13.
Title: [Victorian Masculinities]: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art
Author: Herbert Sussman
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 4
Date Completed: March 4, 2016
Rating: ***1/2

A driving concern of Herbert Sussman’s account of early Victorian artistic grappling with gender is the recognition of a spectrum of masculinity, even within the confines of white bourgeois normativity. In introducing his primary representative symbol, Sussman suggests that “the monk becomes the extreme or limit case of the central problematic in the Victorian practice of masculinity … the figure through whom Victorian men in a mode of historicized psychology could argue their widely varied views about self-discipline, the management of male sexuality, and the function of repression” (3), and through subsequent chapters illustrates the myriad of readings of this symbol by early Victorian artists as they articulate their own anxieties and definitions of manliness and its cultural/social/biological constructions. More important than these individual readings is what Sussman endeavors to show as  whole: that, though prevalent, “compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory matrimony” as touted by the moral middle class is not the only estimation of Victorian manliness, and that even this normativity is “exceedingly difficult to maintain” (13).

Like Kimmel, griffin, and Bederman before, Sussman begins by identifying tensions and anxieties which necessitate an Othering, in order to affirm a sense of selfhood and positive identity. But unlike these other texts, Sussman does not seem to forward a grand narrative of masculinity for his chosen object (the early Victorian white bourgeois man), and instead demonstrates variance which illuminates cultural uncertainty. Sussman is taking Kimmel’s pervasive homosociality, and perhaps the heroic artisan, and broadening its scope.


Topics of interest:
On page 82 Sussman cites the fears of poets such as Browning that their literary work, though definitively masculine in the nineteenth century, is somehow still “women’ work,” and that they are in fact feminizing themselves through their interiority – by staying within their own heads.  This “within” reminds me of Griffin’s descriptions of the Victorian household, and the contentious space of the home in Kimmel: that man should be the ruler of the domestic space, but that this space ultimately threatens his masculinity. I am interested in the potential connection here to the earlier argument that “For Browning, pornography exemplifies the driving of male desire into the inner cloister of the mind, the warping of virility by the puritanical constrains of bourgeois England” (75). Body versus mind (neurasthenia? – Bederman 84), industry versus domesticity.


14.
Title: [Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man]: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America
Author: John F. Kasson
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 5
Date Completed: March 4, 2016
Rating: ****

First, I’ll just say that I really enjoyed the narratives offered by Kasson; Sandow, Houdini, and Burroughs are engaging representations of nineteenth-century popular culture, and the biographic attention to each was certainly entertaining. However, I hesitate to agree with the lavish praise Linda K. Kerber gives on the book’s cover.

John K. Kasson’s Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man explores the bodily construction of late-nineteenth century American masculinity, forwarding Kimmel’s readings of bodily control and construction and reading the performances of manhood in both the acts and flesh of three exemplary popular figures. The book purports to “help us understand more about how the shift to an advancing technological civilization was communicated to an apprehended by publics in North America and abroad. They tell us about how modernity was understood in terms of the body…” (19), but is more intimately concerned with the white male body in popular culture, and how manliness was constricted by others than just Roosevelet (moving beyond Bederman to the “Othered” class of Kimmelian self-made middle class men). Kasson’s text is either too short, or too long; extensive biographies could be trimmed to become a strong lecture, or the accounts could be more fully developed to link the reader’s gaze to the larger gestures made in the introduction to modernity and technology.

The chapters on Sandow, Houdini, and Tarzan each offer the stripped bodies of performing men to represent linear constructions of manhood in struggle – against self, against institutions, against biology and race. That two invite bodily contact – and even penetration/invasion – as assertions of their value raises interesting implications; that they likewise manipulate and make use of popular culture to forward their careers demonstrates a kind of masculinity which moves beyond strong white bodies.

In thinking of the popular culture of the strong white male body, I find myself connecting Sandow to freak shows, and Houdini as a anachronistic reminder of the entertaining deviant – the acceptable vigilante who upholds his own moral bounds and flirts with the destruction of institutions (jail breaking and mad-house escaping, and, ok, Batman – and I’ve just ordered The Devil’s Workshop).