(I forgot to write it down, but I’m pretty sure the prompt was “wild man stories as a metaphor for the masculine growth/education process," so that’s what I’m going off of)
It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think of the “Wild Man” from the story who bears his name as a stand-in for some sort of masculinity rather than an actual character (like a father or father figure). From a very general perspective, then, the story involves the boy: 1. learning how this trait is socially maligned (man in cage), 2. beginning to express the trait himself but sensing the social repercussions (freeing man, running off), 3. struggling with how to live with this masculinity (living out a “secret marriage” in the garden), and 4. embracing the trait to vindicate his social worth (saving England). I’m no psychologist, but hopefully those four stages sound at least a little close to certain identity-development theories—I know I’ve heard a somewhat similar framework for how we come to identify ourselves racially.
Even with this framework in mind, though, the tricky question is what this sort of masculinity actually is, and why it would be somehow “unpopular” in a thoroughly patriarchal society. The first quality that jumps out is the difference between how others see it and how it interacts with the boy: it is captured and displayed as an unkempt drunkard, but its influence on the boy’s life involves cleanliness and hard work (keeping the garden). Other somewhat at-odds qualities include being altruistic (passing on money, saving England) without being entirely moral (stealing the key, stealing meat, bragging about martial exploits), and being both independent (fleeing from home, living in forest at start) and involved in the affairs of everyone around it.
The only way I see of reconciling these differences is by looking at how the boy grows increasingly more proactive and less dependent on others (not counting the wildness itself, of course); that is the masculinity the story wants to promote. The contradictions we see come from the tension of forcing a society-endorsed model into a story about a social outsider; for example, his two thefts may seem to be transgressions in the context of the story, but to the reader they are evidence that the boy is becoming resourceful. I think it’s clear that the masculinity the story wants to foster is, however “ruggedly individualistic” on the outside, ultimately one that acts for the benefit of existing institutions. Still, if we guys are going to have to adopt this masculinity one way or the other, we might as well think we’re being a rebel while doing it.
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I think it's important to note where the Wild Man fails in terms of the values which are ultimately shown by the boy and then rewarded. For one, the Wild Man struggles with self-restraint. Even though he be under a "curse", which we might call alcoholism, he shows very little impulse control when he's going about bothering peasants and destroying crops (The Wild Man story). Once he is freed by the boy, his impulse control seems to return. Instead of immediately going on a path of destruction, he instead "adopts" the boy and teaches him the lessons of masculinity you describe. In the Wild Man story especially, the Wild Man himself also has to go through a change. That both he and the boy must learn this lesson suggests to me that male self-restraint was a very important issue at this time. This idea would reflect a pervasive Puritan mindset, largely based on the ability to sacrifice immediate satisfaction for later satisfaction (happiness on earth for happiness of the afterlife, work now rest later etc.).
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ReplyDeleteThe changes that the Wild Man seems to go through do represent something of a problem if we're to interpret him as an idea rather than a person. One of the ways I tried to reconcile it in my mind was that there is a difference between how the man is perceived by others and how he is perceived by the boy (mentioned in the second paragraph), perhaps with the lesson that this all-important route of masculinity gets a bad rap from many people but is actually a virtuous path in practice. What does it mean for Mr. Masculinity to be under a curse, then? Well, perhaps that curse is itself the consequence of public scorn--an otherwise noble king comes to be seen as too masculine, and thus he takes the appearance of an uncontrolled wild man. The undoing of the curse can then be seen as a vindication of masculinity.