SOURCE: Posnock, Ross. “Purity and Danger: On Philip Roth.” Raritan 21, no. 2 (fall 2001): 85-101.

In the following essay, Posnock explores the tension between the good boy/bad boy persona used within Roth's novels, particularly in The Human Stain.

At least since Baudelaire portrayed Poe as a martyr to “the savagery of bourgeois hypocrisy,” writers have found an unfailing source of creative energy in assaulting the canons of genteel propriety. In his epochal 1911 essay on the genteel tradition, George Santayana named it a “yoke,” a “tyrant from the cradle to the grave.” While one of the constraints Santayana had in mind was the genteel Brahmin social code of compulsive heterosexuality, half a century later homosexuality became, for some, not the antidote to but the image of a stifling normativity. “Most American white men are trained to be fags,” declared LeRoi Jones in 1966, using his favorite shorthand term of abuse that...