Victor Hugo and the Making of Masculinity - From the Pantheon Back to the Page

Victor Hugo's eminence as a writer is bolstered by his reputation for unbridled ambition, prolific talent, and virile sexuality, yet his work is deeply uncomfortable with these aggrandized notions of what it means to be a man. Rereading some of Hugo's most famous writing alongside lesser-known texts, Bradley Stephens reveals how the author of Les Misérables contests normative ideas of manhood in ways that are surprising and urgent for gender studies today. Although Hugo recognized the allure of 'greatness', his writing knowingly resists the patriarchal clichés that were being fastened onto his public image even before he was laid to rest in the Paris Panthéon as one of France's grands hommes in 1885. Hugo channelled nature's spontaneity to understand all forms and types as fluid, not fixed, and his aversion to categorical viewpoints and established hierarchies necessarily questions the binary logic of gender and its naturalization of men's social dominance.