6 - Monstrous Masculinities from the Macaroni to Mr Hyde: Reading the Gothic ‘Gentleman’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
Summary
Come trollops and slatterns
Cock't hats and white aprons
This best our modesty suits
For why should not we
In dress be as free
As Hogs’ Norton squires in boots?
(Jerrold 1911: 92)Citing Kelly Hurley in her 2004 text, Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Catherine Spooner suggests:
The province of nineteenth-century human sciences was after all very like that of the earlier Gothic novel: the pre-Victorian Gothic provided a space wherein to explore phenomena at the borders of human identity and culture – insanity, criminality, barbarity, sexual perversion – precisely those phenomena which came under the purview of social medicine in later decades. (Spooner 2004: 87)
While Hurley draws a timeline between Romantic Gothic and late Victorian Gothic via scientific and pseudo-scientific means, Spooner augments this by focusing on ‘another equally discriminating gaze: that of fashion’ (ibid.: 87). Fashion, as she argues, finds its apogee in the discourse of the dandy, a ‘monstrous spectacle’ who ‘seems to reproduce a Jekyll-and-Hyde dualism whereby public self and monstrous self are inextricably linked’ (ibid.: 87). Such a comment deserves to be unpicked as it points to what might be defined as a crisis of masculinity, spanning the nineteenth century, wherein deviant masculinities (such as the dandy), are coded as effeminate, feminine or freakish in heteronormative discourses. In opposition and stark contrast to these lesser masculinities, the discourse of the gentleman was both a social ethos and a badge of honour based on a Greco-Roman ideal which brooked no blemish, parody or imitation. The gentleman embodied civic humanism, independence and martial attributes as masculine virtues. As Lawrence E. Klein observes:
Civic humanism was preoccupied with the threat of decay and dissolution of the body politic as well as with the conditions for its survival and health. Its view of history was cyclic: states moved from savage to more advanced stages, but following loss of virtue or corruption they would become effeminate, degenerate and decline. Morality was seen as the way to achieve political stability, while moral failures (corruption, effeminacy and selfishness) were seen as threats to the welfare of the state. Civic virtues such as courage, frugality, and military prowess were pitted against such vices as luxury, corruption, cowardice and ‘feminine’ characteristics (such as softness and sensuousness). (Klein 1989: 593)
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- Information
- The Victorian Male Body , pp. 128 - 147Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018