The Effects of Theology and Literature

In 1876, Thomas Hughes gave a series of lectures, published three years later under the title The Manliness of Christ. Christianity was interpreted as synonymous with robust energy, spirited courage and physical vitality. Hughes and others who thought like him, particularly Charles Kingsley, Thomas Arnold, George Augustus Selwyn (perhaps the most influential bishop ever to live in New Zealand), channeled their theological insights into reforms affecting school education, competitive sports, and overseas missionary activities. Whereas Coleridge had regarded manliness as a description of maturity, Kingsley and Hughes stressed the gender and muscular connotations of the word manliness, emphasizing these qualities by identifying the converse of manliness as "effeminacy" (Newsome, 1961, 197).[13]

Hughes wedded the virtues of manliness, godliness, and strenuous physical exertion in his writings, the most famous of which is Tom Brown's Schooldays. To this mix of virtues, Kingsley added cleanliness by writing, oddly, The Water-Babies, still a beloved children's book.

Muscular Christianity was premised on the physical superiority of males; if God made them physically superior to women, that extra advantage must be developed to the maximum in order to be faithful stewards of God's gifts-to fight in His service, to protect the weak, to conquer nature. No less important to Kingsley, it was a man's duty to fulfill his sexual function by the procreation of children in that bliss which is the marital state (Newsome, 1961, 209). Healthy competition was worked out on the rugby field, and "impure" thoughts were kept under control by cold showers and sleeping in the winter with all the windows open.[14]
Boys were encouraged to become rugged men in keeping with an eccentric mis-quotation of Psalm 147:10 as "The Lord delighteth in a pair of sturdy legs."

Muscular Christianity was worked out not only on the rugby field, but in the mission field as well. New Zealand author Jock Phillips summarizes the philosophy of Muscular Christianity as "the duty of patriotism; the moral and physical beauty of athleticism; the salutary effects of Spartan habits and discipline; the cultivation of all that is masculine and the expulsion of all that is effeminate, un-English and excessively intellectual" all combined with a simple and unquestioning Christian faith (Phillips, 1996, 216). The influence of this movement, arriving originally with Bishop Selwyn, was insignificant except among those among the early male settlers who retained a connection with organized Christianity, but at the same time it served to reinforce the exaggerated virility associated with Pakeha manliness.

Two further sources influence the historical development of New Zealand masculinity: the Depressions of the 1880s and 1930s, and the phenomenal price of the wars: Land Wars of the 1860s, the South African War, both World Wars, the Viet Nam War. Space limitations prevent me from developing those themes here, but in neither case should their importance be underestimated.

Closer to our own time, the construction of Pakeha masculinity has again been reinforced in the ars literati of the 1930s through the 1970s. As Kai Jensen has so convincingly argued, male writers of that period carved out a new literature designed to capture the values and parlance of the common working man.[15]

The effect of this "masculinist" literary movement was to nearly eclipse the writing of women for four decades, and to create a national image of New Zealanders based almost exclusively upon the Kiwi bloke. Perhaps no novel expresses this more clearly than John Mulgan's 1938 classic, Man Alone.

Having identified a number of significant historical sources, we must now ask how this history lesson informs the construction of the Pakeha "mythic masculine"?