Of Pit Bulls and Men: Tamed Manhood in Harry Crews’s An American Family (2006)

The article analyzes the decline and reinstatement of southern manhood through the main male protagonist of Harry Crews’s novella An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings (2006), his last published book of fiction. Drawing on several sources investigating manhood in general and southern manhood, with its frequently stereotyped inclination to violence and brutality, in particular, the article focuses on the possibility, suggested by Crews, of the re-education of an ill-mannered wife-batterer through woman-inflicted violence, torture, and humiliation. Against the background of Sigmund Freud’s theory of masochism and selected texts by representatives of various streams of the men’s movement, who consider men to be weak and increasingly feminized victims searching both for their lost manhood and for the release of their suppressed emotions and sensitivities, the article recognizes three stages of the man’s reformation: infantilization, feminization, and re-masculinization. In the novella, Crews compares the ordeal of his protagonist with that of pit bulls, marginalized for their ferocity, but under the right circumstances able to behave as faithful pet animals.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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