Masculinity

In the early decades of the twentieth century, masculinity created a tangled network of man-woman connections centered on power and control. Additionally, how a man formed relationships was very significant in enhancing his public persona. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction articulates this complicated and contentious historiography of masculinity and its linkages to the era’s literary tradition. This paper proceeds toward masculinity studies to demonstrate the representation of affective masculinity in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920). The authors argue that Deleuze’s concept of “affect” and its relation to modern discourses of masculinity would enhance our perception of Fitzgerald’s construction of masculinity in his debut novel. The paper analyzes the affective transformation of Amory Blaine as a new man based on his interactions with the female characters of the story. The results of the research show that in Fitzgerald’s definition of masculinity, man is affected and enhanced by the gentle feminine features, and Amory Blaine too acquires a new identity for himself.

Masculinity, unlike femininity, have long been left understudied by the scholars. This originated from the essentialist idea that men and masculinity are natural, and subsequently had been taken for granted. They were, not required to be studied. Men, were deemed as the agents who gazed and studied. However with the advent of structuralist and poststructuralist ideas in humanities and specially in social theory, masculinity attracted attentions. No longer was masculinity considered natural, God-given. Now the new theories regarded masculinity as a constructed phenomenon subject to cultural, structural, discursive, and material forces. Therefore it was inevitably subject to change, It was no longer seen as an essential entity. These theoretical inventions spread, though belatedly, into the realm of literary studies. Literary works, especially fiction, provides a very rich material to explore the dynamics and nuances of theory. The present article sets to apply the theories in the field of masculinity studies from social theory to a novel by the British-Syrian writer Robin Yassin Kassab. The Road from Damascus could be useful text to investigate how masculinity produced and reproduced, how it constructed and changed as men experience different social structures. The novel, successfully, takes masculinity as a sign whose significance alters as it moves from one structure to another. A significant aspect of the novel is its focus on immigrant people in the cultural space of England. The article would investigate how the two “modalities” masculinity and immigration would invite new meanings into the previous studies done on the work.