The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag 9780748631018

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The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction

EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the premises upon which Area Studies were based have come into question. Starting from the assumption that the study of American literatures can no longer operate on a nation-based or exceptionalist paradigm, the books in this new series work within a comparative framework to interrogate place-based identities and monocular visions. The authors attempt instead to develop new paradigms for literary criticism in historical and contemporary contexts of exchange, circulation and transformation. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures seeks uniquely to further the critical, theoretical and ideational work of the developing field of transatlantic literary studies. Titles in the series include: Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture Michèle Mendelssohn American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation Daniel Katz The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction: Aristocratic Drag Ellen Crowell

The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction Aristocratic Drag

◆ ◆ ◆

Ellen Crowell

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Ellen Crowell, 2007 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 2548 2 (hardback) The right of Ellen Crowell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries: Architectures of Aristocracy in Ireland and the American South

vi vii

1

1. Oaks, Serpents and Dandies: Pseudoaristocracy in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn

28

2. The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha

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3. Ferocious Beauty: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter and the Modernist Female Dandy 125 Epilogue: The Dandy Unmasked: Emma Donoghue’s ‘Words for Things’ and Tim Grimsley’s Dream Boy

178

Works Cited and Consulted

189

Index

201

Illustrations

Figure 1

William Faulkner as Young Dandy, Oxford, Mississippi, 1918.

97

Figure 2

Victorian tradecard depicting Oscar Wilde, Straiton and Storms Cigars, New York, 1882. 108

Figure 3

Victorian tradecard depicting Oscar Wilde, Marie Fontaine’s Moth & Freckle Cure, 1882, Buffalo, New York.

108

‘The Aesthetic Craze.’ Caricature of Wilde by Currier and Ives, 1882.

108

‘Ise gwine for to wuship dat lily.’ Caricature of Wilde by Duval, 1882.

108

Portrait of Katherine Anne Porter, Hollywood, 1947. George Platt Lynes.

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Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen, London, 1948. Angus McBean.

137

Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7

Acknowledgements

The intellectual and creative roots of this book run deep, and writing it would have been impossible without the patient and generous support of the many individuals and institutions I would like to thank here. First and foremost I thank Elizabeth Butler Cullingford for her feedback, critique and mentorship at every stage of this project and my career. I owe her thanks, too, for inspiring me to become a scholar and teacher who combines rigour with delight. I am also indebted to Warwick Wadlington for his interest in this project from its early stages, and for his continued support and feedback. The insight and guidance of three other scholars at the University of Texas at Austin helped shape the critical scope of this book from the beginning: I thank Mia Carter, Evan Carton and Lisa Moore for their guidance and commentary. Mary Blockley provided enthusiastic support for this project at a crucial moment, and I thank her. I am also indebted to the painstaking feedback I received from my colleagues in Irish Studies and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Alexandra Barron, Victoria Davis, Jeanette Herman, Ashley Shannon and Colleen Hynes read and commented on parts of this book in its early stages; together these women offered me an intellectual community that fostered creativity, rigour and complexity. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the English Department at Saint Louis University for their interest in this project. For their support and feedback on individual chapters and proposals, I particularly thank Caroline Reitz, Elisabeth Heard, Georgia Johnston, Toby Benis, Shawn Smith and Joya Uraizee. These colleagues have been

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Acknowledgements

instrumental in guiding my book to its completion. I would also like to acknowledge the inspiration of my students at Saint Louis University, whose enthusiasm and insight consistently influence my own ideas and writing style. In particular I thank Christopher Dickman and Matthew Schultz for their assistance with this project’s completion. My research was assisted by librarians and other staff members at several archival collections. Richard Workman and Linda BriscoeMeyers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas-Austin provided crucial assistance with locating images and manuscripts central to my research. I thank also Beth Alvarez, curator of literary manuscripts at the University of Maryland, for her assistance with the Katherine Anne Porter collection. For permission to reprint images housed in their Oscar Wilde collection I thank The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. For permission to reprint a portrait of William Faulkner I thank the William Faulkner estate; for providing this image I thank the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. I also thank the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for providing a portrait of Elizabeth Bowen by Angus McBean; I thank David Ball of the Angus McBean estate for permission to reprint this image. Finally I thank the George Platt Lynes estate for permission to reprint a George Platt Lynes portrait of Katherine Anne Porter, and I thank the University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections for providing me with this image. An abbreviated version of this book’s second chapter was published in 2004 in the journal Modern Fiction Studies, published by Purdue University Press. I thank the editors for permission to reprint. The research and writing that went into this book was supported by generous funding from several sources. The University of Texas at Austin supported this project in two crucial ways: my education and research was supported by teaching assistantships throughout my career at the University, and a dissertation fellowship allowed me to finish the project quickly and well. I thank the College of Arts and Sciences at Saint Louis University for faculty development fellowships that made completing my research and revisions possible. I also thank the Saint Louis University College of Arts and Sciences and Department of English for their generous assistance with obtaining the numerous images I use in this book. Finally, a 2006 Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center research fellowship allowed me to rethink several key arguments as I completed this manuscript.

Acknowledgements

[ ix

I thank Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, series editors of the Studies in Transatlantic Literatures series at Edinburgh University Press, for their enthusiasm and commentary. I thank, too, the anonymous readers at Edinburgh University Press who provided clear, respectful, transformative guidelines for revision. I am above all grateful to friends and family whose kindness and patience allowed me to stay dedicated to this project over so many years. I thank Vimala Pasupathi, Alex Barron, Victoria Davis, Jeanette Herman, Eric Lupfer, Colleen Hynes, Kyre Osborn, Katie Jones, Monica Spiegel, Joycelyn Moody, Betsy Kellerman, Michele Lorenzini and Darius Savage for their friendship and support. I thank my brother, Ken Crowell, for his sense of humour and his faith in the family business. Finally, without my friend Sue Mendelsohn I could not have completed this project. I thank her for a tireless faith in me and my ideas that keeps me going every day. This book is dedicated to my parents, Richard and Sheila Crowell, who gave me everything.

For my parents

INTRODUCTION Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries: Architectures of Aristocracy in Ireland and the American South

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known . . . W. B. Yeats, ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ [H]e was a good architect; Quentin knew the house, twelve miles from Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished. And not only an architect, General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne [. . .] Sutpen’s ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castlelike magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

In 1845, following the publication of his The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass escaped recapture by travelling through the British Isles, lecturing on the American abolitionist movement. Visiting Ireland on the eve of the Famine, he drew comparisons between destitute Irish peasants living as tenants on Anglo-Irish estates and African-American slaves living on plantations in the American South: [Irish peasants] lacked only black skin and woolly hair, to complete their likeness to the plantation Negro. The open, uneducated, mouth – the long gaunt arm – the badly formed foot and ankle – the shuffling gait – the

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The Dandy in Irish and American Southern Fiction retreating forehead and vague expression – and their petty quarrels and fights – all reminded me of the plantation. (Qtd in Rice 1999: 122)

Douglass’s comparison works in two contradictory ways: his simian imagery reinforces a transatlantic, racist system of identification between the Irish peasant and the African slave, but his use of imagery signifying a common oppression links the two groups politically: ‘I see much [in Ireland] to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over’ (qtd in Hardack 1999: 121–2). This linkage is implicit in his final shift from comparing people to comparing places; the Irish peasant’s ‘likeness to the plantation Negro’ finally reminds Douglass of the ‘plantation’ itself In 1882, an Irish visitor to the American South experienced an inverse déjà vu that reiterated and reinflected Douglass’s earlier experience. Whereas Douglass interpreted mid-nineteenth-century Ireland by drawing comparisons between Irish peasants and African-American slaves, a transatlantic parallel already well established in Victorian caricature, Oscar Wilde familiarised himself with the Reconstruction South by highlighting cultural and political similarities between Irish protestant and Anglo-southern ruling elites. The experience of Wilde’s own uncle testifies to the ease with which a nineteenth-century AngloIrish gentleman might establish himself in the Old South: J. K. Elgee, Jane Wilde’s eldest brother, came of age in Dublin but left in the 1830s to invest his inheritance in the American South. Following the lead of other Irish entrepreneurs,1 he purchased a large plantation in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, and soon secured a prominent place in local politics. Elgee shared his nephew’s flair for ostentatious artistry: in his capacity as state senator Elgee single-handedly designed Louisiana’s colourful confederate state flag, and when Louisiana drafted its Declaration of Secession, the statesman placed his flamboyant, outsized signature at the document’s very centre. And although Oscar Wilde, when asked by New Orleans reporters in 1882 whether he was in Louisiana to ‘look after some of the family possessions’, coyly demurred: ‘however much I might desire to have a plantation in Louisiana, not the least of the attractions of which would be the proprietorship of groves of magnolia trees, I have no such object in view’ (Daily Picayune 1882: 4), the young aesthete likewise ingratiated himself with white southerners by drawing broad ideological parallels between southern and Irish ruling classes.

Introduction: Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries

[3

In so doing Wilde merely offered audiences – then and now – variations on a longstanding theme, one whose roots can be traced both through verifiable cross-colonial histories and in the more porous contours of imagined cross-cultural affinity. As Ronald Takaki records, [t]he conquest of Ireland and the settlement of Virginia were bound so closely together that one correspondence, dated March 8, 1610, stated: ‘It is hoped the plantation of Ireland may shortly be settled. The Lord Delaware . . . is preparing to depart for the plantation of Virginia’. (Takaki 1992: 895)

And indeed, many of the major figures responsible for orchestrating the ‘plantation’ of Ulster also assisted in the plantation of the American South; as Kieran Quinlan observes, the colonisation process in the American colonies bore obvious, and frequently recognized, similarities to events in Ireland, for many of the new colonists from as early as 1594 onwards – Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ralph Lane, Sir Richard Grenville – had gained their first experience of conquest by crossing the Irish Sea and were armed even now with settlement layout plans that had already been used in Ulster. (Quinlan 2005: 23)

The word plantation, then, has its origins in the simultaneous settlements of Ireland and America by the English; the Oxford English Dictionary in fact identifies the word ‘chiefly with reference to the colonies founded in North America and on the forfeited lands in Ireland in the 16th–17th centuries’. For the year 1610, the OED records two instances of the word – one in T. Blennerhasset’s A Direction for the Plantation of Ulster and the other from a pamphlet entitled ‘A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation begun in Virginia’. Given this intimate Irish-American history of the word ‘plantation’, we are compelled to identify, in both Douglass’s observation that an Anglo-Irish demesne ‘reminded me of the plantation’ and Wilde’s professed ‘desire’ for a plantation with ‘groves of magnolia trees’, a continued cross-cultural identification with – and critique of – Irish and southern architectures of aristocratic supremacy. I use the phrase ‘architectures of aristocratic supremacy’ to signal a key focus of this study. For in the above examples, and multiple others besides, we see a transatlantic dialogue between Ireland and

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the South coalescing around questions of power, supremacy, and gentility. In 1836, John Pendleton Kennedy, the Irish-American father of the Southern plantation novel, rewrote the ancestry of the ‘Southern Cavalier’ by conflating Southern honour with its gentlemanly Irish equivalent: [The Cavaliers] were sons of the Emerald Isle, – of a race whose historical boast is the faithfulness of their devotion to a friend in need and their chivalrous courtesy to woman, but still more their generous and gallant championship of woman in distress. (Kennedy 1969: 75)

Wilde, himself an Irish ‘Cavalier’, in interviews with the Southern press conflated the Irish Home Rule movement with ‘the principles for which the South [had] fought’ (Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8) – a strategic identification reciprocated by William Faulkner, who imported ‘The Irish poet, Wilde’ into the grounds of his modernist meditation on performed Southern aristocracy, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) offered readers a Celtic origin myth for the South by following Gerald O’Hara from colonial Ireland, from which he fled after murdering an Anglo-Irish landlord, to the Old South where he lords over a slaveholding plantation that replicates the very colonial power structures that forced his exile. And in The Mind of the South (1941), cultural historian W. J. Cash echoes these transatlantic literary parallels when he ‘account[s] for the [Southern] ruling class’ by imagining what he calls ‘a concrete case’ – ‘A stout young Irishman [who brings] his bride into the Carolina upcountry about 1800’. When this transplanted ‘backcountry Irishman’ dies, he leaves ‘two-thousand acres, a hundred and fourteen slaves, and four cotton gins’ and is remembered as a ‘gentleman of the old school’ and ‘a noble specimen of chivalry at its best’ (Cash 1941: 15). Given this longstanding cross-cultural dialogue, we might find less surprising the fact that, while attending the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s, Eudora Welty nursed homesickness for Mississippi by immersing herself in Yeats, her reading of whom became ‘an end in itself, a compensation for the alienation she felt in Madison’ (Marrs 2005: 23). Or that in 1960, Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen visited a Civil War battlefield on the advice of her friend Welty, and there found a fellow Bowen among the fallen Confederate generals: ‘I went back to the Memorial museum to see his portrait. Fair, like my father’s family, youngish, intent, candid, he returned my gaze: I considered

Introduction: Sham Grandeurs, Sham Chivalries

[5

I knew him’ (Bowen 1960: 73). So, although Anglo-Irish novelist Edith Somerville, after accepting an invitation from South Carolina to ride with the ‘Aiken hunt’, concluded in The States through Irish Eyes (1930) that she preferred her own West Carbery hunt to its Southern equivalent – for many writers on both sides of the Atlantic the distance – cultural if not geographical – between these two landscapes of privilege seemed short indeed. Such meditations, moreover, are not limited to cross-cultural conversations between literary artists. In the figure of Mr Thomas Conolly, mid-Victorian MP, master of Castletown House in County Kildare, and gun-runner for the Confederacy, we find a historical codicil to the transatlantic literary dialogue I sketch above. With fellow Confederate sympathisers Lord Charlemont of Roxborough Castle, Co. Tyrone, and John Palliser of Annestown, Co. Waterford, Conolly shared the (dubious) distinction of having participated in the last blockaderunning expedition to reach the Southern states; when he debarked in 1864 to explore ‘Dixie’ as it fell around him, Conolly also became one of the Confederate South’s last ‘tourists’. In his introduction to Conolly’s travel diary, Nelson Lankford attempts to explain ‘why this leading member of the Victorian gentry of Ireland chose to endure hardship and risk capture, or worse’ for the Confederacy (Conolly 1988: 3). Although Lankford never directly answers this question, the diary itself reveals several compelling reasons. First, Conolly seems to have recognised his own aristocratic culture mirrored in what he termed the ‘Great Cause of the South’: a landed class, relatively new to the status of ‘nobility’, which sought to distinguish itself, both politically and culturally, from a dominant, centralised government. Conolly’s great-great-grandfather, the son of a publican in Co. Donegal, was determined to surpass his father in social position. To this end, he studied law, eventually making his fortune after the Battle of the Boyne through ‘shrewd dealings in confiscated estates’. Thriving in the Protestant domination of all aspects of early eighteenth-century Irish life, this first Conolly amassed enough wealth to commission Florentine architect Alessandro Galilei to design Castletown House, the ‘first great palladian country house in Ireland, the largest private home in the nation, and a source of wonder and comment to the members of the Ascendancy elite who were entertained under its roof’ (Conolly 1988: 5). By the time our Conolly inherited Castletown House, the family had been ‘aristocratic’ long enough that it took this status for granted. Others, however, were quick to assert that ‘Irish gentry’ was not the

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same as the English equivalent; as W. J. McCormack observes, although ‘British nobility included many who could not trace their titled line further back than a few generations’, in British attitudes towards Irish nobility one finds that ‘superiority of the old aristocracy over the new was a familiar theme’ (McCormack 1985: 56). Such attitudes permeated rumours about a certain Anglo-Irish blockade runner: although Conolly’s plans were supposedly confidential, the Irish gentleman’s exploits were a topic of speculative discussion: A rumor difficult to credit, but from the manner in which it is put forward, still harder to refute, has reached us, to the effect that an MP, of large fortune and commensurate eccentricity, is about to seek a new excitement in ‘running the blockade.’ The motive impulse is, of course, sympathy with the Southern cause; but it would seem that although of aces broad, he is not entirely blind to the commercial advantages of the operation . . . Need it be added that the gallant, adventurous, loquacious MP is a native of the sister isle? (Qtd in Conolly 1988: 11)

This characterisation of the Irish peerage as eccentric and avaricious is fairly typical, and although Conolly – whose ungrammatical diary records debauched exploits and excessive drinking – may have fitted the bill, one cannot help noting condescension here. Touring the South, however, Conolly seems to have sought out and found like-minded eccentrics in whose gregarious hospitality he luxuriated – even though that hospitality was offered against the chaotic backdrop of war. Although Conolly spent minimal time discussing the merits of the Southern cause – being too busy gorging on alcohol and food in the company of soon-to-be vanquished Virginia planters – on several occasions he conversed with Southerners who drew parallels between the South’s ‘peculiar institution’ and the ‘Paddy’ question. The Confederate captain who delivered Conolly to North Carolina, Captain Maffit, was born in Ireland and raised in a Protestant Irish family. His observations about the ‘Irish’, recorded by Conolly on 24 February 1864, underscore some less-than-chivalrous reasons Conolly might have supported the Confederacy: ‘spent evening in Captain Maffit’s room his opinion of the Irish & his idea of treating them “Give Paddy once an idea of your Justice & then you may treat him as unjustly as you please” ’ (Conolly 1988: 22). Although he does not comment upon whether he agrees with Maffit’s supremacist solution to the ‘Irish question’, that he records the conversation at all indicates some interest.

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In Richmond, Conolly met the infamous George Fitzhugh, author of such supremacist tracts as Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (1854) and Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (1857). He refers to the writer affectionately as ‘old Fitzhugh’, calling him ‘a real thoroughgoing Tory for Established Church & ranks & orders “on principle” ’ and observing that This dreadful crisis has opened many mens eyes to the value of stable governments & strong checks upon the wicked nature of man – His discourse on the sound Public opinion & moral character of the South. Promises me a Copy of his Book – Fine old man! (Conolly 1988: 45)

Between Maffit and Fitzhugh, Conolly received colourful lessons in cross-cultural racism and supremacy – an education augmented by visits to several (barely) antebellum estates. In his introduction to Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers Grady McWhiney observes that a ‘carelessness about moneymaking and financial affairs as well as a strong commitment to the leisurely enjoyment of life characterized both Celts and Southerners and set them apart from most Englishmen and Northerners.’ As evidence, McWhiney cites one week’s entertainment, which included copious amounts of meat and wine, ‘uproarious’ company at the mansion, ‘strong steeds racing’ and ‘the loud cry of the chase on the misty hills’. ‘This might have been a report on a party hosted by an antebellum Southern planter’, McWhiney observes, but is instead a record ‘of how Daniel O’Callaghen of County Cork, one of Ireland’s “big house” gentry, entertained in the eighteenth century’ (McWhiney 2002: 8). Conolly certainly seems to have felt at home in antebellum plantation culture. He visited Claremont Manor, the Virginia plantation of Major Allen, who, because of his tendency for overindulgence, ‘would have been a perfect companion for Conolly’ (Conolly 1988: 50 n.). On the estate of his host, whom Conolly described as a ‘Fine old Virginia family great planter and owner of 600 negroes before the war’ the Irish lord was delighted to find another transplant from the old country: a landscape gardener who had previously worked the gardens of one of the few Irish estates which rivalled Conolly’s own in size and opulence: ‘met an Irish gardener from Castle Coole, one Boone, . . . & enjoy a short chat with him!’ (ibid.: 50). Conolly’s diary, then, directly affirms Takaki’s observation that ‘the conquest of Ireland and the settlement of Virginia were bound . . . closely together’: even as late as 1845, the

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‘formal gardens’ ornamenting these kindred aristocracies were being maintained by the same gardeners (Takaki 1992: 895). As these multiple examples demonstrate, connections between Ireland and the American South have long been mobilised by colonial strategists, Confederate aficionados, abolitionists, cultural historians and literary figures interested in exploring and in some cases exploiting real and perceived affinities between two ‘nations’ that, as Quinlan observes, ‘have long been the “problem,” if also frequently romanticized regions, of otherwise “progressive” nations’ (Quinlan 2005: 4). Certainly we see in these cross-cultural identifications a mutual recognition of peripheral status, coupled with the persistent romantic draw of the ‘vanquished’ culture; but I submit that these examples reveal the prominence of a much more specific cultural and aesthetic affinity. One extremely potent and persistent area of transatlantic identification between Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern writers has been the problem of supremacy: in the multiple examples I detail above, we see the concept of aristocracy – its establishment, maintenance, persistence, decay and disappearance – mobilised as a central, ideologically mutable motif. Although this cross-cultural Anglo-Irish / Anglo-Southern meditation on the aesthetics of aristocracy began in the early nineteenth century, the following dramatic example from the modernist period illuminates this study’s larger focus. W. B. Yeats begins his sevenpoem lyric sequence ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ with the poem ‘Ancestral Houses’,’ in which the speaker imagines how violence and artistry merged to create the signature icon of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland: the ‘ancestral’ manor house and grounds: Some violent bitter man, some powerful man Called architect and artist in, that they, Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone The sweetness that all longed for night and day, The gentleness none there had ever known . . . (I:17–21)

After imagining this origin scene – in which the ‘flowering lawns’, ‘bronze and marble’ of eighteenth-century architecture soothe the savage beast of colonial violence – the speaker meditates on whether an architectural beauty designed to showcase imperial power is in fact the root cause of cultural decay: What if the glory of escutcheoned doors, And buildings that a haughtier age designed,

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. . . What if those things the greatest of mankind Consider most to magnify, or to bless, But take our greatness with our bitterness. (I:33–4, 38–40)

The original ‘bitter man’, who hires architect and artist to cover over a history of violent land acquisition with the ‘levelled lawns and gravelled ways’ of aristocratic privilege, was at least a virile founder; his ancestors – lazy recipients of ‘inherited glory’ – lack this dynamic admixture of violence and desire. The architectural ‘sweetness’ and ‘gentleness’ which pampered subsequent generations seems to have taken their masculinity, too, along with their ‘greatness’: ‘maybe the great-grandson of that house, / For all its bronze and marble, ’s but a mouse’ (I:23–4). Yeats’s sequence therefore begins with an inquiry into the (gendered) aesthetics of imperialism, finally conceding that the ‘design’ of cultural supremacy, to use a Faulknerian term, is both energised and contaminated by the violence and beauty at its core. This inquiry, broadly sketched for the purposes of my argument, might as aptly describe the meditations on supremacy, artifice, and androgyny that structure William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. For the story of Yeats’s ‘violent, bitter man’ is also the story of Thomas Sutpen, the ‘demon’ at Absalom’s core, a man of uncertain origins who, in 1833, brings his own architect and artist onto 100 acres of land dubiously acquired (‘land which he took from ignorant Indians, nobody knows how’) to fashion there a majestic edifice capable of ‘concealing him behind respectability’ (Faulkner 1990: 10): He returned, again without warning and accompanied this time by the covered wagon with a negro driving it and on the seat with the negro a small, alertly resigned man with a grim, harried Latin face, in a frock coat and a flowered waistcoat and a hat which would have created no furore on a Paris boulevard, all of which he was to wear constantly for the next two years – the sombrely theatrical clothing and the expression of amazed and fatalistic determination – while his white client and the negro crew which he was to advise though not direct went stark naked save for a coating of mud. This was the French architect. (Ibid.: 26)

Of course, readers familiar with Absalom know that Sutpen is a character associated with violence from the novel’s first pages: It seems that this demon – his name was Sutpen – (Colonel Sutpen) – Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon

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the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation – (Tore violently a plantation, Miss Rosa says) – tore violently. (Ibid.: 5; italics original)

More importantly, though, Faulkner’s initial descriptions of Sutpen’s violent ‘rearing in stone’ of his plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred, seem to consciously echo Yeats’s poem. First, Faulkner employs a similar repetition of ‘bitter’: the architect in his formal coat and his Paris hat and his expression of grim and embittered amazement lurked about the environs of the scene with his air something between a casual and bitter disinterested spectator and a condemned and conscientious ghost. (Ibid.: 28; italics added)

But in case readers missed the parallel between Yeats’s violent founder and Faulkner’s own ‘begetter’ of ‘formal gardens and promenades’ (ibid.: 29), we are offered another Yeatsian echo: But he was a good architect; Quentin knew the house, twelve miles from Jefferson, in its grove of cedar and oak, seventy-five years after it was finished. And not only an architect, General Compson said, but an artist since only an artist could have borne those two years in order to build a house which he doubtless not only expected but firmly intended never to see again . . . only an artist could have borne Sutpen’s ruthlessness and hurry and still manage to curb the dream of grim and castlelike magnificence at which Sutpen obviously aimed, since the place as Sutpen planned it would have been almost as large as Jefferson itself at the time . . . (Ibid.: 29)

Once the plantation’s structural features are in place, the ‘architect and artist’ leaves Sutpen in his ‘spartan shell of the largest edifice in the country . . . without any feminized softness of windowpane or door or mattress’, where he camps ‘in the naked rooms of his embryonic formal opulence’ until the time is right to court, marry, and reproduce with the woman of a well-connected family (ibid.: 30). Sutpen’s ‘design’, of course, as Faulkner’s language not-so-subtly implies, depends on progeny. Yet none of the children Sutpen raises in the formal opulence which argues his supremacy – the effeminate Henry, the masculine Judith, the enslaved Clytemnestra – are, in the end, fit inheritors. In both Yeats’s ‘Ancestral Houses’ and Faulkner’s Absalom, then, the architect and his designs represent a crucial

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ideological and aesthetic question: is the architectural artifice designed to argue cultural supremacy laced with a fatal effeminacy which will eventually lead to dissipation and ruin? In his essay ‘William Faulkner and W.B. Yeats’ Cleanth Brooks argues that ‘a fruitful comparison of Yeats and Faulkner must proceed from a recognition of the general parallels between the provincial cultures that nourished the genius of both men’ (Brooks 1978: 332). As I hope the juxtaposition above demonstrates, Faulkner himself seems to have recognised such general parallels: in his ‘ruthless’ planter and his deviant progeny, we see writ large the very anxieties over colonial violence, ancestral inheritance and sexual decadence that energise Yeats’s meditation on the historical roots of Irish unrest. Brooks, suspicious of literary arguments rooted in mere biography, prefers not to dwell upon the fact that ‘Yeats very early became Faulkner’s favorite poet’, maintaining that his inquiry into cultural parallels between Ireland and the South cannot benefit from attendant inquiries into ‘Faulkner’s reading of Yeats or any attempt on his part to imitate his poetry’ (ibid.: 332). But it is precisely such biographical and cultural convergences that comprise the present volume’s main critical focus. The following chapters present numerous and varied examples which together demonstrate that writers in Anglo-Irish and AngloSouthern literary traditions recognised and spoke to each other through the discourse of aristocracy. Tracing ideological and aesthetic connections between the literary traditions of the Anglo-American South and Protestant Ireland from the early nineteenth century through the modernist period, this study argues that in the elaborate, often desperate, aristocratic aesthetics of an ‘other’ across the Atlantic, Irish and Southern writers have long seen reflected the careful selfaetheticisations of their own cultures. We see one such recognition in the ‘violent men’ of Yeats’s ‘Ancestral Houses’ and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, but this longstanding dialogue is made all the more evident by a common narrative focus, starting in the post-revolutionary atmosphere of the early nineteenth century, on the question ‘what makes a gentleman?’ – and, equally importantly, on the literary figure lurking in the landscape of aristocracy who offers one answer. The present volume traces ideological and aesthetic connections between these two traditions, arguing that from the early nineteenth century onwards, Irish and Anglo-Southern writers conducted a sustained exploration into constructions of aristocracy through the figure of the dissipated, deviant gentleman (or lady): the dandy.

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The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the Southern aristocracy were peripheral landed gentries perceived from without as elaborate shams – ‘invented’ aristocracies, marginal to their national cultures, in which claims to gentle birth were reaffirmed through carefully orchestrated self-aestheticisations and performances. When the dandy figure emerged on the scene during England’s Regency period, he must have seemed uncomfortably familiar to such selfmade aristocrats, for from the beginning the dandy was recognised as a non-aristocratic man who gained access to upper-class circles through artifice, arrogance and a meticulous attention to fashion and manners. In Victoria’s reign, however, ‘dandyism’ came to connote a suspicious effeminacy, and after Oscar Wilde was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1895, the term became indelibly linked to (homo)sexual pathology. Over the course of the nineteenth century, therefore, the dandy’s connotations changed: this once-refined apologist for aristocracy developed into an overdetermined embodiment of cultural disintegration. But, as the following chapters will demonstrate, in the literature of Anglo-Ireland and the American South – two traditions in which the pose of gentility has been cultivated and critiqued with equal intensity – the dandy figure has been used as a blurred embodiment of both upper-class hegemony and gentry disintegration, retaining his original, ambiguous role as master of what I term ‘aristocratic drag’ well into the twentieth century. Flamboyant demonstrations of gentility – the dandy’s signature combination of mastery, effeminacy and artifice – become a central focus in the aristocratic landscapes of what I argue should be read as analogous literary genres: the southern ‘plantation novel’ and the Irish ‘Big House novel’. The dandy figure is a central player in the two novels credited with beginning these traditions: Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) is a novel plagued by dissipated, in some cases foppish gentlemen unable to secure a family line, and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) directly identifies in ‘the dandy, Singleton Swansdown’ those effeminate proclivities the Southern planter must avoid to retain his cultural supremacy. By engaging broadly with the phrase ‘architectures of aristocracy’, this book argues that the dandy figure, whose cultivated gentility masked a destructive modernity, fascinated writers in these parallel literary traditions from their inception at the start of the nineteenth century through the modernist period. Although in these earlier novels the dandy figure is deployed as a cautionary

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device, his sustained presence in both literary landscapes alerts us to the fact that from the beginning these literary traditions shared a fascination with causal connections between imperial performance and sexual deviance. Because the Southern aristocracy and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy fell into decline at roughly the same time – between the 1860s and the 1930s – novels which explore seats of power in all their ambivalence are especially fascinating as comparable, aestheticised anatomies of ruin. The chapters that follow trace the ideological and aesthetic connections between the literary traditions of Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-American South to illuminate a generic parallel: Ireland and the South have served as fertile incubators for regional gothic traditions whose evocations of ‘horror’ are steeped in the nightmare of (neo)colonial history. Because this nightmare regularly unfolds against the architecture of aristocracy, writers in both traditions cast the plantation, the architectural embodiment of cultural supremacy, as the appropriate site for the representation of decline and ruin – the gothic landscape in which class and racial tension, coupled with aristocratic decline, threaten the social order. David Lloyd’s often-cited classification of Ireland as an ‘anomalous state’ experiencing a ‘crisis of representation’ also applies to the ‘states’ of the American South, where narratives of social reconciliation depicting an individual’s integration into a stable moral and intellectual community (what Vera Kreilkamp calls ‘the ur-plot of the classic European or English novel’ [Kreilkamp 1998: 4]), are subverted by artists representing – through the figure of the dissipated aristocrat-dandy – a state in ideological (and moral) crisis. Each writer I address in this study – Maria Edgeworth, John Pendleton Kennedy, Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Anne Porter – look to the dandy figure as an ideal trope through which to explicate the artifice of aristocracy. In recent years, scholars have begun to identify and attend to the long and varied history of transatlantic exchange between Ireland and the South, with critical approaches as multifaceted and equivocal as the source texts that inspired them. Postcolonial and cultural studies critics have carefully documented the persistent and damaging history of political caricature, in both Great Britain and America, which forged racist representational parallels between Irish Catholics and African Americans.2 These parallels could be mobilised in multiple ways, however; critics Tracy Mishkin and George Bornstein, to some extent following the lead of Claude McKay’s 1921 essay ‘How Black

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Sees Green and Red’, have painstakingly traced the multiple ways in which African-American and Irish writers themselves identified productive political equivalencies between their respective cultural situations.3 Historians of Irish-American history, including Dennis Clark, David Gleeson and Kerby Miller, have meticulously researched over three centuries of emigration patterns between Scotland, Ireland and the American South, demonstrating the richness and complexity of this cultural exchange.4 Their project differs from the ‘Celtic South’ thesis forwarded by cultural historian Grady McWhiney, who, in Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South and the introduction to Confederate Crackers and Cavaliers, argues that distinct regional particularities distinguish southern cultures from their northern counterparts. The North, his thesis maintains, was settled by AngloSaxons, while the South was the destination of the Celtic fringe: the Welsh, Scots and Irish settlers responsible for a distinct ‘cracker culture’ in the American South. By implication, then, McWhiney recasts the American Civil War as yet another in a long history of Irish bids for independence from England. This broadly essentialist ‘Celtic South’ argument has been controversial: although many historians have responded to McWhiney’s work with cautious optimism, still others have attacked the thesis as an entirely spurious fantasy of hyperbole . . . The imputation of some wild élan to the South, linked by the most illusory supposition to the Celts of pre-Roman Europe, is a historical confection surpassing that of the magnolia-drenched plantation fantasies of cheap Southern novels. (Clark 1986: 106)

Yet in a sense, what Clark terms the ‘historical confection’ of cultural affinity is precisely what other scholars, myself included, have found most fascinating about the connections Irish and Southern writers have themselves drawn between these two fantasy-drenched locales. In the latest contribution to a clearly evolving field of inquiry, Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South (2005), Kieran Quinlan culls together countless instances of the bonds, both historical and fantastical, which have long linked Ireland and the South. In this wide-ranging example of Irish-American cultural studies, which seeks to contextualise 200 years of writing on this cultural exchange – political, epistolary, autobiographical, literary, popular – Quinlan pays close (if necessarily fleeting) attention to the

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many different ways in which Ireland figures into the Southern drama: as a country from which a not-insignificant component of the southern population originated; as a land with a strikingly similar historical experience of defeat, poverty, and dispossession; and, finally at least in the Anglophone world, as a culture that has clear resemblances with that of the American South, not least because of the remarkable twentieth-century literary achievements of both unlikely places. (Quinlan 2005: 4)

Quinlan’s study has three purposes: to document the narratives of Irish emigrants to South who identified there ‘profound similarities between the two places’; to explore the similarity of historical and cultural experience in regions marginal to the predominant ethos of larger societies; and finally to use these meditations as a springboard for the broad ideological questions about ‘identity, race, culture, colonialism and postcolonialism, and prejudice that are of current and ongoing concern’ in both locations (ibid.: 15). Quinlan’s study, therefore, fuses the historical, cultural and literary approaches of previous Irish-Southern inquiries to offer a comprehensive overview of this ambivalent transatlantic conversation. The critical trajectory for Irish-Southern studies mapped out above traces an ever-widening circle, and scholars might plausibly conclude that little remains to be said on the topic. As is often the case, however, after the initial work of establishing the existence of a cross-cultural dialogue is complete, a second stage of inquiry can begin: one which lingers longer over the particular contours of allusions, echoes and affinities. For example, in a chapter attending to broad connections between Irish and Southern renaissances, Quinlan only briefly observes, One might want to note how wonderfully like the career of Thomas Sutpen in pursuit of his ‘design’ and his commandeering of a French architect to assist him is Yeats’s description of ‘some powerful man’ who built his Irish estate in the eighteenth century (possibly using one of the Palladian pattern books so common at the time in England, Ireland, and Virginia). (Ibid.: 225)

Yet as I hope the above comparative reading demonstrates, the thematic and aesthetic complexities of such a notation are most fruitfully apprehended in the specific context of an Irish–Southern meditation on the artifice of aristocracy.

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The softness of the Southern climates produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or passionate rather than preserving effort. E. E. Hale, ‘Northern Invasions’ The notion of an aristocracy in Ireland was bedeviled by an acute consciousness of lapses from the ideal. W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History

The terms ‘aristocracy’ and ‘ascendancy’, used in the context of these closely identified ruling classes, are always in danger of being understood ironically. This is because from the first both were considered to be bastardised ruling classes, in ascendancy only by virtue of money and a forged sense of grandeur. In the nineteenth-century United States, comparisons between the Southern planter class and earlier European examples of landowning aristocracies were used polemically by Southerners and Northerners alike. Particularly after the Civil War, when nostalgia for the Old South flourished in Southern writing, ‘aristocracy’ became a combative word. The trumped-up notion of an extensive aristocratic landed gentry in the Old South reaffirmed that the South had been (and could again be) a genteel, refined society. The 1877 Atlantic Monthly article ‘South Carolina Society’ provides an illustrative example: The planters soon constituted a regular landed gentry. They resided on their estates, erected imposing mansions, kept fine dogs and horses, and hunted over their vast demesnes, on which game abounded, especially foxes and deer, in the true style of English noblemen and squires. (Atlantic Monthly 1877: 671)

However, the idea that the South was ruled by an ‘aristocracy’ was as often interpreted negatively; anti-slavery critiques cast the South as an undemocratic, backward, decadent, effeminate and immoral society. In 1864, E. E. Hale juxtaposed effeminate Southerners with northern models of vigorous manhood: The softness of the Southern climates produces, in the long run, gentleness, effeminacy, and indolence, or passionate rather than preserving effort. It produces, again, the palliatives or disguises of these traits which

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are found in formal religions, and in institutions of caste or slavery. The rigor of Northern climates produces, on the other hand, in the long run, hardy physical conditions among men, with determined individuality of character. (Hale 1864: 245)

This northern critique of the southern character inverted and weakened an earlier, dominant southern discourse which equated chivalry with vital masculinity. The word ‘aristocracy’, when applied to the protestant ruling class of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, was similarly polarised on either side of the Irish channel. In Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History, W. J. McCormack tracks the etymological and ideological shift, at the end of the eighteenth century, from ‘aristocracy’ to ‘ascendancy’ in reference to the Irish Protestant landholding elite, arguing that for two distinct reasons, the term ‘aristocracy’ was a loaded one in an eighteenth-century Irish context. First, as I have already briefly noted, Irish ‘nobility’ was not considered as noble as its English equivalent, in part because of ‘the extensive use of the [Irish] peerage as a form of political patronage’ which served to highlight ‘Ireland’s accessibility to the English administration in matters of rewards for services rendered’ (McCormack 1985: 59). Second, the notion of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy was complicated and challenged by the presence of a displaced Gaelic aristocracy – both on the Continent and in Ireland – that gave the lie to the aristocratic pretensions of this settler-colonial culture. ‘For many reasons, therefore’, McCormack writes, ‘we hear little of a positive nature about Irish aristocracy as such . . . The term had imploded into a functionless vacuum or was otherwise deprived of any power to impress’ (ibid.: 60). The appellation ‘ascendancy’, however, a term born out of a late eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish desire to consolidate Irish power while maintaining a colonial status quo, more aptly characterises the supremacist, anti-native impulse behind the construction of a protestant gentry class in Ireland. The coinage of the term at the end of the eighteenth century depends upon the precarious political status of the newly established (1782) and semi-independent Irish parliament. As McCormack notes, By the end of 1791 the British government were resolved on a relaxation of the penal laws in Ireland. The relative independence of the Dublin parliament together with the complexity of any negotiation with the Irish establishment presented a considerable obstacle to their intentions. . . .

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Emphasizing the importance of conceding this reform to achieve harmony between the two kingdoms, [the English parliament] made it plain that Irish Protestant resistance . . . would only serve to isolate them. (Ibid.: 68)

Lord Westmoreland, then lord-lieutenant of Dublin Castle, responded by asserting an inherent supremacist power in Ireland: ‘he stressed the strength of the “Protestant gentry”, of the “Protestant interest”, and, bluntly, “Protestant power” ’ (ibid.: 68). He then communicated with ‘the principle persons of the Irish cabinet’ and used the term ‘ascendancy’ to argue that a relaxation of the penal laws would ensure ‘the Ruin of the Protestant Ascendancy of the Peace & Quiet of the Country’. Another letter maintained that ‘The connection between England and Ireland rests absolutely upon the Protestant Ascendancy. Abolish distinctions, and you create a Catholic superiority. If you are to maintain a Protestant Ascendancy, it must be by substituting influence for numbers’ (ibid.: 69). To further inflame hysteria, Westmoreland mentioned that ‘the lower Catholics already talk of their ancient family estates’ (ibid.: 70). Therefore, although the reactionary notions of supremacy and power that underlie the Anglo-Irish settler-colonial culture were in place well before 1792, it was not until the threat of emancipation forced them to define and defend this stance that this collective group redefined themselves as the ‘Ascendancy’ – reflecting, among other things, a doubt that the mere existence of titles and the pose of aristocracy were enough to maintain their cultural positions. The coinage of the term ‘Ascendancy’ was therefore accomplished in the service of ‘an aggressive call to resist the admission of Catholics to citizenship, or it was the doctrine in the name of which such a call was made’ (ibid.: 92). In 1795, Edmund Burke, an Irish Protestant living in England, deconstructed ‘Ascendancy’ as ‘mean[ing] nothing less than an influence obtained by . . . artifice and seduction’ (Burke 1881: 347). Therefore, as early as the late eighteenth century, some regarded the Ascendancy as a power structure forged under false pretenses and propped up by elaborate tricks of the eye – a perception that only intensified with time. Just as the rhetoric of ‘Ascendancy’ failed to seduce Burke, the artifice of the Irish country house did not charm Virginia Woolf, who visited Ireland in 1934. Although she enjoyed Ireland’s natural attractions, describing the wild landscape as a ‘mixture of Greece, Italy, and Cornwall’, her visit to Elizabeth Bowen’s country house was underwhelming:

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One can see, after Bowen’s Court, how ramshackle & half squalid & Irish life is, how empty poverty stricken. There we spent one night . . . & it was all as it should be – pompous & pretentious & imitative & ruined – a great barrack of grey stone, & storeys & basements, like a town house, high empty rooms, & a scattering of Italian plasterwork, marble mantelpieces inlaid with brass & so on . . . everywhere desolation & pretention cracked grand pianos, faked old portraits, stained walls. (Woolf 1977a: 209–10)

Even literary historians have imagined the Ascendancy as ‘faked’ and ‘cracked’; in an introduction to the letters of Anglo-Irish writers Somerville and Ross, Gifford Lewis writes, ‘it is eventually borne in upon the reader that the Anglo-Irish “ascendancy” of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was an enormous confidence trick, shored up by faithful servants and good horsemanship’ (Lewis 1989: xii). It is precisely because both the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the Southern aristocracy were, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, dying cultures that their members were held to increasingly rigid definitions of gentility. The codes that governed their social worlds had to be laid bare so that they could be more easily adhered to and enforced. However, when such codes are so clearly articulated, aristocratic power becomes demystified and therefore vulnerable; class- and/or race-based ascendancy, when exposed as artifice, can no longer claim that its power is a product of natural or moral order. In short, when you make a social code hard and fast, social roles become command performances. The script becomes both more readable and more reproducible – and a greater temptation for rule-breakers and rebels. When racially and/or sexually ‘other’ dandies follow these demystified codes and perform aristocracy themselves, their startling reversals lay bare the artifice of supremacy. Aristocratic Drag Clothes never remain a question of pure aesthetics; far too much personal feeling is involved in them. They play such an important part in the delicate business of getting oneself across that it seems impossible to discuss them, for long, objectively. Elizabeth Bowen, Collected Impressions

To return to our gun-running Anglo-Irish MP, yet another aspect of Tom Conolly’s fascination with the ‘Great Southern Cause’ relevant to

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this study is the nobleman’s excessive admiration for the figure of the Southern gentleman. Returning to his hotel after meeting Jefferson Davis, the soon-to-be-deposed President of the Confederacy, a starstruck Conolly wrote: President Davis is a very remarkable man! His quiet manner & ready easy conversation with his clearly chiseled shave face & gray eye & thin lips aquiline nose mask a man of extraordinary determination. The quiet of his address amounts to mildness & he never by accident lets an uncharitable expression of anybody – his presence is very dignified . . . [He] is in all respects a graceful, spirited gentleman. (Conolly 1988: 47)

This only slightly over-the-top description of Davis’s esteemed character and physique is soon topped, in both admiration and documentation, by Conolly’s even more effusive description of General Robert E. Lee: General commanding the army of Virginia the idol of his soldiers & the Hope of His Country is also the handsomest man in all that constitutes real dignity of man that I ever saw. A large rich intense blue-ish gray eye a beautifully shaped head, a most benign expression, manly healthful complexion, iron gray beard neatly trimmed, a nose slightly aquiline, a small well-shaped mouth, erect with commanding porte & long graceful kneck, solidly embedded in broad manly shoulders & deep chest the whole supported by a lightly muscular frame of more than the average height make together with an easy courteous manner one of the most prepossessing figures that ever bore the weight of command or led the fortunes of a nation. (Ibid.: 52)

Had Conolly spent equal time describing the gracious attributes of the Southern belle, one might not be tempted to linger over these passages. Since he did not do so, however, Conolly’s incisive attention to the regal physiques of Davis and Lee seem indicative of a homosocial fascination with the well-wrought masculine ideal. Such affirmations of gentlemanly perfection, borderline-erotic though they may sound to modern ears, serve a distinct purpose: Conolly here affirms Southern supremacy by affirming the perfection of Southern masculinity. One feels, though, that he protests too much, and in so doing underscores yet another connection between Ireland and the South. Although the question ‘what makes a gentleman’ occupied the imaginations of many late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century

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thinkers, it seems particularly fraught in Anglo-Irish and AngloSouthern literature; fear of an aristocracy open to the merely beautiful and stylish infects the vision of conservative supremacy. Early nineteenth-century writers in these two traditions remained anxious about the fallacies inherent in acts of cultural creation, and their narratives, fixated upon cultural creations of aristocratic identity in regions with no clear claims to nobility – betray this anxiety. To write about options available to aristocratic cultures caught between two distinct political identities – ruling over an underclass and being themselves ruled by a hostile central government structure – AngloIrish and Southern writers focused upon the figure of the decadent aristocrat: the indecisive, languid, effeminate embodiment of precisely those aristocratic qualities in need of reining in and refurbishment. The distinctive Anglo-Irish quality Elizabeth Bowen classified as an ‘undertow of the showy’ (Bowen 1951: 23) becomes both ornamental and instrumental in this transatlantic literary tradition. The contested grounds of the plantation are in both traditions haunted by a ‘trickster’ figure: the dandy. From Regency England through the finde-siècle and modernist periods, the dandy registers both aristocratic pretensions and aristocracy’s slow but inevitable decay. The OED records that the word ‘dandyism’ entered the English language in 1819, via Blackwood’s Magazine, as a word signifying affectation of dress to approximate aristocratic leisure and affluence. The word ‘dandy’, however, has a longer history: Far from its native soil, the word appeared in a setting which suggests that from the beginning, dandy had the power to fascinate, to puzzle, to travel, to persist and to figure in an ambiguous social situation in a revolutionary climate. At least as early as the seventeen-seventies the word was being sung throughout the American colonies in the phrase Yankee Doodle Dandy. (Moers 1960: 11; italics original)

This useful etymology begins Ellen Moers’ groundbreaking study of dandyism as an intellectual and artistic movement: The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (1960). Moers traces dandyism’s ‘travels’, from Beau Brummell, the single most influential arbiter of aristocratic style and grace in the Regency period, whose ‘personality . . . established the canons of that vague agglomeration of affectations, aspirations, and negations the nineteenth century called Dandyism’ (ibid.: 17), to Max Beerbohm, the man Moers identifies as the last dandy, who died in exile from England in 1956.

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From Brummell to Beerbohm, and all the dandies in between, Moers attends to dandyism’s central paradox: that a figure so outwardly committed to preserving aristocratic pretension could be the same as the figure in whom Albert Camus found ‘an archetype of the human being in revolt against society’. ‘[The dandy’s] arrogant superiority’, Moers argues, ‘was an affirmation of the aristocratic principle, his way of life an exaltation of aristocratic society; but his terrible independence proclaimed a subversive disregard for the essentials of aristocracy’ (ibid.: 17). One such essential was noble blood; to one of the central ideological questions of the early nineteenth century – What makes a gentleman? – the dandy embodied the most subversive answer of all: ‘He was a gentleman – it was a visible fact – by virtue of a “certain something”, a “je ne sais quoi” which could not be defined – or denied’ (ibid.: 17). Therefore, by reproducing the visual accoutrements of aristocracy, the dandy figure implicitly argued that anyone could become a gentleman. In Le Dandyisme, obligation d’incertitude, Françoise Coblence likewise argues that dandyism emerges as a symptom of and response to early nineteenth-century British and French anxiety over the destruction of royal power, arguing that the dandy, ‘in both literature and history, is the anxious response to a declining aristocracy and the rise of a bourgeoisie’ (qtd in Garelick 1998: 25). Yet although the dandy might therefore seem to be a wholly nostalgic figure, yearning for a traditional, aristocratic past, the very act of yearning signals modernity. As Rhonda Garelick observes, Dandyism may reinvigorate or even improve upon an otherwise waning aristocracy, refashioning it as pure meritocracy, but Baudelaire recognizes that even this brand of elitism is something of a last gasp in a world where aristocracy is stumbling, but democracy has not completely taken over. (Ibid.: 29)

Although Moers’ The Dandy is the first, and still the most comprehensive, exploration of the social world of dandyism, its scope is limited in three ways. First, Moers focuses only on English dandyism, with the exception of her analysis of Wilde (whose Irishness is ignored completely). Second, Moers’ study does not extend beyond the fin de siècle; Max Beerbohm, who lived until 1956, is treated as a relic of the nineteenth century, and Moers does not consider dandyism’s relevance in the world of art and literature beyond 1899. Finally, Moers does not consider the possibility that the discourse of dandyism might

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be available to women. Although she includes a section ambiguously entitled ‘Women’, in it she explores how, in late-Victorian novels, the increasingly effeminate male dandy was consistently cast as foil to increasingly masculine women, ‘the newer the better’ (Moers 1960: 311–12). Recent scholarly studies have attempted to pick up where Moers suggestively left off, extending the boundaries of dandyism to include geographical and psychic landscapes outside the English nineteenth century, in addition to female as well as male incarnations of the dandy figure. Such inquiries into the dandy figure’s multiple manifestations complicate our understanding of dandyism as the exclusive domain of Western European men-about-town, introducing ‘dandies from other places, and female as well as male manifestations of dandyism’ (FillinYeh 2001: 3). Jessica Feldman’s Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (1993), argues that when literary critics ‘fix dandyism’s temporal center in nineteenth-century London or Paris’, they miss dandyism’s core message: ‘an expression of anti-essentialism’ (Feldman 1993: 8); Feldman locates this expression not in the dandy’s traditional European stomping grounds, but rather in the unexpected landscape of American literary modernism. Rhonda Garelick extends her exploration of a symbiotic relationship between the dandy and the actress into twentieth-century pop culture. And although she does not address the dandy figure directly, in Streetwalking the Metropolis (2000), Deborah Parsons traces a recurring literary figure, the flaneuse, through modernist fiction about war-torn cities, arguing that this ‘urban observer’ must be considered separately from her more frequently theorised counterpart, the flaneur. In Gender on the Divide, Feldman distinguishes between what she terms ‘centralized’ and ‘decentralized’ versions of dandyism. The first adheres to formal definitions of the dandy established in the first decades of the English Regency period and then quickly exported to France. These early nineteenth-century French and English manifestations of dandyism set the aesthetic and ideological terms by which we still recognise the dandy figure: The dandy is . . . artificial in dress and deportment, always elegant, often theatrical. He creates ‘la mode,’ style itself. He requires an audience in order to display his hauteur, his very distance from that audience. Aloof, impassive, vain, the dandy has a defensive air of superiority that shades into the aggression of impertinence and cruelty. . . . A man, he pursues an ideal of charm and personal beauty which the dominant culture,

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against which he poses himself, labels feminine. He roams, occasionally, among the capitals of Europe or takes a trip to the Orient. (Feldman 1993: 3)

This ‘traditional’ description of the dandy figure – one which would aptly describe figures like Beau Brummel, Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde – gives way when we consider the dandy ‘decentralised’. Cut loose from the conservative moorings of what one might ironically term ‘conventional’ dandyism, the dandy becomes ‘predictably much vaguer, less a product of any particular time or place’, ultimately identifiable, for Feldman, as ‘neither spirit nor flesh, nature nor artifice, ethical nor aesthetic, active nor passive, male nor female. He is the figure who casts into doubt, even while he underscores, the very binary oppositions by which his culture lives’ (ibid.: 4). Although here, the all-encompassing negation of Feldman’s definition risks meaninglessness, her distinction between a dandyism rooted in the Regency period and a dandyism amorphously ‘abroad’ nonetheless helps me to clarify how my own study uses the dandy figure as a transatlantic harbinger of aristocracy’s inevitable decline. As the following chapters will demonstrate, the dandy figure travelled further than England and France, gaining purchase in the cultural imaginations of Anglo-Ireland and the American South, where writers capitalised upon the (sexually, racially) ambiguous dandy’s performance of gentility and the challenge that performance posed to aristocratic claims of genetic exclusivity. My first chapter initiates this study’s Anglo-Irish / Anglo-Southern literary comparison by introducing dandyism in its nascent form and then arguing that in two texts identified as ‘foundational’ in the Irish ‘big house’ and southern plantation novel traditions, Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), the dandy figure’s cultural and sexual decadence threatens colonial aristocracy. These writers’ common admiration for Edmund Burke’s conservative political philosophies influenced their didactic aesthetics in opposite but complementary ways. Edgeworth’s gothic family chronicle imagines the breakdown of eighteenth-century Irish Protestant hegemony in order to make a larger point about what would constitute a successful dissemination and maintenance of Anglo-Irish order. Kennedy’s opposite formal choice is to depict an idyllic South whose cultural authority is firm. Writing at moments when their respective aristocratic cultures are beginning to show clear signs of economic, political and moral

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rupture, these writers present hyperfantastic visions of aristocratic hegemony or lack thereof – arguing for what has been and could be, rather than what is. Neither Edgeworth’s gothic nor Kennedy’s pastoral landscape, however, is able to keep out the dandy: in both novels, gentlemanly overrefinement threatens to feminise and weaken already-surrounded aristocracies from within. Assessing the long-term literary influence of Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, McCormack argues that the potent Gothicism of the ‘Rackrent genealogy’ rooted itself firmly in the Anglo-Irish literary imagination, ‘where marital introversion and endangered succession will come to provide a potent theme for Anglo-Irish modernism’ (McCormack 1985: 110). As my second chapter implicitly demonstrates, these same themes of introversion and threatened patrimony likewise dominated Anglo-Southern modernism. By the time Oscar Wilde visited the South on his 1882 lecture tour, both Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-South were in progressive states of ruin. The second chapter in this study demonstrates that Wilde’s trip through the ‘ruined’ South reinforced the artist’s nascent preoccupation with the relationship between beauty and decay, a preoccupation which informed his most iconic creation, Dorian Gray: the gothic aristocrat in whom physical corruption and aestheticism merge. I therefore read Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) as a novel whose gothicism was in part born of the same aesthetics of ruin as William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! By first directly invoking ‘the Irish poet, Wilde’, and then reworking the temptation scene from Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Faulkner casts the dandy as a culturally percieved moster who registers the threat that miscegenation and deviant sexuality pose to the postbellum South. Through a series of close historical and textual readings, I show that in Wildean dandyism (as expressed through both Wilde’s self-aetheticisation and his prose) Faulkner recognised a model through which to identify and critique the multiple and fraught performances of Southern aristocracy. Echoing Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex, Ellen Moers has called dandies ‘the androgynes of history’, figures strengthened and distinguished by their sexual ambivalence: ‘In the dandy’s mysterious blend of feminine elegance and masculine power [lies] the archetypal decadence’ (Moers 1960: 264). In her discussion of Baudelaire, Moers translates a passage in which the artist, who more typically sees ‘woman’ as ‘a terrible divinity with nothing to say, stupid as an idol’, grudgingly concedes one positive attribute to the female sex: ‘Her crinolines, her scarves, her heavy jewels, her rouge . . . Indeed,

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artifice is the one sublimity of her animal nature’ (qtd ibid.: 280). However peripheral Baudelaire imagines women to be, in describing their ‘sublime artifice’ (imagined as upper-class artifice) he is compelled to admit that artifice, dandyism’s defining characteristic, is the ‘natural’ state of femininity. Dandyism is a nostalgic discourse which constructs the ‘feminine’ as that which is yearned for, and the ‘masculine’ as he who yearns. Therefore, the ‘nostalgia paradigm’, as Rita Felski terms the gendered dynamics of temporal and national longing, is extremely limited: ‘In conceiving of the feminine as a self-contained plentitude outside social and symbolic mediation, the nostalgia paradigm cannot begin to address the complex and multifaceted nature of women’s involvement in and negotiations with different aspects of modern culture’ (Felski 1995: 56). In this study’s third chapter, I demonstrate that dandyism is not exclusively masculine; the dandy figure can also illuminate how feminine artifice is called upon to project the illusion of cultural hegemony, and how modern women either rise to or resist that call. The figure of the female dandy, an ambivalent embodiment of cultural yearning, complicates our understanding of the nostalgia paradigm: she is both the fetishised icon of national heritage and a critical incarnation of nostalgia’s gendered limitations. In The Last September (1929) and Old Mortality (1939), Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Anne Porter present readers with female protagonists taught to emulate the gendered poses and manners of their dying aristocratic cultures, and who are thus made acutely aware of the theatrical natures of both femininity and nationality. Each finds that her desire for modern sexual and intellectual freedoms conflicts with her loyalty to a culture in dire need of preservation. Through their ambivalently modern heroines, Bowen and Porter are able to at once deconstruct the artifice of femininity and reaffirm the pervasiveness, applicability and ultimate necessity of such artifice in the nostalgic (pseudo)aristocratic cultures of Ireland and the American South. This chapter also conducts an analysis of each writer’s equally ambivalent self-presentation as consummate aristocratic ladies first and artists second. Studio portraits of Bowen and Porter recast the overdetermined relationship between female modernism and female sexuality by embracing a hyperfeminised nobililty – rejecting the early twentieth-century models of lesbian exile modernism embodies by Radclyffe Hall and Gertrude Stein, Bowen and Porter choose instead the ambivalent figure of the modernist female dandy.

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This book argues that moments in the history of dandyism correspond to key transitions in Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern literature. The chapters that follow identify the generic and thematic antecedents of Irish and Southern modernism, recapturing them for audiences tempted to see the dandy and the plantation as isolated, decadent motifs in two isolated literary traditions. These writers imported the rhetoric of decadent dandyism into meditations on the artifice of aristocracy, and they did so in complex, ambiguous and not wholly conservative ways: the dandy can signify innovation and experimentation as often as self-indulgence and decline. Together, the chapters of this study show that dandyism, an elite, pseudoaristocratic movement, rooted itself in these two literary traditions in the early nineteenth century; the dandy figure, thus rooted, continued to fascinate writers on both sides of the Atlantic through the modernist period and beyond. Notes 1. For a full discussion of early nineteenth-century Irish emigration to the South, see Gleeson 2001. 2. Most notable are Curtis 1997 and Ignatiev 1995. 3. See Mishkin 1998 and Bornstein 2001. 4. See Clark 1986; Gleeson 2001; Miller 1985; Miller 2003.

chapter 1

Oaks, Serpents and Dandies: Pseudoaristocracy in Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn

Does monarchy, on its part, contain nothing at all to recommend it? [Bolingbroke] says that he prefers a monarchy to other governments because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than anything of monarchy upon republican forms. I think him perfectly in the right. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France Sir Walter Scott . . . set the world in love with dreams and phantoms . . . with the silliness and emptiness of sham gauds, sham grandeurs, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. . . . [In the South] the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with . . . the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

In a posthumously published sketch entitled ‘A Legend of Maryland’ (1871), John Pendleton Kennedy, Baltimore statesman and novelist, imagined as Irish the cultural foundations of his Southern home state. Kennedy, the son of a Scots-Irish immigrant father and a mother born into the Tidewater Virginia plantocracy, was himself a walking testament to how Irish culture blended with that of the Southern landowning classes in the antebellum South. Yet in this regional origin legend, the writer’s veneration of men who embody a particularly Irish form of national sentiment in colonial Maryland goes beyond celebrating the proverbial melting pot; Kennedy insists on

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an Irish paternity for the quintessentially American figure of the ‘Southern Cavalier’: All the men . . . were sons of the Emerald Isle, – of a race whose historical boast is the faithfulness of their devotion to a friend in need and their chivalrous courtesy to woman, but still more their generous and gallant championship of woman in distress. (Kennedy 1969: 75)

The men Kennedy describes here, residents of colonial Maryland’s ‘border settlements’, have imported chivalry from Ireland to the South; readers are thus asked to trace the figure of the Cavalier back to his (imagined) Irish origins. Like other Southern writers in the years leading up to the American Civil War, Kennedy was invested in creating origin legends for the South that established cross-cultural connections to European forms of aristocracy. And in these gentlemanly protestant Irish settlers, who came from the north of Ireland during the first wave of mass Irish emigration in the early nineteenth century, Kennedy found embodied a hybrid of the Jeffersonian ‘natural aristocrat’: Irish men who, by virtue of their individual merits, honour and ‘gallant championship’ of distressed women, could rise to the upper echelons of Southern culture. This championing of (Irish) rugged individualism as a route to (Southern) gentility was strategic on Kennedy’s part, for the writer himself was a hybrid of old and new. His mother, Nancy Pendleton, was a daughter of the Virginia Tidewater aristocracy, and her father typified for Kennedy the ideal Southern gentleman. But Kennedy’s own father, an immigrant from the north of Ireland, was identified with a perceived threat to Southern culture identified as having the power to disrupt the pastoral provincialism of the Old South. As Charles Bohner observes, in the early nineteenth century AngloSoutherners expressed increasing anxiety over the number of German and Scots-Irish immigrants ‘streaming westward from the great seaports of the middle states’ and into the American South – immigrants widely perceived to be ‘indifferent or hostile to things Virginian’. ‘The scions of old Virginia families’, Bohner writes, ‘sensitive to the foreign element in their midst, carefully nurtured those very aspects of their heritage which they believed to be distinctly Virginian’ (Bohner 1961: 9). Kennedy, a devoted Southerner, recognised that he might be identified as part of this foreign element. Therefore, part of his literary project, evidenced in his identification of Irish ‘racial’ characteristics with the Southern chivalric code, was to argue that the Irish element

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was in fact as essential to the preservation of this distinctly Virginian character as was the aristocratic heritage of the Southern landed gentry. By naming as Irish a chivalric code of conduct considered central to the establishment and maintenance of Southern culture in the early nineteenth century, Kennedy trades in the more traditionally cited Anglophilic antecedents for Southern gentry culture and replaces them with Irish protestant ones, thus presupposing some of the surprising historical and aesthetic affinities between the protestant Ascendancy and the Southern aristocracy this study seeks to expose. In his fiction, letters, European travel narratives and unfinished sketches, Kennedy connects the history of the South and the figure of the Southern Cavalier to eighteenth-century Irish revolutionary history. This strategic connection imagines as analogous the cultural situations of the Southern aristocracy and the Protestant Ascendancy as they sought to define themselves in the early nineteenth century. The Irish Protestant Ascendancy and the Southern aristocracy were from inception derided as home-grown aristocracies built on ‘sham gauds, sham grandeurs, and sham chivalries’. Transforming social liability into aesthetic asset, writers in both traditions seized upon the narrative possibilities suggested by the (pseudo)aristocrat’s command performance of gentility. In the literary traditions which describe these nascent aristocratic cultures – the plantation novel tradition in the American South and the Big House novel tradition in AngloIreland – one finds reflected early nineteenth-century anxieties about the legitimacy of post-French Revolution aristocracies, especially those founded on fantasies of power rather than decreed by bloodline, and the ‘queer’ proclivities and sexualities that flourish within and threaten to feminise what Thomas Jefferson in 1815 termed the ‘Pseudo-aristocracy’ (qtd in Cappon 1959: 389). The plantation novel tradition begins with Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832). Readers familiar with a tradition usually characterised as steeped in nostalgia might be surprised to find that the novel credited as progenitor is anti-romantic and broadly satiric; in it Kennedy chides the South for its tendency towards romanticising revolution and for its puffed-up, lackadaisical upper classes. He does so by lightly lampooning those generic elements of the national romance which he reads as dangerous to the Southern aristocratic ethos: unchecked revolutionary fervour, chivalric fancy and stultifying luxury. At the time of its publication, Swallow Barn enjoyed critical acclaim from both Northern and Southern readers – but for diametrically opposed reasons. Northern

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reviews identified the novel as a send-up of the South: the New England Magazine defined the novel as ‘a gentle satire on the pride, aristocratic feeling, and ignorance of a certain class, rather numerous in the South’, and insisted that Kennedy ‘intended to “show up” the Virginians’ by painting the ‘gentlemen of Swallow Barn’ as ‘the most ordinary, trifling, useless generation the world ever saw’ (Mackethan 1986: 79). Conversely, Southern reviewers hailed the novel as ‘portraiture of the amiable and the natural, the domestic and the cheerful’.1 Edgar Allan Poe, Kennedy’s literary protégé, took his praise further; in the Southern Literary Messenger Poe lauded ‘the rich simplicity of diction – the manliness of tone – the admirable traits of Virginian manners, and the striking pictures of still-life to be found in Swallow Barn’ (qtd in Bohner 1959: 87). Such contradictory reactions to the novel suggest that Kennedy’s portrait of the antebellum South came across as ambiguous, to say the least. The same aristocratic qualities prized by some Southerners as comprising a distinctive ‘national’ character – amiability, manliness and well-bred manners – were the same Northern reviewers cited as evidence of ‘trifling’, and ‘useless’ indulgence. These contradictory responses, however, in fact serve to reveal the didacticism of Kennedy’s novel: Swallow Barn proactively defends the Southern aristocracy by pointing out its weaknesses and gently suggesting modifications that might ease sectional, class and racial tensions. Kennedy’s use of broad satire as cultural corrective links his anatomy of aristocracy in Swallow Barn to that of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent – the novel credited with initiating the AngloIrish Big House tradition. All of Edgeworth’s Irish novels, including Ennui (1809), The Absentee (1812), and Ormond (1817), but particularly Castle Rackrent (1800), explore the moral and economic perils of grafting British aristocratic models onto an incompatible Irish class structure. By reading Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent and Kennedy’s Swallow Barn, foundational novels in suggestively kindred generic forms, against each other, we find dramatically illuminated a shared ideological and aesthetic fascination with the politics and poetics of aristocracy. Although each writer aestheticises aristocracy differently – Kennedy’s antebellum South remains decidedly bright and lighthearted, while Edgeworth’s Anglo-Ireland emerges dark and unsettling – both dramatise the relative stability of the bond between aristocrats and the individuals they lord over by depicting the lord’s symbolic relationship to landscape. Noting this common attention to the relative stability of the aristocratic landscape makes another similarity less surprising: these two

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reform-minded artists were each drawn to the political and aesthetic philosophies of conservative Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. Burke’s paradoxical maxim, succinctly paraphrased by Terry Eagleton as: ‘what [the English aristocracy] ought to have done was to allow the colonies to associate the very idea of their own freedom with the sovereignty that holds them down’ (Eagleton 1995: 38), structures both Kennedy’s pastoral and Edgeworth’s gothic vision of aristocratic reform. On Kennedy’s bucolic Swallow Barn plantation, where dutiful servants are rewarded with certain freedoms within slavery, readers find ‘successful’ applications of Burke’s sovereignty paradox; Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, the decaying ancestral seat in which servants actively and covertly usurp their masters’ power, imagines the dystopic perils of inattentive estate management. As W. J. McCormack observes, Burke’s meditations on Irish affairs consistently decry reactionary bigotry and preach reform: ‘one constant principle of his arguments is that . . . the perpetuation of punishment upon succeeding generations [of Irish Catholics] is foolishly divisive’. Instead, a relaxation of restrictive laws ‘would produce a greater integration of the king’s Irish subjects into his realms’ (McCormack 1985: 64). However, by lessening restrictions and halting punishment a monarch runs the risk of appearing weak, soft and ineffectual. Therefore, the common (and vexed) intellectual project of early Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern fiction was how to imagine a ‘gentleman’ who retains his supremacy while remaining open to reforming his approach to regional, class or race-based dominion – and who, no less importantly, embodies an aristocratic ethos free of the taint of effeminacy. Anglophilic Fictions William Taylor, in his cultural history of antebellum Southern aristocracy, Cavalier and Yankee, argues that the figure of the American planter-aristocrat in early antebellum fiction was consistently likened to the genteel eighteenth-century English lord. In American Slavery, American Freedom, Edmund Morgan identifies this cultural parallel as having been forged consciously and strategically, noting that Southern adaptations of English aristocratic practices served as a mechanism through which to ‘displace and alleviate class tensions’ (Morgan 1975: 386). This insistence upon English models of aristocratic privilege, David Leverenz argues, used racism as the bedrock of a ‘social fiction of provincial aristocracy’ through which ‘squires and

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would-be squires explicitly imitated and idealized English gentry traditions’. This ‘anglophilic fiction’ allowed Southern planters to ‘preserve male status hierarchies in amber, warding off class and racial pressures for social change’ (Leverenz 1997: 81). But although the South ‘was the stage for more, and probably more ambitious and persistent, attempts to replicate the life styles of the English gentry than could be seen in any other part of the country’ (Dekker 1978: 282), the English model of aristocracy was not perfectly suited to the comparatively wild and untried grounds of Southern plantation life. To identify with English cultural origins was to forge a powerfully oppositional, anti-Republican identity for the Southern planter classes. But because by the early nineteenth century the figure of the aristocrat, and the English Regency aristocrat in particular, carried powerful connotations of frivolity and effeminacy, the sartorial, gustatory and architectural forms of aristocratic privilege enjoyed by English-identified Southern planters needed augmentation and defeminisation. In the Southern literary tradition, the generic and representational contours of the national romance changed between 1800 and 1850; novelists shifted from a focus on how to unite as Americans in the new Republic to a question particular to the emerging Southern ‘Cavalier’ identity: ‘how to defend a patria, against the dominant national culture’ (Dekker 1978: 105; italics original). With the publication of Kennedy’s Swallow Barn in 1832, we see Southern writers beginning to solidify the plantation legend, a shared fiction of the ‘Old South’ which, as Lucinda MacKethan argues, preserved ‘the Old South, not as it actually existed or perished, but as . . . a complex, compelling image of Arcady’ (MacKethan 1986: 2). This arcady was not exclusively pastoral: the new ‘Old South’ legend blended images of bucolic agrarian domesticity with dystopic images anxiously illuminating the roots of Southern social decline. The anglophilic Southern planter shared time with the figure of the republican Yankee, who exhibited the crass but undeniably masculine qualities of vigour and industrialism. The South was conversely characterised as a place whose inhabitants embodied the opposite: languor, dissipation and outdated feudal agrarianism – not to mention a dangerous affinity for foppish clothes and useless architectural finery. The pivotal question, variously posed in early nineteenth-century Southern fiction through such illustrative juxtaposition, became how to grant the Southern planter his set of positive, non-Northern qualities to distinguish him, yet avoid feminising him in the bargain. The answer was the Cavalier, patriarch of a chivalric code which placed

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women at the centre of Southern aristocratic culture as objects to be revered and defended, thus providing solid (and solidly Southern) evidence of that culture’s inherent heterosexual masculinity. This struggle to imagine an alternative Southern aristocratic ethos that combined vigorous, masculine individualism with the performance of a cultural heritage predicated upon racial- and class-based privilege is closely related to an analogous struggle for aristocratic selfdefinition at work in the early Anglo-Irish literary tradition of the national romance. One reason for Anglo-Irish reluctance to embrace models of monarchical English aristocracy, and one which also applies to anxieties of inheritance inflecting early Southern fiction, was that the Anglo-Irish aristocracy was widely perceived to be a ‘plebian aristocracy’, as Edmund Burke famously noted – a pseudoaristocracy peopled by a ‘junta of robbers’ (qtd in Kiberd 1995: 17) and established on the shaky foundations of new money, common blood and subjugation of a disenfranchised Irish Catholic underclass. To some extent, this was an accurate observation. The seventeenth-century English protestants offered land grants in Ireland were not, as a rule, aristocrats, and rarely were Irish landed families allowed to forget crucial differences which distinguished Irish ‘ascendancy’ from English ‘aristocracy’. By the start of the nineteenth century, the Acendancy was caught in a crisis of selfdefinition brought on both by Irish republican uprisings that lessened its hold on the Irish peasantry and by English governmental restructuring that eradicated its recently won parliamentary sovereignty. The early literature of this pseudoaristocratic culture, and especially that of the tradition’s founder, Edgeworth, exhibits a pointed unease with the origins of its own power and a clear desire to demonstrate how an enfeebled gentry might initiate region-specific reforms to re-establish moral and cultural authority. Thus, early nineteenth-century AngloSouthern and Anglo-Irish writers were similarly preoccupied with the aesthetics of aristocratic performance: how to cultivate, celebrate and above all perform their own breeds of aristocracy, distinct from the cultures of the American North and Regency England, while avoiding excess, weakness and effeminacy. The fear of being labelled ‘pseudo-aristoi’2 – a cautionary term for both Anglo-Irish and American political philosophers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – inflects the more concrete political arguments that underpin Castle Rackrent and Swallow Barn. Edmund Burke, in a 1792 letter expressing his distrust of antiCatholic Irish popery laws, was perhaps the first to criticise the AngloIrish aristocracy’s flimsy construction: those pseudoaristocratic

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elements of their performance of power that threatened to lower them in outsiders’ estimation. These same elements engendered in AngloIrish noblemen (and women) a marked anxiety over the cultural validity of their own Irish authority. Burke’s argument rested on the principle that under a healthy aristocracy, ‘the nobles have the monopoly of honour; the plebeians a monopoly of all the means of acquiring wealth’. In this scenario, the aristocracy and the common classes do not compete with each other, and ‘some sort of a balance is formed’. Each group is assured a social rank either secured at birth in the case of the aristocracy, or established through the process of free competition in the case of the plebian class. Therefore, those excluded from state rule are compensated and assuaged by their ‘monopoly’ over trade (Burke 1881: 215). However, Burke argued, the late eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish landed gentry had failed to secure the requisite monopoly on honour (not to mention the aristocratic bloodlines) which distinguishes aristocrats from ‘plebians’. Therefore, these pseudoaristocrats were obliged to secure their tenuous power through a system of laws restricting Irish Catholic civic and economic freedoms, thus forcing ‘Roman Catholics to submit to plebians like themselves’ (ibid.: 216). Under the penal system, Burke argued, men of equal intelligence and potential were divided into ‘two distinct bodies’: aristocratic lords and ‘cutters of turf’. The declared object [of the penal laws] was to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education. The professed object was to deprive the few men who, in spite of those laws, might hold or retain any property amongst them, of all sorts of influence or authority over the rest. They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy, or connection. One of these bodies was to possess all the property, all the education; the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. (Burke 1887: 210; italics original)

Burke rejected aristocracies bolstered by repressive laws as a gross misuse of the monarchic principle, and he directly attributed the rise of Jacobinical rebellion in Ireland to this Irish Protestant practice of supremacist pseudoaristocracy: Are we to be astonished when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation . . . we had reduced them to a

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mob; that whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight?. (Ibid.: 210)

Burke’s denunciation of the Anglo-Irish as lords in a plebian aristocracy might be applied also to Southern planter-aristocrats, who in the nineteenth century lost a great deal of moral authority by their continued insistence, despite an increasingly vocal and international abolitionist movement, on subjugating slaves to secure wealth and dominion. Burke was intimately involved in late eighteenth-century British parliamentary debates over slavery and the slave trade. He was therefore aware of the general (if not particular) conditions of American slavery and recognised some similarities between this institution and what he cast as its Irish analogue. Burke makes implicit connections between Anglo-Irish and American Southern aristocracies, employing the rhetoric of slave labor to describe the situation of Catholics employed on Anglo-Irish estates, who he describes as being held in the ‘most shocking kind of servitude’ (Burke 1881: 346). Burke extends his transatlantic metaphor to a discussion of semantics, using the relationship between master and slave to deconstruct the term ‘Ascendancy’: New ascendancy is the old mastership. It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set of people in Ireland to consider themselves as the sole citizens in the commonwealth, and to keep a dominion over the rest by reducing them to absolute slavery under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty solely amongst themselves. (Ibid.: 348; italics original)

Implicit in Burke’s criticisms of the Ascendancy’s acquisition of power through dominion is a criticism of all plebian aristocracies that gain false ascendancy through ‘absolute slavery’, including the Southern aristocracy. Because in drawing an implicit parallel between American slavery and the Irish penal laws, Burke seems to be arguing that emancipation is the paramount goal of social reform, it perhaps seems improbable that Edgeworth and Kennedy, self-identified members of what Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi (1883) termed ‘sham gentries’, would draw upon Burke’s maxims in their respective literary projects. Yet Burke’s outline for aristocratic refurbishment is in fact profoundly, and understandably, attractive to these two writers.

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In her introduction to Castle Rackrent, Marilyn Butler asserts that Edgeworth’s chronicle of the rise and fall of a Big House family ‘[has] the best claim to pioneer the nineteenth-century social novel, which, more self-consciously and more precisely than its eighteenth-century predecessor, criticises and remoulds the reader’s perception of modern social life’ (Butler 1992: 8). In an introduction to Swallow Barn Lucinda MacKethan similarly holds that Kennedy’s novel demonstrates the writer’s ‘commitment to the actualities of the Old South – not just its quaintness but also the sober realities of its politics, economics, and social practices’, an attention, she argues, which ‘makes [Swallow Barn] a work that creates an essentially new American path’ (Mackethan 1986b: xxix). Although I agree that both Swallow Barn and Castle Rackrent are novels attuned to the intricacies of modern social life in the early nineteenth century, I would temper the generic identification of ‘social novel’. Neither novel can be described as social realism, because each attempts to restructure the reader’s perception of nineteenth-century Irish / Southern social life through decidedly non-realistic means: either through Edgeworth’s gothic didacticism, or Kennedy’s pastoral version. These two Burkean novels pursue their didactic ends in formally divergent ways, each writer using the aesthetic form that best suits his or her argument for social reforms geared towards securing aristocratic hegemony. In Natural Aristocracy, Kevin Railey observes that hegemony relates both to the ways in which an ideology becomes a dominant influence on people’s thinking – the whole social process involved in a society’s dissemination and maintenance – and to the degree of success a dominant class has in persuading others in society to see the world its way. (Railey 1999: 40)

Edgeworth’s Rackrent presents a world view which argues that circumstances leading to one family’s ruin are those which could eventually ruin Protestant Ireland. Her characterisation of architectural and ancestral decadence is therefore didactically gothic; by imagining the breakdown of Anglo-Irish cultural hegemony she is able to intimate what a successful dissemination and maintenance of Ascendancy culture might look like. Decadence, therefore, becomes the literary vehicle through which Edgeworth envisions reforms capable of restoring order to Anglo-Ireland. Kennedy’s formal choice – to imagine a pastoral South in which a benevolent aristocracy’s

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authority goes unchallenged – performs an opposite but complementary function. Although in 1832 Kennedy would have easily identified numerous omens signalling the Southern aristocracy’s impending political and moral destruction, he chose to depict his ‘Old South’ through gothic’s antithesis: the pastoral. Kennedy’s fantastic vision of aristocratic hegemony nevertheless performs a cultural function similar to Edgeworth’s gothic vision of cultural rupture. Both writers depict what has been and could be, rather than what is – representing the need for social reform through Burkean aesthetics: Edgeworth emphasising impending ruin; Kennedy emphasising bucolic potential. Swallow Barn is a didactic comedy of manners written, in part, as a response to the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. Although no organised slave rebellions occur in the novel itself, readers remain attuned to the history that surrounded the novel’s composition through Kennedy’s subtle addition of gothic elements to his Southern pastoral. Kennedy’s novel advocates a renovated genteel plantocracy, grounded in the paternalism and carefully managed agricultural feudalism he sees as central to traditional Southern culture, but tempered with just enough republicanism to keep that culture dynamic. Kennedy’s representative Southern gentleman, Frank Meriwether, indeed adopts this Burkean goal of balancing populist flexibility and cultural dominion, and thus secures on his plantation, Swallow Barn, what John Grammer terms Southern ‘pastoral republicanism’ – the aristocrat’s control over family, slaves and agriculture secured through the ‘natural’ combination of both moral and class-based authority (Grammer 1996: 6). The ideological dominance which the ideal Southern planter exerts upon his plantation is necessarily grounded in the extended heterosexual family, and a rigorous, virile masculinity is part of Swallow Barn’s prescription for the ideal Southern gentleman. Kennedy’s reformist narrative argues that when American paternalism and agrarian feudalism are in perfect (and perfectly manly) working order, the South can exist in a pastoral state: Swallow Barn’s domesticated Southern landscape showcases the peaceful domesticity of the aristocratic South. In a scene dramatically illustrative of this potential aristocratic dominion, two aristocrat-lovers walk through an ‘immense forest of pine’, and are surrounded by ‘long and sturdy trunks to nearly their full elevation without a limb, – resembling huge columns of a slaty hue, and uniting their clustered tops in a thick and dark canopy’ (Kennedy 1986: 414). Here, aristocracy has disciplined the land itself; the Virginia pine forest becomes a natural extension of the columned and sheltered plantation portico. Yet the edges of

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Kennedy’s pastoral still glimmer with the intertwined threats of slave revolt and the coming Civil War, suggesting that when paternalist ideals are in disrepair, the South is vulnerable. Thus Kennedy invokes an idyllic and masculine South in his plantation novel in order to argue against the structural weaknesses – broadly imagined – that can lead to insurrection and intrusion. Kennedy’s doggedly bright, gently satiric portrait of life on a Southern plantation contrasts sharply with Edgeworth’s anti-pastoral characterisation of Anglo-Irish estate life.3 The fear – that a weakened aristocracy will be overrun by those whose labour it exploits – is the same for both writers; the difference is in the way that cultural fear manifests in each novel: insurrections merely threatened in Swallow Barn are realised in Castle Rackrent. Just as Swallow Barn is pointedly bucolic, Edgeworth’s novel is pointedly gothic; the time-worn, ramshackle Castle Rackrent is home to successive generations of Lords Rackrent, an impractical and easily swindled line of inheritors who fail to maintain their aristocratic authority. Edgeworth asks us to see these failures as the result of imprudent estate management, widely construed, and advocates Burkean models for aristocratic maintenance by painting their gothic verso. She imagines what might happen when an aristocracy becomes so far removed from its own moral, cultural and reproductive authority that it can no longer maintain its families, servants or property. Composed in the years leading up to and during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Castle Rackrent depicts the gothic roots of Anglo-Ireland’s demise by narrating the rise and fall of one Anglo-Irish family against a backdrop of violent uprisings orchestrated to unseat the culture Edgeworth’s gothic cautionary tale attempts to refurbish. Edgeworth’s Anglo-Ireland is purposely set in the (recent) past – rural Ireland before the year 1782. Edgeworth thus makes her chronicle of Anglo-Irish decay a historical novel, with all of the attendant conventions of distancing, didacticism and nostalgia in place. But because Edgeworth’s backdating does not, in fact, place the novel’s action at any great remove from her own historical present, the novel’s calm, benevolent, yet often deeply ironic ‘Editor’, whose faith that Ireland’s future formal union with England will even out the eccentricities and excesses of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, fails in his attempt to form a historical frame that is capable of lightening the darkness of the familial narrative itself. Similarly, Kennedy sets his 1832 novel is set in the (extremely) recent past to highlight the comparative chaos of ‘present times’. In

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1831, Nat Turner led a violent rebellion in the Virginia Tidewater lowcountry, where bucolic Swallow Barn is set. Readers know that the novel takes place in the year 1829 by the date recorded on the signature line concluding narrator Mark Littleton’s first letter home from Swallow Barn. The year 1829 was not free from threats of insurrection; planters in the 1820s were in a state of agitation after a decade of carefully planned slave rebellions, some of which, like the Denmark Vesey revolt of 1822, were modelled on the successful 1791 revolution led by Toussaint-Louverture in Saint Dominique.4 In an essay tracing the cultural history of the Turner revolt, Tony Horowitz characterises the Southern climate at the end of the 1820s this way: At the time of the [Turner] uprising, the South was rife with anti-slavery agitation. In 1829, a free black named David Walker published a fiery ‘Appeal,’ which, calling on blacks to violently overthrow their masters, caused keen anxiety in the South. William Lloyd Garrison had just begun publishing his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, which was thought to be so incendiary that Georgia posted a five-thousand-dollar reward for Garrison’s capture. Antislavery sentiment was also cresting in Great Britain, which abolished slavery in its empire, including in its West Indian colonies, in 1833. There was even debate in the Virginia legislature about freeing slaves. All this made Southern slave owners feel isolated and defensive; one sign of their growing anxiety was the strengthening, a few months before the revolt, of laws against educating slaves. (Horowitz 1999: 88–9)

By setting the novel two years before the Turner Rebellion, Kennedy invokes a shaky, pre-rebellion Tidewater ‘golden age’. Like Edgeworth, Kennedy uses the convention of ‘historical’ setting to distance the narrative from a disturbing historical event, but also to ask that readers compare the world of the novel to the altered circumstances of the real Tidewater. This is a calculated rhetorical move. Swallow Barn evokes a hazy, peaceful time, exact years left unidentified, when the Southern aristocracy was formed. This shift back in time is significant, because by placing the action of his novel in a Tidewater that existed before the Nat Turner Rebellion, Kennedy implies that a Southern ‘golden age’ existed in a recent past his 1832 readers could look back on with both precision and nostalgia. The pastoral Kennedy draws in 1829, one in which slaves did not rebel, is a strategically nostalgic fiction; the Nat Turner Rebellion was certainly the bloodiest in Tidewater history, but it was not the first.

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Kennedy’s evocation of timelessness in his Southern pastoral – his emphasis on long ancestral lines, multigenerational land disputes, and the gradual falling into ruin of aspects in the Southern landscape – becomes a reminder, made in the face of slave insurrections and approaching civil war, of a golden age that never existed. Kennedy sketches this golden age through Mark Littleton’s references to mythic national history of Captain John Smith; through descriptions of Swallow Barn’s portrait gallery of ancient ancestors; through a centuries-old debate over a decaying plot of land that borders both Swallow Barn plantation and the neighbouring estate; and finally through ancient lore about community members who seem preserved in mythic amber. By thus imagining his 1829 Virginia Tidewater aristocrats enjoying an insurrection-free life of heritage and languor, Kennedy argues that there is a bucolic Southern aristocratic past to reinstate. Although Kennedy’s pastoral is as over-bright as Edgeworth’s gothic is over-dark, their respective aesthetics invoke those disruptive, insurrectionary strains which necessitate proactive reform. Furthermore, a shared preference for vigorous, patriarchal models for moral authority is evidenced in their presentation of both negative and positive examples of gentlemen. A distinct distrust of overrefinement permeates both narratives, suggesting that for Edgeworth and Kennedy, external disruptive forces are only part of the problem. The overrefined aristocrat threatens to undermine the masculine authority essential to the establishment and maintenance of ‘plebian’ aristocracies; to illuminate this danger, both novels explicate those internal cultural deficiencies that plague the ‘aristocratic gentleman’. Drawing upon popular early nineteenth-century assumptions about the relationship between aristocratic excess and deviant sexuality, both authors present readers with dandy figures: men who exchange their moral and patriarchal authority for the more alluring powers to be derived from beauty, style and pose. Ivy to Oak and Rod to Serpent: Aesthetics of Containment In section nine of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, ‘A Defence of the French Monarchy and Aristocracy’, Burke argues that because the French monarchy refused those of common birth any political participation, these aristocrats orchestrated their own demise. In this veiled appeal to the English monarchy, Burke maintains that a too-strict boundary between ‘commons’ and ‘nobles’

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sows the seeds of revolution, and imagines how monarchical reforms might quell revolutionary unrest: A permanent assembly in which the commons had their share of the power would soon abolish whatever was too invidious and insulting in these distinctions, and even the faults in the morals of nobility would have been probably corrected by the greater varieties of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by orders would have given rise. (Burke 1955: 159)

This calm, reasoned analysis, however, finds its opposite in Burke’s essays, speeches and letters concerning Anglo-Irish politics and the threat of Catholic insurrection. Burke’s attention to the question of Catholic emancipation was exhaustive, and in the collection Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs we find impassioned and often embittered analysis concerning how to balance Irish class and power structures to maintain Irish aristocratic culture. In a 1795 letter to Anglo-Irish MP Sir Hercules Langrishe, Burke outlines those elements of Anglo-Irish rule certain to incite rebellion: Whatever tends to persuade the people that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of the opinion that their interest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained to Jacobinism. (Burke 1881: 336; italics original).

The revolutionary atmosphere Burke here envisions is the direct result of aristocratic mismanagement of ‘the people’, a mismanagement which, he argues, lessens moral authority and leads directly to the infectious siege mentality permeating late eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish culture. In a private letter to his son Richard, Burke criticises the Ascendancy’s stubborn adherence to anti-Catholic penal restrictions, which denied Irish Catholics the social and financial mobility he felt were essential to healthy monarchical societies. ‘The violent partisans of [the penal laws]’, he wrote, ‘fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times.’ The tyrannical maintenance of oppressive laws, Burke argues, locks the Protestant Ascendancy in a siege mentality, which encourages, in turn, hysterical affirmations of anti-Catholic supremacy: They say that if the people, under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of constitutional freedom, it will be impossible

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for them to hold their property. They tell us that they act only on the defensive. They inform the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of the people obtain votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in spite of the influence in nineteen parts in twenty of the landed interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole or in the far major part of Papists . . . [who] will instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates . . . [and] they will be, or are to be left, without house or land, to the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation. (Burke 1881: 363)

Such arguments have prompted some critics to label Burke’s his politics progressive; his long-held beliefs in the efficacy of Catholic emancipation and the abolition of the slave trade seem to bear out this identification. Yet reform, in the Burkean sense, is enacted to conserve power. By carefully monitoring the climate of their country and initiating reforms as needed, Burke argues, an aristocracy might retain moral power and thus ascendancy: ‘[The Anglo-Irish] ought well to look about them . . . The complaint, or its cause, ought to be removed, and wise and lenient arts ought to precede the measures of vigor’ (ibid.: 364). The social policies he advocates are designed to give ‘plebian’ classes greater freedoms within aristocratic feudal structures, enabling a ruling class to secure a kind of cultural police state in which the underclasses enjoy ‘a paradoxical freedom achieved through submission’ (Backus 1996: 93). Castle Rackrent, a novel Marilyn Butler has termed ‘a microcosmic version of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall’ (Butler 1992: 8), borrows as its crystallised theme Burke’s warning to the Ascendancy: ‘Look well about you’. Terry Eagleton characterises Edgeworth’s novel as erupting from a particularly vexed moment in Protestant Ascendancy history, and maintains that the specifics of this moment inform the novel’s pointed ambiguities and anxieties: The novel may have been published in the year of the union, but the manuscript was being prepared for the publishers in the thick of the United Irishmen insurrection, in which Maria’s father suffered the fate of all good liberals and narrowly escaped a hammering by both sides. What if the narrative were a fantastic rendering of all that? – if Thady Quirk were no loyal lackey but a type of the disaffected Irish peasantry, concealing

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his subversion behind a mask of servility and working covertly for the overthrow of the landlords? (Eagleton 1995: 67)

Eagleton suggests that Thady Quirk is disloyal, and that his subversion reveals a textual anxiety over clandestine action in Castle Rackrent. I would further argue that this anxiety is born of Edgeworth’s suspicion of particularly Catholic means of accruing Irish wealth and property. The novel presents a gothic vision of the depths to which an aristocracy can fall when lax surveillance from within and unwise penal restrictions from without allow for the covert attainment of resources by a disenfranchised and thus disloyal underclass. S. J. Connolly has argued that many eighteenth-century Catholics operating under the penal laws maintained the appearance of a wide gap of wealth between themselves and the Ascendancy, and this deception became instrumental in diverting attention away from covertly attained Catholic wealth. Restrictions placed on economic and social movement forced Catholic trade underground, where one unplannedfor side effect became an unregulated, untaxed and unaccounted-for trade economy. It is this unregulated economic power that Edgeworth reacts to in Castle Rackrent, which presents in microcosm what happens to Ascendancy power when landlords fail to pay attention to the comings and goings on their estates. Edgeworth’s narrator, the Rackrent family’s loyal retainer Thady Quirk, presents a rambling familial history which works to distract readers (and, implicitly, the Rackrent family itself) from a narrative substrata of financial swindling and semi-hidden transfers of money, titles and property. AngloIrish siege mentality in Rackrent stems not merely from the fear that ill-advised land management will lead to economic ruin. In this novel Edgeworth describes and reacts to the gradual rise of a covert Catholic pseudoaristocracy, and implicitly suggests that to quell this covert insurgency requires a two-part social reform: formal union with Great Britain and Catholic emancipation. The Irish penal law of 1704, ‘To Prevent the Further Growth of Popery’, addressed colonial settlers’ concerns that Catholic landed and mercantile classes were, despite systematic disenfranchisement, still accruing wealth. This code was drafted by Parliament at the insistence of the Council of Cork, which wanted Parliament made aware that ‘great numbers of Irish [were] flocking into [Cork City] to the great damage of the Protestant inhabitants by encroaching on their respective trades’ (Wall 1976: 311). This code restricted the number of Catholic licensed trade merchants to twenty per city – a restriction

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which spoke to rising concerns that a Catholic merchant class was beginning to usurp Protestant industry. This concern extended to the landed gentry class, whose maintenance of landholdings depended directly upon Catholic disenfranchisement. As Burke would have predicted, this increase in penal legislation achieved the opposite of its intention: disenfranchised Catholics turned to covert domestic and European trade. In effect, the penal codes diverted Catholic energies from one means of attaining wealth to another, forcing Catholic wealth underground and systematically mystifying the Protestant Ascendancy project of tracking Catholic Ireland’s financial power. We find dramatic evidence of the uneasy Protestant response to such covert fiscal activity in a 1737 pamphlet, circulated in Cork by a pamphleteer who signed himself Alexander the Coppersmith. Here one finds the kind of slippery-slope supremacist reasoning Burke critiques as permeating the Ascendancy’s siege-mentality rhetoric: [The] popish factor, whose relations and correspondence abroad, and union at home; whose diligence being more, and luxury less, than Protestants, will at last swallow up the trade and suck the marrow of this city; and like the ivy will grow on to be an oak, and prove absolute in their power over the commerce of those, on whom they should be dependent for bread. (Qtd in Wall 1938: 100)

Here, Catholics are characterised as foreign spies who, through their covert ‘union at home’, manipulate a repressive system to secure private wealth that never circulates back into the colonial economy. Catholics’ relative lack of luxury is here characterised as yet another means of covert activity; poverty becomes evidence of suspiciously shrewd industry rather than cultural disenfranchisement. In his final hysterical, horticulturally incorrect metaphor, the Coppersmith depicts the Catholic mercantile class as the ivy that, unchecked, will grow into an oak, and Anglo-Irish Protestants as lazy gardeners who have not been keeping up with their weeding.5 After the establishment of Grattan’s Parliament in 1782, which allowed the Anglo-Irish home rule over Ireland, small-scale Catholic emancipations accomplished a slight relaxation of the penal codes and Catholics were able to take long land leases and purchase property. These relaxations would on the surface appear to denote a degree of increased tolerance building among Ascendancy parliamentarians, but in light of the anxieties illuminated in the above pamphlet, it seems more apt to suggest that these reforms were also designed to reinscribe

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Catholic monies within Protestant-controlled economies. It was Catholic anonymity that was making the Ascendancy anxious, and these partial ‘emancipations’ seem to function as an attempt to limit anonymity and increase financial transparency. Yet these reforms did not halt revolutionary plans already in motion. Maureen Wall observes that ‘it was not until the 1790s, when they were adopting a fighting attitude, that [Catholics] began to claim that they were of considerable consequence in the kingdom because of their wealth’ (Wall 1958: 103). After the 1798 rebellion was quashed by British and Anglo-Irish armies, Great Britain set in motion the Act of Union, through which the colony of Ireland became a formal part of Great Britain. In his postscript to Waverley (1814), Sir Walter Scott insisted that Edgeworth’s Rackrent ‘may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up’ (Scott 1986: 352). Because the Union moved the economic and legislative centre of Ireland from Dublin to London and thus increased Irish absentee landlordism, Edgeworth’s Irish novels after Castle Rackrent question how to ameliorate the negative effects of the Act of Union on the Protestant Ascendancy. But in this first novel, Edgeworth creates a fictional landscape that depicts a Catholic fringe covertly acquiring the money and lands of the gentry, and thus implicitly advocates the stricter surveillance of Catholic movement promised by the Act of Union and Catholic emancipation. In Rackrent’s preface, the Editor explains why Thady Quirk, characterised as a powerless man with a broken will, is a completely trustworthy narrator: ‘Where we see that a man has the power, we may naturally expect that he has the will to deceive us’ (Edgeworth 1992: 62). This statement, ostensibly the Editor’s attempt to contain Thady’s narrative – to make him ‘honest’ – elicits the opposite from the reader: we are prompted to question whether this loyal family retainer is in fact concealing his power. Indeed, the very name Quirk – one early definition of which is a verbal trick, a shift or evasion – alerts us to the possibility of a faux-servile shadow narrative. Thady and his son Jason Quirk live under the unsuspecting noses of a successive chain of ‘masters’, and their clandestine subversions of authority are masked by a performance of servility. Thady, for example, has the power of narration. He alone is in the position to chronicle Rackrent family history, as that history is embodied by three generations of progressively unsavoury, ill-equipped and ineffective landlords in the Anglo-Irish family he appears to serve. The

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first, Sir Patrick Rackrent, Thady considers a ‘good’ landlord precisely because he is inattentive to the business of his inherited estate. Sir Patrick sees lordship only as an occasion for celebration and debauchery; in the end he dies the long death of alcoholism, an affliction described by Thady as a ‘great shake of the hand’ (ibid.: 67). The contrast between Sir Patrick and his successor, Murtaugh Rackrent, is marked. Murtaugh is a landlord as obsessed with the letter of the law as Patrick was obsessed with drink, yet as a result he overlooks his own wife’s gradual and covert accrual of independent wealth. Attention to insignificant legal details prevents him from observing the larger culture of deceit and under-the-table dealings on his estate. Thady understands economic matters as well or better than his master; he meticulously recounts in detail the legal ins and outs of Murtaugh’s monetary dealings, yet he covers this knowledge in subservience by playing the fool: ‘I made bold to shrug my shoulders once in his presence, and thanked my stars I was not born a gentleman to so much toil and trouble’, to which Murtaugh naively replies, ‘learning is better than house or land’ (ibid.: 70). Thady’s son Jason is involved in the business of both learning and land, and readers paying close attention to Thady and Jason’s activities will notice that as Murtaugh’s finances are being slowly depleted, the Quirks are gaining financial power. Thady tells us that his son was given a position by the land agent of the next Lord Kit Rackrent because of his ability to work with numbers, and eventually this agent gives Jason full control of the estate’s rent accounts. Thady allows that he was aware of Jason’s abilities: ‘Jason Quirk, though he be my son, I must say, was a good scholar from his birth, and a very ’cute lad’ (ibid.: 74). We are told that when ‘a good farm bounding us to the east fell into his honour’s hands’, Jason immediately bid on and acquired the property. And although Thady for the most part carefully distances himself from his ambitious son, on the point of this land acquisition he proudly observes, ‘My son put in a proposal for it; why shouldn’t he, as well as another?’ (ibid.: 74). The unspoken answer here is that Jason, as a Catholic, would not have been able to purchase such a substantial property before 1782 – the year before which the novel is set. To have assumed responsibility for the Rackrent books, however, Jason might well have had to convert, as penal legislation in place in the mideighteenth century limited the professional positions available to Catholics. If such a conversion did take place (no account of Jason’s conversion is offered in the novel), Thady offers no criticism of his

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son’s means of acquiring wealth and power. For all of his assertions that he acts only for the good of the ‘family’, Thady in fact aligns himself with a son who, through self-education and religious conversion, seems poised to disinherit the final Lord Rackrent. Thady outwardly maintains he is horrified by Jason’s actions and will remain loyal to the deposed Rackrent family. But in Thady’s most direct pronouncement of his horror, Edgeworth asks readers to question whether he was working for this end all along: ‘Oh Jason! Jason! How will you stand to this in the face of the country and all who know you?’ says I; ‘and what will people think and say when they see you living here in Castle Rackrent, and the lawful owner turned out of the seat of his ancestors, without a cabin to put his head into, or so much as a potato to eat?’ Jason, whilst I was saying this, and a great deal more, made me signs, and winks, and frowns; but I took no heed, for I was grieved and sick at heart for my poor master, and couldn’t but speak. (Edgeworth 1992: 109; italics added)

Thady here is taking his show of subservience too far. By admonishing his usurping son in the presence of the disinherited Sir Condy Rackrent, Thady’s speech is intended as a reaffirmation of his fidelity to the Rackrents – fidelity he argues overrides familial loyalty. But his role as faithful retainer becomes hyperbolic and absurd when he asks, ‘what will the people think?’ Readers, and perhaps Condy Rackrent as well, might be more inclined to think that the ‘people’, other Irish Catholics, would be glad of this reversal of fortune. Thady’s overstated question is thus what cinches his overemphasis on servility and makes his protestations suspect. Jason tries to stop his father’s show of loyal servitude with his ‘signs, and winks, and frowns’, yet true to form, Sir Condy remains unaware of Thady’s exaggerated performance. After encountering this passage, readers are asked to reconsider the role Thady performed on the Rackrent estate. Recalling that he avoids performing any menial task – leaks in the castle’s roof neglected, windows left cracked, chairs unmended – it becomes clear that ‘loyal, honest’ Thady is in fact a pivotal player in the usurping of the Rackrent estate. Yet he keeps up his servile façade to the end, not wanting the powers that be to know the part he plays in this covert revolution. And yet, from where does he dictate this family history? The most logical answer is that he is speaking from the very estate he has served all his life, yet now he is speaking as master – in a reversal of fortune that would make even the most liberal member of the

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Protestant Ascendancy nervous. By characterising as duplicitous the most loyal of family servants, Edgeworth argues for stricter maintenance of Anglo-Irish estates through focused attention to economic health and directly identifies who requires the closest observation. Rachel Jennings has suggested that for Edgeworth, the ‘omnipresent task . . . is to imagine a geopolitical space in which her own privilege is not endangered by the existence of capitalistic social mobility for non-ascendancy citizens who may be as industrious and resourceful as the Edgeworth family’ (Jennings 1996: 97). Castle Rackrent accomplishes this task by imagining a space in which all Ascendancy hold on Irish land is in jeopardy. Through the servile veneer of Thady’s narrative we are confronted with a series of inattentive landlords, each prone to excess and perilously unaware of an emergent Catholic middle class. By thus imagining the roots of Anglo-Irish decline, Edgeworth lends her support to Union – the one solution, she argues, capable of maintaining class-based power while simultaneously subduing and containing covert and insurgent forces. Edgeworth means to shock readers with Jason Quirk’s swift ascension to the title Lord Rackrent. Like Burke, she attempting to frighten the Ascendancy into action.
John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn remains in print today because it is widely recognised as the first ‘plantation novel’ in an influential Southern literary genre that includes writings from the early nineteenth century to the present day. As such, readers unaware of Kennedy’s Irish ancestry might be surprised to find in Swallow Barn a pivotal, Anglo-Irish / Anglo-Southern hybrid character, plucked straight out of imperial Irish history. The young aristocrats in residence on Kennedy’s imagined Virginia plantation are tutored by Mr Chub, an Irish-born Protestant minister whose presence in the American South is the result of revolutionary circumstances which forced his swift departure from Ireland: Mr. Chub is a philosopher after the order of Socrates. He was an emigrant from the Emerald Isle, where he suffered much tribulation in the disturbances, as they are mildly called, of his much-enduring country . . . The early part of his life had been easy and prosperous, until the rebellion of 1798 stimulated his republicanism into a fever, and drove the fullblooded hero headlong into the quarrel, and put him, in spite of his peaceful profession, to standing by his pike on behalf of his principles. By this unhappy boiling over of the cauldron of his valor he fell under

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the ban of the ministers, and tasted his share of government mercy. His house was burnt over his head, his horses and hounds (for, by all accounts, he was a perfect Acteon) were ‘confiscate to the state,’ and he was forced to fly. This brought him to America in no very compromising mood with royalty. (Kennedy 1986: 65)

In this description, Kennedy imagines how the Irish Rebellion of 1798 might have looked to a nonpolitical Protestant landholder jolted out of class-fed complacency by republican rhetoric. Chub’s ‘easy and prosperous’ life, one that involved horses, foxhounds and a substantial estate, came to an end when the romantic atmosphere of the Irish 1790s briefly seduced him into ‘standing by his pike’. Chub’s involvement in the United Irishman revolt was brief and unconsidered, a flight of revolutionary fancy rather than a demonstration of longstanding political conviction. Whereas before the revolution Chub’s position as a Protestant landholder would have been sanctioned and protected by the English crown, after the revolution’s unsuccessful conclusion he found himself on the receiving end of British retaliation – a ‘perfect Acteon’, killed by his own dogs. The violent liquidation of Chub’s assets forced his flight to the antebellum American South, where he ‘found a snug harbor at Swallow Barn’ and ‘sat down in the quiet repose which a worried and badgered patriot is best fitted to enjoy’ (ibid.: 65). Although he might have fled Ireland hating royalty, Chub instinctively sought out a Southern aristocratic landscape whose hierarchies, privileges and privations mirrored those he left behind. Kennedy’s Chub, then, is a man capable of being seduced by both romantic republicanism and aristocratic conservatism. This hybrid ideological mix of revolutionary and conservative, Jacobin and Tory, in turn informs the education Chub imparts to his charges at Swallow Barn – a mix particularly well suited to the postrevolutionary American South in which the novel is set. By 1832, Virginia was a region at cross purposes: the new state remained proud of its role in the recent American revolutionary coup, but, like the South as a whole, its inhabitants were beginning to temper republican principles with a more conservative and isolationist view of the South’s future role in the union. The years between 1800 and 1830 in fact mark a watershed period of regional and national redefinition, in which Southern states reimagined the past in order to outfit themselves for the future – a commitment to heritage-building paradoxically inspired by a recognition of the need for cultural progress. Like many

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of the Virginian characters in Swallow Barn, the Anglo-Irish Parson Chub espouses this early nineteenth-century Southern mix of modern and conservative thinking. Kennedy places Chub’s postrevolutionary Anglo-Irish sensibility at the heart of his regional Southern novel by granting this character power over the minds of the aristocrats he tutors. Furthermore, because Chub is granted full authority in building the estate library – which he fills with archaic folios, classical philosophy and, most notably, the writings of Edmund Burke – he is indirectly responsible for the political and philosophical education of the entire county. Mr Meriwether, master of Swallow Barn and self-fashioned cultural philosopher-orator, regularly enlists the parson’s tutorial skills to improve his impromptu public speeches, and Chub, proud that his wisdom is being disseminated to the masses, stands nearby to identify Meriwether’s oratorial antecedents. In the chapter ‘Traces of the Feudal System’ Meriwether presents a cryptic soapbox prophecy concerning future generations of Virginians and the ‘Union’: Mark me, gentlemen, – you and I may not live to see it, but our children will see it, and wail over it – the sovereignty of this Union will be as the Rod of Aaron; – it will turn into a serpent, and swallow up all that struggle with it’. (Kennedy 1986: 74)

Mr Chub, ‘present at this solemn denunciation’, gleefully points out source-texts for this obscure political forecast: ‘He rubbed his hands with some briskness, and uttered his applause in a short but vehement panegyric, in which were heard only the detached words – “Mr. Burke – Cicero.” ’ The conservatism of this statement is indeed Burkean: Meriwether warns that unchecked republican thinking, as embodied by the ‘union’ of the American states, will someday wreak havoc with traditional southern class systems. Yet there is an unacknowledged subtext: using the Rod of Aaron, Moses unleashed ten plagues on Egypt and finally parted the sea to lead the Hebrews out of bondage. Therefore, Meriwether unwittingly acknowledges that the social threat of emancipation underpins his analogy. In later chapters, the weight of this threat prompts Meriwether to advocate class and race division as a means of maintaining a ‘natural’ and ‘ordered’ South. ‘Traces of the Feudal System’ begins with narrator Mark Littleton’s description of the homogeneous, conservative nature of antebellum Virginia society.

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Her institutions all savor of the soil; her population consists of landholders, of many descendants, unmixed with foreign alloy. She has no large towns where men may meet and devise improvements or changes in the arts of life. She may be called a nation without a capital. From this cause she has been less disturbed by popular commotions, less influenced by popular fervors, than other communities. Her laws and habits, in consequence, have a certain fixedness, which even reject many of the improvements of the day. In policy and government she is, according to the simplest and purest form, a republic; in temper and opinion, in the usages of life, and in the qualities of her moral nature, she is aristocratic. (Ibid.: 71)

It is this ‘nation without a capital’, ancestral, fixed, homogenous and unchanging, aristo-republican in nature, which Meriweather argues is in danger of being consumed and digested by Washington and ‘the union’. In true aristo-republican style, this argument is distributed in a top-down manner through which the class and race-based divisions of the plantation system are both reflected and subverted. Meriweather’s warning to future generations is reconstituted first by Mr Chub during a schoolhouse lesson, then by Mr Tongue, the plantation’s overseer, and finally by Meriwether’s trusted slave Carey – whose final interpretation twists Meriweather’s original meaning to imply that Southern conservatism itself breeds insurrection. Littleton records that ‘the next day, Ned and myself were walking by the schoolhouse, and were hailed by Rip [Meriwether’s young son] from one of the windows’ (ibid.: 74). Inside, the boys were being treated to a ‘regular preach’ by ‘patriotic pedagogue’ Chub, whose lesson had ‘got much beyond the depth of his hearers’. At the most animated part of his strain, he brought himself, by a kind of climax, to the identical sentiment uttered by Meriwether the day before. He warned his young hearers – the oldest of them was not above fourteen – ‘to keep a lynx-eye upon that serpent-like ambition which would convert the government at Washington into Aaron’s rod, to swallow up the independence of their native state.’ (Ibid.: 74–5)

Chub’s reinterpretation of Meriwether’s original sentiment shows how an exile from the Irish Rebellion of 1798 might define the threat of political ‘ambition’, and his explication is instructively ambiguous. Whose ‘ambition’ needs to be kept in check? One reading might be that Southerners must train their ‘lynx-eyes’ upon Northern political

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ambition, lest that ‘imperial’ power, as embodied by the ‘government in Washington’, threaten the South’s claim to ‘native’ independence. Read this way, we hear in Chub’s argument traces of his own republican revolutionary past: words like ‘independence’ and ‘native’ suggesting equivalencies between Southern and Irish struggles for sovereignty and independence. Yet because Chub himself identified Meriwether’s original analogy as Burkean, the ‘independence’ Chub advocates here is the freedom to maintain a nonrepublican cultural tradition – namely, a slave-based ‘feudal system’. Chub’s ‘patriotic pedagogy’ is therefore more closely aligned with those aristocratic principles he embraced before and after his brief foray into 1798 republicanism: namely, those of the institutions he has identified as kindred, the Southern aristocracy and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, whose common objective was to keep an eye trained on the twinned threats of insurrection and emancipation. ‘This conceit’, Littleton continues, ‘immediately ran through all the lower circles at Swallow Barn’ (ibid.: 70). Meriwether’s analogy surfaces again from the mouth of Mr Tongue, the aptly named plantation overseer and spokesman. Tongue, who as overseer occupies a somewhat analogous position on Swallow Barn as ‘middleman’ on an Anglo-Irish estate – overseeing the human labour that feeds the aristocracy – repeats Meriwether’s harangue ‘in the presence of the blacksmith and Mr. Absalom Bulrush, a spare, ague-and-feverish husbandman who occupies a muddy slip of marshland on one of the river bottoms, which is now under mortgage to Meriwether’ (ibid.: 75). Littleton does not record Tongue’s reworking of the ‘Aaron’s Rod’ speech for his white, working-class audience; the narrator only allows that Meriwether’s conceit ‘has spread far and wide, though a great deal diluted’. However, in the light of Chub’s liberal refashioning of Meriwether’s analogy to suit his own political outlook, we might assume that Tongue’s interpretation is similarly personalised. Certainly this is the case once the Burke-derived warning reaches ‘veteran groom’ Carey, a livery slave at Swallow Barn who is first introduced as a ‘pragmatic old negro’ in the chapter ‘A Country Gentleman’, Littleton’s extended portrait of Meriwether. Carey is in charge of Swallow Barn’s prized ‘blooded horses’, which Meriwether breeds ‘as a matter affecting the reputation of the state’ (ibid.: 38). Carey, Littleton tells us, in his ‘reverence’ for horse breeding, ‘is the perfect shadow’ of Meriweather, with whom he holds ‘grave and momentous consultations upon the affairs of the stable, in such a sagacious strain of equal debate, that it would puzzle the spectator

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to tell which was the leading member of the council’ (ibid.: 36). Narrator Littleton cites Carey’s status as equal intellectual partner in these debates as cause for mild concern: because ‘Carey thinks he knows a great deal more upon the subject than his master’, he approaches these consultations with ‘a familiarity in the old negro which is almost fatal to Meriwether’s supremacy’ (36–7; italics added). Carey’s sense that he knows more on the subject of breeding, and his willingness to say so, seems to constitute a breach in traditional power on the plantation. It is not, however, interpreted as such by Meriweather, who, the narrative implies, believes that Swallow Barn’s tranquility is the direct result of his benevolent attention to ‘grooming’ his slaves into ‘perfect shadows’ of himself. Meriwether, in fact, so regularly affirms that the slaves on his plantation hold him ‘in most affectionate reverence’ and are ‘not only contented, but happy under his dominion’, that his protestations betray his anxiety over – and Kennedy’s own scepticism about – the veracity of this privileged description. The threat of slave revolt, which underpins the political debates over slavery reform and emancipation necessitated by the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion (and therefore underway during Kennedy’s composition of Swallow Barn), is powerfully acknowledged (via racist caricature) by Carey’s interpretation of Meriwether’s Rod of Aaron analogy, which he ‘considers . . . as importing something of an awful nature’: With the smallest encouragement, Carey will put on a tragic-comic face, shake his head very slowly, turn up his eyeballs, and open out his broad, scaly hands, while he repeats with labored voice, ‘Look out, Master Ned! Aaron’s Rod a black snake in Old Virginny!’ Upon which, as we fall into a roar of laughter, Carey stares with astonishment at our irreverence. But having been set to act this scene for us once or twice, he now suspects us of some joke, and asks ‘if there isn’t a copper for an old negro,’ which if he succeeds in getting, he runs off, telling us ‘he is too cute to make a fool of himself.’ (Kennedy 1986: 75)

Carey’s interpretation of Meriwether’s political analogy is certainly ‘cute’, or acute, in its economical distillation of white Southerners’ anxieties. Turning Meriweather’s original analogy inside out, Carey exposes the unyielding, racist fear at its heart: that the ‘sovereignty of the union’ will ultimately bring about emancipation, which will in turn unleash the ultimate ‘foreign alloy’, free black citizens, into the homogenous ‘fixedness’ of ‘Old Virginny’. Meriwether’s oration,

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initially offered largely as a performance of his learned gentility, is sifted through progressive layers of reinterptetation and revision only to be exposed for what it is: a terrified and xenophobic version of regional pride. And although the dissemination of Meriweather’s political oration in this chapter certainly ‘traces a feudal system’, we are left unsure as to whether Kennedy is here applauding or critiquing this system. Such ambiguity certainly explains why this novel was, as I explain above, praised by both Southern and Northern American readers for divergent reasons. However, critical appraisals of Swallow Barn have persistently underemphasised such textual ambiguities, preferring to read the novel as a straightforward, romantic and characteristically pro-slavery example of the nineteenth-century plantation novel. For example, analysing late nineteenth-century representations of the ‘gothic south’, Rebecca McIntyre offers Poe’s ‘Usher’ as literary antecedent to the ‘dark and romanticized plantation’ imagined by travel writers in the 1870s, and posits Kennedy’s Swallow Barn as the gothic south’s bright antithesis: ‘Swallow Barn (1832) established the plantation as romantic, chivalrous, gallant, grand, and elegant, the essence of the feudal’, while Poe’s story offered ‘grotesque scenes of decay . . . suggestive of the often unacknowledged ambivalence towards slavery as imagined by southerners themselves’ (McIntyre 2005: 55). Yet as I have shown, Kennedy’s novel can also be read as subtly acknowledging such disruptive ambivalences. This subtlety, in fact, seems to have been a conscious aesthetic choice; Kennedy’s manuscript for Swallow Barn includes one scene which the writer excised before the novel went to press. This episode imagines one of Meriweather’s ancestors responding violently to a slave’s ‘impolitic response to his master’s stupidity’. This earlier Swallow Barn master – unintelligent, short and inclined to violence – looked up at the black with the most awful face he ever put on in his life. It was blood red with anger. But bethinking himself for a moment, he remained silent, as if to subdue his temper. He did not speak one word. If he had not constrained himself with this silence, he would probably have attacked his slave with a stick. (Qtd in Bohner 1961: 86; italics original)

‘Such realism’, Bohner observes, ‘is hardly to be expected to occur in the Southern literature of the time, and especially in a domestic idyll like Swallow Barn’ (ibid.: 86). I would add, too, that such direct reference to a ‘master’s stupidity’ and a slave’s ‘impolitic’ acknowledgement

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of same would seem out of place in a novel that critics like McIntyre have described as ‘the essence of the feudal’. And indeed, this scene does not occur; Kennedy deleted the final italicised sentences before his final manuscript went to press. A scene like this, which exposes the violence which underlies every literary and historical encounter between master and slave, is the ‘realism’ that Kennedy from the start removed from Swallow Barn’s landscape in order to create his idyll. However, the violence subdued by this Swallow Barn ancestor and excised from Kennedy’s final manuscript nevertheless lingers on as potent subtext and ideological ambiguity in a novel whose broadly satiric use of the pastoral imbues the entire narrative with a stubborn ambivalence about the institution of slavery. In the only chapter of Swallow Barn directly concerned with the problem of slavery in antebellum Virginia, the writer presents his most sustained meditation on the efficacy of radical reform for securing aristocratic privilege in the South. In ‘The Quarter’, Mark Littleton accompanies Meriwether to Swallow Barn’s slave quarters, where he is lectured on the institution of slavery. Meriweather tells his visitor from New York: ‘gentlemen of the North greatly misapprehend us, if you suppose that we are in love with this slave institution – or that, for the most part, we even deem it profitable to us’ (Kennedy 1986: 458). Meriwether espouses the typical antebellum Southern argument of slavery as ‘necessary evil’, maintaining that as a whole the institution is ‘temperate and wise’, and that ‘the most we can say of it is that, as matters stand, it is the best auxiliary within our reach’. But after this singularly unoriginal defence, ‘a new vein of thought struck him’, and he offers what appears to be the distillation of a longconsidered proposal: ‘It has sometimes occurred to me,’ he continued, ‘that we might elevate our slave population, very advantageously to them and to us, by some reforms in our code . . . I have another reform to propose,’ said Meriwether. ‘It is, to establish by law, an upper or privileged class of slaves – selecting them from the most deserving, above the age of fortyfive years. These I would endue with something of a feudal character. They should be entitled to hold small tracts of land under their masters, rendering it for a certain rent, payable either in personal service or money. They should be elevated into this class through some order of court, founded on certificates of good conduct, and showing the assent of the master . . . I have some dream of a project of this kind in my head,’ he continued, ‘which I have not fully matured as yet. You will think,

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Mr. Littleton, that I am a man of schemes, if I go on much longer – but there is something in this notion which may be improved to advantage, and I should like, myself, to begin the experiment. Jupiter, here, shall be my first feudatory – my tenant in socage – my old villain!’ (Ibid.: 459)

Critics have dismissed Kennedy’s attitudes towards slavery in this novel as typical of early nineteenth-century Southern thinking on the contentious topic of emancipation and reform.6 Lucinda MacKethan, in her preface to the novel’s 1986 edition, is the critic most attentive to Meriwether’s suggestive social theories; she briefly notes that in ‘The Quarter’, ‘Kennedy gives the narrative to Frank Meriwether so that he can speak, in a voice devoid of humor or sarcasm, as a model slaveholder on the necessary evil of slavery that it is his uncomfortable duty to sustain’ (Mackethan 1986b: xxv). Yet I would point out that Meriweather presents two lines of argument here: one, a typical antebellum defence of slavery’s necessary evils, and another more interesting, because decidedly Burkean, delineation of a neofeudal ‘dream project’. The chapters that immediately follow ‘The Quarter’ – ‘A Negro Mother’ and ‘Abe’ – tell the story of one Swallow Barn slave identified by the experiment-happy Meriwether as naturally smarter and more noble than most, but in these regards also more dangerous: Abe was an exception . . . He was . . . an athletic and singularly active lad, rapidly approaching to [sic] manhood; with a frame not remarkable for size, but well knit, and of uncommonly symmetrical proportions for the race to which he belonged. . . . There was an expression of courage in his eye that answered to the complexion of his mind: he was noted for his spirit, and his occasional bursts of passion, which, even in his boyhood, rendered him an object of fear to his older associates. This disposition was coupled with a singular shrewdness of intellect, and an aptitude for almost every species of handicraft. . . . But a habit of associating with the most profligate menials belonging to the extensive community of Swallow Barn, and the neighboring estates, had corrupted his character, and, at the time of life which he had now reached, had rendered him offensive to the whole plantation. (Kennedy 1986: 466–7)

Abe, the ‘noble’ slave, is reaching manhood and in danger of mixing with the plantation’s ‘profligate’ slave element. Abe’s physical beauty, courageous manner and shrewd intellect render him a threat on the plantation, unless, according to Burkean plantation ethics, he is given

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a station that better fits his character. Through the story of Abe, Kennedy argues that a class system within slavery is a social reform capable of warding off the threat of revolution embodied by Nat Turner, Abe’s clear historical prototype. Thomas Gray, the lawyer who recorded Turner’s ‘confession’ before his execution, noted that ‘for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, [Turner] is surpassed by few men I have ever seen’ (qtd in Horowitz 1999: 84). This sense that Turner was somehow intellectually superior and therefore dangerous persists today: in an interview with Tony Horowitz, Gilbert Francis, producer of a recent Southampton historical society documentary on the Turner Rebellion, claimed that the reason Turner rebelled against the ‘benevolent system’ of the Southern plantation was that he was too well treated: ‘Nat had his insurrection because . . . his expectations rose higher than what he could achieve’ (ibid.: 84). In Swallow Barn, insurrection is averted through prudent reform; Meriwether allows Abe to leave the plantation and take a position as a sailor, thereby rendering him able to apply his intellect and courage on the ocean rather than in masterminding a rebellion. Writing in the aftermath of the Turner rebellion, Kennedy imagines a plantation system modified to secure power through benevolent moderation. Echoing Burke’s ‘moral aristocracy’, Kennedy advocates a flexible paternalism able to preserve traditional culture while modifying just enough to ensure solvency. Pseudo-Aristoi and the Plague of Dandyism The time was right, the circumstances favorable – for dandyism was a product of the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century. When such solid values as wealth and birth are upset, ephemera such as style and pose are called upon to justify the stratification of society. Ellen Moers, The Dandy

A moral aristocracy, as advocated by Burke, would be free of the dandy figure, even as it embraced other aspects of post-French Revolution conservatism. In Reflections on the Revolution, Burke identifies a kind of fatal dandyism at work in an otherwise blameless French aristocracy, a ‘considerable fault and error’ which he argues ‘helped bring on their ruin’: Denying, as I am well warranted to do, that the nobility had any considerable share in the oppression of the people in cases in which real

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oppression existed, I am ready to admit that they were not without considerable faults and errors. A foolish imitation of the worst part of the manners of England, which impaired their natural character without substituting in its place what, perhaps, they meant to copy, has certainly rendered them worse than they formerly were. Habitual dissoluteness of manners, continued beyond the pardonable period of life, was more common amongst them than it is with us; and it reigned with the less hope of remedy, though possibly with something of less mischief by being covered with more exterior decorum. They countenanced too much that licentious philosophy which has helped to bring on their ruin. (Burke 1955: 158–9)

For Burke, the French aristocrat’s one shortcoming was a ‘foolish’ and unnatural mimicry of the superior ‘manners of England’. Using Burke’s hallowed principles of monarchy as mere fashion accessories, French aristocrats substituted outward finery for substantive character; meticulous attention to ‘external decorum’ masked, and therefore encouraged, a dissolute licentiousness which in the end laid them open to revolution. The French aristocrat’s main fault, according to Burke, was therefore dandyism – a ‘foolish imitation of the worst . . . of the manners of England’. Burke’s aristocrat dandy, whose exquisite externals mask moral bankruptcy and sexual licentiousness, is one infused with reform-minded didacticism – from his ignominious ruin rises an aristocratic ideal. At the start of the nineteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams argued at length about those qualities that might constitute, and perhaps preserve, a distinctly American aristocracy, Edmund Burke remained a strong subtext in all of their correspondence. In response to Jefferson’s concept of the ‘natural aristocrat’, Adams argued that stringent checks must be in place in the grey areas between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ in order to police the content of a new American aristocracy, lest that culture be infiltrated by the merely (or dangerously) stylish and graceful. Adams asked how natural aristocrats would be chosen, if not by blood or wealth. His unease seems to stem from the possibility that ornamentation, beauty and charm would stand in for moral character and thus seduce a populace into upholding a new kind of pseudoaristocrat: the charismatic dandy. ‘Now, my friend, who are the [aristocrats]’, Adams wrote. Philosophy may answer ‘The Wise and the Good.’ But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, ‘the rich and the

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beautiful and the well born.’ What chance have Talents and Virtues in competition, with Wealth and Birth? and Beauty? (Qtd in Cappon 1959: 371)

Adams then asked that Jefferson not ‘laugh at the introduction of Beauty, among the Pillars of Aristocracy. But Madame Barry says [true royalty is beauty], and there is no more certain truth’ (ibid.: 372). Then, ‘groping for the secret elixir that explained the mystery of power, [Adams] stumbled onto an idea which closely resembles Max Weber’s concept of charisma: the irrational and indefinable quality which men have historically looked for in their leaders’ (Taylor 1979: 29). ‘Beauty, Grace, Figure, Attitude, Movement’, Adams argued, ‘have in innumerable Instances prevailed over wealth, birth, Talent, Virtues and everything else, in Men of the highest rank, greatest Power, and sometimes, the most exalted Genius, greatest fame, and highest merit’ (Cappon 1959: 372). The beauty Adams identifies as the strongest pillar of aristocracy is by no means considered an unambiguously positive infusion in a Southern context. Thus the ‘doomed aristocrat’ figure embraced by postrevolutionary Southerners becomes closely linked to the emergent figure of the Regency dandy: the effeminate pseudoaristocrat with a secret elixir of power, whose show of gentility becomes a social virus. Dandyism, a post-French Revolution pro-aristocracy backlash, was a Regency movement populated by men of largely common birth who, through a complex show of good breeding, excellent taste in clothing, and conspicuous disregard for the welfare of the underclasses, created a conservative, homosocial haven for those aristocratic qualities simultaneously desired and despised by both Southern aristocrats and the Anglo-Irish. The dandy figure – more perhaps than the doomed aristocrat, or the ‘Southern Hamlet’, as Taylor has it – serves as a litmus test in these fictions for how far an aristocracy has declined: the dandy’s relative sway in a cultural landscape suggests the extent to which proactive reforms have failed to refurbish degenerate aristocracies. Because Edgeworth’s novel, published in 1801, predates the Regency period, her representation of Castle Rackrent’s fashionable, homosocial world, tainted with the worst of European aristocracy, in fact anticipates both the excesses embraced and criticisms engendered by Regency dandyism. We see in her foppish Anglo-Irish gentlemen a critique of the merely stylish, and the writer’s own sense that to survive, the Anglo-Irish must renovate the more dissipated aspects of

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an inherited English aristocratic model. For according to the principles of dandyism, [i]t was, of course, fashionable to be a lord – but not a lord who lived on the family estate, distributed hot broth and warm clothes to his tenants, and supervised the management of the land. Indeed, it was unfashionable to know exactly the extent of one’s resources. The fashionable way to describe a gentleman’s dependence on the land was to say – with the abstraction of a Russian nobleman counting his ‘souls’ – that he had a rent roll of so many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, pounds a year. It was also fashionable and neatly convenient to have part of one’s money ‘in the funds.’ And it was highly fashionable to go hopelessly into debt, for which the fashionable remedy was a discreet removal to the continent. (Moers 1960: 47)

This definition of the dandy’s mode of lordship resembles the AngloIrish mode of landlordism Edgeworth lampoons in Rackrent. Edgeworth’s gothic vision of decay and decadence on an Irish estate in fact begs its own opposite: lords who ‘liv[e] on the family estate, distribut[e] hot broth and warm clothes . . . and supervise[e] the management of the land’. Absentee landlordism, fashionable for a dandy, was according to Edgeworth fatal to the Ascendancy. Not knowing the extent of one’s resources was also fatal; a lack of awareness concerning one’s own assets leads directly to disinheritance. And for the last Lord Rackrent, a discreet removal to the ‘continent’ is impossible; Lord Condy is in the end rendered so impoverished by generations of Anglo-Irish decadence that he can afford no escape. Sirs Kit and Condy Rackrent are proto-dandies; in their imprudent behavior, their eschewing of necessary estate upkeep in favour of the ‘trappings’ and ‘style’ of aristocratic privilege, they are every bit the dangerous dandies Kennedy attempts to oust from his model plantation. Sirs Kit and Condy also presuppose the Regency dandy-aristocrat figure in their singular inability to reproduce: Castle Rackrent, a novel ostensibly concerned with ‘union’, is conspicuously lacking in representations of productive Anglo-Irish nuclear families. In Castle Rackrent, Sir Condy Rackrent must choose between Judy McQuirk, a poor Catholic tenant on his own estate, and Isabella Moneygawl, a young Anglo-Irish heiress. Condy’s first choice, Judy McQuirk, is an inappropriate sexual match for a young lord, because marriage to a poor, uneducated Catholic woman threatens Condy’s status as a proper aristocratic gentleman. Judy, then, is a ‘queer’ match in terms

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of her religion and class. Condy’s only other choice for marriage, Miss Moneygawl, is more ‘appropriate’, yet his interest in her is purely mercenary and doomed to fail. In refusing to favour or make productive any sexual union in a story conspicuously devoid of successful heterosexual relationships, Edgeworth’s novel questions the degenerate aristocrat’s ability to secure patriarchal authority. Edgeworth’s early interest in aristocratic impotence finds an echo in an 1830 conversation the writer participated in and recorded while visiting Paris (later recounted by biographer Isabel Clarke) which took dandyism as its specific topic: The conversation that ensued turned . . . finally to the subject of English dandies. Maria found it entertaining to listen to half a dozen Parisians, all talking at once and giving their respective opinions of such young men who from time to time were to be seen in Paris, not only describing their manners but imitating their gestures, and comparing them with the petit marquis of old French comedy. The duchesse d’Escars finally summed up the difference between them by saying that while the French dandy wished if possible to please women the English one would not do so even if he could. (Clarke 1949: 113; italics original)

The Parisian aristocrats Edgeworth conversed with agreed with Burke that dandyism used aristocratic pretensions to cover over sexual licentiousness; their amendment to Burke’s observation, however, is that whereas French dandies use foppishness to ‘please women’, the English dandy’s extravagances are performed and enjoyed strictly between men. Once can understand why, despite Clarke’s assertion that ‘such discussions must have been entirely new to Maria; it was not the kind of improving talk one heard at Edgeworthstown’ (ibid.: 113), Edgeworth might have recorded this discussion of dandies and sexuality; in Castle Rackrent, Edgeworth implicitly links foppishness with sexual deviance. Although the gentlemen inheritors of Castle Rackrent temper their potentially emasculating taste for extravagant clothes and carriages with long nights of drinking, gambling and flirting with lower-class women, we can nonetheless see Edgeworth forging in this novel an imaginative parallel between aristocratic decadence and sexual deviance. This parallel is taken up more suggestively and explicitly in Swallow Barn – a novel composed after the term ‘dandyism’ has entered the popular vernacular – through a distinctly effeminate, male-identified figure Kennedy explicitly identifies as a ‘dandy’.

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In a letter composed to her son Franklin in 1846, Elizabeth Heritage Washington, the aptly named daughter of a North Carolina cotton planter, warned against ‘overrefinement’ and ‘foppishness’, explicitly informing him of her contempt for ‘Dandyism’.7 This letter, from a lady of the Southern aristocracy to a son at Yale, indicates that the term ‘dandyism’, and its attending connotations of excess and effeminacy, was circulating within Kennedy’s antebellum South. But one need look no further than Swallow Barn itself for the term. When Ned Hazard, the young aristocrat in residence at Swallow Barn, decides to court the moneyed daughter of an adjacent plantation, he briefly feels he must also adopt the foppish code of conduct and dress which she deems ‘gentlemanly’. Hazard is too wild and boisterous in Bel’s estimation; she prefers Southern Cavaliers in the form of Singleton Swansdown, a young dandy-inheritor of a nearby Virginia plantation. Hazard thus determines to ‘assume a more sapient bearing in his intercourse with Bel, and to dazzle her with a display of learning and sentiment’ (Kennedy 1986: 412). According to the ‘usages’ of dandyism, Ned first alters his manner of dress: Ned . . . withdrew to make his toilet; and, in due time, reappeared, decked out in a new suit of clothes, adjusted with a certain air of fashion which he knew very well how to put on. His cravat, especially, was worthy of observation, as it was composed with that elaborate and ingenious skill which, more than the regulation of any other part of the apparel, denotes a familiarity with the usages of the world of dandyism. (Ibid.: 412)

After ‘putting on’ his dandified toilet, Ned then proceeds to dazzle Bel with his knowledge of poetry, social rules, and ‘Our English ancestors’ (ibid.: 417). In this show of dandyism, Ned assumes that by imitating ‘that model of precision and grace, the ineffable Swansdown – whom Bel thinks one of the lights of the age’ he can ‘[seize] upon that secret grace which fascinates the imagination of female beholders’ (ibid.: 412). He is partly right; Bel is at first duly impressed, yet by nightfall she, along with all other members of Hazard’s entourage, is perplexed and ultimately bored: ‘In short, Ned’s substitution of a new character began already to make him dull’ (ibid.: 418). But Hazard merely plays the dandy; when his walk through the woods has come to its genteel end, he and Littleton revert to old habits, drinking through the night over a game of poker.

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Young Singleton Swansdown, the novel’s true dandy, need not struggle to keep any such masculine roughness at bay. This flamboyant bachelor, master of an estate in southern Virginia, [had] a tall figure, and an effeminate and sallow complexion, somewhat impaired perhaps by ill health, a head of dark hair . . . a soft black eye, a gentle movement, a musical, low-toned voice, and a highly-finished style of dress. (Kennedy 1986: 122)

A world traveller and anglophile, this ‘delicate, emaciated’ version of the doomed aristocrat figure first appears riding in ‘a new light blue curricle, with a pair of long-tailed bay horses in fine keeping, driven by and followed by a servant in livery’. ‘It was very evident’, Littleton records, ‘that Mr. Singleton Oglethorpe Swansdown was a man to produce a sensation in the country’ (ibid.: 122). After thus introducing the effete Swansdown, does Kennedy truly mean for us to conclude, along with his narrator, that Swansdown’s bachelor status is ‘the fault only of his stars’ (ibid.: 123)? Swansdown’s genteel habit of ‘looking through the window, with a flower in his hand regaling his nose’ (ibid.: 314) does attract its share of Southern Belles. But Swansdown’s own affections tend to ‘fall off unaccountably’ after a short courtship. Indeed, Prudence Meriwether, the thirty-something doyenne of Swallow Barn, is taken in by Swansdown’s charms only to see her dandy beau ‘wing his flight’ at the mere mention of marriage. He demurs: I particularly regret that the nature of the occupation to which I am about to return is such as to engross me for some months, and most probably may compel me again to cross the Atlantic. It is likely, therefore, that I will have added some years to my account before we meet again. Your fate will be doubtless changed before that happens: as for mine, I need scarcely allude to it. (Ibid.: 348)

With these parting words, Swansdown leaves as he came: ‘the glittering vehicle, with its dainty burden, was seen darting into the distant forest’. Using this exaggerated caricature of aristocratic masculinity, Kennedy critiques those aspects of Southern culture which produce – and tolerate – such men, to whose unmentionable fates one needs scarcely allude. And although for Kennedy the dandy is localised in the hypereffeminate Swansdown, the dandy figure inflects Kennedy’s characterisations of all male Southerners in the novel. Swansdown’s

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suggestive homosociality forms part of the moral Kennedy tries to promote in this novel: that English-influenced aristocratic models must be tempered with a more masculine American individualism to avoid ‘the world of dandyism’ (ibid.: 412). Although the extremes of effeminate homosociality are ousted from Kennedy’s novel when Swansdown departs in his glittering carriage, Kennedy nonetheless imagines the project of uniting North and South not through the typical, ‘national romance’ union of male and female characters, but as a union between two men – Northerner Mark Littleton and Southerner Ned Hazard – who together form the perfect aristocratic gentleman. Early in the novel, in a letter begging Littleton to leave New York and come to Swallow Barn, the young aristocrat Hazard derides relationships with women as sentimental, arguing that any attachment to a woman which keeps a man from travel is evidence of emasculation. Using the bond between Littleton and Hazard, Kennedy queers what Nancy Silber terms the North– South ‘Romance of Union’, an antebellum and postbellum literary form in which a romance between a Northern man and a Southern woman served as a thinly-veiled propagandistic appeal for national unity (Silber 1993: 5). Sidestepping the heterosexual nation building conventions of what Doris Sommer has termed the ‘national romance’(Sommer 1991: 3), Kennedy instead offers a homosocial romance capable of advancing a similar ideological goal: a ‘union’ between North and South securing the best of American male aristocracy. In Swallow Barn, the narrator from New York, Mark Littleton, remains in possession of a masculinity untainted by the South’s ‘fatal effeminacy’, and his presence on the plantation heads Hazard’s potential foppishness – signalled by a dangerous ‘familiarity with the usages of . . . dandyism’ – off at the pass. Therefore, a union of Northern and Southern masculinities, rather than a more traditional national romance plot ending in the union of masculine and feminine, thus guides America’s first plantation novel to its conclusion. 8 Castlereagh’s Boys In his autobiography, Kennedy remembers the early days of his formal education at Baltimore College, a ‘rather famous first-rate academy . . . in the best repute in those days, and the sons of our best families were educated there’ (Kennedy 1969: 37). ‘Our’, here, is Kennedy’s way of pointing to the upper crust of Baltimore families;

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Kennedy’s social status in early nineteenth-century Baltimore secured his place in this small, elite boarding school. The education he received there was for the most part guided by one man: the Reverend William Sinclair, ‘my kind old preceptor, friend and guide for many years’ (ibid.: 37), and model for Swallow Barn’s Irish tutor Mr Chub. This Irish-born Presbyterian parson co-founded Baltimore College in 1809 with fellow Presbyterian clergyman Samuel Knox. Kennedy tells us little about Sinclair other than that he, like Kennedy’s father and many other ‘Irish gentlemen’ in the early Baltimore social milieu, emigrated from the north of Ireland to the American colonies in the late eighteenth century. Kennedy does, however, give readers one more tantalising piece of information: He was a native of Ireland, educated to the Presbyterian ministry, and had been private tutor and companion to Lord Castlereagh, the prime minister, by whom in the time of the Irish rebellion, he was very badly treated, as he was often heard to complain. (Ibid.: 37)

In a letter to his wife composed in 1796, the Anglo-Irish Lord Castlereagh records William Sinclair as present at a drunken dinner the young lord hosted on the eve of the 1798 Rebellion at Mount Stewart, his estate in County Down. His intention was to quell his Irish Catholic tenants’ anxieties, to beg their pledges of allegiance to both himself as landlord and to the English crown, and to dissuade them from joining the United Irishmen brigade: They did it with every mark of sincerity after the ice had been broken and their panic a little removed. They had been much deceived and much threatened. We had a very jolly dinner, Cleland quite drunk, the Rev. William Sinclair (the Presbyterian minister) considerably so, my father not a little, others lying heads and points, the whole very happy, and God Save the King and Rule Britannia declared permanent. (Qtd in Leigh 1951: 80)

Castlereagh, an Anglo-Irish landlord, is here observed by John Kennedy’s later tutor in a scene that strikingly remembers Edgeworth’s Rackrent: an over-confident lord hosting a drunken dinner party for his tenants, certain he can secure a peasant’s political allegiance though food and libations, only to leave again the next morning wrongly convinced that his tenants are loyal, his estate secure. Again we find Kennedy’s Baltimore tutor straddling the kindred landscapes

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of Edgeworth’s Anglo-Ireland and Kennedy’s aristocratic South. More interesting for the purposes of this study, however, is Castlereagh’s status as a dandy-aristocrat: Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh – the Anglo-Irish landowner who ostensibly forced Sinclair’s removal from Ireland and into the waiting imagination of a young John Pendleton Kennedy – was also a Singleton Swansdown-esque, dandified aristocrat, who in the end took his own life rather than face sexual scandal. Lord Castlereagh was born in Dublin in 1769, at the height of what has been termed the Ascendancy’s ‘golden age’. The Reverend Cleland, colleague of William Sinclair, recalled that when he ‘received him at the age of ten, [Castlereagh was] a sickly enfeebled child’ (qtd in Hyde 1959: 165). Despite his delicate constitution, Castlereagh completed his formal education in Ireland and England and was elected to the Irish Parliament in 1790. In 1798, the year of the United Irishmen uprising and William Sinclair’s flight to Baltimore, Castlereagh assumed the post of Chief Secretary, and subsequently used this powerful position to promote the formal Act of Union with Great Britain. As the Act did not inspire wide support in the Irish parliament, Castlereagh assumed the position of convincer, offering money and land to turn reluctant Irish MPs. These tactics, referred to by many as wholesale bribery and corruption, ensured Castlereagh’s poor reputation in the annals of Irish history. Following the Act of Union, Castlereagh served in the English parliament for another twenty years, assuming the posts of Secretary for War (1805) and Foreign Secretary (1815) – with mixed success. Beyond his political exploits, however, Castlereagh is also remembered for a series of scandals which marked his final years. Convinced that blackmailers had compromising information about alleged homosexual habits that would ruin him, in 1822 Castlereagh chose suicide over public exposure. In his biography Castlereagh (1966), C. J. Bartlett quickly dismisses the events surrounding the blackmail scandal as insignificant. He allows that Castlereagh believed himself to be threatened with exposure, but argues that the lord’s mental state at the time of his suicide was erratic, and therefore that ‘this particular piece of evidence need not be taken seriously’ (Bartlett 1966: 262). Another of Castlereagh’s biographers, however, made his mark as a cultural historian by exploiting the theme of homosexual exposure; in The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh (1959), as in his transcription of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials for ‘gross indecency’ (The Trials of Oscar Wilde, 1948), H. Montgomery Hyde places issues of exposure and transgression right at the heart of his narrative.

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‘We now come to the core of the story’, writes Hyde. Granted that Castlereagh believed during his last days that he was about to be publicly denounced as a homosexual . . . the question may naturally be asked: are there any grounds for supposing that he had in fact committed a homosexual offence? (Hyde 1959: 182)

Hyde answers an emphatic ‘no’, arguing instead that although there were those in Parliament who believed Castlereagh to be a homosexual, these opinions came solely from political opponents ‘whose cherished object was to encompass his ruin’ (ibid.: 184). Hyde insists such opponents staged this ‘scandal’ to blackmail Castlereagh, and his reconstruction of the incident goes something like this: ‘when Parliament was sitting and the weather was fine’, Castlereagh often ventured into a nearby red-light district to visit female prostitutes. This fact was noted by ‘a man named Jennings’ who, along with other ‘scoundrels’ plotted an ‘ingenious trap’: [O]ne night during the session of 1819, Castlereagh was taken by his companion to a certain house, where they were both shown into an apartment furnished in the conventional manner of a brothel. His companion began to undress, when to his horrified amazement Castlereagh discovered that the person who had brought him here was not a woman, as he had supposed, but a youth dressed in woman’s clothes and disguised to pass as a woman. (Ibid.: 185)

Whether or not Castlereagh was in the habit of sleeping with men, fear of public exposure seems to have led to a particularly dramatic suicide: Castlereagh retreated from London to his home in Kent and there slit his own throat. As this chapter has demonstrated, a common merger of aesthetics and proactive reform links the Anglo-Irish Big House and Southern plantation novel literary traditions from their inception. Whether they use gothic or pastoral conventions to explicate the ideological contours of their respective aristocratic landscapes, Edgeworth and Kennedy exploit these antithetical literary modes to identify and regulate those individual and cultural deviations which might compromise the mask of supremacy. In the figure of Castlereagh, yet another in this study whose personal history dramatises concrete links between Anglo-Ireland and the Anglo-American South, we find a link between Edgeworth and Kennedy’s early inquiries into deviance and aristo-

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cratic control and later Irish and Southern modernist re-examinations, complications and expansions of these themes. Swallow Barn may be the first plantation novel to evince a preoccupation with the question ‘what makes a gentleman?’ – but as the following chapter will demonstrate, this theme remains central to Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern fiction into the modernist period. When rebel slaves led by Turner in 1831 were caught and killed, some died wearing the clothes of their murdered masters. Some Southern planters responded to this pointed mimicry with a particular kind of horror: namely, that their identity as aristocrats relied on the trappings of gentility secured through slave labour and little more. In this historical, violent send-up of white supremacy, we see the sartorial inversion taken up by William Faulkner as the central narrative tension of Absalom, Abslalom!: the hidden irony of the planter’s power – that the position of ‘master’ is created by and maintained through slave labour – is an irony the planter must deny through public performances of racial and cultural supremacy. The desire to suppress that which is abhorrent to oneself or one’s culture – even if that desire leads to suicide – dominates the two novels I will turn to in the following chapter. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) anatomises the artifice of aristocracy: how beauty, youth and privilege can be mobilised and manipulated to obscure amorality and hide sexual deviancy; Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! explores how sartorial ambiguities inherent in the plantocrat ideal can be manipulated by outsiders – thereby exposing as artifice all constructions of white southern supremacy. The aristocrat’s fear of being exposed as a fraud, a deviant – a fear dramatised by Castlereagh’s suicide in 1822 – becomes, in both Dorian Gray and Absalom, Absalom!, formally intertwined with a characteristically modernist interest in the aesthetics of passing. Notes 1. American (Baltimore, 1832), qtd in MacKethan 1986b: xii. 2. This term takes center-stage in one of the most famous and influential debates in the later correspondence of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: the definition and maintenance of a particularly American ‘natural aristocracy’. See Cappon 1959: x–xi. 3. Lisa Moore makes a similar observation about Castle Rackrent when she labels the novel ‘anti-Romantic’, arguing that through an inversion of the aesthetic principles governing the national romance, Edgeworth can be read as participating in an intellectual dialogue with other Romantics of

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5. 6. 7.

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her time. Moore therefore counters previous critics who have consistently located Edgeworth outside the pale of Romanticism (Moore 2000: 113–44). In Ball 1998 the author records the response to this revolt in his own planter-aristocrat family: ‘A letter from a distant relative points to more distress. “May the almightie protect you . . . from their devilish machinations,” wrote John Moultrie, an in-law in England, to Isaac Ball. “[I]n these times of emancipation and freedom and liberality, you gentlemen freeholders in the Southern states will be in constant apprehensions [of] insurrection and murdering of Whites” ’ (268). Alexander the Coppersmith here gets his metaphor wrong: ivy will never become an oak, although it can ‘suck the marrow’ from an oak over time. See Hubbell 1929; Bohner 1961; and MacKethan 1986b. The Elizabeth Washington Grist Knox Papers: Folder II subseries 1.4: ‘Letters (1846–51, 1863)’. Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries. Walt Whitman’s Calamus sequence, first published in the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860), celebrates what he calls ‘adhesive’ love between men – a love he insisted, in his 1871 essay ‘Democratic Vistas’, is political in nature: ‘It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative [between men and women] love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar society, and for the spiritualization thereof’ (Whitman 1963–4: 414). In the poem ‘Live Oak with Moss’, Whitman makes his most direct allusion to ‘manly love’ between North and South as capable of healing the rifts of Civil War: ‘I saw in Louisiana a live oak growing, / All alone it stood, and the moss hung down from its branches, / Without any companion it grew there, glistening out joyous leaves of dark green, / And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself; / But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves, standing there alone without its friend, its lover – For I knew I could not’ (lines 1–6).

CHAPTER 2

The Picture of Charles Bon: Oscar Wilde’s Trip through Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha

One day I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you. It was to have been my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece. But as I worked at it, every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that the world would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much. Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray But I never saw it. I do not even know of my own knowledge that Ellen ever saw it, that Judith ever loved it, that Henry slew it, so who will dispute me when I say, Why did I not invent, create it? . . . It would not even need a skull behind it; almost anonymous, it would only need vague inference of some walking flesh and blood desired by someone else even if only in some shadow realm of make-believe. – A picture seen by stealth, by creeping . . . into the deserted midday room to look at it. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

In the final chapter of Jefferson Davis, American, William J. Cooper concludes his biography of the South’s enigmatic president by describing a curious encounter. In 1882, a near-bankrupt Davis was living on Mississippi’s Gulf coast at Beauvoir, a ‘raised cottage . . . [of] considerable size . . . Greek Revival details, and extensive grounds’ (Cooper 2000: 611). Attempts to reinvigorate Briarfield, his family’s Mississippi plantation, were failing. His two-volume Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, published in 1881 as a ‘monument to his cause’ (ibid.: 619), received mostly faint praise, and most reviewers depicted him as ‘a man of the past, out of touch with the

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world of 1881’ (ibid.: 620). It was this insolvent and out-of-touch Davis who sat on Beauvoir’s breezy Gulf-front verandah as a twentyeight-year-old Oscar Wilde walked up the stately drive for an afternoon visit. One writer singles out this visit as the ‘single episode’ most ‘emblematic of the changes the world was experiencing while it left [Davis] behind’: The flamboyant, witty, and resoundingly gay Oscar Wilde, on a tour of the United States in 1882, decided he wanted to meet Davis above any other citizen. As Cooper reports, ‘. . . he captivated Varina and Winnie [Davis’s wife and daughter], though Davis found his demeanor and dandyish dress offputting. Wilde left him an unrequested, signed photograph.’ It was the twentieth century knocking at Davis’s door that day, and he simply didn’t know what to do with it. (History House 2003)

It is important to note that in 1882, when Wilde toured the United States decked out in French lace, purple velvet and satin knee breeches, male effeminacy was not necessarily interpreted as indicating same-sex desire. Although many contemporary readers of visual culture, including the reviewer quoted above, are quick to interpret ‘dandyish dress’ as ‘resoundingly gay’, we cannot assume that Davis automatically associated Wilde’s sartorial choices with sexual preference.1 Instead, Davis would have viewed Wilde’s unusual dress through the broad spectrum of assumed ‘deviancies’ that late Victorians regularly associated with effeminacy, including, as Lisa Hamilton observes, ‘aristocratic license, sexual deviance, “vice”, or hereditary debilitation’ (Hamilton 2002: 231). Considering how this list might have resonated in the Reconstruction South clarifies why Davis might have found Wilde’s aristocratic effeminacy particularly offputting. For by 1882, the figure of the dissipated, effeminate and sexually ineffectual Southern aristocrat (one already familiar to readers of Kennedy’s Swallow Barn) was casting his shadow over the American cultural scene. This particular dissipated aristocrat had particular reason to refuse association with one so flamboyantly ‘queer’; Davis was famously rumoured to have donned women’s clothing while attempting his 1865 escape from Yankee forces, and this popular ‘evidence’ of deviancy and decadence became compelling fodder for northern mockery of southern manhood. Nancy Silber records that immediately following this incident, images of Jefferson Davis ‘decked out in crinoline and skirts’

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appeared in periodicals, advertisements and even sheet music, all of which ‘offer[ed] a symbolic display of the Northern view of Southern gender confusion at the close of the war’ (Silber 1933: 30). The modern, androgynous figure in ‘dandyish dress’ knocking at the door of Beauvoir repelled Davis because in Wilde he saw embodied the very gender indeterminacy of which he and men of his class stood accused. But the unreconstructed, ruined Davis fascinated Wilde, because in this defeated statesman the artist identified that particular combination of heroism and decay which informed his later aesthetic philosophies. Lloyd Lewis suggests that because ‘Jeff Davis . . . had been captured wearing his wife’s raincoat’, he ‘had been lampooned savagely enough to merit now the sympathy of a lampooned aesthete’ (Lewis and Smith 1936: 367). Wilde’s fascination with ruined aristocrats might well have begun at Beauvoir; this thematic attraction, however, finds its most complex expression in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and, as this chapter will demonstrate, Dorian Gray in turn offered another Mississippian obsessed with doomed aristocrats a gothic template upon which to re-queer the South. For, forty years after Wilde left Davis on that verandah, William Faulkner brought this Irish dandy back to Mississippi. Halfway through Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! readers encounter the novel’s sole direct allusion to another writer: Mr Compson, the novel’s most decadent-minded narrator, imagines as Wildean a graveyard scene played out against the backdrop of a Mississippi plantation: It must have resembled a garden scene by the Irish poet, Wilde: the late afternoon, the dark cedars with the level sun in them, even the light exactly right and the graves, the three pieces of marble . . . looking as though they had been cleaned and polished and arranged by scene shifters who with the passing of twilight would return and strike them and carry them, hollow fragile and without weight, back to the warehouse until they should be needed again; the pageant, the scene, the act, entering upon the stage . . . (Faulkner 1990: 157)

Because Wilde’s typical landscapes are interior and domestic – the ubiquitous drawing room of his stage comedies – readers might stumble over Mr Compson’s identification of this graveyard ‘garden scene’ as particularly Wildean. Wilde’s early poems, however, often used gardens as decadent erotic settings: Mr Compson might have in mind either ‘The Garden of Eros’ or ‘Charmides’ (in which a young man ravishes a marble statue and a nymph falls in love with a corpse),

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both published in Poems (1881). And even the interior-obsessed Dorian Gray starts out in a garden; the novel begins: The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. (Wilde 1988: 1)

In each of these examples, however, and in true Wildean fashion, nature imitates art: we encounter exterior landscapes so stylised and domesticated that they seem as artificial as any lush interior with which Wilde is more readily associated. And this, it seems, is precisely Mr Compson’s point: with this instructive literary allusion, the narrator calls attention to the ‘hollow fragile’, stylised artifice of Absalom’s plantation landscape, and by extension to the artifice this landscape demands from those who inhabit it. Therefore, when Mr Compson recasts the Southern plantation landscape as a decadent Wildean stage, this genteel artifice is complemented by the stylised characters who enter: a ‘magnolia-faced woman . . . created of by and for darkness whom the artist Beardsley might have dressed’, and a ‘little boy whom Beardsley might not only have dressed but drawn – a thin delicate child with a smooth ivory sexless face’ (Faulkner 1990: 157). To their theatrical decadence Faulkner adds a twist at once characteristically Faulknerian and, as I will argue, Wildean: this graveyard scene is about miscegenation. This magnolia-faced Belle, ‘walking beneath a lace parasol’ and attended by a black servant, shrouds herself in a veneer of ‘civility’ which fails to mask her racial ancestry. Because ‘the octoroon’ (the only name Faulkner gives her) performs the ‘bright dramatic pageantry’ of a segregated aristocracy which denies her, she, as much as her ‘sexless’ son, fits seamlessly into the Irish dandy Wilde’s iconography. By depositing Wilde into the racial, sexual and ancestral battle ground of Thomas Sutpen’s Mississippi plantation, Faulkner envisions the ‘Irish poet’ as a figure paradoxically at home in the South. Absalom, Absalom! is a novel held together by a complex and interlocking series of ‘pictures’. The Sutpen myth is spun by narrators compelled, by desire, hate or a combination of the two, to paint Sutpen and his progeny through the varied lenses of personal obsession. The family portrait Quentin imagines as ‘not quite right’ (ibid.: 9) in chapter 1; the strange ‘picture’ of sexual impropriety Mr Compson imagines Bon gingerly ‘resolving’ and ‘fixing’ through the language of photography

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in chapter 4 (ibid.: 87–91); the bedside picture Rosa Coldfield ‘invents’ and ‘creates’ in chapter 5 (ibid.: 118); and the pocket-sized snapshots that Quentin and Shreve imagine Charles Bon carrying through the Civil War in chapter 8 (ibid.: 286) – each example of real or imagined Victorian portraiture in this multivocal novel expands upon the relationships between portrait, artist and spectator dissected by Wilde in Dorian Gray. Critics have noted Faulkner’s early interest in Wilde’s Salome (1893) and his 1925 visit to the artist’s tomb as important glimpses into his own decadent leanings. Lothar Hönnighausen demonstrates that reading Faulkner’s Marionettes (1920) against Salome illuminates a shared fascination with ‘the poetic quality of biblical prose and the imaginative beauty and unrealistic nature of its images’ (Hönnighausen 1987: 159). But besides a brief inquiry into Wilde’s influence on Faulkner’s later novels, Hönnighausen limits his investigation to the echoes of Swinburnian decadence and Beardsleyesque exoticism that Faulkner’s direct and indirect references to Wilde evoke. Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, Faulkner engages with far more than ‘implications and lingering connotations’ (ibid.: 158) when he imports Wilde into the South. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Absalom, Absalom! are novels joined by their shared fascination with the erosion of moral values and the multiple forms amorality can take. This in itself is not revelatory; many modernist texts incorporate and transform fin de siècle discourses of degeneration to explore moral decay. This shared fascination becomes more complex, however, when we recognise that Faulkner’s Charles Bon is a figure anticipated by the androgynous pseudoaristocrat Wilde: who, like Bon, came down from Oxford to find himself first in Mississippi (visiting with Jefferson Davis on his gracious verandah) and then in New Orleans (where he was escorted on a tour of the city by Civil War hero General P. T. Beauregard). Responses to Wilde’s public persona consistently conflated Victorian notions of femininity and savagery – a conflation Faulkner mirrors in his effeminate aristocrat Charles Bon. As Curtis Marez observes, newspapers responded to Wilde’s 1895 trials for ‘gross indecency’ with ‘visceral, anti-Irish sentiments in which Wilde’s homosexuality represented a foreign contagion that threatened England’ (Marez 1997: 273). One 1895 National Observer editorial exhibits such sentiments in spades: ‘The obscure impostor, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices, his follies, and his vanities, has been exposed’ (qtd

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ibid.: 273). By reading Charles Bon through Wilde, therefore, one finds that all facets of the Wilde figure – effeminate dandy, Irish contagion, cultural pariah – are central to Absalom’s decadent landscape. Wilde’s trip through the ‘ruined’ South crystallised the artist’s lasting preoccupation with the relationship between beauty and decay, a preoccupation which found its fullest expression in the figure of Dorian Gray, a beautiful gothic monster in whom physical decline and aestheticism merge. We can therefore read Dorian Gray as a novel whose gothicism was in part born of the same aesthetics of ruin as Faulkner’s Absalom. Wilde’s seemingly off-the-cuff comparisons between the Confederate position in the Civil War and Ireland’s position vis-à-vis the British Empire in 1882 are, as I will demonstrate in the first section of this chapter, congruent with a larger history of Anglo-Irish identification with the Confederate cause. Significant groups within these two cultures shared a late-Victorian political ideology formed through the dangerous blend of romantic nationalism and garrisoned conservatism, and this paradoxical ideology is one whose inherent ambiguities influenced the artistic imaginations of Wilde on one side of the Atlantic and Faulkner on the other. Because Wilde wrote first, and established an entire philosophy of dandyism that could at once pay homage to and mock the ideologies which produced him, I next argue that in Wildean dandyism (as expressed through both Wilde’s self-aestheticisation and his prose) Faulkner recognised a model through which to augment his critique of the multiple performances of Southern aristocracy. Thomas Sutpen, the planter-patriarch who wills himself into existence and invents aristocracy on his own terms, uses the principles of Wildean dandyism to set into motion his self-described ‘design’. Wilde’s presence in Absalom also draws attention to the way another dandy-aristocrat exposes the equally theatrical category of Southern whiteness. In the corrupted beauty of Dorian Gray, we see the seeds of Faulkner’s Charles Bon: another dandy-aristocrat whose bodily ‘corruption’ operates as a metaphor for cultural ruin. Wilde’s effeminacy, as represented by him and for him in fiction and public life, is always ‘read’ in ways which reflect a reader’s own assumptions about embodied sexuality. Reading Charles Bon against the Wildean dandy figure highlights how Bon’s relative ‘whiteness’ or ‘blackness’ is similarly ‘read’ by Absalom’s narrators, who likewise expose their own assumptions about the relationship between external appearance and racial categorisation. Through allusions to Dorian Gray that illuminate the homoerotic nature of Bon’s relationship with Sutpen’s son Henry, Faulkner

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rearticulates sexual ‘otherness’ as racial unassimilability. By reading Faulkner through Wilde, we can see that Faulkner does not use miscegenation to symbolise same-sex desire, or same-sex desire to symbolise miscegenation. Rather, he presents the two transgressions as imbricated in order to highlight the particular fear of ‘sameness’ each breach of Southern morality engenders. Reading Wilde through Faulkner in turn draws attention to the multiple ways Wilde’s own sexual ‘otherness’ was likewise racialised; Wilde’s race – his Irishness – was cast as yet another in a long list of sexual transgressions. Wilde about the South When, towards the end of his 1882 American tour, Wilde was offered a set of lecture engagements that would take him through the American South, he responded immediately: ‘I have received a good offer for two months light lecturing in the South, which I am anxious to visit’ (Wilde 2000: 163). Wilde’s ‘Southern enterprise’, as his promoter christened it, began on 12 June 1882 at Memphis’s Leubrie Theater, where he was greeted by ‘a cultivated audience of six hundred people’ eager to hear a lecture entitled ‘Decorative Art’ (Lewis and Smith 1936: 358). Wilde spoke next in New Orleans and then travelled to Texas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia, finally completing his Southern lecture engagements on 14 July at the Vicksburg Opera House in Mississippi. To modern readers, Wilde’s tour of the Unites States at the age of twenty-eight, where he lectured on topics as diverse as interior decorating, aestheticism and Irish nationalism, and in locations as farranging as Montgomery, Alabama and Sioux City, Iowa, fascinates by virtue of unexpected juxtaposition: the Irish aesthete shaking hands with the Colorado cowboy; blue velvet knee-breeches showing up against sombre late-Victorian black; and recommendations for ‘The House Beautiful’ intoned for the farmers of Griggsville, Illinois. But fascinating as the whole of Wilde’s tour remains, his trip through the postbellum South emerges as its most illuminating segment. On 4 July, an Atlanta Constitution reporter interviewed ‘the Great Esthete’ in his hotel room. To create advance publicity for that evening’s lecture, Wilde peppered his aesthetic ruminations with praise for the South: It should be – the south – the home of art in America, because it possesses the most perfect surroundings, and now that it is recovering from the

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hideous ruin of the war I have no doubt that all these beautiful arts, in [sic] whose cause I will spend my youth in pleading, will spring up among you. The south has produced the best poet in America – Edgar Allan Poe: and with all its splendid traditions it would be impossible not to believe that she would continue to perfect what she has begun so nobly. The very physique of the people in the south is far finer than that in the north, and a temperament infinitely more susceptible to the influences of beauty. (Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8)

Wilde flatters Southerners by suggesting that their ‘splendid traditions’, played out against the backdrop of ‘perfect surroundings’, create the ideal conditions for American art. Physically and temperamentally, Wilde argues, southerners are superior cultural vessels – advocating a southern renaissance he graciously implies has been only slightly delayed by the ‘hideous ruin of the war’, a ruin from which the South is, in Wilde’s on-the-record estimation, quickly recovering. However, in a private letter composed the next day, Wilde praises instead the aesthetic possibilities of the ruined South: I write to you from the beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance: picturesque too in her failure to keep pace with your keen Northern pushing intellect; living chiefly on credit, and on the memory of some crushing defeats. And I have been to Texas, right to the heart of it, and stayed with Jeff Davis at his plantation (how fascinating all failures are!) and seen Savannah, and the Georgia forests, and bathed in the Gulf of Mexico, and engaged in Voodoo rites with the Negroes, and am dreadfully tired. (Wilde 2000: 175–6)

Passion and ruin, beauty and failure (with some voodoo on the side) are twinned forces that define Wilde’s impressions of South. In his identification of Poe as the South’s greatest poet Wilde underscores the kind of Southern aesthetics he values; one senses that economic recovery is the last thing Wilde would have prescribed for a renaissance in Southern art. Wilde knew what Southerners wanted to hear from a ‘great esthete’, namely, that their war-torn cities were still more cultivated and refined than those in the North. As the son of Speranza, the Irish nationalist poet, Wilde was well-versed in the rhetorical power of underdog nationalism and romantic defeat, and he used this

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knowledge to ingratiate himself with Southern audiences. What also becomes clear is that even in 1882 Wilde was preoccupied with the relationship between art and ruin. Upon returning from Beauvoir, Wilde was asked to describe his visit: [Davis] lives in a very beautiful house by the sea, amid lovely trees. He impressed me very much as a man of the keenest intellect, and a man fairly to be a leader of men on account of a personality that is as simple as it is strong, and an enthusiasm that is as fervent as it is faultless. So it was a matter of immense interest and pleasure to me to meet the leader of such a great cause. Because although there may be a failure in fact, in an idea, there is no failure possible. The principles for which Mr. Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat. (Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8)

Although readers of the Atlanta Constitution might have been touched by Wilde’s unrestrained admiration for ‘the principles for which . . . the South went to war’, most modern readers are shocked to find Wilde espousing such blindly conservative and racist politics. Yet two principles that guided Wilde’s political and aesthetic beliefs throughout his career are at work here. The first, learned from his nationalist mother, was that groups of people bound together by shared politics and cultural tradition have an inalienable right to selfgovernance and are therefore compelled to rebel against imposed governance. The second was to become Wilde’s central artistic principle: that the twinned aesthetics of beauty and ruin form the crux of modern art. Wilde’s conflation of Davis’s personal failures with the military and ideological failures of the South is therefore significant to the artist’s later work; for Wilde, every ruin is a condition to be analysed and aestheticised. In the world of ideas, as in Wilde’s world of art, failure and ruin are aesthetic impossibilities. Richard Ellmann records that after Wilde returned from America, he would explain that ‘in the South, whenever one would mention anything, people would reply, “you should have seen it before the War” ’ (Ellmann 1988: 196). Wilde claimed to have underestimated the power of ruin ‘until one night in Charleston he turned to someone and said, “How beautiful the moon is!” and had for reply, “You should have seen it, sir, before the War” ’ (ibid.: 196). Of course, readers familiar with Mark Twain’s 1883 Life on the Mississippi will note that Wilde’s local colour vignette sounds suspiciously familiar: Twain’s narrator records a conversation in which one man’s rumination on the relative

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brilliance of Northern and Southern moonlight is interrupted by another raconteur: ‘Reminds me of an anecdote . . . There was an old Negro woman . . . A young New Yorker said in her presence, ‘What a wonderful moon you have down here!’ She sighed and said, ‘Ah, bless yo’ heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw!’ (Twain 320)

The superior brilliance of the Southern moon, then, seems to have been a popular Southern conversational topic circa 1882. Whether Wilde directly experienced such an exchange, or merely read Twain, seems less important than his obvious interest in the broader implications of this lighthearted vignette – for in it one finds a central Wildean principle, put most succinctly in his combative preface to Dorian Gray: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’ (3). Fins de Siècle and Fins du Globe ‘Fin de siècle,’ murmured Lord Henry. ‘Fin du globe,’ answered his hostess. ‘I wish it were fin du globe,’ said Dorian, with a sigh. ‘Life is a great disappointment.’ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

While lecturing in the American South, Wilde began to identify himself to his audiences as pointedly Irish and not English – a fact which makes fitting Mr Compson’s assertion that the graveyard melodrama at Sutpen’s Hundred was like one an Irish artist might have imagined. In interviews and public performances, Wilde used his Irishness as a point of departure from which to make connections between the position of the Southern Confederacy in relation to an ‘imperial’ North and the position of the Irish in relation to the British Empire. When Wilde compared the postbellum South of 1882 to the late-Victorian Ireland of his upbringing, he stressed what he perceived to be a shared history of rebellion against a hostile, imperial government. ‘We in Ireland are fighting for the principle of autonomy against empire, for independence against centralization’, he remarked to the Atlanta Constitution, ‘for the principles for which the South has fought’ (Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8). In his conflation of Irish and Southern political principles, one again sees Wilde romanticising the Confederacy in Irish nationalist

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terms. Yet Wilde here goes further – he imposes a shared unionism into his Anglo-Irish / Southern comparison, insisting that although both ‘nations’ wish for autonomy, neither Ireland nor the South truly wish to be divorced from a larger, centralising power. By merging Irish romantic nationalism with a strategic unionist conservatism born of a desire to preserve Anglo-Irish culture, Wilde follows on the heels of other Victorian Anglo-Irishmen who located within the principles of the Confederacy that incongruous blend of Protestant romantic nationalism and self-serving conservatism they themselves embraced. Careful Southern readers in 1882 might have been offended by Wilde’s assertion that Southern Confederates did not intend to dismantle the national union. Despite a military defeat which devastated the South’s arable land and eradicated its slave-based economy, the ‘New South’ in which these readers lived was still defiantly modelled on pre-Civil War agricultural models. Slavery had been replaced with a sharecropping system which ensured that ‘the social and agricultural system remained agrarian oriented’, and ‘the South remained a closed society heavily influenced if not dominated by conservative planters’ (Cobb 1984: 4). As Richard Godden has persuasively argued, the South did not see the Civil War’s true end until this antebellum cultural model was finally dismantled by Roosevelt’s New Deal agricultural policies, a series of Agricultural Adjustment Acts implemented between 1933 and 1935 which legislated the permanent destruction of this neo-slavery social structure. It was only with the implementation of the Agricultural Acts that what Godden terms the South’s ‘long revolution’ ended: To read the historical documents surrounding tenancy during the midthirties (as Faulkner wrote Absalom) is to recognise that the New Deal constitutes the South’s ‘Second Civil War’, another revolution from without, initiating a second and more radical reconstruction of Southern labour. (Godden 1997: 115)

Wilde’s Southern audiences were certainly not uniformly behind ‘union’ as the only means of staving off economic ruin. However, the schism between a secessionist desire for violent dismemberment and a more cautious and strategic desire for national unity divided the late-Victorian Southern political scene as definitively as it did that of the Anglo-Irish. Strategic subscription to both ‘Old South’ nationalism and ‘New South’ unionism was therefore a paradox familiar to Faulkner and his

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contemporaries. Wilde’s ambivalent sense that freedom within empire might constitute a requirement for ‘national’ greatness resonates strongly with Faulkner’s own characterisation of the tension between Old South and New in postbellum culture. For just as Wilde was an artist who, in his own estimation, ‘stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of [his] age’ (Wilde 2000: 657), so did Faulkner position himself and his art against the backdrop of the fast-changing culture of the New South. Secession failed, the New South was in danger of losing that which made the Old South distinctive, and liberal Southerners like Faulkner stood on the dividing line between past and future. The conservative ideals of the Old South still held their aesthetic attractions (as evidenced by the burgeoning Southern Agrarian movement) and yet these ideals obscured the violent restructuring of beliefs and values going on beneath the surface. Faulkner was an artist situated on the often uncomfortable threshold between late Victorianism (a mode of thought which dominated Southern consciousness well into the 1930s) and Modernism – ‘Enough of a Modernist’, Daniel Singal observes, ‘to see through the mask [of the Cavalier myth], he was Victorian enough to be shocked by what he saw’ (Singal 1982: 154). Faulkner’s gothic modernist fiction therefore traverses a transitional generic and cultural ground that mirrors the transitional Victorian landscape from which Wilde’s novel materialises. Dorian Gray and Absalom emerge from and reveal the last days of parallel aristocratic cultures, and both writers use the conventions of gothic fiction to expose the fault lines between individual desire and the weight of colonial history. The fallacy of an ahistorical identity – an identity which will obscure any record of past transgression – breaks down when protagonists are confronted with history written on the human body. Dorian Gray is confronted with an ever-changing portrait which registers the moral degradation caused by his sins. Thomas Sutpen must confront the consequences of rejecting a son who may have mixed blood when that exiled son returns to destroy him. Faulkner’s novel argues that those denied by a xenophobic culture will return to claim their revenge. Wilde’s novel similarly argues that when a man creates an ‘other’ onto which he can project the worst of himself without penalty, he succeeds only in defiling himself – a direct, albeit subtle, anti-imperialist critique. Dorian Gray’s ‘obsession’ with dissociating action from consequence becomes ‘worse than the corruption of death itself’; his portrait, like the Southern aristocrat’s rejected progeny, will ‘breed horrors, yet never die’ (DG 92).

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That Faulkner’s novel engages in an extended dialogue with Wilde’s critique of British colonialism gives literary weight to Sean Latham’s observation that the plantation ‘genealogies’ of Absalom link the Southern plantocracy with ‘the ideological structures of a European model of imperialism which has been effaced from the surface of an American national consciousness’ (Latham 1998: 456). Understanding Faulkner’s dialogue with Wilde in terms of each artist’s position in relation to colonial history and aesthetics in fact draws attention to how what Latham terms a ‘larger Euro-American history of imperialism and subjugation’ (ibid.: 461) has defined the aesthetic conventions of a transatlantic gothic/modernist tradition.
In An Irishman in Dixie, Editor Nelson Lankford observes that sympathy for the Confederate cause was in fact common within the Ascendancy class at large: If it could be said that British opinion was divided when the American Civil War began, it could be argued too that [Ango-Irish landowners] favored the South, or at least viewed the conflict as the North’s attempt to suppress a legitimate Southern impulse for national self-determination. Many of them, like the Confederates they supported, focused on the idealism of a struggle for national independence and chose to ignore the iniquity of the South’s peculiar institution and to deny that the system degraded the master as it oppressed the slave. (Conolly 1988: 8–9)

In an ironic twist, a romantic nationalist idealism associated with struggles for autonomy and independence made Anglo-Irish conservatives more likely than their conservative British counterparts to support the Southern cause.2 Yet it must also be the case that a longstanding anti-Catholicism, which for centuries had justified Anglo-Irish claims to superiority and power, also inflected Anglo-Irish support for the South’s ‘peculiar institutions’. Between 1864, when Anglo-Irish sympathy for the Confederacy was at its gun-running height, and 1882, when Wilde likewise chose to ‘ignore the iniquity of the South’s peculiar institution’, Southern and Irish planter classes were experiencing varying degrees of economic and cultural ruin. In the South, displaced planters fought against the ideological threats of a newly ascendant commercial middle class and a newly emancipated African-American farmer class in order to ‘insure that the New South could be constructed on

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a plantation foundation’ (Cobb 1984: 4). Anglo-Irish planters, likewise threatened with extinction, attempted to enact constitutional reforms meant to preserve an agrarian culture rooted in class and racial inequity. Anglo-Irish landowners’ identification with the South’s bid for independence stems from the two cultures’ similarly garrisoned positions. In the nineteenth century both cultures had at their centres landowning ‘aristocracies’ sandwiched between stronger central governments whose interests increasingly diverged from their own and revolutionary underclasses from whom they must always fear armed revolt.3 J. C. Beckett’s description of AngloIreland’s ‘peculiar and difficult circumstances’ – circumstances that sound much like those of the Southern aristocracy – helps to clarify why the Southern aristocracy presented these surrounded landlords with a fantasy of rebellion: Though almost perpetually under siege, [the Anglo-Irish] had neither means nor authority to organize their own defense. They must work always under orders from a remote headquarters, where strategy and tactics were liable to frequent fluctuations and where the enemy could often exercise as much influence as the garrison itself. They had no power to come to terms on their own behalf; but they lived in constant fear that terms would be arranged behind their backs; that a vital outwork might suddenly be surrendered; and even that, sooner or later, the whole fortress would be abandoned, and they themselves left to their fate. (Beckett 1976: 88)

The American Civil War in fact inspired Anglo-Irish politicians to attempt a watered-down constitutional version of a bid for national self-determination. When in 1869 Isaac Butt proposed modifications to Ireland’s union with England that would restore legislative power to Dublin, many Anglo-Irish landowners supported this bid for parliamentary home rule. The phrase ‘Home Rule’, which, as R. F. Foster records, first appeared in Irish nationalist discourse as early as 1857, was taken up by Butt and his protestant supporters to mean a ‘developed Parliament at Dublin, for Irish affairs, emphatically within the Empire, and compatible with a federalized arrangement for United Kingdom government’ (Foster 1988: 397). Anglo-Irish protestants, anxious over the recent disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and anticipating further damaging reforms, were willing to support a movement that, although unionist at heart, borrowed its rhetoric from the revolutionary nationalism of mid-Victorian Fenianism.

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But whereas Anglo-Irish supporters of this Home Rule movement were looking backwards towards their own ‘golden age’ – the years from 1782 to 1798 marked the last time Ascendancy Ireland had enjoyed parliamentary self-governance – Catholic Home Rulers viewed an Irish parliament as the first step towards national independence. Under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, the Irish Land League orchestrated a mass movement to reform agricultural practices in post-Famine Ireland. This ‘elaborate system of moral-force warfare’, known as the Land War of 1879–82, marked ‘the first time the tenant farmers as a class stood up against the landlords’ (Moody and Martin 1987: 286). The Kilmainham Treaty of 1882, agreed upon between Gladstone and Parnell, granted concessions to tenant farmers in exchange for decreased agitation, and with this and subsequent parliamentary Land Acts the strategic alliance between the British Parliament and the Anglo-Irish planter class was effectively demolished. The Land Acts restructured colonial Ireland; no longer were members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy able to dictate the terms under which their tenants would subsist. Because without the protections of union, Protestant landowners stood to lose their political power, economic livelihood and distinctive culture, many withdrew their earlier support of Home Rule. The short-term goal of Parnell’s Home Rule movement – parliamentary independence – is one Oscar Wilde was primed to support. Wilde’s family identified firmly with that segment of Anglo-Irish culture which produced nationalists like Thomas Davis and William Smith O’Brien, mid-Victorian Protestant nationalists who remained determined that ‘the Anglo-Irish should not be regarded as less than genuine Irishmen, merely on account of religion or descent’ and aimed to ‘proclaim an all-embracing [Irish] nationality in which the Anglo-Irish could share fully, without any risk of being submerged under a Catholic majority’ (Beckett 1976: 100). Wilde’s parents were both avowed nationalists: Sir William Wilde was an esteemed scholar of Gaelic folklore and history; Lady Wilde, writing as ‘Speranza’, gained fame publishing incendiary romantic nationalist verse. However, the romantic ideal of an independent Ireland in which Catholic and Protestant cultural traditions were deemed equally vital was damaged by the Land Acts; when the power structure on which Protestant Ireland had built its history was altered, many Anglo-Irish nationalists (the Wildes included) began to distrust the nationalism they had once wholeheartedly supported.

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Wilde’s sense of his own Irishness and his understanding of ‘revolution’ broadly construed therefore reflect his position as a member of the Anglo-Irish landowning class raised on the principles of Protestant nationalism. Jerusha McCormack illuminates this political context when she argues that the strain of conservatism in Wilde’s otherwise liberal and in some cases anarchistic politics can ‘be ascribed to instincts sharpened by his experience as the son of an Irish landlord’: While Oscar was still a schoolboy, Sir William Wilde had bought a substantial estate on shores of Lough Corrib in County Mayo, where he built Moytura House. After his death and her removal to London, Speranza depended on the rents from this property to augment a meager income. But in 1880, the year Wilde wrote Vera, agitation among tenant farmers for reduced rents and ownership of land reached such a pitch that the Pall Mall Gazette commented: ‘We have really to face in Ireland a social revolt of formidable magnitude . . .’ Speranza wrote that year to a friend: ‘Ireland is in a very unquiet state – I fear the people will now refuse to pay rents and whoever enforces payment will be assuredly shot – I despair of my beloved Irish at last.’ (McCormack 1998: 84)

Faced with monetary evidence that support for Irish nationalism meant the destruction of Anglo-Ireland, Speranza grew more conservative. By 1879 Lady Wilde ‘despaired of Dublin . . . because tenants were failing to pay rents on her properties’, and in that year she relocated to London where she remained until her death. The former nationalist agitator’s political transformation was complete when, on 24 May 1890, she was granted a Civil List pension from ‘the nation against which she had once sponsored a revolution’ (Ellmann 1988: 124, 126). Therefore, when Wilde tells the Southern press that the Confederacy’s revolutionary principles are also those which the 1880s Unionist Irish are ‘fighting’ to preserve, we can hear Wilde speaking from the ambivalent position of a late-Victorian Anglo-Irish nationalist: The case of the South in the Civil War was to my mind much like that of Ireland today. It was not a struggle to see the empire dismembered, but only to see the Irish people free, and Ireland still as a willing and integral part of the British Empire. To dismember a great empire in this age of vast armies and overweening ambition on the part of other nations is to consign the peoples of the broken country to weak and insignificant places in the panorama of the nations, but people must have freedom and

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autonomy before they are capable of their greatest results in the cause of progress. This is my feeling about the Southern people as it is about my own people, the Irish. (McCormack 1998: 4)

Although he argues that progress requires freedom and autonomy, Wilde here insists that ‘to dismember a great empire’ is tantamount to laying the entire imperial body open to attack. Wilde’s ambivalence on the subject of revolutionary politics stems from an inherited loyalist, Anglo-Irish belief in the rightness of imperial ‘union’, and an equally powerful (literary) nationalist conviction that autonomy is mandatory if individuals or nations are to create anything ‘great’. This equivocal political position – one suspended somewhere between imperialism and democracy, unionism and autonomy – is echoed in Wilde’s vexed attraction to the trappings of Empire. His obsession with aristocracy necessitated a kind of tightrope performance of adulation tinged with sarcasm, through which the artist exercised intellectual ‘freedom and autonomy’ through colonial satire. Wilde’s ideal artist would not want to repeal the union between Ireland and England. But that artist would assert his right to openly mock that Empire and to expose the cultural exclusions and prohibitions upon which the maintenance of Empire depends. Longstanding Southern anxieties over the Reconstruction-era incursion of capitalist and market-driven Northern economies only worsened during and after the Agricultural Adjustment Acts. AngloSouthern fears of ‘invasion’, whether from the industrial North or the nonwhite South, permeate Faulkner’s writing. In Absalom Faulkner shows the insidious and hidden cultural power of these fears by choosing to represent them through a narrative subconscious – they are ‘secreted’ through cracks in the mask of Southern aristocracy Absalom’s planter patriarch Thomas Sutpen wears like armour (Godden 1997: 3–4). Through this narrative structure, Faulkner insists that when the aristocratic code of Southern paternalism breaks down under the weight of agricultural, industrial and ideological change, the sexual, economic and racial realities hidden behind Southern plantation culture’s aristocratic performance are brought into harsh relief. Faulkner does not limit his portrait of ruptures in the aristocratic façade to his novel’s time frame (1833–1909); his rendering of plantation aristocracy’s vulnerable fault lines also implicitly extends to an analysis of the economic and racial landscape of the 1930s South within which Faulkner composed the novel. Godden contends that for Faulkner, as for many Southerners, the American

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Civil War did not end with the treaty at Appomattox. Instead, the Civil War did not find its real conclusion until the first Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 restructured slavery-designed sharecropping practices in the South. Following this logic, the 1936 Absalom is a novel forced into existence from the collapsing center of [plantation] culture. Situated at the commercial edge of the owning class as its counterrevolution fails, and prompted by cumulative evidence of eviction, exodus, and tenant unrest, Faulkner anatomizes the long last days of an archaic structure of feeling. (Godden 1997: 21)

Faulkner’s novel therefore considers the Civil War not from the safe distance of 60 years on, but instead from the embattled cultural grounds of a war just ended. In The War Within, Daniel Singal traces a similar trajectory. He argues that the transition from late Victorianism to Modernism in the South was delayed for almost thirty years because the economic devastation of the Civil War, combined with the cultural and ideological repositioning forced on the South by Reconstruction, created a cultural vacuum in which Victorianism maintained a stranglehold on Southern thought until well into the twentieth century. Strict definitions of gender, sexual repression and stringent divisions between the categories of ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’, black and white, formed the anxious Victorian response to the women’s movement, industrialisation and Darwin’s evolutionary theories. White Victorians in the American South had a clear reason to resist these movements, which represented a direct threat to their unique agricultural and paternalistic way of life. Furthermore, although the transition from late Victorian to Modernist culture constituted a dramatic and at times traumatic shift in thinking across the western world, ‘nowhere can it be seen with greater clarity than in the American South’ (Singal 1982: 9): Nowhere else was the topic of race, a prime concern of modernists, more explosive than in the South. Ever since the Civil War the Victorian dichotomy had supplied a principal bulwark for the Southern white supremacy, with blacks cast customarily as savages (or undisciplined children) and whites as the foremost paladins of civilization. (Ibid.: 9)

Reconstruction Victorian thinking allowed white landowning Southerners to maintain their cavalier myth of aristocratic supremacy

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even after the physical and cultural devastation of the Civil War gave the lie to Southern gentility. The Agricultural Adjustment Acts of the 1930s mark the divide between the Old South and the New, between a Reconstruction South garrisoned against cultural change through the ‘new slavery’ of sharecropping agriculture and a postReconstruction South in which agrarian plantocracy no longer structured Southern culture. Although this shift marked the end of Old South plantocracy, those white supremacist beliefs supported by late Victorian pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority still underpinned white Southern thinking in the 1930s, and in Absalom, Faulkner, a Modernist writer only ‘by the skin of his teeth’ (Singal 1982: 111), can therefore be understood as writing about late Victorian Southern culture for a readership whose aesthetics and values that culture still defines. This fact seems to have influenced the novel’s form and narrative structure. Because, as Warwick Wadlington has shown, Absalom is a narrative that turns on the rhetorical power of personal outrage. Faulkner was careful to structure the novel’s distinct moments of moral horror in ways that would provoke, shock, and challenge the late-Victorian value systems of his audience – specifically that reading audience, steeped in the South’s honour–shame culture, in whom ‘the old dynamic of hazarded affront and enabling was still sufficiently alive, or could be revived’ (Wadlington 1987: 61). By presenting ever more scandalous affronts to ‘common’ decency and by locating these affronts squarely within the boundaries of the ‘Old South’, Faulkner’s ‘inventory of incest, rape, fratricide, idiocy, castration, bodily corruption, and tragic miscegenation’ constituted a carefully timed rhetoric of moral outrage. Faulkner’s readers, confronted with a novel which tests them in so many ways – morally, intellectually and, in terms of the sheer reading energy this novel requires, physically – become themselves scripted by Faulkner’s ‘theme[s] of affront [and] revenge’ (ibid.: 61). Absalom’s rhetoric of outrage worked in the 1930s (and still works today) because in this novel Faulkner lets loose into the Cavalier’s South the destabilising notion that ‘decency’ has no common denominator at all; codes of chivalry, demarcations of class, sexual taboos and divisions between black and white are exposed as contingencies. Faulkner’s use of outrage as rhetorical bridge between artist and reader is not only evident in his earlier decadent writings, but in fact underscores his continuing fascination with the Decadents, especially Wilde. By revealing only by obscure degrees the nature of any

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given ‘affront’ (incest, miscegenation, homosexuality) in Absalom, Faulkner employs a Wildean strategy of gothic euphemism in which transgressions are alluded to without giving away central narrative secrets. Readers are thus primed for (and implicated in, since they ‘knew all along’) a carefully orchestrated, rhetorically timed revelation of gothic ‘horror’. Neil Matheson has demonstrated that in The Turn of the Screw, Henry James’s elaborate use of euphemism constitutes the writer’s oblique response to the Wilde trials: The story’s casting of sexuality in the mode of Gothic terror and its thematizing of the fear of going public are responses to the climate of anxiety surrounding non-normative sexuality in England in the 1890s, embodied for James (and many others) by Wilde’s 1895 trials for ‘gross indecency’, three years before the novel’s publication. (Matheson 1999: 711.

Matheson argues that James ‘responds to the Wilde trials by conjuring up a Gothic atmosphere of horror and panic surrounding the idea of transgressive sexuality’ (ibid.: 741); an atmosphere made all the more frightening through opacity: These transgressions are intimately connected with the story’s erotic figurative language, which is both representation and performance. If the story euphemizes acts that are never clearly named, this figuration itself is what is finally transgressive, a potentially scandalous erotic play; in the end James, like [his character] Miles, might claim that all he did was say things. (Ibid.: 741)

Unlike Faulkner, James never names Wilde directly; he instead evokes his presence through allusion and subtle quotation – for when Miles claims that all he did was say things, he in fact paraphrases Wilde’s own not-guilty plea. Although Matheson subtly argues the connections between James’s gothic rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Wilde trials, he fails to notice how gothic ‘figurations’ of unnamed sexual transgressions in The Turn of the Screw mirror Wilde’s own use of euphemism-ashorror in Dorian Gray. Wilde indeed claimed, in response to loud accusations of immorality, that all he did was say things. The exact nature of Dorian’s sin remains unspecified, and readers must implicate themselves if they choose to name Dorian’s transgressions. When asked in court whether a certain passage of Dorian Gray alluded to homosexual liaisons between men, Wilde responded, ‘It describes

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Dorian Gray as a man of very corrupt influence, though there is no statement as to the nature of the influence’ (qtd in Hyde 1959: 132). In one of many letters to the editor written in defence of his novel, Wilde insists as much: It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption. Otherwise the story would have had no meaning and the plot no issue. To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story. I claim, sir, that he has succeeded. Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them. (Wilde 1982: 248)

Dorian Gray is a novel which refuses to attach itself unambiguously to the moral climate it illuminates; as Michael Gillespie notes, the novel stands as very much a product of the Victorian era, yet no fixed or single image of that period – no Platonic ideal – exists as a unified and consistent vision within the consciousness of either the author or his readers. As a result, any notion of the age projected by the narrative of Wilde’s novel will necessarily incite a multitude of different visions. (Gillespie 1996: 59)

It is this multivalent quality that makes it impossible to read Dorian Gray as a straight moral tale. Although Wilde claimed Dorian Gray to be ‘a story with a moral’, this moral’s exact nature remains obscure, and the clear pleasure Wilde takes in dramatising Dorian’s descent into corruption, coupled with Wotton’s elegant elucidation of decadent principles to which Wilde himself subscribed, undermines any moral dénouement. In the final estimation, this novel seems concerned less with morality and more with reception: how audiences both within and outside the novel’s narration respond to its aesthetic, sexual and moral codes. Dorian Gray makes himself simultaneously readable and unreadable, enacting a self-consciously posed and studied ambivalence that prosecutors later deconstructed and read as homosexual in Wilde’s three 1895 trials. Similarly, ‘it will not have escaped attention’, Richard Godden writes, ‘that Absalom, Absalom! is almost unreadable’: As a record of an attempt by a planter and his class descendants to tell the story of planter accumulation it is the product of characters who, in

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order to live with themselves and their properties, have to make themselves more or less unreadable to themselves and to others. Repression, cognitive and political, is their cast of mind, yielding stories that contort, distort, evade, and displace what they know. (Godden 1997: 77)

Faulkner at once subscribes to and mocks these cognitive and political repressions, making the author’s own position in relation to the racial and sexual politics he presents through his narrators notoriously difficult to read. If the novel’s most graceful and heroic figure is murdered because he threatens miscegenation, what is the novel saying about the relative morality of cross-race unions? If as readers we become affectively seduced by the courtship between Bon and Judith (or Bon and Henry) and desire their union, then what is the novel suggesting about incest and homosexuality? This evasion is part of the novel’s dogged moral displacement. If one speaker, in his or her monologue, casts an action clearly beyond the moral pale, another might suggest that the same action is morally acceptable, given specific circumstances. In this way, the novel’s timing in regard to moments of moral outrage mimics the narrative logic of Dorian Gray; in Absalom, the figurative language through which speakers describe transgression itself euphemises unnamed acts, thereby doubling and tripling the meanings assigned to sexual taboos and implicating speakers (and readers) as tainted with the ‘sins’ they imagine. Both novels are chiefly concerned with the aristocrat’s transferal of sin and responsibility onto others in an attempt to preserve his own ego or soul. Dorian Gray transfers his unnamed sins onto his portrait and lets that aesthetic object bear the weight of his transgressions. Reflecting on history, Dorian Gray prophetically muses that ‘mad, wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear’, are acts which bring their own punishments: ‘a degradation infinitely more terrible than the fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they sought to escape’ (Wilde 1988: 101). Thomas Sutpen also attempts to cast off his past, as it is embodied in the racial ambiguity of his first wife, Eualia Bon, and later in his ‘decadent’, dandyish son Charles. In so doing, Sutpen enacts a Dorianesque attempt at the maintenance of his own (and Southern aristocracy’s) ‘purity’, only to find, years later, ‘the face he believed he had paid off and discharged twenty-eight years ago’ on the steps of his plantation and demanding acknowledgment (Faulkner 1990: 231). Both attempts to transfer the physical markers of ‘sin’ to other ‘faces’ replicate the relationship between sin, shame and secrecy

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enacted by colonisers within a colonial context; to live within and benefit from a colonial system one must obscure one’s own complicity in the violence of that system by projecting it onto the features of an ‘other’. This transferral of sin, in both novels, fails; Wilde paraphrased Dorian’s failure in a letter to the St James Gazette: ‘All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment’ (Wilde 1982: 240). Both novels argue that the façade of aristocratic power, represented through either the aesthetics of physical beauty or the wealth of a plantation, cannot purify the aristocrat nor save his progeny from historical retribution. Aesthetic Wills-to-Power The ‘aesthetical’ costume Wilde donned for his American tour never varied much from venue to venue. Occasionally he would write to his agent requesting replacements, all in the romantic style that advertisements promised and audiences expected: Dear Colonel Morse, Will you kindly go to a good costumier (theatrical) for me and get them to make me (you will not mention my name) two coats, to wear at matinees and perhaps in the evening. They should be beautiful; tight velvet doublet, with large flowered sleeves and little ruffs of cambric coming up from under the collar. . . . Any good costumier would know what I want – sort of Francis I dress: only knee-breeches instead of long hose. Also get me two pair of grey silk stockings to suit grey mouse-coloured velvet. The sleeves are to be flowered – if not velvet then plush – stamped with a large pattern. They will excite a great sensation. . . . They were dreadfully disappointed at Cincinnati at my not wearing knee-breeches. (Wilde 2000: 141)

In the South, Wilde’s wardrobe was ‘shocking’, ‘peculiar’ and a ‘spectacle . . . long to be remembered’ (Daily Picayune 1882: 4; Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8). Word of Wilde’s self-presentation had preceded him, and one New Orleans Daily Picayune reporter set out to uncover the ‘real man’ behind this advance hype. The gentleman he found at the hotel, however, was still attired in a version of his ‘peculiar’ costume: His hair is long and straight, not curling, and hangs upon his shoulders in heavy masses. He was dressed in a black velvet jacket, gray tight fitting pantaloons, not knee breeches, red silk stockings and slippers. His shirt collar was loosely tied with a dark scarf. (Daily Picayune 1882: 4)

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In her recent treatment of dandyism and decadence, Rhonda Garelick places Wildean dandyism within a transatlantic tradition of self-aestheticisation for a public audience: Both the early social dandyism of England and the later, more philosophical French incarnations of the movement announced and glorified a self-created, carefully controlled man whose goal was to create an effect, bring about an event, or provoke reaction in others through the suppression of the ‘natural’. Artful manipulation of posture, social skill, manners, conversation, and dress were all accoutrements in the aestheticization of self central to dandyism. (Garelick 1998: 3)

These newspaper responses show that Wilde embodied, as early as his American tour, the subversive potential of the late-Victorian dandy: an artfully manipulated figure that highlights both the theatricality of the self and the theatricality of colonial culture. The identity Wilde donned for Southern audiences was that of the aesthetic aristocrat; his eccentric attire, combined with frivolous lecture topics, signified the ease of affluence as much as they did the principles of aestheticism. It is through this parody of aristocratic privilege that we first see Wilde embodying his distinctive dandyism: using mimicry to expose as fluid those national, racial and sexual identities upon whose fixity colonial power structures depended. Wildean dandyism distinguishes itself through its reliance on the sublime tension which structures the dandy’s consciousness: a gothic version of Immanuel Kant’s psychological sublime, in which the desire to transcend ‘natural’ limitations creates its own unique monstrosities.4 In The Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant maintains that the sublime resides not within natural objects themselves, but in the mind of whoever contemplates the sublime object. Because it divorces the sublime experience from the realm of Christianity (or morality) and places it squarely in the mind of the spectator, Kant’s sublime is clearly linked to the dandy’s aesthetic will-to-power: the human mind is first paralysed by a feeling of helplessness before an overwhelming force, and then experiences the exultation of human possibility that comes with the capacity for resistance which ‘gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature’. The ability to experience the sublime exemplifies, on the one hand, the limitations and weakness of finite humanity and, on the other, humanity’s ‘preeminence over nature’, even when confronted by the ‘immeasurability’

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of nature’s magnitude and the ‘irresistibility’ of its might (Kant 1952: 309–10). Wilde felt the sublime force of English class and race distinctions when he left Ireland at twenty to ‘pit himself against the most ancient university in England’ (Ellmann 1988: 36). The volatile colonial relationship between Ireland and England at the end of the nineteenth century demanded a rhetoric of racial difference which segregated the categories of ‘Irish’ and ‘English’; to upper-class English Victorians, subtle distinctions between Anglo-Irish aristocrats and the ‘common’ Irish remained invisible. Born in Dublin into the increasingly bankrupt Anglo-Irish upper-middle class in 1854, Wilde in late-Victorian London was just another suspicious Irishman. The English ‘high polish’ of Wilde’s prose did not come naturally, and as an Oxford undergraduate Wilde was ‘naïve, embarrassed’, with a ‘convulsive laugh, a lisp, and an Irish accent’ (ibid.: 38). Despite talking well and amusing his peers, Wilde committed several social blunders which were attributed to his being Irish. Thus rebuffed, ‘Wilde determined to be beyond rather than behind the English. His lisp and native intonation disappeared’ (ibid.: 38), along with all other markers of his Irish upbringing: His father had been laughed at by society, so he would mock society first. His father had been unkempt, so he would be fastidious. From his mother he had inherited a gigantic and ungainly body, which Lady Colin Campbell compared to a ‘great white caterpillar’, and which recalled all too poignantly the gorilla-like frame of the stage Irishman in [English] cartoons. To disarm such critics, Wilde concealed his massive form with costly clothes and studied the art of elegant deportment. (Ibid.: 35)

By carefully ridding himself of the markers of Irishness, Wilde sought to become the perfect ‘English’ gentleman, and in so doing suggested that aristocratic ‘Englishness’ was less dependent on bloodline than on a set of entirely reproducible cultural stances. Dorian Gray’s sublime experience follows Wilde’s own. When Lord Henry Wotton’s seductive treatise on amorality ‘touches some secret chord that had never been touched before’ in Dorian Gray, who until that moment had been a passive sitter for painter Basil Hallward, his calculated words transform the young man: I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to

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every dream – I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism. . . . The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. (Wilde 1988: 20)

In the brief time it takes Lord Henry to ‘corrupt’ Dorian’s soul, Basil completes his masterpiece – spurred on by the subtle tinge of corruption that spreads across Dorian’s rapt face, a tinge that somehow produces ‘the effect I wanted – the half-parted lips, and the bright look in the eyes’ (ibid.: 21). For his part, Lord Henry ‘knew the precise psychological moment in which to say nothing’ and felt ‘intensely interested’ in the effect his art of words has had on his subject. ‘He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit its mark?’ (ibid.: 21). Together, Basil and Henry, in a fantastic act of male–male reproduction, give birth to a new, fragmented Dorian: a beautiful, static portrait and a wild, morally unhinged dandy. And upon experiencing the results of this birth – his nascent hedonism twinned with the force of the ideal beauty standing before him – Dorian makes his corrupting, sublime wish: ‘If only it were the other way! If it were I who was always to be young, and the picture that was to grow old! . . . I would give my soul for that!’ (ibid.: 26). Dorian immediately wishes for and begins living out the immortality (and amorality) he believes only his portrait can enjoy. Once he realises that his wish has come true, Dorian uses his portrait to plumb the depths of his own psyche, and believes that he will emerge unscathed. The public persona he dons to accomplish this feat is that of the ageless aristocrat. Faulkner’s own careful and contrived staging of his public image rivals Wilde’s in its scope and intention, and several critics have read this obsession with public ‘masks’ as further evidence of what was clearly an ongoing investment in fin de siècle dandyism. Hönnighausen maintains that ‘a study of Faulkner’s masking practice will show [that] the elusive master employed not one but a multitude of masks to transform himself’ (Hönnighausen 1997: 4), and James Watson, in William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance, argues that Faulkner’s self-presentations as gentleman, dandy, soldier and farmer become mirrored in his prose, where they become separate but interlocking elements of his fictional representation (Watson 2000: 5). Hönnighausen obliquely links this role-playing to the artist’s interest in dandyism, arguing that ‘while it is tempting to dismiss Faulkner’s

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Figure 1 William Faulkner as Young Dandy, Oxford, Mississippi, 1918. (Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and copyright permission of Lee Caplin, Faulkner Literary Estate)

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dandyism as a means for him to compensate for his diminutive size, there is little doubt that such a simplistic approach would prove unsatisfactory’ (Hönnighausen 1997: 4). Indeed, Faulkner’s various self-aestheticisations, including his Oxford dandy, bohemian artist, country farmer and Anglophilic aristocrat poses, are all manifestations of a particularly Faulknerian type of dandyism, a type which, on examination, looks distinctly Wildean.5 This dandyism is evident in Thomas Sutpen, whose late-blooming class-consciousness prompts an elaborate and painstaking attention to aristocratic performance. Faulkner’s readers cannot read about the artist’s infatuation with masks without also remembering this pseudoaristocrat, whose own decadent ‘design’ sets Absalom into motion. Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Faulkner’s own dandy-aristocrat is haunted by the sublime desire to transcend, and through transcendence deem ‘unnatural’ the limitations of class which maintain aristocracy’s cultural, political and economic hegemony. Thomas Sutpen’s design erupts into existence through a moment of psychological crisis, in which he at once recognises what one might desire (the physical wealth of the plantation) and the class structures in place which prohibit the realisation of that desire. Sutpen’s ‘trouble’, as General Compson recalls, ‘was innocence’ (Faulkner 1990: 178): an obliviousness, in Sutpen’s case, to the subtle distinctions of class. Sutpen is descended from Scots-Irish ‘cracker’ stock, and although his sheltered boyhood taught him ‘the difference between white men and black ones’ (ibid.: 183), he remained unaware of any class system which could place one white man over another. Sutpen had assumed that any man ‘would be as pleased to show him the balance of his things as the mountain man would have been to show the powder horn and bullet mold that went with the rifle’ (ibid.: 186). But when he is turned back from the front door of a grand plantation house by an opulently dressed black servant, who tells him to take his business to the back, ‘it was like that; . . . like an explosion – a bright glare that vanished and left nothing, no ashes nor refuse: just a limitless flat plain’ (ibid.: 192). The face of the slave at once becomes the ‘balloon-faced’ symbol of plantocracy, and Sutpen instantly apprehends the futility in either hating or killing a symbol. One must instead infiltrate what stands behind the symbol. Therefore, out of a sublime combination of horror and desire, Thomas Sutpen creates a ‘design’ which demands the adoption of a carefully aestheticised identity. He wants to beat the Southern aristocrat at his own privileged game, and to do so he methodically

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refashions himself in the aristocrat’s physical and moral image. The horror Sutpen feels when he realises that class divisions put some white people below black servants becomes the catalyst for his systematic ascension to the planter class: If you were fixing to combat them that had the fine rifles, the first thing you would do would be to get yourself the nearest thing to a fine rifle you could borrow or steal or make, wouldn’t it? . . . But this ain’t a question of rifles. So to combat them you got to have what they have. . . . You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with. You see? (Faulkner 1990: 192)

‘He left right then’, Mr Compson tells Quentin (ibid.: 193). The instant Sutpen realises first his desire, then his potential to achieve that desire, and finally the design he must meticulously follow to do so, is also the instant at which he realises that the clock is ticking. Like Dorian Gray, Thomas Sutpen is obsessed with the threat posed to his desires by the fact of his mortality – so, like Gray, he makes a devil’s bargain to stop time: his design, the all-encompassing motive for his every action, robs him of humanity as it assures immortality. Later, after learning that his rejected part-black son has returned to pervert his ‘design’, Sutpen asks himself, and General Compson too, what he did wrong. In his recitation of this story to his son Jason Compson, the General again identifies a profound ‘innocence’ as the cause of Sutpen’s undoing. This innocence is itself a willed performance. Sutpen’s willed innocence allows him to see his ‘design’ as wholly of his own making rather than as complicit in the colonial project. Singal argues that the willed innocence of the Victorians is dictated by their struggle to build an unassailable wall between themselves and the uglier aspects of life, and in their pre-Freudian conviction that human evil – that the twentieth century would call the unconscious and the preconscious mind – could be held at bay by a firm act of will. Here was the basis for that incorrigible naïveté, that willful innocence. (Singal 1982: 12)

In order to fully ‘ape’ Pettibone, the planter whose servant turns the young Sutpen from an opulent front door, Sutpen keeps himself from acknowledging the cultural, moral and sexual implications of slavery. Yet Sutpen’s white privilege, the same privilege which allows his ‘design’ to take root, derives from a racial system that oppresses

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others to keep itself ‘innocent’. Sutpen loses his innocence at the exact moment when he strikes his devil’s bargain and begins formulating his design. The system he desires to enter is already corrupted, and by acquiring the planter’s wealth and status, Sutpen himself is corrupted, even if he cannot clearly see the decay surrounding him. The visual trappings and modulated language of decadent dandyism and the combative logics of the Wildean dandy’s pose are always present in descriptions of Sutpen’s transformation from country boy to aristocrat, even when narrators are not immediately identifiable as decadent enthusiasts. Sutpen, like Wilde, uses ‘decorum . . . if not even elegance of appearance’ as ‘the only weapon (or ladder, rather) with which he would conduct the last assault on what Miss Coldfield and perhaps others believed to be respectability’ (Faulkner 1990: 28). ‘Respectability’ here is not general; Faulkner means to suggest that Sutpen’s revolutionary ‘design’ is meant as an assault on the codes of gentility, white manhood and morality that bind the Victorian South. In chapter 2, Mr Compson describes as ‘alertness’ the sheer force of will Sutpen’s aristocrat’s pose required: That . . . alertness which he had to wear day and night without changing or laying aside, like the clothing which without doubt and for a time at least he had to sleep in as well as live in, and in a country and among a people whose very language he had to learn and where because of this he was to make that mistake which if he had acquiesced to it would not even have been an error and which, since he refused to accept it or be stopped by it, became his doom; that unsleeping care which must have known that it could permit itself but one mistake; that alertness for measuring and weighing event against eventuality, circumstance against human nature, his own fallible judgement and mortal clay against not only human but natural forces, choosing and discarding, compromising with his dream and his ambition like you must with the horse which you take across country, over timber, which you control only through your ability to keep the animal from realizing that you actually cannot, that actually it is the stronger. (Ibid.: 41)

Compson here paradoxically characterises Sutpen as a powerless man using the power of dandyism to convince the Southern aristocracy of his rightful place there. As Jerusha McCormack succinctly observes, ‘the Dandy represents the transactions by which the powerless, the nobodies, assume power and importance’ (McCormack 1998: 88),6 and here, the dandy-jockey takes the Southern plantocracy for a ride.

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Declan Kiberd finds an apt definition of dandyism in Wilde’s confession to having ‘strained every muscle in his body to achieve mastery of a London dinner-table’ (Kiberd 1995: 374), and here we see Sutpen’s similar dandyism in the South, one in which an alert, ambitious, ‘unsleeping care’ in regard to clothes, language and human nature is the means by which the powerless can control an ‘animal’ that ‘actually is the stronger’. By affecting the architectural trappings of the planter class, Sutpen exposes the fallacy of class division. Sutpen’s design is dictated by the dandyism of the self-made aristocrat. But Sutpen, again like Wilde and his character Dorian Gray, fails from the first to pull off this pose: his performance of aristocracy is always a bit too florid, always in danger of exposing itself as camp. When Mr Compson describes Sutpen’s shortcomings as an aristocrat, he significantly uses as illustrative metaphor the notoriously unrefined Irish-American boxer John Sullivan, heavyweight champion of the world 1882–92, farcically engaged in the acquisition of step-by-step elegance: [He] saluted them with that florid, swaggering gesture to the hat (yes, he was underbred. It showed like this always, your grandfather said, in all his formal contacts with people. He was like John L. Sullivan having taught himself painfully and tediously to do the schottische, having drilled himself and drilled himself in secret until he now believed it no longer necessary to count the music’s beat, say. (Faulkner 1990: 34–5)

Mr Compson’s Sutpen, like his John L. Sullivan, is too focused upon his performance to be aware of his gentlemanly shortcomings. Although he might concede that other men ‘might have done it a little more effortlessly than he’, he would never admit that any man ‘could have beat him in knowing when to do it and how’ (ibid.: 35). The dandy, of course, makes it his sole purpose to know the whens and hows of ‘formal contacts’, and in this knowledge Sutpen is right in thinking himself unbeatable. But his lack of aristocratic breeding shows through despite careful study, and in this Sutpen is a failed dandy. If the other gentlemen in Jefferson understand his pose to be a ‘raree show’ (ibid.: 20), then his entire design is flawed from the start. Nevertheless, Sutpen’s self-mastery, Mr Compson tells Quentin, cements his place in Jefferson’s community: ‘anyone could look at him and say, Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything’ (ibid.: 35; italics original). ‘Sutpen’s power’, as Sean Latham argues, ‘derives not from any claim to the natural superiority of his

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skin-colour but from the spectacular and violent display of his own primitive will-to-power’ (Latham 1998: 457). Once he secures his entrance into polite Jefferson society through his marriage to Ellen Coldfield, the respectable daughter of a local merchant, ‘some of the faience appearance which the flesh of his face had when he [first] came to town’ (Faulkner 1990: 36) disappears. The word ‘faience’ is instructive here; the glaze of flashy, newly acquired wealth that remained, despite Sutpen’s alertness, a marker of his difference, has lost some of its gaudy, campy lustre. But the glaze still barely hides the simple earthenware beneath. Sutpen’s will-to-power cannot completely obscure his origins, nor perhaps does he mean to do so. For Sutpen’s design is twofold: first to become the aristocrat, and then to outrage that aristocracy by the ease with which he is able to mimic them. Sutpen’s failure to accurately and flawlessly mimic the planter patriarch is therefore an essential part of his dandyism: the cracks in Sutpen’s aristocratic mask constitute his greatest weapon – the ability to provoke the indignation of the class he mocks. When Miss Rosa tells Quentin Compson that Sutpen ‘wasn’t a gentleman . . . wasn’t even a gentleman’ (ibid.: 9), readers see the emotional effects of Sutpen’s provocation. Rosa, obsessed with Southern manhood, cannot condone Sutpen’s mockery of her cherished institution. In her denial of Sutpen’s ambitions, Rosa exposes her own romanticised notion of a strict cultural boundary between ‘demon’ and ‘gentleman’: No: not even a gentleman. Marrying Ellen or ten thousand Ellens could not have made him one. Not that he wanted to be one, or even be taken for one. No. That was not necessary since all he would need would be Ellen’s and our father’s name on a wedding license (or any other patent of respectability) that people could look at and read . . . just as anyone could have looked at him once and known that he would be lying about who and where and why he came from by the very fact that apparently he had to refuse to say at all. (Ibid.: 11)

For Rosa, a gentleman is someone who ‘knew who his father was in Tennessee and who his grandfather had been in Virginia’ (ibid.: 11), a Southerner with a consanguineous relationship to (white) Southern history. Sutpen’s transparent attempt to will these blood ties to the ‘respectability’ of Yoknapatawpha aristocracy ‘was proof enough’ for Rosa ‘that what he fled from must have been some opposite of respectability too dark to talk about’ (ibid.: 11).

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Rosa’s observation that Sutpen ‘came here and set up a raree show which lasted five years and Jefferson paid him for the entertainment’ (ibid.: 12) is both literal and metaphorical: Sutpen supplies Jefferson with a ‘raree show’, or a ‘peep show’, by inviting gentlemen to watch him wrestle his own slaves. Sutpen, out behind his gentlemanly plantation home, creates a theatre of domination that paradoxically literalises both the assertion of white racial supremacy and its underside, the interdependence of master and slave – ‘some opposite of respectability too dark to talk about’: [O]n certain occasions, perhaps at the end of the evening, the spectacle, as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of deadly forethought towards retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself. Yes. That is what Ellen saw: her husband and the father of her children standing there naked and panting and bloody to the waist and the negro just fallen evidently, lying at his feet and bloody. (Ibid.: 21)

Through this spectacle, Faulkner’s Sutpen redefines Wildean dandyism: the dandy’s subtle, humorous and highly aestheticised mockery of aristocratic performance here becomes literal and brutal. By taking on his own slaves to entertain the aristocracy and the ‘riff-raff’ who serve them, Sutpen (perhaps unwittingly) exposes the brutality of the crucible in which master and slave are inexorably joined. Sutpen’s spectacle of Southern paternalism relies on the ‘gentlefolk’: Sutpen presents his audience with a mirror of their own relationship to their slaves, a mirror which denies plantocracy its pastoral myth. As Godden points out, the hidden irony of the planter’s power – that the position of ‘master’ is created by and maintained through slave labour – is an irony the planter must deny through claims of cultural supremacy (Godden 1997: 6–7). Instead, Sutpen’s sideshowaristocrat performance mocks the viability of these claims. The ‘raree show’ that so outrages Rosa and her kind becomes a metaphor for Sutpen’s extended performance of Southern aristocracy; he is always the main attraction in a show meant to put this institution on graphic and public display. What makes the sublime moments and transcendent wishes of these two dandies gothic is the fact of their failures. If Dorian’s movement outside time and decay had gone off without a hitch, if Sutpen’s ‘design’ had been built and maintained as planned, Dorian Gray and Absalom, Absalom! would not be gothic novels.

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Instead, the mask Dorian Gray dons to maintain an ever-youthful exterior eventually exposes those parts of himself he is both obsessed with and seeks to deny, and this denial forces Dorian’s eventual demise. By stepping out of the system of time and ageing, and thus rebelling against Victorian class and sexual mores, Dorian invites his own downfall. Sutpen, too, is undone by those parts of himself and his culture that he seeks to deny. Charles Bon, his infinitely more refined son-in-dandyism and in blood, returns as Sutpen’s ‘double’, his own portrait. Bon’s stylised and ambiguous aristocratic presence on the grounds of Sutpen’s Hundred pulls Sutpen back into the hidden culture of miscegenation he sought to escape. Sutpen fails because in adopting the trappings of the planter class he unwittingly adopts also their code of racial ethics. When standing face to face with his refined son, Sutpen refuses to acknowledge their blood relationship. In the figure of Charles Bon, Sutpen is confronted with a man raised expressly for a life of privilege – a man who has surpassed his father in gentility, intelligence and fashion. Bon has therefore succeeded where his father has failed: he is a perfect dandy who, in all respects, has succeeded in passing as an aristocrat. Volitionless Seductions He is the curious one to me. He came into that isolated Puritan country household almost like Sutpen himself came into Jefferson: apparently complete, without background or past or childhood – a man a little older than his actual years and enclosed and surrounded by a kind of Scythian glitter, who seems to have seduced the country brother and sister without any effort or particular desire to do so . . . William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

In Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age, Mary Blanchard contextualises American responses to Wilde’s strangeness in terms of his impact on a nation still recovering from the Civil War. The new mode of feminine masculinity Wilde suggested to American audiences stood ‘in dialectical relation to a more persistent and visible [masculine] ideal – the man as soldier’ (Blanchard 1998: 4). In 1882, some wary Victorians read Wilde’s effeminacy not merely as a marker of his cultural or aesthetic difference, but as indicative of sexual vice and depravity. Like their European counterparts, late-Victorian Americans were slowly becoming aware of

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‘inversion’ theories espoused by sexologists like Karl Ulrichs and Edward Carpenter: during the 1880s and 1890s American medical journals began analysing sexual ‘uranism’, a term Ulrichs coined to describe the sexual ‘perversion’ of a woman’s soul trapped within a male body. Some journalists covering Wilde’s American tour used language inflected with the assumptions of early sexology to link a perceived effeminacy with an ‘inverted’ sexuality. Reporters repeatedly described Wilde’s face as ‘womanish’ and ‘fleshy’. In San Francisco, members of the Bohemian Club ‘referred to Wilde as a “Miss Nancy” ’, while members of New York’s elite Century Club, to which Wilde had been invited, were reported to have sardonically inquired, ‘Where is she? Well, why not say “she”? I understand she’s a “Charlotte Ann” ’ (ibid.: 12). And a reporter for the Burnet, Texas Bulletin dismissed Wilde as a ‘crack-brained poet . . . lately over from England’ whose ‘filthy verses’ were ‘turning the heads of . . . the northern would-be literati’ (qtd in MacInerney, Rogers and Ward 2003: 558). Southern reporters in particular seemed to marvel at the simultaneous expression of enormity and effeminacy transmitted by Wilde’s physique, as in this passage from the Atlanta Constitution: His personal appearance is perhaps the most striking thing about him. He is very tall, over six feet, with a large frame. His head is large, features all large, and fat rather than strong in expression, but his face has an air of youthful, almost infantile sweetness, which perhaps is the real secret of Mr. Wilde’s power over the people who admire him. (Daily Picayune 1882: 4)

Two versions of Wilde emerge from this description: one almost menacing, with its strikingly ‘large’ frame, head and features; the other effeminate, ‘fat rather than strong’, and ‘infantile’. Although Wilde, a twenty-eight-year-old published poet at the time of his tour, could claim the status of adulthood without objection, reporters commonly insisted upon his youth: ‘He looks to be quite young’, this reporter continued, ‘not much beyond twenty, is beardless, with a florid complexion . . . and his face wears a somewhat over-fat or bloated look, but it does not at any time lose its attractiveness’. Together, these antithetical states of exaggerated and arrested development explain the ‘secret power’ Wilde can exert if one admires him, and the homophobic overtones of a menacing effeminacy are clear.

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Despite the fact that the words ‘giant’ and ‘effeminate’ do not go hand in hand, reporters offered Wilde’s heft as evidence of sexual deviance. The artist’s physical bulk and verbal dominance made his sensuality confrontational. The New Orleans Daily Picayune characterised Wilde as outsized and pathological, despite the fact that the reporter cited as evidence the fact that at ‘over six feet in height’ Wilde ‘would weigh evidently about 180 pounds’ (Atlanta Constitution 1882: 8). By today’s standards, a man over six feet tall, weighing 180 pounds, is certainly not ‘bloated’.7 Reporters allowed their impressions of Wilde’s ‘strangeness’ to distort their sense of his physical presence; repeated references to Wilde’s outsized frame start sounding like evidence of racial, as well as sexual, difference. John Tenniel’s iconic political cartoon, ‘The Irish Frankenstein’, published in the May 1882 issue of Punch, decried the brutal Phoenix Park murders by drawing upon a longstanding tradition in both the British and American presses of using racialised visual cues to link the African ‘savage’ and the dangerously revolutionary Irish ‘paddy’. The Atlanta Constitution seems to draw upon this representational connection: The spectacle that met the astonished gaze of the reporter was one long to be remembered. In the farther end of the room, seated in a large rocking chair, was the great esthete. His appearance was striking in the extreme, so odd he appeared. His hair was long and fell about his shoulders. It was parted near the middle and was rather stiff and in great abundance. His face was large, his lips exceedingly so, and his nose prominent. (‘Arrival’ 8)

This reporter’s language uses physical traits to imply a racial ambiguity he sees in Wilde’s physiognomy. Wilde’s large lips and prominent nose, in addition to his long, abundant hair, together imply both sexual and racial ‘difference’. In the end, as much or more attention was paid to Wilde’s physiology as to his carefully arranged aesthetic dress. Wherever Wilde aligned himself in terms of culture, nationality and breeding, observers insisted on aligning him both with the ‘native’ Irish (and by extension the African ‘savage’) and the effeminate ‘queer’. In Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture, Siobhan Somerville maintains that the increasingly binary-driven definitions of sexuality emerging in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century ‘had to do

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with concurrent conflicts over racial definition and the presumed boundary between ‘black’ and “white” ’ (Somerville 2000: 3). The 1892 Plessy v. Ferguson case ‘formally and explicitly hardened racialized boundaries in new ways’ and ‘ushered in a nationwide and brutal era of “Jim Crow” segregation, an institutionalized apartheid that lasted well into the twentieth century’ (ibid.: 1). Against this 1892 case Somerville juxtaposes Wilde’s 1895 trial for gross indecency under the 1885 Labouchere Amendment, an act which criminalised ‘gross acts’ between men in Great Britain. Although prominent sexologists Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing had already published influential tracts on ‘sexual inversion’, the Wilde case, due to its sensational nature and its (in)famous defendant, galvanised the field of sexology on both sides of the Atlantic. Wilde, who was already a suspiciously effeminate transatlantic icon of Aestheticism, became, through the sensationalism surrounding his trials, ‘a transatlantic icon of [explicit] homosexuality and decadence’ (ibid.: 2). During an evening lecture in Rochester, New York, Wilde was interrupted by ‘the brutal behavior of Rochester students’: At Oscar Wilde’s lecture here to-night considerable disturbance was caused by the students of Rochester University. They occupied seats in the gallery and busied themselves by groaning, hissing, and sighing at opportune moments. They also dressed up an old Negro in a swallow tailed coat and knee-breeches, with a huge bunch of sunflowers in his buttonhole, and had him walk down the center aisle after the lecture had commenced. This caused a great laugh. The gallery students became so much of a nuisance that the opera house policemen commanded them to leave. They answered him insolently and he struck two of them across the face with a cane. A row then occurred, during which the gas in the gallery was turned off by accomplices of the students. . . . During the noise and the disturbance Mr. Wilde folded his arms on his breast and looked savagely at the students, but said nothing. He finished his lecture before a very small house. (Easton Express 1882: 2)

In this dramatic instance, as in the newspaper descriptions of Wilde’s physique analysed above, we see illuminated the varied ways in which Wilde’s persona was read (and mocked) as both sexually and racially queer. This public mockery extended also to the realm of Victorian advertising; merchants all over the United States began placing Wilde’s image on trade cards to sell anything from cigars to décolleté cream. Although many of these merchants used Wilde’s image with

Figure 2 Victorian Tradecard depicting Oscar Wilde, Straiton and Storms Cigars, New York, 1882.

Figure 3 Victorian Tradecard depicting Oscar Wilde, Marie Fontaine’s Moth & Freckle Cure, 1882, Buffalo, New York.

Figure 4 ‘The Aesthetic Craze.’ Caricature of Wilde by Currier and Ives, 1882.

Figure 5 ‘Ise gwine for to wuship dat lily.’ Caricature of Wilde by Duvall, 1882.

(Figures 2 to 5 Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles)

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verisimilitude, many others chose to link a perceived sexual queerness with a perceived racial difference; Wilde’s Irishness, in the tradition of Victorian caricature, was imagined as black. Wildean dandyism, then, outrages first because it seeks to perform an aristocratic identity which the dandy cannot claim by birth. This dandyism doubly and triply outrages because the Wildean dandy’s outward show of aristocratic gentility, a show that has gained him entrance into the inner circles of high society, masks the gothic fact that his blood may be infected with unnamed pollutants. In De Profundis, Wilde’s prose explication of his fall from grace, the artist labelled himself a ‘born Antinomian’ (Wilde 2000: 732). This does not mean that Wilde rejected all moral codes; instead he argued that ideally the individual should pursue a perfect identity, not a perfect morality. The theological definition of an antinomian is one who believes Christians to be free from moral law by virtue of grace: the freely given and unmerited favour of God which regenerates and strengthens humans against evil. Wilde’s personalised definition of antinomianism reflected his training as a decadent aesthete of the Pater school: if a thing is beautiful or brings one pleasure, it can contain no evil. If Wilde was a ‘born’ antinomian, he was so only in a parody of the Christian sense; an innate distrust of strict moral codes informed Wilde’s infatuation with ‘grace’, an ideal he defined as ‘elegance or beauty in form, manner, motion or act’ (ibid.: 642). However, when Michael Foldy, following a trend in Wilde criticism, argues that by substituting ‘a complete and utter faith in oneself for faith in God’, Wilde ‘replaced the redemptive goal of eternal salvation with the more immediate and worldly goals of pleasure and success’ (Foldy 1997: 99), he fails to recognise the extent to which Wilde’s art turns on and is shaped by conventional Victorian morality. Although in Ellmann’s estimation Wilde’s art conducted, at its best, ‘an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics’ (Ellmann 1988: xvi) Wilde never broke free of Victorian ethics altogether. His attachment to beauty as the benchmark of moral purity was, in fact, quite Victorian. Nineteenth-century conventions of physiognomy demanded that the human body display either virtue or corruption in its limbs and features, and, as L. Perry Curtis reminds us, ‘not only were these conventions invested with the authority of art and science’, they were also ‘reinforced by novelists, who drew on physiognomical codes to delineate the moral or emotional character of their protagonists’ (Curtis 1997: xvii). Wilde’s insistence on the

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inherent goodness of the beautiful, then, was not itself revolutionary. It is instead Wilde’s manipulation of Victorian ethics to produce a shocking and sensational effect – his juxtaposition of evil acts and beautiful actors – which ‘belongs more to our world than Victoria’s’ (Ellmann 1988: 589). Critic Daniel Mendelsohn maintains that Dorian Gray, ‘for all its haphazard construction, still suggests – with its almost prurient and (whatever post-facto demurs) never quite unadmiring portrait of beauty wholly divorced from morals – why [André] Gide could have thought of Wilde as “the most dangerous product of human civilization” ’ (Mendelsohn 2002: 31).

Wilde’s Victorian readership was indeed up in arms after the novel’s publication. Because the ambiguously corrupted and corrupting Gray remains separate from the moral markers of his sins for most of the novel, readers, like Gray’s own victims, cannot rely on physiognomy to decode morality. Even though Dorian Gray’s final attempt to destroy the evidence of his sin ends in gruesome failure and plays out the physical-moral connection in spades, Wilde implies that if Dorian had not initiated his own destruction, he could have lived on forever – beautiful and young – completely impervious to physical markers of immorality. In his own juxtaposition of evil acts and beautiful actors, Faulkner manipulates Victorian physiognomy in Wildean fashion. Despite the crucial question of his racial ancestry, Charles Bon remains Absalom’s most refined, handsome, educated and genteel example of white Southern masculinity. Bon is ‘a man with an ease of manner and a swaggering gallant air in comparison with which Sutpen’s pompous arrogance was clumsy bluff and Henry actually a hobble-de-hoy’ (Faulkner 1990: 58). Young Southern aristocrat Henry Sutpen and his clumsily dandyesque father are ‘troglodytes’ whom Bon, with the careful attention of a ‘scientist watching the muscles of an anesthetized frog’, contemplates ‘from behind [a] barrier of sophistication’ (ibid.: 74). Although, as Kevin Railey argues, Bon is ‘very much like Sutpen in the way that both men choose to will themselves into existence, choose to define and invent themselves on their own terms’ (Railey 1999: 139), Bon is quite unlike Sutpen in the level of his dandyism’s success. ‘In short’, Railey continues, ‘Bon is the real thing’ (ibid.: 138). But what ‘thing’ is he?

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‘The coalescence of blood, race, and sexuality in Charles Bon’, Michael Davidson argues, ‘raises important questions about the integrity of blood as a marker of national identity’: Bon’s threat to the postbellum South – and ultimately to Reconstruction America – is the fiction of racial and sexual pollution that will corrupt patrilineal descent. His identity is articulated through a cultural imaginary that includes figures at the heart of American romance from Poe and Hawthorne to Anne Rice and Jewell Gomez: feminized invalids, aristocratic recluses, and vampiric predators. (Davidson 1999: 51)

And, I would add, fallen aesthetes. Bon certainly reminds readers of these gothic, aristocratic icons from American literature, but Wilde in the South stands as his clearest cultural antecedent. Faulknerian dandyism, embodied first in the clumsy, outsized figure of Thomas Sutpen, finds its perfect (and already ‘ruined’) expression in the foppish, genteel, Wildean Charles Bon, who represents ‘the return of a tragic history to the American South – in the guises first of white Creole decadence, then of blackness and in the form of retributive justice’ (Ladd 1995: 357). The ‘aesthetic’ Bon reclines his way through Faulkner’s novel, dressed in an opulent fashion of which Wilde would have approved: This man whom Henry first saw perhaps riding through the grove at the University on one of the two horses he kept there or perhaps crossing the campus on foot in the slightly Frenchified cloak and hat which he wore, or perhaps . . . reclining in a flowered, almost feminized gown, in a sunny window in his chambers – this man handsome, elegant, even catlike, and too old to be where he was, too old not in years but in experience, with some tangible effluvium of knowledge, surfeit: of actions done and satiations plumbed and pleasures exhausted and even forgotten. (Faulkner 1990: 76)

Bon’s secret obscures his age. His ‘elegant, catlike’ presence gives no clue as to his years yet does suggest his sexual corruption; he has ‘plumbed’ and ‘satiated’ all of his (unnamed) desires to the extent that, in true decadent form, he has grown bored. His matriculation to the University of Mississippi at Oxford and to the Oxford university life for which he is ‘too old’ in experience, sparks excitement in overawed undergraduates who ‘admire him’ in all of his ‘Scythian glitter’ (ibid.: 74). Mr Compson’s imagined Oxford, Mississippi, a decadent

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intellectual climate in which Charles Bon effortlessly seduces local youths, reinforces connections between the University of Mississippi and that other Oxford across the Atlantic where Wilde’s antihero Dorian Gray also inspires intense emotions in his younger and less worldly peers.8 Consider these two descriptions, the first from Wilde: Indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realisation of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. (Wilde 1988: 129)

And the second from Faulkner: Yes [Henry] loved Bon, who seduced him as surely as he seduced Judith – the country boy born and bred who, with the five or six others of that small undergraduate body composed of other planters’ sons whom Bon permitted to become intimate with him, who aped his clothing and manner and (to the extent which they were able) his very manner of living, looked upon Bon as though he were a hero out of some adolescent Arabian Nights. (Faulkner 1990: 76)

Gray’s self-presentation belies the corruption underneath; he is a ‘true realisation of a type’, but not the ‘type’ his admirers expect. Similarly, Faulkner’s ‘Arabian Nights’ metaphor here functions as euphemism; by thus orientalising Bon, Mr Compson perhaps unknowingly alludes to the fact that Bon is racially ‘other’ – these young, rich planters’ sons are ‘aping’ the refinements of one whose ancestry is in question. As Siobhan Somerville demonstrates, the figure of the sheik in American culture had by 1920 become a powerful, anti-Victorian symbol for an effeminate, sexually and racially ambiguous man: Within popular culture in the United States during the 1920’s, the term ‘sheik’ itself was racialized and seems to have been used to characterize a specific type of sexualized masculinity, an eroticized and ironically somewhat feminized object of desire, but one who also enacted unbridled sexuality. The ‘sheik’ figure . . . troubled the larger cultural insistence on the bifurcation of ‘black’ and ‘white’ identities. The ‘sheik’ did not fit neatly into either category, and that was, in part, the source of his fascination. (Somerville 2000: 153)

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Like Dorian Gray, another dandy associated with orientalism, Bon is an ‘elegant, esoteric hot-house bloom’ (ibid.: 77) capable of laissezfaire seduction through a nonchalant performance of aristocratic satiation. Bon is as much part-effeminate as he is part-black – his ‘unbridled sexuality’, masked as it is in ‘feminized’ decorum, is what gains the admiration of the young men at ‘Oxford’. This admiration is distinctly homoerotic, yet Faulkner chooses not to cast it in stereotypically feminine/masculine terms. Bon is effeminate, as Mr Compson’s sumptuous descriptions of him show, but he is the dominant partner in his relationship with Henry Sutpen, the most sensitive and effeminate of all Sutpen’s progeny. As John Duvall observes, At the time Faulkner was writing, the model of inversion was the standard way of naming deviance; in this model, the homosexual male can only be effeminate. Yet part of the way that Faulkner’s texts refuse to disavow homosexuality is by unhinging the presumed conjunction of heterosexuality and masculinity. In other words, one can be a male and a heterosexual and still not be a ‘man’. (Duvall 1990: 52)

And following this logic, in Absalom one can be both male and homosexual and still not be effeminate. In Charles Bon, as in Wilde himself, we witness a linking of racial and sexual deviance which makes the sexual ‘deviant’ masculine and monstrous rather than effeminate and pitiable – a redefinition which casts the dandy as a powerful gothic antihero. Neither author is candid about the real ‘secret’ of the power these dandies hold over those who admire them, and this curious attractiveness is the central narrative mystery in each novel. Faulkner’s novel, read once, cannot be reread without linking Bon’s difference, his peculiar and calculated attractiveness, to his ambiguous racial status. Similarly, Wilde’s Dorian Gray cannot be read as a mere morality tale once one understands the novel’s homoerotic subtext, which was used as evidence against the artist in his trials. The influences Dorian Gray and Charles Bon exert on members of their respective enemy-aristocracies are, within the logic of late Victorian culture, capable of corrupting in two distinct but related ways: through infectious, dandified talk and pose – the twinned viruses of homosexuality and miscegenation – these dandies ‘pass’ the ‘bad blood’ infecting aristocracy on both sides of the Atlantic. In Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Judith Halberstam maintains that the dandy, as embodied by such figures as Bram Stoker’s

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Count Dracula and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, is a ‘gothic monster’ whose horror is multipurpose: ‘He represents too much and too little, excess and paucity; the dandy represents the parasitical aristocrat and the upwardly mobile bourgeois’ (Halberstam 1998: 62). A beautiful object, to be ‘read’ only at the peril of the spectator, the gothic dandy performs a part loving, part hateful send up of the aristocratic identity he embodies. The dandy is terrifying and, therefore, gothic because he both foretells ruin and is himself ruined by the culture he both adores and mocks. In the case of Bon, Halberstam’s ‘too much and too little’ takes on a distinctly racial tone; he has ‘too little’ black ancestry to be detected by the Southern aristocracy that almost universally falls in love with him, and therefore his mixed blood is rendered all the more dangerous because of its indecipherability. Especially in Mr Compson’s account, Henry and Judith Sutpen, their mother Ellen Sutpen, her sister Rosa Coldfield, as well as various star-struck Oxford undergraduates, all fall hopelessly in love with Bon or with their own imagined ‘pictures’ of him. Among the novel’s central characters, only Thomas Sutpen, Bon’s own father, escapes this dandy’s genteel seduction. Although, according to Quentin and Shreve, Bon actively and repeatedly seeks his father’s recognition – his definition of which becomes increasingly liberal as time passes – he fails to seduce Sutpen into acknowledging paternity9 Bon performs, and through performing anatomises, the society which denies him. Because he is capable not only of passing as an aristocrat but of surpassing the best Southern aristocratic gentility has to offer, this dandy utilises an insider understanding of aristocratic boundaries and prohibitions to simultaneously seduce and outrage. And yet, true to the principles of dandyism, Bon remains embroiled in the very cultural ethics he wilfully subverts. Even though he recognises as arbitrary those moral codes eroded by his presence within the plantation landscape, he is still in awe of the aristocracy that denies him. His prodigal son return, by invitation, to Sutpen’s Hundred is an act Faulkner therefore characterises as neither mere adoration nor mere revenge: by both admiring and toying with the white Southern aristocracy’s staid conventions and prohibitions, Bon cements his status as dandy: one who, in the words of Jerusha McCormack, admits to the power of cultural conventions while at the same time ‘suffering from and revenging [himself] upon them, and pleading them as excuses against themselves, dominating and being dominated by them in turn’ (McCormack 1998: 89).

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In Mr Compson’s version of the Sutpen story, Charles Bon loved his half-sister Judith ‘after his fashion’, but he loved his half-brother Henry ‘in a deeper sense than merely after his fashion’ (Faulkner 1990: 86). Bon acts as Sutpen’s ‘double’, to use John Irwin’s influential characterisation of the novel’s mirroring aesthetics, but he is more than a mere double to Henry. Formally, as Sutpen’s sons – one abandoned by his father because of blood, the other who ‘repudiated [his] blood birthright’ (ibid.: 71) – the two men act as perfect opposites, and therein lies their narcissistic attraction. That Bon loved Henry and Henry loved Bon makes doubly significant Faulkner’s reference to Wilde’s ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in chapter 4: Faulkner alters Wilde’s original ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ when Mr Compson imagines Bon ‘reversing the order’ and learning to ‘love the thing he has injured’ (ibid.: 86). Bon ‘injures’ Henry by corrupting his Southern gentlemanly sense of right and wrong; Bon’s threat to defy the incest taboo by marrying Henry’s sister is a moral battle which Henry eventually loses. Bon corrupts Henry into accepting incest as unavoidable if he wants to keep the man he loves in the family. But Mr Compson, not privy to this version of the Bon–Henry story, creates another ‘reason’ for Bon’s murder. In chapter 4 Compson imagines a homoerotic temptation scene much like the one between Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde’s novel to explain how Bon ‘injures’ Henry. Although Compson’s temptation scene is almost wholly imagined and certainly gets the core of the later-developed story wrong, his interpretation of Bon and Henry’s relationship as seducer and seduced is one reaffirmed by each narrator in the novel. When, in Faulkner’s Marginal Couple, John Duvall characterises Bon as ‘volitionless seducer’ in the Wildean mode (Duvall 1990: 110), one is reminded of Mr Compson’s imagined Dorian Gray-esque temptation scene: Yes, I can imagine how Bon led up to it, to the shock: the skill, the calculation, preparing Henry’s puritan mind as he would have prepared a cramped and rocky field and planted it and raised the crop which he wanted. . . . I can imagine him, the way he did it: the way he took the innocent and negative plate of Henry’s provincial soul and intellect and exposed it by slow degrees to this esoteric milieu, building gradually toward the picture which he desired it to retain, accept. (Faulkner 1990: 86–7)

Here, Bon is Lord Henry Wotton, calculating the precise moment to let his ‘arrow fly’ into Henry Sutpen’s innocent mind. ‘The terror of

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society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion’, Lord Henry begins, ‘these are the two things that govern us. And yet’, and here Lord Henry pauses, making certain his ‘field’ is, in Compson’s words, prepared for sowing. And indeed, ‘at that moment a look had come into the young lad’s face that [Basil] had never seen there before’. ‘And yet’, continued Lord Henry . . . ‘I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream, I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism. . . . But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the selfdenial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals’. (Wilde 1988: 20; italics added)

Lord Henry, like Charles Bon, is by degrees pulling back the curtain on a new model of morality, one that takes Wilde’s antinomianism as its creed. Mr Compson, who has read enough of Wilde to refer to him directly in his graveyard soliloquy, imagines this process in words that recall Wilde’s novel. The temptation, first initiated through language, continues, as in Dorian Gray, in silence: A dialogue without words, speech, which would fix and then remove without obliterating one line the picture, this background, leaving the background, the plate prepared and innocent again: the plate docile, with that puritan’s humility towards anything which is a matter of sense rather than logic, fact. (Faulkner 1990: 88)

Here Henry becomes the ‘plate’ on which Bon composes his ‘picture’ of amorality, using sense (or sensuality) to override Henry’s provincial Puritanism. Bon, ‘watching him with that cold and catlike inscrutable calculation, watching the picture resolve and become fixed’, tells Henry that the corruption he has so far been allowed to peer at behind the curtain is ‘not it. That’s just the base, the foundation. It can belong to anyone.’ ‘You mean it is still higher than this, still above this?’ Henry, the ‘plate’, asks in reply. Faulkner’s nearoveremphasis here on the language of painting, portraiture and photography reiterates the connection between his own and Wilde’s

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temptation scenes. As Henry waits ‘for the next picture which the mentor, the corruptor, intended’, Bon continues, Talking . . . lazily, almost cryptically, stroking onto the plate himself now the picture which he wanted there. I can imagine how he did it – the calculation, the surgeon’s alertness and cold detachment, the exposures brief, so brief as to be cryptic, almost staccato, the plate unaware of what the complete picture would show. (Ibid.: 88)

And at the temptation’s end, after returning exhausted to his rooms, Bon, ‘the mentor’, is ‘watching again . . . thinking have I won or lost?’ (ibid.: 91). Bon, like Lord Henry after tempting Dorian Gray, must pull back and watch for markers of his temptation’s success or failure. Readers by now attuned to Faulkner’s extended dialogue with Wilde’s novel will note the similarities in each seducer’s calculated retreat. When Dorian Gray tells Lord Henry to ‘Stop! You bewilder me! I don’t know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don’t speak. Let me think. Or rather, let me try not to think’ (Wilde 1988: 20), Lord Henry obliges: ‘With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely interested. . . . He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit its mark?’(ibid.: 21). Absalom’s Henry Sutpen, described by Mr Compson as a ‘façade shuttered and blank’, and who is like Dorian innocent before his ‘fall’ into amorality, is likewise infiltrated and corrupted by a ‘bland and cryptic voice’ whispering ‘secret and curious and unimaginable delights’ (Faulkner 1990: 89). Bon, stepping back from Henry to let the youth come to his realisation alone, is now ‘impotent even with talk, shrewdness, no longer counting upon that puritan character which must show neither surprise nor despair, having to count now (if on anything) on the corruption itself, the love’ (ibid.: 91). In an instant, Henry apprehends Bon’s complete picture, the force of which dissolves some ‘blank and scaling barrier’ in his mind, ‘striking straight and true to some primary blind and mindless foundation of all young male living dream and hope’ (ibid.: 89). Mr Compson imagines that the arrow with which Bon strikes true into Henry’s most animal, ‘young male’ desires has a woman’s name on it. For here readers are first ushered into the boudoir of Faulkner’s Wildean octoroon widow: a place made ‘by and for darkness’ where beautiful courtesans are raised for the pleasure of white men. Compson assumes that Henry – who accepts miscegenation when it is

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regulated by the power dynamics of the plantation, and whose own sister Clytie is a product of these dynamics – suffers a psychic and moral breakdown when he encounters the notion of ‘marriage’ between a nonwhite, aristocratic-looking woman and a man in whom he finds embodied the ideals of Southern aristocracy. But the success of Bon’s temptation, according to Compson, depends on ‘the corruption itself, the love’. Since Henry is not being asked to choose a courtesan for himself, readers are left wondering what love Bon is counting on. His subtle and progressive seduction, calculated to lead Henry by degrees into accepting sexual love between members of different races, may have as its first goal Henry’s acceptance of the octoroon. But as Lord Henry prepares Dorian for his progressive and cumulative descent into amorality, so Bon acts as a proactive seducer – preparing the ground of Henry’s mind for the more explosive revelations about mixed-race desire to come. Although Faulkner’s novels, like Wilde’s writings, consistently anatomise the codes of Victorian morality, Singal reminds us that ‘by contrast to the Victorians, his gaze was not outward and broadranging, but inward and intense. Moral significance was to be found in consciousness, not in some abstract code based on natural or supernatural law’ (Singal 1982: 195). Augmented by its complex dialogue with Wilde’s own exploration of moral consciousness, Absalom goes furthest in exploding those ‘natural laws’ which gave moral significance to sexual acts. The core of Lord Henry’s temptation of Dorian rests in this phrase: ‘The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals’ (Wilde 1988: 20). This is the rationale Lord Henry gives Dorian for shaking off the twinned terrors of society and religion, ‘the basis’ of the moral codes ‘that govern us’ (ibid.: 20). Dorian is compelled by this reasoning. Although he begins his foray into the New Hedonism fairly innocently – venturing into new parts of town, enjoying low-brow theatre – his experimentations with amorality increasingly provoke scandalous gossip in his aristocratic circles. Mr Compson imagines that what Bon attempted to seduce Henry into accepting was his own mulatto wife – and, by extension, marriage between a white man and his mulatto courtesan. If one reads Faulkner’s New Orleans temptation scene through its corollary in Dorian Gray, it becomes clear that Lord Henry’s warning about the denied savage who returns and ‘punishes us for our refusals’ also informs Bon’s decidedly more transgressive seduction of Henry himself. When Mr Compson himself admits that Bon’s marriage to a

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mulatto courtesan ‘does not explain’ why Henry later murdered Bon, Faulkner invites readers to look for another explanation – one implied by Compson’s imagined seduction. For by subtly seducing Henry into shedding part of his aristocratic moral code, Bon, like Wilde’s Lord Henry, prepares Henry Sutpen to accept even greater transgressions of the codes he was raised to uphold. Readers are led to conclude that Bon is Henry’s half-brother, and are thus placed in the same position as Henry: should Bon still marry Judith, his half-sister, and thus keep the Sutpen ‘design’ alive? Henry’s eventual, tortured answer is ‘yes’. In response to his father’s strict ‘He must not marry her’, Henry cries, ‘Yes. I said Yes at first, but I was not decided then. I didn’t let him. But now I have had four years to decide in. I will. I am going to’ (Faulkner 1990: 283; italics original). Here it is Henry who, speaking as bride, accepts Bon’s proposal of marriage (I said yes, I will, I am going to). His desire for Bon, his desire ‘to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream’ (Wilde 1988: 14) has outweighed the religious taboo against incest. Bon’s temptation has been successful on one count. But when Henry finds out, as it seems Bon imagined he would, that his half-brother is part black: ‘He must not marry her, Henry. His mother’s father told me that her mother had been a Spanish woman. I believed him; it was not until after he was born that I found out that his mother was part Negro’. (Ibid.: 283; italics original)

Bon’s temptation fails. ‘So it’s the miscegenation’, Bon hisses to a despondent Henry, ‘not the incest, that you can’t bear’ (ibid.: 285; italics original). Most readers attribute Henry’s murder of Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred to Bon’s resolve to marry Judith. But Henry is also violently rejecting a lover he now sees as black. Although the force of his own sexual desire overrides the incest taboo – he accepts Bon, his brother, as a mate for (himself and) his sister – that same desire cannot supplant his culture’s taboo against miscegenation. Although Bon, in Lord Henry fashion, has warned his acolyte against those punishments which arise from our refusals, Henry Sutpen must refuse this desire. And indeed he is punished for this denial; when Henry kills Bon, he kills a narcissistic love. Because Henry sees Bon as a stand-in for himself, fratricide becomes suicide. Henry disappears after this murder, only returning to die at the novel’s end. Henry’s murder of Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred therefore formally

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matches Dorian Gray’s killing of his own portrait. In both cases the killing hides an aberrant sexuality – miscegenation, homosexuality or incest. In both cases, ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ and kills himself in the process.10 Through his picture of Charles Bon, Faulkner asks his contemporary readers, many of whom were reckoning with new definitions of morality, to themselves create a hierarchy of taboo. Is incest worse than miscegenation? Will we condone one before the other? Faulkner’s readers, in the end, do find a moral tale in Absalom, Absalom!: in the words of Wilde, ‘alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment’ (Wilde 1982: 240). Conclusion: The Aesthetics of Ruined Grace ‘I was a problem for which there was no solution.’ Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters

Wilde composed a one-page preface to Dorian Gray after critics labelled the first edition immoral; he published this combative preface two months before the second edition’s release. The entire piece is formed through epigram, and each epigram is carefully composed to provoke the ire of those who look for morals in a work of art. It begins innocently enough: ‘The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim’ (Wilde 1988: 3). But Wilde’s assault quickly commences: ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. . . . There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.’ ‘No Artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.’ Those critics who labelled Wilde’s novel ‘morbid’ were greeted with this retort: ‘No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express anything.’ Wilde, understanding that his novel was read as an affront to ethics, morality, and above all, artistic convention, took care in his preface to compose a deliberate counterattack. Critics who would use the phrase ‘morbid’ to describe art which takes as its subject ‘the moral life of man’ (ibid.: 3) are not limited to the nineteenth century; in November 1936, a reporter for the Fort Wayne News Sentinel had this to say about Faulkner’s novel: Any pleasure to be had from this disgusting book must be described as little short of sadistic. Revolting as the whole volume is, perhaps

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Christian charity suggests the conclusion that Mr. Faulkner cannot be blamed altogether for insisting upon turning out such slime; for he apparently was just born to see things the way he does see them. But this fact does not alter the lacerating, bitter, repulsive result of his serious writing one bit. (Qtd in Inge 1995: 36)

Responding in 1937 to what he called the ‘Victorianism’ of reviews like the one above, New Orleans critic Herman B. Deutsch wondered aloud about the importance of such literary moralism: When all is said and done, what are these indictments which have been lodged against Absalom, Absalom! by those whose views are entitled to serious consideration? (Obviously it is impossible to devote any regard to the ‘that nasty man!’ school whose artless slogan is the question: ‘Can’t he ever find anything pleasant to write about?’) What else? ‘The book, the theme, the treatment, all are morbid.’ Morbid, of course, is a matter of definition. There are some to whom the cloying scent of tuberoses is morbid, because it calls to mind the mortuary atmosphere of funerals. To the surgeon and the medical student, there is nothing macabre about an autopsy of a corpse pickled in brine. It is true that, out-Faulknering himself, the author in this instance piled the Ossa of incest upon the Pelion of miscegenation. So what? So out of my own lifetime I yet recall the day when the word ‘legs’ was shunned as the plague in polite discourse, when such things as underwear were referred to – if at all – by speaking in hushed and bated tones of flannel unmentionables. (Qtd ibid.: 41)

In fact, upon the Ossa of incest and the Pelion of miscegenation Faulkner also heaped the Olympus of homosexuality – a ‘sin’ for which the word morbid was a Victorian euphemism. Faulkner’s Wildean forms code his Southern aristocrats as dandies, and those Southern dandies perform aristocracy by merging the Victorian discourses of race and homosexuality. When one reads Absalom, Absalom! through Wilde, Faulkner’s examination of Southern culture through dandyism emerges as one of the most central preoccupations in the novel. At the same time, by reading Faulkner through Wilde readers are able to reexamine late-Victorian responses to Wilde in London and the US as reactions piqued by Wilde’s embodiment of both sexual and racial otherness. Wilde and Bon symbolise the deepest desires and the deepest fears of their respective cultures. In De Profundis, the indictment-turned-loveletter Wilde composed in prison after his 1895 conviction, Wilde

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observed that the thin line between ruin and triumph – or, in the words of Rosa Coldfield, ‘demon’ and ‘gentleman’ – depends on who has the power of representation: I remember I was sitting in the dock on the occasion of my last trial listening to Lockwood’s appalling denunciation of me – like a thing out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola’s indictments of the Popes at Rome – and being sickened with horror at what I heard. Suddenly it occurred to me, ‘How splendid it would be, if I was saying all this about myself!’ I saw then at once that what is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it. (Wilde 2000: 769; italics original)

Harsh moral indictments, dramatic accusations of depravity and thinly veiled allusions to even more appalling degradations of the flesh are the stuff Faulkner novels are made of; Wilde’s realisation about the power of the speaker to decide one’s reputation is one that Faulkner also embraced as he structured his chorus of conflicting narrators. When in this same letter Wilde claims that he was a symbol of the age that produced him, readers are returned to his preface to Dorian Gray, which could stand in as a preface to Absalom, Absalom!: All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. (Wilde 1988: 3) Notes 1. How effeminacy in general, and Wilde’s effeminacy in particular, were constructed, mobilised and received in late-Victorian culture, are questions critical to any study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century gender construction. Of course, after Wilde’s 1895 trials, effeminate dandyism and the figure of the homosexual became indelibly connected in the public imagination – as Alan Sinfeld and Ed Cohen have persuasively demonstrated. Before 1895, however, there were no such clear-cut associations between effeminacy and same-sex desire; although by the time Wilde toured the South in 1882 the term ‘queer’ (used often in Southern newspapers to describe Wilde’s dress and deportment) was in circulation as a slang term for homosexual (Showalter 1990: 112). For more on late-Victorian semantic and cultural constructions of effeminacy and homosexuality see the following definitive studies: Bristow 1995, Chauncey 1989, Cohen 1993, Dellamora 1990, Dollimore 1991, Dowling 1994, Halperin 1990 and Sinfeld 1994.

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2. For a full discussion see Bellows 1985: 505–26. 3. The Anglo-Irish were used to having their interests protected by the British Parliament; they largely imagined themselves as colonial agents in a hostile colony and as such felt entitled to governmental support. When, in the late eighteenth century, support was withheld in the form of the disestablishment of Grattan’s Parliament and the subsequent 1801 Act of Union, landed Irish Protestants feared that their colonial way of life in Ireland would gradually fall to ruin. Southern landowners similarly enjoyed the influence they could exert on the United States government to act in their own interests; Southern interests were well protected by the US government well into the nineteenth century. However, Northern governmental resistance to the South’s demand for autonomy in matters of slavery increasingly led Southerners to share the Anglo-Irish sense of being garrisoned between two restrictive forces. 4. Kant’s theory of the sublime draws upon Edmund Burke’s, which juxtaposes the ‘beautiful’ (based on passionate love) and the ‘sublime’ (that which provokes pain, peril or terror). Although Burke ultimately argued that all sublime forms of power derive from the ‘infinite power of a stern and just God’ (see Abrams 1971: 102), his conception of divine sublimity contains an underlying class element echoed in both Faulkner and Wilde, who locate the sublime in the ‘vast, limitless, infinite’ powers of aristocracy, wealth and youth. 5. After purchasing an old plantation house and taking up his position as resident artist of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner occasionally staged ‘English’ foxhunts for which all members of the household dressed in costume. See Blotner 1974: 991–3. 6. McCormack’s reading of dandyism is indebted to Baudelaire, who rejected the idea that the dandy was merely ‘a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes’ (Carlyle 2000: 314) and instead linked dandyism to those times in history when shifting politics demand ambiguous political stances – particularly when democracy is flowering but aristocracy still retains some cultural power. 7. In an appendix to Trials of Oscar Wilde entitled ‘The Problem of Wilde’s Inversion’, H. Montgomery Hyde uses a similar logic when he cites Wilde’s mother’s oversized physiognomy as biological evidence of Wilde’s own homosexuality: ‘Lady Wilde, the poetess “Speranza” . . . exhibited certain peculiar physical characteristics, due to the excessive development of the pituitary gland, which were reproduced in her son. This excess manifests itself in a general physical overgrowth. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for instance, recalls that her hands were enormous, “and the gigantic splaying of her palm was reproduced in her lumbar region.” To Shaw, Wilde thus appeared as an overgrown man with something not

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8. For a discussion of ‘Dorianism’ and the cult of boy love in late-Victorian England, see Dowling 1994. 9. One might argue that there are in fact two failed seductions in the novel: does Sutpen fail to seduce Rosa Coldfield because she refuses to become his mate? I would argue no: Sutpen’s calculated seduction worked perfectly. Rosa, perpetually seduced by the romantic figure of the Confederate soldier, admits she was mesmerised into accepting Sutpen’s ‘florid’ and ‘boastful’ marriage proposal. It is only when Sutpen, thinking practically and not romantically, later asks Rosa to ‘breed like dogs’ before marrying to ensure that their progeny is male, that Rosa refuses. 10. One could also extend this idea to Quentin Compson’s suicide at the end of The Sound and the Fury; like Dorian Gray, Quentin attempts to kill those parts of himself which remain culturally taboo: his sexual desire for his sister and (possibly) his Harvard roommate Shreve, and his ambivalent half-hatred of his inherited Southern lineage.

CHAPTER 3

Ferocious Beauty: Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Anne Porter and the Modernist Female Dandy

The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy’s beauty consists above all in an air of coldness which comes from an unshakeable determination not to be moved; you might call it a latent fire which hints at itself, and which could, but chooses not to burst into flame. Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ I am firmly and increasingly convinced that artists were intended to be an ornament to society. Elizabeth Bowen, letter to Charles Ritchie, in Glendinning

In the spring of 1950, Katherine Anne Porter received a letter from her niece Ann Holloway, who was then touring Europe with a New York-based ballet troupe. Because of Porter’s literary reputation in London, Ann wrote, she was enjoying attention not only from dance enthusiasts, but from literary ones as well. In a subsequent letter Porter recounted this evidence of her ‘fame in Europe’ with obvious pride and amusement: It would not occur to me that a soul in England had ever heard of me. . . . Yet stop. Did I tell you Ann’s account of my fame in England – London at least? She was there with the de Basil Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo (all the russes being American girls like her, and de Basil not having seen Monte Carlo for twenty years perhaps) and a young British writing man led her around to literary teas, and introduced her with a set speech ‘. . . the niece of the American Elizabeth Bowen.’ (Porter 1990: 390)

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Although this off-the-cuff appellation was clearly offered as generic shorthand for London’s literary tea-goers, Porter seems to have found being identified with Bowen worthy of repetition; several months later, Porter attempted to initiate contact with the Irish writer through their mutual friend Eudora Welty. Upon hearing that Bowen was visiting New York, Porter dashed off this quick and hopeful letter: I called Duncan to ask if you might not be in town again just now, for I had heard lately that Elizabeth Bowen was, and your letter told so wonderfully of her visit south with you; and I hope you still have in your head the notion of a little visit: You, Mrs. Bowen, and me, clustered around a table here in my house – I have a remarkably suitable table for such a cluster – with a bottle of some kind of restorative – Bushmills for my choice – not just sitting there, but doing something. (Ibid.: 407)

Despite the undeniable lure of fine Irish whiskey, Porter’s congenial artist’s cluster never materialised: ‘So, that Mrs. Bowen and I shall ever meet seems most improbable’, wrote Porter to Eudora Welty in 1951, ‘I can think of no reason why we shouldn’t, but we don’t.’1 Porter seems to have taken this perceived snub as just another in a long history of slights dealt her by Welty, who had forgotten, in 1949–50, to mention Porter in a series of Atlantic Monthly articles on writers, and now seemed to be hoarding Bowen all for herself. These slights were still on Porter’s mind ten years later: in a 1963 letter to Cyrilly Abels, Porter admonished Welty for ‘perform[ing] the astonishing feat of writing a three-part essay on the short story without mentioning my name’, and denounced her friend’s association with Bowen, who she derided as a ‘Lesbian’ with whom Welty was keeping ‘bad company indeed’ (qtd in Givner 1982: 372). Yet even a brief glance into each writer’s history suggests that they would have had much to discuss. By the early 1950s Porter had established herself as a major literary voice: her first book, Flowering Judas (1935), was followed by the collections Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) (consisting of three interconnected ‘short novels’)2 and The Leaning Tower (1944). These volumes secured her reputation as a distinctive voice in American letters, and more pointedly as one of the leaders of the Southern literary renaissance. Bowen was an artist likewise well-established when Ann Holloway’s guide forwarded this generic connection. Early publications in the 1920s – three short-story collections, Encounters (1923), Ann Lee’s (1926) and Joining Charles (1929), and two novels, The Hotel (1927) and The Last September

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(1929) – laid the groundwork for the outpouring of creative energy to follow. Five novels, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The House in Paris (1935), Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949), as well as three more short-story collections, The Cat Jumps (1934), Look at All Those Roses (1941) and The Demon Lover (1945), together ensured that by 1950, when a Londoner identified Porter as the ‘American Elizabeth Bowen’, the intended literary parallel was well-taken. A less-apparent connection between these two writers – and one both would likely have preferred to keep that way – was a kindred commitment to the pose of aristocracy. In essays, interviews, photographs and fiction, Porter fashioned a public persona around a gracious plantation past that never, in fact, existed: as biographer Janis Stout records, Callie Russell Porter was not born into the genteel ‘Old South’ of Louisiana but instead the grinding poverty of a central Texas farmstead: Instead of her bruited early life in Louisiana in privileged circumstances and education in a New Orleans convent, Porter was born plain Callie Russell Porter in a two-room cabin on a subsistence farm in central Texas to a mother who died when she was not quite two and a father more than a little given to self pity. She was raised in her grandmother’s small house in Kyle, a few miles south of Austin, in circumstances sufficiently straitened that she sometimes wore clothes handed down by neighbors. . . . Determined to achieve significance in life, she clawed her way out of Texas and into a career. (Stout 1999: 127)

Clawing her way out of Texas required a literary persona, and Porter’s strategic association with the landscapes and history of the ‘Old South’ became a significant part of her coveted post as Belle of Southern letters. And although Bowen’s claim to aristocratic gentility was certainly not sheer fiction, by 1950 a carefully cultivated aesthetics of refinement, built upon the shaky foundations of an eighteenthcentury Anglo-Irish estate in decline, was all the writer retained of her family’s (and her colonial settler culture’s) history as Ireland’s privileged minority. By 1959, when decades of financial problems finally forced the sale of Bowen’s Court, these two self-fashioned icons of gentility would have seen eye to eye on at least one thing: an absolute personal and aesthetic commitment to the appearance of aristocracy. In Bowen’s The Last September (1929) and Porter’s Old Mortality (1939), we find decidedly conservative versions of what Gregory

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Castle has termed the ‘modernist bildungsroman’ (Castle 2006). In Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, Castle argues that English and Irish modernists revivified and revised the ‘Enlightenment concept of aesthetico-spiritual Bildung’, a concept which had been ‘rationalized and bureaucratized’ in the Victorian era, to examine the nature of modern selfhood, identity and humanity. This examination, however, tends to create heroes (and heroines) who reject tradition in favour of modernity in all its forms: If modernist novelists embrace the classical tradition of Bildung, they do so in order to enjoy the fruits of modernity. Innovation and experimentation emerge as the novelist employs new artistic means to translate the longing for wholeness and harmony. For it is this longing that dominates the motivations and actions of modernist Bildungshelden, young heroes willing to do anything, create in any way, so long as they are thoroughly modern, thoroughly whole, thoroughly themselves. (Castle 2006: 2)

Although the heroines of The Last September and Old Mortality are certainly dominated by a longing for modern selfhood, wholeness and harmony, this longing is complicated by powerful cultural mandates which lock these women into traditional female roles. The developmental narratives that unfold in these novels are in fact closer in form to what Castle identifies as a ‘colonial variant of the modernist bildungsroman’, which ‘targets an essentially foreign discourse with no normative status in colonial society’. This variant, Castle maintains, ‘is always a more or less self-conscious role-playing, in which colonial subjects find themselves in an alienated relation to the goal of classic Bildung, with effects that range from sincere imitation to subversive mimicry’ (ibid.: 127–8). The bildungshelden of Bowen and Porter’s novels are ambivalent, female inheritors of dying colonial cultures, and the narratives which contain them thoroughly explicate (through both sincere imitation and subversive mimicry), but refuse to condemn outright, those elements of gender and class performance which keep modern women locked in the dubious patterns of a traditional past. Although both writers evoke the modernist bildungsroman form in their portraits of young artists on the verge of creative and sexual maturity, neither does so without revision. That the settler-aristocracies of Ireland and the American South were, by the early twentieth century, dying cultures inflects the notion of ‘coming-of-age’ in these novels, in which adulthood signals not the moment when one is free of the past, but rather when one must psychically re-enter the past and assume its

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directives – in Bowen’s words, ‘I am ruled by a continuity that I cannot see’ (Bowen 1942: 449). In her study of Anglo-Irish autobiography, Elizabeth Grubgeld identifies in that genre a similar narrative logic, through which an individual female life is collapsed into – subsumed by – the ideological directives of a dying culture: The sense of living in the shadow of one’s ancestors intensifies when autobiography is imagined as a moment in familial or cultural history. The autobiography is for many the record of a dying way of life, and the urgency to document the fall of the father’s world often subsumes the desire to tell a personal story. (Grubgeld 2004: xii–xiii).

Personal apprehensions of liberating change are, in Old Mortality and The Last September, subsumed by the desire to fit oneself into inherited models of traditional femininity; these are female protagonists inclined to break free from restrictive cultural mandates, but who self-consciously look backwards as they attempt escape. Although they recognise how the sexual and social roles they are called upon to embody proscribe individual freedoms and sexual autonomy, fears of being ‘pattern-less’ keep these protagonists from acting upon cataclysmic realisations about gender construction and compulsory heterosexuality. Because they remain ambivalent about abandoning the legacies of these dying and therefore sanctified aristocracies, the heroines of The Last September and Old Mortality fail to (or choose not to) escape their respective cultural ‘patterns’. These novels explicate – but do not outright condemn – this failure’s root cause: the power of a dying culture to render seductive for modern women what are obviously limiting, masculinist and reactionary social and sexual roles. Yet neither Porter nor Bowen assumes that any retreat to the alternate country of an aristocratic past can or should be total; instead, through the figure of the female dandy, they present a hybridised conception of how women are called upon to mobilise the power of an aristocratic past in the modern present. Certainly one might compare coming-of-age narratives from regions other than the South and Ireland, or narratives written by any two writers of the same period, to compare and contrast how heroines reckon with the weight of cultural tradition. Yet these two writers (and, as this study demonstrates, many more besides) consistently posited the other’s culture as analogue. Bowen displaced her anxieties

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about Anglo-Ireland (and aristocratic femininity) onto the aristocratic architecture of the South, while Porter identified and pursued a literary affinity with Irish writers, particularly those whose selffashioned aristocratic identity seemed to mirror her own. In the early 1960s, as Bowen made her way through the American South drawing connections between this region’s ‘altered fortune’ and the ruins of Anglo-Ireland, Porter claimed a ‘mysterious love’ for Ireland: I have tottered on the brink a dozen times of just taking a plane and landing in Ireland but I never have and maybe never will. It seems strange for I have a mysterious love of – not the place itself, how could I? I never saw it – but its legend and history and poetry and the way the Irish write English! That is probably what I really love about Ireland! (Porter 1990: 621)

It was this ‘mysterious’ affinity that prompted my initial comparisons between Bowen and Porter. But what at first seemed mere affinity in the end emerges as a common and sustained literary engagement with the intertwined tenets of female dandyism: aristocratic performance, sexual maturation and the disarming attractions of histories at once long past and disturbingly present. Nostalgia, National Heritage and the Female Dandy Porter’s emergence as a Southern writer in the 1930s corresponded with the rise of the Southern Agrarian movement: a tight-knit group of Southern writers and intellectuals responding to the political, sexual and moral upheavals of the World War I era with art that ‘[yearned] for an organic, hierarchical order such as allegedly existed in the antebellum South’ (King 1980: 51). In The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, Mary Titus observes that the ‘solidly partriarchal construct’ of the Agrarian ideal, which ‘reverences the white southern family, identifies the landed gentry as inherently superior by virtue of birth, enthrones the white man, and sets the white woman up on a pedestal’, presented Porter with a ‘vision of family stability and class privilege’ she found deeply appealing (Titus 2005: 179). Declarations of familial and cultural loyalty to an (imagined) aristocratic past become increasingly common in Porter’s writing from the late 1930s onwards, such as this one from a 1944 essay, ‘Portrait: Old South’: I am the grandchild of a lost War, and I have blood-knowledge of what life can be in a defeated country . . . My elders all remained nobly

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unreconstructed to their last moments, and my feet rest firmly on this rock of their strength to this day. (Porter 1970: 160, 161)

By the end of her career, Porter’s literary masquerade as Southern lady of letters, her signature embodiment of ‘Old South’ glamour and proud defeat, had become such an established part of her identity that at the end of her life, ‘neither she nor her audience could recall Katherine Anne before she claimed this cultural affiliation’ (Titus 2005: 178). Porter claimed this ‘blood-knowledge’ for personal as well as professional reasons. An affiliation with the intellectual luminaries of the Agrarian movement put Porter on the fast-track to being identified with the ‘white-pillared crowd’ of the Southern literary renaissance, and the alternative past she constructed as passport into this nostalgiadriven intellectual movement offered psychic escape from a childhood of privation and instability. Equally important, the well-established gender conventions which governed the figure of the Southern belle offered Porter a way to dramatically distance her own artistic persona from elements of female literary modernism for which she increasingly professed hatred – namely, feminism, gender indeterminacy and lesbianism. As Janis Stout, Joan Givner and Mary Titus have all noted, Porter’s conscious cultivation of an over-the-top ‘Southern Lady’ aesthetic began in earnest after her return from Paris in 1936. The significance of her doing so after coming in close contact with the sexual ambiguities of Left Bank modernism cannot be overemphasised. Porter was famously uncomfortable with the term ‘feminist’, preferring ‘female’ to ‘feminist’ and ‘feminine’ to both; her self-presentation as Southern belle was crafted in part as antidote to popular conceptions of the ‘modern female artist’ in the form of, say, Gertrude Stein – whom she famously derided as an ‘Amazon’, ‘not-men, not-women, answerable to no function of either sex’ (qtd in Stout 1995: 178). Porter’s dislike of Stein stemmed from more than homophobia; as Titus argues, Porter feared that ‘to become an artist was to deny [female] sexuality; it was to become, in Porter’s words, “monstrous”.’ Therefore, Porter feared that by choosing for herself the artist’s life she was turning her back on all she believed was ‘natural to female identity’ (Titus 2005: 6–7). Adopting the strategic public image of Southern belle therefore served multiple related functions. By associating herself with popularised, nostalgic formulations of Old South order and beauty, Porter performed ancestral loyalty to an evocative culture already

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well-established as aesthetically exploitable – and profitably so – both by the Southern literary renaissance and by the phenomenon of Mitchell’s popular Gone With the Wind (1936) and its subsequent film version (1939). As this nostalgic culture’s self-appointed spokeswoman, Porter ensconced herself within a powerfully influential – albeit conservative, reactionary and racist – literary subculture. Simultaneously, she used her persona as the belle of Southern letters to distance herself from the sexual and political ambiguities of (female) modernism. Although Anglo-Irish culture offered no feminine mask as prepackaged with iconographic and ideological significance as the Southern belle, Bowen likewise drew upon aristocratic femininity to cultivate an artistic persona which simultaneously affirmed loyalty to a particular cultural position and sidestepped associations with the ambiguities of female modernism. Like Porter, Bowen was uneasy with the term ‘feminist’. As Maud Ellmann observes, Bowen ‘was no feminist’ (Ellmann 2003: 18), citing numerous examples: in 1936 Bowen argued that the woman’s movement ‘ha[d] accomplished itself’, and in 1949 lamented that the ‘bleak quality’, the ‘aggressive streak’ of feminism only serves to ‘irritate, disconcert the adorer of Virginia Woolf the artist’ (qtd in Ellmann 2003: 18). Bowen was a woman consistently described in masculine terms; she is frequently remembered as ‘handsome’ rather than beautiful – her intellect often deemed ‘masculine’.3 Like Porter, Bowen was persistently anxious about her appearance: she draped herself in layers of bright costume jewellery, donned heavy clip-on earrings that caused extreme irritation, and insisted on wearing white doeskin gloves even in the summer heat (Glendinning 1977: 237, 240). Although Bowen, a woman who pursued extramarital affairs with both men and women, did not share Porter’s categorical hatred for deviance, her public performance of traditional femininity suggests a similar ‘anxiety of authorship’, as Gilbert and Gubar term the woman writer’s fear that her artistic pursuits might render her ‘unsexed’ (Gilbert and Gubar 1984: 51). Or wrongly sexed, in Bowen’s case: the author’s carefully constructed public femininity seems to have been crafted – at least in part – to work against naturally ‘handsome’ looks which to some might have suggested literary lesbianism. For Bowen, the signature embodiment of the modern lesbian artist was not Gertrude Stein but Radclyffe Hall, a contemporary British writer preoccupied, as was Bowen herself, with the intersections of aristocracy and female sexuality. The heroine of Hall’s iconic lesbian bildungsroman, The Well of

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Loneliness (1928), ultimately rejects her role as inheritor of her family’s aristocratic country house in favour of the more open atmosphere of Paris’s Left Bank – a narrative trajectory that for Bowen, last inheritor of her own ancestral estate and last inheritor, too, of her aristocratic culture’s fast-fading traditions, would have signalled ‘tribal’, as well as familial, disloyalty. One way to interpret Bowen’s attention to genteel femininity, then, is as a public commitment to and performance of a national culture that the writer recognised was ‘now, I am told, becoming extinct’ (Bowen 1942: 456). In Bowen’s Court, a cultural history of her settler-colonial family’s Irish estate, Bowen recognises that a collective ancestral ‘blood-knowledge’, one marked, as was Porter’s, by war and dispossession, structures both her self-conception and her artistic vision: What runs on through a family living in one place is a continuous, semiphysical dream. Above this dream level successive lives show their tips, their little conscious formations of will and thought. With the end of each generation, the lives that submerged here were absorbed again. . . . The land outside Bowen’s Court windows left prints on my ancestors’ eyes that looked out: perhaps their eyes left, also, prints on the scene? If so, those prints were part of the scene to me. (Ibid.: 451)

During World War II, the London-based Bowen relied upon the memory of this multigenerational scene to provide a vision of exaggerated harmony in the face of chaos: Here was a negative calm . . . [a] picture of peace – in the house, in the country round. Like all pictures, it did not quite correspond with any reality. Or, you might have called the country a magic mirror, reflecting what could not really exist. That illusion – peace at its most ecstatic – I held to, to sustain me throughout war. (Ibid.: 457)

This ‘negative calm’ depends as much upon the suggestion of gentility as it does the absent presence of war; for both Bowen and Porter (as for W. B. Yeats in such poems as ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ and ‘In Memory of Con Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth’) the custom and ceremony of tradition is mobilised as aesthetic insulation against modernity’s chaotic ambiguity. In his 1942 Princeton lecture, ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’, Wallace Stevens imagined something like Porter’s ‘noble

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unreconstruction’ and Bowen’s ‘negative calm’ in his conception of ‘inherent nobility’, a quality upon which modern artists must draw for protection against the ‘pressure of reality’. Through the lens of world war, Stevens argues, the concept of nobility seems distinctly ‘out of time’, particularly because of its perceived antiquity: ‘something that was once noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once’ (‘Noble Rider’ in Stevens 1951: 33, 22). Yet if one separates the concept of nobility from any particular historical and ideological manifestations, nobility can function as a powerful bulwark against the chaos of modernity. Thus ‘unfixed’, nobility offers self-preservation through form: a ‘ferocious beauty’ born of a ‘violence from within that protects us from a violence from without’, a kinetic aesthetics ‘pressing back against the pressure of reality’ (ibid.: 34, 35–6). By carefully vetting all images intended for public circulation, Bowen and Porter engaged in something like Stevens’s rhetoric of nobility: the fiction of upper-class gentility conveyed in such portraits is certainly an example of art pressing back upon the pressure of modern reality. Bowen’s American publishers were under strict orders to use only those photographs the writer marked as acceptable; several in the Knopf publicity files archive are marked with a definitive ‘No’.4 Occasionally, Bowen flatly declined image requests, and in 1947 informed publishers Curtis Brown Ltd that because she was aware of no photograph of herself she liked, she would prefer that none went into circulation.5 Porter’s own anxiety over her public image resulted ‘in outbursts of fury if anyone dared print a photograph of her that was less than flattering’; in 1961 she threatened to sue the magazine Newsweek for printing an image which showed her wrinkles (Stout 1995: 168). Portraits of Bowen and Porter that survived scrutiny are striking in their repackaging of the modern female artist as high-society lady, a retro-chic aesthetic that stands in stark visual antithesis to what had become, by the 1940s, a recognisable iconography of the ‘modernist female artist’: the bohemian, the feminist, the intellectual, the androgyne, the lesbian. We see, then, traditional femininity being called upon to create a barrier between the modern artist and modern articulations of sexual identity: a ‘ferocious beauty’ armed against the chaos of modern culture. Unlike the ‘unfixed’ aristocratic ethos of Stevens, however, we find that for Bowen and Porter the concept of nobility is inextricably ‘fixed’ to fading aristocracies, complicating the relationship between modern art and modernist redefinitions of nobility with each artist’s personal and aesthetic investments in aristocratic nostalgia. Portraits allowed

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to enter wide public circulation had to transmit an aura of femininity and affluence largely on the order of a culturally specific ‘old order’. To this end, in the late 1940s both writers enlisted the services of famed portrait photographers: Angus McBean in London and George Platt Lynes in Hollywood, contemporaries distinguished for meticulous attention to old-school Hollywood glamour as well as innovative experimentation within this stylised genre. In the autumn of 2006, on the occasion of McBean’s first large-scale retrospective, one reviewer cautioned that ‘in McBean’s hands, the camera almost always lies. His portraits tell you next to nothing about his famous sitters, save that they are beautiful and highly accomplished’.6 Yet portrait photographers are hired by sitters for exactly this reason: to communicate a particular breed of surface beauty and accomplishment. In choosing McBean and Lynes, artists known for high polish and a dandyish predilection for surface over depth, Bowen and Porter commissioned highly stylised, hyperfeminised portraits whose overthe-top qualities ironically expose each artist’s complex relationship to the aesthetics of literary modernism. Two portraits in particular, a Lynes portrait of Porter taken in Vogue’s Hollywood studios in 1947, and a McBean portrait of Bowen taken in the photographer’s London studio in 1948, illustrate this paradox: how a conservative performance of femininity and cultural heritage can function as both elegy and critique. In these portraits, the merged icon of artist / aristocrat emits a distinct nostalgic intensity, one which betrays a more-than-intellectual attachment to culturally specific manifestations of order, meaning and beauty. These images therefore operate as a form of staged national heritage, in which clothing and jewellery, posture, lighting and expression all combine to suggest that the woman on display has assumed the role of inheritor of and (ambivalent) champion for a specific, if fading, nobility. By presenting themselves to their reading public in the trappings of upper-class femininity, Bowen and Porter claim a nostalgic allegiance to the aristocratic pasts which infuse those trappings with cultural meaning. Yet as this chapter will demonstrate, the aristocratic ladies presiding over multiple dustjackets, promotional materials and magazine articles, were also artists whose writing anatomised as artifice just this kind of aristocratic femininity. Each writer’s personal admiration for and cultivation of the external markers of a conservative, patriarchal past – the historic houses, white gloves and formal portraits – is seemingly undercut and contradicted by a sustained literary engagement with how the particular restrictions and prohibitions of this

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Figure 6 Portrait of Katherine Anne Porter, Hollywood, 1947. George Platt Lynes. (Courtesy of the Katherine Anne Porter Collection, The University of Maryland Libraries, and copyright permission of George Platt Lynes II, George Platt Lynes Estate)

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Figure 7 Portrait of Elizabeth Bowen, London, 1948. Angus McBean. (Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin, and copyright permission of David Ball, Angus McBean Estate)

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inherited past dictate the personal and public identities available to modern Southern and Irish women. We are therefore confronted with a paradox: despite a common public allegiance to the visual markers of aristocratic affluence, Bowen and Porter also deconstruct these inherited symbols through narratives which interrogate the clash between traditional culture and modern redefinitions of gender and sexuality. Upon closer examination, however, each artist’s iconographic performances of cultural heritage can likewise be read as deeply ambivalent. When read within the context of Bowen and Porter’s fiction, the stylish, feminine figures on display in these portraits betray, through hyperbole, the constructed artificiality of a particularly aristocratic femininity. Lighting, posture and sartorial choice infuse these portraits with a distinct camp sensibility which verges on drag – but a version of drag that plays with assumptions about both gender and class. The portraits come off as hyper-imperious, hyperfeminine, hyperposed – in a word, purple. In them we encounter late-modernist examples of what cultural historian Raphael Samuel has termed ‘retro-chic’, a doubled aesthetics which playfully mobilises ‘the period look’ as it remains resolutely committed to the here and now: as with the fitted carpets and soft-lighting of the newly re-Victorianized pubs, or the air-conditioned modern offices which hide themselves behind supposedly classical, or neo-classical façades. Janus-faced, [retrochic] looks both backwards and forwards in time, using the most up-todate technologies to age or ‘distress’ what would otherwise appear brand-new. (Samuel 1994: 83)

Samuel’s ‘retro-chic’ well describes the post-Imperial aesthetics of modernist dandyism; for the consciously genteel women framed in these portraits are certainly manifestations of the female dandy figure, whose artful aestheticisation of self, her outwardly vain ‘aesthetics of control’ (Moers 1960: 275), preserves the fiction of a gendered aristocratic past. The operative words here are preserve and fiction: the female dandy embodies and performs the requisite femininity of traditional culture, but this performance simultaneously exposes the artificiality of gender construction more generally, and femininity’s requisite service in the construction and maintenance of national identity more specifically. As Grubgeld observes, Bowen’s ‘elegance in dress, manner, and prose style’ functioned as an embodiment of her ‘role as Ascendancy heir’, yet her prose as dramatically announces

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that ‘the inheritance could also be disabling, leaving the female autobiographical subject a barren shadow’ (Grubgeld 2004: 43). By embodying a dying culture’s most pointed object of nostalgic yearning – the ‘belle’ of an idealised past – the female dandy figure invites multiple, often contradictory readings of gender, modernity and cultural nostalgia. In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski identifies nostalgia as central to literary conceptions of modernity, and further argues that ‘the yearning for the feminine as emblematic of a nonalienated, nonfragmented identity’ constitutes a ‘crucially important motif in the history of cultural representations of the nature of modernity’ (Felski 1995: 37). Nostalgia, as Felski persuasively demonstrates, has therefore been traditionally understood as an exclusively masculine affliction: by desiring a national past in the form the national feminine, men are able to cast ‘woman’ as an ‘authentic point of origin’, a ‘recurring symbol of the atemporal and asocial at the very heart of the modern itself’, the ‘ahistorical other and the other of history against which the modern identity is defined’ (ibid.: 38). Women, on the other hand, traditionally identified with the domestic, the home, the mother country, were the ‘classic objects of nostalgic affection . . . not the subjects of it’. ‘Rather than desiring the past’, Felski argues, ‘they were the past’ (ibid.: 41). In the case of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary cultures of Anglo-Ireland and the American South, a healthy nostalgia for the aristocratic ‘belle’ figure functioned as antidote to anxieties over dilapidation, decline and emasculation – casting the nostalgic male as both ‘masculine’ and ‘modern’ through the very act of yearning for a feminine past. As Titus observes, late nineteenth-century ‘popular plantation fiction . . . used the image of the white Southern belle as a discursive sign. The Belle’s beauty and gaiety, and most of all her virginity, confirmed the beauty, gaiety, and social purity of the white, southern aristocracy’ (Titus 2005: 194). The female dandy figure, like her male counterpart, uses hyperaristocratic performance to fracture and complicate representations of ‘beauty, gaiety, and social purity’: the performative ambiguity of both figures calls into question stable notions of class, gender and racial identity. But whereas the male dandy figure, in his embodiment and evocation of an effeminate aristocratic past, signals his modernity through a traditional nostalgia for the feminine, the female dandy (because she, too, is a nostalgic figure) subverts gendered assumptions about aristocratic femininity not through gender inversion but

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instead a doubled, hyperfemininity – a kind of upper-class female drag. Because dandyism is consistently associated with gender fluidity and the sexual deviance fluidity is assumed to imply, one might expect that the inversions central to male dandyism would also define female dandyism. Just as we expect that the male dandy embraces effeminacy to challenge definitions of masculinity, so we assume that the female dandy – in order to destabilise monolithic assumptions about the feminine – will look mannish and act accordingly. Yet dandyism is a discourse which performs nostalgia to signal modernity; the dandy figure, in both its masculine and feminine forms, yearns for and performs a past which has been gendered feminine. And as such, female dandies cultivate an effeminacy that rivals that of their most fastidious male counterparts. Furthermore, by embodying both the subject and object of nostalgic national affection, the female dandy figure complicates our understanding of aristocratic nostalgia as a necessarily masculine affliction. As a woman yearning for a national past that has been typically gendered female, this seemingly conservative figure paradoxically becomes what Felski terms ‘the exemplary modern individual’: If the modern subject is split, decentered, deeply aware of its own formation through exteriority and structures of cultural mediation, then it is woman who has become the exemplary modern individual. Rather than symbolizing undifferentiated nature and unconscious desire, women’s position in relation to the gaze of the other endows them with a degree of self-consciousness that men can never attain. (Felski 1995: 194)

Although a stylised pose of upper-class femininity constructed as a hedge against modernity would seem to suggest compliance with the mandates of a dying culture, this compliance is always partial. The female dandy’s performance of traditional femininity is not merely the ‘assertion of traditional privilege’ in the face of crumbling social structures, nor is it an outright satire of that privilege; she does not ‘simply mimi[c] the past’ nor ‘wish for the reinstating of what once was’ (Moers 1960: 130, Glick 2001: 147). Rather, this chapter will argue that the female dandy figure does both; her smokescreen performance of aristocratic femininity obscures ever-present counterinstinctual impulses towards feminism and alternative sexualities. Through an outward acquiescence to traditionalism, she claims a freedom to flirt with modern gender and sexual identities without risking exile.

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Lady Delacour, the aristocratic lady-with-a-secret at the centre of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), is an early example of a female heroine following this ambivalent model of acquiescence and subversion. Mobilising her subtle awareness of aristocratic feminine artifice, she marshals beauty and breeding to secure financial and sexual freedoms she would otherwise have been denied. In public, Lady Delacour is the picture of gaiety and grace, inspiring newspaper accounts of ‘Lady Delacour’s parties, Lady Delacour’s dresses, and Lady Delacour’s bon mots . . . every thing, that her ladyship said, was repeated as witty; every thing, that her ladyship wore, was imitated as fashionable’ (Edgeworth 1993: 6). In private, however, Lady Delacour critiques the sheer physical toll exacted by the public spectacle she engineers: If I had enjoyed any amusement in the midst of this dissipation, it would all have been very well; but I declare to you in confidence, I have been tired to death. Nothing can be more monotonous than the life of a hackneyed fine lady. I question whether a drayhorse, or a horse in a mill, would willingly exchange places with one – if they could know as much of the matter as I do. (Ibid.: 55)

The female dandy’s intimate understanding of femininity-as-artifice dovetails with an acute awareness of gender roles – an awareness often identified as grounds for rebellion and flight. The female dandy, at once reactionary and revolutionary, recognises those avenues for escape made possible through self-awareness, and chooses not to take them. This is the delicate balance between conservation and rebellion Porter and Bowen explore in their novels and perform in their studio portraits. To dramatise this tightrope performance of femininity – external acquiescence to cultural mandates covering over an internal battle against, if not outright rejection of, requisite gender roles – both writers imagine their young protagonists as female dandies. Through their ambivalently modern heroines, Bowen and Porter are able to at once deconstruct the artifice of femininity and reaffirm the pervasiveness, applicability and ultimate necessity of such artifice in the nostalgic (pseudo)aristocratic cultures of Ireland and the American South. By laying bare the elaborate patterns, prohibitions and morals which create and sustain the ‘Belle’, Bowen in The Last September and Porter in Old Mortality each create female characters who, despite contradictory impulses towards feminism and alternative sexualities, choose

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to shore up the near-ruins of aristocratic style. This choice, however, is not a straightforward wish for the simplicity of the past. The female dandy’s awareness and performance of femininity’s construction constitutes a kind of rebellion – in Baudelaire’s words, the dandy’s ‘characteristic quality of opposition and revolt’ – but her rebellion is contained and limited by ‘the oppressive social relations that [she] sustains’ (Glick 2001: 147). ‘Worse than spinsterhood’: Irish Ingénues in The Last September In her essay ‘The Big House’ (1940), Bowen acknowledges that to outsiders, the Anglo-Irish country house appears looming and lonely, isolated from ‘modern’ life, a last outpost of outmoded aristocracy. She maintains, however, that this perception is due ‘more to effect than . . . reality’ (Bowen 1994: 25). In this essay Bowen ushers outsiders in – leading them beyond imposing external façades and into cool foyers and living rooms, up ornate staircases and through gracious halls, all designed to be ‘functional’ rather than merely ornamental, to ‘contribut[e] to society’ and ‘rais[e] life above the exigencies of mere living to the plane of art’ and (significantly for Bowen) ‘style’ (ibid.: 27). The chief benefits of this architectural functionality, Bowen argues, are behavioural; she applauds this aesthetic ‘social ideal’ for encouraging ‘the subjugation of the personal to the impersonal. In the interests of good manners and good behavior people learned to subdue their own feelings’ (ibid.: 29). For Bowen, subduing one’s emotions is not a form of repression; on the contrary, she asserts that ‘the result [is] an easy and unsuspicious intercourse, to which everyone [brings] the best that they [have] – wit, knowledge, sympathy, or personal beauty’. To those who recoil from such a mannered culture because in it one is forced to be ‘polite’ Bowen asks: ‘Are we to cut grace quite out of life?’ (ibid.: 29). In this essay manners are cast as a form of cultural preservation: the logical response to a fastchanging, chaotic and increasingly vulgar modernity. This essay therefore stakes out an architectural and ideological map of Ascendancy heritage: an eighteenth-century system of recognisable aesthetic and intellectual hallmarks still relevant, she claims, to the turbulent twentieth-century. Bowen – speaking mostly to herself in this essay – implores young Anglo-Irish inheritors, who she maintains ‘cannot afford to be stupid’, to ‘keep alive . . . in a changed world and under changed conditions, the good life for which [the houses] were first built’ (ibid.: 30). She cautions young inheritors

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against wholly breaking with the past, for such hereditary callousness would ensure the final dissolution of Anglo-Ireland. Bowen recognises that young aristocrats will, of course, want to enter the modern age, but requests that they temper their desire for modernity with a respect for tradition and inheritance. Bowen was herself one of these young aristocrats. In 1930, one year after publishing The Last September, her father passed away, leaving Elizabeth the sole inheritor of Bowen’s Court, an unmodernised eighteenth-century family seat in East Cork. Bowen used her literary earnings to install indoor plumbing and electricity, and later kept the house running with numerous short magazine articles: ‘Bowen’s Court now relied on what Elizabeth could earn . . . she had to manage, or mismanage, everything herself’ (Glendinning 1977: 232). Between inheriting in 1930 and reluctantly selling in 1959 to avoid financial ruin, Bowen followed the advice set down in ‘The Big House’: despite extreme financial difficulty she lived as tradition dictated. She employed servants, threw lavish dinner parties, hosted long-term guests, and purchased supplies on a local credit line, paid yearly – as her ancestors had for centuries before her. Guests were treated to the style of living the house suggested: sumptuous feasts, freely flowing liquor, and expensive entertainments: ‘No one was ever, when with Elizabeth, allowed to pay for anything’ (ibid.: 231). These traditions were kept at a price. Over thirty years of ownership, Bowen supplemented funds eked out by her less-lucrative literary work with short articles written for quick profit. She produced critical pieces for the New York Times Book Review and the Saturday Review, as well as articles addressing questions of fashion, deportment and upper-class leisure for magazines such as Holiday, American Home, Glamour, Mademoiselle and McCall’s. Between 1950 and 1960, Bowen wrote at a frenzied pace, publishing in American magazines more often because these offered more generous compensation. Articles with topics ranging from ‘For the Feminine Shopper’ to ‘How to Be Yourself But Not Eccentric’ appeared throughout the decade. This working writer’s break with aristocratic tradition constitutes yet another way Bowen followed her own admonishment of young aristocrats: to keep up inherited traditions ‘in a changed world and under changed conditions’. Glendinning finds it lamentable that Bowen, in her prime as a novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, was forced to expend energy on article writing when ‘someone of Elizabeth’s age and stature should have been using her energy on the books she still had in her’ (ibid.: 233). But in a sense,

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Bowen was merely adapting to suit modern conditions. If one surveys topics addressed in her ‘nonliterary’ essays, one finds that almost without exception she took advantage of these pop-cultural venues as public stages on which to interrogate her own attitudes towards gender, performance and femininity. Titles like ‘The Art of Reserve’ and ‘The Beauty of Being Your Age’ certainly fit the women’s magazine genre for which they were intended. But they also announce an almost sardonic sideline oeuvre, one suited to popular culture and mass readership but with an eye still obliquely trained upon questions central to Bowen’s fiction: the relationships between cultural inheritance, gender and modernity. Although the Anglo-Irish ingénue is a figure less mythologised than the iconographic Southern belle, she is nonetheless a figure called upon (in both history and fiction) to perform a similar reconstructive cultural function. In a jarring description of an 1899 garden party, Lady Mary Carbery, mistress of the West Cork estate Castle Freke, evokes the pressure to keep up the appearance of civility and authority women of her class felt at the turn of the twentieth century: We shuffle from room to room in a solid mass, making ourselves as small as we can to get through the doors. In the garden we expand and become friendly as we look at borders and beds, and walk on the shaven lawn. While people prattle, I think here we are, imprisoned, each one of us, in a body, in solitary confinement, being given a treat; allowed to speak to other prisoners; to take exercise together. Those who can may play little games with balls; those who can’t may peer into empty greenhouses, look at a young frog and a goldfish in a rockery, and talk about slugs and how to catch them, before going back to our cells. (Carbery 1998: 68)

Carbery’s pointed imagery pounds home her sense that aristocratic women are locked in a manicured prison which itself symbolises the bodily imprisonment of their gendered cultural roles: the women ‘shuffle’ and ‘take exercise’ within an architectural structure which makes them feel as ‘small’ and ‘shaven’ as the gardens they submissively tour. Carbery’s sense of imprisonment, however, does not translate into a desire for different circumstances. Although she is ‘restless, hearing the call of the road, the call of mountains with their water courses’, she concludes, ‘I must not listen. I must not leave the children to go away and away’ (ibid.: 65). Nor does her restlessness pique an interest in suffrage: ‘I met a bitter creature who thinks women should have votes. “I’m sorry, I don’t want a vote,” I said

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politely. “You wouldn’t,” she replied bitterly. “You’re too pretty” ’ (ibid.: 121). Although Bowen describes her own stint as an Ascendancy ingénue as ‘frivolous’, ‘girlish’ and full of ‘romance and pleasure’, Victoria Glendinning observes that ‘there is a sort of pent-up feeling of her as a girl, a potential wildness’, an ‘underlying gypsy romanticism which was just as much a part of her as her perfect, ladylike demeanour and beautiful manners’ (Glendinning 1977: 42). The Irish writer Sean O’Faolain noted the same pent-up element in Bowen’s writing: ‘One hears from behind her civil façade that kind of farouche note which one associates with delinquent teenagers about to break prison – that is, about to leave home’ (O’Faolain 1956: 31). But Bowen did not ‘break’ from her Irish home, nor do her heroines ever do so permanently; their gypsy romanticism never gains ascendancy over their beautiful, ladylike manners. Had they done so, Bowen’s fictional ingénues might have followed the models of Anglo-Irish womanhood set by political revolutionary Constance Markievicz, who left behind an 1890s youth spent riding horses, studying art and preparing for presentation at court, to lead the Irish Citizen Army women’s division, Cumann na mBan, and assume the post of second in command at St Stephen’s Green during the Easter 1916 uprising. Or they could have emulated Anglo-Irish ingénue Dolly Wilde’s sexually rebellious example: in 1914, Oscar’s like-minded niece left the British Isles altogether, choosing to transition from debutante to lesbian in the more open sexual climate of Paris’s Left Bank. In a 1927 letter to her lover, Natalie Barney, Wilde wrote that her reasons for leaving home were purely personal. Did you really think I’d work myself into a fever over England’s downfall, distressing though it is to think that the balance of culture in the world is on the decline. National disaster spells personal ruin – that is all. (Qtd in Schenkar 2000: 85)

That Bowen herself identified figures resembling Markievicz and Wilde as embodying potential avenues for female rebellion becomes clear in The Last September, when heroine Lois Farquar is discouraged from adopting either model. Seduced by the revolutionary romanticism of Irish rebels with ‘resolute, powerful profile[s]’, Lois nonetheless cannot identify with their passionate commitment to Ireland: ‘Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally’ (Bowen 1929: 42). Lesbian

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sexuality also offers an escape from her prescribed role, but when the woman who she claims could ‘make [her] do anything’ ‘softly, satirically’ presses against her, she proclaims, ‘I must marry Gerald’ (ibid.: 180, 182). Even the Left Bank deviance offered by Paris art schools fall out of her future plans, for although Lois’s aunt Lady Naylor believes ‘there’s a future for girls nowadays besides marriage’, family friend Mrs Trent thinks her ‘unwisely persistent in encouraging art for Lois; this, for young girls, often resulted in worse than spinsterhood’ (ibid.: 255). Indeed, she might have run into Dolly Wilde and her crowd on the Left Bank, and become callous about England’s downfall. All Bowen critics have noted that Bowen’s fiction consistently explores intense bonds between women, and each ascribes a different rationale for this narrative interest: some cast lesbianism as her central concern, some read her allusions to lesbianism through the history of Anglo-Ireland, others either ignore her gay plotlines or relegate them to the peripheries of the novels’ main narrative foci.7 Bowen’s first biographer suggested that the exploration of homosexuality is not a central concern or unique aspect of Bowen’s work, but is instead indicative of an overarching modernist interest in sex and sexuality. Although she allows that Bowen ‘loved her women friends, and with some of them the friendship was intense’, and that ‘Bowen put these relationships in her books, from the first novel onwards’, she insists that ‘there was nothing “sensational”, to use her word in the more vulgar sense, either in her manner of doing so or in putting them in at all: in the twenties and thirties lesbianism and homosexuality were novelists’ topics’ (Glendinning 1977: 217). This casual assertion, however, obscures some very specific reasons for, first: why homosexuality and lesbianism were 1920s and 1930s’ ‘novelists’ topics’, and second: why writers like Bowen might have been reluctant to call a spade a spade. In Are Girls Necessary? Julie Abraham maintains that ‘the first phase of the lesbian novel ended with the publication and persecution of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928’. Hall’s sympathetic portrait of a gifted writer and congenital invert with the class background and conservative instincts of a country gentleman, who gives up the love of her life so that her lover might have a chance of heterosexual respectability, was charged with obscenity in Britain and the United States within weeks of its initial publication, and banned in Britain for decades. (Abraham 1996: 4)

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The threats Hall’s protagonist, Stephen Gordon, posed to traditional culture are by now infamous; despite being last heir to one of England’s great country houses, the consummate aristocrat Stephen chooses a sexually open exile in Paris over heterosexual reproduction and estate management in England, and Stephen’s lesbian creator was charged with obscenity.8 Although the threat Hall’s heroine posed for female artists after 1928 is less well documented, Neil Miller points out that after the Well trials British writers were made deeply conscious of how homosexuality was at work in their fictions, and in many cases began to censor the ways in which they used the trope of homosexuality in their novels (Miller 1993: 132). Although no record exists that Bowen owned a copy of The Well, several factors suggest that she was affected by the novel and its attendant public controversies. First, four of her closest literary associates were intimately connected to the novel’s troubled history. Virginia Woolf, speaking for the Bloomsbury literary scene which Bowen both skirted and admired, asserted in 1928 that: ‘At this moment our thoughts centre on Sapphism – we have to uphold the morality of that Well of all that’s stagnant and lukewarm and neither one thing or the other’ (Woolf 1977b: 555). Rose Macaulay, who in 1928 helped publish Bowen’s first novel, joined Woolf and other prominent writers in signing a public petition to keep The Well uncensored, and Rosamond Lehmann allowed Hall to list her own novel, Dusty Answer (1927), as trial evidence of other ‘lesbian’ novels published in England without censure. And Bowen’s lifelong friend Cyril Connolly wrote an influential review of Hall’s novel in 1928, calling for a less sensationalist, more literary examination of ‘intermediate’ sexuality. Additionally, evidence from Bowen’s correspondence with one of her early publishers, A. E. Coppard of the Golden Cockerel Press, proves beyond a doubt that she was thinking about how the aesthetic possibilities posed by homosexuality should and should not be exploited in fiction. In one letter, written in 1932, three years after the publication of The Last September, Bowen asks, ‘If I write a story about two women called “Barren Love” shall I bring the G. Cockerel Press in for the tail end of the homosexuality ramp?’ (qtd in Glendinning 1977: 217). A week later, Coppard replied: If you write ‘Barren Love’ I can’t say what you will bring the GC Press in for – that depends on you. And I don’t see why you call it Barren Love, except in the procreative sense which surely doesn’t count in such a relation. It’s a theme that might be beautifully done, but for myself I’d only

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use it if I saw some of its complications as fruitful material for art, not as propaganda a la Lawrence or the Lonely Well lady. Or otherwise you would have to treat it in a daintily pornographic style, for there is no point in just nibbling at that hook. (Italics original)9

Bowen could not have read Hall’s Well as mere propaganda, though. First, Hall’s novel identifies the ambiguities of national identity (Stephen is the daughter of an English father and an Anglo-Irish mother) with lesbianism. As Margot Backus has demonstrated, Hall’s novel relies upon ‘British constructions of “the Irish” as requisite colonial other’ to establish heroine Stephen Gordon’s credentials as an ideal English gentleman: ‘Through a representational sleight of hand, she articulates “the lesbian” as “the male,” “the English,” and “the subject” and places all four in opposition to “the heterosexual,” “the female,” “the Irish” and “the object” ’ as these traits are embodied by the heroine’s Anglo-Irish mother, Anna Gordon (Backus 1996: 253, 257). Hall’s novel also presents an explicitly sexualised portrait of a dandy-aristocrat, and moreover suggested that for the dandy-aristocrat, open lesbian sexuality necessitated exile. Carol Smith-Rosenberg describes The Well as a realist novel in which an aristocratic heroine becomes ‘a romantic figure in a darkened house, an expatriate in an alien land’ who, ‘having discovered the intermediate nature of her sexuality’, is forced to ‘flee the structured security of . . . her family home, the conventions of the English gentry, and England itself to live a creative life in [a] no-man’sland’ (Smith-Rosenberg 1990: 277). Hall insists that although breaking with sexual norms is often far from libratory, break with them one must. As Esther Newton points out, Stephen Gordon’s cross-dressing isolates rather than liberates: ‘if male writers used cross-dressing to symbolize and castigate a world turned upside-down, [and] Virginia Woolf and other female modernists used it to express “gleeful skepticism” toward gender categories, Stephen’s cross-dressing asserts a series of estrangements’ (Newton 1990: 289). Estrangement from the fold of aristocracy is a fate the dandy meticulously avoids. In Bowen’s The Last September, a novel composed in the years 1927–8 against the backdrop of the Well controversies, modern aristocratic heroines are drawn to, but never fully act upon, sexual and cultural rebellion. Instead, in dandyesque fashion, Bowen’s ingénues critique the repressive strictures of settler-colonial culture from the position of insider. In this novel, figurations of female sexuality consistently suggest deviance. But Bowen seems at pains to differentiate her rebellious heroines from the sexually decadent aristocrat at the

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centre of the Well controversies, favouring instead the liminal figure of the female dandy. Although Declan Kiberd’s influential essay ‘Elizabeth Bowen: The Dandy in Revolt’ inspired me to analyse how female writers utilise the discourse of dandyism in their fiction, his analysis does not distinguish between male and female dandyism, nor does he question why female dandies might more acutely fear the loss of home and position heralded by modernity. Although Bowen’s heroines are certainly dandyesque in that they ‘cultivate illusions, even after the chance to entertain any illusions has been lost’ (Kiberd 1995: 377), because such illusions depend so heavily upon the performance of femininity, these heroines recognise the burden of maintaining cultural illusions all the more acutely and self-consciously precisely because ‘women’s position in relation to the gaze of the other endows them with a degree of selfconsciousness that men can never attain’ (Felski 1995: 194). The Last September explores the complex aristocratic trappings orchestrated to trick both the insiders – Anglo-Irish families who must believe they are members of an aristocracy worth preserving – and the outsiders – the surrounding English and Irish forces. Although the novel exposes the desperation which underpins this aesthetic of control, Bowen does not suggest that contrived illusions of power are immoral or duplicitous. The goal of projecting the façade of a unified cultural landscape is presented seriously and lauded as a (futile) means of cultural survival. Renee Hoogland identifies The Last September ‘in traditional generic terms’ as ‘a social comedy that satirizes the manners and morals of the Anglo-Irish landed gentry and the English upper-middle classes’ (Hoogland 1994: 39). But this is less a ‘novel of manners’ than a novel about the breakdown of manners – an anatomy of good breeding and its failure to preserve imperial culture – and Bowen maintains a contradictory and ambiguous attitude towards the manners and morals women must follow in order to maintain this illusion. Bowen’s heroine Lois Farquar, an Anglo-Irish ingénue who comes of age after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921, simultaneously faces her own adulthood and her culture’s extinction – a situation which mirrors Bowen’s own: Persons of her (and my) age, who had to surmount adolescence during the First World War, reacted against any excessive tax, any strain put or demand made upon feeling. To the core, we were neither zealots nor rebels. ‘There’s been enough of that!’ we felt. ‘Stop it: we want to live!’ At the same time, the ambivalence of death and danger, often of violence,

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seemed as elementally natural to this girl as dance music, the sweet pea in the garden, rain, or the rising moon or the setting sun. (Bowen 1929: xi)

Entering adulthood after an adolescence marked by violence and cultural upheaval, Lois (like Bowen herself) charts out a conservative course. Although she is aware of the upheavals around her, and although she is attracted to some of them, she deliberately avoids any personal rebellions that would further disrupt her coming of age. An attraction to women seems to come naturally to Lois, and this issue, perhaps more than those political ones that dominate the novel, takes centre stage. Narrating a sexual identity crisis was, for Bowen, the most apt vehicle through which to imagine Anglo-Ireland’s national identity crisis. The sometimes subtle, sometimes overt mechanisms through which dying cultures shape modern social and sexual decorum litter the Irish landscape traversed by Bowen’s heroines. Bowen consistently depicts the Anglo-Irish national character through discourses of intermediacy and hybridity: her people are a ‘race of hybrids’ (Bowen 1994: 101), a ‘race within a race’ (ibid.: 174), an aristocracy lacking noble titles and therefore forever consigned to the limbo of ‘Anglo-Irish ambiguity’ (ibid.: 150). Bowen’s heroines are often women ‘in between’ – ‘intermediates’ – both nationally and sexually. And, in the case of The Last September’s Lois Farquar and Marda Norton, they are women who embody national intermediacy through intimate relationships with other women. Lois and Marda are characters whose self-presentation codes them as women of the 1920s, but they are Anglo-Irish women of the Irish 1920s and thus represent the last Ascendancy generation to come of age before Irish independence. As such, their desire for modernity in thought and action conflicts with an urgent mandate for cultural preservation, even if such preservation can be attempted only through social decorum and aristocratic posturing. Lois and Marda are typical Bowen heroines: young women suspended somewhere between traditional and modern models of womanhood who show themselves to be acutely (and in Lois’s case, painfully) aware of the strained-for artifice of femininity. They rebel, in decadent fashion, against the versions of femininity dictated to them by their (imperial) culture of origin, yet that rebellion cannot fully sever them from the repetitive patterns of Anglo-Ireland. Lois, who has become ‘tired of being not noticed because she [is] a lady’ and would rather be ‘noticed because she [is] a female’ can declare, in a moment of frustration, ‘I hate women’. But she must immediately qualify her declaration: ‘But I can’t think how to begin to

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be anything else’ (Bowen 1929: 99). And Marda, in a particularly Wildean moment, can advocate a decadent, aestheticised approach to modern femininity: ‘Be interested in what happens to you for its own sake; don’t expect to be touched or changed – or to be in anything that you do. One just watches. Pain is one’s misunderstanding.’ Yet she remains uncomfortably aware that her Wildean posturing is hollow and misguided: ‘The advice, fruit of her own relations to experiences, unwisdom, lacking the sublimer banality, was . . . meaningless and without value’ (ibid.: 100). Because these characters immediately deconstruct for themselves any social innovations, Bowen’s heroines cannot be classified as feminists, or as ‘new wom[e]n of the 1920s’, as John Coates has identified Marda (Coates 1998: 37). However seriously they contemplate mounting a revolt against sexual and intellectual authority, their rebellions remain internal, never running counter enough to their cultures to be identified as mutinous. Lois’s first relationship with another woman was her relationship to her mother, Laura Farquar, née Naylor, who died in exile from the family estate when Lois was a child. Stories about this rebellious fin de siècle lady follow Lois wherever she goes; she is constantly compared to ‘lovely’, ‘vital’, ‘remote’ Laura. Hugo Montmorency, a visitor to Danielstown and Laura’s dejected suitor, remembers his old flame as having been ‘lovely then – though indeed she was always lovely. But she was never happy at all, even here. She never knew what she wanted – she was very vital’ (Bowen 1929: 20). Laura seems to have felt trapped by the stifling expectations of her family home; the most distinctive trace of her presence in the house is etched into her bedroom window, ‘a flawed pane, across which Laura Naylor had scratched her name with a diamond’ (ibid.: 235). After writhing in Brontë-esque rages which no doubt culminated in her diamond-cut graffito, Laura ran off with a Northern Irish man of unknown lineage: [Hugo] could not think why Laura should have married Mr. Farquar. The rudest man in Ulster he was, with a disagreeably fresh complexion and an eye like a horse. Her confusion had clotted up in the air of the room and seemed, in that closest darkness under the ceiling, to be still impending. Here, choked in the sweep of the bed curtains, she had writhed in those epic rages; against Hugo, against Richard, against any prospect in life at all; biting the fat resistant pillows until once she had risen, fluttered at her reflection, dabbed at her eyes, buttoned a tight sleek dress of that day’s elegance over her heaving bosom, packed her dresses in arched trunks (that had come back since to rot in the attics) and driven

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off, averting from the stare of the house an angry profile. Hotly, she went up North to attract and marry Mr. Farquar. It was in her to have done otherwise, but there is a narrow and fixed compulsion, Laurence recognized, inside the widest ranges of our instability. (Ibid.: 149)

Laura’s enraged, desperate, and, in Laurence’s estimation, compulsive rejection of Danielstown finds its antithesis in her significantly less seditious daughter, who is introduced, in the novel’s first paragraphs, dutifully gracing the door from which her mother once fled. Whereas in Laura we are asked to imagine a rebellious woman rejecting a house and culture which imprisoned her, in her daughter Lois, who has assumed her late mother’s rejected place as Danielstown’s tamed ingénue, we are confronted with a self-conscious girl, adjusting her too-revealing feminine clothing as she waits for the novel’s first houseguests to arrive: ‘she knew how fresh she must look, like other young girls, and clasping her elbows tightly behind her back tried hard to conceal her embarrassment’ (ibid.: 3). Although she is ‘feminine’ in the traditional sense, Lois is acutely uncomfortable with femininity. She finds the delicate fabrics of her girlish dresses repellent: ‘the feel of the stuff was like cobwebs – sticky and damp’ (ibid.: 37), and at the close of the novel’s first section she is again mortified by the objectification her social position unavoidably engenders: Lois came down the shrubbery path from the garden, startled, as if at her own great speed, flushed and visibly breathless. A pink unbuttoned cardigan slipped away at the shoulders; she had her hands in both the pockets to keep it on. Her hat flapped back, it rose above her face in surprise, like a wave. Behind her the bushes stirred in an almost invisible backwash. Over the laurels, cropped knee-high at the back of the tennis court, her body rose and dipped with her long steps. ‘Ah, here she is!’ exclaimed several people. . . . Now, engaged by their look, she became all profile; her step flattened, she would have liked to crawl. (Ibid.: 52–3)

Like Laura, Lois is all profile; yet while her mother’s step was defiant and angry, her own is merely flat. Lois is uncomfortable, too, with the flatness of men and male–female flirtation. Her staid suitors, mostly English soldiers, she describes as ‘concrete’, ‘blocking her mental view by their extreme closeness’, and ‘mov[ing] shadowless in a kind of social glare’ which ‘numb[ed] her imagination’ (ibid.: 12). To Marda, the androgynous object of her confused affection, she admits: ‘I don’t

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seem to find young men inspiring, somehow’. ‘I hate women’, she continues, ‘But I can’t think how to begin to be anything else. . . . But I wouldn’t like to be a man. . . . I think I must be a woman’s woman.’ Marda contrasts vividly with the self-consciously awkward Lois, whose description is instructive: answering her friend Livvy’s question ‘is she pretty?’ Lois answers, ‘I feel she may be a person one wants to look pretty at’. Physically, too, Marda offers a counterpoint to Lois’s acute femininity: as Lois observes, she was tall, her back as she stood looking over the field was like a young man’s in its vigorous slightness. She escaped from the feminine pear shape, her shoulders were square, legs long from the knee down. . . . A hardy unawareness of self in her heightened one’s own self consciousness. Her lightest look watched, her casual listening assessed, her aspect was a lightning attack on one’s integrity out of the stronghold of her indifference. (Ibid.: 114)

Marda ‘annoys Aunt Myra’ because she is a tomboy (forever scraping her knees at parties); she is an outspoken intellectual (‘she started an argument about Kimberly and they all stayed until past eight o’clock . . . taking down the Encyclopedia Britannica’); and finally because she approaches marriage with a disturbing nonchalance (she is known to have lost an engagement ring). In an awkward attempt at intimacy, Lois shows Marda her scrapbook of drawings ‘in black ink’, and Marda observes that they ‘remember Beardsley’ (ibid.: 139). Any girl whose drawings remember Beardsley clearly dreams of a future different from any available at Danielstown, but when Marda asks Lois ‘Why do you stay here?’ she replies, ‘I can’t think’. ‘You like to be the pleasant young person?’ Marda retorts, prompting Lois to admit, ‘ “I like to be in a pattern.” She traced a pink frond with her finger. “I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely” ’(ibid.: 142). Marda’s attention hints at an alternative ‘pattern’ which would ensure a clean break with her family’s past, and Lois seems to take the hint: She hitched herself up onto the edge of [Marda’s] wooden bed, where she sat swinging her legs and smiling, all girlhood. She felt movement, a wind in her face as though she were on the prow of a ship. With a bound, life carried her forward again. She felt certain that Leslie [Marda’s fiancé] would die or break off the engagement. ‘Marvellous,’ she repeated. (Ibid.: 148–9)

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Marda, though, is not so ambitious; all her brave talk of alternate futures was just that – talk. She refers to her need to be made less ‘fluid’ by a man’s gaze, and characterises her time spent flirting with Lois at Danielstown as ‘wandering weeks’. Her own desire to be rooted in a fixed sexual and moral pattern overrides her intuitive sexual desire: Leslie’s attention, his straight grey gaze, were to modify these wandering weeks of her own incalculably, not a value could fail to be affected by him. So much of herself that was fluid must, too, be moulded by his idea of her. Essentials were fixed and localized by her being with him – to become as the bricks and wallpaper of a home. (Ibid.: 187)

In an article detailing a narrative strategy that she calls ‘lesbian panic’, Patricia Smith identifies an ambivalent attitude towards the liberatory power of alternative sexualities common to many novels by modernist British writers. She argues that to acknowledge the existence of lesbianism ‘would perforce involve the formation of female sexual subjectivity’, and that although this formation would seem to ensure sexual liberation, often the opposite is true – and this alters narrative form: The realization of one’s desire is not, for the average female fictional character, a liberatory move. Typically, what is at stake for a woman under such conditions is nothing less than economic survival. . . . In many historical texts, moreover, lesbianism frequently lacks a name, much less an acknowledged or acceptable identity. Accordingly, the fear of the loss of identity and value as an object of exchange, often combined with the fear of responsibility for one’s own sexuality, is a characteristic response; and it is from precisely such fears that lesbian panic arises. (Smith 1995: 572)

‘Lesbian panic’ that engenders ‘fear of the loss of identity’ is certainly the panic Bowen’s main characters Marda Norton and Lois Farquar feel when confronted with their mutual attraction. Their feelings for each other remain unnamed – and each finally associates her desire only with potential exile from the heterocentric Anglo-Irish ‘pattern’ which nurtured her. Marda, of course, marries Leslie, a man she finds boring but is convinced she needs to become ‘furnished’ (Bowen 1929: 140). Lois, upon realising her attraction to another woman, makes a similar decision: ‘I must marry Gerald’ (ibid.: 182). Lois and Marda’s chemistry – the only relationship in the novel not characterized as ‘flat’ – prompts both heroines to embrace the concept of

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marriage for the convenient and traditional pattern it offers, not for romantic love. It is as if, like the figure of the flaneuse, these characters understand that their public desirability, and therefore their cultural power, is predicated on their ability to perform requisite heterosexual roles – despite their mutinous desire for each other. In the end, Marda leaves for England and Leslie, and dutiful Lois is sent away not to a scandalous Parisian art school, but instead to ‘Tours. For her French, you know. And to such an interesting, cultivated family; she is really fortunate’ (ibid.: 280). Both young women therefore continue preparations for the cultivated lives they have always been expected to live. But the ‘domestic landscape’ to which Mrs Trent, satisfied finally that Lois has escaped a fate worse than spinsterhood, nods ‘an approving farewell’, will never again need Marda’s wedding ring or Lois’s cultivated French: For in February . . . the death – the execution rather – of the three houses, Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. . . . It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with scarlet, that the country itself was burning . . . (Ibid.: 282).

Rebelling against the Ties of Blood: Old Mortality and the Dandy-Belle In The Confederate Belle, historian Giselle Roberts illuminates a much-mythologised yet under-documented aspect of Southern history, ‘the lives of young, elite, white, Southern women, whose wartime experiences have often been dismissed because of their strong association with the romance and fanfare of war’ (Roberts 2003: 1). The archival sources she assembles underscore the conflicting impulses and loyalties commonly felt by young women obliged to ascend to ‘bellehood’. ‘In the plantation culture of the antebellum South’, she argues, young ladies, or belles, had been trained to embody the finest aspects of Southern gentility, and to extend – or even enhance – family honor by marrying well. A belle represented elite femininity and actively asserted it by pursuing her ‘natural’ role as a wife and a mother (Ibid.: 5)

However, after the ruin of Civil War foreclosed this ‘natural’ option, belles ‘were forced to reassess their traditional rite of passage into

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womanhood, to compromise their understanding of femininity at a pivotal time in their lives’ (ibid.: 6). Although some historians argue that such reassessments often led to women entering social positions once dominated by men (imagine, for example, Scarlett O’Hara’s opportunistic transformation from belle to entrepreneur), Roberts agrees with others who conclude that while postbellum southern ladies ‘may have entered the “public arena,” . . . they continued to cling to the preexisting racial and class hierarchy as they looked for ways to assert their elite status in a world without wealth or slaves’ (ibid.: 2). In the Reconstruction South, ‘the competing and often contradictory ideologies of genteel honor and sacrificial patriotism were never far from the surface’, and although this juxtaposition forced southern women to ‘confront fissures in the mold of the Southern feminine ideal’, any further interrogation of the southern social hierarchy, which had ‘always used race, class and gender to affirm the dominance of the elite white male’, would have even further jeopardised a shaky hold on the only culture they had left. The belle figure thus became the ‘true guardia[n] of a lost culture and a lost cause’: In 1865, their belief in their own elitism was battered, but not broken. Their slaves may have gone, their homes and possessions lost, but young ladies could still assure themselves that something set them apart – and above – others, irrespective of . . . their immediate conditions. This powerful sense of self-worth had provided Confederate belles with a compass to negotiate their way through a difficult wartime world and would ultimately aid them in their quest to reconstruct the tenets of their old life in the New South. (Roberts 2003: 179–80)

Of course, such generalisations are overly broad. But common to all of Roberts’s observations is the centrality of feminine performance; such women were compelled, under a mandate for cultural preservation, to resurrect and maintain antebellum Southern femininity for the New South. Lucinda MacKethan argues that drastic changes in the lives of Southern women in the first decades of the twentieth century – more women went to work, more divorced, and more began to see the necessity of education and property and voting rights – failed to alter the pervasive icon of the Confederate daughter: Even when the realities for women were significantly altered, the utility of the myth of the southern daughter for the white male power structure

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gave the ideal a cultural force far out of keeping with the many new opportunities that southern women had begun to seize even before the Civil War. (MacKethan 1999: 109)

Many novelists of the Southern Renaissance, Faulkner being one, relied upon this figure ‘to explore the effects of the South’s turbulent past upon its present’ (ibid.: 109).10 Southern modernist Evelyn Scott, however, chose to break with this tradition by turning her gaze to belle psychology and exposing the ‘emotional handicaps’ engendered by the Southern belle myth. In her autobiography Background in Tennessee, Scott attends to the hypocrisy of this myth and of those who adopt it: ‘There is something Napoleonic about the women of the South, who can simultaneously exploit the myth of themselves they themselves have fortuitously created, and remain guarded against its most dangerous implications!’ (qtd in Cook 2001: 56). Porter’s conflicting literary critique and personal exploitation of the belle icon presents a similar paradox: in her searchingly feminist fiction she explodes the very myth she ‘fortuitously’ perpetuated in her public life, regardless of its ‘dangerous [antifeminist, racist and often homophobic] implications’. For many, Porter epitomised the grace and gentility of the Old South myth; that she did so floridly and with a distinct campiness went almost unnoticed. During a roundtable discussion at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, Porter’s nephew Paul recounted his aunt’s eccentric self-performance, noting that when she appeared in public she decked herself out in elaborate gowns, signature emeralds, insisted on a pink spotlight, and ended every performance with a formal curtsey. Paul Porter first met his aunt just after the artist’s formative trip to Paris, where she was repulsed by the female modernism embodied by Gertrude Stein. As I discuss above, upon her return Porter developed a less tolerant attitude towards homosexuals – especially writers whose homosexuality, she claimed, left a layer of ‘slime’ on all they wrote (Stout 1995: 178). ‘In her youth’, Stout argues, ‘Porter was apparently an active suffragist’ and ran with radical women who subverted gender roles with their (sometimes masculine) dress, deportment and sexuality. However, her return from Paris in 1936, at the age of forty-six, marks her transition from the persona of radical artist to ‘grande dame, or “Southern Queen” of American Letters’ (ibid.: 166–7). Her discomfort with literary lesbians and what they meant for literature in general might have constituted, in part, a response to the

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Radclyffe Hall trials and ensuing debates over the position of homosexuality in modernist writing. She was certainly thinking about the long-term effects of homosexuality on modern literature, as is evident from a 1951 letter to her unmarried nephew Paul Porter, whose sexual preference she clearly meant to influence: Dear Paul: Oscar always did make me queasy, I always thought him one of the most tiresome men ever born . . . and I send you this copy of De Profundis for the reason I gave in the inscription. It was one of the most discussed and inaccessible of documents, and needed badly to be printed and read especially by young men, and especially young men writers; I hope it does its good work in dispelling the miasma which has poisoned the literary and moral air for two or more generations. . . . You must know without my saying what I think of the whole smelly mess; and I am glad to know the effect it had on you – a healthy one. The whole letter, its whole effect, is of rottenness to the bone – the end, which you realize is only a pervert’s love letter, the aim of which is merely another meeting and a beginning again of the same foul situation, is of course the point to be noted in the whole thing. (Porter 1990: 401)

This letter reveals more than Porter’s anxiety over her beloved nephew’s sexuality; in it, the writer suggests that twentieth-century literature has been ‘poisoned’ by homosexuality, and she prescribes a healthy dose of De Profundis as the ideal homeopathic remedy. In November 1936, immediately after returning from Stein’s Left Bank, Porter wrote the three short novels which secured her fame: Noon Wine, Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider. ‘That was my magic cycle, I guess – at least in those blessed days. Each of those stories was written in just seven days. But I hadn’t planned it that way; it just seemed to happen’ (qtd in Lopez 1981: 17). Each short novel, as she insisted they be termed, weighed in at around 25,000 words. Although each was first published separately, Old Mortality and Pale Horse, Pale Rider in the Southern Review (1938) and Noon Wine in Story that same year, Porter wrote them as a cycle and published them together in 1939. Most critics read this collection as semi- (or mostly) autobiographical – with the possible exception of Noon Wine, which includes no young female protagonist, although it does portray the Texas farm life from which the real Callie Russell Porter sprang. Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the short novel most closely drawn from experience; in it, Miranda Gay almost dies of influenza just as World War I

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comes to an end. Although Porter’s own brush with death in 1915 was brought on by tuberculosis, her description of life-threatening illness against a backdrop of war reads like autobiography. It is Old Mortality, however, despite imagining a young woman coming of age in an Old South that was not Porter’s own, which is most often identified as the collection’s most searchingly autobiographical narrative. In ‘Noon Wine: The Sources’ (1956), written soon after sending her nephew a medicinal copy of Wilde’s De Profundis, Porter remembers this compositional period as an earthy, defiantly regional refutation of ‘unnatural’ European literary modes: All the time [in Europe], I was making notes on stories – stories of my own place, my South – for my part of Texas was peopled almost entirely by Southerners from Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kentucky, where different branches of my own family were settled, and I was almost in a sustained state of mind and feeling, quietly and secretly, comparing one thing with another, always remembering; and all sorts of things were falling into their proper places, taking on their natural shapes and sizes, and going back and back clearly into right perspective – right for me as artist, I simply mean to say; and it was like breathing – I did not have consciously to urge myself to think about it. (Porter 1970: 470)

Here, we detect Porter’s deep conservative streak, one implicitly pitted against the cultural and aesthetic chaos she encountered in Paris. Thinking of all the Southern locations in which her ancestors once lived, Porter’s mind settled, became ‘sustained’ by a ‘blood knowledge’ (to use a Porter term cited earlier in this chapter) capable of restoring ‘natural shapes’, ‘proper places’ and ‘right perspective’. This rejection of international modernism in favour of ancestral, regional order, imagined here as intensely personal (‘it was like breathing’), just happened to dovetail with the aesthetics of Southern Agrarianism – an influential movement whose favour Porter courted. Porter’s discomfort with sexual ambiguity influenced both her selfpresentation and her fiction; like other ‘extravagantly feminine’ artists of the period, including Eleanor Wylie and Edna St Vincent Millay, she deployed the ‘elegant and expensive trappings of successful [Southern] femininity’ as an aesthetic defence against ‘accusations of unnatural sexuality’ (Titus 2005: 188). However, the critique of femininity’s artificiality which underpins Old Mortality complicates our understanding of Porter’s public ‘Old South’ persona. In this novel, Porter’s ironic and critical assessment of the construction of

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Southern womanhood was strident enough to prompt accusations of cultural infidelity from ‘infuriated’ Agrarian writer Allen Tate: ‘Look at the end of Old Mortality: all the rich life of those people is swept away with a callow judgement by MIRANDA (significant name)’ (qtd ibid.: 189). Yet Miranda, like her creator, only calls the sexist privations of traditional culture into question; neither, in the end, outright condemns the fiction of femininity as a result – a fact which underscores Porter’s deep ambivalence about the relationship between women, modernity and literary modernism. Although, as Richard Gray notes, twentieth-century Southern women writers, more often than their male counterparts, recognised the ‘dream of the plantation’ as a ‘myth . . . an elaborate system of belief and behavior’ (Gray 2000: 152), Porter’s own deconstruction of this myth and its attendant gender conventions frustrates our expectation that recognition of artifice necessarily leads to rejection of same. Allen Tate therefore read as outright rejection of the past what is in fact the novel’s much more complex and equivocal conclusion. Porter’s lingering discomfort with feminism and female modernism inflects her heroine Miranda’s sensibilities; by rejecting two polarised models of Southern womanhood – the hyperfeminine Southern belle and the brash, masculine feminist-suffragette, Miranda seems poised for a dandyesque compromise. In ‘The Old Order Undermined’, Mary Anne Wimsatt argues that during the course of Old Mortality, Porter gradually punctures Miranda’s youthful illusions to enable her to realize that the versions of the past perpetuated by her relatives are fabrications engendered by idealized love, understandable bitterness, the distortions of memory, and the passage of time

and concludes that these puncture wounds ‘empower her protagonist to begin her flight toward freedom’ (Wimsatt 1999: 95). Like Allen Tate in the early 1940s, and the majority of Porter critics since, Wimsatt here overlooks the anti-bildungsroman impulses Porter writes into Old Mortality, in which Miranda recognises the sheer power of the past and the dead to hijack the lives of the living and therefore confronts, if subconsciously, the fallacy of escape. One critic who shares my reluctance to characterise Old Mortality as a ‘flight towards freedom’ is Lorraine DiCiccio, who reminds us that although recent critics ‘have typically celebrated the struggle undertaken by [Porter’s] characters to achieve independence and to survive a head-

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strong (southern) patriarchal culture’, a reconsideration of the ‘nature of her female characters’ resistance’ is overdue. DiCiccio argues that the moral fictions of Victorian America, and the ‘power of cultural ideology to shape and distort a girl’s identity and body’, ‘riveted’ Porter, who in turn drags readers back to fin de siècle American culture to witness its repression first-hand (DiCiccio 2001: 81). DiCiccio argues that fear of modern adult womanhood, powerful enough to create physical illness, stops Miranda in her tracks; when faced with the option of breaking with traditional Southern models of femininity, she maintains, Miranda can only look backwards, ‘paralyzed with ambivalence’ (ibid.: 97): Early twentieth-century womanhood is presented as unexplored terrain where one could breach all of one’s inherited models – wife and mother, beautiful coquette, homely suffrage fighter and teacher – but then what? Brazenly confident in so many ways, Miranda knows what she is fighting against but not exactly what she is fighting for. Unable to go forward, Miranda re-examines from where she has come, which is really what Old Mortality is about. (Ibid.: 95)

This is, indeed, what Old Mortality is about, but although the character Miranda engages in this re-examination from a place of paralysis, Porter suggests that not only is this paralysis somehow constructive, it is inevitable: we are inescapably defined both by the stories of those who have come before us, and the related stories we tell about ourselves. Although DiCiccio’s reading of this novel debunks the notion that Miranda ‘escapes’ the fictions of her Southern past through a kind of feminist transformation at the story’s end, she finally laments Miranda’s failure to rise to what she reads as a liberatory occasion: ‘[Miranda] remains at story’s end unable to go forward and sadly trying to go backward’ (DiCiccio 2001: 97). Instead of reading Miranda’s paralysis as static and therefore sad, however, one could read it as merely conservative. Despite recognising as false and subtly rebelling against powerful family myths, neither Amy nor Miranda fully rejects them; like Bowen’s heroines, Porter’s defiant belles accept, however grudgingly, their traditional familial (and national) roles because to reject them would mean an exile from tradition and known patterns. Miranda’s attempt at a clean break with the past is undercut by the novel’s narrator, who insists that these delusions of escape are forged ‘in her hopefulness, her ignorance’ (ibid.: 221).

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Like Bowen, Porter demonstrates a keen interest in how antiquated familial and political mandates sustain and maintain the aristocratic family unit – mandates that shadow modern women struggling for individuality in a stiflingly traditional culture: Maria and Miranda, aged twelve and eight years, knew they were young, yet they felt they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their own years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them. (Porter 1939: 4)

Porter’s novel is structured in three parts. Part One, set in Texas between the years 1885 and 1902, introduces the main character, Miranda Gay, and the reader to the family spectre of Southern womanhood: Amy Rhea. Amy, according to her mother (Miranda’s grandmother) was a woman who, true to an ‘Annabel Lee’ version of the Southern belle, ‘had been beautiful, much loved, unhappy, and had died young’ (ibid.: 98). Miranda is raised on a repetitive canon of stories about her Aunt Amy, the consummate belle whose outward beauty and deft social graces barely mask an inner rebellion against Southern gender conventions. Accounts of Amy’s small revolutions, carefully staged and played to posterity, become the barometers by which Miranda measures her own relationship to her nuclear family and to the equally influential ‘family’ of the Reconstruction South. The novel begins with a description of Amy’s portrait: the ‘ghost in a frame’ Miranda will reckon with for the whole of Old Mortality: She was a spirited looking young woman, with dark curly hair cropped and parted on the side, a short oval face with straight eyebrows, and a large curved mouth. A round white collar rose from the neck of her tightly-buttoned black basque, and round white cuffs set off lazy hands with dimples in them, lying at ease in the folds of a flounced skirt which gathered around to a bustle. She sat thus, forever in the pose of being photographed, a motionless image in her dark walnut frame with silver oak leaves in the corners, her smiling gray eyes following one about the room. It was a reckless, indifferent smile, rather disturbing to her nieces Miranda and Maria. (Ibid.: 97)

This portrait is the central focus in Miranda and Maria’s childhood home. The two girls, haunted by Amy’s arrested femininity, describe her portrait as both beautiful and disquieting: Amy is ‘lazy’, ‘dimpled’, ‘lovely’, ‘smiling’ and ‘flounced’, but she is also ‘frozen’,

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‘posed’, ‘cropped’, ‘reckless’, ‘indifferent’ and ‘disturbing’. She is both belle and spectre, preserved and confined: a dead woman whose eyes follow one about the room. This image, which Miranda’s grandmother displays prominently to mould successive generations into proper belles, produces instead vague unease. The language Porter uses to describe Amy’s portrait is the reader’s first indication that Old Mortality will juxtapose ‘the weight of conventionalized expectations borne by women of ability and intelligence’ forced into ‘the traditional feminine role’ against Miranda’s ‘incipient feminism’ (Stout 1995: 16). After destabilising Southern femininity through this ambiguous portrait, Porter next highlights disjunctures between ‘official’ stories about feminine refinement and women’s material lives. Miranda’s father is fond of blanket statements: ‘There were never any fat women in the family, thank God’ (Porter 1939: 98). Miranda, however, recognises this statement as false. Although in the novel’s first section she cannot yet question why certain facts are obscured present an idealised vision of familial femininity, she knows that there were fat women in the Rhea family and cannot understand why her father leaves them out of the family history. The ideal Rhea woman was strictly defined. As Miranda recites, ‘There were points of beauty by which one was judged severely’. First, a beauty must be tall; whatever color the eyes, the hair must be dark, the darker the better; the skin must be pale and smooth. Lightness and swiftness of movement were important points. A beauty must be a good dancer, superb on horseback, with a serene manner, an amiable gaiety tempered with dignity at all hours. Beautiful teeth and hands, of course, and over and above all this, some mysterious crown of enchantment that attracted and held the heart. It was all very exciting and discouraging. (Ibid.: 8)

From this passage it is clear that even as a child Miranda recognises beauty as artifice, and understands that the beauty myth regulates and defines the adult femininity she is expected someday to embody. Because this family myth is being so rigorously disseminated during 1885–1902, the seventeen-year period Porter identifies as the span of Old Mortality’s Part One, readers are alerted to the extent to which the ‘Old South’ myth of the aristocratic belle gained force and momentum during Reconstruction. Textual clues suggest that Amy, the ideal belle, was born in or around 1848 and died in 1865, making

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her the last Rhea belle before the Civil War. Amy, according to those dedicated to her memory, belongs to the world of poetry, but not the poetry readers might expect. She is remembered through the works of Spenser, Radcliffe and Poe – all gothic writers, although Miranda’s father especially claims Poe as the family’s (and the South’s) own: ‘ “He was our greatest poet,” and [Miranda] knew that “our” meant he was Southern’ (ibid.: 35). Here, readers are prompted to remember Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’, an ode to a dead Southern belle which describes a child-woman solely through the poet’s relation to and vision of her: ‘And this maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me’. By connecting family narratives about Amy with larger narratives about femininity circulating through nineteenth-century Southern culture, Porter suggests that the regulatory gender identities insisted on by Southern tradition forced Amy into her longstanding role as ‘ghost in a frame’ and threaten to lock Miranda there as well. Miranda, programmed through both familial and national myth, is asked to first apprehend and then assume her requisite role as a married, aristocratic woman – a key member of the Southern family romance. But was Amy beautiful, much loved and above all pure? According to her own mother, this is a woman who, when asked to wear white at her wedding, insists on grey: ‘I shall wear mourning if I like. It is my funeral, you know’ (ibid.:110). And when Amy protests against her family’s constant involvement in her personal life, she does so by asking: ‘If I am to be the heroine of this novel, why shouldn’t I make the most of it?’ (ibid.: 26). Here, Amy’s dandyism takes the form of tragic recognition: she is well aware that she is playing not only one role but a complex system of them; she is the heroine of the novel who will be read differently by readers who each have a different stake in her performance of femininity. The memory of Amy’s feminine perfection is complicated by one incident each narrator revisits and troubles over in the stories they tell – an incident referred to as ‘a very grave scandal’. The scandal is this: one night, Amy dresses too provocatively for a costume ball. When her father demands that she let down her hem and wash the makeup from her face, she refuses: ‘When Amy appeared from her dressing room . . . her skirts were tucked up more daringly than before, and the spots on her cheeks were like pomegranates’ (ibid.: 115). Perpetual suitor Gabriel, a ‘good match’ whom Amy consistently rejects, is only one of the young men who follows Amy around the ball; her brother Harry notices with alarm that ‘She was entirely

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too popular. He saw young men make beelines across the floor, their eyes fixed on those silk-white ankles’ (ibid.: 115). Amy is eventually lured to the garden by an ex-lover who ‘appeared late, alone’ – a man named Raymond, dressed as Jean Lafitte and identified only as ‘a young Creole gentleman’. This class identification invokes the history of racial controversy that has attended the word ‘Creole’ since the eighteenth century; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers a definition that highlights the word’s lasting ambiguity: ‘any person of nonAmerican ancestry, whether African or European, who was born in the Americas’ (Hall 1992: 157). Raymond is thus identified as man of unclear racial origins who has compromised Amy’s virtue; in a fit of rage Amy’s brother shoots Raymond without initiating a formal duel. Amy is therefore doubly guilty in this ‘grave scandal’: in her flouting of convention she compromises both her own honour and her brother’s chivalrous decorum. Directly after this episode, Amy is remembered to have fallen ill. She suddenly accepts Gabriel’s longstanding and long-refused offer of marriage and insists that the ceremony be planned right away: ‘If we get married now there’ll be just time to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. If we wait until Lent, it may be too late’. ‘How could it ever be too late?’ Gabriel asks. And according to legend, Amy replies: ‘You might change your mind. You know how fickle you are’. Here, then, are two irreconcilable narratives. Although the family has convinced itself that what made Amy’s ‘very grave scandal’ scandalous was a mere breach of social convention, Porter’s emphasis on Amy’s artificial, staged sexuality and her subsequent ‘dance’ with an inappropriate suitor suggests an alternate story: Amy became pregnant at that dance; her transgressions – extramarital sex and possible miscegenation – force her into marriage with a man to whom she is not and has never been attracted (Porter 1939: 29). Porter suggests that such transgressions, which eventually lead to Amy’s death, are glossed over by a family committed to upholding Amy as a didactic example of the perfect Southern belle. In a letter Miranda’s grandmother reads out loud to her granddaughters, Amy breezily describes her married life in New Orleans, a city which ‘Hasn’t changed as much as I have since we saw each other last’, in terms of fashion and her figure: ‘I now have a eighteen-inch waist thanks to Madame Duré. I expect to be so dashing that my motherin-law will have an attack’ (ibid.: 30). This letter is presented as exemplary evidence of Amy’s dutiful adherence to convention, even after marriage has threatened to render her ‘a staid old married woman’.

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When Amy dies in New Orleans only six weeks after her marriage, the family remembers her swift departure and subsequent death as the natural result of a spontaneous and flamboyant nature. As Stout observes, ‘in the family legend her bold gestures are . . . [not] remembered as a substantive protest’ against gender roles. ‘Only the attentive reader sees that she has enacted a parody of the feminine ideal’ (Stout 1995: 194). In her cousin Eva Parrington, Miranda is presented with a negative example of Southern womanhood. If ‘Aunt Amy belonged to the world of poetry’, she reasons, then ‘Eva was a blot, no doubt about it’ (Porter 1939: 38). Eva, who has a bad chin and chooses the life of scholar and a suffragette rather than wife, functions as Amy’s opposite in the didactic narrative of Rhea womanhood. As such, Eva is the one member of the family who does not believe the ‘official version’ of the Amy myth, and yet she too constructs a self-serving reading of Amy’s life. In a conversation with Miranda she alludes to a possible counter-story: ‘You could hardly blame anyone for being mystified. The way she rose up suddenly, from death’s door to marry Gabriel Breaux, after refusing him and treating him like a dog for years, looked odd, to say the least. To say the very least’ she added, after a moment, ‘odd is a mild word for it. And there was something mysterious about her death, only six weeks after marriage.’ (Ibid.: 57)

Part Two of the novel, which takes place in 1904, centres around Miranda’s emerging sense of sexuality, and one image in this section is crucial to understanding Porter’s examination of femininity in this novel. Many critics have read Old Mortality as a novel intent upon deconstructing requisite femininity, and many cite one image in particular as indicative of the kind of feminist critique Porter is making.11 In this section, Maria and Miranda have been enrolled at a convent school in Louisiana. Each weekend, they wait for their father to come and take them for a day trip. If the nuns report that either girl misbehaved during the week, their father will not come. One Saturday he does come, and takes the two girls to the racetrack. There, they meet the man that Amy’s romantic, dejected suitor has become: the bloated, alcoholic Uncle Gabriel who spends his time running longshot horses at the track, betting more than he can afford, and naming a series of horses after the one he and Amy owned before she died: Miss Lucy.

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Miranda is taken with the glamour of the racetrack. She quickly decides that if she cannot be a ‘beauty’ she will be a jockey, and fantasises about emulating male riders, dressing in their bright costumes, and surprising her family with graceful riding and serene repose: The jockeys sat bowed and relaxed, their faces calm, moving a little at the waist with the movement of their horses. Miranda noted this for future use; that was the way you came in from a race, easy and quiet, whether you had won or lost. (Ibid.: 39)

The two girls place one dollar each on Gabriel’s Miss Lucy, after he nostalgically asks Miranda’s father, ‘Remember Amy’s mare, Miss Lucy? Well, this is her namesake, Miss Lucy IV. None of ’em ever came up to the first one, though’ (ibid.: 38). Miss Lucy IV is a hundred-to-one long-shot, and she wins. But Miranda’s enchantment with the world of the racetrack is dashed when she sees Miss Lucy after her triumphant run. The horse is ‘bleeding from the nose, two thick rivulets were stiffening her tender mouth and chin’. ‘She’s got the nosebleed, Harry’, Gabriel says, crying over her victory. ‘Had it since yesterday. We thought we had her all fixed up. But she did it all right. She’s got a heart like a lion. I’m going to breed her, Harry’ (ibid.: 40). Miranda, transfixed by the sight of Miss Lucy, realises that this ‘was winning, too. Her heart clinched tight; that was winning, for Miss Lucy. So instantly and completely did her heart reject that victory, she did not know what happened, but she hated it, and was ashamed’ (ibid.: 39). Stout argues that the ‘filly sequence’, as this scene is often called, exemplifies Porter’s ‘sense of the tormented plight of women in a masculinist culture’ (Stout 1995: 170). The horse, entered in a race by an owner aware of her physical limitations, puts on a good show. She looks ‘beautiful, vital, full of energy’, and is clearly well bred, groomed and trained. Porter’s emphasis on bloodlines in this sequence – the key detail here being that Miss Lucy is in fact the fourth horse in a long line of running ‘ladies’ – doubles as an examination of aristocratic femininity as it falls into decay. This line of thoroughbred Miss Lucys, each one less impressive than the last, mirrors the slow decline of the ‘well-bred’ Rhea women themselves and the culture they are called upon to preserve. Porter’s ‘filly sequence’ can be read as another evocation of female dandyism: the breeding and manners covering over a decayed bloodline and the ravages of the performance of femininity.

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In Part Three, set in 1912, Miranda meets her cousin Eva on a train bound for Texas. Both are returning home for Gabriel’s funeral. Miranda, raised on and still somewhat invested in the Amy myth, responds to Eva’s more cynical version with incredulity: ‘She knew this part of the story and could set Eva right about one thing. “She died of a hemorrhage of the lungs. She had been ill for five years, don’t you remember?” ’ Eva laughs bitterly, and allows that she has ‘ “heard that [version] often enough. But”,’ she asks, ‘did you ever hear about that fellow Raymond somebody-or-other from Calcasieu Parish, almost a stranger, who persuaded Amy to elope with him from a dance one night, and she just ran off into the darkness without even stopping for her cloak?’ (Ibid.: 57)

Miranda holds tight a while longer to the wholesome version of Amy’s death, incapable of reconciling this vision with the one she has been fed her whole life. Eva drops the subject for a moment to honour Miranda’s sensibilities (‘you dear innocent. . . . How old are you, anyway?’), but bitterness soon takes over. Upper-class Southern women, in Eva’s view, are fed a steady diet of ghost stories about perfect, dead belles to ensure they fare well in the marketplace of marriage and reproduction. But according to Eva, at the core of every idealised belle narrative dwells extreme sexual repression: ‘It was just sex,’ she said in despair. ‘Their minds dwelt on nothing else. They didn’t call it that, it was all smothered under pretty names, but that’s all it was, sex. Amy carried herself with more spirit than the others, and she didn’t seem to be making any sort of fight, but she was simply sex-ridden, like the others. . . . None of them had, and they didn’t want to have, anything else to think about, and they didn’t really know anything about that, so they simply festered inside, they festered.’ (Ibid.: 63)

Although Eva repeatedly protests that while others questioned Amy’s chastity she herself never did so, the version of the scandal she finally recounts for Miranda is riddled with doubt: ‘What I ask myself, what I ask myself over and over again,’ she whispered, ‘is, what connection did this man Raymond from Calcasieu have with Amy’s sudden marriage to Gabriel, and what did Amy do to make away with herself so soon afterward? For mark my words, child, Amy

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wasn’t so ill as all that. . . . She did away with herself to escape some disgrace, some exposure that she faced’. (Ibid.: 60)

After being forced to listen, Quentin Compson-like, to an elderly woman’s crude account of sex-obsessed Southern womanhood, Miranda is suddenly transported by a gothic vision, finding herself ‘deliberately watching a line procession of living corpses, festering women stepping gaily towards the charnel house, their corruption concealed under laces and flowers, their dead faces lifted smiling’ (ibid.: 63). Miranda recognises, however, that this vision, too, is subjective, shaped partly by the belle myth and partly by Eva’s bitterness. She rejects her own vision, thinking coldly, ‘Of course it was not like that. This is no more true than what I was told before, it’s every bit as romantic’ (ibid.: 63). Miranda recognises two possible female identities in the models offered by Amy and Eva: the Southern belle and the feminist suffragette, whose pursuit of political power and a strong intellect has rendered her unattractive, mannish, celibate and bitter to the point of hysteria: ‘Oh Eva, the trouble with her is she has no chin. Eva has given up, and is teaching Latin in a Female Seminary. Eva’s gone out for votes for women, God help her’ (ibid.: 51). Miranda posits a causal connection between feminism and physical unattractiveness, asking ‘why was a strong character so deforming? Miranda felt she truly wanted to be strong, but how could she face it, seeing what it did to one?’ (ibid.: 62). She sees both Amy and Eva as locked within debilitating ideologies of womanhood, and attempts to choose a modern, individual route to autonomous identity: ‘Her mind closed stubbornly against remembering, not the past but the legend of the past, other people’s memory of the past, at which she had spent her life peering in wonder like a child at a magic lantern show’ (ibid.: 70). She resents the power of family, which Eva calls ‘the root of all human wrongs’ (ibid.: 64), to dictate one’s reality: ‘It is I who have no place,’ thought Miranda. ‘Where are my own people and my own time?’ She resented, slowly and deeply and in profound silence, the presence of these aliens who lectured and admonished her, who loved her with bitterness and denied her the right to look at the world with her own eyes, who demanded that she accept their version of life and yet could not tell her the truth, not in the smallest thing. . . . [H]er inner and secret mind said plainly, ‘I will be free of them, I shall not even remember them.’ (Ibid.: 67–8, italics original)

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At the end of her critical journey through the mythic southern past, Miranda insists that she will not ‘have false hopes, I won’t be romantic about myself’ (ibid.: 70). But Porter undoes this final pledge in the last words of the novel. Miranda, whose ‘blood rebelled against the ties of blood’, cannot in fact shed her culture’s hold on her identity. ‘At least I can know the truth about what happens to me, she assured herself silently, making a promise to herself, in her hopefulness, her ignorance’ (ibid.: 70). Landscapes of Confidence and Ruin We knew for long the mansion’s look And what we said of it became A part of what it is [. . .] A dirty house in a gutted world, A tatter of shadows peaked to white, Smeared with the gold of an opulent sun. Wallace Stevens, ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’

‘Old South’ pilgrimages were first declared a Southern tradition in the 1930s, when the idea of a plantation visiting ‘season’ was inaugurated by once-wealthy towns along the Mississippi River. By the late 1950s, towns across the South – from Eufala, Alabama, to Natchitoches, Louisiana – seized upon the financial benefits of antebellum tourism and took up this tradition in earnest, complete with Southern belles in period dress leading tours, maypole dances in manicured antebellum gardens, and often (in a tradition that continues today) a Confederate pageant, where the best of Old South entertainment could be had for a price. In 1939, the same year in which she published Pale Horse, Pale Rider, Porter embarked upon her own pilgrimage, touring several plantations around St Francisville, Louisiana, and recording her impressions in the essay ‘Audubon’s Happy Land’. ‘Our guide appeared in a few minutes’, she writes. ‘She was dark and thin and soft-voiced, so typically Louisiana French that we thought she must be from New Orleans, or the Bayou Teche country.’ Looks can be deceiving: ‘It turned out that she was from Idaho, lately married to a cousin of the Percys at “Greenwood.” No matter; she belonged also, by virtue of love and attachment, as well as appearance, to the scene and its history’ (Porter 1970: 166). Porter’s willingness to deem authentic this Idaho-born Southern belle can be best explained

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by remembering that she herself claimed a plantation ‘heritage’ only by virtue of love, attachment and appearance; ‘Audubon’s Happy Land’, therefore, describes St Francisville’s Pilgrimage Season from a self-proclaimed, but decidedly faux, ‘insider’ perspective. And it is as insider that Porter mourns the slow commercialisation of antebellum culture signified by heritage tourism. Not everyone, she chides, can see the real South behind this contrived façade. Only with members of the ‘white-pillared crowd’ – both Southern and other – will this landscape share its ‘peculiar treasure’: The celebrated oak allées are there at ‘Live Oak,’ at ‘Waverly,’ at ‘Rosedown,’ perhaps the finest grove of all at ‘Highland’ – the wide, shaded driveways from the gate to the great door, all so appropriately designed for the ritual events of life, a wedding or funeral procession, the christening party, the evening walks of betrothed lovers. W. B. Yeats causes one of his characters to reflect, in the face of a grove of ancient trees, ‘that a man who planted trees, knowing that no descendant nearer than his great-grandson could stand under their shade, had a noble and generous confidence.’ That kind of confidence created this landscape. . . . But this landscape shares its peculiar treasure only with such as know there is something more here than mere hungry human pride in mahogany staircases and silver doorknobs. The real spirit of the place planted those oaks, and keeps them standing. (Ibid.: 169)

By invoking W. B. Yeats as a kindred artist who shares her ability to recognise the ancestral spirit of place embodied in aristocratic horticulture, Porter (unwittingly) reinforces the complex ideological and aesthetic connections between Anglo-Irish and Anglo-Southern colonial landscapes this study has sought to illuminate. Yeats here praises the Ascendancy planter whose aesthetic foresight will grace future generations, and readers immediately translate Yeats’s Irish aristocrat into Porter’s plantation context. However, in choosing a quotation from Yeats to highlight her own status as a cultural insider who ‘know[s] there is something more here than mere hungry human pride’, Porter ironically draws attention to the two writers’ analogous outsider status. Like Porter, Yeats claimed allegiance to and structured his writing around an aristocratic culture into which he was not himself born; he was as committed to aristocratic self-presentation as Porter herself was. Although she (like Yeats) may not have been born into the ‘white-pillared crowd’, she (like Yeats) manipulated its established iconographies to fashion her artistic persona.

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Just north of St Francisville on Highway 61, across the Louisiana– Mississippi border, lies Natchez, a town ringed with plantation homes and boasting its own heritage tourism. Elizabeth Bowen chose Natchez as the first stop on her own Old South tour: arriving in January 1960, she regretted arriving too early for the official ‘season’: ‘Told that this was a pity, we were shown photographs proving why – not for us the hostesses billowing or their daughters bevying, all in crinolines, through magnolias, or beaming welcomes from steps of porticos.’ The ‘pilgrimage season’, as Bowen observes in her essay ‘A Ride through the Deep South’, requires that women re-enacting, at least for one week, the complicated rituals and codes that defined the antebellum Southern belle, must brace themselves for ‘crinolines . . . shortly out of mothballs’, ‘flounces steam-pressed back into running order’, and ‘possibly dieting’ she continues, ‘for ante-bellum requires a nipped-in diaphragm’. Bowen, herself a bona fide (pseudo)aristocrat, observes without critique these rigorous preparations and deprivations, proclaiming: ‘Honour to the hostesses, who, throughout the Pilgrimage, succeed (I understand) in snapping apart neither in the temper nor at the waist’ (Bowen 1960: 73). As in her essay about modern Anglo-Irish culture, ‘The Big House’, Bowen here applauds, if a bit sardonically, feminine artifice donned in the spirit of preserving cultural heritage. Yet the sentiment expressed here must be read in a new context: Bowen’s impressions on this Southern tour were registered through the lens of dispossession. When financial problems finally forced the sale of Bowen’s Court in 1959, Bowen turned over her family’s estate with the assurance that the new tenant, a local farmer, would inhabit and care for what had been her family’s home for 200 years. But in an act the Irish Times called ‘outrageous vandalism’, this farmer soon demolished the house for grazing land (in 1963 Bowen wrote: ‘It was a clean end. Bowen’s Court never lived to be a ruin’ [Bowen 1964: 459]). When she drove away from Bowen’s Court for the last time as its owner, on 10 January 1960, she did so without looking back. Refusing to succumb to what must have been debilitating personal grief and ancestral guilt, Bowen left Ireland immediately on a plane bound for the United States to begin research for her precommissioned article on the ‘Deep South’, to be published in Holiday magazine. Bowen therefore approached the southern landscape of disinherited aristocracy as one newly disinherited, with only the style and pose of aristocracy left to her. Because Bowen is a writer for whom ‘place’ is of primary significance, and because the South conveys its

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own iconic sense of ‘place’ in spades, it stands to reason that Bowen would have found there a great deal to focus on. But she goes further; Bowen uses the southern landscape as an ‘enlarging lens’ (Bowen 1960: 71) through which she examines her own thorny relationship to the landscape of ruined aristocracy. In this essay, the first piece written after transferring ownership of Bowen’s Court, Bowen evokes a South which transcends geographic context, becoming a clear displacement of anguish and loss. In her ride through Dixie, Bowen twins the ‘ruined landscapes’ of Anglo-Ireland and the Southern Aristocracy – their houses, histories and women – to mourn indirectly the ‘bitter shadow of altered fortune’ (ibid.: 73) in her own history. From the first, Bowen focuses on the South’s ‘civility, wealth and custom’. She refuses to describe in detail any segments of Southern culture that do not fall into one of these three categories – categories that remain ‘inside [her] own vocabulary’. So captivating was the ‘resinous leisure’ of Raleigh that the writer ‘lingered around, drinking it in’ (ibid.: 72). Mississippi’s ‘lush, gracious, low-lying country’ belongs also to what Bowen alludes to in her unfinished autobiography Pictures and Conversations as the ‘Bowen topography’ (Bowen 1951: 282): ‘You might think yourself in an English park, but the road speaks nothing but its own stark, obsessive, DeepSouthern loneliness’ (Bowen 1960: 73). Upon visiting the Civil War battlefield at Vicksburg, Mississippi, Bowen imagines a hereditary connection between her own Anglo-Irish family and that of a Confederate officer named Bowen. Thrown into a ‘volcanic state of confusion’ by the ‘springy grass with blood in its ancestry’, the writer searches for, and finds, a personal connection to violent history: ‘Finding a Bowen to have been among the Confederate commanders, I went back to the Memorial museum to see his portrait. Fair, like my father’s family, youngish, intent, candid, he returned my gaze: I considered I knew him.’ Of course Bowen assumes that her ‘ancestor’ will be memorialised in portraiture; as is clear from Bowen’s Court, all Bowens remember their ancestors by wandering through portrait galleries. Like Elizabeth Bowen, this CSA (Confederate States of America) Bowen was most likely a member of that final generation of aristocrats who witnessed first-hand the wars (the Anglo-Irish War in Ireland and the American Civil War) which brought their respective ‘colonial’ lifestyles to a halt. In Natchez, noting that ‘some ante-bellum mansions are right in town, some around the outskirts, none far out in the country’, Bowen perhaps unwittingly voices the impulse behind her identification of

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the Anglo-Irish aristocracy with the Confederacy: ‘it seems the aristocracy cleaved together’ (ibid.: 73). Bowen applauds the façade of femininity when erected in the larger service of maintaining aristocratic traditions. This applause fades, however, when Bowen’s choice of language fuses ‘ruined’ architectural and feminine façades. After a long day spent touring the grand old plantations that line Louisiana’s Great River Road, all ‘sublimated feminine houses, some named after ladies and others by them’, ‘old white houses’ that ‘dream up and down the bayou . . . like pearls on too long a string’, Bowen shifts her focus from feminine finery to an architectural ruin anthropomorphised as female. Like the Southern belles of the Natchez Pilgrimage, ‘Louisiana houses show lineage’. Their opulent yet delicate femininity is evident in ‘traceried fanlights’ and ‘slender balustrading’, but behind this feminine façade lies a ‘sunless face sulking back behind . . . eight Doric columns’ whose ‘more bitter shadow of altered fortune’ betrays ‘the inner side of that veil of melancholy’. If renovated (i.e., made-up) these houses ‘gain in paint what they lose in poetry’, but many are ‘haunting, with a touch of dereliction’, and some, like Belle Helene, drift ‘too far into sadness’. ‘Shorn, they have come to look, phantoms, anachronisms’, and in every house, ‘The old spirit [stands] in a corner watching’ (Bowen 1960: 111). The cumulative weight of so many ruined (female) houses and histories takes its toll: ‘In my nostrils was to linger for days after the peculiar, semi-embalmed odor of interior’, and what follows is an aristocratic writer’s meditation on the impossibility of escaping from one’s own ruined heritage, a meditation which ironically inspires an alternate, desperate, and temporary avenue of alcoholic escape: The War, the ravages. . . . Down here, the young don’t listen any more; they have had it, they are for disengaging themselves; they have a future – all the same, a hereditary residuum, a sediment, is somewhere at the bottom of the bright cup. A point in the afternoon saw me tipping brandy into my coffee. The sky filmed over; the milk-white frontages blurred somewhat. (Ibid.: 111)

Travelling from one ruined façade to another, facing each time decaying spectres of upper-class femininity, Bowen finally confronts the fallacy of disengagement: the young want freedom from the past, but the oppressive weight of a morally vexed and architecturally ruined tradition can only inspire impassioned yet unproductive youth revolt: any revolt will always be limited and handicapped by the formative

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power of ‘repetitive pattern[s], twined together by legends’. In the end, Bowen seems undone by these morally corrupt ruins and the fresh feelings of guilt and grief they revive: she pours brandy into her own ‘bright cup’ to blur the columned porticos and ‘milk-white frontages’ so evocative of the Irish old order which ‘had left her stranded as any of her characters’ (Kiberd 1995: 378).
As Bowen’s anguished identification with spectral belles and ghostly porticos illustrates, a common, anxious relationship to aristocratic heritage defines the curious state of suspension Anglo-Irish and AngloSouthern modernists shared – caught, as they were, between a colonial past and a democratic future, between Victorian and twentiethcentury cultural models. ‘Heritage’, argues Raphael Samuel, is often ‘aristocratic-reactionary in nature, and represents the hegemony of what [Patrick Wright] calls the “Brideshead complex” over the more progressive spirit of the post-war welfare state’ (Samuel 1994: 233). Yet as I hope this study has demonstrated, the performance of cultural heritage often exudes a dandyesque ambivalence which complicates and undercuts surface-level conservatism. This is the side of aristocratic heritage Bowen and Porter invite us to recognise: through an inquiry into the hyperfeminine pose of the aristocratic Irish / Southern lady, these writers explore how women utilise the rhetoric of aristocratic heritage – preserving tradition to confront the ‘emergencies of the moment’ (ibid.: x) – and at the same time manipulate and critique the gendered mandates of cultural preservation. In these hybrid performances of heritage, Bowen and Porter manipulate the aesthetics of an aristocratic past in contradictory, yet paradoxically, complimentary ways. They each fashioned reactionary public personae in the face of modernity, yet also capitalise upon this suspended quality in their fiction to illuminate and critique the cultural mandates imposed upon female representatives of their respective cultures. The ‘young’, Bowen observes, ‘have had it, they are for disengaging themselves; they have a future’. But this future is clouded by ‘a hereditary residuum, a sediment’ of the tenacious cultural past which binds itself to the present. Attempts to escape, as Porter’s narrator argues in the final lines of Old Mortality, would be acts of both ‘hopefulness’ and ‘ignorance’ (Porter 1939: 70). Despite apprehending alternate and more liberatory public and sexual personae, Porter and Bowen’s heroines resist the seductive form of the modernist bildungsroman, in which modern women break free of traditional

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roles, in favour of the counterimpulse-laden, looping-back narrative trajectory suggested by the dandy. Notes 1. These artists did manage at least one brief meeting: in his two-volume biography of Faulkner, Joseph Blotner all-too-briefly records that the three writers shared drinks and ‘animated conversation’ at a 1959 New York cocktail party (Blotner, 1974: 1724). That these three artists were all self-declared representatives, to one degree or another, of the dying aristocratic cultures at the foundation of their fictions, makes all the more compelling the conversational and performative possibilities of this brief encounter. 2. As Enrique Lopez records, ‘Some people called them long short stories; others preferred the terms “novella” or “novelette”; but [Porter] adamantly insisted they were short novels and openly resented anyone calling them novellas. Certainly, no one could deny that they had the impact of novels five or ten times longer . . . [many] subsequently remembered them as if they were full-sized novels’ (Lopez 1981: 76). 3. See Glendinning 1977: 50–1, 152, 188, 216–17. 4. The Alfred A. Knopf archive is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. 5. See letter from Elizabeth Bowen to Miss Betty Ferguson, Curtis Brown Ltd, 15 December 1947. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Elizabeth Bowen Collection, Folder 10.5. 6. Rachel Cooke. ‘The Lovely World of Angus McBean’. Observer, Arts section, 9 July 2006: 18. 7. See Glendinning 1977; Lee 1981; Jordan 1992; Hoogland 1994; Coughlan 1997; Backus 1999; Ellmann 2003. 8. The Well of Loneliness, released in Britain on 27 July 1928, when Bowen was living in Oxford and drafting The Last September, initially elicited little criticism and some praise. But on 19 August 1928 critic James Douglas published a review in the Sunday Express entitled ‘A Book that Must be Suppressed’. This sensational condemnation forced other English newspapers to scramble for their own angle on the story and, because there were 16 national newspapers, 21 Sundays and 130 provincial papers in circulation in England in 1928, Radclyffe Hall and her ‘poisonous’ novel saturated England during the second half of 1928. In December, under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, The Well was seized and ordered destroyed – securing its infamy. Hall, with the support of many English artists (a number of whom were Bowen’s close friends) challenged the ban through a signed petition and in court. The ensuing obscenity trials turned The Well into an underground bestseller – 7,500 copies were sold in England in 1928 alone.

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9. See letter from Alfred E. Coppard to Elizabeth Bowen, 12 August 1932. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, A. E. Coppard Collection. 10. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! stands as a notable example of this type of exploration; both Rosa Coldfield and Judith Sutpen are excellent examples of Southern daughter characters used as barometers gauging the past’s effect on the present. 11. For a more detailed reading of this horse-race sequence see DeMouy 1983 and Stout 1995.

EPILOGUE The Dandy Unmasked: Emma Donoghue’s ‘words for Things’ and Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy

The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist in defiance. Albert Camus, The Rebel

On 25 December 1998, the confirmed bachelor and B-movie actor forever identified with Wilde’s Dorian Gray passed away in Cork, Ireland. Hurd Hatfield was the perfect Dorian Gray for Albert Lewin’s 1945 film; like Wilde himself, the actor’s elegant and acerbic mannerisms allowed him to ‘pass’ as an upper-class Englishman despite foreign birth. Hatfield’s vaguely sadistic sexual charisma landed him this signature role, even though his dark hair and eyes contradicted Wilde’s original golden-haired, blue-eyed Dorian. Although Lewin played it safe when it came to the novel’s suggestive treatment of sexuality, replacing Wilde’s miasma of queer influences with a mysterious Egyptian statuette and a faithful fiancée, Hatfield still suffered from the novel’s ‘sinful’ atmosphere, insisting that ‘the role was a curse as well as a blessing’: ‘I have been haunted by The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (qtd in Vallance 1998: 5). Perhaps this haunting explains why Hatfield retired from films early, preferring an obscure retirement in rural Ireland. Or perhaps his move to Ireland made the haunting complete, for when Hatfield began looking for Irish houses to buy, he settled on one fit for an Irish dandy: In 1974, Hurd came to Ireland, visiting his Dorian Gray co-star, Angela Lansbury, at her home in Conna. Travelling around East Cork, he came across the spectacular sprawl of Ballinterry House. One of the oldest

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homes in the county, it was in danger of being knocked down when Hatfield intervened, picked it up for a song and spent the next 24 years renovating, decorating and refining it with infinite taste. (Barry 1999: 13)

Ballinterry House, located two kilometres outside Rathcormac, East Cork, was built in the early eighteenth century on the grounds of a thirteenth-century Norman castle. Less than twenty miles to its north is the site of Elizabeth Bowen’s ancestral home, demolished only fourteen years before Hatfield rescued Ballinterry House from a similar fate. When Hatfield died, he left the restored estate in the care of a friend who preserved its contents exactly as he left them. Enter Boomerang, an experimental Irish theatre company, whose actors had become fascinated with Hatfield and his story. Boomerang obtained permission to film inside the house; they later used this footage as a backdrop for a stage production of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, where it formed ‘another level of the same story’. What the actors found inside Hatfield’s Irish estate added another level to their production: ‘When the team arrived at Ballinterry, they found all that Hurd Hatfield had kept from the movie: props, costumes, photographs, letters, and a video of the film itself.’ In the multilayered production made possible by Ballinterry House footage, Wilde’s gothic tale becomes ‘the story of Hurd Hatfield, the Dorian Gray-type he might have been in real life’ (Leland 2002: 7). In this story, in which an unmarried, untitled, un-Irish actor haunted by his association with Wilde’s Dorian Gray fills an Irish colonial estate with paraphernalia from the very film that haunts him, we find echoes of the larger story this study has sought to illuminate: an unlikely queer outsider here becomes an ‘insider’ hero (and interior decorator) of a dilapidated aristocratic landscape. In each novel I have so far considered, suggestions of corruption and decadence obliquely point to unspoken levels underpinning ‘official’ cultural narratives: Irish and Southern stories about gentility are consistently shadowed by the dandy figure’s implicit sexual, racial or political ‘queerness’. And whether they deem the dandy’s presence laudable, despicable or just plain unavoidable, all the writers I have addressed in this study share a working definition of dandyism: an elaborate public relations scheme through which the structures and conventions of aristocracy can be manipulated to obscure suspect sexual and racial identities. Susan Lanser has suggested that in the eighteenth century, ‘irreproachable female intimacies’ were distinguished from ‘dangerous ones’ via the imperatives of class – ‘the dominant screen

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distinguishing virtuous and Sapphic bodies’ (Lanser 1998: 178). Class is also, as Wilde and Faulkner show so well, deployed to obscure racial identity; when dominant class structures are destabilised those in power depend all the more on strictly defined gender roles and racial markers. Therefore, the dandy’s trump card – his (or her) ability to pass as an (irreproachable, virtuous, white) aristocrat – often confers a degree of protection against sexual prosecution and/or forced exile. Because dandyism depends on silence, however, dandies can draw upon the protection afforded by the aristocratic landscape only if their deviance remains obscure. The simultaneously adulatory and adversarial nature of aristocratic drag stems from the understanding that if unmasked, dandies will be forced into exile. Offended enough by aristocracy’s (sexist, racist, classist, homophobic) exclusivity to desire some form of revenge, the dandy is nevertheless too impressed with cultural power and the safety it confers to risk self-exposure. In Anglo-Irish and Southern fiction, the dandy’s balancing act – his or her commitment to aristocratic drag – therefore expresses a complex and contradictory subscription to the ideological and aesthetic remnants of a pervasive cultural heritage. This epilogue will briefly consider two contemporary Irish and Southern narratives in which the dandy emerges unmasked. By making queer identities within aristocratic landscapes central and explicit, Emma Donoghue and Jim Grimsley concretise what Irish and Southern writers from Edgeworth to Porter left suggestively ambiguous. In their use of the ‘queer aristocrat’ figure, these writers acknowledge the dandy’s longstanding aesthetic presence as a decadent figure signifying aristocratic decline. Making explicit the transgressions the dandy figure only suggested, these writers render dandyism’s artifice obsolete; by explicating the exact nature of the dandy’s ‘queerness’ Grimsley and Donoghue introduce dandies turned rebels: openly defiant protagonists who draw upon the dandy’s ambiguity to embody what traditional cultures once deemed taboo. Nothing Comfortable about This Love: Emma Donoghue’s ‘Words for Things’ The words were building up behind her tongue, making her gag. Nine months she has been living behind my hair, thought Margaret; that is as long as a baby. She parted her lips to breathe and a howl split her open. Emma Donoghue, ‘Words for Things’

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In her historical study Passions between Women (1993), Irish novelist Emma Donoghue presents readers with a ‘full range of representations of lesbian culture in British print . . . in a variety of discourses, from the poetic to the medical, the libertine to the religious’ (Donoghue 1993: 1), asking us to reconsider eighteenthcentury depictions of ‘passions between women’ by listening to them with a ‘lesbian ear’ (ibid.: 17). In the short-story collection The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), Donoghue offers, in fiction, a demonstration of this critical method: drawing on obscure bits of eighteenth-century English and Irish history, Donoghue fills in suggestive gaps to transform fragmentary anecdote into historical fiction. One story in the collection, ‘Words for Things’, proceeds from this question: why, in November 1787, was the twenty-nine-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft summarily dismissed from her post as tutor to Margaret King, the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Kingsborough, of Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland? The only biography of Margaret King, Edward McAleer’s The Sensitive Plant, says only that Margaret was extremely attached to her tutor, and that this attachment led to Wollstonecraft’s dismissal: Mary . . . was granted a few days to pay a visit to her sister, whom she had not seen for over a year. As Mary was preparing to leave, Margaret showed so much regret at being separated from her that Lady Kingsborough flew into a passion and dismissed Mary on the spot. (McAleer 1958: 53)

In her own version, Donoghue eroticises McAleer’s ambiguous ‘regret’: ‘Words for Things’ imagines that Lady Kingsborough sends Wollstonecraft packing because she is scandalised by her ‘mannish little trull’ of a daughter and her excessive homosocial attachments. Before Wollstonecraft’s arrival, Margaret’s education had been limited to the domestic and frivolous – the kind of ‘feminine’ education the real Wollstonecraft lampooned in letters from Ireland to her sister, in which she critiqued this ‘set of silly females’ as ‘Ladies [who] put on rouge . . . and make up their faces for the day – five hours, and who could do it in less – without including preparations for bed washing with milk and roses &c &c’, concluding, ‘You cannot conceive my dear girl the dissipated lives women of quality lead’ (qtd ibid.: 42). From the first, however, Margaret King has

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resisted these genteel expectations, exhibiting tomboyish qualities in spades. At fourteen, she is larger and more unruly than her sisters; her exasperated mother refers to her as ‘perverse’ (Donoghue 2002: 160), while her new governess labels her a ‘hoyden’ with an ‘unrestrained guffaw certain to set on edge the nerves of any potential suitors’ (ibid.: 161). ‘Wild’ Margaret ‘seem[s] to be growing larger by the day’, and her ‘queer’ proclivities, at fourteen, are already evident (ibid.: 160). Margaret enters adolescence fighting instead of embracing her emerging femininity; her mother tries to correct her daughter’s rebellious nature through recitation: ‘You will run mad before the age of sixteen and then I will be spared the trouble of finding a husband for you.’ ‘Yes, madam.’ ‘Have you forgotten who you are, girl?’ ‘Margaret King of the family of Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Kingsborough Estate.’ ‘Of which county?’ ‘Of the county of Cork in the kingdom of Ireland in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-six.’ ‘Now go and wash your face so your new governess will not think you a peasant.’ (Ibid.: 161–2)

This formulaic incantation reiterates two of Margaret’s obligatory roles: she is expected to be both feminine and marriageable, and through this feminine role she will solidify the cultural supremacy of her ruling class. To this end, Lady Kingsborough ensures that Margaret’s figure will be ‘presentable for Dublin Castle’, by forcing her to sleep in her stays. She wakes in the morning ‘breathless; one rib burned under the weight of whalebone’, bound both physically and mentally because all books have been ‘confiscated on her mother’s orders’ (ibid.: 159). To survive this restrictive environment with her intellect intact, Margaret wills alternative reading materials into being – those that rewrite familial history to make room for a daughter like her: ‘She shut her eyes again, and called up a grey, wavering page with an ornate printer’s mark at the top. “The History of the Primdingle Family,” she spelled out, “Part the fifth” ’ (ibid.: 160). As her imagination grows, her alternative family histories grow more and more fantastic: one, involving the Quintumblys, chronicles a gentry family ‘who, it seemed, kept tamed weasels and sailed down the Nile’ (ibid.: 164).

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When she is able to sneak into the family library, Margaret searches the volumes for concrete words to describe ‘girls like her’: Romp and hoyden she knew already. Tomboy was when she ran down the front staircase with her bootlaces undone. But there were sharper words as well, words that cut when she lifted them into her mouth to taste and whisper them. Tommie was when women kissed and pressed each other to their hearts; it said so in a dirty poem on the top shelf of the cabinet. Tribad was the same only worse. The word had to mean, she reasoned, along the lines of triangle and trimester, that she was three times as bad as other girls. (Donoghue 2002: 168)

Margaret assumes that to be a ‘tribad’ means that ‘if she let the badness take her she would grow and grow’ (ibid.: 169). One book in the family library threatens ‘that she would grow down there until she became a hermaphrodite shown for pennies at the fair, or ran away in her brother’s breeches . . . and married a Dutch widow’ (ibid.: 196). She asks Wollstonecraft, ‘why was I not born a boy? My mother says I am a mannish little trull. Already I am taller than ladies like you. So why may I not be a boy?’ To which her liberal tutor cautiously responds, ‘There is nothing wrong with being manly in the best sense. Manly virtues, you know, and masculine fortitude’ (ibid.: 166–7). Donoghue’s King decides that when her new ‘freakish flesh push[es] through’, when she is ‘three inches long’, she will ‘run away to Galway fair and show herself for sixpences. The pretend families would come along with her, riding in the ropes of her hair’ (Donoghue 2002: 172–3). And like the historical Margaret King, she leaves Ireland in search of the comparatively more radical political and sexual possibilities of continental Europe. In a short story that borrows conventions from the traditional Big House narrative, Donoghue substitutes dutiful acquiescence with joyous escape: her queer protagonist flees Ireland for radical freedoms elsewhere. Had Margaret chosen instead to live within the metaphorical stays of Anglo-Irish culture, satirising her aristocratic landscape by masquerading as a proper lady while covertly pursing deviant passions and politics, she would be identifiable as a female dandy figure. Instead, Donoghue’s story asks readers to reconsider suggestive silences in previous Big House novels, implicitly suggesting that in their use of the dandy figure and her suggestive ambiguities we find echoes of a hidden queer history. In the story of Margaret King,

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Donoghue makes literal what in earlier novels was left suggestive, and lets her heroine escape. In the Shadow of the Big House: Jim Grimsley’s Dream Boy In his dreams he and Roy are buying horses, beautiful dark-coated animals, and riding across gardens of goldenrod, yarrow, chicory, and ironweed, with a view of the mountains blue-veiled in the distance. Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy

Emma Donoghue’s ‘Words for Things’ fuses two distinct literary genres: the Big House narrative and the coming-out story. Her narrative conforms to what we expect from a queer bildungsroman: after slowly identifying who she is and how her culture seeks to repress and change that identity, Margaret King escapes – ostensibly to live a more open life outside of tradition. The contemporary Southern novelist Jim Grimsley accomplishes a similar generic fusion in his second novel, Dream Boy (1995), set in North Carolina in the mid-1990s. This novel imagines the courtship of two teenage boys by grafting the familiar tropes of the plantation novel onto the modern queer bildungsroman. But whereas for Donoghue, it is the voyage out that becomes the end goal – Margaret sees no place for girls like her in the stifling landscape of eighteenth-century Anglo-Ireland – Grimsley’s novel reorients the direction of the coming-out narrative: his protagonists seek refuge from persecution by venturing further into, rather than away from, the aristocratic landscape of the plantation South. By employing the decaying manor house, ‘site of violent acts and vivid superstitions’, as an icon for the South’s plantation past, Grimsley draws on the pervasive atmosphere of sexual ambiguity that, as this study demonstrates, has long permeated literature set in the plantation South. And because this narrative implies that contemporary queer protagonists might find refuge within the gothic landscape of the plantation, Grimsley borrows from the principles of dandyism: Dream Boy’s contemporary Southern lovers yearn for the dandy’s protective aristocratic mask. Nathan, Dream Boy’s main character, has just moved to a small farming community located on the grounds of what was once a large slaveholding plantation. His parents are devout Baptists, yet their zealous faith fails to stop Nathan’s father from repeatedly raping his son, and keeps his mother blind to her husband’s abuse. The novel begins in church, where the exasperated preacher John Roberts muses

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over why, at the Last Supper, ‘the disciple Jesus loved . . . lay his hand tenderly on Jesus’ breast’. The preacher says we do not know why the Scriptures point to the disciple, we do not know why it is mentioned particularly that Jesus loved John at this moment of the Gospels. He grips the pulpit and gazes raptly into the air over the heads of the congregation, as if he can see the Savior there. (Grimsley 1995: 1)

Nathan gazes too, but not at the son of God: ‘Nathan thinks about the body of the son of the farmer who owns the house Nathan’s family rented three weeks ago. Jesus has a face like that boy’ (ibid.: 1–2). That boy, Roy Connelly, is a distant descendant of the Kennicutts, the antebellum planters who once owned the land upon which Nathan’s rented home now stands. Roy knows the old family’s land well enough to ‘find his way home in the pitch dark’ (ibid.: 43), and the extended grounds of the old Kennicutt plantation offer the privacy and sanctuary the boys’ love affair requires. The grounds of a Southern plantation therefore ironically offer these lovers freedom; the Kennicutt family graveyard in particular, located behind Nathan’s father’s house, becomes a refuge, and the two boys embrace in its moonlit ‘white, glowing world’. The two are silent as they move into the enclosure, overgrown with weeds. Tombstones, some toppled, and the leavings of wreaths impede their passage. The ground gives off a clotted, dank smell. Roy is breathless. He passes his hand along eroded marble in which letters are carved. Nathan studies the words but fails to read them, so Roy leans close and whispers, ‘This one says, Sarah Jane Kennicutt, Her Father’s Favorite Daughter. The Kennicutts used to own all this land, that’s what people say.’ (Ibid.: 25–6)

Nathan watches as Roy ‘surveys the surrounding tombstones as if they are his estate’ and claims one as family: ‘This grave belongs to Frederick Kennicutt. He was kin to my great-grandaddy’. As the two ‘huddle together in the dark of the grave’, ‘dressed only in white underwear in the shadow of the granite marker’, Roy offers to lead Nathan one day ‘way off in the woods’, where the Kennicutts’ haunted big house waits for them (ibid.: 26–7). Grimsley’s lovers bask in the ruins of the Old South, where the shelter of history keeps their relationship safe. The closer they come

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to the decaying shell of the Kennicutt mansion, the more they sense they are protected by the ghosts of the dead family, ‘sheltered among the dead Kennicutts and their married relations’ (ibid.: 89). The forest becomes ‘something other than a neighbor now, it becomes a new world’ (ibid.: 40), and ‘[i]n the shadow of the tombstone of Sarah Jane Kennicutt’, the boys ‘hold each other on the . . . edge of wild country’ (ibid.: 106). What Grimsley casts as the gothic Eden of the Kennicutt plantation becomes a refuge from the violence of the present. When Nathan’s father attempts rape after his son has spent the night out with Roy, Nathan escapes to the Kennicutt cemetery, ‘never moving beyond the silent graves’ (ibid.: 87). For a full week Nathan hides among the dead Kennicutts, until Roy finds him and manages to get permission from Nathan’s mother for a weekend camping trip. The boys quickly gather the necessary equipment and disappear with two of Roy’s high-school friends into the Kennicutt Woods, which immediately open to enfold the boys and just as quickly obscure them from view: ‘It is easy for Nathan to refuse to look back. He has been granted two days of safety, and the woodland enfolds him in green gold’ (ibid.: 110). The ruined plantation house sits at this novel’s affective centre, and to underscore the link between Nathan and Roy’s illicit attraction and these aristocratic ruins Grimsley repeatedly draws upon architectural imagery. As the two approach the Kennicutt mansion the bond between them ‘grows strong’, becoming ‘a room in which they are always walking’ (ibid.: 113); camping in the shadow of the Kennicutt ruins the boys ‘kneel, side by side, in the canvas darkness, with the mansion of dusk and rain collapsing around them’ (ibid.: 120). When Nathan falls asleep on the Kennicut grounds, his dreams transform the lovers into antebellum plantation masters purchasing horses on which to tour their extensive estate: ‘In his dreams he and Roy are buying horses, beautiful dark-coated animals, and riding across gardens of goldenrod, yarrow, chicory, and ironweed, with a view of the mountains blue-veiled in the distance’ (ibid.: 123). This is not a dream of unbridled freedom and wilderness; Nathan’s vision is one of cultivated leisure in which lovers ride thoroughbreds across gardens of wildflowers, not expanses of wilderness. This out-of-time Eden, in which Nathan ‘basks in the beating of his own heart, in the descending calls of birds, in the fresh shadows of the leaves on the back of his hands’ and where ‘life becomes a cool gentleness, a caressing presence’ is disturbed by a regulatory and ominous presence: ‘when Nathan turns, there is Burke, watching’

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[ 187

(ibid.: 126–7). Grimsley’s Burke, a homophobic, macho young man who functions in the novel as a figure both of surveillance and punishment, reminds readers familiar with Kennedy’s Swallow Barn of Edmund Burke’s investment in policing the permeable boundaries of the aristocratic landscape. Whereas Burke assumes responsibility for guarding these boundaries, Nathan assumes what he feels to be his natural place in this landscape. As the group approaches the ruined mansion, Nathan senses he has been there before. His heart pounds, ‘something like awe [rises] in him, at the fact of the road and its destination but also at the eerie familiarity. Something prickles in the image, as if he already knows the place’. The ruin still shows signs of an opulent past; the ‘broad curve of a carriageway’ fronts the façade of a house with ‘graceful lines’, and there is a latent, inviting hospitality in the ‘spacious porches and broad doors’ (ibid.: 136). Roy tells Nathan that his Uncle Heben read about this house in a book of North Carolina ghosts, and the story goes that ‘the last fullblooded Kennicutt who lived here got killed by one of his slaves, and they cut his head off. So he still walks around the place at night, looking for his head’. Burke, whose invasive surveillance of the two lovers has become keener as the group closes in on the house, threatens that Nathan might face a similar punishment by ominously whistling ‘Dixie’ and slowly intoning: ‘Wish I was in the land of cotton’ (ibid.: 131). In a trance, Nathan moves towards the plantation house, ‘hold[ing] fast to the house, fac[ing] that direction, and breath[ing] in the scent of late-blooming jasmine’: Nathan steps past Roy, into the shadow of the big house. The others can follow, or not. He vanishes into the blackest shadow of his life. . . . The emptiness beckons him, as clearly as if it is calling his name. Again comes the sensation that the passage of time has been slowed or stopped. That he will never leave this darkness. (Ibid.: 141)

And he never does. Inside the dark house Burke waits, as if he, too, understands his role in this updated plantation drama. After catching the lovers having sex in one of the mansion’s dark rooms, Burke seizes Nathan and takes him to the attic where he rapes and murders the young man, leaving him dead inside the ruins. But here, Grimsley rewrites the plantation novel’s old script: when, after several days, Nathan rises, Grimsley’s novel breaks free from realistic conventions. The risen Nathan washes the blood caked into

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his hair, descends the stairs that lead to the main hall, and steps outside the mansion into the bright sun. He slowly makes his way out of the woods, and emerges at his own funeral. Roy is the first to see Nathan standing just beyond the border of the Kennicutt Woods, and he rushes to meet him: ‘It is a relief that they can feel each other, that their hands are warm. It is a relief that they are in the same world’ (ibid.: 193). Nathan and Roy, together again, ‘disappear into the woods’, ostensibly returning to the ruined mansion to take up residence as its permanent queer ghosts. In positing the plantation both as a site of brutal hate crimes and as a safe haven for gay lovers, Dream Boy seems to almost mourn a past culture that placed a premium on self-invention and artifice. Grimsley’s protagonists are not dandies: their ‘deviance’ is eventually dragged out into the open for all to see. But in Nathan’s dream of riding over gardens with his lover at his side, one hears echoes of Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon riding together across the grounds of Sutpen’s Hundred. As I hope these brief readings have demonstrated, the ambiguously deviant figure of the aristocratic dandy (even in his or her absence) is a force still being reckoned with in Irish and Southern fiction.

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INDEX

Adams, John on ‘natural aristocracy,’ 59–60 Agrarian Movement, 130–1 American Civil War, 14, 16, 29, 84, 86, 88–9 American South Agricultural Adjustment Acts, 81, 87–8 and aristocracy, 12–13, 16, 25–6, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 53, 84, 87, 89, 114, 121, 130, 173 and English cultural models, 32–3 and Ireland, 1–8, 13–15, 83–4 ‘New South,’ 81–3, 89 ‘Old South’ mythos, 16, 29, 33, 37–8, 80–2, 89 planter culture in, 8, 11–13, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 87, 130, 139, 171, 175 and Reconstruction, 72, 81, 87–9 settlement of, 33 Anglo-Irish, 8, 11–13, 17–18, 21, 24–5, 31–2, 83–6, 130, 139, 142, 143, 145, 171, 173, 175 anti-Catholic sentiment, 42–6, 49 and aristocracy, 5, 6, 12–13, 16–19, 30, 34–6, 39, 42–6, 49, 53, 61, 83–5, 95, 142, 171, 174 and autobiography, 129

and English aristocracy, 34 and ingénue figure, 144–5 aristocracy, 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15–17, 21–2, 27, 29–36, 42, 87 artifice of, 12–13, 15, 21, 22, 27, 30, 58–60, 94, 180: in Absalom, Absalom!, 92–3; in Castle Rackrent, 39; in The Picture of Dorian Gray, 92–3; pseudoaristocracy, 26, 27, 30, 34–5; in Swallow Barn, 38, 41 aristocratic drag, 12, 19–24, 138–40, 180 Ascendancy see Anglo-Irish aristocracy Atlanta Constitution, 77, 79, 80, 105–6 Backus, Margot, 148, 176n Baudelaire, Charles, 22, 25–6, 123n, 125, 142 Beckett, J. C., 84 Beerbohm, Max, 21–2 belle figure, 130–2, 139, 141, 144, 155–7 Big House novel tradition, 12, 24, 30, 31, 37, 68, 183 and Castle Rackrent, 31, 37

202 ]

Index

Big House novel tradition (cont.) and Emma Donoghue’s ‘Words for Things’, 183 Boomerang theatre company (Ireland), 179 Bohner, Charles, 29, 55 Bowen, Elizabeth, 4, 13, 18, 21, 26, 126–30, 132–5, 138, 141, 142, 143, 144–55, 161–2, 172–6, 179 ‘The Big House,’ 142–3, 172 Bowen’s Court, 133, 173 The Last September, 26, 127–9, 141, 143, 145–55 ‘A Ride Through the Deep South,’ 172–5 and artifice of aristocracy, 26, 127, 130, 134–5, 138, 175 Bowen’s Court, 142–3, 172–3 self-presentation, 26, 132–5, 138 sexuality, 132, 146–7, 154 tours the American South, 4, 130, 172 Brummell, Beau, 21–2, 24 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 24 Burke, Edmund, 18, 24, 32, 34–6, 41–3, 45, 49, 51 Irish Affairs, 32, 42–3 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 28, 41–2 on the dandy figure, 58–9, 62 on Irish penal laws, 35–6, 42 Butler, Marilyn, 37, 43 Butt, Isaac, 84 Byron, George Gordon, 24 Camus, Albert, 22, 178 Carbery, Lady Mary, 144 Carpenter, Edward The Intermediate Sex, 25, 105 Cash, W. J., 4 Castle, Gregory, 127–8 Castle Coole, County Fermanagh, 7–8 Castlereagh, Lord (Robert Stewart), 66–9

as dandy, 67 Castletown House, County Kildare, 5 Conolly, Thomas, 5–7, 19, 20 as blockade runner for American South, 5–7 Coppard, A. E., 147 Curtis, L. Perry, 27n, 109 Daily Picayune, 93, 106 dandy figure, 11–13, 19, 21–7, 41, 58–64, 76, 94–5, 100–1, 114, 121, 139–40, 149, 176, 179–80 Elizabeth Bowen as, 135–9 William Faulkner as, 96, 98 Katherine Anne Porter as, 135–9 Oscar Wilde as, 93, 94, 109 in Absalom, Absalom!, 74–6, 92, 104, 110–21, 188 dandyism, 12, 22–7, 58, 60–3, 65, 76, 94, 98, 100, 109, 138, 149, 179, 180 female dandy figure, 23, 26, 129–30, 138–41, 149, 167 and nostalgia, 22, 26 in post-bellum South, 72–3 Davis, Jefferson, 20, 71–3, 78–9 Davis, Thomas, 85 Davitt, Michael, 85 Denmark Vesey revolt 1822, 40 Disraeli, Benjamin, 24 Donoghue, Emma Passions between Women, 181 The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, 181 ‘Words for Things,’ 180–4 Douglas, Frederick, 1–3 compares African American slaves and Irish peasants, 1–2 Duvall, John, 113, 115 Eagleton, Terry, 32, 43–4 Edgeworth, Maria, 12–13, 24–5, 31–2, 34, 36–41, 43–4, 46, 49, 60–2, 66–8, 141, 180

Index Belinda, 141 Castle Rackrent, 12, 24–5, 31–2, 34, 37, 39, 43–4, 46–9, 60–2, 66 Elgee, J. K., 2 Ellis, Havelock, 107 Ellmann, Maud, 132, 176n Ellmann, Richard, 79, 109 Faulkner, William, 4, 9–11, 13, 25, 69, 73–7, 81–3, 87–93, 95–6, 98–100, 110–22, 157, 180 Absalom, Absalom!, 4, 9–11, 25, 69, 73–6, 82–3, 87–93, 95, 98, 99–104, 110–22 Marionettes, 75 The Sound and the Fury, 124n and anglophilia, 98, 123n interest in Wilde, 75 reviews of, 120–1 self-presentation, 96–8 Feldman, Jessica, 23–4 Felski, Rita, 26, 139–40 feminism, 131–2, 140, 160, 163, 169 Fitzhugh, George, 70 Galilei, Alessandro, 5 Garelick, Rhonda, 22–3, 94 Gilbert, Sandra M., 132 Gillespie, Michael, 91 Givner, Joan, 131 Gladstone, William, 85 Glendinning, Victoria, 143, 145–6, 176n Godden, Richard, 81, 87, 91, 103 Grattan’s Parliament, 45, 123n Grimsley, Jim, 180 Dream Boy, 184–8 Grubgeld, Elizabeth, 129, 138 Gubar, Susan, 132 Halberstam, Judith, 113–14 Hall, Radclyffe, 26, 132–3, 146–8, 158

[ 203

The Well of Loneliness, 132–3, 146–8 Hatfield, Hurd, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (film, 1945), 178–9 Heritage, 135–9 and the American South, 29–30, 50–1, 170–1 and Anglo-Ireland, 142–3 and dandyism, 26 heritage tourism, 170–5 Hönnighausen, Lothar, 75, 96 Hoogland, Renee, 149, 176n Horowitz, Tony, 40, 58 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 67–68, 123–4n Ireland Act of Union 1800, 46, 67, 123n connections with American South, 1–8, 13–15, 83–4 Home Rule movement, 4, 84–5 Irish Land League, 85 Kilmainham Treaty 1882, 85 Land Acts, 85 Land War (1879–82), 85 penal laws, 17–18, 35–6, 44–5 Rebellion of 1798, 39, 46, 50, 52–3 Irwin, John, 115 James, Henry, 90 Jefferson, Thomas, 30 and ‘natural aristocracy,’ 29, 59–60 Kant, Immanuel, 94–5, 123n The Critique of Judgment, 94 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 4, 12–13, 24–5, 28–34, 36–41, 49–58, 62–9, 72 Swallow Barn, 12, 24, 30–4, 37–41, 49–58, 62–6, 69, 72 critical reception, 30–1 Irish-American ancestry, 29 Kiberd, Declan, 34, 101, 149

204 ]

Index

King, Margaret (Lady Mountcashel), 181–3 Labouchere Amendment 1885, 107 Langrishe, Sir Hercules, 42 Lankford, Nelson, 5, 83 Lanser, Susan, 179–80 Latham, Sean, 83, 101 Lee, Robert E., 20 Lehman, Rosamond, 147 Lynes, George Platt, 135–6 Macaulay, Rose, 147 McBean, Angus, 135, 137 McCormack, Jerusha, 86, 100, 114 McCormack, W. J., 6, 17, 25, 32 McIntyre, Rebecca, 55–6 McKay, Claude, 13 MacKethan, Lucinda, 33, 37, 57, 156 McWhiney, Grady, 7, 14 Markievicz, Constance, 133, 145 Mitchell, Margaret Gone With the Wind, 4, 132 Moers, Ellen, 21–3, 25 Nat Turner Rebellion, 38, 40, 54, 58, 69 national romance, 30, 33–4, 65, 69n Newton, Esther, 148 nostalgia , 26–7, 130–40 and dandy figure, 22, 26 ‘nostalgia paradigm,’ 26 O’Brien, William Smith, 85 O’Faolain, Sean, 145 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 85 Parsons, Deborah, 23 Plantation novel tradition, 4, 12, 24, 30, 68 and Dream Boy, 184–7 and Swallow Barn, 30 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling 1896, 107 Poe, Edgar Allen, 31, 55, 78

Porter, Katherine Anne, 13, 26, 125–35, 139, 141, 157–71, 175, 180 ‘Audubon’s Happy Land,’ 170–1 Old Mortality, 26, 127–9, 141, 158–70, 175–6 Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 158–9 attempts to meet Bowen, 125–6 attitudes towards homosexuality, 131–2, 157–9 hyperfemininity, 26, 130–2, 135, 138, 157, 159, 171 self-presentation, 26, 127, 130–1, 134–5, 138, 175 Protestant Ascendancy see AngloIrish aristocracy Quinlan, Kieran, 3, 8, 14–15 Railey, Kevin, 37, 110 St. Vincent Millay, Edna, 159 Samuel, Raphael, 138, 175 Scott, Evelyn, 157 Scott, Sir Walter, 46 Silber, Nancy, 65, 72 Sinclair, Reverend William, 66–7 Singal, Daniel, 82, 88, 99, 118 Somerville, Edith, 5 Somerville, Siobahn, 106–7, 112 Speranza see Wilde, Lady Jane Stein, Gertrude, 26, 131–2, 157 Stevens, Wallace, 133–4, 170 Stout, Janis, 127, 131, 157, 166–7 sublime and Absalom, Absalom!, 98–100 in Baudelaire, 26 in Burke, 123n in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 94 and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 96–8 Sullivan, John L., 101

Index Tate, Allen, 160 Taylor, William, 32, 60 Tenniel, John, 106 Titus, Mary, 130–1, 139 Toussaint-Louverture, François rebellion of 1791, 40 Turner, Nat see Nat Turner Rebellion Twain, Mark, 36, 79–80 Ulrichs, Karl, 105 von Krafft-Ebing, Richard, 107 Welty, Eudora, 4, 126 Wilde, Dolly, 145 Wilde, Lady Jane, 2, 78, 85–6 Wilde, Oscar, 2–4, 12–13, 24–5, 69, 72–83, 85–7, 89–91, 93–5, 98, 100–1, 104–7, 109–13, 115–22, 159, 178–80 ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ 115 De Profundis, 109, 121, 158–9 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 25, 69, 73–6, 82, 90–5, 98, 103, 110, 112–13, 115–20, 122 Salome, 75 aesthetics of ruin, 73, 76, 78–80 American responses to, 104–6

[ 205

in the American South, 2–3, 25, 72–3 compares Irish protestant and Anglo-southern ruling elites, 2–4 as dandy, 93–4, 109 at Oxford, 95 The Picture of Dorian Gray (film), 178–9 redefinition of Victorian ethics, 109–10 reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray, 120 trials of (1895), 12, 67, 75, 91, 107, 121 Wilde, Sir William, 85 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 181–3 Woolf, Virginia, 18, 132, 147–8 visit to Ireland, 18 Wylie, Eleanor, 159 Yeats, W. B., 4, 8–11, 133, 171 ‘A Prayer for my Daughter,’ 133 ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz,’ 133 ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War,’ 8–11 Eudora Welty’s interest in, 4 Katherine Anne Porter’s interest in, 171