New Commodities: Masculinity, Male Bodies, Literary Labor
How we understand the links between creativity and manliness has everything to do with basic assumptions about the defining features of masculinity for this period, which were far from stable. As scholars know, histories of Enlightenment men and maleness are about masculinities rather than a single universal type; about fluid and often permeable gender boundaries; about social, economic, and political forces as well as sexual behavior; about transitions and consolidations of the categories of maleness rather than transhistorical modes; and about the relationship between public representations and actual behavior. Historians seem agreed that eighteenth-century maleness was subject to a variety of new configurations and developments. Perhaps the most difficult question of all has been the debate about when and how there might have been a shift from “masculinity” understood and experienced as social reputation to “masculinity” as an interiorized sense of personal identity defined increasingly by sexuality. John Tosh has framed the historical question and its interpretive difficulty concisely:
All that can be said with confidence is that a fundamental shift occurred between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries masculinity was regarded as a matter of reputation; it had first to be earned from one’s peers and then guarded jealously against defamation…. In the twentieth century, by contrast, masculinity has come to be experienced as an aspect of subjectivity, sensitive to social codes no doubt, but rooted in the individual’s interiority; an “insecure” masculinity is one which is assailed by inner doubt (particularly about sexuality) rather than by threats and aspersions from other men…. Was the period 1750–1850, so crucial for the development of class identities, also critical in the gradual transition from masculinity as reputation to masculinity as interiority?1
At first glance, one might be tempted to say “yes,” and then look for specific discursive evidence and individual case studies which would substantiate the general claim that the eighteenth century witnesses the emergence of a new configuration for masculine identity in which selfhood becomes an internalized sexual identity variously construed across a range of acceptable and transgressive modes. Anthony Fletcher has made such arguments easier by pointing out “that the word masculinity, meaning ‘the quality or condition of being masculine,’ had its first recorded usage in England in 1748.” His acknowledgment that “New words enter the language as people feel the insufficiency of current speech to express something they want to encapsulate” might suggest that the word enters common usage precisely in order to name this new sense of interiority. But Fletcher also cautions us about the difficulties of proof: “How far among men living in the Victorian period, let alone during the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, it [masculinity] involved an internalised identity—an interiority of the mind and emotions—as opposed to a sense of role-playing—is very hard for the historian to judge.”2 Tosh goes so far as to suggest that, even by the nineteenth century, “It is hard to see compelling evidence for a new sense of interiority.”3
A different reservation has been issued by Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen in the introductory essay to their important collection of studies of Enlightenment maleness. The historical development of masculinity in this period, they say, is as complex, contradictory, and variable as that of femininity, and therefore is not well-accounted for by simplistic models of historical change:
The model of a straightforward transition from a single early modern masculinity based on social reputation to a modern version in which men defined themselves through sexual behaviour (both heterosexual and homosexual) and through their control of women (newly confined to the domestic sphere) can now be seen to be inadequate. Such a model assumes that the main problems masculinity engages with are sexual and patriarchal in nature and that there exists a single unified masculinity available for historical analysis.4
The question then: is there sufficient evidence to mark the eighteenth century as the period when masculinity moves from social to internal positioning, and how might this be reflected in self-conscious literary commentary? The cautions and reservations of these prominent social historians are especially important challenges because the work of the majority of scholars in the field has assumed there is considerable evidence for such claims.
Indeed, a good deal of scholarship in the last decade has tried to recover and describe the subjectivities or internalized identity-markers of various kinds of men and masculinities. Although there are now too many good publications to provide an assessment of each, the following brief selection will give some sense of how vigorously scholars have proceeded under the assumption that a newer sense of an internalized sexual identity explains much about the history of Enlightenment masculinities. First, there are those historians after Foucault whose work has helped to frame fundamental questions about categories, cultural paradigms, and historical contexts, and without which much subsequent scholarship might have been inconceivable. The work of Randolph Trumbach, for instance, has been important for providing a significant array of empirical, archival data about the new-style sodomite-molly which has made possible more nuanced readings of the subjective space of individual self-identification.5 G. S. Rousseau, likewise, has opened up significant conceptual questions about gender identification and sexual identities in the past, offering a powerful counter-balance to heterosexist assumptions about history, biography, and sexual stereotypes.6 One of the foundational claims of Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud7—that the idea of “sexuality” as a fundamental constituent of identity does not become a particularly meaningful concept until the eighteenth century—has convinced many that the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are the birthplace of an interiorized, sexualized sense of a masculine self. Also important is Michael McKeon’s “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,”8 whose astute theoretical observations on the historical overlap and differences of male sexual identity and class identity have prevented an over-simplified isolation of sex and gender matters from other material contexts within which identity-questions are inevitably embedded.
These influential conceptual assessments of the historical terrain are widely referred to and have, in different ways, encouraged more specific reconstructions of internalized male identities, either of individual men or of homosocial sub-sets. Kristina Straub’s important study, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology,9 is in part an examination of the problematic ways in which discourses about the sexuality of male actors was a site of cultural struggle over how normative and transgressive male sexual identities would come to be defined. Jill Campbell has written persuasively about gender and identity in Fielding’s writing, arguing that his contemporaries were “engaged in a process of reformulating the import of gendered identity in the course of the eighteenth century,” and that Fielding himself harbored a suspicion “that the apparently most personal and essential aspects of identity may be revealed as