The Victorian Novel and Masculinity

P. Mallett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780230272323
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137491541
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Social Sciences

What did it mean, in the rapidly changing world of Victorian England, to 'be a man'? In essays written specially for this volume, nine distinguished scholars from Britain and the USA show how Victorian novelists from the Brontës to Conrad sought to discover what made men, what broke them, and what restored them.

1

Masculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontës

Sara Lodge

‘I am a sailor. Captain Arthur Fitz-Arthur, commander of the Formidable, one hundred guns. Your Lordship is Miss Jessy Heathcote.’

Many who study the Brontës still do not read the Angrian fiction, despite the fact that it forms a body of work larger than all their published novels combined and that reading only those published novels means joining their fictive practice quite late: Charlotte was 30 by the time she ventured into print. There are various reasons for this relative neglect. Until recently, it was difficult to access the early work of Charlotte and Branwell in a format that lent itself to sustained reading.¹ The tiny ‘books’ in which they wrote were, indeed, deliberately designed to make this writing ‘secret’: its manuscript format and insider narratives, while they minutely mimic the appearance of published texts, are purposely designed for a private rather than a public audience. The early work is discontinuous and potentially confusing: it consists of dialogues, reviews, plays, histories, poetry and stories. The Angrian narratives form episodes – like those of a soap opera – in an on-going drama with a large, inter-related cast of characters, many of whom go by several different names. As Sally Shuttleworth remarks, Charlotte’s Angrian tales have often also been politely overlooked due to the ‘common misapprehension that all her early writing takes place amidst exotic climes in a heady atmosphere of emotional intensity’.² Far from being juvenile gush and mush, however, Charlotte’s early fiction is rumbustious, political, highly rhetorical, and increasingly sophisticated: it experiments with male narrators whose voices are marked by irony, cynicism and a ‘man about town’ ton that typically enjoys its own vanity and impudence. Within this world, the excesses of clothing, of consumption, of behaviour (seductions, duels, betrayals and uprisings) can be both relished and mocked. Productively, Angria allows the Brontës to sport with excess in personal style and in literary style: the play of the stories draws much of its pleasure from the relationship between an investment in the Romantic will to power and a pithy, anti-Romantic view of the extravagances into which unchecked desire and egotism lead its chiefly male protagonists.

This chapter will argue that looking at the Brontës’ early work sheds important light on their conception and depiction of masculinity. The constant verbal and physical sparring and competition for power between men in Angria contains elements of Charlotte’s rivalry with Branwell in directing their fantasy kingdom but also mimics the rhetorical play of contemporary magazine culture: it is an arena of repartee, slang, drunkenness, political one-upmanship, challenge and reply that fully enjoys the freedoms accorded to men in the outside world, while also hinting that beneath the swagger, most of the male characters are mildly ludicrous. In these shared works, which are an extension of earlier ‘plays’ that the Brontë children acted out together, ‘masculinity’ is a much more fluid and contested set of signifiers than those unfamiliar with the detail of this writing might imagine.

Since most of what we have from the early period of the Brontës’ output is Charlotte’s writing, I shall be talking here chiefly about ‘Charlotte’s’ stories. However, as Bette London has convincingly argued, there is good reason not to speak of individual authorship when writing about these early fictions: they are essentially serial collaborations, written into a mutually constructed world, where plot and character developments were moved forward or cancelled at different moments by Charlotte and Branwell.³ Although Anne and Emily in 1832 broke away from Glass Town, to form their own private literary land of Gondal (of which we know sadly little), surviving diary papers mentioning Zamorna and Northangerland suggest that they were still imaginatively engaged with Charlotte and Branwell’s chief characters. The fact that all four Brontë siblings became so closely involved in this imaginary world, that was co-directed by male and female hands, suggests the way in which these fictions enabled a literary space where gender difference was itself subject to interrogation, impersonation and play.

An interesting example of the ironised presentation of gender identity occurs in the episodes ‘Stancliffe’s Hotel’, ‘The Duke of Zamorna’ and ‘Henry Hastings’ written in 1838–9. The narrator of these pieces is the worldly Charles Townshend (formerly known as Charles Wellesley), brother of the Duke of Zamorna and close friend of Sir William Percy, with whom he exchanges news and gossip. Townshend and Percy are dandified young men, highly conscious of their own appearance and personal charms. William Percy, describing a visit to the theatre in his diary, admits that he failed to notice that the audience was not staring at him, but at Jane Moore, the beautiful daughter of a distinguished Angrian barrister:

While I was sitting in my box and thinking myself in my full-dress uniform an uncommon killing sight, I observed a sort of sensation commencing round me, and heard, amidst many whispers and a rising hum of admiration, the words often repeated, ‘It is the beautiful Angrian!’ Translate me, if I didn’t at first think they were alluding to myself! The words ‘Spare my blushes’ were at my tongue’s end, and I was beginning to deliberate whether or not it would be necessary to acknowledge so much polite attention by a graceful bow, when I perceived that the heads and eyes of the ninnies were not turned towards me, but in a clean opposite direction – to a box where a tall young woman was sitting in the middle of a crowd of most respectable-looking masculine individuals, who one and all wanted nothing but a tail to make the prettiest counterfeit monkeys imaginable.⁴

Percy verges here on ‘camp’ in his theatrical performance of irritation at the discovery that the audience does not have its eyes on him and that he is not the blushing beauty they admire. He calls the spectators who fail to acknowledge him ‘ninnies’ and casts aspersions on their gender identity (‘masculine individuals’, prettiest monkeys without tails), which bounce back to reflect compromisingly on his own masculinity.

This is not the first time in the tales when Percy has been made to look foolish by Jane Moore. In ‘Stancliffe’s Hotel’, Townshend reports that he and Percy decided to visit the Moore residence, knowing that Jane’s father was absent at the assizes, in order to ogle her. In order to win admission and claim some refreshments, the two young bucks pose as Messrs Clarke and Gardiner, clients of her father. Jane goes along with this pretence, but catches the two men as they are about to ‘prig’ something from the work-table in her boudoir, with its scissors, thimble and lace. (Percy tells us he is always ‘prigging’ in this way – the reader wonders whether it is the sewing materials or the fancywork that he is after.) Jane then reports audibly to her father, when he unexpectedly returns, that ‘I’ve two chits in my parlour – very like counting-house clerks or young surgeons or something of that kind. Just come and look at them.’⁵

Townshend and Percy are caught out in an assumed identity – pretending to be Clarke and Gardiner – but this performance also adumbrates an uncertainty about their masculine status. Their comic discomfiture is completed by the fact that Jane Moore identifies them as ‘chits’: literally ‘children’, but a word more often used to describe foolish women. She takes (or affects to take) their disguise literally, taking them down several pegs, from aristocrats to lower middle-class employees. They came to stare at her (as, Townshend tells us, everybody does), but she reverses this male gaze, turning them into a spectacle beyond their control: ‘just come and look at them’.

Jane Moore effects an even more remarkable challenge to gender conventions in ‘The Duke of Zamorna’ when she is at a ball. Percy reports in a letter to Townshend that she seems to have set her cap at the Duke of Hartford, a disreputable old roué whom we have seen in a previous story pursuing Mina Laury, one of the Duke of Zamorna’s mistresses. Jane tries to flirt with Hartford, but he tells her that he will never propose to another woman, so she will have to make him an offer instead. She responds that, if she is asking him to dance then she must play the man and he the lady:

But remember, if I perform the gentleman’s part in asking, I will carry it on all through, and your Lordship shall be the lady. I am a sailor. Captain Arthur Fitz-Arthur, commander of the Formidable, one hundred guns. Your Lordship is Miss Jessy Heathcote. I love you and intend to run away with you. You are very little and very slender, and you like me because I am so brave, and such a tall, handsome man … Now, Miss Jessy, will you dance with me?’⁶

The oafish Duke of Hartford doesn’t hear her out; he yawns and leaves. Jane Moore is indeed brave. Percy, who remarks that ‘women are such deep dissemblers’, is caught between disdain toward her and admiration. He cannot ‘during the whole night satisfactorily unravel the puzzle of our heroine’s character’. Is she a shallow, complacent social butterfly or profound and unhappy: someone with a ‘strong and original’ mind who conceals pain, putting on an assumed character and ‘acting a part at will’?⁷ We wonder too. The performativity of the scene, and the open question of how ‘natural’ Jane’s behaviour is, calls attention to the performed nature of gender roles in general and how such performances may mask untold suffering.

The tone of the episode is unstable. Townshend and Percy’s self-consciously arch narration combines with their flagrant voyeurism to produce a view of Angrian affairs that hovers between comedy and high drama. ‘Stancliffe’s Hotel’ begins light-heartedly with Townshend’s journalistic social vignettes and the ogling visit to Jane Moore, but ends with bloody mob violence, when Angrian operatives, who have gathered to protest Zamorna’s continued familiarity with Northangerland – formerly a republican traitor – are, on Zamorna’s command, ridden down by 300 horsemen, led by Lord Stuartville, in an act of political suppression that echoes Peterloo.

This tonal instability mirrors a wider instability that is characteristic of Charlotte’s Angrian fiction. We do not know with what seriousness the text is inhabiting any genre from one moment to the next. And this textual ambivalence manifests itself also as ambivalence toward the performance of gender roles: at one moment we may be invited to see Jane Moore as the knowing, eyebrow-raised master of her situation, commanding her formidable wit and exposing the men who surround her as foolish jessies; at another, we are invited to suppose that she has become one of the Duke of Zamorna’s mistresses, joining the comically infinite troop of ladies in this narrative (including his 22 female cousins) willing to kiss his wayward rod. The presentation of men in Angria is deeply equivocal. Their ‘masculine’ characteristics are frequently offset by traits and tastes conventionally coded ‘feminine’ and, as I shall explore later, passionate, vulnerable homosocial bonds with his half-brother and father-in-law are a key feature of Zamorna’s identity. On a wider level, we see men exercise power – in fights, seductions, and political machinations – but that very exercise exposes signal weaknesses: vanity, foppery, overindulgence, deception, and failure of judgement. Like Zamorna, when his carriage is mobbed by rioting Angrians, men in this world usually evade their intratextual critics (whether spouses or plebeians), but extratextual critics are granted a different and more cynical perspective on their escapades.

Male personae, skirmishes; interrogating ‘masculine’ stylistics

As Carol Bock has noted, the self-conscious rhetoricity of the Brontës’ earliest experiments in fiction is striking.⁸ From the first, the Brontës have little interest in writing ‘as themselves’. The act of writing is inherently associated with assuming a persona: it is, quite literally, an ‘act’, which liberates the child to assume the identity they choose and to control events in an adult world. The beginning of the ‘plays’ that would become fictions was bound up with the arrival of a set of lead soldiers which Mr Brontë brought back in 1826 as a gift for Branwell from a trip to Leeds. In Charlotte’s account, each of the four children seized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Masculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontës
• 2 Working-Class Masculinity and the Victorian Novel
• 3 Dickens and Masculinity: The Necessity of the Nurturing Male
• 4 Tomboys and Girly Boys in George Eliot’s Early Fiction
• 5 Manful Sensations: Affect, Domesticity and Class Status Anxiety in East Lynne and Aurora Floyd
• 6 Growing up to Be a Man: Thomas Hardy and Masculinity
• 7 Masculinity, Imperialism and the Novel
• 8 Aestheticism, Resistance and the Realist Novel: Marius and Masculinity
• 9 Conrad’s Theatre of Masculinities
• Index