The Founding Adolescents

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.
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. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. . . . This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.
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From the start, American culture was notably resistant to the claims of parental authority and the imperatives of adulthood. Surveying the canon of American literature in his magisterial “Love and Death in the American Novel,” Leslie A. Fiedler suggested, more than half a century before Ruth Graham, that “the great works of American fiction are notoriously at home in the children’s section of the library.” Musing on the legacy of Rip Van Winkle and Huckleberry Finn, he broadened this observation into a sweeping (and still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “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.’”

3 comments:

  1. Arts & Letters Daily put this up a little while ago. It's one of those pieces I decided, part way into it, that was playing with something interesting but that probably wasn't worth the time it would take to construct a reply.

    The two places he seems to rise to deserving a reply is in his discussion of certain classics of American literature. I think his thesis is wrong, though. The current pop culture he's comparing them to ('end of the patriarchs') end in death because adulthood ends in death, not because patriarchs in this moment seem to need to die. This is why Sir Thomas Malory's book, which treats the whole life of Arthur, is called 'the Death of Arthur.' So were many other treatments of Arthur in the period.

    Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn don't end in the death of the narrator not because eternal boyishness is delightful, but because boyishness has died. Mark Twain is more explicit about this at the end of Tom Sawyer, where he says it outright:

    "SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can."

    There are a couple of other natural stopping points, one of which is initiation, and the other of which is death. Huck Finn and Moby Dick are novels of initiation, in which a naive person passes through fire and deep water to emerge with a full, adult understanding of his world. You can stop there because the fundamental change has given you a kind of death, the death of the boy, the birth of the man. The man dies to himself, in a way, in marriage -- reborn as one flesh with another, a patriarch with a matriarch. And the patriarch, as the matriarch, dies to this world entirely at the end of their natural life.

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  2. Eric Blair6:50 PM

    Well, what is missing from that essay is the understanding of the idea, spoken or not, of the 'frontier' in the American psyche.

    There's a whole lot of history that needs to be understood in trying to understand where we are at now, and I can see all the time that most people and especially most writers these days, have no idea what has happened, never mind why it happened.

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  3. Ymar Sakar7:16 PM

    A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open.

    The slaves think they are free, as usual. What clowns Americans have become.

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