Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness

In his eighty-eighth epigram, "On English Monsieur" (1616), Ben Jonson ridicules the vainglorious pride in apparel of his subject and specifically the Englishman's obsession with clothes and accessories from France. Attired head to toe in French clothing, the Englishman becomes unrecognizable as such: he mutates into a "Monsieur" through his very apparel. Jonson, however, does much more than simply deride the man's vanity. By asking his reader to marvel at the Englishman whose clothing belies his nationality, he puts into question the very identity of the English subject: "Would you believe, when you this Monsieur see, / That his whole body should speak French, not he?" ¹ Could the reader imagine, continues Jonson,

That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather,
  And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither
And land on one whose face durst never be
  Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree? ²
That he, untravelled, should be French so much,
  As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch? (3-8)

The Englishman, though never having ventured beyond his homeland, has forsaken any signs that reveal his proper national affiliation by wearing the various French garments. He has invited foreign fashion "hither," thus becoming a foreigner in his own land. The body of the English subject, covered over with "so much" that is French, not only obscures his Englishness but also welcomes the unsavory qualities stereotypically associated with the French: vanity and moral laxity. Indeed, Jonson suggests that the Monsieur's father may have had "the French disease" when his son was conceived, thereby passing it on to him both in its manifestation as syphilis and in the obsession with clothes (10). Jonson concludes the poem by remarking upon his subject's preoccupation with his tailor's wares and the display of foreign apparel: the Monsieur "must prove / The new French tailor's motion, monthly made, / Daily to turn in Paul's, and help the trade" (15-16). By parading through Paul's Walk, the middle aisle of St. Paul's Church and London's early modern catwalk for the fashionable, the Englishman tests his sartorial success. ³ Moreover, by exhibiting the apparel in a public place, the French tailor and his "motion" or puppet, the English Monsieur, perpetuate the domestic market in foreign clothes. ⁴

As Jonson's epigram demonstrates, clothing and the cloth from which it was made was not only associated with specific nations, but also helped to create sentiments of nationhood through the linkage of clothing with a particular county. As William Prynne asserts in his antitheatrical polemic, Histriomastix(1632), "apparell" was meant, among other things, "to distinguish . . . one Nation . . . from another." ⁵ In the early modern period, national identification could be negotiated and made clear by the visible medium of clothing. At the same time, however, as Jonson's epigram also underscores, clothing confusesnational identity. While clothing may have confirmed national origin in its unworn state, the donning of apparel by actual bodies often disrupted this imaginary national clarity. Wearing foreign clothes disrupted the way of knowing one's country of origin and, perhaps more upsetting, where one's loyalty lay. The English Monsieur, his very name a blurring of national fealty, is several things at once: completely domesticated ("untravelled"), utterly French, morally suspicious (carrying "the French disease"), and possibly traitorous. Jonson and other satirists of early modern London, who favored disparaging stylish men and women, decry the social misdeeds that accompanied wearing foreign fabrics. But by drawing attention to the foreignness of the clothes, the authors do something else: they present the notion that clothes are capable of both disrupting and affirming English national identity. As Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones point out in their important new study of clothing in the Renaissance, "the innovative force of fashion was associated both with the dissolution of the...