The Invisible Center: Conceptions of Masculinity in Victorian Fiction—Realist, Crime, Detective, and Gothic

Abstract

The development of mainstream gender roles in the Victorian era was closely linked with the major socioeconomic shifts Britain had witnessed since the eighteenth century. These shifts resulted from the long process of industrialization and the concomitant growth of a consumer economy, a development that influenced the formation of the dominant middle-class value systems (cf. Langford; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb). The ideological tenets of Victorian Britain manifested themselves in a variety of discourses, such as the economic, the religious, the political, and the medical discourse, which all affected and reinforced the construction of both femininity and masculinity. This gender ideology became particularly conspicuous in the discourse of domesticity, that is, the ideology of the sanctity of the home and the separation of the private and the public spheres. As decades of women’s and gender studies have shown, the dominant, middle-class gender discourse of the nineteenth century established—and maintained—a binary gender model that formed an integral part of the concept of domesticity. The definition of allegedly male gender features such as activity, strength, determination, and rationality, and their association with the public sphere of business and work, stood in neat opposition to their respective counterparts, perceived as female, and the private sphere of the home, to which the Victorian woman is regarded to have been all but fettered.¹