Men's physique: Standards of embodiment and middle-class masculinity in nineteenth-century British and American fiction

The figure of the steroid-enhanced, muscular man is all too familiar in our body-obsessed culture today that privileges a fat free and highly toned physique, even while our culture continues to assume that concern about body size and shape is a women's issue. Men, as some scholars are just now beginning to recognize, are subject to standards of embodiment just as women are. Standards of male embodiment, however, have been around for much longer than many realize. With its penchant for defining, classifying, and categorizing, the nineteenth century placed an increasing emphasis on corporeal discipline, management, and reform than ever before. While corporeal ideals are certainly more stringent today, Victorians were not without concern for body size and shape. Of the few studies that have taken up the topic of the male body, several tend to give short shrift to the fact that men's preoccupation with their bodies began much earlier than the last decades of the twentieth century. In continually "discovering" issues associated with the male body, these scholars inadvertently reinscribe the very gender binaries they are trying to challenge. Moreover, they overlook the historical complexities of the male body and the issues of gender, class, race, and empire that surround it. Examining men's bodies during the nineteenth century and how these bodies both meet ideals of embodiment as well as deviate from such norms is therefore critical to understanding the history of the Victorian period. The present study interrogates the construction of masculinity during the Victorian era by examining the male physique and men's body-shaping practices as they are represented in nineteenth-century British and American fiction. I demonstrate how the male body is instrumental to nineteenth-century ideologies of gender, class, and race, as well as how it was pressed into the service of nation building and imperial expansion. Within this context, I also argue that an emphasis on muscularity increased over the course of the Victorian period in order to show how muscular manhood emerged as an ideal of masculinity by the turn of the twentieth century.