«Hombres de bien» («Proper men»): ideals of masculinity and female expectations, between fiction and reality

Abstract

Writing the history of love allows us to explore the interpretive possibilities of literature as a historical source and to show the rhetorical mechanisms at work in other sources, paying attention, as new cultural history does, to the complex relationship between language and experience. This article studies eighteenth-century models of masculinity in relation to sentimental and material expectations and values concerning love and marriage, both in recent scholarship and through an analysis of primary sources. It compares ideals drawn by conduct literature and fiction to other evidences, particularly those in court records, in order to show how eighteenth century women and men perceived and expressed their experiences and feelings in the framework of received models, but also negotiated them according to their own circumstances.