Learning to be a Proper Man: The Role of Male Bonding in American Modernist Fiction

This dissertation discusses how Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, John Dos Passos's Three Soldiers, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby display constructs of masculinity that seek to revitalize the sense of loss experienced in the post-World War I period. In that critical time, American modernist authors sought a cultural redefinition of manhood which would more appropriately respond to their anxiety. The sequence of the chapters demonstrates how men turn away from more traditional models of masculinity---the ones associated with emotional detachment and tough-minded actions---and embrace, as Nick Carraway does in Fitzgerald's novel, a masculinity grounded on romantic sensibility. Masculinity, like any cultural by-product, requires a process of learning; men understand the proper way to behave by observing other men---that is the role of male bonding as perceived in the novels studied in this dissertation. These novels present models of masculinity (Philip Marlowe, Jake Barnes, John Andrews, and Jay Gatsby, respectively) who pass on their values to other men through episodes of bonding, in the novels; weaker men are drawn to follow their lead in order to attain a reinvigorated manhood. Except for Nick Carraway, however, none of these relationships is successful in the transmission of a redefined masculinity: at the end of The Great Gatsby Nick becomes the loyal disciple of Jay Gatsby's values, attributing to Gatsby a heroic greatness that the narrative and Nick's subsequent behavior honor.