Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature

Andrew Dowling

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351920148
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The purpose of this book is to address two principal questions: 'Was the concept of masculinity a topic of debate for the Victorians?' and 'Why is Victorian literature full of images of male deviance when Victorian masculinity is defined by discipline?' In his introduction, Dowling defines Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline. He then addresses the central question of why an official ideal of manly discipline in the nineteenth century co-existed with a literature that is full of images of male deviance. In answering this question, he develops a notion of 'hegemonic deviance', whereby a dominant ideal of masculinity defines itself by what it is not. Dowling goes on to examine the fear of effeminacy facing Victorian literary men and the strategies used to combat these fears by the nineteenth-century male novelist. In later chapters, concentrating on Dickens and Thackeray, he examines how the male novelist is defined against multiple images of unmanliness. These chapters illustrate the investment made by men in constructing male 'others', those sources of difference that are constantly produced and then crushed from within gender divide. By analysing how Victorian literary texts both reveal and reconcile historical anxieties about the meaning of manliness, Dowling argues that masculinity is a complex construction rather than a natural given.

1Victorian Metaphors of Manliness

What then are the dominant codes of masculinity that are evident in the nineteenth century? As both James Eli Adams and Herbert Sussman emphasise, it is an ideal structured around a controlling metaphor of discipline.

Friedrich Nietzsche claims that ‘what passes for truth in every age’ is nothing but ‘a mobile army of metaphors’:

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding. (‘On Truth and Falsity in the Ultra-Moral Sense,’ p. 180)

Ideals of Victorian manhood exerted power, not necessarily by repressing individuals but by constructing a ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ of what it meant to be a man. The hegemonic truth about manliness in the nineteenth century was established through metaphors of control, reserve, and discipline, that were placed in opposition to images of chaos, excess, and disorder. The idea of masculinity that pulsates at the heart of many Victorian texts is evidenced through this relationship between opposed metaphors of manliness; metaphors that became in the nineteenth century ‘fixed, canonic and binding.’

This chapter examines these images of control and discipline that defined Victorian manliness. The chapter does this by analysing examples of dress, speech, and an ideology of separate spheres. However, the second half of the chapter returns to these same examples to argue that male deviance was inextricably linked to male discipline in the nineteenth century. The argument put forward here is that while Victorian manliness was defined by discipline, these definitions always contained within them the suggestion of deviance. For example, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) tapped into contradictions that were already evident in nineteenth-century codes of masculinity. The sombresuited and self-disciplined Victorian man already contained more than a hint of potential deviance. This tension between restraint and disorder can be seen in the speech, dress, and ideology of separate spheres that governed male and female experience at this time.

* * *

John Harvey believes that repression of the self became a fashion statement in the Victorian period. After analysing the black clothes that the Victorian bourgeois man so often wore, Harvey claims that the nineteenth century ‘looked like a funeral’ (p. 24). It was in the nineteenth century that men wore black as never before. Harvey claims that ‘if one consults the fashion journals one can see colour die, garment by garment, in a very few years,’ and that by 1820 or so, ‘black came and did not go’ (p. 23 & p. 29). Ellen Moers also claims that ‘everyday male dress in the ‘sixties was probably the ugliest ever worn: black settled over the Victorians like a pall’ (p. 226). Black is the colour associated with death, but also with self-control; ‘the colour that, having no colour, effaced and took one’s self away’ (Harvey, p. 43). By wearing black, the Victorians revealed how repression could be displayed.¹

A display of discipline was also evident in the armoured knights that Victorian painters continually portrayed. Joseph Kestner claims in relation to the visual arts that while, ‘for the Greeks, it was the naked male that constructed masculinity; for the Victorians, it was the armoured male’ (p. 97). This icon of chivalry transformed the male body into a ‘permanent erection’ as Kestner claims, but it did so by hiding and covering the body (p. 97). The armoured self places the male under a literal iron control, often in contrast to a female body that is presented in these paintings as naked and vulnerable [see fig 1.1].

The image of the disciplined, hardened male who protects the passive, vulnerable woman is also evident in the Victorian ideology of separate life spheres for men and women. One example is in the famous statement of John Ruskin’s ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1865). Ruskin’s dream of a clear division between the sexes crystallised a Victorian mythology of the active male and the passive female:

The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, and their places. Her great function is Praise; she enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial; — to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature of home — it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. (Section 68)

Through his endurance in the ‘open world,’ the man envelops and protects the domestic woman in a way that suggests he is protecting the quiet, passive centre of himself. This image of active masculinity is, of course, culturally specific. A traditional Jewish construction of masculinity, for example, offers a direct contrast to the active male celebrated by Ruskin specifically and by Western culture generally. Daniel Boyarin points to the seclusion and retirement of the Jewish male studying Torah, where it is the Jewish woman who maintains contact with the outside world. However, for Ruskin, the passive woman exists as the result, the shining product, of male endurance.

1.1 Painting by John Everett Millais, The Knight Errant, 1870. Tate Gallery, London, 2000.

This definition of Victorian masculinity in terms of discipline is also evident in the speech that was expected of men at this time. The Victorian construction of manliness in terms of discipline extended to the mind as well as the body and was expressed through speech as well as action. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), for example, claims that the language of emotion was concentrated at this time in the figure of the middle-class domestic woman. Armstrong claims that middle-class women gained cultural authority by being positioned closer to emotional truth and a language of emotions than men.² While nineteenth-century women could speak of inner feelings, nineteenth-century men were defined by their stoic silence.

James Eli Adams also claims that a tortuous relationship to language on the part of men stemmed from the idea that male identity was ideally expressed through action rather than words. Talking of Carlyle’s heroes in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), Adams says that Carlyle defined manliness in terms of an opposition between silent, ‘savage depths,’ and polished, theatrical surfaces:

Language is not simply incapable of capturing the ineffable force that impels heroic selfhood; it actively enmeshes the hero in a web of compromising social relations When the hero does speak, his words invariably disrupt the regimen of linguistic decorum, whether through a ‘rude’ sincerity bordering on incoherence, or through an economy of speech whose very terseness does violence to polite form. (Dandies, p. 31)

Michèle Cohen also believes that the ‘monosyllabic English tongue’ was an invention of the eighteenth century and that taciturnity became ‘emblematic of English masculinity’ because polite conversation, which had been central to the shaping of the gentleman for over a century, was associated at this time with the French nation as well as with frivolous women (p. 3).

This relationship between nationality, masculinity, and speech is evident in James Fitzjames Stephen’s 1862 article on ‘Gentlemen’ in the Cornhill Magazine, which identified straightforward, unemotional speech as the gentleman’s defining characteristic:

The great characteristic of the manners of a gentleman, as we conceive them in England, is plain, downright, frank simplicity. It is meant to be, and to a great extent it is, the outward and visible sign of the two great cognate virtues — truth and courage. It is the manner of men who expect each other to say, in the plainest way, just what they mean, and to stand to what they say, with but little regard either for the opinions or for the approbation of others, though with full respect to their feelings.

This sturdy mixture of frankness when they do speak, with a perfect willingness to hold their tongues when they have nothing to say, is the great distinguishing feature of educated Englishmen, and is the one which always strikes foreigners with surprise. (‘Gentlemen,’ p. 336)

Chillingly silent, or crushing in his absolute candour, the English gentleman is certainly not discursive. His muteness is, for Stephen, a ‘proof’ of manliness and is, in fact, the sign of the most fundamental manly virtues, ‘truth and courage.’ Stephen uses the repudiation of emotional speech as a proof of manly worth and even claims that straightforward speech is displayed by every English gentleman, no matter to what class he belongs:

A gentleman and a labouring man would tell the same story in nearly the same words, differently pronounced, of course, and arranged in the one case grammatically, and in the other not. In either case the words themselves would be plain, racy, and smacking of the soil from which they grow. (p. 337)

Codes of ‘manly’ speech certainly naturalised class divisions. Anthony Trollope, the great mid-Victorian delineator of the gentleman, drew on codes of manly speech to attack a more fluid social order. In his posthumously published An Autobiography (1883), Trollope declared that

As what I now write will certainly never be read till I am dead, I may dare to say what no one now does dare to say in print, — though some of us whisper it occasionally into our friends’ ears. There are places in life which can hardly be well filled except by ‘Gentlemen.’ The word is one the use of which almost subjects one to ignominy. If I say that a judge should be a gentleman, or a bishop, I am met with scornful allusion to ‘Nature’s Gentlemen.’ Were I to make such an assertion with reference to the House of Commons, nothing I ever said again would receive the slightest attention. A man in public life could not do himself a greater injury than by saying in public that commissions in the army or navy, or berths in the Civil Service, should be given exclusively to gentlemen. He would be defied to define the term, — and would fail should he attempt to do so. But he would know what he meant, and so very probably would they who defied him. (pp. 39–40)

Trollope’s irony conditions the seriousness of his final point; that the idea of the gentleman is well known, and would only be denied by those who are not gentlemen. But in the very act of saying ‘what no one now does dare to say,’ Trollope enacts the primary characteristic of the gentleman — that sturdy willingness to say, ‘in the plainest way,’ just what one means.

This emphasis on judging a man through his relationship to language was a commonplace in Victorian literature and thought. The role of speech as a sign of the manly self can be seen, for example, in the following observation on a lecture by Charles Kingsley:

No other man in England could have done what he did; I say man emphatically, because if I were to seek a word to express my opinion of it, 1 would say it was the manliest thing I had ever heard. Such a right bold honest way of turning from side to side, looking everything straight in the face, and speaking out all the good and all the ill that could be said of it, in the plainest way, was surely never seen before.. (Letters 1.249; qtd Rosen, p. 18)

Kingsley’s language is manly because it is confrontational. What his body does literally, his language does metaphorically; it shapes up to the topic and looks it ‘straight in the face.’ His person and his speech confront the topic, and give it no quarter. Speech that works in a subtle way is, by implication, unmanly.³

Manly communication is thus visceral rather than verbal. As a consequence, the broken male body becomes the dominant sign of the individual man’s entry into culture. Bette London has claimed that ‘brokenness has no necessary or exclusive connection to the feminine’ (p. 261). However, it would be more accurate to say that ‘brokenness’ has everything to do with traditional ideals of manliness. The popular ethos of Imperial England, for example, thrived on images of defeat and prostration while simultaneously insisting on the perpetual supremacy of British subjects. When Thomas Hughes proclaimed, in his enormously popular novel, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), that ‘from the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man’ (p. 240), there was an implicit and thrilled awareness that pain as well as victory constituted the legacy of British manhood. Glorifying pain was essential in idealising masculine endeavour, as Carlyle realised when he wrote, in Past and Present (1843), that ‘man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life “a battle and a march,” under the right General’ (pp. 163–4).⁴ Physical pain is the natural corollary of verbal reticence. Discipline is required for both, but personal expression for men occurs most fully through the body. The Victorian construction of manliness in terms of discipline, apotheosised here by Carlyle in terms of military discipline, was pervasive and hegemonic.

* * *

These examples of speech, dress, pictorial representation, and an ideology of separate spheres confirms the notion that Victorian masculinity was defined by discipline. Metaphors of endurance, pain, reticence, and reserve flowed through all of these discourses to define Victorian manliness.

However, Victorian ideals of manly discipline also carried with them a suggestion of deviance. As James Eli Adams has noted, the whole idea of masculine reserve implies something that needs to be reserved in the first place:

reserve may also embody a deliberately, even ostentatiously, public withholding of information; onlookers, whether readers or spectators, assume that the reserved subject is concealing something that, by virtue of being concealed, must be important. (‘Hero,’ p. 226)

The display of discipline was crucial to Victorian masculinity because it suggested something underneath or beyond it. This display of discipline was predicated upon an idea of deviance; that ‘important something’ that, in Adams’s words, men needed to reserve. A closer look at Victorian metaphors of manliness reveals that male deviance, no matter how conceived, was often positioned in Victorian culture as a projection or hidden possibility of an ideal masculinity.

The location of deviance within discipline can be illustrated again through the examples of speech, dress, separate spheres, as well as of law and religion. In relation to the armoured male, it is clear that armour often symbolises discipline as well as the need for discipline. In Millais’ painting [fig 1.1], the sight of human flesh against burnished steel suggests that the armoured knight could just as easily be the woman’s rapist if he wasn’t already her saviour. Beneath the knight’s shining armour lies a brutal savagery waiting to be unleashed. Carlyle described this primitive brutality in Past and Present as the evolution of ‘two men with clenched teeth, and hell-fire eyes hacking one another’s flesh; concerting precious living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses of putrescence’ (p. 163). Black clothes and shining armour signified both the presence of control, and the need for control. The question of whether Victorian men became as colourless as the black clothes they wore, or as rigid as the armour they fantasised about wearing, is not the point. Rather, it is to emphasise how t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Victorian Metaphors of Manliness
• 2 Dickens, Manliness, and the Myth of the Romantic Artist
• 3 Masculinity and its Discontents in Dickens’s David Copperfield
• 4 Homosocial Bohemia in Thackeray’s Pendennis
• 5 Masculinity and Work in Trollope’s An Autobiography
• 6 Masculine Failure in Gissing’s New Grub Street
• Conclusion: From Feminism to Gender Studies
• Works Cited
• Index