‘It is better to be beautiful than to be good.’ Physiognomy and Masculinity in the
beautiful male character of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilkie
Collins’ The Guilty River and the Victorian fin de siècle.
In 1886 Wilkie Collins published The Guilty River, 1 this was followed five years later
by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.2 In both stories we are presented with
a male character of extraordinary beauty, and in both cases this character is involved
in unsavoury and criminal actions. In the effects their beauty has on others we see
some of the ideas of physiognomy, a ‘vogue’ of the late eighteenth century and a
thought that carried on through the nineteenth century. In particular we notice the ageold associations of beauty with virtue and ugliness with vice. In these two books, the
beautiful male is described in very feminine terms and even said to look female,
which poses some interesting questions about fin de siècle masculinity. As Gagnier
points out there existed ‘a crisis in the 1890s of the male on all levels – economic,
political, social, psychological, as producer, as power, as role, as lover.’3 Both stories
partake in this debate and also draw on the döppelganger idea, popular at the time,
and of great significance in discussing a new masculinity. The ideas of Physiognomy
and themes of masculinity are repeated throughout fin de siècle literature including,
amongst others, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard and Olive Schreiner. The first part of this
essay will address the ideas of physiognomy and the second part will discuss the
crises of masculinity. Throughout the essay there will be examples of how these ideas
permeated fin de siècle culture.
Physiognomy has existed since the ancient Greeks; an essay titled
‘Physiognomics’ has been credited to Aristotle which states ‘an alteration of the state
1
Wilkie Collins, ‘The Guilty River’ (1886) in Miss or Mrs?; The Haunted Hotel; The Guilty River
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
2
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; repr. London: Penguin Books, 1994).
Page 1 of 19
of the soul produces an alteration in the form of the body.’4 Ever since, there has been
an interest in physiognomy and in 1775 Johann Casper Lavater published his
Fragmentes physiognomoniques (translated into English 1789 – Essays on
Physiognomy), a publication that changed physiognomy into a household concept.
Lavater’s work attempted to create a ‘system’ by which one may learn to decipher
someone’s character from his or her appearance. The work contained a number of
contradictions and ambiguities yet ‘Lavater was none the less convinced that
physiognomy was basically a science and that it would eventually enjoy the same
status as Mathematics.’5 Tytler found the Fragmentes to be disappointing stating that
‘interesting as [they are], they cannot be said to do justice to a man whose intuitive
powers won the esteem of Goethe.’6 Contemporaries also seemed to reflect this view
and the ‘scientific popularity of Lavater soon faded’;7 both Goethe and Lichtenberg,
once friends of Lavater, attacked his work for being deterministic. Hegel also
supported Lichtenberg in his views that man’s actions reveal his character far more
than his appearance.8
Regardless of its scientific status, Lavater’s work achieved great fame
throughout the nineteenth-century and enjoyed ‘amazing success in Britain’.9 The
work remained popular across Europe and ‘by 1810 there were 16 German, 15
French, 2 American, 2 Russian, 1 Dutch, 1 Italian and no less than 20 English
3
cited in J.A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History (Aldershot:
Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 1997) p. 5.
4
Aristotle, ‘Physiognomics’, in J. Barnes (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle Vol. 1 (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1984) p. 1242 (808b 11-14).
5
G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982) p. 54
6
. ibid. p. 64.
7
S. Frey, ‘Lavater, Lichtenberg, and the Suggestive Power of the Human Face’, in E. Shookman (ed.)
The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Casper Lavater (Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1993) pp. 101-103.
8
G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, pp. 77-104.
9
G. Tytler, ‘Lavater and Physiognomy in English Fiction 1790-1832’, in Eighteenth Century Fiction
22, no. 3 (April 1995), p. 297.
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versions’,10 and eventually this would total 151 editions in various languages.11 ‘One
London publisher, William Tegg, brought out at least eleven editions … from 1840 to
1878’12 but Lavater’s work reached it’s twilight in the 1870s, and ‘since [1875, his]
works have been rarely published.’13 The impact of Lavater was such that Tytler
claims from 1775 ‘European culture in general appears to have been dominated by
what may be aptly described as the Lavaterian physiognomical climate’ and that his
‘effect on the literary world was so profound that it was difficult not to react to him
emotionally.’14
In a literary sense, Lavater’s impact can be seen in the wealth of character
descriptions in the Victorian novel, and in many cases these descriptions have some
reference to the personalities of the bearer. Most important to this essay is Lavater’s
reinforcement of the idea that beauty is associated with virtue and ugliness with vice.
According to Shookman ‘this antithesis of moral good and bad, of physical beauty
and ugliness, was the crux of physiognomy according to Lavater.’15 This is one of the
central issues of The Guilty River and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and largely
represents the fin de siècle interest in physiognomy. ‘The idea that superior physical
beauty was the expression of higher mental development was quite commonplace in
the mid-nineteenth century.’16 However it is not exclusively from Lavater that
Victorians may have come across this idea; Herbert Spenser wrote an essay titled
Physical Beauty in 1854 in which he expressed that ‘mental and facial perfection are
10
G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, p.82.
L.A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces: Window to the Soul? (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1997)
p.3.
12
G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, p.84.
13
. ibid. p.85.
14
. ibid. pp. 5-6.
15
E. Shookman, ‘Pseudo-science, Social Fad, Literary Wonder: Johann Casper Lavater and the Art of
Physiognomy’ in E. Shookman (ed.) The Faces of Physiognomy, p.17.
16
L. Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 110.
11
Page 3 of 19
fundamentally connected’ thus establishing a link between physiognomical tradition
and the emerging evolutionary culture.17
Many Victorians, like Wilde and Collins, shared an interest in the theatre, and
we find that ‘Victorian theatre audiences preferred a man who wore his villainy
plainly on his face … when the stage villain entered, the audience saw something they
collectively recognised as villainous in his appearance … [and] it is quite unlike the
English faces in the audience.’18 Thus there existed a Victorian theatre culture of
villainy, which also supported this idea. English theorists such as Shaftesbury,
Hutcheson, Gerard, Hogarth, and Henry Home who were all concerned with the
relationship between physical beauty and the inner man (sic) had influenced Lavater
personally and had also impacted more broadly on Victorian culture.19 ‘According to
Lavater’s Kalokagathia – which is part of the same Neo-Platonic tradition as
Shatesbury’s and Hutcheson’s moral sense philosophy – beauty expresses virtue,
while ugliness exposes vice.’20 I would argue therefore, that through physiognomy,
drama, and philosophy there existed a culture in nineteenth-century Britain that
maintained the belief that beauty was a sign of virtue and ugliness indicative of vice.
Wilde and Collins tap into this belief in their respective novels.
In The Evil Genius, published in the same year as The Guilty River, Wilkie
Collins presents a direct reference to Lavater, highlighting some familiarity with the
work:
The personal appearance of Miss Wigger might have suggested a modest distrust of his own
abilities to Lavater, when that self-sufficient man wrote his famous work on physiognomy.
Whatever betrayal of her inner self her face might have presented, in the distant time when she
17
. ibid. pp. 110 – 114.
J. Jones ‘The Face of Villainy on the Victorian Stage’, in Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History
and Technique of the British Theatre 50, no. 2 (1996), p.96.
19
G. Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel p. 50.
18
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was young, was now completely overlaid by a surface of a flabby fat which, assisted by green
spectacles, kept the virtues (or vices) of this woman’s nature a profound secret until she
opened his lips. When she used her voice, she let out the truth. Nobody could hear her speak,
and doubt for a moment that she was an inveterately ill-natured woman.’21
Although this appears a satirical attack on Lavater, Collins has overlooked that to
Lavater the expert physiognomist must take into account the whole appearance
including the voice before making character judgements. We find further
confirmation of Collins’ views on physiognomy in The Legacy of Cain, in which he
highlights the deception of appearances:
Let me add that daily observation of all classes of criminals, extending over many years, has
considerably diminished my faith in physiognomy as a safe guide to the discovery of
character. Nervous trepidation looks like guilt. Guilt, firmly sustained by insensibility, looks
like innocence. One of the vilest wretches ever placed under my charge won the sympathies
(while he was waiting for his trial) of every person who saw him, including even the persons
employed in the prison. Only the other day, ladies and gentlemen coming to visit me passed a
body of men at work on the road. Judges of physiognomy among them were horrified at the
criminal atrocity betrayed in every face that they noticed. They condoled with me on the near
neighbourhood of so many convicts to my official place of residence. I looked out of the
window, and saw a group of honest labourers (whose only crime was poverty) employed by
the parish.22
Oscar Wilde’s knowledge and views of Lavater are not so apparent in his literature.
We do, however, find in The Star Child, an instance of ugliness as vice when the
beautiful Star-Child becomes ‘as foul as the toad, and as loathsome as the adder’ and
realises ‘surely this has come upon me by reason of my sin.’23 Adders and Toads are
20
C. Zelle, ‘Soul Semiology: On Lavater’s Physiognomic Principles’ in E. Shookman The Faces of
Physiognomy, p. 57.
21
Wilkie Collins, The Evil Genius: A Domestic Story (1886)
www.blackmask.com/jrusk/wcollins/main.html (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1900) ch. 9.
22
Wilkie Collins, The Legacy of Cain (1888; repr. Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1995) p. 7.
23
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Star-Child’ (1891) in Oscar Wilde, Complete Short Fiction (London: Penguin
Books, 1994) p. 156.
Page 5 of 19
symbolically ugly creatures but their use may also represent some of the Lavaterian
ideas that discuss the similarities of animal and human physiognomies. This would
suggest Wilde was more sympathetic to Lavater’s ideas on ugliness and vice than
Collins, even if he was not as aware of the work itself. Lavater offered a pre-emptory
defence against Collins’ attack in his Essays on Physiognomy, when he claimed
I have known young people of a very beautiful figure and an excellent character who in a very
short space of time destroyed their beauty by intemperance and debauchery: they still passed
for beautiful, and were so; but great God! How fallen from their original beauty!’24
We may well find this a fitting ‘tribute’ to the two characters to be discussed.
In Collins’ The Guilty River, ‘The Cur’25 makes the following first impression on
Gerard Roylake, the story's hero:
If I could be sure that the moon had not deceived me, the most beautiful face I had ever seen
was looking down on us – and it was the face of a man! By the uncertain light I could discern
the perfection of form in the features, and the expression of power which made it impossible
to mistake the stranger for a woman, although his hair grew long and he was without either
moustache or beard. 26
Dorian Gray, is likewise described by Lord Henry Wotton, when viewing his
painting: ‘This young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose
leaves … he is a Narcissus.’27 And later in person, ‘Yes, he was certainly wonderfully
handsome, with his finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair.
There was something that made one trust him at once.’28 Both characters also
resemble their mothers in appearance – ‘The Cur’ ‘resembling my good mother
24
cited in K.J.H. Borland ‘Reading Character in the Face: Lavater, Socrates, and Physiognomy’, in
Word and Image: A Journal of the Verbal/Visual Enquiry 9, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1993) p. 259.
25
The character in The Guilty River refuses to reveal his name and asks to be known as ‘The Cur’ but
is also called ‘The Lodger’ in some instances.
26
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 254.
27
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 9.
28
. ibid. p. 23.
Page 6 of 19
physically’29 and Dorian possessing ‘a strange likeness to his mother’30 further
suggesting the feminine nature of their respective beauties.
Both characters then undergo a similar and rather mysterious transformation.
‘The Cur’ presents Roylake with a portfolio of his writing and Roylake ‘opened the
leaves, which were to reveal to [him] the secret soul of the man.’31 In a similar fashion
Dorian’s soul was to be represented and revealed on Basil’s portrait of him, whilst his
youth and beauty remained physically. They also part with their secret in similar
ways; when Dorian finally allows Basil to view his altered painting he mutters, ‘see
my soul … you shall see it yourself, tonight! … now you shall look on it face to
face.’32 This is echoed when ‘The Cur’ hands over his portfolio and says, ‘You shall
know me.’33 ‘The Cur’s’ portfolio is a confession of his life and his growing vices,
and is similar to the rumours circulating about Dorian Gray. ‘The Cur’ confesses to
‘judicious friends, who … undertook the moral management of [him]’, similar to the
influence of Lord Henry and Huysman’s Against Nature on Dorian.34 ‘The Cur’ also
confesses how his ‘famous beauty … had worked such ravages in the hearts of young
women.’35 Likewise with Dorian when it is noticed that ‘women who had wildly
adored him,…, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered
the room.’36 Dorian’s list of vices far exceed those of ‘The Cur’ and Basil is the most
outspoken and outraged on the subject:
Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? … One has a right to judge of a man by the
effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity.
29
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 264.
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 77.
31
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 260.
32
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 175.
33
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 259.
34
Lord Henry presents Dorian with a copy of J.K. Huysmans, Against Nature (1884); a tale of a young
Parisian, disgusted by the vulgarity of modern life, who withdraws from society in order to indulge in
the pleasure of fine art and literature – a ‘bible’ of decadent literature.
35
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 272.
36
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 263.
30
Page 7 of 19
You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You
have led them there.37
Yet both failed to shed the look of innocence associated with their beauty. Basil
confesses to Dorian:
I don’t believe these rumours at all. At least, I can’t believe them when I see you. Sin is a
thing that writes itself across a man’s face … Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face,
and your marvellous untroubled youth – I can’t believe anything against you.38
Even among society we find that Dorian’s good looks steer blame from him:
Of insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most
people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that
wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the
calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him.’39
Like Basil, Roylake too, felt his accusations against ‘The Cur’ melt away upon
viewing his face:
What I read of his writing disposed me, now that I saw the man by daylight, to find something
devilish in the expression of his face. No! strong as it was, my prejudice failed to make any
discoveries that presented him at disadvantage. His personal attractions triumphed in the clear
searching light. I now perceived that his eyes were of that deeply dark blue, which is
commonly and falsely described as resembling the colour of violet. To my thinking, they were
so entirely beautiful that they had no right to be in a man’s face. I might have felt the same
objection to the pale delicacy of his complexion, to the soft profusion of his reddish-brown
hair, to his finely shaped sensitive lips, but for two marked peculiarities in him which would
have shown me to be wrong – that is to say: the expression of power about his head, and the
signs of masculine resolution presented by his mouth and chin.40
Basil paid the ultimate penalty for his physiognomical assumptions, when Dorian
Gray lured him upstairs, revealed the portrait and murdered him. By blackmailing a
37
. ibid. p. 174.
. ibid. p. 172.
39
. ibid. p. 163.
40
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 277.
38
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chemist Dorian was able to dispose of the body without any signs of guilt. Roylake
would have suffered a similar fate had Cristel Toller, not intervened in ‘The Cur’s’
attempt to poison him over tea.
Both authors have constructed a tale which on one hand satirises the common
belief associating beauty with virtue, by presenting us with beautiful characters who
both pursue murderous intentions – the pinnacle of human vice. On the other hand
however, both our beautiful characters have a strange relationship with their soul,
which prevents vice manifesting itself physically. Dorian Gray would have shown his
vices on his body, had it not been for Basil’s portrait. When his servants enter the
room, after his “suicide”, ‘they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of
their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and
beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart.
He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not until they had
examined the rings that they recognised who it was.’41 ‘The Cur’ had transferred his
soul to his portfolio, and with his last action, dictates a letter to Roylake advising him
on where their shared love, Christel Toller, may be found. Roylake concludes ‘there
was some good in that suffering man; and I thank God I was not quite wrong about
him after all’42, again linking beauty and virtue.
This idea was repeated in various fin de siècle literature, in The Time Machine,
H.G. Wells presents us with future humanity divided in two. The ‘beautiful and
graceful’ Eloi – ‘there was something in these pretty little people that inspired
confidence’43 and ‘the queer little ape like figures’44 of the Morlocks – ‘you can
41
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 256.
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 351.
43
H.G. Wells, ‘The Time Machine’ (1895) in H.G. Wells, The Time Machine and The War of the
Worlds (London: Millennium, Orion Publishing Group, 1999) pp. 23-24.
44
. ibid. p. 46.
42
Page 9 of 19
scarce imagine how nauseatingly inhuman they looked.’45 The Eloi were kind and
peaceful and the Morlocks were violent and cannibalistic. Arthur Conan Doyle in The
Sign of Four, presents Sherlock Holmes faced with two villains. Tonga, the savage
islander of whom Watson has ‘never seen features so deeply marked with all
bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his
thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with
half animal fury.’ And Jonathan Small, the archetypal Victorian villain with ‘his ugly
face and outlandish talk … a network of lines and wrinkles all over his mahogany
features … bearded chin … black, curly hair … heavy brows and aggressive chin.’46
These two villains stand in contrast to the more refined Sherlock Holmes and Dr.
Watson. Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde also
explores this concept. The ‘pale and dwarfish’ Mr. Hyde giving ‘an impression of
deformity’ in which ‘there is something wrong with his appearance; something
displeasing, something downright detestable’, stands in stark contrast to the ‘large,
well-made, smooth-faced man’ of Dr. Jekyll. Although the “same person” it is the
‘detestable’ Hyde who commits crimes and murder, and the ‘well-made’ Jekyll who is
a philanthropist and respected scientist.
All of these stories associate beauty with virtue, and ugliness with vice yet are
often ambiguous in their use of this idea. The nature of these stories are such that we
are still left questioning this idea particularly the innocent appearances of Dorian
Gray, ‘The Cur’ and Dr. Jekyll. All these men look like respectable gentleman yet all
commit, or at least attempt to commit, murder. Regardless of the state of the ‘soul’ in
45
. ibid. p. 56.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890, repr. London: Penguin Books, 2001) pgs. 63 and 89;
see J. Jones ‘The Face of Villainy on the Victorian Stage’ for the villain archetype – ‘dark colouring,
dark hair, and moustache, and a heavily lined face.’ p.102
46
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each case, we are left to question the ideas of physiognomy and in ‘The Cur’s’ own
words to ‘be on your guard … against false appearances. They lie like truth.’47
This has great significance to us today, when we find that these ideas have not
yet left us. Zebrowitz terms the idea that “what is beautiful is good” as the
“attractiveness halo” and although the work is inconclusive to date, there are some
interesting concerns. Attractive people who break the law are less likely to be noticed
or reported; attractive defendants are less likely to be convicted and if they are,
receive shorter sentences. Attractive applicants are more likely to receive help/aid
from institutions and members of the public and attractive individuals are treated
more warmly than unattractive ones from an early age. Teachers also have higher
expectations for the performance of attractive children.48 In this light we may do well
to consider the literature discussed, and instead of believing Lord Henry: ‘people like
you – the wilful sunbeams of life – don’t commit crimes’49 we should perhaps heed
‘The Cur’s’ warnings: ‘men of your age seldom look below the surface. Learn that
valuable habit, sir – and begin by looking below the surface of me.’50
The second part of this essay will now address the ideas of fin de siècle
literature concerned with the changing role of masculinity within culture. The
industrial revolution, according to James Doyle ‘did more to affect men’s lives than
almost any other social change in history.’51 Early in the century Carlyle’s ‘works
quite self-consciously seek to establish a foundation myth of manliness for an
industrial society.’52 Carlyle envisioned the Monk as a suitable figure for manhood,
given their regulation of sexual energy and commitment to duty, equating them with
47
. ibid. p. 304
L.A. Zebrowitz, Reading Faces, see chapter 7: ‘The Advantages of Attractiveness’ pp. 140 – 159.
49
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, p. 63.
50
Wilkie Collins, The Guilty River, p. 259.
51
cited in J.A. Kestner Sherlock’s Men, p. 3.
52
H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 16.
48
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ideal factory workers. The factory was an exclusively male sphere and it was this
tension between the homosocial atmosphere of the workplace and pub against the
heterosexual environment of the married home that energised the idea of
monasticism.53 Another important standard for Victorian masculinity was that of the
‘Gentlemen’:
The Victorian gentlemen should be courteous, affable, kind, deferential, temperate,
unassuming, clean, pure, considerate, courageous, understanding, inoffensive, unobtrusive,
socially adroit, truthful, civil, circumspect, sympathetic, respectful, unaffected, and
adaptable.’54
By the end of the century, changes in legislation – particularly regarding marriage, the
rise of the “new woman”, the ideas of decadence and degeneration, the growth of
Imperialism, new ideas of psychology and the growth of social exploration literature
left many men struggling to find their place within existing masculine culture. The
literature of the period reflected this concern and offered some diverse and sometimes
disturbing alternatives.
Certainly
excluded
from
Victorian
masculinity
were
homosexuals,
demonstrated in the 1895 trials of Oscar Wilde. Basil’s admiration of Dorian, and to a
lesser extent Roylake’s admiration of ‘The Cur’, goes beyond the homosocial into the
realms of homoerotic. This presents a challenge to the bourgeois masculine ideals of
heterosexual marriage, and the Carlylean monasticism. Furthermore the femininity of
the characters oppose ‘the respect for muscle and might so prevalent at the close of
the Victorian era.’55 This admiration of muscle and might may however be found in
53
. ibid. p. 5.
K. Volland Waters, The Perfect Gentleman: Masculine Control in Victorian Men’s Fiction 18701901 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997) p. 21.
55
M. Roper, cited in J.A. Kestner, Sherlock’s Men, p. 3.
54
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H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in which Sir Henry ‘one of the biggestchested and longest armed men I ever saw’56 battles with the natives in Kukuanaland:
More gallant was the vision of Sir Henry, whose ostrich plumes had been shorn off by a spear
stroke, so that his long yellow hair streamed out in the breeze behind him. There he stood, the
great Dane, for he was nothing else, his hands, his axe, and his armour, all red with blood, and
none could live before his stroke.57
In King Solomon’s Mines, Rider Haggard gives us a tale subscribing to Carlyle’s
exclusively male authorship and readership.58 The narrator Allan Quartermain offers
us ‘the strangest story ever that I know of. It may seem a queer thing to say that,
especially considering that there is no woman in it – except Foulata … at any rate I
can safely say that there is not a petticoat in the whole thing.’59
This exclusion of women, proved to be somewhat of a backlash to ‘the new
woman’ writers of the period, who were trying to break down the barriers preventing
female participation in education and the professions, particularly literature and
establish a new role for women. Olive Schreiner, a leading ‘new woman’ author
develops some of this new thinking within the character of Lyndall in The Story of an
African Farm. Lyndall leaves home to be educated and boasts ‘when I come back
again I shall know everything that a human being can.’60 Lyndall is ‘never miserable
and never happy’ and expresses a number of views common to the ‘new woman’, and
antagonistic to Victorian masculine values. On marriage she states ‘I am not in so
great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man’s foot; and I do not so greatly admire
the crying of babies, … there are other women glad of such work.’61 Her friendship
with Waldo is jeopardised by her beliefs, ‘I’m sorry you don’t care for the position of
56
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 11.
. ibid. p. 226.
58
H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 22-23.
59
H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, pp. 8-9.
60
Olive Schreiner, The Story of An African Farm (1883 repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
p. 151.
57
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women: I should have liked us to be friends; and it is the only thing about which I
think much or feel much – if, indeed, I have any feeling about anything.’62 This
coldness or lack of feeling, often associated with sexlessness, was popular among
‘new women’ and can also be found in Sue Bridehead in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the
Obscure – ‘people say I must be cold-natured, - sexless.’63 On women’s future roles
Lyndall prophesises ‘if I might but be one of those born in the future; then, perhaps, to
be born a woman will not be to be born branded … we were all equals when we lay
new-born babes on our nurse’s knee. We will be equals again when they tie up our
jaws for the last sleep.’64 For men seeking a new masculinity, this presents a dramatic
change for the future, in which Carlyle’s exclusively male realm and the bourgeois
ideals of marriage will be drastically altered, if not destroyed.
This equality between men and women is interestingly used in Jude the
Obscure and The Time Machine. ‘Jude and especially Father Time are imagined as
precursors of a new biological species of male too ‘frail’, even too ‘androgynous’ to
live in this world.’65 H.G. Wells takes this to it’s logical conclusion with the Eloi who
‘in costume, and in all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the
sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed
to my eyes to be miniatures of their parents.’66 In this future vision, equality is
achieved to such extent that neither masculinity nor femininity have any cultural
significance.
Returning to the ideas of the soul, we start to see in these works questions
being asked on the duality of man. Dorian Gray’s portrait reflects his soul or given
61
. ibid. p. 150.
. ibid. p. 154.
63
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, (1896; repr. London: Penguin Books, 1994) p. 179.
64
. ibid. pgs. 154 and 156.
65
H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 186.
66
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, p. 29.
62
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life his döppelganger, Dr. Jekyll has an immediately recognisable döppelganger in
Mr. Hyde and in their introduction to The Guilty River, Page and Sasaki suggest we
may ‘regard the Lodger [‘The Cur’] as Roylake’s double, the dark side of himself.’67
We also see a duality of man presented in The Time Machine – Morlocks and Eloi,
and in The Lost World with the Doda and Accala sharing a similar contrast.68
According to Kane ‘The double appears to be a symptom of the collapse of a set of
dualist oppositions, a series of assumptions and a system of belief and identification
that one might subsume under the name of patriarchy.’69 Victorian masculinity, had
often been defined by opposing it the Victorian ‘other’, in many cases this was the
feminine, just as frequently it was the foreigner, it could also be an effeminate
aristocracy, the homosexual, the dandy, or the decadent. These ‘others’ had changed
their significance towards the end of the century and masculinity could no longer rely
on being different polarised against them. The duality of man reveals a number of
internal conflicts between the individual man, rather than between man and the
‘other’, and also between masculinities in general. ‘Dualism entails not just the notion
that the body and the soul (or the mind) are two separate entities and that one is better
or more important than the other, or even that one is good and the other is bad.
Implied here is also the separation of a spiritual world from a material world.’70 This
poses serious complications for masculinity and suggests that an internal balance must
also be reached. This equilibrium is not achieved by Dorian, ‘The Cur’, or Dr. Jekyll,
who are all killed off, nor can it be established between the rival factions in the
science-fiction tales of Wells and Conan Doyle. As Volland Waters argues the
67
Wilkie Collins Miss or Mrs?; The Haunted Hotel; The Guilty River, introduction p. xx.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Lost World (1912), in Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other
Stories, (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1995).
69
M. Kane, Modern Men: Mapping Masculinity in English and German Literature 1880-1930,
(London: Cassell, 1999) p. 51.
70
. ibid. p. 7.
68
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‘perfect gentleman is a mask which covers man’s degenerate and feminine
possibilities … [and that duality] implies that a part of him is potentially
uncontrollable … [and furthermore] a self that cannot be contained cannot be
controlled and is therefore certain to be destroyed.’71 These ideas present a massive
blow against patriarchal control and the Carlylean regulation of energy.
These serious issues confronting Victorian masculinity at the end of the
century are given a disturbing and apocalyptic voice in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. Kurtz’s journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ presents, among other things, a
journey into this duality and inner soul of man (sic). ‘They – the women I mean – are
all out of it – should be out of it’72 and so again we enter the Carlylean exclusively
male sphere. Kurtz had gone into the ‘heart’ as ‘a prodigy, an emissary of pity, and
science, and progress, and devil knows what else.’73 When he reaches the ‘heart’
however we find that the wilderness ‘had whispered to him things about himself
which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with
this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.’74 Like
Dorian’s fascination with pleasure, ‘The Cur’s’ fascination with crime, and Dr.
Jekyll’s voyeuristic enjoyment of Hyde’s actions, Kurtz is attracted to his inner
desires, and Marlowe finds these actions to be of ‘unsound method’ or of ‘no method
at all’.75 Echoing back to the earlier masculine ideas of Carlyle and Tennyson, Conrad
supports the idea that ‘the opposite of manliness is madness.’76 In Kurtz’s case,
Marlowe finds ‘his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within
71
K. Volland Waters, The Perfect Gentleman, pp. 115-116.
Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1902) in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Stories
(Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1999) p. 76.
73
. ibid. p. 53.
74
. ibid. p. 86.
75
. ibid. p. 90.
76
H. Sussman, Victorian Masculinities, p. 48.
72
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itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad.’77 But Kurtz had found more than
madness in the depths of his ‘wilderness.’ In death the veil was lifted and on his face
could be seen ‘the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror – of
an intense and hopeless despair’ which Kurtz’s dying words defined as ‘The horror!
The horror!’78 This horror at the duality of man, was equally demonstrated by Dorian
Gray’s disgust at his portrait, ‘The Cur’s’ loathing of mirrors and in Dr. Jekyll, for
who ‘it was no longer the fear of the gallows it was the horror of being Hyde that
racked me.’79 Like Dr. Jekyll, Victorian patriarchal masculinity may also have
realised, ‘I feel that my days are numbered, and that I must die; and yet I shall die
incredulous.’80
77
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 94.
. ibid. p. 97.
79
Robert Louis Stevenson, The strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, p. 68.
80
. ibid. p. 54.
78
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