Angry Men.

I have been thinking about men and anger. Angry men. There is a difference there-- an angry man and a man who gets angry are different.

And for the record, I'm not thinking about this because I have any particularly angry men close to me.

This semester I have a full-time schedule at school, but I'm actually only taking one class that I show up for. My other six hours are thesis hours, and I get to work on this at home (which is a huge blessing, and sometimes a curse). The class I am taking is Southern Literature.

The first book we read was William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and we discussed this last week. This was my first foray into Faulkner. I bought The Sound and the Fury years ago, but as with so many of my book-hoarder purchases, I have yet to actually read it. For some reason I was dreading and a bit trepidation about approaching Faulkner unguided. After reader the former, I am sad I haven't started reading Faulkner sooner.

But that is actually not the point of this post. I guess that is really to encourage you, if you haven't read him, to pick up old WF. I think starting with As I Lay Dying is a good idea because it is his self-proclaimed tour de force, and is also one of the two books he won a Pulitzer Prize for (and, oh yeah, a Nobel Peace Prize in Lit). It is also amazingly modern in the sense of the modernist movement, and also quintessentially southern. So anyway...

So in this book there are a slew of maddening characters, one of whom is named Jewel. He is fiercely angry. He has a hard time expressing himself at any point, and even the one thing he loves (his horse), he abuses. This is enclosed in an examination about the power or lack thereof of language, but even if that weren't present, the anger issue seems paramount to Jewel as a character.

My professor mentioned that when she was raising her sons, she read a book on parenting boys. One major thing that the book mentioned is that men turn to anger as an emotion because it is socially acceptable. This means that often we see men express anger in lieu of other emotions-- even happiness, excitement, and love. The point she was making was to help us see Jewel in that light, not singular and simply angry, but that perhaps his anger is a shield or a tool for other emotions.

I think this idea is really interesting. I happen to be married to a man who is not particularly angry, and is, on the whole, very good at expressing himself, even if it takes a bit of prodding from time to to time. I have brothers and a father who do this well too, at times. But I know I remember, particularly in their teen years, my brothers being angry. I remember feeling angry as a teenager too, so maybe that doesn't mean anything, but maybe it does. (and for the record, none of us really had any reason to be angry... we all had our issues, but I especially had nothing to be such a jerk about-- sorry mom!)

I wonder how real this is. I don't have children, and I don't really interact with little boys well enough to know whether anger is an issue at a young age. It seems like, if it is an impulse that grows out of being socially acceptable, it wouldn't exist in younger children unless their fathers are particularly angry. I buy into some of the discussion about gender construction, and I think this might be a place where we can see that in action. Girls can be happy, in love, ecstatic, sad, afraid, etc-- after all, we're overly emotional and uber-sensitive, aren't we? But men... if you express these things as a man-- are you less of a man?

I think we're moving away from this, but I want to know what you think. I honestly haven't read much about this, but I've been mulling over it. I know there is a difference in the way Matthew and I deal with just about everything, and we express emotion in different ways too. Is this because he's limited to socially acceptable ways of dealing with stress (play video games! have a beer! don't you dare cry!) as opposed to the ways I do (cry! cry! eat! eat! bake something! blog about it! cry some more! take a shower! exercise!)?

What do you think?

Still mulling...