Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege by Adam Parkes (review)

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• Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege by Adam Parkes
• Alex Murray

PARKES, ADAM. Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 336 pp. $100.00 hardcover.

As is perhaps appropriate for the subject at hand, Adam Parkes has written a monumental, authoritative study of aristocracy in British modernism. Evidently the product of many decades of scholarship, it will remain the final word on the topic for some time, and an important contribution to modernist studies more generally. As Parkes notes in his introduction, this was a period in which the British aristocracy suffered a series of blows which David Cannadine influentially labelled the “unmaking” of the British aristocratic and landed classes: from the agricultural crises of the 1870s through 1890s, the introduction of an estate tax with the Finance Act of 1894, the death of significant numbers of the aristocracy during the First World War, the loss of landholdings in Ireland following the War of Independence, and the erosion of income from overseas estates and investments as the empire crumbled. More broadly, the spread of suffrage, as well as the culture of democracy and the democratization of culture, fundamentally changed British views of class. Parkes’s central thesis is that modernist literature undertook an “imaginative remaking” of the British aristocracy that cannot be grasped simply as critique or celebration, but as a series of moods (3). As Parkes notes, given how pervasive aristocratic culture is in literary modernism, it is striking that it “has been sitting in plain sight for so long that it’s easy to forget it’s there” (15). While there are a great many books on the fascist politics of British and European modernisms (Jameson, Carlston, Hewitt, Frost), and recent work on conservatism (Hadjiyiannis), the aristocratic has been neglected: like all good books, Modernism and the Aristocracy is so essential that it’s almost impossible to understand why it hasn’t been written before.

Parkes organizes his study around a “cluster of attitudes, affects, and moods, which operate as tropes” (17). This gives the book a dynamic structure, although at times it can be a little disorienting, with authors appearing in multiple chapters or particularly important authors only getting brief cameos. Chapter One examines the stupidity of aristocracy in D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley (although as the chapter develops Huxley takes center stage). They are, of course, both deeply reactionary and anti-democratic writers, but as Parkes explains, each “hanker[s] after some form of aristocracy, natural and intuitive in Lawrence’s case, rational and intellectual in Huxley’s,” which makes them both trenchant critics of the stupidity of hereditary aristocracy (23). Parkes, drawing on Deleuze, Ronell, and others, distinguishes between the negative stupidity of vapid conversation and convention and the productive stupidity which unsettles shibboleths. Lawrence and [End Page 110] Huxley “unsettle the very categories of stupidity and intelligence, collapsing the social and political hierarchicalism with which they are sometimes associated” (28). Ranging widely, at times frenetically, across the novels, essays, and letters of both authors, Parkes offers an impressive anatomization of the ways in which Lawrence and Huxley challenge the pretensions of the aristocratic cliques they encountered at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor, as well as Lawrence’s celebration of an “aristocracy of touch” (35), and Huxley’s ambivalence as to the possibility of an aristocracy of the intellect.

The second chapter focuses on aristocratic boredom in Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen. Parkes distinguishes between historical/situational boredom (a product of the conditions of modernity) and profound or existential boredom, arguing that both Waugh and Bowen push “boredom to its limits as an historical category” (71). Parkes’s reading of Bowen’s The Last September (1929) is wonderful, convincingly arguing that Bowen “leaves her privileged characters in a state of suspension, their eminence toppled, their future uncertain in the democratic, middle-class, post-imperial world” (104). Waugh presents a rather murkier picture in that he is scathing about modern aristocracy in A Handful of Dust, but deeply sceptical of the middle-class ‘Age of Hooper’ in Brideshead Revisited. I would have liked to have heard a little more from Parkes about boredom and...