The novel, as a literary form, has been closely tied to cultural mores and contemporary social anxieties since its formal inception in the seventeenth century, although it was preceded by the romance genre, which can be regarded in much the same way. Having become a major literary form, and perhaps the most prominent since the eighteenth century, the novel both reflects and is a vehicle for discussing the social and cultural contexts of its own production. Not surprisingly, then, the novel reflects the tensions surrounding normative forms of masculinity, especially during periods of change and conflict.
History
Often regarded as the first modern novel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha was published in 1605 and satirises the preceding romance genre’s courtly ideals—epitomised in the gallant knight, rescuer of ladies in distress—while reinforcing normative masculine identities through the emasculation of its protagonist (Cartegena-Calderon 2000). An important distinction here is the work’s rejection of the stylised masculinity of earlier courtly and chivalric romances while concurrently satirising undue attachments to masculine ideals inappropriate on the grounds of age, class, race and social position. In line with this propitious opening to the genre, one of the earliest novels in the English language is Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, first published in 1688. With its hero an African slave in the new world, this work reflects the challenges of reconciling contemporary male privilege to racial difference and female authorship (Gruber 2003). This is particularly significant since the work is set and was printed during the politically contentious period of religious and imperial strife that followed the restoration of the monarchy, with its abjected slave hero also reflecting royalist ideals. This combination is indicative of the social pressures often examined in the novel by scholars. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) explores the same nexus of tensions revolving around relations between men across racial divisions (Haggerty 2005). In this work, Crusoe, a white Englishman, must manage his selfidentity when abandoned on an island with only a black male companion, thus anticipating the later interaction between theoretical studies of masculinity, race and postcolonialism. Significantly, these issues, which dominate critical approaches to masculinities in the novel in the 1990s and 2000s, have been with the genre since its inception.
Given the relative voyeurism and sense of transgression in Restoration English literature (1660 to approximately 1700), this focus on the shifting ground of masculine identities is not surprising. However, this contrasts with the English novel in the eighteenth century, where the genre is frequently taken up as a morally didactic medium suitable for feminine pursuits, in terms of both readership and authorship. Richardson’s Pamela: or, Virtue Kewarded exemplifies this turn well with the subtitle: Now jirst published in order to cultivate the Prindples of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes. With the novel increasingly seen as a conduct manual, typically for women but also for men, its tone shifts away from the sexual titillation found in some earlier French and English fictions. Nonetheless, the representation and struggle with masculine identities and notions of masculinity remain constant. In the same pattern as Pamela (1740) and as the most popular novel of its time, Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) draws a negative example of unsuccessful masculinity in the aristocratic seducer/rapist who violates the pure heroine (Spacks 1995). In contrast, Fielding resists Richardson’s didacticism and offers a more ribald though still morally virtuous masculine ideal in the lusty yet generous heroes of The History of Tom Jones (1749) and Joseph Andrews (1742) (Potter 1998; Bartolomeo 2002). More dramatically, the Marquis de Sade responded to these texts with sexually promiscuous and perverse characters in his novels of the late eighteenth-century.
However, the dominant mode of the eighteenth-century novel was sentimentalism, as seen in Goethe’s The Sonows of Young Werther (1774), where the male protagonist, after anguished self-examination, commits suicide, contrary to dominant notions of masculinity (Brodey 1999). Contrary to the idea that novels simply reflect social anxieties, however, this text prompted imitations in both life and art.
Whereas Gothic novels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) featured mysterious or tortured male characters, the nineteenthcentury comedy of manners more realistically portrayed men as subjects of economic calculation and as objects seen from the perspective of women seeking appropriate husbands. For example, Austen’s most famous novel, Pride and Prejudice (1813), excludes private conversations between men that were not readily observed by a woman and thus approaches notions of masculinity only through the public face of male characters (Brinks 2003; Frantz 2003).
The later nineteenth century saw the rise of the popular serial novel, its prime exemplars being Dickens in England and Dumas in France, with their various masculine ideals of a poor boy who goes from rags to riches and swashbuckling comrades wielding their swords to fight side by side.
In the twentieth century, there is an increasing shift to the psychological study of the male subject, such as in the male-centred existentialism of Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, whose male characters brood about the meaning of life, guilt and responsibility. The modernist novel is particularly rich in ties to the predominant social anxieties and predilections of the period and continues to express developing notions of masculinity (Boone 1998; McKracken 2001). The quintessential exemplars of modernism are expressly concerned with gender and the social construction of normative masculine and feminine roles (McKracken 2001). For instance, the change from male to female experienced by the protagonist in Woolfs Orlando (1928) requires the reader to examine the role of gender and the behaviours expected of each sex in life and in literature. Lawrence likewise challenges received notions of masculinity through the homoerotic male bonding of the ostensibly heterosexual male protagonists of such novels as Women in Love (1920). Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934) became one of the most famously banned books of the twentieth century, prompting a legal battle of greater intensity than either Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) or Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) (Boheemen-Saaf and Lamos 2001), primarily owing to his satirical representations of American and European masculinity performed through misogyny and sexual conquest. The sexist, apparently unconscious male-centred tendencies of the early modernist novel have been much discussed, while the high modernist novels of the 1940s and 1950s explore the social construction of gender roles more explicitly.
In late colonial and postcolonial novels, race, class, gender and other intercultural points of conflict are shown to intersect with masculinities, and critics have focused upon the connections between sexualities and identity politics that are produced or maintained in hybrid postcolonial societies (Ouzgane and Coleman 1998). In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), for example, Kurtz and Marlowe show competing modes of British masculine identity that contrast with the simultaneously denigrated and idealised men of the Belgian Congo. In Gide’s L’lmmoraliste (1902) the feminised French protagonist rediscovers his masculine identity through interactions in Algeria, whereas in Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60), the recovery of masculinity ironically becomes an express concern of the emasculated narrator although its essential or constructed nature is questioned by homosexual and bisexual male and powerful female characters as well as by gender-indeterminate passages (Boone 1998). Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) closely examines male and female relationships among the Igbo in preand post-contact Africa, as well as gendered constructions of selfliood and colonial relations between men of competing nationality. Ondaatje compares competing interracial conceptualisations about able-bodied and disabled forms of masculinity in The English Patient (1992), while Rushdie’s Fury (2001) explores the emasculation of middle age from the perspective of male—female relations and the postcolonial migrant’s experience in urban and rural societies. All of these novels have been studied with regard to the relationship between postcoloniality and masculinities.
Critical approaches
Studies of the forms of masculinity represented in novels began to seek prominence in the 1980s, most notably with Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1992). This points to the emergence of literary studies of masculinities developing within academic gay and lesbian studies and feminist approaches to the novel as a genre. This trend continued through the 1990s and early 2000s. The overlap between literary studies of masculinities with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory and feminism remains significant, as does the generally interdisciplinary nature of masculinities studies based in the arts. Other approaches within literary criticism about masculinities in the novel include single author studies (Boheemen-Saaf and Lamos 2001), those relating to postcolonial masculinities (Ouzgane and Coleman 1998), and studies of modernism as a literary movement (Boone 1998).
The general recent trend in studying masculinities in the novel has been to focus on masculinities and the queer male protagonist or to decipher queer readings of the ostensibly heterosexual male protagonist. Particularly important novels in this trend, apart from pornographic or erotic texts with homoerotic or homosexual materials, such as Fanny Hill (1749) and Teleny (1890), begin with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). This work ties the protagonist’s close bonds with other male characters to Wilde’s aestheticism and dandyism, challenging the stereotypical notions of male identity and behaviour of his time (Sedgwick 1992). In the same vein, Mann’s novella Death in Venice (1912) depicts a similar aesthete also struggling not only with the relationship between masculinity and aging, but also with his lateblooming homoeroticism. Melville’s posthumously published novella Billy Budd (1924) and Forster’s similarly posthumous novel Maurice (1971) have also attracted criticism from the joint directions of masculinities studies and of gay and lesbian studies (Sedgwick 1992). Operating against the social taboos that still surround such subjects, such studies have only begun to explore the ties between male bonds generally and men’s homoeroticism.
References and further reading
Bartolomeo, J. (2002) Matched Pairs, Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press.
Boheemen-Saaf, C. van and Lamos, C. (eds) (2001) Masculinities in Joyce, Amsterdam: Rodolpi.
Boone, J. (1998) Libidinal Currents, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Brinks, E. (2003) Gothic Masculinity, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Brodey, I.S. (1999) ‘Masculinity, sensibility, and the “man of feeling”’, Papers on Language and Literature, 35 (2):115–41.
Frantz, S. (2003) ‘Jane Austen’s heroes and the great masculine renunciation’, Persuasions, 25: 165–75.
Gruber, E.D. (2003) ‘Dead girls do it better’, Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 14 (2):99–117.
Haggerty, G.E. (2005) ‘Thank God it’s Friday’, in M.E.Novak and C.Fisher (eds) Approaches to Teaching Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, New York: Modern Language Association, pp. 78–87.
McKracken, S. (2001) ‘From performance to public sphere’, Textual Practice, 15 (1):47–65.
Ouzgane, L. and Coleman, D. (1998) ‘Postcolonial masculinities’, Special Issue of Jouvert, 2 (1).
Potter, T. (1998) Honest Sins, Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press.
Sedgwick, E.K. (1985) Between Men, New York: Columbia University Press.
(1992) Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Spacks, P.M. (1995) ‘The grand misleader’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 28 (1):7–22.
