Much
derision was directed toward aesthetes in the late 19th century, who, led by
Oscar Wilde, declared their devotion to beauty in all its forms. That moment in
the history of men and their fashions is remembered today because of the fate
of Wilde, imprisoned for what was then the crime of “gross indecency”. But this
was not the first sensational trial of a high-profile homosexual. That had
happened long before, such as in the notorious “macaroni” case of 1772.
Over the
centuries, all manner of dandies have attempted to make their place in society.
Wilde’s predecessor, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell became an arbiter of men’s
fashion in Regency England despite his obscure social origins and lack of
interest in women. Part of the secret of his success was his cultivation of a
refined but understated style that avoided the kind of flashiness that could
get a man condemned for “effeminate” flamboyance.
In the
1760s and 1770s, there was an explosion of public interest in the “macaronis”, fashionable
society gents who were given that name because, in the eyes of the penny press
of the day, they committed such cardinal sins as rejecting good old English
roast beef for dainty foods from continental Europe – such as pasta. Those
finicky eaters, who also sported excessive French fashions in clothing, were in
some ways the predecessors of Wildean aesthetes, but they have largely been
forgotten today.
Wilde, by
contrast, is remembered because of his talent and for the way he was treated by
the British legal system. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became a kind of “gay
icon” with a new relevance to a generation struggling with the horrors of the
AIDS epidemic. His disgrace at the end of the 19th century was reinterpreted as
a kind of queer martyrdom that presaged later struggles for lesbian and gay
liberation.
Queer
theory
Enthusiasm
for Wilde on the part of lesbian and gay activists in the late 20th century was
connected to the rise of a new form of cultural and literary analysis known as
“queer theory”. This development was heavily influenced by the work of the
French philosopher Michel Foucault on the ways in which textual discourse
operates. The focus was no longer on identifying gay men or lesbians in past
centuries but on identifying when and why those terms were used.
It was this
thinking that led the prominent scholar of Alan Sinfield, a leading British
queer theorist, to identity the Wilde trials of 1895 as a “queer moment” when
dandyism became linked with same sex desire.
The
stereotypical proto-homosexual man emerged as a being that was attracted to
younger men, who was theatrical rather than understated, effeminate rather than
manly, and artistic rather than sporting. But it was not true that Wilde became
obvious as a homosexual during the course of his trial – for the simple reason
that the term “homosexual” was not reported in the British media until the time
of another scandal, that surrounding the Prussian Prince of Eulenburg, that
unfolded between 1906 and 1909.
And the
fact is that Wilde was far from the first allegedly effeminate “sodomite” or
“bugger” – and here I use terms that were widely employed at the time – to be
disgraced in court.
The scandal
of Captain Jones
Hester
Thrale (1741 - 1821) was a member of the literary circle surrounding the famous
encyclopediast Dr Samuel Johnson. She kept a fascinating diary in which she
noted a wide variety of sexual foibles and eccentricities in the society
circles of her time. She had a striking ability to recognise homosexuals (both
male and female). Thus, in the entry for March 29, 1794 she discussed
“finger-twirlers” as being a “decent word for sodomite”. In one passage,
recorded in late March or early April 1778, she recalled the time six years
earlier when a certain Captain Jones had been convicted of crimes against
nature, and sentenced to die:
''He was a
Gentleman famous for his Invention in the Art of making Fireworks, and adapting Subjects fit to be represented in that Genre; & had already entertained the
Town with two particular Devices which were exhibited at Marylebone Gardens
& greatly admired: viz: the Forge of Vulcan in the Cave of Mount Etna,
& the calling of Eurydice out of Hell – If he is pardoned says Stevens, He
may shew off the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; it will have an admirable
Effect.''
Jones was a
man of fashion in society who had been convicted at the Old Bailey for
sodomising a 13-year-old boy. The link that Thrale made between camp dandyism
and same sex scandal was rife in the papers of the time. As one correspondent
put it in a letter to the Public Ledger on August 5, 1772, Captain Jones was
“too much engaged in every scene of idle Dissipation and wanton Extravagance”.
He was referred to as this “MILITARY MACCARONI [original emphasis]”. And, the
writer concluded, “therefore, ye Beaux, ye sweet-scented, simpering He-She
things, deign to learn wisdom from the death of a Brother”.
Arguments
were brought forward that the boy’s testimony was unreliable and Jones was
granted a royal pardon on the condition that he left the country. Members of
the public seethed with indignation at the thought of an establishment cover-up
and a variety of men fled to the Continent.
The
macaronis have, however, been remembered for their style rather than for
imputed sexual notoriety. We remember the uncouth revolutionary soldier who was
originally mocked by the British as a “Yankee Doodle” for having “Stuck a
feather in his cap / And called it macaroni”. But we’ve forgotten how queerly
peculiar such an act may have seemed in the wake of a trial that bears
comparison with those endured by Wilde a century later. That Americans could
appropriate the song as a patriotic air implies a degree of innocence or,
perhaps, of convenient forgetting.
See also : A
Queer Taste for Macaroni by Dominic Janes. Essay published in : The Public Domain Review , February 22, 2017
The
dandified man of fashion was no stranger to rumours of vice. As “Ferdinand
Twigem” wrote in The Macaroni: A Satire (1773) “what pigmy monsters teem / what
crowds of beaus effeminate are seen” who first blush at their acts of
dissipation but afterward give way to all indulgence. Earlier in the century it
had been the aggressively masculine “rake” who was associated with vices such
as excessive drinking, gambling, and whoring. Effeminate “fops” in the
Restoration and earlier Georgian periods were vapid, enervated men who were
likened to weak and feeble women. Both the rake and the fop were characterised
by their repeated attempts to gain the confidences of respectable women but
were mocked for being, respectively, over- and under-achieving in their endeavours.
Susan Staves is one scholar who has been notably keen to assert that the
allegedly effeminate fop was not some sort of proto-homosexual but rather a
kind of “new man”: “the so-called effeminacy of these old fops was an early if
imperfect attempt at the refinement, civility, and sensitivity most of us would
now say are desirable masculine virtues”. A queer quality had, however, crept
into some uses of the word “fop” by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly
when employed in association with the term “macaroni”.
Yale University
houses an excellent collection of the furniture, objets d’art, books, and
prints once owned by the prominent connoisseur, writer, and politician Horace
Walpole, the son of the man generally referred to as Britain’s first Prime
Minister, Robert Walpole. Horace, who was not a married man, presented himself
as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the
existence of a “Maccaroni club” in 1764 which consisted of “all the travelled
young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses”. This trait of being
“travelled”, or at least adopting certain Continental affectations, was
particularly salient for the identity of the macaroni, and indeed lies behind
the slightly peculiar label itself. Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast
beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly
acquired tastes for Italian cuisine — with a supposed penchant for macaroni
pasta in particular.
As with
food, so it was with the wardrobe — a certain flair for Continental fashion being
an essential aspect of macaroni life, and one mocked in hundreds of satirical
prints. One such print, A Macaroni Dressing Room published in 1772, shows a
group of affected, fashion-obsessed men. At the centre of the print an
individual wearing facial beauty patches has his wig attended to by a
flamboyant hairdresser and his black assistant. Another man practices fencing
and a third plays with a pet cockatoo.
The
implication was not merely that they had fallen prey to the supposed vanity
that was held to characterise women of fashion but also that they were in
thrall to French-derived notions of the elite lifestyle. Dandyism, therefore,
was equated with a treasonous flirtation with the nation’s luxury-obsessed
enemy across the Channel. Furthermore, so Peter McNeill argues, this flair for
outlandish styles can be coded in terms not simply of effeminacy but also of
sexual preference: “by the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to
fashion was read as evidence of a lack of interest in women, or as potentially
unattractive to women”. The macaronis in
their dressing room were, from this point of view, dressing up for the benefit
of each other, and so snubbing the ladies. Indeed, permeating all these late
eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and
dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men
brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the
Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried
Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies
on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats
might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.
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