Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century.

Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century, by George E. Haggerty. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 214 + xii pages. Cloth $49.50; paper $16.50.

Haggerty, a professor of English at Columbia University, specializes in eighteenth century literature as well as gay and gender studies. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of Gay History and Cultures (1999), and so he knows well the literature of the period about which he is writing. Some definitions are in order. The first term is love, a term he adopted to avoid what he feels are misleading terms such sodomy, libertinism, or romantic friendships. To Haggerty, love not only implies the emotional bond between pairs of friends, but also the lustful or erotic aspect of such friendships. Masculinity for him is also complicated, because he feels there were many different male "identities," ranging from the heroic friendships of the seventeenth-century romance and Restoration tragedy; the "Greek" friendships of writers such as Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole, and Richard West; fops and beaus found in Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedy; and effeminate sodomites and mollies portrayed in literature and sodomy trials throughout the period. He also reevaluates the nature of the libertine, the man of feeling, and the Gothic villain. In his mind the eighteenth-century views are different from those of the nineteenth century; the roles are more fluid, and society is more accepting of differences.

Unfortunately, as in most literary studies or for that matter in most historical ones, he is basically describing the upper class rules and types, and not necessarily a picture of society as a whole. In fact, he clearly agrees that the closeted intimacy of the males, which held eighteenth-century society together, excluded women, minorities, the ordinary person, and variously-defined "others."

He emphasizes that eighteenth-century society was just beginning to codify gender differences into what became a rigid binary model which marginalized excessive behavior and isolated the "unnatural," and which drove a wedge between public and private discourse. As a result, the period is in a sense, at least in England, a period in which male love had many forms and varieties which the nineteenth and twentieth century tried to ignore, repress, reinterpret, or misinterpret. In sum, it is a fascinating study of a society undergoing change, in a sense the last gasp of the aristocracy as the dominator of manners and morals before its values were replaced by the more rigid guidelines imposed by the rising middle classes.

The work is well documented. Haggerty realizes there are people who would disagree with him and who, in fact, have, but he counters the criticism of his concepts gracefully and, for the most part, convincingly. For the readers of this journal deeply involved in the nature-nurture controversy, Haggerty only documents that the answers are complex and complicated, and that we do not need to turn to anthropology or cultures other than our own to see that concepts have changed radically over the past 200 years. Haggerty describes some of these changes, but the reasons for them are ignored. That task he leaves to others since it belongs more to the social historian than the literary one that he is. In this pioneering work, he has made the task of attempting to find such answers much easier by the clues he has left to follow.

REFERENCE

Haggerty, G. E. (1999). The encyclopedia of gay histories and cultures. New York: Garland.

Vern L. Bullough, Department of Nursing, University of Southern California, Center for Health Professions, 1540 East Alcazar St., Los Angeles, CA 90033; e-mail: [e-mail].