Victorian Era

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VICTORIAN ERA

The Victorian Era ( 1 837-190 1 ) is the period in history dur ing which Queen Victoria reigned over Great Britain. This includes both British and American cultural history from the 1 830s to the end of the nineteenth century, though Victorian mores and practices had begun to fade during the 1 880s. As a set of cultural conventions of male gender identity, Victorianism was generated by the fundamental social and economic changes of the nineteenth century, particularly industrialization, urbanization, and the market revolution. The term usually refers to prescriptions of middle-class man liness and emphasizes self-control in public conduct, com panionship and emotional expressiveness in private life, and competitiveness and success in men's occupational lives. Social and Economic Sources of Victorian Manhood

With the onset of the market revolution after 1 820, the cul tural foundation of manliness shifted from patriarchal con trol over the household and communal obligations to an emphasis on an acquisitive individualism that found affir mation through economic performance in an expanding, open marketplace. The market revolution led to a functional differentiation between private life and public life by dis rupting the spatial link between men's homes and their workplaces. In the United States, this new notion of manli ness, primarily grounded in individual entrepreneurial abil ity and economic performance, created an idealized man, variously labeled as the "masculine achiever," the male breadwinner, the "self-made man," and the "Yankee." While this new definition of manhood, grounded in capitalist mar ket economics and profit-oriented performance, offered new opportunities for monetary gain and social experimen tation, it also made male self-worth contingent upon eco nomic structural forces increasingly beyon d individual control. As such, it bore not only new possibilities, but new anxieties. The transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau captured this in Walden ( 1 854) when he referred to the market as a '''place of humiliation'" ( Kimmel, 43). To prepare themselves for the vagaries of the market and the public sphere, men articulated new modes of self-control and self-representation, including prescriptions for genteel

manners, etiquette, conduct, fashion, and sexuality, that defined Victorian middle-class manhood.

Victorian Gentility

Eighteenth-century American society and social relations were characterized by small communities and face-to-face interac tions, but social relations changed as American society urban ized and a market revolution began to generate interregional, and eventually national, markets. A society consisting of fairly insular neighborly communities became a society of strangers lacking communally enforced standards of conduct. Social relationships became more impersonal and anonymous, and therefore increasingly uncertain and unpredictable. In an attempt to restore predictability to social relations, Victorians conceived a variety of rules of personal conduct and social interaction that, while applicable to both men and women, carried a particular urgency in male behavior, since men's lives were more firmly grounded in the new public world of market exchange. Genteel male deportment in this new amoral world required, above all, self-control, moral discipline, and sincer ity. These imperatives shaped Victorian male manners, eti quette, and fashion.

Such nineteenth-century advice and etiquette book authors as Timothy Shay Arthur and Samuel Goodrich pro moted genteel manhood and its association with elegance, gracefulness, and politeness. These etiquette books offered a blueprint for public male behavior in a society that had drifted from its traditional communal bases for polite and moral con duct. The application of their advice promised to produce a trustworthy style of manhood that would stand up to public scrutiny and examination.

Fashion became one of the major areas for expressing and signaling gentility. Whereas eighteenth-century middle-class and (especially) upper-class men tended to wear clothes in an array of flamboyant colors and materials ranging from satin to silk to velvet as an expression of their status and wealth, by the 1 830s men's fashion had become increasingly somber, with black as the predominant color. A man who chose to dress dif ferently was considered a dandy who was incapable of disci pline and self-control, thus inviting the ridicule of his peers. Tall dark hats, double-breasted suits, and a thin overcoat (even in summer) signified the fashionable sobriety of Victorian middle-class manliness.

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474 VICTORIAN ERA

Another way to indicate one's standing as a genteel man was through polite deportment and manners. A man was respectful toward other men, always courteous to women, and in command of himself in any given situation-both in his emotional and his physical conduct. Moreover, a genteel man comfortably handled a vast array of rules regulating conduct at the dinner table, including what forks or spoons to use, what glass to use for what beverage, and how to choose topics for conversation.

This rigor and self-control in public life transferred into men's private, reproductive lives as well. Advice writers such as Sylvester Graham, William Alcott, and John Harvey Kellogg promoted a male ethos of bodily purity, applying it to male nutrition, digestive functions, and reproduction. Contemporary advice books urged sexual restraint both before and within mar riage. Insistence on bodily purity and sexual moderation was intended, in part, as a cultural defense against the rapid social and economic changes resulting from urbanization, industrial ization, and the market revolution, yet it also reinforced a capi talist ethos of delayed gratification.

Victorian gentility and Victorian manhood had implica tions for both race and class. These codes were accessible and were appropriated by nonwhite men, such as the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose indictment of slavery relied heav ily on appealing to Victorian sensibilities. His autobiograph ical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass ( 1 845) derived much of its appeal from demonstrating that slavery in all its forms-its subversion of autonomy, its reliance on physical force and use of physical cruelty, the labor demands it placed on women-violated Victorian cultural beliefs about gender. In turn, white middle-class Americans, perceiving African Americans as childlike, tended to respond to these abolition ist appeals with paternalistic pity. With regard to social class and class difference, Victorian emphases on self-restraint, physical and emotional composure, and admonitions against excess served to distinguish white, middle-class men from the alleged excesses of working-class and immigrant men, such as the Irish, whom they perceived as racially different, brutish, and lacking in self-control. Victorian manhood was constructed in conscious opposition to urban working-class manhood, and to the leisure practices and street politics of Jacksonian America.

Male Emotion and Companionship

Victorian men compensated for this extreme rigor in public life and private sexuality through a new emphasis on emo tional expressiveness and companionship in their personal relationships. While they used a language of civilized morality

and cultural sobriety when speaking of their business lives and careers, they used a highly romantic and sentimental lan guage when discussing their marriages and friendships. Bemoaning the spatial separation between business and household, they described the home as a place where they could be more truly themselves, and they perceived affection ate domestic relationships as a key aspect of male gender identity. Indeed, both men and women cherished emotional self-expression, which no longer seemed possible in the superficial public sphere, as a way of sharing their sacred, innermost selves within the sanctity of the home.

Victorian men practiced this private, emotive style in homosocial as well as heterosocial settings, and they understood sentimental, even romantic, relationships with other men as central to their identities as men. Before the twentieth century, men routinely formed emotionally and physically intimate (though usually nonsexual) friendships with other men, and they attached deep spiritual significance to these friendships. While men perceived sexuality and their physical relations with their wives as a part of their mutually expected and cherished self-expression, intense, long-lasting friendships among men were valued because they lacked an association with sex or phys

ical consummation. Such friendships not only represented a way to facilitate the transition from youth to adulthood, but they also expressed men's ab�lity to love. These friendships lasted even after the men got married, and men's wives not only knew of these friendships, but appreciated them as a sign of their chosen partners' capacity for love and affection.

Challenges to Victorian Manhood

Victorian definitions of manhood were often ambiguous and ambivalent. While they affirmed an emerging capitalist market and the resulting commodification of social relations, they also suggested resistance to these developments by offering com pensatory behavior. Victorian ideas about masculinity were increasingly challenged during the early twentieth century by the emergence of a consumer society, by new ideas about sexu ality and the body, and by the formation and expansion of cor porate and bureaucratic sectors in society. The expanding array of leisure activities offered by consumer culture and urban areas undermined a Victorian insistence on sexual self-restraint and sobriety. Furthermore, Americans interpreted the ideas of Sigmund Freud, which gained in popularity in the United States, as supportive of heterosexual self-expression as a source and an indication of psychological well-being.

At the same time, psychologists' invention and stigmatiza tion of homosexuality rendered suspect intensely emotional male-male friendships. In addition, while emerging corporate

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and bureaucratic cultures incorporated the Victorian empha sis on sobriety into new professional codes of manliness, they also encouraged a style of manhood (one viewed with suspi cion by Victorians) that emphasized external impressions over inner character. Victorian definitions of manliness focusing on the outward representation of a true and unchanging inner self lost influence with the twentieth-century shift to the notion of a self that was grounded in interpersonal relations and that emphasized role playing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1 982.

Kasson, John F. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1 990.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1 996.

Lystra, Karen. Searching The Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Rosenberg, Charles E. "Sexuality, Class, and Role in 1 9th-Century America." American Quarterly 25 (May 1 973): 1 3 1-153. Yacovone, Donald. '''Surpassing the Love of Women': Victorian

Manhood and the Language of Fraternal Love." In A Shared Experience: Men, Women, and The History of Gender, edited by Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone. New York: New York University Press, 1 998.

VIETNAM WAR

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VIETNAM WAR

U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ( 1965-73) reflected and shaped American articulations of masculinity. Because the fig ure of the male soldier has long been an icon of both national and masculine identity in America, the United States' inter vention in Vietnam offered two opportunities. First, within a larger context of Cold War rivalry, it could establish the supe riority of U.S. military power and American masculinity over an Asian people and the Communist powers (the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China) that backed them. Second, it could reinvigorate masculinity at home at a time when such social forces as a resurgent women's rights movement, an emerging gay rights movement, the counterculture, and the economic downturn of the late 1960s and early 1970s under cut notions of a stable definition of manliness. Although only a small number of American men eligible for the draft actually served in Vietnam, masculinity was at stake at many levels dur ing and after U.S. involvement in the war. Since connecting manhood to the war made masculinity contingent upon a decisive victory in the conflict, U.S. failure to achieve that vic tory complicated cultural constructions of masculinity.

The application of masculine metaphors to the conflict by top-level policymakers suggested a broad cultural equation of U.S. military involvement and support for the war with a tough, virile masculinity. In National Security Council meet ings, President Lyndon B. _{Johnson appeared to be greatly con}

cerned to take a sufficiently masculine approach on U.S. policy in South Vietnam. On one occasion, Johnson expressed con cern that he might compare less than favorably to his prede cessor John F. Kennedy, who cultivated a youthful, virile image. Reflecting such concerns with a sufficiently masculine stance in Southeast Asia, President Johnson stated after the 1 966 Christmas bombings of North Vietnam that he "did not just screw Ho Chi Minh" but "cut his pecker off" (Fasteau, 396). Johnson thus compared U.S. military action in Southeast Asia to domineering sexual penetration, culminating in the castration of allegedly inferior Asian males. Johnson's rhetoric, in particular, indicated the importance of masculine imagery in both domestic political life and in Cold War foreign policy.

Not all American men accepted the identification of inter vention in Vietnam with American strength and masculinity. Conscientious objectors and participants in the antiwar move ment, such as the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, formed in 1 967, tended to identify their conscience-based resistance to what they perceived as an unjust and needless war as a marker of a more genuine manhood grounded in a commitment to responsible citizenship and social j ustice. Tensions between