Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege

In our current age of unprecedented income inequality, it was perhaps unsurprising to witness the critical success in the last year of two fables of under-class revenge: Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (2023), in which Oxford scholarship-recipient Oliver Quick cons and murders his way into ownership of the film’s titular estate, and Netflix’s limited series Ripley (2024), a reboot of Patricia Highsmith’s infamous antihero, Thomas Ripley, who cons and murders his way into the literal shoes of American dilettante, Dickie Greenleaf. If, on the surface, both these works trade on their audiences’ desires to overturn inequality through a ruthless disposal of the wealthy elite, their stylish and stylized aesthetics nevertheless depend on both the attractiveness of upper-class forms and a depiction of upward social mobility as parasitic and even monstrous.Despite its subtitle, Adam Parkes’s Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege traces similarly ambivalent structures in modernist texts from a century prior to our current moment (indeed, the fables of Quick and, to a lesser extent, Ripley can be read as reframings of Charles Ryder’s story in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a prominent text for Parkes’s study). While the various writers who populate Parkes’s archive frequently shine a critical light on the monstrous means by which the aristocracy sought to maintain its cachet in an age of waning influence (be that through rhetorical, economic, or physical violence), their creations—and indeed their very style—often mine upper-class signifiers for aesthetic effect. As a reminder of Western literature’s longstanding, uneasy investment in the idea of a privileged class, this work is timely.In the context of what David Cannadine has described as the “unmaking of the British upper classes” in the first half of the twentieth century (qtd. on 1), Parkes’s monograph charts a “widespread and newly intensified fascination” in modernist writing “either with flesh-and-blood aristocrats or with their cultural surrogates” (2). While large parts of this book are dedicated to interrogating modernist fiction’s mobilization of characters drawn from an expansively defined aristocracy of exclusive, wealthy families often associated with large estates, much critical energy is also devoted to thinking through the ways in which writers of this period engaged in an “imaginative remaking” of the aristocracy (3).A great strength of this book is its dual focus not only on how modernist writing represented the aristocracy—its historical trajectory, attitudes, and affects—but also on how this subject matter shaped “the form and style” of “literary modernism as an aesthetic project” (15). Built on a broad assortment of close readings of canonical and more obscure modernist texts (Edith Wharton’s unfinished The Buccaneers plays a surprisingly important part), this approach pays dividends in extended sections that seek to excavate the multivalent suggestiveness of key passages. Parkes is an especially astute reader of Elizabeth Bowen’s style, for instance, with his own writing, at times, mimicking the paratactic strangeness of her syntax as in this delightful reflection on the bathetic deflation of a moment of threatened violence in The Last September: “Action dwindles into non-event; tragedy limps off to collapse into the arms of dull farce; boredom resumes its intimacy with stupidity” (86).Parkes anatomically organizes his study around key tropes, “a cluster of attitudes, affects, and moods” that “literary modernism attributes to aristocracy” (17). So, in successive chapters, we get analysis of: stupidity in the interwar fiction of D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Huxley; upper-class boredom in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Evelyn Waugh; country-house nostalgia primarily in novels by D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford (with a brief detour through T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets); transatlantic sophistication as imagined by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton; and, in the final chapter, benevolence and cruelty in the fiction of Ford, Lawrence, Waugh, and Bowen. Parkes’s thematic approach allows for a varied and complex series of arguments about the imaginative purchase of the aristocracy for these writers. Of course, a disadvantage of this approach is that, at times, it is difficult to ascertain just what cohesively can be said about the ways in which these diverse writers approach the somewhat amorphous cultural category of the British upper class.Readers of Edith Wharton will be most interested in the monograph’s fourth chapter in which Parkes charts how her and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictions “grant aristocratic status to their American characters” (182). The trope of “sophistication” functions in this chapter as a description both of the “worldly knowingness” by which aristocratic characters identify each other and of the complex styles used by these two American authors (202). In the wake of Henry James’s international narratives, Fitzgerald’s and Wharton’s Americans “press ever-stronger claims for consideration as eminent, even essential, actors on the stage of the transatlantic social elite” (185). James’s infamously baroque late fiction serves as a counterpoint to the stylistic choices of his compatriots—it is the relatively “easy legibility” of Wharton’s novels and the “beguilingly accessible form” of Fitzgerald’s writing that pose new kinds of interpretive challenges (186, 187). Both novelists, Parkes suggests, allow an “unusually inviting” style, “alternately (and often simultaneously) accessible and opaque” to trouble their readers’ navigation of aristocratic sophistication (187).In this context, Parkes reads Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night alongside Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. The story of Dick Diver, as Parkes rightly notes, ties the New World elite’s failed efforts to perform aristocratic values to a fateful fulfilment of the future promised by Fitzgerald’s “unflattering sketches of Old World aristocrats” (190). But where Dick “suffers from the ambivalence of class division” (199), Fitzgerald ask his readers to adopt a more optimistic form of ambivalence, free from the “intertwined consolations of banal emotionalism or moralistic judgment” (200). Making a case for the modernism of Wharton’s approach, Parkes notes how The Age of Innocence’s limited third-person narration strikes a similar balance between “ironic distance” and “sympathy” (202). Where the aesthetically sophisticated Newland Archer lacks the social sophistication necessary for escaping New York’s labyrinthine customs and codes, Wharton’s style encourages an adaptive, flexible form of reading capable of traversing the novel’s contending versions of sophistication. This argument turns around analysis of the “monstrous obesity” of Catherine Mingott, whose layers of fat become a figure for the “monstrous adaptability” demanded by old New York (210), and Dallas Archer, who becomes the plain-speaking embodiment of the “sympathy and sophistication” required to appreciate the novel’s representation of a paradoxically rigid yet ever-shifting social system (211).The unfinished and posthumously published historical novel The Buccaneers forms the surprising focus of Parkes’s reading of Wharton. Annabelle (Nan) St. George, with her “distinctive combination of unsophistication, curiosity, and sympathy” is, Parkes argues, key to the novel’s imagining of an American resuscitation of the British aristocracy, “mediat[ing] that aristocracy to itself” (223). Where Nan brings an outlook both newly “liberating” (227) yet preternaturally imbued with “some innate feeling for England” (226) to Guy Thwarte’s estate, Honourslove, Guy’s own appreciation of his family home and Nan proves reinvigorated by the mostly elided story of his profitable adventures in Brazil. In this context, the synopsis’s planned union of Guy and Nan, banished to South Africa at the periphery of empire, would have brought to fruition the novel’s implicit suggestion that “aristocratic self-preservation and renewal” rest on “imperialistic presumptions of racially-marked socio-economic hierarchy and its attendant freedoms” (231). Ultimately, Parkes suggests, the novel’s unfinished state may bespeak a broader “air of irresolution” underlying Wharton’s imagining of aristocratic futures (233). Parkes’s close attention to differences across the manuscript, typescript, and synopsis of The Buccaneers will no doubt generate further discussions of this fascinating unfinished novel.The uncertain fate of Guy and Nan, in search of “a different kind of aristocratic identity” marked more by “structures of thought and feeling” than by bloodlines and inherited wealth (234), exemplifies a key thread throughout Parkes’s book. As a sign of both the attractiveness and potential redundancy of a cultural elite, modernist writers, according to Parkes, frequently drive their works toward alternative circles of privilege for both their characters and their envisaged readers. This argument becomes more pronounced in the book’s final chapter where we encounter: Christopher and Valentine’s “middle-class aristocracy” founded in “a materially circumscribed benevolence” at the conclusion to Parade’s End (250, 251); Connie’s and Mellors’s claims on an “aristocracy of touch” in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (266); Charles Ryder’s final vision of a “spiritual aristocracy” in Brideshead Revisited (275); and Bowen’s evocation of “high aristocratic benevolence” as a style of narration in the closing pages of The Heat of the Day (285).The sheer variety of these reimagined structures of belonging might invite scepticism as to the value of understanding all of them under the umbrella of aristocracy. In testament, however, to Parkes’s twinned exegesis of privilege and affect in these novels, the term “aristocratic” feels right. Just as the tropes driving Saltburn and Ripley suggest, the idea that creators of prestige texts are drawn to fantasies of deposing and extending elite social structures rings true.

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