Hard -boiled masculinities: Fantasizing gender in American literature and popular culture, 1920--1945

Emerging from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s, the hard-boiled male quickly became an icon of modern American masculinity. This dissertation focuses on the popular icon as a locus of cultural fantasy, tracing the history of his career from his 1922 debut in the pulp magazine Black Mask to the acme of his fame in the films noirs of the forties and fifties. Although conventionally associated with the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Chester Himes, I argue that the hard-boiled character is equally central to canonical modernist novels by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Able to cross and recross the great divide between high and popular culture, this broadly popular figure wedded a diverse, and often contradictory, set of political and cultural investments to a relatively fixed conception of male subjectivity organized around the twin fantasies of masculine individualism and affectless objectivity. By attending to the relationship of these twin fantasies to political discourse, I suggest the ways in which this conception of masculinity placed limits upon political thought and struggle in the interwar years.;In the Introduction, I theorize the concept of cultural fantasy and its significance for understanding the figure of the hard-boiled male. Next, in Chapter One, I read Dashiell Hammett's brutal allegory of American violence, Red Harvest, as the hard-boiled genre's first auto-critique. Chapter Two on Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises chronicles the transformations that take place when the hard-boiled male travels from the mean streets of the American city to the bars and cafes of Paris and Pamplona. My revisionary interpretation of William Faulkner's Light in August in Chapter Three enables me to address the racial borrowing that implicitly underpins the hard-boiled form. Chapter Four's analysis of Chester Himes' hard-boiled excoriation of American racism, If He Hollers Let Him Go, explores the intimate relationship between fantasies of race and fantasies of gendered violence. My concluding epilogue asserts the value of a collective ethics of fantasy for transforming masculinity and its relationship to political and economic struggle in the United States.