Scarecrows of Chivalry

English Masculinities after Empire

Praseeda Gopinath

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813933818
• eBook ISBN: 9780813933832
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Exploring the fate of the ideal of the English gentleman once the empire he was meant to embody declined, Praseeda Gopinath argues that the stylization of English masculinity became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many literary texts that represented the "condition of Britain" in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. From the early writings of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to works by poets and novelists such as Philip Larkin, Ian Fleming, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt, the author shows how Englishmen trafficking in the images of self-restraint, governance, decency, and detachment in the absence of a structuring imperial ethos became what the poet Larkin called "scarecrows of chivalry." Gopinath's study of this masculine ideal under duress reveals the ways in which issues of race, class, and sexuality constructed a gendered narrative of the nation.

1

Manly Independent Men

(De)constructing the English Gentleman

Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be.

GEORGE ORWELL

In order to track the changes in hegemonic masculinity, the change from gentleman to post-gentleman, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it is necessary to go back to the Victorian ideal of the gentleman. As I delineated in the introduction, many of the protagonists in the literature of the interwar and postwar period rework, adopt, and disavow gentlemanly traits—such as restraint, chivalry, disinterestedness, service, and detachment—which are also the virtues of the English/British tout court. To study how gentlemanliness affected subsequent iterations of national masculinity, we must consider, albeit briefly, how and why the gentleman became the national, imperial ideal, and, more important, how those constituent traits became fundamental to national and masculine identity.

The gentleman was mass-produced under the specific system of the Victorian public schools that had acquired unparalleled hegemonic status by the end of the nineteenth century. The public school was instrumental in creating a ruling class where meritocracy and exclusivity worked in tandem; as Perry Anderson describes, they were “designed to socialize the sons of the—new or old—rich into a uniform pattern that henceforth became the fetishized criterion of a ‘gentleman’” (22). The gentleman became the instrument through which the mercantile bourgeoisie and the aristocracy coalesced in the nineteenth century, a union that defined English polity and society well into the mid-twentieth century. From this amalgam emerged the hegemonic traits of Englishness and gentlemanliness that Perry Anderson calls “traditionalism” and “empiricism”—traits that continued to define Englishness in the mid-century moment, as seen in Martin Green’s rendering of the decent man.

Assumed to have begun with Thomas Arnold’s reform of Rugby in 1827, public schools became training grounds for future administrators and national leaders—in short, a new ruling class—in response to the new demands of industrialization and an expanding empire. Public schools defined and articulated the ideals of Englishness and English manhood, ideals that crystallized through a sustained interaction between the industrial/capitalist exigencies (the merging of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) and the theater of empire (the conquest and administration of colonies). This interaction entwined national and cultural identity with national/imperial institutions. Public school boys were educated into “a vocation of ruling”: the curriculum specifically designed to produce “better-trained and informed administrators” (Viswanathan 56). According to Sarah Cole, they “became the purveyors of an ideological vision that centered on the perpetuation of England’s imperial mission, provided the core training for Britain’s ruling elite, creating a set of norms about how to live and what to believe that touched nearly all sectors of British life, at home and in the expanding empire” (Cole 32). The course of studies in English public schools was designed to foster those leadership qualities required of a governing elite: “independent thinking, a strong sense of personal identity, and an ability to make decisions on one’s own authority” (Viswanathan 56). The ideal gentleman, then, connected the personal code of ethical manliness—how to behave as a gentleman—with the ethno-national code of appropriate leadership—how to behave as an Englishman. The traits of public school gentlemanliness are inextricably linked to the ideals of Englishness and national identity, illustrating the structural presence of empire in the consolidation of English national gender identity. The 1869 Clarendon Commission report on the nation’s public schools makes this link clear:

It is not easy to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most—for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their vigour and manliness of character, their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion, and their love for healthy sport and exercise. These schools have been the chief nurseries of our statesmen; in them and in schools modelled after them, men of all the various classes that make up English society, destined for every profession and career, have been brought up on a footing of social equality, and have contracted the most enduring friendships, and some of the ruling habits of their lives; and they have had perhaps the largest share in the moulding of the character of the “English Gentleman.” (Simon and Bradley 153)

The commission connected the qualities of the gentleman with Englishness. The “English Gentleman,” with his respect for authority, control, vigor, and aptitude for governance, symbolized the qualities of the English people. It is significant that the English gentleman is defined by his ability to control himself and “govern others.” The public schools create not just a classed, gendered identity, but a classed, gender, and national identity, that makes the English gentleman inherently suitable to imperial and national governance. E. M. Forster, in his “Notes on the English Character,” also observes this particular phenomenon when he opines that “just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle class is the public-school system … as it perfectly expresses the character” of the Anglo-Saxon (Abinger Harvest 3).

While the public school, as Harold Perkin shows, emphasized the professional ideal, a great deal of their energy was focused on ensuring the training of professionals to head out to colonial spaces. Mangan argues, “Once the Empire was established, the public schools sustained it” (21). In the words of G. Kendall, a former headmaster of University College School, “The public schools claim that it is they who, if they did not make the Empire (for most of them were hardly in existence when the Empire was made), at least maintained and administered it through their members” (qtd. in Bamford 241). The headmasters of public schools announced their commitment to the empire; for them, “the white man’s burden signified moral status as well as moral duty” (Wilkinson 102). The imperial civil and military careers required specific kinds of training, and in the schools, “the classical and modern sides evolved their curricula and conditions in response to this requirement” (Mangan 22).

Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) quite explicitly ties together the elements of the curricula—in this case, cricket, one of the team sports that was part of what J. A. Mangan calls “the games ethic”—to character building aimed at ruling the self, dependents, and, finally, the world. The novel that transformed England’s perception of public schools as well as popularized Thomas Arnold’s conception of manliness and education, has acquired almost canonical status, not just in terms of children’s literature but also within the larger framework of Victorian gender and culture studies. Tom Brown’s maturation toward a disinterested, disciplined self-assertion is revealed in the final section of the book with his captaincy of the Cricket Eleven, clearly the acme of his public school career. In a passage that has acquired canonical status in its own right, the captain of the Eleven, Arthur, and a young master deliberate upon the wonder that is cricket:

“I’m beginning to understand the game scientifically. What a noble game it is, too!”

“Isn’t it? But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,” said Tom.

“Yes,” said Arthur, “the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.”

“The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable, I think,” went on the master, “it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.”

“That’s very true, said Tom, “and that’s why football and cricket, now one comes to think of it, are much better games than fives … or any others where the object is to come in first or to win one’s self, and not that one’s side may win.”

“And then the Captain of the eleven!” said the master, “what a post is his in our School-world! Almost as hard as the Doctor’s, requiring skill and gentleness, and firmness.

“What a sight it is,” broke in the master, “the Doctor as a ruler! Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire, which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now.” (312)¹

While being undoubtedly a paean to cricket, what is interesting here the natural movement from cricket pitch to empire. Cricket is equated with the legal mechanisms of “habeas corpus” and “trial by jury” as quintessentially English contributions to the world. Cricket is an important English institution because it inculcates the values of unselfishness in its players. Boys who play cricket subsume their desire for personal glory and merge into one, so that “the side can win.” The discourse of not letting the side down becomes a crucial marker of gentlemanly behavior: from following codes of appropriate classed behavior, to behaving in a manner appropriate to English imperial rulers. Qualities crucial to victory on the cricket pitch, such as discipline and unselfishness, are exponentially expanded to include the national and imperial arena. In fact, Tom makes this point more explicitly when he praises fellow Rugbean Harry East, a commissioned officer in India: “No fellow could handle boys better, and I suppose soldiers are like boys” (Hughes 318). Gentlemanliness is constituted at the crux of class, nation, and empire and thereby is its most perfect exemplum, a fact of which the text is extremely aware as the narrative vision gradually stretches to include the speakers, the game, the school, and the imperial horizon, paralleling Tom’s growth from the “Little World” of Rugby—an idyllic microcosm of the imperial nation—into the widening world of Oxford, England, and the imperial periphery.

To return to the Public Schools Commission report, it also seemed to indicate that public schools unified men across social classes, which is highly debatable, although the qualities cultivated in these schools certainly acquired cultural cachet across the spectrum of British society. Even schools that were not public schools, but a sort of second cousin to these elite institutions catering to the less wealthy middle classes, followed the patterns set by public schools, and the ideology of gentlemanliness certainly percolated down to the lower classes through sermons and boys’ weeklies.² The national-cultural ideal of the gentleman cemented in the public school system extended to the institutions of church and university, hence consolidating bourgeois power.³ By the early decades of the twentieth century, through militaristic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigades, the hegemonic ideal of manliness had spread to sections of the lower-middle and even working classes (Springhall 53).

Gentlemanliness, as I read it, is a metropolitan gender ideal, that is, one that emerges in the imperial center. The ideal evolved along two tracks: the domestic hierarchical landscape, and in relation to the expanding empire that also structured and sustained it. In my parsing of the gentleman ideal below, I focus on, and meld, both tracks, since it is difficult to separate out the purely domestic and the purely imperial in nineteenth-century metropolitan culture and gender formation. The ideals of the gentleman emerge at the cusp of the national and the imperial, as both Catherine Hall and Mrinalini Sinha have variously shown. Hall argues that “manly independent men,” or the Englishmen of the ruling classes, only emerged “in relation to the dependent and subjected”—women, children, colonized, and working classes (170). Sinha, building on this, contends that British and Indian notions of masculinity/gender in the nineteenth century “cannot be understood simply from the framework of discrete ‘national’ cultures.” Her work illustrates the “prior significance of imperialism in the construction of both ‘national’ British and ‘colonial’ Indian politics of masculinity” in the late nineteenth century. Sinha’s focus is on the “effeminate Bengali”; however, her historicized paradigm of the imperial social formation of masculinities reveals that English national masculinity is imperially structured (Colonial Masculinity 7). I use Hall and Sinha’s theorization of the metropolitan gentleman as a starting point and trace the alterations in the icon through the literature of the interwar and mid-century periods. My book focuses on how historical pressures, the institution of the welfare state, and the disintegration of the empire that sustained and globalized the ideal affect this hegemonic gender configuration. The next few pages lay out the emergence and evolution of some of the key gentlemanly virtues that inform all subsequent versions of late-imperial and postwar literary representations of masculinity examined in this book. Gentlemanliness, as I use the term, constitutes a core set of traits that are associated with the middle-class Englishman/gentleman. Even as the gentlemanly ideal shifts between the various segments of the middle and upper classes (of which there are many, a fact to which this book pays close attention), those who considered themselves gentlemen, or were expected to behave as gentlemen, operated within the coherent, yet dynamic, code of gentlemanliness.

The Traits of a Gentleman

Gentlemanliness was always structured in relation to an Other. The working classes formed the perfect dialectical antithesis to the synthesis of the gentleman construct. The working-class man represented an undiluted, almost primitive form of masculinity against which gentlemanliness was the acme of discipline, self-restraint, and Englishness. What distinguished the physicality of gentlemanliness from the working-class male body was its moral dimension: the vigor and virility of manliness was tempered and disciplined (Kingsley 19). In an earlier iteration of the argument he develops in his recent The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922, Joseph Valente explicates this point further: “The normative (gentle)man was … seen to be invested with great and effective moral energy for the restraint, discipline, and redirection of his urgent and brutish desires. A muscular ideal of manhood consisted precisely in the simultaneous necessity for and exercise of this capacity for rational self-control—in strong passions strongly checked—from which the virtues of conventional ‘masculinity’ (fortitude, tenacity, industry, candor) were assumed to derive.”⁴ He goes on to argue that the productive tension between this almost animalistic male energy and the moral imperatives of self-discipline set manliness apart, ensuring the superiority of the middle-class gentleman. Valente refers to this “closed-circuit self-referencing tension between [manhood’s] component energies” as a sort of “discordia concors” where gentlemanly self-government and self-restraint became the markers of autonomy and right to self-determination and, as a consequence, the right to govern others. In the same quarter, the disciplined manliness of the English gentleman was set against, and defined by, the effeminate or inadequate masculinity of the imperial Other. Thomas Carlyle’s Englishness, as he defined it in his “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” depended on the decisive and forceful manliness of the Englishman as opposed to the idle chaotic primitivism of the “Quashee.” Carlyle argues for the superiority of the English by legitimizing a specific stylization of English middle-class manliness, and he feminizes and “unmans” the “Quashee”: “Do I, then, hate the Negro? No; except when the soul is killed out of him, I decidedly like poor Quashee; and find him a pretty kind of man. … A swift, supple fellow; a merry hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in his composition” (311; italics mine). The Jamaican Negro stands in antithesis to the vigorous manliness of the Englishman. The Englishman’s manliness depends on the coding of Quashee as feminine, soft, and frivolous, which in turn defines and concretizes the superiority of Englishness. However, at the very moment of the articulation of that difference, the difference is also consolidated and made over into myth.

One of the defining traits of hegemonic English manhood was the expansive service ideal, which was predicated on the Englishman’s inherent moral superiority and detachment. The notion of detachment was most clearly and influentially articulated by Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). Arnold’s conceptualization of this inherently English ideal was itself underwritten by the domestic empire within Britain. Arnold, while ostensibly making a case for the preservation of Celtic literature, details the inherently hybrid identity of Englishness. He contends that the “English genius” is a “composite of the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the Norman genius” (Arnold 87). Englishness in itself, it seems, does not exist; it is, according to Arnold, the commingling of the best of different racial traits. While the Normans, the Saxons, and the Celts (in particular) possess an essence, a myth, and an eternal spirit, the English possess no such thing, and therein lies their greatest strength.

For Arnold, the absence of an inherent essence allowed the English the privilege of detached observation. As opposed to the Normans, Saxons, and Celts, who were limited by their holistic essence, the English, in the absence of a predetermined cultural and racial memory, could disinterestedly absorb and control the totality of others. Other Europeans, Arnold points out, have noted the Englishman’s inherent self-consciousness, which he asserts is a direct consequence of the “English nature being mixed … while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German nature, and the Celtic nature” (102). When Arnold talks about the Englishman, he refers to the middle-class or upper-middle-class Englishman; he certainly does not mean the lumpen working-class man. He attributes this self-consciousness to Englishness as an admixture of racial traits produced by a long history of conquest and dominance, where England itself was both conquered and conquering. The Englishman strives to maintain a balance with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: English Masculinities in Transition
• 1. Manly Independent Men: (De)constructing the English Gentleman
• 2. Out of Place: Evelyn Waugh and the Retreating Gentleman
• 3. An Orphaned Manliness: George Orwell and the Bovex Man
• 4. “One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-Up Guys”: Posting the Gentleman in Philip Larkin’s Poetry
• 5. “Moulded and Shaped”: John Wain, Ian Fleming, and Threshold Masculinities
• 6. Writing Women, Reading Men: A. S. Byatt, Barbara Pym, and the Post-Gentlemen
• Epilogue: The Postcolonial Gentleman
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index