Masculinity and Marvel Comics
A read with the archaic but stochastic name of Ye Olde Statistician brought this article by Edward Feser to my attention, and I would like to return the favor. This is some of the best and clearest thought I have seen applied to the relatively humble question of fantasy versus imagination — two things that seem the same, yet are distinct.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2019/10/masculinity-and-marvel-movies.html
Here is a quote, to whet your appetite:
t is the two stars of the Marvel movies – Tony Stark/Iron Man and Steve Rogers/Captain America – who are the most obvious examples of idealized masculinity. And their character arcs through the series are about realizing that ideal. Each of them starts out as an imperfect specimen of the masculine ideal, albeit in very different ways. With Stark it is a vice of deficiency and with Rogers it is a vice of excess. But by the end of their arcs, in Avengers: Endgame, each achieves the right balance.
(It might seem odd to think of Rogers rather than Stark as the one prone to a kind of excess. Bear with me and you’ll see what I mean.)
On the traditional understanding of masculinity, a man’s life’s work has a twofold purpose. First, it is ordered toward providing for his wife and children. Second, it contributes something distinctive and necessary to the larger social order of which he and his family are parts. Society needs farmers, butchers, tailors, manual laborers, soldiers, scholars, doctors, lawyers, etc. and a man finds purpose both by being a husband and father and by filling one of these social roles. Though the traditional view regards women as “the weaker sex” and as less assertive than men, it understands a man’s worth and nobility in terms of the extent to which his strength and assertiveness are directed toward the service of others.
Liberal individualism, both in its libertarian form and its egalitarian form, replaced this social and other-directed model of a man’s life’s work with an individualist and careerist model, on which work is essentially about self-expression and self-fulfillment – making one’s mark in the world, gaining its attention and adulation, attaining fame, power and influence, and so forth. Nor is it even about providing for wife and children, since sex and romance too came to be regarded as a means of self-fulfillment rather than the creation of the fundamental social unit, the family. (Feminism took this corrupted individualist understanding of the meaning of a man’s work and relationships and, rather than critiquing it, urged women to ape it as well.)
Read the whole thing.
Glancing into the comments on Feser’s website, I see a remark by our own Tom Simon, as insightful and erudite as we expect from him:
Haldane takes his definitions of fantasy and imagination from Coleridge, and his valuation of them from the Modernist school of 20th-century literature. For a sound and cogent corrective, I strongly recommend ‘On Fairy-Stories’, by the then Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford – chap by the name of Tolkien.
Tolkien, of course, doesn’t have much time either for Haldane’s type of sharp verbal distinction between imagination and fantasy, or for the dismissive Modernist attitude towards fantasy in stories. Note that Haldane repeats the old canard that fantasy is ‘escapist’ and that this is a bad thing. Tolkien’s quite sensible response is that the people chiefly concerned to prevent others from escaping are jailers. The analytical rigour of this essay is frequently under-appreciated even by Tolkien’s admirers; it is a foundational text of its field, and it is rather disturbing that Haldane adopts the verbal habits of one who has never heard of it. —Oh, and for what it’s worth, Tolkien was Catholic to the bone.
My comment:
Feserm or, rather, the scoundrel JBS Haldane, defines the terms fantasy and imagination incorrectly, even misleadingly, but the point still stands.
I propose a clearer definition:
One is mere wish fulfillment that excludes consequences and context, and hence is outside the moral order.
The suave British spy who nonchalantly seduces any gorgeous woman seen, yet without fathering any bastards or breaking any hearts, is an example.
The other reaffirms the moral order, by means of the exaggeration and distilled essentials that are the crux of all art, but with the deep things of reality brought to the surface via disguising them in avatars taken from the timeless worlds of fairy tale, myth, symbolism, or archetype.
The story of Cinderella, which is the Magnificat in the form of a fairy tale, where the lowly are raised up and the haughty plucked from their seats, is an example.
What I mean by the disguise of avatars is this: War, for example, in all its theory and practice, confusion, horror, hellishness, bravery, glory, logistics and strategies and tactics, the clash of arms and blare of trumpets, heroism and cowardice, absurdity and pathos, iron and fire and crow-clouded killing fields is too huge and complex at idea to hold in one’s head at once.
But picturing the fierce Mars as a bearded and bronze skinned youth lolling with his head in the soft lap of glancing-eyed Venus, who can for a time beguile his violence with love, but only by cuckolding her ugly but industrious husband Vulcan, is a living image one can grasp. Such is the task of poetic imagination.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
