I N T R O D U C T I O N

Spectres ofMen offers an analysis of the various ways in which hegemoniemasculinity has been constructed, contested, and preserved in selectedworks of British literaturę. By reading a number of texts from the MiddleAges to the present, and by situating these works in the larger culturalmilieu, this book describes some of the processes of othering that havebeen crucial to the formation of the successive models of manhood. Sińcethe gendering of men has involved the exclusion of a number of elementsperceived as unmanly at a given point in time, a part of this project is todelineate these elements, to illustrate their changeability, and to describetheir gradual inclusion into the dominant image of masculinity. Whilethe set of "others" against whom manliness has been defined is historicallydependent, alterable, and expcndable, Spectres ofMen focuses primarily onthe separations drawn along the lines of class, nationality, race, and sexuality,all of which arę subsumed under the category of effeminacy. Effeminacy hasplayed a key and constant role in defining hegemonie masculinity, althoughit has been variously attributed to different bodies, objects, or concepts.Therefore, one o( tlie basie aims of the book is to show the multiple waysin which eftcminacy has been conceptualised, and to outline the dynamie,md m u t u a l l y dependent relations between the notions of the feminine andrhe mascul inc, as wel l as their suecessive implications in the construction ofv. i lue systems. (iender is nor only an abstraet category, but also a lived andcmbodicd praeiice, and that is why Spectres oj Men situates various modelsol m a s c u l i n i t y w i t h i n their speeific social contexts, thereby giving them,i liistory. Ii is a history ot constant changes and shi f t ing gender positions,and ol subjccts i m w i n g towards "terms ol gender designations" that arę"constantly in t l i ć proeess ol being rcmade" (Burler 2004: 10). Historicising

I N T R O D U C T 1 O N

cr in . iy lu-lp c x p l a i n why and how these termshave been remade, as well.is siingcst w l i y somc of thcm continue to be unchanged.

' l l u- m.ijor l o c i i s of rhis book is the dominant image of manhood thatpiw. i i l s ,it .1 g ivcn timc, cxamined herc on the basis of male-authored fiction. n . l ,i sel iTtion of p o l i r i c a l , philosophical, social, and critical writings by

im n l ł \ In, u s i n g 0 1 1 tcxtsby andaboutmen, SpectresofMen does not zim &tI m l i i i g o i l u T u - x i s ni guulcrs, but rather at examining a specific "system

ni s i ^ n i l u . i i i n n s l i \ w l i i i h .1 socicty or a section of it understands itself andn i . l n mi i s \\ n 11 i l u w di K l" ( l )ollimore andSinfield 1985: vii). Masculinityi . . I | I | I I . I . H h. .1 in i l u book .is i r l . u i o n a l , formed against a set of others in

M , | . | . v - . \ M I I I I . i i | i n w i i I H iworks, and therefore always addressing othery,i l u l i i1. ,u ul i . x i 1 . , . v c n whcn, or perhaps particularly when such evocations

ml n|u n l \ , | . k l i n w l i i l g C i l .

"M,IM i i l i i u i y " tl a key term employed in this study, and it is used to1 1 " KOndcrlllg proccsscs in the works from Beowulfto the present

l - i i . i i i . l . i . i i l i . n n r, .1 u - l . i t i v c l y rcccnt concept. The f irst recordedusageni n i . i - i i n l i n i i \ i n l;,nglund datcs back to mid-eighteenth century, and itl . . . .HM. •.MIOIIMIIOUI wlth "manliness" only at the end of the nineteenth. . m i n \ r . m i i l i 2004i 9). "Manliness" comprised the essential manly

• ' l - I n dlly ftdmired in a mań, and, by mixing "the ethical" with11 ii," lt providcd the paragon of civic virtues and heroic

M U ni i loith 1994: 180-182). This morał dimension of manhoodWM *b«i IH M I mtmcilllnlty," which in the łatę nineteenth century described

!• H'td by all incn, rcgardless of their social position (BedermanH IN), In Sfwttw of Men, "manliness" is used to describe nineteenth-

i . u l , l w i nilclh-ccntury models of manhood, and to stress the morałi l i i n . i i u l u i i , , l l u l n g u innn. In most cases, however, "masculinity" is used

-ul i ti i | u u l i t y shared by all men and a specific script of manlybłlinvlni I lu cholcc of "masculinity" is to highlight the impossibility of

l» i u « i n i l u - "natural" and the cultural, as well as to stressIM i u r y pcrspective from which the analyses arę conducted.

A i l i l l l l i i l i i i l l y , whl lc tlić cxaminations in Spectres ofMen demonstrate thatthfff łM <lw»y» mttny masculinities at any point in time, "masculinity" is

h. n H M .1 in i l u - s ingular to underline the persistence of the attempts.n nu.i) ' , . n l . i imified and stable małe subject position.

II | . i ni hegemonie masculinity conveys this sense of thei i b j c i i ,is always already internally split and variegated, with

"masculinity" scen as a dynamie construct, which includes the dominanceof men over women, relations of subordination between groups of men,complicity in global patriarchal privilege of men as a group, and processesof marginalisation along the lines of class, race, ethnicity, agę, sexuality,and other differences significant at a given time (Connell 2005). R. W. Connellhas defined hegemonie masculinity as a "configuration of gender practicewhich embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of thelegitimacy of patriarchy" (2005: 39), and which, although it may not bethe most common one, is the most visible form of masculinity, embodyingnotions of cultural authority and leadership (Connell 2001). Spectres o f Menemphasises these notions of cultural authority and leadership by focusingon texts that have shaped the dominant ways of thinking about men, andwhose influence persists throughout time to mould contemporary genderpractices. Thus, for example, Thomas Carlyles ideas of ennobling manlylabour continue to underlie contemporary concepts of work, andD. H. Lawrence's dream of a society of men has proyided a point of referencefor a number of małe writers and critics throughout the twentieth centuryto the present. The canonical works of these małe "organie intellectuals" aręread alongside their less known or influential texts and alongside texts byother, less prominent men in order to both illustrate the diversity beneathany dominant concept of manhood and to show the continuing persistenceof certain themes, such as the link between manliness and capitalism, which,though yariously defined, has continued to be madę.

Gender designations arę produced simultaneously across a number ofsites and arę often contradictory. My reading of literary texts against non-literary writings is to convey this sense of contradictoriness and to point tothe variety of writings involved in the construction of the dominant model.The difference between the literary and non-literary is erased in many ofthe texts under discussion, and it is hardly possible to, for example, separateCharles Kingsley s project of a better society based on healthy bodies from themuscular heroes of his novels, or to approach comments such as John Ruskinscondcmnation of Shakespeares Ophelia as a "weak woman," who "fails Hamletat the critical moment, and is not [...] aguide to him when hę needs her most"(Ruskin 1871: 139) from the perspective of literary standards. Ruskins planfor educating women into their gender role through reading appropriatebooks m.ikes the l i n k between gender and l i teraturę explicit, and also suggeststhat the division into l i terary and non-l i terary works may be gendered as wcll.

10 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Literaturę has played an important role in the re-production of gendercategories, and the gendering of men has involved also the gendering ofliterary works, where some genres or forms, such as the epic or tragcdy, aręperceived as masculine, and othcrs, such as the pastorał or the sonnet, aręconsidered as emasculating. The gendering of literary works is historicallyspecific, and continues to provide a regulatory framework as visible in,for example, the contemporary divisioii into Chick lit and Lad lit, or theuse of the Bildungsroman to record twentieth-century stories of initiationinto manhood, thereby re-writing the eighteenth-century preference for"histories" and biographies over other, morę "effeminate" kinds of fiction.Tlić gendering of literaturę en-genders its readers: in 1982, Jonathan Cullernotcd that "rcading as a woman is not necessarily what occurs when a womanrcads: womcn can rcad, and havc rcad, as men" (1982: 49), and in 2005Alicc Fcrrebe summarised the masculine paradigm of twentieth-centuryBilaungsromans by describing their aim as one "to consolidate a communityfoundcd upon masculine principles of identity, and to console a genderanxious about its instability" (2005: 14). One of the basie assumptionsof Spedres uf Men is that literaturę, although it is not merely a reflectionof a particular timc or place, cannot be separated from the culture andsocicty in which it has been produced, and that by reading literary texts,and by placing them against other texts of their times, a certain "systemof significations" can be reconstructed. The texts arę thus approached asproducts of specific historical and social conditions with the aim to disclosethe "structure of feeling" - of "meanings and values as they arę activelylivcd and felt" (Williams 1977: 132) - that dominatcs a particular periodof cultural production, and to notę the culturally dominant, residual, andemergent elements present in these texts (Williams 1977: 132-134).

Raymond Williams's description of culture as encompassing dominant,residual, and emergent formations provides the generał framework withinwhich the analyses included in Spectres of Men arę placed, as well as themodel within which the production of masculinities presented herein issituated. Williams describes the dominant formation as the hegemonieone, and the emergent as the new that has not yet been fully formed,but where "new meanings and values, new practiccs, new relationshipsand kinds of relationship arę continually being created" (Williams 1977:122). The residual formation is one that, although formed in the past, is"still active in the cultural process [not] as an element of the past, but as

I N T R O D U C T I O N

an effective element of the present" (Williams 1977: 123). It is to bedistinguished from the archaic, which is "wholly recognized" as belongingto the past and is fully assimilated by the dominant culture as what is "to beobserved, to be examined, or even on occasion to be consciously 'revived', ina deliberately specializing way" (Williams 1977: 122). While some residuesarę incorporated into the dominant as idealizations or fantasies, the residualalso includes those "experiences, meanings, and values which cannot beexpressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture," andmay therefore support or give rise to new practices and forms (Williams1977: 122-123). The impact of past formations and the ongoing emergenceof new forms complicate the linear temporal framework and mąkę evidentthe indebtedness of both the present and the future to the past. As a result,the culture of a given time cannot be seen as monolithic and stablc, but asalways in the process of being madę and remade. It is anchored in the past,and it is destabilised by new practices and meanings, which can be eitheroppositional or alternative, and which Williams sees as emerging from "theexcluded social (human) area" (1977: 126).1

Spectres ofMen refers to this model of culture as a process in order toaccount for the co-presence of dominant, residual, and emergent models ofmanhood, as well as to describe the procedures of incorporating the new andre-inventing the old that arę inherent to hegemonie masculinity. Williamsstresses that the emergence of the new is never a smooth process, and that it isimmediately countered by an attempt at incorporating it into the dominantculture: as hę writes, the "new practice is not [...] an isolated process. Tothe dcgrce that it emerges, [...] the process of attempted incorporationsignificantly begins" (1977: 124). Within this model of ongoing culturalincorporation, the emergence of a new gender designation or a novel literaryronn is a ncccssary part of cultural production. It is not an abrupt disruptionof the hegemonie present, though, but a series of departures from and returnsto the old, and "a constantly repeated, an always renewable, move beyond.1 phase or practical incorporation" (Williams 1977: 124). As the readingsguthcred in this book demonstrate, the constant incorporation of the newinto the d o m i n a n t makes hegemonie masculinity an unstable construct, yetone thar remains a key element in the genderingprocedures that masculinisecertain ideas, texts, activities, and bodies and reminise others.

' W i l l i a m s p o i i u s to two sourccs ol t l ić cmergciu: " t l ić t l . iss .mii t l ić cxdiii lcd social (human)126),

12 I N T R O D U C T I O N

One effect that the emergence of the new produces is, according toWilliams, a "regular confusion between the locally residual [...] and thegenerally emergent" (1977: 125). This is a specifically temporal confusionwhen the old may be mistaken for the new and the past may be takenfor the future. Ultimately, this is a confusion caused by the ąuestion ofinheritance, of recognising the past as "an effective element of the present,"distinguishing it from the new, and deciding what to do with it. Inheritance,Jacąues Derrida writes, "is never a given, it isalways atask" (1994: 54),aboutwhich we arę reminded by the ghosts that come from the past, but that aręalways conjured by the present.2 The spectres "return because it is we whowant something of them" (Redding 2001), and their appearance leads toi\ tcrnporal confusion sińce "one can never distinguish between the future-to-comc and the coming-back of a specter" (Derrida 1994: 38).

In Spcctm nfMarx, to which my book owes its title, Derrida describesthe spccrrc as the element d isturbing the linearity of time andhistory.but alsomaking rlicir movcment possible sińce it is only by recognising the spectreas an cfTcctivc componcnt of the present that the new, always harbouredi n the old, may bcgin. The past is thus not only always part of the present,bur also a condition for the emergence of the future, with the spectre beinga rcmindcr of "rhe radical and necessary heterogeneity of an inheritance"(Derrida 1994: 16; cmphasis in the odginał), and sometimes merely of thepnss ib i l i ry of having a choice. Like Derridas spectre, Williamss residualruuints the present with memories of "human experience, aspiration, and,u"hicvcmcnr" which the current "dominant culture neglects, undervalues,npposes, rcprcsscs, or even cannot recognize" (1977: 124). The residues arę"a necessary complication of the would-be dominant culture" that open uprourrs inro rhc future by enabling the present to reach back to the meanings,md Y.ilnos which wcre created in the past, and which can be re-created inrhc ncxt phnsc of cultural production (Williams 1977: 126, 123). Likerhc rcslHue, rhc spectre is historical, it "belongs to the structure of everyhegcmony," and ir is always social (Derrida 1994: 4, 37, 151): it is conjuredw i r h l n spccific historical conditions and power relations by specific textsnnrl prnplr. The spectre i s neither merę fantasy nor an individual invention;

Tlić imssi l i i l i ty lo l i n k Raymond Williams's account of culture with Jacąues Derrida'si l r icr lp t lon of iprrrrrs has been notcd also by other critics. For example, John Toth connectsDcrrlił* with Williams in Jhe Passing of Postmodernism (2010), a book in which hę proposesj u i o i U l ul uiluu.ll .uulysis - spectroanalysis - based on Derridas concept of haunting.

it has a politics, and it continucs to haunt, productively and coercively,systcms of powcr and cultural production. Sińce "a ghost never dies, itremains always to come and to come-back" (Derrida 1994: 99), it preventsus from committing what Williams identifies as "the basie error" of criticismas well as life: "the reduction of the social to fixed forms" (1977: 129).

Spectres ofMen approaches the social not as a fixed form, but as whatis always in the making through the work of individual people, as well aspolitical and cultural institutions, and as what is kept in constant movementby the comings and goings of ghosts. Stephen Greenblatt has remarked thathauntology is "a queasy awareness of suppressed politics" (2002: 297), andone aim of this book is to mąkę the awareness less queasy by describing thegender politics of specific historical periods and cultural texts. There arę, forexample, reasons other than a fascination with abject aesthetics that mąkęthe Gothic return at specific historical times, and there arę well-knownpolitical and social reasons for the attempts to return to Yictorian valuesin the 1980s Britain. In proposing to think about the production of genderand literaturę as animated by spectres, this book conceptualises the socialand the literary as constituted by acts of welcoming or negating the comingof ghosts, and as always haunted by the possibility of their arrival. Thesuppressed apprehension of the "presence" of a spectre, the feeling of being"observed, sometimes under surveillance by it even before any apparition"(Derrida 1994: 101), is a key characteristic of literary production, as wellas of hegemonie masculinity, in which the new is incorporated into thedominant also as a means of delaying the eruption of radical pluralism.

The inheritance stressed in this book is the literary one, with most of theanalysed texts belonging to the canon of literaturę by men. On the one hand,the focus on the selective tradition makes particularly yisible the yariousprocedures of constant "interpretation, dilution, projection, discriminatinginclusion and exclusion" through which the residual is incorporated into thedominant andplaced in linę with its system ofvalues and meanings (Williams1977:123). On the other, it points to the homosocial character of the canon,where the production of individual works and their criticism can be seen asa speaking of men to men that is driven by what Harold Bloom (1973) hascalled the "anxiety of influence." Bloom describes literaturę as created by actsof artistic misprision, of wilful misreadings and misinterpretations whoseultimate aim is to install the successor as prior and superior to the precursor.It is an exclusively małe history of parricidal battles, in which literaturę is

14 I N T R O D U C T I O N

envisaged as "the enchantment of incest, disciplined by resistance to thatenchantment" (Bloom 1997: 95). The anxiety of influence is predominantlythe fear of belatedness, of having nothing to say, and of being flooded bythe literary father(s), while the greatness of the son, his creative strength, isdetermined by his ability not only to f ather himself, but also to mąkę himselfappear as his own precursor's father (Bloom 1997: 148-154).

This model of literaturę as endless revision leaves little space forthe presence of spectres and envisions the past as always already fullyincorporated into the present as its archaic element to be revived, observed,and sometimes denied. Bloom describes the act of creative revision as "a lie,"though "not against being, but against time" (1997: 130), and states thatliteraturę "is not a struggle against repression but is itself a kind of repression"(1997: 99). What is repressed is the possibility of otherness and difference,not only of the present, but also of the past, so that literary history becomesa history " of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, ofperverse, willfulrevisionism" (Bloom 1997: 30; emphasis in the original), and merely a tale ofthe endless transmission of małe authority. While Bloom postulates that noartist is "an autonomous ego" (1997: 91), hę also claims that the creator isnot determined by his specific political and social situation - as hę declares,"[pjolit icizing literary study has destroyed literary study" (1997: xvi).Paul Bovć describes the overall aim of this model of literary history as anattempt "to stabilize 'tradition' as a defense against time" which establishes"a productive but unaccommodated relationship with the past" (in Fite 1985:192). This relationship strives to negate the heterogeneity of inheritance andperpetuates the past as a version of the present through repeated misprisionsby writers and by critics, with the latter being perhaps morę dangerouslyrepetitious sińce they arę "not ephebes wrestling with the dead, but moręnearly necromancers, straining to hear the dead sing" (Bloom 1997: 65).

"Anxiety" has bccome one of the key terms used in current literarycriticism to describe the uncertainty that underlies and drives the efrorts withwhich hegemonie masculinity asserts its right over other masculinities andgenders. Unlike Bloom, who refuses to historicise anxiety, masculinity criticshave stressed the social causes and effects of the uncertainty, describing it asone of the basie mechanisms through which hegemony is sustained and małepower reproduced. In this perspective, while the anxiety of influence andthe writers desire to mark himself as different from his precursors continueto play a role in literary production, they arę secondary to the anxiety of

losing the powcr and privilege linked to hegemonie masculinity. Thedominant model of masculinity has been described by contemporary criticsas unccrtain of itsclf and anxious, with the anxiety defined in Freudian termsas the fear that anticipates a danger before it is actualised in order to preventits emergence. Mark Breitenberg has emphasised anxiety as the constitutivefactor of małe identity, and described it as "the result of projecting one'sown mental constructions," such as the fear of loss of reputation or honour,"onto the world or onto another person and then mistaking them asobjectively true" (1995: 4). Hegemonie masculinity is thus for Breitenberga self-defensive mechaiiism, in which "the most powerful threat to theconstruction of masculinity must be externalized, turned into an Other, butthe presence of the same threat is also the condition of masculinity" (1995:66; emphasis in the original), and his analysis of Early Modern English textsunderlines the status of the małe subject as always in "a state of suspicionwithout trust" and of "perpetual uncertainty" (1995: 5). Thus, while anxietyunderlies performances of masculinity in various times and places, it is alsohistorically specific and motivated not so much by the need to be different,but rather by the desire to be the same, to remain like other men.

In contemporary literary criticism, the production of hegemoniemasculinity has been represented as driven by the fear of otherness and asproceeding through a series of repressions and disavowals, or through a processthat Andrew Dowling calls "hegemonie deviance," in which "deviancy" ismanufactured in order to maintain "normalcy" (2001: 3). As will becomeyisible in the readingof this book, the hegemonie designates a white, upper- ormiddle-class, English, and heterosexual model of masculinity that respondsto yarious threats, real or imagined, by acknowledging some of them to beits integral part, and by extrapolating others onto other territories, botheonceptual and geographical. The adaptive character of masculinity hasbeen stressed by a number of critics, who follow the insights of the works byEve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel Foucault, which also provide a frequentpoint of reference in this book. This need to adapt is undoubtedly animatedby anxiety, a concept to which I return at various points in this book,and which I approach as an experience underlying not only masculinity,but all gendering processes, where the disavowals, negations and refusedidentifications through which subjects arę re-articulated as self-identical,return to haunt them interminably and constitutively (Butler 1995: 26).Anxiety is a psychic mechanism, whose content is determined by social

16 I N T R O D U C T I O N

processes and events that have a history and that, in turn, work to determinethe history of the anxious małe subjects. Although it certainly concerns themałe fears described by Breitenberg, anxiety animates a larger process ofpartition or differentiation of individuals from other subjects, objects, andthe world, and is an important part of the contemporary way of thinkingabout masculinity as always in crisis or, as this book argues, as haunted bythe possibilities of differently gendered becomings.

The idea that masculinity is in crisis has dominated recent criticalstudies, as well as popular representations of men. The 1990s were hailedfrom various positions as a time of acute masculinity crisis,3 and accountsof the crisis proliferated, either "celebrating" it as the proof of the needto rebuild men's damaged sense of self and their decreased power, orinterrogating naturalised notions of masculinity in attempts to deconstructthe mechanisms of patriarchal dominance (Archer 2004: 245). A growingnumbcr ot critics in the 1990s began to conceptualise masculinity as bydetinition in perpetual crisis (Wiegman 2002: 32), so that by the end ofthc decade, "masculinity as crisis" had become the "regulatory fiction" ofmasculinity studies and its "proscribed critical refrain" (Traister 2000: 297,281). 'Ihe ongoing focus on crisis has effectively interrogated masculinenorms, leading a number of critics to consider the possibility of a post-genderor post-patriarchal world. However, it has also rendered both "crisis" and"masculinity" somewhat yacuous, and risked reinforcing the normative ideałby obliterating and de-historicising the differences between various modelsot masculinity (Traister 2000: 297-299). Thus, alongside studies heraldingprogressive change, there have appeared morę cautionary accounts pointingto the need to examine transpatriarchies rather than post-patriarchies, andto "go back from masculinity to men, to examine the hegemony of men andabout men" (Hearn 2006: 47; emphasis in the original).

Spectres ofMen foregrounds the connection between masculinity andcrisis in order to present it as a defensive strategy that is inherent in hegemoniemasculinity. "Crisis," as Derrida writes, is "a very insufficient concept" (1994:78), and it attempts to impose a finite temporal framework on a process of

3 For example, in a 1997 issue of The Journal of Mens Studies, Ronald F. Levant,a psychologist of men and masculinity, simply stated that "there is a masculinity crisis" (221).Gail Bederman traces the contemporary use of the trope of "masculinity crisis" back to Joe L.Dubbert s "Progressivism and thc Mascul ini ty Crisis" published in the Psycboanalytic Revien> in1974(2011).

othering that is necessarily infinite. The rhetoric of crisis "falsifies historyby implying there was once a golden time of unproblematic, stable gender"(Gardiner 2002: 14), and obliterates the asymmetrical relation betweenthe past, the present, and the future by imprisoning them in a nostalgically(de)formed past. To insist that manhood is in crisis is to suggest that it is"a transhistorical category of fixed essence [...] rather than an ideologicalconstruct which is constantly being remade" (Bederman 1995: 11), as wellas to divorce it from other cultural and social processes implicated in theproduction of the crisis. Every crisis is historically produced, and it alsoproduces its own history, fabricating a set of ghosts to be struggled withand exorcised. By situating the various crises of masculinity within specifichistorical contexts, and by linking them to other crises, Spectres of Mencndeavours to write a history of masculinity not as crisis, but as changeableand negotiable, as always in transition which sometimes comes to be called•A crisis, either by its subjects or by the belated critics.

If hegemonie masculinity is formed against a set of others that aręsimultaneously extrapolated and internalised, then the notion of masculinityi n crisis implies a time of intensified production of others, accompaniedby A reinforcement of various borders and by a backlash against the forcesdcsignated as dangerous. Spectres ofMen describes a number of such periodswhcn the increased appearance of the new exacerbated the desire fors.uncncss, and points to the continuing use of gender categories to imposei K1 w divisions disguised as a repetition of the old. In various periods of rapidt r a n s i t i o n , whether economic, political or social, gender has been used toic d niw tlić: borders between the public and the private, and masculinityl i . i s Iłccn pronounced to suffer from a crisis. The gendered discourse.iccompanying the discovery of new lands or the threat of feminisationt'volu-d at t imcs of increased industrialisation and social change providen i i l i i s book somc cxamples of such intensified attempts to prevent thennrigcncc ol tlić new by incorporating it into the dominant or by makingl i p.n i ol the archaic.

l l i c lesearch on mcn and masculinity by women's, gender, queer, andi n . i s t i i l i n i t y studies has de-naturalised masculinity and madę men visiblerts gctulcrcit subjects, thcrcby significantly contributing to the emergenceof the most rcccnt masculinity crisis. Already in 1979, Peter Schwengerpoltucd to t l i ć cmasculating potential of gender criticism by claiming that"lt]o think abotit masculinity is to bcconic less masculine onesclf" sińce

I N T K O D U C T I O N

"one of the most powerful archetypes of manhood [is] chat the real mań isthe one who acts, rather than the one who contemplates" (1989: 110). Thefirst studies that approached masculinity as a problem appeared in the łatę1960s and 1970s, andwere significantly inspired by the womens movementand womens studies research (Messner 1997: 50). The initial accounts usedthe sex-role theory, which was criticised in the 1980s for its ahistorical andindividualistic focus, and was replaced at the end of the decade in "newmens studies" by an approach to masculinity as socially constructed andhistorically conditioned (Newton 2002: 185)/* This shift reflected thelarger turn from the examination of "sex" to the focus on "gender," a conceptintroduced by the anthropologist Gayle Rubin in "The Traffic in Women:Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975). Rubin's definition of"gender" as "a socially imposed division of the sexes" and "a product ofthe social relations of sexualiry" (1997: 40) was significantly extended inSedgwicks Between Men: English Literaturę and M ale Homosocial Desire(1985), a book whose publication marked the emergence of gender studiesas a scparatc field of enquiry (Schor 1992: 275).

A number of critics, including R. W. Connell, Harry Bród andMichael Kimmcl, have located the beginnings of masculinity studies infcminist criticism and womens studies programmes - the first masculinitystudies courscs in the 1970s and 1980s were taught within womens andgcndcr studies programmes (Gardiner 2002: 2). By the end of die century,masculinity studies, or studies of men and masculinities, had matured intoan independent discipline: in 1999, Connell claimed that it had developeda ncw intellcctual agenda (2005a: 36), and three years later Kimmel describedit as "an independent field" (2002: 2). In 1990, Joseph Boone and MichaelCiuidcn proclaimcd the existence of a distinct group of literary critics who,"cngcndercd by feminism," applied its methodologies to investigate thercprcicntfttlon of men in literary texts (1990: 2). Studies of masculinityprollferatcdi sińce the mid-1970s until 2002, over four hundred books onmen ftnd masculinities were published (Flood 2002: 203); by 2006, almost50 pucuil ol ihc books were in the areas of literary and cultural studies(Kmig and Kowland 2010: 9). In effect, hegemonie masculinity has been

' JuJlth Newton points to three collections published in 1987 as indicative of the change:Jltt Mnkutn of Mtutttlimties: 'Ihe New Mens Studies edited by Harry Bród; Men in Feminismcilltcil by Allwjardincand Paul Smich; and ChangingMen: New Directions in Research on Menunii MitiiMitnity cditcd by Michael Kimmel (2002: 179).

t l ioroughly deconstructed, de-naturalised, and re-embodied; it has beenrcpresented as rragmented, multiple, and contradictory, and, under theinfluence of Foucauldian criticism and queer theory, analysed as reactionaryand pcrrormative.

Ihe representation of men in British literaturę and the ways in whichl i tc rary works rcplicate or undermine the dominant models of masculinityhavc been the subject of numerous studies. These studies can be broadlydivided into, on the one hand, historicist explorations of the intersticesbetween the materiał conditions for the production of masculinity andits l i terary represciitations, and, on the other, psychoanalytically-orientedinqi i i r ic s into the internal mechanisms and contradictions involved intlie production of gender and literaturę.5 Ali of them focus on variousdisciplining mechanisms, both internal and external, and describe thestrategies through which hegemonie masculinity has been re-formed byrepressing or silencing a number of others. Specific historical periods andgenres liave been examined to explore the regulation of a fundamentallymobile desire and to record the anxious production of the masculine norm.A number of critics have focused on specific models of masculinity, such asmuscular Christians, bachelors or imperiał adventurers; analysed the linksbctween manliness and imperialism; examined the feminising influence ofy. i r ious practices, like intellectual labour; or studied threats to masculinity,i n c l u d i n g madness, homoerotic desire, and racial or class others. Whilei i i.s impossible to list all the studies and critics dealing with literarymasculinit ies, it is possible to summarise their overall aim as an attemptid prcseiit mascul ini ty as determined by specific historical conditions, ashcterogcneous, and as othered.

S(>irt>rs oj Men refers to these studies of literary masculinities andd i . i w s on thcir f indings to present the changing models of manhood

I l u ś b r i c f su ni n i . i r y rcrcrs to LI vcry complcx debatę between critics representing historicisti n - l psyihoanalytic approaches to the study of literaty masculinities. While the materialist

.i| 1 1 i i n.u l i d o m i n . i L e s i n conteniporary criticism, a number ofscholarshave criticised its limitations.l ni r x . i n i | i l c , ( ' h r i s n i p l i c r l ..mc- statcs that "excessive historicism" runs the danger of seeing anyI n i r n u l d i l l i i u l t i c s .is simply "tdways already moments of political crisis or significance, as if| i - i \ i 11 u l i l c WITC n i c r c l y an etfect o f c u l t u r a l pressure or historical events" (l 999: xviii; emphasisini l u ni i ^ i n . i l ) , .u u l L y n n c Scgal argucs that "[o]nly psychoanalytic thinking [...] begins to get any(( i i | i m i i l u - y o l . i t i l c i i . i r u r i 1 ol gender difterences, on the necessarily diyided, layered, fragmentedt iu l u i n t r . i d u t o r y l u t t i r c ol our s e x u a l identities" (1993: 627). In Spcctres of Men I attempt tol l l i l t c l l i c s r .ipproachcs hy prcscntmg the production ol hegemonie mascu l in i t i e s as ridden bybuth i ' X U ' i n . i l and i n t e r n a l e o n l l i e l s .

20 1 N T R O D U C T I O N

from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century, and to outlinethe processes of othering that have been employed in the construction ofhegemonie masculinity. The book is divided into six chapters, each dealingwith a particular historical period and focusing on the works that reflect,form, and question the dominant image of manhood. The titles of thechapters illustrate the processes that I see as dominating the production ofgender at a specific time. Thus, "binding" refers to the Medieval and EarlyModern efforts to demarcate a masculine sphere against the undifferentiatedfeminised space, and stresses the task of marking borders not only on theoutside world, but also on the małe body. "Bonding" defines the major aimof the eighteenth-century as establishing and stabilising the link betweenmasculinity and such crucial concepts as nationality and class belonging,and also points to the continuing importance of homosocial relationsin eighteenth-century England and to the misogyny accompanying theemergencc of the modern subject as małe. The nineteenth century isapproachcd as a period of intensified production of gender denominations,whcrc "labouring" highlights the concerted efFort to elaborate a codeof hcroic manlincss against yarious forces designated as feminine andrcminising. "Codifying" reflects the emphasis on imposing dirferencesbctwccn, on the one hand, various groups of men, particularly betweenthe aristocracy, uppcr-middle and middle-class men, and, on the other,bctwccn womcn and men, culminating in the reinforcement of the ideologyof scparatc spheres. The first half of the twentieth century is described by"struggling," which refers both to the actual combat in the world wars andto the ctforts to prcscrve and negotiate some ideals of the heroic manhooddamagcd by the First World War. Finally, "dissolving" summarises theinereascd dlvcrsification of the category of masculinity in the second half ofthe twcntlcth century under the influence of the womens movement, sexualmlnorltlcs. shifts in class relations, and economic and political changes,Inclllding the proccss of devolution. While the titles of the chapters highlighta particular łtratcgy of hegemonie masculinity, these strategies arę not to betrcatcd »« belonging cxclusively to a given period, but as always a part of thehegemonie Itructurc, variously mobilised to stabilise the relations betweenthe rciidual, the emergent, and the dominant. Similarly, although the titlesrcfer to ipecific periods, the chronological dhdsions arę frequently disruptedby my tum to past or future texts and practices, thereby pointing to the»n»chronlc movements of spectres.

N l K O I M . T l K I N 21

l l ic f i r s t chapter of Spec trą ofMen approaches Medieval, Early Modern,and Renaissance texts as haunted by the possibility of radical pluralism,and as attempts to impose a linear and dichotomised order on a worldcxpcrienced as chaotic, heterogeneous, and dangerous. The description ofthe endeavours to construct a unified internal space against a threateningoutside begins with Beowulf,wherc the work of the hero is predominantlyaimcd at delineating and combating a number of forces marked as feminine.I hę analyses of Beawulfand Sir Gawain and the Green Knight establishthe framework for considering other texts in this book, and emphasisethe homosocial movements both inside and outside the literary works.Homosociality and an overall gender ambiguity play a key role in the worksof William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser or Christopher Marlowe, andin the proto-colonialist discourses examined in the chapter. Geographicaldiscoveries, the development of new social formations, and technologicalchanges, includingthe invention ofprint, arę some of the processes that hadan impact on the early definitions of manliness, and that were themselvesexpressed in an increasingly gendered idiom, registered in the genderingof literary forms. A number of Renaissance and łatę seventeenth-centurytcxts record the emergence of the modern małe subject, with Shakespeare sHamlet representing him as haunted by the ghosts of the past, RobertBunons Anatomy ofMelancholy as distinctly melancholie, and John Milton'sPamdise Lost as originally guilty and dispossessed.

Chapter Two begins with a description of the increasing number ofidentificatory sites available to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century men,such as the libertine, the fop and the molly, and focuses on the rise of the novelas proyiding a new regulatory space against which and in which masculinityamid be defined. The discussion of the new form is placed against the generałeighteenth-century misogyny and the fears ofloss of social intelligibility, whichaccompanied the development of capitalism and the growth of individualism.l l ic sentimental novel, as well as the gendering ofreading and writingpractices

i ,ui lie scen as responses to the fears of the dissolution of social space, includingilie division into the private and the public, and distinctions between genders.'Ihrotighout the eighteenth century, the links between manliness, language,.n ul national identity came to be morę explicitly articulated, and it is againstl l i c national, class, and gender anxieties that I situate the emergence of the(lOthic genre. While it is the Gothic that best coiweys the changeable naturęol hegemonie masculinity, my readings of the novels by Daniel Defoe and

1 N T R O D U C T I O N

Samuel Richardson emphasise the labour involved in gendering and theunstable manly status of their protagonists.

Chapters Three and Four examine the production of gender categoriesthroughout the nineteenth century, the time to which critics haveattributed the invention of several gender denominations, including that ofhomosexuality. Alongside the works of a number of novelists, such as RobertLouis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Anthony Trollope,Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy, these chapters refer to the writings byJohn Ruskin, Samuel Smiles, Walter Pater, and other authors whose workinfluenced nineteenth-century concepts of gender. Chapter Three focuseson the delineation of manly labour in the work of Thomas Carlyle, whoseassessment of the condition of nineteenth-century Englandlinked manlinesswith questions of imperiał conquest, race, class, capitalist production, andnationality. Carlyle's writings positioned manly work against a number ofemasculating proccsscs, including effeminate consumption, and exerteda strong inf luence on his contemporaries, such as Charles Dickens, whoseHarrl Times is analysed here from the perspective of manly labour. It is alsoro Carlyle to whom the ideals of muscular Christianity developed by CharlesKingsley and Thomas Hughes arę indcbted, and the chapter focuses on theirprojccrs of rc-fonning socicty and of proper schooling of manly boys. Thesignifiorincr of rhdr work to imperiał conquests is described in ChapterFour, whcrc a number of adventure stories and the imperiał romances ofH. R i H r r Hnggnrd nre analysed as both reinforcing and interrogating therrnrrs of hegemonie masculinity. The chapter includes a discussion of therrprrsrnrnrion of mnie madncss in a number of Victorian novels and finisheswirli \\ prrsrnrnrion nfrhcjjn-dc-sićclc crisis of masculinity as recorded in(Jorh ic ficdon.

'I hę ideals ofhcroic manhood to whose construction Carlyle's writing.md thr work of Kingsley and Hughes contributed were seyerely damagedhv rhr Hlrsr World Wir. The experiences of the trenches and of shell shockunmnnnfH rhr soldirrs, nnd the disfigured bodies of the war veterans madęIf ImpoNslWr ro locatc manliness in the virile małe body. In Chapter Five,l łjr-trririr tomr ofrhc rcactions to the demise ofheroic manhood, including1), H. I.ttWrcnccs projcct of manly society, the interwar cult of fitness,iinił rhr cnntrrv:irivc arracks of Anthony Ludovici. The model of heroicmnnhooH Hrtrroyrd in rhe First World War is juxtaposed against the image. . l I n p n i . . 1 1 1 , i n . i s i i i l i n i t y a ) i i s r n i i icd d i i r i n g t l i ć Second World War, i n

23

which the borders separating soldiers from civilians and women from menwere less distinct. Unlike the First, the Second World War was fought inthe name of a better post-war Britain, whose construction began alreadyduring the war, and which included also a differently imagined model ofmasculinity, society, and culture. Some of the reactions to the changes, andparticularly to the supposedly classless society arę analysed on the basis ofpost-war novels and of the protests voiced by the Angry Young Men.

The finał chapter records the construction of the welfare state, itsdismantling under the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, andthe attempts to return to the Yictorian ideology of separate spheres. Thedemocratisation of culture that followed the two wars opened models ofmasculinity to contestation and pluralisation, and the section describesthe various scripts of manhood that dominated the latter half of thetwentieth century. The pro-feminist critique of masculinity by men andvarious attempts at deconstructing hegemonie masculinity, as well as someconservative responses to the new political and social situation of men aręanalysed alongside the development of the womens liberation movement.md the mens movement. The chapter closes with an analysis of the novelsrhat both contributccl to and were a reaction against the much vaunted crisisof mascul ini ty at the end of the century, and outlines some reasons why, "themorę the period is in crisis [...], then the morę one has to convoke the old,'IłoiTow' from it" (Derrida 1994: 109).

W h i l c each chapter is dedicated to a specific historical period, I return10 ,i set of- themes throughout the book in order to explore issues relatedi n power, hegemony, and embodiment. These themes arę placed againsti l i e generał description or the era and arę supplemented by a discussion of,i spee i f ie work or works. Sińce the eighteenth century, the novel has becomet ł u - dominant literary form, and therefore I focus on prose rather than ond i , i m , i or poetry in the discussion of modern masculinities. My choice ofl idT.iry works has been dietated by, on the one hand, their significancei i i ( . o n s i r u c r i n g rhe małe canon and their importance to the image ofi n . i s i i i l i n i i y that dominates in a given agę, and, on the other, by the volumeul iTitical w r i t i n g dedieated to specific texts. My aim is thus not only totlclineate a ccrrain continuity within the literaturę by men, but also toO l l t l i n e theareas and periods that havedrawn the attention ofcontemporarylltcrai y cr i t ics, and to supplement the history of l i t e rary masculinities with

' I l i s t o r y ol t h e i r e r i t ic i sm.

24 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Spectres ofMen cndcavours to present the links between hegemoniemasculinity and literaturę from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-firstccntury. Ań examination of texts written over such a long span of time runsthe risk of gcneralizations and omissions, but it also offers a chance to notęccrtain recurring strategies and themes, and to register the re-appearance ofthe same ghosts. By focusing on the history of British literaturę rather thanon a specific period or writer, I want to delineate a certain linę of hauntingthat runs throughout the literary periods, and that, although constantlydisrupted, continues to conjure up and exorcise the same spectres. Mygenerał aim in writing this study has been to combine in one volume thenumerous and yarious insights into gendering processes and masculinitiesorTcrcd by contanporary literary and cultural criticism. While the readingsof Mcdieval and Early Modern literaturę significantly draw on the existingstudies, my analysis of the nineteenth-century discourses on men andthe critiquc of masculinity in contemporary fiction attempt to notę, andpossibly open up new routes of inquiry.

As a whole, this project has been driven by the comdction that "themaking of art," such as literaturę, is "never itself in the past tense", but is"always a fbrmativc process, within a specific present" (Williams 1977:129),encloscd by and within the conceptual frameworkof the critic. Like the worksit discusscs, this book inevitably has its own spectres, and by emphasisingthe borders between the feminine and the masculine in the production ofhegemonie masculinity, I have barred entrance to a few ghosts. There aręno womcn writers included in the analysis, and, while I notę the influenceof sexual and racial minorities on the anxious re-formations of hegemoniemasculinity, I do not explore gay writings or books written by non-whiteauthors. These spectres open up different avenues of investigation; they aręthe residues from which there may emerge different writings and futures.Derrida insists that whenever there is one ghost, there arę already toomany (1994: 138), and Williams claims that "no dominant culture ever inreality includes or exhausts all human practice, human energy, and humanintention" (1977: 125). No cultural critique can welcome all its ghostsor control their comings, and my book certainly produces morę spectralpresences than I can notice. That is why Spectres of Men does not presentitself as a closed and finite investigation, but hopes to open other lines ofhaunting and to welcome, rather than evade, the coming of other spectres.