The Secrets of Genteel Identity in The Man of Mode: Comedy of Manners vs. the Courtesy Book

The Secrets of Genteel IdentityzyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPON in The Man of Mode; Comedy of Manners vs. the Courtesy Book SUSAN STAVESNMLKJIHGFEDCBA I take my text from the gospel according to George Bernard Shaw: “Acquired notions of propriety are stronger than natural instincts. It is easier to recruit for monasteries and convents than to induce an Arab woman to uncover her mouth in public, or a British officer to walk through Bond street in a golfing cap on an afternoon in May.”1 Shaw here wittily expresses a fundamental insight of good comedy of manners. So-called “natural appetites” like the drives for food and sex are com­ monly understood as extremely deep transhistorical and powerful deter­ minants of human behavior. Yet Shaw sees that supposedly superficial and fleeting codes of manners may be still more powerful determinants of human action. While good comedy of manners often mocks the absurdities and unnaturalness of fashionable manners, it also often has a less judgmental side. It may non-judgmentally revel in the sheer plenti­ tude of behavioral styles and fashionable artifacts, in the exuberantly baroque creativity with which human beings make nonutilitarian signs and ascribe meaning to them. Good comedy of manners also often expresses a more basic wonder at the power of social codes, not only to determine human behavior but also to constitute human identity itself. Shaw’s observation usefully sidesteps the oppressive question of whether manners are revelatory of morals or whether they are mere “surface” forms, perhaps of aesthetic interest, but not fundamentally 117 118 / KJIHGFEDCBA S T A V E S expressive of “deeper” morals. Some common usage, much courtesy lit­ erature, and most literary criticism have inclined to the former sober view, insisting that manners have a sacramental character, that good manners are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace and moral health. That such a view no longer predominates in our own American culture may be one reason why literary critics have been inclined to worry that comedy of manners, however amusing, is lamenta­ bly trivial. In a recent study of English courtesy literature from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, Michael Curtin has argued that early modern courtesy books and nineteenth-century etiquette books are fundamentally different from each other. The earlier Christian humanist courtesy literature “joined the more minute and ceremonious aspects of ‘manners’ with those broader and more substantial parts of conduct that verge onto what we call ‘morals,’ ” Curtin argues, whereas the later etiquette books “concentrated on precise descriptions of the exact rules of interpersonal behavior with a relative disregard for moral thought.” Significantly, he notes, the later etiquette books “were orga­ nized around particular social situations —dinners, balls, receptions, pre­ sentations at court, calls, promenades, introductions, salutations — rather than according to the moral virtues of an ideal individual —grace, fortitude, self-control.”2 Sir George Etherege’s fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The Man of Mode (1676), as a comedy of man­ ners of the 1670s, is one text in a complex set of discourses on manners in the 1670s. This essay will consider Etherege’s play along with a few of the contemporary courtesy books, both because we can gain some further insight into the play and because this is a nice cameo-exercise in consider­ ing what I have elsewhere written about as competing “spheres of dis­ course.”3 Here we have the sober discourse of courtesy books published between 1670 and 1678 to set beside the comic discourse of the stage. Some assistance in this project is available from earlier criticism. D. R. M. Wilkinson in an odd but not worthless book entitled The Com­ edy of Habit: An Essay on the Use of Courtesy Literature in a Study of Restoration Comic Drama (1964) earlier undertook a project resembling what I propose here. Wilkinson apparently began prompted by a desire to rebut L. C. Knight’s animadversions that Restoration comedy was dull by providing the comedy with a more appropriate historical context, but he ended by convincing himself that the comedy was indeed not only dull but quite without moral or “artistic coherence.” Moreover, Wilkin­ son decided that even the allegedly witty prose of Restoration comedy was not as well written as...