«He calls himself a man»: Gentlemanly Politeness and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilkie Collins's Basil

Abstract

Acknowledging previous research on the novel and drawing upon the social history of Victorian masculinities by John Tosh, I argue that Basil (1852), Wilkie Collins’s first venture into the sensation genre, offers an insight into a specific socio-cultural moment in the history of Victorian masculinities, when the changing British social scenario together with the expansion of the middle class onto the commercial and political stage triggered a clear crisis of an aristocratic masculinity defined in terms of «gentlemanly politeness» (Tosh, 2002). This paper’s grounding in Masculinities Studies is informed by Herbert Sussman’s investigations on Victorian manhood as a highly variegated terrain strictly interwoven with cultural beliefs. Therefore, I employ Sussman’s examination of Victorian middle-class masculinities as a fundamental category of analysis to argue that the novel offers a comparison between two opposing «styles of Victorian masculinity» (Adams, 1995) in the characters of Basil, the novel’s anti-hero, and Mr Sherwin, his father-in-law. Whereas the latter is consistent with Sussman’s definition of the middle-class economic man, Basil personifies an exclusive male aristocratic culture that is threatened by the new market forces. Analysed within a wider historical and socio-cultural context, I argue that Basil’s deficiencies are emblematic of the growing crisis of gentlemanly politeness and its struggle to adapt outdated lifestyles to modern realities.