ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ―WELL-DISPOS‘D SAVAGES‖: ELITE MASCULINITY IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE Elizabeth Veisz, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Dissertation directed by: Professor Laura Rosenthal Department of English Writers in eighteenth-century Britain catered to, and helped create, public fascination with the brazen, sometimes illicit, often violent exploits of elite and aristocratic men. Literary critics have seen this elite male figure as part of an outmoded order superseded over the course of the century by the rising British middle class. Debauched aristocratic characters are often reformed over the course of eighteenth-century narratives, reflecting a larger societal shift in values towards polite restraint. As expressed in my dissertation‘s title phrase, however, many of the period‘s writers develop elite male characters whose behaviors and self-presentation blur those very boundaries between oppositional categories, like savagery and civilization, on which both Enlightenment theories of human progress and polite culture‘s prescriptions for decorum were presumed to rest. Through an examination of this paradoxical figure in novelistic, dramatic, and autobiographical literature, my dissertation demonstrates that the oft-repeated reform-of- the-rake narrative calls attention to obstacles and resistance to the ascendancy of a middle-class culture, not to the inevitability of its rise. Each chapter centers on a site that is accessible to a larger public only through literary or dramatic accounts, including the club, the elite school, the court, and the overseas estate. Chapter One, ―‗Our imperial reign‘: Addison, Steele, Gay and the London Mohocks,‖ examines writings about a gang of rakish gentlemen rumored to prowl the streets of Augustan London. Chapter Two, ―Schools for Scandal: Elite Education and Eighteenth- Century Narrative,‖ uncovers a relationship between key mid-century novels and a longstanding debate about elite schooling. The final two chapters trace the influence of late-eighteenth-century discourses of liberty and sensibility on constructions of elite masculinity. Chapter Three, ―Command Performance: Boswell‘s Libertine Diplomacy,‖ focuses on the journals and travelogues of James Boswell, a self-professed libertine who strove, with mixed results, to restrain his appetite for power and pleasure. Chapter Four, ―A ‗strong transition of place‘: Cultural Encounter and the reform plot in Sydney Owenson‘s The Wild Irish Girl,‖ offers a new framework in which to read the genre of the national tale by shifting the critical lens from the novel‘s Anglo-Irish marriage plot to a parallel plot of intersecting and competing masculinities. ―WELL-DISPOS‘D SAVAGES‖: ELITE MASCULINITY IN EIGHTEENTH- CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE by Elizabeth Veisz Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment Of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Advisory Committee: Professor Laura Rosenthal, Chair Professor Vincent Carretta Professor Tita Chico Professor Clare Lyons Professor Orrin Wang © Copyright by Elizabeth Veisz 2010 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: ―Remarkable and Useful Things‖……………………………………….….1 Chapter One: ―Our Libertine Reign‖: Addison, Steele, Gay, and the London Mohocks………………………………………………………………………………….19 Chapter Two: Schools for Scandal: Elite Education and Eighteenth-Century Narrative…………………………………………………………………………………64 Chapter Three: Command Performance: Military Masculinity, Military Costume, and Boswell‘s Libertine Diplomacy………………………………………………………...111 Chapter Four: ―A Strong Transition of Place‖: Cultural Encounter and the Reform Plot in Sydney Owenson‘s The Wild Irish Girl………………………………………………...162 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...207 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………213 1 Introduction: “Remarkable and Useful Things” In 1680, Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet published an account of the deathbed penitence of the notorious aristocratic rake John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Burnet‘s text, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester, was popular throughout the period known as the long eighteenth century, stretching from its original publication in the Restoration era through multiple reprintings in the Regency years of the early 1800s.1 As a form of ―Christian propaganda,‖2 Burnet‘s narrative assures readers of the power of revealed religion to bring even the worst sinner and most confirmed skeptic toward faith and repentance. To give the reader a sense of what he encountered in his clerical discussions with Rochester, Burnet includes this insight into the libertine attitude toward morality: For Morality, he freely own‘d to me, that though he talked of it as a fine thing, yet this was only because he thought it a decent way of speaking; and that as [Rochester and his companions] went always in Cloaths, though in their Frolicks they would have chosen sometimes to have gone naked, if they had not feared the people: So though some of them found it necessary for humane life to talk of Morality, yet he confessed they cared not for it, further then the reputation of it was necessary for their credit, and affairs.3 This anecdote about Rochester‘s desire to eschew conventional morality and indulge in naked frolics is notable for being one of the very few tangible descriptions of actual rakish behavior included in Burnet‘s account. In fact, in a subsequent passage, while disavowing any literary embellishment or use of poetic license, Burnet explains how he strategically shaped the narrative through his decisions about which details of Rochester‘s biography to include and which to omit: 1 See David Farley-Hills, ed., Rochester: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 4. 2 Ibid. 3 Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John, Earl of Rochester, 1680, 23. 2 I have said nothing but what I had from his own mouth, and have avoided the mentioning of the more particular Passages of his life, of which he told me not a few: But since others were concerned in them, whose good only I design, I will say nothing that may either provoke or blemish them. It is their Reformation, and not their Disgrace, I desire: This tender consideration of others has made me suppress many remarkable and useful things.4 According to Burnet, then, the central fact of ―Reformation‖ is the heart of the narrative. Rochester‘s life becomes a Christian tale of redemption instructive in its general outline and its theological underpinnings; the ―remarkable and useful things‖ Burnet could have included are cast aside as unnecessary, and possibly harmful, distractions. Burnet‘s account is one example among many popular reform-of-the-rake narratives that permeated eighteenth-century British culture. One of most popular plays of the Restoration period, for example, was George Etherege‘s The Man of Mode (1676), whose central character is a libertine named Dorimant, modeled after Rochester, who softens his stance towards romantic love when he falls for the play‘s heroine.5 As these two examples show, the reform-of-the-rake tale does not remain in a fixed form either in terms of genre or narrative strategy. Burnet‘s teasing, tantalizing omission of the scandalous details of Rochester‘s pre-reform life and adventures, in fact, serves as an illuminating contrast to the methods of later, mid-century novelists like Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, who give to their readers fictional accounts of those ―remarkable‖ details of the rake‘s character and misdeeds that Burnet seeks purposely to ―suppress.‖ Burnet‘s guardedness, his stated strategy of withholding material from the public marketplace of readers, like Rochester‘s own opposition to the publication of his court-circulated poetry, emphasizes his membership in an elite circle marked by status, gender, and proximity to the power center of the court. Novels like Richardson‘s Pamela 4 Burnet, 28-29. 5 George Etherege, The Man of Mode, ed. John Barnard. London: A&C Black Publishers, 2007. 3 (1740) and Clarissa (1747), on the other hand, while they cannot claim to be first-hand accounts of the experiences of real-life rakes, use and develop the tools at the eighteenth- century writer‘s disposal, including the novel form, the print marketplace, and a public appetite for rakish characters, to transport the reader into the imagined life and sometimes the very imagined consciousness of the elite male rake and his aristocratic counterculture, whose ―Frolicks‖ test the boundaries of what the English public (Rochester‘s feared ―people‖) define as civilized behavior. This study examines the techniques of narrative and characterization that writers develop throughout the long eighteenth century to provide imaginative access to the exclusive realm of the rake, where the social rules and categories of polite society do not apply. My first primary claim, then, is that rakes and libertines do not substantively disappear from the literary landscape after the Restoration. Due to eighteenth-century studies‘ focus on the historical rise of the British middle class, the critical assumption has been that the libertine, both as a fictional character and as a social type, was superseded over the course of the century, pushed to the margins by the polite gentleman and symbolically upstaged by the virtuous domestic woman.6 Few have challenged Terry Eagleton‘s claim, for example, that the aristocratic villain of Samuel Richardson‘s