Religion, manliness and imperialism in 19th century culture

• Main Author: Alderson, David
• Published: University of Sussex 1996
• Subjects: 800; Homosexuality
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.295953

Christian manliness emerges from a period of intense counter-revolution in English history, one in which protestantism and especially Anglicanism - plays an important ideological role in legitimating English national development. The form of manliness associated with Kingsley et al crystallises various aspects of the protestant ethic - conscience, independence and the redemptive value of work - into an ideology of English masculinity which becomes prescriptive and institutionalised in the public schools of the second half of the century. This sense of masculinity is established as an important part of English imperial hubris. For this reason, the thesis is very much concerned with England's relations with Ireland - a nation stigmatised as unfit for self-rule because predominantly Catholic. backward and effeminate. The thesis begins by outlining in broad terms elements of protestant Englishness, and moves on to look at the emergence of christian manliness as an extension of the counter-revolutionary concerns of the christian socialist Charles Kingsley. It is in this cultural context of manly protestantism that the 'effeminacy' of 1. H. Newman and other Catholicising elements in the Anglican Church are considered. After analysing dominant characteristics of English writers' conceptions of Ireland, the thesis looks at the contradictory ways in which Gerard Manley Hopkins's admiration for the male body is bound up with a patriotism at odds with his Catholicism, and argues that the specific elements of this patriotism determine the 'desolations' of his final years in Ireland Finally, Oscar Wilde's relations to English culture are considered - specifically. his understanding of his Celtishness as subversive of English puritanism; a subversiveness ultimately still indebted - because antithetical - to English manliness.