ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how a cultural-studies approach to masculinity, drawing on historical, social, and literary material, can provide insights into a gender identity which, by dint of its association with the universal, escaped theorization in the nineteenth century. It explores the meanings of the term and the crisis of meaning which besets it, and shows how George Sand's novels reflect, but also deconstruct, prevailing cultural norms of masculinity. The chapter aims to survey the dominant meanings attached to masculinity in nineteenth-century France, and to explore the points at which the link between maleness and manhood breaks down. Robert Nye and Andre Rauch offer what are probably the fullest historical accounts of masculinity in nineteenth-century France. Nye argues it is anachronistic to divorce concepts of manhood and masculinity from male body, and advocates thinking about gender roles in nineteenth-century French society not as operating independently of biological sex, but as social categories which give meaning to biological differences between the sexes.
