"It all fell in on him": masculinities in Raymond Carver's short stories and American culture during the 1970s and 1980s

Journal of Men's Studies, The, Spring, 2009 by Vanessa Hall

In 1971, Esquire published Raymond Carver's "Neighbors," the most explicitly sexual, even deviant, of his stories. The story's central characters, Bill and Arlene Miller, are vaguely dissatisfied with their lives and envious of their friends, whom they believe "lived a fuller and brighter life" (p. 9). While cat-sitting for their neighbors, the Millers recharge their sexual lives by imaginatively changing identities. On the pretext of feeding the Stones' cat, Bill secretively rifles through and consumes his neighbors' possessions; he even goes as far as to try on Harriet Stone's clothing, although he stopped at her shoes as he "understood they would not fit" (p. 14). At the end of the story, Bill realizes his wife has had similar adventures in the Stones' apartment. The story ends when the Millers, attempting to enter the Stones' apartment together this time to view "some pictures," realize that Arlene has accidentally locked them out. This recognition momentarily paralyzes them, and Bill comforts Arlene whose "lips were parted, and her breathing was hard, expectant" (p. 16).

The publication of "Neighbors" in Esquire proved to be Carver's break into the literary mainstream, introducing themes that would preoccupy much of his writing: dissatisfaction with everyday life and a resulting voyeurism and dissociation, an attraction to (gender, sexual, class, racial) "otherness," sexual crisis. While the crisis in "Neighbors" results from the Millers being literally blocked from the terrain of their sexual fantasies and flirtation with otherness, the events of the story, and particularly Bill's cross-dressing, signal a larger thematic preoccupation. Kirk Nessett (1995) confirmed this: "again and again in Carver, the crisis [his male characters confront] hinges on sex" (p. 23). These sexual crises take different forms in Carver's stories, but, particularly in his stories from the 1970s, revolve around a male character's fears of his wife's sexual infidelity; this forms the theme of some of his strongest stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976). In "What's In Alaska," Carl fears that something is going on between his wife and his friend Jack (1976d); in "What Is It?," Leo fears his wife has sold her body for a good price on their car (1976e); and in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?", Ralph discovers that his wife had an affair several years earlier (1976f). This discovery prompts Ralph's journey through bars filled with dangerous "Negroes," "frightening" women, and assorted symbols of cuckoldry.

While men's preoccupation with their wives' fidelity is not in itself historically remarkable, the general threat of emasculation in other Carver stories is more historically specific. The sexual crises Carver's male characters face, while deeply rooted in traditional gender relations and literary conventions, do more than "ultimately reflect a kind of [ahistorical] fortune and fate which, forever unseen and unheard, dictate the bleak circumstances of their lives," as Nessett claimed (1995, p. 11). Carver's portrayals of male sexual insecurities, the "deep symbolic concern with emasculation" that Ewing Campbell (1992) also noted (p. xi), span Carver's writing and reference a larger cultural upheaval in gender relations occurring in the 1970s; masculinity critic Michael Kimmel, in Manhood in America (1996) termed this cultural transformation a "growing crisis of masculinity" (p. 290). Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1983 book, The Hearts of Men, traced the multiple cultural transformations contributing to what she terms, "the male revolt ... against the breadwinner ethic" (p. 13). Carver's stories reflect this massive shift away from "normative masculine identity" occurring in American society and culture during the 1970s (Savran, 1998, p. 194).

In this essay, I analyze Carver's stories in relationship to dominant cultural discourses surrounding masculinity in the 1970s and 1980s. Traditional ideas and myths of manhood were drawn into question in the 1970s, largely a consequence of shifting gender ideologies--"scathing critiques of traditional masculinity" offered by feminist and other social movements of 1960s and 1970s (Kimmel 1996, p. 271)--but also a result of economic restructuring; more women entered the workforce out of necessity. As Ehrenreich's book demonstrated, however, it was not just feminist agitation and economic restructuring that contributed to gender role transformation, but also a deep dissatisfaction men felt with traditional gender roles and the pressures to conform to a set role of "mature" husband, father, and economic provider. A variety of social and cultural factors contributed to many men's abandonment of traditional gender expectations, including discoveries of the supposed impact of stress on men's health, the loosening ties between so-called "effeminacy" in men and homosexuality, and changing ideals of human development. For example, according the Human Growth Movement, which became influential in the early 1970s, marriage could function as an obstacle to individual growth; "Divorce, then, no longer signaled a 'failed marriage' but an accomplished growth opportunity" (Ehrenreich, 1983, pp. 96-97). Chris Bullock (1994), the only critic to date who has offered a sustained analysis of masculinity in Carver's stories, also observed that Carver's "heroes are concerned with dilemmas of masculine identity" (p. 343).