Christian Manliness Research Articles

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys inThe Maltese Falcon, 1929/1941

Hardboiled Hysterics: Shell Shock and Tough Guys in<i>The Maltese Falcon</i>, 1929/1941

Religion and the Marketplace in the United States

Acknowledgments Contributors General Introduction Jan Stievermann, Daniel Silliman, and Philip Goff PART ONE: Reassessment 1. Why Are Americans So Religious? The Limitations of Market Explanations E. Brooks Holifield PART TWO: Evangelicals and Markets 2. Weber and Eighteenth-Century Religious Developments in America Mark Valeri 3. Billy Graham, Christian Manliness, and the Shaping of the Evangelical Subculture Grant Wacker 4. Money Matters and Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family on the Traditional Family and Capitalist America Hilde Lovdal PART THREE: Religious Book Markets 5. The Commodification of William James: The Book Business and the Rise of Liberal Spirituality in the Twentieth-Century United States Matthew Hedstrom 6. Literature and the Economy of the Sacred Gunter Leypoldt 7. Publishers and Profit Motives: The Economic History of Left Behind Daniel Silliman PART FOUR: Religious Resistance and Adaptation to the Market 8. Selling Infinite Selves: Youth Culture and Contemporary Festivals Sarah Pike 9. Religious Branding and the Quest to Meet Consumer Needs: Joel Osteen's Message of Hope Katja Rakow 10. Unsilent Partners: Sports Stadiums and their Appropriation and Use of Sacred Space Anthony Santoro PART FIVE: Critical Reflection and Prospect 11. Considering the Neoliberal in American Religion Kathryn Lofton Index

Thomas Arnold, Christian Manliness and the Problem of Boyhood

Thomas Arnold is a well-known character in Victorian Studies. His life and work are usually discussed in relation to his role as Headmaster of Rugby School and the development of the English public school system. His importance in the history of Victorian manliness has, by contrast, been somewhat obscured. When scholars do comment on his highly influential idea of Christian manliness, they tend to assume it was an overtly gendered ideal, opposed to a well-developed notion of effeminacy. A closer study of Arnold's thought and writings, as well as the reflections of his contemporaries and pupils, reveals rather that his understanding of manliness was structured primarily around an opposition between moral maturity on the one hand and immoral boyishness on the other. As this article argues, one of Arnold's chief concerns at Rugby was to ‘anticipate’ or ‘hasten’ the onset of moral manhood in his pupils. Moreover, his discussion of manliness in his role as Headmaster was closely connected to his work as a historian – another neglected aspect of Arnold's career. Inspired, above all, by the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico, Arnold's historical writing is punctuated by the Vichian concept that nations, like individuals, pass through distinct stages of maturity, from infancy, through childhood, manhood, age and decrepitude. A close reading of Arnold's school sermons and other works on the peculiar dangers of boyhood suggests clearly that his historical writing inspired the notions of moral manliness and vicious boyhood that underpinned much of his educational thought.

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields

Christian Manliness for Women?: contradictions of Christian youth organization in early 20th-century Sweden1

Evangelical revivalism attracted large numbers of young adherents in early 20th-century Sweden. In this article we discuss what happened when Christian youth societies for men and women merged into mixed societies. The decline of the ideal of the single-sex youth society meant that a decidedly female form of religious organization disappeared. We argue, however, that the change also entailed cautious challenges to established notions of gender. First, a discourse was created in which notions of manliness were placed in the centre, and women, to some extent, were seen as embodying masculinity. Secondly, even though central actors had objections towards a direct female leadership of men, female board members were accepted from the start in local societies. The patriarchal gender order remained, but in some ways the mixed Christian youth organization gave way to an exercise in partnership.

Voicing, De-voicing and Self-Silencing: Charles Kingsley's Stuttering Christian Manliness

(2008). Voicing, De-voicing and Self-Silencing: Charles Kingsley's Stuttering Christian Manliness. Journal of Victorian Culture: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 1-17.

Voicing, De-voicing and Self-Silencing: Charles Kingsley's Stuttering Christian Manliness

Voicing, De-voicing and Self-Silencing:Charles Kingsley's Stuttering Christian Manliness Louise Lee (bio) On the morning of the much-feared 'Monster' Chartist rally of 10 April 1848, London resembled a ghost town: two million protesters were expected to march on the capital; the Queen and Prince Albert had fled to the Isle of Wight; shops were closed; and an ageing Lord Wellington had barricaded London Bridge. All London gentlemen were made special constables in anticipation of a bloody fight. Yet while the city's gentry were busy dusting down their sabres and pistols and boarding up their doors and windows, Charles Kingsley, who had hurriedly caught the train to London that day, was calmly walking towards Kennington, site of the demonstration, with the intention of delivering a speech to the working men of England.1 As it turned out, the march was already dispersing as he and the young socialist journalist John Malcolm Ludlow approached, and a torrential deluge of rain was rather more effective in damping down the revolutionary fervour of the thousands of campaigners standing on the green that day than any words of support issuing from the mouth of the vicar of Eversley. Yet Kingsley's conduct is striking: it demonstrates a profound and unshakeable confidence that he could intervene between two warring sides and prevent what threatened to be one of the biggest bouts of blood-letting in modern British history. It is a sense of optimism that he carried to his early novel-writing life, but one that he realised, in his [End Page 1] own terms, with variable success. Some years later, in December 1855, shortly after the publication of his successful war novel Westward Ho!, Kingsley re-assessed his part in the dramatic events of the previous decade: it was a moment of painful self-revelation. In a doleful letter to Ludlow, he reproached himself for 'hitting as hard as I could and fancy[ing] blasphemously, as I think, that the word of God had come to me only [my emphasis] and went out from me only'.2 That last quote is telling. For at the heart of Kingsley's involvement in the Christian Socialist movement and his early writing career lay his profoundly held belief that words, or perhaps more specifically, his words could heal the bitter divisions of a feuding nation; that he could, in some way, superimpose his voice onto a wounded social body.3 In Alton Locke (1850), this belief is fictionalised in his decision to write the false autobiography, not biography, of a working class tailor and poet. The novel begins with the words: 'I am a Cockney among Cockneys . . . I have drunk of the cup of which they drink' (1–2).4 This is an audacious move. For a well-educated, well-fed, middle class cleric to attempt to internalise, as the cup-drinking metaphor implies, the life of poverty and physical hardship of a consumptive East London tailor might seem an unconscionable act of authorial chutzpah. Bodies, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, are 'memory pads': they have their own histories, their own identities yet Kingsley's body had absorbed no such pasts and no such subjectivities.5 But it is perhaps easy to see why Kingsley of Kennington, fired up by the spirit of Christian identification and righteous conviction, might attempt such a task. Autobiography requires literacy and culture, both of which were logistically beyond reach of much of the working class. And despite Kingsley's overly harsh reading of himself as suffering from some kind of Messiah complex he was, as a hard-working parish priest (well-used to the sick-room of his parishioners), committed sanitary reformer and educator, more qualified than most of his class and generation to undertake such a writing mission.6Alton Locke can be seen as Kingsley's hopeful authorial amalgam, a chance linguistically to 'de-monster' the monster but also to educate the upper classes in the inequities of the capitalist system. Alton, as his form-changing name implies, occupies two worlds: as down-trodden Cockney seamster, representative of the potentially insurgent working class; and, as aspirant poet, mover in the middle-class world of writing...

“Those Who Cannot Work”

This paper considers how Henry Mayhew, a nineteenth-century social investigator and reformer, explicates the ideal of “Christian manliness” through the metaphoric body of the disabled man. In particular, it assesses how Mayhew's desire to “grapple manfully” with the uneasy classification of crippled, blind, or otherwise disabled men, indirectly makes visible a crisis in Victorian masculinity.2 This crisis, which reflected the insecurity brought about by social and industrial changes in the new urban centers, was undergirded by a fear that the working classes, if not checked, had the potential to become the dangerous classes. In the face of this fear, middle-class Victorian men united in an attempt to articulate a “moral” masculinity and the corresponding, all-encompassing concept of the “Universal Brotherhood” of man, (London Labour, IV: xiv). In order to reveal and establish this “new” masculinity and render it unproblematic, it was necessary to eliminate, as far as possible, any difference between men while, at the same time, clearly and hegemonically defining a masculine identity suitable for articulating a coherent capitalist and Christian utilitarian ethics appropriate to the growing nation and the growing modern metropolis. In Mayhew's classificatory system, the disabled man is assigned no intrinsic value and, consequently, remains a mere object for middle-class scrutiny. He “who will or who can work” becomes a convenient vehicle for the promotion of a self-reliant, Christian masculinity, while he “who cannot work” represents a monstrous masculinity, and a danger to the future well-being of the human race. This study argues that this nineteenth-century classification and construction of manhood foreshadows disability prejudices that are still somewhat prevalent in the twenty-first century. 1. An earlier version of this article was published in Culture and the State, Vol, IV, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Mailloux-Zezulka (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2004).”

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields - Consolidation

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields - Consolidation

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields - Beginnings

Imperial Origins: Christian Manliness, Moral Imperatives and Pre-Sri Lankan Playing Fields - Beginnings

Useful Industry and Muscular Christianity: George Augustus Selwyn and His Early Years as Bishop of New Zealand

Charles Kingsley in 1855 gave the following dedication to his novel, Westward Ho!:To the Rajah Sir James Brooke, K.C.B., and George Augustus Selwyn, D.D., Bishop of New Zealand this book is dedicated, by one who (unknown to them) has no other method of expressing his admiration and reverence for their characters.That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing, which he has tried to depict in these pages, they have exhibited in a form even purer and more heroic than that in which he has drest it.Brooke, the adventurer, soldier, and colonial administrator, and Selwyn, the missionary colonial bishop, appealed to Kingsley as exemplars of what he called ‘Christian manliness’. One of Kingsley’s reviewers, T. C. Sandars, described Kingsley as ‘spreading the knowledge and fostering the love of a muscular Christianity’. The defining characteristics of this ‘muscular Christianity’, a term with which Kingsley was uneasy, were ‘an association between physical strength, religious certainty, and an ability to shape and control the world around oneself’.

“Working” in the West: The Canadian Prairies as Playground in Late-Victorian Literature

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian literature, specifically fiction about the Canadian West, frequently had multiple national origins and audiences. Some fiction by Canadian authors was published solely in Canada; a good percentage was also published in the United States; and some novels, particularly by popular writers like Ralph Connor, were published in Toronto, New York, and London. During the same period, a number of British novelists were also writing stories about the Canadian West, published first in London for British readers and, if successful, subsequently in New York or Toronto. For Canadian and British-born novelists alike, the prairies and foothills of the West (though frequently portrayed with very little accuracy or detail) served as an ideal setting for adventure and romance. While the entire corpus of turn-of-the-century novels written about the West has generally been considered part of Canadian literature, regardless of an author's origin, the ideological and mythologica l functions of the West in this literature often vary significantly depending on a given author's nationality. The purpose of this essay is to draw a line of distinction between fictions of the Canadian West produced by Canadian and British writers and, by analyzing constructions of work and masculinity in these texts, to show that British novelists utilized the West to address particular British cultural anxieties quite removed from the concerns of Canadian writers. More specifically, I will argue that while Canadian-born authors like Ralph Connor and Robert J.C. Stead attempted to fashion a masculinity of work suited to civilizing the Western territories, British writers engaged in a cultural redefinition of the gentleman, a redefinition designed to celebrate the masculine and genteel virtues of emigrant manual labor at a time when British gentlemen faced professional unemployment at home. Late-Victorian novels like John Mackie's The Heart of the Prairie (1899) and James Morton's Polson's Probation (1897) insist that gentility cannot be sacrificed by working in the West, and that only by working with his hands can a British boy achieve manhood and become a gentleman. These British texts purport to ennoble manual labor and thus appear to concur with Connor's steadfast Christian manliness. However, because the British narratives so rarely depict work and replace it with a West filled with adventure and sport, what emerges from these texts is less a sense of genteel, working manhood than a state of perpetual adolescence which handicapped actual British emigrants with false expectations. II will begin by discussing briefly the masculine mythos in the novels of Ralph Connor before proceeding to the major focus of the essay, British fictions of the Canadian West. In Ralph Connor's fiction, the ideal man is invariably a Westerner. J. Lee Thompson and John Thompson have shown that, for Connor, a man's full potential can only be realized in the West, just as Canada's national destiny will only come to fruition in the stern but redemptive environment of the West. (1) In novels like The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry, The Foreigner, and Corporal Cameron, Connor symbolizes the making of a nation in the making of a man, and thus settles on a readily identifiable model of manhood as the exemplar of Canadianness. Like the British authors discussed below, Connor too is invested in the ideal of the gentleman who works hard, but with an eye toward how that ideal defines a Canadian. For Connor, the true Canadian is Anglicized, in that he adapts English habits of orderliness along with a Protestant outlook, but without the Englishman's sense of class hierarchy. Kalman Kalmar, the hero of The Foreigner (1909), successfully sheds his Eastern European traditions and becomes a go od Canadian--Canadian enough to marry the Scottish heroine Marjorie Menzies. Connor felt that if Canada was to achieve cultural greatness, however, the West must not only assimilate foreign cultural identities, it must also call forth a new breed of Anglo-Saxon man, a breed significantly different from the men found in many British novels about Canada. …

Religion in Victorian Britain Volume V: Culture and Empire ed. by John Wolffe.

BOOK REVIEWS87 scious that we see now through a glass darkly, and continually pleading for a wise and gentle minimism until that time has passed away" (p. 428). Gerard H. McCarren Immaculate Conception Seminary Seton Hall University Religion in Victorian Britain. Volume V: Culture and Empire. Edited by John Wolffe. (Manchester University Press in association with the Open University . Distributed in the United States and Canada by St. Martin's Press, New York. 1997. Pp. viii, 359. $24.95.) In 1988 the Open University created a course on "Religion in Victorian Britain," accompanied by four volumes oftexts and readings with the same title. The course and books successfully reflected the state of the field at that date, but a decade of further scholarship has convinced the Religious Studies faculty that a fifth volume should be added to cover cultural and imperial contexts omitted from the original set. There are three substantial essays on the topics of gender, church music, and colonial missions, and three case studies, two on authors whose work involved mission themes and one on colonial religions in Britain. The second part of the volume consists of documents keyed to the essays . John Wolffe's "Introduction: Victorian Religion in Context," in addition to a useful survey of the recent literature, makes the interesting suggestion that Georgian Britain was not less but rather differently religious, leaving Victorian religion with no fixed reference point for its development. The first essay, by Frances Knight on questions of gender, covers a field in which most of the literature is recent, dealing with the separation ofworkplace and home, constructions of middle-class femininity and masculinity (including "Christian manliness"), single women and education, and women's philanthropy and ministry . Wölffe supplies a long essay on hymns and church music, a vital part ofthe Victorian religious experience, but omitted from many surveys because it falls between disciplines. Terence Thomas gives a general account of the British missionary movement, largely based on the Indian experience, examining the relationship between missionary and imperial expansion. The first case study, by Gerald Parsons, is a moving re-evaluation of Bishop John William Colenso of Natal, notorious for his biblical criticism, which has obscured his constructively liberal theology which respected the God-given dignity of the natives whose rights he upheld. Gwilym Beckerlegge's study of Max Müller similarly interrelates scholarly and missionary concerns: the contest for the Sanskrit professorship at Oxford is shown to center on differing views of the relation of philological studies to mission work; and Müller's later work in comparative religion was affected by his concern for the common bond shared by Christianity and primitive Indian religion. The final essay by Beckerlegge on the presence of Islam and South Asian religions in Britain itself is truly pioneering. He finds that 88BOOK REVIEWS non-Muslims (except for Parsis) came as individuals and did not form communities , but they brought new influences to some English individuals in theosophy and Vedanta; Islam produced an English community with a mosque in Liverpool led by a convert, Abdullah Quilliam, of whom he gives a fascinating account. This useful volume does not stand alone: not only is it conceived as part of an ongoing course, but its essays complement and enhance those of the original volumes for scholars. Collectively, they represent the maturation ofVictorian religious history. Josef L.Altholz University ofMinnesota Glorious Battle:The Cultural Politics ofVictorian Anglo-Catholicism. ByJohn Shelton Reed. (Nashville, Tennessee:Vanderbilt University Press. 1996. Pp. xxiv, 357. $34.95.) The subtitle of Reed's book indicates his approach. In dealing with the "Ritualist " phase ofthe Anglo-Catholic revival, one engages practices as much as doctrines , practices that constituted "symbolic affronts to central values of Victorian middle-class culture" and in some cases "actual threats to those values " (p. xxii). Clerical dress, liturgical vocabulary, liturgical artifacts and gestures, the practice of auricular confession, eucharistie devotion, the establishment of sisterhoods functioned as signs of identity to those who converted to the movement and generated vocal, occasionally violent, and eventual legal opposition from without. Reed addresses the problem of why a style of religious behavior that had been abandoned in the Church of England succeeded in attracting...

How Muscular was Victorian Christianity? Thomas Hughes and the Cult of Christian Manliness Reconsidered

Despite the enduring popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which has never been out of print since its publication in 1857, the reputation of its author, Thomas Hughes, has suffered from the general reaction against Victorian values which characterized the first part of the twentieth century. Even as late as 1965, out of sympathy both with Hughes’s Christian beliefs and with his moral didacticism, Kenneth Allsop could dismiss him as a writer ‘fluctuating between a facetious smugness and a creepy piety’. However, in recent years scholars such as George Worth and Norman Vance have provided us with a more sensitive and nuanced picture of his thought, and one which severely qualifies the traditional image of Hughes as an exponent of a muscular Christianity which exalted an anti-intellectual credo of schoolboy athleticism and adult male toughness perfectly attuned to the ethos of high Victorian imperialism. This paper examines some of the ambiguities which are to be found in Hughes’s attempts to encapsulate and transcend the ideals of appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour within the specifically Christian context from which they arose, and in so doing cast some light on the way in which Victorian Christianity both contributed to, and was influenced by, the construction and maintenance of gender roles for both men and women.

‘Knights of God’: Ellice Hopkins and the White Cross Army, 1883–95

A historiographer of recent literature on masculinity might be forgiven for assuming that nineteenth-century definitions of Christian manliness were solely the domain of male commentators. The shifting and often conflicting emphases of the manly ideal proposed by critics such as Arnold, Kingsley, Hughes, and Carlyle exerted a prevailing influence upon the Victorian ruling classes – this much is beyond doubt. That codes of manliness were also subject to considerable attention by women, however, is suggested by this preliminary study of the prescriptive writings of the High Churchwoman and leading moral reformer Ellice Hopkins, whose discourse of social purity emerged as a force in the search for regulation of male sexuality during the 1880s and 1890s.

Billy Sunday and Christian Manliness

Billy Sunday and Christian Manliness

Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age by Donald E. Hall (review)

204Victorian Review EUot's essays, which might have yielded further insights about EUot's strategies of self-presentation. But no one book can do everything, and as it is The Real Life ofMary Ann Evans contributes substantially to our understanding of a remarkable woman and her writings. ROHAN ??GG??? Dalhousie University Donald E. HaU, ed. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. xn + 244. When the second wave of feminism began in the nineteen sixties and seventies, the scholars who developed the newly-conceptualized disciplines of feminist history and literary criticism sought their foremothers in the Victorian past, and found inspiration, models and documents of tremendous research interest in the feminism of MiUicent Fawcett, George EUot and many others. Thirty years on, the people who are making an academic subject out of "men's studies" and the study of masculinity have looked into the past and come up with Charles Kingsley. The muscularity of Kingsley's reUgious faith, and its expression in his novels and journaUsm, speaks compellingly to their inteUectual interests. They ask how masculinity, and the male body itself, can be regarded as a cultural construct, and they are profoundly concerned with analyzing the male social role. Furthermore, they are eager to project these poUtical and theoretical concerns back to an earlier time. Of the ten essays in this volume, five focus entirely or partly on Kingsley, no other "muscular Christian" is the subject of more than one paper. As several of the contributors point out, Kingsley disliked the term "muscular Christianity," and preferred to speak of "Christian manliness." The difficulty about terminology highlights the defect in this book's approach: the Victorians subordinated the muscularity to the Christianity, whereas these writers put them the other way around. Hall states in his introduction that earlier studies such as Norman Vance's The Sinews of the Spirit (1985) stressed the Christianity, whereas his contributors wish to "address the muscularity of the same men, while they attempt never to lose sight of the other half of the phrase." Unfortunately these scholars too often fail to come to terms with Victorian theology and Victorian faith, in their focus on how Kingsley, Hughes and others used "the ideologically charged and Reviews205 aggressively poised male body as a point ofreference in and determiner of a masculinist economy of signification and (all too often) degradation" (9). Their lists of works cited read like a nouvelle cuisine restaurant menu, plenty of Foucault, Irigary and Derrida as weU as the newer scholars who have begun to work on masculinity as a subject — but not much of the plain food of what the Victorians themselves had to say about the Uves and the texts of the "muscular Christians." And as the apologetic parenthesis suggests, HaU and his contributors never let the reader forget their awareness that the men with whom they are concerned stand accused of victimizing women, working class people, and colonial subjects. Nevertheless they claim a ground for their subject, since "Constructions of differing political, regional, national, and more recently, sexual identities among men have always worked to undermine any sense of a united phallic front" (6). Muscular Christianity is divided into three parts. Under the heading "Foundations of Muscular Christianity", David Rosen discusses how Kingsley used the Platonic concept of thumos as a way to understand his own sexuaUty as well as to express the masculinity of his Uterary persona. HaU writes about Christian sociaUsm, the way in which F.D. Maurice and others portrayed their intellectual encounter with the masculinity of the Chartists. The article by CJ. W.-L. Wee tackles the unstable way in which Kingsley dealt with issues ofrace and ethnicity: when he wrote about "primitive" peoples he "appropriated [the ''primitive"] as a category to disrupt modernist conceptions of nation and empire" (71). The second part of Muscular Christianity moves on to "Varieties of muscular Christianity." Laura Fasick examines the way that Kingsley portrayed women in his novels: he used contemporary scientific concepts, such as the theory of degeneration, to support a model in which the correct gender role for men was to be aggressive, and for women patiently to endure assault and victimization. The bodies of Thomas...

Spaces of Adventure and Cultural Politics of Masculinity: R M Ballantyne and The Young Fur Traders

Masculinities reflect the characteristics of the spaces—real and imaginary, material and metaphorical—in which they are constructed. Mapmakers, ranging from academic geographers to popular storytellers, chart masculinist geographies: Spaces in which masculinities are mapped. One important genre of masculinist geographical narrative is adventure. I explore the masculinism of adventure through a detailed, contextual reading of one particular adventure story. The Young Fur Traders—a British Victorian boys' adventure story set in Canada, written by the Scottish writer Robert Michael Ballantyne. In the setting of The Young Fur Traders, Ballantyne mapped a form of masculinity known generally as Christian manliness. Literal journeys through the spaces of adventure constituted metaphorical journeys through adolescence, from white, middle-class boyhood to white, middle-class manhood. Settings—liminal, largely unknown but broadly realistic, male-dominated, primitive, simplified, and idealised spaces—were imprinted upon this masculinity. The settings of adventure stories arc cultural spaces in which hegemonic masculinity is mapped and, in some cases, unmapped.

Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford by Linda Dowling (review)

102Victorian Review the text with a sophisticated awareness of poststructuralism, especially feminist psychoanalytic and deconstructive approaches. Certainly any Victorianist would enjoy it. In addition, the book should appeal particularly to readers interested in the process of artistic development as well as in the related issue of how child prodigies use their early successes in their later work; this characteristic should attract readers outside even the wide parameters of Victorian studies. SHARON ARONOFSKY WELTMAN Louisiana State University Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca and London: ComeU UP, 1994. xvi + 173. $25.95 US (cloth). Between 1854 and 1884 there flourished in Oxford a unique brand of "homosociality", an intense and ideaUstic male comradeship inspired and nurtured by the study of literae humaniores or "Greats". The dates are important and quite specific, beginning with the institutional and cunicular reforms which enshrined Greek studies at the heart of the inteUectual Ufe of Oxford and ending with the aboUtion of the ceUbacy requirement for college FeUows. As Linda Dowling shows, this period "would in later years be recalled with great tenderness by the men who had experienced it either as undergraduates or dons" (85). The coUeges were whoUy residential and their Ufe communal, but the tutorial system made for a passionate intimacy between individual students and fellows, a "species of devotion" which was "peculiarly Oxonian" (33). The Greek ideal, deriving from Plato and mediated by eighteenth-century German HeUenism, provided not only an education but a source of civic, national and imperial virtue, an antidote to materialism and an alternative to Tractarian "effeminacy" or to Kingsley's Christian manliness. Older civic discourses had also owed a debt to ancient Greece, and Dowling distinguishes between the classical republican idea of the citizen as warrior (derived from Thucydides) and the Oxford Hellenism which sought to accommodate and transcend the Uberal values of the modem industrial state. One of the highlights of Dowling's book is the reading of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" as a key poem of the mid-century where, as in the Crimean War section of Maud, we find "the archaic warrior ideal surfacing in the midst of a bewilderingly complex modernity" (51). (The possibUities for readings of other Victorian poets are suggestive: Hopkins, for instance, Reviews103 mentioned only briefly, whose fascination with male "procreancy" may have been wrongly interpreted by feminist critics.) The warrior ideal had feared the debilitating effects of modem life (heated nurseries were seen as particularly threatening) and had associated ease and luxury with effeminacy and "corruption"; the Oxford ideal, for all its homoerotic overtones, its Platonic "procreancy of the spirit", emphasized the "manliness" of intimate relationships between men. In an ironic twist of intellectual history unforeseen by Mill, Arnold or Jowett, male love was "triumphantly proclaimed the very fountain of civic health in a polity that has been urged to take as its cultural model the ancient city-state of Athens" (79). What then was the relationship of this version of Hellenism to the desire for and experience of sexual acts between men? John Addington Symonds later came to resent the ambiguous, contradictory education which inflamed young men with "Platonic" ideas of mascuUne love whUe defining actual erotic relationships as unnatural; it was only after he had left England for good that he was able to enjoy fully consummated relationships with men. Pater, however, dying in 1894, just before WUde's trials, remained unchallenged by the sexual realism of a modem, urban culture. After Wilde, and weU into our own century, the discourse of homosexuality was medicalized, the idea of the "abnormal" replacing Victorian moral and legal categories of the unnatural or the criminal. DowUng's book begins and ends with Wilde himself, finding in his speech from the dock in his second trial and in certain passages of De Profundis a crucial moment of homosexual expressiveness which draws on the discourse of Hellenism to link an ancient ideal of male love with an essentiaUy modem understanding of individual and social identity: such a moment can be seen as "the temporary space, always implied, though never mentioned as such, in Foucault's influential analysis of nineteenth-century sexuaUty ... an idea of male...

‘Christian Manliness’ and the Nonconformist Tradition in West Yorkshire, c. 1880–1920

(1995). ‘Christian Manliness’ and the Nonconformist Tradition in West Yorkshire, c. 1880–1920. Northern History: Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 267-280.