Lughnasa                                                                               College Moon

A.O. Scott’s article, The Death of Adulthood in America, has this claim at its heart:

“In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand…In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.”

Woolly Mammoths take note. His claim rings true to me and I am happy that it does. Those who find feminism an important part of their political and personal life will, too. Scott’s argument highlights the reason intelligent conservatives have concern about the Republican future. It is a party controlled by and serving mainly the interests of elite white men.

While I appreciate and concur with Scott’s conclusion, his analysis seems shaky to me. As the film critic for the NYT, he naturally sees an arc in cinema and television that expresses this change through popular media. You can read his article for the particulars of his claim, but the essence is that film and television used to reflect patriarchal assumptions about family, career and the meaning of life; but, now, such television programs as Mad Men, the Sopranos and Breaking Bad reveal the tenuous and disintegrating hold maleness has in our culture. Instead of valiant heroes we have flawed men in morally compromised, even morally bankrupt roles.

So far he’s making sense. But he then tries to track back through American literature a quasi-homo erotic thread: Ishmael and Quee-Queg, Huck Find and Jim, Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook and make the case that Americans have generally written young adult novels rather than the more mature marriage and courtship work prevalent in European writers. This argument he gets from the famous literary critic Leslie Fielder.

Scott quotes Fielder:

“The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat — anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage and responsibility. One of the factors that determine theme and form in our great books is this strategy of evasion, this retreat to nature and childhood which makes our literature (and life!) so charmingly and infuriatingly ‘boyish.’ ”

The works of Dreiser, Lewis, Anderson and Fitzgerald, to mention four all have works counter to this conclusion. Dreiser’s American Tragedy, The Financier and its trilogy of desire and Sister Carrie each one cut against this argument’s grain. Lewis’s Babbit and Arrowsmith do so as well. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby are novels of American civilization, not “man on the run” fiction. Willa Cather, too. Think of Death Comes for the Archbishop or My Antonia.

Too, Scott posits a run of puerile comedies, Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler’s work for example, as consistent with this man on the run ethos though admittedly devolved. I don’t have his grasp of third millennium cinema, so I don’t know what to cite as counter evidence, perhaps some of you readers do, but my sense is that the Apatow/Sandler axis surely represents the low end of the pool.

My point here is that American culture is not puerile, not young adult fiction, but is a distinctive and thoughtful attempt to understand who we are as a people and how sex roles have worked and have changed and are changing. I’m not arguing against Scott’s conclusion, but rather in favor of what seems to me to be his intuition, not his rationale.