Reclaiming Manhood with the Iron Giant and Mr. Darcy
“What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”
— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.
When I was in college I decided to start a faith-based discussion group for men, about well, being a man. For some strange reason, I felt that it had to be very early in the morning, because getting up early was manly. In my campus-wide emails I also resorted to tasteless jokes about going out to chop down trees and break rocks with heads. Whatever this says about my social development is less relevant than the question that I was attempting to answer, however foolishly, with that group and those jokes: What does it mean to be a man?
This is a question that has tortured me since my adolescence, and tortures me still. Whether this essay will provide any relief remains to be seen. My small group, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, even with my Christian friends. Not many undergraduate guys were willing to get up for a discussion group that started at 6:30am on Friday mornings; or if they were willing, the flesh was weak. This does not mean that the group was a failure, because I had one regular attendee who I was able to talk quite deeply with, and I still think about him today. I was also told by a few people that they would have attended if it was at a less inconvenient time. This showed me that I was not the only one tortured by the question.
So, what does it mean to be a man? We will find out together, dear reader, whether I am any better equipped to answer this question than I was over a decade ago. But first I must define exactly what is meant by it. We could try to answer it by taking a survey of the men in our lives, and saying, “These examples show what it is to be a man.” But despite confounding us with wildly different conclusions, this method also reveals to us our bias. I think that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have already taken a survey of the men in our lives, and the results have made us uneasy. That the question occurs to us reveals an insecurity about manhood that cannot be assuaged by the simple truth that no men are perfect. We would not be asking if there wasn't something resembling a real crisis. What I believe we really mean to ask is, “What does it mean to be a good man?”
Content warning: This essay contains discussion of rape.
In Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, after Tess tells her new husband that she is not a virgin and he rejects her, Thomas Hardy describes a scene in which the husband sleepwalks, carrying Tess through a field, over a river, to an abandoned stone coffin outside of a run down Abbey. He lays her in the coffin and falls to the ground asleep. Then Tess sits up in the coffin. This scene is one of Hardy's “moments of vision,” a moment that Virginia Woolf described as a passage in which both author and reader seem “to be suddenly and without their own consent lifted up and swept onwards.” It is perhaps vain to attempt to discern the meaning of this passage. Hardy himself, who stated in the explanatory note of the novel that “novels are impressions, not arguments,” might deplore such an effort — but I am the reader, and as Woolf also wrote about reading him, “it is for the reader, steeped in the impression, to supply the comment.” 1
“She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle.”
— To the Lighthouse (84)
On page 84 of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf describes how Lily Briscoe, squeezed by social pressure during dinner at the Ramsey's house, remembers “all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure,” that she can improve her painting by “moving the tree to the middle.” She then picks up a salt shaker and puts it down “so as to remind herself to move the tree.”
These are two rather mundane sentences. They do not evoke strong emotion and they do not have particular significance in the immediate context. But Virginia Woolf weaves them into the text, using the movement of the salt shaker to remind both Briscoe and the reader twenty pages later that to “move the tree to the middle,” does not simply mean improving one's painting; it also means finding purpose and value outside of society's expectations (for Lily it is to marry). Then, when Lily comes back to the Ramsey's many years and pages later, after Mrs. Ramsey's death, the reader and Lily are taken back to that flash of inspiration at dinner with a simple phrase: “Move the tree to the middle, she had said (102).”
For those who have not tried to write compelling prose, this example may seem underwhelming. But as with many masterstrokes, “moving the tree to the middle” can be appreciated by imagining what you might have done instead. Even if you had lit on the idea of moving the tree to symbolize Lily's commitment to her art, would you have been brave and innovative enough to recall it twenty pages later, not with simple exposition that a reader cannot miss, but with a glance “at the salt cellar on the pattern”? This use of the word “salt” enhances the tree idiom. It is a word you can taste. It draws the reader into Lily Briscoe's mind and lived experience. This is immersion. This is how Virginia Woolf rewards the reader for journeying into the human soul with her.