From trench to trope: Narrating American masculinity after World War I.

摘要

This dissertation analyses how American novels of the 1920s represent the violence done to men during World War I, in order to understand how the experience of violence changed the ways masculinity could be fictionally represented. Despite hopes that war experience would bolster American manhood, World War I exacerbated an enduring crisis of masculinity.;The violence of war moves, in these narratives, from "trench" to "trope": trauma does not stay confined to combat narratives, but instead transforms post-war domestic life. Veterans come home, and whether or not they narrate them directly, stories of "foreign" war redefine the home front world.;Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all suggest that the experience of men in World War I could not be narrated directly. These writers adapt rhetorical means---including omission, analogy, and unreliable narration---to represent war's traumatic residues.;In This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald identifies benefits of surviving war: it justifies masculine inadequacy. Described as war experience, incapacitating losses and failures become admissible. Fitzgerald uses war stories to question masculinity's authenticity and coherence.;In One of Ours, Cather also depicts a masculine crisis, which influences the ways in which war can, and cannot, be represented. Cather evokes the war in ways that romanticize its violence, however. Alluding to popular images of women in the war, she figures the violence of modern war as feminine, and shifts the blame for damaged masculinity onto female figures.;In Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Faulkner's Sartoris, repressed memories of war experience return as post-war violence. Both writers depict car 'accidents' as analogies for, and belated effects of, war trauma. Characters exhibit symptoms of shell-shock, and their feelings of vulnerability and threat become generalized. In this way, both writers recall the violence of war and question the possibility and the value of acting 'like a man.';I argue that the traumas of World War I found their way, belatedly and indirectly, into American narratives. Awareness of these traumas allowed writers to critique, and sometimes reassert, cultural assumptions about male agency, male victimization, and the male propensity for violence.