Faithful unto death: The postures of Victorian stoicism.

Abstract

This dissertation traces the emergence of Stoicism as an intellectual phenomenon among Victorian male writers, including such figures as Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Robert Browning, and A. C. Swinburne. In elegiac poems and narratives, Stoicism became a means of articulating a masculine denial of the emotions and the body that suffers them. It functioned, then, as part of a larger rhetoric of classicism that promoted an ancient heroic ideal of manhood marked by an internal regime of control. At the same time, the drama inherent in the performance of masculine self-denial was positively sympathetic. Posed in front of an appreciative audience, the Stoic hero defied the pain of loss with minimal gestures that had a voluptuous flourish. I argue in the first chapter that the incursion of arch pathos into an ostensibly anti-emotional mode was a symptom of the sensational nature of hard Victorian masculinity. For Matthew Arnold and J. S. Mill, sympathy colluded with Stoic manhood in the expressive characters of the Stoic heroes themselves, to produce figures who mixed moral sternness with a barely-hidden compassion. The combination of a Stoic hard masculinity with a more modern, soft, quasi-Christian charity offered a threat to the cultural pre-eminence of Christian morality. My second chapter discusses how Stoicism thus became an important resource for critics of hegemonic Christianity in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, primarily through reinterpretations of the Stoic Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Yet Stoicism also came under attack by later readers for precisely the hegemonic, imperialistic qualities that for some were so attractive. I address in my third chapter how Walter Pater in particular contested Victorian Stoicism's rigidly hierarchized vision of the male body, the mind, and the state in his historical novel <italic>Marius the Epicurean</italic> (1885). This dissertation ends with a discussion of the revisions of earlier Stoic models undertaken later in the century by A. E. Housman, Browning, and most extendedly, Swinburne. It addresses how these writers both critique and extend Arnold's characteristically Stoic abstractions of the body and of experience itself.