In Old School, the students at an elite, all-boys New England prep school face off in several different kinds of competition. The school holds literary contest in which students contend to meet a visiting writer; students compete to be published in the school’s literary review, Troubadour; and the students battle over girls at a nearby sister school. The competition over these various prizes becomes extremely heated as boys try to assert their dominance over one another. In an institution like an all-boys prep school, competitions become the primary way for the boys to assert their burgeoning masculinity and pride.
Winning honors at the school is viewed as a point of masculine pride and desirability to the opposite sex. Wolff emphasizes this by using sexual or animalistic language to describe the competitions: the narrator describes how the school “crackled with sexual static,” and that “the absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized.” This gendered language highlights how competitions for grades and other prizes are a proxy for competitions over young women. In this way, the boys’ academic competition is a way for them to prove their competence and thus their sexual desirability—even with no girls around to appreciate these qualities. The narrator reinforces this when he explains, “For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams.” The metaphor implies that the boys take on the qualities of animals brashly fighting to prove their dominance or battling to win sexual partners through these competitions. The narrator is also the director of publication of the school’s literary magazine, Troubadour. He enjoys reading and determining which submissions will be published, and he describes that the board takes pleasure in “[making] sport of [their] schoolmates” for their submissions. Not only does winning honors give them superiority, but determining the winners of competitions gives them even more power and pride.
While the school’s literary competition is meant to foster genuine creativity and opportunity for the boys, in reality they use this competition to bolster their pride. Three times a year, the sixth-form (senior) boys compete for the chance to meet a famous visiting writer by submitting a story or poem. The writer then chooses the winning work. The narrator describes how, during his first three years at the school, he would watch helplessly “as boy after boy was plucked from the crowd of suitors” for the competition. His language implies that he desperately wanted to be chosen and prove his superiority over the crowd. And the comparison of the boys to “suitors” again puts the competition in romantic or sexual terms as they vie to be considered the best among their peers. Years later, Susan Friedman (a former student at the nearby girl’s school Miss Cobb’s), criticizes the literary competitions. She explains that they frame literature as “some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing,” implying that in the absence of violence, young men use the competitions as a way of measuring their masculine dominance against one another. Even the teachers acknowledge the effect that the competitions have on the boys: Dean Makepeace, the dean of the school, knows that the headmaster originally thought of the competitions as a way to get more boys interested in writing. But instead, he recognizes that their true effect is to “sanction[] the idea of writing as warfare by other means, with a handful of champions waving the bloody shirt over a mob of failed pretenders.” This implies that the competitions are fierce partisan battles: while the winning boys see themselves as “champions” over “failed pretenders,” in reality their views are biased and exaggerated, and the competitions only serve to flatter their egos.
Competing over girls represents the most literal competition of male dominance, as the boys try to win the favor of female students at Miss Cobb’s. On a few occasions, the narrator and his classmates attend dances with the girls from Miss Cobb’s. At one dance, the narrator meets a girl named Rain, and they dance so closely that a monitor makes them separate. Later, however, he sees Rain making out with a classmate named Jack Broome, and the narrator “glow[s] with stupidity,” feeling “the sheer impersonality of her ardor.” The fact that the narrator is so replaceable in Rains eyes is troubling to him—it’s a blow to his ego. This illustrates how vying for girls is another point of pride for the narrator and his classmates. Later, Susan Friedman critiques the boys’ behavior toward the girls as well, remembering “boys dropping hints of their importance within moments of meeting her” and then “forcing themselves on her as if she had no choice in the matter.” The ability to have a sexual encounter with a girl (whether consensual or forced) is another way the boys prove themselves superior to one another—and it’s a competition to prove their superiority over girls as well. Like the literary contests and other honors, social competition among their peers are simply a means for the boys to prove their own masculinity and dominance.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Competition, Masculinity, and Pride ThemeTracker
Competition, Masculinity, and Pride Quotes in Old School
By custom, only sixth formers, boys in their final year, were allowed to compete. That meant I had spent the last three years looking on helplessly as boy after boy was plucked from the crowd of suitors and invited to stroll between the headmaster’s prize roses in the blessed and blessing presence of literature itself, to speak of deep matters and receive counsel…
The atmosphere of our school crackled with sexual static. […] The absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized. For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams, and to make your mark as a writer was equal as proof of puissance to a brilliant season on the gridiron.
I was conscious of him throughout the meal and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. The element of performance in his bearing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality—charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly, as if a glamorous woman had entered the hall.
I didn’t want to lose my place in the circle, so of course I was afraid of what my schoolmates would think after reading “Summer Dance.”
My fears came to nothing. Masters and boys alike told me pretty much what George had said—with plain goodwill and something else, something like relief, as if they’d felt all along that I was holding back, and could breathe easier now that I’d spoken up.
Susan considered my caper with her story a fine joke on this ivy-covered stud farm, and on Papa, as she acidly called him, and on the idea of literature as some kind of great phallic enterprise like bullfighting or boxing.
A writer was like a monk in his cell praying for the world—something he performed alone, but for other people.
Then to say it did no good! How could she say that? Of course it did good. And I stood there half-drunk and adrift in this bay of snoring men, and gave thanks for all the good it had done me.
Arch was sick of these competitions. The headmaster had launched them years ago to encourage more boys to try their hand at writing, and at the time Arch had seen merit in the idea, but it soon palled on him. The scramble to win a private audience set them against one another and sanctioned the idea of writing as warfare by other means, with a handful of champions waving the bloody shirt over a mob of failed pretenders.
