Victorian Masculinity Research Articles

Pox, Prose, and Prostitution: Masculine Anxiety, the Myth of the Male Author, and the Late-Victorian ‘Exchange Economy’ in George Gissing’s New Grub Street

Abstract George Gissing’s friend and fellow novelist, H. G Wells, would remember the ‘last decade of the nineteenth century’ as ‘an extraordinarily favourable time for new writers’(H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries of a Very Ordinary Brain, Volume II (Since 1866) (London: Gollancz, 1934), p. 506.). His experience fits neatly with the myths of the successful Victorian male author that were in circulation throughout the century. For the vast majority of writers, however, the reality was quite different. As many scholars have recognized, George Gissing’s 1891 novel, New Grub Street, presents a realistic portrayal of the travails of the average writer trying to live by their pen at the turn of the century. Nonetheless, little work has examined these economic travails against the backdrop of nineteenth-century images of male authorship. Bringing together work on Victorian masculinities, research on cultural depictions of syphilis, and work on the nineteenth-century marketplace alongside current Gissing scholarship and primary sources, this article will argue that Gissing’s novel foregrounds the shared ‘exchange economy’ of prostitution and the literary market to explore specifically masculine anxieties around the male author at the fin de siècle (Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 131.). In tracing the interconnections of pox, prose, and prostitution, this article re-negotiates the novel’s relationship with other images of Victorian authorship, as well as using work on cultural depictions of syphilis to position the text in a new field.

Victorian Masculinity and Mrs Warren's Profession

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the emergence of a new professional society in turn-of-the-century England and explores how Victorian masculinity is challenged by prostitution in George Bernard Shaw's play Mrs Warren's Profession (1893). Mrs Warren undermines Victorian masculinity by subverting the professional ideal undergirding late Victorian society. Mrs Warren challenges the Victorian acceptance of the Protestant notion of work as “duty” and alleges how work is deeply related with economic necessity. Also, Mrs Warren debunks the Victorian acceptance of the Christian notion of body and work and claims how work becomes a practice of self-formation via self-distancing not self-discipline.

Sketching the New Man Out: Ellen Wood's Exploration of Victorian Masculinity

ABSTRACT In ways similar to other sensation novelists, Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood questioned some ideological foundations of the Victorian shaping of gender models. Besides exposing the discontents of women trapped into fixed roles, she interrogated models of Victorian masculinity to envisage the possibility of new masculine roles and behavioural patterns. Drawing on gender theories, this article explores Wood's thought-provoking characterisation of men, examining some strategies she adopted in her fiction to question dominant male figures, such as the authoritative husband and the strict paterfamilias. While raising doubts on the desirability of the strength and self-assurance associated with these figures, Wood sketched out alternative male characters endowed with “feminine” virtues like patience and gentleness, or liable to be dominated by assertive and commanding women. Examples from different Wood works are offered to explain this combined process of deconstruction and rethinking of the abstract category of man. The second part of the article focuses on Roland Yorke (1869), a novel that bears evidence of the author's exploration of problematic aspects of Victorian masculinity, of her effective use of irony and her efforts to delineate alternative figures which, though never well-wrought, pave the way to future conceptualisations of the New Man.

Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner

Reviewed by: Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood by Diane Waggoner Katherine Wakely-Mulroney (bio) Lewis Carroll's Photography and Modern Childhood. By Diane Waggoner. Princeton University Press, 2020. The impact of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on modern conceptions of childhood was visual, as well as textual. John Tenniel's iconic illustrations encapsulate the play, discovery, boredom, frustration, and fear that Carroll's works describe. However, Diane Waggoner's study argues that the author's critical role in "expanding the meaning of the child to encompass a protean subversiveness, perversity, energy, and curiosity" was dependent on another, far less familiar cache of images (20). Between 1856 and 1880, the writer known in his private life as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created hundreds of portraits of children using the new technology of photography. These were designed for private viewership, artfully arranged in the pages of albums rather than displayed on gallery walls. As Waggoner shows, Dodgson's photographs nonetheless reflect his extensive engagement with the Victorian art world, responding to debates concerning realism, Pre-Raphaelite compositional strategies, and the work of other pioneering photographers. Waggoner's volume is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century visual culture, allowing for comparison between Dodgson's beautifully reproduced portraits and their many artistic influences. By arranging her study chronologically, Waggoner invites readers to follow the evolution of Dodgson's aesthetic against the backdrop of Victorian cultural change. More crucially, she provides a powerful sense of how Dodgson's desire to look at and capture images of children, predominantly girls, intensified over the course of his adult life. His controversial interest in producing, commissioning, and collecting sketches and photographs depicting girls in a state of partial dress, or fully nude, became particularly pronounced in his final decades, and is consequently addressed in the last chapter of Waggoner's study. If images of this nature formed the "logical endpoint for [Dodgson's] decades-long undertaking to picture children's bodies," they also provide a logical endpoint for any work that seeks to reckon honestly with the man behind the camera (185). Waggoner begins by exploring the development of Dodgson's photographic style during the 1850s and 1860s, placing his work in dialogue with that of other photographers of [End Page 440] childhood, including Julia Margaret Cameron, and highlighting his role in the elevation of photography from a technical practice to an imaginative art form. Waggoner also uses this introductory chapter to establish the important social function of photography to Dodgson's life. The ritual of taking photographs and guiding adult and child friends through the images arranged in his albums allowed Dodgson to cultivate and commemorate relationships simultaneously. The second chapter is dedicated to Dodgson's portraits of his muse, Alice Liddell, and her sisters, Lorina and Edith. Waggoner avoids spending too much time treading familiar ground here, as Dodgson's complicated relationship with Alice and her family has been the subject of considerable scrutiny and speculation. His pictures of the Liddell girls are instead considered alongside eighteenth-century child portraiture, which provided a blueprint for the author's vision of girlhood as a time of innocence, beauty, and playfulness. Dodgson moved beyond this aesthetic, Waggoner suggests, by establishing a "poetics of imperfection" that celebrated both the unique attributes of individual children and his intimate knowledge of each subject (which is strikingly apparent in his portraits of Alice) (110). Chapter 3 considers Dodgson's understudied photographs of boys. These formed a significantly smaller percentage of his output, yet offer a unique insight into varieties of Victorian masculinity and the author's own childhood. Images of Alfred Lord Tennyson's sons epitomize what Waggoner terms "girlish boyhood," emphasizing the sitters' vulnerability and need. By way of contrast, Dodgson's portraits of pupils at his alma mater Twyford, a preparatory school for boys aged eight to fourteen, emphasize their subjects' transition from boyhood to maturity. These images were taken in 1858, and Waggoner examines them alongside the discourse of masculinity codified by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days, published the previous year, and in light of Dodgson's own tenure as a pupil at Rugby School (the setting for Hughes's...

Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care.

Gender and Pain in Nineteenth-Century Cancer Care.

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity, by Laura Eastlake

Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity, by Laura Eastlake

The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt

Reviewed by: The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne E. Parsons, Ruth Heholt Irina Strout (bio) The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt; pp. viii + 259. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $39.95 paper. The Victorian Male Body, edited by Joanne E. Parsons and Ruth Heholt, is a three-part collection of essays focusing on the role of the white, male body in Victorian England. The introduction to the anthology states that during this period, there were numerous limitations, restrictions, and contradictions placed on the white, middle-class male body. This anthology poses a few key questions regarding Victorian manhood and masculinity, specifically regarding the claim that masculinity is a myth that needs to be demystified. Men seem to fall into two categories: visibly present, powerful men of Christian morality and obscure, fragmented, almost invisible men. One point is clear, however: there is no perfect male body and notions of masculinity constantly change, adapt, shift, and survive [End Page 697] as do societal expectations and ideals. Masculinity is an ever- changing and evolving social construct that cannot be seen as a single unified concept. The editors of the anthology, Heholt and Parsons, demonstrate the ways in which Victorian masculinity was not limited to “rigid prescription[s] of manliness” but could include, by the end of the century, “flamboyant and extrovert celebrations of otherness.” Their survey of masculinity studies, emerging in the 1980s, suggests that “historically masculinity has not been a spectacle: everyone else formed the spectacle and white men have been the invisible, or at least less visible, powerful surveyors.” The editors note that white masculinity has remained “concealed” as a ruse of power: invisibility here is ideological, but it masquerades as universality, obscuring and at the same time normalizing itself (2). The male is estranged from a collective identity and suffers in solitude in an attempt to achieve a meaningful masculine identity, having to come to terms with the notion of what men are and what they should be. A few scholars suggest that, in many cases, within that invisibility lies the greater power; the body is a cultural discourse marker for a number of practices. Where white men have been associated with mind and spirit, and gross physicality allocated to other, usually racialized bodies, the Victorian male body is granted a “new physicality” (5) understood to be “chosen” rather than natural, displaying “strength of will and a negation of pain” and therefore in control of itself and its image: a “muscular body” that is both self-protective and seemingly impenetrable “to otherness” and to “the world” (6). H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) showcases the paradoxes of a “colonial world of men” (6) in which the whiteness and physicality of Allan Quatermain’s “colonial body matters and does not at the same time” (7). The white colonial male body is juxtaposed to the dark native body, yet it is also rooted in nature. Success in the colonies (and at home) came to depend on codes of masculinity that idealized a British combination of “virility, morality and civility” (12), or, in C. L. R. James’s words, “the British reticence, the British self-discipline, [and] the stiff upper-lips” that epitomized Muscular Christianity (qtd. in Heholt and Parsons 12). The white body is a norm that opposes the other; as a result, the authors wish to deconstruct the notion of a perfect male body because it simply did not exist. The anthology is thematically divided into three parts. Part 1 contains three essays and focuses on traditional masculinity. The first essay, “Violent Play and Regular Discipline: The Abuses of the Schoolboy Body in Victorian Fiction” by Alice Crossley, looks at the abused body of a boy and its aspects. Crossley does not focus on psychological or moral abuse but on physical pain and the body’s lack of agency. She claims that many boys had to endure physical pain and abuse in order to develop their character, using examples from such writers as Charles Dickens and George Meredith. The second essay, “Punishing the Unregulated Manly Body and Emotions in Early Victorian England” by Joanne...

Cosmopolitan Patriots: The Italian Risorgimento and Masculine Self-Fashioning in Vittoria

Recent research explores the historical development of Victorian masculinity in relationship to British nationalism and imperialism. This article complicates these recent studies by exploring the cosmopolitan construction of masculinity in George Meredith’s novel, Vittoria (1866). Set during the 1848 revolutions in Italy, Vittoria imagines a complex geopolitical representation of Austrian, Italian, and English masculinities that does not fit into typical nationalist or imperialist analysis of Victorian masculine ideologies. This essay argues that the novel’s representation of the cosmopolitan patriot, who fights for humanity rather than nation or empire, destabilizes the relationship between males and masculinity through its heroic representation of its female protagonist and presents an alternative form of public masculinity focused on social duty and virtue rather than the private interests of financial gain, domestic authority, and manly self-discipline typically associated with Victorian masculinity.

The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt

Reviewed by: The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Jennifer Fuller Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt, eds., The Victorian Male Body Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. ix + 259 $110/£75 cloth. This ambitious collection considers how the male body was examined and judged in Victorian culture. The essays (largely by female authors) concentrate on representations of the body to trace the discourse of ideal masculinity that developed in fiction. While the male body represented a set of complex virtues, it was unable to maintain those ideals under scrutiny. White masculinity, while intended to represent a form of power, was [End Page 423] never "one, unified, complete, (perfect?) construction;" nevertheless, "discourse around this ideal had real and embodied consequences for women, people of color, colonised subjects and white men themselves" (15). Thus, each of the book's three sections examines how masculinity was discussed, debated, and adapted from the ideal and what those digressions help us understand about the coded norms of the Victorian male body. The collection's first section, "Constructed Bodies," focuses on the way men were expected to tailor their masculinity to an idealized body. Alice Crossley opens the section by analyzing the physical abuses suffered by schoolboys in Victorian fiction. Emphasizing a range of acceptable behaviors from sensitivity to assertiveness, these texts reveal the shifting conversation about masculinity in the nineteenth century. The theme of punishing the male body continues in Joanna Begiato's essay, which considers the role of self-denial in manliness. Using records from insane asylums, she demonstrates the contemporary belief that a man's inability to master his passions would produce "beast-like or child-like" behavior (rather than effeminacy) and could lead to penalties including the label of insanity (61). While the first two chapters explore masculinities in flux, Tara MacDonald's essay examines physical perfection in relation to ideas about the New Man in Ménie Murel Dowie's Gallia (1895). With strong eugenic undertones of national identity, constructions of the New Man objectified the male body as a specimen to be judged on its capacity to produce offspring. The next section, "Fractured and Fragmented Bodies," analyzes the disabled and diseased male body. In a lively essay, Ryan Sweet examines pirate fiction and the presumed connection between villainy and prosthesis. Questioning this stereotype, Sweet shows that many pirates exhibit a hypermasculinity in accepting and overcoming physical loss. Meredith Miller focuses on tuberculosis, which is usually coded feminine, as a way to explore an alternate masculinity embodied by John Keats and the "wasting male youth of visionary sensibility" (109). In contrast to hyperphysical imperial masculinity, Miller reads tubercular men in the works of Henry James and George Eliot as a Gothic antithesis that emphasized Romantic sensibility over national identity. Alison Younger also takes up unconventional masculinities in her analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She argues that gents, dandies, and other identities that imitated masculine behavior while flouting traditional rules of breeding and manners were coded as monstrous in literature, "grotesque parod[ies] of a noble idea" (144). From the monstrous, Ruth Heholt takes us to the supernatural with her reading of the male body in ghost stories by Victorian women. As she insightfully notes, criticism of this genre typically focuses on the way women writers used ghost stories as a form of liberation, but little has been said of the male ghost who inhabits a sphere generally associated with weakness and need. Heholt argues that male [End Page 424] ghosts undermine stable ideas of masculinity not only by creating anxiety about healthy male bodies but also positing a hypermasculine mind robust enough to deny death. These stories challenge the link between Victorian masculinity and virile embodiment by asserting that even the most ablebodied men will eventually die. The final section focuses on "Unruly Bodies" that do not fit (sometimes literally) within the restrained notions of ideal masculinity. Of special interest to periodical scholars, Françoise Baillet's chapter considers how George du Maurier's sketches for Punch opened a forum for the discussion of middle-class manliness. The starving male body features in Charlotte Boyce...

Martyr to Masculinity: Patriarchal Violence and Female Masculinity in “The Lady of Shalott”

Recent criticism has viewed the female protagonist in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as an avatar of the male Romantic artist, who displaces his anxieties about his socially liminal position as an artist onto the tragic feminine figure. Instead of analyzing masculinity exclusively in relation to the male artist, this article situates “The Lady of Shalott” more broadly within the field of Victorian masculinity studies and considers the problematic of masculine self-fashioning in the poem in relation to Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, analyzing the relationship between the labor of weaving and the dandiacal body. Laboring under a mysterious “curse,” the Lady’s life at Shalott represents not only a critique of the effects of domestic ideology on the lives of women but, moreover, a reflection on the toxic expectations internalized within Victorian masculine subjects. The Lady’s death at the end of the poem reflects a double sense of martyrdom, suggesting both the ideological violence placed on female subjects by patriarchy and the pathological nature of masculine self-fashioning itself.

Performative Sherlock Holmes: Male Direction and Female Digression in “A Scandal in Bohemia”

Embodying archetypical Victorian masculinity, Sherlock Holmes is an unrivaled man in his intellectual capacity. Through this character, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories attempt to consolidate ge...

Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel by Karen Bourrier

BOURRIER, KAREN. The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in Mid-Victorian Novel. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2015. 184 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $35.00 paperback. Over a decade ago. Martha Stoddard Holmes's Fictions of Affliction called for disability studies interventions in Victorian Studies, which has long been invested since work of Bruce Haley in role of health and embodiment. The Measure of Manliness contributes to this developing subfield of Victorian disability studies by putting into conversation long-standing Victorian scholarship on invalidism and illness with more recent disability theory and its investments in social model of disability, where sickness and disability are not fixed biological states but part of a culturally constructed continuum of ideas about fit body (16). Drawing explicitly on Holmes's work. Bourrier focuses on relationship between affect and disability, and how it shapes a normative Victorian masculinity characterized by taciturn strength. Methodologically, her study hinges upon a central dyad: the affective of masculine and disability and impact it has on narrative form of midcentury (16). In a move similar to Georges Canguilhem in The Normal and Pathological and Lennard Davis in Enforcing Normalcy, Bourrier argues for mutual dependence and co-constituency of disability and normative health as key concepts animating Victorian fiction. The archive to which Bourrier turns is mid-century domestic novel, which persistently features what she describes as pairing of strong man and weak man, in which latter serves as an alternative and complementary Victorian mode of masculinity, supplementing masculine strength with his emotional self-consciousness and verbal effusiveness (3). The narrowing of scope to middle-class masculinity enables her to 1 ) connect figure of Victorian disabled man to earlier eighteenth-century man of feeling, and 2) trace strong-weak dualism as a narrative pattern within a particular generic form. Bourrier begins with novels of muscular Christianity: Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) and Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857). The contrast between taciturn suffering of characters like Guy Morville or Tom Thurnall and their vulnerable, disabled counterparts valorizes an active masculinity that is physically capable and spiritually sound. It is this model of intimate friendship that underpins Bourrier's second paradigmatic example. Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856). where Christian masculinity gives way to self-discipline and self-consciousness of self-made man. While represented as individually self-made, John Halifax's social climbing and industry is quietly enabled by Phineas Fletcher's invalidism and influence. Bourrier turns then to Eliot's The Mill on Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881) as revisions of this originary strong man-weak man with which both authors were deeply familiar. Eliot's Tom Tulliver and Philip Wakem and James's Caspar Goodwood and Ralph Touchett represent markedly different duos than their predecessors in that disabled weak man does not exist purely to support able strong man; in fact, these men begin to diverge from one another entirely. Measure of Manliness thus traces a trajectory from an uncomplicated and improving friendship between strong man and a weak man to a rivalry to almost no relationship at all (123). …

Detective Stories from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel

Detective Stories from Sherlock Holmes to WhitechapelAbstractThe Victorian period in England was one of the most influential and important epochs in history. During Queen Victoria’s reign, England was arguably the most powerful nation in the world, setting standards for social, economic and industrial development. Among the rules of Victorian society were stringent codes pertaining to what was acceptable for men and women. Men were expected to hold decent jobs, marry respectable women, and create the next generation of proper British citizens. Women were raised to marry, breed virtuous English children, and live quietly in the confines of the household. As Elaine Showalter (1987) says Victorian households had different spheres for men and women. There were certain behavioral norms for men and women that were standard practice for asserting one’s proper gender codes. In his 1995 book Victorian Masculinities, Herbert Sussman identifies, within Victorian men’s writing, a method of constructing masculinity that opposes the dominant English model of manliness based on bourgeois domestic matrimony. During the first half of the Victorian period, normative masculinity required a man to master his psychic energy by establishing a bourgeois domestic identity founded on matrimony. However, this concept translates into the bachelordom plot, wherein male desire finds an appropriate outlet in a sidekick rather than a wife, thus, under the terms of popular middle-class belief, permanently affirming masculinity. When we come to 2010s a bestseller Whitechapel hinges on the same lone detective trying to pursue the killers and criminals. The purpose of this paper is to probe and grapple with the similarities and dissimilarities the detective genre from Sherlock Holmes to Whitechapel by focusing on the detective himself, the crime types, criminals- their motives and ethnic origins-, masculinity, and male-male bonding.

The Victorian novel and masculinity

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL AND MASCULINITY, edited by Phillip Mallett. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 240 pp. ISBN 9780230272323 (hb) 9781137491534 / 9781137491541 (e-bk)Philip Mallett's edited book, Victorian and Masculinity consists of nine essays explore the various aspects of masculinity at in the Victorian age as represented in the literary works of some of the most representative authors of the day. book puts to rest the monolithic ideas of masculinity as propagated by Carlyle, one of the leading thinkers of the times, both by the authors discussed in this interesting collection as well as this book itself, the aim of the collection being to show, as Mallett puts it, that there was and could be no monolithic 'ideal' of manhood; neither as a goal to be embraced, nor as a standard no individual man can live up to or fulfil but rather a diversity of masculinities (p. xii). book covers a wide range of Victorian literature, from the to the industrial novel as explored by Mrs Gaskell, George Gissing through Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot to the Imperial novel right to the Aesthetic novel, as well as Conrad's works coming at the close of the age and spilling over onto the next. Much like the time frame itself, which we try to neatly classify, notions of gender, especially of masculinity, fail to be contained in neat categories and threatens to spill over the set boundaries. This is what makes this book a highly valuable addition to the growing body of Victorian masculinity studies.The essays have been arranged chronologically, as per the timeline of the various Victorian novelists. volume opens with an exploration of masculinity in the literary works of the Bronte siblings. In Maculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontes Sara Lodge argues the early fictional world of the sheds much light on the way they shape up their male characters in their more recognized and celebrated later works. According to Lodge, The fact four Bronte siblings become so closely involved in this imaginary world, was co-directed by male and female hands, suggests the way in which these fictions enabled a literary space where gender difference was itself subject to interrogation, impersonation and play (pp. 2-3). rest of the essay deconstructs the early world of the in the form of Angrian fiction-the fictional world, which the young Bronte siblings called Angria and which was to later find a place in their more mature fictional works.The ensuing essay titled Working-Class Masculinity and the Victorian Novel explores masculinity and its relation to the working class and as evident in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing and Arthur Morrison. link between three novelists is that, Chris Louttitt writes, all three depict men attempting (and sometimes failing) to negotiate the demands of working-class life (p. 34).Natalie McKnight's chapter, and Masculinity: Necessity of the Nurturing Male, is one of the most enjoyable essays in this volume. It highlights some of the challenges Charles Dickens, one of the foremost popular as well as the most influential author of the era, levelled against prevailing notions of masculinity in his times. McKnight argues at the very beginning of the essay Throughout his career, and increasingly toward the end, Dickens questioned the very gender norms he himself had helped to establish. In particular, Dickens undermines rigid gender divisions through male characters... (p. 51) thus helping to establish him as one of the leading dissenters of Carlyle's ideals of masculinity. McKnight sums it up aptly when she talks about the maturing Dickens who gave voice to the various men and women in his novels and in so doing created challenging, provocative and androgynous characters who are among the most memorable of a very memorable cast to be found in British literature (p. 64).Shelly Trower delves directly into the fictional world of George Eliot in her essay, Tomboys and Girly Boys in George Eliot's Early Fiction. …

Adapting Victorian Masculinities: Oliver Parker'sDorian Gray(2009) and Guy Ritchie'sSherlock Holmes(2009)

This article explores the construction of masculinities in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray (2009) in the context of neo-Victorian adaptational strategies. Sherlock Holmes enacts a version of adaptation characterised by a recombination of citational fragments taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Character provides a unifying force, with Holmes and Watson acting as nodal points. Their latent homoeroticism negotiated via homosocial triangulations and the deferral of pleasure within male social bonds is a powerful means of ensuring consumer retention. In that it constitutes a reproduction of Wilde's novel with a difference, Parker's Dorian Gray lives up to a more traditional version of adaptation. It renders sex between men explicit, but tames Dorian's homosexuality in a psychodrama of childhood abuse and the ‘healing’ influence of the New Woman. Within different adaptational strategies, both films reconstruct late-Victorian masculinity by displaying the male characters' physicality, bodily sensuality, and libidinal energies.

A Man’s Work Must She Do: Female Manliness in Tennyson’s Gareth and Lynette

While and woman still are incomplete, I prize that where and woman meet, Which types all Nature's male and female plan, But friend, man-woman is not woman-man. (1) This 1889 poem by Alfred Tennyson, On One who Affected an Effeminate Manner, articulates an idea about gender the complexity of which belies the verse's brevity--the best people combine the virtues associated with both genders, but those who fail to live up to the standards of their sex cannot hope to compensate by evincing the virtues of the opposite one. A manuscript version of the second line reads, best man, the and women meet (Ricks, 3:217): Tennyson's change from earth's best man to the gender-neutral soul indicates how important it was to him that women who combine masculine and feminine virtues should be just as much admired as who so. manuscript for Locksley Hall Sixty Years After puts this even more clearly: As our greatest is man-woman, so was she the woman-man (3:217-218). But a much more extensive exploration of this idea is embedded in Gareth and Lynette, the second poem in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. idyll's opening, including Gareth's declaration that Man am I grown, a man's work must I do (l. 115), seems to focus on a boy's growth into manhood. However, I argue that the text as a whole is more concerned with a woman's development of virtues that characters in the poem designate as manly, and which middle-class Victorians would have regarded similarly. Existing scholarship on Idylls has explored sexual role-reversal, but almost exclusively from the perspective of male characters assuming female qualities. In The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse, Elliot L. Gilbert considers the cycle in the context of a Victorian culture in which often men and women [were unwilling] to play their traditional social and sexual roles, one that witnessed the growing assertion of female authority through the of the usual male-female roles that was occasioned by the condition of having a female monarch and a male consort; Gilbert concludes that Idylls can be read as an elaborate examination of the advantages and dangers of sexual role (emphasis mine). (2) Yet despite his sensitivity to sexual role reversal in general--as opposed simply to male appropriation of female roles--in Victorian society, Gilbert focuses his argument on King Arthur's femaleness and does not consider the maleness of any of the female characters in the cycle. Even though Gilbert asserts that the hopeful invocation of female is one of the most striking features of the cycle, he confines his study to the manifestation of that energy in a male character, as opposed to a female character playing a male role (241). character of the womanly King in Idylls is explored in great depth, but that of the manly lady is not--neither in Gilbert's essay nor elsewhere. My study aims to address this lack. My argument derives inspiration from Judith Halberstam's 1998 book Female Masculinities, which disconnects masculinity from and surveys the variety of techniques by which masculine women create and express masculine identities through the ways they dress, the ways they act, the art they produce, and so forth. (3) Although Halberstam understands masculinity primarily as styles of self-presentation rather than a set of virtues to be acquired, her understanding of male masculinities as unoriginal and thus not very entertaining performances is relevant to my analysis of Tennyson's poem, which reveals how Gareth's manliness, and in particular the way he achieves and asserts his manliness, is predictable and lacking in dramatic suspense. In recent years, scholars from various disciplines have constructed several useful theoretical frameworks for Victorian masculinities. Like Halberstam, James Eli Adams considers gender largely in terms of performance, emphasizing that masculinity always requires an audience. …

Reconstructing Masculinity in Charlotte Riddell's ‘The Open Door’ and Rudyard Kipling's ‘They’

This essay examines how two much-anthologised ghost stories from the long nineteenth century – Charlotte Riddell's ‘The Open Door’ and Rudyard Kipling's ‘They’ – challenge the perceived idea that the experience of witnessing a spectre has a shattering or feminising effect on men. Instead, ghostly encounters enable the male protagonists to develop a form of spiritual awareness which bolsters rather than undermines their embodiment of traditionally masculine traits. The concept of manliness was continually being contested and redefined during the period in which these tales were published. Its perceived links with rationalist materialism were also being eroded as various male-orientated groups sought to synthesise the ghost within scientific discourse. ‘The Open Door’ intriguingly promotes a supernaturalised form of masculine identity through an interrogation of class: the spectral encounter is crucial in the development of the middle-class protagonist into a model of hardworking Victorian masculinity. ‘They’ reworks the motif of the manly but spiritually sensitive central character via a focus on paternity, suggesting that trauma and loss can be adequately incorporated into this rehabilitated form of British masculinity. Both tales thus utilise the experience of ghost-seeing to highlight the importance of emotion and sensitivity to masculine identity at the end of the long nineteenth century.

“A Wizard of Silks and Tulle”: Charles Worth and the Queer Origins of Couture

Charles Worth, founder of modern couture system of fashion production, scandalized his contemporaries with his incursion into sphere of women's dress. The satirical, hostile journalistic accounts of Worth, from his rise to fame in 1860s through his death in 1895, suggest that the great man-milliner escalated Victorian anxieties about gender and value. Simultaneously, memoirs of Worth's fans reveal genesis of a species of cross-gender relationship between designer and clients that is chaste but enamored, controlling but also collaborative. Reading across these opposing perspectives, I argue that Worth embodies a queer Victorian masculinity based not in sexual preference or effeminacy but in social and material relations to women, and that opulence of his work transcends boundary between fashion and art.

<em>Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading</em>, by Clinton Machann

Reviewed by: Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading by Clinton Machann Martin Danahay (bio) Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading, by Clinton Machann; pp. vi + 166. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010, £55.00, $99.95. Clinton Machann’s book attempts to resuscitate and rehabilitate arguments that emerged in the 1990s when the field of masculinity studies was new and the publications of R. W. Connell and Michael Kimmel helped delineate the field. This comes across most strongly in his chapter on Aurora Leigh (1856) which focuses largely on the role of Romney Leigh. Machann argues that Romney is a “heroic figure” and “sincere in his love” for Aurora (66), and is simply acting according to his “Christian humanistic vision”—an argument that glosses over Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s subtle critique of his hegemonic use of the language of selfless devotion (70). Romney is, in Machann’s terms, just trying to be a good man. The chapter as a whole could unfortunately be used as an argument against masculinity studies because the focus on masculinity occludes troubling issues of power in gender relations. The argument in this chapter and throughout Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics seems largely untouched by critical developments over the last few decades, especially the impact of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and the sustained critique of normative heterosexuality by those working in queer theory, despite Machann’s nod in the introduction toward critics who see gender as socially constructed. Machann points out correctly in this introduction that the Victorian long poem has been increasingly neglected, and as a result he focuses on four of the best examples from the period: Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–85), Aurora Leigh, Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1858), and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69), in that order. While it’s admirable to see a book-length treatment of these poems as a remedy for their neglect, it is not clear why this genre rather than, say, four Victorian novels should be analyzed in terms of masculinity. Indeed the most successful of the chapters, on The Ring and the Book, notes its affinities with the novel and goes on to make some interesting and perceptive comments on changing attitudes toward violence against women as they inform the poem. Machann analyzes character in all senses of the word here as he does elsewhere, and his analysis works best with the complex psychological portraits in The Ring and the Book. [End Page 117] The analysis of these long poems is yoked to a defense of literary Darwinism, and again it is not entirely clear why these poems are the best subject to be studied from this perspective. As Machann says, he takes a “somewhat revisionist stance” in his approach to Victorian masculinities and goes on to argue that gender differences “ultimately derive from an interaction of innate qualities and cultural concepts” (16). This assumption seems to be what qualifies this analysis as literary Darwinist. However, the appeal to an innate human, especially male, propensity to violence flattens out the historical landscape so that Homer’s The Iliad might as well have been the topic of this book as the Victorian long poem if the aim were to examine such innate masculine traits as a tendency toward violence. The introduction of literary Darwinism into the mix, therefore, seems largely irrelevant, and a glance at the index shows that, after the discussion of the topic in the introduction, it is referred to again only twice in the rest of the book (81, 107–08). This raising, then dropping, of key theoretical points makes reading Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics a frustrating experience. While it is the work of an astute close reader of Victorian texts, it is often unclear what is at stake in the close readings. By the time one reaches the conclusion it’s not evident why the Victorian long poem was chosen as a focus for the book, why literary Darwinism would be brought to bear on it, and how it relates in its treatment of masculinity to other Victorian art forms such as the novel or...