The Sensitive Son and the Feminine Ideal in Literature: Writers from Rousseau to Roth

by Myron Tuman

Overview

This book considers major male writers from the last three centuries whose relation to a strong, often distant woman—one sometimes modeled on their own mother—forms the romantic core of their greatest narratives. Myron Tuman explores the theory that there is an underlying psychological type, the sensitive son, connecting these otherwise diverse writers. The volume starts and ends with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Confessions provides an early portrait of one such son. There are chapters on other adoring sons, Stendhal, Sacher-Masoch, Scott Fitzgerald, and Turgenev, as well as on sons like Bernard Shaw and D.H. Lawrence with a different, less affectionate psychological disposition toward women. This book demonstrates how, despite many differences, the best works of all these sensitive sons reflect the deep, contorted nature of their desire, a longing that often seems less for an actual woman than for an elusive feminine ideal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030157012
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Publication date:	05/11/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	576 KB

About the Author

Myron Tuman was a professor of English at universities in West Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana. This work on male writers and their mothers follows earlier studies of male writers and their sons, Melville’s Gay Father, and female writers and their fathers, Don Juan and His Daughter.   

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction - Hector’s Helmet.- Chapter 2 Getting Started - Roth, Proust, Freud, and Rousseau.- Chapter 3 The Adoring Son in Love, 1 - Rousseau.- Chapter 4 Another Stolen Ribbon - Mozart and Kierkegaard.- Chapter 5 The Sorrows of a Young Son - Goethe.- Chapter 6 Pygmalion in Love - Bernard Shaw.- Chapter 7 The Narcissist Son - Freud and da Vinci.- Chapter 8 The Masochist Son - Sacher-Masoch.- Chapter 9 The Uneasy Son - F. Scott Fitzgerald and D. H. Lawrence.- Chapter 10 The Bachelor Son - Stendhal and Schopenhauer.- Chapter 11 The Sensitive Son’s Midlife Crisis - Hazlitt and Rousseau.- Chapter 12 The Dutiful Son - Flaubert.- Chapter 13 The Adoring Son in Love, 2 - Turgenev.- Chapter 14 The Sensitive Son in Old Age - Rousseau.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This book changed forever how I look at 300 years of ‘greats’ in English literature. The author weaves a biographical thread of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s life while reexamining the erotic ideals behind some of the world’s most famous writing. The 15+ male writers presented here had lifelong attachments to mothers whom they worshiped as embodying some kind of feminine ideal. The book stimulates larger questions about that ideal after considering works ranging from Freud and Kierkegaard to Philip Roth, among others. This ground-breaking study broadens our understanding of ‘romance.” (Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Senior Lecturer in English, Brown University, USA)