Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History by Mike Goode

Abstract

Mike Goode. Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 270. $90. cloth/$29-99 paper. In Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, Mike Goode investigates the role of in the late eighteenth through mid nineteenth centuries, from Edmund Burke through Sir Walter Scott to Lord Acton and Goldwin Smith. In this period, narrative developed from a branch of letters to a science; through an era where the novel was prevalent to one where it seemed to be superseded by academic writing. Throughout his book, Goode makes a striking case for the role of the feelings in thinking and writing about history: historical epistemology underwent a shift over the course of the long nineteenth century from being a. feeling of to being an idea of history (3, his emphasis). Disputes about the writing of are part of larger disputes about manliness and feeling, modes that were in contention throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Writers put forth other models of the masculine that took into account, or even exploited, the role of the emotions, central to Adam Smith's influential The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Goode begins his readings with a couple of fascinating and persuasive chapters on Edmund Burke and his detractors. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) emphasized and praised groundedness in a manly capacity for feeling. Historians of the Scottish Enlightenment like Hugh Blair and David Hume had already assumed that had a role in creating interest in history. But Burke made feeling of utmost importance. Reflections both defends and displays sentiment (29); it argues that the French were lacking in feeling when they let a mob force the royal family from Versailles to Paris and when their new government rationalized societal institutions without regard to sentiment. Burke's famous delightful vision of an idealized Marie Antoinette takes part in this reliance on sentiment, too, as the portrait of the distraught Queen gives urgency to the preservation of male sentimental deference to rank and women (39). The ideal man uses the feelings in and political judgment, just as French rationalization, technocracy, and violence seem to rule them out. Burke's critics notice his reliance on the feelings, and they quickly use his own depicted emotions--for the Queen, especially, but also for traditional gradations of rank, station, and tradition--against him. Arguments about the Revolution intertwine with disputations about Burke's manliness, as when Mary Wollstonecraft makes fun of his style for its ornament and hyperbole, or Thomas Paine attacks Burke's sentimentality as artificial and unnatural. And Burke was widely visually lampooned in the press, using recognizable types drawn from the coarse English tradition of caricature, which had no shyness about making fun of a person's actual physical traits. Political cartoonists depicted Burke as a bizarre combination of four standing stereotypes of masculine deficiency: the Jesuit (who was propagandized as preying on erotic secrets in the confessional), the Man of Feeling (who was actually on the make), the Quixote (who failed to grasp reality), and the Antiquarian (whose love for books overtook normative heterosexual relationships). The cartoons, which uniformly figure Burke as a gaunt, elongated, bespectacled figure topped with an absurd headdress that is meant to be a biretta--(it's clear the cartoonists never saw one)-- critiqued him using the same codes of manliness that he accesses as essential in his politics. Even as they condemn him, they admit the terms of disagreement. In Goode's words, caricatures of Burke [that] oppose him actually end up confirming his model of 'the chivalric man of feeling' (5). Goode argues that Sir Walter Scott continues Burke's sentimental historicism in order to depict the sense of as a matter of the feelings in his novels. …