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Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885, by Joseph Bristow; pp. x + 193. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, $39.50, $15.00 paper, 42.50.
The notion that masculinity and femininity are the natural expressions of anatomical sex is one which is hardly specific to Victorian culture, but it may be claimed that many Victorians held this view with particularly strong conviction. The sense of masculinity and femininity as complementary opposites was one which in many ways rigidly structured the culture and social organisation of Victorian society-at least for the middle and upper classes. If femininity was nurturing, self-effacing, and pure, masculinity connoted strength, aggression, and, possibly, sexual rapacity-which is why many aspired to cultivate "manliness," an ethical term suggesting the restraining and channelling force of the will on elemental masculine energies. Such ideological perceptions of the ideal male character were even pedagogically disseminated, becoming central to the proliferating "public schools of the second half of the nineteenth century, which self-consciously aimed to produce an imperial elite.
Male self-definition was therefore no peripheral matter for the Victorians, and in this context "effeminacy" was inevitably a profoundly troubling phenomenon, suggesting both a dislocation of the supposedly natural relation between maleness and masculinity, and, often simultaneously, a suspect moral condition (unmanliness"). Emotion may have been...