Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (review)

In Gender at Work in Victorian Culture, Martin Danahay sets out to "analyze the ideological contradictions in the masculine subject position" as fundamental to "male identity itself" (4). He considers the life and works of writers and artists such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Ford Madox Brown, John Ruskin, and George Gissing, all of whom, he claims, "are caught between a masculinity that they represent in working-class terms, and a middle-class identity that is implicitly feminized" (5). These contradictions have been amply defined and analyzed by some outstanding critics, most notably James Eli Adams and John Tosh, and Danahay freely acknowledges his debt to these writers and to others who have mined the depths of Victorian class and gender ideologies. It is accordingly clear from the introduction that Gender at Work will be synthetic rather than arrestingly original, but a good synthesis, especially one that promises to look at some generally accepted theories of identity from a somewhat different perspective, can be fascinating and profound; a well-wrought synthesis can be as valuable to scholars as a ground-breaking theory.

Alas, Gender at Work is not a well-wrought book. It is marred by errors ranging from idiomatic or stylistic infelicities that obscure meaning to significant lapses in scholarly rigor. These errors are, moreover, pervasive and not only render Danahay's book uneven but also seriously undermine its credibility. While some sections are clearly written, and based on solid evidence and fair consideration of other critics' arguments, other parts are muddied by writing flaws and errors—many of which should have been caught in editing—and questionable interpretations, assumptions, and assertions. For example, Danahay presents an oversimplified interpretation of the experience of Mary's aunt in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) to support the position that there is an inevitable association between female workers and prostitution in the Victorian imagination. Danahay's reduction of Esther's fall to the bland statement that she "goes from working into [sic] a factory to prostitution" is followed by a sweeping and unsubstantiated claim, presumably intended to support his position: "As many feminist scholars have documented, the linkage of women, work and money inevitable [sic] raised the specter of prostitution" (37–38). Information about who these "many" unidentified "feminist scholars" may be and what they may or may not have said, in what context, about what kinds of work, and about what literary texts or cultural phenomena is not presented for the reader's consideration. Other moments in the book raise questions about how carefully Danahay has considered Victorian concepts of work and class, or even some Victorian texts. He argues, for example, that Brown is "in reality a 'piece worker'" because "his income is tied directly to the number of paintings he sells" (102); he refers to Arthur Munby variously as middle-class, upper-middle-class, and upper-class, as if these terms were interchangeable (111, 108, 115); and he makes the very curious observation that "most menial work carried out by women such as Harriet Carker, Little Dorrit and Mrs. Clennam is transformed through love into a noble form of female self-sacrifice" (85). To suggest that Mrs Clennam exhibits love and noble self-sacrifice is so bizarrely off the mark that one has to wonder at this point if Danahay has actually read Little Dorrit (1855–57). It is not in his bibliography, but then neither are Bleak House (1852–53), Self-Help (1859), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), all of which he cites extensively.

A short section from the conclusion illustrates the ways in which errors and scholarly oversights combine to undermine the credibility of the book's arguments. Danahay analyzes three passages from three different Victorian texts, all reproduced in the Broadview edition of The Odd Women (1893). The parenthetical citation for each of the three passages is "Gissing Odd Women" and a page number; information...