Tara MacDonald

The new man, masculinity and marriage in the Victorian novel

Introduction 1 Middle-Class Manliness and the Dickensian Gentleman 2 Healing Masculinity in Mid-century Fiction 3 Doctors, Dandies and New Man in New Woman Fiction 4 The Retreat of the New Man at the Fin de Siecle 5 Sympathy, Suffering and Schreiners Colonial New Men Conclusion Works Cited Index

DOCTORS, DANDIES AND NEW MEN: ELLA HEPWORTH DIXON AND LATE-CENTURY MASCULINITIES

This article examines Ella Hepworth Dixons engagement with late-century models of masculinity, namely the doctor, dandy and the New Man, in The Story of a Modern Woman (1894). Specifically, it argues that Dixon isolates the doctor and the dandy as particularly threatening to the New Woman. Though these roles constitute radically different identities, she shows how they similarly confront the New Womans feminist politics and stand in the way of her desire for intellectual, social and sexual equality. Dixon also gestures to more positive versions of masculinity, even if they are not fully realized in the novel. Many New Women, especially eugenic feminists and social purists, imagined a New Man who could be on equal terms with the New Woman. Such a figure is largely absent from Dixons novel, though the artist Perry Jackson comes closest to New Manhood. Jacksons status as an artist frees him from conventionality, though his growing commercial interests challenge his non-conformity. Dixons decision to avoid such an idealized relationship for Mary ultimately demonstrates her commitment to rejecting traditional love plots in favour of a more realistic mode.

Sensation fiction, gender and identity

The heroine of Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875), Valeria Macallan, is in many ways a typical sensation heroine. She is resilient, independent and determined to get what she wants. What she wants, however, is not to marry rich, hide her bigamous past or inherit a fortune that is rightfully hers, but to prove her husband’s innocence. I begin this chapter with an example that emphasises women’s complex representation in sensation fiction, and the way that male characters were often secondary to the action of the story, reduced to observing ‘high-strung women, full of passion, purpose, and movement’. Valeria is married only a short time before she discovers that her husband was once on trial for the murder of his first wife and that he received the ambiguous verdict ‘Not Proven’. Valeria’s excessive, selfless devotion to her husband seems to make her the epitome of the good Victorian wife; however, her fidelity is paired with an independent streak, as she determines to prove her husband’s innocence despite his protests. When he insists, ‘A good wife should know better than to pry into affairs of her husband’s’, she inwardly retorts, ‘[h]e was treating me like a child’. Valeria ignores her husband’s wishes and stubbornly gathers evidence; in one instance, she goes so far as to permit a hotel chambermaid to improve her appearance so that she can draw information from her husband’s friend and well-known flirt, Major Fitz-David. Valeria records: [The chambermaid] came back with a box of paints and powders; and I said nothing to check her. I saw, in the glass, my skin take a false fairness, my cheeks a false colour, my eyes a false brightness - and I never shrank from it. No! I let the odious deceit go on; I even admired the extraordinary delicacy and dexterity with which it was all done. (57) The example of Valeria Macallan gestures to a number of themes characteristic of sensation fiction: false appearances, wilful female characters and cautious men. This chapter will explore these themes, with attention to notions of identity and performance.