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Victorian Studies 43.4 (2001) 657-659



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Book Review

A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England


A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, by John Tosh; pp. xii + 252. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999, $30.00, £28.00.

The notion of Victorian Britain as a world of radically disjunctive "separate spheres" still has a curious allure for many students (and more than a few scholars). The binaries lend a satisfying clarity to the more complex yet still pervasive force of gender in modern life, while they also define an arena especially suited to stark dramas of transgression, whether of victimization or defiance. Over the past two decades, however, a rich and growing body of scholarship has broken down the imagined Victorian fire wall that divided public and private into distinctly masculine and feminine realms. But as scholars have recovered the public lives of Victorian women, and the political dimensions of domesticity itself, much less attention has been devoted to the place of domesticity in the lives of men. This is the challenge that John Tosh stakes out in his absorbing new study, A Man's Place.

Tosh's study is grounded in two major scholarly developments. The first is the broadening of women's history to embrace the history of gender, which in turn has enabled an understanding of the family as a system "embracing all levels of power, dependence and intimacy" (2). The second is the development of an economic and social history that views domesticity as an integral feature of modernity: domesticity--as distinct from sheer domestic life--is an essentially nineteenth-century invention, an affective ideal "grounded above all in a sense of alienation from the social and moral consequences of industrialism" (178). As such, Tosh urges, the notion of domesticity as "women's sphere" was for the Victorians "a convenient shorthand, not a claim to exclusivity" (50); indeed, the doctrine of "separate spheres," Tosh argues, "has been more dogmatically asserted by modern scholars than it ever was by the Victorians themselves" (77). Moreover, the very phrase obscures the distinctively masculine prerogative of enjoying ready access to both spheres--and thereby glosses over the stresses men often encountered in moving between them.

Like these premises, Tosh's main points are less novel--in part due to his own important work--than they were a decade ago. But the history he outlines is unparalleled in its elegant, wide-ranging synthesis of an enormous amount of scholarship on Victorian gender and domesticity, to which he gives added clarity and texture with his own archival research focusing on the private correspondence of seven families. For all the satisfactions domesticity offered Victorian men, traditional tensions between manliness and domestic life were exacerbated by the rise of evangelicalism, which in helping to shape domesticity made it "a defining attribute of manliness" (113) even as home and child-rearing were increasingly thought of as the special province of women. The displacement of masculine authority by feminine "influence" was compounded by increasing questioning of patriarchal authority, both in legal reforms and in the "unprecedented critique" of male sexuality in the great public debates of the 80s and 90s. In these later decades, pressures on masculinity were [End Page 657] bound up with an erosion of the domestic ideal itself, which increasingly was experienced as confining to both men and women. These conflicts are familiar enough, but Tosh's careful analysis foregoes the melodrama of much recent cultural history. Although "both symbolically and practically the father's headship of the household was under threat" (93), he notes, it would be a "wild exaggeration" (160) to suggest that late-Victorian domestic patriarchy was in "crisis." While the legitimate scope of patriarchy was a subject of increasing public debate, patriarchy as such was questioned only by a tiny minority of feminists. Likewise in family letters, Tosh urges, shifting understandings are registered less in explicit questioning than in "a perceptible change of atmosphere" associated with domestic life...

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