Reviewed by: The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity Michael Mackenzie The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. George L. Mosse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 240. $25.00. George Mosse has provided us with another book in his continuing study of the relations and homologies between conceptions of race, sexuality, and nationality in modern European society. This latest installment is another segment in the arc connecting the conformity of a [End Page 190] socially cohesive group in European society on one end with racism and the oppression of outsiders on the other. In The Image of Man, Mosse is concerned with the history of the modern ideal of masculinity, both the ideal masculine character, and its bodily representation, the ideal male physique. This masculine ideal was, according to Mosse, both a positive stereotype and a social function. It was the glue that held modern society together, reconciling a desire for both order and progress: order because of its balanced and harmonious appearance, and progress through its decisiveness, activeness, and virility. The ideal male body symbolized a healthy, well-ordered society. Mosse understands the masculine ideal as the combination of middle-class, Christian values and an ideal of the male physique borrowed from classical Greek sculpture. The ideal male was virtuous, honorable, and merciful as well as strong and courageous; he was chaste and exercised self-control. This inner virtue was, in turn, given visual representation and signification by a well-proportioned, trim, and muscular body. As a moral code and physical image, this type remains a recognizable ideal today. Mosse dates the appearance of this positive male stereotype to the time of the Napoleonic Wars. With the increasing importance in the nineteenth century of visual cues for the interpretation of the world and for the identification of individuals or groups, the physical body became a cardinal signifier of the individual man’s virtue. The ideal physique came to signify membership in the dominant social group, and ugly physiques to signify marginalized groups, primarily Jews and homosexuals. This is a breezy history, and despite the richness and variety of its cultural sources, the first few chapters leave me dissatisfied. The broad cultural trends that produce the male stereotype are left vague and unconnected. Some major figures are cited as originators of the male ideal, and most of them are familiar, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Kaspar Lavater. Some are less familiar, but not unexpected, such as the fathers of men’s gymnastics in Germany, J. F. C. Guts Muth and F. L. Jahn. Despite Mosse’s desire for historical and cultural specificity, the masculine stereotype that arises from these disparate cultural connections remains homogeneous. It seems simply to appear at the start of the nineteenth century everywhere and at once, fully formed and without conflict or incoherencies, and to go uncontested for a hundred years. Mosse himself may identify the source of the problem when he states that “giving a full account of the institutionalization and the penetration of this stereotype would mean writing the social and cultural history of the nations of Europe” (134). The range of its history is certainly the book’s virtue. Mosse attempts thereby to show that the masculine idea is linked to the dominance of modern middle-class values. Yet the book curiously fails to remain consistent on this very point; once the masculine stereotype has been established and defined, it remains so static that it seems always already in place, no longer historically contingent or culturally determined. The first significant tremors Mosse records beneath the modern social landscape come with the experiences of World War I. In Germany especially, the stereotype was hardened, brutalized, with a corresponding decrease in emphasis on self-control and mercy. At the same time, the Austrian socialist Max Adler put forth the first distinctly alternative ideal of masculinity, which renounced violent struggle and nationalism in favor of a brotherhood based on a utopic socialist order. Ultimately, of course, mainstream socialism in Western Europe and the visual arts of the Soviet Union exalted what had become the standard image of the ideal man: broad-shouldered, stalwart, courageous in the face of...