Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910 by Claudia Nelson

Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850-1910 Reviews

• 
  Jackie

  In this engagingly written, extensively researched volume, Nelson examines “the shifting attitudes toward paternity in the sixty years between 1850 and 1910, identifying some of the ways in which, as motherhood came under scrutiny, fatherhood lost more and more of its symbolic power while always, perhaps, appearing as a cause for anxiety” (2). Taking as her sources general interest periodicals of the period, Nelson is less interested in “actual” fathers and more in ideologies of fatherhood of the period. Writing at the beginning of the movement to study masculinity, Nelson’s goal is in part to open up the male and the domestic to the scrutiny of the cultural historian.
  Nelson’s introduction limns the general argument of her book: The rise of sentimental domesticity, beginning with the late eighteenth century and reaching an apotheosis by 1850, led to an elevation of the role of the mother and a devaluation of the role of the father in the family setting, as patriarchal authoritarianism gradually was gradually replaced by bonds of affection. As Nelson argues, “The resulting shift from a family model based on duty and respect to one grounded in warm emotion emphasized nurture over the merely biological fact of birth. Correspondingly, the father’s erstwhile role as family lawgiver was minimized by the Victorian domestic ideal, which privileged empathic understanding over hierarchical control. As the notion of separate public and private spheres gained in importance, so did the mother’s perceived value in the home” (14).
  In the book’s first two chapters, Nelson examines first the construction of motherhood, and then of fatherhood, by periodical writers discussing domesticity directly. While domesticity might have been constructed as a separate sphere, it was not regarded as a lesser one; rather, most commentators in periodicals construct it as the better sphere. And the women who occupied it were typically viewed as superior in to men in many ways; as Nelson notes, “[e:]ven those loudest in claiming men’s greater intelligence (and they were by no means an overwhelming majority) were eager to acknowledge women’s greater sensitivity, morality, and capacity for emotion; the qualities that seemed central to motherliness also proved women more competent at ruling the home” (16).
  Intriguingly, while the image of the ideal mother remained stable throughout the period, discourses of ideal fatherhood were far more contested; no consensus on what constituted ideal fatherhood emerged, “in part because so few Victorians seem to have imagined that ideal fatherhood was possible” (36). Some writers saw men as “ghosts within the home,” denying that anything like fatherhood could exist; others focused on bodily difference, asserting that even if men and women did the same things, they were so different biologically that difference was maintained; still others proposed that “fatherhood and motherhood operate in separate territories of location or authority, complementing each other without overlapping” (42). None of these three types of fatherhood can be associated with one period, or one political point of view; they all circulated throughout the Victorian era, and in different political groups. But they all pointed to a shift away from fatherly power within the home; where once the father had stood “in the place of God” to his wife and children, the hierarchical family had lost cultural support by the mid-Victorian period. Nelson suggests that “as masculinity came to seem less domestic, it took on what John Demos calls ‘a certain odor of contamination,’ lessening the father’s perceived right (or even ability) to be the king of the family castle” (43).
  Nelson’s subsequent chapters trace the ways in which public debate of key cultural issues demonstrate this devaluation of the father and elevation of the mother. Chapter 3 discusses scientific and medical discourse, which, with its new focus on heredity post-Darwin, suggested that the father’s role began and ended with conception. Simultaneously, anthropological discourse “traced the evolution of marriage customs to kinship patterns in which the father was invisible; students of instinct explained that while the maternal instinct was the basis of civilization, the paternal instinct was a late and trivial acquisition” (75). Both discourses stood in opposition “to the more humanist and woman-oriented school of writers on the home, who saw environment as the most significant factor in shaping the life of any individual” (75); both also deemphasized the father’s importance in the home, normalizing inactive fathering.
  Chapter 4 focuses on debates in family law, particularly debates about divorce and child custody. In the early Victorian period, women’s rights under the law were slim: “married women were ineligible to bring suit, own property (unless, in the case of the upper classes, appropriate marriage settlements had been arranged), or otherwise act as legal entities in their own right” (109). Men, not women, had sole right to custody of their children. Such laws, grounded on patriarchal ideas that viewed wives and children as part of the “corporate entity of the family” rather than as separate individuals, “reflected an increasingly outmoded view of children as economic assets whose earnings reverted to the male holder of the pursestrings…. But as children came to be seen as emotional assets and financial liabilities (rather than vice versa), legal precedents began to seem correspondingly misjudged. The moral importance of the mother, reformers argued, could not be reconciled with her legal insignificance” (110). Reformers deployed negative images of fatherhood in their campaigns for increased women’s rights under the law. While women did win some legal rights, the larger trend was for the courts to take over the paternal responsibilities once granted to the father: “Judges were not presiding over a shift toward a legal matriarchate, which many feminists hoped to see, but over a shift away from the private family, a lessening of ‘the rights of parenthood itself’” (110-11).
  Chapter 5 discusses an anomalous case, the case of the schoolmaster. The ideal master “combines masculine professional standing with feminine nurturance; because he can operate in both spheres, he is best fitted to lead (male) pupils from one to the other. It is this ‘bilingualism,’ this combination of maleness and maternity, that consistently characterizes positive portraits of the Victorian educator” (144). Pedagogy, like child rearing, was shifting during this period toward the nurturing and maternal, and the periodical discourse continually constructs the schoolmaster in both masculine and feminine terms. This situation was possible, Nelson argues, because the headmaster “played his part on a stage on which women were the invisible gender,” not men, as in the domestic home (207).
  The final chapter focuses on state intervention into the family, particularly into the working-class family. Interventions regarding child labor, child abuse, and incest were justified primarily through the depiction of the working-class father as “damaged”; discourse on the subject “traced matters to the lack of some central family authority: to the wife’s need to earn money because of the deficiencies of her husband, to the husband’s dearth of self-control or responsibility or tenderness, to the outsider’s intervention in the household and consequent rearrangement of ‘natural’ hierarchy. Because the Victorians viewed governance as part of the male gender role, in one sense it was almost always the father who was being found wanting, whether the problem was one of child maintenance, child abuse, or child delinquency” (200). Nelson also suggests, however, that denigration of the working-class father also reflected anxieties about middle and upper-class fathers, fears that could “break through tact-imposed constraints when the subject was the poor”: “The frequent depiction of working-class fathers as perverse, sadistic, cruel, irresponsible, or simply incompetent, then, functioned as a sort of group ‘picture of Dorian Gray’ to remind the middle- and upper-class father of his shortcomings, delinquencies, and ultimate helplessness in the face of larger social forces” (200).
  Nelson’s conclusion reiterates the main points made in her previous six chapters.