The contemporary construction of masculinities: Pat Conroy, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah

Based on post-structuralism's theories regarding gender, my dissertation examines how three contemporary southern American authors, Pat Conroy, Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, construct their respective ideas of masculinities. Focusing on the transitory nature of masculinity, this paper discusses how these male authors, living in a time, according to some commentators, of "masculine crisis," address the intrinsic subjectivity of maleness. Conroy's first novel The Great Santini, via Ben Meechum's coming-of-age narrative, examines masculine models that the high schooler encounters in South Carolina. As my analysis reveals, Ben eventually rejects his father's male subjectivity, an overtly violent masculine performance, in favor of a "gentler" masculinity, suggesting that Conroy himself privileges this softer masculine subjectivity. But in The Prince of Tides, Conroy demonstrates that a "sensitive" male living in the American south, like protagonist Tom Wingo, often suffers from psychological anxiety. Only when Tom "mans up," ironically at the behest of a radical feminist therapist, is he able regain mental and emotional stability. Larry Brown in Father and Son considers "facing the music," a metaphor introduced in an early short story, the preeminent standard of admirable masculine behavior. Brown valorizes the novel's males who take responsibility for their actions. Even a repugnant character like Glen Davis, Brown implies, can partially redeem himself by facing the music at the novel's end. Like The Great Santini, Brown's Joe is also a bildungsroman, yet Joe concludes much less hopefully. The young co-protagonist in Joe, Gary Jones, lacking the admirable surrogate fathers of Ben Meechum, likely eventually behaves irresponsibly like his father, Wade, and his surrogate father, Joe. Barry Hannah, in his novella Ray and two stories from Airships, parodies southern mythologies regarding the Civil War, suggesting that prevailing notions of masculinity as they relate to "Johnny Reb" are fictions, exaggerated performances incapable of being viable models of masculine subjectivity. My discussion concludes with this main point: Conroy, Brown, and Hannah all valorize "new" perspectives regarding masculinities, while criticizing "old" notions of manliness, and of course these shifting perspectives reinforce, ultimately, the intrinsically transitory nature of masculinities.