HOUDINI, SILVERMAN, "THE PERFECT MAN" & "THE PERFECT WOMAN"

Last week we compared Houdini to Leonardo da Vinci; this week it's Tarzan and, woke as we are, Pocahontas.

We're putting the burden of proof on our late friend and benefactor Ken Silverman. He can handle it: he won the Pulitzer Prize, and he did the ultimate vanishing act two years ago.

The great thing about writing is that the writer can speak to you from beyond the grave. We ran across this delightful piece of Ken's from 18 years ago, when white maleness was already a thing, but not yet a constitutional crisis:

Houdini wanted to be taken seriously. He protested his identification in Who's Who as ''magician,'' asking to be listed instead as ''actor, inventor and author.'' Starting out in grubby sideshows and 10-cent circuses -- as the self he ruefully called ''Dime Museum Houdini'' -- he wanted to be known for what he became: pioneer aviator and film producer; university lecturer and historian of magic; man of the theater, starring on Broadway beside Lunt and Fontanne.

John F. Kasson and Adam Phillips take Houdini seriously indeed, although not in the way he wanted. For Kasson, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Houdini was ideological cousin to the Prussian strongman Eugen Sandow and to Tarzan of the Apes. He stood only about 5 feet 5 inches tall, but he cultivated his little-Hercules physique and performed as a ''magus of manliness.'' His muscular escapes spoke to American males standardized at work by corporate life, intimidated in public by the all-powerful state and challenged at home by the New Woman. His 30-year career helped counter their fears of the emasculating effects of modern culture and to inspire in them an ideal of revitalized manhood.

Houdini himself subscribed to this philosophy. He expressed it in his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt, author of the best-seller The Strenuous Life. 

"Col. Roosevelt and I have been friends for many years," Houdini wrote.

[Theodore Roosevelt] came to believe that modern urban life was a threat to white middle class specifically and the nation generally.... Roosevelt believed that nations, races, and civilizations did not remain always young. Roosevelt ascribed to a theory of stages of development ... which he applied to races, nations, and civilizations. 

First was savagism, a state of disorganized chaos. Barbarism was the next stage when military virtues were developed. The third stage, civilized, was one of “social efficiency,” where military virtues were combined with a love for order and race fecundity. However, the final stages were marked by diminished virile virtues, a love of ease, softness, willful sterility, a contemplative life, and material possessions. At the end of the evolutionary continuum, lamented Roosevelt, lay the specter of racial and national decadence.... 

The fate of those that lost the primary virtues was clear for Roosevelt. Greed, luxury, materialism, and sensuality ate like acids into the fiber of the upper class. Perhaps most important to Roosevelt, decadence occurred when the average citizen lost the fighting edge. Roosevelt feared that entire peoples, including Americans, lusted after ease and luxury, sought refinement, desired culture, and generally risked losing the rugged, virile virtues.... In particular, they thought the demands of urban life drained the individual’s supply of “nerve force” or “nervous energy,” resulting in “nervelessness,” nervousness, or neurasthenia. As explained by George Beard in 1881, “The chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization.” 

Those who exhibited worry, melancholia, nervous exhaustion, irritability, and a paralysis of the will were diagnosed as neurasthenics, who, according to Gail Bederman, “were highly evolved white middle-class who had overtaxed their vital energies by over stimulating themselves with civilization.” For the neurasthenic, illness was caused by civilization itself.  

Not only was neurasthenia associated with the stresses of urbanization and competitive business environment, critics also held writers the likes of Sarah Hale, Lydia Sigourney, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Stowe and Louisa May Alcott accountable for producing a romanticized, over-civilized Protestant culture that endangered middle class American character. Middle class Americans felt themselves ensnared in the paradoxes of their own progress. Caught between an imagined, fading American past and an uncertain industrial, technological future, reformers felt a particular responsibility to retrieve that past in order to take a hand in determining and shaping America’s future.  -- from Degeneration, Gender, and American Identity, in LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 

The lodestar for ideal womanhood, we learn, was Pocahontas - a great heroine, and herself quite an escape artist, like Houdini. Paging Senator Warren: to be compared to Pocahontas is an honor, not an insult.

The Pocahontas Narrative in American Literature 

The Pocahontas narrative originates out of the well-known story of Pocahontas, the daughter of chief Powhatan... John Smith, one of the English settlers who arrived in Virginia in April 1607, was captured by a hunting party of Powhatan Indians while exploring the Chickahominy River. Brought into chief Powhatan’s presence at the capital city of Werowocomoco, Smith was saved from certain death by the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas.... 

In a 1616 letter to Queen Anne, Smith wrote “… at the minute of my execution she [Pocahontas] hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine; and not only that, but also prevailed with her father, that I was safely conducted to Jamestown.” 

Smith claims in his Generall Historie that Pocahontas aided the colonists during that first year. He reports that every “foure or five dayes, Pocahontas with her attendants, brought him so much provision, that saved many of their lives, that els for all this had starved with hunger.” 

Later, in 1613, Pocahontas was captured by the English Captain Argall and held in Henricus for nearly a year as security for English prisoners of war and equipment captured by Powhatan during the first Anglo-Powhatan war (1610-1614)... During her captivity... Pocahontas met tobacco farmer John Rolfe, whose wife and son had died during the journey to Virginia. Rolfe applied to Governor Thomas Dale and was granted permission to marry Pocahontas. They were married April 5, 1614, and lived together for the next two years on Rolfe’s plantation. She bore Rolfe a son, Thomas, in 1615. Subsequently, Governor Dale sent the couple with their son to England to publicize the success of Jamestown colony and to promote investment in the venture. 

Arriving in England six weeks after the death of Shakespeare, the now famous couple, along with perhaps eleven other Powhatans, was entertained at a variety of social events in and around south and southeast England, including a presentation to the King of England at Whitehall. 

....The Pocahontas narrative becomes less about portraying a historical female Indian and more a vehicle for artists and authors to represent idealizes versions of womanhood, character, and American identity...In this case, as the daughter of a Powhatan chief, the royal lineage of Pocahontas was stressed over her aboriginal roots. In this way, her aristocratic and noble “disposition” was transmitted to her descendants, avoiding the possibility of a savage lurking somewhere beneath. 

Constructions of the Pocahontas Narrative

 Pocahontas figured prominently in nineteenth-century American literary projects that attempted to offer American rather than European themes. Narratives, poems, and plays recreated her character in frontier romances, sang her praises from the pages of literary magazines, and staged her rescue of John Smith at popular playhouses throughout the nation.... 

In this way, whenever the heroine is a young native woman who in one way or another acts as a protector of the male leader of the white race, it is fair to say that Pocahontas would have been called to mind. In other words, there were many Pocahontas who functioned as saviors in antebellum romances....  

                          --LUX

They say history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. In the words of our President, never a Rough Rider: "We'll see."