Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity by Laura Eastlake (review)

As Laura Eastlake's Ancient Rome and Victorian Masculinity convincingly argues, in the Victorian age conservative and radical politicians, men of letters, imperial conquerors and rulers, and even aesthetes and Wildean decadents saw themselves as latter-day Romans. Given a shared classical vocabulary and the "cultural authority" of the classics, Rome was quite easily "used to conceptualize and solidify different 'styles' of manliness" (12).

This detailed account of the reception of ancient Rome joins with other current scholarship in deconstructing the idea of a single unified Victorian masculinity. At a given historical moment, the changing confluence of class position, education, and the real world of foreign threats and of empire creates different styles of manliness. The study, then, productively expands our sense of the importance of Roman models within the Victorian male psyche.

In the early Victorian decades, the hegemonic style of manliness for the hereditary landed elite was grounded in the ethos of the boarding school with its "elite education" in the classics (17). The Roman republic provided models for the comradely governing class. The Arnoldian sense of civic duty tempered by morality was exemplified in Thomas Babington Macaulay's enormously popular Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), in which a manly martial prowess is employed not in imperial expansion, but as patriotic obligation to defend the state.

As the land-based hereditary elite vied for power with an industrial elite, the reverence for the Roman republic and its model of manliness—although contested, notably in Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South (1854) by the industrialist John Thornton—continued in the schools as cultural capital for a potential rise in social status. Even in my own mid-size industrial town, the Lays of Ancient Rome was required reading in the schools in the 1950s.

In the early Victorian decades, as Eastlake interestingly argues, the imagery of classical Rome was taken over by revolutionary France, and the codification of political ideals by Rome became unstable. The varied receptions of Rome became instruments in political contestation. At the time of the first Reform Bill, for example, the Duke of Wellington was pictured by conservatives as a modern moderate Roman ruler while radicals such as Leigh Hunt saw him as a modern dictatorial Caesar.

Eastlake nicely shows us how Rome "plays into the semantics of the political male" in the Victorian novel with close examination of Wilkie Collins's Antonina, or, the Fall of Rome (1850) and Anthony Trollope's parliamentary novels (86). Trollope was fascinated by Rome, somehow finding time within his super-heavy workload to write an introduction to The Commentaries of Caesar (1870) and The Life of Cicero (1880). The study makes a convincing case that the parliamentary novels are structured, especially in the career of the Duke of Omnium, on Roman political models as a contest between an activist Caesarism and a quiet form of republican manliness.

By the end of the century, classical Rome provided particularly compelling models for contested visions of imperial manliness. Eastlake reminds us that the British envisioned their empire as a new Rome. For some, imperial expansion required an imperial manliness modeled on the Roman Legions, warriors who, separate from domestic life, expanded and guarded the empire with a physical vigor and martial courage. Liberal imperialists looked to manliness of dedication and selflessness validated by their ideal of Roman rule of a vast heterogeneous empire as a civilizing mission.

Yet for the imperialists the expansion and rule of empire generated a conflict within the male psyche. The conquest of the Orient was imagined in sexualized imagery, as penetration of the submissive female, yet the imperialist males were also obliged to uphold Victorian morality. Eastlake explores this psychodrama of manliness in the astute section "The Problem of Cleopatra." Here the study examines in detail H. Rider Haggard's popular imperial tale Cleopatra (1889). The novel dramatizes the temptation of Cleopatra, the exemplary Orientalized femme fatale, and the final rejection of her by a moralized Caesar as...