The American Adam—caught between the myth of innocence and the guilt of perpetration

Abstract

The collective sense of male identity in the US is founded on a mythic hero that has permeated American literature since the nineteenth century: the American Adam. He is an innocent outsider, living free to conquer the “Wild West” within or—with the loss of the geographical frontier—beyond the national borders of the United States. Through the military machine, a man can release himself from the demands of society and recreate his sense of innocent masculinity. This male ego ideal con-tinues to be influential as the guiding principle for the political leadership of the USA. This is exemplified by psychoanalysing a documentary film about a Vietnam veteran and by an in-depth comparison of the “Adamic” quality of two recent presidents with two of Melville’s literary protagonists: Billy Budd and the Confidence-Man.