The Phantom of Manhood

[chapter two of “Masters and Masculinity: The Men of Industry in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester Novels”]

In his 1831 essay “Characteristics,” Thomas Carlyle addressed the dilemma of manhood in the changing times.  That portion of the essay heavily quoted in discussions of Victorian masculinity specifically grapples with the downfall of the old ideals and the rise of the new.  Carlyle writes, “For young Valour and thirst of Action no ideal Chivalry invites to heroism, prescribes what is heroic: the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one clutching this phantom, another that; Werterism, Byronism, even Brummelism, each has its day” (Carlyle 29).  The definition of manhood, according to Carlyle, is fluid rather than fixed, and with such fluidity comes the threat of immorality.  The old ideal, according to Carlyle, is based in faith, which drives a man to be strong in the face of difficulty, and is “bound up with aristocratic notions of rank and honour” (Mallett vi).  If the old ideal, a known entity of chivalry and heroism, has now become “obsolete,” what is society to do?  The fact that he also points out three varieties of manhood which have failed to endure the test of time invites the reader to contemplate the differences between “phantoms” of manhood.

Carlyle’s three phantoms of manhood present changing concepts of masculinity, especially as compared to the “old manhood” of chivalry and faith.  Weterism, referencing Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, reflected the dramatic young man who ultimately commits suicide after being unable to marry the woman he loves.  An almost cult-like following of Wether began, as did the style of dress à la Werther.  The second phantom, Byronism, expands Werterism to a fascination with the foreign and less gentlemanly behaviors.  Known perhaps equally for his poetry and his shocking love life (though he actually may be more notorious for the latter than the former), Lord Byron also became a fashionable figure due to his retreat from society’s accepted behaviors and looks.  Dramatic fashion, such as Thomas Phillips’s portrait of Byron in Albanian dress, and a reputation of being “mad, bad and dangerous to know” made Byron a dramatic example of masculinity.  But for Carlyle, Byronism, like Werterism, is a phantom that exists briefly and then fades—for all the excitement a Byronic masculinity can bring, the lifestyle is not easily maintained, as can be noted by the fact that Byron himself died in 1824 at only thirty-six years old.  The third phantom of manhood, Brummelism, is based on Beau Brummell, a friend of the Prince Regent credited with the rise of dandyism in British culture.  Brummell focused his fashion on simplicity and tailoring, moving toward more practical, yet attractive, clothes that are the foundation of the modern man’s suit and tie.  Like Byron, the Brummell lifestyle is not an easy one—the man himself fell into deep debt and ran away to France to avoid repayment—and so another phantom of manhood slips away.

While the phantoms of manhood that Carlyle condemns faded out, the Victorian masculinity is, as he wrote, not easily defined.  Manhood, with the rise of the middle class through the self-made man, became more flexible in both fashion and behavior.  How, then, are we to define Victorian manhood as it applies to Gaskell’s works?  Like Carlyle, one must accept that defining manhood scientifically, with unanimously approved appearances, behaviors, or qualities, is like groping in the dark and seizing all different phantoms, each of which claims to be manhood.  Thus, developing a working definition of masculinity by which Gaskell’s characters can be measured requires the combination of several scholars’ understandings of masculinity in the Victorian era.

In Herbert Sussman’s Victorian Masculinities (1985), he considers manliness as a continuous process, impossible to pin down to a single definition.  Much of Sussman’s work attends to Carlyle’s discussion of the significance of the monastery for development of masculinity, as the monastery is a purely masculine space in which the men focus on silence and labor under the idea of gaining proximity to God.  Within the spectrum of masculinity’s process, however, Sussman points to an association of manhood with the cotton industry, comparing the industrial cotton mill to Carlyle’s male-centric monastery, “a wholly male world” (Sussman 61).  Such spaces, under the control of the master and in the hands of the laborers (who have access to the union of fellow men), present the opportunity to establish masculine communities based on labor and relative silence.

Another scholar of masculinity, James Eli Adams, expands on Sussman’s ideas in his 1995 work Dandies and Desert Saints.  Focusing on middle-class male writers, including Carlyle, Dickens, and Kingsley, Adams examines the “constructions of gendered identity as forms of intellectual and social authority” and “on the connections between the literary and social logics informing those constructions” (Adams 12).  Significantly, Adams looks at masculinity as portrayed by his selected writers through models of masculinity.  These models are the gentleman, dandy, priest, prophet, soldier, and professional, all of whom possess different qualities yet are also united in that they are more of a continuum of Victorian masculinity than distinct varieties.  Most significant in regards to approaching Gaskell’s male characters, especially John Thornton, is Adams’s analysis of the Carlylean hero and his opposition to the dandy.  Carlyle’s hero is anchored in morality, action, and sincerity, while the dandy is a performer for society.  Although it appears that the hero of North and South falls into the type of Carlylean hero, Adams’s study reminds scholars that masculinity as constructed by literature and society is not limited to the design of any one man.  Through this widened scope, Adams addresses masculinity not merely in literature but in the authors themselves as Victorian men, and thus lends a more concrete understanding of the slipperiness of masculinity.

John Tosh, in A Man’s Place, breaks down masculinity of middle-class Victorian home life into the development of boys into men.  Of significance is his discussion of the movement from boyhood to manhood through school.  As a predominantly male experience, going to school, meaning education occurring away from the boy’s home, “was an indispensable introduction to the company of males,” particularly males of the boy’s age (Tosh, Man’s Place 105).  At school, the boy must learn not only to communicate with his contemporaries, but also sometimes to defend himself against them.  After all, school could allow young men to engage in fist-fights as well as testing their independence, and even Anthony Trollope, in his autobiography, acknowledged the challenges a boy may face when surrounded by his peers.  After school, Tosh notes, young men are encouraged to pursue appropriate careers (these are, after all, those young men of the middle and upper classes whose families can afford to send them off to school and encourage successful careers) and take part in the society game of matrimony.  Marriage meant providing for a wife and, the most likely scenario, children, and such expectations could cause men anxiety over their decisions.  Until the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, divorce required significant amounts of money to either annul the union or to put forth a private bill to obtain an act of Parliament for the divorce.  Marriage, then, became for both men and women a contract not to be taken lightly (especially as women lost most of their admittedly few rights upon joining a man in matrimony).

Even within Gaskell’s works, masculinity experiences a shift of definitions.  Chartism, an essential political aspect of Mary Barton, established its own variety of masculinity into which its members should attempt to fall.  Chartism was a political movement with divided branches, although both branches emphasized the importance of family.  The branch concerned with what Martin Francis calls the “moral force” “lionized domesticity,” while the “‘physical force’ Chartists suggested that the role of the plebeian activist was not to instruct his family at home, but to defend their interests, with his fists, on the street” (Francis 642).  Francis’s division of Chartism into “moral” and “physical” further highlights the conflicting definitions of masculinity within Victorian England.  While physical action was still considered an aspect of masculinity, the growing emphasis on moral behavior allowed a second avenue for men to be manly.  Anna Clark, in “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity,” notes that “Chartist men faced continual tensions between their advocacy of domesticated manhood and the necessity to build on the public strength of masculine trade organizations and the solidarity of pub culture” (Clark 87).  Chartist men were supposed to be involved in their family, especially from a moral position, but were also supposed to be manly in accordance with other socially acceptable masculine behavior.  

With such division even within a unified political union, it is no wonder that the men of Mary Barton are divided in their versions of masculinity.  In Lisa Surridge’s “Working-Class Masculinities in Mary Barton,” Surridge notes that Gaskell’s concern with masculinity is a necessary part of the plot because the work is, according to Gaskell, about John Barton himself.  Specifically, Surridge analyzes the Chartist movement’s version of masculinity focused on the family life.  Manliness, in Mary Barton, is the “ideal combination of largeness, strength and tenderness” and it “rests unequivocally with working-class characters such as John Barton and Jem Wilson” (Surridge 333).  The masculinity of working-class men is based on their connection to family as well as their strength.  Working-class men are uniquely linked to children throughout Mary Barton as they actively care for the children.  “As a student in one of my classes exclaimed about Mary Barton,” Surridge writes, “‘The men literally walk into the novel carrying babies’” (333).  John Barton and George and Jem Wilson all care for children, whether they are related or not—Barton, for instance, reunites a lost child with his mother because the child is crying.  Such caring actions are not effeminate in Mary Barton, but rather a display of Chartist masculinity.

In North and South, masculinity becomes even less clearly defined, as Margaret Hale’s understanding of masculinity is based in her southern life and changes as she comes to understand northern men.  One of the concepts Tosh touches upon in A Man’s Place, that of male education, is partially at play in Gaskell’s North and South, as Thornton’s friendship with the Hales begins when Mr. Bell suggests Mr. Hale as Thornton’s private tutor.  Though Margaret is skeptical of a master’s desire for “the accomplishments of a gentleman,” her father argues that some of the masters are “conscious of their own deficiencies” and “want resolutely to learn,” emphasizing the importance of education not only in social standing but in the creation of the individual’s masculinity and gentlemanliness (Gaskell, NS 37).  Margaret, after all, associates classical education with gentlemen, not masters, and her understanding of the difference between the two becomes a point of discussion in the later chapter fittingly titled “Men and Gentlemen.”  For Margaret, coming from the south of England, northern definitions of manhood and masculinity (focused on industrial success and disposable income) are not compatible with her ideas of what makes a man.  

Significantly, Gaskell does not limit masculinity to Margaret’s understanding because John Thornton, during the dinner party, delivers a speech about his definitions of “gentleman” and “man.”  Like Sussman, Adams, and Tosh argue, masculinity in North and South is fluid because Margaret and Thornton have different understandings of the same concept.  Thornton, as will be discussed later, struggles to define himself and his relationship to his employees, but he attempts to do so against his definition of “man.”  When Margaret and Thornton engage in a conversation about gentlemanliness, Thornton quickly declares that he does not know about the word “gentleman,” but he surely does not believe the individual to be a “true man.”  When Margaret argues that “gentleman” includes “true man,” Thornton corrects her:

I take it that “gentleman” is a term that only describes a person in his relation to others; but when we speak of him as “a man,” we consider him not merely with regard to his fellow-men, but in relation to himself,—to life—to time—to eternity.  A cast-away lonely as Robinson Crusoe—a prisoner immured in a dungeon for life—nay, even a saint in Patmos, has his endurance, his strength, his faith, best described by being spoken of as “a man.”  I am rather weary of this word “gentlemanly,” which seems to me to be often inappropriately used, and often, too, with such exaggerated distortion of meaning, while the full simplicity of the noun “man,” and the adjective “manly” are unacknowledged—that I am induced to class it with the cant of the day.

(Gaskell, NS 150)

Thornton’s argument against the use of “gentleman” helps manufacture the rubric for positive masculinity against which he repeatedly checks himself.  To be a gentleman, he argues, is to compare and contrast, to observe a single man amongst others.  The significance he places on “man,” and thus “true man,” comes from the fact that a man must be judged on his own merits against everything, including himself.  Biblical overtones arise again in his reference to “a saint in Patmos,” alluding to St. John who was exiled to the island of Patmos, where he wrote the Book of Revelations.  St. John, separated from everyone except himself and God, cannot be seen in relation to others if no others exist, whereas a gentleman of Margaret’s description, Thornton believes, can only be seen in relation to others.  

Thornton furthers his argument against “gentleman” by his frustration that it is overused, as words so often are, to the point of being less meaningful than the simple word “man.”  Thornton’s respect for the words “man” and “manly” are part of his understanding of himself, of his goals for himself, because a true man is one whom he can respect.  In setting up a sort of rubric for manliness based on judging a man on his own merits, Thornton aligns himself with the more Evangelical idea of masculinity based on a man’s conscience.  Evangelical writers believed “the problem with manliness lay in its undue respect for the worldly standards subsumed in the notion of ‘reputation’; in its place they strove to establish ‘character’, by which they meant the internal urgings of a man’s conscience” (Tosh, “Gentlemanly” 467).  Masculinity cannot be explicitly defined if each man is subject to the judgment of his own conscience.  Thornton’s speech to Margaret makes the separation between modes of masculinity explicit in that being a gentleman does not necessarily include being a man.  Separating “gentleman” and “man” means that masculinity cannot be restricted to any one definition because, in Thornton’s mind at least, “man” must be made in relation to himself.  That Thornton also says the use of “gentleman” rather than using “man” or “manly” is part of the “cant of the day” further relegates “gentleman” to a word rather than a meaningful definition.

With such a spectrum of masculinity, even confined to the Victorian era, masculinity and manhood is impossible to exactly define.  Even within Gaskell’s novels, the male characters are caught between variations of masculinity, whether the Chartist manliness of caring for family and being strong, or the fluidity of the word “gentleman.”  Thus, the following analyses of Mary Barton and North and South does not argue for any one definition of masculinity in Gaskell’s work, but rather looks at her treatment of the varieties of manhood through master-worker relationships.  Both novels involve, to a different degree, three “stages” of the development in the master-worker relationship: male suffering, action against another man, and mediation/reconciliation.  For Mary Barton, both John Barton and John Carson experience great suffering as fathers, and John Barton’s violent action in killing Carson’s son prompts Carson to act against his son’s murderer in attempting to have him arrested and hanged; by the novel’s conclusion, the men are unified in their agony through a sort of religious mediation that leads to a very brief reconciliation.  The stages in North and South are less pronounced, but still at play: Thornton suffers from his father’s suicide before the novel begins, the workers’ sufferings prompt a riot against Marlborough Mills, and Thornton and Higgins eventually find peace with each other through Margaret’s mediation.  Thornton’s success garners more attention than Carson’s, as he finds reconciliation with his employees not only professional, but as men.  Peace between master and worker, regardless of the definition of masculinity, can come only through internal knowing of self, and it is only when the masters and workers have experienced agony and violence that they can turn their attention to building better relationships between men.