The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag

Ellen Crowell's The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction demonstrates a "cultural and aesthetic affinity" that exists between the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern communities. Crowell incorporates literature and history to illustrate the ways that Irish and Southern perceptions of aristocracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries communicated with one another. Crowell asserts Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern culture developed a dialogue about whom and what a gentleman is through literary characters that explore and reveal the ways in which aristocracy is crafted. In particular, Crowell finds that it was through the figure of the dandy that Irish and Anglo-Southern writers expressed the artificiality of aristocracy and, consequently, the disintegration of gentility.

Crowell focuses on six authors—the nineteenth-century American novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and Katherine Anne Porter—but includes a brief epilogue that discusses Emma Donoghue's short story "Words for Things" and Tim Grimsley's 1995 novel Dream Boy. Crowell pairs each Anglo-Irish author with an Anglo-Southern author chronologically to explicate the novels and their depictions of dandy figures while incorporating biographical and cultural information about the authors and their heritage. This does, at times, detract from the literary dimensions of the argument, as the study often centers on the cultural rather than literary parallels. The brief readings of the novels consequently do not always provide enough literary evidence to support the claims of a connection between the Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern depiction of the dandy. However, Crowell does establish a tradition of Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern writers exploring the "constructions of aristocracy through the figure of the dissipated, deviant gentleman (or lady): the dandy." Crowell convincingly contends that the novelists artifice of the dandy is a means of critique in order to demonstrate the mutability of upper-class society and the facade that has sustained Anglo-Irish and Southern gentility.

The crux of her argument is that the dandy's aristocratic mastery manifests itself as effeminate and artificial in order to illustrate the "connections between imperial performance and sexual deviance" that mark both the Southern plantation novel and the Irish Big House novel. Thus, these literary genres are analogous in part because the dandy figure is consistently a central figure that allows authors to represent the perceptions of cultural supremacy against the decline and ruin that threatens social order. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and Southern aristocracy went into their declines at approximately the same time; degenerating, each society increasingly idealized the past. The performance of gentility became a hallmark of some, including Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Anne Porter, because they strove to capture and present the aristocratic facade of their forbearers. Just as Bowen and Porter sought to present a genteel picture of femininity—Bowen the model of Anglo-Irish nobility and Porter a striking Southern belle—many of the characters representative of the decline of the Irish Ascendancy and Southern aristocracy typify the idealization of the recent past.

Crowell illustrates the tradition of representing the dandy and declining culture in her first chapter about Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832). According to Crowell, Edgeworth and Kennedy were "similarly preoccupied with the aesthetics of aristocratic performance: how to cultivate, celebrate and above all perform their own breeds of aristocracy…while avoiding excess, weakness and effeminacy." Edgeworth and Kennedy wrote well before the decline of their cultures and therefore their novels are concerned with sustaining and cultivating the standards with which they were accustomed. A clear threat to the culture of their novels is the male dandy who focuses on pleasure, decadence, and appearance in lieu of his estates and family—a direct challenge to the role of the aristocratic gentleman. Edgeworth and Kennedy caution against the charms of the dandy: while he most often artificially assumes the qualities that distinguish the upper class, these characteristics allow a golden...