The myth of the female dandy (Dandyism in nineteenth-century France)

Much discussion of dandyism in nineteenth-century France has focused on the relationship between this concept and an implicitly monolithic model of masculine identity initially associated with Beau Brummell. This article questions this tendency in two ways. First, it argues that male dandyism was more historically and linguistically context-dependent than has typically been acknowledged. The shifting semantics of dandyism become evident once canonical representations are reintegrated into the non-literary genres and discourses from which they emerged, including journalism, the Parisian literary physiology, and contemporaneous writing on temperament and psychology. The typologies, terms and concepts which circulated within these amorphous discourses frequently shaped contemporaneous readers' responses to literary texts. Second, the article seeks to outline a body of neglected discourse about female dandies and related types such as the lionne, focusing on texts by Barbey d'Aurevilly produced during the 1840s. These problematic figures, it proposes, illustrate the intense ambivalence generated by the concept of female exception in mid-nineteenth-century France, a cultural context in which female anomaly was viewed at once as a logical impossibility, a pathology, and an instance of moral monstrosity or sin.