The Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pete Newbon

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781137408143
• Thema: Geschichte
• Thema: Sozialgeschichte

This book explores the evolution of male writers marked by peculiar traits of childlike immaturity. The 'Boy-Man' emerged from the nexus of Rousseau's counter-Enlightenment cultural primitivism, Sensibility's 'Man of Feeling', the Chattertonian poet maudit, and the Romantic idealisation of childhood. The Romantic era saw the proliferation of boy-men, who congregated around such metropolitan institutions as The London Magazine. These included John Keats, Leigh Hunt, Charles Lamb, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Thomas Hood. In the period of the French Revolution, terms of childishness were used against such writers as Wordsworth, Keats, Hunt and Lamb as a tool of political satire. Yet boy-men writers conversely used their amphibian child-adult literary personae to critique the masculinist ideologies of their era. However, the growing cultural and political conservatism of the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a canon of serious literature, inculcated the relegation of the boy-men from the republic of letters.

© The Author(s) 2019

Pete NewbonThe Boy-Man, Masculinity and Immaturity in the Long Nineteenth CenturyPalgrave Studies in the History of Childhoodhttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40814-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Too Much of the Boy-Man

Pete Newbon¹

(1)

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Pete Newbon

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Modern Immaturity

On 9 June 2009, the world was rocked by the news of the death of the music virtuoso Michael Jackson, who died following an overdose of sleeping pills administered by his personal physician. Although on the verge of an attempted ‘come back’, the former king of pop music had, for over a decade, lived as a recluse under a cloud of scandal and opprobrium. Raised as a musical prodigy in a strict, sometimes abusive, sexually repressive Jehovah’s Witness family, the child Jackson first appeared on stage in the 1970s, under the spotlight at the tender age of seven as the lead singer of the family band, The Jackson Five. Later, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, through his combination of dynamic pop music, unique singing voice, inimitable dancing and remarkable showmanship, Jackson trailblazed his way to become the world’s most famous musician. Yet this transition from precocious child star, to androgynous youthful sex symbol was fraught with inner turmoil and public controversy. ¹ His album HIStory (1995) featured a self-portrait on the cover sleeve titled ‘Childhood’, depicting Jackson as a boy, curled in a corner in an attitude of frightened misery. ² One of the most remarkable—if not to say infamous—aspects of Jackson’s tortured character was his obsessive identification with the eponymous hero of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). As Jackson’s biographer Joseph Vogel observes, this was manifested most ostentatiously in his luxury ranch, which he fittingly named ‘Neverland’:

Neverland was a child’s paradise: There was a C.P. Huntington-style train (similar to the one at Disneyland) that circled around much of the grounds. There were tepees and forts and barricades for water balloon fights. There was an amusement park complete with bumper cars, a flying ride, and a large Ferris wheel; a recreation building and an arcade; and a five-acre lake with a bridge crossing over it and a waterfall. A zoo held giraffes, and deer, zebras and llamas, lions and chimpanzees…There were statues of blissful children everywhere… ³

Yet underlying this whimsical idyll was a darker aspect to Jackson’s fixation. Following the release of Dangerous (1991), allegations of rape and child abuse began to circulate. These culminated in 1993 with a deluge of allegations, which fundamentally rendered him unviable as a mainstream entertainer. ⁴ A New York Post headline of the time encapsulated the public ambiguity over Jackson: ‘Peter Pan or Pervert?’ ⁵ Furthermore, his increasingly unusual appearance as a consequence of his addiction to plastic surgery—his body dysmorphia exemplifying his endless quest for an eternally boyish face—and his publicly known dependence upon narcotics and painkillers, made him evermore grotesque and ‘other’ under the media gaze. ⁶ Jackson’s death in 2009 evinced a complicated melange of regret that the world had lost so powerful a musical star, with a form of morbid fascination. As the queer theorist James R. Kincaid provocatively expresses it:

Had Michael Jackson not existed, we would have been forced to invent him, which is, of course, what we did…The hounding of Michael Jackson is a spectacular case in point. Michael Jackson, to whose music we have sent our children and our soft-drink companies with record piles of dollars, is superchild and now super-child-molester. ⁷

A cursory glance at contemporary Western culture corroborates this much of Kincaid’s assertion: that Jackson was the most consummate, flamboyant and celebrated expression of a form of adult immaturity that has become increasingly commonplace. Since the 1960s, modern societies have seen the unparalleled sociological phenomenon of the cult of youth. This is manifest in twenty-first-century American and European culture, with the unprecedented conflation of adult and childhood forms of entertainment, dress, reading matter, films, pastimes and subcultures. Such a convergence has been a cause of social anxiety by commentators on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum. In 1983, the psychiatrist Dan Kiley’s The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up presented the condition of Barrie’s hero as a form of debilitating mental pathology (albeit one that never achieved inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). On the Left, the polemicist firebrand Neil Postman argued that modern, secular capitalism was eroding the distinctions between childhood and adulthood. In his The Disappearance of Childhood (1994), Postman’s chief concern was the sexualisation and excessive exposure of children to commercial society. These, he argued, were effectively destroying the category of childhood as it had historically been understood. ⁸ Since publishing, various sociologists have cast sceptical doubt upon Postman’s thesis that such recent innovations as television and video games augur the ‘loss’ or ‘end’ of childhood. Instead, they argue that modern defenders of childhood, like Postman, overly essentialise the historical separateness of adults and children. ⁹ Yet a corollary of Postman’s argument is that, in tandem with the accelerated maturation of children in modern societies, the state of adulthood has been allowed to regress into self-incurred, perpetuated immaturity—what he terms the ‘adult-child’. ¹⁰

More recently, the historian Gary Cross excoriates a society in which adult men across all tiers of society are devoted to the childlikeness of modern hedonism—fixated with computer games and television culture at the expense of personal, social and financial responsibility. ¹¹ Cross attributes such failures of modern manhood to social transformations of the twentieth century such as the decline of the patriarchal domestic model, the increased material pleasurability of childhood and the lure of modern consumer capitalism ¹² : ‘The culture of the boy-man today is less a stage of life than a lifestyle, less a transition from childhood to adulthood than a decision to live like a teen “forever”’. ¹³ On the political Right, the libertarian sociologist Frank Furedi argues that the modern higher education system in Britain is betraying the legacy of the Enlightenment through the ‘infantilisation’ of adults. For Furedi, this is manifested through the oversimplification of academic learning and the supposed mollycoddling of students, sheltering them from disturbing subject matter. ¹⁴ These disparate testimonies describe contemporary perpetuated immaturity—especially male immaturity—as though it were a novel phenomenon. Perhaps this is so, in terms of its social pervasiveness. But cultural anxieties about self-incurred immaturity, whether as a moral foible, a pathological deviation, or perhaps—especially—as a mark of idiosyncratic genius, is far from a singularly modern proclivity.

The Possibilities of Not Growing Up

This is a literary historical study of the relationship between authorial identity, masculinity and immaturity. In particular, this book focuses on a series of dynamics inculcated in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and their convergence in the nexus that was the period of the French Revolution. The Boy-Man is an analysis of the lives and works of a loose collective of Romantic-era writers, all of whom were marked in similar ways by the impression that they had never grown up. The title for this work derives from an enigmatic essay titled ‘A Character of the Late Elia, by a Friend’, which was published in January 1823, and penned by the Romantic essayist Charles Lamb. In this peculiar text, Lamb seems to announce the death of his nom de plume, the playful ‘Elia’, and delivers a frank—and even devastating—obituary, emanating from the mouth of ‘Phil-Elia’ (‘the friend of Elia’):

He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important and parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. The ...