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The Hero as Spectacle Carlyle and the Persistence of Dandyism

1. Jerome Buckley, The Victorian Temper (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 37. [BACK]

2. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus and On Heroes and Hero-Worship (London: Everyman's Library, 1908), 205. Subsequent citations of both works are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

3. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 51. [BACK]

4. Letter to William Olen, 22 February 1833, in The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles R. Sanders (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1970-), 6:334. Subsequent citations from the Letters are given parenthetically in the text. Teufelsdröckh is similarly "a wild Seer, shaggy, unkempt, like a Baptist living on locusts and wild honey" ( Sartor, 21). [BACK]

5. Charles Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1986), 24. [BACK]

6. This visual dependency complements the dandy's dependence on the economic system for which he expresses disdain—a dependence that Baudelaire readily admits. See Peter Zima, "From Dandyism to Art, or Narcissus Bifrons," Neohelicon 12, no. 2 (1985): 201-38; and Camus, The Rebel, 47-54. [BACK]

7. Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (1960; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 178. [BACK]

8. The use of theatrical terms to describe social action is laden with conceptual problems that cannot be addressed here. But I wish to preserve the important distinction between "spectacle" and "sight," and use the former term to identify a fantasy not merely of being visible, but of calculated self-presentation to all imagined gaze. See John J. MacAloon, "Introduction: Cultural Performances, Culture Theory" in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 1-15; and Dean MacCannell, "Sights and Spectacles,'' in Iconicity: Essays on the Nature of Culture, ed. Paul Bouissac, Michael Herzfeld, and Roland Posner (Tübingen: Stauffenberg, 1986), 421-35. [BACK]

9. I am thus addressing obliquely a largely tacit paradox in recent writings on gender. While anthropologists and sociologists argue that norms of masculinity across a variety of cultures require, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, that a man "constantly put himself in the gaze of others" (quoted by David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990], 51), psychoanalytic cultural studies influenced by Jacques Lacan hold that such virile display is in fact a feminizing posture. [BACK]

10. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), offers the most comprehensive survey of Western resistance to theatrically. On Johnson's association of the literary marketplace with theatricality, see James Eli Adams, "The Economies of Authorship: Imagination and Trade in Johnson's Dryden, " Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 467-86. [BACK]

11. John Stuart Mill, "What is Poetry?" in Literary Essays, ed. Edward Alexander (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 56. [BACK]

12. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edition, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1987). [BACK]

13. Tennyson's anxiety is clearly central to the rise of the dramatic monologue as a literary form that, as Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., puts it, "disintegrates the implicit claim of self-presence in lyric into a rhetorical fabric of self-presentation" ("From Monomania to Monologue: 'St. Simeon Stylites' and the Rise of the Victorian Dramatic Monologue," Victorian Poetry 22 [1984]: 125). [BACK]

14. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard D. Altick (New York: New York University Press, 197), 230. [BACK]

15. Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 56, points out that the transgressive theatricality of Jane Eyre reinforces the convention "that dissociates rhetorical (and ontological) power From social power, producing a chiasmus in which the inferiority of oppressed or marginal groups virtually guarantees their latent, but all the more disruptive, eloquence." [BACK]

16. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 77-78. [BACK]

17. Quoted in Alan Bowness, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites (London: Tate Gallery, 1984), 204. [BACK]

18. Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 14, notes this as a more general phenomenon, but regards it only as a circumscription of the roles available to intellectual women, rather than a tension within "patriarchy" itself [BACK]

19. [W. J. Courthope], "Modern Culture," Quarterly Review 137 (October 1874): 207. [BACK]

20. For an account of Carlyle's construction of "the hero as man of letters" as an effort to reconcile conflicting models of manhood, see Norma Clarke, "Strenuous Idleness," in Manful Assertions, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (New York: Routledge, 1991), 25-43. [BACK]

21. On continuities between the dandy and Lacan, see Robert Viscusi, Max Beerbohm, or the Dandy Dante: Rereading with Mirrors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 23-30. [BACK]

22. "His Letters and Memories of His Life," in The Life and Works of Charles Kingsley, 19 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1901), 2:189. [BACK]

23. See Robin Gilmour, The Ideal of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981). [BACK]

24. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: New American Library, 1965), 97. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

25. See John Kucich, "The Purity of Violence in A Tale of Two Cities," Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 119-38. [BACK]

26. Catherine Gallagher, "The Duplicity of Doubling in A Tale of Two Cities," Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 125-45. [BACK]

27. See Albert Hutter, "The Novelist as Resurrectionist: Dickens and the Dilemma of Death," Dickens Studies Annual 12 (1983): 10. [BACK]

28. Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 266. [BACK]

29. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald J. Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 92, 97, 78, 97. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

30. See James Eli Adams, "Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism," ELH 59 (1992): 441-466. [BACK]

31. Walter Pater, "Diaphaneitè," in Miscellaneous Studies (London: Macmillan, 1910), 251. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text. [BACK]

32. Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater's Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 179. [BACK]

33. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 19-88. [BACK]


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