Masculinity, Insecurity, and Violence Theme Analysis

Peter and Jerry live wildly different lives: Peter is married with daughters while Jerry is single and unsure of his own sexuality. Peter is a middle-class textbook publisher while Jerry is poor and his source of income is never revealed. But as they talk in the park, it becomes clear that they have something in common: insecurities around masculinity and sex. Whenever one of them alludes to the complexities of manhood and male sexuality, the other grows defensive—and rather than openly confronting their anxieties around gender and sexuality, Peter and Jerry begin to define masculinity in terms of violence, goading each other to “fight for your manhood.” Finally, the tension between the two men does escalate into a physical fight, in which Jerry purposefully impales himself on a knife that Peter is holding. In The Zoo Story, then, violence and even death are direct consequences of unhealthy masculinity and the pressure that men feel to perform a narrow idea of masculinity.

From the beginning, the play establishes that both characters have deep insecurities around masculinity and sex. For example, Peter seems profoundly uncomfortable when Jerry guesses (correctly) that Peter has not fathered any male children. Jerry then takes further aim at Peter’s sense of manhood, saying that he guessed it from “the way you cross your legs…something in the voice.” Here, Jerry is invoking the physical norms of masculinity (aggressive body language, a deep voice) to suggest that Peter is in some way failing to be masculine and therefore should be blamed for his lack of a male child. But Jerry seems to have similar insecurities. Set off by Peter’s implication that Jerry should have a girlfriend, Jerry explains that he has never been able to have sex more than once with a woman. He identified as gay for a week when he was 15, but now he no longer seems comfortable with this label. Jerry’s insistence that homosexuality is in his past, along with his distancing of himself from the gay “queen” who lives next door, perhaps implies his belief that masculinity is tied to heterosexual desire—and that he therefore should try to feel such desire, even if this goes against his natural impulses.

Both men’s insecurities stand out most when Jerry discusses his deck of “pornographic playing cards.” Jerry mocks Peter for throwing away his own pornography right before he got married, hinting that Peter’s marriage has weakened or destroyed his sexual desire. Jerry, on the other hand, explains that when he was young, he would “use the cards as a substitute for real experience”—but now, he uses “real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.” In other words, Jerry consistently finds the physical experience of sex with women disappointing, so he prefers fantasies of sex to the real thing—but this this cuts against the social pressure for men to enjoy sex. Both men therefore suspect that their desires for sex are somehow abnormal, insufficient, or un-manly.   

Despite sharing insecurities about masculinity, neither man can openly discuss this topic, and instead they often over-compensate with anger, disgust, or hysteria. For instance, when Jerry tells Peter about his landlady’s sexual advances, both men are revolted. “She presses her disgusting body up against me to keep me in a corner so she can talk to me,” Jerry explains, and Peter replies, “that’s disgusting. That’s…horrible.” Jerry feels literally “cornered” by female sexuality here, viewing it as a force that traps and “disgusts” him; this is a common theme for Jerry, who seems repulsed by even the women he does sleep with (“the pretty little ladies aren’t pretty little ladies,” he will later complain). But tellingly, Peter is also “horrified” by the landlady’s behavior, even though he has never experienced it firsthand—in fact, this is one of the first times he has so wholeheartedly agreed with Jerry on anything. It can be argued, then, that Peter is also troubled by even just the idea of overt female sexuality, and therefore is not nearly as comfortable with heterosexual desire as he pretends to be. Furthermore, in the moment when Jerry tickles Peter—the first moment in which the two men make physical contact—Peter reacts almost “hysterically,” his voice becoming “falsetto.” Both of these words are traditionally used (usually with derogatory undertones) to describe women, so it seems that Peter—unable to make sense of physical male intimacy in any form—immediately resorts to a kind of feminized panic.

Ultimately, as each man’s insecurity leads him to attack the other, the play suggests that rigid ideas of masculinity can cause dangerous violence. For instance, it’s masculinity that initially leads the men to fight. Jerry has been trying to pick a fight for a while, but he fails to provoke Peter until he cries out, “fight for your manhood…you couldn’t even get your wife with a male child.” Peter then immediately picks up the knife, demonstrating that he is more insecure about his masculinity than anything else, including his family and his “self-respect,” which Jerry has already insulted without inciting violence. Furthermore, the actual conflict between the two men is itself filled with phallic symbolism, which underscores that masculinity is at its heart. Mocking Peter’s fixation on the bench, Jerry dismisses it as “this iron and this wood”—phallic language that suggests that Peter, by defending his place on the bench, is actually fighting to prove some kind of physical or sexual prowess. Moreover, the knife on which Jerry impales himself acts as a kind of phallus, entering him with deadly force. Jerry’s death is thus a cautionary tale, exposing the harm of narrow gender norms and illuminating the need for a more expansive view of manhood and male sexuality.