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영어

This paper examines the social phenomena of dandy in nineteenth century England and aims to open a new perspective on dandyism. A dandy has been identified as an upper class young man who dedicated himself to improving his appearance and dandyism has been criticized as the philosophy of idleness. This paper argues that a dandy should not be regarded merely as a purely ornamental existence and dandyism not as a principle of displaying vanity. A dandy has to be repositioned as a resister against the reign of the bourgeois respectability and dandyism redefined as an opposition to the middle class ideology by the aristocracy. Nineteenth-Century England was dominated by the middle class ideology founded on the work ethics which stressed productive labor and on the gender norms which highly valued utilitarian masculinity. A dandy rejected the value of hard work by practicing the principle of idleness and subverted the gender ideology through making himself a spectacle and desiring other’s gazes. In dreaming of a return to the old system in which class hierarchy had been stable, dandyism was a regressive and anachronistic movement and doomed to failure.