A Reconciliation with Asia, Female, and Other: Regeneration of Masculinity in Park's Quest
Published as one of the articles in Bridges for the Young (Scarecrow Press, 2003)
Yoshida, Junko
Katherine Paterson's Park's Quest (1988) can be read as a story of an adolescent boy's quest for masculine identity. In the novel the eleven-year-old Parkington Wadell Broughton V, who has been raised by his mother, embarks upon his quest to find the truth about his heroic father, Park IV, who was killed in the Vietnam War. To discover his father, Park V visits his grandfather, the Colonel, another Park, III, and learns that both his heroic grandfather and father are fallen idols: the Colonel is confined, sobbing, to a wheelchair, and the divorced father has been unfaithful to his wife, Park's mother, Randy. The protagonist Park finds his grandfather suffering from an unhealed wound. By coming to terms with his Uncle Frank, a farmer who has married the widowed Vietnamese wife of Park's father, and with his own half-sister Thanh, Park heals the psychic wound of his grandfather.
The plot of this novel is obviously based upon the Percival story, in which an adolescent boy leaves his mother to attain his knighthood in the world of men, where he encounters the maimed Fisher King, whose wound parallels the desolation of his kingdom. Jungian analysts like Robert A. Johnson and Guy Corneau maintain that the myth of Percival's quest for the Holy Grail provides a useful paradigm for understanding male psychology: a psychologically "fatherless" youth seeks an ideal manhood through his encounters with father figures, including Gournamond, the Scarlet Knight, and the Fisher King. Particularly, the meeting with the Fisher King is the culmination of Percival's quest because the Fisher King, who represents wounded masculinity, cannot heal himself; Percival must mature to wholesome manhood so he can bring about the healing. It is not by chance that Paterson, on the opening page of the book, cites a passage from Rosemary Sutcliff's Arthurian tales, The Sword and the Circle (1981). Paterson's interposition of Arthurian texts with her own is equally intentional. As is indicated by her recent retelling of the Percival story, Parzival: The Quest of the Grail Knight (1998), the author has a persistent and keen interest in a male's quest for maturity: an innocent fool, Parzival, becomes the Grail King after his decades-long journey of trials and tribulations. Similarly, Park's Quest narrates an adolescent boy's psychological journey toward gender identity through its textual interchange with the Arthurian stories.
In dealing with the signification of masculinity in Park's Quest, it is necessary to place the novel in the socio-cultural context of the United States in the 1970s and 80s, when Park's father was killed in the Vietnam War, and Park seeks the truth about the father he never knew. The socio-cultural contextualization of the novel enables readers to follow the trajectory of Park's growth as a young man in the light of shifting conceptions of masculinity reflected in concepts of the "manhood" of the American Empire.
Into the Heart of Darkness
Park's journey begins with his rebellion against his affectionate and devoted mother, Randy, who calls him "Pork": "[Park] wasn't a kid any more. . . . He was growing up. [Randy] couldn't keep him cramped into her narrow life much longer. He would have to make her tell him about his father -- about his father's family" (14). Randy has been unwilling to call her son "Park," the name also of her deceased ex-husband, whom she is trying to forget. She refuses to think back to the year 1973, when he was killed in the war. However, demanding to be called by the same name as his father, "Park wanted to know how and why [his father] had died -- even when. Deceased: January 22, 1973"(13). Just as Percival's accomplishment of his quest for the Holy Grail depends upon his asking the important questions, Park's questions are vital to propel his search. Park has reached that crucial stage of his psychological development when he wants to be free of his mother's sphere, the kitchen, and to enter the world of men. In this sense, Paterson likens Park to Sir Gareth, who works as a kitchen scullion nicknamed Beaumains ("beautiful hands") in the kitchen of King Arthur's castle. In his initiation into knighthood, Beaumains has to prove his prowess by killing one knight after another in order to be truly recognized as noble and brave. His chivalry involves murder and violence, dark aspects of the world. Similarly, the men's world Park is entering is tainted with murder and violence.
In the next stage of Park's quest, Paterson likens him to Sir Gawain who rides down into the valley of despair, where the Green Knight awaits him, sharpening the dreaded axe to decollate him. Park knows that he, too, is setting out for the heart of darkness, similar to the despair he recognizes behind Randy's cheerful conversation. Park says: "[B]ehind her bantering was this coldness, this darkness, this heart of darkness that he couldn't fathom. It had to do with his father . . . " (24). To eleven-year-old Park, Randy's darkness is as unfathomable as his father's book, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is beyond his understanding. However, he keeps
reading these dark, powerful tales that pulled him into a deep forest where he could not see his
way . . . not to understand the stories themselves, which were really beyond his understanding,
but to seek for the path through the forest to the enchanted place where his father and, perhaps,
his grandfather were being held in thrall. (23)
Park is now a Marlow descending deeper into African jungles as well as a Sir Gawain rescuing the captives held under the spell of Morgana le Fay. *1 According to the religious-sociologist Walter T. Davis, "Conrad's Heart of Darkness is the prototype used by many for interpreting the Vietnam experience" (67). Paterson uses the metaphor just as aptly for the suffering of this son of a soldier searching for his father killed in that War.
To find his father Park thinks back to the year 1973, imagining his father as a "big and masculine-looking" warrior, the John Wayne type. Davis maintains, "By the early 1960s John Wayne had become an icon, the warrior-gentleman, representing American masculinity" (67). When Park visits the Vietnam war memorial and touches his father's name, Parkington W. Broughton IV, on the stone, he experiences inexpressible emotion, which urges him to continue to probe for information about his father, to descend deeper into the "heart of darkness." Consequently, he determines to visit his grandfather, the Colonel, another Broughton in a long line of warriors. As Randy explains to Park, "you could pick a war, any war, and you'd have a Broughton in it. The Broughtons have always been crazy about war" (39).
The Maimed Fisher King
Expecting to meet with the "noble, white-haired warrior"(43) he has imagined his grandfather to be, Park journeys alone from New York to the family farm in Virginia. Once there, however, he is met with one disillusionment after another. The first is Uncle Frank, who, looking like a hired man, meets him at the bus stop and drives him to the "castle" in a Toyota pickup. His grandfather, now reduced from the proud colonel he once was to a sobbing paralytic, is the culmination of Park's disillusionment. The boy had "never heard a grown-up cry out loud in real life. . . . The old man was in there sobbing, sobbing his heart out . . . . Haaaa. The wail, for it was a wail, almost inhuman, the cry of some wretched animal in pain. Haaaa" (94-95). Obviously, the real Colonel is not the masculine warrior Park had imagined. The iconic "sobbing Colonel" is comparable to the Fisher King of the Grail legend, who has been wounded in the area of the thigh. In his interpretation of the vague phrase, "in the area of the thigh" of the king, Corneau maintains:
The obscure description of the king's wound can be seen as a veiled reference to castration:
the principle of male reproduction has been damaged, the masculine has lost the power to
engender or regenerate. . . . The Fisher King's wound in the middle part of his body indicates
that masculine energy has been cut in two: the noble, higher parts have been severed from
the base, lower parts. The masculine is unable to regenerate itself, unable to engender new
attitudes, and unable to progress at all since it has been cut off from its own legs. (140).
The king's wound is linked to the barrenness of his kingdom: drought and crop failure. Likewise in Park's Quest, "the noble, white-haired warrior" is confined to a wheelchair and has lost his psychic energy, able to produce only an inhuman wailing. The Colonel's virility has been debilitated by his strokes, preceded and probably caused by his son's disloyalty to his wife Randy, his divorce, and his return to Vietnam to marry a Vietnamese woman, all actions the Colonel considered deviant and inappropriate. The Colonel suffered his first stroke immediately after his firstborn son, Park, was killed in Vietnam; he suffered his second stroke shortly after his second son, Frank, married his brother's Vietnamese widow. As the housekeeper Mrs. Davenport tells Park V, it was a traumatic experience for Colonel Broughton, a big name in the community, to admit that his sons have married "one of them" (70). Like the realm of the wounded Fisher King, the Colonel's farm seems to be under a curse: his warrior sons are lost forever, his dignity is fallen, his body is paralyzed, and he has lost his tenants.
To understand the full meaning of the collapse of the Colonel's masculinity, it may be significant to place it in the socio-cultural context of America during the Vietnam War. In 1973, the same year that Park's father died, the war finally was coming to a close, and there was mounting suspicion of the Watergate scandal. The historian Peter N. Carroll maintains that the traumatic impact of the Vietnam War reflected on American identity and that the Watergate scandal inflicted a wound that would not heal on American society. Caroll asserts:
More than the loss of life and property, more than the erosion of American power, Vietnam
symbolized a failure of national purpose, a weakening of the historic values that had welded
American omnipotence with its assumption of cultural superiority. . . . The American warrior
ethic, carried to a logical extreme in Vietnam, had produced only pain and suffering, horrible
violence and impotent defeat. (95, emphasis mine).
It is certainly legitimate to suppose that Colonel Broughton, more than anyone else in the novel, believed in the national myth, according to which American soldiers serve their country for the sake of righteousness. According to Davis, the national narrative has two subplots: an "alternative consciousness" and a "royal consciousness." The former comprises stories about freedom, democracy, opportunity, plenty, and justice. The latter includes "those imperialistic pretensions that are masked by a theology of special calling wedded to an optimistic, progressive view of history. . . . This "royal" plot about American righteousness and invincibility unraveled in Vietnam" (7). In accord with a "royal consciousness," a warrior's manhood is closely connected to the idea of an American empire. Viewed in this context, the Colonel's physical suffering and mental anguish suggest the collapse of the traditional warrior-concept of manhood that has served and defended American righteousness.
Morgana le Fay
When Park first hears his grandfather's wail, he cannot fathom the cause. He asks himself, "What could be so terrible that a man who had spent his life in the army -- a colonel, a veteran . . . of many battles -- what could reduce a soldier and a hero to sobbing aloud in the middle of the night?" (94). These questions urge him forward to confront the stark reality of the male world. Important to the Percival story is the fact that the king's wound will not heal unless Percival asks certain questions. This is emphasized in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival on which Paterson's retelling, Parzival (1998), is based and which is the allusive text for Park's Quest. In all these stories, Morgana le Fay is a key character who helps to answer the questions.
In Park's Quest the Vietnamese wife of Frank, and her daughter Thanh, play the role of the Arthurian Morgana le Fay, supposedly weaving a cunning and deadly spell upon the Colonel. Park imagines that a "witch" has enchanted a noble knight (his grandfather) and that he, Park, will be the one to break the spell that holds the knight in thrall (12, 14, 59). The labels used to describe Thanh and her mother -- "some kind of heathen," "something foreign," not "a Broughton, whatever she was," and "geek" -- highlight their differentness and liken them to witches (102, 57, 83-84). Their "otherness," though recognized, is never detailed. Moreover, to Park, Thanh "was the cause of his mother's angry grief which had festered unhealing all these years" (136).
Thanh, as she struggles to define her place in American society, is like the "weird little kid" Paterson recalls herself as being when, with her family, she was refugeed to the United States from China during wartime. Like Thanh, the child Paterson became aware of a "borderline" between Americans and non-Americans ("others").*2 Thus, framed in the traditional Arthurian narrative, non-American women are depicted as wicked and treacherous and decried as witches. At the beginning of his journey, Park has no doubt that the Vietnamese women are wicked witches. Take his first meeting with Thanh in front of the springhouse, for example. Thanh's hostile attitude toward him leads him to think Thanh "is in truth Morgana le Fay her very self, and has set for any knight who passes that way a cunning and deadly enchantment" (59). He compares the Thanh of his imagination with people he knows in his "real" life: "There were lots of Orientals in his school, mostly refugees. Vietnamese [Park] decided, or Cambodian. They all looked alike to him -- the people who had killed his father" (63, emphasis mine).*3
However, when Park finally dares to look into his grandfather's eyes (metaphorically, to arrive at the heart of his darkness), the truth about his father is disclosed. Then, as Park begins to have a new regard for both the warrior and the witch, the focus in the novel shifts. Thanh gradually turns from witch into a maiden who carries the Holy Grail, a symbol of healing. As keeper of the springhouse, she relieves the grandfather's thirst. "She filled the coconut shell with water and held it to the old man's lips." By so doing, she is able to draw out a "crooked smile" from the old man who had sobbed so despairingly (119).
Despite Thanh's changing role, however, she is still an outsider, merely a helper in Park's quest, parallel to the females in Percival's quest, who are excluded from the company of the Grail. Corneau comments, "Percival abandons his wife -- just as he abandoned his mother and the Scarlet Knight's maiden. Obviously, Percival is unable to commit himself to women. His adventures always draw him away from involvement with the feminine world" (139). Although Park can assume a compassionate attitude toward his grandfather, he is ignorant of Thanh's pain, agony, and fear. He cannot fully understand Thanh's despair until he shoots a crow with his father's gun.
The Company of the Grail
Park's shooting of the crow coincides with his mounting attraction to guns, symbols of masculinity. While he is practicing shooting, he accidentally hits one of the crows lighting on the ground close to the target, which leads to an unexpected revelation about himself; i.e. his ideal of manhood includes acceptance, even admiration of the violent. The crow lies on the ground with its wings spread out in surrender, its left eye staring up wide and angry with a look that resembles that of his grandfather. Park asks himself, "What had [I] done? Killing was too easy. It shouldn't be easy. You did it without even meaning to, and there was no way to take it back" (126). Park's shooting of the crow infuriates and scares Thanh, who had experienced the trauma of war. Thanh screams, "You kill! You murder!" (125). In her anger she attacks Park, beating and biting him. Park has psychically wounded Thanh as he has shot the crow. Significantly, the crow does not die.
The apparent death of the crow is indispensable to the process of Thanh's transformation from Morganga le Fay into the Maiden of the Grail. In the early Celtic legends, Morgana le Fay was originally a war goddess, known as Morrigan or Morrigu, who temporarily took the form of a raven.*4 The crow sprawled on the ground signifies that Thanh's role as Morgana le Fay is ending. Meanwhile, Park feels bitter regret at having unquestioningly pursued the male dream, and he sincerely apologizes to the bird for his stupid and senseless act. It is only after Thanh's burst of anger and Park's recognition of the violence of his masculinity that Park discovers that the crow is still alive. The two young people subsequently care for the crow: Thanh lets the bird drink water from the coconut shell she holds; Park offers it his T-shirt for a bed. Their actions are symbolic of a phase in the ritual process of their reliving their Vietnam experience, explicable by Davis's analysis of the American war in Vietnam as the cultural-anthropological concept of the "rite of passage." *5 As a consequence of the incident with the crow, Park and Thanh undergo transformation in the "liminal stage or the "communitas," in which the social structure is suspended, a spirit of affection and oneness dominate, and "an essential and generic human bond" is formed (Davis 30-39). At the end of the novel, after assuring herself that the crow has taken flight from its sick bed in Park's T-shirt, Thanh appears from the springhouse as the Maiden of the Grail:
When [Thanh] came out, it was slowly, carrying in both hands the coconut shell, filled to
overflowing with cool, sweet water. "Now," she ordered. "Now. All drink."
Then [the grandfather, Park, and Thanh] took the Holy Grail in their hands and drew away the
cloth and drank of the Holy Wine. And it seemed to all who saw them that their faces shone
with a light that was not of this world. And they were as one in the company of the Grail.
(148, emphasis mine)
The female character who has been either a wicked witch or a "target of shooting" in the traditional Arthurian narrative is finally included in the company of the Grail. In other words, Thanh, who, as an Asian female, has been objectified in the Western patriarchal narrative, attains her subject position in Paterson's revised narrative.
Here again, Paterson's version of the story reflects her own experience, this time of living in post-war Japan as a young woman and her return to the United States. That experience provided her with an advantageous viewpoint, the double-consciousness of "the other." In retrospect she writes that after her four-year stay in Japan, she returned home to Virginia feeling like "a different person" because, by living in Japan, she had acquired a different viewpoint (Gates of Excellence 701). Since then, it has been an imperative for Paterson to dissolve the boundary between the non-American and the American.
The dual otherness of Thanh -- she is both the "other" sex and the "other" race -- has added significance if the novel is read in the socio-cultural context of America. Analyzing the discourse of Orientalism in Western society, Edward W. Said maintained in the 1970s that, after World War II and America's recent Japanese, Korean, and Indochinese adventures, a more realistic "Oriental" awareness was devloping.*6 However, on an unconscious level, according to Said, "The Oriental was linked . . . to elements in Western society (delinquents, the insane, women, the poor) having in common an identity best described as lamentably alien"(207). Accordingly, under the bias against the female and Asia, "latent Orientalism also encourages a peculiarly . . . male conception of the world" (207). It is no wonder that in the Johnson administration the decision to start the war in Vietnam was deemed a "test of masculinity," as some politicians and journalist later pointed out (Gerzon 93-94). In other words, the war strategists had in their minds an image of masculinity in which the "warrior" male regards women and Asians as "others." In 1973, domestically, America had already seen the second wave of the feminist movement that radically questioned the exploitation and marginalization of women, and by 1988, when Park's Quest was published, the exploitation and marginalization of the feminine in the construction of manhood was questioned also by men under the influence of feminism.*7 Therefore, the inclusion of Thanh's dual "otherness" -- gender and ethnic -- in American society that had been dominated by white males seems an inevitable consequence of the decline of the warrior mentality and the feminist movement.
Another Broughton
In Chretien de Troyes' The Story of Percival, Percival's failure and the death of his abandoned mother are connected by two different characters: the cousin and the hermit. They blame Percival for his mother's death, which has contributed to his failure to ask the questions that would break the spell upon the Fisher King, and for the ensuing calamities (de Troyes 209, 261). In his obsessive pursuit of male heroism, he has abandoned his grieving mother, as well as his wife and the Scarlet Knight's maiden. He fails to heal the wound of the Fisher King because he excluded the feminine from his quest for knighthood. The point is that reconciliation with the feminine in Percival's quest is vital if he really wishes to attain his goal. Likewise, in Park's Quest the welfare of the Brougtons' manhood depends upon Park's reconciliation with the feminine. Ironically, however, Park achieves that reconciliation through a male, his Uncle Frank, who represents quite a different type of manhood than does his elder brother, Park's father.
Frank Broughton is a gentle, patient, and humble farmer, in contrast to Park's ideal, heroic father, represented in an icon, the "war hero." Park cannot help but feel repulsed by his uncle:
[Park] could only see Frank's back--his blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, his
overall straps stretched taut between wide shoulders, his dark red neck bent toward the cow's
flank. My father didn't look like that, Park thought . . . . He wasn't just a farmer. He was a pilot --
a bomber pilot -- totally in control of a gigantic plane, high above the world. He didn't go around
watching for cow shit. Park glanced down at his ruined sneakers. For a minute he thought he
might vomit. (60)
However, when Park later finds a rifle in a cabinet, he changes his attitude toward Frank and approaches him purposefully to ask his uncle to teach him how to handle and shoot a gun.
Frank is associated with Gournamond (or Gornemans) de Gorhaut, a godfather in The Story of Percival, who trains Percival in the ways of knighthood, including the handling of weapons and instruction in appropriate manners. He is the very person who endows Percival with knighthood. However, the fact that Frank is not a warrior and dares to marry "one of them" against the Colonel's strong objection means that he presents Park with a new type of manhood. Gerzon, in his discussion of archetypes of ideal manhood in American society, maintains that each archetype has satisfied certain "marketing strategies" (4, 233). He posits that each type had historical significance if the men who embodied these ideal types of manhood happily adapted to the societies of their own days. Take the Soldier archetype, for example. Gerzon describes its original function as follows:
He was the man who defended his loved ones and the entire community. He symbolized security
. . . . The Soldier was willing to risk his own life in order to protect those he loved. . . . Great
sacrifices were required of the Soldier. Hardship and deprivation, fear and anxiety, were constant
possibilities. But the Soldier endured because, in exchange for his services, his culture conferred
upon him a priceless gift. It considered him a man. If he performed his duty well, he was a hero
. . . . What war required was, by definition, manliness. The men who were the best soldiers were,
in effect, the best men. (31)
Park's Quest makes clear that, in order to establish the Broughton dynasty in Virginia the farmer family had to hand down the name "Parkington Waddell Broughton" from generation to generation, along with the conviction that the masculine was equated with the warrior archetype. However, judging from the social environment in which the novel is set, not only has such a "strategy" already become a burden for the firstborn male but also an object of rejection. Gerzon maintains:
As young Americans were sent to their death, every group that did not fit the image of the white,
able-bodied, successful male was rebelling against that image. Blacks, Indians, feminists, gays,
hippies, and the handicapped shared with white, middle-class antiwar activists a revulsion for the
old archetypes of masculinity. . . . They did not want to be like "the best and the brightest." They
wanted to measure themselves against a different model of manhood. (95, emphasis mine)
Obviously, Frank is one of those who "wanted to measure themselves against a different model of manhood"; his propensities are toward nurturing, caring, and loving, not for murder and destruction.
Indicative of the declining acceptance of the warrior type of manhood, the death of Park's father is more or less suicidal. Although he had finished his one-year service in Vietnam and returned home, he subsequently divorces and goes back to Vietnam for a second tour of duty in order to live with the Vietnamese woman with whom he had a child. The parabola he draws means that he is heading toward his "death as a warrior" and the "margin" of society. Following the path of his elder brother, Frank later deals a deathblow to the warrior type of his father, though in a milder, gentler way.
More important, Frank's rebellion against his father comes not as a warrior, but as a farmer. He follows his path, not by killing, but by caring, nurturing, and loving, traditionally regarded as feminine characteristics. It is in Frank that the masculine reconciles with the feminine. In this sense, Frank, the caring and affectionate farmer who marries a Vietnamese woman, is as iconic a figure as "the sobbing colonel" in the changing conceptions of masculinity.
By following the role model represented by Frank, Park can make peace with Thanh and accept her as his half-sister. Then, his mother Randy and his grandfather are finally ready to call him "Park," and he thereby regains his name:
"Haaaa," [the grandfather] repeated. "Haaaa." The hand flopped heavily from Park's cheek to his
own chest.
"Yes," said Park, suddenly understanding. "Park. You mean Park. I'm Park, and you're Park. That's
what you mean, right?" . . . "Yes, we're both Park." Park could understand him! (147)
If the three Parks in the novel are interpreted as representing the evolution of the ideal manhood of the post-World-War-II America, it can be said that the wound inflicted upon America's identity is beginning to heal. Swerdlow's essay, "To Heal a Nation," which Paterson quotes as an epigraph to the novel, supports such a reading:
The names have a power, a life, all their own . . . . Everyone, including those who knew no one who
served in Vietnam, seems to touch the stone. Lips say a name over and over, and then stretch up
to kiss it. Fingertips trace letters. Perhaps by touching, people renew their faith in love and in life;
or perhaps they better understand sacrifice and sorrow. (3, emphasis mine).
Park, by touching his father's name, then revisioning his ideal of manhood, renews his faith in love and life, and achieves a new kind of masculinity, thereby regaining his proud name.
And Katherine Paterson, employing the paradigm of the Percival myth, tells her version of the story, dealing with the unhealed wound of the Vietnam War, a wound inflicted on America's belief in a "manhood" that emblemized all biases and prejudices against the "other" that infuse its society. The powerful assertion of Park's Quest is that the regeneration of disintegrated masculinity lies in reconciliation with the feminine and with the "other" ethnicities.
Notes
1. In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1973), 100, 102; Kurtz calls what he has discovered "The horror! The horror!" and Marlow, "some inconceivable world that had no hope in it and no desire."
2. Katherine Paterson, "Sounds in the Heart," Horn Book (December 1981): 699, "Newbery Medal Acceptance," Horn Book (August 1981): 101, 106.
3. As Edward W. Said maintains in Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 207, "the very designation of something as Oriental" means that they are seen in a biased view of racism.
4. Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 675; Katherine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), 304.
5. This theory was first set forth by Arnold Van Gennep and later developed by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Cornell UP, 1977), 97.
6. Said explains the term Orientalism in Orientalism as follows: "The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part of culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles . . . . in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (2).
7. One of the arguments in the men's movement that started in the 1970s was about the relationship between the conventional conception of masculinity and the feminine, as is explicitly declared by the psychologist Herb Goldberg in his book, The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege (New York: Signet, 1977), 20: "Earth Mother is dead and now macho can die as well. The man can come alive as a full person." Also, the sociologist Anthony E. Rotundo suggests in his book, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: BasicBooks, 1993) that American men have excluded the feminine in their socio-cultural construction of masculinity based on the ideology of the "separate sphere," and thereby contributed to the formation of the modern society.
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