Historians of masculinity agree that the early nineteenth century saw a change in the definition of the gentleman and that this change had consequences for the definition of masculinity.Footnote 1 There is, however, less agreement about why this shift occurred and what was meant by the new gentleman and by masculinity. In part, this is because different historians refer to different versions of eighteenth-century gentlemanly masculinity and, therefore, to what it was that changed.
For Philip Carter, gentlemanly masculinity was not just a “social but a sociable category in which gender identity was conferred, or denied, by men's capacity for gentlemanly social performance.”Footnote 2 On the other hand, for Lee Davidoff and Catherine Hall's notion of the gentleman, masculinity was “based on sport and codes of honor derived from military prowess, finding expression in hunting, riding, drinking and ‘wenching.’”Footnote 3 Both these versions of gentlemanliness existed in the eighteenth century, but I would argue that it was the polite and refined gentleman that represented hegemonic masculinity.
The concept of hegemonic masculinity, a concept concerned with the structure of gender relations, first developed in 1983 by R. W. Connell, has been a useful analytical tool for the study of masculinity because it has brought into focus not only “the structural relationship between men's power over women” but unequal power relations between different categories of men.Footnote 4 In the eighteenth century, it was polite and refined masculinity that was supported by cultural means such as conduct manuals, moral literature, popular periodical essays like the Spectator, and educational ideals and practices. However, while the theory of hegemonic masculinity is underpinned by the notion that different forms of masculinity are always contested and in a tense and unstable relationship with each other, it seems to take for granted that the form that is hegemonic at any particular time is homogeneous.
A critical aspect of polite gentlemanliness was precisely that it was not homogeneous but, rather, rent with anxieties, in particular the anxiety about effeminacy, because tensions between masculinity and refinement made it difficult for a man to be at once polite and manly.Footnote 5 As Carter points out, any model of refined masculinity formulated by conduct manuals had to allow men to “display a capacity for refinement while maintaining their masculine identity.”Footnote 6 Politeness, as an art de plaire, required self-control and discipline of both body and tongue. The “ease” of politeness was not relaxing, but the effect of artful mastery over one's manners and conduct, in line with the classical legacy of moderation and stoicism on which notions of politeness were ultimately founded. But as Addison saw it early in the century, men also had to be polished “out of those Manners most natural to them.”Footnote 7 If “natural” manliness was, as variously noted throughout the century, rough, brutal, ungracious, or rude, in fashioning themselves as polite, men became softer and more refined, but not necessarily more manly.Footnote 8 The “dilemma of masculinity” suffused all expressions of politeness, as Marcia Pointon has illustrated in her analysis of the wig. While the “artificial covering of the head” was required as a sign of “virility, station and decency,” it was “simultaneously threatened by the connotations—religious, moral and sexual—of the only item that could secure that signification.”Footnote 9 Inevitably, “as a code, politeness was always in danger of collapsing into effeminacy.”Footnote 10
By the end of the eighteenth century, Philip Carter has argued, polite society, “both as network of venues and as a social ideal to be enacted therein” broke down, with consequences for “the definition of the gentleman as well as concepts of manliness in the nineteenth century.”Footnote 11 Indeed, John Tosh's remark that politeness is not “a quality we readily associate with Victorian men” supports and extends Carter's argument.Footnote 12
What happened to politeness? For all that historians have written about the origin and spread of politeness over the eighteenth century, few have asked how it ended, and for whom, but it is beyond the scope of this article to do more than point to this neglect. One approach to the question holds that in the nineteenth century, etiquette replaced politeness.Footnote 13 But politeness and etiquette are not synonymous.Footnote 14 A key difference is that whereas nineteenth-century etiquette concentrated mainly on “precise rules of interpersonal behaviour,” politeness, though concerned with social performance, was also an attribute of identity and a social virtue.Footnote 15 It is this sense of politeness that Tosh refers to when, in a second approach to the question, he claims that in the early and mid-Victorian period, manliness replaced politeness “as a marker of social and political virtue.” Politeness, he argues, became increasingly redundant and irrelevant as the “core values” of manliness increasingly addressed middle-class experience. Politeness did not disappear altogether but continued to be associated with gentlemanliness.Footnote 16
I want to propose a third approach to the question by suggesting a different trajectory for politeness. I agree with Carter that in the late eighteenth century, politeness ceased to be a dominant social ideal, but I differ from him about how it broke down. My contention is that it is only in relation to men that politeness can be considered to have broken down. By mid-century, the development of the culture of sensibility had highlighted the shortcomings of politeness, in particular its vulnerability to the charge of hypocrisy and insincerity, and its dissembling.Footnote 17 In the same period, politeness began to be questioned not because it failed to fashion the gentleman, but because of its incompatibility with a masculine national character. This questioning came from a variety of directions, especially from writers such as playwright Samuel Foote and most significantly from Richard Hurd, whose Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762) marked a shift in attitude to chivalry. These tensions contributed to the end of politeness as an ideal for the fashioning of gentlemanliness. At the same time, retaining its main eighteenth-century characteristics, politeness became “feminized” and “domesticated,” and by the early 1800s, its emphasis on pleasing, on “consider[ing] others more than [oneself],” on self-effacement, “annihilating, as it were, ourselves,” had become naturalized as characteristics of femininity.Footnote 18 By then, the “abandonment of self to please others” was now considered “womanish,” and “pleasing” was no longer a principal attribute of the gentleman.Footnote 19 Instead, as regards men, a different “system of manners” for fashioning the gentleman emerged, one based on a notion of chivalry that had been developing since the middle of the century.
This was not an abrupt change. “No cultural transformation is all that straightforward.”Footnote 20 Indeed, as I will argue later, there was enough overlap between politeness and chivalry to explain why the rise of chivalry in the mid- to late eighteenth century has attracted little attention from historians. What needs to be done is to identify the cultural conditions that made it possible for the shift to take place when it did and to relate these conditions to the changing definitions of masculinity and the gentleman. This is the aim of this article. My main argument is that chivalry provided a vocabulary for refashioning the gentleman as masculine, integrating national identity with enlightenment notions of progress and civilization. This would have important consequences for gender relations.
One problem that arises when examining cultural constructs such as chivalry and the gentleman is that of definition. Both these constructs have many meanings, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory. As regards chivalry, depending on who revived or, “relocate[d]” it for contemporary relevance, its origin and definitions varied, so that “chivalry” seems rather to have been, at least initially, a category into which a variety of meanings could be imagined.Footnote 21 It is my aim here not to unravel what the eighteenth century tangled together but, rather, to show that the very ambiguities inherent in the representations of chivalry were most productive of meaning and contributed to the force and spread of the chivalric ideal.
It is precisely because it was possible to attribute different meanings to chivalry that it could be, and was, appropriated by politically and culturally diverse writers, politicians, poets, essayists, and artists, ranging from Burke's “political lament for the ancien régime in France” to liberal or radical writers in the 1790s who thought it represented “a moral ethos which echoed their own political ideals.”Footnote 22 But there was another reason—its “intrinsic appeal.”Footnote 23 The code of values it embodied represented “abstract universal ideals such as generosity, justice and courage” and made it possible at the same time to transcend particular appropriations.Footnote 24 This is held to account for its ascendancy and cultural power. For instance, an allusion made to romance in an 1817 issue of the Black Dwarf, “one of the most militant popular journals of the time” is, according to David Duff, “a measure of the extent to which the language of romance and chivalry had penetrated the political idiom of Regency England.”Footnote 25
It is important therefore to acknowledge chivalry's plural meanings and resist the attempt to reduce it to a coherent phenomenon, eliding its complex, multifaceted, and contradictory character. One aspect of this plurality is manifested in the variety of “moments of origin” identified for its revival.
The revival of chivalry as a cultural phenomenon is usually associated with the Gothic Revival in art and architecture in the nineteenth century and with Romanticism, but Rosemary Sweet has argued recently that as early as 1707 the Society of Antiquaries had considered chivalry “as one area in need of antiquarian inquiry.”Footnote 26 By the 1740s, Gothic architecture, long regarded as a “non-classical muddle and as such unworthy of the Man of Taste,” had not only received appreciative attention from many but “had become a fashion,” and Gothic had “ceased to be synonymous for barbarous or violent.”Footnote 27 The revival of interest in chivalry is also thought to have been influenced by the Mémoires sur la Chevalerie by De La Curne de Ste Palaye, published in France in 1750 and in England in 1784.Footnote 28
However, it is Richard Hurd who is usually credited with marking the shift in attitude to chivalry and the Middle Ages when he announced that Gothic manners were superior to classical as a subject for poetry. This signaled “the ending of an exclusively neo-classical ideal.”Footnote 29 In this Hurd was not a lone voice since “the promulgation of an alternative to classical taste was beginning to emerge in this period.”Footnote 30 For example, Walpole's gothicism, though unrelated to Hurd, whom he opposed, is said to have been part of the “Gothic reaction against the hegemony of classical or Augustan taste.”Footnote 31 What may have mattered to Hurd in addition was that the Gothic was antithetical to “all things French.”Footnote 32 Burke's lament that “the age of chivalry is gone” is also considered to mark “the point at which it began.”Footnote 33 Some historians have invoked industrialization either because it “gave people a sense of nostalgia” or because of the “social and economic dislocations” that it produced.Footnote 34 The popularity of Walter Scott's romances and his essay on chivalry (1814) too are often given a primary role.Footnote 35 “Ivanhoe,” argues Norman Vance, “helped to make the old chivalry a valuable imaginative resource in the midst of the social and economic dislocation of the industrial revolution.”Footnote 36 The problem with some of these explanations is that they tend to imply either that the cult of chivalry sprang directly out of the Middle Ages or that the “English sense of chivalry” had always been there.Footnote 37 Nonetheless, they provide a general idea as to when chivalry began to be revived.
Chivalry, National Identity, and Civilization
The shift in taste associated with the revival of chivalry is also linked to the expansion of antiquarian inquiry about ancient Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. One impulse for this inquiry was the search for the origins of English liberties and the English constitution in England's past. Though Colin Kidd in particular has depicted the confusion that reigned in the eighteenth century as to who were thought to be the true originators of English liberties and institutions—ancient Britons, Celts, Saxons, Goths—whoever they might be, what they represented were glorified, unsullied ancestors differing radically from the present effeminate and luxurious society.Footnote 38 The notion of ancestors was “an idealisation of continuity, which was glorified as a virtue and an achievement of itself. It was the fulcrum upon which the very notion of British identity turned. Continuity conferred legitimacy, it proved efficacy, it was the test of character.”Footnote 39 Not only did English constitutional history serve as “the most powerful integrationist myth” but, as Sweet has argued, “the study of ancient British antiquities made a highly significant contribution to the discussion of national origins from which a sense of national identity and national difference could grow.”Footnote 40 In addition, “the concept of ‘antiquity,’” a common process in “nationalist recovery and reappropriation,” also had to be a heroic age that could dignify the nation-to-be.Footnote 41 Following the American war and the loss of the colonies, the Gothic served that purpose and was “increasingly invoked as part of the urgent project to re-imagine national identity,” because it was “defined increasingly in terms of a proud military heritage” as well as a “unique national identity.”Footnote 42 At that time, the Middle Ages also “served as a battleground for the clash between competing visions of what the nation had been and what it should be.”Footnote 43
Chivalry was also taken up by scholars engaged in an entirely different intellectual project. In the 1770s, a number of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, among whom were Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Lord Kames, were inquiring into the origins and development of civil society, developing schemes to explain the history of progress as a series of successive stages from rough and simple to refined and civilized.Footnote 44 In these conjectural histories, the progress and civilization of a nation were associated with developments in commerce and the arts and linked to the status of women. What Duff calls the “rehabilitation of chivalry” was, in part at least, the result of this larger enquiry. “From this historical perspective,” he explains, “the chivalric system, previously discredited as a gothic absurdity, came to be seen as an important stage in the transition from the barbarism of the ‘dark ages’ to the civilised manners of modern times.”Footnote 45 Women were central to this model of progress and civilization, because the relations between the sexes and the respect accorded to women were the mark of a civilized and refined nation.Footnote 46
Though conjectural histories, as a “heuristic construct or system which should have been applicable either to all human societies or to none of them in its particularity,” were not generated by a nationalist impulse, they were in effect appropriated by nationalist discourses.Footnote 47 The Germania by Tacitus, Jane Rendall has argued, was central to the historical agenda of the Scottish Enlightenment writers. The Germania provided not just “elements of a golden age for women” but “elements of the exceptional history of British liberties,” a concern which underpinned antiquarians’ interest in the Saxons as well.Footnote 48 “According to the Whig interpretation of history,” Sweet explains, “the Saxons brought with them from Germany the principles of freedom and representation that Tacitus had described in the Germania, from which the Anglo-Saxon constitution had evolved.”Footnote 49 This had important consequences for the definition of national identity, because if the ancient Germans had been the source of Britain's constitution, this provided Britain with “a non-Roman and anti-Gallic source of constitutional history” and played a key role in its eventual self-definition as an Anglo-Saxon nation.Footnote 50 Liberty was the inalienable ancestral trait characterizing Britons as it had the ancient Germans, also a “free people,” in contrast to the French, whose character inherently “predisposed them to adore despotism and made them incapable of liberty,” a stereotype that was, ironically, retained even after the French Revolution.Footnote 51
A key feature of both Ferguson's and Hurd's representation of chivalry was its consideration for women. “The system of chivalry, when completely formed, proceeded on a marvellous respect and veneration to the fair sex.”Footnote 52 Among the ancient Germans, who were thought to have provided the foundation of chivalry, “consideration of the sex was prodigious,” Hurd wrote, for even as they wrought the ravages and devastation of barbarian warfare, “they generally abstained from offering any violence to the honour of the women”—in other words, they did not rape them “as an occasion of war,” unlike ancient Greeks and Romans, as Adam Ferguson was keen to point out.Footnote 53 In his Essay on the History of Civil Societies (1768), Ferguson depicts the hero of modern romance as one who behaves with “refined courtesy” and “scrupulous honour” on the field of battle, never taking advantage of his enemy nor exploiting his spoils, and who “employs his valour to rescue the distressed, and to protect the innocent.” By contrast, the hero of Greek fable employs his “superior force, courage and address” to take advantage of his enemy and is precisely “actuated by a desire of spoil.”Footnote 54 In this sense, chivalry represented a more “civilized” moment than the time-honored models of civility, the ancient Greek and Roman cultures. Hurd and Ferguson both represented chivalry as a moment of civilization in Britain's own past, which had introduced manners whose influence on “taste and sentiments” was still being felt in their own time and were linked to the refinement and progress of the present.Footnote 55 They were not alone. Though somewhat reluctantly in view of chivalry's abuses, Gibbon conceded that “the benefits of this institution, to refine the temper of barbarians, and to infuse some principles of faith, justice, and humanity, were strongly felt, and have been often observed.”Footnote 56 Even Burke, who was not interested in the Gothic Revival, “like those who were … tended to credit the nature of modern European society to feudalism and chivalry.”Footnote 57
Chivalry and Politeness
It is in their relation to women that politeness and chivalry appear to share certain features—they are both systems of manners associated with a high regard for women, and they share a courtly language of gallantry and courtesy. As Barbara Taylor's analysis of Wollstonecraft's critique of “gallantry” demonstrates, as far as women were concerned, there was much overlap between the gallantry of politeness and that of chivalry, giving the impression not just of similarity but of unbroken continuity between the two.Footnote 58 However, as regards men, and this would lend support to my argument, politeness and chivalry had very different meanings.Footnote 59
Thus, while it was in the company of ladies, as Reverend Thomson imagined it in 1791, that the knight acquired “the graces of external behaviour, and improved his sensibility and tenderness,” the object was not, as for politeness, to soften and refine his manners but to ensure that these graces would become “an habitual virtue” that “attended him in the field of battle and checked his passions in the ardor of victory.”Footnote 60 Tournaments, “the best school of civility as well as heroism,” were for Hurd emblematic of the system, while Gibbon commented wryly that “impartial taste must prefer a Gothic tournament to the Olympic Games of classical antiquity.”Footnote 61
The ideal of politeness as an “art of pleasing” implied that men must please women, but pleasing was not love; it was the instrument by means of which the gentleman was fashioned as polite.Footnote 62 By contrast, love was central to the chivalric system. The chivalrous knight was the “champion of God and the ladies” wrote Gibbon (though he added in brackets “I blush to unite such discordant names”).Footnote 63 John Millar interpreted the fact that “the love of God and of the ladies” was one of the first lessons of chivalry more positively. For him, romantic love defined the refinement and civilization of chivalric manners.Footnote 64
The focus on gender relations was a characteristic feature of chivalry as it was of politeness. But whereas the company and conversation of women essential to the fashioning of the polite gentleman could also endanger his masculinity, the chivalric code associated the love of women with the love not just of arms but of hazardous enterprise and adventure, and was unambiguously masculine.Footnote 65 Thus, while being in love was “one of the necessary qualifications of a knight,” what this love enflamed was his passion for war, inspiring him to earn his beloved's regard by valorous deeds and heroic martial ventures taking him far away from her rather than requiring him to spend time in her company.Footnote 66 Chivalric gallantry, as its double meaning implies, integrated the martial and the affective, “ferocity” and “love of blood” with “gentleness, … sentiments of tenderness and pity,” and idealized love.Footnote 67 This idea of love was not held as an ideal by all. It was precisely because she objected to the chivalric notion of love and gendered relations that Mary Wollstonecraft attacked Edmund Burke, arguing that the “homage” chivalry paid to women “vitiates them, prevents their endeavouring to obtain solid personal merit; in short, makes those beings vain inconsiderate dolls who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society.” For Wollstonecraft, gallantry, a “vestige of gothic manners” was insidiously degrading to women.Footnote 68 Similarly, in Epistles on Women, her conjectural history in verse, Lucy Aikin argued that gallantry was “a parasite and treacherous corrupter of the sex.”Footnote 69
By the early nineteenth century, chivalry was still a “much controverted subject,” poised between nostalgia and derision, simultaneously extolled for its purity, spirit of honor, and respect for women and ridiculed for its excesses.Footnote 70 It is worth noting that both Hume and Millar, while being attracted to chivalry for similar reasons—its importance in forming modern manners and morals—seem to suggest some ambivalence about its excesses. They both noted the improvements that had accrued in modern times from an “absurd though generous” system (Hume) and from the “extravagance of Gothic institutions and manners” (Millar).Footnote 71 The use of these terms might be interpreted as a display of resistance to the seduction of chivalry and thus as evidence of chivalry's still equivocal status at the time, especially if, in addition, it had not completely lost its “residual associations of barbarism and backwardness.”Footnote 72
Chivalry and Masculinity
Despite the stress on the martial training and heroic deeds that were part of the chivalric code, chivalry did not present models of heroic martial masculinity for late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century military action. The reasons for this are not clear, but one explanation is that the association of chivalry and war was underplayed because it evoked too closely the barbarism of ancient times.Footnote 73 Another claims that “the martial actions of romance” were “feats of arms rather than wars because they ‘do not fit into any politically purposeful pattern.’”Footnote 74 Finally, it was not until World War I, A. J. Frantzen argues, that “the sacrificial crucible of war … shaped the self-sacrificial ideals of chivalry and its code of heroic masculinity.”Footnote 75
Ferguson and Hume may have praised chivalrous knights’ martial behavior, yet it was not their behavior as fighters but their “refined courtesy” and “scrupulous honour” that Ferguson highlighted, while Hume's model of the “real and truly admirable heroism” of chivalry was Edward (the Black Prince) Prince of Wales's behavior not during but after the battle, toward his vanquished enemy.Footnote 76 More than anything, it was chivalry's martial system of education that was one of its early and most enduring attractions. It promised the construction of manly males.
I have argued earlier that in fashioning themselves as polite, men risked becoming effeminate. One reason was that by pleasing and conversing with women, men might become like them. Another reason was that men also had to imitate the French because they had most developed the art of pleasing and the conversational skills at the heart of politeness and were its best models.Footnote 77 These requirements generated a number of tensions for men that were, in complex and contradictory ways, intertwined with masculinity and the national character (while contributing to shaping it).Footnote 78 The grand tour, which played a central educational role in the eighteenth century, not only embodies these tensions and contradictions but also can usefully be contrasted with chivalry, “a code of conduct specified for the boy”Footnote 79 and a structure for his education.Footnote 80
In the early eighteenth century, it had become the practice for young men of quality to complete their education by traveling to France and Italy. They spent time in France to perfect their manners and conversation by socializing with the Beau Monde and in Italy to experience the ruins and view the art of the classical civilizations that had been the subject of their education. The grand tour was the “crown” of a young man's liberal education.Footnote 81 Though the practice of the grand tour always had critics as well as advocates, from the 1760s, the nature of the criticisms changed. Central to these criticisms was a concern over masculinity. One of the first to initiate this change was Richard Hurd.
In his Dialogues on the Uses of Foreign Travel, Hurd criticized the grand tour and the accomplishments it promised not because they failed to fashion the gentleman but because they were alien to the manly English character. Hurd's comment that “by going abroad the youth may be polished out of his rusticity … but may easily wear himself into the contrary defect, an effeminate and unmanly foppery” encapsulated the central dilemma of politeness for the gentleman. Significantly, unlike many of his contemporaries, Hurd did not merely denounce “French politeness” in order to fashion a superior and more worthy English politeness. He rejected politeness altogether, declaring that the concern for politeness came from women and the sedulous and effeminate French and was therefore best left to them. Englishmen should distinguish themselves instead by their native plain, rough manners and, especially, their “unpolished integrity.”Footnote 82 This choice of words was not accidental. It was part of a vocabulary that had been emerging since the middle of the century that took the ancient Briton as a model for a manly national character, in contrast to the Frenchified effeminacy evinced by those who pursued the ideal of politeness and sociability modeled on the French.Footnote 83 In the same period, Catharine Macaulay also denounced the grand tour. Far from being the finishing “crown” of liberal education, it was “the finishing stroke that render[ed] [men of fortune] useless to all the good purposes of preserving the birth-right of an Englishman”—his liberty. Because it was impossible for youths, she reasoned, to “distinguish the different natures of different governments, their advantages, their disadvantages” (one of the key rationales for the tour), they “grow charmed with everything that is foreign, are caught with the gaudy tinsel of a superb court, the frolic levity of unreflecting slaves, and thus deceived by appearances, are rivetted in a taste for servitude.”Footnote 84 By the 1780s, it was possible to argue that there was “no need to go out of our own country to learn politeness and manners. Many judicious foreigners prefer ours to the French, as more manly and becoming.”Footnote 85
When Hurd criticized the grand tour for “turning out a set of fine Gentlemen” (meant ironically),Footnote 86 he seemed to be making a contrast with a system of education he admired and had discussed in his Moral and Political Dialogues, the chivalric system of education. “The youth in general were fired with the love of martial exercises. They were early formed to habits of fatigue and enterprize. And, together with this warlike spirit, the profession of chivalry was favourable to every other virtue. Affability, courtesy, generosity, veracity.”Footnote 87 The chivalric system was a way of producing men, not Frenchified and effeminate fops. Hurd was not the only critic of the grand tour who wrote about romance and chivalry. Dr. John Moore, whose opposition to the grand tour bore the stamp of experience and authority, having accompanied the eighth duke of Hamilton as tutor on his tour in 1775–77, described in detail the chivalric system of education in his “View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance.” Each stage was marked distinctly, from the removal of the seven-year-old boy from the “parental home to a foreign castle” where he would learn obedience through humble and menial tasks, to the age of fourteen, when the boy would be “taught the use of the spear and the battle ax, and accustomed to exercise under the incumbrance of armour,” to the final stage, at twenty-one, when “he was received into the order of chivalry” with ceremonies that were meant to make a “deep and lasting impression.” Education was “severe and required steadiness and strength” so that boys with “stout constitutions and intrepid minds were preferred among all others of equal rank.” But their education was not solely martial. Their “address and manners were attended to.” They were taught to dance and play the harp and religion, as well as the “metaphysics of love which impressed in their minds an early devotion to the sex.”Footnote 88
For the many who complained that too many youths returned from the grand tour as effeminate fops “who knew no toils but those of the toilet,” chivalric education, with its “carefully calibrated scales of perfection” and its bodily disciplines, contrasted starkly with the polite and Frenchified education that produced the effeminate gentlemen who might have been responsible for the failure of the American war.Footnote 89
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, Godwin could “call attention to the age of Chivalry as a suitable object of study for a young man learning to be independent and generous,” and young men's education was central to The Broad Stone of Honour, by Kenelm Digby, whom Mark Girouard credits with having “brought chivalry up to date, as a code of behaviour for all men.”Footnote 90 When Digby recommended that young men “emulate the virtue of their famous ancestors,” he meant chivalrous knights, not classical figures.Footnote 91 Not only that, he specified that if a youth was to “acquire the accomplishments of the scholar,” he had to “cultivate those habits of bodily exertion which can develop and exercise the other powers which nature has entrusted you.”Footnote 92 Digby's recommendations were not new. In Liberal Education, his plan for the reform and regeneration of English education, Vicesimus Knox had already deployed the language of exertion for the physical as well as mental training of boys, as part of promoting schooling rather than home education. While home-educated boys were coddled, he maintained, schools encouraged and developed boys’ “natural” need for exercise “which contributes equally to the strength of body and vigour of mind.” In the early nineteenth century, educationist William Barrow extended this language in Essay on Education, where “hardy and even dangerous diversions” were meant to “give the rising generation activity of body and vigour of mind; the capacity of making manly exertions, and bearing fatigue and inconvenience; and courage and confidence in themselves and their own powers.”Footnote 93 While nothing in their texts suggests that Knox and Barrow had chivalry in mind, their stress—especially Barrow’s—on physical as well as mental exercise implies that education was implicated in the construction of a “martial” masculinity. Catharine Macaulay's recommendation, in her Letters on Education, that boys should practice bodily exercises such as fencing but that it be “as a mere healthy exercise only and not on the romantic notion of playing the knight errant” suggests that such associations were indeed made at the time.Footnote 94
In 1810, Sydney Smith published a withering attack on public schools, highlighting the “painful hardships,” the “unpleasant servitude,” and the “ridiculous” stress on manly exercises inflicted on pupils. The aim of Smith's criticism was to expose what he saw as the arbitrariness of these ordeals on boys who, destined to a civil life of “opulent idleness” or the learned professions, would never have to endure them again.Footnote 95 Yet it is just this sort of hardship that was the foundation of the chivalric training of Digby's gentleman: bodily exertion and hardship were important because “the temper and the courtesy of a gentleman” was incompatible with “effeminate delicacy and the love of luxurious ease.”Footnote 96 The chivalric system of education also figured centrally in the histories of chivalry that were published in the 1820s, such as Mills's History of Chivalry, or Knighthood and its times.Footnote 97
Chivalry and the Gentleman
The main purpose of this article has been to identify the cultural conditions that, since the middle of the eighteenth century, contributed to the shift from the hegemonic ideal of politeness to a new ideal of gentlemanliness incorporating elements of a revived chivalry. This was not an abrupt shift, nor is it still entirely clear how it progressed. This is partly because similarities between chivalry and politeness such as those hinging on the pivotal term “gallantry” meant that they could be conflated. In part, too, this may be an effect of the workings of hegemonic masculinity. Because the power relations between a subordinate form of masculinity and the hegemonic form are unequal and unstable, the gradual ascendancy of the subordinate form is not always discernible. A comment by Alan Sinfield (in another context) seems particularly apt here. It is not “necessary to assume an even development, whereby one model characterises an epoch and is then superseded by another.”Footnote 98
According to the system of manners embodied in politeness, the “compleat” eighteenth-century gentleman was a man of conversation, distinguished by his civility, good breeding, manners, and his ability to please and make others feel easy. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, a counterimage of the gentleman, the ancient Briton, had been emerging, and a specific vocabulary was used to imagine him: a “manly … ancient nobility and gentry,” with plain, rough, and bold manners, ready to “wield the spear and battle axe against the enemies of [his] country.”Footnote 99 The ancient Briton was configured as the antithesis of his polite, Frenchified, and effeminate eighteenth-century heirs.Footnote 100 However, ancient Britons, with their unpolished rudeness, were unlikely to provide an attractive model of manliness to emulate for the refined late eighteenth-century gentleman, especially if this refinement was associated with progress and civilization. Chivalry, on the other hand, “for all its absurdity” was always associated with “those qualities which eventually civilised society”—manliness, bravery, loyalty, courtesy, truthfulness, purity, honor, and a strong sense of protection toward the weak and oppressed.Footnote 101 To illustrate the transition between the old and new model of gentlemanliness, I will compare three male characters in Jane Austen's Emma (1816). Emma is particularly appropriate for this purpose because, Claudia Johnson writes, it is a novel that “works … to redefine masculinity.”Footnote 102
Why is the master of Donwell Abbey called Mr. Knightley? It has been suggested that Jane Austen adapted the name from her brother, who took on the name Knight after he inherited a landed estate from a man bearing that name.Footnote 103 I want to argue rather that Mr. Knightley's patronym represents not a celebration of family affection but a new ideal of gentlemanliness that incorporates elements of chivalric masculinity.
Mr. Knightley's most outstanding trait is that he is never concerned to please. He is as honest and truthful morally as he is physically “firm” and “upright.” Truth was emblematic of chivalry, and as such, explicitly or implicitly counterposed to politeness, which required holding back and concealing the truth so as to please and not offend.Footnote 104 The knight, wrote Gilbert Stuart (1778), “professed the most scrupulous adherence to truth and to justice. … To utter a falsehood, was an offence of which the infamy was never to be effaced. The culprit was degraded from knighthood; a punishment more terrible to the warrior than death.”Footnote 105 Mr. Knightley tries to please Emma least, for it would have to be at the expense of truth. This is the nub of his relationship with her: he always reproves her when he feels he must and tells her where she fails, even though truth can be unpleasant and he risks losing her. He is at his most stern on the occasion of Emma's most serious breach of politeness, when she “could not resist” alluding to Miss Bates's excessive volubility.
The conversation about Frank Churchill's amiability is most revealing about the new concept of gentlemanly masculinity illustrated in the novel. Emma claims Frank is amiable, Mr. Knightley disagrees: “No Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘aimable,’ have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.” While Frank Churchill represents Emma's idea of the polite gentleman—she praises his ability to “adapt his conversation to the taste of everybody” and be “universally agreeable”—it is precisely these traits that make him insufferable to Mr. Knightley, for whom these are mere flatteries. There is nothing of false politeness about Mr. Knightley; “he has nothing of ceremony about him.” His language is emblematic of his authenticity. He speaks briefly, authoritatively, and even—or especially—when declaring his love, uses “plain unaffected gentlemanlike English,” not the unmeaning “Flowers of Speech” associated with gallantry.Footnote 106 Mr. Knightley may not be a “gallant man,” but his lack of gallantry is not a lack. It is an expression of the truth and depth of his sentiments. It is gallant young men like Frank Churchill, who seems to “love without feeling,” who are incapable of true sentiments. Like fops, they are “all outside, no inside,” all show.Footnote 107
Mr. Elton's manners, having “more gentleness,” are held to be superior to those of Mr. Knightley, and he too personifies politeness. He is always intent on being agreeable, especially when it comes to pleasing the ladies. Mr. Elton's carefully constructed public/social persona does not fool the Knightley brothers one bit, but as is often asserted in the eighteenth century about women, Emma and Harriet, lacking such discernment, are taken in.Footnote 108 They believe that the appearance of politeness and sentiment suffices as the assurance of inner virtue. But politeness and even, as Carter has shown, sensibility, can serve to dissemble.Footnote 109 Despite his abundant “sighs and fine words,” Elton ultimately proves to be cold, selfish, and venal. His lack of taste and discernment—and therefore gentlemanliness—are exposed by his choice of the rude, ostentatious, and domineering woman he takes as his wife.
Unlike his brother John, who is so taciturn and antisocial as to be ridiculous (which also suggests that the solution to the problems of politeness is not simply to enact its opposite), Mr. Knightley's civility and courtesy are moderate and rational. He is as “simple and dignified” in his behavior as he is in his language. His main aim is not polite sociability but—one is given to guess—domesticity. When he visits John to try to distance himself from Emma, the felicity of his brother's household ensures that the opposite happens, and he desires Emma and domesticity even more ardently.
Although Mr. Knightley still uses the vocabulary of politeness and he knows French, his qualities and virtues evoke those that were to become part of the character of a new gentleman: love of truth, sensitivity to those weaker than oneself, and protection of women.Footnote 110 The latter virtue Mr. Knightley displays at the ball, when he invites Harriet to dance in what can only be called a chivalrous gesture, to rescue her from the humiliation Elton inflicted upon her. Above all, Mr. Knightley exudes a confident manliness, derived from both his easy authority over the women of his entourage and his difference from the young men who flit about them. He has always known what was best for Harriet and makes even Emma feel obliged to be honest with herself. “I have very little to say for my own conduct—I was tempted by [Frank Churchill’s] attentions, and allowed myself to appear pleased.—An old story.”
Mr. Knightley's tranquil moral authority may make him appear as a stuffy middle-aged man. Indeed, Johnson claims, “it is the work of Emma to make Mr Knightley seem traditional.”Footnote 111 In fact, despite his more mature years, it is he who represents the new man and the younger Mr. Eltons and Frank Churchills that are yesterday's men. Mr. Knightley represents a new ideal of gentlemanliness that incorporates elements of the chivalric ideal. Here, I differ from both Ward Hellstrom, for whom Mr. Knightley is “clearly the English knight,” and from Johnson, who maintains the opposite, that he is “certainly not a chivalric figure”—because for her, chivalry means only the “pseudotraditionalism celebrated by Burke.”Footnote 112 Mr. Knightley is not a chivalric knight because that is not what revived chivalry produced. His supreme virtues are neatly summarized by Emma: he is neither a gallant nor a polite gentleman. He is a “very humane” man.Footnote 113 However, he does embody what chivalry seems to have provided, a solution to the problems of politeness, especially the tensions surrounding its uneasy relation to authenticity and its association with effeminacy, tensions that even “sensibility” could not resolve.Footnote 114 But chivalry did more than that. It presented a challenge to the cultural hegemony of the classics and of politeness, both rooted in ancient Greece and Rome. The new gentlemanliness Mr. Knightley represents is also a composite of the new and the old, but it is a new “old.” Austen, Johnson notes, “harkens back to some older ideals in creating him, … a native tradition of gentry liberty.”Footnote 115 Nineteenth-century chivalry was precisely that, a fusion of notions of an ancient liberty with modern manliness and civilization. It also illustrates how one hegemonic ideal of masculinity can be displaced or replaced by another, and thus it provides a perspective on continuity and change.
Chivalry and Gender Relations
I have argued that chivalry rewrote the concept of the gentleman. I want to suggest further that it entailed changes in the relative positioning of men and women, involving a reordering of gender relations. In conjectural histories, especially John Millar's Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, the status of women is a key feature of the progress and refinement of a nation. To interpret this status as some form of “equality” with men would, however, be a serious misunderstanding. What Millar argued was that it was the difference between the sexes that was the index of refinement and progress. It was in savage life that there was little difference between males’ and females’ “strength and activity of bodies.”Footnote 116 Thus, Lucy Aikin claimed she was writing Epistles on Women, her conjectural history in verse, to illustrate women's role in history but also to disclaim the “absurd idea that men and women might be placed on a ‘footing of equality.'”Footnote 117
But the implications of difference were not simple, as the Scottish physician William Alexander remarked in his History of Women (1779). Taking up the tenets of the discourse of sensibility, whereby women's finer and more sensitive nerves predisposed them to the “more delicate feelings for which we [i.e., men] value and admire them,” he noted the paradox that “if women are really inferior to men, they are the most so in nations the most highly polished and refined.”Footnote 118
Although politeness, chivalry, and histories of progress all held women to be of central importance, the end of politeness as a social ideal also meant that women were demoted from their position at the center of cultural production and as the “Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation,” on whom men depended to become polite.Footnote 119 Indeed, Millar's conception of the progress and improvement in the relations of the sexes was at the cost of women's publicity, of “the married woman's communication with the outside world. The home now became the abode of love and affection.”Footnote 120 The language of love was not the language of equality, quite the reverse. Analyses of progress, such as Lord Kames’s, cast women as delicate and requiring protection, positioning men not just as superior but as protectors and governors because of their physical and mental strengths. “The man, as a protector, is directed by nature to govern” while the woman “delicate and timid, requires protection” and “conscious of inferiority, is disposed to obedience.”Footnote 121 This is what Wollstonecraft understood so perspicuously and opposed so fiercely. This ordering of gender relations, integral to the notion of progress, was precisely embodied in the chivalric code, and the delicacy and weakness of women upon which revived chivalric masculinity was predicated was paradoxically the index not just of the refinement of a nation but of its progress and modernity.
