SOURCE: Speranza, Tony. “Renegotiating the Frontier of American Manhood: Maxwell Anderson's High Tor.” American Drama 5, no. 1 (fall 1995): 16-35.

“In these new times,” asks Lise, Maxwell Anderson's spectral ingenue in High Tor, “are all men shadow? / All men lost” (58)? Coming during the waning years of the Great Depression, these questions about the substance and location of American men resonated beyond the walls of the Martin Beck theatre. In January 1937, Anderson teamed with director Guthrie McClintic to bring together on stage frontiers past and present in an attempt to locate within the fractured corporate and industrial economy of the twentieth-century a substantive ideal of American manhood. Anderson used frontier imagery and revised American folklore to provide American men with a past and future that made sense amidst a depression.

Unlike Washington Irving's hero, Maxwell Anderson's Rip Van Winkle character runs toward domestic responsibility. By 1937, Rip's Catskill retreat no longer sustained the dreams of American manhood. The frontier individualist needed to make room in his life for a family. The hero came down the mountain to look for a new frontier with his bride. In High Tor, the playful hunter of the past became the family provider of the future by investing himself in the teetering capitalist system. By rooting High Tor in folklore, Anderson attempted to revise a pioneer tradition into one in which the ideal American man heads a family as sole breadwinner, and the New Woman gives up her independence to be his wife.

During the Depression, American men walked into an uncertain economic future. With industry failing and the likelihood of economic independence dwindling, the country looked for leadership to a physically challenged father figure. Economic collapse challenged the traditional independent, pioneering ideal of American manhood. Among the places middle-class men went to work through these challenges was the theatre. In High Tor, the frontiersman rises out of the ashes of modernity to reconcile the pioneering ideal with corporate capitalism.

Lise, Anderson's feminine addition to the ghostly crew of Dutch sailors responsible for Rip Van Winkle's twenty-year nap, questions modern American manhood. She and her time lost compatriots hail from the very beginning of what historian Frederick Jackson Turner called “the first period of American history” (58). Turner wrote these words in 1893, at the end of that period, an era during which, according to Turner, the existence and the idea of the frontier between nature and civilization defined American men.

Despite the closure of the physical frontier and the emergence of new technologies that linked even the most isolated communities (Wiebe), the idea of the frontier continued as a conceptual space in which playwrights worked out manly ideals. In 1909, Clyde Fitch, for example, fashioned urban locations as the frontiers of the 20th-century in The City. In their comedy, The Cave Girl, George Middleton and Guy Bolton used the frontier as a site to mature a city boy into a man. Only the Depression rocked the faith in the frontier as an idea that could shape American men. For instance, in 1934, playwright Robert Sherwood likened to fossils the romantic and rugged individualists Alan Squier and Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. The success of Anderson's High Tor indicates that in 1937 ideas of the frontier continued to exert a powerful, yet ambiguous, influence on American masculine identity.

Although its romantic and vibrant hero clings to his frontier life, High Tor represents that frontier as a lonely mountain threatened by the blade of a steam shovel. It is the home of ghostly 17th-century explorers and a dying, last-of-his-race, Indian. In fact, one contemporary critic found the dead Dutch crew to be part of the mountain. “Mr. McClintic's production,” she wrote, “has made the ghosts so much of the texture of the rocks that their illusiveness is uncanny” (Wyatt 129). This ethereal environment, like a mountain fog, envelops Anderson's protagonist Van Van Dorn. Van, a modern day Rip Van Winkle, lives in a dream world where the disappearing Catskill frontier still shapes his identity, like it did before him for the American Indians and his Dutch colonial ancestors.

One or two centuries earlier, Van's resourceful self-sufficience would have won him a successful pioneering existence amid a sparse community of like-minded individuals. In 1937, however, Van is a dinosaur. John, the Tor's last surviving Indian, begins the play with a melancholy speech in which he looks forward to his final rest. A trap rock company eagerly awaits its opportunity to pound Van's mountain into gravel for constructing highways. Judith, the independent working woman Van loves, although not quite the harping, “termagant wife” of Rip Van Winkle (Irving), demands that Van enter the 20th-century and work a regular job to secure a future for them and any children they might have.

Van faces a crisis in the first act. Judith and he enjoy a sunset picnic when two representatives of the trap rock company, Skimmerhorn and Biggs, emerge from the woods. These overwrought and overweight modern day Stephano and Trinculo offer to buy the tor from Van. When Van sends Skimmerhorn and Biggs, huffing and wheezing, down the mountain empty handed, Judith leaves Van, vowing never to return.

With nighttime and a storm coming on, Judith safely descends the mountain, but not the dishonest duo of Skimmerhorn and Biggs. They had hoped to pay Van far less than the authorized payment and pocket the difference. If they make it down the mountain, they intend to declare Van incompetent and take the tor. However, through adventures with bank robbers, a Caliban of a ghost, and a steam shovel, Skimmerhorn and Biggs provide much of the comic relief.

Meanwhile, the storm stirs the time-trapped crew of Henry Hudson's Onrust, who await Hudson's return on the Half Moon. While the majority of the crew accept their spectral state, Lise, the captain's wife, longs to feel warm blood in her veins. Encouraged by Dewitt, a curmudgeonly silenus, Lise seeks an encounter with Van, a kindred spirit. She presents herself to Van as a woman equally at home on his mountain. As she hoped, Van falls in love with her, but the centuries between them prove too wide to bridge. In the end, Van must choose between fighting alone for his mountain, the symbol of an American pioneering manhood, or selling the mountain and moving off to a new frontier “out West” with Judith, who has returned.

Pulitzer prize winning playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote High Tor towards the end of this decade of fermentation for American theatre (Gassner). Although not out of economic trouble, the United States was emerging from the dreariest years of the Depression. More than Anderson's timing, however, makes High Tor an especially clear picture of the soul of American manhood. The play examines an ideal American man by evoking an identification between the 1930s American man, the first European explorers of the Hudson Valley and American Indians. Although High Tor seems at first highly critical of modern capitalism as it threatens this trinity, it finds a way to reconcile this traditional American manhood with the demands of industrial capitalism via heterosexual union.

Until the Depression, a man's identity as breadwinner and head of the family was seldom questioned, despite the increases in women's economic power and work opportunities that occurred in the 1920s. Heavy industrial jobs, traditionally the province of white men, were among the greatest casualties of the economic crash. Service jobs, traditionally left to women and African American men, suffered proportionally fewer losses. While white men squeezed black men out of job opportunities, the gender lines of service remained strong, and often women became the sole earners in a family (Kessler-Harris 250-59). Robbed of the sense of economic independence and self-sufficiency afforded them by adequate wages for industrial and corporate work, white men in the 1930s looked to assess blame for their loss. They also looked for new, stronger moorings to which they could attach their masculine identity.

Much of the national popular debate regarding gender voiced a backlash against women's new opportunities. As historian Barbara Melosh points out, the decade of the 1930s was the first period of social policy change without an accompanying increase in feminism and female power (1). Writing in a 1934 issue of Scribner's Magazine, Thomas H. Uzzel and V. E. LeRoy identified what they called “the decline of the male” (19-25). At the root of this perceived erosion of masculinity, Uzzel and LeRoy found a separation of men from America's pioneering tradition due to increased leisure time and the growing economic and cultural power of women. Social critics debated the New Deal in gendered terms: some saw it as an extension of masculine technocratic virtues (Seldes); others described it as nurturing and feminine (Stone).

Theatre historians also examined their subject in gender terms. Albert McCleery and Carl Glick, writing a history of civic theatres in 1939, described theatre as the frontier of the 1930s. Men in the 1930s, McCleery and Glick argued, saw the amateur theatre as an important and powerful cultural institution and so rescued it from the control of women, renaming “Little Theatres” “Civic Theatres” and working to make community theatre flourish as it never had before (16-20). In her study of manhood and womanhood in the New Deal, Barbara Melosh details the complex manipulations of gender ideals in the Federal Theatre Project. Most significant to my study is her identification of the “comradely ideal” in artwork and theatre dealing with images of the 19th-Century American frontier (33-52, 97-100). The theatre of the 1930s, both public and private, wrestled with difficult issues of economics, gender and race relations, war, and peace.

In 1937 Anderson joined the fray and presented American manhood in crisis. Anderson, however, not only created a hero who, in the words of critic Charles Dexter, “would return to a lusty past of roaming adventures” (7), but he placed his own manhood on the line attempting to revive a “lusty past” of manly Elizabethan drama and American folk tales for his contemporary audience. According to Grenville Vernon writing for The Commonweal, High Tor echoes Elizabethan drama not out of imitation, “but because the man himself [Anderson] possesses a freedom of thought and a masculine daring in the expression of that thought, such as was the rule in the Elizabethan age” (132).

Much of Anderson's stormy play alludes to Shakespeare's colonial drama, The Tempest. When Anderson's Caliban, an ancient Dutch mariner, comes across the trap-rock crooks, Skimmerhorn and Biggs, taking refuge from the storm under the same overcoat, he reenacts, moment for moment, Caliban's discovery of Shakespeare's besotted servants, Stephano and Trinculo.

The Dutchman also belongs to the same ghostly seafaring band that induced Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle to slumber too soundly for too long in the Catskills. Thus, with style and literary allusions as well as plot, Anderson placed in the context of the Great Depression the voice and figure of an ideal American manhood: self-sufficient brave, explorer and pioneer. He struck a nerve in an age when men felt their independence threatened, and theatre professionals were self-conscious about their supposed complicity in this cultural change through their pandering to a feminine audience.

Theatre critic Vernon applauded the choice of High Tor by the Drama Critics Circle as best play of 1937. Describing Anderson's writing as “extraordinarily vital,” he used masculinist terms to laud the playwright for “the mastery of his technique” and the “power of imagery” in the play. It was the manliness of Anderson's writing, however, that Vernon found most important. “What is most significant of all,” Vernon wrote, “is that he is masculine—there is bone and sinew in his writing as there is in his thought. In an age in which writing is too often ugly or neurotic, in which the expression is by turns brutal and effeminate, Anderson is at once male and wholesome” (132). Yet, the admiration of High Tor was hardly unanimous among the critics. It took eleven ballots before High Tor gained sufficient support to win the Drama Critics Circle prize (Nathan 65-67).

Perhaps indicative of the complexity and subjectivity of gender ideals, other critics attacked as unmasculine the verse prized as virile by Vernon. Mary M. Colum found Anderson's verse “not vital enough.” “They lack muscle,” she wrote of the playwright's lines. Anderson's poetry seemed to Colum little more than feminine decoration: “Without the power of getting this tone, what Yeats called manful energy, verse in plays can never be more than ornamental” (353). Douglas Gilbert acknowledged that “as a fairy rumination” High Tor “is thumped up with considerable vigor.” But, he ultimately found this “fey lesson of primeval beauty made sordid in a world of crass realism” to be “a fake” because Van, “a virile Rover Boy,” sells out in the end (114).

Brooks Atkinson called High Tor “the gustiest fantasy in the American Drama” (Anderson's High Tor 15). Thus, Atkinson joined the critics like Vernon and John Mason Brown in asserting the virility of High Tor despite its feminine form of fantasy. Brown, citing its sound thinking, satisfying poetry and American humor, wrote, “The play is strong where most fantasies are weak” (155).

Generally, the realism of 1930s drama was seen as more masculine in its form and intended audience than the fantasies and melodramas associated with the “feminine” culture of the 1920s. Burgess Meredith, according to some critics, as Van Van Dorn, supplied much of the realism that provided “bone and sinew” to Anderson's fantasy.

Atkinson, for example, wrote, “Burgess Meredith knows how to translate the power of Mr. Anderson's writing into the vitality of character” (Fantasy X, 1). If it were not for Burgess Meredith, “whose quality for manly pathos makes a person of Van,” according to Douglas Gilbert, Van might have been “but a stubborn Boy Scout quoting Thoreau” (14). Yet, for all his “manly pathos,” Meredith could not convince Gilbert that Van represented a real American hero. Like Edith J. R. Isaacs, Gilbert saw the similarity between Van and the characters in Hart and Kaufman's 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play about an individualistic tax-evader named Vanderhof (176). Gilbert notes, however, “Grandpa wouldn't have given up his mountain” (14).

The acclaim received by High Tor and You Can't Take It With You (Hart and Kaufman) in 1937 speaks both to the renewed popularity of an independent, self-sufficient manhood and to the belief that modern forces were robbing men of their individuality. Kaufman and Hart offered pure wish fulfillment as Martin Vanderhof (Grandpa) provided a home in which oppressed and oppressors alike escaped modern demands of conformity and followed their deepest wishes. The Vanderhof house, like High Tor, is a sanctuary from modernity in an idealized past. The Vanderhof's, however, beat back all challenges. Unlike Kaufman and Hart, then, Anderson, attempted to purchase some philosophical ground amidst modern society on which to set his pioneering individual.

Van's high ground above the Hudson River, however, is not the place to make this purchase. Modern industrial society has already caught up to High Tor. A steam shovel stands at the edge of the mountain ready to tear into it. Modern society in High Tor is hostile to Van's kind of manhood. Already Van must travel much farther than Rip Van Winkle, as far away as the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, to maintain his economic independence and survive. Modern institutions, equivalent in Van's mind for their capacity to deny men their freedom, lie within view of the tor. To Van, both the penitentiary and the Chevrolet plant on the Hudson are prisons. If you work in the factory and buy a car, Van explains, “you put in your time / to pay for the goddam thing. If you get in a hurry / and steal a car, they put you in Sing Sing first, / and then you work out your time” (11). To Van, a car merely offers an illusion of the freedom he owns by living off the earth.

Van's fiancee Judith, however, sees things differently. A car to this “thoroughly modern Millie” provides transportation to a safe and secure life earned by men of ability (11). Judith works as a stenographer in a hotel. Douglas Gilbert describes Judith as “a lass of flesh, dumb and comfortable and incurious, whose tresses, meet for vine leaves, are bound with figurative typewriter ribbons” (14). But as a child of hard times, Judith stands with her feet firmly planted on modern ground. She understands Van and his romanticism and, despite her love for him, refuses to share in the rural poverty his lifestyle demands.

In the opening scene, Judith resembles Mrs. Van Winkle. Her unforgiving rigidity seems calculated to villainize her. By play's end, however, it is clear that Judith merely pushes Van towards a manhood compatible with the dependent womanhood for which she would trade her independence. By the end of the first scene, she leaves Van alone to defend his mountain. Under siege, he refuses to sell, entrenching his dying breed of American masculinity.

Anderson constructed Van as essentially American by identifying his woodsman with other symbols of lost America: a Native American and the specters of the first Europeans to settle in the Hudson Valley. In an essay on Hart Crane's The Bridge, Jared Gardner identified in the literature of the 1920s the use of Native Americans to symbolize an ideal racial identity for all Americans that side-stepped issues of biological descendence from European races. “As this inheritance was theorized by writers of the 1920s,” Gardner wrote, “the cultural embrace of the Indian allows for the rejection of Old World genealogy in favor of a new kind of inheritance, an American self” (25).

High Tor begins with a monologue by John, the last Indian of a group that used to hunt and live on the tor. He announces his end is near, “I have heard / the dead women calling upward from the earth” (4). As Judith precedes her man into modernity, the women of John's race have preceded him in falling to the advancing industrialism. Like Judith warning Van, John's female voices remind him of his obsolescence, they tell him, “‘… you are no longer welcome where you walk …’” (4). Van and John share similar relations to their women and a last-of-their-kind status. Van also states explicitly his identification with the Indian: “Every night I come back here like the Indian / to get a fill of it” (13). Both Van and the Indian are in a place out of time. Anderson gives both men equal claim to the high ground by virtue of their heritage: John the last of the original owners, and Van the last with a clear line of descent from the early Dutch settlers (21).

For all his earthly vitality, Van remains like his Dutch forebearers: “Wraithlike, half-effaced” (31) in opposition to the forces of industrialization besieging him. Van seemingly must choose between being a man with what Lise describes as “spectres of an old time” and being a man in the modern world. Fat and greedy, the male ambassadors from this world make it seem less than inviting. Skimmerhorn and Biggs tear up the countryside for profit, leaving only devastation behind a facade of palisades. Van sees the modern world in terms of these men: “All their world's / made up of fat men doing tricks with laws / to manage tides and root up hills” (58). Van asserts the devolution of men. Their Dutch ancestors were men, but Skimmerhorn and Biggs represent “[a] race of grubs bred down from men!” (58). Anderson's scripting of crooked businessmen seems to uphold Van's description and suggests that a critique of industrial capitalism resides somewhere within High Tor. Indeed, Charles E. Dexter writing for the communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, asserted upon seeing the play, “With little modification his [Anderson's] ideas could electrify that vast audience which awaits fighting words” (7).

Anderson in High Tor also levied heavy criticism at state intervention in the lives of individual men. Although relief money buys the same as other money, Van insists it's “Bad for the stomach, though / to live on humble pie.” Thus, to Van, modern American men, “grubs,” sold their independence for relief checks while he continues to eke out a living off the land. Anderson did, however, give Van a consciousness raised enough to understand that greedy capitalists like Biggs and Skimmerhorn control the situation. At one point, Van threatens to dump the duo down a cliff to show them “how it feels / when you kick out the props from under men / and slide 'em on the relief rolls” (90). However, Van clearly sees government assistance as eroding manly independence.

If government relief fails American manhood, so too does unprincipled engagement with industrial capitalism. The obesity of Anderson's comic characters symbolized their undisciplined appetites, their susceptibility to the evils of modernism. These men too, however, have their heritage. Anderson gave Skimmerhorn and Biggs an ancestor among the Dutch sailors. Dewitt is a man of bluster and moral weakness easily seduced by the appearance of wealth and power available with modern capital. He finds a bit of the stolen bank money and becomes convinced it has supernatural powers. He takes the bills, announcing, “I'm hanged if it's not noticeable at once, a sort of Dutch courage infused into the joints and tissues from the mere pocketing up of their infernal numbered papers” (74). Intoxicated by the heady aura of paper money, Dewitt stares down the bank robbers and tries to seduce an unwilling Judith. However, despite his assertions, “You're a man, DeWitt!” (74), the totems of industrial capitalism alone cannot purchase for him a modern manly existence. He remains a ghost, represented in flesh only by his descendants, Biggs and Skimmerhorn.

If this collection of luckless comic villains were the only representatives of industrial capitalism, Van would be an anachronism. The stage individualist would have remained banished from modern America, isolated in an uptown house like the Vanderhofs, or fossilized in The Petrified Forest. However, Van ultimately makes a deal with American capitalism, trading his mountain for a viable independence in an industrial society. Van, however, deals only with the honest agents of modernity: a loosely tethered New Woman and an upfront businessman.

The arrival of a senior Skimmerhorn, president of Igneous Trap-rock, puts an end to Van's antagonistic dealings with the criminal duo of Biggs and Skimmerhorn. A generation closer to the lost Dutch sailors, Skimmerhorn, Sr. brings with him more integrity than the other two. He lays his cards on the table when he must. He tells Van, “I can offer you a fair price for your land, and if you don't take it we may have to push you a little, because we want this acreage and we intend to have it” (125). The straightforward offer eventually works with Van, who sells his mountain for ＄50,000, a far sight more than Anderson's Stephano and Trinculo offered with their goal of pocketing most of the company's tender offer.

Van's acceptance of Skimmerhorn, Sr.'s offer comes with conditions, however. Van reserves some ground in which to bury John, who had advised, “There's no hill worth a man's peace” (128). Yet, Van would rather forfeit his peace and retain his pesky, manly independence than enter industrial society alone and dependent upon pleasing others for his livelihood. As he told Judith, “A woman can stand that stuff [working for someone else], but if you're a man / I say it chokes you” (10). The financial settlement for the tor allows Van to retain his independence and therefore his manly integrity. Still, without a companion, Van refuses to come down from his mountain. He tells Judith:

I guess if you were with me then we'd sell
for what we could, and move out farther west
where a man's land's his own. But if I'm here
alone, I'll play the solitary wasp
and sting them till they get me.

(113)

Money and the expansive west make a modern independent existence possible for Van. However, making peace with his age holds no attraction for Van without a partner.

Judith is a reined-in version of the 1910s and 1920s New Woman. In many plays, like Why Marry? (Williams) and The Silver Cord (Howard), this controversial figure triumphed over conservative forces. In both plays, scientist women retained both their careers and the men they loved despite the machinations of horrified relatives. By 1937, at least in High Tor, the bread-winning assertiveness of Judith passes without controversy. While her willingness to submit to a wage earning life and her desire for safety and security make her a feminine foil to Van's defiant and independent manhood, it also reveals her strength in an age when safety and security were far from certain. Since Judith's strength and independence escape notice, however, so too do her assumptions that were she to marry Van, she would no longer work and she would have to adopt his lifestyle.

Thus, Judith is not the New Woman of the previous decades. Strong and capable, she will work to support herself as long as she's single, but she will trade her steno pad for an apron at the altar (Kessler-Harris 355-59). Significantly, although Judith leaves Van because he will not give up his mountain, she returns to tell him he was right. “I came to say,” she confides in Van, “if only I could keep you, you should keep / the Tor” (112). Thus, Van's decision to sell his home is free from feminine pressure. Yet, a partnership with this representative of a repentant femininity, powerful but clearly subordinate to him, is a key ingredient to the survival of Van's revised masculinity.

Barbara Melosh calls this partnership as it manifested in the public art of the 1930s the “comradely ideal” (35-51). Depictions of the pioneer past in Federal art and theatre, according to Melosh, privileged egalitarian and complimentary images of men and women engaged in the domestication of the frontier. She writes, “New Deal-sponsored playwrights and artists gave relatively little attention to the romantic images of masculinity so prominent in frontier lore” (33). Commenting on a production of Susan Glaspell's Inheritors, Melosh notes that “male characters squander their frontier inheritance of freedom; women are repositories of memory and the authentic inheritors of democratic tradition” (34). In High Tor, male characters devour what once was frontier, leaving Van, a romantic image of masculinity if there ever was one, so isolated that he can no longer sustain his pioneering lifestyle. In the end, Anderson mirrored New-Deal depictions of the frontier by privileging a domestic version of Van's independent life, made possible through his relationship with Judith and money to purchase land “out west” that he might call his own.

Despite the seeming sexual democracy in frontier images sponsored by New Deal agencies, Melosh notes that subtle hints signify the continued subordination of women to men in these frontier partnerships. In her analysis of two Ward Lockwood paintings in Washington, D.C.'s Federal Building, Opening the West and Settling the West, Melosh notes, “The two paintings seem to celebrate intrepid pioneer women and yet uphold female dependency and maternity as the ultimate goals” (47). Similarly, Judith and Van head west together but with clear signs of her subordination and eventual maternal role. Having repented her earlier decision to leave Van, she gives him the final say in whether or not to sell the mountain. One of her objections that she had to overcome had to do with children. “And what if there was a child?” (12), she asks Van, when questioning his refusal to sell High Tor. Thus, Anderson redeems something of 19th-Century manhood by revising the romantic pioneering man and the New Woman, so popular in the previous decade, into the “comradely ideal.”

Clearly, not everyone saw this as a positive revision. Douglas Gilbert thought Van sold out; some contemporary social critics would have agreed. In as much as Van is wild and sexually aggressive in his relationship with Lise, he represents the “raping rapscallion” that Uzzel and LeRoy miss so desperately in their Scribner's article arguing the decrepitude of the American male. “With the end of pioneering in this country and the beginning of the age of leisure,” they wrote, “the male looks like anything but a conqueror” (19). Given this criteria for manhood, when Van sells High Tor, he turns in his musket for a smoking jacket. Stewart Holbrook and Lois Henderson Bayliss would join the others in seeing High Tor as further evidence for the disappearance of the glorious, pioneering style of manhood (270-99, 501-3). Such voices, however, were not the only ones heard in the 1930s debate over manhood.

Responding to Uzzel and LeRoy, Robert Faber articulated the numerous possibilities for a strenuous American manhood in the 1930s: “Not one in a dozen working miners, stevedores, fishermen, farmers, bricklayers, policemen, or laborers suffers from ‘weak muscles’ or from ‘lack of hard work and fresh air’” (58). Noting the economic conditions that led to competition from women in industrial jobs, Albert De Pina argued that relations between the sexes had merely changed, not eroded masculinity. “Virility can be expressed in a thousand ways,” he wrote, citing jobs from bridge building to teaching (58). Interestingly, both men argued for a certain “comradely ideal” between the sexes. Faber asserted “that a vigorous masculinity is not incompatible with a strong womanhood” (58). De Pina wrote, “Surely, after two thousand years of civilization, we have a right to expect that women, as human beings, should occupy a place of equality in the race for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and cease to be mere slaves and child-bearers” (58).

Although allegorical in its setting and characters, High Tor belongs in this debate as it tried to redeem images of pioneering manhood for urban, late-Depression males. Similarly, Faber and De Pina equated the pioneering work of the 18th and 19th Centuries with the industrial and agricultural work done by men in the 1930s. High Tor also asserted a compatibility between a strong womanhood and their adapted manly men. Yet, despite their apparent feminism, De Pina (48) and Faber (59) joined Anderson in limiting the power of their modern women by tying them to the domestic sphere.

Clearly, the question of American men's virility was an important one to both middle-class men and middle-class women. By linking the activities of modern men to those of idealized pioneering men, men and women learned to value those activities as manly. As Faber and De Pina did when they asserted equivalence between acts of pioneering in an era gone by and industry of the 1930s, Maxwell Anderson attempted to bring the older manhood in line with industrial capitalism by finding a way that his romantic pioneering hero could cross the frontier into the 20th-century with something of his manhood intact. Cash buys Van his independence, and the popular image of the “comradely ideal” affords him a domesticated version of his frontier life. While Frederick Jackson Turner tolled the end of the physical American frontier, writers, directors and theatre-goers continually found in the idea of the frontier a means of restoring purpose to American manhood.

Critic Gilbert is right, in part. Van sold out. In a way, the trap-rock company left only the facade of Van's manhood, like they would leave High Tor's palisades. However, given the changing landscape of American culture, Van's anachronistic manhood could not have survived away from his mountainous time capsule. Although it rests on the shoulders of a heterosexual partnership, Anderson breathed new theatrical life into an individualistic style of American manhood that had been dying on New York stages for years.

Whether a mere shell or a product of evolution, Van struck a balance between romanticized ideals still held dear by a 1930s middle-class and the demands of late-Depression industrial life in the United States. Anderson's words, his form, McClintic's staging and the performances of Burgess Meredith and Charles D. Brown are but a few of the production elements that added to the 1930s gender negotiations. Furthermore, the study of manhood in Anderson's play reveals something of the processes by which gender ideals of any time evolve as they confront social realities hostile to them. Explicit debate and cultural productions continually revise them. Conservative forces, like Uzzel and LeRoy in 1936, will badger men with assertions of manly tradition. If there is a manly tradition, it seems to be one of continual negotiation, change and adaption. In the parting words of Anderson's Indian, John, “Nothing is made by men / but makes, in the end, good ruins” (142).

Works Cited

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———. “Fantasy from Up River.” The New York Times 17 Jan. 1937: X, 1.

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Brown, John Mason. Two on the Aisle. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1938.

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Dexter, Charles E. “Mr. Anderson's ‘High Tor’ Is Elegant Entertainment” Rev. of High Tor by Maxwell Anderson. Daily Worker 13 Jan. 1937: 7.

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Gardner, Jared. “‘Our Native Clay’: Racial and Sexual Identity and the Making of Americans in The Bridge.” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 24-50.

Gassner, John. “Introduction: An American Decade.” Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. Ed. John Gassner. New York: Crown Publishers, 1939. vii-xx.

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High Tor. By Maxwell Anderson. Dir. Guthrie McClintic. With Burgess Meredith, Judith Anderson, and Charles D. Brown. Martin Beck Theatre, New York. 9 Jan. 1937.

Holbrook, Stewart H. “The Vanishing American Male.” The American Mercury 40 (1937): 270-9.

Howard, Sidney. The Silver Cord. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928.

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Isaacs, Edith J. R. “‘A Young Race, in Its Morning’: Broadway in Review.” Rev. of High Tor, by Maxwell Anderson. Theatre Arts Monthly 21 (1937): 175-78.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

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