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Long Live the English Gentleman
Praseeda Gopinath. Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013. 280 pp. $29.50 paper. $59.50 cloth. $29.50 e-book.
Praseeda Gopinath explores the intertwined discourses of gentlemanliness and imperialism across the twentieth century. As the emblem of Englishness, the gentleman loses its authority as the British Empire contracts, and reinvests itselfas the symbolofa resurgent national culture of postwar England. While this narrative of decline and revival is persuasive, it also risks stabilizing the concepts of the "gentleman" and "Englishness. "
Keywords: empire / gentleman / masculinity / twentieth century
One of the most recognizable figures in English literature and culture, the gentleman stands for a set of virtues: duty, impartiality, self-restraint. But perceptions and characterizations of the gentleman have also been imbued with anxieties, longings, and ambiguities: Pip's aspiration to be a gentleman is founded on misrecognition, and leaves him with more frustration than fulfillment. Praseeda Gopinath's Scarecrows of Chivalry offers a compelling account of the transformation of the English gentleman across the twentieth century.
Through close analysis of canonical and less canonical works by Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, Salman Rushdie, and others, Gopinath argues that gentlemanliness, as a metropolitan gender ideal, loses its authority in the wake of British imperial decline, and reinvents itself as the symbol of a resurgent national culture of postwar England. According to Gopinath, gentlemanliness not only designates "hegemonic masculinity," but can also be read as a national allegory (6). Her book traces the parallel changes in British imperial power and literary representations of the gentleman.
In her reading...