ABSTRACT
Although many individual elements of respectability obviously continue to exist today as cultural traits that frame daily behavior, respectability as a public construct – the principal subject of the book – has all but disappeared except in a few places. Some of the discourses of respectability have been reconstituted within others under different names, but the structure of respectability as a map of the modern long ago lost most of its coherence. How and why did this happen? Chapter Eight first briefly suggests a few general causes, including overt criticism of respectability in the public sphere, the appearance of a fashion for presenting respectability as a form of bourgeois hypocrisy, and, late in the nineteenth century, a growing tendency to treat respectability as the bearer of an “unnatural” morality that repressed sexuality. Against these, however, must be set the adoption of respectability as cultural context and public construct across the globe. Direct attacks on respectability seem to have been a less important factor in the loss of coherence than were perceptions, expressed in the public sphere, that respectability failed to reflect significant aspects of the modern world and that the strategic adoption of respectability to promote inclusion was not as effective as had been thought. Changes in perceptions of respectability’s relationship to the world are explored in several popular works of fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde displays the disintegration of the self-respecting self and the futility of moral maps of the social environment. Émile Zola’s Germinal implies that objective observation of social reality produces a more useful social map than does respectability – even though Zola’s view of how people of all social class should behave actually corresponds closely to elements of respectability. Oscar Wilde’s comic play An Ideal Husband casts doubt on the idea that respectability (in the sense of moral competence) can be the principal guide to political behavior. G.K. Chesterton’s novella The Man Who Was Thursday strongly defends respectability, but the fact that respectability is effectively turned into an ideology suggests that it has lost its claim to standing above politics and interest. The chapter then turns to events that demonstrated respectability’s weakness as a means of affording inclusion: the aftermath of the suppression of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in India. The chapter ends by noting survivals of nineteenth-century public respectability: as part of the habitus of modern community life and as a recognizable part of a number of important contemporary global discourses, especially those of rights and the environment. It reiterates the argument that nineteenth-century respectability was an important factor in the construction of the modern world.
