Literary Masculinities and Men’s Emotionality: Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers as a Case Study

Abstract

This article examines grief and psychic pain in Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015). It is argued that the novel subverts the pervasive association between men’s suffering, psychopathology and violence in fiction, as the protagonist’s ‘split identity' transcends the deeply masculinised trope of the raging double. A review of approaches to emotionality in Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities is provided, with particular attention to the literary representation of men’s grief. Using psychoanalysis, Porter’s Crow is seen as representing a foray into the Kristevan maternal semiotic, taking the novel’s aesthetic innovation as politically significant in recasting masculinities as fundamentally fluid. Drawing on affect theory, grief is taken as a political emotion capable of transgressing traditional scripts of masculinity by severing its associations with wage labour and imperviousness, and reconfiguring it instead around vulnerability and an ethics of care.