Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man
The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians
In his exciting new book, John F. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were.
When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity -- bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. Concern with the white male body -- with exhibiting it and with the perils to it --reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Me Tarzan, You Jane. Me White, Me Better." That was the subtext not only of Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel Tarzan of the Apes, but also of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini's career, as well as that of vaudeville star and bodybuilder Eugene Sandow, according to this illuminating and engrossing cultural study of modern masculinity. Exploring how public presentations of the white male body, particularly in popular culture, reinforced both gender and racial superiority in the formative years of this century, Kasson (professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina) deftly weds these three major figures into a single narrative. Sandow embodied pure male form and strength in response to women gaining more social power, Kasson says, while Houdini represented the survival of the threatened male body in an age when the state was imposing more control over the individual. Meanwhile, the fictional Ape Man symbolized the inherent mastery of whiteness in an increasingly complex racialized world. Drawing on a wide range of sources including vaudeville programs and photos, newspaper reports, personal letters and autobiographies, as well as medical texts, historical accounts and cultural theory Kasson manages to weave in other (mostly forgotten, but historically important) figures such as Julian Eltinge, the world's most noted female impersonator, and spiritualist Mina Crandon, who was exposed as a fraud by Houdini. Witty and well written, this is a top-notch work of cultural history that can be read with great enjoyment by general readers and social historians alike.
