Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1999. ISBN: 0-333-68325-0; 0-312-22039-1. UK £47.50 (US $72.00).

The growth of gender in Romantic Studies has coincided closely with the increasing prominence of Edmund Burke, since the latter seems literally, and almost self-incriminatingly, to highlight the masculinist politics of power which critics such as Anne Mellor suggest is implicit in the 'Romantic sublime'. Kant and his followers, of course, saw things rather differently, stressing the sense of unity with the forces underlying the natural world which is produced by confrontation with objects too vast to comprehend in a single intuition, or with uncontrollable forces from which, in our spiritual essence, we seem nevertheless to be secure. We opt (it may be said) for Burke or Kant as our convenience requires; yet in those authors whose philosophical position is predominantly idealist, the grounds for identifying the sublime with terrifying and oppressive masculinity may not always be compelling. Even if the trope of nature as female is interpreted as evoking something more than its generative and nurturing capacity, indeed, Wordsworth's 'conquest' of physical nature may well be elevating (or 'sublime') for no other reason than that, in overcoming the vastness of the physical, he seemed to discover his identity with the deeper, spiritual force which underlies appearances. Ironically, indeed, the Burkeian sublime of 'terror' is more prominent in the works of women writers of the period (Mary Wollstonecraft, Ann Radcliffe, and Mary Shelley are obvious examples) than in those of William Wordsworth or Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a fact which, however, seems to reflect a widespread sense of female disempowerment, as distinct from the unlimited creative and spiritual energy which enables their male contemporaries to overcome all earthly limitations. Perhaps, therefore, our emphasis should not be on Wordsworth's effort to conquer (metaphorical) woman and thereby become 'masculine', but rather on the extent to which his (or Coleridge's, or Kant's) sense of unity with the spiritual essence of nature fails to register their female contemporaries' experience of a continuing powerlessness or oppression. Tim Fulford's emphasis, however, is neither on these limitations of the Kantian sublime, nor on the practical disempowerment of women in this period, but rather on the widespread quest for an ideal of 'masculinity' which is not only inherently fictive, but also plays a central role in conservative political and social discourses, among which those of Burke are most prominent. Burke's analysis of the sublime, he suggests, evokes an ideal of thrilling and terrifying power which authors such as Wordsworth and Coleridge seek to emulate in many of their self-representations, thus securing themselves from the fear (or at least the appearance) of weakness or 'effeminacy'. The same dualism of the 'masculine' and the 'effeminate', Fulford suggests, is used by these authors to distinguish their loyalty to the state from the Jacobinism and gender-ambiguity of their opponents. In Burke, indeed, the preservation of male rights is specifically linked to a natural order which Britain has protected against the moral anarchy of feminized France (pp. 51-2), while Coleridge—with scarcely less aggressive conservatism—describes French literature and philosophy as fatally flawed by an effeminacy which also threatens the British state (pp. 20, 24). As Fulford shows, however, the ideal of British 'manliness' implied in these attitudes differs sharply from Coleridge's private celebration of the 'androgyny' characteristic of 'great minds'—a notion which, he argues, arises principally from his envy of Wordsworth's strikingly 'masculine' writing, and his search for an alternative form of 'manliness' which (paradoxically) depends upon a greater degree of androgyny than is found in Wordsworth, and which is most vividly evident in the works of Shakespeare (p. 23). Coleridge's only direct reference to androgyny occurs in a notebook-entry of 1820, from which his …