The Subject of Money: Late-Victorian Melodrama's Crisis of Masculinity

This article focuses on the relationship between male suffering and economics in two late-Victorian melodramas, Henry Arthur Jones's The Silver King and Arthur Wing Pinero's Sweet Lavender. Both plays express contemporary anxieties about the stability of privileged male identity, offering narratives of masculine progress that affirm the superiority of moral, domestic values over economic ones while concomitantly making visible the imperative demands of the marketplace. This conflict between the domestic and economic spheres is expressed in the ailing bodies of the victimized male protagonists, whose physical incapacities suggest the limited ability of the male subject to manage the systemic contradictions that threaten the coherence of the domestic sphere. The suffering male body in late-Victorian melodrama thus emphasizes the problematic relationship between identity and money as well as the complicity of domesticity in the economic sphere to which it is nominally opposed.