating the use of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) – a psychedelic drug that causes expansion and an altered experience of senses, emotions, memories, time, and awareness – as a way to transform masculinity from its young professional, hard “robotic body” model typified in the 1950s to a softer, mutable, and receptive body that, according to Penner, “becomes a new cultural ideal for the younger generation of the 1960s” (p. 182). To his credit, Penner acknowledges Leary’s questionable research methodology, practices, and findings (particularly his practice of administering psilocybin to prisoners to determine whether or not their aggressive masculine behavior could be neurologically softened). However, what is disconcerting about the “Leary” section is that Penner also provides puzzling interpretations to circumstances that seem at first glance rather obvious.
For example, he relates an episode when Leary—under the guise of psychological research—gave novelist Arthur Koestler psilocybin which, subsequently, awakened in him past experiences as a political prisoner, including memories of torture, brainwashing, and extorted confessions. But Penner concludes ultimately that Koestler’s aversion to psychedelic drugs is rooted in a desperate attempt to “retain masculine autonomy, as he refuses to allow his mind to be penetrated by ‘little pills'” (p. 184). It is worth noting that Leary himself documented Koestler’s “bad trip” and his attendant revisiting of wartime trauma, making Penner’s gender-based argument for Koestler’s negative reaction to taking drugs seem at best far-fetched and at worst astonishingly callous.
In fact, the text itself is rife with questionable interpretations and notable research shortcomings. In discussing with Allen Ginsberg, Penner points out that “On the one hand, Ginsberg is associated with masculine courage; on the other hand, the notion of performance is often considered feminizing because the performer becomes a visual spectacle and, in some cases, the object of desire” (p. 144). In a book that purportedly details the shifting sands of masculinity, this statement seems rather rigidly essentialist, as it assumes that by being objectified, Ginsberg has no choice but to abdicate all semblance of masculinity and become feminized. Numerous critics such as Laura Mulvey (whom Penner cites), along with Kaja Silverman, Steve Neale, and Richard Dyer (whose research Penner surprisingly overlooks), have all challenged the notion that spectatorship and masculinity are hermetically sealed concepts, and Penner’s omission of this antiessentialist body of criticism is disappointing. Later, Penner also appears enthralled by Eldridge Cleaver’s conceptualizing of a racial caste system (in his 1968 work Soul on Ice) that pits weak, frail, and effeminate white male “Omnipotent Administrators” against strong, virile, and physically beautiful black “Supermasculine Menials” in what could be described as a libidinal Battle Royal. In his elucidation of Cleaver, however, Penner completely ignores the long history of critical research dealing with the torqued contours of white and black male masculinity. Indeed, Penner’s omission makes it appear as though Cleaver’s work appeared ab ovo in late-1960s America, just in time to meld seamlessly with the myriad social and sexual upheavals rocking the country.
Penner’s inclusion of influential and important scientific studies, psychosocial treatises, and political and cultural movements throughout Pinks, Pansies, and Punks certainly gives an illuminating background to the book’s forty-year time period coverage. But the haphazard, nonlinear fashion in which these “cultural moments” are applied ultimately confuses more than it clarifies. As a result, readers are presented with a profoundly unfocused “variations on a theme of dichotomy” rather than being able to clearly delineate the full continuum of twentieth-century American masculinities.