The Yard of Wit. Raymond Stephanson
responses by individual male authors and actors whose lives appear to have been suspended between old and new paradigms for acceptable masculine self-identification. In an earlier essay of my own, I tried to account for the ways in which the apparently sexualized rhetoric between predominantly heterosexual male friends might have been part of how an internalized masculine identity was experienced—a male subjectivity, in other words, whose nuances were recognizable in the eighteenth century and before but which are now lost to us.11 More recently, Shawn Lisa Maurer has done much to explain how the domestication of masculinity in the new social periodical helped to provide the contexts which would lead to the internalization of “the bourgeois family man … as the prototype of desirable masculinity.”12 In his impressive reading of male-male relationships and identities in eighteenth-century homoerotic culture, George Haggerty has made a convincing case for “how sexuality became a feature of Enlightenment subjectivity and why gender codification became the central marker for difference, the central dichotomonic legacy of early modern culture.” In a subtle discussion of Beckford, Haggerty argues “that we can discover in this case—in Beckford’s writing, in the press, and in the popular response to his situation—the beginnings of a particular kind of male homosexual sensibility.”13 Philip Carter’s recent essay on Boswell examines “the various styles of manliness that Boswell was keen to develop, and some of the personality types that he was eager to impersonate,” such as “sense, self-control, moderation, independence, refinement and sentiment.” Carter suggests that while “Boswell considered sex an important part of his adult identity and his understanding of manliness, both as a universal and personal category…. he did not do so to the exclusion of other manifestations of manly behaviour.” Carter concludes that “the value of the case study is not just in setting out what ideals were to be emulated, but also how effectively these were either put into practice or complicated by other forms of social identification.”14
Whatever masculinity-as-identity might have been as it left social markers to become an interiorized mentality, studies such as these—written mainly by literary critics—claim that the period roughly 1650–1800 was developing a new idiom, new discourses, new stereotypes and prejudices about how maleness and masculinity were to be defined, understood, represented, or how they might have been experienced and internalized as identity. This is not to say that such studies ignore the social and reputational dimensions of what “masculinity” might have meant, but rather they emphasize that being “manly” and exhibiting a masculine character were increasingly derived from a sexualized inner self. Still, the cautions of social historians are salutary, I think, because they warn us of the dangers of oversimplification and the subtle anachronisms that can be brought about by an over-magnification of a single facet such as sexual identity. Such cautions also remind us that what we actually mean by “masculinity” itself as a changing historical thing still needs further elaboration.
My own position is that an interiorized sense of maleness-as-sexualized-identity is emerging at this time, although still informed variously by older paradigms based on social hierarchy and reputation. I agree with David M. Halperin’s point that the large-scale cultural transformations and reorganizations which accompanied the shift to industrialization and the emergence of a capitalist economy also had significant impact on “the various relations among sexual roles, sexual object-choices, sexual categories, sexual behaviors, and sexual identities in bourgeois Europe between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Sex takes on new social and individual functions, and it assumes a new importance in defining and normalizing the modern self.”15 However, because the period is clearly one of changing sex and gender attitudes, one must approach questions of identity with an awareness that such a concept is likely in transition as well, and our readings of the evidence must therefore allow for the play of older modes and stereotypes as they are modified, blended with the new, or finally eliminated. On shifting ground of this sort, the subject “masculinity” becomes particularly difficult to come at or catch, and certainly easy to oversimplify. The main challenge right now, as it seems to me, is to incorporate the best macro- and micro-studies of this complex history—both the social, hierarchical, reputational structures and the interiorized sexual, psychological self-identificatory evidence—in order to chart a history which can simultaneously reveal older and newer modes, eclectic blends and mixes, the variable relationship of sexual acts and sexual identities, and the uneven shifts and accommodations which can make it difficult to differentiate between older and newer discourses.
In his study of masculinity in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Mark Breitenberg has spoken of the difficulty which faces the social or literary historian in sketching what he calls a “nascent interiority.” While his remarks are about the need to historicize or translate psychoanalytical approaches—which see identity as mental or psychic conditions—into Renaissance social phenomena, his distinction is helpful to the point I want to make about the period which concerns this book:
While psychoanalysis locates subjectivity in the individual’s psychic struggle, the early modern period discovers identity in the more public context we associate with shame cultures, where such factors as property, reputation and status are pre-eminent. Indeed, quite possibly psychoanalysis articulates what was only beginning to emerge, or perhaps, submerge, in the early modern period. Hamlet is a useful figure for this nascent interiority: his dilemma is surely the result of social factors (loss of place, public title), but his response appears to us as familiar for its interior manifestations.16
Breitenberg’s “nascent interiority” is a useful heuristic device for imagining a flexible model of historical transition which embraces both macro- and micro-approaches to Enlightenment masculinities, as well as acknowledging the nearly always psychologized and sexualized conceptualization of such matters as the historically-inherited norm of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In other words, for studies of Enlightenment masculinities to progress we need to balance the modern psychological privileging of subjective individualism in the history of selfhood—an assumption Roy Porter has described as the “question-begging and self-serving leftover of Victorian fanfares of progress” which discovers “an ascent from some primordial collective psychological soup to a sharply defined individual identity”17—with the ways in which masculinity, to quote sociologist R. W. Connell, is always “deeply enmeshed in the history of institutions and of economic structures. Masculinity is not just an idea in the head, or a personal identity. It is also extended in the world, merged in organized social relations. To understand masculinity historically we must study changes in those social relations.”18 The history of masculine identity, then, must be wary of some exclusive interpretive attachment either to external pressures of rank, reputation, and shame, or to newly fashioned internal self-identifications based on sexual character. The historical record points to a far more complex reality.
David Halperin has framed the interpretive difficulty and challenge in a slightly different manner, but one which similarly recognizes the anachronistic and transhistorical tendencies of much recent work. Our modern model of identity—tied, he says, to a notion of a psychologized sexual subjectivity—is one which “knits up desire, its objects, sexual behavior, gender identity, reproductive function, mental health, erotic sensibility, personal style, and degrees of normality or deviance into an individuating, normativizing feature of the personality called ‘sexuality’ or ‘sexual orientation.’ ” Such a model, he writes, “is inconceivable” before the nineteenth century, but he hastens to add that this does not mean that it was impossible “for sexual acts to be linked in various ways with a sexual disposition or sexual subjectivity well before the nineteenth century.” What we must bring to our studies of these pre-1800 historical matters, he suggests, is a far more nuanced sense of the wide array of possible relationships between sexuality and notions of identity:
What my argument does do, I hope, is to encourage us to inquire into the construction of sexual identities before the emergence of sexual orientations, and to do this without recurring to modern notions of sexuality or sexual orientation and thereby contributing to a kind of antihistoricist backlash. Perhaps we need to supplement our notion of sexual identity with a more refined concept of, say, partial identity, emergent identity, transient identity, semi-identity, incomplete identity, proto-identity, or sub-identity. In any case, my intent