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Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
John F. Kasson
Hill and Wang
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"Me Tarzan, You Jane. Me White, Me Better." Well, that isn't exactly verbatim from Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1914 Tarzan of the Apes, but it might as well have been. The news that Tarzan only got to be the great white father hero is not new. (Watching how the Hollywood films changed over the years-- from overtly disregardful of their native African characters to lauding them as more heroic than Tarzan-- it's clear that even Tinseltown producers caught on to the films' subtexts.) But this is only one of the points that John Kasson makes in his wonderful and engrossing look at how white maleness-- and by extension femaleness and queerness-- were invented and manufactured at the turn of the century.

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The Ape Man is Kasson's final example-- and, while illuminating, his least groundbreaking. Earlier in the book, he examines the lives and careers of two other popular cultural icons who had as much influence on how we think about men then and now. The first is Eugen Sandow, a late-Victorian strongman and physical culturalist who virtually invented what we now call body-building and gym culture. Although he got his start in Great Britain, Sandow became famous in America when he toured with Ziegfeld's Follies and was presented as "the perfect man."

Sandow was emblematic of male physical perfection and racial purity, as well as illustrative of (British) nationhood. While he was billed as "the strongest man on earth"-- a moniker that worked well on the vaudeville stage where he would performs authentic, if slightly grandiose physical feats-- Sandow also marketed another cultural value: near-naked male beauty. While ancient Greek statuary had long been admired in museums, Sandow was beauty made flesh and made accessible. Part of his income-- aside from a chain of "physical culture centers" (i.e., gyms) he opened and a "physical culture" magazine he published-- were "studio cards." These carefully unclothed photographic studies were sold after his shows and on newsstands. Sandow-- well, his body-- was both a celebration and commercialization of male beauty and sexiness. His career, particularly the studio cards, were the beginnings of commercialized gay male porn, for although they were probably purchased by as many women fans, they were also used my men as "models" upon which to form their own bodies.

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Kasson's second example of preeminent masculinity performed quite a different feat. Ehrich Weiss was born to a poor Jewish family in Budapest in 1874, but after moving to America, designing a series of audience-pleasing physical feats, and repackaging himself, he became world-famous as Henry Houdini. If Sandow represented unbridled masculinity to the masses, Houdini played to a different fantasy. Here was man enchained-- literally-- but always managing to escape and free himself. Enacting a repetitive, but powerful dream of the popular unconscious, Houdini allowed himself to be encased in chain-wrapped trunks, locked into water-filled glass cases, handcuffed, straitjacketed, and generally bound-up-- only to find the strength and the ingenuity to release himself. He represented to his fans the survival of the male body in an age when it faced unprecedented threat from the state's imposition of more and more control over the individual and, after 1918, from the incredible assault on the male body that occurring in The Great War.

Kasson garners an impressive array of documentation to prove his points-- vaudeville programs, newspaper reports, personal letters, autobiographies, and lots of photographs-- and he maps out a convincing argument that these pop-culture figures had a lasting impact on American culture. But along with these constructions of new types of masculinity, he also examines how alternative masculinities were also being made.

As Houdini was gaining fame as a hyper-masculine escape artist, Julian Eltinge was equally famous as a female impersonator both in vaudeville and on Broadway. (He was so well-known that he had a Broadway theater named for him in 1912.) Completely entrancing and confusing audiences with his "ambidextrous" abilities, Eltinge-- who began life as William Dalton-- pushed the boundaries of how audiences thought about gender on-stage and off. Men marveled at his beauty, while women came to the show, they claimed, for fashion tips. If Houdini, trained as a magician, performed physical magic, Eltinge escaped from masculinity into femininity with the same ease. While his promotional material described him as a he-man and an avid ladies man (neither particularly true), Eltinge provided a curious trap-door to the more standard and restrictive notions of masculinity that were offered by Sandow and Houdini.

In an age where Brad Pitt, Keanu Reeves, and Leonardo DiCaprio have replaced the more stalwart popular icons of masculinity, and one-time tough-guy Bruce Willis has turned in his best performance ever in The Sixth Sense (playing a sensitive, moody, and dead child psychoanalyst), we're clearly still dealing with how to be a man in this world. Kasson's book-- with its wealth of data and its smart, witty analysis-- is a great way to begin to figure out how we got to where we are, even if we still don't quite know where we're going.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com