Iron John: A Book about Men

Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), the American poet Robert Bly's interpretation of the German fairy tale “Der Eisenhans,” became a foundational text for the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1990s. Concerned that modern American men had become alienated from the source of their masculinity, he proposed the recovery of that identity through a regimen of healing ritual.

In the book, Bly measures late-twentieth-century American manhood against a romanticized preindustrial past in which males lived in close contact with nature, received ritual instruction in their passage through adolescence, and learned healthy male behavior by working alongside their fathers. According to Bly, the Industrial Revolution separated fathers from sons and robbed men of their connection with nature and each other, leaving men unable to feel or express compassion properly or form healthy relationships with other men. Furthermore, the elevation of women's authority in the American home had feminized men by giving mothers too great a hold on their sons' affections and encouraging maternal smothering of young boys. The Vietnam War reinforced these developments by undermining young men's faith in the paternal authority of the government and alienating them from their fathers. Because modern American men lack strong mentoring models of strength, passion, and decisiveness they have become spiritually damaged and are fearful of expressing their natural appetites and desires.

For Bly, the key to recovering lost masculine identity lay in the figure of the strong man, the Iron John figure, that was prominent in most cultures' myths and fairy tales. This archetype represents an essential manliness that must be kindled within a boy and nurtured throughout his lifetime. Traditional ritual initiation of boys by men into a broad range of male roles and experiences would allow boys to define themselves in relation to powerful male figures and apart from their mothers. By initiating, or “wounding,” the boy, the older man facilitates the boy's escape from his mother and allows the boy to carry through life the healthy, passionate spirit of the natural inner warrior. According to Bly, a boy nurtured and mentored by men will grow into a man respectful and tolerant of both men and women, and he will be able to constructively manage disappointment and anger. Iron John counsels men to identify a cause or a quest and to chase it with singleness of purpose. Bly's emphasis on healing and fellowship, rather than grass-roots, public policy–oriented action, distinguished the mythopetic men's movement from the male liberationist and fathers' rights advocates of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their Christian contemporaries, the Promise Keepers.

Bly's conceptualization of a new masculine ideal draws from a variety of sources, particularly the psychologist Carl Jung and the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Iron John, however, is frankly poetic and literary rather than historical or sociological. The text features Bly's retellings of myths of masculinity, his readings of those myths, and selections of poetry, including his own. Although Bly is careful not to blame feminism for the woes of contemporary men, Iron John stands in the tradition of other twentieth-century lamentations about the baleful effects of too much maternal love, as well as fears that urban, industrialized men have lost their vitality.

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