Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era

Charlotte Yonge's Models of Manliness

Susan Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138356054
• eBook ISBN: 9781351156028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beginning with the premise that women's perceptions of manliness are crucial to its construction, The author focuses on the life and writings of Charlotte Yonge as a prism for understanding the formulation of masculinities in the Victorian period. Yonge was a prolific writer whose bestselling fiction and extensive journalism enjoyed a wide readership. The author situates Yonge's work in the context of her family connections with the army, showing that an interlocking of worldly and spiritual warfare was fundamental to Yonge's outlook. For Yonge, all good Christians are soldiers, and Walton argues persuasively that the medievalised discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men that is often connected with late nineteenth-century Imperialism began earlier in the century, and that Yonge's work was one major strand that gave it substance. Of significance, Yonge also endorsed missionary work, which she viewed as an extension of a father's duties in the neighborhood and which was closely allied to a vigorous promotion of refashioned Tory paternalism. The author's study is rich in historical context, including Yonge's connections with the Tractarians, the effects of industrialization, and Britain's Imperial enterprises. Informed by extensive archival scholarship, Walton offers important insights into the contradictory messages about manhood current in the mid-nineteenth century through the works of a major but undervalued Victorian author.

Chapter 1
Happy Warriors? Military Matters and the 1850s

Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
that every man in arms should wish to be?
It is the generous Spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought:
Whose high endeavours are an inward light
That makes the path before him always bright: …
This is the happy Warrior; this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be.

—From ‘character of the Happy Warrior’ by William Wordsworth
(Composed Dec. 1805/Jan. 1806, published 1807)

Battles in the Imagination

‘The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing’. With this opening sentence to her book, An Intimate History of Killing, Joanna Bourke sent shocked ripples through the ranks of military historians.¹ The consternation caused by her arguments was magnified by their astonishment at a woman writing such a book; that women in the late twentieth century were not only enrolled on active service to fight alongside men, but claimed the right to pass judgment on past military campaigns in which they had no role. The columns of the Daily Telegraph fizzed with critical comments after an extract was published.² Bourke’s contention was that ‘the centrality of killing’ was usually sidestepped by experts writing about war, as if the role of soldiers was to ‘be killed rather than to kill’ (pp. 1–2). In her exhaustive reading of the diaries and letters of twentieth-century combatants, she had been forced to recognize uncomfortable facets of soldiers’ emotional responses to battle. Chief among these was the possibility that for many men there was pleasure gained from fighting in war; that ‘for men, combat was the male equivalent of childbirth: it was the initiation into the power of life and death’ (p. 14). Military situations can push men to the limits of endurance, buoyed up by male comradeship and laughter. While sport can mimic these experiences, nothing comes near the intensity and exhilaration of the actual challenge. She was surprised by many of her findings: that soldiers recorded their need to visualize in their imaginations the faces of their enemies when technology meant they could no longer glimpse them: ‘personalizing the foe could be crucial to the moral and emotional well-being of combatants and formed a buffer against numbing brutality’ (p. 7); that those sections which did not need bayonets, such as the Medical Corps, resisted the order to dispense with them, as bayonets had symbolic significance as emblems of combatancy (p. 53). In The Pity of War, Niall Ferguson controversially supports Bourke’s hypothesis as applied to the First World War: ‘Even the most famous war writers provide evidence that murder and death were not the things soldiers disliked about the war. Killing aroused little revulsion and fear of death was suppressed’.³ If he and Bourke are right then these are uncomfortable truths, difficult to incorporate into notions of modernity and the construction of disciplined male citizenship. How can a mature society, which prides itself on having enlightened attitudes about the sanctity of the lives of citizens, authorize a section of its male population to unleash primitive violent urges to kill opponents? All the more important that, as Ferguson avers, ‘the motifs of holy war and Christian self-sacrifice employed by clergymen on both sides enabled soldiers to rationalize the slaughter they found themselves perpetrating and suffering’. How else could modern men justify the barbaric quality of warfare?⁴

Although both Bourke and Ferguson focus on the First World War, it seems feasible to extract some conclusions from their work and reposition them within an earlier period, in order to scrutinize the beginnings of a narrative of knightly warfare which dovetailed with the evolving domestic ethos: soldiers ‘whose master-bias leans/To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes;/…/More Brave for this, that he hath much to love’. Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warriors’, grounded by their attachment to the sacred centres of hearth and home, gave women a central role in moulding and maintaining recruits of calibre. This was a discourse that would gradually permeate Victorian society, reaching its apogee in the mass volunteering of 1914, but it was also one at odds with the reality of warfare, where the ravages of new weaponry and old diseases made nonsense of much of the noble rhetoric. My argument will be that the re-introduction of this mediaevalized discourse of sanctified violence executed by upright moral men was a process that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century and that Charlotte Yonge’s work was one strand that gave substance to this discourse and its wider dissemination.⁵ of particular interest is the role played by women in spurring on their menfolk to take up arms. As Yonge herself came to realize by the last decades of her life, there was an imbalance between the gallant expressions of intention and what happened on battlefields. Indeed, by the last years of her life, during the campaigns in southern Africa, she could not bear to hear the Boer War mentioned; sadly, her worst fears were realized when her brother’s son was killed in this conflict.⁶ Although her admiration for soldiers never diminished, her maturer self preferred the enlistment of men for the defence of spiritual rather than geographical citadels.

Of particular interest are those sections in Bourke where she elucidates how martial combat has a before as well as an after; that it has to be imagined beforehand in order to activate the necessary behaviour, a preparation achieved partly by the internalization of war stories. Such accounts have always formed an integral part of literature and these imaginative zones provide a linguistic structure within which aggressive behaviour can legitimately be fantasized (p. 16). Narratives of war can thus sanctify actions that would be deemed savage in civilian life. Almost as an aside, Bourke comments that girls too are entranced by such literature. This can be corroborated by casual questions to groups of women; these often unearth memories of their enjoyment of stories written for boys and the frequency with which they identified with the male rather than the female characters.⁷ In her examination of how women relate to war and ‘the war stories deeded to us’, Jean Bethke Elshtain recounts her own dislike as a child of the passive roles assigned to women in heroic tales. Joan of Arc became her first role-model until she found a modern heroine in Margaret Higgins, a war photographer for Life during the Second World War, a vocation that enabled close witness of battle.⁸

Memoirs by the feminist academic, Terry Castle, give further credence to the continuing confusion engendered by war stories. Castle admits an obsession with the First World War and describes her pilgrimage to the trenches to envisage what her great-uncle had confronted. She anatomizes the stages of her thinking; how can she as a woman comprehend the roles asked of men in war:

If you’re a woman … it’s hard to know where to stand with all of this. You regret the appalling absurd waste of life … . You see the savage toll the cult of heroism takes – has always taken – on men and boys. But painful too – at times exorbitantly so, once you become sensitised to it – the near-total exclusion of your own sex from such primal dramas of unflinching physical courage. You feel at a moral deficit. You wonder, perhaps dubiously, if you would be capable of such nobility under the circumstances – of moving forward calmly. … women have seldom been asked to exert their valour in this direct, theatrical, entirely wasteful and (yet) sublime fashion.⁹

Although the language is modern, the sentiments are ones with which Charlotte Yonge would have empathized – she yearned to have been actually present in the war-stories she heard and read, balanced by shame about her timidity at any loud noise or bloodshed. Instead she channelled her military obsessions and imaginings into her writings, instructing sisters and mothers how to construct brothers and sons who would represent them in battles, actual and metaphorical. There are two important points raised here: the significance of the imagination in creating soldiers and providing them with communal sanctions for their deeds; and, secondly, the possible function of women in persuading their menfolk to be manly champions who must fight the nation’s battles. Both are themes of special interest in relation to the writings of Yonge in the 1850s, a decade when military matters forced themselves onto the public mind. Joshua Goldstein, in his monumental examination of the complex relationship between war and gender, concludes that ‘the single main lesson … for those interested in gender is to pay attention to war. … [T]he war system influences the socialization of children into all their gender roles’.¹⁰

Contrary to the idea that war thrills men, expresses innate masculinity, or gives men a fulfilling occupation, all evidence indicates that war is something that societies impose on men, who most often need to be dragged kicking and screaming into it, constantly brainwashed and disciplined once there and rewarded and honored afterwards. (p. 253)

Goldstein uses a telling phrase, ‘the feminization of noncombat’ (p. 306), to explain the necessary ‘psychological defense used widely by male soldiers – the construction of a feminine “normal” sphere of experience from which war is separated’ (p. 304). He endorses Gilmore’s cross-cultural study on the commonalty of methods employed to convert boys into soldiers (pp. 264–6) and emphasizes the essential role of women in the ‘making of militarized masculinity’:

… just as women participate actively in shaming men, and in serving as mirrors for their masculinity, they also participate as mothers in shaping their sons for war. In theory, since they control infant care, women could change gender norms. They could … train girls to be aggressive and boys to be passive. But in fact mothers … reward boys for being tough and girls for being nice. They raise warriors. (p. 309)

How women in the nineteenth century should perform this task in the newly industrialized, urban state, which now prohibited duelling as an acceptable method for gentlemen to resolve disputes and where captains of industry were more visible than their military counterparts, was problematical.¹¹ In a nation which held the Continental practice of conscription in contempt it was, however, a theme of importance which figures as an undercurrent in many of the novels of Charlotte Yonge and probably reflected the confusions within her own life engendered by her love of the military.

Although none of Yonge’s work can be labelled as displaced narratives of war (such as Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!), she deals with issues of manly behaviour and heroism in a way which had a direct bearing on contemporary disquiet about the place of the army in early Victorian Britain. In this chapter I consider the specific context of her writings in the light of the debates current in those years: a detailed examination of the build-up to war in the Crimea and, more briefly, its aftermath with the Volunteer movement of the later 1850s. John Peck, in one of the few examinations of the place of war an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: 'Make us Thine own soldiers true'
• 1 Happy Warriors? Military Matters in the 1850s
• 2 Shaping Brothers and Sons into Soldiers I
• 3 Shaping Brothers and Sons into Soldiers II
• 4 The Fatherland of Parish and Community
• 5 The Fatherlands of Henrietta's Wish and Hopes and Fears
• 6 Missionary Men as Christian Knights
• 7 The Heirs of The Heir of Redclyffe in the South Pacific
• 8 Charlotte Yonge's Historical Heroes
• Bibliography
• Index