Emotional stoicism and affective masculinities in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

ABSTRACT

Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) offers a compelling phenomenology of contemporary masculine affect in the story of troubled young white men on a college baseball team who struggle with ‘emotional stoicism’, a term gender scholars use to describe how boys and men are taught to hide feelings and vulnerabilities that Western culture has long associated with girls and women. Harbach’s novel explores the association between masculine ‘stoicism’ and the eponymous philosophy of Stoicism, which developed exercises to extirpate emotions. Harbach finds in the impossible quest for Stoic apatheia an analogy to the similarly futile pursuit of hegemonic masculinities, both fruitlessly following the logic of what Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’, a concept that can help vividly illustrate how some Stoic philosophy distorts the affective lives of men. Yet the novel redeems elements of Stoicism, revealing how masculinities that encourage a competitive and controlling orientation toward others fundamentally contradict central Stoic ethical teachings. A re-envisioned, non-sexist Stoicism, the novel implies, might help boys and men to avoid the most harmful manifestations of hegemonic, ‘stoic’ masculinity.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotional stoicism
• affect
• emotion
• Ancient Stoicism
• hegemonic masculinity
• sports literature
• whiteness studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Chap. 2 of Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men (2018).

2 In the best critical study of the novel, Ryan Lackey highlights the novel’s ‘positive’ depictions of ‘inclusive’ gender and sexuality (2021, p. 221).

3 The novel may support recent claims that changing, ‘inclusive’ gender norms are better understood as occurring primarily in certain communities of ‘white, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied men’ (De Boise & Hearn, 2017, p. 781).

4 See, for instance, the special issue of NORMA (13.3-4) dedicated to this topic in 2018.

5 See Sam de Boise’s editorial, ‘Is Masculinity Toxic?’ (2019) for some helpful warnings about labeling masculine identities.

6 Some early, lesser-known Stoic writers did advocate forms of gender equality; see Grahn-Wilder (2018).

7 Stoics sometimes referred to pathē as ‘irrational,’ but in a different sense than Pella implies. A Stoic pathē, reports Plutarch, ‘has nothing irrational in itself, but is called ‘irrational’ when it is carried away by the excessiveness of the impulse toward some ill-suited object’ (qtd. in Graver, 2007, p. 234).

8 On perfectionism and masculinity, see Adams (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathanial B. Smith

Nathanial B. Smith is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in literary analysis and writing, including a course on sports literature. His research focuses on gender, medicine, affect, and the reception of ancient philosophy in medieval and early modern English poetry and drama.