Revisions of the American psycho : re-reading Patrick Bateman and western masculinity

Abstract

When Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho was published in 1991 it became one of the most, if not the most, controversial publications in contemporary American literature. As Ellis himself stated a number of times in various interviews, even though the controversy was good business, the author was afraid American Psycho would forever be remembered for its graphic depictions of torture and murder and not much for anything else. Fortunately time was kinder than Ellis predicted. Today, just over twenty years later, not only has the novel had a cinematic adaptation but it is also currently being adapted into a Broadway musical. The phenomenon is not hard to understand. The years have given readers distance, it is only now that we may give the American Psycho controversy some perspective and it is only this perspective that could help us read the novel in all of its complexity without being distracted by the 'appalling' and the 'disturbing'. In the following dissertation I intend to add to this body of work by providing a re-reading of American Psycho from a masculinity studies perspective. Until recently the major critical readings of the novel have centred their arguments on the themes of late twentieth century commodification, consumerism and Baudrillardian cultural discourse. These readings, though shedding strong light upon American Psycho's allegorical critique of the Reagan era 1980's cultural make up, tended to diminish the significance of the novel's brutally vivid depictions of extreme violence towards women. By focusing on American Psycho's protagonist, Patrick Bateman, and by tracing the character's representation of the historical traits that have made up Western masculinity across both Europe and America this dissertation accentuates the allegorical importance of the violence in the novel. After reviewing all of the necessary historical and psychoanalytic interpretations the dissertation provides a re-reading of Bret Easton Ellis' influential text as a challenging, possibly profeminist critique of Western heterosexual