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22 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
eleven-year period of his personal rule (1629–1640), an attempted-revival of
monarchial absolutism, Charles I was painted by Sir Anthony Van Dyck after
Castiglione’s courtier—“celebrated,” as Roy Strong has written, “as the perfect
cortegiano” (56). Plate 2, Van Dyck’s Charles I à la ciasse, shows the monarch
in a moment of (studied) relaxation; and yet the graceful pose, with the left arm
set akimbo, or bent from the hip, and the hand turned back, reminds the viewer,
as Strong has suggested, that even in repose Charles was essentially a monarch
(56). In showing themselves with arms set akimbo, the aristocrats were
presenting their difference from other classes as a recreation of body through an
act of will(power).
The bourgeoisie saw aristocratic affectation not as self-control, but as a
dissembling of nature. As the physiognomical philosopher John Bulwer
cautioned the orator in 1644, “Shun affectation; for all affectation is odious; and
then others are most moved with our actions when they perceive all things to
flow, as it were, out of the liquid current of nature” (244). 2 Defining the aristocratic
body as dissimulated, the bourgeoisie constructed themselves oppositionally as
“open,” as the Abbé du Bos described it in his Critical Reflections on Poetry and
Painting of 1719. One hundred years later, in his manual for actors and orators,
Gilbert Austin quoted du Bos’s judgment that “nature, herself sincere and
candid, intends that mankind should preserve the same character, by cultivating
simplicity and truth, and banishing every sort of dissimulation that tends to
mischief” (474). This “real” or “inner” self was not that to be discovered in the
formal rhetoric of court portraits, masques, or processions: the “natural” self was
that which would be “visible” only when the subject was not “performing.”
Aristocratic self-display became resistantly represented by the bourgeoisie as
empty shows, dissimulations concealing a lack of social being. The bourgeoisie
associated aristocratic lack of openness with the arbitrariness characteristic of the
period of Charles I’s personal rule and for which he lost his head—an
arbitrariness associated with Italianate Machiavellianism and popery. The
aristocratic adoption of a studied casualness as a way of marking their difference
from the social body was reread by bourgeois critics as a kind of perversion, a
disjunction of the self and the social body.
The juxtaposition of aristocratic affectation and bourgeois openness followed
an already established tenet of the popular science of physiognomy, which held
that identifications of gender, class, race, and so on, could be seen in the lines
and manners of the body. As early as 1644, Bulwer had insisted that the lines of
the body and its movements disclosed “the present humor and state of the mind
and will” (5). Bulwer claimed that gestures indicated the interior complexion of
the individual and were not dependent on culture or custom (16). This
assumption of the purity of the semiotics of gesture had a utilitarian function: it
was, as Bulwer wrote, “a great discoverer of dissimulation, and great direction in
business” (5).
Against the spectacle of the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie argued that the
surfaces of the body were politically meaningful only to the extent that they