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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Homo Americanus
ISBN# 9780838642542
Reviewed by: David Roark, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Project Muse |
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John Bak's Homo Americanus is at once a narrow character study and a broad examination of American masculinity in the twentieth century, The main character under study is Brick Pollitt, protagonist of Tennessee Williams's 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Brick exemplifies the titular homo americanus, a queer heterosexual male whose struggles with sexual identity mirror the "epistemological confusion in understanding the rules governing sexual identification" experienced by modern man. Bak reads William's work as a response to the queer aesthetics of a writer popularly seen as more homophobic than queer -- Ernest Hemingway.
Despite the usual move of comparing a novelist with a playwright, Bak's Homo Americanus is not a genre study, nor is it interested in exploring the numerous thematic connections between Williams and Hemingway, or even between Hemingway's 1924 novel The Sun Also Rises and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. What the book does provide, succinctly and cogently, is an explanation of the numerous theorists that are involved in the service of Bak's thesis, including Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Simone de Beauvoir, Eve Sedgwick, Fredric Jameson, Gilles DEleuze, and Felix Guattari, and Roland Bathes. Bak employs these theorists in order to study Williams not just as a playwright, but as a modernist whose use of the themes of impotence and sterility builds not just on the work of Hemingway, but on such modernist classics as T.S. Eliot' The Waste Land.
Bak pervasively argues that Williams used Hemingway's queer masculine aesthetics as a sounding board for the playwright's own explorations of the topics.
In his introduction, Bak modestly claims that Homo Americanus "will not likely be of great interest to Hemingway scholars." I must respectfully disagree. Although the book is indeed "written for a Williams audience by a Williams scholar," it serves not only to illuminate the two authors it takes as its focus, but also contributes to gay studies, masculinity studies, and modernist studies in general. It is an ambitious work that demonstrates how much drama studies has to offer to the study of American literature.
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