Questioning Masculinity: A Re-Reading of Stan Rogers’s “Harris and the Mare”
Reconsidering What It Takes to “Be a Man” in One of Stan’s Greatest
I have always thought of Stan Rogers’s “Harris and the Mare” as a sort of guilty pleasure. It’s a song from his brilliant live album from 1979, Between the Breaks. The pleasure part is easy to explain — the exquisite fingerpicking-good guitarwork, the marvelous incorporation of the haunting Northumbrian smallpipes played by Grit Laskin, and Stan’s orotund and powerful baritone under perfect control.
Then there’s the added attraction that it’s that rarity in contemporary song, a tautly told narrative poem. First there’s the rising action — a couple going out to the bar and encountering a drunken lout, young Cleary, who hits on the wife. Then the climax: she slaps the loudmouth, he punches her and knocks her out, then the narrator husband grabs Cleary and smashes his head against the door; the raging Cleary pulls out a knife but in the ensuing struggle he is the one who ends up dead on the floor. And finally, the dénouement: the narrator carries away his still-unconscious wife, with none of his so-called friends in the bar raising a hand to help. After hauling her half a mile, he encounters his friend Harris, out with this “trap” (a buggy) and his old mare. Thankful to at last find a friend who can help, the narrator asks Harris to take them home.
OK, so there’s much to admire about the song. Why, then, has it for so long been for me a guilty pleasure? Quite simply, it has always struck me that the song seems to glorify a definition of manhood that seems almost incomprehensibly out of date. At three different points in the song, the narrator speaks of being “a man.” “I had to see his blood to be a man,” he says, before grabbing hold of Cleary’s throat. Then when he’s telling the story of the fight to Harris: “by God, I was a man! But now I cannot stand.” And in the last verse he says again, “In my nine-and-fifty years I’ve never known / That to call myself a man, for my loved one I must stand.” What’s worse is that all this talk about manhood is tied in with an astonishing amount of violence. There’s Cleary’s initial verbal aggression, which leads to the wife’s slap. Then it escalates into Cleary’s knockout punch, followed by the narrator grabbing Cleary’s throat and beating “his head upon the parlor door,” leading to Cleary dragging out his “awful knife” (and roaring “I’ll have your life”). He stabs the narrator, they tussle on the floor, and the knife ends up in Cleary’s back “when we rolled o’er.”
I’m writing this in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in a school (it hardly matters which one — there’s bound to be another one next week) by a young man — a boy, really, not yet grown into manhood, who pulls a gun apparently to settle scores with his classmates. In a culture that equates manhood with dominance that is all too often expressed as violence, well, it’s not surprising that teenaged boys just beginning to wonder how to prove their manhood keep pulling out their loaded phallic symbols and start shooting. I hear the expression “toxic masculinity” thrown around a bit these days. Too often it seems definitions of masculinity aren’t just toxic but downright murderous.
Perhaps that is why, when I started to learn how to play “Harris and the Mare” in the DADGAD tuning that Stan liked so well, I semi-apologized when I played it for my wife. Specifically, I confessed my discomfort with all the macho stuff about what it takes to “be a man.” But my wife, who conveniently (for my purposes here) (and elsewhere!) teaches feminist theory and gender studies, said she didn’t see it that way at all. She wondered if the song doesn’t show that the macho strutting is what causes all the pain that arrives at the end of the song. The song might in fact be calling into question our definitions of masculinity, since trying to live up to those definitions leads to the narrator’s position at the end, no longer able to stand on his own, let alone carry his wife any further, and desperately needing help from a neighbor. “Please, Harris, fetch thy mare,” he pleads at the end, “and take us home.” Rather than celebrating his “manly” independence, the song ends up placing the speaker very much in a dependent position, wounded spiritually as well as physically, needing to rely on someone else’s help. No man is an island, as they say — and as John Donne was first to say.
Beyond being happy that I had the feminist blessing to play a song I so cherished, my wife’s words also sent me back for a closer look at the song. And I was pleased to see that the song, like the best of poems, seems to delight in ambiguity — in this case regarding the issue of masculinity.
The obvious villain of the piece is Cleary, of course, the drunken lout who initiates all the violence. We might wonder about the fact that the first act of physical aggression is not from either of the men, but from the wife when she slaps Cleary. But in context that seems like an appropriate response to Cleary’s brutish behavior. From there, though, it’s both men who respond by escalating the violence — from punch to throat grab and head beating to knifewound to fatal stab.
But if Cleary is so clearly villainous, perhaps we should not be so quick to defend the narrator for similarly responding with violence — and in fact helping to escalate the violence. Rather than congratulate him on standing up for his woman and being “a man” in confronting the bully, perhaps we should hesitate in validating his version of events. Violence begets violence, and leads not only to the death of the obnoxious drunk but to the pathetic state of abandonment that the narrator finds himself in at the end. Perhaps that is why the narrator’s friends do not raise a hand to help him after the stabbing. Maybe they weren’t necessarily seeing his actions as heroic.
The song also raises some really interesting ambiguities about the whole notion of “raising a hand.” When Cleary punches the wife, we are told he “raised his ugly paw.” So to raise a hand is to threaten or perpetrate violence. But after the knife fight, the narrator says, while bewailing the fact that none of his neighbors at the bar offer help, that “no hand was raised to help us through the door.” So now to raise a hand means to offer help. But later, telling the story to Harris, he says that “no neighbor stayed his [Cleary’s] hand, I was alone.” So now the raised hand is again threatening violence, and the good neighbor should “stay” that threatening hand. The point here is that the image of raising a hand goes both ways, threatening violence or offering help. The repetition of that image serves to highlight the ambiguity, and it raises questions, perhaps, about the employment of the narrator’s own hands. After all, they have blood on them, so they’re not entirely clean.
All of this is to suggest that in the song we may be dealing with an unreliable narrator. While that’s not common in songs, where we are often encouraged to equate the speaker with the singer or the songwriter, it’s not that unusual in poems. In fact, it’s particularly common in the poetic form known as the dramatic monologue, and lo and behold that’s what we have here.
So first, a definition: a dramatic monologue features one speaker (duh, that’s why it’s a monologue) speaking at a particularly dramatic moment. In doing so, the speaker usually turns out to be less than admirable. The classic example is Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” where the Duke of Ferrarra is entertaining an emissary from the Count whose daughter is slated to marry the duke. In the course of the poem, though the duke does all the talking, he gradually reveals himself, to discerning readers at least, to be a jealous and petty monomaniac who gave orders to kill his previous wife (“my last duchess”). For what heinous offense? Had she in some way betrayed the duke? Not at all. She liked picking cherries and watching sunsets, she blushed modestly at a compliment, and she was kind to poor people. In other words, she found joys in places other than the Duke’s lavish holdings (of both her and other fancy things).
In “Harris and the Mare,” the dramatic situation is the meeting up with Harris after the trauma of the bar fight. But from his account of the events, do we have any reason to distrust our narrator? Well, once we resist the temptation to take the side of the speaker, maybe we see that the dire situation he finds himself in — abandoned by his neighbors, wounded, alone, blood on his hands — is partially his own doing. We might still feel sympathetic towards him — in fact, we might see him as the victim not only of Cleary’s belligerence but of his own culture’s definitions of masculinity — but we might also see that he bears responsibility for his plight. It’s the old sympathy versus judgment dilemma — we might feel sympathy for him while also making a judgment against him.
Or maybe not. We might also see the whole situation as unfortunate but not of his own making. But we should at least be sensitive to the possibility that it’s not as easy to determine right and wrong as it first appears. Which is to say that there’s some ambiguity to sort out here.
There’s one more element to all this as well, another point that might convince us that we should not be too quick to think that the speaker is Stan himself. While it’s true that, according to his brother Garnet’s memoir Night Drive, Stan did have a reputation for standing up to bullies with fisticuffs — and it wasn’t just Stan’s voice that was big and powerful — there are plenty of reasons for us to resist assuming that the narrator’s views about manhood are also Stan’s. Aside from the fact that Stan is not known to have engaged in any knife fights, the story in the song clearly seems to be historical. After all, the narrator doesn’t ask Harris to take them home in his Ford pickup. The story is not set in the modern day but in a time when people still got around by horse and buggy. That would make it the early twentieth century at the latest. But we can get still more specific.
There is a point in the song where the narrator is making the point that he has a reputation for being a pacifist. “I was a conshie in the War,” he says, “crying what the hell’s this for.” What follows is his declaration that, despite that history, “I had to see his blood to be a man.” So he would have us believe that his part in the fight was not out of some bloodthirsty nature but necessity. He had no choice — if we assume that manhood requires eye-for-an-eye justice.
What strikes me is the use of the term “conshie,” slang of course for conscientious objector. That certainly evokes a time that Stan would have been familiar with, the Viet Nam War and the conscientious objectors who moved to Stan’s native Canada to evade the draft. But that term “conshie” wasn’t used much in the 1960s. Rather, it dates back to World War I. The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1917 as the earliest known usage of the term, appearing in the Daily Mail in an article about an anti-war protest in Dartmoor, where apparently use of the term, as “conshie” or “conchy,” was widespread. It also appears in Frederick Manning’s WWI novel from 1929, The Middle Parts of Fortune.
In other words, the use of the term “conshie” as well as the reference to a world where people still traveled by horse and buggy (or trap and mare), marks the song’s time frame as after World War I and before the widespread use of cars. Stan, then, is not writing about a contemporaneous scene. And if that’s the case, he may be suggesting that the song’s portrayal of the moral codes regarding manhood is not about the way things are or should be in our time, but about what they were like in the past. Perhaps that may help us recognize something about the cultural background that has influenced our own codes of behavior regarding gender. And that may lead us to question those codes and their relevance to our own lives and our own time.
It’s a tragic song, and a beautiful song, and yes, it’s possible to be both. And perhaps we can see both horns of the dilemma “Harris and the Mare” presents us with regarding questions of manhood. Either way, I am left admiring the song even more for rewarding a close reading as well as a close listening.
Works Cited
Rogers, Garnet. Night Drive: Travels with My Brother. Tickle Shore, 2016.
Rogers, Stan. Between the Breaks . . . Live! Fogarty’s Cove, 1979.
