Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Erin Mackie. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 231pp. $57.00 USD (hardback), $29.95 USD (paperback). ISBN 9781421413853.In this work, Erin Mackie looks at a collection of very well-known works, John Gay's Beggars Opera (1728), Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), as well as some rather obscure works such as the nineteenth-century Dick Turpin romance, Rockwood ( 1834) by William Harrison Ainsworth. Mackie argues that behind, beside, alongside, and inside the civil, mild-mannered gentleman who emerged as the ideal masculine type in the eighteenth century, other types of masculinity were on display. These were the "outlawed" and old-fashioned, yet potent figures of the rakes, highwaymen, and pirates of the title-who were not so much oppositional to the ideal gentleman as they were a formative and constituent, if paradoxical, part of that ideal. The old Adam-or Dick Turpin-still lurks in the "legitimate" gentleman, for as Mackie points out in her introductory chapter, "That masculine prestige clings so tenaciously to illicit modes of conduct through three centuries speaks to ways in which masculine power continues to rely on modes of privilege, aggression, and self-authorization that violate the moral, social, and legal dictates that constitute its own legitimacy" (2). Yes indeed, and where would much modern cinema and television entertainment be if the "good" cop upholding civil society, or the pleasant law-abiding doctor set upon by villains, could not, with great ease, call upon wells of violence (and appropriate hardware) and side-step the law to vanquish villains and uphold the law? Dr. Mackie's insight that masculinity, even when tamed to Bevil-like proportions, still implies and instantiates, if not violence, the capacity for violence, is worth stating, but perhaps not for quite so many chapters. The performative nature of rakish behavior and the glamour of the rake is frequently mentioned, and George Etherege's Dorimant is mentioned, as a possible portrait of the Earl of Rochester and as part of a discussion of the relationship of the rake and the fop. Oddly enough, although rakes-not just Dorimant but more outrageous rakes such as Nathaniel Lee's Nemours or Aphra Behn's Willmore-might be considered part of a cultural discussion on the role and nature of the rake (of his absurdity or cavalier old-fashioned nature), few are ever mentioned. Indeed, generally the stage role of rakes, highwaymen, and pirates is ignored and all texts, novels, plays, essays, are flattened out: gender occludes genre. Equally, strangely absent is any discussion of those plays that sought to portray the new "hegemonic" gentleman-or any discussion of gender as performance.This book's lively and attractive title, and the engaging subheadings (e.g., "Boys will be Boys"), and chapter headings (e.g., "Romancing the Highwayman") suggest an equally lively text. Unfortunately this is not the case; the writing itself is often rather turgid, and unnecessarily heavy-going. The statement that ". . . this study suggests that the chiefest part' of the romantic highwayman and of his outlaw brothers lives on for centuries in culturally mythic figures unconfined by, though always responsive to, genre and legible as sorts of cultural palimpsests copied in scripts that trace continuity even as they shift with history" (25) really takes too long to unpack-would a statement to the effect that, "these figures have retained their place and popularity and much of their nature while also changing as time passes" miss a great deal of the implied profundity of the thought? Or ever simpler yet, as Raymond Williams pointed out, nothing is lost in culture. However, "mythic figures" moving through time and place (and mostly major works of literature) is very much Mackie's topic: she rejects the "imposition of positivist historical reality" in favor of accounts of the ways mythic figures emerge and the purposes they serve (74), which may explain the rather shaky historical assumptions in the work. …