While Brummell enacted his elite status through a haughty manner, it was propelled by the public’s active fascination with him—his fame was wholly created and maintained by public discourse. This being the case, it was difficult even for his contemporaries to separate fact from fiction, and, for that matter, Brummell himself from his coterie of dandy followers: “The dandy- gent was a trope in fiction even before Brummell’s death. The manner—the poise, deft wit and an air of languorous indifference—became a signifier of the gentleman, just as clearly as his clothes” (Kelly 7). If Brummell’s social world was designed to be inaccessible, fiction reacted by creating an imagined accessibility. The stories about him became their own sort of fact in the cultural imagination. Feldman says of her research on dandies, “If I try to capture dandies by studying pictures and accounts of actual, historical dandies, I am struck by these dandies’ inevitable slide into fiction, for the ‘realer’ the dandy, the more a product of (his own) make-
believe he is. If a dandy is a person who plays the part of himself, how can the real be neatly culled from such fiction?” (2). A better question is what do these distinctions mean? I argue that by conferring meaning on style we create stories that become their own kind of truth.
While Brummell’s authority was disseminated through popular media, as a celebrity his legacy was also shaped by that media—he presents himself as an impenetrable figure, but the public is able to penetrate him by crafting and controlling his narrative, circulating stories about his life and granting meaning to his style. It is in this struggle for narrative control that the interactive mode of the dandy’s style takes effect; perhaps for Brummell his style was his own, but once it enters into public discourse it becomes pulled and torn by many perspectives,
interpretations, and mutations. Moers traces the history of the dandy persona through the figure’s near-constant presence in literature. At the height of his popularity, Brummell’s image was both replicated by his dandy cohort and fictionalized by and for the delight of those dandies and the Regency in-group.17 By 1828 Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Pelham took what Brummell had created, opened up its mysteries, and set it on the path of development that would lead to the decadent dandy. Pelham “taught the rules of the game to many an aspiring dandy…. It titillated Exclusive society and—greatest proof of coterie success—actually set a new fashion in
gentlemen’s dress” (Moers 68). Bulwer-Lytton’s novel was beloved by Regency Exclusives, but it would also serve as “a warning beacon” to those outside that in-group: the early Victorian gentleman. In the transition from Regency to Victorian London the two facets of the dandy-gent began to diverge; Pelham the dandy character represented all that the dandy was (an
ungentlemanly figure of aristocratic excess), and all that the Victorian gentleman should not be.
17 The dandy was featured not only in popular genre fiction and mass-produced magazines such as
According to Moers, eventually “the dandies were an old and notorious story in England, and 1830 was the year to renounce the Regency and vilify the dandy class. It was the year
George IV died and Fraser’s Magazine was born” (167). Fraser’s would be instrumental in both registering and guiding public opinion of the dandy, most notably in its views on literature; for Fraser’s, “of all classes of society… the aristocracy is least worthy of curiosity” (172). But any press is good press, as it turns out, for the dandy retained the spotlight in Fraser’s and elsewhere, negative though it was. Public opinion may have shifted during this time, but public interest surely did not.
All of this—the dandy’s place in literature, the dandy’s disparagement in literature, the turn away from an interest in the aristocracy in literature—stems in large part from “the problem of the literary man’s social status,” which troubled many of the authors Moers writes about (198). At first, authors writing about dandies were dandies themselves. Feldman writes, “In a dizzying reflexivity, the dandy created within the work of art—Pelham or Onegin or Don Juan— is actualized, rendered ‘real’ in print by the living, breathing dandy-writer who chooses to make of himself and his daily life a fiction” (3). But by the mid-nineteenth century, non-dandy authors seeking to shake the dandy’s elite status capitalized on the widely held suspicion that novels about the dandy-aristocrat were often anonymously written by servants who had unparalleled access to the life of the aristocracy without being part of it. Thackeray, most interestingly, puts the opinions on class and style previously dictated by the elite dandy into the mouth of his fictional Yellowplush, a semi-illiterate dandy servant who “parodies the language of his betters in society” poorly and comically (Moers 200). The power to shape the text is still in the hands of the observing dandy, but the location of that power is no longer within the aristocracy—rather it is comically displaced in ambiguity.
While the dandy is defined by his outward appearance, visibility, and positioning to observe, the elements of exclusivity (exclusion) and tantalizing mystery suggest a flip side— secrecy and hiding. Perhaps due to the dandy’s discourse being taken over by the public pen, or perhaps by his very nature all along, what began as intrigue as to the secret of this powerful figure’s concealed self became a nervous distrust of his nature, his motives, and his sexuality. Important discussions of the dandy’s sexuality abound, focusing on his appropriation of a traditionally feminine concern with fashion and personal appearance. Rather than delving into what life the dandy keeps secret, or who was drawn to the dandy lifestyle for its emphasis on an open secrecy, I will instead call our attention to the dominant discourse from which
contemporaneous criticisms of the dandy as “effeminate” result—the complicated and fluctuating relation between social standards of masculinity and what it means to be a
“gentleman.” Moers writes, “A hearty distrust of a degenerate and effeminate aristocracy was the Regency’s legacy to the men of William IV’s day, who came to believe that England’s salvation lay in a return to old-fashioned English manliness” (176-7). This is the new Victorian gentleman versus Thackeray’s mock-Regency dandy genlmn, the name the Regency dandy’s servant lovingly gives him throughout Yellowplush (215).
Though begun by Brummell as the utter perfection of the simple dress of the Regency’s country gentleman in reaction to aristocratic excess, by mid-century the dandy would come to represent the opposite of a gentleman. What the Victorians have in the dandy is a disdained other—it is no longer an original type of dandy they revile and ridicule, but representations of him through the eyes of those who are opposed to him. In other words, the exclusive
Brummellian dandy has been replaced by the echoes and reverberations of his influence, filtered through the perspectives of those excluded from his elite circle and transformed through
literature, literary discourse, and literary criticism. But Brummell and his dandy legacy continue to tantalize and charm, even to this day.18 He represents an individual focal point within the collective focal point of the elite—a being both within and separate from his social group. What he represents is not just an inaccessible in-group, but also the more modern inaccessibility of self. Thus when the dandy loses his elite status in the Victorian era’s shifting social boundaries, he is still intriguing precisely because the hyper-stylized surface reflects the concerns of its audience. After all, “it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (Dorian Gray 3). As a public figure, the dandy’s identity morphed from stylized persona to object of written
representation and finally, in Wilde’s fiction, to stylized text itself. The figure becomes, ultimately, a parody of itself—but a parody with telling implications for the relation between style and an ever more unstable social world.