The Defeminization of British Boyhood Naomi J. Wood (bio) Claudia Nelson . Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. Claudia Nelson's Boys Will Be Girls is a witty exploration of the relationship between the Victorian feminine archetype of the Angel in the House and the seemingly antithetical category of young boys. Nelson describes the purpose of the Angel as being "the instrument of Victorian society's subversive quest to heal itself by undermining the precepts of aggression, selfishness, and competition upon which the male world depended" (4). Paradoxically, these values were directed at the very boys who were expected, by their aggression, selfishness, and competitiveness to spread British influence throughout the world. Nelson argues that the gentle, spiritual, unobtrusive influence, lauded as natural to "Woman" by the likes of John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill, was coded into boys' books in order to redeem them by undermining the male world of the marketplace. At its height, this ideal permeated such diverse genres as the school story, the adventure story, the historical novel, and the fantasy. However, the celebration of these values was gradually eroded by the very influences that this feminine ideal was supposed to contain, so that by the end of the Edwardian era and the beginning of World War I a thoroughly masculinist, misogynistic, and homophobic ethos was emphatically in place. Nelson historicizes the Angel in the opening chapter by surveying early-nineteenth-century literature for children and drawing connections among pedagogical theories, Evangelical and rationalist theories of childhood, and what Nelson terms the "femininist" bent of Victorian theories of "Woman's" role, for example as portrayed in Sarah Stickney Ellis's The Daughters of England (1843) and Dinah Mulock Craik's A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858). The "femininist" rhetoric encouraged both women and children to distance themselves from the world in which they were already disenfranchised and to deploy instead the "real spiritual force that an egoless child [or woman] could wield in the domestic and future worlds" (11). [End Page 100] Nelson continues to describe the source and evolution of "asexuality and virility as social ideals." Although at the beginning of the period asexuality and spirituality were valued most highly, by the end of the Edwardian era the transition from spirituality to nationalistic virility was complete. This increased differentiation between genders occurred along with changes in the discourse about sexuality, as well as to the redemption of physicality that accompanied the increasingly widespread acceptance of Social Darwinism and the theory of evolution. Nelson argues that celibacy and a delicately spiritual demeanor had become so suspect in the last years of the century that "as an ideal for boys, the Angel in the House turns into the Degenerate in the Closet" (53). Nelson traces the rise and fall of the Angelic ideal as a worthy example for boys to follow. In school stories, in historical novels, in adventure stories, and in fantasy, boys initially were encouraged to take on the "femininistic" qualities of piety, purity, patience, humility, and resignation. Toward the end of the period, boys were urged to forswear what had become dangerous effeminacy and instead take on as their primary goals patriotism, physical prowess, athletic and military achievement, and worldly success. Nelson argues that the very success of the Angel determined her failure, because it brought out the contradictions she embodied: "Her intrinsic ambiguity as a power that rejected power was her chief weapon; but it was a weapon that turned in her hand" (173). Nelson closes with the suggestion that as women's difference from men is undermined, so is their social power; under "feminist pressure" Victorians saw the advances the Angel had made for public morality disintegrate as women asserted their similarity with men. "Ultimately, instead of conquering men, the Angel may have conquered herself" (174). As a literary-cultural history that analyzes the connections among the status of women, children, and children's books, Boys Will Be Girls offers a provocative thesis that recalls other cultural feminist works that reexamine the seemingly sentimental and retrograde material of popular culture to find narratives of subversion and resistance. In the...