The provocative sentence that “a dog could be a sheep” fascinated the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, who was one of the first readers of the Zhuangzi when it appeared translated by Herbert Giles in 1890. Young Wilde wrote one of the first reviews of the book and arguably designed his theory of “dandyism” in accordance with some of its principles. Dandyism was a provocative fashion movement that was very influential in the nineteenth-century upper strata of English and French societies. One of dandyism’s most prominent characteristics is that it questions the rules and codes of correctness in language and behavior. I attempt to characterize dandyism as a Daoist activity critical of Political Correctness.

The link between dandyism and Daoism has been established by other scholars. Oscar Wilde did not just write the review of the Zhuangzi, but influences or coincidental parallels between the philosophy of Daoism and Wilde’s dandyism are multiple. Jerusha McCormack sees both Zhuangzi and Wilde as “contrarians,” that is, as people who “think against prevailing conventions in a way that appears to be systematically perverse, hence ‘contrary’ to the dominant discourse” (McCormack: 77). Historically, Wilde’s anti-Victorianism mirrors Daoist anti-Confucianism because “the kind of society advocated by Confucius and that of high Victorian England had many similarities” (78). Daoism was against Confucianism, and Wilde fought the puritan Victorian moral earnestness of his society, ultimately being imprisoned for homosexuality. Both Zhuangzi and Wilde combated similar “sanitizing” social tendencies and undermined a certain form of “correctness” by using peculiar counter-methods reaching from the aesthetic to the anarchic.

In this book, I want to widen the spectrum and look not only at Oscar Wilde, but also at dandyism more generally. I put a special focus on the founder of dandyism, George “Beau” Brummell, who is, I believe, a truly Daoist figure. Brummell fought hypocrite aristocratic culture not, like Wilde, during the Victorian era, but roughly seventy years earlier, during the English Regency era. Charles Baudelaire, another dandy who lived in France a little later,[iv] explains that dandyism appears “in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall.” For Baudelaire, Dandyism is the “last spark of heroism amid decadence” (Baudelaire 1986: 28). The Regency era, the time during which dandyism most consistently developed in England, was an unstable period submitted to great social, political, and economic change, which creates a parallel with China. Daoism thrived during the Warring States Period (475–221 BC), which was a time of political division in which feudal systems were verging on decay. The situation resembled that of the Holy Roman Empire in its decadence. However, it was also an era of great cultural and intellectual expansion, and the thoughts and ideas of this period remain important to this day in many Asian countries.