School of Culture and Communication

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Masculinity, Violence, and the Failure of Patriarchal Values in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy

Tulloh Harper, Julia McVean ( 2022-10)

This dissertation examines Cormac McCarthy’s concerns in his fiction with how American patriarchal, hegemonic masculine values fail to deliver their promised benefits to men. I argue that McCarthy is critical of the way cultural myths around manhood exacerbate in these men what he sees as a propensity toward violence as a means of control.Through an analysis of McCarthy’s manipulation of form, including his evocation and interruption of mythic narrative structures and recognisable character typologies, I assess the extent to which McCarthy distances himself from or aligns himself with the violent and misogynist masculinities he portrays. I also examine McCarthy’s attitude toward representation, language and narrative as adequate mechanisms for structuring human life and whether his presentation of American masculine ideals as linguistically generated allows for a more ameliorative reading of his fiction. Crucially, I consider the fact that the suffering of women is generally portrayed as subordinate to the suffering of men. I find McCarthy’s fiction to be still beholden to many core characteristics of hegemonic white American masculinity, in particular its tendency to centre itself in narratives of suffering and survival–and so I propose that any critique of white American masculinity in his works must only be seen as partial.