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The Quest for Masculinity in The Chocolate War:
Changing Conceptions of Masculinity in the 1970s
This social environment, however, was not necessarily a favorable one for adolescents attempting to establish a masculine identity. In the case of The Chocolate War, refusing to conform, that is, choosing to disturb the universe, means that Jerry himself is thrown into chaos. When he opens his locker to find it vandalized and is attacked by his peers, he finally understands the meaning of disturbing the universe: he has disturbed the norm for manhood in his society. The disturbed locker is a metaphor for both Jerry's inner disturbance and the disturbed norm of manhood at the school. This confusion is further reflected in Jerry's bewildered response to a violent attack by the school bullies, Janza and his buddies. Overwhelmed by the desire for revenge, Jerry identifies himself with the macho image of violent manhood. What is worse, he goes on to confront Janza physically in the boxing ring and temporarily becomes intoxicated with the thrill of physical violence. But then, a "new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it" (183, emphasis added). Cormier thus successfully demonstrates the violent and dark side of masculinity and provides readers with a powerful indictment of conventional manhood.
Jerry's violent response expresses his understanding of power and masculinity. He mistakenly believes that he can gain power and manliness if he physically confronts Janza, that power is some entity of which he can be robbed, and that gaining hierarchical power is masculine. Jerry eventually realizes that this masculine identity is self-defeating. Note that a similar motif can be found in the story of Percival when he encounters and kills the Red Knight. According to Johnson, "The Red Knight is the shadow side of masculinity, the negative, potentially destructive power. To truly become a man the shadow personality must be struggled with, but it cannot be repressed" (24). This passage is also reminiscent of the vital scene in A Wizard of Earthsea in which Ged confronts the shadow. He names and accepts it as part of himself, just as Jerry later recognizes and calls himself "another beast, another violent person."
Jerry calls his recognition of his deep psychological wound "knowledge." It is the knowledge that he should not have disturbed the universe, that he should have conformed, that he should have continued to play aggressive masculine sports such as football. Thus the novel ends with Jerry's despairing warning to Goober, "Don't disturb the universe" (187), which is also a spiritual death sentence pronounced on himself. In other words, Jerry is "murdered" by other males on the all-male "field," as is metaphorically depicted in the opening scene. In this sense, Jerry seems to be an "American Adam," R. W. B. Lewis's term for the innocent, isolated, nonconformist hero so common in American literature, especially the one in "the party of Irony" (7), who suffers a "Fortunate Fall" on his way to maturation. The Chocolate War ends at the very nadir of the hero's fall, however; there is no happy ending, no rebirth of the hero. As MacLeod writes, "Cormier has abandoned an ending American myth" (76). Even in The Catcher in the Rye,*4 which also ends unhappily, Holden Caufield is not "murdered." Although psychologically weakened and wounded, Caufield escapes into a world of innocence, allowing Edgar Branch to say with some justification that Caufield embodies the "myth of American youth" (207). Similarly, Rebecca Lukens criticizes The Chocolate War in comparison with The Catcher in the Rye: "Holden finds that he is his own best hope for the phoniness of adult life. Cormier's characters come to no such faith. They are left without hope. The world grew darker between 1951 and 1974. Both writers skillfully create a realistic picture of the adolescent world, but unlike Salinger[,] who offers discovery, Cormier offers only despair" (13, emphasis added).
From a feminist perspective on changing masculinity, however, I do not share this opinion. We cannot simply charge that Cormier offers us only despair or a hopeless world but instead must ask: Why does Caufield survive as an American Adam, while Jerry is "murdered"? An answer lies in the fate of the "Earth Mother," described by Goldberg in The Hazards of Being Male as "fragile, helpless, and dependent . . . modest, pure, sexual, and unworldly" (14). The Earth Mother -- the externalized and institutionalized feminine nature -- was alive and well in the 1950s because, during the postwar marriage rush and baby boom, "the gender-based division of labor at the heart of male breadwinning remained more or less unquestioned" (Griswold 6-7), even if some, like Caufield, suspected the phoniness of such manhood. While Caufield complains of his "damn lonesome" feeling, he often seeks warmth, compassion, and affection in female characters such as Phoebe and Jane Gallagher. As long as women assumed the institutionalized role of the Earth Mother, men could safely escape into the realm of childhood, a metaphor of innocence, and remain American Adams.
But the time The Chocolate War was published, the social climate had changed drastically. The Earth Mother was already dead to many of those who had believed in her. As Goldberg declared, "Earth mother is dead and now macho can die as well. The man can come alive as a full person" (20). Many women questioned the gender-based division of labor and rejected the role of Earth Mother. But since many men excluded feminine nature from their construction of masculinity, death of the Earth Mother was even more critical. This crisis for manhood is implied in The Chocolate War by the death of Jerry's mother and by the description of the power-hungry hierarchical men's world as "rotten" (87,116), consisting, in Archie's words, "of two kinds of people -- those who [are] victims and those who [victimize]" (80), or those who are "greedy and [those who are] cruel" (175).
It should be noted that in 1973, a year before the publication of The Chocolate War, the Vietnam War ended, and rumors of Watergate spread. According to the historian Peter N. Carroll, America was suffering a "raw, painful, unhealing wound" or "a gaping crack in the American identity" (It Seemed Like Nothing Happened 20) inflicted by the "dishonesty of the Vietnam War" and the Watergate scandal (159). Symptomatic of this "Gaping crack," films of the period reflect the ongoing dispute over a new male image. According to the Japanese scholar of American culture Kamei Shunsuke, "So-called 'New Cinemas' without any conventional heroes were in vogue. There were no heroes who would fight for the country, society, and its citizens, or for the righteousness and peace, but those who indulge in sex and violence, or those who roam around without any explicit purpose. What were there were anti-heroes" (10). Kamei*5 further points out that, around the same period, the American hero was resurrected in the character of Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone (12-13). As the popularity of Stallone's sequels and Rambo films show, this new hero was accepted by American society in general. Thus in the 1970s and 1980s two competing types of hero coexisted, and therefore it is no wonder that Jerry's quest for masculine identity ends not with a hopeful prospect for his future or the healing of his wounds but with his metaphorical death.
Cormier has objected to having his books labeled "realistic" just because they do not end happily:
But does an unhappy ending alone make a novel realistic? . . . . I am more concerned with reality
than realism in the novels . . . . I wanted to bring to life people like Jerry Renault . . . who appears
for only one poignant moment. . . . But first came the emotions and then the characters. Once the
characters are created and they become as real to you as the people you stand in line with at the
movies that night, you must follow the inevitability of their actions. ("Forever Pedaling" 47-79,
emphasis added)
Cormier's interest lies in depicting characters' emotions sympathetically rather than in constructing a realistic environment for his characters. In other words, Cormier depicts the confused emotions of men who are thrown into intense transitional crises. Such a crisis is Jerry's rebellion against gender stereotypes, and it cannot be over-emphasized that Cormier, in creating Jerry, became a pioneer for nonconformists like him. Cormier, however, has Jerry pay a high price for his rebellion: his psychic wound.
As the story of Percival suggests, Jerry's psychic wound, recalling the wounded king, is a necessary part of his quest. But the ending of The Chocolate War offers no sign of Jerry's wound being healed. So it remains for Beyond the Chocolate War (1985) to deal with Jerry's healing or rebirth. Read as accounts of a single quest, the two books actually constitute one story. As the sequel's title indicates, the author depicts a new masculinity 'beyond' the old one, a masculinity that transcends the chaos of conflicting models.
In the year Beyond the Chocolate War was published, there was a backlash against the counterculture and radicalism and, as evidenced by the Reagan presidency, an emergence of a new conservatism. In the 1980s, according to Rabinowitz and Cochran, "masculinity that defined the male psyche as a simplistic, achievement-oriented black box" returned (xvi). Some youths who found no appropriate masculine model came to identify with a narrow and rigid masculinity in order to protect themselves from possible confusion. It is not surprising, then, that a "mythopoetic perspective" segment of the men's movement became active during this period. Its actives were primarily based on Carl Jung's theory that men's psychological wounds could be healed by probing the archetypes buried in their unconscious and regaining their psychospiritual health. One politicized and feminist contribution to the debate, John Rowan's The Horned God (1987), offers insight into Jerry's trajectory of psychological healing. Rowan acknowledges that many men have repressed or excluded their feminine elements from themselves. The rejection of the feminine, he maintains, worsens the wounds men receive when the phoniness of their masculinity is exposed. Rowan believes that men can heal their wounds by reconnecting with the feminine buried in their unconscious, but first "it is important for men to allow themselves to be wounded. The wound is necessary before any healing can happen" (1). This observation is true of Jerry in The Chocolate War and Beyond the Chocolate War, and his recognition of himself as a beast is a significant part of the healing process. It is important to note that both Rowan's book and a feminist rereading of Percival's quest accomplish what Foucault's work fails to do in that they point toward a reconciliation with femininity.*6
Although it is not the purpose of this essay to explore Beyond the Chocolate War in detail, I would like briefly to analyze the novel's treatment of wounded masculinity and its eventual healing. The story opens with the sinister sentence "Ray Bannister started to build the guillotine the day Jerry Renault returned to Monument" (3). Ironically, it is obedient Obie who rebels against Archie, now the "unchallenged champion of Trinity High School" (37), and conspires to let Bannister kill him, pretending an accident with his magic guillotine. Even though Archie learns of Obie's treachery and the plot fails, he falls from the seat of power. Archie cynically says, "You blame me for everything right, Obei? . . . I'm an easy scapegoat" (263-64), thus indicating his recognition that power is not an entity that can be possessed but one that lies in the political relations between individuals. He has been thoroughly exposed to the phoniness of his masculinity -- the illusions of his power and dominance. This recognition is as indispensable as jerry's when he recognizes himself to be a beast.
In the meantime, the wounded Jerry has been sent to his mother's home town in Canada, where he is affectionately taken care of by his uncle and aunt. He finds rest in "the Talking Church," where he can smile for the first time since the incident as "he [listens] to the small whispering, chattering sounds" of the wind (107). Significantly, this wounded youth benefits from stereotypically feminine influences and experiences -- nurturance, tenderness, affection, warmth, whispering, and chattering -- while reconnecting with his matriarchal heritage. If we consider conventional masculinity to be wounded by its separation from femininity, Jerry's communication with the deep feminine side of his nature seems a significant step in the healing process.
Jerry comes back to Trinity High School half a year later, determined to confront his foe Janza once again. Jerry does not respond with violence this time but rather with nonviolence, "knowing where his strength was, where it had to be" (219, emphasis in original). Moreover, he smiles at Janza and explains to Goober, who witnesses the scene, "Just now, Janza was beating me up. But he wasn't winning. I mean, you can get beat up and still not lose. You can look like a loser but don't have to be one." He realizes now that "Janza's the loser, Goober. He'll be a loser all his life. He beat me up but he couldn't beat me." He goes on: "They want you to fight, Goober. And you can really lose only if you fight them. That's what the goons want. And guys like Archie Costello. You have to outlast them, that's all" (223-24). Jerry's recognition is empowering because it both discourages Janza from fighting and makes him feel "drained" and "like he had lost something" (222). Symbolically, Jerry's recognition almost coincides with Archie's "execution" by guillotine. In other words, the birth of the new manhood coincides with the death of conventional manhood.
In the guillotine episode Archie seems to undergo a change parallel to Jerry's. The previously power-hungry Archie is transformed into an unresisting fool who meekly accepts the execution. Noteworthy here is the instrument of Archie's intended death; ironically, the guillotine is the ultimate Enlightenment punishment because it completely severs the head from the heart, or reason from emotion.*7 In this sense, Archie's execution is indicative of the transformation he will undergo, a bitter and isolating one compared to Jerry's. Archie's self-recognition acknowledges that he represents what other males hide inside themselves: "I'm an easy scapegoat. . . . I am Archie Costello. . . . And I'll always be there, Obie. You'll always have me wherever you go and whatever you do. Tomorrow, ten years from now. Know why, Obie. Because I'm you. I'm all the things you hide inside you. That's me --" (264). He embodies the conventional manhood that helps create the "rotten" world made up of victims and victimizers. In contrast to Jerry's transformation, which involved getting in touch with the feminine, Archie's takes place without any feminine influence. His attitude toward the feminine is exemplified in his one-sided relationship to his girlfriend, Jill Morton. Not only does he keep himself distant from her, but he is also alienated from the feminine within himself. Moreover, his relationship with Obie contrasts with Jerry's relationship with Goober. In Jerry's rebirth Goober stands as a witness and pledges his friendship to Jerry, but Archie, in his turn, can only say "Good-bye, Obie" once and for all; he is incapable of intimacy or friendship. Archie's transformation, therefore, is only a shallow one; he is still limited by the confines of conventional masculinity.
It is interesting to place these parallel rebirths of two different masculinities within the cultural context of the 1980s. In the early 1980s there was an active discourse on the new man. Goldberg calls this type of man a "new male" who integrates his feminine aspects (The New Male 29-39), but Robert Bly in Iron John calls him a "soft male" and urges readers to offset this type of manhood by encountering "the Wild Man" within themselves in isolation from women (1-27). As Archie's case indicates, however, rebirth apart from the feminine may not lead to a balanced and well-rounded masculinity. Rowan's criticism of Bly's "Wild Man" is to the point: "For these men who have never done the feminine bit at all, who are unreconstructed male chauvinists, the [Wild Man] is simply an invitation to be even more aggressive" (111).
If we consider that Jerry's "murder" and rebirth coincide with such discourse on changing conceptions of masculinity, we can see that Cormier offers more than despair or Jerry's "death". If the book is read as a mythological quest story, Jerry's despair is undoubtedly a necessary passage to his rebirth. Therefore, Cormier's achievement in revolutionizing masculinity as a social construct cannot be overestimated. In fact, it seems to have anticipated later adolescent novels that deal with changing masculinity such as Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest (1988), based on the Percival legend, and Le Guin's Tehanu (1990). What the protagonist Park finds at the end of his quest are the fallen idols of both his heroic grandfather and his father: the sobbing colonel confined in a wheelchair and the divorced father who was disloyal to his wife. More noteworthy is that Park's uncle, Frank, a gentle farmer who seems to be an identifiable father figure for him, has been married to the widowed Vietnamese wife of his dead brother and has adopted their daughter Thanh, as though to "[mop] up someone else's mess" (142). Similar reconciliations with the feminine occur in Tehanu when Ged, a fallen hero who has believed that "both men and magery are built on one rock: power belongs to men" (664), marries Tenar (a once-exploited child) and adopts Therru (an abused girl). By facing the ugly reality of child abuse, Ged not only acknowledges the dark side of conventional masculinity but also finds nurturance, a stereotypically feminine quality, within himself.
In a sense, the fact that Troye's story of Percival was left incomplete is symbolic. Just as many scholars since the twelfth century have had to imagine an ending for Percival's quest, so today we have to wonder what the ending will be for male youth's quest in a world of changing masculinities. But the second wave of feminism has brought us to the point where the direction of these changes cannot be backward. Clearly, the health and welfare of masculinity is closely connected with the acceptance of femininity. Cormier's The Chocolate War, with its acute and sympathetic sensitivity, stands as witness to the need for this connection.
Notes
1. See, for example, Frappier, Chretien de Troyes et le mythe du graal.
2. See Jung and von Franz, The Grail Legend; Johnson, He: Understanding Masculine Psychology; Corneau, Absent Father, Lost Sons.
3. According to Foucault, the idea of panopticism is based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, an architectural design for a wheel-like prison with observant guards at the central watchtower behind one-way glass. Because it permitted ceaseless vigilance, this theoretical structure would have been especially effective for internalizing in the prisoners the principle of discipline and punishment. Foucault maintains that the Panopticon is designed "to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (201).
4. The Catcher in the Rye was originally published in Collier's (1945) and The New Yorker (1946). In a strict sense, then, this novel does not belong to the 1950s, though the masculine myth was equally strong in the postwar 1940s.
5. In the Japanese name system the family name comes first, followed by the given name.
6. Foucault maintains in Discipline and Punish that "docile bodies" are fabricated by the dominant power. Thus, in the process of their formation, their own voices are silenced and their existence suppressed or marginalized. Here feminism found commonality with Foucault's theory, but he fails to examine the relation of gender to body. As Sandra Lee Bartky says, "Foucault treats the body throughout as if it were one, as if the bodily experiences of men and women did not differ and as if men and women bore the same relationship to the characteristic institutions of modern life" (65). In other words, Foucault's theory does not specify which elements are excluded from the fabric of conventional masculinity and femininity, respectively. It remained for feminists to clarify the lack of femininity within conventional manhood and women's silenced voices in "true womanhood."
7. I am indebted to Professor Jerome F. Shapiro, one of my colleagues at Hiroshima University, for this idea about the guillotine.
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