The writings of Esteban Echeverría, like those of Bolívar and Bello, tend to mythify the feminine and historicise the masculine, which, in turn, extend to troped representations of man and woman in imaginative literature, as we shall see. This chapter draws on recent work on war, gender and the history of masculinities, in particular the concept of hegemonic masculinities (Tosh 2004: 54), as mobilised by historians, to explore the development of contradictory or competing masculinities (including revolutionary masculinities) in nineteenth-century politics and war. Joan B. Landes's discussion of heterosocial desire in French republican culture highlights the symbolic significance of the female body as the object of patriotic love, the ‘site for men's patriotic investments’ (Dudink 2004: 103). This usefully complements Mosse's work (1996) on homosocial desire in the discourses and visual culture in the age of nation-building, when the ‘manly ideal’, signifying national progress, was modelled on the young Greek male. The view that citizenship became masculinised and masculinity militarised throughout the nineteenth century is a valid one, but this is only true if we take the French model as exemplary (Dudink and Hagemann 2004: 18). In other words, historical specificity is paramount. War and violence are recurrent elements in the constructions of masculinity. As noted in Chapter 1, Goldstein claims that gender difference is reinforced by war and that the constant potential for war produces gender. It is important to enquire into the effect of the legacy of violence on the gender system and how it affects the social and cultural construction of masculinities and femininities and the meanings attributed to ‘man’ and ‘woman’. For Goldstein gender is the symptom of war and ultimately the source of conflict (Goldstein 2001: 264). It is in the light of this research that Echeverría's work will be considered.