The Libertine, the Rake, and the Dandy: Personae, Styles, and Affects

Abstract

The parade of sexualized personae that features in this chapter’s title carries a history. Libertines, rakes, and dandies are figures that occur in a sequence that begins in the sixteenth century and effectively comes to an end by the twentieth century, although, admittedly, it is a sequence marked by overlaps and ambiguities. And it is a history each of these figures shares with others. They are jostled by less prominent figures with somewhat similar status: fops, macaronis, coxcombs, and coquettes - to select some eighteenth-century characters from a survey recently compiled by Elaine McGirr. Libertines, rakes, and dandies are also defined in the public sphere against a more respectable, if less spectacular, suite of types who more securely belong to the approved ethos: the pious Christian, the honest laborer, the connoisseur, the man of feeling, the bluestocking - again to select at random. It is no coincidence that the spectrum of types evoked here only approximately corresponds to a modern axis of queerness. Certainly the libertine tradition is marked by the practices and pre-formations of homosexuality - sodomy, sapphism, male effeminacy, homosociability, and so forth - and by the discursive idioms of wit, playfulness, and irony that we readily associate with queer sensibility. Yet libertinism is equally characterized by casual misogyny, phallic violence, voyeurism, female passivity, and other hallmarks of a long, historically entrenched heterosexism. So libertines, rakes, and dandies play a significant part in lesbian and gay literary history, but they do so by showing (once again) that that history did not know a hard hetero-homo distinction until comparatively recently. Indeed, it may be that the emergence of that distinction in its modern form marked the end of the older libertine-rake-dandy assemblage that is under discussion here.