The Iniquitous Aesthete: Margaret Deland's Velvet Man

Of the many anxieties troubling America's Gilded Age, gender dislocation figured prominently in periodical essays and stories; as the "Angel in the House" was being threatened by the "New Woman," so the "Manly Man," the desired national goal of Theodore Roosevelt's code of "the strenuous life," seemed in peril because of "effeminacy" tainted by associations with degeneracy and Oscar Wilde, "the consummate flower of aestheticism."¹ Indisputably, the turn of the century was caught in a confused morass of conflicted and conflicting ideas and theories about gender roles and sexual identity. An interesting example of these tensions in serialized fiction, Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (1911), begins in the late 1860s and follows two generations through fraught gender conflicts, in particular son against mother. The older generation is represented by three major characters: Sarah Maitland, a business-minded widow who owns and operates an iron mill; Helena Richie, a seemingly perfect mother with a "past"; and Robert Ferguson, Mrs. Maitland's manager, who is in love with Helena. The younger generation is represented by four children: Mrs. Maitland's spoiled son Blair, her passive daughter Nannie, Helena Richie's model son David, and Robert Ferguson's niece and ward, the passionate Elizabeth, who is wooed by both young men and becomes sexually entangled with both. The novel is rife with the anxieties of the age: concerns for the responsibilities of motherhood, the ill-effects of divorce, the value of work versus art, and above all the unstable constitution of masculinity and femininity. Though Diana Reep details Deland's repeated interest in depicting strong independent women and "the extremes of the feminist question," she stresses her essential conservativism: "Margaret Deland was not an ardent feminist. She opposed women's suffrage and believed staunchly that marriage was the cornerstone of a woman's life. . . . Deland, therefore, was a moderate, fearful that feminism would destroy the family."² Though Deland tests some variables which appear to call convention into question—a widow capably runs a factory, a son is a talented aesthete—she always rebounds to the culturally sanctioned norms, a victim of the dominant cultural context.

That context for masculinity was chiseled in stone by Roosevelt, who set the stakes high. "The strenuous life," he contended, was essential to the nation: "A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual."³ Despite a proliferation of debates in periodicals, ultimately the cultural and political need to construct a fixed ideology of heterosexual, "normative masculinity" disallowed any unsettling ambivalence to thrive. Roosevelt had spoken: the "unmanly" man was un-American.

Between 1890 and 1909, hundreds of articles by and about Roosevelt appeared in periodicals and magazines covering a wide range of topics, including military reform, the responsibilities of college men, civil service reform, big game in the West, Daniel Boone, law enforcement, the national character, forest preservation, the Rough Riders, life in the cities, social welfare, the merit system, the New York police force, professionalism in sports, the value of athletic training, and "true" Americanism. These essays appeared in most of the prominent journals of the decade, including Outing, Forum, Harper's Weekly, the Atlantic Monthly, Science, Sewanee Review, Century, the National Geographic, the North American Review, the Critic, and Scribner's. In addition, two of Roosevelt's books, Wilderness Hunter and The Winning of the West, were widely and favorably reviewed; and The Rough Riders was serialized in Scribner's throughout 1899. As Howard Chudacoff notes, "Roosevelt, with his obsession with the strenuous life, often is identified as the most influential model of American manliness in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. . . . Roosevelt symbolized the panacea for an emasculated manhood that was presumed to be characterizing the modern American male population."⁴

Once a delicate child who "reformed" his spindly asthmatic body through physical training and who became a big-game hunter and a Rough Rider, in 1882 the newly elected assemblyman, only twenty-three, suffered from...