Commonsense, Manners, Guts’: ‘Manliness’ in the English School Story

‘COMMONSENSE, MANNERS, GUTS’: ‘MANLINESS’ IN THE ENGLISH SCHOOL STORY 1887-1917 BY CAROL NAYLOR B.A. (Hons.) Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University, February 2003 DECLARATION This is to certify that any material in the thesis which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any institution is identified in the text. This thesis may be made available for consultation, loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Signed……………………………………. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis is for my mother, Joy Haine who continues to inspire me. It is also dedicated to the memories of both my father, Ken Haine and my brother Roger Haine who passed away during the writing of the thesis. I wish to thank Hazel Rowley and Wenche Ommundsen for their supervision in the early stages of the thesis and Clare Bradford for her patient and invaluable help as Principal Supervisor. I would also like to acknowledge the help of the following: the staff at the Deakin Library, Dale Campisi for excellent editing, Ruth Lee and Kim Waters for proof-reading and colleagues and postgraduate friends at the Waurn Ponds campus who have cheered me on. Lastly, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my immediate family, including my brother Alan, my husband Geoff and sons Tim and Philip for their abundant love and understanding. I could not have completed this work without the support of all of these important people. ILLUSTRATIONS Thesis Frontispiece This is the cover illustration from G. Forsyth Grant’s The Hero of Crampton School, London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd., (no date). First published in 1895. Plates Plate 1 This is a reproduction of the front cover of E.F. Benson’s David Blaize, The Hogarth Press, 1989. Plate 2 This cartoon (from Patrick A. Dunae’s article ‘Boy’s Own Paper: Origins and Editorial Policies’, Private Library 9, 1976, p.126.) and first appeared in Boy’s Own Paper, 4 May, 1907, p.483. Plate 3 This is the etching that accompanies Ascott R. Hope’s ‘Emily’: A Story of School Life, in Boy’s Own Paper, Saturday October 1, 1887, p.4. IMAGE REMOVED : Cover Illustration from G Forsyth Grant's, The Hero of Crampton School, London : Sampson Low, Marston & Co. Ltd. Table of Contents Chapter One: ……………………………………………………..p.1 Chapter Two: …………………………………………………….p.46 Chapter Three: …………………………………………………...p.121 Chapter Four: ………………………………………………….…p.166 Conclusion: ………………………………………………………p.194 PREFACE This study stems from my interest in English public school fiction and the late Victorian/early Edwardian historical period. I want to raise questions about masculinity that are both embedded in the fiction of that period, and which are still relevant today because the world we live in is the product of cultural discourses that have inculcated the belief that to be ‘masculine’ means to dominate. I examine discourses and ideologies of education and socialisation in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century English public school fiction for boys. I will consider how cultural representation is directed toward subjective identity or subject formation, and the extent to which narrative transgressions reveal slippage in the hegemonic imperial ideal. Masculinity and power are integral to the school stories I examine: the texts are informed by a variety of discourses on masculinity and manifest considerable ambivalence. The stereotypical hero of the late nineteenth century school story is independent and self-reliant – a formulation consistent with popular narratives of imperial domination. Paradoxically, close reading of texts such as The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s and David Blaize reveals an effect of feminisation in the romantic attachments and relations between boys, unsettling such stereotypes and indicating a rupture or contradiction. By looking at the resistances and various subject positions that readers are invited to take up, I hope to indicate the historically and socially constructed nature of such narratives. I also want to suggest that the discursive production of a masculine ‘ideal’ involves exclusion. Barthes, Fairclough and others have argued from several critical perspectives that language – as a system of signification, or discourse – is imbued with ideology. Rather than looking at discourse as social practice, I am concerned with the discourse of narrative fiction for children and the way that ideological practices are integral to and inseparable from this fiction. The study of language used in text enables us to examine the way that certain socially dominant moral values are inculcated or resisted. The writer’s ideological position is often overt and the story is deliberately used as an agent of socialisation. Several of the texts I examine are consciously didactic in intention and tone. Using theories of narrative and critical linguistics, I will examine the intersection of the ideologies of texts with the subject positioning of readers. My chapters are organised as follows. Chapter One outlines my methodology and contextualises the school story in terms of historical background, masculinities and class. Chapter Two explores notions of gender. I look at the Victorian homoerotic school story and the ways that discourses around sexuality intersect in Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s, E. F. Benson’s David Blaize and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth. Chapter Three analyses Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co with particular focus directed to the theme of Empire and the ideologies of masculinity embedded in it. The final chapter examines issues around the discourses of education and the socialisation of children. In the late nineteenth century the school story was a staple of the Boy’s Own Paper – a popular weekly magazine published by the Religious Tract Society. Its readership included both the working class and the middle class. The magazine was appealing to men, women, boys and girls, and it is my contention that this publication (and others) promulgated an imperialistic, hegemonic masculinity. At the same time, I reveal contradictions, gaps and exclusions. I explore the construction of middle class masculinity in Britain in boys’ fiction and the way in which it was presented to working class males. The specific site of masculinity that I investigate is that which occurs at the intersections between imperialism and the public school ethos. The period between 1880 and the First World War saw widespread anxiety about the changing shape of masculinity. As Jeffrey Hantover puts it, men in this period ‘believed that opportunities for the development and expression of masculinity were being limited. They saw forces of feminisation in the world of adults and adolescents ... [and that perceived phenomenon] contributed to the anxiety of men worried about the present and wary of the future’.1 I am looking at the relationship of a number of school stories to their historical context and the way that relationship affected gender formation during a time when the meaning of masculinity was in a state of flux. I bring to the project the perspective of a female, feminist scholar at a historical distance from the texts. I suggest that women have a place in a study of men and masculinity and concur with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s statement that women as well as ‘men of all ages and cultural backgrounds – straight, gay, bisexual and female’ need to engage with projects that explore ‘key issues about the nature of masculinity.’2 As Sedgwick puts it, ‘As a woman, I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not more so than men are; and like men, I as a woman am also a producer of masculinities and a performer of them.’3 My study uses a number of specific terms and concepts that require definition – most of them are slippery notions. I discuss human sexuality, particularly in Chapter Two in connection with discourses of sexuality. I have adhered to Foucault’s definition (in his History of Sexuality) of ‘sexuality’ as a discursive construct, although, as Roberta Seelinger Trites asserts, this definition is open to criticism in that it denies the pre-discursive physicality of human sexuality.4 1 Jeffrey Hantover, ‘The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,’ Journal of Social Issues: Male Roles and Male Experience, 34 (1978): p.186. 2 Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, ‘Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!’ in Constructing Masculinity, Ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson, Routledge, New York, London, 1995, pp.12-13. 3 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ibid., p.13. Foucault shows that Western cultures define themselves by both the repression and the liberation of sexuality, but asserts that they depend on a repressive definition of sexuality. Because Western discourses about sex are repressed, he argues that the practices of confession and psychoanalysis, for example, have evolved from the need/requirement of people to discuss sexual matters. In History of Sexuality he claims: What is peculiar to modern societies … is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.5 Most of my chosen texts use a didactic form of narration. The serialised story ‘Emily’ that I analyse in Chapter Four, and Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. are examples of what Foucault has identified as ‘practical texts’: They are written for the purpose of offering rules, opinions, and advice on how to behave as one should: ‘practical’ texts, which are themselves objects of a ‘practice’ in that they were designed to be read, learned, reflected upon, and tested out, and they were intended to constitute the eventual framework of everyday conduct. These texts thus served as functional devices that would enable individuals to question their own conduct, to watch over and give shape to it, and to shape themselves as ethical subjects.6 The stories that I analyse represent and construct a range of public schools in their narratives.

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