A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians
In his exciting new book, John F. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were.
When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity -- bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. Concern with the white male body -- with exhibiting it and with the perils to it --reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.
A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians
In his exciting new book, John F. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were.
When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity -- bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. Concern with the white male body -- with exhibiting it and with the perils to it --reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.
Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
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Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
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Overview
A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians
In his exciting new book, John F. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were.
When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity -- bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. Concern with the white male body -- with exhibiting it and with the perils to it --reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429930031 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/02/2002 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
John F. Kasson, who teaches history and American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man, Amusing the Million, Rudeness and Civility, and Civilizing the Machine.
John F. Kasson, who teaches history and American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man; Amusing the Million; Rudeness and Civility; and Civilizing the Machine.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WHO IS THE PERFECT MAN?
EUGEN SANDOW AND A NEW STANDARD FOR AMERICA
Images of male muscular development and bodily perfection have both a distinguished lineage and a troubled history in Western culture. Though securely established in classical Greece and Rome, their position afterward became highly precarious, particularly in the context of a Christian pursuit of spiritual perfection that denied the body. In response, artists from the Renaissance on have been remarkably resourceful in attaching both male and female nudes to classical, biblical, ideal, or exotic subjects. In addition, beginning in the 1840s, the new medium of photography offered an expanding range of images of the nude in more and less acceptable guises: academic studies for artists; records of medical and scientific subjects; ethnographic evidence of exotic peoples; and pornography. Still, even in the late nineteenth century, to display the unclad male figure, let alone the female one, bereft of divine, allegorical, or alien trappings — not as a god, virtue, ruler, hero, exotic figure, or scientific specimen but simply as a person — was to risk falling from the lofty plane of the nude to the shameful one of the merely naked.
Given this context, the emergence of the unclad male body from the realms of high art, science, and low life into the broader culture toward the turn of the twentieth century demands historical investigation. That body did not simply walk free. It faced suspicious inquiries as to its status. And it carried heavy aesthetic and cultural baggage, into which were stuffed a multitude of claims and aspirations, fantasies and anxieties. This baggage bore various tags, sometimes prominently, about manliness, heroism, power, virility, and eroticism. The figure who could lift them all would be regarded as not an ordinary but a perfect man.
Sandow dressed in fig leaf and Roman sandals, 1894. Photograph by Benjamin J. Falk. Library of Congress
This was perhaps the weightiest baggage that accompanied Eugen Sandow when he disembarked from the liner Elbe in New York in June 1893, and it only increased during his appearances across the United States in the next year. Sandow arrived at a key moment: just a month earlier, the stock market had crashed, slowly pulling the economy into a deep depression that profoundly threatened the sense of independence and control once enjoyed by men. Already bankers and businessmen feared ruin; soon millions of workers were unemployed, and tens of thousands of tramps drifted around the country. The depression intensified a widespread sense of gender malaise. To many, manhood seemed no longer a stable condition — absolute and unproblematic — but rather an arduous, even precarious achievement that had to be vigilantly defended. Supposedly a biological category, manhood was also a performance. And Sandow quickly emerged as the most brilliant performer of manhood of the 1890s. In his live appearances at vaudeville theaters, in widely circulated photographs, newspaper and magazine illustrations, and in some of the very first moving pictures, Sandow's unclad body became the most famous in the world and his name a synonym for muscular development. He helped to reshape notions of what male bodily perfection — and masculinity itself — might be in modern industrial society. And for all his active participation in this process, this "perfect man" was not simply a figure waiting to be discovered. In significant respects he was created out of the cultural demands of his time.
FROM ADONIS TO HERCULES
An acrobatic strongman on the English music-hall stage, Sandow made his American debut on June 12, 1893, at the Casino Roof Garden at Broadway and Thirty-ninth Street in New York City. He was an unusual attraction for the Casino, whose manager took pride in its being among the most refined variety theaters in the country, offering comic operas and other stylish acts in a theater of fantastic Moorish design. Sandow's six-week run came during the slack season, one made worse by a heat wave that baked the city and by the economy's plunge into depression. After the stock market's collapse in May, credit had tightened like a fist. Businesses failed daily. The Erie Railroad went bankrupt in July, and other railroads rapidly followed. Rich, middle-class, and laboring men alike had reason to feel tense about the future and uncertain about themselves. Depending on their class and political position, they would cast the blame on labor agitators or greedy capitalists, Democrats or Republicans. All were receptive to a man who embodied strength and confidence — as were many women of all classes. The wealthy saw Sandow first, but instantly newspapers and illustrated magazines made him a household name.
Sandow went onstage immediately after a performance of William Gill's musical spoof Adonis, one of the most popular American plays of the time. In retrospect, we can see the two acts not simply as diverting offerings on a single variety bill but as contending performances of masculinity, the first of a series of such contrasts that Sandow's American tour entailed. To appreciate the effect of Sandow's performance, we need to watch the previous act closely.
The title role of Adonis, the perfection of male beauty, was taken by a handsome, trim matinee idol named Henry Dixey. Adonis, first produced in 1884, when he was twenty-five, had made his career. Dixey was a "master of pantomime," in the words of one critic, and had made "his body ... a thoroughly trained instrument of expression, of which he has perfect and complete control." He was so successful at embodying this popular theatrical ideal of physical perfection that he was virtually trapped in the role, performing it more than seven hundred times in New York alone, in addition to tours around the country and an acclaimed run in London.
Adonis was a late-Victorian burlesque lampooning the conventions of melodrama, society plays, and gender roles as it presented women in aggressive competition for and pursuit of an irresistibly beautiful man. Gill's play turned inside out the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which a sculptor falls in love with his female creation, whom Aphrodite brings to life. (The Pygmalion story was being freshly popularized at the time both in comic treatments, including a play by W. S. Gilbert performed in New York in 1881, and in paintings by the British artists G. F. Watts and Edward Burne-Jones and the Frenchman Jean-Léon Gérôme.) In Gill's play a sculptress has created in her statue of Adonis a "perfect figure." Indeed, he is so beautiful and alluring that she cannot bear to sell him as promised to a wealthy duchess. Seeing Adonis, the duchess, together with her four daughters, is instantly and passionately smitten as well. The daughters try to conceal their ardor as each offers a refined observation about the figure's artistic merits: "Isn't it lovely." "What grace in that nostril." "What symmetry in that eyebrow." "What indications of strength in those biceps." Until the fourth sighs, "And what lovely calves."
To resolve the question of ownership, an obliging goddess brings the statue to life. Theatrical photographs suggest how Dixey comically achieved this metamorphosis. The determinedly absurd plot combined the spirit of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe (in which Dixey had earlier played) and a college farce. The pursuit of Adonis rapidly becomes entangled with three figures who are burlesques of stock characters of melodrama: the Marquis de Baccarat, a quintessential "polished villain"; Rosetta, a self-declared simple and poor "village beauty ... pursued by all the lordly vilyuns for miles around"; and Rosetta's rustic father, Bunion Turke, who, doubting his daughter's virtue, repeatedly declaims the necessity of shutting against her his "poor but honest door" and "poor but honest heart"— even as he attempts to steal Adonis's lunch. To heighten the absurdity (and the gender inversion), Adonis ludicrously assumes the disguise of a village maid and is briefly courted by the Marquis. For her part, Rosetta, who promptly falls in love with Adonis and who boasts that she weighs 120 pounds, was played by the hefty Amelia Summerville. (In an earlier production she had been played by the 300-pound George K. Fortesque in drag.) Ultimately, Adonis is cornered by all his female pursuers, who demand that he choose among them. Instead, he beseeches the goddess who gave him life, "Oh take me away and petrify me — place me on my old familiar pedestal — and hang a placard round my neck: — 'HANDS OFF.'" Thus, exhausted by his stint as a flesh-and-blood object of desire, Dixey as Adonis reassumed the pose of a perfect work of art as the curtain fell.
Adonis pointed to a new set of attitudes governing gender relations and bodily display, in which genteel women were assuming some of the prerogatives that earlier in the century had been reserved for men. That a man might be the construction and possession of women, valued solely for his beauty, his body openly admired and aggressively pursued by them (as well as courted by his own sex) — such was the stuff of both male fantasies and male anxieties. In its farcical way, Adonis played with the meaning of gender in modern life and with the question of whether anatomy indeed determined destiny or merely offered a pretext for roles and disguises. Still, if at the end of the play anyone in the audience were asked who best portrayed the perfect man, the answer would undoubtedly have been Henry Dixey.
Then it was Sandow's turn. When the curtain rose again, Sandow, clad only in a loincloth and Roman sandals, had assumed the statue's pose in Dixey's stead — and the contrast made the audience gasp. One observer wrote, "New York has come to look upon Dixey as a fairly well-made young man. When New York has seen Sandow after Dixey, however, New York will realize what a wretched, scrawny creature the usual well-built young gentleman is compared with the perfect man." Slowly, this new statue came to life as Sandow struck classical poses and moved his "forest of muscles" at will. For almost a decade, Dixey had successfully played the part of a beautiful classical statue come to life, but Sandow took on the dual roles of sculptor and masterpiece. He instantly eclipsed Dixey. In the words of one journalist at the time of his debut: "It was hard for the spectators ... to believe that it was indeed flesh and blood that they beheld. Such knots and bunches and layers of muscle they had never before seen off the statue of an Achilles, a Discobolus, or a fighting gladiator." Another reporter marveled: "He postures so as to bring the muscles more prominently before the audience, and he appears to be able to make them rise and fall just as easily as he can open and shut his eyes."
In the second part of his act Sandow demonstrated his strength and dexterity. With a crisp, military manner and to piano accompaniment, he performed a series of feats with two fifty-six-pound dumbbells, repeatedly exceeding what the audience thought possible. Holding a dumbbell in each hand, he turned a back flip; he did the same feat with his ankles tied together and his eyes blindfolded. Then, with a great show of exertion, eight men brought onstage a huge barbell with a basket holding a man at each end. Using only one hand, Sandow lifted the two men over his head, stopping momentarily to hold the barbell straight out from his shoulder as a further proof of his strength. In still another feat displaying his powerful abdominal and dorsal muscles, he had his knees fastened to a Roman column and then bent backward to lift two men over his head.
The finale of Sandow's half-hour performance was the human bridge. Making his body into an arch with his chest upraised and his hands and feet on the floor in the "Tomb of Hercules" position, he supported a wooden platform on his shoulders, chest, and knees. Then three trained horses (actually ponies), with an advertised combined weight of twenty-six hundred pounds, stepped onto the platform and stayed there for about five seconds supported by Sandow, whose "every muscle ... stood out like whipcord."
From the moment of his New York debut, Sandow was seen not simply as a remarkable figure of strength and showmanship but also as a new ideal of the male body which brought to the fore a host of personal and cultural issues. At the height of his career, from 1893 to 1906, he repeatedly toured the United States (the total duration of his visits amounted to nearly seven years, far more time than he spent in his adopted home of England or anywhere else), but already by the end of his second American tour, in 1894, his presence had dramatically altered the discussion. His appearance shattered the prevailing image of the strongman: the thickset, barrel-chested performer in circuses, dime museums, and beer halls who might be mistaken for a blacksmith but never for a gentleman, let alone an Adonis. Sandow brilliantly succeeded in winning the applause of elite theatergoers even before he gained the attention of the broader middle and working classes. To them all, he represented a new standard of male fitness, beauty, strength, and potency. Starkly exposed and thoroughly publicized as he was, he became an icon of the hypermasculine who with his extraordinary muscular development literally embodied characteristics that many men and women believed were threatened by modern life.
Spectators viewed Sandow's body as both an attraction and a challenge, a model of strength and an object of desire, an inspiration, a rebuke, and a seduction. He simultaneously incited superlatives and stirred disquieting controversies and ambiguities. He was touted as the "strongest man in the world" and the "perfect man," yet he was pursued by challengers, imitators, and impostors who claimed they could duplicate or better his feats. He was celebrated as a monument not only of strength but also of classical beauty, yet his body was criticized as abnormal, even decadent. He cultivated prestige in both medical science and sport, yet he was supremely a creature of the vaudeville stage, the newspaper interview, and the photographer's studio. He presented himself as a modern gladiator with a heroic aura, yet he aroused charges of fabrication and deception. He was ostensibly an apostle of asexual health and strength, yet he implicitly promised to restore lost virility. He never acknowledged himself as an object of erotic interest, yet he enlarged the boundaries of the display of the male nude in live exhibitions and in photographs that elicited intense interest from women and especially from men at a time when the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality did not squeeze so tightly as to inhibit a man's frank admiration of another man's body. He claimed to embody an ancient heroic ideal of manhood that had been lost in the modern world, yet he turned his body into a commercial spectacle and a commodity whose image was widely reproduced and sold.
THE RECOVERY OF LOST MANHOOD
Superlatives and ambiguities began with Sandow's accounts of his upbringing and training. At the outset of his American tour, he concocted an autobiography that emphasized his eminently respectable origins and heroic achievements, and he reiterated it throughout his career in interviews, articles, and amply padded books (beginning with Sandow on Physical Training, a compendium of physical instruction, biography, press clippings, photographs, and line drawings. In the process he changed his name from Friedrich Wilhelm Müller to a version of his mother's maiden name, Sandov (frequently Anglicizing his new given name of Eugen to Eugene as well). He preserved his background in Prussia, where he was born on April 2, 1867, but elevated his father from a fruit and vegetable seller in the markets of Königsberg to a successful jeweler and merchant. At the same time he shrewdly insisted his strength was not a gift of nature but an attainment strenuously earned. Indeed, the more he retold the story, the more his health as a youth declined. In some of his earlier newspaper interviews during his first American tour, as well as in his first book, he was "healthy," though less strong than his fellows; in later accounts he grew "very slight and sickly" as a child, and "my parents, as well as the physician, had serious doubts as to whether I would live."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man"
by .
Copyright © 2001 John F. Kasson.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
INTRODUCTION,
ONE - WHO IS THE PERFECT MAN?,
TWO - THE MANLY ART OF ESCAPE,
THREE - "STILL A WILD BEAST AT HEART",
CONCLUSION,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY JOHN F. KASSON,
NOTES,
INDEX,
Copyright Page,
Introduction
Introduction
In 1904 a balding, compactly built banker in Muncie, Indiana, posed for the camera on his forty-fifth birthday. It was not a conventional birthday portrait, however. For the occasion he stripped to the waist, flexed his biceps, and had himself photographed from behind. His business life was sedentary, but during the next forty years he kept up various physical regimens, ranging from lifting light weights to deep-breathing exercises. His name was Albert G. Matthews, and he was my great-grandfather; he died nine days before I was born.
I first saw this portrait in a family album as a child, and it prompted questions that fascinate me still. My initial response was surprise: What was he doing? Other male relatives in photographs showed their bodies, if at all, only in swim trunks as they squinted at the camera, usually holding a fish. Later I wondered, What was his sense of his body, and how was it shaped by the technologies and culture of his time? What models of strength did he admire? What dreams and anxieties did this image contain? Family photographs were one of the earliest ways by which I learned the importance of visual evidence in history, and in retrospect, I can see that this photograph was the first historical fragment that led to this book.
Many years later, I sifted through some thirteen thousand photographs at Harvard University devoted to the most famous of all Albert Matthews's contemporaries (ten months his senior), the man who was president when his birthday portrait was made in 1904, Theodore Roosevelt. Here the sense of theatricality that I had first glimpsed with my ancestor burst forth on a colossal scale. Crucial to Roosevelt's success was his ability to turn prized characteristics of manliness into spectacle, literally to embody them. The camera and the pen were essential aids in that effort. Born in 1858 to one of the richest and most socially prominent families in New York, Roosevelt created his own stirring drama of childhood adversity overcome in an account of how he transformed his "sickly, delicate," asthmatic body into the two-hundred-pound muscular, barrel-chested figure of a supremely strong and energetic leader. His Autobiography, first published in 1913, included illustrations of Roosevelt in positions of executive authority (assistant secretary of the navy, governor of New York, president of the United States) carefully balanced with portraits of him active and outdoors (on horseback, returning from a bear hunt in Colorado, with hand on hip as Rough Rider colonel in the Spanish-American War, and holding a rifle "in winter riding costume").
The photographic archive showed that Roosevelt had practiced such poses assiduously, and no American of his generation or president before or since — not Lincoln, not Kennedy, not Reagan — developed a broader repertoire. Once past his childhood, when he was pictured in the unisex white dress, long hair, and bonnet worn by upper-class children of the time, he seems to have determined never to appear before the camera in a pampered guise again. In a routine physical examination as a Harvard undergraduate, he learned from Dr. Dudley A. Sargent, the college physician and the nation's leading authority on physical education, that he had "heart trouble" and should lead a sedentary life, taking care not even to run up stairs. Roosevelt replied that he could not bear to live, that way and in- tended to do precisely the opposite. A photograph from about this time shows him outside the Harvard boathouse wearing rowing togs, bare-chested and barefoot, his jaws filled out with a beard, his biceps bulged by his fists.
From his college clays to the end of his life, Roosevelt appears to have considered no hunting trip complete without recording it either in the field or in a photographer's studio. For his first book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), based on his adventures in the Dakota Territory, he struck various attitudes, holding a rifle and wearing a fringed buckskin outfit in the style of Buffalo Bill and sporting the holsters, pistols, chaps, and broad-brimmed hat of the ranchman. In 1898, upon his return from Cuba, where he had led his regiment of Rough Riders in victorious charges up Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, he instantly memorialized his achievements in portraits that displayed a commanding martial bearing. In 1904, the year my great-grandfather posed for his birthday portrait, Roosevelt repeatedly jumped a fence on horseback until a Harper's Weekly photographer caught just the right dynamic image for the upcoming presidential campaign. After his presidency, a stage of life in which most of his successors have done nothing more strenuous than golf, he threw himself into new activities — with photographers always at the ready. He recorded his exploits as big-game hunter and explorer (including obligatory poses with animal trophies) in Africa in 1909. Four years later, after his fiercely energetic but unsuccessful "Bull Moose" campaign against William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, he headed for uncharted wilderness and big game once again, this time in Brazil, where he nearly lost his life. He spent his last years, also before the camera, stumping on behalf of the U.S. military effort during the Great War and itching to be in the thick of battle himself.
Many historians exploring manliness in this period have stopped with Roosevelt. But my pursuit has taken me further. And it has led to three immensely popular artists who entertained Americans in the two decades between 1893 and 1914: the strongman Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), the escape artist Harry Houdini (1874-1926), and the, author of Tarzan of the Apes, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs's Tarzan all acquired immense national and international fame. They literally became part of our language, which suggests that the cultural need for the metaphors they supplied was great, as was the power with which they entered into the lives of their audiences. Viewed in conjunction, these figures assume still greater significance: they expressed with special force and clarity important changes in the popular display of the white mate body and in the challenges men faced in modern life.
Although Sandow's name is no longer a household word, he is still revered as the father of modern bodybuilding and a pioneer of physical culture. In his heyday as a vaudeville performer, his position was even more exalted. Physical-fitness experts and journalists alike hailed him as the "perfect man," and his unclad body became the most famous in the world. He established a new paradigm of muscular development and attracted countless followers, ranging from the reformed "ninety-seven-pound weakling" Charles Atlas to the poet William Butler Yeats. His significance for cultural history is still greater. His display of his physique provides a fresh point by which we can assess the changing standards of male strength and beauty that may have inspired men like Albert Matthews to inspect their own bodies in private.
Sandow's celebrity has faded, but Houdini's hold on the popular imagination remains strong even today, though the nature of his feats and the context of his career have been obscured. For the general public, his name dominates the history of magic-to the intense annoyance of many conjurers and magic historians, who rank others superior. Wildly erroneous myths about him persist, such as that he died performing his "Chinese Water Torture Cell" escape (as does Tony Curtis's character in the 1953 Paramount film Houdini). Meanwhile, there has been little effort to place him in full historical and cultural context as not only the most brilliant escape artist in the history of illusion but also a magus of manliness, known for some of the most audacious displays of the male body in his time.
Burroughs's fictional character Tarzan is best known of all, but, again, in ways that obscure the significance of his creation. As the subject of twenty-four books written by Burroughs over thirty-five years, and of roughly fifty films, four major television series, a radio serial, and comic books, Tarzan and his adventures have been adapted in ways that hardly resemble the original. The persistence of his popularity testifies to enduring cultural fantasies about manly freedom and wildness. And an examination of the cultural milieu at his first appearance in Frank Munsey's All-Story magazine in 1912 illuminates important, if forgotten, aspects of American life a century ago. It reveals why a story about an immensely strong, incomparably free, indomitably wild noble savage could so entrance men who felt locked in the "iron cage" of modern urban, corporate life.
*Endnotes were omitted.
Copyright © 2001 John F. Kasson