Power and Masculine Anxiety in Late Eighteenth-Century British Narratives: How British Men Reconstructed Their Roles by Brian D. Reed (review)

In this brief study, Mr. Reed explores the intersections of gender, sentiment, and national identity. Eighteenth-century constructions of masculinity, he posits, “arose primarily in response to anxieties about sensibility,” which posed a “threat to male authority.” As the early modern age advanced, older forms of masculinity, which he characterizes as “primal,” gave way to a new domesticity. The result was a “new model of manliness,” one that incorporated “respect for women, interest in the plight of others, and concern for domestic tranquility.” Anxiety about this new construction created an antithesis, which is discoverable “in the strained juxtaposition of masculine physical power and sensitive masculinity in eighteenth-century narratives.” In this discussion, which borrows heavily from Lawrence Stone and R. W. Connell, we find the strengths and limitations of Mr. Reed’s work. He presents his argument with laudable clarity and concision but relies heavily on scholarship twenty or more years old. In addition to Stone and Connell, whose cited works were published between 1965 and 1995, Mr. Reed finds theoretical foundations in Claudia Johnson, Michel Foucault, Jean Hagstrum, Deidre Shauna Lynch, David Rosen, Nancy Armstrong, and Judith Butler, good names all, but not representative of recent gender scholarship. The bibliography lists more than 130 studies, but only five from after 2000, and only one from the last ten years.

A second limitation is Mr. Reed’s tendency to present his argument in sweeping terms. At times, this approach provides useful insights for beginning students: “Squire Western, Fielding’s parody of primal masculinity in Tom Jones, effectively exemplifies the negative homosocial characteristics of hunt culture and patriarchal order that Connell grounds in the late seventeenth-century male.” On other occasions, Mr. Reed’s generalizations seem overwrought, perhaps procrustean: “all of the deeds of Fielding’s paragon of natural benevolences [Tom Jones], in fact underscore the tendency of the period to figure sentimental males as sexual predators.”

Chapter 1, “Manipulating Men: Anxious Sensibility in Boswell, Sterne and Smollett,” begins with an ambitious claim: “The desire by men to transform sensibility into sensual, sexual action can be traced to the beginnings of the sentimental movement.” For evidence, Mr. Reed cites a sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Tillotson, “Of Doing Good,” and claims that “Tillotson’s language indicates how the sensual pleasure of benevolence can easily, if not automatically, turn into bodily desire.” The only quotation offered from Tillotson—“there is no sensual pleasure that is comparable to the delight of doing good”—argues a very different point. Before turning to the authors of his chapter title, Mr. Reed offers a brief discussion of Sarah Fielding’s David Simple. The novel’s protagonist “resists standard masculine norms” and adopts “feminine traits” and by so doing becomes “socially ineffective.” David’s wife, Cynthia, comes closer to embodying “virtuous masculinity” and provides “the primary sources of stability in David’s life.” In the London Journal, Mr. Reed discovers “one of many masculine texts that demonstrate how sexual pursuit and sensibility can be united for the purpose of dominance.” While the narrator’s relations with Louisa support the idea that “much of what controls Boswell’s sensibility, in fact, is his sexual appetite,” Mr. Reed overlooks much of the text’s complexity, most notably the author’s continual self-fashioning. A similar critique can be made of his discussion of A Sentimental Journey, where once again “sensibility … migrates from the emotional to the physical”; and of his claim that Roderick Random exhibits “the same kind of manipulative posturing we have seen in Boswell and Yorick.” Lumping together Boswell, Yorick, and Roderick suggests an oversimplification that most careful readers would want to avoid.

In Chapter 2, “Men of Parts: The Consuming Nature of Smollett’s Men,” Mr. Reed usefully connects Smollett’s constructions of masculinity to his anxiety about the “societal fragmentation tied generally to rapid changes...