CENTURY LITERATURE A Dissertation by JUNG SUN ... - Repository

and James Eli Adams concur that Victorian notions of manliness were transformed
significantly during the course of the century. If the conceptual transformation of
manliness can be generalized, the mid-nineteenth century tends to encourage
womanliness in manhood to produce androgynous manifestations and ascetic masculine
selfhood in boys and men, while keeping social supervision over the matter of
problematic male sexual energy (Nelson 37). Studies of Victorian masculinity show that
manliness as the definition of what men should do is the solution to what they find out
about Victorian men’s gender status and sexual practices as cultural anxiety. Victorian
society responds to this anxiety, launching a cultural movement to clean up men’s
overpowering sexuality as a result of emphasizing physical manliness by employing the
moral concept of character development and the ideological space of domesticity.
Mid-nineteenth-century attitudes toward physical manliness as a potential threat
tended to encourage the conflation of masculine and feminine qualities in male behavior,
manner, or speech. The idealization of asexual manifestations in Victorian men is
produced and reproduced in various forms of literary materials such as poetry, novels,
pamphlets, newspaper columns, medical documents, and self-help books. As Herbert
Sussman and Adams point out, many Victorian literary writers and artists tried to
accommodate the cultural demand in the figure of ascetic manliness. Self-help books
such as Smiles’s Self-Help inform Victorian men how to behave like a gentleman
through the management of the body and male sexuality. William Landels’s “How Men
Are Made” (1859) also claims that moral and mental training is necessary to become a
manly man. As depicted in Thomas Hughes’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857),
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