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Paul R Deslandes, Joanne Begiato. Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 452–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae478
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Joanne Begiato’s Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 examines how the male body—depicted and imbued with meaning in a variety of visual, textual, and material forms—helped to construct masculinity over the course of the long nineteenth century in Great Britain. With attention to recent trends in the discipline—labeled by some as a somatic turn—this book urges historians to carefully interrogate cultural constructions of the body, emotions, and “‘lived, embodied experience[s]’” (to borrow from Karen Harvey, as Begiato does) (16) in their explorations of gender. Pushing beyond studies of manliness that center educational institutions, associational life, or leisure pursuits and recreational activities as the most important spaces in which gender formation occurred and admired nineteenth-century masculine attributes were inculcated, this book prioritizes how the ideals of manliness were “made manifest through emotionalized bodies and material culture” (5).
In pursuing these interpretive goals, Begiato claims several innovations in her work. First, and perhaps most important, is her attempt to counter a narrative, embraced by many historians of the nineteenth century, that posits that masculine identities were increasingly embodied as Queen Victoria’s reign pushed toward the twentieth century. In rejecting this idea, Begiato asserts that classed and raced bodies were just as important in defining masculinity in the Age of Sensibility as they were in the so-called era of High Imperialism. She also claims several additional interpretive interventions in her work, including a sharply focused analysis on the roles that representations of working-class bodies played in the articulation of masculine ideals and the important place that desire—both heteronormative and queer—occupied in a cultural landscape in which discussions of manliness were ubiquitous. Throughout, Begiato charts not only what it meant to embrace manliness successfully during the long nineteenth century but also what resulted when one failed to achieve the ideals of self-control, bodily mastery, temperance, appropriate emotionality, and hardiness. As such, hers is a work that captures moments of consensus as well as inconsistency and paradox, profitably establishing the messiness inherent in reconstructing gender through a historical lens.
