Fishing

As a livelihood, pastime, industry, and literary theme, fishing has been perceived and portrayed as singularly masculine, and, as such, it has played a distinct role in constructions of American manhood. Both recreational and commercial fishing have long represented a haven where men can escape from society and engage in contact with the natural world. With most recreational fishing, this interaction is regarded as contemplative and sublime; with commercial fishing, it is viewed as courageous and potentially tragic.

Predating capitalism, fishing represents an atavistic masculine pursuit that recreates a primal connection to nature. The nineteenth-century naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau associated fishing with “the lower orders of nature,” as opposed to man's “instinct toward a higher…spiritual life” (Thoreau, 140, 143). But many men have regarded fishing as primal, spiritual, and transcendently philosophical. In 1653, Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation characterized fishing as a thinking man's practice and an artful mastery of the natural world using both human technology and one's own skills. Walton (and many who have followed him) regarded fishing as a balance of contemplation and positive action that leads to spiritual communion with a nonterrestrial, and otherwise unknowable, aquatic world. These ideas about fishing were most recently reinvigorated in American popular culture with the 1993 film adaptation of Norman Maclean's novel A River Runs Through It (1973), which depicts fly-fishing as a rugged yet sensitive and spiritual practice that draws a father and his two sons together, making them better men.

Recreational fishing, like hunting, has long provided a temporary escape from work and family responsibilities. The fictional character Rip Van Winkle, created by the nineteenth-century writer Washington Irving, escaped his wife and “profitable labor” by fishing “all day without a murmur” (Irving, 35). In the late nineteenth century, and throughout the twentieth century, fishing's popularity expanded as part of a general growth in leisure activities offering men an antidote to the alienating influences of industrialized and bureaucratic work experiences. Men who have “gone fishing” (as the clichéd sign left behind announces) do something that can be simultaneously passive and masculine, the opposite of work but also removed from domesticity and women's influence. Fishing retains one familial association, however, as a leisure activity that fathers can share with their sons. As a masculine activity, fishing allows fathers to fulfill a paternal role by teaching their sons to be men through close contact with nature.

Recreational fishing has also served as a therapeutic masculine ritual. The author Ernest Hemingway, for example, portrayed fishing as a means of coping with physical and [Page 172]psychological wounds inflicted by modern warfare and twentieth-century social change. In “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925), Hemingway's Nick Adams fishes to recapture “all the old feeling” and to “choke” painful memories of war, and in The Sun Also Rises (1926) Jake Barnes retreats to a mountain trout stream to restore a masculine identity threatened by a sexually debilitating war wound and promiscuous modern womanhood.

Since the late nineteenth century, American men have considered recreational fishing a leisure activity that allows escape from domestic responsibility and from industrial and bureaucratic work and promotes contemplative communion with nature. In this photo, a man fishes while enjoying a beer and a cigarette. (©

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