미국계 유대인의 남성성 추구의 어려움 :『포트노이 병』

Abstract

This paper tries to analyse the meaning of the malady of Jewish masculinity of Portnoy’s Complaint. This novel represents how tough and painful it is when a Jewish boy tries to achieve his masculine self. According to academic researches of social scientists in 1940s and 1950s such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, Jewish men tend to be treated as boys by their domineering mothers. This kind of relationship is reflected in the Portnoy’s relation with his mother. What is worse, Jewish men had had a long history of negative images according to which they are not proper men but abnormal, hysterical and powerless like women. Portnoy’s father is portrayed as this kind of person. According to the development model of boys by Freud, boys’ achievement of masculinity requires the separation from their mothers and identification with their fathers. But Portnoy cannot carry this task because his mother is too domineering and his father is too powerless. But Roth does not present Portnoy’s problem wholly resulting from his own parents’ extraordinary personality. He relates the problem of Portnoy’s parents with their own fragile social positions in the dominant Christian white society. When Portnoy attempted to prove his masculinity through the American masculinity model, we can read his desire for assimilation into American dominant society. But this attempt turned out to fail because of his sensitive self-consciousness of Jewish identity and his guilt feeling and traditional values of daring sexual adventures. This fail led him to try the opposite way of adopting the authentic Jewish identity in Israel, the new country of patriotic Jewish people. But he is refused by an Israel girl because of his American characteristics. From the failure of Portnoy’s attempting to prove his masculinity, Roth tries to say that American Jewish masculinity cannot be achieved wholly relying on either Jewish identity or American identity. Although this novel does not show the ideal model of masculinity, the problematic aspects of Jewish American masculinity are well described.