The Ghost of Gary Cooper: Masculinity, Homosocial Bonding, and The Sopranos

When Soprano consigliere Silvio Dante complains that his daughter Heather protests his ownership of the Bada Bing! strip club on the grounds that it "objectifies women," we know that there has been a seismic shift in the sexual landscape of the gangster narrative ("Down Neck," episode 7). Indeed, a number of scholars argue that The Sopranos reinvents a traditionally male-dominated and misogynistic gangster genre through its acknowledgement of feminism's impact on contemporary culture. Kim Akass and Janet McCabe argue that the "female narrative authority" of mob boss Tony Soprano's wife, Carmela, and therapist, Jennifer Melfi, consistently disrupts Tony's desire to identify himself through the mafia's masculinist codes: His "options are circumscribed by a morality defined by civilizing women," and he is caught between the conflicting realms of the male mafia family that he rules and the feminized domestic where he is (at best) second in command (Akass and McCabe 150). Cindy Donatelli and Sharon Alward contend that the show's integration of soap opera techniques functions as a "feminist metatext" that subverts generic expectations of the male characters and the audience. The Sopranos thus signifies a "wholesale collapse of [the] masculinity" embodied by earlier gangsters, such as The Godfather's Michael Corleone (Donatelli and Alward 65, 71). In other words, this is not your father's gangster narrative: It's your mother's.

Yet while The Sopranos clearly highlights women's roles in gangster life and incorporates traditionally feminized generic elements, these tactics yield feminist readings only if one is willing to collapse distinctions between female, feminine, and feminist, or to reductively view masculinity and femininity as existing purely in opposition to one another. The Sopranos' deployment of soap opera narrative practices does often "deny [the male characters] the dignity of a full-length Mafia movie," displacing the masculinist gravitas characteristic of The Godfather trilogy, but does not automatically compel or promote feminist interpretations or modes of viewing (65). Moreover, although women characters prompt Tony to reassess his conduct and engage in what might be called feminized behaviors, their influence also reinforces his criminality and chauvinism, rendering their "female narrative authority" problematic and distinctly not feminist (Carmela's power within the domestic sphere is, after all, predicated on Tony's professional success).[1]

I argue that feminism informs The Sopranos on a more profound thematic level, namely through its depictions of the social constructed-ness of femininity and masculinity, and the conflicts, negotiations, performances, and power imbalances that these social constructions generate. As vexed as perceptions of manhood might be for The Sopranos' men vis-á-vis women, then, they are no less complicated when the men are by themselves. In fact, the show undermines the male characters' tautological "old school" view that "men are men and women are women" by revealing how the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in masculinity manifest themselves in the characters' psychic processes, actions, and relations to one another. At the same time, the show asks us to reconsider our own seemingly more "progressive" investments in configurations and representations of gender. Thus, on a metatextual level, as Lisa Johnson also argues in this issue in her analysis of femininity and sexuality, The Sopranos consistently demonstrates that the nature of gender is anything but natural.