The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia (review)

Although many of us may think we understand what constitutes an English “gentleman” and may link the concept to chivalric ideals rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Christine Berberich’s engaging book forces her readers to reevaluate such beliefs. In eloquent and thoughtful prose, Berberich’s study sets out to answer a series of key questions: “[I]s the ideal dead, has the gentleman become superfluous, or does it (and he) still exist in today’s society? And if so, in what form?” (7). In response, Berberich examines the work of four key twentieth-century writers—Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Kazuo Ishiguro—and tracks how these writers inflect their representations of the gentleman to engage complex social, cultural, and political debates and events. The result is a persuasive and meticulously researched analysis that combines detailed close reading with attention to deconstructive, gender-oriented, and Foucauldian methodologies, and, additionally, that explores how the writers under consideration address nostalgia, a sentiment that often accompanies representations of the gentleman—“some merely to chronicle it; others to wallow in it; and yet others again to highlight its dangers, and the risks involved in applying and imitating old traditions and ideals unquestioningly” (29).

Berberich’s study divides into two sections followed by a brief coda. In the first part, Berberich pursues three objectives. She seeks to define the term “gentleman,” which turns out to be much more complex and elusive than might initially appear. She tracks how the meaning of the term has changed from the middle ages to the present. Finally, she considers the diverse ways in which a variety of authors before the twentieth century—among them Chaucer, Sidney, Steele, Richardson, Austen, Thackery, Dickens, and Trollope—have understood and deployed the term. “The preoccupation in English literature with the ideal of the gentleman,” Berberich writes, “is astounding. Even writers whose work is not necessarily associated with the image of the gentleman were and are intrigued by the ideal” (31). In the second part of her study, Berberich explores the representations of the gentleman in the works of her chosen writers, while the coda considers the work of additional contemporary writers, including John Fowles, Alan Hollinghurst, William Boyd, and Ian Fleming.

The image of the gentleman, Berberich argues, “comprises so many values—from behaviour and morals to education, social background, the correct attire and table manners,” and draws on such ambiguous concepts (for instance, class, culture, and Englishness), “that it would be indeed restrictive to limit it to just one brief, defining sentence” (5). Discussion is likewise complicated by the intellectual and visceral reactions that the term arouses: “it seems uncomfortably linked to class, images of feudal landlords or snobbish ‘toffs,’ while simultaneously raising issues of education, style, manners, or simply inner values—ideas which seem, for many, incompatible” (5). Also complicating analysis is the fact that each individual carries around a “subjective inventory” of gentlemanly images and traits: “which might include top hat, stiff upper lip, public school, emotional frigidity, clubs, evening clothes, arrogance, fox hunting, courteous behaviour, cricket, aristocracy, good manners, fair play, homoeroticism, country house period films, Englishness, moustaches, cigars, Pall Mall, dandyism, menservants, class . . . and so on” (38). This catalogue must forever remain incomplete, but that also suggests the breadth of subjects that Berberich tackles in her ambitious study.

As a way out of these problems, Berberich explores how literary approaches to the image of the gentleman have changed over time, particularly from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. “[T]wentieth-century authors turn the ideal of the gentleman from the universal truth it was considered to be in the nineteenth century,” she writes, “to a more personal one, each of them approaching it according to their own preferences” (13). As a result, the second part of her study underscores “the increasing subjectivization of twentieth-century literary depictions of the gentleman,” especially in her chosen writers (164...