17.
Title: [Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature: Duelling with Danger]
Author: Emelyne Godfrey
Genre: Masculinity, Victtorian, History
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 6
Date Completed: March 19, 2016
Rating: ****

In Masculinity, Crime, and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature, Emelyn Godfrey approaches shifting cultural values of manliness and the reading of violent reaction to crime through an examination of communicative cultural objects – the literature, plays, newspapers, and commercial advertisements which both reflect and direct the responses of the audience. For Godfrey’s project, manliness is particularly defined by gentlemanliness, recalling the restraint and abhorrence of violence described by Ben Griffin in The Politics of Gender. The principles of the “savage” and the “natural” violence of men, so often cited as a conscious interest for Victorians, is acknowledged as the “other” against which gentlemen are defined – they who have morally evolved past such brutishness to restrained morality.  This dichotomy is reflected in the “blood men” – i.e. those who respond violently – and their more thoughtful counterparts (Holmes is a strong example used by Godfrey). But what of chivalry and manliness? Of self-defense? Godfrey’s work details how such necessary violence is defined by Victorians in response to the uncivilized brutes (i.e. criminal lower classes, or “blood men”), and whether or not self-defense and even retaliation are manly.

I admit that I find myself a bit distracted by Godfrey’s source material – specifically the material goods offered to promote the successful manliness of gentlemen, and their reversal of symbolism as they fall out of favor (handguns, for example). I’ve long worked with the material construction of identity of female characters in literature, and Godfrey’s accoutrements offer tantalizing possibilities to carry this over to masculine characters (oh, the anti-garroting collars! Life-preservers! The “monstrous fashion” for handguns! p.119).

In a more broad sense, Godfrey’s work on the “average” (i.e. white, middle-class, male) citizen offers a lens through which one can read popular vigilante heroes in novels, media, comics, and our own sensationalized news.

I really enjoyed this book for both its methods, and its histories.  While the readings of the Whitechapel Murders were pointedly shallow and seemingly insignificant to the project, tangentially related for being of a time and sensationalized in the press, the readings of literature as reflective of a reaction to the perception of criminal threat were pointed and thoughtful, offering strong conclusions and suggesting areas of further research.