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Published in the Journal, Children's Literature 26 (Yale UP,1998) The Quest for Masculinity in The Chocolate War: Changing Conceptions of Masculinity in the 1970s

YOSHIDA, Junko

　　The first paragraph of Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War (1974) is metaphorical: "They murdered him. As he turned to take the ball, a dam burst against the side of his head and a hand grenade shattered his stomach" (7). We are immediately exposed to this violent scene without any knowledge of who "he" is, who "they" are, or what this scene is about. As the story unfolds, we learn that Jerry Renault, the protagonist, is involved in a conflict called the "chocolate war." But what is Jerry fighting against? And who or what is the enemy? On one hand, Patricia J. Campbell places the story in a moral context: "What he is opposing is not Brother Leon, not Archie, not Emile, but the monstrous force that moves them . . . evil" (46). Anne Scott MacLeod, on the other hand, maintains that Cormier's novels are "political novels" because he "is far more interested in the systems by which a society operates than he is in individuals" (74). I prefer to place The Chocolate War in a social and cultural context, reading it as a novel about changing conceptions of masculinity during the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s.

　　Many sociologists view masculinity as a set of behaviors and attitudes that are constructed and maintained by a complex system of rewards and punishments. According to Arlene Skolnick, the sociocultural changes of the '60s were rooted in the unexpressed discontents of the '50s. In the mid-'70s, stimulated by the second wave of feminism, various men's movements began to develop. The first National Conference on the Masculine Mystique and the first Men and Masculinity conference were held in 1974 and 1975, respectively. In 1974 Marc Feigen Fasteau's The Male Machine was published, followed in 1975 by Warren Farrell's The Liberated Man. The year 1976 saw the publication of Richard Doyle's The Rape of the Male and Herb Goldberg's The Hazards of Being Male. The various men's movements argued over conflicting ideals of masculinity. In fact, sociologist Kenneth Clatterbaugh identifies eight perspectives ranging from the "conservative" to the "evangelical Christian" (9-14). Nonetheless, America's cultural anxiety about masculinity was based on a narrow image of the white middle-class heterosexual male. As in the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), this image often caused a "masculinity crisis" (Griswold 185; Skolnick 111), for such men were expected to conceal their vulnerabilities, suppress their emotions, provide for their families, control their women, and, at the same time, be democratic and affectionate husbands and fathers. In other words, "the ideology of the strong male was at odds with the ideology of togetherness" (Skolnick 71).

　　This masculinity crisis is deeply connected to unease about the feminine side of masculinity. As the sociologist E. Anthony Rotundo shows in his book American Manhood, the concept of masculinity is defined by the notion of a "separate sphere," which has become the norm for American society. This sphere excludes any attributes that are thought to be feminine, such as the nurturing, the caring, the intimate, and the emotional. As though to reflect the omission of the feminine from this conventional notion of masculinity, Cormier's The Chocolate War lacks major female characters except for Jerry's dead mother. The story unfolds in the all-male world of Trinity School. This unnatural absence of females in the novel emphasizes a masculinity that has excluded the feminine. Cormier is daring enough to portray the all-male world as bleak, to find fault with traditional gender roles, and to depict his protagonist, Jerry, as seeking a new male identity.

　　I would first like to examine the novel as a mythological quest story in which a young man seeks a masculine identity. Percival's quest in Arthurian legend is one of the most representative stories in which a fatherless young man leaves his mother and sets out to seek adventure. Because of his upbringing in the depths of the forest, Percival is ignorant of the outside world and, especially, of the power politics in the men's world. His encounter with the wounded Fisher King, whose kingdom is barren, is a crucial incident in his quest. When Percival witnesses a procession of Grail objects at a banquet, he misses a chance to ask specific questions, one of which is "Whom does the Grail serve?" Later Percival learns from his cousin of a legend predicting that an innocent fool would wander into the castle and ask questions by means of which he would heal the Fisher King. After wandering many years, Percival meets the Hideous Damsel, who reminds him of his failure to ask questions, thus prompting him to resume his Grail quest. Finally, he encounters an old hermit who reminds him a third time of his failure and its relation to his abandoned mother's death. Although Chretien de Troyes's Le Roman de Perceval ou le conte du graal, one of the oldest stories of Percival, ends at this point, many scholars presume that he returns to the Fisher King and questions him. As a result the wounded king is miraculously healed and the Waste Land becomes fertile again.*1

　　Among the many Jungian interpretations of this story as a boy's quest for masculinity,*2 Robert A. Johnson's is especially insightful. From a feminist point of view, however, Johnson's focus on Percival's "homespun garment," a gift from his mother, is problematical. Johnson regards the garment as a metaphor for the mother complex in relation to Percival's failure to ask the questions (48). Instead, I see a connection between this failure of Percival's and the death of his abandoned mother, a connection made by two different characters: the cousin and the old hermit. From a feminist perspective, the healing of the wounded Fisher King is closely connected with Percival's reconciliation with his dead mother. In other words, reconciling with the feminine is essential for the rebirth of masculinity. We shall return to this point later in the analysis of the novel.

　　The Percival archetype can be found in several books contemporaneous with The Chocolate War. Isabelle Holland's The Man Without a Face (1972) and Laurence Yep's Dragonwings (1975) can be read as mythological quest stories, for both depict "fatherless" boys who seek their "fathers" after leaving home. In The Man Without a Face, a virtually fatherless boy, Charles Nostad, encounters Justin McLeod, the man without a face, in his isolated house on top of a cliff. The encounter takes place away from Charles's home, where his mother tries to tame and domesticate both Charles and his male cat (21). Likewise, in Dragonwings, Moon Shadow, who has been brought up without a father, departs from China, where his mother and grandmother live, and sets out for the United States to live with his father, Windrider. In both stories "fathers" are overwhelmed by suffering: Justin, who takes on the role of surrogate father, has a facial disfigurement and has secluded himself from society; Windrider is spiritually lost and entrapped within Chinese-American society.

　　The Chocolate War, in the same vein, unfolds as a boy's quest for a masculine identity. Jerry Renault, who lost his mother half a year before, is now being initiated into an all-male world, Trinity School, and is on his way to establishing his masculinity. Jerry's problem derives from the fact that his father is devastated by the loss of his wife and therefore cannot give adequate attention and care to his son. In other words, Jerry is a psychically fatherless son at a significant point in his development. Commenting on such situations, the psychoanalyst Guy Corneau maintains that the "lack of attention from the father results in the son's inability to identify with his father as a means of establishing his own masculine identity" (13). Such fatherless sons "tend either to idealize the father or to seek an ideal father-substitute" (19). To make matters worse, Jerry, who is portrayed as a "skinny kid," cannot find an ideal model of masculinity even in his all-male world. Janza and Carter, his macho peers, are too physically tough to be adequate role models, nor can Jerry conform to the conventional model of masculinity represented by Archie and Brother Leon.

　　While Jerry is suffering from the trauma caused by his mother's death, he is thrown into "the chocolate war" by vice principal Brother Leon, who compels the students to sell chocolates as part of their annual fund-raising effort. Archie Costello, the leader of the students' secret society, "The Vigils," gives Jerry an "assignment" to refuse to sell the chocolates. By giving assignments to his peers, Archie forces them to rebel against school authority, especially Brother Leon. Jerry's ultimate refusal to sell the chocolates drives him into isolation at school, especially in Brother Leon's class. Jerry knows that his rebellion is not against the chocolate sales but against the conformity underlying this activity. He says to himself, "It would be so easy, really, to yell 'Yes.' To say, 'Give me the chocolates to sell, Brother Leon.' So easy like the others, not to have to confront those terrible eyes every morning" (98).

　　Jerry at first obeys Archie's order and continues to say no, but he gradually comes to realize that the Vigils' rebellion is not an ultimate threat to the school. The Vigils are tacitly allowed to exist because of their behind-the-scenes cooperation with Leon. As is shown in their later cooperation in the chocolate sale, the Vigils' members are merely conforming to Leon's expectations. Archie and Leon are in an interdependent relationship, as Archie admits: "Officially, The Vigils did not exist. How could a school condone an organization like The Vigils? The school allowed it to function by ignoring it completely, pretending it wasn't there. But it was there, all right. . . . The Vigils kept things under control. Without The Vigils, Trinity might have been torn apart like other schools had been, by demonstrations, protests, all that crap" (25).

　　Aaron Esman sheds light on the relationship between Brother Leon and the Vigils when he argues that adolescent rebellion during the tumultuous '60s did not derive from a "generation gap" but rather from efforts to live up to their elders' expectations. According to Esman, "the 'young radicals' . . . were, in most cases, expressing in an intensified from the liberal, antiauthoritarian view of their parents, who in many cases supported and encouraged their children's supposed 'rebellion.' . . . Most adolescents in most cultures conform rather quietly to the expectations of their elders" (29). Jerry learns from three illuminating encounters or observations that his assigned role is not to rebel at all but to conform to his peer group. To begin with, a hippie who meets him only once at a buss stop criticizes him for his passive conformity, saying he is "middle-aged at fourteen, fifteen. Already caught in a routine" (20). In fact, Jerry is afraid to become like his middle-aged father, who after his wife's death lives in a "gray drabness" (52). Jerry cannot help but ask, "Was this all there was to life, after all?" (52, emphasis added), and we are told that "now he [can] see his father's face reflected in his own features" (53). Next the quotation on a poster, "Do I dare disturb the universe?" (emphasis added) from T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, " urges Jerry to rebel against the whole school and "disturb the universe." Finally, when he sees his best friend Goober exploited by Archie, Jerry recognizes that the assignment, despite its rebellious appearance, requires nothing but conformity to the Vigils.

　　Both Jerry's and Prufrock's questions are radical ones, posed by males who need to grow emotionally in order to escape their bleak situations. And, just as Percival is rebuked for his failure to ask the right questions, Jerry is challenged by the hippie and the poster to ask the right questions in the face of the suffering man and the Waste Land. When Jerry finally says no of his own will, however, his question takes the form of rebellion against the conventional masculinity embodied in both Brother Leon and Archie. On the eleventh day of his assignment, when he is supposed to say yes, Jerry declares, "'No. I'm not going to sell the chocolates.' Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence" (89). At last Jerry has disturbed the universe. The only way Jerry has been able to establish his gender identity has been by arming himself with stubbornness and by fighting against conformity. Thus, even though Jerry has no positive role models at home or at school, he inaugurates his quest for masculinity by staging his own rebellion. So great is the difficulty of challenging the status quo in total isolation that Jerry's quest virtually becomes a war.

　　As The Chocolate War unfolds, it becomes clear that the type of conventional masculinity embodied in Leon and Archie is power-oriented. As their status as vice principal and vice president of their respective groups suggests, both of them are ambitious. Thus, despite their external differences, they are quite similar in their attempts to pursue power. Perry Nodelman points out that all the characters are "obsessively concerned with the chocolate sale" (24) because that is "the showcase" where power is exercised and displayed. In Leon's daily roll call, for example, students are not allowed to respond to their names without accepting the chocolates and reporting their sales. In the students' eyes, Leon is a tyrant who stands on top of the hierarchy: "Everyone could see that Brother Leon was enjoying himself. This is what he liked -- to be in command and everything going smoothly, the students responding to their names smartly, accepting the chocolates, showing school spirit" (63). Archie is no different from Leon in his orientation to power. As Campbell points out, "arch" means "principal or chief" (45); he is another tyrant in his realm, that of the Vigils, who, Cormier writes, "were the school. And he, Archie Costello, was The Vigils" (26, emphasis in original). And when Archie sells all the chocolates, he is "on top again, . . . in charge once more, the entire school in the palm of his hand" (170). It is to this power-hungry masculinity that Jerry says no, starting the war.

　　Such power as Archie and Brother Leon wield, which has particular features and patterns, warrants a closer look. First, their power is exercised through controlling information. Archie has Obie record personal information on all the students at the school. "His notebook was more complete than the school's files. It contained information, carefully coded, about at Trinity" (15). Archie thus manipulates information instead of threatening others by physical power and avoids using violence as mush as possible. Archie explains, "I usually lay off the strong-arm stuff in the assignments. The brothers would close us down in no time and the kids would really start sabotaging if we started hurting people" (134). He is afraid that violence might reveal his manipulation of power. And visibility might threaten the existence of the Vigils at Trinity.

　　Archie's manipulation of psychology and information demonstrates his awareness of a principle that Michel Foucault identifies in Discipline and Punish: "The power exercised on the body is conceived not as a property, but as a strategy, that its effects of domination are attributed not to 'appropriation,' but to dispositions, maneuvers, tactics, techniques, functionings; . . . In short this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the 'privilege,' acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic position" (26). To put it another way, power is something manipulated in a political relationship; it cannot be obtained or possessed. Thus Foucault illustrates how "docile bodies" were constructed in the process of Western civilization by rulers' exercise of power within the institutionalized panopticism*3 of discipline and punishment, where a watchful eye is unceasingly vigilant for social deviates. The same was true of American society during the '50s, when there was a sort of McCarthyism with respect to gender roles (Skolnick 65). Griswold maintains that in the postwar era there was "conformity, a plague that infected middle-class men. . . . Men had become slaves to conformity" (199). Conformity in the '50s, no doubt, worked as a shaper of conventional manhood. And there was no more perfect place to socialize white middle-class adolescent boys into conformity than prep schools such as Trinity.

　　Archie, as the leader of the Vigils, is aware of the principle of discipline and punishment in every detail of school life and manipulates people best by only hinting at the possibility of force. That is why he hates to see Janza and Carter exercise physical power, although he relies on them as a threat of violence. In this way, Archie meticulously distances himself from such a macho image. For example, he hates "the secretions of the human body, pee or perspiration" (106) and "betraying an emotion" (130) such as anger. The ideal image of masculinity for Archie is an isolated man "in harness," "cool" and "in command," with a poker face, who uses his brain instead of his body. Leon exercises power in a similar way, using his eyes and his pointer to manipulate his subjects, "watch[ing] the class like a hawk, suspicious, searching out cheaters or daydreamers, probing for weaknesses in the students and then exploiting those weaknesses" (23-24). Leon is consistently portrayed as one who gazes from the top of the hierarchical power structure. Like Archie, Leon avoids intimacy with the students, insisting that a "line must be drawn between teachers and students . . . that line of separation must remain" (35). Leon's exercise of power, represented by his hawklike, ever-vigilant eyes and his isolation from students, resembles the Vigils' panopticism.

　　The type of masculinity described above -- one that manipulates power and, at the same time, is manipulated and constructed by power -- has several problems. First, a man who adopts such a masculinity consciously or unconsciously suppresses his emotions and is therefore dehumanized and disindividualized. Just as Archie is portrayed as an impassive man who tries to erase the proof of his human body (urine or perspiration), Leon's existence is often reduced to his most prominent physical feature, his moist and hawklike eyes, thus obliterating his personality. He epitomizes what Fasteau calls "the male machine," whose "armor plating . . . is virtually impregnable. His circuits are never scrambled or overrun by irrelevant personal signals . . . His relationship with other male machines is one of respect but not intimacy" (1). Brother Leon has taken the conventions of masculinity so far that he seems at times an automaton. In The Hazard of Being Male the psychologist Herb Goldberg issues a warning to "men who live in harness." From the standpoint of the men's liberation movement, he stresses men's oppression more than women's: "They have lost touch with, or are running away from, their feelings and awareness of themselves as people. They have confused their social masks for their essence and they are destroying themselves while fulfilling the traditional definitions of masculine-appropriate behavior . . . . Their reality is always approached through these veils of gender expectations" (3). This passage seems an accurate description of Brother Leon.

　　A second problem with conventional masculinity is its tendencies toward isolation and dominance over others. As demonstrated by Archie and Leon, a man with this type of masculinity is isolated from others by his position at the top of the hierarchy. As the feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan points out in her In a Different Voice, males tend to form hierarchical relationships, separating themselves from other males in order to gain power whereas females tend to form weblike interdependent networks (62, 160, 170). As a result, the masculinity constructed through the exercise of power began to acquire stereotypical images: it was seen as aggressive, emotionless, dehumanized, disindividualized, isolated, and incapable of intimacy. Consequently, by the time The Chocolate War was published, the various men's movement groups were trying to dispel this myth of masculinity.

　　It was in this social climate that several noteworthy adolescent novels dealing with masculine identity issues were published, including, as already mentioned, Dragonwings (the Chinese Windrider) and The Man Without a Face (the homosexual Justin). In A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), published only slightly earlier, Ursula K. Le Guin portrays an adolescent boy, Ged, who seeks his male identity as an immature young wizard. Two things are worth noting in this novel. First is Ged's act of naming the gebbeth, the nameless shadow, which has been conjured up by the power-hungry Ged himself. Interestingly, the shadow reminds us of the cultural anxiety about gender exhibited during the 1950s, when adolescent boys rebelled "without a cause." By confronting the suppressed side of his conventional masculinity, Ged finally identifies his shadow. Second, Le Guin presents readers with an unconventional dark-skinned hero. Le Guin writes in Earthsea Revisioned, "I meant this as a strike against racial bigotry" (8). Similarly, Virginia Hamilton's The Planet of Junior Brown (1971) also deals with the identity crisis of a fatherless boy, Junior Brown. In place of his absent father are two black surrogate fathers, Buddy Clark and Mr. Pool. Whereas conventional American masculinity had been based on the image of the white middle-class heterosexual male, these writers suggest the new types of masculinity evolving from the changing social environment.

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