Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire

By Praseeda Gopinath

Exploring the fate of the ideal of the English gentleman once the empire he was meant to embody declined, Praseeda Gopinath argues that the stylization of English masculinity became the central theme, focus, and conceit for many literary texts that represented the "condition of Britain" in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. From the early writings of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh to works by poets and novelists such as Philip Larkin, Ian Fleming, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt, the author shows how Englishmen trafficking in the images of self-restraint, governance, decency, and detachment in the absence of a structuring imperial ethos became what the poet Larkin called "scarecrows of chivalry." Gopinath's study of this masculine ideal under duress reveals the ways in which issues of race, class, and sexuality constructed a gendered narrative of the nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780813933832

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Introduction

English Masculinities in Transition

You cannot say you know England until you know the English gentleman.

V. S. NAIPAUL

When Eric Blair decided to adopt the pseudonym George Orwell—based on England’s patron saint and the little river that ran beyond the garden of his childhood home—he deliberately crafted what he believed to be a quintessentially English everyman persona: an Englishman who was patriotic, but reasonably so; one who believed in the English countryside as the heart of the nation, in the English people, in decency, and in the quotidian virtues of life. He emphasized common sense, egalitarianism, and the empirical perspective, while still believing in the long-standing traditions of a national culture, looking forward and back at the same time. He was the spokesperson for the intelligent and the traditional ordinary Englishman.

In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), part-ethnography and part-autobiography—written for Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club—Orwell calls himself a sufficiently typical example of the English middle class even as he attacks its attitudes and prejudices. The book, published on the eve of World War II, sits on the cusp of massive cultural change. Over the course of the next two decades, England participated in a world war, conceded independence to many of its colonies, and established the welfare state. Ostensibly a documentary account of the poverty in working-class communities and the failure of socialism in Britain, it is actually an ethnographic account of the state of England and what it means to be a middle-class Englishman in a transitory time. As a typical example of the middle-class Englishman, he describes his background and prejudices, and in doing so, he tracks his own evolution from Eric Blair to George Orwell, connecting it to the larger national changes: I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middleclass. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the ’eighties and ’nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded (Road 121). This is a surprisingly accurate rendition of the mood of the 1930s, especially as seen through the perspective of the middle-class Englishman. The interwar years were, as Alison Light has argued, a period of tumultuous change as far as the middle classes were concerned: The ‘middle class’ was undergoing radical revision between the wars, and this revised class included the beautician as well as the civil servant, the florist and the lady doctor … and the manifold differences in between (13–14). This particular description of Orwell’s hyphenated and nuanced background is often used to illustrate the upheavals of the middle classes and the attendant financial and class insecurities of the interwar period. In interesting ways, Orwell the persona, especially in terms of his own non-fictive biographical writings, is synecdochic of national tumult.

As Orwell points out, he came of age after the luxury and privilege of the Edwardian era, when the empire was on the wane and the bright sheen of wealth, power, and prestige was slowly ebbing away from the lower reaches of the upper-middle class and the middle class in general. Orwell’s trajectory reflected this shift, but in the case of his crafted, gendered persona, it also reflected both the decline and the expansion of the class system. Orwell’s belatedness as an upper-middle-class English gentleman enabled him to be aware of the unjust hierarchy that propped up his own cultural, social, and gender delineations, and consequentially allowed him to see himself as a product of those hierarchies. In a proto-Bourdieuvian move, Orwell links class origin to identity and taste. Raymond Williams, in his astute analyses of Orwell’s life and literature, points to Eric Blair’s precarious class position—of being simultaneously dominator and dominated—as instigating a conflict in Blair that brought about a crisis of identity. It is Blair’s double vision that led to the creation of George Orwell.¹ In this interstitial moment, he attempted to shed the fastidiousness and unself-conscious snobbery and gentlemanliness of Eric Blair by reinventing himself as George Orwell. However, his commitment to the values of the gentleman—and, by extension, Englishness—determined his good, solid English name with its associations of St. George and the countryside. Even as Orwell removed himself from the taint of the bourgeoisie’s oppressive hierarchy, he was inescapably encoded by a gendered and classed Englishness that was his cultural inheritance. His ideals of abstract Englishness are inflected by his culturally inherited gentlemanliness.² What becomes apparent is that his gentlemanliness is rendered explicit at the very moment of his self-distanciation from the class of his birth.

Being a gentleman, Orwell could not reject the ideals of the gentleman within which he was belatedly inscribed even as he dismissed bourgeois ideology en masse. He embodied in his persona the crisis and contradictions of the declassed and subsequently new middle-class Englishman: he drew on the upper-middle-class public school values of gentlemanliness while expanding and transmuting them to fit the entire range of clerks, hairdressers, copywriters, traveling salesmen, and advertising agents that rose up the ranks as well as the working classes, or, to use Orwell’s vernacular, the ordinary, decent Englishman. While he persistently distanced himself from his lower-upper-middle-class background, the abstract ideals that he espoused in the name of socialism and Englishness were embedded within his bourgeois gentlemanliness: fair play, brotherhood, decency, honesty, forthrightness, and hardiness. This list reads like a catalog of ideals that headmasters of Victorian/Edwardian public schools would have exhorted their boys to pursue. Indeed, they overlap rather unsurprisingly with the ideals set out by Hely Hutchinson Almond, the headmaster of Loretto in 1897: Truth, purity, courage, simplicity, hardiness and reverence; to set honesty above cleverness, manliness above refinement, character above attainments, moral and physical perfection above abundance of possessions and elaboration of surroundings (qtd. in Mangnan 26). Hence, Orwell’s values for a classless society, which he purports are the values of the English as a whole, are actually values that English gentlemen since the mid-nineteenth century were urged to embody. The belief in the rarified traits of Englishness as divorced from class hierarchy is symptomatic of Orwell’s being etched within hegemonic and naturalized ideals of manliness.

Orwell’s reiteration of the ideal of decency, for instance, as a particularly English virtue that transcends class, is indelibly tied to bourgeois respectability. According to John Rodden, Orwell uses decency to evoke a great variety of attributes which he held in high esteem: simplicity, honesty, homey coziness, warmth, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism [and] grit (Rodden 171). More precisely, these virtues are public school virtues: cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, grit, and honesty are ideals that public school boys were expected to cultivate. Orwell abstracts decency from its hierarchical underpinnings to float free as an intangible English virtue, which English people inherently possess but don’t necessarily enact.

Orwell, then, is a transitional figure whose ideals of masculinity—derived from his own inherited gentlemanliness—shaped and influenced postwar literary representations of masculinity. Considering Orwell in this way also reveals the obscured genealogy of masculinity that runs from the Victorian/Edwardian periods through the postwar era. He marks the move from the still functioning ideals of gentlemanliness in their fragmented form in the late imperial moment to the democratized, post-imperial petit bourgeois mutations of an inherited gentlemanliness adapted to a shrunken ex-centric island, as explored in the works of postwar writers such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain.³

Considering George Orwell as an exemplar and influential figure, Scarecrows of Chivalry argues that the stylization of English masculinity becomes the central theme, focal lens, and formal conceit for many literary texts that represent the condition of Britain in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. This study reveals that alterations in the ideal of the gentleman, forged in the interstices of metropole and colony, are fundamental to the formation of metropolitan Englishness post-1945. Scarecrows of Chivalry, then, unfolds a masculine narrative of the nation, while closely attending to issues of race, sexuality, and class. It tracks how hegemonic masculinity alters as an effect of the increasing diffusion of cultural, economic, and national-imperial power from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Englishmen thus become what Philip Larkin calls scarecrows of chivalry, trafficking in earlier models of masculinity within the contours of the post-imperial, postwar welfare state. Through a careful analysis of the literary adaptation of key facets of the gentleman and of Englishness—self-restraint, governance, disinterestedness or decency, chivalry, and detachment—in postwar literary texts, the following pages will uncover the continued determining presence of an earlier gender script. Though the shifting ideal of the gentleman stretches at least as far back as the sixteenth century,⁴ I am concerned with the mid-nineteenth-century public school avatar of what I call gentlemanliness, which I will outline in detail in the next chapter. Emphasizing the longue durée of the Victorian gentleman, Scarecrows of Chivalry stresses the post-imperial breakup of conventional languages and types of masculinity and expands the standard analytic frames of reference such as the welfare state, World War II, and rising feminism. Methodologically oriented by postcolonial and feminist masculinity studies, this book demonstrates how literary works that have been read as object lessons in gender-neutral class politics are in fact structured by imperial gendered geographies. The postcolonial lens of this study reveals that empire inflects nationally bounded late-imperial and postwar literature, and in doing so it challenges the insular frame within which this literature has usually been read by a generation of critics. The book explores the role of the empire, state infrastructure, and the rise of professionalism (especially welfare state practices) in the literary construction of the male citizen-subject in late-imperial and post-imperial Britain. The narrative arc of my argument connects the periods before and after World War II—two periods that most literary and cultural scholars read as historically distinct. By doing so, the book searches out and emphasizes the connective threads between prewar and postwar masculinities.

Gendering the Nation

Gender as constitutive of the nation, nationalism, and national identity is now axiomatic. As Anne McClintock points out, "All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. … Nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference" (Imperial Leather 352–53). The regulation of sexualities and the enforcement of the heterosexual imperative structure these national and foundational processes. It needs to be emphasized here that the disciplining and surveillance of women proceeds dialectically with the construction of a national masculinity. While woman functions as a metaphor for the nation, men’s relationship to the nation and nationalism is typically metonymic, where men are contiguous with, and representative of, the national whole (Boehmer 6). This book, examining Englishmen as "an equally constructed category" vis-à-vis the imperial nation-state (Mayer 5), follows the making of, and alterations within, this metonymic gender formation through the literature of the mid-century. What becomes evident when one considers masculinity as a constructed category that evolves in a symbiotic relationship with the nation is that all men are not metonymic of the nation (Boehmer 6). The vectors of class, race, and sexuality intersect with masculinity to delineate the particular gender norm that is aligned with the nation.

R. W. Connell’s theorization of hegemonic masculinity differentiates the various orders of masculinity within the nation-state and beyond: that is, those who might be considered metonymic of the nation and those who are marginalized, excluded, and subordinated. Hegemonic masculinity is the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women, only possible when cultural ideals and institutional power are wedded together (77). The theory makes a clear distinction between individual men in power who do not live up to this fantasy ideal in their real lives and the public or corporate ideal or display of masculinity that cannot be shaken. The analytical purchase of Connell’s classic sociological theory lies in its fluidity and its emphasis on relationality. It is a relational construct produced at the intersection of class, race, sexuality, and gender practices.⁵

At its most general, hegemonic masculinity is often taken to stand for manly traits that are naturalized and common sense in a particular social formation. In this book I will use it more precisely to refer to the gendered norms that are held as the most valuable by the politically dominant class, which, in turn, authorize and legitimate its power and status. Because of its long historical perspective, my analysis revises Connell’s conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity. Whereas Connell focuses on the relationality of hegemonic masculinity as a construct within a synchronic frame, I call attention to its alterations within a diachronic frame. As it relies on the Gramscian theory of hegemony, hegemonic masculinity emphasizes the dynamism and changeability of this relational construct through time, and when considered in tandem with the temporal narratives of the nation, such a formulation allows us to see how earlier scripts of masculinity determine changes in hegemonic masculinity and also how it is altered by newer, emergent gender norms. For instance, as we shall see in the case of gentlemanliness in the nineteenth century, the ideal drew from earlier aristocratic investments in social hierarchy and manners and newer bourgeois norms of a work ethic and pragmatism. In this paradigm, hegemonic masculinity at any given point in time is a product of residual, emergent, and dominant ideals of masculinity.⁶ Changes in national masculinity are never isolated and always occur in relation to existing ideas of gender and the demands of the nation.

In examining the alterations in hegemonic masculinity through the mid-century moment, this study intervenes in current postcolonial studies of Englishness. The focus on masculinity reveals that national culture—in this case, Englishness in the twentieth century—is determined by the politics of masculinity. Since Edward Said’s postcolonial call to analyze cultures contrapuntally, or with attention to the mutual imbrication of both colonizer and colonized in the making of modern cultural and social formations (18), there have been a number of rigorously theorized and historicized postcolonial analyses of Englishness, but there have been no full-length studies that consider the relationship between masculinity and Englishness in the late imperial and postwar periods.⁷ I consider the gendered, specifically masculine, genealogy that constitutes national culture. As the epigraph from V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival indicates, the English gentleman was the quintessence of England. Even a casual listing of the traits associated with the English in the popular imagination both abroad and at home connects them to the traits of the gentleman: the stiff upper lip, restraint, decency, love for tradition married to a love of liberalism, common sense, steadfastness, and plain speaking. The traits of gentlemanliness were also the traits of Englishness. I show that what are assumed to be core, essential values of Englishness are gentlemanly, and as the nation changes, so does national masculinity. Masculinity and the nation exist in a symbiotic relationship, and revisions of the nation and national identity imply a reworking of hegemonic/national masculinity: shifts in and adaptations of gentlemanliness are not just sociocultural phenomena but national ones.

Writing in 1959, the cultural and literary critic Martin Green unwittingly drew attention to how dominant ideas of masculinity and the nation change in relation to each other. Asked to comment about the state of the nation and literature for the U.S. Kenyon Review, he declared that the dominant national type, the gentleman, had outlived his usefulness (British Decency 507). He believed that a new type, the decent man, had replaced the gentleman (509). As a disciple of F. R. Leavis’s notions of organic, self-contained Englishness and a decent man himself, Green had a vested interest in the transition. Nevertheless, his observations about the national elevation of a group of male English realist writers are accurate. Green argued that the process, begun with D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, had gained momentum with the success of the Angry Young Men and their Anglo-Saxon rebellion. The Angry Young Man was a much criticized journalistic catchphrase used to describe a number of young male realist writers whose young male protagonists of the lower-middle and the middle classes thumbed their noses at the Establishment. Green does not point to why the gentleman had outlasted his usefulness or why the decent man replaced him. Scarecrows of Chivalry suggests that this purported shift from one style of hegemonic masculinity to another is an effect of the reconfiguration of the nation-state. In part, national reconfiguration involved a gradual turn inward, where England became important in the wake of the collapse of the outward-looking, expansive empire that gradually emptied the nation’s coffers and its essence.⁸ However, tracing the move from gentleman to decent man also reveals another aspect of national shifts: even as the empire shrinks, the nation finds a new confidence in shedding its imperial baggage and embracing the self-contained new nation.

While the imperial nation, as Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have argued, was an outward presence, it was offset by an inward lack (Nairn 285). Building on this, Krishan Kumar points out that there is no epic of English nationalism precisely because England saw itself as an agent of civilization and progress, an elect nation called to "carry out a particular, God-given mission in the world. Only when this sense failed them, only when they had serious qualms about it, did they turn inwards towards themselves, and begin to ask themselves who they were (196; my italics). The institution of the welfare state—which was a necessity to stem economic decline—with its logic of collective responsibility and organic unity, is a defining moment of rediscovery. The new state was popularly seen as a victory of the common Englishman and England’s apparent egalitarianism, a triumph of the people’s war."⁹ The decent man is the figure that emerges to stand for the new nation when the hegemonic ideal of the outward-looking, detached gentleman alters and devolves to fit the postwar nation. Or, as Green so succinctly put it, the decent man takes the place of the gentleman, who has outlasted [his] usefulness.

In keeping with the notion of a continuous genealogy of national masculinity, the attempt to disentangle from the empire begins in the interwar period and, as Alison Light argues, was represented by the home, the little man, and ordinariness (10). The crystallization of the quotidian and ordinary Englishman that occurred in the thirties carried on through the war and beyond. The decent man, an Orwellian invention (at least, in terms of its later circulation), became significantly more important in the national imaginary during World War II and after. Yet, as I have demonstrated, the figure had emerged earlier, in the invention of the Orwell persona and its dissemination in his early novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939). The decent man was a response to the nation’s de-linking from a failing empire and the fear of an impending war. Orwell, through his persona and his protagonists, negotiated the residual presence of the dominant gentlemanly ideal and the emergent masculine values of an ordinary, middle-class, consumerist society. Anthony Hartley contends that the the ‘no-nonsense’ air of an entire postwar generation came from Orwell, whose ideas of decency and common sense underpinned the masculine affects of the postwar writers (State of England 47–48). The ordinary decent man was defined by a concern with right and wrong, decency, marriage, filial and parental duties. He was primarily concerned with every subtlety and profundity of truth, but rendering them plainly, relating them always to the great moral imperatives, invested in the heteronormative family structure and committed to country, civilization and the four-square citizen (Green, British Decency 507–10).

The discourse of the ordinary Englishman and English people gained momentum during World War II, even as there was a corollary cultural emphasis on the potential remasculinization of the nation as an effect of the crisis of war (S. Rose 178–79). British masculinities during World War II lie outside the purview of this book, since the examination of the emergence and consolidation of wartime masculinities would involve a different analytic framework and a different set of discursive considerations; the nation during wartime is in a state of emergency, in which all normal ideas of nationhood and society cease to function and/or are deliberately suspended. Nevertheless, Sonya Rose’s brief but informative essay contends that wartime Britain saw the concretization of a temperate masculinity (193) as opposed to the hypermasculinity of the Nazis, drawing on nineteenth-century ideals of manliness and foregrounding virtues such as emotional reserve, rationality, and stoicism (178–79). This continues the reign of the ideals of gentlemanliness, now disseminated across the hierarchical landscape of English society.

Postwar masculinity, because of its links to the prewar Orwellian influences, is Janus-faced: the Englishman so often celebrated in the literature of the early fifties is shaped by the very discourses of the Establishment or the gentleman that they claim to repudiate. In other words, the new Englishman celebrated by Green and the postwar writers is genealogically linked to the gentleman, and is what I call the post-gentleman. In uncovering these continuities, Scarecrows of Chivalry expands the paradigms for the analysis of the gentleman in the twentieth century from the insular national and the purely personal, and the analysis of the postwar new hero within a social-cultural frame.¹⁰ My distinctly postcolonial argument, because it considers Englishmen and gentlemanliness as determined by the narratives of imperial decline and post-imperial national resurgence, does not see the cultural preoccupation with new masculinities as a social crisis, but as a national preoccupation with how to define the nation-state: redefining the nation is inextricably tied to reworking national masculinity. Most important, my reading allows us to see that the changes in hegemonic masculinity—the shift from the gentleman to post-gentleman—is necessarily coterminous with imperial-national changes. The new man is not new, but rather a reconfiguration of the old dominant ideals. The book reads the upper- and middle-class gentleman and the lower-class, postwar new man as being part of the same discourse of dominant masculinity. In its consideration of gentlemanliness as metonymic of the imperial nation, it also opens up twentieth-century literary explorations of the gentleman as analyses of national masculinity and national-imperial shifts, and not just a search for personal truths by individual authors (Berberich 13).

The term post-gentleman perfectly captures the contradictions and multiple layers inherent in the constructions of postwar masculinity: the turn away from the imperial to the post-imperial; the turn toward the energy and newness of the welfare state and the idea of a new England/Britain; the emergence of a new national masculinity as inescapably contoured by the classed and raced ideals of gentlemanliness that persist, even when the new hero ostensibly dismisses gentlemanliness as outmoded; the reconfiguration of the traits of gentlemanliness; and finally, the overlapping of Englishness and the traits of masculinity. The post-gentleman is signified by the postwar decent man and his cohorts: the Angry Young Man, the common man, the ordinary man. They are all examples of English essence, of the national and/or regional, of the attempts to come to terms with the post-imperial as opposed to the imperial gentleman. Tom Paulin’s reference to personality in his analysis of Philip Larkin’s poetry has broad national resonance when he says, Larkin speaks not for the imperial male—too transcendental a subject that—but for the English male, middle-class, professional, outwardly confident, controlled and in control (239–40). Indeed, my chapter on Philip Larkin traces exactly how Larkin’s post-gentlemanly personae navigate the inherited traits of gentlemanliness in a changing nation, and how much of that control is a painful negotiation of classed, gendered expectations. Scarecrows of Chivalry maps this rearrangement of hegemonic English masculinity from gentleman to ordinary Englishman, from imperial Englishness to post-imperial nation.

The through line of gentlemanliness in the history of Englishness recasts the postwar period not as a moment of rupture, but rather as one of transition. This book will show how the literature of the period treads a double edge: it is simultaneously conservative and iconoclastic; (post)imperial and national; melancholy and confident; old and new. The Janus-faced Englishman, like the nation he symbolizes, looks back in time and ahead: he embodies the melancholia of England’s imperial decline, but also the newly minted egalitarian energy of a self-contained nation. He is conservative in terms of gender and sexual politics, as the new man emerges through an exclusionary assertion of a heteronormative/homosocial masculinity. Yet he is ostensibly progressive in his class politics, because national masculinity expands to include the ordinary EveryEnglishman.

By examining the intertwined relationship between the nation and a dominant masculinity, this study stresses that the national permeates the personal. The literature of the mid-century, ranging from Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) to John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), is littered with examples of men who attempt to remake themselves as men of integrity and worth within the contours of a national masculine ideal. They struggle against and within domesticity: for instance, protagonists like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1937) forge their sense of self within the suburban domestic space in a consumerist world, while those like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) violently resent it, even as they perceive it to be their sole domain of masculine assertion. The national turn penetrates to the very core of personality, as evidenced in Larkin’s male personae. Larkin’s Englishmen struggle with objectivity and self-restraint, traits that are culturally and imperially determined; and as they attempt to conduct their professional and personal lives in an England of lowered horizons, these qualities bleed over into self-consciousness and paralysis. The new hero in literature has one skin too few¹¹ as he shuttles between anxiety and aggression in the post-imperial welfare state. The intimate emotional and social struggles of the postwar man express the anxieties of the nation, not just in terms of a structural alignment, but in the gender scripts that determine what Englishmen should and should not do, how they must and must not behave.

This argument also alters our current understanding of late-imperial and post-imperial writers through its focus on the Englishman and the resulting narrative arc. For example, while Evelyn Waugh is frequently read as a satirist, existing studies have surprisingly overlooked one of the foci of his satire, the travails of the upper-middle- to middle-class gentleman in relation to England and the empire—a fundamental theme that I explore. I also show how the theme of gentlemen and the shifts in the gender ideal connect Orwell’s early works to many of the postwar writers contemporaneously raised to national significance. In the process this study challenges the critically accepted consensus about Orwell’s gender-neutral politics and offers a new gendered take on George Orwell, the persona, and his notions of decency.

Orwell and his postwar disciples—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Philip Larkin, and Robert Conquest, to name a few—have commonly been read within the paradigm of class mobility. These writers have been frequently cited as anti-elitist and anti-modernist (usually conflated) advocates of welfare state egalitarianism: traits that made them seem iconoclastic and representative of the postwar nation. However, they were not all anti-modernist—both Orwell and Larkin frequently cited and celebrated modernist works. Nor did many of the writers endorse welfare state capitalism/socialism; in fact, many of them were rather critical of it. I show that what links most of these writers and makes them seem radically new was their return to, and celebration of, decency, the ordinary man, and heterosexual/heteronormative masculinity. Their politics of masculinity is the vehicle through which they endeavored to dismantle the entitlement and values of the ancien régime, characterized as the Establishment. It is not enough to catalog that these realist male writers were exponents of xenophobia, provincialism, democracy, classlessness, and realism.¹² It is also important to see that these traits for which they are famous emerge from a primary concern about Englishmen struggling to find a place in a transitioning England. Criticism that ignores the issue of masculinity in these texts blindly reads the newness, which is actually an adaptation to the old, as motivated solely by class. It is not. Class is, of course, vitally important, but I argue that it is masculinity and its relationship to the nation, empire, and state along with strategic leverage of class that consistently defines these texts.

The Decent Man and the Postwar Nation

Examining the works of postwar authors such as Amis, Wain, and Ian Fleming with a focus on gender allows us to see the overwhelming narrative focus on the tribulations of being a man in postwar England. These works carefully and deliberately chart the transmutation of the English masculine ideals along a continuous spectrum, from gentleman to decent man. The protagonists work within and through inherited, possibly outmoded imperial gender scripts, the discourses of the welfare state citizen-subject and professionalism. The post-gentleman displaces the gentleman in the national imaginary as the dominant ideal. The traits of the post-gentleman—decency, an ambivalent chivalry, straightforwardness, vigor, moral rectitude, self-interest, detachment—are traits separated from the code of gentlemanliness. They have mutated with the pressures of imperial decline, the rise of welfare state governmental practices, and the insular turn as an imperial nation attempts to assert its post-imperial, postwar identity.

World War II and the ensuing victory had two contradictory effects on the state of the British nation. On the one hand, the prohibitive costs of maintaining control in various parts of the empire and the vanquished nations (Germany, India, Egypt, Palestine, the Far East, as well as several British colonies in Africa) necessitated gradual withdrawal. The relinquishing of control was particularly resonant as Britain was entirely dependent on the United States for financial recovery. On the other hand, the fraught institution of the welfare state, in the midst of this narrative of imperial decline, was a huge accomplishment, a British revolution (Beveridge 17). Economically, politically, and culturally, the welfare state signified the conceptual and geographic demise of the old British empire and the arrival of a newly insular egalitarian nation whose focus was on domestic and socialist liberal policies. The welfare state was the product of John Maynard Keynes’s managed capitalism, where collective interests could modify the actions of private individuals and firms resulting in a stable economy and ensured the continuance of the nation-state (Esty 171). In fact, as Timothy Mitchell points out, the move from free to the managed market redrew the conceptual boundaries of the economy from the inclusive and sprawling British empire to the more significantly exclusive nation as defined by English cultural traditions: The General Theory replaced the abstraction [the market], which had no geographical or political definition, with ‘economic system as a whole,’ a system whose limits corresponded to geopolitical boundaries (89). The reconceptualization of the nation and its relationship to the world was signified by the dropping of the British from the title of the new Commonwealth of Nations in 1949—though Britain still headed the organization.

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, published in 1954, illustrates how this national turn inflected stylizations of English masculinity. Jim Dixon’s masculine subjectivity mirrors the emergence of the egalitarian state from the imperial nation. The novel was contemporaneously read as Zeitgeist literature and seen as ushering in the age of a new man.¹³ My analysis of this, perhaps the most famous of the Angry Young Man novels, sets the tone for the study of the post-gentleman in a post-imperial nation in this book. Lucky Jim is the story of lower-middle-class Jim Dixon, employed as a temporary history lecturer at a provincial university. The narrative satirizes the affectations of the inhabitants of the college. It details Jim’s escapades as he navigates between the despised and pretentious Welches, members of the provincial bourgeoisie, the tortured academic Margaret—with whom he is carrying on an affair—and the beautiful, upper-class Christine, the woman he loves. Welch as the caricature of the gentleman and Jim as the post-gentleman signify Green’s narrative of displacement and national shifts. Jim is the spokesman for the ordinary man, for egalitarian values, for England, and for the redrawn nation. Meanwhile, Welch and his wife are pretentious cosmopolitans, independently wealthy and useless amateurs, and the protectors of an unfair hierarchy. The narrator sympathizes with the uncertainty of Jim’s situation, especially as his vulnerable outsider position is accentuated by the fact that he has to defer and submit to his senior, Professor Welch, in order to be made permanent. He is also bullied by Welch’s son, Bertrand Welch, because of his lower-class credentials. Ultimately, through his display of masculine enthusiasm and common sense, he wins Christine and the approval of her wealthy uncle, Gore-Urquhart, and escapes to a well-paid job in London.

The comic-realist novel of utopian wish-fulfillment portrays three different types of classed masculinity: the lower-middle-class decent man; the provincial, ineffectual upper-middle-class gentleman poseur; and the upper-class natural gentleman who recognizes Jim as a kindred spirit among inauthentic men. The protagonist, Jim Dixon, is poor, but he is possessed of physical, emotional, and intellectual vitality. He embodies this masculine affect: he is on the short side, fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulders that had never been accompanied by any special physical strength or skill (8). He is the ordinary everyman whose physique is decidedly neither upper class nor working class but carries within it an innate sense of power that does not need to be proven in feats of athletic accomplishment. Since his job depends on pleasing Professor Welch, the pseudo-cosmopolitan provincial upper-class gentleman, he must stifle his innate vitality. Welch is tall and weedy, with limp whitening hair (8). Everything about Welch is drooping and symptomatic not just