The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel

Tara MacDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317317791
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

By tracing the rise of the New Man alongside novelistic changes in the representations of marriage, MacDonald shows how this figure encouraged Victorian writers to reassess masculine behaviour and to re-imagine the marriage plot in light of wider social changes. She finds examples in novels by Dickens, Anne Brontë, George Eliot and George Gissing.

1 Middle-Class Manliness and the Dickensian Gentleman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315654010-2

It may seem an odd choice to begin the story of the Victorian New Man with Dickens, a highly contentious author amongst feminist critics in both the Victorian period and today. In her memoirs, for instance, Ella Hepworth Dixon complains of ‘the dolls and drolls which represented womenkind in the works of the great novelist’.¹ Dickens’s fiction certainly includes a number of doll-like heroines whose characterizations support the conservative model of the self-denying ‘angel in the house’. Yet his novels also contain sympathetic portraits of abused women, women trapped in loveless marriages and women aware of the limitations imposed upon them by Victorian society. In David Copperfield (1850), the outspoken Betsey Trotwood, a woman who leaves her abusive husband, in fact demonstrates the variety of female models within Dickens’s fiction with her complaint that David’s meek mother is ‘a wax doll’.² Betsey’s non-romantic cohabitation with the childish Mr Dick is just one example of Dickens’s exploration of alterative gender identities and domestic arrangements. Dickens moreover depicts happy companionate marriages in which husband and wife work professionally alongside each other. Exploring a range of relationships, I focus in this chapter on Dickens’s representations of masculinity in David Copperfield, arguing that the Dickensian gentleman is an important, if surprising, predecessor to the later-century New Man, The chapter ends with a brief consideration of the way in which Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) rewrites, less optimistically, the role of the professional gentleman.

The idea of the gentleman was far from fixed at the mid-nineteenth century. Many middle-class professional men, as James Eli Adams notes, ‘legitimated their masculinity by identifying it with that of the gentleman – a norm that was the subject of protracted contention throughout Victorian culture, because the concept served so effectively to regulate social mobility and its attendant privileges’.³ Severing the link between gentlemanliness and rank (if not entirely class), the gentleman in the early years of the Victorian period was associated with integrity, earnestness and self-discipline. The contention surrounding the term ‘gentleman’ and the related confusion over whether gentlemanliness was innate or could in fact be learned, allowed new definitions of masculinity to surface in the mid-century. Many critics, like Adams, have emphasized how these new reconfigurations compensated for the loss of traditional forms of masculinity; in an attempt to restore more secure notions of manhood, many mid-Victorians emphasized the separation of home and work, and thus fathers from their children, as well as the importance of all-male boarding schools in forming masculine identity.⁴

The fiction of Charles Dickens reveals a more moderate response to male identity and development, one that does not demand male separation from domestic or feminine influences. While Dickens and Samuel Smiles may have differed in some of their fundamental philosophies – Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times (1854) is most often read as a critique of Smiles’s notion of the self-made man, for instance – Dickens would certainly have agreed with Smiles’s assertion in Self-Help (1859) that ‘Gentleness is indeed the best test of gentlemanliness’.⁵ In a recent article on male nursing in novels by Dickens, Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte Yonge, Holly Furneaux argues that these authors promoted ‘physical tenderness as an integral part of that most quintessential figure of nineteenth-century masculinity, the Gentleman’ thereby complicating ‘the persisting association of masculinity and aggression’.⁶

In 1855, Margaret Oliphant noted that Dickens’s ‘heroes are not the young men of clubs and colleges – not the audacious youngsters of Eton, nor the “awful swells” in whose steps they follow’. Instead, Dickens’s heroes are middle-class boys and men who are ‘home-bred and sensitive’.⁷ In addition to his sensitivity, Dickens’s new gentleman adopts a female-inspired model of sexual ‘constancy and patience’.⁸ When these qualities are praised in the gentleman Tom Traddles, for instance, he admits candidly that his fiancée is such ‘an extraordinarily dear girl herself, that it’s possible she may have imparted something of those virtues to me’.⁹ Dickens formulates his ideal man as a gentle, domestic figure; the Dickensian gentleman’s ability to be at ease in the domestic realm is a key factor in his success, a skill that John Wemmick in Great Expectations hyperbolizes. I read Dickensian gentlemen as precursors to the New Man, then, for the way in which they comfortably integrate ‘feminine’ characteristics into their identities and create fluid boundaries between spaces typically defined as masculine and feminine. Prioritizing domesticity alone certainly does not make a mid-century gentleman a proto-feminist figure – and indeed, the notion that man should reign king over his home supports misogynistic models – but Dickens’s heroes typically display an emphasis on domestic contentment in marriages that emphasize intellectual exchange, mutual affection and cross-sex friendship. The fin-de-siècle models of the New Man that I discuss later in the book draw on these notions of mid-century gentlemanliness and marriage as imagined by Dickens.

Despite such historical connections, there are important differences between these periods: the mid-Victorian companionate marriage model exemplified by the unions of Sophy and Tom Traddles, Clara and Herbert Pocket and Agnes and David Copperfield was no longer an ideal for New Women writers by the end of the century. Although Dickens values the incorporation of conventionally ‘feminine’ traits in his male characters, his female characters remain largely confined to the private sphere. While they never achieve the autonomy of New Women, their roles within that sphere, however subtly, permit them a degree of control over their own lives and the lives of their husbands, as they advise and often direct their spouses in personal and even professional dealings. My argument thus supports current reassessments of Dickens’s representations of marriage and masculinity, which are attentive to the flexibility inherent in his characters’ mid-Victorian gender models. In Queer Dickens, Furneaux argues that Dickens’s ‘portrayals of nurturing masculinity’ can challenge conceptions of Victorian ideals of maleness.¹⁰ In her examination of queer relationships in Dickens’s fiction, Furneaux explores the ‘diversity of families, erotics, and masculinities that Dickens’s society and work could comfortably accommodate’.¹¹ More recently, in Dickens and the Rise of Divorce, Kelly Hager suggests that Dickens’s novels are feminist in that they educate readers about the dismal state of the law as it concerns women and marriage.¹²

While, again, there are large gaps between the feminism proposed at the end of the nineteenth century by progressive New Women and New Men and Dickens’s earlier century critiques of marriage and the child-wife, I agree with Furneaux and Hager that Dickens’s gender politics are more accommodating, queer and even feminist than critics have traditionally believed. In fact, Dickens’s interest in new, nurturing masculinities can be understood in the context of the developments of feminism in the mid-nineteenth century. As I noted in the introduction, mid-century social purity campaigns focused on the need to control male sexuality, as they would again later in the century. It was during the religious revival of the 1850s that prostitution came to be regarded as the ‘great social evil’.¹³ In response, Evangelicals attempted to curb the relationship between a man’s sexual behaviour and his manliness, suggesting that one’s ‘character’ be elevated as the true test of masculinity.¹⁴ Without explicit Christian doctrine, Dickens’s literary project too promoted such an ideal of masculinity, as his domestic gentlemen reject rakish behaviour and endorse models of sexual continence.

Dickens’s interest in the condition of Victorian women took a more personal shape in his involvement with Urania Cottage, the home for reformed prostitutes that he began with heiress and philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts. They began to correspond in May 1846 about an asylum for prostitutes; the home opened its doors in 1847. Fallen women could enter the home, which had strictly regimented daily routines, and learn skills that would enable them to become either useful servants or wives.¹⁵ While Dickens’s progressive attitude towards prostitutes and other female criminals only extended so far since the women were eventually sent to the colonies and not reintegrated into English society, the project demonstrates his sympathy for vulnerable, lower-class women and his belief in their potential for reform. In ‘An Appeal to Fallen Women’, a pamphlet Dickens wrote in 1849 for distribution among women in prisons, he writes to them as a ‘friend’:

[D]o not think that I write to you as if I felt myself very much above you, or wished to hurt your feelings by reminding you of the situation in which you are placed. God forbid! I mean nothing but kindness to you, and I write as if you were my sister.¹⁶

The model that Dickens adopts here is that of a friend or brother to the women whom he hopes to move from a troubled life to a happy (if well-ordered) home, and it is also one that he scripts for his new gentlemen. In Great Expectations, for instance, Herbert Pocket helps to remove his future wife, Clara, from a home with a cruel, alcoholic father into a space of domestic contentment and in David Copperfield, Tom Traddles rescues his sister-in-law from her ‘vagabond’ husband and invites her to live with him and his wife.¹⁷ Many of Dickens’s heroes act out aspects of this protective fantasy. While there are no doubt elements of traditional chivalrous masculinity attached to such a model, it nonetheless positions the Dickensian gentleman as a restorative figure, one situated in contrast to abusive or aggressive styles of masculinity.

Debates on the ‘Woman Question’ in this period focused not only on prostitution or the legal position of women, but also on the importance of equal, fulfilling marriages. In Cassandra (1854), Florence Nightingale complains that the forced idleness of Victorian women, as well as their lack of employment and education, necessarily affects their marriages: ‘Look round at the marriages which you know. The true marriage – that noble union, by which a man and woman become together the one perfect being – probably does not exist at present upon earth’.¹⁸ With these conditions in mind, John Stuart Mill, in The Subjection of Women (1869), imagined an ideal of marriage as one between

two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them – so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development[.]¹⁹

Such beliefs in equal marriage between two intelligent partners demanded new models of both femininity and masculinity, of the kind that Dickens idealizes in his fiction. While David Copperfield’s Agnes Wickfield is no New Woman, David’s progression from a marriage with his child-wife Dora to the more capable Agnes forecasts the progression towards more equal gender relations and marriages in the Victorian period.

This chapter examines Dickens’s ‘home-bred and sensitive’ men first in David Copperfield and then, briefly, in Great Expectations. While Great Expectations might be Dickens’s most explicit meditation on the Victorian gentleman, David Copperfield sets up many of the masculine dynamics that Dickens would later explore in Pip’s narrative. Because of David’s intimacy with the other men in the novel, in particular James Steerforth, Uriah Heep and Tom Traddles, and his privileged position as narrator, his characterizations of these figures offer striking examples of a Victorian male’s mediations on marriage, homosociality and ‘proper’ male sexuality. In particular, Dickens sets up Tom Traddles as a positive model of middle-class masculinity for David to emulate. Traddles’s sexual constancy, professional diligence and companionate marriage with Sophy make him an important example of the new Dickensian gentleman. John O. Jordan notes that if ‘Steerforth is David’s role model during the first half of the book, Uriah … teaches him how to become middle class.²⁰ Yet more than either Steerforth or Uriah, Traddles is presented as a key model for David and a positive one at that. David gradually repositions his ideal of manliness by moving his admiration from Steerforth’s brand of robust, careless masculinity to Traddles’s moral sensitivity and self-discipline, a revaluation of masculinity which also implies a transition from aristocratic to middle-class values.

In Great Expectations, Dickens rewrites Traddles as the character of Herbert Pocket. Herbert too serves as a figure who must educate the main character, Pip, in middle-class values of masculinity. When Pip moves to London, Herbert literally teaches Pip how to behave as a gentleman, instructing him, for instance, in how to hold his fork and knife. He also presents to Pip and to Victorian readers a style of masculinity that is opposed to competition and violence and relies instead on compassion. Characters such as Traddles and Pocket have been under-explored critically, perhaps because they are not ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Middle-Class Manliness and the Dickensian Gentleman
• 2 Healing Masculinity in Mid-Century Fiction
• 3 Doctors, Dandies and New Men in New Women Fiction
• 4 The Retreat of the New Man at the Fin de Siècle
• 5 Sympathy, Suffering and Schreiner’s Colonial New Men
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Notes
• Index