Masculinity In All My Sons

This paper illustrates how the ‘common man’ is unable to live up to its ideals and clinch success in his pursuit of the hegemonic success that could assert his masculinity. The play All My Sons shows the contradicting feelings of aspiration and inability, self-deception, betrayal and guilt which Miller showcases a successful business man’s desperate struggle to cling on to success and the relative guilt he develops about the ways and means he resorted to attain it and also the emptiness of such an unethical accomplishment when he introspects.
In the play All My Sons Joe Keller has all the ingredients of hegemonic masculinity. He is a rich industrialist and his growth is attributed to the inborn drive to achieve something great in life. This

Fear of Failure and Sustenance of Hegemony in All My Sons
The concept of hegemonic masculinity was formulated two decades ago, it was considerably influenced recent thinking about men, gender and social hierarchy. Hegemonic masculinity was distinguished from other masculinity, especially subordinated masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it. But it was certainly normative. It embodied the currently most honoured way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men
Connell considers that hegemony in gender as a system of relations and practices controlled and directed by a dominative and asymmetrically operating force. Hegemonic masculinity represents the ideal masculinity and the yardstick for gender practice. Hegemonic masculinity refers to a culturally normal and ideal male behaviour. The term hegemonic masculinity has roots in the assumptions that there is a hierarchy of masculine behaviour, suggesting it as a fact that most societies encourage men to exemplify a dominant versions of