Masculinity as Violence? Cultural and Literary Revisions

Focusing on some contemporary literary revisions of male violence, this chapter draws on a selection of contemporary white male fictions that seem to question and rewrite from particularly innovative perspectives the traditional cultural conception of violence as a symbol of virility. Although concentrating mostly on subversive images of male violence, such revisionary depictions, most of which were by U.S. novelist Richard Ford, will be preceded by, and contrasted with, more traditional fictional approaches to the subject, which in this chapter will be exemplified not only through literature but also through cinema, from the Ernest Hemingway to Russell Bank’s fiction to contemporary films as popular as Fight Club, directed by David Fincher and based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, among others. Even though the association of masculinity with violence is particularly recurrent in most contemporary literature and cinema, this chapter will also make use of other films, such as In a Better World by Danish director Susanne Bier, in addition to some stories by Hemingway himself, as examples of the deconstruction of said relationship. In analyzing subversive rewriting vis-à-vis more conventional representations, the chapter tries to provide examples not only of traditional constructions but also of the possible deconstruction of male violence in contemporary fiction and cinema. In doing so, it provides some alternative images of being a man with a view to visibilizing less violent and more gender-equal societies.