In this engaging and highly readable study of the political uses of masculinity in seventeenth-century England, Diane Purkiss persuasively demonstrates that masculinity became highly contested ground: Charles I was considered to have been dominated by his wife Henrietta Maria and therefore effeminate, but his supporters’ posthumous representation of him as a heroic martyr had the effect of recuperating his masculinity. By contrast, Cromwell's success as a military leader shored up his masculinity, but his royalist foes figured as feminine his lower-class origins as well as his worrisomely excessive brutality and tyranny. Purkiss's method is psychoanalytic, yet by carefully contextualizing her discussion in the historical circumstances of the English Civil War, her book avoids the criticism most often leveled against psychoanalytic theory that it is transhistorical and not responsive to historical particulars. For example, to support her claim that early modern masculinity was constituted on the difficult and repeated efforts to separate from the mother (a contention that has also been made by Philip Slater in discussing ancient Greece in The Glory of Hera [Boston, 1968]), Purkiss discusses grammar books that inculcated bodily control and the removal of the boy from his mother's influence and stories such as Bevis of Southhampton that emphasize the link between the hero and his father while separating him from his mother.
As Purkiss states in the conclusion, this work tells many “stories” (221), and in its practice of juxtaposing these “stories” to literary texts by canonical figures it calls to mind the strategy of new historicism. Yet she tells multiple stories rather than an arresting single story as classic examples of new historicist criticism have done. Their multiplicity gives confidence that the “stories” can more accurately illuminate the historical contexts that provided material to authors such as John Milton. Although Purkiss firmly grounds her psychoanalytic method on Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and other post-Freudian theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, she might have provided a more explicit critical reflection on the relationship between her theoretical models and seventeenth-century materials, perhaps by reference to other scholars of early modern England whose methods have been inflected by psychoanalysis. In general, a more direct engagement with the work of scholars on related topics would have made clearer its specific intervention in the ongoing scholarly conversation.
The range of popular publications and lesser-known authors from which Purkiss cites her evidence is impressively broad. Yet the most substantial contribution of this work may be in the use of these texts to read canonical literature, especially Milton's various works, which here receive fresh interpretations. For example, Purkiss offers a persuasive reading of the War in Heaven by juxtaposing it to the military writings that emphasized the dangers on the battlefield exacerbated by modern gunpower and the use of cannons. She demonstrates that the wounds of the fallen angels exemplify the threat to masculinity presented by the vulnerable body, while the loyal angels’ orderly procession recalls the “hardness and invulnerability” (46) prescribed by civil war manuals. In another instance, Purkiss reads Satan and Sin in Paradise Lost through the popular pamphlets satirizing “Mistriss Parliament” that feminized and demonized Parliament's antimonarchical stance. While Milton shares in the anxiety and disgust toward pregnancy and childbirth expressed in the royalist pamphlets, he reverses their political import and problematizes Sin's obedience to Satan as a perversion of Parliament's independence and an “allegory of political corruption” (202). Thus Purkiss shows that both the royalist pamphleteers and Milton use figurations of masculinity (constructed in opposition to a demonized femininity) to advance opposing political positions.
In the conclusion, where Purkiss reflects upon the book she has completed, she usefully details directions in which her work could be developed. For example, she acknowledges that she does not take into account regional differences nor differences in class or rank. I did not miss the former as much as the latter (though early in the work Purkiss does discuss how boys of higher and lower rank were exposed to very similar constructions of masculinity). Yet are there differences inflected by class and rank, for example, in the association of violence with masculinity? Or in the readership targeted by “literature” (in the title) by writers such as Milton and Andrew Marvell, and popular, nonliterary texts such as newsbooks and pamphlets?
This final comment brings me to reflect on the title of this book and on the exigencies of contemporary publishing. Purkiss recounts in the introduction that the study began as “Broken Men,” aptly signifying both the physical and psychic trauma experienced by men during the Civil War. Not only is the more generic title that the book now bears less striking than the original title, it falls short of informing potential readers of the specific nature of its intervention: shouldn’t the title at least include the word “masculinity”? And the rather general “literature” does not adequately represent the rich and broad array of texts, including nonliterary ones, that Purkiss discusses. I have heard from other Cambridge authors that they have had to revise their titles to conform to the tyranny of the “keyword.” But in this case, as in others, forgoing an informative (and memorable) title can only do this insightful and thought-provoking work disservice, making it perhaps less effective in reaching the readership that it deserves.
