Sketching the New Man Out: Ellen Wood's Exploration of Victorian Masculinity

• Published in: Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period Vol. 28; no. 2; pp. 265 - 282
• Main Author: Costantini, Mariaconcetta
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 03.04.2021; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Ellen Wood; gender models; Masculinity; Roland Yorke; Victorian sensation
• ISSN: 0969-9082; 1747-5848
• DOI: 10.1080/09699082.2021.1879440

In ways similar to other sensation novelists, Mrs Henry (Ellen) Wood questioned some ideological foundations of the Victorian shaping of gender models. Besides exposing the discontents of women trapped into fixed roles, she interrogated models of Victorian masculinity to envisage the possibility of new masculine roles and behavioural patterns. Drawing on gender theories, this article explores Wood's thought-provoking characterisation of men, examining some strategies she adopted in her fiction to question dominant male figures, such as the authoritative husband and the strict paterfamilias. While raising doubts on the desirability of the strength and self-assurance associated with these figures, Wood sketched out alternative male characters endowed with "feminine" virtues like patience and gentleness, or liable to be dominated by assertive and commanding women. Examples from different Wood works are offered to explain this combined process of deconstruction and rethinking of the abstract category of man. The second part of the article focuses on Roland Yorke (1869), a novel that bears evidence of the author's exploration of problematic aspects of Victorian masculinity, of her effective use of irony and her efforts to delineate alternative figures which, though never well-wrought, pave the way to future conceptualisations of the New Man.