The Jung and the restless: The mythopoetic men's movement

Abstract

The attractiveness of the “mythopoetic men's movement,” especially as represented by poet Robert Bly's Iron John (1990), to the American “New Class” invites the rhetorician of social movements to account for the movement's appeal for cultural revitalization of American masculinity in the late 1980s. Bly creates an oral‐based “speakerly text” that introduces pieces of metaphoric clusters (e.g., dark/light, wounded/healed, soft/hard, savage/wild) attractive to men experiencing the discontents of the New Class. The narratives of the movement offer the power of stories, the power of status, and the power of essentialism. The argument for essentialism signals the greatest departure of this movement from previous New Class social movements and creates a gender division in the class.