Southern Manhood and AKM, old an new

Friend in his text, Southern Manhood, attributes an “honor-mastery” paradigm to masculinity in the antebellum South whereby the son honors his father by carrying on his cause and livelihood as he endeavors to create and reign over his own household. Oddly, though, Friend describes this “mastery” as being internally realized and achieved through personal conduct, not by public acknowledgement. Accordingly, the homodiegetic Burden—a self-professed student of history, unsure of his father’s identity—fails to live up to these standards allows himself to become mastered by another (Talos). Though this symbolic order is restored by the end of the novel as Burden moves into Judge Irwin (his biological father’s house), marries Anne Stanton, and begins telling his story, the homodiegetic Burden inveterately struggles with how he’s supposed to live his life. More than anything, Southern Manhood; Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South makes a clear distinction between honor, which was acted out for public consumption, while mastery was achieved internally. This contradiction elaborates the notion of masculinity as gender performance in that Burden’s narration betrays his former self’s lack of masculine self-mastery and assurance.

In contemporizing male tropes in terms of the time period of AKM (1930s), Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction shows how notions of “Muscular Christianity,” evolutionary theory, and Nietzsche’s overman, pushed the “new” southern masculinity into a category of behavior defined more by will, sexuality, and physical force. This fits Talos perfectly in both his philandering and to his drive to give Louisiana a more modern/dynamic economy with his road projects and hospitals. Outwardly, Talos is seen as a savior by promoting industrial/economic growth and dismantling the good-old-boy networks (though he ironically establishes his own) that mired the old south. Similarly, since manhood in the south has been typically classified as governed by the passions rather than intellect (Burden typifies himself as a man of ideas), Burden can’t be a leader and must subjugate his intellectual agency to another patriarch.