The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (Corporealities: Discourses of Disability) - Softcover

Bourrier, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472052489 ISBN 13: 9780472052486

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2015

Synopsis

The Measure of Manliness is among the first books to focus on representations of disability in Victorian literature, showing that far from being marginalized or pathologized, disability was central to the narrative form of the mid-century novel. Mid-Victorian novels evidenced a proliferation of male characters with disabilities, a phenomenon that author Karen Bourrier sees as a response to the rise of a new Victorian culture of industry and vitality, and its corollary emphasis on a hardy, active manhood. The figure of the voluble, weak man was a necessary narrative complement to the silent, strong man. The disabled male embodied traditionally feminine virtues, softening the taciturn strong man, and eliciting emotional depths from his seemingly coarse muscular frame. Yet, the weak man was able to follow the strong man where female characters could not, to all-male arenas such as the warehouse and the public school. The analysis yokes together historical and narrative concerns, showing how developments in nineteenth-century masculinity led to a formal innovation in literature: the focalization or narration of the novel through the perspective of a weak or disabled man. The Measure of Manliness charts new territory in showing how feeling and loquacious bodies were increasingly seen as sick bodies throughout the nineteenth century. The book will appeal to those interested in disability studies, gender and masculinity studies, the theorization of sympathy and affect, the recovery of women’s writing and popular fiction, the history of medicine and technology, and queer theory.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Bourrier is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Measure of Manliness

Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel

By Karen Bourrier

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2015 Karen Bourrier
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-05248-6

Contents

Introduction: Men of Feeling, 
1. Charles Kingsley's and Charlotte Yonge's Christian Chivalry, 
2. Invalidism and Industry in Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman, 
3. Tom Tulliver's Schooldays, 
4. The Portrait of Two Gentlemen: Henry James's Invalids and Self-Made Men, 
Conclusion: Modern Men, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Charles Kingsley's and Charlotte Yonge's Christian Chivalry

Perhaps few authors have enjoyed such differing posthumous reputations as Charlotte Yonge and Charles Kingsley. Kingsley is known today as the author of swashbuckling stories for boys, Yonge as the author of pious family dramas for girls. Although Kingsley did in fact read and enjoy Yonge's work (Hayter 1), we can imagine the high church hero of The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Guy Morville, as the type of highly strung, effeminate man that spurred Kingsley to denounce John Henry Newman's theology. Yet there are also few Victorian novels that give a higher place to self-denial, chivalry, and the importance of suffering for others than The Heir of Redclyffe. G. A. Lawrence's rather odd assertion in his novel Guy Livingstone (1857), whose hero is an Oxford blood, that "men ... are most moved by the quiet and simple sorrows. ... [W]e yawn over the wailings of Werter and Raphael, but we ponder gravely over the last chapters of The Heir of Redclyffe" (276) gives an idea of the power of Yonge's depiction of masculine suffering. In this chapter, I read Kingsley's novels of the Crimea, Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857), alongside Charlotte Yonge's popular domestic drama The Heir of Redclyffe. In doing so, I make a claim for the centrality of spectacles of masculine suffering in developing the hero's sense of Christian duty. This theory of Christian chivalry is refined through sickroom scenes and the care of an invalid friend or brother, which teaches the hero the importance of protecting those who are weaker than himself. Finally, in both Yonge and Kingsley, masculine suffering is seen as enabling self-expression, so that each novelist develops a connection between invalidism and authorship. Disability comes to be seen as an enabling condition for the writer, as the immobility caused by invalidism gives him a chance to refine his powers of observation and his wit.

This connection between invalidism and authorship is viewed more positively in Yonge than it is Kingsley, who sees volubility as in greater tension with a self-assured masculinity. Yonge uses the spectacle of male suffering and invalidism to train the reader emotionally. In the Heir of Redclyffe, Charles, the Edmonstone family's disabled brother, conjoins an effusive sentimentality with a demand for self-discipline in a sometimes unstable equilibrium. The boredom of the sickroom causes him to long for action; there is a restless energy in his ennui that resembles the narrative energy necessary to set the plot in motion. But as the novel draws to a close, Charles, like the other characters in the novel, must learn to restrain his feelings. The novel's emotional trajectory, from the opening's ennui to the climax's angry intensity and the ending's calm, thus follows Charles's affective development, developing a connection among narrative form, authorship, and disability.

By contrast, Kingsley critiques his intelle

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472052489
• ISBN 13: 9780472052486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184