Gender at Work in Victorian Culture

Martin A. Danahay's lucidly argued and accessibly written volume is an important contribution to our understanding of the complex issues surrounding the definition and division of labor in British culture. ""Work,"" Danahay argues, was a term rife with ideological contradictions for Victorian males during a period when it was considered synonymous with masculinity. Male writers and artists in particular found their labors troubled by class and gender ideologies that idealized ""man's...
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Martin A. Danahay's lucidly argued and accessibly written volume is an important contribution to our understanding of the complex issues surrounding the definition and division of labor in British culture. ""Work,"" Danahay argues, was a term rife with ideological contradictions for Victorian males during a period when it was considered synonymous with masculinity. Male writers and artists in particular found their labors troubled by class and gender ideologies that idealized ""man's work"" as sweaty, muscled labor and tended to feminize intellectual and artistic pursuits. Among the results was a fissured representation of the masculine body occasioned by the distinction between manual labor and ""brain work."" Danahay analyzes novels, nonfiction prose, poetry, and paintings by Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, Thomas Hood, Richard Redgrave, William Bell Scott, and Ford Madox Brown, as well as photographs from the Munby Collection, to examine the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work.