ABSTRACT
A central concern of people who employed respectability in public discourse was with power. In this chapter, power is treated as a construct of the public sphere, an integral part of discourses of modernity and a definitive conceptual aspect of the modern, projecting promise for improving the human condition but also great danger. Much of the appeal of respectability in the nineteenth century lay in the belief that respectable modes of thinking and acting promoted beneficial uses of power and curbed detrimental ones. The first part of the chapter examines several examples of respectable discourses of power, grouped into categories. It starts with a general consideration of sexual power by comparing characters created by Jane Austen and the Marquis de Sade. It turns to the role of sexual power in respectable discourses of political corruption and then to constructions of corruption in the context of political reform that do not refer significantly to sexuality. The role of respectability in the creation of respectable public images by nineteenth-century European monarchs is examined briefly. Respectable discourses of law and order are approached mainly through Carolyn Conley’s study of criminal justice in Kent. The final category consists of respectable discourses of nations, races, colonies and empires. The second section of Chapter Seven focuses on one of the factors that led to the enthusiastic adoption of public respectability around the world: its attractiveness to individuals and groups who perceived themselves as outsiders in their societies and who wanted to be accepted as insiders. Several instances are examined: post-Mutiny Indian nationalism as embodied in a newspaper of the 1860s, the strategic employment of respectability by minorities in Australia, the conscious adoption of respectability by large numbers of Jews in Europe and the Americas and by most of the suffragist movement in the United States, the creation of a “politics of respectability” by African-American leaders, and the vigorous promotion of respectability in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
