Muscles, Symmetry and Action: ‘Do You Measure Up?’ Defining Masculinity in Britain and America from the 1860s to the early 1900s

Abstract

Among the Greeks of antiquity, the mesomorphic male form had been accorded high status. Two approaches inform the modern world's thinking about ‘the body’ – that which predominates in the biological sciences (the body is a ‘machine’ that is governed by the laws of physics and chemistry) and that which has been receiving intense attention from scholars in the social sciences and humanities (the body is substantially a neutral surface upon which social and cultural values are imprinted). What occurs deep within the body's structures is immensely important but it is anatomical form that commands our attention. The mesomorphic forms that presently pervade the media insistently proclaim that muscularity defines what it is ‘to be a man’. This is by no means the first time that such a message has been heard in the modern world. Among the better educated, by the 1860s the icon of the well-muscled male – and all that this implied – was rapidly replacing the eighteenth-century ideal of manliness as one of proper stances, gestures and countenance. This found particularly powerful expression in new forms of athletics and the concept of ‘athleticism’ that emerged first in England and quickly made its way across the Atlantic, where it became linked to the rising interest in anthropometry and a host of contemporary values. Not everyone agreed, however, that athletics were beneficial; or that the tape measure and dynamometer alone could ‘take a man's measure’. This paper examines the complex matter of the reassertion of the mesomorphic male body in Britain and America from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s – about not only its physical configuration but what was inferred from and about gross anatomical form.