SOURCE: "Barbey's Dandy Narratives," in Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 69-88.

Bernheimer is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he examines Barbey's conceptions of dandyism, gender roles, and sexuality as they relate to his narrative approach in "A Woman's Revenge" and "At a Dinner of Atheists."

The theory of dandyism was set forth in 1844 in a little book called Du dandysme et de George Brummeil by Baudelaire's friend and admirer, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. One of the points of Barbey's essay is that a dandy should never allow himself to love, since loving entails becoming a slave to desire. George Brummell . . . escaped such slavery. His triumphs, notes Barbey, "had the insolence of disinterestedness." He always stopped with women "at the limit of gallantry," keeping them under his intellectual dominion by nullifying their sexual attraction. The dandy...