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The Late Victorian Adventure Story Men at Work and Play: The Late Victorian Adventure Story A dissertation submitted to the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies Drew University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree, Doctor of Philosophy Michael G. Smith Drew University Madison, New Jersey May 2010 Copyright © 2010 by Michael G. Smith All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Men at Work and Play: The Late Victorian Adventure Story Ph.D. Dissertation by Michael G. Smith The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies May 2010 Drew University This project explores how the Victorian middle- and upper-middle class gentleman attempted to construct his role through the avenues of work and play. However, these prove to be flawed attempts and the Victorian gentleman is simply an empty concept that tries to accommodate a constantly fluxuating middle-class Victorian masculinity. Work served as a key building block for Victorian masculinity since men were expected to produce. Play has dual meanings. The Victorian gentleman was engaged in playing a part, complete with expected behaviors and attitudes. However, he also played literal games and his performances in sports helped him to earn a place as a gentleman. Work and play, though, were subject to sliding criteria. Because these issues were so engrained in Victorian culture, they found their way into literature. As a result, they surface in works like the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dracula, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both the villains and the heroes often expose these concepts as flawed, so the stories serve as good cultural reflection of the tenuous position of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle class gentleman and the flawed attempts at producing a solid, middle-class masculinity as embodied by the gentleman. Contents Chapter 1. Introduction 1 2. Holmes-of-all-Trades 37 3. Athletic Issues 81 4. Studying and Passing: Dracula's Gentlemanly Attempt 119 5. "I came to act a part:" Dr. Jekyll's Theatre 156 Conclusion 198 Works Cited 202 IV Chapter 1 Introduction An oft-repeated phrase in Richard Marsh's 1897 adventure tale, The Beetle, is "Play the man." This is usually spoken by a male to another male in order to motivate that character to action. The phrase serves as an entry point into the subject of this study: the construction of the role of Victorian middle- and upper-middle class gentleman is essentially constructed through work and play. A gentleman's profession defined who he was, so work was a very important part of his construction. Play has two meanings. Play can literally mean playing of sports and games. Sports were grounded in masculinity; performing well on the field served as way to both teach and judge one's manliness. However, play can also mean literal role-playing. The concepts of work, play and male identity construction are nothing new and my point in starting this project with a quote from a lesser known work is to show that the literature of the late Victorian era reflected the culture's views. If a lesser known work espouses them, then it would be logical to think that the more well-known adventure stories of the late Victorian era would be especially permeated by these same ideas. As a result, I am going to examine work and play and the construction of the English gentleman in various Sherlock Holmes stories (1887-1927), Dracula (1897), and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). I have chosen these works because first of all, I enjoy reading them. Others have liked them as well and their popularity indicates that they have something to say about the era. The heroes are all middle- and upper-middle class professionals who are representative of the seemingly successful masculine performance, complete with reserve and discipline. The villains of the pieces 1 2 either expose or threaten to expose the unstable foundation of masculine performance; sometimes the heroes themselves are examples of this instability to the point where the gentleman himself is called into question. In the end, the works showcase, but ultimately betray, work and play as unsuccessful attempts to solidify Victorian masculinity. John Tosh, in Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2005), admits that the term manliness has often been used as the term to discuss men's gender in the nineteenth century; however, this term implies that there is a "single standard of the manhood," while in fact masculinity is a more encompassing term because "its meaning is meditated not only through class, but through ethnicity and - most of all - through sexuality" (2,3). Consequently, "masculinity has fractured into a spectrum of identities" (14). Focusing on the "study of masculinities," Herbert Sussman observes that masculinities are socially constructed (Sussman 8). An emphasis on the plural "masculinities" "stresses the multiple possibilities of such social formations, the variability in the gendering of the biological male, and the range of such constructions over time and within any specific historical moment" (8). The "voluntaristic character" of the "making of manhood" suggests that manhood can be created by the individual as well as the social in various ways (Tosh, Manliness 14). In Dandies and Desert Saints (1995), James Eli Adams argues that "masculine identities are multiple, complex, and unstable constructions, even within the framework of a particular culture" (Adams, Dandies 3). Because of the "rhetorical fabric of self-presentation" inherent in masculinity (52), there is an "intractable element of theatricality in all masculine self- fashioning, which inevitability makes appeal to an audience, real or imagined" (11). 3 The reliance on an audience is countered by a tradition of seeming "disinterest" since the male subject does want to appear as though he is acting for the approval of his fellow males. For instance, in A Community of One (1993), Martin Danahay notes, "Masculine authors represent themselves (my emphasis), in other words, as autonomous individuals" (Danahay, Community, 3). Within the context of Danahay's discussion novelists want to differentiate themselves from laborers who are economically motivated (3). Danahay uses the phrase "autonomous individuals" to discuss how nineteenth- century male authors also used "feminized other[s]" to define themselves through their use of autobiography (3). This strategy is problematic, for by opposing themselves against the feminine and the working classes, middle-class writers are not really autonomous (5-6). They are actively defining themselves against something else, which shows a need for someone to see that they are in fact not like these "others." By suppressing other voices, the writer constructs a "distinctive form of subjectivity" (Kucich, cited in Danahay 6) and is an example of "middle-class self- fashioning" (Adams, Dandies 35). Using Carlyle as an example, Adams observes that the "persistence of dandyism is registered in the works of male Victorian writers who represent heroic vocations as self-conscious spectacles" (Adams, "Spectacle," 215). Carlyle tries to distance his hero from the theatricality exhibited by the dandy, but in actuality, his writer-hero showcases the same theatricality since he also caters to an audience (Adams, Dandies 35). In Novel Professions (2006), Jennifer Ruth quotes Bourdieu: "'disinterest' cannot be pure self-sacrifice without turning into mere dissimulation" (qtd. in Ruth 21). Thus, total disinterest is actually a disguise; by making a point of not acknowledging the audience, one is making a show of doing so. 4 Much of this construction takes its form in spectacle, a "calculated self- presentation to an imagined gaze" (Adams, "Spectacle" 230). Men define themselves, not only against others, but also for the benefit of other men in their collective circles, so that masculinity is an active pursuit. Adams's five "models of masculine identity: the gentleman, the prophet, the dandy, the priest, and the soldier" (Adams, Dandies 2), are all reflections of the performative/constructive nature of masculinity because all of these models need someone to preach to, to protect, or perform for. The gentleman is an "anxious conjunction of discipline and performance" (10), and "is centrally preoccupied with varieties of self-representation.. .encompassing social pursuit of mastery through self-definition" (Adams, Dandies 13). Thus, for Judith Butler, "gender is always a doing" (qtd. in Adams, Dandies 2). What the Victorian gentleman was "doing" was presenting an image of stable masculinity steeped in discipline. As Foucault observes, power structures work best when they are able to hide their "mechanisms" (Foucault, Sexuality 86). The participants in the system are controlled in a subtle way while they appear to move freely (86). In this case, the Victorian gentleman serves as an avenue for "regulation, arbitration, and demarcation, as a way of introducing order in the midst of these powers, of establishing a principle that would temper them and distribute them according to boundaries and a fixed hierarchy" (86-87). The more general term of masculinity, with its contradictions, is an example of Foucault's "multiplicity of force relations," and the "support which these force relations find in one another" (92) that gives an underlying structure to the relationships. All of these conflicting forces interact with one another and so create a seemingly unified 5 organization (92). Middle-class and upper-middle class masculinity is shaped by various conflicts: the conflict between interest and disinterest. Likewise, the middle-class professional found himself at a crossroads because a value was placed on labor, but he did not want to be associated with workers of the lower classes. In addition, women were exerting their identities more and more, chipping away at the middle- and upper-middle class professional's importance. All of these conflicts make up what it is to be a Victorian middle- and upper-middle class man. These conflicts are reigned in by discipline.
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