"Taking myself in hand": Jean Toomer and physical culture

Modernism - Modernity

Volumn 10, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 597-615

  Whalan, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149552046     PISSN: 10716068     EISSN: 10806601     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/mod.2003.0093     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Jean Toomer, "Race Problems and Modern Society," 1929, rpt. in Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 174-5
2. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923), ed. Darwin T. Turner (New York: Norton, 1988). Henceforth abbreviated as C
3. William Stanley Braithwaite, "The Negro in American Literature," 1925, in The William Stanley Braithwaite Reader, ed. Philip Butcher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 83-4
4. Quoted in J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 53
5. This type of reaction was very common in assessments of Toomer during the Black Arts movement. Important later assessments include Alice Walker's; she saw Cane as the "parting gift" as Toomer said "good-bye to the Negro he felt dying in himself," and believed most of Cane's contemporary readers would be disappointed with the moral choice Toomer had made in choosing to "live his own life as a white man." See "The Divided Life of Jean Toomer," In Search of our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: The Women's Press, 1984), 62, 65
6. Perhaps the most vehement critic of Toomer's approach, however, is Robert B. Jones; he comments that Toomer's "Positing the self as the origination of a new social and political order, on the basis of a privileged notion of the self as having special mystical powers, is at best solipsistic, at worst, fascistic. Such ahistorical millennialism does not consider the collective as a catalyst for social change." Jean Toomer and the Prison House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 135
7. Jean Toomer, "Earth Being," in The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer, ed. Darwin T. Turner (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1982), 19. Darwin T. Turner, the editor of this autobiography, dates it as either 1928 or 1929, with probable revisions in 1930. The autobiography will henceforth be abbreviated as WAS
8. For biographical portraits, see Cynthia Earl Kerman and Richard Eldridge's The Lives of Jean Toomer: A Hunger for Wholeness (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), henceforth abbreviated as TLOJT
9. Nellie Y. McKay's Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of his Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)
10. Darwin T. Turner's In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and their Search for Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971)
11. and Charles R. Larson's Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen: Invisible Darkness (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993)
12. Jean Toomer, Book X, Second Draft, 61. JTP Box 11, Folder 362. Henceforth abbreviated as BX2
13. Harold B. Sergel, Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1
14. See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 137. Henceforth abbreviated as MIA
15. Robert Ernst, Weakness is a Crime: The Life of Bernarr Macfadden (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 24. Henceforth abbreviated as WIAC
16. Bernarr Macfadden, Making Old Bodies Young: 38 Lessons in Building Vitality (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1919)
17. Marriage a Lifelong Honeymoon (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1904)
18. The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1903)
19. The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1901)
20. Physical Culture for Baby (New York: Macfadden Publications, 1924)
21. How to Gain Weight (New York: Macfadden Book Co., 1936)
22. How to Lose Weight (New York: Macfadden Book Co., 1936)
23. Exercise and Like It (New York: Macfadden Book Co., 1937)
24. Greg Mullins, "Nudes, Prudes and Pygmies: the Desirability of Disavowal in Physical Culture," Discourse 15 (1992), 28. Henceforth abbreviated as "DOD."
25. Other historians have concurred with this. Anthony E. Rotundo has remarked on the "dramatic shift of masculine ideals in nineteenth-century America ... from a standard of manhood rooted in the life of a community and the qualities of a man's soul to a standard of manhood based on individual achievement and the male body." See his "Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920," Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983), 23
26. As Kimmel notes, four out of five American men were self-employed in the early nineteenth century; by 1870, this figure had dropped to one in three. Richard Edwards comments that even as late as the 1880s, firms with net assets of $10m or over were being classed as "very large" in contemporary studies. This reflects the predominance of small-business ownership; indeed, he remarks "the 'firm' as an entity separate from the activities of the entrepreneur hardly existed." Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (London: Heinemann, 1979), 24
27. Michael Kimmel, "Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832-1920," in Laurence Goldstein (ed.), The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 21
28. Such a shift in the locus of male identity is very similar to the observation made by Warren I. Susman, that personality as a concept and a term was becoming increasingly socially valued at the expense of the notion of character in this period of American history. See his "'Personality' and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture," Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 271-85
29. Anne Fabian, "Making a Commodity of the Truth: Speculations on the Career of Bernarr Macfadden," American Literary History 5.1 (1993), 52. Henceforth abbreviated as "MACOT"
30. Bernarr Macfadden, Muscular Power and Beauty: Containing Detailed Instructions for the Development of the External Muscular System to its Utmost Degree of Perfection (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co., 1906), 17
31. Bernarr Macfadden, Manhood and Marriage (New York: Macfadden, 1916), 9. Henceforth abbreviated as MAM. Macfadden saw a strong sexual urge as central to healthy masculinity, but believed that marriage was the only suitable institution for the expression of sexuality. He was also a keen supporter of eugenics, and commented that in the act of "selecting a wife" men should "marry a woman, first, because you love her; second, because you are convinced that she would be the mother of strong, splendid children; and, third, because you admire and respect her." In addition, he advised that "the eugenic considerations in marital selection are not to be ignored" (MAN, 30-2)
32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, transl. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), 42. Masturbation had been a cause of concern for many years before this in medical discourse and conduct manuals, concern which reached a particular intensity in the mid 1800s. This was tied to the "marketplace man" model of masculinity; male sexual energy became regarded in economic terms, and masturbation was seen as harmful due to the "waste" of "man's vital energies" that it involved (Kimmel, "Consuming Manhood," 15-8)
33. Bernarr Macfadden, Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, 5 Vols. (New York: Physical Culture Publishing, 1912), 2450
34. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; London: Penguin, 1990), 8
35. Jean Toomer, "Why I Entered the Gurdjieff Work," in Jean Toomer: Selected Essays and Literary Criticism, ed. Robert B. Jones (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 107. For a discussion of Toomer's involvement with these various bodily disciplines, see Kerman and Eldridge, TLOJT, 383-4
36. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, transl. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), 13
37. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 152-3
38. Dyer, White, 164
39. Charles B. Johnson, The World War and Democracy as Regards the Negro: The Truth (N.P.: N.P. [c. 1920]), 25
40. For example, there was much debate over whether to train black officers during the war; eventually a special training camp for black officers was constructed at Des Moines, but to the outrage of black political organizations the instructors were all white. Moreover, the achievements of the black soldiers in France made several in authority uncomfortable; a secret U.S. Army communiqué to the French forces advised them "not to commend too highly the American troops, particularly in the presence of [white] Americans." Propaganda was distributed to French Troops, entitled "Secret Information Concerning Black Troops," which warned of the "dangers" of allowing black soldiers to associate freely with white women; advising no social contact with black troops, it also explained segregation as necessary to prevent rape. One white U.S. observer bewailed that the training of black Americans into combat troops and officers was "regarded by practically all regular Army officers as one of the greatest mistakes ever made by the war department." Tensions over the stationing of black troops had sparked race riots in 1917; and in the South there were several cases of African American soldiers being lynched in their uniforms upon their return from Europe, lynchings egged on by vicious editorials in southern newspapers. See David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13-14
41. and also Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I (New York: DaCapo P, 1996)
42. This "hard" view of heredity as the major determining factor in an organism's characteristics was indebted to the theory of the "continuity of germ plasm" advanced by August Weismann, and the recently revived work of Gregor Mendel on heredity. This differed from the "soft" heredity of Lamarck, which saw changes in organisms caused by the environment as being inheritable. For further discussion of the difference between these approaches, see Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995), chapter 3
43. For an excellent account of the connections between ideas of heredity, eugenics, nativism, and the immigration restriction bills of the 1920s, see John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 264-330
44. Jean Toomer, "The Book of Searching and Finding," in Incredible Journey: Drafts Fragments, 1924, JTP Box 18, Folder 503
45. Jean Toomer, "The Negro Emergent," in A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, ed. Frederick L. Rusch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 90
46. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discoursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993), 66. Henceforth abbreviated as BTM
47. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner's, 1918), 18. Henceforth abbreviated as POTGR
48. Butler proposes that Passing offers a way of starting to think about how sexual difference intersects with racial difference: "What requires radical rethinking is ... what convergent set of historical formations of racialized gender, of gendered race, of the sexualization of racial ideals, or the racialization of gender norms, makes up both the social regulation of sexuality and its psychic articulations" (BTM, 182). Siobhan Somerville offers a slightly different version of the meanings of the word "Queer" in New York society in the 1920s; see her Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 142-3. Henceforth abbreviated as QTCL
49. Barbara Foley, "Jean Toomer's Washington and the Politics of Class: From 'Blue Veins' to Seventh-Street Rebels," Modern Fiction Studies 42 (1996), 308
50. Linda Martín Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenon of Racial Embodiment," in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 275
51. Alcoff, "Toward a Phenomenon of Racial Embodiment," 276
52. See my article "Jean Toomer, Race and Technology," Journal of American Studies 36 (2002), 459-72
53. Jean Toomer, "Not Typically American," in A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings, 99-100
54. Jean Toomer, "Preface to a Place and a Function in Society," JTP Box 51, Folder 1116, 1935; "The Individual in America," JTP Box 51, Folder 1111
55. Jones, Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought, 17