“Where is your country?”: Locating White Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses

Men are still largely in charge, mind you, but they are slipping fast. Modern America is a society where... women complete high school and college at significantly higher rates than men, and have new doors of opportunity open to them every day. A society where a third of all wives make more money than their husbands. A society where women are increasingly in control of their biological and economic destinies, often choosing to raise their children alone or not to have children at all or to leave an identifiable man out of the reproductive picture entirely, through the miracles of the sperm bank. A society, in other words, where a man is not necessary in the way he was customarily needed-to protect, to provide, to procreate... So, given the current culture, it's no wonder that a guy... would want to move to Alaska and reclaim some noble and antique ideal of manhood.(Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man )In The Last American Man (2002), Elizabeth Gilbert describes a "crisis" wherein Americans, citizens of an "impotent nation," stmggle with the social and cultural repercussions of the post-Fordist economy (225). Despite her apparent concern over the miserable state of U.S. citizens in general, Gilbert's text primarily chronicles the feminization white men incur as a result of laboring in the service economy as well as the emasculation these men feel in consequence of women's advances in equality. Gilbert's hero, Eustace Conway, counteracts the resultant impotence by enacting an iconic American fantasy: he recovers his "soul" by engaging in physical labor and returning to nature (a womanless milieu). In so doing, he negates society's "corruption and greed and malaise" (13-14).1 On Turtle Island, Conway invokes folk labor and cultural practices: he acts as a homesteader, wears homespun clothing, engages in traditional agriculture (clearing the land himself, sowing crops without use of machines, growing only enough to sustain his household), and embraces Native American culture and lifeways (building and living in a teepee, adopting a Native American name). Conway's overtly physical work sharply contrasts with the post-Fordist service economy, conventionally gendered as feminine. Beyond that, Conway's pre-Fordist utopia also reverses women's increased participation in the workforce and their resultant potential to achieve the social and financial independence to reject male authority.2 The masculinity premised on women's performance of the role of housewife was, historically, available only to middle- and upper-class men; more specifically, this normative manhood has been the privilege of primarily white men. As such, folk labor practices restore white middle- and upper-class men to power and therein recuperate the masculinity which relies upon exploiting an imbalance between the sexes, as well as retaining a class prerogative in which minorities are relegated to the margins.3White middle-class men's displacement from power and their response to the resultant sense of impotence, articulated in texts like The Last American Man, is also depicted and dissected in contemporary American literature. Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992) grapples with the apparent emasculation of white men, feminized by late 20 -century social, cultural, and economic upheaval. John Grady, a mid-20th-century cowboy ousted from his chosen profession by changes in the economy as well as transformations in gender relations-both of which presage similar shifts, associated with post-Fordism and Second Wave Feminism, which were of concern at the time of the novel's publication- seeks a pre-modern, patriarchal enclave as a sphere in which he may be valued as a laborer and therein recuperate masculinity. Critics typically situate McCarthy's novel within New Western History, detailing the ways in which All the Pretty Horses interrogates conventional frontier tropes. While this line of inquiry provides a necessary and important lens on McCarthy's work, it doesn't account for the ways in which All the Pretty Horses grapples with the social and economic developments of the late 20th century. …