Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, Adam Parkes
Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, Adam Parkes, Oxford: OUP, 2023, 326 p., ISBN 978-0-19-286629-5
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1Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege is an ambitious and compelling study of literary representations of the British aristocracy in the inter-war period. It is ambitious because it offers fresh insights into a wide range of works by Elizabeth Bowen, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West and others. It is compelling because, oddly enough, this topic has received little critical attention despite modern writers’ sensitivity to class dynamics, Britishness and power.
2The discussion harnesses two labels, ‘Modernism’ and ‘the Aristocracy’, that both resist clear-cut definitions. In the introduction, Parkes accounts for his choice of the term ‘modernism’, understanding it to encompass the formal and thematic features of writing that challenge norms with a goal to reshape literature. His choice authors, some of whom are only loosely connected to modernism, set out to depict in modernist ways a painful sense of anachronism that afflicted British and European aristocracy. Like modernism, the aristocracy is both rooted in the consciousness of the past while attuned to the circumstances of the present. Also like modernism, its meaning is expansive; it is a fluid concept complicated by its relation to power. Parkes makes use of David Cannadine’s influential work on the ‘unmaking’ of the British aristocracy to delineate the issues that captured writers’ attention. The historian traces the misfortunes that led to the decline of the aristocracy in a post-imperial world during the rise of the democratic middle-class. Political reforms that affected the landed classes in Great Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, together with heavy losses of members of the aristocracy during the First World War, all contributed to the decline of this hereditary class. Parkes is therefore interested in how these developments urged writers ‘to imagine a literary remaking of the aristocracy’ in their fiction (3). His discussion inevitably explores the rise of democracy that redefines ‘aristocracy’ as an emerging elite, ranging from plutocrats to intellectual elites or experts, the drop of the definite article being symbolically indicative of the reshaping of the socio-political fabric. Thus, the elusive meanings of both ‘Modernism’ and ‘the Aristocracy’ fruitfully accommodate engaging readings of the selected fictions and essays.
3The five chapters of the book are organized around attitudes, affects or moods that, according to Parkes, characterize literary representations of aristocrats. At times used as tropes to discuss modernist features of the narratives, these themes are stupidity, boredom, nostalgia, sophistication, kindness and cruelty. Signposting how these themes are embedded in the texts, nearly all chapter titles and subheadings are quotes from the novels and essays, while the book’s subtitle Monsters of English Privilege comes from one of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels discussed in a Coda that extends the themes to more contemporary works.
4Avital Ronell’s and Keston Sutherland’s explorations of good and bad stupidity provide the first chapter with a useful framework to examine the imaginative possibilities made available to modern writers. Investigating how it became a means of Othering, Ronell understands stupidity as a mark of socio-political segregation that legitimizes the power of a ruling elite. Stupidity excludes the Other, and creates borders and castes. Ronell follows Deleuze’s work on bêtise that distinguishes the bad stupidity of bourgeois Enlightenment ideals from the good stupidity that resists them. Sutherland similarly looks at the origin of stupidity and its function in satire, philosophy and art, recalling that stupidity generates Aristotelian non-understanding, or stupefaction, that inspires thought. Good and bad stupidity relate to language, the latter constituted by empty, meaningless repetition, while the former challenges emptiness and conventions. Both theorists view, then, stupidity in terms of class, Sutherland’s Marxist approach associating bourgeois and capitalist ideology with idiocy. In this light, the idle chatter of aspiring intellectual aristocrats assembled in country houses, as depicted by D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, reads as a satire of the assumed intellectual vacancy of the aristocracy, although both writers also saw stupidity among the middle and working classes. The satire points to the need to define the features of a new ruling class, of a ‘natural aristocracy’ (57), an issue Lawrence and Huxley both address by ‘unsettl[ing] the very categories of stupidity and intelligence’ (28). Parkes makes good use of Huxley’s comments on Wordsworth’s celebration of the idiot to probe his imaginative depictions of stupidity, and also turns to Huxley’s essays on eugenics to shed light on the intellectual assets and limitations of his fictional managerial experts, the Alpha Pluses.
5In the second chapter, Parkes suggests that boredom is the aesthetic and affective companion of stupidity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest use of the term ‘bored’ is in Lord Byron’s Don Juan where the Bores and the Bored, ‘two mighty tribes’, form society. Defined by Schopenhauer as the absence of new desire, boredom is identified by both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard as ‘a definitive aristocratic attitude’ (69) and Heidegger, who wrote extensively on the topic, historicizes boredom as a mood particularly attuned to an age of expanding capitalism and technology. Parkes finds in Elizabeth Bowen’s and Evelyn Waugh’s fictional aristocrats evidence that boredom is both historical and trans-historical, situational and existential. Bowen’s depictions of the demise of the landed class in Ireland play, he writes, on the discrepancy between the characters not ‘know[ing] what they are waiting for, and the historical knowledge of her readers, who do’ (77). Situational boredom is also existential in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust where waiting turns boredom into a ‘constant postponement of death’ (71).
6Like boredom, nostalgia is the index of socio-economic change in the inter-war years. Denoting acute homesickness, nostalgia involves specific temporal and spatial coordinates that are embedded in the structure of the narratives. Drawing more specifically from the work of French philologist Barbara Cassin, who looks at how language may generate an alternative notion of home to cope with uprootedness, in his third chapter Parkes capitalizes on the distinction between Heimweh, a longing to go back, and Sehnsucht, a painful yearning for things to come, to tease this sense of dislocation out of works by Rebecca West, Vita Sackville-West, Ford Madox Ford and T. S. Eliot. Thanks to structural readings, his focus on country house nostalgia, in particular, traces the narrative circles, ellipses and lines, in other words the ‘shapes nostalgia makes’ in their fiction and poems (18).
7In the fourth chapter, Parkes asks whether American elites may be considered as ‘aristocratic’ in view of their transatlantic input in British and European circles through marriage and business. Sophistication, taken as a defining feature of the aristocracy, provides the angle to explore encounters with an emerging plutocracy in Edith Wharton’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. Parkes draws an astute parallel between their social, political, financial and intellectual aristocratic recreations and the American reinvention of Modernism. Fictional American elites may not always share European aristocrats’ boredom and nostalgia, but introducing a transatlantic approach at this point in the book is timely since they may, like their European counterparts, collapse kindness and cruelty, the antonymic topic of the final chapter. Parkes historicizes literary representations of kindness and cruelty by engaging with genres, the Gothic for instance, and also with the Marquis de Sade’s influence on fiction. Ford, Lawrence, Waugh and Bowen provide Parkes with case studies of casual cruelty and at times of authorial aggression towards the readers, similar to Surrealist Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty which, in the inter-war years, promoted a new language in order to confront the audience with the dark aspects of human existence.
8Parkes’s densely written book conveys his enthusiasm for his original topic and offers detailed readings that combine thematic and structural approaches with literary history and theory. This welcome addition to modernist studies will benefit scholars interested in writers’ renderings of class dynamics in the inter-war years.
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Shirley Bricout, « Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege, Adam Parkes », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 69 | 2025, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2025, consulté le 21 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/18367 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158kr
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