English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Brains Behind the Brawn

Jarvis, Christina.  The Male Body at War:  American Masculinity During World War II.  Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. 243 pp. $43.00.

By E. Stone Shiflet, University of South Florida—Tampa

            After watching Tim Russert's NBC Sunday morning television staple, Meet the Press, last February, the implications of a strong male body in America were on my mind.  California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in all of his massive, muscular development, in all of his physical prowess, spent the better part of his half hour with Russert expounding why President George W. Bush is such an effective leader.  Here's a Hollywood action hero running one of America's largest, most powerful states.  Whether you like him or not, people listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger when he speaks.  His strong presence literally allows his body to fill up the television screen, via satellite, making Russert look rather small in comparison. 

             The notion that "size matters" is not new to American debate.  New is Christina Jarvis' perspective on how that notion is constantly defined and redefined in terms of strength. Exploring how size matters in America, Jarvis' book focuses its gaze on the male body of World War II ,offering detailed and multidisciplinary fuel for thought as well as a good history lesson about where the import of size comes from in the last century.

             In a clever point of departure, Jarvis begins with the 1954 dedication of a U.S. war memorial honoring the World War II Marines.  After stating what the construction of this memorial says about America as a culture, Jarvis traces how the images of FDR and his legions are deployed to create hypermasculinity.  That construction is powerful enough to destroy the Neo-Classically represented German body images and the demonized "other"—Japan.  The pattern of constructing "effort, triumph, and patriotism" through images of dominant white males with pronounced upper body strength redefines all American bodies, under Jarvis' argument, and perpetuates marginalized masculinities of other races, religions, and genders.  The hypermasculinized image of the white, male American soldier unites and empowers the war effort at home and across the battlefield.  The male body, says Jarvis, was noticeably weakened in American during the Depression.  But, she argues, the rapid mobilization of troops in a global "good" war provoked an assault on weakness in America that still informs the way America represents war and conflict today.

            In chapter one, Jarvis contextualizes her position by defining  how the American body politic of World War II is maintained through careful categorization of soldiers and messages of war.  To Jarvis, FDR is a man who, with the press, creates an image that "depended on the careful distancing between his actual disabled, often infirmed body and his skillfully orchestrated body politic" (29).  Jarvis tells how American institutions followed suit, working to create a stronger male population through government programs, increased categorization of soldiers, and even a stronger, more intimidating Uncle Sam. The clean-living, physically developed, disease-free soldier is charted and reflected across the American landscape, from war posters to novels to Hollywood films.  Of course, in the process, marginalized groups are placed into the equation to perpetuate the new, hypermasculinized body politic.

             The effects of the more powerful American body politic are outlined chapter two, where Jarvis provides a detailed examination of the new methods of classification employed by the American government during the war and how the rhetoric of these classification records permeated the "commonplace parlance" (59) of newspaper, war propaganda, songs, radio, and everyday conversations.  America works to maintain a strong military on the warfront and strong national support for the military on home soil. 

            The following chapter works to explain how "the damage inflicted on the body through war wounds might also be understood in terms of abjection" (90).  Jarvis traces the tropes employed by American institutions that allow soldiers and citizens to "see the wounds as alien, 'not self'" (90).  She explicates this point through close readings of war novels and soldiers' stories.  Jarvis's voice sometimes shifts dramatically within chapters, from research-intensive accounts to textual explications that are sometimes scant on citation; still, her message is forcefully delivered. 

             As she traces issues of race within the American war machine and without in the enemy camp, Jarvis is particularly interested in how images of Philippine and Chinese bodies are recast to imply "ally" instead of "other," while metaphors of hunting the savage are deployed on the Japanese culture held accountable Pearl Harbor. Jarvis is quick to point out that the boon of pop ethnographies designed to educate America on foreign cultures often did little more than to perpetuate stereotypes that, in turn, perpetuated the superiority of the white war body politic. 

             In a war climate where wounds are addressed only when they can enhance the war effort at home, Jarvis explores ways in which the dead become "'texts' on which the meanings of war and nation could be inscribed" (157). Aligning her arguments with noted scholars from Julia Kristeva to Alan Friedman, Jarvis's training in literary criticism situates the vast work on the subject from history and cultural studies in a unique conversation with multiple texts, including the actual bodies of the war dead.  By the conclusion, her suggestion that Nixon, George H. Bush, and the children of World War II soldiers are all informed by the hypermasculinized body politic of America in World War II needs little explication or evidence to generate sound logic. Jarvis's compelling arguments grounded in scholarship from across the disciplines "create a broad (though certainly not complete) picture of personal and cultural narratives of male embodiment during and shortly after the Second World War" and suggest possibilities for future scholarship.  An exhaustive "Notes" section invites scholars to explore her primary sources in conjunction with these interesting connections.  Each return visit to Jarvis's fascinating text yields new insight and possibility.