Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity, 1660-1815 by Jason Solinger (review)

Part of Palgrave's "Global Masculinities" series, Jason Solinger's study makes a valuable contribution to the broader scholarship on modern masculine identity by tracing its emergence from a historically specific and culturally stable, yet at the same time highly malleable figure—that of "the gentleman." Working against those critical currents that have ignored or marginalized the eighteenth-century gentleman as the "relic of a vanishing world" (4), Solinger argues instead for the category's foundational role in shaping a new type of ruling-class male, one whose power lay not in birth or status, but rather in education, experience, and "knowledge of the world"—knowledge that increasingly derived from forms of cultural literacy seemingly available to all men. In readings of a wide variety of sources, including conduct and educational treatises, neoclassical poetry, periodical essays, and novels, Solinger shows how writers transformed a "tradition bound to blood and inheritance into a new masculine ethos" (3) by strategically incorporating traditional components of male identity. The result, he contends, is nothing less than the "gentrification of empire" (10) embodied in the historical fictions of Walter Scott, in which nostalgia for a previous era's noblesse oblige becomes, in turn, the grounds for imperial paternalism.

Locating the gentleman's lasting cultural power within specific generic developments in eighteenth-century literary history, Solinger's transgeneric methodology offers a useful corrective to the common critical practice of separating established neoclassical modes marked as masculine from those emerging forms of print culture, in particular the novel, increasingly associated with women. Arguing for the reconfiguration of masculine gentility as necessarily interconnected as well as ongoing, a subject always in the process of "becoming," Solinger establishes compelling connections between the gentlemanly personae of proscriptive literature and the idealized heroes of later fiction. Moreover, by arguing that "gentlemanliness ... shaped popular literacy through the development of literary forms" (141), his study challenges, in beneficial ways, those histories of the novel's rise that ignore the gentleman's crucial role in "transform[ing] the status quo without seeming to do so" (142). Through possession of those seemingly apolitical forms of knowledge and qualities of mind available to all readers of fiction, the gentleman hero forms, according to Solinger, the necessary counterpart to the "feminine ideal of the domestic woman" (13), as "the emergence of the modern subject required the remodeling of masculinity as well as femininity" (141).

The broad scope of Solinger's analysis, which moves roughly chronologically from the Restoration to the novels of Scott, provides one of its greatest strengths. Usefully reminding us of proscriptive literature's attention to men, chapter 1 examines a wealth of instructional literature focused on teaching "knowledge of the world"—a category Solinger likens to our contemporary fixation on self-improvement. By reimagining learning as a gentlemanly form of cultural commerce that was functional rather than esoteric, such writers as Locke, Swift, Shaftesbury, and Chesterfield contributed to the ideological project, famously expressed by Addison's Mr Spectator, of bringing "Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses" (Spectator no. 10). Turning next to Pope's Essay on Criticism, Solinger reads the poem less as a manifesto on neoclassical poetics than as a kind of conduct book for Pope's own literary mastery, through which the polite man of letters becomes, in effect, a new kind of masculine ideal. As Solinger compellingly argues, we find the antitype of this figure in the Rape of the Lock's both "fashionable and retrograde" Baron, whose "antiquated sense of honor" (62) provides an important contrast to the more educated and articulate gentlemanly persona of the poem's narrator.

Yet the nuanced revisions of the gentlemanly ideal, traced so deftly in Solinger's initial chapters, become problematic when the study turns to novels by Burney and Austen. Contrasting Evelina...