British Masculinity in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' 1731 to 1815, by Gillian Williamson. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. 296 pp. ISBN 9781137542328 (hb) 9781137542335 (e bk)
British Masculinity in the 'Gentleman's Magazine' 1731 to 1815, by Gillian Williamson. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. 296 pp. ISBN 9781137542328 (hb) 9781137542335 (e bk)Read in lieu of contemporary feminism obsessed literary multiculturalism, British Masculinity, with its strikingly fragmented chapters against the promise of thematic investigation, encapsulates the spirit of prevalent gender comparisons. As a candid narrative of intellectual repetition, it succeeds to portray an example of female critics' growing thirst for rewriting historical clashes which have gendered literary competition amongst men and women. Offering, at the outset, a parallel text for comparative significance, the author invites her readers to consider Kathryn Shevelow's Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodicals (1989) for its analysis of feminine attributes. However indirect yet untactful this readerly instruction appears in its positioning within the introductory chapter, there is no doubt, as Gillian Williamson asserts, that the Gentleman's Magazine provides a robust source for literary scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By way of unabashedly conventional reading and chronological evaluation, British Masculinity, in short, chronicles the theoretical backdrop of eighteenthcentury "gentlemanliness" as Williamson categorically summarizes certain ideas and ideologies on politeness, anxiety, and private and public spheres, rather than expanding on the magazine's acceptance in public literary and non literary circles. In her expansive thematization of eighteenth century masculinities, Williamson momentarily discusses the diversity of cultural qualities that bring us to her literary engagement with British manliness historiography.Even so, much careful analytical work has gone into two other particularly interesting areas in this book, namely the social practices of the magazine's readership and its literary cultural approach to masculinity. Williamson's choice of the masculine "middling sort" men, that of those espousing self restraint while being involved in active and economically productive industry, goes some way towards hypothetically instructing the reader where to look for in periodicals for cultural definitions and poetic identifications with "ideal" British masculinity of the pre and post Enlightenment eras. In her more strategic than literary manoeuvre, Williamson demonstrates the core counter argument to eighteenth century feminine frailty, exposing masculine "power" as the centre subject through numerous issues of the Gentleman's Magazine. She has recognised the magazine's take on the idea of gender and its subdivisions in eighteenth century masculinities as hierarchically and "socially constructed" power rather than its engagement with observed manliness and practiced gender norms of the time.Despite the author's attempt to clarify manliness as portrayed in the magazine, a want of adequate debate surrounding diverse literary behaviours of eighteenth century male and female writers is manifest. For instance, one hardly notes any mention of "maternal authority" as discussed throughout by Davies (2014) written in conversation between male and female writers or presented in works of fiction and poetry of the time, while also being advertised and mentioned in the same magazine. Given the expansion of Williamson's introductory themes, one would have expected to see further examples of contextual gender roles as the realistic background for what emerged in actual volumes of the magazine. Sarah and Henry Fielding, for instance, would have been befitting literary figures for such conversational and contextual understanding of gender roles within literary circles. Several questions arise, in the face of missing mention of such close knit literary families, one being whether Sarah Fielding's female characters were discussed with male writers concerning their assertive and active roles rather than presenting eighteenth century frail femininity.