The Crisis of American Masculinity in James Herne’s Margaret Fleming (1890)

Hailed as the first modern American play, James A. Herne’s Margaret Fleming reflected the theatrical realism depicting the serious and realistic conditions of the modern individual toward the end of the nineteenth century. Touching on core issues such as sexual infidelity in Victorian familial settings, morality, and devotion, Herne’s play was initially praised by scholars for featuring a subversive feminist ending. The critical literature around the play focused thus on the appeal of the New Woman while disregarding Herne’s naturalism in depicting a masculinity in crisis. This article argues that the theme of emasculation targeting the white American men in the Gilded Age is a theme that is implicitly interwoven through the portrayal of immigrant characters, emasculating concerns in relation to the feminization of American culture, failure to live up to the ideals of self-made man, and protestant work ethic that is considered to trap the male in an iron cage.