Where Have All the Good Men Gone

This article explores a recurrent theme in postwar American culture, a perceived crisis of manhood/masculinity, through Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter. On one level, Banks establishes a sense of anxiety and threat with roots in confused and devalued masculine roles. Linked in the narrative to the deaths of multiple children of a small town and especially to fathers' failure to protect their daughters, Banks implies that America's future is imperiled by the degradation of fatherhood. But on a deeper level, the novel suggests that at the core of America's postwar anxiety about families and fathers is not a loss but a lack. The idealized masculine roles whose loss we mourn, Banks tells us, may never really have existed at all

Anxiety · Art · Literature · Masculinity · Narrative · Psychiatry · Sociology · Theme (computing · American and British Literature Analysis · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis

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