
In reading George Mosse’s historical tracing of manliness, one gets the impression of an author who appears omniscient of masculinity’s insidiousness and is also personally encumbered by the subject matter at hand. Oppressed both by totalitarianism and, as a gay man, it is no wonder that he has a keen eye for the inner workings of stifling social structures, having been trapped within their labyrinthine chambers for large swathes of his life.
Much like Mosse’s itinerant existence, emigrating from Nazi Germany to Britain and then to the US, The Image of Man charts diverse historical territories, giving an expansive account of modern masculinity’s evolution from the French Revolution onwards. Nevertheless, Mosse intrepidly reverses his first-hand experience of fleeing fascism in this book by guiding us towards the climactic status of modern manliness; a mobilising force in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Before the climax, Mosse seamlessly escorts us through the annals of modern masculinity in all its disparate manifestations. The evolution begins at the transition from aristocratic to bourgeois society; dissecting the duel and its subsequent abolishment to show how literal mediaeval honour codes were both diluted and zealously reappropriated by the modern zeitgeist. Thanks to the fine balance between facts and theory, there’s nothing particularly taxing about The Image of Man. Nevertheless, Mosse rewards committed readers with little historical gems. Such as Karl Marx’s instigation of a student duel, an indispensable piece of information for seminars and house parties alike.
Mosse explores how the false equivalence between a masculine beauty ideal and moral righteousness came to be. This is followed by a fascinating exposition of the ‘countertype’ to this ideal, which emboldened the oppression of minorities that strayed from the hegemonic standard of being a white male. Burgeoning fin-de-siècle opinions precipitated huge societal shifts in this domain of ideas which Mosse juggles with poise in his succeeding chapter on decadence, masterfully conveying how sexual deviance and nascent scientific discoveries interacted with masculinity. Mosse then takes a detour into the socialist applications of manliness before boomeranging back to fascism, which is most striking in its co-opting of classical imagery in service of hate.
What is most commendable about this history is its steadfast alignment with its stated aim. Mosse prefaces the book with the claim that it is purely ‘concerned with the evolution of a stereotype’ and this principle is stuck to assiduously. Mosse resists narrativization to the point of explicitly noting that the history of this idea lacks ‘dramatic tension’. The Image of Man illuminates a thread of masculinity through modern history so vividly that one can chart when it is frayed and challenged by other social forces, when it is pulled taut and rope-like for the erection of fascist states, and when it is tortuous and tangled, asphyxiating a range of victims with its stifling demands.