The Crisis of Masculinity and the Interior Life

Good and bad ways to lose a leg

When he heard about Grendel, Hygelac's thane was on home ground, over in Geatland. There was no one else like him alive.
In his day, he was the mightiest man on earth, high-born and powerful. He ordered a boat that would ply the waves. He announced his plan: to sail the swan's road and search out that king, the famous prince who needed defenders.

-Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

[Warning: this post contains details some readers may find disturbing.]

The picture above depicts Napoleon visiting his friend, Marshal Jean Lannes, in the aftermath of the Battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809, shortly before the latter died. Lannes, having just seen his close friend, Pierre-Charles Pouzet, decapitated by a cannon ball, had gone to sit down during a lull in the fighting. Another stray cannon ball, ricocheting off something, then hit him across both legs. His right knee was shattered and the leg had to be amputated; the other was also ruined. He died eight days later after gangrene set in.

Lannes had risen through the ranks of La Grande Armée to Marshal from beginning his military career in the republican army as a lowly sergeant-major, and had fought with Napoleon in Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, and Poland, in numerous battles. He was renowned for his great courage and daring. One story that is often told about him is that, at the Battle of Ratisbon, his II Corps had been ordered to scale the walls of the town and repulse the Austrians defending them. He asked three times for volunteers and each time they were beaten back by furious fire. When his men proved reticent about making the attempt a fourth time, he is said to have stood before them and shouted ‘All right, gentlemen. I was a grenadier before I was a Marshal, and I'm still one!’ before rushing to attack the walls himself. His men were then shamed into charging forward to join him, whereupon the town was taken.

This story may be apocryphal, but we can have no reason to disbelieve the broad brushstrokes with which it paints of his character, and Napoleon (himself a man of great physical courage) clearly thought Lannes was a cut above - allowing the latter, very unusually, to refer to him informally as tu rather than vous. After being hit by the cannonball that ultimately killed him, Lannes is said to have remarked to the men who rushed to help him that ‘I am wounded; it's nothing much.’

Lannes’ life, by any measure, was a success. He rose from relatively humble origins (the son of a small-town trader) to become a Marshal of the Empire, Duke of Montebello, and Prince of Siewierz, and he had five children (many of his descendants going on to have distinguished careers). He died young, aged only 40, but in that time had travelled around Europe, fought and won great victories, and secured for his family a life of prestige and prosperity thereafter. In other words, he was a paragon of what, until fairly recently, we considered to be the masculine virtues: courage, decisiveness, strength, ambition, and also protectiveness and provision for his dependents. And he received his rewards for that.

I was thinking about Lannes when I read about the appalling case of Marius Gustavson and his ‘disgusting and abhorrent’ (as the judge sentencing him put it) ‘eunuch-maker website’. This site, the centre for a network of ‘extreme body modification’ aficionados who would pay to watch people being voluntarily mutilated, was recently broken up and a number of the participants convicted of various criminal offences, including conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm. Many of the cases appear to have involved removal of the penis and testicles, but there were other ‘procedures’ involved too, most notably the amputation of Gustavson’s own leg. A man called Jacob Crimi-Appleby, who was at the time only 18 years old, with Gutsavson’s consent froze the latter's leg in a bucket of dry ice, with the result that it later had to be surgically removed.

The contrast between Jean Lannes and Marius Gustavson is in some respects trite, but bears I think commenting on. Which is better: to lose one’s leg bravely in battle, or to lose it providing sexual gratification to decadent oddballs watching the event streamed on the internet? Even our non-judgmental age obviously intuits the difference, even if lots of people would nowadays have a hard time explaining precisely why, but reality has a way of making it plain regardless - Lannes had a glittering career and secured a much better life for his family. I don’t think the same will be true of Gustavson. We might also then be led to ask: what on earth are our societies doing in failing to instil in boys a desire to emulate men like Jean Lannes, and instead encouraging them (indirectly) to stew in their own juices and ultimately travel down dark paths that lead to abysses like Gutsavson’s website?

But there is much more to be said about these two cases, and it is to do with an important feature of male psychology which I think even men themselves poorly understand, and which women often - because, definitionally, they are not men - don’t quite grasp.

This is that it is actually bad for men to have too much of an interior life. This is not to say that men are better off not thinking per se. Rather, it is that they are better off not thinking very much about themselves. Indeed, the way that modern life seems to encourage us to reflect on our individual selves, our thoughts, our experiences and our ‘mental health’, actually works to the detriment of most men. Men are at their most satisfied when they are engaged in a task which they consider to be productive or virtuous, or which improves their social standing. And concomitant with this is the feeling that one’s own feelings, desires and personal problems don’t actually matter all that much - and that, indeed, being in control of one’s interior life, such that it does not affect one’s behaviour, is a source in itself of what ‘good mental health’ means.

One sees this very plainly in pre-modern literature, wherein male heroes are depicted always as acting, rather than thinking. In Beowulf, the titular character, hearing about the ravages of Grendel, does not dwell on the dangers, or consider his own feelings about the matter, but simply makes a decision and announces it. He will go and defeat the monster, and that is that. And the reader (or listener) is not encouraged to imagine that he feels any sense of trepidation about this. Rather, one is encouraged to see Beowulf’s behaviour as simply natural and good.

The unconscious didactic purpose of this is, of course, clear: be brave, and don’t let something as trivial as your feelings get in the way. Feelings in the end don’t matter; what matters is doing.

The history of literature in the Western world can partly be understood as a reflection of the growing importance of the interior life, together with a growing perception that it is the individual and his or her feelings that must be reified above all else; compare, for example, the modern novel (most of which are about nothing but the interior lives of the characters) with Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This has resulted in great art - imagine reading Shakespeare, or Austen, or Bellow, or Greene, without the author touching on the feelings of the characters. But it has also lead us to the position that feelings as such are considered to matter a great deal, and should be treated as being central to one’s existence and one’s sense of happiness and fulfilment.

To suggest that this is ultimately detrimental to male mental health in particular is to go very much against the grain of modern discussion of the matter. In the city in which I live, for example, it is common to see posters and stickers advertising a charity called Andy’s Man Club, a male suicide prevention charity whose main slogan is ‘It’s Okay to Talk’. The idea here is that male suicide is driven by a refusal on the part of men to confront, and discuss, their feelings - with the result being they bottle their feelings up and eventually become self-destructive.

I don’t want to suggest that this is not true in some cases. But all of this focus on encouraging men to share their feelings draws attention away from the self-destructive impulses, often much less spectacular than those of Marius Gustavson, which can develop within the hearts of men who are encouraged to dwell on and share their feelings too much. Across the West, young men increasingly congregate in online spaces in which they share grievances, express dark and unhappy thoughts, and egg each other on in giving vent to their worst temptations and vices. It is not hard to imagine how a man like Marius Gustavson, presumably lonely and dissatisfied with life, could be drawn into a downward spiral in those circumstances - or, more generally, how young boys can fall into a kind of death trap in which they become increasingly divorced from society around them due to being forced to think altogether too much, and ultimately stray so far from the socially productive world that they find it hard to make their way back.

If anything, then, I think we need to talk more seriously, not about how men can be made more aware of their feelings and share them, but how men can be encouraged to see their feelings and preoccupations as largely unimportant when set against the importance of doing useful things. This is in the end how I think the crisis of masculinity will be solved - not through encouraging reflection on the interior life, but through diminishing its importance.

The question arises as to how this can be done, but I increasingly wonder whether it will happen inevitably as life grows materially (and morally) worse. I am not optimistic about the future of Western societies, nor about global stability, and it is not difficult to sketch out our future as a period of decadent decline leading to eventual disorder. One can therefore imagine circumstances arising - quite rapidly - in which it will become necessary for men to re-engage wholeheartedly in the world of doing, and to emulate figures like Jean Lannes once more. But if that ever does become the case, it will only be after a period of intense pain and discomfort - a prospect which puts the subject of male psychology under an aspect of some urgency.