Book contents
5 - Cromwell
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
As we have just seen, Charles I appears to pose immense problems for masculinity, yet eventually a way is found to represent him as feminine which leaves patriarchy quite untroubled, a way which incorporates what began as Charles's threat into a productive and consolatory image of heroism. Cromwell, by contrast, appears to pose no problems at all. His military prowess is itself comfortingly phallic. His godliness, plain dress and lack of interest in the consuming extravagance of court life show a masculine swerve away from anxiety-provoking images of effeminate and effeminising tyrants. Taken together with his victories in battle, Cromwell's abstemiousness creates for him a hard and unitary body, absolutely isomorphic with the phallus. In Klaus Theweleit's analysis of the men of the Freikorps, military masculinity is constructed over against the filth, chaos and disorder of battle and death. We saw in looking at Civil War battle memoirs that the logic of the hard male body versus the chaos of battle was inscribed in the discourses of the war before Cromwell became crucial to its representation. In a sense, the pro-Protectorate Cromwell is or ought to have been a perfect soldier, his hard body triumphing over the foe. Around and from such a body, a figure of masculine republicanism can be created, or recreated, since it draws extensively on classical art and writing, a figure that endures until the French Revolution and after: the strong figure of the male body of citizenship, a Heracles who can defeat the monster of tyranny.
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- Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War , pp. 131 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005