Decadence of Victorian Masculinity, or Dandyism in Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan

.İngiltere'de, on dokuzuncu yüzyıl toplumunda değişen iktisadi güç yoluyla, orta sınıfların üst sınıflara baskın çıktığı ve emperyalizme bağlı Victoria çağı erkeklik kavramını oluşturdukları iddia edilmektedir. Ne var ki Victoria döneminin son on yılı, başta manevi ahlak kaygıları olup sonra da kapitalist ekonomik çıkarlarla şekillenen bu imparatorluk adamlığının Victoria dönemi ikiyüzlülüğüne karşı duruşunun yanı sıra estetik değerler de taşıyan erkeklik ilkeleriyle donanmış züppeliğe dönüşümüne şahit olmuştur. Bu makale, bu nedenle, öncelikli olarak toplumsal cinsiyet, siyaset ve tıbbi alanlarla ilişkilendirilmiş Victoria çağı erkekliğinin tanımını ve özelliklerini verip Oscar Wilde ile onun edebi ve eleştirel eserlerinin temsil ettiği çöküş kavramını ve dönemini incelemektedir. Akabinde, bu dönemin yeni erkeklik ideali olan züppeliğin estetik ilkeleri, Charles Pierre Baudelaire ve Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly'nin tanımladığı felsefi temellerle birlikte verilmektedir. Bu düşünürlerden etkilenerek on dokuzuncu yüzyılın sonlarında İngiltere'deki züppevari erkekliğin sanatsal temsilcisi olan Oscar Wilde, züppe erkek tiplemelerini Lady Windermere'in Yelpazesi gibi oyunlarında da sunmaktadır. Bu komedide çok çeşitli erkek karakterler aracılığıyla züppe erkekliğinin muhtelif kaygıları ve ilkeleri bulunabilmektedir. Bunlara bağlı olarak, bu makale Victoria çağı değerlerinin adamlık biçimlendirmedeki çöküşünü ve daha bireyci ve sanatsal bir erkekliğin yükselişini vurgulamaktadır.

Victoria Çağı Erkekliğinin Çöküşü, veya Oscar Wilde'ın Lady Windermere'in Yelpazesi Oyununda Züppelik*

It is contended that, by means of the changing economic power in the nineteenth-century society, the middle classes prevailed over upper classes in Britain, and they hence established their concept of Victorian masculinity on the basis of imperialism. However, the last decade of the Victorian era witnessed the transformation of this imperial manliness that was primarily concerned with sentimental morality and later shaped by the capitalist economic interests into dandyism that was embellished with aesthetically affected codes of masculinity against the hypocrisy of the Victorian era. Therefore, this article first establishes the definition and characteristics of Victorian imperial masculinity in relation to the disciplines of gender, politics and medicine, and then delves into the concept and decade of decadence which was represented by Oscar Wilde, and his literary and critical works. Subsequently, the poetics of dandyism, as the new epitome of masculinity in this decade, is articulated with its philosophical foundations as Charles Pierre Baudelaire and Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly define. Having been affected from such philosophers, Oscar Wilde, as the artistic representation of dandiacal masculinity in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, also presents dandy men in his plays like Lady Windermere's Fan (1892). In this comedy, one can find various codes of a dandy's masculine preoccupations and principles with a wide range of male characters. In keeping with these attitudes, the article will underline the fall of Victorian ideals in the formation of manliness and the rise of a further individualistic and artistic mode of masculinity.

PDF

___

Barbey D'Aurevilly, J. (1897). Of dandyism and of George Brummell (Trans. D. Ainslie.). London.
Barthes, R. (1962/2006). Dandyism and fashion. A. Stafford and M. Carter (Ed.), in The language of fashion (pp. 60-64). London: Bloomsbury.
Baudelaire, C. (1863/1981). The painter of modern life (Trans. P. E. Charvet), in Baudelaire: selected writings on art and artists. (pp. 390-436). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Bell, M. (2000). Sentimentalism, ethics and the culture of feeling. New York, NY: Palgrave.
Beynon, J. (2002). Masculinities and culture. Buckingham: Open UP.
Booth, H. J. (2000). Male sexuality, religion and the problem of action: John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough. A. Bradstock et al. (Ed.), in Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture (pp. 116-133). London: Macmillan.
Brady, S. (2009). Masculinity and male homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Camus, A. (1951/1991). The rebel: an essay on man in revolt (Trans. A. Bower). New York, NY: Vintage.
Carlyle, T. (1836/1984). Sartor resartus. G. B. Tennyson (Ed.), in A Carlyle reader: selections from the writings of Thomas Carlyle (pp. 124-337). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Connell, R. [W.] (2009). Gender in world perspective (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Polity.
De Balzac, H. (1830/2010). Treatise on elegant living (Trans. N. Jeffries). Cambridge, MA: Wakefield.
Defeyt, A. (2014). Masculine plural and singularly masculine. Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire and Jules Berbey d'Aurevilly: three dandies seen through the prism of the masculinity of the nineteenth century. Masculinities: A Journal of Identity and Culture, 2: 171-185.
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: an introduction (Vol. 1; Trans. R. Hurley). New York, NY: Pantheon.
Ganz, A. (1957). The dandiacal drama: a study of the plays of Oscar Wilde. PhD dissertation, Columbia University, New York, NY.
Glick, E. (2001). The dialectics of dandyism. Cultural Critique, 48: 129-163.
Hogan, A. (2000). "Reading men more truly": Charlotte Brontë's Villette. A. Bradstock et al. (Ed.), in Masculinity and spirituality in Victorian culture (pp. 58-70). London: Macmillan.
Horzum, Ş. (2015). Masculinities from the libertine to the dandy in the comedy of manners: George Etherege's the man of mode, Oliver Goldsmith's she stoops to conquer and Oscar Wilde's lady Windermere's fan. MA thesis, Hacettepe University, Ankara.
Kuchta, D. (2002). The three-piece suit and modern masculinity: England, 1550-1850. Berkeley, CA: U of California P.
Laver, J. (2002). Costume and fashion: a concise history (4th ed.). London: Thames & Hudson.
Mangan, M. (2003). Staging masculinities: history, gender, performance. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mosse, G. L. (1996). The image of man: the creation of modern masculinity. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Nelson, B. (2007). Dandies, dandyism, and the uses of style. C. Magerski, R. Savage and C. Weller (Ed.), in Moderne Begreifen: Zur Paradoxie eines Sozio-Ästhetischen Deutungsmusters (pp. 135-143). Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag.
Pearson, H. (1930). Introduction. In Oscar Wilde's plays, prose writings and poems (pp. vii-xvii). London: Dent.
Pearson, H. (1946). The life of Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen.
Ribeiro. A. (2002). On Englishness in dress. C. Breward, B. Conekin and C. Cox (Ed.), in The Englishness of English dress (pp. 15-28). Oxford: Berg.
Roper, S. (1825). Letters on the nature and objects of political economy, and on some particular topics of that science. London.
Ruskin, J. (1865). Sesame and lilies: two lectures (2nd ed.). London.
Schneider, R. (2011). The invisible center: conceptions of masculinity in Victorian fiction - realist, crime, detective, and gothic. S. Horlacher (Ed.), in Constructions of masculinity in British literature from middle ages to the present (pp. 147-168). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sussman, H. (1995). Victorian masculinities: manhood and masculine poetics in early Victorian literature and art. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Taşdelen, P., and Koca, C. (2015). Viktorya dönemi İngiltere'sinde kadın bedeni politikaları ve kadınların spora katılımı (Women body politics and women sport participation in Victorian England). Hacettepe University Journal of Faculty of Letters, 32.1: 205-214.
Wilde, O. (1891/1989). The critic as artist - part II. I. Murray (Ed.), in Oscar Wilde: the major works (pp. 267- 297). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Wilde, O. (1892/1995). Lady Windermere's fan, a play about a good woman. London: Penguin.
Wilde, O. (1904). Rose-leaf and apple-leaf: l'envoi. London: Privately Published.