Macaronic Mediterranean : the queer fluidities of the eighteenth-century imagination

Abstract

Taking my cue from a neglected play – Robert Hitchcock's The Macaroni. A Comedy (1773) – I explore the compelling and contradictory nuances of its titular figure, both as a particular dramatic character and as a sweeping cultural phenomenon at the latter end of the long eighteenth century. As a cultural icon, the macaronis were young men who turned themselves, through their language, mannerisms, and ludicrous fashion, into a counter-image of British self-perceptions. At a particularly volatile period in history when the Empire was invested in consolidating Britishness, the macaronis threatened to wash it all away by importing a distinctly Mediterranean perspective to bear on various facets of British identity. The macaronis' attack-by-parody took to task, especially, contemporaneous imaginaries around masculinity, and they were in turn derided, even dehumanised, for their flamboyant play with gender. Considering their provocation as one which takes the form of clashing conceptual borders (geographical, political, temporal, gendered), this article undertakes a queer-historical perspective in examining eighteenth-century British relations with the Mediterranean region, its sea, and its linguistic landscape. Ultimately, this essay examines how this relation's visual-semiotic framework foregrounds a poetics of fluidity upon which any constructed solidity is mere display. As a character, Hitchcock's macaroni, pointedly named Epicene, is an unhappy one, trapped between the demands of conventional masculinity and the appealing liquification of gender binaries. He, too, will have his say occasionally, if we can hear him against what his author intended.