Critical Survey

The study of Victorian masculinities is now a burgeoning field. In 1995 an emphasis on pluralities was registered in titles such as Herbert Sussman’s Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art and Joseph A. Kestner’s Masculinities in Victorian Painting. Ten years on, Martin A. Danahay’s Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity would still be concerned with the many and competing ways in which masculinity was represented in the nineteenth century. This is not the only task of writers on masculinity, however. In 1995 R.W. Connell noted: ‘To recognize more than one kind of masculinity is only a first step. We have to examine the relations between them. Further, we have to unpack the milieux of class and race and scrutinize the gender relations operating within them.’ Much recent work on masculinity does just that and the essays published here reflect this imperative.

In its review of the Grosvenor Gallery’s June 1880 exhibition, the Victorian society magazine The Queen juxtaposed reproductions of Carl Haag’s A Zulu (1880) – a striking profile of a black male warrior – and S.M. Fisher’s portrait of Ethel, Daughter of W. H. Peake, Esq. (c.1880) – a young white girl seated and demurely facing the viewer. The magazine’s readers would have been struck at once by the contrasts between the two images: one body, male, adult, black and in a ‘savage’ state of undress; the other, female, child, white and properly attired in so many respectable layers of clothing that only her face remains uncovered. According to The Queen, the figures in these two works ‘represent respectively Barbarism and Civilisation, each in the highest types’

Animal imagery and anthropomorphic parallels abound in Rider Haggard’s fantastic African adventure, She (1887). Africa itself is presented to the reader as a landscape inhabited by ‘beastly’ natives and wild animals galore. Even the novel’s overpowering female presence, that of ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’ (as Ayesha is known by those natives over whom she rules), is eventually reduced to a simian status. Such a textual focus, fitting comfortably into a more extensive dream of Victorian empire, lent the novel cultural, as well as fictive, power. The animal imagery helped to produce durable models of African identity and otherness which were compatible with current ideas of geography, race and human evolution.

James Eli Adams, in Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (1995), has written of the ‘intractable element of theatricality in all masculine self-fashioning, which inevitably makes appeal to an audience, real or imagined … even the normative is typically asserted as an unending performance’. It could also be argued that ‘masculine self-fashioning’, and the necessity for display to an audience gaze, is taken to its extreme in the world of entertainment, where men appear on stage, in costume, wearing make-up, and acting out aspects of masculinity often alien to their own personae. Through applying this debate to nineteenth-century popular culture, this article discusses men who confronted the gaze of both sexes while posing as living statues, displaying muscular strength, or encouraging idolatry through their charismatic presences on the legitimate stage.

In nineteenth-century Britain, pulmonary tuberculosis – known as phthisis, decline or consumption – killed more people than any other disease. Furthermore, the social and ideological impact of consumption extended far beyond mere mortality. The common belief in an identifiable, hereditary ‘consumptive type’ of person, combined with the often chronic nature of tuberculosis, caused the disease to be regarded as a permanent, identity-conferring condition. Popular belief in the hereditary ‘consumptive type’ long predated the publication of Darwin’s theories of human evolution in 1871 and survived long after 1882, when the disease was proven to be contagious rather than hereditary, indicating that consumption carried a complex cultural significance independent of its scientific status.

The masculinity of the Victorian painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) has always been a subject of intense interest for scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and art history. The question ‘how manly was Rossetti?’ resurfaces every so often, and answers have always been varied. Jay D. Sloan’s ‘Attempting “Spheral Change”: D.G. Rossetti, Victorian Masculinity and the Failure of Passion’ (2004) positions Rossetti as a nonconformist, a man who rejected gender norms and sought to express his manhood through a rhetoric of passion. Sloan’s argument provides a neat contrast to one provided by Herbert Sussman in Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (1995), in which Sussman argues that Rossetti crafted a ‘Bohemian’ model of manhood that, despite its veneer of otherness, allowed room for ‘masculine’ expressions of a normative nature.

This article explores the ambiguous role of gender in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and early criticism, an aspect of his work hitherto almost entirely neglected by Victorian scholars. In the first part, a link is posited between effeminate caricatures of Arnold and his early work and those of John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, whose notions about the peculiar spiritual value of poetry and of contemplative seclusion exercised a pervasive influence upon Arnold as an Oxford undergraduate in the early 1840s and indeed throughout his life. The article goes on to suggest that while Newman felt confident enough to propose an alternative ideal of manliness based upon the traditionally feminine, yet irrefutably Christian, virtues of self-denial, self-inspection and obedience, Arnold lacked the certainty which Newman’s faith gave him, and, in addition, felt that he had failed to live up to the contrasting ideal of self-assertive, active manliness propounded by his father, Newman’s arch-rival and critic, Thomas Arnold.

Born in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1966, Niall Griffiths lives in the west Wales town of Aberystwyth. Now with seven novels to his credit, Griffiths originally arrived on the literary scene in 2000 with his first book, Grits, much of which was based on personal experience. Incorporating a narrative style critics frequently describe as ‘uncompromising’, Griffiths’s convincing regional vernacular lends his work a good deal of its authenticity, or, as the author puts it, the argot of place and class ‘carries a weight of nonestablishment, marginal knowledge’ (see page 102). This conviction is akin to shibboleth, to the recovery of custom and place and language that dominates his work. To see his fiction in this light necessitates acceptance that the vast multitude so often unrecognised in literature have a story to tell. Yet critics unwilling to comprehend the world inhabited by Griffiths’s characters invariably reach for adjectives such as ‘stark’, ‘raw’ and ‘uncompromising’ – the accustomed synonyms attributed to his work – as a means of explaining away a view of society at odds with their own.

Journal Frau Schackenberger’s Afternoon RUTH O’CALLAGHAN

Thorn Gruin’s Sorrowful Sonnet JOHN LUCAS

Defying the Odds: Selective Poems by David Tipton (Sow’s Ear Press, 2006), 216 pp. ISBN-10: 0-95432-481-1, £9.99.

Notes on contributors