Wednesday
Yesterday, using poems by Adrienne Rich, I discussed how Gloria Steinem helped free women from myths that entrapped them in confining identities. Today, turning again to Rich and also to Margaret Atwood, I show how Steinem did the same for men like myself.
For a vivid exemplar of a man trapped in a corrosive male myth, one need only look at our Secretary of Defense (or “Secretary of War,” as Pete Hegseth likes to call himself). By performing the caricature of the manly man, Hegseth hides his insecurities. Real men don’t abuse women, blow up fishing boats and Iranian weddings, fire generals who disagree with them, and do push-ups on national media. The amount of energy expended on reassuring oneself takes a mental toll.
I’ve written several posts on this anxiety, which often shows up in comedy. Fear of being labeled a cuckold, of being a man who can’t satisfy or control his wife, is a running joke in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Cavalier poets, and Restoration comedy. As Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu pointed out in the 18th century, a woman needed only to hint that she was unfaithful for a man to fall apart: the husband might appear to have the power but it didn’t take much to shatter it. (See my post on her “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.”)
In “The Knight,” written in 1951, Rich shows the inner toll that maintaining a manly façade exacts. As I noted in a previous post on the poem, Rich shows the inner misery of men who are obsessed with maintaining the image of themselves as heroic knights. The first stanza captures how they want to be seen, the second shows how they feel inside, and the third wonders what it will take to free them of the metal/mental trap in which they have caged themselves:
The Knight
A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
A knight rides into the noon,
and his only eye is living,
a lump of bitter jelly
set in a metal mask,
betraying rags and tatters
that cling to the flesh beneath
and wear his nerves to ribbons
under the radiant casque.
Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently,
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?
Wearing “nerves to ribbons” is probably a reference to military ribbons, worn to signal prowess. (Donld Trump once confessed, “I’ve always wanted to get the Purple Heart.”). These are the emblems “crushing his chest with their weight.” When Hegseth’s cosplay comes to an end as he is hurled to the ground (as he will be), will he still seek to hide his rags and his wounds? Will he still try to maintain his metal mask?
As a sensitive boy who grew up not playing football in football mad Tennessee (I was born in 1951), I recognize the pressure. I even had my sixth-grade teacher call me “a sissy.” Fortunately, I was supported by my bookish, birdwatching father, who had successfully resisted similar pressures when he was growing up. Nevertheless, one could not be a boy during the 1950s without being aware of the expectations.
Therefore, this Margaret Atwood poem meant a lot to me when I encountered it in the early 1980s. It’s the first of the poet’s “Circe/Mud” poems, in which the Homeric island goddess critiques the macho ethic that drives Odysseus:
Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers
or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather
or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.
All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,
on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes..
I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.
I’ll let you decide which of the macho postures can be best applied to Hegseth and Trump. Many of them the president is explicitly using on his AI-generated Truth Social posts these days, which often feature eagles and the president as either George Washington, General Patton, or a superhero with supernatural powers (Green Lantern, for instance). Rather than setting the two men apart, their he-man act just makes them as common as flies as they “swoop and thunder/ around this island…sparks flashing, bumping into each other.” Atwood is familiar with Rich’s “Knight,” and her men disintegrate in similarly spectacular ways (“melt, come apart,/ fall into the ocean/ like sick gulls”). The reference is to Icarus, who thought he could soar as high as the sun, only to find out otherwise.
How might Circe create or manufacture such creatures? Perhaps by fluttering her eyelashes and feigning helplessness? Atwood criticizes women who are complicit in the charade. “You can have this water,/ this flesh, I abdicate,” she writes in another of the Circe poems, before concluding,
I watch you, you claim
without noticing it,
you know how to take.
I wouldn’t say that I escaped the male mythology with barely my life. As I say, having a father who honored my bookish sensitivity helped. Nevertheless, I sometimes did feel a little wrong. And yes, I love the image of a strongly rooted, life-affirming tree.
So thank you, Gloria Steinem, for understanding how female liberation leads to male liberation.
