英文摘要 |
The construction of White masculinity is perceivable through nineteenth-century discourses of medicine, literature, and culture that fashion male colonialists, travelers, missionaries, and explorers as sturdy, healthy, accommodating, and energetic adventurers. The effeminate White patient thus becomes “the Other” to the mainstream construction of masculinity. Thus said, this paper wants to highlight the Otherness of the White patient from the tropic, foreground his or her long ignored, repressed, and abased experience of sickness, and explore how diseases serve to dismantle the construction of masculinity by Victorian discourses. Masculinity promoted by Muscular Christianity Movement in Victorian England has exerted its influence on missionaries preaching gospels overseas. The masculine, stalwart military force guarding the far-reached territories of the British Empire finds its counterpart in the image of a sturdy overseas evangelical worker. The first Canadian Presbyterian missionary to Formosa, an island which has just opened its ports to foreign powers since the 1860s, George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901) is represented as an evangelist braving the tropic, intimidating heathenry in the memoir From Far Formosa, which was published in 1895 for readers, lay and religious, to bolster Christian masculinity. Such construction of masculinity may also reflect Victorian fear of becoming “the invalid,” a feminized figure who fails to adapt to the harsh milieu of the conquered territories. Unlike previous studies of Mackay highlighting his missionary achievements, this paper underscores Mackay’s largely unexplored role as a patient of tropical fever, examining how narratives of disease in From Far Formosa serve to undermine White muscular Christianity fashioned through heroic missionary writing and uncover fin de siècle masculinity crisis felt by men at home and abroad. |