The Continental White Manspreading Narrative

is lazy, ahistorical, and ubiquitous

One more note about Virginia Heffernan’s specious Politico essay on manhood in America, because this is now an increasingly popular fake theme:

From almost the moment they arrived, American men of European descent have taken pains to pretend they belonged here, that this country was theirs, that they’d been here all along.

That’s from the all-howlers last paragraph, if you want to go see it yourself. Of course, when someone says something like “American men of European descent have taken pains to pretend they belonged here,” obvious questions follow: Did American women of European descent pretend they belonged here? I live in a ring of highly-Asian immigrant communities in suburban Los Angeles, near places like Monterey Park and Arcadia. Do they pretend they belong here? I’m represented in Congress by Judy Chu, whose mother immigrated from Guangdong. Did she pretend she belonged here, or has that framing just become inappropriate and insulting?

But more importantly:

Heffernan has a literature PhD from Harvard, so I’m forced to suspect that she’s encountered American immigrant literature. The themes of that literature are alienation, confusion, struggle, and disorientation, and everybody kills the dad. Take the Norwegian immigrant novelist O.E. Rølvaag, who spent the early decades of the 20th century teaching at St. Olaf College: His trilogy about Norwegian immigration to the Dakota territory depicted a people clinging to the surface of a hostile earth, fighting hunger and nature. Dad dies in the first book, on snowshoes, his body found months later in the spring thaw; in the second book, the Norwegian mother watches in horror as her sons start speaking English at their own dinner table, gradually losing their native language, until a girl from another nearby immigrant settlement lures one of her sons with her dark Irish femininity and the whole immigrant story goes straight to hell. One of the recurring themes of Euro-American immigrant literature is can’t we just go home?

Willa Cather’s Plains trilogy kills the dad twice, IIRC, in My Antonia and O Pioneers! The Bohemian immigrant father in My Antonia kills himself in helpless shame as his family clings to life in a grim sod dugout during the Nebraska winter, with his daughter sleeping in a badger hole the family digs into the floor to try to keep their girls warm; his bloody corpse freezes solid, and there’s the second frozen dad in two paragraphs. You can see the arrogant white immigrant theme of presumptive domination and ownership. (The Swedish immigrant father in O Pioneers! doesn’t make it out of the first chapter.)

Think about the early American literature you know that has white men in it — Upton Sinclair’s cocky white Eastern European immigrants in The Jungle, for example, swaggering around the slaughterhouse like they owned the place. Or: Captain Ahab, mauled and abused by nature, hunts nature for revenge, unsuccessfully trying to kill the thing that ruins him:

Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.

Such a typical white male, with his offensive confidence, thinking he’s the boss of everything. Melville’s theme is men who try to dominate nature because it terrifies them, and aren’t sure that they belong anywhere on the earth, given the propensity of the things of that earth to tear them apart. Square “the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began” with “American men of European descent have taken pains to pretend they belonged here, that this country was theirs, that they’d been here all along.”

The difference between Herman Melville and Virginia Heffernan is that Melville could write.