Deliverance

The novel focuses on the experiences of men and explores conflicting ideas about masculinity. In their daily lives, Lewis, Ed, Bobby, and Drew are all competent, middle-class, middle-aged men who depend to varying degrees on their work for a socially acceptable masculine role. Their journey into the wilderness, though in part an attempt to connect with a more “authentic” version of manliness, ends up testing even the masculine identities they have crafted for themselves.

Ed, though bored by his life’s routines, feels proud of the graphic design firm he co-owns, and his sense of masculine identity comes from his managerial role. He observes that the employees at his office are under his control and feels a sense of satisfaction from that fact. Yet as Lewis observes, the natural world will test that: “There’s nothing you do as vice-president of Emerson-Gentry that’s going to make any difference at all, when the water starts to foam up. Then, it’s not going to be what your title says you do, but what you end up doing. You know: doing” (36).

Lewis’s comment represents his version of masculinity, which is defined through action and strength. Lewis is so stereotypically male that Ed seems to think this masculinity can be imparted to those around him. As Ed observes, when he is around Lewis, he feels “a great deal lighter and more muscular” (30). However, if Lewis’s character is a stereotype of virile masculinity, it is an ironic one; although Lewis survives the canoe trip, he is physically broken by it. Moreover, the novel exposes the tensions within the normative masculinity Lewis represents. This kind of hypermasculinity is traditionally associated with heterosexuality because the latter is also coded as masculine. Yet Ed’s observations of Lewis hint at sexual desire. When four friends swim naked in the river, Ed observes the perfection of Lewis’s physique, noting that he has “never seen such a male body in my life, even in the pictures in the weight-lifting magazines” (92). Importantly, Lewis acknowledges Ed’s appreciation of his body: “I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes” (92). Lewis is aware of his maleness and understands that its construction is based in part on the admiration of other men. Ed’s observation of Lewis troubles conventional ideas about heterosexual male friendship, causing the subsequent scene of sexual violence to play out in part as a parody of bonding between purportedly straight men.

The assault on Bobby and attempted assault on Ed also challenges the classed nature of the masculinity the main characters embody. In the middle of the wilderness, the cultural and economic power Ed and his friends would normally wield over their poor, rural assailants is meaningless, and the novel communicates the inverted power dynamics through the gendered nature of the attack. Significantly, Ed is tied up and threatened with castration; this removal of the source of his male hormones would figuratively deprive him of male power. Bobby—always coded as feminine—becomes further “feminized” as the object of sexual assault. When the men force him to disrobe, they demand that Bobby remove his “panties”—a word typically used for women’s underwear. While the assailants have clearly led hard lives and thus lack Lewis’s physical strength, their implication is that they embody rugged masculinity better than middle-class men used to the comforts of urban life.

Lewis shoots the older man with an arrow before the younger man can attack Ed, beginning the process of reasserting both his own masculinity and that of his friends. Though motivated by practical concerns about survival, Ed’s later “hunt” for the man who may or may not have been his assailant is likewise symbolic retaliation for the prior blow to his masculinity. However, the kind of masculinity Ed embodies during the hunt is not middle-class and urban but rather one closely associated with the brutality of the natural world—and the backwoodsmen who attacked him. While this kind of primal masculinity was part of what the friends sought in traveling into the wilderness, the blurring of lines between assailant and victim suggests its cost.

The novel explores the relationship of images to reality through Ed’s point of view. As a graphic designer, Ed constantly references visual images to explain what he sees, yet he yearns for the “reality” beyond the image. The desire to encounter something authentic is part of what intrigues him about the canoe trip: “I had a good feeling about this trip. After so much shooting at paper images of deer, it was exciting to think of encountering a real one” (4). Like much about the trip, however, the reality does not match Ed’s fantasy: When Ed leaves the tent on their first morning in the wilderness to hunt with his bow and arrow, he misses the deer he targets, and it disappears into the forest. This suggests the fleeting or illusory nature of the reality behind the images; Ed’s contact with unfiltered reality is brief and unsatisfying, hinting that the impulse to tap into something more “real” than urban life is misguided (something subsequent events bear out).

Moreover, while Ed searches for signs of the essence things beyond mere images, he relies upon the images, tropes, and stereotypes to make sense of his world. His frequent references to movies are a good example. For instance, Ed thinks that the old man at the gas station looks “like a hillbilly in some badly cast movie, a character actor too much in character to be believed” (49)—a comment that suggests that films are somehow more realistic than life. Likewise, Ed’s ability to paddle a canoe is informed by images and movie depictions of Indigenous Americans, and he references the film version of the novel Tarzan when observing Lewis swimming. Most notably, Ed mediates the wild river landscape through pop culture; the cliff they stop near after the canoes are wrecked looks to Ed like a giant drive-in movie screen. Crucially, when Ed’s experiences are radically unfamiliar to him, he retreats into the familiar language of images. This culminates in his decision that he must hunt and kill the man suspected of shooting Drew. In imagining how he will hunt the man down, he thinks as though he were in consultation with colleagues at the graphic design firm: “What then, art director? Graphics consultant? What is the layout? It is this: to shoot him from behind, somewhere on the top of the gorge” (158). Ed translates reality through the images and language of graphic design to make sense of and master chaotic and unfamiliar circumstances—the very “reality” he ostensibly wanted to access.