Gothic Masculinity: Effeminacy and the Supernatural in English and German Romanticism

by Ellen Brinks

Cultural and individual fantasies of masculinity enter troubling terrain in gothic tales of British and German Romanticism. In the interiority of dreams and visionary spaces, a male protagonist makes a fateful encounter with a supernaturalized force and finds himself dispossessed of his real and symbolic masculine estate. Emphasizing the interdisciplinary range of this recurring motif, Ellen Brinks traces "distressed masculinity" in canonical instances of gothic imagination - Byron's Oriental Tales and Coleridge's Christabel - but also in works such as Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Keats's Hyperion fragments, and Freud's letters and scientific writings.
Gothic tropes and tableaux of the effeminizing supernatural cross a range of genres and perplex social and "natural" distinctions concerning masculinity and male sexuality to produce multiple, often contradictory, identifications. They report, from various sites, increasing anxieties about male effeminacy or the emergence of a male "homosexual" identity within the fraught cultural desires during the Romantic period and its Freudian afterlife.
An elegant and compelling account of the construction of sex and gender in the Gothic, Gothic Masculinity will be of interest to scholars of sexuality, gender, queer theory, Romantic subjectivity, and the German and English Gothic.

Genres: Gothic

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2003

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thorough academic study of gender and sex in regards to several well-known male Romantic poets. Ms. Brinks is quite articulate, and her arguments are well-supported, though I do have to make a small gripe about the language: this is a very good example of why people feel like academic writing has a note of elitism. While most concepts were addressed attentively, paragraph structure and vocabulary was rarely friendly to the unfamiliar reader. I had trouble keeping pace with the way one assertion stemmed directly into another assertion with perhaps a sentence of catch up time per every half-page paragraph; it could benefit from light expansion (and this is coming from someone who reads gender-studies material of my own free will).