On Neddy Merril’s Crisis of Masculinity in  The Swimmer

Chenying BAI

doi:10.3968/12232

On Neddy Merril’s Crisis of Masculinity in The Swimmer

Chenying BAI

Abstract

The Swimmer is one of John Cheever’s best known stories. It presents the classic theme of quest and journey. This paper focuses on the protagonist Neddy’s swimming journey, probes into his intense longing for masculinity, scrutinizes the nature and causes of his masculinity crisis relating to the postwar conceptions of class, gender and patriarchy norms combined with structural economic changes and the increasing autonomy of women, and reveals Cheever’s deep concern about white middle class male’s dilemma so as to offer some inspiration for resolving modern spiritual crisis.

Keywords

John Cheever; The Swimmer; Masculinity; Crisis

Full Text:

PDF

References

Auser, C. (1967). John Cheever’s myth of the man and time: The Swimmer. CEA Critic, (6), 18-19.

Averill, L. (1963). Sexuality in crisis. Christian Century, 2(October), 1196-1199.

Berrett, J. (1997). Feeding the organization man: Diet and masculinity in postwar amend. Journal of Social History, 30(Summer), 805-825.

Blythe, H., & Charlie, S. (1984). Perverted sacraments in John Cheever’s The Swimmer. Studies in Short Fiction, (4), 393-394.

Blythe, H., & Charlie, S. (1989). An historical allusion in Cheever’s The Swimmer. Studies in Short Fiction, (4), 557-559.

Blythe, H., & Charlie, S. (1992). Cheever’s Dark Knight of the Soul: The failed quest of Neddy Merrill. Studies in Short Fiction, (3), 347-352.

Bossard, J. (1957). Divorce: Some selected repercussions. In E. H. Mudd & A. Krich (Eds.), Man and wife: A source book of family attitudes, sexual behavior, and marriage counseling (pp.97-111). New York: W.W. Norton.

Bossard, J., & Boll, E. S. (1958). Why marriages go wrong: Hazards to marriage and how to overcome them. New York: Ronald Press Company.

Caprio, F. (1953). Marital infidelity. New York: Citadel Press.

Cheever, J. (1978). John Cheever: Collected stories and other writings (B. Bailey, Ed., pp.726-727). New York: Library of America.

Cheever, S. (1984). Home before dark. New York: WSP.

Connell, R. W. (1995). Masculinities: Knowledge,Power,and Social Change. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Dawson, G. (1991). The blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, imperial adventure and the imagining of English-British masculinity. In J. Tosh & M. Roper (Eds), Manful assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. London: Routledge.

Dean, R. D. (1998). Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the domestic politics of foreign policy. Dilplomatic History, (1), 29-62.

Donaldson, S. (1988). John Cheever. New York: Random House.

Faludi, S. (1999). Stiffed: The betrayal of the American man. New York: William Morrow.

Ferrebe, A. (2005).Masculinity in male-authored fiction, 1950-2000: Keeping it up. Basingstoke: Plagrave.

Forth, Christopher, E. (2008). Masculinity in the modern west: Gender, civilization and the body. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall.

Griswold, R. L. (1993). Fatherhood in America: A history. New York, Basic Books.

Hochschild, A. (1989). The second shift. New York, NY: Viking.

Kimmel, M. (1994). Consuming manhood: The feminization of American culture and the recreation of the male body, 1832-1920. In L. Goldstein (Ed.), The male body: Features, destinies, exposures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Kimmel, M. S. (2005). The history of men: Essays in the history of American and British masculinities. New York:State University of New York Press.

Kinsey, A. C., Pomeroy, W., & Martin, C. (1948). Sexual behavior in the human male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.

Langum, David. (1994). Crossing over the line: Legislating morality and the Mann Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lasch, C. (1991). The true and only heaven. New York: Norton.

Martin, R. F. (2002). Hero of the heartland: Billy Sunday and the transformation of American society, 1862-1935. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mosse, G. L. (1996). The image of man: The creation of modern masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Reumann, M. G. (2005). American sexual character: Sex, gender, and national identity in the Kinsey Reports. CA: University of California Press.

Robinson, S. (2000). Marked men: White masculinity in crisis. New York: Columbia University Press.

Schlesinger, A. Jr. (1958). The crisis of American masculinity. Esquire. (11), 64-66.

Silverman, K. (1992). Male subjectivity at the margins. London: Routledge.

Thakur, A. (2015). Monomyth in John Cheever’s Short Fiction The Swimmer. Labyrinth, (2), 95-100.

Tiger, L. (1999). The decline of males. New York: Golden Books.

Weston, J. (1957). From ritual to romance. NY: Doubleday.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/12232

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard

Please send your manuscripts to sll@cscanada.net，or sll@cscanada.org for consideration. We look forward to receiving your work.

We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Username
Password
Remember me

Studies in Literature and Language