Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man by Alexis L. Boylan

Author:Alexis L. Boylan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Figure 3.2 Charles Dana Gibson, Advice to Caddies—You will save time by keeping an eye on the ball, not the player, 1900; Publishing Co./Life Publishing Co./Museum of the City of New York. X2011.34.580

Men here are fodder for women who pay them no mind. Men also have to suffer competition; there is no playing hard to get when another man is ready to take your place. Women, popular visual culture opined, not only had their way with these disempowered or “tiny men”; they had their choice of them. The odds are all wrong for men in these images; courtship was a fraught endeavor with little chance of men’s success.

In one sense, these illustrations were simply pulling from a long tradition of depicting love and courtship as a humorous game to be won or lost; Gibson’s silly men might be seen as the heirs to Mount’s baffled sportsman. Yet in Mount’s image, only one man loses, so to speak, and he does so because of his own personal failings. Viewers are not meant to identify closely with the sportsman, as his inadequacies are evident. He is not ready for love, manhood, or to care for the angelic woman in white unlike the attentive and more serious suitor. Again, Mount assures the viewer that the better man has won. The better man is attentive, well dressed, worthy; he is secure in his place in the cycles of heterosexuality and his role in the cycles of nationhood. Finally, whiteness itself has triumphed: the “better” white man has won the day, but no matter what, still an image of whiteness bound to heterosexual visibility.

Gibson’s image is more threatening about gender, race, and national balance. None of the men in his images are doing anything visibly wrong. On the contrary, they are all well dressed, attentive, and looking to aid the lady golfer. Driving home this point, Gibson provides a variety of types of white men—some older, some younger, each dressed in their own individual but stylish ways. No matter. The men are made irrelevant not through their actions, but through the power of the Gibson Girl. As viewers, Gibson did not mean for our sympathies to lie with the woman, but with the men made to look like fools.23 Masculinity itself is diminished; the joke is on all men who might have thought their gender would afford them some authority over women. Visualizing a diminished white manhood directly reflected the dialogues of Roosevelt and countless scholars and politicians who were consumed with the science of eugenics and narratives of white racial suicide and anxiety over the ethnic and racial composition of the United States with immigration and migration. While this new woman might seem physically appealing, according to the logic of Gibson’s images, she fundamentally erodes and undermines the importance of white men in this modern moment. Gibson’s function, like Mount’s, was to visualize heterosexual courtship as a platform for speaking to national character, as a visual code to determine models of citizenship. Mount might

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