Victorian Era

Social and Economic Sources of Victorian Manhood

With the onset of the market revolution after 1820, the cultural foundation of manliness shifted from patriarchal control over the household and communal obligations to an emphasis on an acquisitive individualism that found affirmation through economic performance in an expanding, open marketplace. The market revolution led to a functional differentiation between private life and public life by disrupting the spatial link between men's homes and their workplaces. In the United States, this new notion of manliness, primarily grounded in individual entrepreneurial ability and economic performance, created an idealized man, variously labeled as the “masculine achiever,” the male breadwinner, the “self-made man,” and the “Yankee.” While this new definition of manhood, grounded in capitalist market economics and profit-oriented performance, offered new opportunities for monetary gain and social experimentation, it also made male self-worth contingent upon economic structural forces increasingly beyond individual control. As such, it bore not only new possibilities, but new anxieties. The transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau captured this in Walden (1854) when he referred to the market as a “‘place of humiliation’” (Kimmel, 43). To prepare themselves for the vagaries of the market and the public sphere, men articulated new modes of self-control and self-representation, including prescriptions for genteel manners, etiquette, conduct, fashion, and sexuality, that defined Victorian middle-class manhood.

Victorian Gentility

Eighteenth-century American society and social relations were characterized by small communities and face-to-face interactions, but social relations changed as American society urbanized and a market revolution began to generate interregional, and eventually national, markets. A society consisting of fairly insular neighborly communities became a society of strangers lacking communally enforced standards of conduct. Social relationships became more impersonal and anonymous, and therefore increasingly uncertain and unpredictable. In an attempt to restore predictability to social relations, Victorians conceived a variety of rules of personal conduct and social interaction that, while applicable to both men and women, carried a particular urgency in male behavior, since men's lives were more firmly grounded in the new public world of market exchange. Genteel male deportment in this new amoral world required, above all, self-control, moral discipline, and sincerity. These imperatives shaped Victorian male manners, etiquette, and fashion.

Such nineteenth-century advice and etiquette book authors as Timothy Shay Arthur and Samuel Goodrich promoted genteel manhood and its association with elegance, gracefulness, and politeness. These etiquette books offered a blueprint for public male behavior in a society that had drifted from its traditional communal bases for polite and moral conduct. The application of their advice promised to produce a trustworthy style of manhood that would stand up to public scrutiny and examination.

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