Abstract
Cultural studies has always been indebted to the analysis of how everyday experience can be made sense of in cultural texts. While during the past decades the focus has been increasingly shifted to media texts, the book has not been given much attention. This article argues for a reintegration of popular fiction into the research agenda of cultural studies, claiming that the genre of ‘ladlit’ may serve as a challenging cultural locus where gendered identity scripts are negotiated, constructed and deconstructed. Based on the premise that popular fiction both shapes and reflects on changing conceptualizations of gender, fatherhood and family life, the article analyses how the masculinity scripts of the New Man and the New Lad are drawn upon in the construction of identity, and how these two scripts are rearticulated and deconstructed with a specific focus on the notion of fatherhood.
Introduction
Even though the project of cultural studies took its import from English studies, 1 over the last couple of decades its focus invariably has shifted to the analysis of popular media culture. As a consequence literature, or more accurately the medium ‘book’, has not been given a great deal of critical attention anymore. 2 As cultural studies made the everyday experience one of its most prominent research areas, it seemed obvious to concentrate on media rather than literary texts. ‘Reading’ became synonymous with reading television, advertisements or other texts provided by the new cultural industries. Furthermore, in recent years cultural studies has undergone a crisis regarding both its theoretical and methodological approaches. As an interdisciplinary project rather than an established discipline, it has often been accused of being too ‘fuzzy’. During the past ten to fifteen years, attempts have been made to rehabilitate cultural studies from this kind of accusation. One remedy, it has been suggested, is to formulate meta-theories and core methodologies in order to facilitate the analysis of macro-structures, rather than confining oneself to the micro-level of culture and the everyday (cf. Hall and Birchall, 2006; White and Schwoch, 2006). While it certainly has been necessary to critically reflect on the traditional approaches employed within the field of cultural studies in order to accommodate analyses that are concerned with sociocultural developments on a larger scale, including the drastic changes that furthered the global economic crisis we have been faced with during the past years, I very much doubt that turning cultural studies into a science of culture, as has been recently suggested (cf. e.g. Hartley, 2009), is the right avenue for cultural studies to pursue, at least not in terms of a general shift of focus. Sociocultural changes find their expression on different levels, and while I appreciate innovative attempts that aim at analysing larger social structures, this should not be done at the expense of a bottom-up approach that takes issue with social phenomena that are articulated on the level of the everyday.
The specific sociocultural change that will be addressed in this article is the crisis of masculinity and the effect that this crisis has had on the concept of fatherhood. For the past fifty years, feminism has sought ‘gender justice’ (Connell, 2005[1995]) and has put men and masculinities in a critical spotlight which has resulted in revealing men’s privileged status as well as their most ingrained fears, which in turn are responsible for the persisting patriarchal structures and the oppressiveness of traditional masculinities. Along with that general insecurity concerning the question what it means to be a man, the nature of traditional fatherhood also has been fundamentally questioned: ‘While some argue that fatherhood has ceased to be a normative expectation and has become a voluntary commitment, others argue that effective fatherhood is an essential quality of masculinity’ (Cabrera et al., 2000: 132). As a result, several established and emerging concepts of fatherhood exist which have resulted in what Collier and Sheldon (2006) call ‘fragmented fatherhood’.
Departing from the assumption that fiction forms an important backbone for meaning-making processes which both shapes and reflects on conflicting concepts such as modern fatherhood, in what follows I want to plea for the reintegration of popular fiction in the research agenda of cultural studies. Since identity is no longer perceived as having an underlying, essential core but is seen as a composite of socially constructed attributes, it makes more sense than ever to discuss gendered identities in conjunction with fictional narratives. As Alan Petersen argues: ‘The critique of identity does not necessarily mean that one should disavow identity, but rather that one needs to be constantly aware of the fictitious character of identity and of the dangers of imposing an identity’ (2003: 62). Identities are constructed discursively, and whether this process is achieved in a novel or in so-called ‘real’ life does not change the material implications that the social construction of identity produces.
To provide a framework that underpins my claim, I will draw on the ‘ladlit’ genre to elucidate how popular fiction articulates and transforms social norms and attitudes as well as gendered behaviour in heterosexual relationships. The use of popular culture as an integral part of everyday life can be understood as an attempt to achieve psychological and ontological security in a vastly contingent world. Fred Inglis (2005) rightly argues that our life-world is full of habits and routines that make the world relatively predictable and understandable, and hence grant a certain degree of psychological security. Moreover, popular culture offers a way of making sense of what we already know. At the same time, it seeks a slight variation thereof which, in the highly rationalized, modern world we live in, helps reduce complexity and serves as a tactic for enriching the everyday, which often seems marked by routine rather than excitement. Focusing on the problems of lack of commitment and prolonged adolescence with respect to the concept of fatherhood, I will show how masculine identities are constructed and deconstructed as they display both stabilizing and destabilizing forces, and hence not only negotiate between the familiar and the potentially new but, more crucially, between distinctive cultural identity scripts. By reading three specimens of ladlit against the background of the social phenomena of lack of commitment and prolonged adolescence – that is, two aspects of masculinity in crisis that have influenced how modern fatherhood is perceived nowadays – it will become obvious how gendered subjectivities are shaped through and contested in fictional discourse.
Confessional writing
Ladlit supposedly articulates the confusion and uncertainty with which the young, male generation of the 1990s struggled against the effects of the sexual revolution and the dissolution of the class system. According to Elaine Showalter: ‘lads of the 1990s were no longer able to blame the class and caste system or the ludicrous narcissism of their fathers for their difficulties (2002: 73). The genre as such was initiated with Nick Hornby’s semi-autobiographical book Fever Pitch (1993), which tells the story of an obsessive Arsenal football fan who cannot make sense of the world outside football and therefore lacks the ability to successfully engage in social relationships. Hornby’s book was greeted enthusiastically, as it voices the trials and tribulations to which male readers in particular could relate. Moreover, its style, cutting-edge humour and the sensitivity with which it tackles human deficiencies makes the book an entertaining and stimulating read even for those who are not obsessed with football. Hornby not only turned football into a respectable topic, but also created a character whose weaknesses and foibles make him an average, young man whose main fault is that he does what lads do, and thus became the representative of the young British male in crisis.
Hornby’s Fever Pitch was a huge success and seemed to match the zeitgeist of the 1990s perfectly, as is evident in the following appraisal: ‘“Fever Pitch is a sophisticated study of obsession, families, masculinity, class, identity, growing up, loyalty, depression and joy. He should write for England.”’. 3 The mix between sophistication and obsession, on the one hand, and the high potential for reader identification, on the other, proved to be a successful recipe for a new genre within the popular fiction market. Hornby was subsequently commissioned to write a proper novel, High Fidelity, which was published in 1995, sold more than one million copies and made the top 10 of the 1990s. The novel has been described as a literary bestseller in the fashion of a postmodern Bildungsroman (Knowles, 2002), and writers such as John O’Farrell and Tony Parsons, whose work will be discussed below, have followed its generic style assiduously. Literary history is full of narrative confessions, and there is one specific form of confessional writing, the Bildungsroman, to which the male confessional novel owes a great deal in terms of generic set-up. The emergence and establishment of the Bildungsroman in the 18th century as a genre occurred simultaneously with a specific educational ideal represented, for example, by Schiller in Aesthetic Education (Jeffers, 2005).
The English terms ‘novel of formation’ or ‘educational novel’ point to the fact that the main protagonist typically undergoes a process of maturation or phase of initiation, which is important because ‘[a] successful initiation leads to group solidarity and a warm sense of belonging; a successful adolescence adds to these a profound sense of self – of one’s personality’ (Moretti, 2000: 106). The tradition of the English Bildungsroman dates back to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and comprises novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1860). The Bildungsroman is ‘about the maturation process of a protagonist who in virulent confrontation with social norms and the natural environment aims at finding an adequate, socially accepted lifestyle that is also in compliance with his talents and desires’ (Gutjahr, 2007: 8). There are two characteristics of the traditional Bildungsroman that have survived and decidedly characterize both the storyline and the rhetoric of the male confessional novel of the 1990s: namely, the desire to fit in and the notion of the flawed self. In order to overcome those flaws that prevent the male anti-heroes from growing up and engaging in lasting and meaningful relationships, they have to undergo an often painful process of maturation during which they are forced to mend their flawed selves. The contemporary novel of formation, to which ladlit undoubtedly belongs, is marked by a high degree of self-reflexivity which manifests itself in confessional narratives that constitute the flawed self and draw the reader into a conspiratorial relationship with the main character. This apologetic gesture is of particular interest, as feminist literary scholarship has often claimed that in literary history, men have been omnipresent in the sense that most books are authored by men and feature male protagonists. Women authors or female protagonists were often singled out, thus femininity became the marked gender, whereas the male experience often went unnoticed because of its taken-for-grantedness: ‘Men have written plenty about themselves as men; little of it consciously’ (Middleton, 1992: 2). However, in order to gain a deeper insight into their gendered identity, ‘it is crucial that men come to some understanding and appreciation of the wider implications of what being a man means for their gendered subjectivity’ (Whitehead, 2001: 364). By giving the male characters a voice, trying to make sense of their own flawed selves, the male confessional novel turns masculinity into the marked gender. By self-consciously drawing attention to the mistakes that the anti-heroes make and the learning processes that they have to undergo, masculinity is put in a critical spotlight.
My reading is based on the premise that masculinity is neither innate nor essential, but socially constructed and performed and hence discursive and anti-essential. Being born with male genitals does not make a man a man, neither does it convey anything about his masculinity. In gender and masculinities studies, a significant shift from the singular to the plural has been increasingly noted (cf. e.g. Noble, 2004). Taking into consideration all these claims, I would like to understand masculinity as a performance (cf. Butler, 2006[1990]; Emig and Rowland, 2010) of a gendered subject position drawing on residual, dominant or emergent discursive practices that express aspects of maleness.
The advent of ladlit: New Man versus New Lad
Ladlit novels share a number of characteristics, most strikingly a male main protagonist who refuses to grow up, delays decisions and engages in obsessive pastimes. These three impediments have found ubiquitous sympathy, granting a high degree of reader identification. 4 Rob Fleming in High Fidelity represents the average guy that readers can identify with: he is a kind of an everyman of the 1990s. Despite being a fictional character, Rob could be our next-door neighbour. He is somebody we think we recognize, somebody to whom we can relate. He is neither a hero with superpowers nor a malicious villain; he is a normal, average guy who makes mistakes and has to learn his lesson.
The questions that arise if one considers ladlit (or the male confessional novel, as I prefer to term it) as a specific articulation of the 1990s, is why did the crisis of masculinity, or at least the awareness of such a crisis, emerge during the 1990s, and why did the notion of obsession pitch in so well with the contemporary structure of feeling? I very much doubt that the 1990s were a decade during which the crisis of masculinity was more trenchant than in any other decade. However, what makes the 1990s stand apart is that there were men who publicly admitted to being in crisis and confessed that they did not know what was expected from them as partners or fathers. As I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Ochsner, 2009), the insecurity and resulting crisis that men faced during the 1990s was partly fuelled by the feminist movement, or rather by its effects, but more importantly by a general gender crisis, as masculinity and femininity could no longer be perceived as clear-cut categories. At the end of the last millennium, the question of identity had become a most difficult and complex project that challenged the norms and values endorsed by mixed-gender relationships.
In what follows, I will focus specifically on how notions of masculinity and male identity are negotiated and articulated against the tension resulting from the two opposing masculine gender scripts ‘New Man’ and ‘New Lad’ which, according to Sean Nixon, are ‘two distinct cultural scripts through which the link between masculinity and consumption is established’ (Nixon, 2001: 375). The New Man script emerged in the mid-to-late 1980s and began to dominate consumer markets in the UK, most of all those of menswear, grooming and toiletries (Nixon, 2001). The New Man is depicted in decidedly pro-feminist and anti-homophobic terms, as he may be gay or straight and is supposed to be emotionally sensitive, respectful of women and highly invested in his physical appearance. By contrast, the New Lad is characterized as selfish, homophobic and anti-feminist, and pre-eminently concerned with beer, football and sex. He is anti-aspirational and insensitive to other people’s feelings. He refuses to grow up and take responsibility. Often, this latter observation has been read as symptomatic of masculinity in crisis. Bethan Benwell contends that the implications of such a crisis ‘arguably resonate in the widely observed regressive and adolescent tendencies acted out by New Lad magazines in which there is a nostalgic retreat to infantile forms of behaviour’ (2003: 14). Her account of new laddism is rather dismissive, and while I agree with her reservation towards this particular version of masculine behaviour, nevertheless I am inclined to draw attention to the difficulty of accounting for these tendencies that might seem rather unified and homogenous. Correspondingly, scholars have assumed that laddish behaviour must be viewed as retrosexist and as a backlash against feminism and feminist achievements (Connell, 1990; Gill, 2003); others claim that there is no crisis of masculinity but of the working class (Heartfield, 2002), or that men have always been in crisis (Kimmel, 2002). While all of these claims are certainly true to some extent, I would like to understand the crisis of masculinity as it was perceived in the 1990s as a specific, gendered form of identity crisis. Against the background of a number of new social movements, including the women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the transgender movement, heterosexual masculinity and fatherhood have been challenged by a myriad of alternative, masculine gender scripts. Pitching the New Man and the New Lad against the concept of fatherhood, it becomes obvious that the performance of masculinity has acquired the sort of complexity that can no longer be accounted for by clearly distinguished gender scripts. The New Lad script in particular endorses a rather functional understanding of fatherhood that is not adaptable to the new ideal of ‘the nurturing father’ or ‘the involved father’. Masculinity is an ongoing, discursively formed identity project, a matter of becoming rather than being, and hence is marked by instability and complexity. In poststructuralist parlance, one could say that masculinity is a signifier that has no signified – its meaning is constantly deferred. Stabilizing attempts are temporarily achieved in discourse, but discourses always give rise to counter-discourses whereby hegemonic masculinity or fatherhood, or any other kind of gender scripts are subject to destabilizing forces at the same time. 5 Such stabilizing or destabilizing processes are historically and spatially specific. Therefore:
Discursive constructs of masculinity should not be viewed as stable elements of institutions or of a culture, since even as they are posited, they are resisted in numerous ways. As a result of this process, they should be viewed as constantly agonistic, or as in a continual relation of struggle between institutional power and other forms of power. (Reeser, 2010: 35)
The emergence of new masculine scripts such as New Man and New Lad are partly an attempt at fixing identities. Conversely, they are an expression of the postmodern condition which has furthered the proliferation of lifestyles and gender scripts promoted by the advertising industries. Such scripts serve their purpose as long as the accessories and gadgets associated with them are selling. Therefore, gender scripts such as the New Man and the New Lad are frequently represented as products of particular chronological moments, with the New Man representing the zeitgeist of the 1980s and the New Lad the 1990s. However, I argue that the distinction between these two types of masculinity, which are often depicted as mutually exclusive, are mere constructions serving the market segments mentioned above. In the genre of the male confessional novel this clear-cut demarcation blurs, especially if the New Man and/or New Lad has to come to terms with being a father as well. As my examples will show, the protagonists struggle to reconcile these two cultural scripts, including a number of variations thereof. I understand this juggling of gender identities to be a direct effect of postmodern uncertainty fostered by the new social movements mentioned above. In view of the feminist movement and the advent of feminist masculinity studies, the two cultural scripts stand in direct relationship to residual and emergent types of fatherhood.
Consequently, the (re)articulation of masculinity and experimenting with gender scripts should be considered an expression of the structure of feeling of the 1990s, a term I prefer to ‘zeitgeist’. Structure of feeling is a concept proposed by the Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Williams, 1960[1958], 1977, 2001[1961]), that is supposed to capture the tension between experience in the sense of culture as it is lived and the forms through which it is lived. 6 Structure of feeling differs from hegemonic culture because it refers to the ‘emergent culture of a new generation’ (O’Connor, 2005: 79). I read the male confessional novel as a specific articulation of the structure of feeling of the 1990s; by implication I propose to understand the crisis of masculinity and fatherhood as an experience of tension and instability, and the male confessional novel as one form through which the crisis is expressed and negotiated towards a new understanding of both masculinity and fatherhood. 7
The challenge of being a new father
Will Freeman: the surrogate father
The somewhat shallow hero of Nick Hornby’s second novel, About a Boy (1999), is an ideal example to illustrate both commitment-phobia and the phenomenon of prolonged adolescence. Will Freeman, as his name suggests, hates the very idea of committing himself or being tied down. He entertains rather futile relationships with women until he gets bored with them. Will has no proper sense of belonging, and he does not take much interest in anything except himself. Curiously, however, he fits in with the broader contemporary social fabric by exclusively subscribing to the postmodern, hedonistic lifestyle philosophy. He is very careful about how he dresses and decorates his apartment. In other words, Will displays a prefect mix between the New Lad and New Man, being highly suspicious of relationships and appreciating women only in terms of casual sexual relationships, but looking after himself in a manner suggested by New Man magazines.
Will despises families because in his view, they represent the sort of boring lifestyle he is trying to avoid at all costs. He could never imagine being tied down by the responsibilities that a serious partnership and possible fatherhood entail. When he visits a couple who have just had their second baby, it becomes quite clear that Will is not only disgusted by the messy state that a house with children is in, but simply abhors the idea of having children:
These two were beginning to make him feel physically ill. It was bad enough that they had children in the first place; why did they wish to compound the original error by encouraging their friends to do the same? For some years now Will had been convinced that it was possible to get through life without having to make yourself unhappy in the way that John and Christine were making themselves unhappy. (Hornby, 1999: 16).
Will does not subscribe to the concept of finding a partner for life and settling down. To him, having a family stands in direct opposition to his idea of being happy. However, he becomes aware that there are a lot of single mothers who are looking for a new partner, and therefore decides to exploit what the singles market has on offer. Furthermore he realizes that women might find him more interesting if there was something that would touch their feelings. So he invents Ned, his alleged two-year-old son, before joining a single parent action group called SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together), where he dishes out a ludicrous story about having been deserted by Ned’s mother:
True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn’t a fraud. He was Robert De Niro. (Hornby, 1999: 44)
This is how Will makes excuses his manipulative behaviour. He draws on the spectrum of lifestyles that he has been observing in contemporary society, and by exploiting his knowledge, he turns his rather empty and superficial personality into an artistic character. In a way, he disguises his New Lad tendencies by boasting New Man characteristics.
Obviously, Will does not get away with his deceiving performance for long. When he meets Marcus, an eccentric 12-year-old schoolboy and his hippie vegetarian mother Fiona, who tries to commit suicide at the beginning of the novel, his life takes an unexpected turn. First, he realizes that he can entertain a friendship with Fiona even though he does not find her attractive at all. Suddenly, women lose their hitherto monolithic purpose – to entertain him until he gets bored of them. He realizes that he can become friends with a woman without wanting her to become his lover. Second, Marcus chooses Will as an adult male friend who teaches him what normal boys at his age are supposed to do. His mother raised him to be different and not to blend in with mainstream teenage culture, which causes a lot of problems for Marcus at school. He simply does not know how to behave like a teenager and is constantly bullied by his peers. Even though Will refuses to spend time with Marcus at first, the boy is persistent and keeps turning up at Will’s apartment. As he is getting to know Marcus better, he suddenly realizes that he makes his life ‘real’:
The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff … He liked watching real stuff on EastEnders and The Bill, and he liked listening to Joe Strummer and Curtis Mayfield and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. (Hornby, 1999: 112f.)
Will begins to understand that real life cannot be shut out – it always finds a re-entry into his life. Until he met Marcus, he had never maintained a steady relationship because as soon as problems came up, he broke it off. Third, Will becomes a kind of a surrogate father to Marcus. Marcus very consciously seeks him out to be taught how to be a teenager. Marcus is very aware of not having a male parent and tries to fill this void by turning to Will as a mentor or father figure. Without realising this, Will is perfectly able to help the boy as he is very knowledgeable when it comes to football and popular music, and provides Marcus with the kind of information that makes him less conspicuous among his peers. In this respect their growing friendship is entirely to Marcus’s benefit, as his mother is oblivious to Marcus’s problems at school in her attempt at teaching him to be different.
Marcus, on the other hand, teaches Will to care for someone and to take responsibility, and his influence on Will grows even deeper when he falls in love with Rachel, another single mother, who is under the misapprehension that Marcus is Will’s son. This suits Will fine, because by then he has understood that it takes more than an attractive physique and smart clothes to make a woman fall in love with him. Marcus provides the solution as he is the only interesting aspect in Will’s life; he transforms Will from a self-centred bachelor and womanizer into a caring father.
In the end, as the genre of the romantic novel predicts, there is a happy ending even though Rachel finds out that Will is not Marcus’s real father: she understands that despite pretending to be what he is not, Will actually cares for Marcus, which she regards as a redeeming character trait. Through Marcus, Will has learned to take responsibility and to act his age. He has also understood that life was not as simple and ‘clean’ as he wanted it to be prior to his meeting Marcus and Fiona. On the contrary, life is complex and messy, but by abandoning his former commitment-phobic attitude, Will can appreciate the human connections that dealing with the complexity and messiness of life entails:
[T]he boy was awkward and weird and the rest of it, but he had this knack of creating bridges wherever he went, and very few adults could do that. Will could never have imagined that he would have been able to walk across to Fiona, but he could now; his relationship with Rachel had been entirely underpinned by Marcus. (Hornby, 1999: 267).
The novel tackles the contemporary notion of fatherhood from different angles. First, it features a number of single mothers and absent fathers, of whom Marcus’s parents get most of the attention. Second, through Marcus’s reflections on his mother’s precarious psychological condition and growing up without a father, the problems that the absence of a male parent can cause are addressed directly in the narrative. Third, by Will pretending to be Marcus’s father in order to appear more interesting while at the same time getting increasingly involved with the boy, Will and Marcus embark on a kind of father–son relationship on both a consciously fabricated and unconsciously emotional level.
Harry Silver: the single father
While Will in About a Boy only flirts with the idea of fatherhood, the anti-heroes of the following two novels have experienced what it means to be a proper father, at least in the biological sense. Harry Silver, the main protagonist in Man and Boy (2000) by Tony Parsons, is a happily married father of a little boy, but is unfortunately hit by a premature midlife crisis when he turns thirty. He temporarily gives up his New Man attitude and turns into a New Lad, having a one-night stand with a colleague. His wife, Gina, finds out because Harry has lent her his mobile on which his new lover leaves a message. Gina breaks up their marriage without a second thought and moves to Japan. She leaves their son behind but is adamant that she will return to get him as soon as she has settled in. Harry is suddenly faced with being a full-time father and finds this task rather challenging because before he was on his own, he enjoyed the easy tasks of being a father, playing and fooling around, whereas now he has to worry about the cooking and washing his son’s hair:
They [Harry’s parents] stayed with Pat while I did our shopping at the local supermarket. It was only a five-minute drive away, but I was gone for quite a while because I was secretly watching all the women I took to be single mothers. I had never even thought about them before, but now I saw that these women were heroes. Real heroes. They were doing it all by themselves. Shopping, cooking, entertaining, everything. They were bringing up their children alone. And I couldn’t even wash Pat’s hair. (Parsons, 2000: 80)
Due to his wife’s departure, Harry is faced with the real challenges that fatherhood places on men. He is forced to take responsibility and temporarily is completely out of his depth. Apart from the problem of having to cope with his son on his own, he feels severely threatened in his masculinity. Even though he put his harmonious family in jeopardy by having an affair, Harry is a rather conservative man, especially when it comes to family questions, and he is convinced that ‘the lousy modern world’ is responsible for so many kids growing up with single parents:
This is how it works, I thought. You break up and your child becomes a kind of castaway, set adrift in a sear of daytime television and ducked responsibilities. Welcome to the lousy modern world where the parent you live with is a distant, contemptible figure and the parent you don’t live with feels guilty enough to grant you asylum any time things get too tense at home. But not my boy. Not my Pat. (Parsons, 2000: 74)
For a good part of the narrative, Harry does not realize that his general philosophy of life and the way he behaved when he committed adultery do not really match. He sees the breakdown of his marriage as a symptom of the ‘modern’ world. In his view, fatherhood boils down to being around rather than taking an active part in the child’s upbringing. He is faced with the emerging phenomenon of single fatherhood, thereby becoming very self-conscious with regard to both being a man and a father. He reflects on how women might perceive him:
She saw a man alone with a child and she thought that somehow that must make me better than other men – more kind-hearted, more compassionate, less likely to let a woman down. The new, improved male of the species, biologically programmed for child-caring duties. As if I had planned for my love to work out this way. (Parsons, 2000: 87)
Conversely, he is also aware that he not only stands for the New Man and New Father, but by the same token epitomizes the broken home:
Young mothers didn’t talk to me. They avoided my eye. They really didn’t want to know … The women who were single parents had more in common with the women who had partners than they did with me. At least that’s how they all acted … There might be understanding and enlightenment for a single father with a little kid out in the working world. But here at the sharp end of parenting, outside those school gates, nobody wanted to know. It was as if Pat and I were reminder of the fragility of all their relationships. (Parsons, 2000: 199f.)
Harry reminds other people of what they try to avoid at all costs but could happen to them at any time – becoming a single parent. This problem is even more accentuated when he starts seeing another woman who is also a single parent. Even though this relationship ultimately helps him overcome his outdated attitude towards love and romance, at the beginning he finds it rather hard to accept her daughter because she is a constant reminder of his lover’s past and poses a serious threat to his masculinity. However, by going out with a single mother he begins to understand that there are various ways of being a father, since fathering a child in certain circumstances does not necessarily include aspects of nurturing. His personal situation as well as the one in which his partner finds herself makes him reflect on his role as a father as well as on his masculinity, both of which are challenged when his own father dies. Harry admired and respected his father, believing that he represented the good old times when families stayed together and gender roles were clearly assigned on the basis of biological gender. Harry suffers from some kind of triple castration complex, his masculinity being fundamentally questioned three times during the course of the novel. First, his wife leaves him, bereaving him of the status of the head of the family; second, his father dies, which leaves him without a male role model to look up to; and finally, he loses custody of his son to his future ex-wife, which completes the disruption of the male genealogy of the Silvers. However, in a painful process of re-evaluating and letting go, he learns to accept that fatherhood can take on many forms, and emerges as a new man aware of the fact that there is no textbook version of masculinity available. Being a single parent and fighting for his son when his wife comes back to collect him turns him into a more mature and balanced human being. Even though at first he wants to fight for custody of his son, he soon gives up because of his son’s welfare.
To sum up, despite being fictional, Man and Boy offers an interesting insight into the phenomenon of single parenthood and the breakdown of the nuclear family. Harry experiments with different versions of fatherhood, from the traditional father who leaves the burden of raising the child to his wife, to the single father to the part-time father who can only see his child according to specific rules endorsed by the law. Harry mistakenly relies on an outdated model of parenthood with clearly assigned roles to the mother and the father.
Michael Adams: the part-time father
In a similar manner, Michael Adams in John O’Farrell’s The Best a Man can Get (2000), is forced to grow up and accept responsibility as a parent. He is married with two children, his wife pregnant with their third child. He loves his family but cannot cope with being around them all the time, and so finds a flatshare with three single men in another part of town, pretending he is working long hours earning their family income as a jingle writer. He invents this second identity as he does not feel ready to face the duties and responsibilities as a husband and father; it makes him feel old and as though he has missed out on something.
At the beginning of the novel, we accompany Michael on the journey from his bachelor flat to his family home. We are unaware of Michael’s destination, and the disclosure that he has a family comes as a big surprise. By establishing Michael as a bachelor first, the reader immediately becomes an accomplice in his deceiving scheme. Despite the surprise we experience when Michael is greeted by a two-year old girl who turns out to be his daughter, we are compelled to feel sympathy for his unusual situation.
To Michael, the arrival of children is the end of one’s youth: ‘The day that baby comes out it’s over. Your independence, your youth, your pride – everything that made you what you were. You have to start again from scratch’ (O’Farrell, 2000: 178). Furthermore, he has great difficulty combining being a parent and a professional at the same time: ‘I couldn’t look after a toddler and a baby and try to restring my acoustic guitar as well’ (2000: 208). Having children puts a question mark on his identity – Michael struggles to define who he is. Apart from being unable to reconcile the different roles that he is supposed to assume, he believes, like Will Freeman in About a Boy, that children are tedious:
Small children are boring. We all pretend we find every little nuance of our off-spring wonderful and fascinating, but we’re all lying to ourselves. Small children are boring; it’s the tedium that dare not speak its name. (2000: 88)
I would argue that Michael’s most severe predicament is that he has no clear idea of who he is. He is unhappy about being a full-time father, but he does not opt to become a hard-earning businessperson either. He wastes his time by not doing anything properly and by travelling back and forth between his two lives. He is always on the move, chasing and running away from his identity at the same time. He seems to have an idée fixe that having children erases his identity, and by living a double life, he subscribes to the illusion of being single and independent, clinging to his ‘old’ self, successfully prolonging his adolescence:
I felt like a man having an affair, only it wasn’t an affair with a younger woman, it was an affair with a younger version of myself. Just as some men get back in contact with old girlfriends after they are married, I’d met up again with the twenty-something Michael Adams. He’d made me feel young again; he’d understood all my problems. And we still had so much in common; we liked to do the same things. (O’Farrell, 2000: 192)
Michael is unable to live up to the expectations of modern fatherhood, which includes providing for the family both as a breadwinner and a carer. Here, residual and emergent concepts of fatherhood clash. The novel critically reflects on a new model of ‘responsible fatherhood’ which has emerged in recent years. The problem with this new model grounds in ‘contrasting and often contradictory, ideas about men and masculinities, gender, and autonomy’ (Collier, 2010: 450). Michael seems unable to harmonize the various versions of fatherhood that circulate at the turn of the millennium, and resorts to a temporary solution that is bound to fail. Instead of accepting that fatherhood is not a clear-cut role but has many different facets, he goes on believing that different versions cannot be reconciled in one life. Therefore, he invents a second life in which he pretends to be single, without responsibility for any fatherly duties:
[M]y double life was a well-oiled machine. I had a wife, but I was independent, I had a job in which I could choose my own hours, I had the perfect amount of time with my beautiful children, but I also had my own space and all the time to myself that I could possibly want. (O’Farrell, 2000: 162)
Michael departs from the assumption – not unlike Will Freeman – that life can be controlled and divided into perfectly separate spheres. Possible complicating factors are being ignored because they might spin out of control. Michael wants it both ways: he wants to be a family man and a single man at the same time. It does not occur to him that ‘freedom’ might take on a different meaning: that is, he does not necessarily have to opt for two extremes in two carefully divided set-ups. He loves spending time with his children, but only when he has had a break from them beforehand. Similarly, he enjoys staying with his three flatmates who have no idea that he is a married father, and he indulges in their laddish pastimes such as guessing games or making lists. Here again we have a fine example of a male character who tries to juggle the two identity scripts of the New Man when he is at home with his family, and the New Lad when he spends time with his flatmates.
The big turning point ensues when one day he runs into his wife and daughter by accident while in the park with his flatmates and friends: he is hit by remorse and decides to abandon his bachelor life. However, meanwhile his wife has found out that he has been ‘cheating’ on her and leaves him on the spur of the moment, and now his life is really out of control:
From the outside it might have seemed a similar existence, but whereas before I’d believed I had organized myself the perfect life and had revelled in the best of both worlds, now I was utterly miserable. Because now none of it was in my control, now my hours as a father were begrudgingly meted out to me rather than being generously granted by my good self. Catherine had the power … No I’d been exiled to parental Siberia, condemned to solitary confinement with two hours’ visiting time a week. (O’Farrell, 2000: 232)
Michael feels utterly sorry for himself. He still thinks he is entitled to a ‘perfect life’. He wants every moment to be special, including the moments he spends with his family. However, everyday life only rarely includes special events, and when his double life comes to an end, the only special moments that he is likely to experience take place when he is granted his weekly visiting hours. This, in his understanding, is not special because he is not at liberty to choose whenever he feels like seeing his children – only when his wife thinks he should see them.
Michael and his wife make up at the end of the novel, but only after she has had her revenge by making Michael believe that their third child was not his but the result of a brief affair with their German neighbour. Only after Michael has confessed everything and expressed his willingness to adopt the child does his wife assure him that he is the child’s biological father after all. After a long odyssey Michael can finally adjust to the idea of being a father without trying to be independent at the same time. He has finally realized that there are many different ways to be a man, and that fatherhood does not erase his masculinity.
Conclusion
As has become clear, the protagonists of the male confessional novel all suffer from a flawed self which they have to mend by undergoing some sort of maturation process in the fashion of what we might call a postmodern type of Bildungsroman. I hope to have shown that by looking at how common stereotypes such as those of the New Man and the New Lad are drawn upon in those novels, a cultural studies approach enables us to deconstruct these types. None of the protagonists completely adhere to either of the two scripts; rather, in the daily construction of their masculinity, they mix the traits of both. Furthermore, juggling the two scripts has an interesting effect on how they understand the concept of fatherhood, which tends to be rather rigid in their theoretical and rather functional understanding, while they somehow seem to be at a loss when it comes to its practical implications. They all subscribe to an outdated model of fatherhood that is based entirely on a gender-specific model of masculinity, being unaware that ‘[f]amily relationships are less obviously organized around gender; there is talk of ‘partners’ rather than ‘spouses’ and of ‘parents’ rather than of mothers and fathers’ (Morgan, 2001: 230).
Regardless of whether they are biological or surrogate fathers, full-time or part-time ones, they struggle with the expectation that a mature, responsible male adult is supposed to fulfil when entrusted with the care of a child. Whereas they perceive the attractive characteristics of a New Man father, they cannot reconcile its implications with their anxiety of committing themselves, and in the process, growing older. In order to avoid facing middle age, they anxiously cling to their younger and freer selves. Only after having undergone a serious crisis which puts their masculinity under threat do they come to realize that neither being a man nor being a father is a clear-cut role that can be learned. Rather, they are performances that can vary depending on the social setting and circumstances. There are many ways to ‘do’ masculinity and fatherhood which, in a post-traditional understanding, need not necessarily be dependent on each other.
In my understanding of what cultural studies should and could do is to lay bare the tension between these essentializing assumptions and the deconstruction that is necessarily at work in cultural texts, including popular fiction. While fiction is a specific discourse in itself, it invariably draws on other cultural discourses as, unlike more elitist forms of literature, popular fiction must sell. Therefore, it often ties in with mainstream and hegemonic discourses. As we have seen above, poststructuralist language theory denies clear-cut meanings, and while we may observe a propensity to stabilize norms in popular fiction, similarly its discourse is subjected to such destabilizing forces. Without exception, the protagonists in the male confessional novel fail because they cannot uphold their preferred identity script: it prevents them from moving on in life, and they invariably undergo a transformation process during which they learn that they have to take on different roles that are not necessarily mutually exclusive – that is, they cannot stick to a single script that they think makes up their identity. Whereas a traditional literary appraisal of these novels – if they were to make it onto the list of worthwhile areas of research in the first place – would focus exclusively on the text at hand, a cultural studies approach helps to shed light on the tension between essentializing and destabilizing tendencies and thus between the theory and practice, on the one hand, and between the fictional and the everyday, on the other.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.