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Houdini tarzan and the perfect man
Houdini tarzan and the perfect man






houdini tarzan and the perfect man

Meanwhile, the fictional Ape Man symbolized the inherent mastery of whiteness in an increasingly complex racialized world. Sandow embodied pure male form and strength in response to women gaining more social power, Kasson says, while Houdini represented the survival of the threatened male body in an age when the state was imposing more control over the individual. Exploring how public presentations of the white male body, particularly in popular culture, reinforced both gender and racial superiority in the formative years of this century, Kasson (professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina) deftly weds these three major figures into a single narrative. Me White, Me Better." That was the subtext not only of Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel Tarzan of the Apes, but also of magician and escape artist Harry Houdini's career, as well as that of vaudeville star and bodybuilder Eugene Sandow, according to this illuminating and engrossing cultural study of modern masculinity. Concern with the white male body - with exhibiting it and with the perils to it -reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.

houdini tarzan and the perfect man houdini tarzan and the perfect man

Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context.

houdini tarzan and the perfect man

With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity - bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were. A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians








Houdini tarzan and the perfect man