Emotional stoicism and affective masculinities in Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

Abstract

ABSTRACT Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) offers a compelling phenomenology of contemporary masculine affect in the story of troubled young white men on a college baseball team who struggle with ‘emotional stoicism’, a term gender scholars use to describe how boys and men are taught to hide feelings and vulnerabilities that Western culture has long associated with girls and women. Harbach’s novel explores the association between masculine ‘stoicism’ and the eponymous philosophy of Stoicism, which developed exercises to extirpate emotions. Harbach finds in the impossible quest for Stoic apatheia an analogy to the similarly futile pursuit of hegemonic masculinities, both fruitlessly following the logic of what Lauren Berlant terms ‘cruel optimism’, a concept that can help vividly illustrate how some Stoic philosophy distorts the affective lives of men. Yet the novel redeems elements of Stoicism, revealing how masculinities that encourage a competitive and controlling orientation toward others fundamentally contradict central Stoic ethical teachings. A re-envisioned, non-sexist Stoicism, the novel implies, might help boys and men to avoid the most harmful manifestations of hegemonic, ‘stoic’ masculinity.