Masculinity In Victorian Literature Analysis

The statement ‘masculinity in Victorian literary texts is a category radically divided, re-imagined and problematic’ sums up not only masculinity but also the main male characters from Victorian literature. Some of the most memorable male characters within literatures comes from this era, and they are radically divided from women, they are re-imagined character from the typical Anglo-Saxon white English gentleman, and in no way a stereotypical male, (even creating a new stereotype) and yet they are all problematic flawed characters. The most memorable masculinity novels have characters that are divided, re-imagined and problematic like that of Heathcliff, Allen Quatermain Sherlock Holmes and Watson. With a close textual analysis readers can see how these Victorian masculine characters are made immortal.

Masculinity cannot be assessed without femininity to contrast to, even in the book that is for boys written by a boy and about boys King Solomon’s Mines, written by H. Rider Haggard. The Victorian era was one ‘of rapidly shifting ideas of what it was to be a man (and) how one defined one’s masculinity,’ (Conor 10). Therefore the ideas of masculinity were one of re-defining, and new definitions are formed.

The men venture on the female body as the landscape, which means that the men start at the head, continue through the breasts “These mountains standing thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped exactly like a woman’s breasts” and midriff and end at the climax on the novel in the womb. (Haggard 57). Some scholars argue the landscape is over sexualized with the female form, stating that it is ‘difficult to fail to notice the fertile gendered imagery related to the land’ ( Driss 2) this feminizing of the landscape emphasis the dominate that the mascunline in the form of three main charcters, has over the