Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915 (review)

At the end of the nineteenth century a significant number of writers forsook the capacious domestic novel and began to produce shorter, action-driven tales, often set in exotic locations and focused on male characters. This revival of romance, as it was styled by its advocates, seemed entirely consonant with the explicit imperialism of the period. A number of critics have discussed the ideologies of imperial masculinity that are advanced and sometimes critiqued by these texts: Joseph Bristow’s Empire Boys: Adventures in a Man’s World (1991) and Graham Dawson’s Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire, and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994) are two of the better known accounts. So familiar has this ground become that only a book claiming that these novels were not really about empire or masculinity at all would really startle us.

This has not deterred Joseph A. Kestner, who considers the ways in which the adventure fiction of this period was involved in “imprinting codes of masculinity” while also interrogating those same codes (1). In an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion that takes us up to the spy novels of John Buchan, he surveys this adventure literature using four categories: initiation into a man’s world, encounters with other varieties of masculinity, masculinity and the business of empire, and romantic and sexual encounters. Gender theory, in particular the idea that dominant ideologies of gender equate the (biological) penis with the (Lacanian, symbolic and authoritative) phallus, comes from Kaja Silverman among others. Kestner suggests that adventure fiction negotiates ideas about gender, sometimes offering the reader models of heroic masculinity, sometimes revealing discrepancies between gender and power.

The book surveys novels and short fiction by such figures as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Erskine Childers, Alfred Edward Wooley Mason, Anthony Hope, and Buchan, as well as by some less predictable figures, notably William Henry Hudson and Olive Schreiner. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904), notwithstanding its proto-ecological tendencies, seems to fit quite well; Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) does not. Chapters are divided by theme, with internal organization by chronology, so that chapter 1, for example, deals with the voyage as a chronotope of initiation, using as examples texts from Treasure Island (1883) to “The Secret Sharer” (1910). Other chapters are not as well compartmentalized. There are, for instance, some gaps between advertised content and delivery in chapter 2, where some of the gender encounters described are not in fact with the promised “‘Other/ed’ masculinities” (63), but with other white Europeans against an exotic backdrop. In chapters 2 and 3 (“Mapping” and “Invading,” respectively) one feels that “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888), which is placed in chapter 2 as a text of encounter, could just as reasonably have been placed in chapter 3 with the other texts of imperial exploitation.

This apparent arbitrariness, I feel, is a symptom of the way in which Kestner’s approach makes all texts seem much the same: they are all about imprinting masculinity, and differences in form, setting, register, and tone are not allowed to distract us for long. Perhaps this would be less of an issue if the adventure/masculinity nexus was not quite so familiar to us from other studies. To be fair, the author is evidently fully aware of the considerable body of work on his topic, and the secondary literature is quoted frequently and with approval. But this too is a problem in that nowhere does the author disagree with any of these other critical voices. To take an extreme instance, in the space of just two pages there are three paragraphs that begin approvingly with the phrase “According to,” and another that begins “One can agree with” (136–37). Absent is any critical equivalent of the aggression that he describes so effectively in the adventure fiction; agreement appears to be the only mode of critical engagement. This is a pity, as in other ways this is...