Lisbon Revisited: Urban Masculinities in Twentieth-Century Portuguese Fiction by Rhian Atkin (review)

Rhian Atkin's 2014 study Lisbon Revisited offers a welcome contribution to our understanding of gendered behavior and specifically masculine identity in Portugal. Atkin aptly notes in her introduction that despite several important studies on literary representations of gender in Europe, there does indeed remain a "significant lack of substantial sociological, cultural or anthropological studies in relation to masculine-gendered behaviours" (1). While Atkin argues that this is especially so in Portugal, we might easily say the same regarding the need for additional scholarship on literary representations of masculinity in Brazil and certainly in Lusophone Africa.

Lisbon Revisited presents an analysis of a somewhat unusual collection of three texts: 1) Fernando Pessoa's Livro do desassossego, attributed to the heteronym Bernardo Soares and written primarily during the period of 1929–1935; 2) Luís de Sttau Monteiro's Um homem não chora, published in 1960; and 3) José Saramago's História do cerco de Lisboa, first published in 1989. Atkin uses this grouping to examine historical transformations in the manifestations of masculinity in Portugal during key moments of the twentieth century. An initial glance at this grouping may lead one to question why Atkin has privileged these three moments at the expense of others—she seems to skip over the 1940s, 60s, and 70s—but Atkin never claims to provide an exhaustive chronological survey of the evolution of masculinity in Portugal during the twentieth century. Furthermore, her book is not structured primarily by chronology but rather by theme. Following an initial chapter that briefly examines each of the texts under consideration and places them in historical context, each of the subsequent chapters considers different modes and places in which masculinity finds expression in Portuguese culture. These chapters respectively address the following broad themes: 1) masculinity and modernity; 2) masculinity in the street; 3) masculinity in public spaces of consumption (like stores and coffee shops); and 4) masculinity at home and at work.

Atkin's first chapter, entitled "Masculine Subjectivities in the Modern City," considers the ways in which twentieth-century industrialization and modernization precipitated a particular form of masculinity in crisis. Drawing upon the work of Georg Simmel, Atkin notes that urbanization and technological transformations in Portuguese culture caused male subjectivities to fragment and become destabilized. Accordingly, she reads Pessoa's heteronymic project and specifically Bernardo Soares's Livro do desassossego as both symptomatic of and a reaction to modern insecurities. Similarly, she maintains that Monteiro's protagonist in Um homem não chora is likewise defined by an emotional instability that "implies emasculation" (35). Atkin suggests furthermore that we can read the male characters of Pessoa and Monteiro as figures who respond to masculinity in crisis by abstracting or fragmenting themselves as a means of "protecting [themselves] from the world" (37). In contrast, she observes that Saramago's protagonist, Raimundo Silva, emerges as a character who "accepts fragmentation as a necessary step in his development as a subject" (37). Thus, modernity and twentieth-century urban experience in Portugal have created social configurations resulting in crises of masculinity, primarily expressed through fragmented and divided notions of the self.

In the second chapter, "Masculinities in the Streets," Atkin explores the behavior of men in public open spaces, namely, streets, squares and plazas, and she devotes particular attention to the ways in which Pessoa, Monteiro and Saramago both appropriate and resist manifestations of flânerie and dandyism in Portuguese culture. She observes, for example, that because the "long, wide and straight Avenida da Liberdade" (61) was only opened in the late-nineteenth century, flânerie appears much later in Portuguese culture and literature than in France. Furthermore, she mentions key characteristics of the Portuguese flâneur characters, who "may not dress in the flamboyant manner of the nineteenth-century dandy […], nor are there explicit suggestions of homosexuality; yet their attitudes towards and experiences of the city posit them as marginalized figures who resist the normalizing flow of urban life" (59). She...