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Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
dressed, he has every confidence in himself, and chatters inanely throughout the journey
. . . his favourite subjects being allusions to going out to dinner, sly references to well
known but perfectly respectable actresses, and complaints about the trouble it is to get
into evening dress every night. 9
A further column “Judging a Man by His Buttonhole” adapted the popular and
sentimental language of flowers to an observational code that sorted the discredited
“green carnation brigade” from the passion flower wearing collier, the orchid
sporting “young dog about town” and the rosebud bedecked “ladies man.” 10 Light
hearted though such articles may have been, their jokey pseudosociological tone
endorsed a lively masculine attention to the social detail of everyday appearances
and encouraged the circulation and discussion of fashionable stereotypes in
suburban life. Contemporary critics like Masterman failed entirely, of course, to
see the joke:
No one can seriously diagnose the condition of the “suburbans” today without seriously
considering also the influences of [their] chosen literature. There is nothing obscene about
it, and little that is morally reprehensible. But it is mean and tawdry and debased . . . The
reader passes . . . from one frivolity to another. Now it is a woman adventurer on the
music hall stage, now the principal characters in some “sensational” divorce case, now a
serial story in which the “bounder” expands himself . . . At the end this newspaper world
becomes – to is victim – an epitome and mirror of the whole world. Divorced from the
ancient sanities of manual or skilful labour, of exercise in the open air, absorbed for the
bulk of his day in crowded offices . . . each a unit in a crowd which has drifted away
from the realities of life in a complex, artificial city civilization, he comes to see no other
universe than this – the rejoicing over hired sportsmen . . . the ingenuities of sedentary
guessing competitions, the huge frivolity and ignorance of the world of music hall and
the yellow newspaper. Having attained so dolorous a consummation, perhaps the best
that can be hoped for him is the advent of that friendly bullet which will terminate his
inglorious life. 11
While this celebration of the ephemerality and endless variety of the fashionable
world earned suburban men a condemnation that labeled them as emasculated, the
development of more internalized identities, which drew their influences from the
enclosed domestic world of the suburban home rather than the bright lights and
bachelor stereotypes of the public stage, further aided a characterization of
suburban masculinity and its appearances as effeminate. A renewed pleasure in the
rhythms and material culture of domestic life has been identified by several recent
histories as a defining trait of modern constructions of manliness from the turn of
the century to the outbreak of World War II, though a reaction to the horrors of
trench warfare after 1914 is more generally citied as the cause of the change.
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