“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”

Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis

Abstract

A scholar reacts to An American Dream, particularly its treatment of violence. Mailer fashions a protagonist who is violent and seemingly misogynistic yet simultaneously sympathetic and vulnerable, who seems alternately sure of his masculine prowess and crushed beneath the weight of his masculine anxiety. Curious about the critical conversation surrounding the work, McKinley delves into the scholarship surrounding the novel and was surprised to discover that while An American Dream had received much attention at the time of its publication, little had been written about the novel’s intersecting representation of gender and violence in the past forty years. Now that decades have passed and, to some degree, American cultural attitudes about gendered conflict have shifted what new perspective might readers have of this work? In particular, what now can be said about the novel’s depiction of the shaping of masculine identity?