(Dickinson writes of the Anglophilia) “This stylization extends to a whole way of life, not only the acquisition of clothing. Gestures, postures, places of residence, sexuality and the body are all constructed within the confines of style.”
Anglophiles, in this regard, can be identified not merely by their great admiration for all things English but by their performativity. “Acting English” becomes a manifestation of this identification and at times it can become not merely superficial, but suffusive of one’s identity. It can be the wearing of English clothes (Harris tweeds, Burberry scarves) and affecting one’s accent, but it can involve participating in distinctively British institutions (attending certain kinds of Anglican churches, sending your children to a British-style private school, even hiring an English nanny). It can even involve outright rejection of national circumstances and making England one’s adoptive country, both geographically and legally.
Before Lord Black, the novelist Henry James, the poet T.S. Eliot and the Canadian industrialist, Lord Beaverbrook, perhaps North America’s best-known anglophiles, took this route and made England their permanent home. It should be noted, as Dickinson (1997) points out, that these “performances” were preceded by a stage of consumption. One needs to buy authentic Harris tweeds and to pay for English-style boarding schools, none of which can be acquired cheaply. This expense serves to make anglophilia not only more desirable, but also more exclusive, thus heightening the participant’s sense of detachment from the reality of modernity still further.
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Full Text: http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/2010-vol13-num04-fall/plato.html
Michael Plato
There’ll Always Be An England: Anglophilia as Antimodern Leisure
College Quarterly
Fall 2010 Volume 13 Number 4
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A Sense of Place 