Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (review)

Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, by David Alderson; pp. vii + 207. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, £61.49, $79.95.

David Alderson's Mansex Fine starts from the uncontroversial premise that veneration for the male body is an integral feature of the culture of empire, and takes the mutual development of Protestantism and imperialism during the nineteenth century as its purview and Ireland as its most particular focal point. Arguing that Protestant characterizations of Catholicism as repressive and antithetical to freedom and virtue became integral to Victorian representations of Catholic nations, Alderson proposes that Protestant manliness became symbolic of British social order, promoting a model of the redemptive power of work ostensibly absent in Catholic regions. Despite the totalizing force of this paradigm, Alderson remains sensitive to the inconsistencies and the lack of uniformity surrounding literary and philosophical accounts of Protestant/Catholic interaction, and he complicates the picture through a discussion of major figures of Anglo-Catholicism, such as John Henry Newman.

Like other recent studies dealing with the development of sexual codes during this period, the book rightly emphasizes the imperial dimension to nineteenth-century formulations of the body, and it points out a number of the economic and political impulses that propelled the concept of Christian manliness into Victorian consciousness. Following the work of Catherine Hall and others, Mansex Fine continues a discussion of the empire at home, focusing on that most domestic of issues, faith. Following historical arguments that the nineteenth century begins with the French Revolution, the book works forward from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), setting the stage for a discussion of how the social order as a whole came to be grounded in the conduct of the men who constituted it.

In the subsequent analyses of Alfred Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among others, Mansex Fine balances readings of prose works by Jane Austen, Charles Kingsley, and Oscar Wilde with poetry that often has received less attention by critics of imperial literature. The goal is to "uncover the tensions between corporeal existence and spiritual aspiration" (46). Mansex Fine offers a compelling genealogy of the application of racial theory to Ireland during the nineteenth century and of the way in which images of Celtic instability dovetailed with evolving ideas about masculinity, hysteria, and bodily erotics. Through his analysis of Hopkins, in particular, Alderson exposes some of the erotic tensions and complications surrounding Christian veneration of the male body, as well as Hopkins's singular recuperation of temptation through renunciation and justification.

Although Mansex Fine should not be faulted for its lack of interest in conceptions of the feminine and the "angel in the house" who lived alongside the muscular Christian man of the idealized Victorian household, it can be criticized for evincing little interest in tracing the articulation of Protestant constructions of manliness in other imperial arenas. By not providing the greater historical, geographical, and critical context to which the book's subtitle of "Religion, Manliness and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture" lays claim, Alderson's explanation of the particularities of the Irish/ Celtic situation lacks force. Reading John Stuart Mill's 1868 essay on "England and Ireland," for example, Alderson points out that Mill uses India as his model for British rule in Ireland. Why, then, does his analysis of "hysterical Celts" ignore similar articulations of hysterical Indians in the wake of the 1857 Mutiny?

Alderson presents a compelling picture of the development and employment of notions of muscular Christianity in a variety of realms. Yet the book could do more to connect these readings to the larger picture of empire. It also might make better use of recent criticism on the homoeroticism of imperial encounters, in particular Christopher Lane's The Ruling Passion (1995) and Lane's notion of the "empire of selfsame." And, although Alderson's emphasis is on Protestantism and...