Sarah has co-edited a volume of essays on "women constructing men", and it includes an essay she's written herself, on the topic of Suzanne Brockmann’s Sam Starrett. I thought it would be interesting to interview her to find out more. But first, here are some details about the volume:
Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and their Male Characters, 1750-2000. Ed. Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009.Female novelists have always invested as much narrative energy in constructing their male characters as in envisioning their female. The collected articles in Women Constructing Men demonstrate that the topic of female-authored masculinities not only allows scholars to re-discover almost every novel written by a woman, but also triggers reflections on a host of theoretical questions of gender and genre.Here's a list of the contents of the volume:
- Sarah S. G. Frantz and Katharina Rennhak - Female Novelists and their Male Characters, 1750-2000: An Introduction
- Shawn Lisa Maurer - Happy Men: Mid-eighteenth-century Women Writers and Ideal Masculinity
- George Haggerty - Male privilege in Frances Burney’s The Wanderer
- Katharina Rennhak - The Medium Makes the man: Anne Plumptre’s Something New and The History of Myself and My Friend
- Sarah Ailwood - Too Much in the Common Novel Style: Reforming Masculinities in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
- Sara Pearson - Constructing Masculine Narrative: Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor
- Frederick Burwick - The Lifted Veil: George Eliot’s Experiment with First-person Narrative
- Rainer Emig - Assimilating the "pretty youngster": George Eliot’s Eroticized Men on the Borderlines of Morality, Religion, Race, and Nation
- Roxanne Harde - "His spirituality or his manliness": Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s (Re)constructions of Christian Masculinity
- Virginia Richter - The Differential Construction of Masculinity in the Writings of Virginia Woolf
- Ellen McWilliams - Knitting Paradise Lost: Masculinity and Domesticity in the Novels of Carol Shields
- Katherine Bode - Looking (Im)properly: Women Objectifying Men’s Bodies in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fiction
- Angela Laflen - Unmaking the Self-made Man: Louise Erdrich’s Fictional Exploration of Masculinity
- Sarah S. G. Frantz - "I’ve tried my entire life to be a good man": Suzanne Brockmann’s Sam Starrett, Ideal Romance Hero
SSGF: I don't know about the "briefly" part. :) When I first sent out the call for proposals for this book, someone expressed interest in writing about Rochester in Jane Eyre. I did a little bit of research and found one article on MLAB that was focused on Rochester. One. To my mind, very reductively, feminist literary criticism started when it realized that male critics were analyzing female characters in books by men (Pamela, for example) with very little understanding of what it meant to live the female experience. Feminist literary criticism quickly and logically moved from examining female characters written by men to female characters written by women. With the rise in masculinity studies, people began to study male characters written by men from a gendered perspective, as constitutive of gender expectations as much as female characters. But there's a gaping hole there. Very rarely do critics of gender studies and gender creation examine the ways in which female-constructed masculinity is equally as constitutive of gender dynamics as the other three possible permutations. Surely women are revealing a lot about the world as constructed by gender when they create male villains or fathers or brothers or lovers or ideal heroes? There has, up until now, been very little work done on female-authored masculinity. Even authors like Austen have only very recently received extensive evaluation of their construction of ideal masculinity. So Women Constructing Men allowed us to bring together some cutting edge research by some very smart people about the ways in which female novelists--both in the canon and on the fringes--construct masculinity in their books.
LV: The volume spans three continents and 250 years. As you've noted elsewhere, those years include the period during which what came to be known as "the Great Masculine Renunciation" took place:
Gone were the scarlets and purples, satins and velvets, lace and embroidery of conspicuous consumption that men wore in the middle of the eighteenth century. Romantic-era men wore instead dark blue or black wool coats, stiffly starched, blindingly white shirts, and skin-tight, skin-colored pantaloons [...] But this Great Masculine Renunciation entailed more than Romantic era men suddenly realizing that dark blue wool and starched shirts were more masculine than red velvet and pantaloons. Indeed, the ideological work that went into making that realization a reality demonstrates the radical transformation that representations of and assumptions about masculinity experienced in the Romantic era. I argue, in fact, that the total transformation in men's fashions in the Regency era was an outward manifestation of a similar renunciation in men's ability to express their emotions. This emotional change was of particular concern to female authors of novels in which a man and a woman had to fall in love with and express their love to each other--female authors of which Jane Austen was one of the earliest.For her part, Katharina Rennhak has previously written that
A study of gendered authorial identities around 1800 seems especially promising: As has been shown by recent scholarship, the later phase of the long eighteenth century not only saw the triumphal (discursive) procession of the ideology of separate spheres and (as a consequence?) the beginning of the marginalisation and exclusion of women writers from literary histories; but it was also the time when female novelists were rapidly gaining a significant market share.But the volume also takes us right up to the end of the twentieth century, and very significant social changes had occurred during the 250-year period. Were there any aspects of women's constructions of men and manhood that remained constant?
SSGF: A fascination with men! The vast majority of women, after all, are attracted to men and enjoy their attentions and want from them companionship and relationships and sex and love. Female novelists, then, get the opportunity to create their own romantic ideal. It's amazing how much time and effort over the centuries that women have put into doing precisely that and its equally amazing to me that this aspect of their writing hasn't yet received sustained study.
I guess something else that's consistent is that women consistently attempt to write ideal men, the perfect mate, the one man who can solve all problems. Sometimes their construct succeeds and everyone lives happily ever after, but often it fails and that spirals everything in the book down into destruction. But the impulse to write Mr. Right is a strong one and seems to be universal.
LV: We were discussing slash fiction and m/m romance recently, and you've mentioned that "the book I will be writing for the next few years is about the power, appeal, and history of the modern American romance hero." Could you tell us a bit more about why you and others find romance heroes so fascinating?
SSGF: Personally, I find romance heroes fascinating AS female constructs. I'm not much interested in male characters written by men. I'm interested in what female authors include when they write a hero. I'm fascinated with why angsty, dark, tortured heroes are so popular. I'm fascinated with what we, as woman, consider ideal, with what we consider attractive in a romance hero vs. what we'd like in real life mate. And I'd have to say I'm not alone, considering the success of all the many hero-focused romance series out there. As to why we find them fascinating? Well, we're surrounded by men, we like men, we have to work with men every day, and I think the ideation of good and bad men is a way to work through issues in our lives and relationships.
LV: Sarah, you summarised Brockmann's oeuvre in an article published in Teaching American Literature in 2008 and you've written elsewhere that
A game I like to play in all of Brockmann’s books is finding the tears. Because Brockmann’s heroes like to cry. The entire of personality of her most famous character, Sam Starrett, and his love affair with Alyssa is built around his relationship to his own tears, and they’re pretty powerful stuff.Is it Sam's tears that make him your "Ideal Romance Hero"?
SSGF: Heh. Well, the famous scene in Over the Edge when Alyssa finds him crying after he's torn up his room is quite wonderful, to be sure. I guess I like vulnerability in my heroes, the proof that they can be moved. And I really enjoy seeing how Brockmann plays with her heroes' tears now. But my article on Sam is about how Brockmann uses him to explore the romance hero tropes (rapist hero, rake, the unforgettable former lover, and the superhero), only to discard them all as inappropriate to a truly heroic masculinity. I show how "a true, lasting masculinity, deserving of a happy ending, cannot be built without love as its foundation," which is a really sweeping thing to say, I know, but it's the conclusion of my paper and I think it does a pretty good job of showing how I get to that point. Overall, I'm very proud of the book as a whole. I think it does a wonderful job of showing what can be done if we open our eyes to female-authored masculinity and I'm very interested in what might happen to the field in the future. And thanks for this lovely interview!
LV: Thank you for telling us more about Women Constructing Men!
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- Frantz, Sarah. "Jane Austen's Heroes and the Great Masculine Renunciation." Persuasions 25 (2003): 165-175.
- Frantz, Sarah. "Suzanne Brockmann." Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 2.2-3 (Special Issue Spring/Summer 2008).
A very interesting subject. I've read many comments in which women state that they can always tell when a romance has been authored by a male. And, being a male reader of romance fiction, I've noted that women writing male characters don't get things completely right either. This is especially notable in sex scenes told from the male's point of view. Ms. Franz's study may explain both these reactions.
ReplyDelete"I've read many comments in which women state that they can always tell when a romance has been authored by a male."
ReplyDeleteI've seen comments like that too, but I've also seen at least one comment by a reader who was absolutely convinced that a particular author had to be male because the sex scenes were too explicit to be written by a woman. Other people were able to confirm that the author really was a woman.
As far as I know, thanks to the searching I did for this post, I've known in advance when I was reading a romance written by a male author writing under female pseudonym. I've only read a few of the authors listed there, but I don't think I'd have been able to tell they were male. I suspect there are probably quite a lot of other men writing romances under female pseudonyms, and whose works I've read. It's never crossed my mind, though, to start querying the gender of the authors.
"I've noted that women writing male characters don't get things completely right either. This is especially notable in sex scenes told from the male's point of view."
The most obvious inaccuracy I've seen mentioned in this context are the hymens located a considerable distance up a vagina. And lots of women have queried other aspects of the sex scenes. For example, Smart Bitch Sarah has noted that
the sex in a romance novel is most often outstanding, wall banging, bed pounding excellence, it’s also like that in movies and on tv most of the time. Realistic sex that’s sometimes silly, funny, goofy or passionate or awkward or emotional or mind numbing is an experience that books can’t really replicate.
"the hymens located a considerable distance up a vagina"
ReplyDeleteUmm, sorry, that could sound really, really odd. It was one hymen per vagina, not multiple hymens up a single heroine's vagina.
"I've noted that women writing male characters don't get things completely right either. "
ReplyDeleteThank goodness there's always a guy around to mansplain how we women need to do things to suit him better.
This is, to go off on a tangent slightly, what I was talking about recently with regards to m/m fiction. Questions of *accuracy* really have no relevance if the author and audience don't place a value on it, and if you're talking about a non-marginalised group like men as a whole, then it's not even an important intellectual consideration.
Reframing men in a way that allows women to impose their own desires and needs upon an idealised without policing of real life males is not only the heart and soul of what romance - and m/m - is about, it's why romance is such an essential part of women's lives. It's a valuable escape valve, and it's also how we can cope with some pretty serious real life consequences of living under male rule.
Not only are male opinions about whether we're doing it 'right' unnecessary, they're harmful in that they seek to control in an area where that control is vehemently rejected and subverted.
Speaking purely for myself, I wouldn't hang a sign up over the tree house saying 'No boys allowed' but I might - just might - ask them to hand their testicles over for the duration before they come in ;)
"But the impulse to write Mr. Right is a strong one and seems to be universal."
I don't read a lot of het Romance, but the 'Mr Right' doesn't have to be the *reader's* personal MR Right to be enjoyable, so far as I can see. Romance, at least in the m/m sphere, is also creating the ideal men with whom me might work, who might govern us, who will carry out the traditional male roles in our society...but do so in a manner which takes account of what women want from government and society.
"I think the ideation of good and bad men is a way to work through issues in our lives and relationships.'
Exactly so.
We write men who *should* already exist - those who ::cough:: wouldn't thump into a discussion about women's writing and tell them they're doing it wrong, for instance, or who can talk about their feelings, who are brave and selfless and honourable - even if we don't actually want to have sex with them or marry them, because men dominate so much of our existence and shape our lives in thousands of ways. If we can't have true equality with men, let's at least have quality men.
Sarah, I really want to read your book! Thank you, Laura, for letting her tell us about it. In all seriousness, I think a companion volume on the popularity and importance of female-authored, male-character-dominated fiction (i.e. yaoi and m/m and all the permutations there of) surely must be the next step?
How uncanny. I've been thinking about this very topic for the last couple of weeks. Specifically, how even the tortured heroes are invulnerable in the sense of always being - cool. The one thing that a romance hero is never allowed to be is deeply uncool. Nerdy. A bit of a loser. I suppose it's I have a sense that the appeal of *dark and tortured* is that it's a sexy way of creating a flawed man without giving him a flaw that's sexually unappealing. And in that sense, the thing that the sketching of a romance hero has it's very core, is desire/ appeal/ sexiness. It's the one thing that cannot be tinkered with.
ReplyDeleteI contrast this with, for example, Nick Hornby's books which feature men being a bit crap; vulnerable in a way that is unheroic and unsexy.
Now, I'm expecting - and even hoping - you will prove me wrong with an example to the contrary**.
**The nearest I can think of is at the end of the second Bridget Jones book where Bridget and Mark are sitting together at the end and she sees a vulnerable side to him and touches his bald spot tenderly. I remember reading that and having this huge feeling of surprise.
"I've noted that women writing male characters don't get things completely right either. This is especially notable in sex scenes told from the male's point of view."
ReplyDeleteThe odd thing about this observation to me (speaking from a male point of view) is that it assumes there is some single, recognizable "right" way that men experience sex, or anything else. I don't see why that would be true, or how you would test it, even if it were.
I've also heard, many times, that so-and-so's male characters aren't "realistic," and been puzzled to see that they're the same characters that seemed most believable to me.
As for the importance of women authors somehow "getting it right," I'll admit that sometimes I'll burst into a huge grin of recognition at something a male character does--a sort of "yes, that's exactly right!" response. But those have hardly been the moments that drive my reading of the genre, and I wouldn't say that those moments are what I'm searching for as I read. It's romance, not realism. It's supposed to map desires, not bow to verisimilitude.
Great interview, Laura & Sarah!
"Questions of *accuracy* really have no relevance if the author and audience don't place a value on it"
ReplyDeleteThat's very true. If, as Sarah as said, women's texts are read in terms of their "construction of ideal masculinity" and, as you said, of "ideal men with whom me might work, who might govern us, who will carry out the traditional male roles in our society," then there's no reason why they should be entirely accurate and realistic in all respects.
Of course, some romances are more unrealistic than others. Vampires, for example, can be found in many romances, but they're not creatures one would expect to encounter in real life but some romances deal with some fairly gritty issues (post traumatic stress disorder, infertility, addiction, bereavement etc) in ways which can be described as "realistic."
Jennifer Crusie puts it better than I can:
As Luthi has pointed out, “Fairy tales are unreal, but they are not untrue: they reflect the essential development and conditions of man’s existence” (70).
But what can’t be escaped can be revised. The magic of the specific tale romance is that it resolves the problems women have with the specific stories by revising the detail without altering the central truth of emotional justice, thereby coupling the resonance of the story with the satisfaction of getting it told right this time.
So even when romances are at their most "unreal" that doesn't mean they're "untrue." This is what Susan Elizabeth Phillips has written: "the fantasy these novels offered me was one of command and control [...] - a fantasy of female empowerment" (55) and
Creating a fantasy world is one of the primary functions of all popular fiction. The mystery novel gives us a world of perfect justice, the western a world with no moral ambiguities. And the romance novel gives us two empowered and integrated human beings.
The romance novelist has an implicit contract with the reader who buys her book to portray life exactly as it is not. For the time that a reader is absorbed in a love story, she is not only safe from harm but empowered to rise above every limitation, every obstacle, every worry that confronts her. (58)
Personally, I don't think the existence of a couple made up of two relatively "empowered and integrated human beings" is a fantasy. But in real life they probably wouldn't be anywhere near as "empowered" as a super-rich vampire, so obviously there's a range of possibilities open to the writer, from the almost-like-reality (but a bit more interesting, or it wouldn't make for a good story) to the very-obviously-a-total-fantasy.
"I don't read a lot of het Romance, but the 'Mr Right' doesn't have to be the *reader's* personal MR Right to be enjoyable, so far as I can see."
I think that's true, although it maybe depends on what a particular reader is looking for in romances. I think this touches on what Tumperkin mentions in her comment. Many a romance Mr Right might be rather uncomfortable to live with in daily life, but readers who feel that way about him can still like to read about him because he's attractive to them. It may also depend on how someone reads: if you're living the story inside, or along with, one or more of the characters, it may be more important that you personally find the hero attractive, whereas if you read as a detached observer, you may only need to be convinced that the characters are right for each other.
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Phillips, Susan Elizabeth. "The Romance and the Empowerment of Women." Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance. Ed. Jayne Ann Krentz. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992. 53-59.
"it's a sexy way of creating a flawed man without giving him a flaw that's sexually unappealing"
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of an interview question I was once asked. It was something like: what do you think's your biggest character flaw. It seemed a bit of a strange question to ask, because I would have thought most people would come up with a "flaw" that casts them in a good light. I can't imagine anyone says "Oh, I don't know, it's so difficult to choose between my laziness, inattention to detail, lack of good time-keeping, rudeness, inability to follow orders....."
As far as heroes are concerned, I do not find "dark and tortured" sexy. I tend to wonder why any heroine would waste her time trying to reform Mr Tortured when there must be lots of other men who wouldn't require so much work. But there's no accounting for taste, so I accept that she finds him sexy, even though I'd walk away from him as fast as I could.
"Nick Hornby's books [...] feature men being a bit crap; vulnerable in a way that is unheroic and unsexy.
Now, I'm expecting - and even hoping - you will prove me wrong with an example to the contrary"
I can think of heroes whose flaws aren't particularly heroic in a "dark and tortured" sort of way. Georgette Heyer's Freddy, in Cotillion is very untortured. He's not very handsome or quick witted, either. In Fiona Hill's The Country Gentleman the hero has a loud laugh that really irritates the heroine, and he isn't in the least bit tortured.
But romance heroes do tend to have to do something to deserve the heroine, just as she has to do something to show she deserves him. Otherwise you wouldn't get the feeling of "emotional justice" that's mentioned in the Crusie quote I included in my last comment.
I'm glad you enjoyed reading the interview, Eric!
ReplyDelete"it assumes there is some single, recognizable "right" way that men experience sex, or anything else. I don't see why that would be true, or how you would test it, even if it were."
Yes, and similarly, I don't think there is only one way that women authors and readers imagine the ideal man. When I asked Sarah if "any aspects of women's constructions of men and manhood [...] remained constant," she replied "A fascination with men!" And even if you look at a single female author's work, she won't necessary just write one type over and over. Austen created Mr Darcy, but she also created Captain Wentworth, Henry Tilney, Edward Ferrars, Edmund Bertram and Mr Knightley.
An excellent look into the book. Great interview Laura & Sarah.
ReplyDelete" I argue, in fact, that the total transformation in men's fashions in the Regency era was an outward manifestation of a similar renunciation in men's ability to express their emotions."
I'm struck by this and puzzled as to why the change occurred. What was the impetus for the change? The difference between the excesses of the Georgian to the Beau Brummellian of the Regency is so stark and so rapid a transformation, it almost defies belief. So...why? Straightened circumstances? (Clearly, this holds true mostly only for the nobility; less change was visible as one went down the class structure.)
"What was the impetus for the change?"
ReplyDeleteYou can read Sarah's opinions about that, in full, in her article.
She contrasts "a portrait of George Lucy, by Pompeo Batoni, painted in 1758 when Lucy was on his Grand Tour" with one "of Charles Christie, Esq., by Henry Raeburn, painted in 1800." It's probably worth noting that George Lucy was in Italy at the time his blue, gold-embroidered coat was painted and apparently
Writing home in 1755 when he was in Naples, George Lucy explained that fashionable Italian society: '...dress much and I have been obliged to daub myself all over silver, accompanied by a sword and bag wig'. His grumbles about the formality of Italian clothing help to reinforce the relative simplicity of English dress. This lack of grandeur was noted by foreign visitors to Britain, who found the daytime dress of English men so plain as to cause comment; they were equally confused by the dress of some female servants, which was so rich that it was difficult to ascertain who was mistress and who the servant. (Cumming 86)
So perhaps even before the Grand Renunciation male clothing in the UK (among the aristocracy) was tending towards simplicity, at least relative to continental daytime fashions.
Here's something I found on a website regarding 18th-century men's fashions:
In England at this time period high fashion and everyday dress for the nobility became separated into two distinct entities, for example, a mid-18th Century English Duke might wear laces, gilt embroidery and velvets at a formal occasion yet wear simple dark Quaker built clothes during the day, almost indistinguishable from what a middle class shopkeeper might wear.
The Dominant style in the the early part of the century was with the formal mode of dress which gradually phased out, until in 1800, almost all that was left was the informal day dress. Throughout the century the two styles existed side-by-side, usually cut along the same lives and only distinguished by color, fabric and trimming.
I have no expertise in this area at all, so I can't say for sure whether this information is accurate, but it does suggest that the process of change was a gradual one.
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Cumming, Valerie. Understanding Fashion History. London: Batsford, 2004.
As for why the change happened, Sarah writes in her essay that
ReplyDeleteone fashion historian claims, Brummell's look [...] "suggested that the wearer exercised special powers of self-control, that his emotional and intellectual life had special qualities of rigor and discipline, that this was a man who was fully in control of his faculties and fully in possession of himself" (McCracken 452)
This reminds me of the black clothing worn by Philip II of Spain:
Gridley McKim-Smith offers one of the best explanations for the relative austerity of Spanish Golden Age fashion by linking the construction of identity to clothing, especially color. By the early sixteenth century, black was already a distinctive marker of Spanish material culture, gender, and race, especially for men at the zenith of their power who wished to express an inward subjectivity through outward display. It is often agreed that for Philip II and his followers, black demonstrated one's religious and fiscal restraint through penitence and mourning. Yet, as McKim-Smith explains, the wearing of black had deeper roots. From the time of the first nation-wide expulsions in 1492, black became the color of ethnic Christians wishing to differentiate themselves from Moriscos and conversos [former Jews]. Although Spanish Christians had a long history of appropriating the coloristic brocades and jewels often associated with Muslim fashion, after the fall of Granada they began to express their rejection of the Other by embracing black as the "noncolor." In this way, a narcissistic obsession with the body was displaced on others. (Donnell 154)
Again, this is not my area of expertise, so I don't know if there are other explanations, but I thought it was interesting to mention it, for comparative purposes.
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Donnell, Sidney. Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity. Cranbury, NJ:, Associated University Presses, 2003.
Laura, you're a marvel. Thank you for the details and the links.
ReplyDeleteFascinating! I'm reminded a bit of the Lesser Male Renunciation that occurred in my own lifetime, between the fashions of the later 1960s and '70s and the return of "power" dressing (suits, etc.) in the American 1980s.
ReplyDeleteSuch an interesting interview and book. Thanks for doing it, Laura and Sarah, and congratulations, Sarah on a fantastic achievement!
ReplyDeleteI also loved the Sam crying scene in Over the Edge, and I also completely agree with Tumperkin, and can only add that Laura's 2 exceptions from among the presumably hundreds if not thousands of romance she has read prove the rule.
@ A. Sommerville: You know, I wasn't trying to "mansplain" anything. My god, it would be terrible if, because I'm male rather than female, I should try to understand romance fiction, written by, for, and about women, and therefore beyond the ken of a mere male.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous said....
ReplyDeleteOh who cares. I don't talk to people who don't put a name to their remarks, and Eric said it better than I could anyway.
@ E.M. Sellinger:
ReplyDeleteOf course, you're right, there's no "right" way for males to experience sex. At the same time, there are some things that the bolt can do and experience that the nut can't do and therefore won't experience. There are also some positions that are physically impossible.
Glad to be of help, Keira!
ReplyDeleteThere's more about the Great Masculine Renunciation and the reasons for it in David Kuchta's "The Making of the Self-Made Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 1688-1832." The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Ed. Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1996. 54-78. You can read all of it (as I did) via Google Books, although the illustrations have been replaced with blank spaces. He argues that "for the past three hundred years, elite masculinity has been identified with the values of industry and economy. These values have become obvious, unquestioned, second nature, synonymous with masculinity itself" (54-55) and his "essay argues that the great masculine renunciation was propelled by an ideology and social dynamic of men's fashion that I have called 'inconspicuous consumption.'" (55). He traces it back to the "Glorious Revolution" which "ended royal pretensions to absolutism by replacing James II with the more politically and sartorially modest William and Mary, and in turn court observers began to notice the increasing tendency among upper-class Englishmen [..] to be 'temper'd with becoming modesty'" (56).
That dates the beginnings of the trend rather earlier than the Regency, of course, but the other sources I quoted had mentioned earlier differences in wealthy men's day and evening wear, and a relative lack of ostentation among Englishmen and Kuchta mentions it here, too: "Traveling in England in 1698, the Frenchman Francis Misson observed that 'generally speaking, the English men dress in a plain uniform manner.'" (60).
At the same time,
elite women displayed their social station by becoming guardians of consumption, responsible for the world of fashion. In this construction of femininity, wealth still corresponded with worth; consumption was still conspicuous.
Thus a new political culture was used to define new constructions of both masculinity and femininity, and [...] early feminists had to both denaturalize this feminization of fashion and degender virtue. (66)
I'd guess that the finer points of when the change began to happen, and why it happened, are areas of scholarly debate.
Here's a bit more, this time from Brent Alan Shannon's The Cut of his Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914. Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 2006. [Excerpts available via Google Books]
ReplyDeleteMost conventional histories posit that between 1800 and World War II, men's consumption was suppressed and their sartorial display muted because of dramatic changes in social concepts of both class and gender formation. In 1930, the psychologist J. C. Flugel popularized the theory of the "Great Masculine Renunciation," a radical shift to sober male attire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (23)
Interestingly, and perhaps rather paradoxically in the light of Sarah's opinions about the sexiness of Regency male dress:
Many scholars [...] popularly regard the Great Masculine Renunciation as a renunciation of men's physicality - of a male sexual, visual self - in favor of what Anne Hollander and Davidoff and Hall identify as a "utilitarian male body" devoted to work rather than pleasure. (25)
Of course, those breeches could be rather tight fitting, and utilitarian menswear in the form of jeans are also often considered very sexy, so perhaps the paradox is that men have come to be considered more sexy (because more masculine?) when they don't look as though they're trying to be sexy, whereas women generally have to put a lot of effort into achieving a sexy look.
And finally here's a bit more about Flugel, who came up with the phrase "The Great Masculine Renunciation." According to Joanna Bourke's article on Men's Dress Reform in Inter-war Britain (unfortunately you can only see the first page at that link):
ReplyDeleteIn 1929, the Men's Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that since the end of the eighteenth century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by 'making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts'. He called this event 'The Great Masculine Renunciation', or the occasion when men 'abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful' and 'henceforth aimed at being only useful'. In the face of inter-war feminism and the denigration of masculinity, the professionals who joined the Men's Dress Reform Party regarded it as their duty to lobby for the aesthetic liberation of men. [...] The experience of warfare between 1914 and 1918 was crucial in focusing attention on the bodies of men. Dress reform was necessary not only for the sake of enhancing masculine beauty, but also to prevent the further degeneration of the 'British race'. Health and hygiene were high on the agenda of male dress reformers. (23)
Some of their arguments were elitist: they were not happy with the way that "when you met soldiers in the streets you could not tell from their appearances 'whether they have come from country houses and parsonages, or from labourers cottages and artisan dwellings'" (23). Some were anti-women: "All symbols of men's inferiority to women were to be tackled. For instance, hats needed to be thrown away (or remodelled) so as not to cause baldness. The physical deformity caused by over-tight clothing had to be eradicated. Middle-aged men should never again faint because of over-tight belts, stays, and collars" (24). Some were based on strange scientific ideas: "The reformers [...] argued that exposure to sunlight would cure a wide range of illnesses, particularly rickets and tuberculosis" (26). They didn't get very far with their ideas and "Members were often regarded as part of the loony fringe" (27). Lots of men apparently had reservations about showing their legs and other parts of their bodies in public, because they thought their bodies were too ugly, and "It was recognized that male dignity rested on the clothes covering his body" (29).
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Bourke, Joanna. "The Great Male Renunciation: Men's Dress Reform in Inter-War Britain." Journal of Design History 9.1 (1996): 23-33.
Laura's 2 exceptions from among the presumably hundreds if not thousands of romance she has read prove the rule.
ReplyDeleteHmph! Miles Vorkosigan is very short and at some point in his series develops a kind of epilepsy. So that makes three. I'm sure I could think of a few more....
All About Romance has a list of "Romances with characters who are homely, plain, scarred, or do not meet the standards of beauty for their time." It includes a lot of heroines, though, and I'm not sure that all the heroes on the list are really ugly. For example, Elizabeth Hoyt's The Raven Prince is on the list because the hero has pockmarks but Dionne Glace has commented that "For a supposedly ugly dude, Edward is super-hot. To compensate for the pockmarks, he’s got a really muscular, super-buff body. Duh." Lord Dain in Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels is supposed to be ugly, but I was never convinced about that. And yes, there are a lot of heroes whose beauty has been "marred" (i.e. enhanced) by some terribly sexy scars, or a minor limp. So I suppose I'll just have to admit that the supposed defects in heroes' appearances generally aren't intended to make them seem unsexy.
@Ann Sommerville:
ReplyDeleteWho cares? Only those, I suppose, for whom good manners still have some value.
But since I've been released from that requirement, I really can't see that it's noteworty female authors create males as they wish them to be. That's what being an author is all about isn't it? Whether their creations change the ideas about what masculinity is, is questionable, I think, for the males they create are only fantasies and their audience is primarily female.
Dick Winegard
"since I've been released from that requirement"
ReplyDeleteMy general position on moderating comments threads here at TMT is that I want commenters to feel free to engage in robust exchanges of ideas. However, I would take a less than positive view of exchanges which deteriorated into purely personal attacks. That would be an indication that the parties involved had moved away from the original topic of debate/discussion.
In the history of Teach Me Tonight's existence, however, things have never deteriorated to that extent and I'm very grateful that's the case.
"I really can't see that it's noteworty female authors create males as they wish them to be. That's what being an author is all about isn't it?"
ReplyDeleteI think it depends what you mean by "as they wish them to be." Perhaps you mean that authors have control over the characters they create, so therefore the characters end up as the authors wish them to be?
On the other hand, if by "as they wish them to be" you mean that authors are exploring ideals, that's a rather different thing. Are you arguing that exploring masculinity is "what being an author is all about"? That would seem to me to be a rather limited definition of what the whole of literature is about.
Whether their creations change the ideas about what masculinity is, is questionable, I think, for the males they create are only fantasies and their audience is primarily female.
As pointed out in the 2008 UN report on The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality
In their families and communities, men live in social relationships with women and girls: as wives, partners, mothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, nieces, friends, classmates, colleagues and neighbours. The quality of these relationships in large part determines the quality of men’s lives. (5)
I'd suggest that many heterosexual men do have some interest in women's opinions of them. A man who exhibits behaviour very, very far removed from women's ideal of masculinity would presumably not get as many dates.
In addition, childcare still tends to be provided by women and while I wouldn't go as far as to echo the Jesuit claim of “Give us a boy until he is seven years of age, and we will answer for him for the rest of his life!,” I do think that, in theory, women's roles as providers of childcare could give women some degree of influence in changing male children's concepts of themselves and of masculinity. Here's something else from that UN report:
A project undertaken in a number of preschools in Sweden filmed the teachers’ interaction with students, and analysed the video material from a gender perspective. The videos provided evidence of boys being prioritized and treated differently in key ways. Communication with boys was command-oriented, with little space for verbal
interactions. Girls were expected to be competent and independent in getting dressed and tying their shoelaces, etc. Boys were left to play on their own, while girls were kept at a closer distance to the staff and prevented from playing “physically”.
On the basis of this evidence, the preschool staff started to change their behaviour with both girls and boys. In the boys’ group, boys were encouraged to tell stories, something that they normally would not have done. As a result, boys gradually changed their behaviour in mixed groups, becoming more cooperative, calmer and focused. Although initiatives such as these have shown some success, further development of the approach is necessary. For example, a huge discrepancy between the numbers of male and female preschool staff continues to exist. At present, only 3 per cent of preschool staff in Sweden are men, and status and salary for this profession remain low.
Source: L. Jalmert (2003), “The role of men and boys in achieving gender equality: some Swedishand Scandinavian experiences”, paper presented at the expert group meeting entitled “The role of men and boys in achieving gender equality”, organized by the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Brasilia, Brazil, 21-24 October 2003.
"That would seem to me to be a rather limited definition of what the whole of literature is about."
ReplyDeleteYes indeed. We write to make sense of the entire world, not discrete bits of it. It's not surprising that women in a male-dominated society spend so much time reshaping and exploring visions and ideas of men, real and unreal. But my romance stories aren't *just* - or even primarily about men at all. They're about family, social and legal justice, social ideals, vengeance, rehabilitation of the apparently irredeemable, gender roles, science, individual responsibility....
Oops, all that was what I covered in my very first book :) It gets complicated after that.
Making the gay sex serve the thematic purpose of the book is also an intellectual challenge, of course :)
Interesting that studies have shown that while boys do better in mixed sex schools, girls do considerably worse academically. It seems the trade off between achievement and acceptance begins very early.
"I do think that, in theory, women's roles as providers of childcare could give women some degree of influence in changing male children's concepts of themselves and of masculinity."
Yes, I agree. Unfortunately since so many women have internalised sexism and oppressive self-images, their influence in shaping man children isn't always in the manner which best serves women's best interests - or even those of men.
@Laura Vivanco:
ReplyDeleteI meant the first of your interpretations of "as they wish them to be," although the second might apply a bit within the first. However, I think the efforts of authors, male or female, is to create characters, not ideals--except perhaps in true fairy tale--and I think that's true in romance fiction as well other fiction. Certainly if the character is a male, they are exploring what masculinity is insofar as the character they've created displays it. But I don't think that they would change the character to display something about what they think masculinity in general is.
Of course men are interested in women's opinions of them, but I don't think that they think of it in terms of what an author of any kind of fiction has determined is masculine or not. And I'm doubtful that women do either. In fact, the great number of women who are fascinated by the so-called "alpha" male always add that they wouldn't want to be in a relationship with that type of male.
Dick Winegard