Nederlandse Letterkunde - Volume 29, Issue 2, 2024

This article contributes to the emergent study of the representation of masculinity by focusing on the construction of masculinity in a corpus of five male-authored Dutch novels from the late nineteenth century. The analysis is guided by the assumption that masculinity, including the domestic, sexual and societal dispositions of men, is increasingly questioned towards the end of the nineteenth century. In the Netherlands the 1890s are a period of intense social debate, which sees the rise of the feminist and the socialist movement, among others. This article hypothesizes that the women’s movement in particular incited a foregrounding of masculinity in male-authored novels in both the canonical genre of the naturalist novel and in novels with a more direct political purpose (tendency writing). An interaction between genre and gender is observed: the former (by Emants and Couperus), while not explicitly engaging with feminist issues, explore hierarchies between various types of masculinity and serve to debunk to notion of masculine sovereignty in their protagonists; the latter (by Heijermans and Ortt), by engaging with contemporary social debates, present male protagonists who are more willing to follow the feminist movement in its questioning of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

The democratic, progressive and emancipatory potential of the novel has been emphasized many times by literary theorists. But although it has become a commonplace to frame the medium of the novel in this way, there is hardly any empirical evidence that novels historically reflect or shape social progress. Comparing two large corpora of Dutch novels from the 1960s and the 2010s, this article hypothesizes that gender representation in modern novels transforms in light of the changing societal position of women. This hypothesis is rejected on four grounds. 1) Female characters do not become more visible in this period of approximately fifty years, neither in terms of how often they occur, nor in terms of the amount of words used for their characterization. 2) In terms of their social networks, female characters do not increasingly take up more central roles. 3) In terms of most distinctive words used for the characterization of men and women, the literary discourse on female gender remains highly stereotypical (more than for male gender). 4) There is no shift in the ‘distance’ between male and female gender, suggesting that these categories are not becoming more fluid and less restricted in this period. Based on these four arguments, the article concludes that gender representation is remarkably stable between the 1960s and the 2010s. More generally, these findings are used to reconsider the novel’s alleged democratic, progressive and emancipatory potential.