“Manliness” and “Beastliness”: Food, Sexuality, and Masculine Virtue in Three Early-Twentieth-Century Public School Novels

Abstract: By the Edwardian period, the public school story was a ubiquitous and highly influential site for discursive construction of masculinity. This paper discusses masculinity and its complex, sometimes contradictory relationship with the body and its appetites through the lenses of food and sexuality in Horace Annesley Vachell’s The Hill (1905), E. F. Benson’s David Blaize (1916), and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917). All these novels represent (homo)sexuality and same-sex relationships—whether romantically or erotically driven—as an integral part of public school life. Differing attitudes to sexuality—explicit moral condemnation in The Hill ; a demon to be conquered before “boy-love” can flourish in David Blaize ; a quotidian, inevitable occurrence most notable for its exposure of the iniquitous public school system in The Loom of Youth —are reflected in differing attitudes to food, which becomes variously a metonym for “evil” self-indulgence in physical pleasures ( The Hill ), a vehicle for transposed emotional climax serving to validate the central relationship and its social appropriateness ( David Blaize ), and a symbolic means of social negotiation and stage-setting noticeably divorced from moral judgment, echoing the story’s matter-of-fact attitude to sexual encounters ( Loom of Youth ).