Boxer Handsome; a Novel and Critical Study of Representations of Masculinities in Modern Literature

Boxer Handsome; a novel and critical study of representations of masculinities in modern literature. Anna Whitwham Thesis Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Royal Holloway, University of London 2014 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Anna Whitwham, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Anna Whitwham Date: 31/08/2013 2 Acknowledgments A very special thank you to my supervisors, Andrew Motion and Robert Hampson, for all their invaluable support and guidance throughout my PhD. I would also like to thank my agent, Simon Trewin for believing in my writing. I am very grateful to Chatto &Windus for publishing my novel to my editor, Parisa Ebrahimi. 3 Abstract This thesis is a study of modern masculinities as represented in both fiction and non–fiction. It is explored through a novel, Boxer Handsome and through a critical essay. The critical essay will explore working class masculinity through an analysis of 1950s fiction, cinematic representations and factual accounts of boxers and gangsters and the performance of masculinity within sub-cultural groups. I will look at how representations of masculinity are performed within specific sub-cultural groups of men and the way language is formed as a response to social and cultural experience. The thesis will be separated into four chapters: Chapter 1. Post-1950s British fiction and cinema; Chapter 2. Fictional and factual accounts of boxers; Chapter 3. Gangsters and Violence, and Chapter 4. Representations of women in some of these cultures. My conclusion demonstrates how these areas have informed my writing. My novel, Boxer Handsome, set in a working-class neighbourhood in East End London, borrows from all these cultures, specifically boxing. Boxer Handsome, is set against the backdrop of contemporary East-End London and studies the tribal tensions between Bobby, an Irish-Jewish amateur boxer and Connor, a boxer from an Irish travelling community. From the same boxing club, the boys inherit old feuds from their fathers and uncles, which force them to fight inside and outside the boxing ring. Bobby, burdened by a constant cycle of violence, seeks to redeem himself through his boxing. 4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction. p. 6 2. Chapter 1. Post 50s Masculinity p.13 3. Chapter 2. Boxers p.21 4. Chapter 3. Gangsters p.32 5. Chapter 4. Women p.40 6. Conclusion p.45 7. Bibliography p.52 8. Boxer Handsome p.54 5 Introduction This thesis is a study of modern masculinities as represented in both fiction and non–fiction. It is explored through a novel, Boxer Handsome and a critical essay. The critical essay will explore working class masculinity through an analysis of 1950s fiction, cinematic representations and factual accounts of boxers and gangsters. I am interested in looking at the performance of masculinity in working class subcultures and the relationship between social context and language. The thesis will be separated into four chapters: Chapter 1. Post-1950s British fiction and cinema; Chapter 2. Fictional and factual accounts of boxers; Chapter 3. Gangsters and Violence, and Chapter 4. Representations of women in some of these cultures. My conclusion demonstrates how these areas have informed my writing. My novel, Boxer Handsome, set in a working-class neighbourhood in East End London, draws on these cultures, specifically boxing. I. Class, Codes and Language A useful starting point is provided by Victorian notions of manliness in the context of nineteenth- century industrialism, and a helpful approach to masculinity is through the class system as represented in contemporary fiction. P. J. Keating discusses the emergence of the working class and their representation in fiction in The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. Of this industrial context and the industrial novel’s representation of the working man, he says, ‘He is part of a composite portrait called Labour and is shown to be in bitter conflict with a further composite portrait called Capital’1. However, as Gaskell’s North and South shows, there was also a new, emerging class. Those who gained from the emergence of a commercial market were men of a transitional class, the factory owners and businessmen, who began to emerge alongside the aristocratic predecessor. Thomas Carlyle described the development in this period of two types of men: men of education, ‘the lettered classes’, and men without education, whom he referred to as ‘real men’. As this suggests, manliness became admired as a moral virtue as against a system of learned manners that had been associated with the gentleman class. He shows how this emerging class was defining a new masculinity. Ideas of stoicism, individualism and physical strengths were associated with manliness and were available to those born outside the ‘lettered classes’.2 The issue of class also raises the question of language and representation, and here Basil Bernstein is a useful guide. Bernstein states that language exists in relation to a desire to express and communicate. More importantly, he argues that language is the product of social contexts and cultures and that there is a relationship between cognitive expression and social class. Patterns of speech, behaviour and performance are a way of organising and responding to experience.3 This idea of class 1 Keating, P.J The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1971), p.17 2 Roper, Michael and John Tosh, Manful Assertions, Masculinities in Britain since 1800, (London: Routledge, 1991) p.14 3 Bernstein, Basil Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, (Oxon: Routledge 1971), p.43 6 and performance is relevant to my study of modern masculinities: I am interested in exploring how social context affects the way in which masculinity functions, and I have a particular interest in the way masculinity functions in specific working-class boxing and criminal cultures. Bernstein found that working-class linguistic patterns functioned through descriptive linguistic codes rather than analytical codes, developing into what he calls a public language.4 Public language is an informal language developed as a function of a particular social structure, a language that endorses social inclusion and social allegiance and does not easily facilitate individual qualification.5 Its descriptive and linguistic symbols (and its dialect elements) reinforce inclusivity and solidarity within a community, a form of social relationship which identifies with the aims and principles of a local group rather than with the complex differentiated aims of the major society.6 This can consequently produce conflicts with other sub-cultural groups and dialects.7 Michael Roper and John Tosh propose subordinate social groups can form a kind of fraternity, in collusion and in competition with each other, and this can find expression in a distinctive use of language. 8 This inclusivity can be found in Cockney slang, for example, which I considered using in Boxer Handsome. It reinforces and preserves the secret, coded culture of an East End community. This can be located within adolescent gangs and criminal sub-cultures, for whom this public language might be used to rationalise the use of violence, an idea I have explored in relation to gang mentality in boxing and criminal cultures. Bernstein emphasises that behaviour informed by gangs blurs the implication of intention and guilt is subsequently minimised. Although the individual may be aware that an act is wrong, his feelings are separated from the notion of its wrongness.9 An impersonal sanction is given to the behaviour because the individual’s specific relation to the act is never characterised precisely. Although the individual might be aware of the nature and implications of violence, it creates allegiance with his gang and becomes the collective responsibility and function of the wider social group and not the individual.10 The codes and symbols of this public language are explained by Bernstein as grammatically and syntactically simple, communicating events rather than ideas. It can make a subject general and impersonal. The use of ‘one’ and ‘it’ is infrequent; instead the collective ‘we’ is favoured. Because the pronoun ‘one’ is rarely used as the subject, the language behaves outside the personal experience. Statements are used in the group, formulated as implicit questions to share sympathy between speakers or to confirm a shared body of knowledge and experience. For example, ‘It’s only natural, isn’t it?’.11 This communication of immediate events and common experiences reinforce strong 4 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.42 5 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.47 6 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.50 7 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.47 8 Tosh, John, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain, (London: Pearson, 2005), p.78 9 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.49 10 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.49 11 Class, Codes and Control, Volume 1, p.42 7 inclusive relationships. The public language is primarily a means of making social not individual qualifications, and the behavioural implication of individuals using public language is the difficulty expressing themselves and their individual experience.12 As a means for making social qualifications, Bernstein refers to it as a ‘tough language’, and, he suggests, behaviour will be in accordance with this, both verbally through the language structure and physically through expressive movement and style.13 The concern with the immediate blocks the reflective experience and ‘tender feelings’, which the individual will struggle to express. Indeed, the individual will misplace these feelings as embarrassment or shame, or hostility towards the object that aroused the feelings14. The experience of tender feelings requires individual qualification, which is a potential threat to speakers of a public language because of its implications of social isolation.

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