Humanities Honors Program

This thesis examines the vicissitudes of masculinity as it presents across three late-Victorian novels in order to unpack the anxieties produced by the shift of power from aristocratic to professional communities and the tensions this shift produced between and within those communities. The various models of masculinity on display in the examined works of Gothic literature operate on ideas that came into play during the period surrounding sexuality and gender structures. Furthermore, each work takes on a particular perspective on masculinity as it works on the physical body and how that body interacts with others of its kind. The common themes of mutation, metamorphosis, and bodily decay or degeneration stand in relief to the ideal of masculinity they implicitly reference, which points toward the focal point of power relations between men and the world they inhabit as well as between each other.

Chapter One examines the world of the Victorian professional man as it exists in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This formulation of masculinity is modeled both on a rejection of aristocracy in favor of a professional cohort of male socialization and on an implicit moral structure which works on a continuum of degeneracy to sophistication. Chapter Two focuses on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and its portrayal of the late-Victorian aristocratic man in the form of the dandy. This text, of the three, comes closest to incorporating an explicit homosexual valence into the interactions of the male characters, so the analysis here will adapt Eve Sedgwick’s adaptation of René Girard’s work on “erotic triangles.” However, instead of the typical formulation (as seen in Dracula) of two male rivals competing for the female romantic/erotic object, Dorian Gray’s triangle consists of three men, blurring the lines between homosocial desire and homoerotic desire. Chapter Three traces the reification of heterosexual masculinity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.