Masculinity is the actions and quality of a man; in the play all three characters are important because they are three very different types of man. Between them, they cause tension, fights and arguments.
“Marco is face to face with Eddie, a strained tension gripping his eyes and jaws, his neck stiff, the chair raised like a weapon over his head – and he transforms what might appear like a glare of warning into a smile of triumph, and Eddie’s grin vanishes as he absorbs his look.”
If one of the characters didn’t act the way they did, e.g. Rodolpho doesn’t sing, cook, make dresses etc then Eddie and Rodolpho wouldn’t have the conflict between them and Eddie couldn’t say that he was gay for an excuse that Catherine can’t marry him.
The tension is reliant on all the characters, and if anyone of them change, then all the tension is lost.
Eddie is stubborn, arrogant and is driven by his beliefs. He thinks that everything evolves around him. His belief is very traditional and believes that a woman’s place is in the kitchen and a man should work and look after their family, not sing, cook or make dresses. Eddie thinks that Rodolpho should be more like a “real” man and stop acting like a woman, since cooking is a woman’s job. He thinks that he should be more like his brother, Marco or a bit like himself because he finds it hard to believe that a man would do these kinds of things in the 50’s. Eddie treats Catherine and Beatrice like any man would in the 50’s, his respect is important to him in front of Catherine and Beatrice but more importantly the whole neighbourhood.
“Beatrice: Why! What do you want?”
“Eddie: I want my respect. Didn’t you ever hear of that? From my wife?
Eddie demonstrates the type of man he is to the audience during the whiskey bottle scene. In the scene it shows that he enjoys drinking (which is usual for a man in this time period), it also tells the audience that he is trying to drown his sorrow and that he likes Catherine which he is stressed about because he is afraid that Rodolpho would take her away from him.
Marco is strong but silent unlike Eddie who thinks that you need to show off your strength to prove how manlike you are. This is shown to the audience through the scene where Eddie hits Rodolpho during the boxing match. Marco is more like Eddie than he is like Rodolpho, i.e. Eddie and Marco is both driven by their beliefs and protective of their family. The most important thing to Marco is his family back in Scilly; he has come all the way from there to America only because he can’t earn enough money to support his children. Honour is also very important to Marco, which is way he kills Eddie in the end for telling on him to the immigration bureau. All these things about Marco are demonstrated to the audience by the way he works and the fight between him and Eddie at the end of the play. Marco and Eddie are similar in many ways, they are protective of their family, they stand up to what they believe in and they both want respect but in different ways. Marco wants his respect because Eddie told the immigration of his presence but Eddie wants his respect in front of the neighbourhood (because Marco “took” his good name). He also wants respect from his family because he thinks that being the man of the house you must have respect from everyone. Physical strength to Marco is not to show how manly you are but to Eddie he thinks it’s a way of telling people how tough and manly he is, so he challenges Rodolpho to a boxing match and hits him. Marco then shows him what strength is for,
“Here. He kneels, grasps, and with strain slowly raises the chair higher and higher, getting to his feet now. Rodolpho and Catherine have stopped dancing as Marco raises the chair over his head.”
This scene shows us that Marco is protective of his brother and physically stronger than Eddie.
Rodolpho is a totally different man to Eddie and Marco. He can sing, make dresses, cooks and is very talented. Eddie and Marco both has plans for their future but Rodolpho just likes to dreams of becoming an American citizen, owning a motor bike and going to Broadway to sing and dance. Eddie is made uneasy by all the cooking and singing because at the time this wasn’t what a man would do and it would be left for a woman. Catherine likes Rodolpho because she is naive and hasn’t been allowed out of the house, whereas Rodolpho has came all the way from Scilly and he is different to Eddie which is the only man she has known is here entire life.
“Once we went to Yugoslavia.”
These are the reasons why Catherine is seduced by Rodolpho and the fact that he respects her makes him even more attractive to her.
I think that the characters are very believable as men because in the 50’s Eddie and Marco was the type of man you would find everywhere, but Rodolpho is a little less believable as a man because in the 50’s this is not what a man would do (singing, dancing, cooking etc) and was considered as a woman’s. Catherine likes Eddie but only because he has brought her up and looked after her, because of this she feels that she must be responsible and stay by his side and obey his commands. While she likes Rodolpho because he is young attractive, different from Eddie and has travelled far and wide around the world, where she has only stayed in Brooklyn for her whole life.
Masculinity is important to the play because if any characters behaviours where different then the play would have changed dramatically. E.g. if Eddie didn’t love Catherine, then he wouldn’t have told the immigration bureau about the two Sicilian brothers and if this never happened, Marco wouldn’t have needed to seek revenge. In the end the real man is probably Eddie because he died for what he believed in but Marco could be considered as the real man because he too stood up to what be believed in and killed Eddie and also protected his brother when Eddie hit him.
In the end, I think that the audience comes out thinking that Eddie and Marco are the “real man,” this is probably because that they both stood up to their beliefs and Eddie even died for what he believed in. Although people may think that Marco was wrong for killing Eddie, all he was doing was following his Sicilian unwritten code of honours.