Military men of feeling: emotion, touch and masculinity in the Crimean War

摘要

Military Men of Feeling, the book with which Holly Furneaux seeks to offer a fresh reading of Victorian masculinities through interpreting the popular figure of the 'gentle soldier' in Victorian Britain, simultaneously advances the history of nineteenth-century masculinities and signals the potential for historical approaches in critical military studies (CMS) to contextualize the relationship between militaries, war, and society across time. Furneaux's aim in this study of mid-Victorian militarism and emotion is to reconfigure perceptions of how Victorians imagined masculinity and the soldier, particularly around the time of the Crimean War - when the figure of the British soldier, she suggests, was far from the stereotype of the emotionally repressed and stiff-upper-lipped British Victorian man that viewers and readers of popular histories are still likely to encounter. The Crimean War owes its place in British popular memory primarily to two tropes, one on either side of the hegemonic gender binary of militarism: one is the masculine valour of the 'Charge of the Light Brigade', commemorated in poetry by Alfred Tennyson only six weeks later, and the other is the mythology of the female war nurse built around Florence Nightingale's field hospital. The condensation of Crimean War nursing into the Nightingale myth has, Furneaux shows, elided a history of male care-giving in the continued supply of military male orderlies and the forming in 1855 of the army's first medical corps. The image of the 'stiff upper lip' popularly associated with Victorian officers such as the men who must have ordered their cavalry to charge into the face of certain death at Balaclava, meanwhile, remains powerful as a class-marked and racialized form of national masculinity which continues to inform the belief in military culture that the suppression of emotions is essential for effective soldiering - to the psychological detriment of soldiers and their families (Gray 2015, 115).