‘The Prisoner of Sex’

Abstract

In Mailer’s work the treatment of sexuality and the relation between the sexes has become closely, indeed inseparably, linked with his ideological and metaphorical ‘war’ on totalitarianism. Nevertheless, because sexual matters have become increasingly important in his writing, particularly since The Deer Park, and because this aspect of his work has aroused a great deal of critical comment, it is perhaps worth looking at it as a separate theme. The relation between men and women has been present as a theme from his first novel, but like his political outlook and his stylistic development, his treatment of it seems to me to undergo considerable changes in the mid-fifties, around the time of The Deer Park and Advertisements for Myself. When the socialist ideas which dominated his first two novels ‘failed’ for Mailer, he turned on the one hand to existentialist ideas and on the other hand returned to certain nineteenth-century progressive traditions. From both of these he drew fairly eclectically on everything which seemed to provide him with ammunition for his crusade against totalitarians and the technologising of human existence.