Romantic Circles

Significance

This print connects dandies to artistic commodification, effeminacy, and homosexual desire. The dandies are men who value art, both the performing arts and the sartorial arts of their own persons. The conflation of the dandy and the opera-lover in this print suggests that dandies not only use fashion to create themselves as works of art, but that they also liken themselves to the artists they admire on stage. This is most pronounced in the dandy on the left, whose gesturing arms and widespread hand mirror the pose of the opera singer. Yet the opera singer is not a typical performing artist; he is a castrato, a eunuch who represents effeminate and enfeebled masculinity at its height. The castrato is both a monstrous form of masculinity—associated with luxury, enervation, and sodomy—and a highly sought after commodity whose voice is a prized rarity (Nussbaum 34-5). By modeling himself after the castrato, the dandy similarly becomes an exceptional commodity that is both prized for its artistry and denigrated for its anomaly. This print’s emphasis on dandies as a group whose admiration for the castrato is taken to the extreme counters the dominant interpretation of the dandy as an excessively autonomous and stoic individual, a figure who makes himself an artwork so successfully that he can be neither imitated nor commodified (Garelick). This print depicts dandies not as self-created, idiosyncratic individuals, but as a social unit formed from a shared desire for artistic commodities. A homogenous group of opera lovers, these dandies display many of the characteristics associated with London’s sodomite sub-cultures, such as effeminacy, secrecy, and hyper-sexuality (Trumbach). Each dandy is feminized by both his hysterical behavior and his sartorial appearance. Their cinched waists, the high waistlines of their pants and jackets, and their exaggerated chests liken them to contemporary women in empire-waist dresses, while the fan on the floor in the foreground is also a highly feminized accessory. As the text emphasizes, it is the performance of a castrato opera singer, aptly named “Signeur Nonballenas,” who has thrown one of the dandies into “raptures,” a word that conjures sexual ecstasy, and has caused him to faint. The other dandies also refer to the fainter with terms of endearment, such as “dear” and “love,” while the three dandies who support the fainter stand between his legs and grasp his chest. Like the opera singer, each dandy is both male (a “Signeur”) and emasculated (“Nonballenas”), representing homosexual desire as a contradiction. The two candles on the table also register as phallic symbols, one phallus leaning towards the other, while the chamber pot under the couch alludes to bodily functions. Finally, the closing of the curtain signals that this opera box in the public theater is about to become a private space, one in which illicit activity could occur unseen.