Come Back to the Raft Ag´in, Ed Gentry, by Betina Entzminger

In his essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Ed Gentry,” Betina Entzminger argues that at the heart of James Dickey’s Deliverance lies the search for a lost masculinity in today’s world, told through the lens of the protagonist’s canoe trip. He asserts that Ed understands the societal pressures upon each gender, forces that compel us towards the stereotypes that pervade our culture. Further, Entzminger believes, “Despite the fact that Ed sees these constructions as constructions, he is unable to rise above them” (Entzminger). Ultimately, Entzminger posits, “Ed dutifully destroys that which challenges his own and his community’s conceptions of gender and sexuality, and he finds comfort in his return to his community at the novel’s close” (Entzminger). However, though Entzminger is correct that Ed never does ascend beyond society’s gender constructions, his error is in his assumption that Ed ever wanted to, or that he even should have.

These gender questions are in play early in the novel. At the outset, before the canoe trip, Ed visits his office. Surrounded by women, he feels alone and uncomfortable. To compensate he forces himself to look each of the women over, breaking them down from people into purely sexual objects. Meant to satisfy his lost masculinity, the ordeal brings him little pleasure and even depresses him. “I am with you but not of you. But I knew better. I was of them, sure enough” (Dickey 15). Ed feels the constant feminine bombardment that has overhauled American society over the past century, from women’s suffrage in 1920, to the expansion of women in the workforce during WWII, to the Equal Rights movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. These changes have made women of us all, and Ed, along with his three companions, ...

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... life. The ultimate power, and ergo machismo, is authority over life and death, and it was his.

After the trip, Ed returns home to his wife, to civilization. However, he is now unaffected by the feminist influences that plagued him before, he is a man and understands his place in the world. The trip pushed his limits, forcing him to overcome the emasculation granted him by society, as when he fought the gun from the would-be rapist’s hand or when he killed the other mountain man with nothing to rely on but himself. He has reclaimed his manhood, his “true, whole self” as Entzminger would say, and may return to civilization the better for it.

Works Cited

Dickey, James. Deliverance . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. Print.

Entzminger, Betina . "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in Ed Gentry." Southern Literary Journal 40.1 (2007): n. pag. Project Muse. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.