The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel

The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel, by Karen Bourrier. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press, 2015. 184 pp. ISBN 978-0-472-07248-4 (hb) 978-0-472-05248-6 (pb) 978-0-472-12083-3 (e-bk)I must confess at the outset that I'm not a big fan of I call the theorem argument, widely taught to students as a technique of writing. This kind of essay commences with a statement of the piece is about, thus in effect firing all the shots in one's locker and leaving the author with the task merely of demonstrating the truth of that statement through exemplification, albeit critical and analytical. Such writing invites frequent repetition of the key statement, and may offer the author little choice about how to conclude the piece except for a sort of Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum, a Latin phrase that signifies what was to be demonstrated or proved).And so it is with Karen Bourrier's work. She announces early in her introductory chapter:The figure of the voluble weak man was a necessary narrative complement to the silent strong man. The crippled male embodied traditionally feminine virtues, softening the taciturn strong man and eliciting emotional depths from his seemingly coarse, muscular frame. Yet the weak man was able to follow the strong man where female characters could not, to all-male arenas such as the warehouse and the public school. This pairing led to a for- mal innovation in the literature: the focalization or narration of the novel through the perspective of a weak or disabled man. This narrative innovation demonstrates how, far from being marginalized in a culture that prized health and industry, weakness and came to serve an integral role in shaping narrative form, and ideals of it meant to be a man in the Victorian era and beyond. (pp. 2-3)She notes, in addition, the alignment of the weak or disabled male character in the mid-Victorian novel with the process of narration itself, which in turn suggests a connection between the life of suffering of the disabled character and the sensitivities that such suffering was apt to produce: Weak or disabled characters were cast in this role as narrator figures because of the emotional depth that was increasingly presumed to accompany the experience of physical disability (p. 3). From this, Bourrier perceives a kinship between the sensitivities of the disabled man and those of narrative itself, produced-presumably-by the author's own heightened awareness of the human condition: Finally, in both Yonge and Kingsley, masculine suffering is seen as enabling self-expression, so that each novelist develops a connection between invalidism and authorship (p. 20), an idea that she goes on to develop in later chapters. These key ideas recur repetitively throughout the book.This is not to say that those ideas are negligible or trite-far from it. Though other readers of the Victorian novel have pointed out the trope of invalidism, and have considered how it functions in terms both of the narrative and of the culture's valorisation of illness, not all have made the connections that Bourrier suggests between the trope of or invalidism and the structuring and definition of masculinity in such novels. However, a different method of developing her arguments might have led the reader of her book, via her analysis of the various novels she examines, to the understandings she sets forth, rather than, as it were, giving the game away right from the start.Bourrier pays attention particularly to Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! (1855) and Two Years Ago (1857), Dinah Mulock Craik's John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1881), but she includes references to other novels of the mid- to late Victorian period. For example, in discussing Eliot's novel Bourrier includes a reading of Thomas Hughes's 1857 novel Tom Brown's Schooldays. …

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