Patterns of Manhood

Hamlet has long been interpreted as a figure who is too paralyzed by moral self-consciousness to act in the way he feels it is his duty to act.  One way of understanding the root of that paralysis is by examining the character of Fortinbras, the warrior-prince, who in his resolute pursuit of military glory, stands in evident contrast with Hamlet's own indecisiveness.  The play makes us consider whether the moral bewilderment that is such a common affliction of modern man is in fact the result of his typical displacement from the battlefield, and the kind of indubitable duties to be found there.

Crane's famous novel of the Civil War captures one of the paradoxes at the heart of the warrior's experience.  The brute violence of the battlefield seems to reduce men to so many amoral objects, a process memorably described by Simone Weil in her reading of the Iliad.  Yet through their endurance of that violence, men often emerge from the experience of war morally transformed.  The battlefield then becomes the place where man's dignity is, at one and the same time, supremely degraded and supremely exalted.

Why are anger and its destructive effects such endemic features of life for men?  In the heroes of the Iliad, Crime and Punishment, and Moby Dick, we see a similar pattern repeat itself.  Sorrow over life's intrinsic injustice transmutes into rage, as the passivity intrinsic to sorrow finds its necessary remedy in the active self-assertion of fury.  This alchemy by which sadness turns to anger - what he called the "masculine form of despair" - is incisively explored by Kierkegaard in his extraordinary tract, The Sickness Unto Death.  What emerges from this work is the need for some other response to the bitter suffering of life than rage and defiance, a lesson that is dramatized in the relationship between King Lear and Cordelia.

Shakespeare's Macbeth is the tragedy of misconceived manhood.  Under the malign influence of his wife, Macbeth comes to believe that the essence of masculinity lies in the suppression of emotions associated with piety and affection.  In the person of Macduff, his great enemy, we see what it means when masculinity emerges from those very emotions.  The confrontation between these two figures at plays' end is not just a battle between two bitter enemies, but between two rival conceptions of what it means to be a man.

In his unwieldy masterpiece, Either/Or, Kierkegaard posits two fundamental approaches to life: the aesthetic and the ethical approach.  The aesthetic approach is characterized by a lack of commitment, and a corresponding flight from duty.  The ethical life, by contrast, is defined by an embrace of commitment and the duties that attend it.  In the character of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde presents us with a figure torn between the competing claims of these two perspectives.  The disastrous squalor of his own life suggests that the choice between the aesthetic and the ethical is more apparent than real.  

Faulkner's famous story explores the paradox of a young man growing up in the "doomed wilderness," bred to virtues that modern life seems to render superfluous.  Yet in the "talk" of the hunt, the enduring story of the men who pursued the legendary bear year after year, Faulkner calls our attention to one of the ways those virtues might be preserved for our times.

Olenin, the hero of Tolstoy's novella "The Cossacks," is a young man who has convinced himself he is more virtuous than he really is.  He presents us with a model for all those ardent yet fundamentally flippant young men, who are deluded by their own romantic rhetoric into overestimating the tenor of their character.