A dandy[ (also known as a beau or gallant is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance in a cult of Self.Historically, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain, a dandy, who was self-made, often strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background. Though previous manifestations of the petit-maître (French for small master) and the Muscadin have been noted by John C. Prevost, the modern practice of dandyism first appeared in the revolutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. The dandy cultivated skeptical reserve, yet to such extremes that the novelist George Meredith, himself no dandy, once defined cynicism as intellectual dandyism; nevertheless, the Scarlet Pimpernel is one of the great dandies of literature. Some took a more benign view; Thomas Carlyle in his book Sartor Resartus, wrote that a dandy was no more than a clothes-wearing man. Honoré de Balzac introduced the perfectly worldly and unmoved Henri de Marsay in La fille aux yeux dor (1835), a part of La Comédie Humaine, who fulfils at first the model of a perfect dandy, until an obsessive love-pursuit unravels him in passionate and murderous jealousy. Charles Baudelaire, in the later, metaphysical phase of dandyism defined the dandy as one who elevates æsthetics to a living religion,[6] that the dandys mere existence reproaches the responsible citizen of the middle class: Dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism and These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking .... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind. The linkage of clothing with political protest had become a particularly English characteristic during the 18th century. Given these connotations, dandyism can be seen as a political protestation against the rise of levelling egalitarian principles, often including nostalgic adherence to feudal or pre-industrial values, such as the ideals of the perfect gentleman or the autonomous aristocrat, though paradoxically, the dandy required an audience, as Susann Schmid observed in examining the successfully marketed lives of Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron, who exemplify the dandys roles in the public sphere, both as writers and as personae providing sources of gossip and scandal. The origin of the word is uncertain. Eccentricity, defined as taking characteristics such as dress and appearance to extremes, began to be applied generally to human behavior in the 1770s; similarly, the word dandy first appears in the late 18th century: In the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, the first verse and chorus of Yankee Doodle derided the alleged poverty and rough manners of American-citizen colonists, suggesting that whereas a fine horse and gold-braided clothing (mac[c]aroni) were required to set a dandy apart from those around him, the average American-citizen colonists means were so meager that ownership of a mere pony and a few feathers for personal ornamentation would qualify one of them as a dandy by comparison to and/or in the minds of his even less sophisticated Eurasian compatriots.A slightly later Scottish border ballad, circa 1780,also features the word, but probably without all the contextual aspects of its more recent meaning. The original, full form of dandy may have been jack-a-dandy. It was a vogue word during the Napoleonic Wars. In that contemporary slang, a dandy was differentiated from a fop in that the dandys dress was more refined and sober than the fops. In the twenty-first century, the word dandy is a jocular, often sarcastic adjective meaning fine or great; when used in the form of a noun, it refers to a well-groomed and well-dressed man, but often to one who is also self-absorbed. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 13:37:12 +0000
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