Abstract
The creation of a villain starts with their very appearance. In this chapter, we’ll explore how the dapper antagonist utilizes clothing to bypass class boundaries. We’ll explore three works whose characters rely on their mode of dress: Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Heathcliff of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. To accompany our exploration will be two seminal sociological works in performativity: Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
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References
Brontë, Emily. 2011. Wuthering Heights. New York: Signet Classics.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. 1974. The Great Gatsby. New York: Bantam Books.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wilde, Oscar. 1995. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Signet Classics.
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Paparella, S. (2021). Dressed to Kill: Manipulating Perceived Social Class Through the Con of Clothing in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Fiction. In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_18
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