Saviors, Survivors, Mothers of Men, and Manly Women: Women’s Responses to Nineteenth Century Toxic Masculinity in the Novels of Anne Brontë

Though the term toxic masculinity has only been defined and in use in recent years, the type of masculinity that emphasizes characteristics that are harmful (to women, society, or to the men themselves) is not exclusively modern. I locate toxic masculinity depicted in nearly all of the male characters of Anne Brontë’s novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), whose practice is legitimized and supported by male dominance in the nineteenth-century British middle-class. While the nineteenth- century British middle-class encouraged domestic masculinity, which emphasized caring for the home and family, many of Brontë’s male characters opt to practice toxic masculinity instead in order to assert their masculine identity and exercise authority, particularly over women. The characters in the novels associate characteristics of toxic masculinity—indulgence, brutality, superiority, and exclusively male spaces—with masculine identity. In these novels, toxic masculinity often leads to the men’s mistreatment of women’s bodies, emotions, possessions, and labor, or even outright abuse and physical violence. Because of the socially, legally, and culturally sanctioned dominance of men and common expectations for women’s subservience in the nineteenth-century British middle-class, toxic masculinity was essentially inescapable for women, and because they had no option for legal recourse in the face of abuse by men, they were forced to respond to toxic masculinity themselves. While all of the women in the novels experience toxic masculinity, it is not always to the same extent, and thus the women are not unified in their responses, but each responds in the way most beneficial to herself. While many women opt for the path of least resistance and meekly accept their treatment under toxic masculinity, others choose to try to utilize it for their own gain by either appropriating or indulging it, while the heroines of the novels attempt to challenge toxic masculinity.