Taken from the book The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal, by Philip Mason.
1 Reading List
Book of Snobs, The
Book of Courtiers, The
Description of England
Edwardians, The
Idea of a University, The
Ideal of a Gentleman, The
Knight on Wheels, A
Legend of Good Women, The
Way of the World, The
2 Qualities
Courtesy
Gentillesse
Gravitas
Intellectual attributes
Manners
Moral qualities
Musical ability
Physical attributes
Ruling class
Scholarship
Snobs
Sportsmen
Squire
Statesmanship
Stoicism
Troubadours
Women, attitudes to
I have been thinking about masculinity and femininity and this book uses both history and literature to examine the English idea of the “gentleman” and how it evolved from the time of the Norman Conquest through about World War I. He draws examples from Geoffrey Chaucer, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and others, all of whom as an English major I read in college, which means I absorbed this very English-ruling-class idea of masculinity without realizing it.
But I find it fascinating that Mason says in a footnote, “More than one critic who saw an early draft of this book wanted me to include some comments on the Japanese samurai. But I know nothing of Japanese culture, and I think it would take a year’s work to fit myself to write even half a page of useful comment on the samurai” (Mason 235, n. 23). This is interesting to me because I think I have also absorbed a lot of what I think it means to be a good me (masculine and/or feminine or other) from studying (primarily Japanese) martial arts for more than half my life. And although contemporary Japanese culture does make some strong distinctions between masculine and feminine, they are not always in ways Westerners would recognize, so I will have to think more about this.
