The following abstract and sample is from an essay by Dennis Gouws, differentiating gynocentric chivalry from inter-male expression of chivalry. The full essay is published in the book War, Espionage, and Masculinity in British Fiction edited by Susan L. Austin (2023).

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Chapter 2

Kipling’s Modern Chivalry: Masculinity and War in The Light That Failed

Dennis S. Gouws
Springfield College

Abstract

This chapter begins with a discussion of how the concept of chivalry evolved, expanding beyond the nobility, and shaping standards of behavior for commoners who wished to establish themselves as English gentlemen. It then argues that chivalrous attitudes toward women and self-sacrifice prove futile and destructive for the male characters, while the chivalrous emphasis on brotherhood encourages positive bonds between them.

Keywords: Chivalry, English Gentleman, Manhood, Masculine Identity, Masculine Friendship, Rudyard Kipling

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Excerpt:  In The Light that Failed, Kipling questions the usefulness of nineteenth-century chivalry for guiding fin-de-siecle love and war and seems surprisingly modern in doing that. Examined from a twenty-first-century perspective, the usual chivalric love association described by Keen is too often a misandrist (male-hating) imperative, requiring men to internalize a toxic idea of themselves as a condition for finding love. Peter Wright astutely observes this kind of chivalry is “both sexist and gynocentric in nature, one that demands men provide numerous psychological gratifications and material benefits to recipient women;” he concludes, “The chivalric role offers heterosexual men a life-map to guide their social behaviour while providing a sense of self based on service to women” (56). Traditional chivalry has declined to gynocentric (woman-centered) service; consequently, it has little to offer twenty-first-century males. Kipling’s male contemporaries still willingly protected the weak; however, as the reader of The Light that Fails discovers, conventional chivalric courtship does not win the day in the author’s “originally conceived” (vii) fifteen-chapter version of the work (the different endings of the twelve-chapter Lippincott’s version and the longer MacMillan’s version will be discussed below). It is dramatized as humiliating rather than satisfying for the parties involved.

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Most of this essay can be read on Google Books or the longer volume can be purchased at Amazon.