Negotiating Male Identity and Other Aspects of Masculinity in British/American Modernist Literature. A Comparative Study Based on William Faulkner’s Benjy and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: Psychoanalytic Literary Approach

Abstract

This thesis is a comparative study which aims to highlight the main masculine traits and characteristics within two selected modernist novels. It tends to establish a proper male image by focusing on the dominant masculine roles being particularly performed by “Orlando” in Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography” (1928) and “Benjy” in William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” (1929). Recently, the pre-established social reality about masculinity has been reinforced with falsified male traits which forcibly theorize its mode of stigmatization. Some males are mostly stigmatized due to their absurd masculine roles. This absurdity can determine the masculine emptiness of the modern man. The modern man can hardly elevate, strengthen, or empower his masculine nature. Indeed, this man can hardly show his masculine resistance to sustain and restore his purified nature of maleness. From particular dimensions, the modern man mostly prefers to re-new his masculine identity by inserting other gender choices. By that, the modern masculine sense can be threatened by unsupported gender insertions. These insertions lead to subvert the whole masculine identity. From other dimensions, the modern man strictly prefers to perform adequate male role which ensures his original masculine nature. This original masculine identity can be impeded by diverse implicative forces which dramatically foster its decline. As a consequence to such decline, the masculine sense will be delivered with devalued male traits. Unfortunately, the devalued male role is featured to indicate the deficient way of expressing masculinity. In both novels, the selected male characters are portrayed with deficient masculine identities. This masculine deficiency is asserted either by sexual selections (androgyny), or by other qualities of mental/physical disability. Woolf has selected a protagonist with clear androgynous qualities and sexual transformations whereas Faulkner has selected a protagonist whose masculine identity is highly impeded by severe forms of idiocy and physical handicap. This thesis aims to investigate the main challenges, conditions, and obstacles which mark the protagonists’ masculine failure. Further, it tends to figure out the psychological hesitation which negatively affects those male protagonists from proving and improving their masculine presence. To analyse this masculine loss, a psychoanalytic approach is applied on the selected works so as to reach the literary significance behind masculinity representation. The findings of the study revealed that there are different forces which lead to foster the masculine de-construction. All these forces work to distort the masculine identity. Moreover, the significance of psychoanalysis, as an analytic approach, facilitates the understanding of such masculine distortion