E3W Literature | University of Texas

Ellen Crowell

The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag

Edinburgh University Press, 2007

205 pages

$90.00

Reviewed by Emily Bloom

Through a compelling range of examples, from Oscar Wilde and Elizabeth Bowen’s visits to the American South to William Faulkner’s Wildean influences and Elizabeth Porter’s “mysterious love” of Ireland, Ellen Crowell cre­ates a vivid argument for the cultural affinities between Ireland and the American South in The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag. Build­ing on the work of previous transatlantic criticism such as Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988) and Kieran Quinlan’s Strange Kin: Ire­land and the American South (2005), Crowell argues that writers from these literary traditions participated in “a transatlantic dialogue” centered on the figure of the dandy.

Crowell identifies the dandy as a shared literary and cul­tural trope in the pseudo-aristocratic plantation classes of both societies: the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy and the American Southern planter class. The Anglo-Irish Prot­estant ascendancy originated with the usurpation of Catho­lic land following Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland. Cromwell’s Protestant allies were granted land and titles to purge the Irish aristocracy and secure Ireland for Britain. The Anglo-Irish, like their American southern counterparts, claimed the cultural trappings of aristocracy through vio­lent usurpation and ongoing repression. Therefore, Crow­ell argues, unlike their British peers for whom titles have longer histories and less translucently violent origins, Irish and Southern aristocrats understood that aristocracy must be created and maintained through careful posturing.

Beginning in the nineteenth-century, when both groups began their long decline from power, this posturing of sham aristocracies created a vulnerability in which, Crow­ell argues, the dandy figure appears as the aristocrat par excellence and also the dangerous mimic capable of tearing down the entire facade. Crowell writes that in both cul­tures, well into the twentieth-century, “the dandy figure has been used as a blurred embodiment of both upper-class hegemony and gentry disintegration.” The dandy, in hyperbolizing the performance of aristocratic values, un­masks the class aspirations of a pseudo-aristocracy. He or she also exposes fears of social decay by suggesting sexual deviance beneath the decadent style. In this sense, the dandy is both an inherently conservative preserver of tradi­tion and also a symbol of a threateningly modern sexuality.

Crowell’s analysis adds to an expanding body of work on the dandy and modern literature, including that by Ellen Mo­ers, Rhonda Garelick, and Jessica Feldman. However, in her chapter on Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Anne Porter’s female dandyism, Crowell offers an interesting addition to a largely male-dominated oeuvre. She describes Porter and Bowen resisting the masculine poses of their modernist peers through the ultra-feminine personas of the southern belle and the Anglo-Irish lady. Crowell argues that the “outward acquiescence to traditionalism” allows these writers to explore themes of deviance within the community. For instance, in her analysis of Tim Grimsley’s Dream Boy (1995), she shows how the plantation house itself becomes a site both for the fulfillment of homosexual love and for its brutal oppression.

According to Crowell, dandyism enters Irish and Ameri­can Southern literature with the beginning of two genres: the Irish big house novel and the American plantation novel. Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), the two foundational texts for the big house novel and the planta­tion novel, respectively, were both influenced by Edmund Burke’s arguments in the wake of the French Revolution that aristocracies must reform in order to survive. As didac­tic novels, both Castle Rackrent and Swallow Barn use the negative example of the dandy to show the upper classes that they must reform to avoid decadence and decline.

While the dandy figure enters both literary traditions as a harbinger for social decline, in the chapters on Wilde, Faulkner, Porter and Bowen, dandyism becomes a sub­versive, yet still inherently conservative, cultural practice. Crowell describes these writers as caught between the de­sire to perpetuate a cultural tradition marked by aristocracy and style and yet possessing a subversive awareness of the repressive and empty nature of these forms. In their public lives, all four authors developed elaborately constructed aris­tocratic personas, which Crowell illustrates with compelling descriptions and fascinating photographs. Crowell inter­weaves this biographical analysis with her literary criticism, showing how dandy characters expose the fault lines with­in Anglo-Irish and American Southern systems of power.

Crowell supports her assertions through a wide range of scholarship including critical analysis of novels, biographi­cal background, historical memoirs, and news reports in the popular presses. However, in arguing for the interrelation­ship of the writer’s dandy personas and their literary work, Crowell occasionally omits moments of dissonance. For in­stance, in her chapter on Bowen, Crowell refers to Bowen’s “aristocratic nostalgia” without referencing her 1951 BBC radio broadcast entitled “The Cult of Nostalgia” in which Bowen warns that “one of the dangerous powers of the writer is that he feeds, or plays up, fantasies he knows to exist.” In this broadcast, Bowen argues that while a writer may feel nostalgia, he must resist it in his work. Though Bowen may have felt the pull of an “aristocratic nostalgia” in her personal life, her novels and stories often mercilessly purge this nostalgia, going so far as to burn the big houses that stalk her imagination. While Crowell effectively shows how these authors used dandyism to define both their in­dividual personas and their fictional work, there could be more explanation of the tensions that exist for writers like Bowen between personal affinities and literary output.

Transatlantic work between Ireland and the American South often runs the risk of not fully accounting for how a system of slavery created different contexts for defining privilege and oppression. While nineteenth-century figures such as Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell marked similarities between the American slaves and the Catholic Irish, there are many clear differences between the exploita­tion and disenfranchisement of the Catholic Irish and the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans. Instead of creating a simple analogy between slavery and sectari­anism, Crowell’s chapter on Faulkner and Wilde offers a compelling analysis of racial passing, hidden sexuality and class aspiration in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and racist caricatures of Wilde in the American press.

As issues of sexuality and cultural heritage continue to trouble the American and Irish political imaginations, this work offers a timely analysis of the literature of privileged social groups and the subversive practices available within the trappings of conservatism. This book also offers a wealth of historical ex­amples that make fascinating reading. By the end, the reader is left with a distinctive sense of what Crowell describes as “analogous literary genres” emerging from two cultures that share similar aristocratic pretenses and fears and that have channeled these into two indisputably rich literary traditions.