Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini by Nowell Marshall (review)

It is a rare thing—a work of literary criticism and history that also issues an important call to contemporary social change. Deriving insights from the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Rene Girard, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, and others, and bringing those insights to bear on an unlikely genealogy of culture from William Blake to Andrew Holleran, Nowell Marshall has accomplished just that, arguing in Romanticism, Gender, and Violence that the often unmeetable social expectations of gender perpetuate a performative melancholia that can lead to acts of violence, both to others and to oneself. As Marshall is quick (and right) to note, the problem he explores in this book is not a “‘gay’ problem; it is a human problem” that impacts anyone whose performance of gender is “non-normative” (4, 1). His first and most powerful example of this phenomenon is the story of a heterosexual man named George Sodini, who, in 2009, murdered three women and injured several more at a fitness club before committing suicide, motivated, his online journal later revealed, by his hateful self-regard as an “unmasculine” male repeatedly rejected by the women he pursued. According to Marshall, Sodini’s “self-perception of failed masculinity” is part of a tragic history that can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century, when, as has been noted by Thomas Laqueur and others, modern codifications of gender (masculine and feminine) took root (3–4). In tracing from Romanticism on a “pre-history of abnormality” and noting its frequent connection to masochistic acts, Marshall draws attention to a subject that is both illuminative for the study of various literatures and politically exigent today. “Only by recognizing and rejecting the urge for normalization,” he insists, “can we, as subjects whose gender performance varies from the norm, break the cycle of violence inflicted on ourselves or others” (20).

Marshall’s study is thoughtfully divided into five sections, each exploring a different facet of the performative melancholia he articulates quite compellingly in his introduction. A section on “Romantic Coupling” looks first to Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion and then to Frances Burney’s Camilla as commentaries on the (perceived) gendered shortcomings of their characters and, more revealingly, on their authors’ very different approaches to masochistic violence as a means of self-correction. Twin sections on “Melancholic Femininities” and “Melancholic Masculinities” cover a broad swathe of Romantic and Victorian literature. The former turns to Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in order to articulate a disturbing connection between “failed” performances of femininity and retributive and displaced acts of violence. The latter offers some of Marshall’s strongest analytical reading, looking first to William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and then Byron’s The Giaour as assessments of risk in the game of masculinity performance: to fail at being a “man” in the world of these narratives is to jeopardize everyone and everything, from self to family to social order. A section entitled “Abandonment, Performative Melancholia, and Madness” draws the line between the subject at hand and perhaps less violent but no less worrisome forms of psychological damage, presenting subtle readings of William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” and “The Ruined Cottage,” Percy Shelley’s “Julian and Maddalo,” and Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter. In the final section, “After Romanticism,” Marshall widens his focus from Romantic literature to our contemporary moment, examining “failed” gender performance in LGBT culture and offering extended discussions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance.

Marshall’s message—especially with regard to the issue of depression and suicide among those struggling to reconcile their gender identities with cultural expectations—is a welcome and timely one, and he succeeds in delivering it in a convincing and well-historicized medium of cultural analysis. At times, the book does feel a little...