Abstract
This is a book about the struggle to define “the gentleman” during the long eighteenth century and about the role this struggle played in the development of literary forms. Focusing on a familiar yet unexamined group of tropes, images and extra-literary debates, its chapters uncover the stakes of representing the gentleman across genre and movement. It thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship on masculinity, but it is also, fundamentally, a literary study that reaches across two of the most entrenched divisions in eighteenth-century studies. One is the widely perceived disconnect between the masculine Augustan canon and the fiction that has been described as writing by, for and about women. Austen herself promotes this distinction in Northanger Abbey, where she famously compares the slighted “labour of the novelist” with the glorified efforts of “the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne.” With tongue in cheek, she comes to the defense of her fellow novelists, taunting, in the idiom of Pope, those who seem bent on “slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them” (30). In reality, Austen read the Spectator with pleasure, and even her gothic-loving heroine, Catherine Morland, we learn early in the novel, read Pope in her youth.
Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are made to serve this or that, and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.
—Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
There is no Title and Appellation better known, and more universally used, than that of a GENTLEMAN; and yet I don’t know any other CHARACTER that is more mistaken, and misapplied.
—A Discourse Concerning the Character of a Gentleman (1716)
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Notes
The most famous political reading of the libertine remains Terry Eagleton’s discussion of Lovelace in The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (1982). Studies in satire, such as Ronald Paulson’s classic Satire and the Novel (1967), have been a locus of work on the politics of country gentlemen in the mold of Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley.
For studies that examine the liminal position of the male gentry, consult Johnson’s Equivocal Beings (1995)
and Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987). Following Armstrong’s influential argument “that the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” (8), a number of scholars have shown how eighteenth-century depictions of women helped Britons to imagine modernity.
See Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story (1994),
Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998),
Laura Brown’s Fables of Modernity (2001),
and Felicity Nussbaum’s The Limits of the Human (2003).
A recent exception to this trend is Erin Mackie’s Rakes, Highwaymen and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (2009). Like Mackie’s book, my study regards the gentleman as a productive category that encompasses and creates qualities associated with modern masculinity and the emergent middle class. Where Mackie focuses on the gentleman’s relation to outlaw figures across culture, I examine the gentleman’s links to domestic women, revealing in the process how an elite tradition of masculine letters worked in concert with a feminine gendered popular culture.
I refer to such books as Henry Dwight Sedgwick’s In Praise of Gentlemen (1935), which I discuss in chapter 5, and
John E. Mason’s useful Gentlefolk in the Making: Studies in the History of English Courtesy Literature and Related Topics (1935). Rich in data, Mason’s archival survey nonetheless resembles the instructional manuals it discusses. Mason sets out to illuminate “the theory and practice of English gentlefolk” to better explain “the meaning and origin of good manners” (2), but he also celebrates gentlemanly culture. “In America,” he remarks, “a few writers with a philosophic turn of mind have pictured a business administrator compact of moral excellencies, personal dignity, and an adequate degree of culture. It may be questioned, however, whether this ideal is often found in actual life, and whether it is generally accepted. We are, after all, prevailingly a business civilization; and the popular figure is still the man who has acquired great wealth. Such a man must have certain laudable qualities—diligence, thrift, executive ability, and so forth; he is often genial and—after office hours—amiable enough; but he frequently has not been willing to find time for the cultivation of an art of life as this is practised in the more refined circles of Europe … Yet the cultivation of such an art has its place in any perfect civilization, and no ideal of conduct can be considered complete and authentic which disregards it” (1).
See G. J. Barker-Benfield’s The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1992);
Steven Shapin’s essay “‘A Scholar and the Gentleman’: The Problematic Identity of the Scientific Practitioner in Early Modern England” (1991) as well as chapter 2 of his book A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (1994);
Lawrence Klein’s Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (1994);
Michele Cohen’s Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (1996);
Shawn Maurer’s Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth Century (1998);
Linda Zionkowski’s Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–1784 (2001);
Michael Kramp’s Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man (2007);
and Erin Mackie’s Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (2009).
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© 2012 Jason D. Solinger
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Solinger, J.D. (2012). Introduction. In: Becoming the Gentleman. Global Masculinities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391840_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230391840_1
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