‘Please, look at me’: Masculinity, (In)visibility and Vulnerability in Ian McEwan’s Tale of Madness

Abstract

Ian McEwan’s 1997 Enduring Love has its resolutely rational protagonist, Joe Rose, stare madness in the face once he becomes the object of another man’s obsession. Although he remains, for much of the novel, an invisible presence, Jed Parry is as central a character as Joe, whose near-monopoly on narrative voice may well relegate the former’s version of the story to the margins, yet fails to silence him. Although, as stated by Guillaume Le Blanc, the vulnerable often tend to become invisible in our society, in Enduring Love, Joe often finds himself unable to look away from Jed. By foregrounding the rarely explored madness of men, the novel simultaneously makes traditionally marginalised forms of masculinity visible, and sheds light on what often remains invisible behind the façade of hegemonic masculinities, exposed as quintessentially narrative constructs. This paper focuses on the ways in which Parry’s vulnerability seeps into a narrative which both repeats and repeals traditional processes of invisibilisation and silencing of men with mental illness, and on the (un)masking of masculinity at play in the confrontation between Joe and Jed.

Keywords

• masculinities
• madness
• mental illness
• erotomania
• (in)visibility
• invisibilisation