English Masculinities, 1660-1800

Tim Hitchcock, Michelle Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317882497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa rinascimentale

This collection of specially commissioned essays provides the first social history of masculinity in the 'long eighteenth century'. Drawing on diaries, court records and prescriptive literature, it explores the different identities of late Stuart and Georgian men. The heterosexual fop, the homosexual, the polite gentleman, the blackguard, the man of religion, the reader of erotica and the violent aggressor are each examined here, and in the process a new and increasingly important field of historical enquiry is opened up to the non-specialist reader.
The book opens with a substantial introduction by the Editors. This provides readers with a detailed context for the chapters which follow. The core of the book is divided into four main parts looking at sociability, virtue and friendship, violence, and sexuality. Within this framework each chapter forms a self-contained unit, with its own methodology, sources and argument. The chapters address issues such as the correlations between masculinity and Protestantism; masculinity, Englishness and taciturnity; and the impact of changing representations of homosexual desire on the social organisation of heterosexuality. Misogyny, James Boswell's self-presentation, the literary and metaphorical representation of the body, the roles of gossip and violence in men's lives, are each addressed in individual chapters. The volume is concluded by a wide-ranging synoptic essay by John Tosh, which sets a new agenda for the history of masculinity. An extensive guide to further reading is also provided.
Designed for students, academics and the general reader alike, this collection of essays provides a wide-ranging and accessible framework within which to understand eighteenth-century men. Because of the variety of approaches and conclusions it contains, and because this is the first attempt to bring together a comprehensive set of writings on the social history of eighteenth-century masculinity, this volume does something quite new. It de-centres and problematises the male 'standard' and explores the complex and disparate masculinites enacted by the men of this period. This will be essential reading for anyone interested in eighteenth-century British social history.

Chapter One

Introduction

Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen

Woman alone seems to have ‘gender’ since the category itself is defined as that aspect of social relations based on difference between sexes in which the standard has always been man.¹

So wrote Thomas Laqueur in 1990 in his seminal work Making Sex. This collection of essays, and the project of writing the history of masculinity in general, is about de-centring and problematising this male ‘standard’ and exploring the highly complex and gendered behaviour illuminated in the process.²

In part, therefore, this collection represents a new direction in historical writing. While it aims to use many of the insights gained from the analysis of the history of traditionally excluded groups, the history of women and of homosexual men in particular, it is not an attempt to redraw the boundaries between exclusion and inclusion, power and powerlessness; rather it reflects an increasing awareness of the diversity of ways in which men constructed and thought about themselves, and deployed those facets of self-identity in their relations with other men and women.³

To have suggested that this volume attempts to do something new is not to say that it is built from new materials. The significance of gender for, and its role in, male behaviour has been charted in a whole range of historical literatures.⁴ However, there is currently little agreement about the nature and direction of historical change not just in gender relations as a whole but in the meanings of gender itself. Whether we look at masculinity, or indeed femininity, from the perspective of the salon or the molly house, the demographers’ figures or the medical textbook, from the centre or the periphery, the elite or the plebeian, the story of eighteenth-century gender, and hence masculinities, looks different. The purpose of this volume, then, is not to subsume these different perspectives under a single over-arching analysis, a history of English masculinity, but to explore different masculinities in the various contexts in which they took shape over the course of the long eighteenth century. It has sought to bring together a range of perspectives, based on a wide variety of different sources; to juxtapose work on the gendered behaviour and culture of poor and rich men, of the articulate and inarticulate, of the metropolitan and the provincial. It has also sought to bring together work representing a diversity of methodologies, including micro-historical case studies and anecdotal and synthetic arguments. In other words, this collection is in some ways simply a mapping of the diversity of historical masculinities found in the eighteenth century. At the same time, however, that very diversity, and the debates which surround its components, suggest a broader characterisation of the field as a whole.

A brief survey of the literatures upon which most of the chapters of this book are based will highlight some of the main areas of debate and consensus. The most important and obvious of the literatures involved is women’s and latterly feminist history. In one way or another, all the work included in this volume reflects and extends the concerns and agenda developed within this tradition. But the history of women does not provide the only point of departure for the history of eighteenth-century masculinity. As part of the transformation in the nature of historical writing over the past 30 years, a substantive literature on homosexuality, the family, language and manners, and sexuality and the body has appeared, and at least tangentially addressed the changing roles of masculine behaviour and identity. And while none of this historical effort has resulted in an uncontested consensus about the nature of even a small facet of eighteenth-century society, by relating each of these literatures to the material presented later in this volume, this introduction will seek to chart some of the major features which make up the geography of eighteenth-century English masculinities.

The literatures which perhaps most directly address the history of masculinity are those on homosexuality and the body. At first sight these appear to suggest that eighteenth-century masculinities were becoming more sharply defined; that the categories available to men were being gradually reduced to either a macho heterosexuality or else an effeminate homosexuality, and that these identities were being reified in relation to the body by new medical understandings of sexual difference.

Historians of European homosexuality such as Randolph Trumbach, Alan Bray and Antony Simpson have argued that prior to a transition dated roughly in the latter half of the seventeenth century, sodomy was considered a sin, but not evidence of a sexual identity. Not only could individuals participate in homosexual acts without having to reconsider their identity, but the sin was the same whether sodomy was performed with males or females.⁵ In other words, before the eighteenth century, men did not define themselves in terms of their sexual behaviour, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Rather, they constructed their identity from a variety of behaviours amongst which sexual practice was only one. These historians have argued that in traditional European societies sodomy, while certainly a grievous sin, associated with God’s destruction of Sodom and subject to the death penalty in extremis, was simply one of a range of sins into which anyone might fall – more damning perhaps than pride or dishonesty, but not fundamentally different from these.⁶

In extreme instances, for example fifteenth-century Florence as described by Michael Rocke, sodomy was an aspect of power and inter-generational relations, and was, like homosociality, one facet of the world of young unmarried men.⁷ But even in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, pre-modern sodomy was largely detached from the meanings we now tend to expect. It was only with the onset of the long eighteenth century that the association between sodomy, and exclusive homosexuality and effeminacy become commonplace. Alan Bray’s chapter in this collection explores the culture of male behaviour which preceded this transition and which was largely swept aside by the new cultural magnetism of heterosexuality in the eighteenth century.

In the northern European cities of Amsterdam, Paris and London, the eighteenth century witnessed the creation of what appears to be a radically different form of homosexual identity and organisation – the molly, and the molly house.⁸ For the first time, groups of men engaged in sodomy started to present themselves in ways which set them radically apart from their contemporaries. By congregating in alehouses largely dedicated to serving a specifically ‘molly’ clientele, and by adopting extreme effeminate manners, eighteenth-century mollies created a recognisable homosexual subculture. This creation was part of the changing nature of heterosexuality and, with the rise of a new homophobic discourse directed specifically at molly culture, it contributed to a dynamic of anxiety and fear within the broader culture of masculinity.

One trajectory for eighteenth-century masculinities must be seen as the development of these new extremes and roles – the effeminate molly and newly non-effeminate heterosexual. As has been forcefully argued by Antony Simpson and Randolph Trumbach, the creation of a specific ideal ‘homosexual’ characterised by transvestism and effeminacy provided one ‘other’ against which most men and women could then judge individuals now deemed to be ‘heterosexual’. In this analysis sexual normality became a question of not being a ‘molly’.

At the same time the significance of these developments should not be overstated. Philip Carter, for instance, has convincingly argued that the figure of the effeminate ‘fop’ was strongly associated with heterosexuality rather than homosexuality, with fops being ridiculed for vanity, excessive or affected refinement and, at times, failed heterosexuality.⁹ In his contribution to this collection he argues, among other things, that an at least superficially foppish ‘pretty man’ formed one important facet of that rampantly heterosexual figure, James Boswell.

From this perspective it can also be argued that the association between homosexuality and effeminacy made by historians of homosexuality fails to address the multiplicity of ways in which ‘effeminacy’ was used and understood in our period. Nearly every chapter in this collection refers to effeminacy: men who fell short of the ideal of ‘manly religion’ (Gregory), men who, using slander, were thought to adopt a female vice (Shoemaker), men who showed an ‘excessive devotion’ to the ideals of politeness (Foyster), men who acted immaturely or frivolously (Carter) and men who emulated not just women but the French (Cohen) – all were labelled effeminate, though this had nothing to do with their sexual behaviour. The concept of effeminacy highlights the crucial ways in which the ‘other’ to manliness in the eighteenth century was not simply the feminine, but also the effeminate. As a result, it also complicates our understanding of gender and gender boundaries in our period, and adds a new and awkward twist to the story of increasingly extreme gender identities found in the history of homosexuality.

Historians of the body and of medicine working on the understanding of sexual difference have come to a set of conclusions which is apparently consistent with the model of increasingly stark gender definitions found in the history of homosexuality. But as with the literature on molly culture, these conclusions need to be used with some caution. Following the lead of Tom Laqueur and Londa Schiebinger, a new narrative of the gendering of the body has been articulated.¹⁰ This model posits a transition from a ‘one-body’ to a ‘two-body’ model of human anatomy and sex difference during the course of the long eighteenth century.

Essentially, this history suggests that up until approximately 1700 most Europeans thought of themselves as possessed of a single body type. Under the ‘one-body’ regime, the testicles and penis, and ovum and womb (or in later formulations, the vagina), were homologous, the former being driven from the body by the dry heat of the male while the latter remained inside, in the cool, wet interior of the female.¹¹ Thus, because one’s body was plumbed in much the same way whether one was male or female, it was the experiences which the body underwent and the possession of a peculiar mix of humours which determined whether one would be male or female. As a result of this view, masculinity and femininity (both as physical and mental characteristics) were seen as part of a continuum which encompassed not only masculinity and femininity but effeminacy. While this implies that both gender and sex were unstable – maleness could degenerate into effeminacy, females could become male – it does not necessarily mean that gender boundaries were unstable as well.¹² Thus, while many eighteenth-century men were accused of being effeminate, because manliness was a virtue that could be aspired to by both sexes, women could equally be praised for their ‘manly’ characters.¹³ In neither case was the social role of the individual fundamentally questioned.

While anatomy was not used to exclude either sex from possession of the characteristics normally associated with its opposite, ‘woman’ was associated with unrestrained sexuality, irrationality and openness to the influence of both the devil and God, while ‘man’ was seen as more rational, sexually controlled and possessed of a kind of dangerous intellectual pride which threatened his ability to experience salvation.¹⁴ Gender, under this regime, was seen to be a predominantly cultural and political phenomenon, necessary to social order, rather than an irreducible scientific ‘fact’.

Over the course of the period covered by this volume the rise of a new view of anatomy, driven by the need to redefine the ‘natural’ distinctions between men and women, led to the creation of a new kind of difference between the sexes. Most of the work on this material has concentrated on the history of women’s bodies, but the implications of this change for the assumptions about male behaviour are equally stark. Gradually, women’s generative organs came to be viewed as profoundly different from those of men. Orgasm in women ceased to be necessary in order to conceive, while the importance of sperm and semen in reproduction was valorised, in some formulations coming to take on an all-important and singular function independent of any female contribution. The older understanding of human character as being controlled by the specific humoural mix possessed by the individual was replaced by an understanding which gave central place to a more fixed anatomical difference in determining gendered behaviour. By the end of the eighteenth century, men and women were increasingly being seen as ‘naturally’ and predeterminedly different, and their characteristics those of ‘opposite sexes’.

The implications of this transition are usually taken to mean that ‘woman’ was constructed in difference from ‘man’, not only sexually passive but physically weaker than men and because of the presumed homology between body and mind, mentally weaker as well, culminating in the stereotype of the passive and delicate Victorian woman. However, the recent work on heterosexual effeminacy and masculinity suggests instead that the new construction of gender was deeply concerned with men. It was not just femininity that had to be clearly delineated, but masculinity. If, as increasingly appears to be the case, men possessed the more unstable and contested gender, the urge to fix the category of ‘male’ in the new anatomy becomes all the more significant. In other words, because the new ‘two-body model’ conceptualised sexual difference as mutually exclusive and ‘incommensurate’, man had to be constructed in difference not just from woman but from the effeminate. This new construction went a long way towards resolving the anxiety over effeminacy.¹⁵ This transition must in part explain why the discourse of effeminacy was so much less prominent in the nineteenth century than the eighteenth. This new construction of gender entailed that, as men and women were now ‘naturally’ opposite sexes, men should and would desire women, and women alone. While sodomy had previously been seen as a part of a broader libertine sexuality, it appeared increasingly as a perversion of a new ‘naturalised’ heterosexuality.

This transformation has been described as a facet of the rise of a ‘compulsory heterosexuality’,¹⁶ but, more than anything else, what the new understanding of the physical body did was to place a stro...