Making a Man

This recently published book contains a chapter devoted to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

Making a Man

Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

By Gwen Hyman

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
296 pages • 6 × 9 in.

May 2009

• Hardcover: 978-0-8214-1853-6

• Paperback: 978-0-8214-1854-3

Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel addresses the role of food, drink, and drugs in the conspicuously consuming nineteenth century in order to explore the question of what makes a man of a certain class in novels of the period. Gwen Hyman analyzes the rituals of dining room, drawing room, opium den, and cocaine lab, and the ways in which these alimentary behaviors make, unmake, and remake the gentlemanly body.

Making a Man makes use of food history and theory, literary criticism, anthropology, gender theory, economics, and social criticism to read gentlemanly consumers from Mr. Woodhouse, the gruel eater in Jane Austen's Emma, through the vampire and the men who hunt in Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Wilkie Collins's Law and the Lady, Hyman contends, the gentleman is delineated and revealed through his cravings, his feasting and fasting. Hyman argues that appetite is a crucial means of casting light on the elusive identity of the gentleman, a figure who is the embodiment of power and yet is hardly embodied in Victorian literature.

Chapter 2, "An infernal fire in my veins", Drink and be Merry is devoted to Anne Brontë's

A review of the book can be read on Book News.

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