Men of Their Words

The Poetics of Masculinity in George Sand's Fiction

Nigel Harkness

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781904350873
• eBook ISBN: 9781351195898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Whereas the centrality of femininity to nineteenth-century French fiction has been the focus of widespread critical attention, masculinity has, until recently, received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical domains. In this book, Nigel Harkness uses the fiction of George Sand (1804-1876), the pre-eminent woman writer of the period, to explore questions of masculinity as they pertain to the nineteenth-century French novel, and to map out new approaches to the study of literary masculinity. Drawing on contemporary theories of gender and narrative, Harkness reveals how Sands novels repeatedly focus on a nexus of language, masculinity and power, in which narrative is both a vehicle for the expression of manhood, and a site where masculinity is discursively performed. Masculinity is thus reconfigured in Sands fiction as an identity constituted as much through words as through actions. Analysis of the performances of masculinity staged in Sands novels opens onto an exploration of gendered processes of literary representation: the links between masculinity and the doxa, the equation of writing and power, the homosocial function of acts of narration, and the masculinity of authorship and authority."

Chapter 1
Conceptualizing Nineteenth-Century Masculinity: Male and Female Gazes

Women do not write books about men.

VIRGINIA WOOLF, A Room of One’s Own

Un homme n’aurait pas idée d’écrire un livre sur la situation singulière qu’occupent dans l’humanité les mâles.

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, Le Deuxième Sexe

Whereas nineteenth-century studies have demonstrated the centrality of femininity to canonical fiction, albeit negatively in terms of its problematic status or disruptive potential, masculinity has received little sustained treatment in either the literary or socio-historical fields. It appears as the unproblematic norm which escaped the critical gaze that nineteenth-century medical, philosophical, and literary communities directed onto femininity. Yet it was in the aftermath of the Revolution that the ideal of modern masculinity was formed in France: drawing on the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment, and increasingly dominant medical and legal discourses allied to a bourgeois ideology, the meanings of hegemonic masculinity were endlessly mapped out.¹ The aim of this chapter will be to survey the dominant meanings attached to masculinity in nineteenth-century France, and to explore the points at which the link between maleness and manhood breaks down. This will then serve as the basis for considering the way in which Sand’s novels reflect and inflect these constructions of masculinity.

Before I continue, however, a word on terminology. I have until now treated masculinity as a self-evident concept, in need of no definition. Yet masculinity, as the term now signifies within contemporary gender paradigms, was not a concept with any currency in nineteenth-century France. ‘Masculinité’ is defined in the major encyclopaedia of the era, the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle, simply as ‘caractère, qualité de mâle’, and thus derives its meaning from being anchored in the male body. Where gender theory now establishes a distinction between biological maleness and the cultural practices of masculinity, in the Grand Dictionnaire universel the terms ‘mâle’, ‘homme’, ‘masculin(ité)’, and ‘viril(ité)’ form an unbroken semantic chain in which the qualities of what we would now distinguish as ‘manliness’ dominate.² As opposed to the all-encompassing term ‘masculinity’, which accommodates a range of behaviours and gendered practices, ‘manliness’ implies a more narrowly defined standard of masculinity. It is a status which is not conferred on individual men simply by dint of their biological sex, but is affirmed through the development of certain qualities and characteristics — notably strength, courage, and autonomy — and is validated within the male peer group. Whereas masculinity signifies in opposition to femininity, manliness does so within a homosocial context in relation to other modes of male behaviour, and thus draws attention to the hierarchies and differences operating within masculinity. In what follows, then, masculinity will be used in its broad sense to designate a plural and internally fractured category which encompasses both the manly and that which it excludes.

Robert Nye and André Rauch offer what are probably the fullest historical accounts of masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Rauch’s examination of the issues that particularly affect masculine identity formation in the course of the long nineteenth century sets itself the objective of examining the ‘crise de la domination masculine, une fois proclamée la Déclaration des droits de l’homme’,³ that is, to explore the mutations in masculinity attendant on the move from a ‘société des pères’ (p. 8) to a ‘société d’égalité relative — une société des pairs — devant la loi’ (p. 9). His study maps out the ways in which six key areas — citizenship, the army, bourgeois society, rural traditions, school, and leisure — anchor masculine identity throughout the century. While alive to the evolutions that questions of masculinity, manhood, and virility undergo during a period stretching from the Revolution to the Great War, Rauch demonstrates that a number of key characteristics return to define manliness: independence, work or production, courage, heroism, and self-control. He particularly highlights the ways in which the Revolution fundamentally alters the context in which manhood is affirmed: whereas, in the aristocratic model, status within the homosocial community was fixed by reference to illustrious ancestors, in the nineteenth century, valorized status comes to depend on the internalization of a code of behaviour, and thus becomes something which is acquired based on merit: ‘la naissance ne garantit plus l’avenir’ (p. 51). As French society moves from an aristocratic model based on the family and inherited property, towards one in which production and innovation are central, new modes of masculine behaviour are constructed around the male as productive citizen who is judged on his actions and his contribution to society.

Nye, on the other hand, focuses on the ways in which masculinity in nineteenth-century France, in both its bodily and social manifestations, was regulated by codes of honour and shame inherited from the Ancien Régime and reconceived for an increasingly bourgeois society. He suggests that ‘there were two domains of male honor in modern France: the honor embedded in the sex of the male body and its sexual hygiene, and the public rites of honor expressed in male sociability and the duel’.⁴ His presentation of the first type of honour examines the medical codes governing the male body in the context of Foucault’s assertion that ‘le “sang” de la bourgeoisie, ce fut son sexe’.⁵ According to Foucault, the notion of aristocratic race was replaced in the nineteenth century by a bourgeois preoccupation with the production of healthy, virile, and productive heirs, worthy of receiving the family’s financial capital as an inheritance, and capable of managing and augmenting this legacy. Genetic capital was thus linked closely to financial capital, and prudence was the watchword of both the sexual and capitalist economies: expenditure had to be carefully monitored, and financial and genetic stock was to be invested for maximum return. Foucault sums up this attitude when he writes: ‘[la bourgeoisie] a converti le sang bleu des nobles en un organisme bien portant et en une sexualité saine’ (p. 166). As a consequence, male honour became, in Nye’s words, ‘embodied in bourgeois men as a set of normative sexual characteristics and desires that reflected the strategies of bourgeois social reproduction’ (p. 9). Medical discourses throughout the nineteenth century reinforced this construction of masculinity, and ‘proved’ the naturalness of the roles which men and women were assigned within society, thus stressing the complementarity of the sexes as the basis for successful unions. Nye writes:

When properly implemented, this system [of disciplined bourgeois procreation] will produce vigorous offspring with distinctive sexual identities, the qualities required for both social reproduction, and the maintenance of sexual divisions in social life. Thus Foucault’s dictum refers to sex in at least two senses: a hygiene of sexual relations, and a regime of sexual difference. (p. 62)

The need to reproduce, and particularly to produce healthy male heirs, was seen as essential both for the renewal of the Nation and also for the preservation of the bourgeois family. Bourgeois reproductive and inheritance strategies, as well as national fears about depopulation, meshed with medical and scientific discourses of the period to promote a ‘socially useful’ model of sexuality. In this new sexual economy, reproductive potency became linked to social power, in that the capacity to father children was seen as a crucial element of manhood: the family was one seat of man’s power, and his heirs were destined to become the guardians of both his financial capital and the symbolic capital of his name.

Nye argues that it is anachronistic to divorce concepts of manhood and masculinity from the male body, and advocates thinking about gender roles in nineteenth-century French society not as operating independently of biological sex, but as social categories which give meaning to biological differences between the sexes. Taking a strongly materialist approach, Nye contends that ‘sexual identity has been largely experienced and regarded in the past as a natural quality, expressed in and through the body and its gestures’ (p. 6). Nonetheless, his analysis of medical and (homo)social discourses of masculinity has the advantage of presenting masculinity as a constructed identity, and thus of uncovering the cultural and ideological framework in which the biological signified. It also exposes the functioning of regulatory discourses of gender in the nineteenth century which sought to reinforce the link between cultural practices of masculinity and the male body, a process which itself suggests that the ‘natural’ correlation between the cultural and the biological could not always be guaranteed.

Masculinity in Crisis

Despite the solidity which appears to attach to masculinity as an identity in this period, it is often presented as being in crisis. In the wake of the French Revolution, previously solid markers of status, birth, and sex were progressively eroded: birth no longer guaranteed social position and access to power in an increasingly meritocratic society; industrial capitalism transformed the economic landscape; and the inherent superiority of the male was challenged as feminist groups asserted women’s rights. Thus Peter Gay talks of the nineteenth century’s ‘pervasive sense of manhood in danger’,⁶ and the titles of Annelise Maugue’s and André Rauch’s studies — L’Identité masculine en crise au tournant du siècle and Crise de l’identité masculine 1789–1914 — similarly suggest that all is not well with masculinity. Surveying comparable ‘masculinity in crisis’ literature of the 1990s, Lynne Segal argues that such writing is problematic, for it draws a veil over the fact of men’s superordinate status in society:

Whatever else it is [...] ‘masculinity’ condenses a certain engagement with power, however unrealized and largely unrealizable. But that is, of course, the problem: the source of the misery and crisis. Men will fail, and fail again, to measure up to its promise. Masculinity is always in crisis.⁷

For Segal, the concept of crisis is inherent to masculinity because individual men will always fall short of the ideals it represents. But masculinity is also in crisis because it signifies only as a relational concept. Masculinity is not a self-sufficient and self-defining term placed at the centre as source and origin of meaning; instead it is locked in a relative binary in which it is defined at once against and by the feminine. It signifies, as Gay notes, ‘not in isolation, but in an uneasy contest with the other sex’ (p. 169). The anxieties that this generates are significant for our understanding of masculinity as a concept, and can be illustrated through a range of definitions in the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle.

If we begin by examining the pairing ‘masculin’ and ‘féminin’, it is soon apparent that they reflect to a large extent the normative patterns which Nye outlines in relation to a dimorphic conception of gender, grounded in the body as stable signifier of difference, and based on a binary in which the masculine is the primary term. Hence ‘féminin’ is defined as ‘qui est de la nature de la femme ou de la femelle, qui caractérise la femme ou la femelle’, and ‘masculin’ as ‘qui appartient, qui a rapport au mâle’. Both entries establish a clear correlation between the biological male/female, and the social and symbolic roles indicated by these two adjectives. Even the notes on masculine and feminine as linguistic categories are not devoid of an ideological position, for although both entries make clear that words relating to objects ‘dépouvus de sexe’ (entry on ‘féminin’) are nonetheless categorized as either masculine or feminine, it is equally clear that linguistic gender is not seen as entirely detached from the social and sexual beings, man and woman. Finally, it is particularly striking that the article on ‘féminin’ gives three antonyms — masculine, neuter, and epicene — making it a relative term, whereas no antonyms are given for ‘masculin’, indicating its apparent self-sufficiency as a concept.

In turn, an examination of the correponding binary pair ‘homme’/‘femme’ reveals an ostensibly stable set of characteristics which present the limits for each sex. Nonetheless, the two entries are not mirror images of each other, for the article on ‘la femme’ is significantly longer than that on ‘l’homme’, the latter running to just nine pages, whereas the former extends to twenty-two pages. The comparative length of the two articles already indicates that ‘woman’ is seen as more problematic than ‘man’, and the space given over to debates about woman’s rights and the role she can play in society, as well as the extensive bibliography which concludes the article, confirm this.

The purpose of the two entries is to present stable and apparently eternal characteristics which define the limits of each sex according to a dimorphic conception of sexual identity. ‘Homme’ is defined as:

Animal doué de raison, qui appartient à la classe des mammifères, mais qui se distingue de tous les autres animaux par l’excellence de son organisation intellectuelle [...]; Individu appartenant au genre humain [...]; Personne humaine douée des qualités qui honorent et distinguent sa nature [...]; Personne humaine ou ensemble des personnes humaines du sexe masculin: Un homme et une femme [...]; Individu mâle qui est parvenu à l’âge adulte.

The first meaning of ‘homme’ links the category to animality and then to humanity, but without evoking masculinity. ‘Homme’ thus signifies primarily here as a de-gendered universal, for male specificity is introduced only when ‘l’humanité’ becomes ‘personne humaine [...] du sexe masculin’. Respect for this distinction between the gendered and the universal would explain why the term ‘homme’ is absent from the entry ‘masculin’. But in fact, the boundaries between what is generic and what is specifically masculine soon reveal themselves to be less than watertight, for the third definition (‘personne humaine douée des qualités qui honorent et distinguent sa nature’), which appears to fall within the gender-neutral part of the entry, since the meaning of ‘homme’ is explicitly limited to the male sex only in the next section, takes on masculine connotations through the examples used:

Certes, l’homme est celui qui dit: “Voilà ce que je suis;” l’homme n’est pas celui qui dit: “Mon père a été ceci ou cela.” (maxime arabe) Faites des hommes et tout ira bien. (Michelet) En toutes choses, dans les instincts rudes et dans les instincts mâles, les Germains se montraient des hommes. (H. Taine)

At this point, when issues of the superiority of ‘man’ are broached, the field of reference is limited to the male of the species. Such notions as the freedom to define oneself through study and virtue, and to distinguish oneself from one’s ‘fathers’, implicitly exclude the female, and this is confirmed later with the use of such adjectives as ‘mâles’ and ‘rudes’. The semantic slippage between the generic and the gendered suggests not only that the superiority attached to the notion of mankind (the ‘excellence de son organisation intellectuelle’, the reference to ‘raison’) is the preserve of ‘man’, the sexed being, but also that the polyvalent nature of the term is exploited to confirm man as the norm. By way of this association with the universal, masculinity becomes conceptually invisible and is also established as the primary term within the sexual binary, with femininity its negative counterpart.

Woman...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Conceptualizing Nineteenth-Century Masculinity
• 2 Masculinity, Homosociality, and Representation
• 3 A Man's Word is his Power
• 4 The Father-Son Relationship and Literary Paternity
• 5 Disrupting Narratives of Masculine Desire
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index