“Those Who Cannot Work”
2005; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01440350500068791
ISSN1743-9426
Autores Tópico(s)Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism
ResumoAbstract This paper considers how Henry Mayhew, a nineteenth-century social investigator and reformer, explicates the ideal of “Christian manliness” through the metaphoric body of the disabled man. In particular, it assesses how Mayhew's desire to “grapple manfully” with the uneasy classification of crippled, blind, or otherwise disabled men, indirectly makes visible a crisis in Victorian masculinity.Footnote2 This crisis, which reflected the insecurity brought about by social and industrial changes in the new urban centers, was undergirded by a fear that the working classes, if not checked, had the potential to become the dangerous classes. In the face of this fear, middle-class Victorian men united in an attempt to articulate a “moral” masculinity and the corresponding, all-encompassing concept of the “Universal Brotherhood” of man, (London Labour, IV: xiv). In order to reveal and establish this “new” masculinity and render it unproblematic, it was necessary to eliminate, as far as possible, any difference between men while, at the same time, clearly and hegemonically defining a masculine identity suitable for articulating a coherent capitalist and Christian utilitarian ethics appropriate to the growing nation and the growing modern metropolis. In Mayhew's classificatory system, the disabled man is assigned no intrinsic value and, consequently, remains a mere object for middle-class scrutiny. He “who will or who can work” becomes a convenient vehicle for the promotion of a self-reliant, Christian masculinity, while he “who cannot work” represents a monstrous masculinity, and a danger to the future well-being of the human race. This study argues that this nineteenth-century classification and construction of manhood foreshadows disability prejudices that are still somewhat prevalent in the twenty-first century. 1. An earlier version of this article was published in Culture and the State, Vol, IV, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Mailloux-Zezulka (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2004).” Keywords: disability studiesdisabilityVictorian Londonmasculinityworking classcapitalismHenry Mayhewsocial reform Notes 1. An earlier version of this article was published in Culture and the State, Vol, IV, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Mailloux-Zezulka (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studio, 2004).” Sally Hayward is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Sally's research interests focus on the social construction of disability and, in particular, the way in which disability is constructed in and through narrative. Her dissertation examines the official and unofficial narratives and discourses surrounding certain key Canadian legal cases in order to consider how and why people with disabilities are either appropriated by or occluded from the national imaginary. Address: Department of English and Film Studies, Alberta, 3–5 Humanities Centre, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E5. [hayward1@telusplanet.net] 2. William Tuckniss, “Introduction” in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, IV: xiii, (London: Frank Cass, 1967) 3. William Tuckniss, “Introduction” in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, IV xv 4. William Tuckniss, “Introduction” in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, IV xiii 5. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1987), 20 6. Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body”, in Muscular Christianity, ed. Donald E. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7 7. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21. As Donald E. Hall notes in “Muscular Christianity”, Norman Vance “uses the term ‘Christian Manliness’ rather than Muscular Christianity, arguing that the former was more commonly accepted by clergymen of the era and that the latter ‘draws attention more to muscularity than to Christianity (Vance 2)” (Hall 9). I prefer to use Vance's term to Hall's because it draws attention to “manliness” and indicates the tensions between a moral and political, and social and personal way of reading nineteenth-century masculinity 8. B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Thomas Nelson, 1922), 152, 214. Rowntree also expresses an explicit concern regarding “the smallness of the number of men… who come under the direct influence of the Christian churches” (402). His statistics show that women's attendance far outnumbers the attendance of men. For example, one study shows that on Sunday, “March 17 and 24, 1901, 9,639 women attended the Church of England service, while only 5,267 men attended. Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church shows an attendance of 2,777 women and an attendance of 1, 943 men” (405) 9. Eileen Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator”, The Unknown Mayhew (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 82 10. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 10 11. Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity”, 11 12. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 22 13. Henry Mayhew, London Labour, IV: xiii. Subsequent references to Mayhew will be cited by volume and page number in parenthesis in the text 14. This fear was inspired, at least in part, by the French Revolution. Thomas Carlyle comments on the English reaction to this “Golden Era going down in leaden dross, and sulphurous black of the Everlasting Darkness”, when he writes, “At home this Killing of a King has divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies. Fraternity of Peoples, Revolutionary Propagandism; Aetheism, Regicide; total destruction of social order in this world!” See Thomas Carlyle, Best of Carlyle: Selected Essays, ed. Herbert LeSourd Creek (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1939), 382 15. William Tuckniss, “Introduction,” London Labour. IV: xiv 16. Quoted in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 62. As Thomson points out, the aristocracy and the middle classes considered a working-class uprising a serious threat. Not only were the British people noted throughout England for their “turbulence… [astonishing] foreign visitors by their lack of deference”, but they were capable of both “direct action on particular grievances… [and] great political uprisings”, which were “often highly organized”, as well as being supported and protected by the local community (62) 17. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy”, in Mathew Arnold, Mixed Essays: Irish Essays and Others (London: John Murray, 1903), 27–8 18. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy”, in Mathew Arnold, Mixed Essays: Irish Essays and Others (London: John Murray, 1903) 35 19. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy”, in Mathew Arnold, Mixed Essays: Irish Essays and Others (London: John Murray, 1903) 28 20. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy”, in Mathew Arnold, Mixed Essays: Irish Essays and Others (London: John Murray, 1903) 32 21. Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 5 22. See Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity”, Muscular Christianity, 3–13 23. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy”, 11 24. Mathew Arnold, “Democracy” 18–19 25. Samuel Smiles, Self Help (London: John Murray, repr. 1958), 37 26. Samuel Smiles, Self Help (London: John Murray, repr. 1958) 36. Reflecting this ideal, Jeremy Bentham's compelling call to “trust to self-interest”, promoted a laissez-faire, competitive political economy that focused on the “adult male worker”, who, according to Bentham, must be “left free from legislative ‘interference’ to the mercies of the free market”. See Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator”, 52; and C. R. Fay, Life and Labour in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), 43 27. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 9. Although two types of Victorian public and private manliness are considered here, there were many varieties of manliness, including, among others, the man of science, the man of letters, the dandy, and the military man. For those interested in reading more about this Victorian incitement to and endorsement of particular kinds of manliness, Norman Vance's The Sinews of the Spirit and James Eli Adams' Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995) should prove useful 28. Samuel Smiles, Self Help. 39–40 29. John Stuart Mill quoted in Mayhew, London Labour, I: 396 30. Here B. Seebhom Rowntree, who studied the working classes in York, and Charles Booth, who studied the working classes in London are specifically referred to 31. B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty, xviii 32. More work needs to be done on the analysis of Mayhew's use of visual representations—circulated in working-class spaces in the form of Daguerreotypes and woodcuts—but, for brevity's sake, the focus in this paper is on Mayhew's written descriptions of the working classes, and disabled men, in particular 33. William Tuckniss, “Introduction,” London Labour. IV: xi 34. Eileen Yeo, “Mayhew as a Social Investigator”, 57 35. Henry Mayhew quoted in Yeo, 54 36. Donald E. Hall, “On the Making and Unmaking of Monsters: Christian Socialism, Muscular Christianity, and the Metaphorisation of Class Conflict” in Muscular Christianity, 48 37. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero Worship (London: Cassell, repr. 1908), 11 38. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, 38 39. This heroic sentiment is reflected in Arnold's belief that citizens of all classes have a “sense of duty” to building a strong and great nation (Arnold “Democracy”, 35). According to Arnold, obedience to this duty would be reward by the “sense of belonging to great and honourable seats of learning and of breathing in their youth the air of the best culture of their nation” (35) 40. C. Herbert, Culture and Anomie (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 229 41. This sentiment takes a ominous twist in the appearance of the eugenics movement in the late nineteenth century. This movement feared that the impure, the diseased or the deformed would bring about the degeneration of the human race. On a national level, the belief in the primacy of heredity elicited the call of a genetically pure and “fit” people who would best be able to contribute to a strong and “fit” nation. This led to either the incarceration or the systematic genocide, as in Nazi Germany in World War II, of those considered physically, mentally or morally inferior 42. Samuel Smiles articulates this need to become self-reliant, stating , “however much the wise and the good may owe to others, they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers”. See Smiles, Self-Help, 57 43. According to Smiles, self-reliant masculinity, as embodied in the “spirit of self-help, [and] as exhibited in the energetic action of individuals, has in all times been a marked feature in the English character, and furnishes the true measure of our power as a nation”. See Smiles, Self-Help, 38 44. John Tosh. A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 46 45. There is an indication here that manhood is both self and other constructed. One ‘becomes’ a man because it serves one's best interests to do so. Consistent with this idea, Herbert Sussman argues that, at least “for Carlyle,… manliness is not an essence, but a process, the achievement and maintenance of a tense psychic equilibrium. This manliness or achieved manhood is consistently represented through energy,’” See Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28. While undoubtedly manliness, in all its forms, is a product both of a Christian and a market-driven patriotic and patriarchal economy, it is also, more significantly, a product of male desire and the “Victorian male imagination” (29) 46. Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body” in Muscular Christianity, 9 47. It is important to note here that however problematic Mayhew's portrayal of the disabled is, he does, at least, attempt a representation. In Rowntree's and Booth's studies, the disabled are essentially invisible 48. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative”, The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 179 49. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1966), 94 50. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Fredrick A. Praeger, 1966) 113 51. For a more complete study of how the norm was established in the nineteenth century as a measure of “fit” and “unfit” national subjects, see Leonard Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London and New York: Verso, 1995) 52. William Tuckniss, “Introduction,” London Labour IV: xv 53. Women, and disabled women in particular, are no threat to the hegemony because they are encouraged to enjoy their confinement in their homes. As Mary Douglas emphasizes, “so long as [women] stay at home”, valorizing the home above all else, “their peculiar behaviour is accepted”. See Douglas, Purity and Danger, (97) 54. It is interesting to note here that there are no portrayals of these extreme forms of masculinity in Mayhew's collection of Daguerreotypes and woodcuts 55. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 98 56. John Tosh, A Man's Place, 44 57. Roberta J. Park. “Biological thought, athletics and the formation of a ‘man of character’: 1830–1900.” Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America: 1800–1940. Ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 11 58. John Tosh, A Man's Place, 44 59. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 44 60. Donald E. Hall, “Muscular Christianity” in Muscular Christianity, 9 61. John Tosh, A Man's Place, 44. The Bird Seller's self-representation here performs for Mayhew a working-class virtue that discards aristocratic rule and privilege in favour of a puritan attitude that enables the Bird Seller to recreate himself as a “good”, compliant working-class subject: one who is indoctrinated in religious rhetoric and behaviour, while refusing political engagement with the “real” world 62. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative”, 178 63. In his essay, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative”, Thomas Laqueur emphasizes the importance for the nineteenth-century humanitarian to act on one's sympathies. “Through contact”, he writes, “two conditions of humanitarian concern—a sense of obligation and a faith in the remote consequences of actions—are made evident and valorized” (201–2) 64. Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit, 22 65. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, 40 66. William Tuckniss, “Introduction,” London Labour, IV: xv
Referência(s)