Man in the Modern Age
The war affected society severely. It took a lot from human being but returned almost nothing. As a result, modern man was growing up cut off from their culture and tradition. They were known as the ‘lost generation’ as Earnest Hemingway portrays them in The Sun also Rises (1926). Many modem writers describe the modern world as the apocalyptic time .W. B Yeats, who observed both the Victorian era and the modem era, portrayed the anarchy o f modem time in his poem “The Second Coming:”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence drowned;
The best lack all the conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming
The poem describes the nature of modem era and the death of traditional values. For Yeats ,traditional values are more important than the modem values. Culture and traditional values of the society have been destroyed in modem times. It is often said that apocalypse has already arrived in the modem era:(Dada Surrealism) is the art consequent of Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principal ,’of the destruction of civilization and reason in the First World War, of the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness of absurdity (Bradbury and McFarlane ,P27).
At the end of the eighteenth century. It was then that the stereotype of masculinity that we know today emerged. However, the contribution made by previous ideas of masculinity to the modern stereotype cannot be neglected. If the direction of the idea of masculinity changed in the late eighteenth century, what did it change from ?The break with old aristocratic ideas of masculinity was not surprising. Medieval ideals such as chivalry and institutions such as jousting have continued into the modern era. Previous ideals of masculinity, limited to the aristocracy, were largely based on the warrior class; However, the refinement and rituals of court society had softened this image of masculinity long before the end of the eighteenth century.
However, medieval tournaments were more like war games than rituals of chivalry, which were, in any case, associated with chivalry in its decline - when powerful rulers set limits on violence. Some men themselves have attempted to present alternative views on masculinity that do not conform to the standard stereotype. Here it was the socialist intellectuals who constructed what they called the “New Man” who would continue the tradition of the Enlightenment, which the standard stereotype in its nationalism and latent aggressiveness seemed to have rejected. At the beginning of this century, men like Max Adler returned to Enlightenment ideas put forward nearly a hundred years earlier. These socialists were generally not interested in physical images, but in the human spirit that the new man should possess. However, these efforts to change the normative masculine stereotype have failed, even among grassroots socialists. The stereotype that is our main concern fulfills many social needs and has become deeply rooted; It dominates the discussion of masculinity (Mosse,P14,17).
