Epilogue: Manhood Found and Lost at Sea: The Loss of the Eurydice

Conley, Mary

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_13

Epilogue: Manhood Found and Lost at Sea: The Loss of the Eurydice

Mary Conley⁷

Chapter
First Online: 16 January 2022

188 Accesses

Part of the book series: Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History ((GSSCMH))

Abstract

This volume illustrates the strength of the scholarship of maritime masculinities and articulates useful concepts and methods to engage in further research. The study of maritime masculinities is a maturing field whose research is no longer pushed to the margins of either maritime history or mainstream British history. In fact, there is greater recognition that the maritime is constituent of larger mainstream history and the currents that helped to inform maritime masculinities contributed to the consolidation of masculine attributes over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Masculinity remains a useful analytical tool in the study of men who took to the sea for work. The challenge now is to find further opportunities to layer discourse with practice in order to understand the interplay between social expectations and men’s own experiences. This may involve engaging with existing scholarship in new ways, like using Hopkins’s The Loss of the Eurydice as a springboard to analyse how manhood was envisaged in the wake of ship disasters. And, it may push us to find new methods through visual mapping to understand both the coherence and complexity of maritime communities. Corpus analysis offers similar possibilities for embracing extensive comparative regional studies of maritime literature and material and visual culture. No matter the form that these studies take, more studies need to be done that, like Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815–1940, juxtapose, integrate, and compare experiences across shores and professions. Such studies not only have the benefit of revealing how seafarers navigated their own desires and needs to craft their own masculine identities, but also inform our understanding of wider domestic and transnational masculinity formations.

The Eurydice—it concerned thee, O Lord:

Three hundred souls, O alas! On board,

Some asleep unawakened, all un-

warned, eleven fathoms fallen

Where she foundered! One stroke

Felled and furled them, the hearts of oak!

And flockbells off the aerial

Downs’ forefalls beat to the burial

—Robert Bridges, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: H. Milford, 1918), 32–37.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 99.00; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 129.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
John Tosh, “The History of Masculinity: An Outdated Concept?” in What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. John Arnold and Sean Brady (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31.
2.
Claude Colleer Abbott, ed., The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges April 1878 (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 48, quoted in Hannah V. Dunleavy, “‘The Naked Eye’: Vision and Risk in the Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins” (PhD diss., University of York, 2010), 164.
3.
Catherine Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 18, 21. Phillips notes the influence of Gerard’s godmother Frances Anne Hopkins upon his appreciation of art and his informal understanding of the navy given her father’s career as a rear-admiral and noted hydrographer.
4.
Norman White, Hopkins: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.
5.
Manley Hopkins, The Port of Refuge, or Advice and Instructions to the Master-Mariner in Situations of Doubt, Difficulty and Danger (London: Henry S. King, 1873).
6.
Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, 194, 197; Arthur Hopkins, ‘A Ball on Board a Battleship’, The Graphic (31 July 1894), 70–71.
7.
Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, 214–215.
8.
Paul Mariani, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (New York: Viking, 2008), 195.
9.
Joseph Bristow, “‘Churlsgrace’: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body,” ELH 59, no. 3 (1992): 693–711; Simon Humphries, ‘Hopkins’s Silent Men’ ELH 77, no. 2 (2010): 447–475.
10.
White, Hopkins, 296. White notes that Hopkins had mentored one of his students who had entered the competition.
11.
Dunleavy, “‘The Naked Eye’: Vision and Risk in the Work of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” 164.
12.
Phillips, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World, 216.
13.
Simon Humphries, “Hopkins’s Silent Men,” ELH 77, no. 2 (2010): 453.
14.
Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 190.
15.
Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Humphries, “Hopkins’s Silent Men,” 453.
16.
Mary A. Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Representing Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
17.
See Hopkins’s commentary on embodied nationalism in “What shall I do for the land that bred me”: “Where is the field that I must play the man on? / O welcome there their steel or cannon. / Immortal beauty is death with duty” / …Under her banner we fall for her honour’. See Robert Bridges, ed., Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: H. Milford, 1918), 81.
18.
This is a wider theme in cultural histories of the First World War. For two examples, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Allen Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
19.
Joanne Begiato, “Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture,” Transactions of the RHS 26 (2016): 125–147.
20.
John Tosh, “An Outdated Concept?,” 31.
21.
Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 19.
22.
Isaac Land, “Customs of the Sea: Flogging, Empire, and the ‘True British Seaman’, 1770 to 1870,” Interventions 3, no. 2 (2001), 172, 179. British sailors and maritime reformers sought to capitalise on rising moral outrage within Britain against slavery by the 1830s, but distanced themselves from slaves as they pointed to the incompatibility of corporal discipline as punishment for true Britons. As Land argues, rather than recognise solidarity with slaves, white sailors presented themselves as valorous and virtuous exemplars of British manliness, a racialised attribute increasingly constructed around assumptions of metropolitan ‘whiteness’ and one that helped construct the ‘everyman’ figure of Jack Tar by the mid-nineteenth century.
23.
Wendy Gagen, “Remastering the Body, Renegotiating Gender: Physical Disability and Masculinity during the First World War, the Case of J.B. Middlebrook,” European Review of History, 14, no. 4, 2007, 526; R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no 6 (2005), 836–37.
24.
R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 71.
25.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053–75; reprinted in Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, New York: 1988), 28–50.
26.
Mrinalini Sinha, “Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India,” Gender & History 11, no. 3 (1999), 454.
27.
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
28.
Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 546–547.
29.
Isaac Land, “The Humours of Sailortown: Atlantic History Meets Subculture Theory,” in City Limits: Perspectives on the Historical European City, ed. G. Clark, J. Owens and G. Smith (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2010); Brad Beaven, “The Resilience of Sailortown Culture in English Naval Ports, c.1820–1900,” Urban History 43, no. 1 (2016), 72–95; Louise Moon, “‘Sailorhoods’: Sailortown and Sailors in the Port of Portsmouth, 1850–1900” (PhD diss., University of Portsmouth, 2015).
30.
Alston Kennerly, “British Merchant Seafarers and their Homes,” International Journal of Maritime History 24, no. 1 (2102): 129–130. Kennerly speaks to the benefits of missions and sailors’ homes in maintaining communication home and acknowledges that lagging rates of literacy among seafarers in the twentieth century, along with uncertain mail delivery, impeded sustained letter writing which further disrupted ‘feelings of connection with home’.
31.
Moon, “Sailorhoods,” 8.
32.
Christopher E. Forth, Masculinity in the Modern West: Gender, Civilization and the Body (London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
33.
Laura Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 1 (1994), 64.
34.
Laura Tabili, ‘We ask for British Justice’: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Stephen Bourne, Black Poppies (Cheltenham: History Press, 2014); F.J.A. Broeze, “The Muscles of Empire—Indian Seamen and the Raj 1919–1939,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 17, no. 1 (1981): 43–67. Significant work is now being done at the University of Portsmouth and the Port Towns and Urban Cultures through their BAME Seafarers in the First World War project. See http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/source-information/bame-seafarers-first-world-war/.
35.
Ben Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity as a Historical Problem,” Gender & History 30, no. 2 (2018), 387.
36.
Alexandra Shepard, “Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700,” Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005), 291, quoted in Griffin, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 384.
37.
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 23.
38.
Demetrakis Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory & Society 30, no. 3 (2001): 355.
39.
Jo Stanley, “‘They Thought They Were Normal—and Called Themselves Queens’: Gay Seafarers on British Liners, 1945–85,” in Maritime History and Identity: the Sea and Culture in the Modern World, ed. Duncan Redford (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 237. See also Paul Baker and Jo Stanley, Hello Sailor: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea (London: Routledge, 2003).
40.
Julia F. Savile, A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 7.
41.
Seth Stein Le Jacq, “Buggery’s Travels: Royal Navy Sodomy on Ship and Shore in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 2 (2015), 103–116; B.R. Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); George Chauncey, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War One Era,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 2 (1985), 189–211; Mary Conley, “The Admiralty’s Gaze: Disciplining Indecency and Sodomy in the Edwardian Fleet,” in A New Naval History, ed. Quintin Colville and James Davey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 70–88.
42.
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 110–112.
43.
Houlbrook, Queer London, 121.
44.
Baker and Stanley, Hello Sailor; Sarah Penny, “Crossing the Line: A Rite of Passage on HMS Terrible,” Performance Research 21, no. 2 (2016): 32–37; Jo Stanley, “Hoofing it on Deck: Images of Dancing in the Maritime Past,” International Journal of Maritime History 27, no. 3 (2015): 560–573.
45.
Joanne Begiato, Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 17.
46.
Alison Twells, “Sex, Gender, and Romantic Intimacy in Servicemen’s Letters during the Second World War,” The Historical Journal 63, no. 3 (2020): 732–753.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, USA
Mary Conley

Authors

Mary Conley
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mary Conley .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

School of History, Australian National University School of History, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Karen Downing
Queens College, CUNY, Queens, NY, USA
Johnathan Thayer
School of History Philosophy & Culture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Joanne Begiato

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Conley, M. (2021). Epilogue: Manhood Found and Lost at Sea: The Loss of the Eurydice. In: Downing, K., Thayer, J., Begiato, J. (eds) Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815–1940. Global Studies in Social and Cultural Maritime History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_13

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77946-7_13
Published: 16 January 2022
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-77945-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-77946-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics