The struggle of the male self: A New Left activist and his 1961 diary

TY - JOUR

T1 - The struggle of the male self

T2 - A New Left activist and his 1961 diary

AU - Hughes, Celia Penelope

PY - 2015/9/2

Y1 - 2015/9/2

N2 - This article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

AB - This article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - self-making

KW - introspection

KW - masculinity

KW - sex

KW - New Left politics

KW - generation

U2 - 10.1017/jbr.2015.118

DO - 10.1017/jbr.2015.118

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0021-9371

VL - 54

SP - 898

EP - 925

JO - Journal of British Studies

JF - Journal of British Studies

IS - 4

ER -