The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt (review)

This ambitious collection considers how the male body was examined and judged in Victorian culture. The essays (largely by female authors) concentrate on representations of the body to trace the discourse of ideal masculinity that developed in fiction. While the male body represented a set of complex virtues, it was unable to maintain those ideals under scrutiny. White masculinity, while intended to represent a form of power, was never "one, unified, complete, (perfect?) construction;" nevertheless, "discourse around this ideal had real and embodied consequences for women, people of color, colonised subjects and white men themselves" (15). Thus, each of the book's three sections examines how masculinity was discussed, debated, and adapted from the ideal and what those digressions help us understand about the coded norms of the Victorian male body.

The collection's first section, "Constructed Bodies," focuses on the way men were expected to tailor their masculinity to an idealized body. Alice Crossley opens the section by analyzing the physical abuses suffered by schoolboys in Victorian fiction. Emphasizing a range of acceptable behaviors from sensitivity to assertiveness, these texts reveal the shifting conversation about masculinity in the nineteenth century. The theme of punishing the male body continues in Joanna Begiato's essay, which considers the role of self-denial in manliness. Using records from insane asylums, she demonstrates the contemporary belief that a man's inability to master his passions would produce "beast-like or child-like" behavior (rather than effeminacy) and could lead to penalties including the label of insanity (61). While the first two chapters explore masculinities in flux, Tara MacDonald's essay examines physical perfection in relation to ideas about the New Man in Ménie Murel Dowie's Gallia (1895). With strong eugenic undertones of national identity, constructions of the New Man objectified the male body as a specimen to be judged on its capacity to produce offspring.

The next section, "Fractured and Fragmented Bodies," analyzes the disabled and diseased male body. In a lively essay, Ryan Sweet examines pirate fiction and the presumed connection between villainy and prosthesis. Questioning this stereotype, Sweet shows that many pirates exhibit a hypermasculinity in accepting and overcoming physical loss. Meredith Miller focuses on tuberculosis, which is usually coded feminine, as a way to explore an alternate masculinity embodied by John Keats and the "wasting male youth of visionary sensibility" (109). In contrast to hyperphysical imperial masculinity, Miller reads tubercular men in the works of Henry James and George Eliot as a Gothic antithesis that emphasized Romantic sensibility over national identity. Alison Younger also takes up unconventional masculinities in her analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She argues that gents, dandies, and other identities that imitated masculine behavior while flouting traditional rules of breeding and manners were coded as monstrous in literature, "grotesque parod[ies] of a noble idea" (144). From the monstrous, Ruth Heholt takes us to the supernatural with her reading of the male body in ghost stories by Victorian women. As she insightfully notes, criticism of this genre typically focuses on the way women writers used ghost stories as a form of liberation, but little has been said of the male ghost who inhabits a sphere generally associated with weakness and need. Heholt argues that male ghosts undermine stable ideas of masculinity not only by creating anxiety about healthy male bodies but also positing a hypermasculine mind robust enough to deny death. These stories challenge the link between Victorian masculinity and virile embodiment by asserting that even the most ablebodied men will eventually die.

The final section focuses on "Unruly Bodies" that do not fit (sometimes literally) within the restrained notions of ideal masculinity. Of special interest to periodical scholars, Françoise Baillet's chapter considers how George du Maurier's sketches for Punch opened a forum for the discussion of middle-class manliness. The starving male body features in Charlotte Boyce...