ABSTRACT
In his fiction of the 1890s, Gissing's attention becomes increasingly engaged by issues of Empire and national identity, and, to a greater extent than previously, by late Victorian culture's construction of gender. Gissing had been preoccupied to some extent with the nature of masculinity since his first novel Workers in the Dawn (1880). The hero Arthur Golding tries and fails, like Henry James's effeminately-named Hyacinth Robinson (in The Princess Casamassima), to square external demands for masculine action with an internalized responsibility for the production of art. Gissing continued to chart the ways in which the male protagonist's identity might be threatened or oppressed, most often by the balance of power within marriage (Grylls 1986, pp.l62f.). In New Grub Street (1891), Edwin Reardon struggles to assert himself against his 'masculine' wife:
He had but to do one thing: to seize her by the arm, drag her up from the chair, dash her back again with all his force - there, the transformation would be complete, they would stand towards each other on the natural footing. With an added curse perhaps - Instead of that, he choked, struggled for breath, and shed tears.
