masculinity – Empowering women through fiction and history.

The Order of Actaeon

Photo Credit: Marble bust of Actaeon with animal skin on his head, Hadrianic Period (AD 117-138), Museo delle Navi, Nemi: Following Hadrian/Flickr/CC BY SA 2.0

As many of you know, if you’ve read my blog post about the title evolution of False Fathers, the idea of Actaeon, the hunter who earned the goddess Diana’s displeasure and paid the consequences, plays a role as a metaphor for Gilded Age masculinity in the book.

One of the ways that Actaeon (whose story you can find here) figures into False Fathers is in a male fraternity called The Order of Actaeon (or, as they refer to themselves, the “Actaeons”). I talked about the importance of male secret societies and fraternities in the 19^th century here. Many men belonged to such societies in the Gilded Age, because it was a way for them to cement their identity as men in the chaotic twists and turns of the last decades of the 19^th century, when the definition of masculinity was changing just like the definition of femininity. Women had the suffragists and the New Woman to help them cope with these changes, and men had their societies and fraternities.

The Order of Actaeon (which, by the way, is entirely fictional) operates on the principle that there is, in the Gilded Age, a “disturbing inclination of modern young men toward falling into the twin traps of profit-seeking and vicious competition characteristic of civilized life and thus losing their manly strength and virtue.” It began, in fact, so that older men (known as “Patriarchs”) could guide younger men (known as “Youths”) and help them live a purer, more decent life with beliefs and virtues that were honorable and admirable. Each Youth enters the order on the recommendation of a Patriarch who then becomes his mentor throughout his life (or the duration of his involvement with the Order).

The Order’s activities evolve mainly around masculine pursuits, such as carpentry, fishing, and hunting. In fact, the hunt is an important metaphor for the Actaeons and the reason why they named their fraternity after the Greek mortal. The Order believes that hunting develops skills of “strength, aggression, instincts, pride, and self-control.” To this end, the Order organizes weekend hunts, where each youth is expected to participate and submit to guidance by his Patriarch.

Another important aspect of the order is secrecy. They don’t even allow men to know one another’s real names. Each member that enters the order choses a name for himself by which he is known in the order (Jake chooses the name “Carlton,” his beloved grandmother’s maiden name). Neither are the men allowed to know about one another’s life outside of the order. This secrecy is so important that, as one of the men explains to Jake, one of their founding members was asked to leave after he revealed some of their activities to his wife.

The quotes I use above are from a document that appears in False Fathers, where the Order of Actaeon principles and philosophies are outlined in writing. Harland Stevens, the main father figure in Jake’s life, is the one who creates it, brought into the order as a Youth by the man who was asked to leave it and, now, one of the leading Patriarchs. Stevens’ vision of the orders’ philosophies are very clear and precise:

That emotional attachments may drain a man of his intelligence and virility, and he is to maintain some distance between himself and his loved ones beyond keeping the secrecy of the Order.
That modern man is forced to separate his pure life from his civilized life to cultivate his development and well-being.
That each man shall agree to the virtues of hunting not only as a means of athletic skill and success, but also as a way of developing his strength, aggression, cunning, and wile. He shall seek to make himself a skilled hunter and help others do the same.

The order and especially its vow of secrecy plays a major role in Jake’s journey at the end of the novel.

If you’d like to read an excerpt from False Fathers involving the Actaeons, you can do so by joining my readers group. For more about the book, go here. And don’t forget to check out the series page to find out more about the entire Waxwood series.

Release Day Blitz for False Fathers (Waxwood Series: Book 2)!

False Fathers Front Cover Photo Credit: Photo Credit: Portrait of a Young Man, Ferdinand von Wright, 1860s, portrait, oil on canvas, Finnish National Gallery: BotMultichill/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 100 expired

Title: False Fathers

Series: Waxwood Series, Book 2

Author: Tam May

Genre: Historical Fiction/Coming of Age

Release Date: December 28, 2019

Sometimes no father is better than a false father.

At nineteen, Jake Alderdice is shy, contemplative, and passionate about art. With the death of his grandfather, shipping magistrate Malcolm Alderdice, he becomes the new family patriarch and heir to Alderdice Shipping and Alderdice Luxury Liner. After two years of mourning, he is ready to add to the family honor just as all the Alderdice men have, but as an artist, not a shipping magistrate. His plans are delayed with his mother announces the family will be retreating to Waxwood, now a fashionable resort town favored by the San Francisco elite, for the summer, fulfilling her father’s dying wish to “go back”.

On the train, he meets Harland Stevens, an enigmatic but charming older man, who has come to Waxwood as chaperone and guide to his college-aged cousin Roger and Roger’s friends. Mr. Stevens, or, as he tells Jake, “just Stevens”, takes an interest in the young man’s ambitions, and introduces him to the town’s most prominent gallery owner. But when Jake takes his paintings for appraisal, the man delivers a fatal blow — Jake’s mythology-inspired paintings are too original for the market of realistic landscape paintings favored by Gilded Age patrons.

Stevens seizes the devastated and wandering Jake and counsels him toward a more aggressive but moralistic path to manhood inspired by Teddy Roosevelt and Thoreau. Jake proves himself to be more studious and serious than Roger and his friends. Impressed with the young man’s determination to take over his grandfather’s business, Stevens introduces him to The Order of Actaeon, a secret society built upon those ideals favored by his idols.

But the path to emotional maturity and masculine identity is, Jake learns, a complex thing in the Gilded Age. Will his journey free him from the Alderdice family illusions, half-truths, and lies that have kept him a child, just as it did his sister Vivian’s six years before? Or will it lead him into the world of Actaeon, where the hunter becomes the hunted?

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Excerpt

The afternoon sun had arrived with its vengeance of rising heat. Jake took out his handkerchief and wiped at his forehead. At the same time, he felt something inside him shiver. He couldn’t help but think of what Vivian would have said, if she had heard the tale. He knew she would have found it one more reason to avoid Stevens, as the story would have struck her as another way in which Roger had been right about the way in which Stevens and his father engineered their will against the will of others.

“I suppose your father understood you.” He put the handkerchief away and made a shot through the hoop in front of him.

As Stevens set down his mallet down, Jake felt the weight of his expectant eyes. “I thought you would change your mind.”

“Change my mind?”

“About needing guidance,” said the redhead. “You needn’t be abashed. Other young men such as yourself have come to me when they needed a father too.”

“I didn’t say I needed a father.” Jake looked at the tussled grass at his feet. “I only meant I would be grateful for any ideas you have for me about my new undertakings.”

“As you wish,” said Stevens, though his eyes sparkled in the sun.

About the Author

Tam May grew up in the United States and earned her B.A. and M.A in English. She worked as an English college instructor and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher before she became a full-time writer. She started writing when she was 14, and writing became her voice. She writes fiction about characters who find their future by exploring their personal past influenced by the time in which they live.

Her first book, a collection of contemporary short stories titled Gnarled Bones And Other Stories, was nominated for a 2017 Summer Indie Book Award. She is currently working on a Gilded Age family saga. The first book, The Specter, is now available, and the second book, False Fathers, will be out in December, 2019. She is also working on a historical mystery series featuring a turn-of-the-century New Woman sleuth. Both series take place in Northern California.

She lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature and historical fiction, watching classic films, or cooking up awesome vegetarian dishes.

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The Odd Duck: The Character of Jake Alderdice

[Jake Teaser]

Photo Credit: Father and son (Thomas Hopewell and his son Timothy), Frank Buchser, 1861, oil on canvas, Galerie Koller: Botaurus/Wikimedia Commons/PD art (PD old 100)

In an earlier version of False Fathers, my second book in the Waxwood Series, Jake Alderdice tells his mother how people have always thought of him as an “odd duck.” To me, this summarized Jake’s character not only in the story but in the canon of my own writing.

I won’t lie. Writing about Jake was a struggle for me for many reasons. On the one hand, since the Waxwood Series is about the deterioration (physically, mentally, and emotionally) of the Alderdice family, Jake’s story had to be told since he’s Vivian Alderdice’s younger brother. But I was nervous about writing the story of a male main character, even though Jake’s psychological reality was familiar to me.

The story I conceived of Jake in the original 3-part novel about the Alderdice family (which I talk about here) included Jake’s story. In fact, his story is the only one that remains more or less true to my original conception of it from that novel, in the sense that Jake comes of age amidst psychological circumtances many young men usually don’t have to deal with. But I realized when I started rewriting the story that I didn’t really know Jake at all. My own uneasiness about writing male characters (especially central ones) kept me from really digging deep into his character. I knew some things about him — that he was an artist, taught by his grandmother, that his mother had a particular loathing for him she didn’t have for his sister, and that his identity as a man (and the only surviving male of the family) was instrumental to his evolution. I liked him, but he felt remote to me, much more so than his sister Vivian or Gena Payne, the main character in Book 3 of the series.

What gave shape to the character of Jake was the historical time frame. When I wrote the book as contemporary fiction, Jake didn’t seem all that much different from other young men. He didn’t go for “sowing his wild oats,” but so do a lot of young men these days. He was an artist, but so are many others. His mother treated him as if he were a mistake, but so do a lot of other mothers (unfortunately).

So why did the historical context change this? Simply, I started to see Jake’s character against the backdrop of the Gilded Age. The psychology of gender has always interested me, not only regarding women but men as well. When I started researching masculinity in the Gilded Age (some of which I talk about here and here), I realized how complex the idea of what it meant to be a man back then was, almost more complex than what it was to be a woman (since women had some support with the suffragist movement and the New Woman ideal). As I wrote the drafts for this book, I got to know Jake better and understood his struggle to figure out who he was, not only in the shadow of the family half-truths, lies, and myths, but with his own personality and quirks that did not suit the growing ideals of masculinity at the end of the 19^th century.

So he became a character I appreciated and thought I could make readers appreciate as someone looking for what he wanted to be in a chaotic world with contradicting messages and conventions (not unlike young people in our world today). I could see not only his struggles, but also what he learns about his family, those around him who profess to help him, and, most importantly, himself.

To learn more about Jake, you can check out the series page here. To order your copy of False Fathers, which is now at a special preorder price, go here. Plus, you can read a bonus excerpt from the book if you join my readers group here.

Fatherhood in the 19th Century

Photo Credit: A family in a drawing room, artist unknown, 19^th century, Bonhams: FA2010/Wikimedia Commons/PD art (PD old)

As the title of the second book in the Waxwood Series, False Fathers, suggests, the idea of fathers plays a huge role in the story and in the psychological reality of Jake Alderdice, the main character. Like everything else in the Gilded Age, fatherhood was a complex and changing concept in the late 19^th century.

Before the 19^th century, the role of the father was less removed from the family. Since so many Americans lived in rural towns and kept farms or other small ma-and-pa businesses, fathers worked close to home and sometimes even alongside their families. Their involvement with their wives and children was more intimate because of their close proximity to their families.

But this changed in the 19^th century, and the concept of the separate spheres played a role. As industrialization and urbanization became the norm for many families (that is, families moved to the cities, and men worked in larger companies owned by someone other than themselves), men’s “place” was regulated more to the pubic sphere. That is, their attention shifted to the larger spaces of business, law, and finance. As such, fathers were more detached from what went on in the home, though they still maintained a certain level of control as the main disciplinarians and educators of their children. The separate spheres also put women more firmly in private places such as the home. Their role as mothers and caregivers became more important, thus removing fathers even further from the day-to-day workings of the family.

We also want to remember the characteristics of the Gilded Age — success at any price, excess, and flaunting wealth. This was an ideal many American men wanted to achieve and, as such, they needed to put all of their focus on their business and financial endeavors to get it. This didn’t leave them much time or emotional energy to devote to their families. Thus, the identity of the father became one of the bread-winner.

There was something else that factored into the extrication of fathers from family life — public schooling. Up until the 1850’s, sending children to public schools was optional. As I mention above, many Americans were still living in rural areas and tending to farms or small businesses. In this atmosphere, children were often times given a very spotty education that depended more upon when they were needed to help out with the family (for example, on the family farm or during harvest seasons) than upon the idea that children should get a steady education. But in the 1850’s, that began to change as states issued laws that made sending children to public schools mandatory. Although the transition to mandatory public schooling for all states didn’t happen until the late 1910’s, it took the role of educator out of the hands of many fathers.

But while fathers lost their hold on their children as educators, their role shifted to business advisors, mainly for their sons (since most women did not and weren’t expected to work). This put the emotional connection between fathers and sons on a different level, a more authority-oriented level that we can imagine may have been somewhat less affectionate than it had been in earlier times. This is indeed the role various father figures take in relation to Jake in False Fathers. Much of his struggle for masculine identity lies in what his future success in the public sphere will look like. In this, he asks and receives help from a number of older men in the book.

I realize this paints a pretty dismal picture of fatherhood in the 19^th century, since it makes it sound as if men were little more than bread-winners and business advisors for their families. This is not to say that fathers were emotionally remote from their wives and children by any means (as the painting above shows). And, in the 1920’s, when women had earned more of their rights, they began to demand men share in the raising of their families, both physically and psychologically. In turn, men themselves were advocating for this, starting a Fatherhood Movement which, thankfully, has gained a lot of ground today and continues to do so.

To read more about False Fathers (which is now on sale at a special preorder price), you can go here. If you want to find out more about Jake and other characters in the Waxwood Series, read the series page here. And if you’d like to read an excerpt from False Fathers, you can join my readers group.

The Gilded Age Masculine Identity Crisis

Photo Credit: Men of Progress, Christian Schussele, 1862, oil on canvas, National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C: ~riley/Wikimedia Commons/PD old 100 expired

The second book of the Waxwood series, False Fathers, is a coming-of-age story about the male protagonist, Jake Alderdice, transitioning from boyhood into manhood in the late 19^th century. In doing my research on masculine ideals of the era, I came across an article that takes an interesting view at the subject. You can find the article here.

According to the author, John Robert Van Slyke, the Gilded Age brought about a crisis in the definition of masculinity for men. I have mentioned in my blog post about the Gilded Age how the chaos and the excesses of the era changed the way in which Americans saw themselves, socially and psychologically. We know how this was true for women, as the Victorian idea of the “angel in the house” was breaking down in the face of suffragism and the new American ideal of womanhood represented by the New Woman.

But many changes were going on for men as well. For Van Slyke, this was represented by “a shift from the term ‘manliness’ to ‘masculinity’” (pg. 2). These may seem like the same or similar, in terms of meaning,and perhaps in our modern way of thinking about gender, they are. But for the 19^th century, they were very different. Manliness was a Victorian ideal rooted in abstract realities, a “‘honorable, high-minded’” idea that required “sexual restraint, a powerful will, and a strong character” (Van Slyke, pg. 3). Masculinity, however, was a concept emerging into the new century that implied “‘aggressiveness, physical force, and male sexuality” (pg. 3). So while the qualities of what made a man in the Victorian era (looking back from the Gilded Age) were intangible, those qualities of the 20^th century (looking ahead) would be required to be more tangible and measurable.

One reason for this was that America was moving into a more “doer” century, where one’s deeds rather than one’s values would be the measure of one’s character. For men, success in the public sphere was imperative in the Gilded Age, and their worth was judged by their achievements. America was becoming bigger, richer, and more powerful on the world stage. Competition was becoming fiercer. Therefore, a more forceful, physical presence was necessary to succeed.

Van Slyke brings in a nice example of this from the business world. Many men in the 19^th century began their business success by getting loans and gaining credit from the bank with which to build their companies (much as entrepreneurs do today). In the mid-19^th century, a man could get a loan or credit based on his character. If he proved himself to be a reliable, upstanding, dependable citizen, a hard worker and moral man, those were enough. However, by the Gilded Age, this was no longer possible. It was a man’s prospects and his assets that determined whether he would be given a loan or credit.

This crisis of looking back to manly virtue and looking forward to masculine physicality presented problems for young men in the Gilded Age. Success in the public sphere was still the name of the game, but the means with which they achieved it were no longer based on their fathers’ and grandfathers’ manly virtues. They were based more on how aggressive they could be in business, how wily and cunning they were, and how much interest they had in commercial success.

This crisis is one Jake faces in the book. His artistic nature makes him more contemplative and dreamy, the opposite type needed to become a business titan like his grandfather, and this is contrasted by other male characters his age in the novel. One reason why he accepts Harland Stevens, a middle-aged man who befriends him during his summer in Waxwood, as a surrogate father is because Stevens seems to present the balance between Victorian manliness and Gilded Age masculinity.

To read more about the book, coming out in December, go here. To read more about Jake and Stevens, take a look here. And if you’d like to read an excerpt from False Fathers, you can do so by joining my readers group here.

Works Cited

Van Slyke, John Robert. “Changing ideal of manhood in late-nineteenth century America” (2001). Graduate Student Thesis, Dissertation, & Professional Papers. Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana.