American Coriolanus.

Moses and Jesus were fatherless sons. In the story of the infant Moses found in the bulrushes and the Egyptian princess who would become his surrogate mother, one finds not even a shadow of paternity. In the New Testament Mary looms so large and Joseph so small that the later claim of a virginal conception meshes smoothly with the beauty and magnificence of her motherhood in the gospel accounts. Fathers as begetters are superfluous in the foundation narratives of Judaism and Christianity. Has there ever been, will there ever be, a song with the lament, "Sometimes I feel like a fatherless child"?

Pop psychologists tell us that a son raised by a "single parent" mother is doomed to failure. Feminists might argue that this deterministic prognosis reflects only male self-importance. But since the debate about "family values" and child-rearing tends to bog down in dogmatism and sloganizing, it is illuminating to examine William Shakespeare's complex and wise portrait of a fatherless son, the Roman hero Coriolanus.

This soldier, Caius Martius Coriolanus, a man of rigid personality and principle, owes his valor as much to his mother's pedagogy as to his native temperament. The paradoxically virile and patriarchal Volumnia is more than equal to the task of being mother, father, and drill sergeant all in one. Her son is the product of relentless and even Skinnerian conditioning to the perils of war. She boasts that "when he was but tender-bodied" he was raised by her to be a paragon of military ruthlessness. Indeed, her grandson is being formed in the same mold that shaped the character of his steely father. Lest there be any doubt of the outcome of such an education, Shakespeare gives us this chilling glimpse of precocious ferocity:

   I saw him [young Martius] run after a gilded butterfly; and when he caught
   it, he let it go again; and after it again; and over and over he comes, and
   up again; catched it again.... he did so set his teeth and tear it. O! I
   warrant, how he mammocked it! [Coriolanus 1.3.55-61]

Coriolanus' mother--the teacher's teacher--proud of her accomplishments, then comments, "One on's father's moods." Juvenile sadism is both inherited and cultivated; it will be harnessed to battlefield combat. The men of this family are trained to kill.

Shakespeare's Roman tragedy is about the all-encompassing virtue of manliness--the strength of character that nourishes integrity, family piety, political scruples, and patriotism. Coriolanus seems to embody all of these, but we discover that they have transformed themselves into their opposites, indeed, into caricature. The hero's bravery masks the fear of being thought a coward, dignity disguises arrogance, proud principles veil a dangerous philosophical absolutism. Then there is the metamorphosis of his ardent love of country into hatred and treason. Coriolanus--a man whose name will become synonymous with a principled but extreme and nearly demented revenge. Coriolanus--the man who almost succeeds in destroying both his mothers: Volumnia who invented him, and the greater womb and nursery, Rome.

Shakespeare makes us understand that the excessively macho Coriolanus is a boy. As the play draws to an end, the soldier's old enemy, Aufidius--briefly a newfound ally and now an enemy again--knows this and sneers at Coriolanus with the taunt, "Thou boy of tears!" Three times Coriolanus spits out the indigestible word boy, and we know that lodged in the heart, groin, and muscle of the brave soldier's machismo is an aching deficiency, a kind of soul sickness.

Caius Martius, honored with the name Coriolanus, is nothing if not his mother's work, her masterpiece, the damaged product of her extravagant love. It was she who, upon his homecoming after the great victory at Corioles, counted his wounds as if they were new grandchildren. It is Volumnia who reminds him that he has not yet received "the one thing wanting" to crown his career--and that, predictably, is political power. It is she who convinces him to try a second time to "submit to the people's voices" in petitioning for a consulship. When that attempt fails, we see, as Coriolanus does not, that Volumnia is an efficient but harmful teacher.

Long before his enemy Aufidius destroys him, Coriolanus has been programmed for tragic failure. Volumnia created a grotesquery; Shakespeare's proud soldier has been engineered to self-destruct. Pedagogue and behaviorist, Volumnia doesn't understand what she has wrought until it is too late to modify the killing machine she designed.

When all others have failed, Volumnia finally succeeds in persuading Coriolanus to give up the vendetta against Rome. We think, so Mother wins--that could have been predicted!--and the man of iron loses the ideological battle. But capitulation to Volumnia is also a repudiation of the ruthless pedagogy that sought to rear a superman. Volumnia created in her son both his grandiose patriotism and its violent inversion. The mother's victory is for the son a defeat; only the collective mother, Rome, enjoys an unequivocal triumph. When the chastened and soon-to-die hero again becomes the patriot he once was, the return represents the triumph of what we might call matriotism: both mothers have prevailed.

It would be hard to find a better example of life imitating art--Coriolanus in our time--than in the career of General Douglas MacArthur. One biography, William Manchester's American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, tells us that MacArthur "was a well-born victim of Uberangstlichkeit, a mama's boy who reached his fullest dimensions in following maternal orders to be mercilessly ambitious." In his early thirties, MacArthur, extremely solicitous of the well-being of his mother Pinky, kept her with him on the post at Leavenworth. Describing MacArthur's life in the Philippines in the 1920s, Manchester remarks, "Always in the background lurked the formidable figure of General MacArthur the Elder's widow, eleven thousand miles away but very much present in spirit." There she used supposed ill health to manipulate her son. Manchester continues, "Up and about, the old lady threw her redoubtable energy into a campaign for her remaining son's further rise in rank. It was time, she decided, that the War Department made him a major general."

If Volumnia might have taught Pinky something about the perils of overweening ambition, Douglas MacArthur's mother could have shown the Roman matron a trick or two from her manual of "infight[ing] in the lists of army politics." Manchester continues: "His mother was to remain close to him until he was in his fifties ... under her mannered, pretty exterior she was cool, practical, and absolutely determined that her children would not only match but surpass the achievements of her father-in-law [Arthur MacArthur Sr.] and her husband." Only after his second marriage to Jean Marie Faircloth in 1937, when he was fifty-seven, did Douglas MacArthur find a woman who would serve as a substitute for his powerful mother.

In the last words of "Taps," the concluding chapter of Manchester's book, where he seeks "images" and "gleams" of Douglas MacArthur's essential character, Pinky appears again. She is issuing "imperious commands to fight and fight and never lower his blade short of victory." Pinky, who was "both meek and tough, petulant and sentimental, charming and emotional," was an American Volumnia: a woman as autocratic as that breeder and trainer of imperiousness, Coriolanus' mother.

Some might say that, in MacArthur's political battle with President Harry S. Truman over the conduct of the war in Korea (1950-1951), the general came as close to treason as it is possible to get while remaining safely on the side of legal innocence. If the president of the United States is, operatively and credibly, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, then MacArthur's deliberate misunderstandings of presidential directives constituted insubordination. Coriolanus, goaded by anger both justifiable and indefensible, made common cause with his country's enemies. MacArthur did not violate the trust accorded him and his office as flagrantly as the hot-tempered Roman; however, Manchester cites one historian who asserts that the general "would not play unless both the policy and strategy were transformed in accordance with his liking" and another who points out that "he would cooperate with the administration only on his terms."

Coriolanus, soon to commit treason, denounces as traitors those who accuse him of subverting the state's most venerable political traditions. Like the Roman general, our American zealot held politicians and civilians in contempt. When high-level military men supported the restrictions and cautions set forth by President Truman and his advisers, MacArthur imagined there was a conspiracy to destroy him. Citing Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (it is unclear who is being quoted), Manchester writes: "It is doubtful if there ever has been in this country so violent and spontaneous a discharge of political passion as that provoked by the President's dismissal of the General.... Certainly there has been nothing to match it since the Civil War." Manchester describes a national reaction to the dismissal in which "the President was burned in effigy ... a Denver man founded a `Punch Harry in the Nose Club.'... Workmen in Lafayette, Indiana, [carried] `Impeach Truman' placards."

American democracy, however, contrived not a martyr's but a conquering hero's denouement for the general. If he was disgraced by having been stripped of his command, he also was uniquely honored with the privilege of addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress. In his swan song (delivered to a rapt audience), the general told the nation that "old soldiers never die; they just fade away." MacArthur did not fade away; he became a national hero, an ardent right-wing political soldier, the trumpet of anti-communism. His politics--granted the imprecision of such comparisons--are those of the imperious Coriolanus. But the model for the rhetorician whose orotund sentences ravished the minds and hearts of those who heard him on the radio was Mark Antony, the spellbinder who provokes mutiny while saying, "Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up/To such a flood of mutiny" (Julius Caesar 3.2.216-217).

Manchester describes ecstatic responses to the general's speech. U.S. Representative Dewey Short declared, "We heard God speak here today, God in the flesh, the voice of God!" Coriolanus' persistent abuse of the "mutable, rank-scented meiny [common citizens]" provokes one of the tribunes to declare, "You speak o' the people/As if you were a god to punish, not a man of their infirmity" (Coriolanus 3.1.103-105). Coriolanus does not reply. He seems willing to accept apotheosis, even if intended as an insult, and we know that his radically patrician ideas are indeed godlike.

No less distrustful of representative government than Coriolanus, MacArthur used the legislative forum to beat the politicians at their own game. In his farewell address he took the issue--his military competence, judgment, and integrity-directly to the people, and they gave him a resounding vote of confidence, fashioning him into a mythic hero who combined the folkloric virtues of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, William Jennings Bryan, Joseph McCarthy, and, as Manchester's biography suggests, a Roman emperor.

MacArthur began his now legendary speech with the declaration, "Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, distinguished Members of Congress, I stand on this rostrum with a deep sense of humility and great pride." Coriolanus, however, never once felt humility and--so much the worse for him--could never succeed in faking a credible imitation of it. Our American Coriolanus--our democratic warrior-hero--was more wily, more the politician than the transparently prideful Coriolanus could ever be.

Manchester calls MacArthur a "poseur"; Pinky taught her son lessons in political tactics and strategy. (In 1952, MacArthur wanted to become president. Although he campaigned for Senator Robert Taft and against Dwight D. Eisenhower, "MacArthur's first choice," Manchester wryly observes, "was still MacArthur.") But Volumnia cannot inspire this military man Coriolanus to really desire political eminence and honor, to tether his truculent tongue, to be politic. The American general could be, let us say, flexible in a way that Shakespeare's rigidly principled Roman despised.

In the many successes that mark the career of Douglas MacArthur, we detect the energetic, persistent, and shrewd tutelage of his mother. Unfair though it may seem to blame Volumnia, Coriolanus is most notably his mother's laboratory-created product in his failures: his blindness, his lopsided character, and, above all, his inability to rise to simple human decency--or as he might want to say, to descend to soiled human frailty. Coriolanus' brutalities are tied by pathology to his attachment to his mother.

Whether we admire MacArthur's grandeur --Manchester calls it "thespianism"--or find it repugnant, a mask for quasifascist aims and attitudes, the doting Pinky must be credited or blamed for her son's imperial gestures. Coriolanus' ferocious mother can also be credited or blamed for his arrogance and self-regard. But the Roman's hubris makes a deeper wound than that of the American general.

The lives of these grand but blighted soldiers might remind Shakespeare readers of a remark made by the disillusioned Troilus when he witnesses the sexual betrayal of Cressida: "Think, we had mothers" (Troilus and Cressida 5.2.153). Can the sins of Cressida who, after all, had a mother, "soil" the good name of mothers? Ulysses thinks not. Can mothers, even the most loving and devoted of them, "soil"--that is, deform--the personalities of their children? They can. Coriolanus and MacArthur harbor the same embarrassing and unsuccessfully hidden secret: heroic and exceptionally virile though these men are, they are in a sense "mama's boys"--yes, these same pluperfect soldiers, these "real men," who might be the first to apply the former label to those who reject the cult of military violence.

Melvin Seiden is an emeritus professor of English at the State University of New York at Binghamton.