ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that any effort to reconsider the 'age of equipoise' must of necessity involve rethinking the structural principles that have shaped the last several decades of writing about mid-nineteenth-century England. Sensational stories of England's new man entail a complication of masculinity in the context of a public discourse of gender as problem. This chapter discusses Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Thomas Hopley's polemic on his appearance in the divorce court in the context of these questions. Shifting away from the earlier Victorian commitment to silence about the tensions that structure private life and the exercise of public power, both narratives demonstrate how the trope of masculine failure becomes an occasion for the display of a newly professionalized model of male authority and identity. Like Collins's fictional story of masculinity under siege, Hopley's Cry makes a spectacle of its hero's troubles.
