Unsinkable Masculinity: The Artist and the Work of Art in James Cameron's Titanic
2002; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cul.2002.0007
ISSN1460-2458
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoNot many years before the Titanic sank in 1912, Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class that the "modern feminine [code] . . . leaves no alternative direction in which the impulse to purposeful action may find expression" (358). This particularly Americanist economy of functionalism and efficiency, threatened by the excesses of the "feminization of American culture" (to borrow Ann Douglas's phrase), shared a similar relationship with the economy of the American arts. Walt Whitman, for example, urgently called attention to what he perceived as the European, decadent (i.e., feminized) art forms infiltrating and endangering America's emerging national aesthetic. For Whitman, the idea of the feminine should strike a commonsense (i.e., masculinist) balance between male and female. 1 Woman's presentation of self, in Whitman's mind, is to suggest both "a strong and sweet Female Race" (328) that must be "raised to become the robust equals" of man (343). 2 To secure America's claim to a financially sound and aesthetically viable culture, a masculinist rhetoric intervenes where cultural feminization purportedly occurs. Titanic the ship and Titanic the film (James Cameron, 1997) reinscribe this tradition in contemporary cultural mythology as moral reminders of the necessity to contain the economies of this feminine excess. In addition, Cameron's Titanic rehearses this cultural ideology through the filter of the American artist and his work of art. At stake here, as we might suspect, is the body of the woman.
Referência(s)