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[ 1 ] Writing in the tradition of the novel of sensibility and its Man of Feeling, Jane Austen developed male characters who are never two-dimensional and are always complicated. It is Austen’s heroines, however, who establish the ideal of masculinity towards which her male characters must strive. Filtered through multiple female perspectives, Austen’s male characters are essentially created by the women of her works, with the female gaze acting as a catalyst in the development of masculinity in her novels. Furthermore, her male characters accommodate two rival models of late-eighteenth-century masculinity, fusing Edmund Burke’s traditional, chivalrous, masculine ideal and Mary Wollstonecraft’s more modern, authoritative, and virile male individual. Fashioned as both subjects and objects of desire, Austen’s heroes embody an innovative model of masculinity, and the charming Captain Frederick Wentworth is no exception to this rule. In Persuasion, Austen achieves a new model of masculinity through the female gaze, which casts Anne Elliot in the role of sexual subject, and Wentworth in the role of desired object. Furthermore, the dynamics of the gaze serve to create equality between Wentworth and Anne, who both simultaneously desire and are desired. By employing the female gaze in her novels, Austen advocates a progressive brand of masculinity in which women are not servile and sexually or emotionally passive, and men are able and willing to adapt to their lovers’ desires.(1)
[ 2 ] Austen’s male characters can be contextualized within the debates regarding masculinity that existed during her own lifetime. In post-French Revolution Europe, numerous anxieties about the “proper” behaviour of men emerged as traditional views met with new interpretations of what it meant to be a man. In eighteenth-century British society, however, the delineations of appropriate male stoicism and moderation were not always clear. For example, the importance placed on manners in Romantic Britain was closely—and dangerously—linked to effeminacy. Michèle Cohen articulates the complexity of this situation by highlighting the fact that the “social spaces” of balls, operas, and dinners in which the sexes met and conversed were the domains of women (47-59). Neither fully public nor private, social spaces were places of performance, locations where men and women constantly watched each other and moderated their behaviours according to cultural expectations. The presence of women in...