Low on Assurance: The Troubled Masculinity of Victorian Comedy

Victorianism is often associated with a monolithic patriarchy that oppresses women but gives men almost unlimited power. The present essay challenges this assumption and shows that men and the masculinity that is supposed to shape them are also subjected to the great ideologies that rule the nineteenth century: class and wealth. Men have price-tags on the marriage market, rise or fall according to their changing market value and are ultimately as hollow as that which supposedly gives them an identity: money. The discussed plays by the successful Victorian playwrights Dion Boucicault and Edward Bulwer-Lytton display this nexus between their supposed display of the gentleman ideal and their underlying materialism even in their titles. In them, assurances and money come to dominate any trace of what might be a ‘natural,’ ‘normal,’ or ‘ideal’ masculinity and replace it by a vacuous and often comical, though nonetheless seductive, blueprint.