THAIS E. MORGANdevoted to care of the family and maintenance of the home, while the true
man dedicated himself to pursuit of economic success and his role as
paterfamilias. This domestic ideology meshed with the larger political goals
of the middle class: manly aggressiveness ensured the prosperity not only of
the family but also the nation, while womanly spirituality provided support
for both men and their heirs.
We find several Victorian masculinities represented by Alfred Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold, and Algernon Charles Swinburne not only when their
poetry is compared but within each poet's work. To clarify these differing
models of manhood, this essay adopts Raymond Williams's model for
analyzing the competing discourses that constitute culture. The first
section, "Domestic Masculinities," looks at how the male poet positions
himself in relation to domestic ideology: the "dominant" ideological
formation that, to draw on Raymond Williams's terminology, comprises
the "central system of practices, meanings and values" which "constitute[d]
a sense of reality for most people" in Victorian England. 3 The second
section, "Heroic Masculinities," considers the importance of both mediev-
alism and classicism to constructing the ideal of manliness. These "resi-
dual" ideologies provide a means of representing "experiences, meanings
and values, which cannot be ... expressed in terms of the dominant
culture" but were "nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of" the past
(40). The third section, "Emergent Masculinities," explores the "new mean-
ings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences" which
were "continually being created" in response to both dominant and residual
ideologies (41).
Dominant domestic ideology operates as a "hegemony," establishing a
hierarchized sexual difference between men and women. 4 Hegemonic
masculinity sets a norm of patriarchal organization in both private and
public life. Manliness entails homosociality or close relationships among
men that exclude women, but homoeroticism or male-male desire remains
taboo. Hegemonic masculinity must be "continually... renewed, recre-
ated, and defended" in response to "alternative" as well as "oppositional"
viewpoints (38). Tennyson, Arnold, and Swinburne put into play a range of
ideological effects at the contested site of Victorian masculinities.
Domestic masculinitiesVictorian male poets inhabited an ambiguous cultural space: as poets, they
were expected to express deep feelings and explore private states of
consciousness, yet this was identified in domestic ideology as the preserve
of the feminine. Tennyson's early poetry exemplifies the tension between
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