“Engineering the New Male” in James Lasdun’s pre-#MeToo Academic Novel The Horned Man

Abstract

James Lasdun’s pre-#MeToo novel The Horned Man (2002) tells the story of a British academic, Lawrence Miller, teaching Gender Studies at a college in upstate New York, where he is also a member of the Sexual Harassment Committee. Reflecting on sexual politics at a US university campus, and a broader “continental drift of the sexes”, involving the “engineering [of] the New Male”, Miller’s first-person account both chronicles the changing reality in the West at the turn of the 21st century, and departs from reality, as it becomes increasingly unreliable and Kafkaesque. Tracing the novel’s intertextual and cultural references, the paper interprets the complicated and confusing tale of confusion, suspected conspiracy, mistaken and appropriated identity, cross-dressing and femicide as a symbolic expression of a struggle between “new” and “old” masculinity. Lasdun’s prescient engagement with issues which in the “real world” had to wait almost two decades for the emergence of the #MeToo movement to become widely discussed is read from a feminist perspective as a representation of the ongoing tortuous process of transition towards more equitable gender relations.

Keywords

• the #metoo movement
• academic novel
• gender
• toxic masculinity
• crisis of masculinity
• sexual harassment