Artikel
Atale of two dandies : Gore, Dickens and the "social-fork" novel
Verfasst von:
Alexander, Sarah C.
in:
Wallingford:
2009
,
283 - 300 S.
Weitere Informationen
| Einrichtung: | Ariadne | Wien |
|---|---|
| Verfasst von: | Alexander, Sarah C. |
| In: | |
| Jahr: | 2009 |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
| Beschreibung: | |
| This essay reconsiders Catherine Gore's 1841 novel Cecil, or The Adventures of a Coxcomb in terms of its engagement with the social issues of post-Reform Act England. Examining the depictions of dandyism in Cecil and in Dickens's Bleak House (1852-53), the author challenges the familiar reading of Cecil as a typical silver-fork novel which celebrates aristocratic frivolity and offers a model for middle-class excess. Instead, the author claims that both novels reveal the ways in which dandyism was perceived to have a negative social impact after the First Reform Act. The Victorians looked back on the Regency dandy as a solipsistic clothes horse, but, for Gore and Dickens, the Victorian dandy actively rejects the self-abnegation that had come to be valorized in the interest of bourgeois identity after the First Reform Act. The Regency dandy chose self-consciousness over social consciousness but, for the Victorian dandy, solipsism fails, as self-denial becomes the middle-class benchmark of morality. The Victorian dandy's consumption, which serves to conceal social relationships, is figured as an attempt to re-establish the fading aristocracy. In other words, the Regency dandy's solipsism may, in the face of political reform, be understood as commodity fetishism. While the pre-reform dandy is solipsistically inactive, the Victorian dandy is characterized by a potentially more harmful form of fetishistic activity. | |
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