Novel Masculinities

THIS INFORMATIVE edited collection joins a number of new works in Victorian masculinity studies, the most extensive since Michael Roper and John Tosh’s Manful Assertions (1991) and Tosh’s A Man’s Place (1999) bookended the 1990s. In 2007, the collection Gender and Father-hood in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers, could still claim to be one of the first of its kind. Since then, works such as Charles Hatten’s The End of Domesticity (2010), Valerie Sanders’s The Tragicomedy of Victorian Fatherhood (2009), and Bradley Deane’s Masculinity and the New Imperialism (2014) have contributed much to the field. As with the earlier waves of important scholarship, the essays in this new collection stress masculinity as a contested, ever-changing concept. The essays, arranged in chronological order, take readers from the first writings of Charlotte Brontë to the final novels of Joseph Conrad. The goal of the collection is to present the “matrix of culturally and historically specific masculinities” available to scholars of the Victorian novel, with Victorian fiction as the ideal ground for “exploring, questioning, and reinforcing values and beliefs” related to masculinities. The incorporation of poetry, drama, and popular periodical fiction would certainly offer a wider array of masculine “performances.” However, the generic limitation becomes a strength of this volume, as the narrowed focus helps the collection cohere across its chapters. In addition, the essays do not overlook what may be subversive about these largely familiar authors and canonical texts.

Two of the book’s nine chapters focus on the aesthetic payoffs of analyzing the novel, as opposed to other artistic forms. Emma Sutton’s “Aestheticism, Resistance, and the Realist Novel: Marius and Masculinity” argues that a critical focus on poetry and essays, in studies of aestheticism, creates the false impression that “the novel was a marginal genre in this movement.” Linda Shires’s “Conrad’s Theatre of Masculinities” draws from a number of definitions of theatre—from “medical amphitheatre” to dramatic performance for an audience—within a thorough overview of Conrad’s novels. Her study reflects upon the “total skepticism about the truth of identity, including gender identity, that he introduces when he asks: What is it to be a man anyway?” All of the essays attempt to answer Conrad’s question by surveying entire careers rather than isolated works. Each chapter becomes a useful resource for future studies of particular authors. There is no concluding essay that draws all of its threads together, but the lack of closure is appropriate for a book emphasizing masculinities in the plural.

Two chapters discuss blurred boundaries between male and female gender performance. Sara Lodge’s essay, “Masculinity, Power and Play in the Work of the Brontës,” reads Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia as seed for a career that “calls attention to the performed nature of gender roles in general and how such performances may mask untold suffering.” Going beyond familiar arguments about the masculine pseudonym as an appropriation of male narrative authority, Lodge suggests that Brontë’s acts of narrative cross-dressing necessitate a transformation in masculinity itself. Lodge ends her essay by framing Jane Eyre as a reiteration of the patterns of representation in the juvenilia, patterns that deconstruct strategies for performing gender. Natalie McKnight’s essay, “Dickens and Masculinity,” follows Holly Furneaux’s Queer Dickens (2009) in refusing to dismiss Dickens’s works as hyper-masculine, misogynist, or patriarchal. McKnight acknowledges how his novels respond to his increasing disenchantment with his marriage, but argues that they do not merely reproduce this disenchantment. Instead, his novels, especially his late novels, “questioned the very gender norms that he himself had helped to establish” and, at times, even “celebrat[e] androgyny.”

Three chapters focus on physiology. Jane Thomas’s “Growing Up to be a Man: Thomas Hardy and Masculinity” complements Suzanne Keen’s Thomas Hardy’s Brains (2014). As with Keen’s book, Thomas’s chapter argues that Hardy’s interest in psychology and brain science appears in his literary works. Thomas discusses...