Victorian man-making: Shifting trends in Victorian masculinities in 'Jane Eyre', 'Shirley', and 'Middlemarch' (Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot)

This dissertation considers Charlotte Bronte's and George Eliot's heroes of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Middlemarch in a cultural context of Victorian attitudes toward masculinity. Using a range of Victorian periodicals, I establish a mid-Victorian shift in masculinities in order to study the ways in which Bronte and Eliot reflect and transform these attitudes in novels central to their careers.; In the early years, 1844--1855, periodicals suggested that work would give men control, over themselves and others, in spite of cultural change. Writers advised men to cultivate specific traits for different situations, particularly work and the home. They advised specific responses for specific settings, but neglected to discuss the tensions between advices---either those for one setting or those between different settings, insisting instead that these traits were "natural." In her more optimistic novel, Jane Eyre, Bronte portrays her hero's ability to shed disguises which result from his effort to maintain control over his responses to different situations. If Rochester as well as Jane undergoes an unconventional transformation, the two remain nonetheless firmly bound by different, reciprocal strengths. In Shirley, Bronte envisions a masculinity which adds sympathy to several more traditional forms of masculine authority---involvement in work, detachment from friends, and decisiveness in civic affairs. Bronte's masculine men evince decisive leadership and protective care. Through both heroes, Bronte affirms a straightforward masculinity.; In the later period, 1865--1975, men were again asked to hone a collection of attitudes about themselves in work and in romance. But by this period the simple terms of masculine identification needed frequent qualification. More and more, writers tried to externalize difference in terms of class or gender when the fundamental fear they faced lay within, in the way the male self would not conform to the masculine/feminine binary structure. In Middlemarch using the negative examples of Mr. Casaubon and Dr. Lydgate, Eliot explores the destructive potential of traditional forms of masculine authority. Then, in a progressive pattern between James Chettam, Fred Vincy and William Ladislaw, she emphasizes the extent to which her truly heroic men relinquish tight hold of conventional expressions of manhood and respond more freely to their own instincts, be they so-called "masculine" or "feminine" in nature.; The consistency in Victorian attitudes toward masculine attributes suggests how daring Eliot's masculinities remain. This work, I believe, suggests insights into our current ambivalence about manhood.