| This dissertation contributes to growing critical efforts to interrogate constructions of whiteness and masculinity in American literature, while also considering a series of widely-consumed texts that are finally receiving critical attention. In this project, I focus on the figure of the solitary white man navigating urban spaces, and trace this figure through its permutations in 1930s--1950s popular representation. Lower-middle to working class, unmarried, childless and without close ties, he navigates his way through a city figured as threatening, corrupt, even "unmanning.";Specifically, I argue that urban narratives focused on the solitary white man reflect anxieties about race and gender. Deriving in part from past models of the frontier or Western hero, this modern urban figure spans a series of cultural crises, including Depression-era class anxieties, World War II gender realignments and Cold War containment panic. I begin by examining how he functions in the popular works of hardboiled novelists Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, who provide compelling case studies for the tough white guy's confrontations with urban exoticism confrontations suffused with both pleasure and danger over racial and gender indeterminacies. Likewise, this dissertation investigates how the 1940s film adaptations of these texts handle such confrontations, arguing that the films assert the solidity of gender binaries and evacuate or suppress most of the texts' racial tensions. Moving into the 1950s and '60s, I consider how African-American novelist Chester Himes, writing in the wake of white hardboiled fiction's popularity, offers a compelling, absurdist revision of Cain and Chandler, reversing the white male perspective through the introduction of his African-American police detective heroes, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Himes's crime novels both revise the white male figure and risk recapitulating hardboiled gender ideologies in the process. This dissertation ultimately carries the reader through multiple cultural representations of the white male in urban space---in literature, in pulp paperback, in cinema and in popular consciousness. |
