This essay examines how Thomas Hughes`s novel represents how mid-Victorian boys and men already understood that gender is not innate and unstable, and they must try to achieve hegemonic manly status and struggle to maintain the earned merit of being a manly man through a series of fights. As Hughes emphasizes it, fight metaphors in sport, games, and confrontations are useful in elucidating how the average Victorian boy earns his Christian manliness and maintains his gender status, which is not fixed to his self. Hughes`s protagonist Tom Brown starts his life as an average English boy who is the son of a country squire, has middle-class privilege in wealth and status, is physically strong and able, and has a likable disposition. Through a series of male educational instructions that Tom receives at home, at private school, and at public school, Tom undergoes physical, moral, and spiritual fights and wins his heroic battles. His displayed superior manliness determines his gender status of hegemonic masculinity that helps him to be mobilized towards the highest rungs of the ladder in all male groups. (Soongsil University)