Suffering men/male suffering: The construction of masculinity in the works of Stephen King and Peter Straub.

摘要

This dissertation argues that the contemporary horror fiction of Stephen King and Peter Straub is a form of male protest literature which critiques dominant forms of masculinity and offers a new, feminized version of maleness as a cultural ideal. King and Straub construct effeminate forms of masculinity and loving all-male communities, articulate a longing for loving male mentors, and reprove bad fathers and corrupt patriarchal institutions. Their fiction is peopled with male protagonists who have attributes and behaviors heretofore assigned only to biological females. In particular, terror and suffering, which are culturally coded as feminine, get recoded as male experience and masculine affect.; While protagonists are menaced by patriarchal institutions, actual horror resides in female or gay male bodies. It is through the production of such horror or abject monstrosity that a space is cleared from which male subjectivity can emerge. Thus, the space of the normative subject is extremely narrow-imperiled on one side by cruel patriarchy and on the other by monstrous female or queer male bodies. The antidote to male suffering lies in the construction of loving all-male bonds enacted through and cemented by the appreciation and exchange of literature. Indeed, literariness is the privileged mechanism to constitute and express this new feminized masculinity.; Loving male relationships, however, carry the risk of homoeroticism, and the very mechanism that allows for the expression of male intimacy and emotion is also that which threatens heteronormative masculinity. The continuation of the new male community, therefore, is only possible in the presence of external female monstrosity which also provides the impetus for male bonding. Thus, while the new man may be feminine, he must remain distinct from that which is female. Indeed, even the later works of Straub, which allow the male subject to transcend his suffering through a recognition of his essential queerness, do so only through the effacement of actual women. Ultimately, King and Straub's critique of hegemonic masculinity paradoxically functions to reinforce our gender binary which constructs subjectivity as exclusively male.