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 Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the
Trajectory of the Development of Victorian Masculinity
Studies

Natasha Anand
IGNOU (New Delhi), India

Abstract
This article presents an overview of critical studies on Victorian men and Victorian masculinity. It begins by
defining masculinity and delineating how its sociology is typically understood as consisting of three main
‘waves.’ It then proceeds to tracing the early beginnings of Victorian Masculinity Studies through the late
1970s to the early 1980s. Subsequently, it provides a reading of major works on Victorian masculinity from
the 1990s to the 2000s. In so doing, it argues how the trajectory of both literary and historical scholarship
has moved away from the traditional focus on a unitary, homogeneous, and culturally sanctioned form of
Victorian masculinity to the plurality of Victorian masculinities. Drawing from Connell’s theory of
hegemonic masculinity, which posits a hierarchy of multiple masculinities engaged in power relations, the
article reviews works that examine a series of dominant as well as subordinate masculinities as created,
negotiated and sustained in the Victorian era. The article finally shows how the analysis of multiple forms
of Victorian masculinity points toward the fluidity and instability of masculine identities thereby
constructing the subject of Victorian masculinity as an ever-changing theoretical phenomenon embedded
within historically, culturally and socially embedded discourse that is crucial not only to an understanding
of Victorian studies but also to the academic study of both literature and history.

Keywords: hegemonic masculinity, masculinity vs. masculinities, subordinate masculinity, Victorian

gender ideology

Introduction
(a) Defining Masculinity
What is ‘masculinity’? Is ‘masculinities’ a more appropriate term? If yes, then how are Victorian
masculinities socially, culturally and historically constructed? What are some of the ways in
which Victorian masculinities have been conceived, researched, studied and theorized? It is
imperative to state here that because the answer to the first question paves the way for answers to
the remaining three, this article characteristically begins by tracing the origin and meaning of the
basic term—masculinity.
The concept of masculinity or masculinities in its current form was first used in the mid-
1980s, although prior to that, it had already been employed in psychology (Brod & Kaufman1994).
In 1985 a classic article by Carrigan, Connell, and Lee was called “Toward a New Sociology of
Masculinity.” This was followed by Jeffrey Weeks’ Sexuality (1986), a text that coined the term
‘masculinities.’ A year later, a collection edited by Brod was called The Making of Masculinities,
and by 1989 Jeff Hearn referred to ‘masculinities’ as a term describing issues and research about
men. This being its foundation, what indeed does masculinity mean? The closest answer to this
question is perhaps that masculinity encompasses all those values, perspectives, behaviours,
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935), Vol. VII, No. 3, 2015.
Ed. Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay & Tarun Tapas Mukherjee
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URL of the article: http://rupkatha.com/V7/n3/12_victorian-masculinity-studies.pdf
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 108 Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V7N3, 2015

practices, gestures, forms of speech, and body language which are typically associated with males
and therefore culturally defined as not feminine. In this sense, masculinity is dependent on its
others (e.g., women and gay men) for its definition. It follows then that masculinity is inherently
relational rather than merely the product of genetic coding or biological predispositions
(Clatterbaugh 1990; Whitehead & Barrett 2001). Because each culture that treats men and women
as bearers of polarized character types embodies and exercises this concept of masculinity (Alsop
et al 2002), it becomes important to pay attention, as the next section of this article does, to
historical change and historical specificity that illustrate the social construction of masculinity,
and to the plurality of ways in which masculinity is lived, practiced and sustained.

(b) The Sociology of Masculinity

The sociology of masculinity comprises the critical study of men and as such, it not only
originates from but is also influenced by, and aligns itself with, feminist theories. But where
feminist thinking tends to oversimplify the position of men in the gender order by upholding and
amplifying their socioeconomic advantages against women, and viewing them in a somewhat
universalist and unidimensional mode, as heads of family and state who wield power in a
patriarchal society, Masculinity Studies strives to problematize this largely reductionist
interpretation and challenges the portrait of men as essentialist. Masculinity Studies, then, in
many ways, is the double of feminist criticism as it examines the social construction of and
changes in ‘masculinities’ (as opposed to ‘masculinity’) based on men’s differences in sexuality,
class, race, nationality and other such factors.
Since its beginnings, the sociology of masculinity has traversed across three distinctive
theoretical ‘waves,’ almost in tandem with corresponding shifts in the theoretical patterns of
feminist thinking. Influenced by the initial activity of the Men’s Liberation Movements located in
Britain and North America, the first of these waves emerged during the 1970s and was concerned
with the problematic of the male role, and the accompanying socialization processes and social
control. It contended that men too, like women, are harmed by sexism in internalizing and
attempting to conform to dominant expectations of masculine ideology, a process that Joseph
Pleck (1981) has termed “male gender role discrepancy” (13). After the first developments were
made under the paradigm of gender-role theory, the second wave of Masculinity Studies began to
form following third wave feminism in the late 1980s. During this phase, Masculinity Studies
focused on the experience of marginal and minority men and was concerned with issues
pertaining to class, ethnicity, sexual identity and so forth. Exemplified by the work of Carrigan,
Connell and Lee (1985), second wave theorizing introduced hegemonic masculinity as the
touchstone concept of Masculinity Studies, and consequently the notion of plurality was
established as a central tenet of masculinity. Derived from the Gramscian notion of hegemony,
Connell defined hegemonic masculinity as the dominant masculine ideal of a culture (1987:183;
1995:77). This was followed by third wave theorizing in the early 1990s that viewed gender as a
main discursive metaphor for exercising power. Prevalent even today, it is chiefly concerned with
unraveling the complex relationship between men’s identities, and the naturalization of, as well as
resistance to, patriarchal power. This cultural turn within the sociology of masculinity has been
primarily influenced by feminist post-structuralism as well as theories of post-modernity (Butler
1990; Nicholson 1990), and focuses on questions of normativity, performativity and sexuality.
It is against such a background that this article charts the trajectory of the development of
Victorian Masculinity Studies. Because the discourse on Victorian Masculinity Studies cannot be
separated from the larger discourse within its parent field, that of Masculinity Studies, any
109 Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the Trajectory of the Development of
Victorian Masculinity Studies

overview of the former must necessarily begin with, and be informed by, an outline of the latter.
This overarching context of the meaning and sociology of masculinity therefore equips us with
the tools required to examine the growth of Victorian Masculinity Studies from its early stages to
the present day.

Methodology
Drawing from Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s theory which disrupts the notion of a
singular, uniform masculinity to argue that there exist, instead, multiple forms of masculinities,
each engaged in the power struggle to gain ascendancy over the other, this article employs her
classification of the categories of hegemonic and subordinate masculinity (1987; 1995). Because
the trajectory of Victorian Masculinity Studies essentially involves academic forays into both
these hierarchical groups of masculinities—one that fits into the dominant or hegemonic ideal
(heterosexual and therefore viewed in the Victorian era as normative), and another that qualifies
as a subordinate type (homosexual and therefore viewed in the Victorian era as non-normative)—
the article oscillates between providing a recapitulation of works that deal with the social and
historical pressures which conditioned, characterized and bolstered the former with all its
concomitant cultural denominations, complexities, contradictions and conflicts; and a
summation of those that set out to tabulate the history, anxieties and the ideological as well as
iconographical representations of the latter. In so doing, some of the research questions asked
are: What distinguishes hegemonic and subordinate forms of masculinity? If social constructs
such as the heterosexual and the gentleman are read as hegemonic, how are these located in the
history, culture and ideology of the Victorian era? If non-normative figures such as the
homosexual and the effeminate man are read as subordinate, how does this reflect questions of
masculine identity and sexuality prevalent at the time? Finally, how does the dialogic framework
between these two different kinds of male gender behavior operate in the context of the
development of Victorian Masculinity Studies?

Discussion
(a) The late 1970s and early 1980s: Early Beginnings of Victorian Masculinity Studies
One of the earliest studies that took as its subject matter the constraints of hegemonic Victorian
masculinity is Carol Christ’s “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House” that appeared as
a chapter in Martha Vicinus’ influential feminist anthology A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of
Women (1977). The phrase, which has come to typify the Victorian ideal of womanhood, is taken
from Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the House” (1854-62), and Christ employs it not
only as a means to reconsider the stereotype but also as the basis to explain its relationship to
male ambivalence about normative manhood. Drawing upon feminist insights, she uncovers
instances of idealized visions of femininity found in the works of Patmore, Tennyson, John Ruskin
and Charles Dickens in order to examine “the pressures the age brought upon the Victorian man”
(1977:147). These male writers not only defined but in fact, valorized womanhood as passive and
inert, yet at the same time, in keeping with Victorian gender ideology, they were also acutely
aware that the onus of sexual responsibility which included both intercourse and conception was
to be carried by men alone. This was no small responsibility as both Christian precept and the
discourse of reason inherited from the Enlightenment stated that sexual passion should be tamed
and controlled. The leading writers of the period were therefore both drawn to and re-
 110 Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V7N3, 2015

constructed these “fantasies” of feminine virtue in their works which represented the qualities
that men wanted to embody but were excluded from in their Victorian role as the sole bearers of
sexuality (146-162). Christ shows how the writers’ expression of deep fears of the sexual energy
within man and the consequent fragility of manhood itself was the result of historical pressures
affecting conceptions of hegemonic masculinity as well as femininity.
Almost coinciding with Christ’s analysis of hegemonic Victorian masculinity is sociologist
Jeffrey Weeks’ exploration of one of the forms of subordinated Victorian masculinity—the
homosexual—encapsulated in Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Nineteenth Century to the
Present (1977). In surveying the “homosexual politics” of Victorian England based on political
leaflets, manifestos, handouts and other such documents, Weeks details a history of the British
Gay Liberation movement. He begins by identifying the differences between earlier attitudes
toward sodomy and buggery and the late nineteenth century discovery of a group apart called
homosexuals. This distinction is once again mirrored in Michael Foucault’s first volume of The
History of Sexuality (1978). Both writers contend that the law punished men and women who
performed sexual acts contrary to accepted heterosexual norms. However, it was only in the
nineteenth century that there emerged what Weeks calls the “homosexual consciousness”
(1977:22) and “homosexual self definition” (125) of British radicals. Even as a new terminology, in
particular the word “homosexual” was invented to describe this deviant subculture, same-sex
desiring individuals constructed their own perception of identity and community through
recourse to social and cultural discourses such as law, politics and the art. Coming Out was an
important text of its times, it being one of the first studies to call attention to the myriad ways in
which individuals defined their identities based on non-normative sexualities.
Weeks’ work was soon followed by Robert Hurley’s English translation of The History of
Sexuality (1978), where Foucault argues that we generally tend to read the history of sexuality
since the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth century in terms of what he calls the
“repressive hypothesis” (15-36). This hypothesis supposes that sexuality as well as the open
discussion of sex during these periods was repressed as a result of the rise of capitalism and the
bourgeoisie. Consequently, sex was treated as a private matter that occurred only between a
husband and a wife. Sex outside these confines was not prohibited but repressed through efforts
to make it both unthinkable and unspeakable. Foucault argues against this hypothesis by positing
that dialogue on sexuality, in fact, proliferated in the nineteenth century and was the result of
nineteenth-century medical discourse, an “artificial unity” that “cobbled out of anatomical
elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations and pleasures”(1978:154). This discourse on
sexuality, contends Foucault, surreptitiously inveigles people into policing their own desires
without any pressure from external forces. It was through these medical practices that people
learnt to internalize both the notion of their “true” (69) sexual identities as well as how their
sexual practices comprised the most fundamental truth about themselves (65-67). As a result of
this medical regulation of sexual activity, what Foucault calls the “scientia sexualis” (53-73), the
male homosexual emerged as a distinct sexual category, and a new “species” was born (37-49). Yet
Foucault maintains that the nineteenth-century also saw the onset of a “reverse discourse” (101)
on homosexuality in that it served as the particular historical moment in which the homosexual
male first attempted to defend himself:
The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole
series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty,
and “psychic hermaphroditism” made possible a strong advance of social controls into this
area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse:
111 Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the Trajectory of the Development of
Victorian Masculinity Studies

homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or
“naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by
which it was medically disqualified (101).
This reverse discourse remains to this day one of the basic political tactics of modern gay and
lesbian liberationists.
Robin Gilmour’s The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981) is another early
work that analyzes the figure of the gentleman who, like the heterosexual male was yet another
type of hegemonic masculinity that existed in the Victorian era. Even though, unlike its
predecessors the text lacks a basic awareness of masculinity as a social construction, nevertheless
it successfully combines Victorian notions of masculine gender identity with that of social class
and the world of commerce. For Gilmour, the concept of “gentleman” is significant firstly because
it was for most Victorians “a cultural goal, a mirror of desirable moral and social values” (1981:1),
and secondly because this notion lay “at the heart of the social and political accommodation
between the aristocracy and the middle classes” (2). For Gilmour it is the assumption, rather than
the reality, of gentlemanly status that worked to satisfy middle class men and their “desire to be
accepted by the traditional hierarchy”(9). By linking characteristics associated with the gentleman
(which included physical appearance as well as moral character) to the idea (if not reality) of
social mobility, Gilmour establishes how gender identity functions in a larger historical
framework making the visibility of a certain type of hegemonic masculinity—in this case the
figure of the gentleman— more vital than its actuality.
Drawing from the insights of both feminists and historians, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), offers an account of
relationships between men and how these relationships impinge on men’s relations with women.
Sedgwick uses the term “male homosocial desire” to refer to all male bonds, including, potentially,
everyone from overt heterosexuals to overt homosexuals. In this sense, Sedgwick combines in her
study, a type of hegemonic masculinity with another type of subordinate masculinity. She
differentiates between “homosocial” and “homosexual” positing that the former signifies a form of
male-male bonding often accompanied by the fear or hatred of homosexuality. She rejects the
notion that one can readily distinguish the three categories of hetero-, bi- and homosexual men
from one another, because what might be conceptualized as ‘erotic’ depends on a series of
unpredictable local factors. Borrowing from Rene Girard’s theory of ‘mimetic desire’ to describe a
triangular structure of desire, Sedgwick argues that when two men vie for the same woman, their
potentially homoerotic desires get routed through the woman who then “can be seen as pitiable
or contemptible” (1985:160) for she exists merely as an emblem of desire between men. In the
latter half of her study, Sedgwick uses this paradigm in order to analyze a series of romantic
triangles operating within eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction such as Tennyson’s The
Princess, Eliot’s Adam Bede, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and The
Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sedgwick’s was a seminal work because it argued that feminist analysis
of gender roles in the nineteenth century is incomplete if it fails to also include an examination of
erotic relations between men as these existed within mainstream ideologies of masculinity from
the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

(b) The 1990s: Burgeoning Period of Victorian Masculinity Studies

The achievements of feminist and sexuality studies scholars of the 1970s and 1980s laid the
groundwork for the rapid development of Victorian Masculinity Studies in the 1990s when it came
 112 Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V7N3, 2015

into its own as a distinct and established academic field of literary, historical and cultural inquiry.
Reiterating issues pertaining to the formation and practice of Victorian masculine identity, all of
these studies sought to seek answers to questions raised by earlier critics: What are the
differences between hegemonic and subordinate forms of Victorian masculinity? What is the
relationship between the two forms of masculinity? How can these distinct forms, the patterns of
creating, acquiring, embodying and sustaining them be classified and theorized, and their inter-
relationship(s) articulated?
One of the leading accounts of subordinate masculinity produced during this period is
Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (1994) which
insists, as the title itself indicates, on the cultural weight of Oscar Wilde’s example. Dissecting the
history of the image of homosexual men and its relation with effeminacy, Sinfield argues that
Wilde’s effete behavior did not necessarily suggest homosexuality to his Victorian contemporaries
until during and after the conviction. Sinfield thus sees the series of 1895 trials involving Wilde as
the defining moment in the production of the twentieth century male queer identity. Even
though effeminacy is a social construct with a history of its own that is separate from the history
of homosexuality, yet because of the typifying cultural force of Wilde’s individual case which
included his own life-history, the trials and their dissemination, effeminacy forever came to be
inextricably linked to, and synonymous with, male homosexuality creating the “Wildean
stereotype” (1994:149) that exists even to this day. Surveying the shifting connotations of
effeminacy across English literary history from Marlow and Shakepeare, through Wycherley,
Tobias Smollett and Sheridan, to Tennyson, Thomas Hughes and then to Wilde, Sinfield’s
ultimate aim is to show how “dominant twentieth century queer identity…has been
reconstructed…mainly out of elements that came together at the Wilde trials: effeminacy, leisure,
idleness, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism” (12).
If the Wilde Century is concerned with the enmeshment of queer identity through the
figure of the effeminate man and the male homosexual, then Joseph A. Kestner’s Masculinities in
Victorian Painting (1995) offers a detailed analysis of some compelling pictorial depictions of
Victorian men in contexts ranging from the social, historical, anthropological, imperial to the
literary, educational, institutional, legal, and aesthetic. Utilizing images from the works of
Victorian artists such as Leighton, Waterhouse, Burne-Jones and Alma-Tadema to Dicksee, Pettie,
Watts, Woodville and Tuke to name a few, Kestner’s main argument is structured around the
examination of “five pivotal representations of males which evolved a paradigmatic masculinity
for nineteenth century British culture: the classical hero, the medieval knight, the challenged
paterfamilias, the valiant soldier and the male nude” (1995:42). He posits that the portrayal of men
in paintings both “constructed the paradigm of masculinity” as well as “interrogated it/conflicted
it by proposing inadequacies, fissures, inconsistencies, incommensurabilities in the prevailing
paradigm” (19). Kestner concludes that social institutions are influenced by, as well as influence
and employ artistic representation which in turn leads to the formation of gender ideologies.
However, it is not merely heterosexual masculinity that is of interest to Kestner but also male-
male desire, or what he calls “homoeroticism” (250). In the final chapter, he explores pedagogic
and pedophilic relations among men through the theme of Icarus (often embodying ephebic
qualities) as represented in the art of Draper and Richmond. In addition, he also unearths
swimming and bathing scenes involving men in the paintings of Fredrick Walker to reveal how
the male gaze was centered on the male nude thus replacing the traditional female nude as the
site of desire. The book can thus be seen to cover aspects of both hegemonic and subordinate
Victorian masculinities. In this way, Kestner’s work, as he himself points out, registers the
plurality of masculinities by emphasizing that the term “ ‘masculinities’ recognizes how the term
113 Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the Trajectory of the Development of
Victorian Masculinity Studies

‘masculinity’ cannot be monolithic or essentialist in the sense of applying to all males, which
would be to ignore differences among men of class, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity or
nationality” (5).
Much like Kestner, Herbert Sussman’s aim in Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and
Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (1995) is to see “masculinity as a historical
construction rather than an essentialist given”(14). The subject of the book is to “refashion the
notion of manliness and of artistic manhood” (2-3) as it emerged in the literature and art of the
period from 1830 to 1860. He contends that early Victorian masculinity existed not as a
“consensual or unitary formation, but rather as fluid and shifting, a set of contradictions and
anxieties” (2) between hegemonic conceptions of masculinity and the lived experiences of men.
Sussman aims to unravel this conflict, in particular, through a “discourse of monasticism”(57). For
nineteenth-century men, “manhood was conceived as an unstable equilibrium of barely
controlled energy”(13). Thus Sussman’s main argument is that the figure of the celibate monk was
used by “representative figures” (1) such as Carlyle, Robert Browning, Pater and the Pre-Raphaelite
brothers for “turning male energy…to the production of art” (4). Because the Victorians classified
masculine energy as being innate and were concerned with appropriate ways of channeling this
energy, the lives of monks provided these Victorian writers with a means to negotiate a manly
exterior with an artistic life which being “situated outside the male sphere…unmans the male
writer and artist” (6-7). Bourgeois marriages also meant the sapping of male creative potency so
much so that the monastery becomes for Sussman “an imaginative zone in which male writers
negotiate the troubled boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual” (5). In examining
speech patterns, actions, forms of physicality, degrees of self-control and emotional availability as
component parts of masculine self-representation, evident in the “anachronistic” (2) figure of the
artist monk in the work of these authors, Sussman identifies the development of a “masculine
poetics” that is marked by heterogeneity and contradiction. This emphasis on “contradiction,
conflict and anxiety” (150) points to the instability of Victorian manhood thereby establishing
these aspects as “the governing terms of Victorian masculinity” (15).
In line with Sussman’s Victorian Masculinities, James Eli Adams’ Dandies and Desert
Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995) is also concerned with rigorous moral (as well as
economic) discipline of the Victorian male as the basis of claims to cultural authority. In
exploring the ideal of manhood—self-discipline or ascesis—that was prevalent in the 1800s,
Adams examines the ways in which Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Tennyson, Arnold, Dickens,
John Henry Newman, Kingsley and Walter Pater attempted to construct a masculine identity for
themselves via icons of middle class-masculinity as varied as that of the dandy, gentleman,
soldier, prophet and priest. Given that the Victorian writer, both as a result of his vocation as well
as the cultural forces of industrialization, was deprived of the traditional male roles of his father’s
or grandfather’s generation, he sought these new styles of manhood since existing ideals, in
particular, that of intellectual labour became associated with the feminine and the domestic. In
order to avoid the charge of effeminacy and to masculinize intellectual vocations, these writers
took recourse in these models of masculinity transforming them into a “paradigm of ascetic
manhood” (1995:16). Adams argues that each of these theatrical roles of authorial creativity and
self-fashioning involved a degree of group secrecy creating a sort of “homosocial intimacy” that
threatened to disrupt “existing structures of authority” (230). Finally, Adams seeks to emphasize
the performative dimension of manhood and delves into the interrelations, complexities and
similarities between these types that are seen as an essential structure in the “rhetorical
transaction” of masculine self-fashioning (11). Victorian masculinity is thus always a performance,
 114 Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V7N3, 2015

a ‘style’, that is at once both personal and social.

In keeping with questions regarding the hegemony of such styles and constructs of
masculinity, is Angus McLaren’s The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930
(1997) that argues how nineteenth and twentieth-century western society created what we now
take to be the traditional model of the heterosexual male. By examining a series of cultural
documents ranging from court records, medical texts and journalistic reports to literary
representations, McLaren reveals the process of social construction whereby “normal sexual
behavior, and male gender identity” (1997:7) were selected, delineated, and maintained. The
central argument of the book is that the ideal of manhood, or what McLaren calls “dominant” (10)
masculinity was constructed historically by default, legitimized as it were, against new “negative”
(10) categories of deficient masculinity such as the cad, the weakling, the homosexual, the
exhibitionist and the transvestite thereby suggesting the pluralized formation of masculinity. The
essential limits of what constituted the masculine or the “boundaries of masculine comportment”
(7) were policed through the collaborative discourses surrounding legal “trials” and the
“medicalization of male sexual deviancy” (134). This reinforced the notion of the heterosexual
male as being normative and embodying “the hegemonic model of masculinity” (231). He
concludes by asserting that the domains of law and medicine worked under the assumption that
“there was one essential form of masculinity…What they did not realize is that the model of
masculinity that they took as given was one that they were actually helping to construct” (238).
In John Tosh’s A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle Class Home in Victorian England
(1999), as opposed to the commonplace tendency shown by feminist scholars of treating
domesticity as an aspect of women’s history, the author attempts to redefine men’s relationship to
the domestic sphere by using a sample of sixty Victorian families and the advice literature of the
period. Tosh contends that “hegemonic masculinity” exercised its influence across the classes
because it “not only emphasized the authority of the paterfamilias over his wife and family, but
also stigmatized masculine traits that undermined this position” (1999:44-45). Even though the
ideology of separate spheres held sway during this period in terms of masculine and feminine
gender identities, roles and responsibilities, yet, the relationship between masculinity and
domesticity is far more complex than it has been usually understood. If the Victorian man spent
too much time at home, where women, in the role of wives and mothers, exercised their
influence, then he was seen as infringing upon domestic authority, becoming feminized himself
and thus not ‘manly’ at all. On the other hand, if he devoted too much time to the public sphere,
he was seen as guilty of neglecting his duties as the paterfamilias—a role that was the very basis
for Victorian ‘manliness.’ Tosh argues that the domestic man was thus caught in a precarious
balancing act between the private and the public. The pressures, contradictions and dilemmas
entailed a negotiation of Victorian ‘manliness’ (or what we understand today as ‘masculinity’)
between the divergent demands of the home and the world, one that is analyzed by Tosh across a
gamut of familial roles and relationships via which masculine gender identities in the period were
constructed: husband and wife, father and child, boyhood and manhood, the homosocial
environment of the public world and the heterosexual intimacies of the private home. In so doing,
Tosh conclusively shows how the notion of domesticity as “women’s sphere” was for the
Victorians, “a convenient shorthand, not a claim to exclusivity” (50), and that indeed, the doctrine
of separate spheres “has been more dogmatically asserted by modern scholars than it ever was by
the Victorians themselves” (77).

(c) The 2000s: Upsurge of Academic Interest in Victorian Masculinities

115 Theorizing Men and Men’s Theorizing: Mapping the Trajectory of the Development of
Victorian Masculinity Studies

Whereas the 1990s were concerned with establishing the plurality of Victorian masculinities, the
2000s have focused on problematizing Victorian masculinity by conflating its intrinsic plurality
with issues of imperialism, race, class, and economics. As a result, these works tend to be
interdisciplinary in nature rather than exclusively devoted to the subject of Victorian masculinity
as in the 1990s. By addressing men in contexts which may not, at first glance, lend themselves
easily to gendered analysis, the scholarship of the 2000s points toward the popularity of the
subject and the variety of topics as well as methodologies being pursued within studies of
Victorian masculinity.
In keeping with this trend, Bivona and Henkle’s “central contention” (4) in The
Imagination Class: Masculinity and the Victorian Urban Poor (2006) is that “many of the images
that [the Victorians] constructed served the purpose of self-definition of an emerging—and
largely male—professional class” (4). The authors argue that the representation of poverty served
not only to document the living and working conditions of England’s urban poor but also to
establish the difference between the bourgeoisie and the working classes. Such documentation of
the urban poor on the part of male, largely middle-class, writers helped construct a new definition
of the gentleman that associated him with the Victorian ideal of manhood—self-discipline—yet at
the same time, distinguished him from older, rank-based categories of masculine gender identity,
such as that of the dandy, that were increasingly being perceived as effeminate. In particular,
Bivona and Henkle argue how investigating and writing about the urban poor could be construed
as a “new sphere of manly adventure” (2006:6). In examining this figure of the middle class writer
as a slum-adventurer stepping into the slums to document the poverty therein, Bivona and
Henkle view him as part of a project that equates writing to physical labor thereby legitimizing
male writers as hard-working men. This construction of writing as a means of physical and
manual labor at once distances as well as brings closer men from the middle-class and the
working-class. The factory worker is filthy, uneducated, and a hired labourer while the middle-
class man is clean, educated, and in charge of his own labour yet both are similar in that they
work hard in the public sphere. In order to advance their thesis, Bivona and Henkle cover a wide
variety of texts ranging from the works of James Greenwood, Charles Dickens, Beatrice Webb,
Margaret Harkness, Arthur Morrison to George Gissing, H.G. Wells, Jack London and W.T. Stead.
The book can thus be seen to represent how exercises in male hegemony are enacted and how
these performances “could be brought within the hegemonizing of middle-class culture” (123).
The depiction of writing as an intellectual activity equal to physical action that is tied to
the establishment of a dominant middle class is also the subject of Joseph Sramek’s “ ‘Face Him
Like a Briton’: Tiger Hunting, Imperialism, and British Masculinity in Colonial India 1800-1875”
(2006). Sramek argues how the importance of establishing the middle-class author as active (both
mentally and physically) led to the representation of real men as those who were physically
aggressive, and in particular, traveled far from their homes to engage in wars or explore the
colonies. These representations of active soldiers and colonizers served as models of appropriate
masculine gender identity in the Victorian era. Sramek also contends that early-to-mid-century
tiger hunting in India was largely symbolic in that it offered the British a means to demonstrate
their physical and mental strength, and thereby validate their superiority over the colonized
people. By interweaving the three thematic strands of hunting, imperialism and masculinity, he
explains how this “gentlemanly chivalric ideal” became a “powerful rationale for British tiger
hunting [as it] began to develop in India: the supposed need for British hunters to protect Indian
men, women, and children from the savage creature” (2006:667). Imperialism demanded that the
British not only shield their own families but also “supplant the traditional roles of contemporary
 116 Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, V7N3, 2015

Indian rulers as benevolent protectors of Indian men, women and children against tigers and
other large beasts”(668). Even though Sramek analyses here a type of masculinity that existed in
the colonial period and one that he terms as “the British imperial masculinity” (662), the
construction of this type depends on the association of physical action with masculine gender
performance, and is therefore not very different from notions relating to hegemonic masculine
gender identity that were prevalent in Victorian England.
This is not to say, however, that the engagement of earlier critics with various forms of
nineteenth-century subordinate masculinities or the lives of sexually non-normative men in the
Victorian era has altogether vanished. In fact, as Joseph Bristow’s “Remapping the Sites of Modern
Gay History” (2007) shows, there has been a renewed interest in revising this old theme through
what he terms as “the new gay history” (2007:120). In this extensively researched essay, Bristow
reviews H.G. Cock’s Nameless Offenses: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003), Matt
Cook’s London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (2003), Sean Brady’s Masculinity and
Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (2005), and Morris Kaplan’s Sodom on the Thames: Sex,
Love and Scandal in Wilde Times (2005). Bristow observes that these works, even though
borrowing from Weeks and Foucault, have gone much beyond their predecessors, to bring out
newer domains for research into Victorian homosexuality. Whereas Cock’s study aims to situate
the patterns of arrest and the workings of the law for homosexuals within the context of history,
Cook and Kaplan focus on the cultural understandings of homosexuality brought about through
sex scandals and the popular press. Brady’s book is concerned with examining the development of
masculinity as a social status through historical research that challenges the medical and legal
construction of the male homosexual in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In
summation, according to Bristow, these writers “who sometimes indulge in mismanaged revisions
of Weeks’ and Foucault’s work succeed in remapping the intellectual terrain that their academic
forebears began to chart three decades earlier” (2007:120).

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The author is currently registered as a PhD Research Scholar at the Department of English,
IGNOU (New Delhi) and writing her thesis in the area of Victorian Masculinity Studies. She has
previously taught across various colleges in Delhi University including Hans Raj College, Jesus
and Mary College, St. Stephen’s College and Shri Ram College of Commerce. Her areas of
academic and research interest include Masculinity Studies, Advertisements and Popular Culture,
Nineteenth Century British Literature, Feminist Theory, and Film Studies.