The Oxford Handbook of Decadence 9780190066956, 0190066954

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

DE C A DE N C E

The Oxford Handbook of

DECADENCE Edited by

JANE DESMARAIS and DAVID WEIR

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022012692 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​006695–​6 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190066956.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Marquis, Canada

In memory of David Geoffrey Weir (1973–​1991) and Derek Mahon (1941–​2020)

Not long from barbarism to decadence, not far from liberal republic to defoliant empire and thence to entropy . . .

—​Derek Mahon, “America Deserta”

Plus rien à dire!

—​Paul Verlaine

Contents

Acknowledgments  Contributors 

xi xiii

Introduction: Decadence, Culture, and Society  David Weir and Jane Desmarais

1

PA RT I .   P E R IOD S 1. Classical Antiquity: Unlikely Decadent Prototypes in Republican Rome  Shushma Malik 2. Ages of Empire: Pinnacles of Decline  Norman Vance 3. Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque: Different Endings to the Same Century  Shearer West

21 39

61

4. The Interwar Period: Legacies of Decadence  Melanie Hawthorne

80

5. Contemporary Contexts: Decadence Today and Tomorrow  Alice Condé

96

PA RT I I .   P L AC E S 6. France: The Rise of Modern Decadence  Bénédicte Coste

117

7. Belgium: Decadent Land, Barbarian Language  Clément Dessy

135

viii   Contents

8. Britain and Ireland: Decadence beyond London  Alex Murray

153

9. Italy: Decadent Dichotomies in a Disruptive Age  Lara Raffaelli

174

10. Germany: Decadence from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic  Katharina Herold

190

11. Nordic Cultures: From Wilderness to Metropolitan Decadence  Pirjo LyytikÄinen

209

12. Eastern Europe: The “New People” of Decadence  Sasha Dovzhyk

227

13. Turkey: Ottoman Tanzimat and the Decadence of Empire  Özen Nergis Dolcerocca

245

14. Japan: Decadence and Japonisme  Stefano Evangelista

264

PA RT I I I .   G E N R E S 15. The Decadent Novel: Generic Inversions  Kristin Mahoney

285

16. The Decadent Short Story: Forms of the Morbid  Kostas Boyiopoulos

301

17. Decadent Theater: New Women and “The Eye of the Beholder”  Sos Eltis

318

18. Essays: Defending and Describing Decadence  Nick Freeman

335

19. Prose Poetry: All the Rest Is Literature  Jane Desmarais and David Weir

351

20. Cinema: Adapting Decadence  David Weir

368

Contents   ix

PA RT I V.   M AT E R IA L I T I E S 21. Book Arts: The Decadent Gesamtkunstwerk  Kirsten MacLeod

391

22. Fashion: Decadent Stylings  Catherine Spooner

417

23. Interior Decoration: Designing Decadence  Jessica Gossling

442

24. Architecture: Constructing Decadence  Lori Smithey

461

PA RT V.   SE N SE S 25. Vision: Decadence in Symbolist Art of the Fin de Siècle  Vivien Greene

483

26. Hearing: Bodies Resounding in Decadent Literature  Fraser Riddell

507

27. Smell: Perfume and Olfaction  Catherine Maxwell

525

28. Taste: Savoring Decadence  David Weir and Jane Desmarais

543

29. Touch: Unfeeling Decadence  Jane Desmarais

562

PA RT V I .   T H E OR I E S 30. Theology: Decadent Aesthetics, Anglo-​Catholicism, and Ritual  Matthew Bradley

583

31. Science: Entropy, Degeneration, and Decadent Self-​Destruction  Jordan Kistler

600

32. Ecology: The Vital Forces of Decay  Dennis Denisoff

617

x   Contents

33. Philosophy: Post-​Kantian Narratives of Decadence  Andrew Huddleston

634

34. Psychoanalysis: From Degeneration to Regeneration  Jean-​Michel Rabaté

649

35. Politics: Ideologies of Decadence  Neville Morley

666

Index 

683

Acknowledgments

Scarce is the book that is published without the help of a vast number of friends, colleagues, and professionals. Yet this is just such a book: we could never have done it without ourselves (although, truth to tell, each has substantial doubts about the other). Admittedly, there were a few scattered individuals who attempted to help us out whenever they experienced a rare moment of sobriety or brief respite from disillusion and, either for reasons of exhaustion or lack of dedication to their own self-​destruction, offered to lend a hand. However puzzling such altruism might be, our own lassitude released us, albeit briefly, from our general skepticism about the worth of humanity in this epoch of the Misanthropocene and allowed their assistance. Among these hapless individuals are May Beldray, Elisa Bizzotto, Peter Coles, Aimee Genell, Ian Keliher, Brendan King, Frank Krause, the late Derek Mahon, Robert Pruett, Michael Shaw, Martin Sorrell, Martha Vicinus, Becky Walker, and our Oxford University Press reviewers. Less hapless and even more helpful are those indefatigable members of the editorial and production team who brought this book together: Alyssa Callan, who guided the project into production with grace and good humor; Afrose Anwar, who managed the production with peerless efficiency; Holly Mitchell, who came to the project late, but stayed anyway; Prakash Jayaraman, who saw the book into print, happily and readably so; and, last but by no means least, Elda Granata, whose attention to detail, kind support, and generosity have left us wondering whether we are really living in the Misanthropocene after all.

Contributors

Kostas Boyiopoulos is an Honorary Fellow and Teaching Associate in the Department of English Studies at Durham University, England. He specializes in literary decadence and has published widely on fin-​de-​siècle themes. He is the author of The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson (2015), partly funded by the Friends of Princeton University Library. He is co-​editor of The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology (2014). Recent essay collections he has co-​edited include Literary and Cultural Alternatives to Modernism: Unsettling Presences (2019) and Aphoristic Modernity: 1880 to the Present (2020). Matthew Bradley is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Liverpool in England, specializing in late Victorian literature and culture, with a focus on the relation between literature and religion at the fin de siècle, decadence, and the history of reading. He is the editor of The Varieties of Religious Experience (2012) and, with Juliet John, Reading and the Victorians (2015). Alice Condé is Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her scholarly interests include representations of masochistic men and cruel women in nineteenth-​century decadent fiction, as well as decadence in contemporary subculture with reference to queerness, drag, and social decline. She is co-​editor, with Jane Desmarais, of Decadence and the Senses (2017), and, with Jessica Gossling, of In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson (1867–​1900). She is also Co-Deputy Editor of Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies. Bénédicte Coste teaches Victorian literature and culture at the Université de Bourgogne, France. She works primarily on British decadent writers such as Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons, focusing on their reception and presence in French letters. She has translated Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and other essays into French, along with other writings by Arthur Symons, Vernon Lee, and John Addington Symonds. Dennis Denisoff is the McFarlin Chair of English at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Aestheticism and Sexual Parody (1999) and Sexual Visuality from Literature to Film (2004), editor of Arthur Machen: Decadent and Occult Works (2018), co-​editor with Liz Constable and Matthew Potolsky of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999), and co-​editor with Talia Schaffer of The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature (2020). He has also served as guest editor for the “Global Decadence” issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (2021).

xiv   Contributors Jane Desmarais is Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is primarily focused on nineteenth-century literary, visual, and musical decadence, and Anglo-French cultural relations at the fin de siècle. Her recent publications include Decadence and Literature, co-edited with David Weir (2019), Monsters Under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present (2018), Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems, co-edited with Chris Baldick (2017), and Decadence and the Senses, co-edited with Alice Condé (2017). Clément Dessy is an FNRS Research Associate at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is the author of Les écrivains et les Nabis: La Littérature au défi de la peinture (2015) and the co-​editor of (Bé)vues du future: Les imaginaires visuels de la dystopie (2015) and L’artiste en revues: Art et discours en mode périodique (2019). He has studied the relationship between painters and writers and literary magazines in late nineteenth-​century France. His current interests include literary cosmopolitanism and cultural exchanges, in particular the relations between Belgium and Britain between 1880 and 1914 and the work of writer-​translators during the same period. Özen Nergis Dolcerocca is Associate Professor of Literature at the University of Bologna. She received her doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from New York University in 2016. She is author of Self and Desire in the Modern Turkish Novel and guest editor of the special issue of the journal of Middle Eastern Literatures titled “Beyond World Literature: Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Today.” She is also the recipient of a 2020 European Research Council Starting Grant for her project “Modernizing Empires: Enlightenment, Nationalist Vanguards and Non-​Western Literary Modernities.” Sasha Dovzhyk is Researcher at Birkbeck, University of London and a Goldsmiths Distinguished Visiting Scholar attached to the Decadence Research Centre, Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written on topics ranging from the legacies of Chernobyl to queer decadence for peer-reviewed journals and literary magazines, including British Art Studies, Modernist Cultures, BRANCH, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Ecologist. She is founder and Director of the Aubrey Beardsley Society, established in 2020. Sos Eltis is Associate Professor in English at Brasenose College, Oxford University. Her research interests include Oscar Wilde; Victorian, modern, and contemporary drama; performance studies and theater history; sexuality and gender; women’s suffrage literature; and theater and politics. She is the author of Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (1996), Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–​1930 (2013), and a new edition of George Bernard Shaw’s early plays for Oxford World’s Classics. Stefano Evangelista is Associate Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford University. He is the author of British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece (2009), and his edited books include The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe (2010), Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate (2013), Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic,

Contributors   xv Vagabond (2018), and Happy in Berlin? (2021), which accompanied a series of exhibitions on British writers in early twentieth-​century Berlin. Together with Catherine Maxwell, he is co-​founder and co-​editor of the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series which specializes in scholarly editions of aesthetic and decadent literature. Nick Freeman teaches English at Loughborough University. He has published widely on the literature and culture of the fin de siècle and is the author of Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870–​1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain (2011, rev. 2013). He has also published a critical edition of Arthur Symons’s Spiritual Adventures (2017). Jessica Gossling is Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches Victorian literature, decadence, modernism, poetry, and literary theory. Her research is primarily focused on French and English literary decadence, spatial theory, and occulture. With Alice Condé, she is co-​editor of In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson (2019). Vivien Greene is Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, specializing in late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century European art, with concentrations in French and Italian modernism and turn-​of-​the-​century aesthetic currents. Her recent exhibitions and catalogues include Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+​Croix in Paris, 1892–​1897 and Italian Futurism, 1909–​1944: Reconstructing the Universe. She often presents papers at scholarly symposia and has written, especially, on modern Italian culture for peer-​reviewed publications. Among other honors, she was awarded a Rome Prize. She received her PhD in art history from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Melanie Hawthorne is Professor of French at Texas A&M University. Her work focuses on women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Rachilde. Her most recent book, Women, Citizenship, and Sexuality: The Limits of Transnationalism, appeared in 2021. Her project documenting Renée Vivien’s gravesite in Paris can be viewed at melaniehawthorne.com, along with the “Renée Vivien Cocktail Hour.” Katharina Herold is Assistant Professor in English Literature at the University of Regensburg. Her research interests focus on literature and the arts at the European fin de siècle, specifically aestheticism and decadence; Victorian, modern and contemporary drama and performance; and literary Orientalism. She is the author of “Socio-aesthetic Histories: Vienna 1900 and Weimar Berlin,” in Decadence and Literature (2019), “‘Against civilisation’: Symons, the Gypsy Lore, and Politicised Aestheticism,” in Arthur Symons: Poet, Critic, Vagabond (2018), and “Dancing the Image—Sensoriality and Kinaesthetics in the Poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Symons,” in Decadence and the Senses (2017). Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy and Co-​Director of the Centre for Research in Post-​Kantian Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he teaches courses on Kant and German Idealism, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, and Foucault. His

xvi   Contributors main research interests are in the history of post-​Kantian philosophy (especially Nietzsche; also German idealism, early German Romanticism, and the Frankfurt School) as well as in aesthetics, social philosophy, and ethics. He is the author of Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019). Jordan Kistler is Lecturer in English at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, specializing in Victorian literature. Her research interests include Victorian poetry, literature and science, museum studies, the New Woman and women’s writings of the fin de siècle, and Gothic fiction. She is the author of “The Science of Decadence” in Decadence and Literature, as well as a book, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, a Pre-​Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum (2016). Pirjo Lyytikäinen is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Finnish, Finno-​Ugrian, and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki, specializing in Finnish fin-​ de-​siècle symbolism, decadence, and early modernism. She has published widely on Finnish symbolism and decadence, including the monograph Narkissos ja sfinksi (Narcissus and the sphinx, 1997). She has published many articles and several edited volumes in English. Recently, she has explored emotions and affects in decadence, as in “Passions against the Grain: Decadent Emotions in Finnish Wilderness” from the collection Nordic Literature of Decadence (2020), edited by Lyytikäinen, et al. Kirsten MacLeod is Reader in Modernist Print Culture at Newcastle University. Her research interests include American and British print culture from 1870 to 1930; late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century periodical studies; book history; aestheticism, decadence, and modernism; and collectors and collecting culture. She is the author of a critical edition of Carl Van Vechten’s The Blind Bow-​ Boy (2018), American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation (2018), and Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Literature and the Fin de Siècle (2006). Kristin Mahoney is Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She has published essays on aestheticism and decadence in Victorian Studies, Criticism, English Literature in Transition, Literature Compass, Nineteenth-​ Century Prose, Victorian Review, and Victorian Periodicals Review. Her book Literature and the Politics of Post-​ Victorian Decadence was published in 2015. Shushma Malik is Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Roehampton, London, specializing in classical studies. Her research interests include the roles of Roman emperors in post-​classical texts, Roman religions, and imperial historiography, with particular emphasis on Emperor Nero’s portrayal in Christian history as the Antichrist and the portrayals of Roman emperors in the works and letters of Oscar Wilde. She is the author of The Nero-​Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (2020). Catherine Maxwell is Professor of Victorian Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, and author of The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing

Contributors   xvii Blindness (2001), Swinburne (2006), Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (2008), and Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (2017), awarded the 2018 ESSE prize for Literatures in the English Language. Edited and co-​ edited works include Algernon Charles Swinburne (1997), Vernon Lee’s Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales (2006), and Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics (2006). She is co-​founder and co-​editor with Stefano Evangelista of the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series of scholarly editions of aesthetic and decadent literature. Neville Morley is Professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter. His principal areas of research are ancient economic and social history; the reception and influence of ancient texts and examples in the modern world, with a particular focus on the influence of the Greek historian Thucydides; and theoretical and methodological approaches to ancient history. His books include Classics: Why It Matters (2018), Thucydides and the Idea of History (2014), The Roman Empire: Roots of Imperialism (2010), and Antiquity and Modernity (2009). Alex Murray is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts, English, and Languages at Queen’s University, Belfast, specializing in British and American literature of the period 1880–​1940, with particular expertise in decadence and writing of the fin de siècle, modernism, literature and place, and travel writing. He is author of Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (2016) and co-​editor of Decadence: A Literary History (2020), Decadence and the Age of Modernism (with Kate Hext, 2019), and Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (with Jason David Hall, 2013). Jean-​Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-​ editor of the Journal of Modern Literature, and co-​founder of Slought Foundation, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited more than forty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, and philosophy. Recent publications include Rust (2018), Kafka L.O.L. (2018), After Derrida (2018), Rire au Soleil (2019), New Beckett (2019), Understanding Derrida /​Understanding Modernism (2019), Knots: Post-​ Lacanian Readings of Literature and Film (2020), Beckett and Sade (2020), and Rires Prodigues (2021). Lara Raffaelli is Chief Editor at Milpark Education, and the translator of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere, published in 2013. She is co-​editor with Michael Subialka of a special issue of Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies on D’Annunzio’s “Seduction of the Senses.” Fraser Riddell is Assistant Professor in English and Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, England, where he teaches literature in English from Shakespeare to the present day. His research is broadly focused on questions of gender, sexuality, and

xviii   Contributors embodied experience in Victorian and early-​twentieth century literature, with special expertise in music and the queer body in English literature at the fin de siècle. He has published articles on music and queerness in the Journal of Victorian Culture and Victorian Literature and Culture. Lori Smithey is an architectural historian, theorist, and design educator. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan in 2019. Her research examines the architectural dimensions of nineteenth-​century literary decadence and the ways in which decadent aesthetics inform subsequent design sensibilities into the twentieth century. Her recent work has been published in Journal of Architectural Education and TEXT: Journal of Writing and presented at numerous architectural conferences. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cooper Union in New York City and a Master of Science in architectural history and theory from the University of Washington, Seattle. Catherine Spooner is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She is the author of Post-​Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (2017), Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004), and Contemporary Gothic (2006). She has also co-​edited four books, including, most recently, The Cambridge History of the Gothic, Volume 3: The Twentieth and Twenty-​First Centuries (with Dale Townshend, 2021). In 2019 she was awarded the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize by the International Gothic Association for advancing the field of Gothic Studies. Norman Vance is Emeritus Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor at Ulster University. He is a Fellow of the English Association and of the Royal Historical Society. His books include Irish Literature since 1800 (2002), Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (2013), and The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Volume Four: 1790–​1880 (2015), co-​edited with Jennifer Wallace. David Weir is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Cooper Union in New York City. He is the author of ten books, including three on the topic of decadence: Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), Decadent Culture in the United States (2009), and Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (2018). He has also written the “Decadence” entry for the second edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2014) and edited, with Jane Desmarais, Decadence and Literature (2019). Shearer West is Professor of Art History and, since 2017, Vice-​Chancellor and President of the University of Nottingham. She has written numerous articles and authored or edited nine books, including Portraiture (2014), The Visual Arts in Germany, 1897–​1940: Utopia and Despair (2000), and Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty (1994). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Higher Education Academy, and the Royal Historical Society, and has held two visiting Fellowships at Yale University.

I n t rodu ction Decadence, Culture, and Society David Weir and Jane Desmarais

The idea of culture and the idea of decadence are incompatible with one another. The Latin word from which modern decadence derives (via modern French décadence) is the verb decadēre (de-​ “down” +​cadēre “to fall”), meaning “to decay.” The etymology of modern English culture is similar to that of decadence insofar as both words share the same linguistic pedigree via classical Latin and modern French, with both Latin cultūra and French culture expanding the meaning of “cultivation” from agriculture to individual development—​the growth of learning, education, and the like. In the seventeenth century, the German word Kultur was also borrowed from the French, but by the eighteenth century another semantic expansion occurred in German, such that Kultur came to refer not only to the “state of intellectual development” in the individual but also to that of society as a whole (OED). This meaning has also filtered into English, so that today the idea of “decadent culture” comes across as an oxymoron, with the concept of decay impossibly wedded to the concept of growth or development. Curiously, this paradoxical alignment of culture with both decay and growth, decline and development, finds support in certain scientific senses of culture, which in 1884 was defined by biologists as “the artificial development of microscopic organisms esp. bacteria in prepared media” (OED). The year 1884 also saw the publication of two books that could not be more unlike but have in common the concept of culture, albeit regarded from radically different perspectives: J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature), that seminal “breviary” of decadence,1 and the British bacteriologist Emanuel Edward Klein’s Micro-​organisms and Disease, a study of “the relation of micro-​organisms to infectious diseases” emphasizing the importance of cultivating micro-​organisms “artificially in suitable media, i.e., outside the animal body,” in order to make them observable and accessible to experimentation.2 What Klein here calls “media” is elsewhere called “culture,” and his book provides thorough instruction in the proper methods whereby such cultures may be prepared and controlled. Methods of handling artificial cultures in the laboratory were much improved by Julius Richard

2    David Weir and Jane Desmarais Petri’s invention in 1887 of the dish that bears his name,3 another example of the rough parallelism of scientific and artistic interest in the relationship between culture and disease in the 1880s, the period when decadence began to make an impact in British and European literary circles. Literary decadence was clearly identified with the scientific discourses of the day, especially those deriving from the fields of medicine, biology, zoology, and psychiatry, so it is not surprising that in 1893 the British poet Arthur Symons described the culture of decadence as “a new and beautiful and interesting disease.”4 Earlier, Henrik Ibsen explored the social relevance of the relation of microbes and disease in his 1882 play An Enemy of the People, while writers and artists as various as Émile Zola and Aubrey Beardsley might be described as adopting a bacterial model of human culture—​as something expansive, invasive, lively, lethal, exotic, and omnipresent. If we apply this late nineteenth-​century notion of culture to a cultural-​historical perspective, the task becomes one where analysis of a decadent culture involves procedures analogous to those of the biologist, whose job is to observe the development of organisms (or “cultures”) in a Petri dish. The metaphor suggests that while an antagonism to nature may be one of the keys to decadent culture, culture so conceived has in common some of the microbial properties of nature insofar as it is understood to involve processes of infection, disease, morbidity, and decay.

Decadence Learned, Decadence Lived Any discussion of decadence in the context of culture needs to acknowledge the basic paradox active in the literary work of such figures as the poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–​ 1867), the novelist Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-​Eymery, 1860–​1953), the poet, playwright, and novelist Oscar Wilde (1854–​1900), and many others, all of whom drew creative energy from a sense of historical decline, philosophical pessimism, and sexual perversity. In these cases and others, the creation of a culture of decadence that is antagonistic to culture at large and “infects” it from within is perhaps easiest to understand as the expression of unease with the progressive paradigm of modernity whereby the culture that “grows” from modern bourgeois society is understood in terms of decay and disillusion. Of many possible examples, Baudelaire’s poem “Le cygne” (“The Swan”), from the Tableaux Parisiens section of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), is often cited as an example of the sense of alienation incited by progress. The great white swan dragging its wings in the “filth” of modernity as it stumbles over the cobblestones of one of the new boulevards constructed by Baron Haussmann on the ruins of an old Paris neighborhood is figured forth as an emblem of all that has been lost. That vanished Paris, paradoxically, undergoes a kind of reverse idealization, with the human squalor and urban decay of the old city emerging as infinitely richer and far more desirable than the insipid order and cleanliness of the new Paris of pristine boulevards and bourgeois shops.

Introduction   3 It would be a mistake, however, to construe decadence in simple terms as some kind of protest against the rise of modernity and all the attendant modifications in social structures the emergence of modernity entailed. Baudelaire undoubtedly went out of his way to adopt a lifestyle at odds with institutions the bourgeoisie venerated, such as marriage and the family, but there can also be no doubt that he had scant interest in proposing alternatives to such institutions, which any reasonable notion of protest would involve. Moreover, Baudelaire enjoyed many advantages that accrued to him as the stepson of a successful bourgeois gentleman, such as a regular income (albeit dispensed somewhat irregularly), not to mention a different set of advantages that he enjoyed as a citizen of a nation-​state whose colonial enterprises lay behind the poet’s “oriental” taste for opium and hashish—​and for the mixed-​race woman, Jeanne Duval, who inspired so much of his mordant poetry.5 Baudelaire’s dual position as both the paradigmatic poet of decadence and the prototypical decadent poet—​that is, as someone for whom decadence informed both his art and his life—​helps to show that aesthetic culture is not the only form that decadence may take. One purpose of the present volume is to expand the discussion of decadence by recognizing that the culture is not limited to literature, or indeed to other forms of what is usually called learned culture—​philosophy, architecture, music, visual arts, and so on—​although those nonliterary areas of learned culture have not been sufficiently examined for their relationship to decadent traditions, either. This collection means to address that shortcoming while also considering the role of decadence in lived culture.6 The concept of culture is enormously variable and highly complex, but all cultures involve both a lived and a learned dimension, the former social and behavioral, the latter aesthetic and intellectual, so decadence can likewise be approached from the perspective of either lived culture or learned culture. To give one simple example of this distinction, one can read the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus and learn all about the always dissolute but sometimes refined corruption of certain Roman emperors, such as Nero or Elagabalus, both notorious for their decadence. At the same time, one can also emulate a Nero or an Elagabalus and indulge in food and drink at such a level of excess and refinement that the experience of dining crosses over into the experience of decadence. The phenomenon is quite clearly a historical development in the lived culture of foodways within the context of the modern restaurant as a social institution. After all, the restaurant emerged in the late eighteenth century as part of the material culture of Romanticism, an institution devoted to—​as the name implies (from the French verb restaurer, “to restore”)—​the restoration of bodily health. Today, restoration is the least of it: high-​end dining at a world-​class restaurant run by a celebrity chef is more often than not a form of dissipation, of both health and wealth. To be sure, haute cuisine is a type of learned culture, but the excessive experience of it illustrates the basic principle whereby different types of culture interfere with one another to the point that decadence, in one form or another, results. To be clear, the example of that latter-​day Nero or Elagabalus who takes culinary refinement (a form of learned culture) to such excessive lengths that the act of eating (an element of lived culture) becomes decadent involves a deliberate distancing from the reality of what food is

4    David Weir and Jane Desmarais really for: to nourish the body and sustain life. Culture begins where biology ends (however much that culture may involve biological models); the gourmand requires art more than nourishment. Taste replaces need. So, the culture of decadence may be both learned and lived, or, rather, may lead to a condition in which learned culture and lived culture interfere with one another to the point that life is not just subjected to artifice but is also reduced and even destroyed by it. Baudelaire’s contribution to the decadent tradition is manifold, but his most important insight may well be that nature no longer provides sufficient basis for artistic production. The fact that he couches the insight in the Catholic context of original sin does not gainsay its influence; yes, the terms are initially moral—​“Evil happens without effort, naturally, fatally; Good is always the product of some art”7—​ but somehow the sense of morality dissipated as the idea developed and spread, until we arrive at the kind of programmatic expression of principle we find in Huysmans’s Against Nature: “Nature . . . has had her day.”8 The idea that artifice is somehow more authentic than nature can be extended—​indeed, Baudelaire himself did so—​from art to life, so that not only the worth of poetry but also the value of lived experience came to be measured by its removal from nature. Baudelaire did not appear to express any great interest in gourmandizing or bringing food into the domain of artifice, but he did look to fashion as a way of proving the point about the inherent inferiority of nature by adopting the manners and mode of dress of the dandy. Fashion, after all, renders a basic, natural need—​protection from the elements—​almost superfluous to the “larger” purpose of decorating the body. So far no one has died from dandyism, but the gourmand runs some real risks when the learned culture of decadence combines with the lived culture of food. Connoisseurship can kill when nourishment is no longer enough to satisfy those extravagant diners who want so much more than they need. But the alliance of decadence with self-​destruction, at least in the nineteenth century, is more readily illustrated by way of drink rather than food. Indeed, the bitter liqueur absinthe has a place in the popular imagination as “the drink of decadence” that is not wholly undeserved, even though the association is mostly the product of a handful of artistic representations. Édouard Manet’s Le buveur d’absinthe (The Absinthe Drinker, 1859), Honoré Daumier’s Le premier verre, le sixième verre (The First Glass, the Sixth Glass, 1863), Jean-​François Raffaëlli’s Les buveurs d’absinthe (The Absinthe Drinkers, 1881) (Figure 1), and, most famously, Edgar Degas’s Dans un café (At a Café, 1875–​1876) (Figure 2) suggest that the déclassé figures the artists portray have all come to ruin because of addiction to the poisonous drink. Degas’s painting was not well known until it was exhibited at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1893,9 the same year that Symons published his landmark essay describing decadence as a cultural disease. While it is true that such notable English decadents as Wilde and Ernest Dowson followed the French poet and absintheur Paul Verlaine in developing a self-​destructive taste for the stuff, the social history of the drink relegates artists and writers to the minority of its consumers. In France, absinthe was originally an

Introduction   5

Figure 1.   Jean-François Raffaëlli, Les buveurs d’absinthe (1881). ​

Source: Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (Wikimedia Commons).

antimalarial agent for French soldiers in colonial Algeria before becoming a workingclass drink (because of its cheapness), but its popularity spread after the phylloxera epidemic devastated the wine industry, starting in 1863 (the root-eating plant lice were not brought under control until the 1890s). L’heure verte (the green hour), socalled because of the color of the liqueur, emerged as a perfectly acceptable bourgeois custom in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as one popular brand of the beverage suggests (Figure 3). Ancestor of the modern cocktail hour, l’heure verte started around 5:00 p.m. and—again like today’s cocktail hour—lasted a good deal longer than 60 minutes.10

6    David Weir and Jane Desmarais

Figure 2.  Edgar Degas, Dans un café /​L’Absinthe (1875–​1876). Source: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons).

Decadence and the Bourgeoisie As the example of l’heure verte shows, the boundary between the social practices of decadents and those of the bourgeoisie is not always so clear cut. The blurring of that boundary over the long nineteenth century is the result of several factors, depending on the nation-​state under consideration. Not for nothing was the reign of Louis Philippe known as the “bourgeois monarchy” (1830–​1848), and even though cultural opposition to the politics of the period are traditionally associated with Romanticism, antagonism

Introduction   7

Figure 3.  Poster advertisement for Absinthe Bourgeois (1902). Source: Collection Betina Wittels.

to the bourgeoisie—​especially the wealthy variant that replaced the aristocracy as the kingmakers of the nation—​established a pattern that would persist into later periods that saw the rise of decadent culture proper. In fact, the development of decadence in France owes a great deal to the Romantic poet and novelist Théophile Gautier (1811–​ 1872), whose long career as a journalist and critic is of seminal importance to that development. The preface to his 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin helped to establish the aesthetic precept of l’art pour l’art, later taken up by the British aesthete Walter Pater, whose ideas came to be identified with the principle of “art for art’s sake.” Gautier’s 1868 preface to a posthumous edition of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil went even further in describing and identifying decadence as a particular form of cultural expression typical

8    David Weir and Jane Desmarais of periods of historical decline. Gautier described Baudelaire’s poetry as evidence of a style of decadence (le style de décadence), the key markers of which were recognizable from earlier periods of decline—​the late Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire in its senescence—​and were evident, to the critic at least, in the waning years of the Second Empire (1852–​1870). The sense of decadence that Gautier identified in Baudelaire’s poetry, however, involved more than stylistic description. The elder critic found in the younger poet validation of his own reactionary politics that looked askance at all the democratization and commercialization of society that the gradual establishment of the bourgeois class entailed. Hence it is tempting to define decadence in ideological terms as a culture always at odds with the bourgeoisie. That definition may hold for the earliest stages of the development of decadence in France: both Gautier and Baudelaire expressed nostalgia for the aristocracy and came to identify themselves—​Baudelaire especially—​with an idealized version of that class. Obviously, the contrast between a reactionary ideological decadence and a progressive, liberal bourgeoisie only obtains if the bourgeois class is liberal in fact, but such is not always the case. Increasingly, the assumption that liberal democracies depend for their development on a strong middle class is coming under question. “No bourgeois, no democracy” was the axiom asserted in 1966 by the sociologist Barrington Moore in a now-​classic analysis, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. 11 Such assessments appear to have a lot to do with the historical context of the Cold War, when such hidebound political concepts as “the dictatorship of the proletariat” still obtained and it was possible to claim, with the Soviet Union (1922–​1991) as evidence to the contrary, that democratic political institutions and bourgeois social institutions were interconnected. Today, one of the most striking things about the upsurge in autocratic and near-​autocratic governments worldwide is the political support provided by the middle classes, but the phenomenon is by no means new. The bourgeoisie will generally support whatever ideology most ensures their continuing socioeconomic security. The failure of the 1848 revolutions shows that the ideal of liberty does not stand a chance when the middle classes face the threat of sharing that ideal with plebeian others lower down on the socioeconomic scale. This particular deal with the devil is not always successful, of course: as Hannah Arendt observed of the German bourgeoisie in the 1930s, they “staked everything on the Hitler movement and aspired to rule with the help of the mob,” only to discover that “the mob proved quite capable of taking care of politics by itself and liquidated the bourgeoisie along with all other classes and institutions.”12 One effect of the fluctuating ideological allegiances of the bourgeoisie is a corresponding fluctuation of the ideological value of decadent culture. In a sense, then, decadence is anti-​bourgeois after all, but the meaning of the culture of decadence will vary depending on the political character of the middle classes at a particular time and place. Later manifestations of decadence in France, for example, take on a different ideological coloration against the bourgeois background of the Dreyfus affair and the anti-​Semitic machinations of the Action Française, as the example of Octave Mirbeau’s Le jardin des supplices (Torture Garden, 1898) shows.13 In England, the liberalization of the middle

Introduction   9 classes through a series of reform acts did not really result in a decadent culture as ideologically oppositional as the earlier phase of decadence in France. Rather, antagonism to the middle classes on the part of British decadents like Wilde played out mostly in moral terms, given expression primarily through the satire of the moneyed and landed classes in Wilde’s society comedies. Still, the sense is quite strong indeed that Wilde shared the relaxed attitude toward conventional morality represented by the aristocratic characters he satirized, which, paradoxically, ensured his success with that same middle class he so disdained. In fact, nothing argues for the basic social concord between the celebrity decadent Wilde and the educated British middle class than the author’s enormous popularity prior to 1895, when his scandalous conviction for “gross indecency” with other men ended his career. In sum, the origins of nineteenth-​century decadence definitely include ideological opposition to the emergent bourgeois class, the principal beneficiaries of modernity in its economic form as capitalism and in its political form as liberal democracy. At the same time, this oppositional ideology does not mean that there is anything like a consistent “politics of decadence,” for two reasons. First, the bourgeoisie differs considerably across Western democracies, depending, again, on how democratic certain societies are in fact. For example, the British middle class enjoyed an increasing level of enfranchisement, in contrast to the middle class in Austro-​Hungary, where a system of noblesse oblige remained in place, with those in power dispensing titles rather than rights. Second, the bourgeoisie is not consistently liberal, the politics of the middle class varying considerably both over time and from country to country. Thus, while it may be true that decadence is “anti-​bourgeois,” the varying and volatile nature of the bourgeoisie means that ideological opposition to it cannot possibly be consistent. For this reason, the oppositional culture of decadence has been associated with a dizzying range of ideologies, from anarchism to fascism.

Decadent Culture and Society A ready explanation for the polymorphous nature of decadent politics lies in the inherent contradiction between a decadent culture and a healthy society. This much is suggested by the critic Paul Bourget (1852–​1935) in his analysis of aesthetic disunity and social disintegration, whereby one serves as an analogue of the other. A society is decadent, Bourget claims, when it “produces too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life.” Excessive individualism results in a loss of collective social purpose. Similarly, a book is decadent when too much stylistic attention is devoted to individual words and phrases, whereupon “the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word.”14 Bourget’s well-​known description of le style de décadence, however limited, ramifies into the post-​Hegelian thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, who understood the relationship between stylistic and

10    David Weir and Jane Desmarais social individualism in a more causal fashion as providing a moral basis for democracy itself. For Nietzsche, the style of decadence in literature is a simile for “every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disgregation of the will, ‘freedom of the individual,’ to use moral terms—​expanded into a political theory, ‘equal rights for all.’ ”15 Nietzsche’s adoption of Bourget’s formulations should be regarded less as a borrowing and more of an incorporation of those formulations into an already existing critique, whereby the dialectical design of history envisioned by G. W. F. Hegel is turned against itself. Where Hegel saw history as a dialectical process of thesis and antithesis, of ongoing progressive development momentarily subverted by countervailing reactionary forces but leading ultimately to the establishment of the liberal state as the fulfillment or endpoint of the dialectic, Nietzsche saw history as an endlessly proliferating process without any design or purpose outside of that imposed, or not imposed, by the all-​too-​ human agents of political power. This most individualist of philosophers understood democratic individualism as a symptom of decadence at the most granular of levels: the part insisting on autonomy from the whole, the whole in this case being not the nation-​state but European culture at large. Indeed, Nietzsche called nationalism “the most anti-​cultural sickness and unreason there is,” a “névrose nationale [national neurosis] that Europe is sick from.”16 Nietzsche deployed the same psychological metaphor to describe his former mentor Richard Wagner—​“Wagner est une névrose”—​because of the composer’s nationalistic cultivation of “the German spirit.”17 What we are here calling “decadent culture” accords with Nietzsche’s philosophy in several ways: aesthetically, it eschews formal unity in favor of the kind of disaggregated style that Nietzsche’s own writing simultaneously decries and embodies; politically, it rejects liberal democracy and idealizes the aristocracy even as it retains the idea of individualism;18 culturally, it negates national traditions and cultivates transnational identifications.19 This alignment of aesthetics, politics, and culture is notable for its negative consistency: decadence makes a virtue of “againstness,” of going against the grain. And while this tripartite countering of classical aesthetics, bourgeois liberalism, and cultural nationalism may be most active in the foundational, nineteenth-​century sense of decadence, it persists with remarkable durability into later iterations of decadent culture, even though, in different contexts, one or the other element may be less pronounced than in Baudelaire’s poetry or Nietzsche’s philosophy. An illiberal, anti-​nationalist culture that embraces disunity is hardly compatible with the idea of society that developed throughout the West in the wake of the dual industrial and political revolutions that ushered in the age of modernity. Like decadence and culture, society enters English by way of classical Latin and modern French, those two parent languages imparting a host of significant connotations to the word. Latin societās, derived from socius, “companion,” refers to a “body of people associated for a common purpose” (OED), with French société and English society both following suit. This meaning was first specialized to refer to particular groups (e.g., a religious society or community) before becoming generalized to refer to a “community of people living in a particular country or region and having shared customs, laws, or institutions” (OED). Hence the idea of society in its modern sense incorporates the idea of culture (shared

Introduction   11 customs, laws, and institutions). Moreover, the culture that unifies society is bound up with national sympathies. National cultures, in turn, depend for their continuing existence and integrity on certain institutions dedicated to the maintenance of the shared cultural values that sustain society. This now-​familiar and oft-​critiqued construction was largely the brainchild of the Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–​1803), for whom the decline of monarchy raised concerns about the means whereby society might be unified as older political systems based on princely sovereignty declined and new systems of republican governance emerged. His solution was the cultivation of national cultures: nature may provide the basis for society in the family, but that “extended family” known as the nation needs to be based in “one national character,” or culture.20 As F. M. Barnard summarizes, Herder’s central political idea lies in the assertion that the proper foundation for a sense of collective political identity is not the acceptance of a common sovereign power, but the sharing of a common culture. . . . To the possession of such a common culture Herder applies the term nation or, more precisely, Volk or nationality.21

In the nineteenth century, the issue that so concerned Herder, that of ensuring societal unity through shared national culture, was the same one that so exercised Nietzsche, but from the opposite direction, so to speak. That is, by Nietzsche’s time the identification of Kultur with Volk had become so pervasive that the life-​affirming values of civilization itself had been lost or obscured: Wagnerism was evidence of the phenomenon—​ the (German) cult had overwhelmed (European) culture. The problematic relationship of culture and society that Herder and Nietzsche investigated from radically different perspectives also engaged such prominent Victorian thinkers as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. Their insistence on the interdependence of morality and culture for the sake of social stability forms a key background to the development of decadence in England, certainly, but the basic idea of national culture as a means of societal unity is pervasive throughout the West in the nineteenth century. To be sure, decadence is not the only kind of culture that sets itself against whatever traditions have been accepted as most relevant to or expressive of the shared values of society at large, but it may have a special place in the history of which it is a part precisely because the decadent manages to remain within society while not quite being a part of it. That paradoxical positioning covers the case of Baudelaire’s flâneur, the distanced and disdainful observer of the pageant of modern life who brings to the crowded urban scene the solitary perspective of the melancholy Romantic. Yet however much decadence may appear to be an urban displacement of Romantic sensibility, there is a difference between Romantic removal from society and decadent disdain for it, mainly because the only thing worse than society is nature. Nature, remember, has had her day. The broader import of decadent culture for our own times does not lie so much in this negation of nature; indeed, contemporary anxiety over environmental catastrophe is hard to square with the decadent tradition. Nonetheless,

12    David Weir and Jane Desmarais recent scholarship has found points of comparison between the decadent desire for human extinction and a neo-​pagan, neo-​Romantic ecology that accepts and even celebrates decay as a precondition for the restoration of the natural world.22 As the mid-​twentieth-​century Italian decadent Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa observed, “While there’s death there’s hope.”23 This positioning suggests yet another iteration of a pattern that has been evident for some time: the ineluctable connection between decadence and renewal. Much in the way that decaying cultures in a Petri dish sometimes lead to the discovery of organisms with positive medicinal properties (as with the inadvertent discovery in 1928 of the bacteria-​killing mold now known as penicillin),24 the negative decadence of exhausted cultural tradition leads inexorably to cultural innovation; indeed, the way the decadent dynamic of renewal plays out in the proliferation of various modernist movements in the early twentieth century is now widely recognized.25 But does the decadent impetus to renewal in culture also play out in society as well? This is a more difficult question to answer, because so much of the decadent tradition is ideologically retrograde. If Raymond Williams were alive today, his remarkable gifts for scrutinizing sociocultural terminology would probably make him curious about the perplexing usage of politics and political in contemporary academic discourse, as in the phrase “cultural politics.”26 What individual academics mean by political in relation to culture is subject to a great deal of variability, but when professors talk about “politics” in the classroom, they most likely do not refer to running for city council, canvassing for votes, doing volunteer work at a polling station, or any of the other activities citizens of a functioning democracy perform in an effort to maintain effective governance at the local, state, or federal level. Rather, they are speaking of politics in an extended, almost metaphorical sense, whereby the principle of power attached to the business of actually governing the polis becomes an analogue for the “exercise of power, status, or authority” (OED) in other arenas, such as culture. The academic sense of “politics” refers, more or less, to the degree to which cultural artifacts (novels, paintings, films, etc.) reflect or do not reflect a progressive ideology of social justice,27 depending on the power, status, or authority those artifacts have both within the academy and in society at large. In some cases, the cultural artifact may well be construed not only as reflective of progressive ideology but also as instrumental to the realization of that ideology. Efforts to decolonize the curriculum in colleges and universities and to engage students with culture outside Western canons of art and literature reflect this instrumental ambition to make education more progressive and inclusive. However admirable such ethical considerations may be, they are difficult to reconcile with most manifestations of decadent culture, whose practitioners by and large make a point of insisting that art by its very nature can have no instrumental value whatsoever. Hence Gautier declares apropos the morality of literature that “[b]‌ooks follow manners and manners don’t follow books” and condemns the proposition that art can serve a useful purpose more generally by observing that “the most useful place in a house is the lavatory.” Likewise, Pater proclaims his “love of art for art’s sake,” and Wilde avers that “All art is quite useless.”28 Moreover, the insistence on the pure

Introduction   13 aesthetic value of the work of art in decadent culture, its removal from questions of morality, was extended into the realm of human conduct, such that conduct itself came to be judged not on the basis of right and wrong but on aesthetic criteria: the decadent is guided not by morality, but by style. Understandably, the contemporary academic, driven by a kind of institutional imperative, often engages in revisionist readings of prior culture in an effort to adjust the ideological shortcomings of the past to the progressive ideals of the present. A good example is the contemporary focus on a number of queer decadents as the very real victims of social and even state oppression, whose work is then incorporated into a metanarrative of social justice. But it seems that some decadents cannot, and should not, be redeemed. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what a socially just version of a Gautier or a Baudelaire would look like. At the same time, even those misogynistic pseudo-​aristocrats point to another one of those imponderable paradoxes that seem endemic to decadence. In its aloof removal from social norms, its irreverent refusal of moral conventions, its disdainful denial of bourgeois expectations, and its stubborn opposition to the kind of homogenizing cultural paradigm that Herder and so many others advocated, decadence, ironically, prepares the way for—​or, at least, anticipates—​the pluralistic, heterogeneous cultures of contemporary society. If the decadent resistance to convention and conformity ramifies into the present day, the development might be construed as a positive cultural payoff of a largely reactionary nineteenth-​century tradition. That said, finding affirmative value in such an unrelentingly pessimistic tradition as decadence requires a fair degree of rhetorical gymnastics. Decadence, after all, is literally a downer, and today there is ample reason to think that a tradition that is dark by definition is only getting darker. The perception that one is living in a decadent age is by no means new, but what seems different now is how closely perception and reality align. In the nineteenth century, decadents living during the fin de siècle participated in a culture in which fin du globe was a given, but history shows that, however pessimistic those decadents might have been, the world did not end with the end of the century after all. The development of modernity in all its commercial, political, and social forms fed the perception that progress itself was a form of decadence, yet that perception was offset by a very different reality: improved sanitation led to less disease, economic growth meant greater financial security, educational reform assured increased literacy, political enfranchisement guaranteed more rights for all (or almost all), and so on. But that was then: today, what we see seems more like what we get, and what we get, wherever we look, is a world well on its way to ending. To give only the most obvious example, global temperatures really are rising: climate change—​for the worst—​is a measurable fact. In a simpler, more eschatological time, the end of the world was imagined as a singular event, a catastrophe at the terminus of history that occurred after a long twilight of decline. Today, that quaint idea of apocalypse is almost refreshingly naïve, not only because the climate disaster is continuous, not instantaneous, but also because our contemporary crises are just that—​multiple, not singular. Today, “apocalypse” comes in several varieties (in addition to the climatological): the political (right-​wing

14    David Weir and Jane Desmarais authoritarianism), the economic (income inequality), the social (systemic racism), the epidemiological (the COVID-19 pandemic), and more (would that there were only four horsemen).29 The end of the world, in short, once imagined as an event, has since become a condition; and if decadence is a cultural response to a time of decline, that culture now seems more pertinent than ever as an expression of our contemporary predicament. The organization of this collection of essays accommodates both traditional literary historical approaches to decadent culture and more recent developments. Some chapters treat decadence in conventional British terms as a literary “movement” of the late Victorian Era (1837–1901), but most understand decadence not only in relation to literary cultures outside the usual French-British orbit, but also as a culture in itself that may be manifested in material and social terms well removed from literary expression. Decadent culture broadly conceived is the product of several critical periods—antiquity, various ages of empire, the fin de siècle, the interwar era—and certain key places that go beyond the traditional realms of France and Britain. Indeed, the periodization of decadence can be extended to our own times, and the cultural geography of decadence expanded to include places and nations outside Western Europe—such as, for example, Finland, Ukraine, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan.30 The learned culture of decadence may be manifest most clearly in traditional literary genres such as the novel, the short story, the play, the essay, and the prose poem, but it has also found a place in popular culture, notably cinema. To these traditional genres can be added several forms of material culture wherein decadence has found expression, such as clothing, furniture, and buildings. Decadence is not just something you read, and even in the case of reading, the text is not always the whole story—the book itself matters, also. What you hold in your hands is, in many cases, as much a part of decadent culture as whatever you hold in your head. You can also wear decadence and walk around in it. It is, in short, not just an intellectual experience but a sensuous one as well: the look, sound, smell, taste, and feel of decadence likewise make their way into the culture, sometimes all at once. Imagining that perfumes, colors, and sounds might somehow echo one another is strange to contemplate today, yet that is how Baudelaire heard the unseen world that color and smell intimated to him. The tension between that synesthetic ecstasy and the certainty of original sin may be less intensely felt by the decadents after Baudelaire, but it left its mark on the culture going forward. Indeed, the vacillation between spiritual conviction and anxious uncertainty—what Baudelaire called l’idéal and le spleen—is part of the paradoxical theology of decadence, only the first of several elements that urge a broader theoretical examination of the culture from different disciplinary perspectives: science, ecology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, politics. Periods, places, genres, materialities, senses, and theories: this scheme might, at first, appear to cover all the angles and exhaust the possibilities of a culture at odds with progressive modernity and insidious to bourgeois society. But the reader of the essays collected herein can rest assured that when it comes to decadence there will always be more to say: too much is never enough.

Introduction   15

Notes 1. In 1899, Arthur Symons called Against Nature “the breviary of the decadence.” See The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Constable, 1908), 139. A breviary is a prayer book designating specific prayers for specific hours of the day. 2. E. Klein, Micro-organism and Disease: An Introduction to the Study of Specific Microorganisms (London: Macmillan, 1884), 1–2. 3. Don Rittner and Timothy McCabe, Encyclopedia of Biology (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 189. 4. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 252. 5. For recent discussions of Baudelaire’s relationship with Jeanne Duval, see Mireille Rosello, “Jeanne and Charles: Les Fleurs du Mal as ‘Uncertain Fables,’ ” Australian Journal of French Studies 54, no. 1 (2017): 45–57; and Robin Mitchell, Venus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020). More generally, the best biographies of Baudelaire in English remain Enid Starkey, Baudelaire (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1958) and Joanna Richardson, Baudelaire (London: John Murray, 1994). The standard biography in French is Claude Pichois and ́ Jean Ziegler, Charles Baudelaire (Paris: Fayard, 2005), first published in 1987. 6. The distinction between learned culture and lived culture has long been recognized as a critical concept in applied linguistics, particularly in second-language learning. A native speaker of English intent on learning Japanese, for example, needs to master not only the phonology, syntax, and lexicon of the language in order to speak it, but also the social protocols unconsciously encoded into the culture (bowing, nodding, appropriate conversational distance between speakers, etc.) that allow for effective communication. For discussion, see Alice Omagio Hadley, Teaching Language in Cultural Context, 3rd. ed. (Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 2001), 349–89. 7. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 2nd ed., trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 32. 8. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 22. 9. A newspaper notice from the time describes the female absinthe drinker in the painting as “apathetic, heavy-lidded, and brutish, absolutely indifferent to all things external, nod[ding] to the warm languor of the poison. Her flat shuffling feet tell all the tale. Every tone and touch breathes the sentiment of absinthe.” See Phil Baker, The Book of Absinthe: A Cultural ​ History (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 123. 10. Baker, The Book of Absinthe, 109. 11. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 418. 12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1976), 124. 13. For a wide-ranging discussion of political ideology in the context of decadent and symbolist literature, see Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). For specific discussion of Octave Mirbeau, see Reg Carr, Anarchism in France: The Case of Octave Mirbeau (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1977). 14. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98.

16    David Weir and Jane Desmarais 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 170. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 140. 17. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 166, 186, and passim. 18. In 1889, Georg Brandes nicely captured the concept of aristocratic individualism when he described Nietzsche’s “hope of an aristocracy of intellect that could seize the dominion of the world.” See Georg Brandes, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. G. Chater (London: Heinemann, 1914), 52. 19. The transnational dimension of decadence has been detailed by Matthew Potolsky in The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 20. J. G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 324. 21. F. M. Barnard, introduction to J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, 7. 22. For this perspective, see Dennis Denisoff, “Ecology: The Vital Forces of Decay,” chapter 32 of this volume. 23. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random House, 1988), 72. 24. For an account of the Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin, see Guy de la Bédoyère, The Discovery of Penicillin (Pleasantville, NY: Gareth Stevens, 2006). 25. For discussions of the phenomenon whereby decadence ramifies into modernism, see David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Kate Hext and Alex Murray, eds., Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 26. Curiously, Williams includes no entry for politics or political in his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 27. The concept of “social justice” has been around since the early nineteenth century (the first OED citation is 1824), when the problem of the equitable distribution of wealth during the Industrial Revolution emerged. As such, it was closely related to the later philosophy of utilitarianism, which John Stuart Mill described as “not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” See Mill, Utilitarianism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 10. Mill’s axiom is often paraphrased as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” But even in Mill, the concept of social justice is already moving away from the strictly distributionist sense it had earlier in the nineteenth century and beginning to acquire the moral meanings it has accrued more recently as an ethical obligation to ensure the equitable treatment of individuals by all institutions in a particular society. The fanciful title of the book notwithstanding, a good overview of recent discussion of social justice is David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28. Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Joanna Richardson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1981), 35, 39; Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 121; Oscar

Introduction   17 Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 4. 29. In his recent book about American decadence, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat uses the metaphor of apocalypse to identify the “four horsemen” of decline as economic stagnation, reproductive “sterility,” institutional sclerosis, and cultural repetition (i.e., lack of originality). See Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: America before and after the Pandemic (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021), especially “The Four Horsemen,” the first four chapters that make up Part 1, “Stagnation,” “Sterility,” “Sclerosis,” and “Repetition,” 15–116. 30. The “Places” section of this collection is not exhaustive, two notable omissions being the United States and Latin America. For the United States, see David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–1926 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); for Latin America, see Michela Coletta, Decadent Modernity: Civilization and “Latinidad” in Spanish America, 1880–1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018).

PA RT I

P E R IOD S

Chapter 1

CL ASSICAL ANT I QU I T Y Unlikely Decadent Prototypes in Republican Rome Shushma Malik

On a Sunday in the summer of 1886, Paul Verlaine offered his critics the following pronouncement:1 I love . . . the word decadence [décadence], all shimmering in purple and gold. I dismiss, of course, any insulting accusation and any idea of decline [déchéance]. This word suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws out the brilliance of flames and the gleam of precious stones. It is made up of carnal spirit and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of the Lower Empire; it conjures up the paint of courtesans, the sports of the circus, the panting of the gladiator, the spring of wild beasts, the collapse among flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets. The decadence is Sardanapalus lighting the fire in the midst of women, it is Seneca declaiming poetry as he opens his veins, it is Petronius masking his agony with flowers.2

The imagery conjured by Verlaine to describe and defend decadence belongs to the period of ancient Rome. Sardanapalus, it is true, was supposedly the last Assyrian king (seventh century BCE), but he is positioned amid the trappings of Imperial Rome—​ gladiators, the circus, Seneca and Petronius, and the trumpets of barbarian invaders.3 It is little wonder that, in 1981, the French historian Pierre Chaunu wrote “la décadence, c’est Rome” (Decadence is Rome).4 The decline of no other age has been reveled in as much as the decline of Rome.5 However, Verlaine deliberately rejects the idea that decadence is synonymous with decline, even though he would have known the word décadence is related to the Latin decadēre, “to decay” or “to fall down.” Verlaine picks the near synonym déchéance deliberately, in a self-​consciously futile attempt to separate decadence (extreme luxury and artistic freedom) from decline (decay). But the very point of his rejection is that

22   Shushma Malik it rails against scholarly and popular opinion. By the time Verlaine was goading his critics, Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was a century old. In Gibbon’s words, the “opulent nobles of an immense capital, who were never excited by the pursuit of military glory, and seldom engaged in the occupations of civil government” were ultimately to blame for Rome’s decline.6 In a more popular publication, The Leisure Hour (a Victorian general-​interest magazine published by the Religious Tract Society in London), the anonymous author of “The Sack of Rome” wrote: The observer cannot but be struck with strange parallels in the moral aspect of the Paris of to-​day and Rome of the Decadence. . . . The austere virtues to which Rome was indebted for proud pre-​eminence as crowned mistress of the world, were certainly not conspicuous in her, in the days of her decline. Emperors sunk in the softness of Asian indolence, shut within palace walls, ignorant of affairs, governed by women and eunuchs, and consulting with ministers scarcely less effeminate than themselves, could not, with their languid efforts, guide well the State.7

Both Gibbon and the author of “The Sack of Rome” use the argument that Rome fell because of decadent practices to call attention to the potential for decline in their contemporary Europe (Britain, Paris). Rome worked seamlessly as the paradigm of decadence for those as different as Gibbon and Verlaine, which begs a question: Why? There have been many excellent expositions about the appeal of Rome as the prototype of a decadent age. Recently, Jerry Toner provided an extremely useful overview of the relationship between decadence and the Roman discourse of luxury, tracking the development from anxieties about the expansion of empire to the profligate emperors of Imperial Rome.8 Indulgence in luxury was linked to moral decline, and when emperors were perceived to push extravagance to the extreme (massive spectacles, grand dinner parties, ornate clothes and hairstyles, etc.), the downward trajectory was, for moralist writers, confirmed as inescapable. This confirmation was in part responsible for the reputation of Imperial Rome as the locus of decadence in the nineteenth century. While contemporary moralists such as Désiré Nisard and Max Nordau adopted the ancient narrative of decline (specifically with relation to Latin literature—​Lucan and Petronius were but pale and vulgar imitators of Cicero and Virgil), French aesthetes such as Paul Verlaine and J.-K. Huysmans used precisely this moralistic criticism to declare the excellence of later Latin.9 Thus, as Nordau described Roman literature from Petronius onward as composed by “authors of the Roman and Byzantine decadence” and a model for the “degenerate writers” of his own age,10 Huysmans’s protagonist in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), Des Esseintes, declares that Latin had “attained supreme maturity” in the works of that same Petronius.11 Ancient Rome is so versatile because the era provided examples of those who set the rules of morality, and those who violated them. For every historian like Livy designating decline, there was an emperor like Caligula reveling in excess.

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   23

Exempla and Decline in Republican Rome Whether Paul Verlaine wanted to admit the close connection between decadence and decline or not, the association is inescapable in relation to Rome. The standard version of Rome’s story goes that its military success in the wars against Carthage and Macedonia in the second century BCE caused an influx of luxury into the city that led to moral decline in its leaders and, eventually, its wider population.12 This is a familiar argument in relation to the “fall” of the Roman Republic and the rise of the principate, but it is hard to find any period of Roman history that has not been populated with characters demonstrating some of the marks of decay. On the one hand, Roman literature is infused with exempla—​figures from the past whose acts could demonstrate the heights of moral integrity, and from whom others could learn the best Roman behavior. But on the other hand, for every account of a virtuous Roman acting in the best interests of the state, there were others calling those same acts into question, either in terms of the motivation of the actor or because they failed to live up to their function as exempla for later generations. Roman literature does not consistently portray one figure who can be understood as superior to others; for all of, say, Horatius Cocles’s courage in defending a bridge across the Tiber from invading Etruscans, later Romans would wonder whether he actually turned and fled.13 Rather, Romans problematized their own past using tropes that later became associated with decadence: weakness, lateness, inadequacy, and decline. As Rebecca Langlands explains, “Roman exemplarity operates in its own form of eternal Sisyphean recursiveness, where the forward thrust of exemplarity is always countered by the slippery slope of moral degeneration.”14

Lucius Junius Brutus Let us begin with the trope of “falling short” or inadequacy. Lucius Junius Brutus is credited as a driving force in the expulsion of Rome’s tyrannical kings and the foundation of the Roman Republic (ca. 509 BCE). He appears regularly in oratory and historiography as an exemplum gentis—​an example whom his family members (the Junii Bruti) in particular should aspire to equal, and against whom they and other Romans can be measured.15 The most famous descendent of L. Junius Brutus is Marcus Junius Brutus, one of the assassins of Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BCE. But Brutus the tyrannicide was not the first to be compared with (or compare himself to) his famous ancestor. Cicero preserves in his fictional dialogue set in 91 BCE, De oratore, a speech given by Lucius Licinius Crassus against Marcus Junius Brutus (the father of the tyrannicide) that is centered on the idea that M. Junius Brutus fell far short of his ancestor

24   Shushma Malik in character and behavior. In the speech, Crassus challenges Brutus to imagine what account his recently deceased aunt Junia would make of him to his ancestors when she meets them again: Brutus, why seated? What news would you have that venerable dame carry to your sire? to all those whose busts you behold borne along? to your ancestors? to Lucius Brutus, who freed this community from the tyranny of the kings? What shall she tell them you are doing? What affairs, what glorious deeds, what worthy ends are you busied with? Is it increasing your heritage? That is no occupation for the nobly-​ born, but—​assuming it were so—​you have nothing left to increase; sensuality has squandered every shilling. . . . Do not you tremble exceedingly at the spectacle of that dead lady? and of those same busts, you who have left yourself no room even for setting them up, much less for emulating their originals?16

The “original” Brutus, named by Crassus as the one who “freed” Rome, exposes by his example the decline in his family that has resulted in a descendant who is neither a lawmaker, nor a soldier, nor an orator. The strength of the establishment of L. Junius Brutus as exemplum gentis makes his later relatives prime targets for invective precisely on these grounds.17 If anyone could live up to such a model, surely it should be Brutus’s own family. Their failure to do so implicitly calls into question Brutus’s efficacy as a model. However, the foundation of the Roman Republic was not the only deed for which L. Junius Brutus was remembered. His biography contained within it a tragedy equal to the “agony” of Verlaine’s dying Petronius. After the expulsion of the Tarquinius Superbus (Rome’s final king), Brutus and Tarquinius Collatinus become the first consuls of the new republic. In the same year, disaster struck. The expelled Tarquins plotted with some other leading Roman families, including the Vitellii and the Aquilii, to restore the royal family. Brutus was married to a member of the Vitellii, and with her he had two sons, Tiberius and Titus. These sons joined the plot with their uncles, seeking to undo the action of their father. However, the conspirators were betrayed by a slave, and the plot was crushed by the consuls. Tiberius and Titus, alongside other young nobles, were condemned to death—​they were stripped, scourged with rods, and beheaded.18 Livy describes the scene as Brutus stood and witnessed his sons’ deaths: “through it all men gazed at the expression on the father’s face, where they might clearly read a father’s anguish, as he administered the nation’s retribution.”19 This episode works on two levels in relation to decadence. First, the tragedy of Brutus is made exquisite by the pain he endures. Second, Brutus’s own sons were incapable of emulating their father’s exemplary character and behavior. Livy laments the lost potential of the noble line owing to the deeds of the sons: “To think that those young men, in that year of all others, when their country was liberated and her liberator their own father, and when the consulship had begun with the Junian family, could have brought themselves to betray all.”20 The poignancy of this dreadful moment continued to resonate in later times; when Voltaire comes to write his version of the story in his play

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   25

Figure 1.1  School of Jacques-​Louis David, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789). Source: Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (Wikimedia Commons).

Brutus (1729), he begins with Lucretia already dead, Tarquinius Superbus already exiled, and Brutus already consul. The foundation of the Republic is not the story, but rather Brutus’s anguish as the treachery of his son unfolds. Voltaire’s decision proved influential. In the 1780s, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789), attributed to Jacques-​Louis David (Figure 1.1), and Guillaume Guillon Lethière’s Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (1788; Figure 1.2) both depict a desolate father being presented with the lifeless bodies of his children. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw numerous versions of Voltaire’s play enter the theaters. Brutus Ultor (1886) was written by two decadent poets, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, and published under the pseudonym Michael Field. Bradley and Cooper, as Michael Field, were well known in the literary and artistic circles of London, including those of Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and Vernon Lee. Their tragic Brutus must pay for his decision to condemn his sons by also bearing the suicide of his wife, who cannot bear to leave her dead children without their mother.

26   Shushma Malik

Figure 1.2  Guillaume Guillon Lethière, Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (1788). Source: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (Wikimedia Commons).

Horatius Cocles, Cloelia, and Mucius Scaevola According to Valerius Maximus’s handbook of memorable Romans, the bravest of all were Horatius Cocles (“one-​eyed”) and Cloelia, both of whom were involved in the war against the Etruscans led by Lars Porsenna also in the aftermath of the Tarquins’ expulsion.21 Together with Mucius Scaevola (“left-​handed”), Horatius and Cloelia constituted the exemplary Roman resistance against invaders in the earliest period of the Republic. The stories (and stories they are, told of legendary figures by writers living centuries after the events are supposed to have happened) of Horatius and Cloelia are similar in an important way; both swam across a river, risking death, in order to protect Roman lives. Horatius saved a group of soldiers when he held the enemy back so his comrades could cross back over the Pons Sublicius (the Bridge of Piles). He then destroyed the bridge so the enemy could not follow. After this, Horatius swam across the Tiber and either sacrificed his life (Polybius) or lived and joined the rest of the group (Livy).22 His deed was rewarded with a statue in the forum, a piece of land, and gifts (rations of food) from the people of Rome, albeit in a time of famine.

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   27 Cloelia also swam across the Tiber during the same encounter with the Etruscans. When she was taken hostage by Lars Porsenna along with other Roman women and children, Cloelia took advantage of the location of the Etruscan camp near the river and led a group of girls to safety through the water. The king was so impressed with her feat that he demanded her return, under his protection, but allowed the other girls to remain free. In due course, he also released the young boys in the group of remaining hostages as a present to Cloelia.23 Cloelia’s bravery is rewarded by the Romans with an equestrian statue, also in the forum, making her the only woman to receive such an honor. Mucius Scaevola’s exemplary story shares the tropes of military courage and valor with Horatius and Cloelia but involves fire rather than water. Rome was under Porsenna’s blockade when Gaius Mucius (later “Scaevola”), a young nobleman, obtained permission from the Senate to try and infiltrate the Etruscan camp and kill Porsenna. But when he reached his destination, Mucius mistook the king’s secretary for the king and killed the wrong person. Once he was seized and dragged before the king, he demonstrated the courage and the spirit of the Romans by plunging his right hand into a fire until one of the king’s attendants forced him to remove it. Porsenna was so impressed he allowed Mucius to leave, unharmed by the Etruscans. In the aftermath of this episode, the Etruscans made peace with Rome. Mucius received a piece of land from the Senate as his reward.24 All three of these stories seem fairly unproblematic as exemplary tales—​they demonstrate the numerous admirable qualities of the best Romans, both male and female. Even the failure of Mucius in his assassination attempt is turned around when it causes the war to come to an end. But the stories as I have just told of them (drawn primarily from Livy) are not the only version of events. Generations of Romans added complexities to these exemplary characters, questioning their motives and consequences to figure them as weak, late, or fated for inevitable decline. Criticism of Cloelia can be found not long after Livy wrote his version of her heroism. As Matthew Roller has argued, Livy presents a Cloelia who both exhibits the courage (virtus) of men (e.g., by swimming across the Tiber with arrows being fired at her, as Horatius had done), and also the courage only appropriate for women (e.g., her protection of other young women and children).25 The subject of whether her actions can really be understood as matching or outdoing a man in the military sphere not only sees her lauded like no other woman, but also criticized because of the (perceived) inherent and unmistakable weaknesses in women. Thus, while Manilius, writing a text on astronomy in the late Augustan period, describes Cloelia as being greater than men, Pliny the Elder, a generation later, questions whether she deserved her equestrian statue at all. Others, such as Lucretia and Brutus, those who had expelled the kings in the first place, were surely more deserving.26 If Pliny’s Cloelia is not brave enough, Silius Italicus’s is too constrained by her gender to show real masculine daring at all. Her courage is feminine and childish; had she really been able to summon the qualities of a man, she would have killed Lars Porsenna when she had the chance.27 For Pliny and Silius Italicus, the exemplary Cloelia is not as worthy of praise as she first seems. Coming after Horatius, and performing such a similar feat to him, makes

28   Shushma Malik Cloelia “late” in the eyes of Pliny, and, for Silius, her weakness in the face of a foreign king contradicts Manilius’s claim that she could hold her own alongside any man. That Cloelia’s gender makes her a complex exemplary figure is arguably not surprising in the context of a society such as that of ancient Rome. But hers is not the only story to come under fire. Mucius and Horatius are also accused of acts or attributes that illustrate a trajectory of decline. First, both men, despite being held up alongside Cloelia as paradigms of military valor by Valerius Maximus, are nevertheless also “late.” Dionysius of Halicarnassus is careful to describe Gaius Mucius as a man who comes from a distinguished line—​he is just one of his family to perform noble deeds.28 He may be equal to others, but he is after them. Similarly, Polybius contextualizes the act of Horatius Cocles with a description of him and other young Romans attending aristocratic funerals to hear of their forebears’ great achievements and receiving inspiration to match them in glory. Again, Horatius’s deeds may be great, but they replicate those of others.29 Unlike Cloelia, Horatius and Mucius also suffer debilitating injuries. Horatius seems already to have lost the use of one eye before the battle at the bridge, but some Roman writers suggest (against Livy) that he also sustained injuries during his swim from the arrows fired at him in the water.30 A wound to either his hip or his leg caused him to limp. On the one hand, his disabilities remained as a testament to the sacrifice he made for his country, but on the other, such physical imperfections halted his public career from that point onward. Dionysius of Halicarnassus writes that while Horatius was one of Rome’s most courageous men, he was unable to pursue a political career because of the state of his leg.31 This act was the beginning of his end, the beginning of his decline. For this man, more than three thousand hungry Romans were made to give up their food rations. Moreover, both Horatius and Mucius are ridiculed for, in effect, inflicting their wounds upon themselves by their inability to think of better, less dangerous alternatives. In his account of Cicero’s speeches against Antony in the Roman Senate, Cassius Dio includes a rebuttal against Cicero made by one of his enemies, Quintus Fufius Calenus. After Cicero had used the leg of Horatius and the hand of Scaevola to highlight Antony’s lack of bravery and statesmanship,32 Calenus replies that his man had no need to “break a leg in a vain attempt to make his own escape, nor burn off a hand in order to frighten Porsenna, but by his cleverness and consummate skill, which were of more avail than the spear of Decius or the sword of Brutus, he put an end to the tyranny of Caesar.”33 These “heroes” of Rome wounded themselves for nothing. Such a speech could plausibly be made by Calenus precisely because, within the exemplary tradition, there were ambiguities embedded within the stories. Horatius’s career was (according to some) quickly over after he destroyed the bridge, and Calenus depicts him as having made a cowardly escape. Mucius may not have been brave, but rather zealous and stupid. Cloelia did the best she could for a woman, but even then there were more worthwhile women to memorialize with a statue, such as the faithful Lucretia. As such, not only are these most exemplary of Romans unable to halt the decline of the Republic by setting examples, they themselves often suffer as a result of their

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   29 exemplary deeds. This element of failure seeps through, if subtly, into instances of their reception history. When Thomas Babbington Macaulay wrote the immensely popular Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) about Rome’s early heroes, Horatius Cocles was his first subject. Although the upstanding Horatius is triumphant in battle, Macaulay has the poem’s narrator reveal that his own time was one in which deterioration was already taking place: “Roman is to Roman /​More hateful than a foe,” while “men fight not as they fought /​In the brave days of old.”34 Macaulay describes the narrator as living just before Rome was sacked by the Gauls, in ca. 390 BCE—​well before the expansion into Carthage and Macedonia had begun, let alone corrupted Romans with the ensuing wealth. Macaulay, a man who knew the ancient sources well, included in this book aimed at children the signs of early Roman decline.

Cato the Younger As the Roman Republic was approaching its “fall,” one character stands out in the exemplary tradition for his honorable behavior as a political player, Cato the Younger. Cato was a contemporary of the prolific writer Cicero, and also the great-​grandson of another famous Roman, Cato the Censor (or Elder). Cato the Elder was a novus homo (the first in his family to enter the Senate), but soon established himself as a staunch conservative interested in protecting Roman morals. The elder Cato was distinguished not by one particular deed, but by his mode of behavior. He was praised for his attempts to curb luxury in society at a time when Rome was succumbing to the riches of an expanding empire, but he was also criticized for his less than acceptable business practices in the pursuit of profit and the indulgence of his sexual appetite in old age.35 Much like Lucius Junius Brutus, the elder Cato’s public, if not private, conduct provided an exemplum for all Romans, but particularly for those in his family. Cato the Younger sought to be even more steadfast in his sternness and conservatism than his ancestor, and he was, for the most part, successful. He is repeatedly described by ancient writers as an exceptionally staunch and upright man.36 Cato possessed such a reputation that Cicero was able to use it against him when the two men appeared as opposing advocates in the courtroom. Cicero, as defense lawyer for Lucius Licinius Murena (a senior politician charged with electoral bribery in 62 BCE), argued that Cato was unable to show any leniency whatsoever, to the point that he had become zealous in his rigid application of the law.37 Clearly, Cicero was trying to win a case, but those listening to the advocate’s words might also question Cato’s integrity when they considered that he chose not to prosecute his brother-​in-​law Decimus Junius Silanus for the same crime in the same year, despite a public promise to bring all those involved to justice.38 Owing to his occasional slips, Velleius Paterculus hinted at an element of performativity in Cato’s excellence; he too (like his ancestor) had private vices that compromised his actions:

30   Shushma Malik Cato brought home from Cyprus a sum of money which greatly exceeded all expectations. To praise Cato’s integrity would be sacrilege, but he can almost be charged with eccentricity in the display of it; for, in spite of the fact that all the citizens, headed by the consuls and the senate, poured out of the city to meet him as he ascended the Tiber, he did not disembark and greet them until he arrived at the place where the money was to be put ashore.39

The ultimate expression of Cato’s rigidity was his suicide in 46 BCE. Julius Caesar, Cato’s political nemesis, had defeated his rivals and became (as Cato saw it) de facto tyrant of Rome. Rather than submit to a tyrant, Cato took his own life in a decisive act of liberty. But the ethics of suicide in these circumstances were not entirely clear: Plutarch describes Marcus Junius Brutus (Cato’s nephew and son-​in-​law, the tyrannicide) as having struggled with the issue in a conversation with Cassius. When younger, Brutus says, he had blamed Cato for taking the easy way out, for running away instead of accepting and facing the challenge of life under Caesar.40 Moreover, as Alexei Zadorojnyi has shown, Plutarch himself displays in his body of work a discomfort with Cato’s chosen method of suicide.41 Unlike the model left by Socrates of a clean death using hemlock, Cato stabbed himself with a sword, not killing himself immediately but rather falling off his bed, which prompted his friends to rush into the room. A doctor then attempted to replace his entrails and sew the wound back up, but Cato reopened it with his hands, and died.42 The scene is messy, bloody, and disordered rather than composed and rational—​it is out of step with the consistency and excellence that characterized his public and political life. For later periods trying to get to grips with Cato, Christianity adds a further complication with which to contend—​suicide as a sin. Augustine, in City of God, cannot accept that Cato’s suicide was justified—​Cato could not have thought that living under Caesar was so bad, otherwise, he would also have killed his son on the same night. Rather, Cato could not live with the shame of being pardoned by Caesar.43 Dante is kinder when he places Cato in purgatory rather than in the inferno, but the anxiety over how to handle Cato’s suicide is still evident hundreds of years later. One of the eighteenth century’s most popular Catos, that of Joseph Addison’s play (Cato, 1712), used his final words to express a fear that he has been too hasty. As Catharine Edwards suggests, Addison creates a “proto-​Christian” Cato but in doing so depicts a protagonist with no real reason to die.44 Similarly to Plutarch’s, Addison’s Cato is given a death scene out of step with his life. The Romans did not construct their exemplary characters to be beyond reproach.45 This was entirely intentional—​the ambiguities contained within their stories are precisely what make them important and useful as educative tools and as devices to employ in political and philosophical thought—​they are, as Langlands puts it, “working stories.”46 The hints of lateness, weakness, contradiction, and decline in the ancient sources betray a Rome populated with characters who are not only corrupted by the expansion of empire, but who have always struggled with the decisions they made and with their own inadequacies. For an audience looking to censure or celebrate flaws in society, the entirety of Roman history lends itself as a model. While the ages of Roman

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   31 emperors like Nero and Elagabalus would emerge as the most obvious symbols of decadence in the late nineteenth century, the sense that Rome was tainted long before the advent of the emperors made the city hard to parallel as a locus for decay.

Exemplary Romans, Romantics, and Decadents For writers like Théophile Gautier, Verlaine, and Wilde, and for artists like Thomas Couture and Sir Lawrence Alma-​Tadema, supreme decadence could be found in the literature and culture of the period of ancient Rome’s emperors, in particular that of their first dynasty of rulers, the Julio-​Claudians (Augustus to Nero).47 Beyond the city itself, the Roman Empire in this period encompassed other loci of decadent fascination, including Judaea (Moreau’s and Wilde’s Salomé) and North Africa (Flaubert’s Salammbô). The Romans of this period lived not under the constraints of social mores, but as the subjects of emperors who could (allegedly) enjoy pleasure palaces in Capri (Tiberius), build a floating bridge across the bay of Naples (Caligula), or set fire to an entire city just for artistic inspiration (Nero). They were testament to what could be achieved if immorality and criminality were removed as barriers, with purely aesthetic concerns awarded primacy. For the decadents, Imperial Rome was synonymous with liberation—​only the absolute authoritarian power of an emperor-​aesthete such as Nero or Elagabalus could produce a decadent state. Republican “moderation” would not do. However, while many scholars have convincingly shown that the Imperial period is the most recognizable in decadent literature as a symbol, it remains significant that Rome often surpasses other places and times in history as the site of incomparable decadence. We may wonder whether such claims for artistic freedom could be found in the Persia of Croesus, or such crime in the Corinth of Periander. In fact, we need only go back a few generations to see how Rome’s “long” history could function as a site of decline. Romantics, in other words, provide important context for understanding the choices of decadents. If the decadents were fascinated by Rome’s emperors, the Romantics were gripped by Rome’s republic. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were periods of dramatic political upheaval (revolutions in the United States and France, the Representation of the People Acts in the United Kingdom), which naturally prompted extended discussions of political theory. Accompanying and shaping these political moments were works like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) on the radical side, and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) on the conservative side. Ideas about Roman political structures were infused throughout these texts, in particular those of Godwin and Burke. But, as Jonathan Sachs has argued, the two theorists use different

32   Shushma Malik versions of Republican Rome to explore their arguments. Burke positions himself as the new Cicero, using satirists such as Horace and Juvenal to lend weight to his status.48 His audience is intentionally limited—​his use of untranslated Latin signaled the work as an attempt to “appeal to members of a particular class of men.”49 Godwin, on the other hand, speaks to a wider audience, focusing not on works of literature or oratory but rather on individual exemplary “heroes.” His well-​known study evaluates Rome’s exemplary tradition in terms that invite moral judgment, judgment both of the individual characters and of the nature and temperament of the Roman state before the emperors. Godwin uses exemplary Romans to demonstrate how men can be virtuous and noble even in the most oppressive of political environments. While his contemporary historians were writing accounts of the Roman Republic that cataloged both progress and decline, Godwin’s Rome had no Golden Age, no period of moral greatness. Rather, all Romans were stained by their continual engagement in war: It is an old observation, that the history of mankind is little else than the history of crimes. . . . Indeed the Romans, by the long duration of their wars, and their inflexible adherence to their purpose, are to be ranked amongst the foremost destroyers of the human species. Their wars in Italy endured for more than four hundred years, and their contest for supremacy with the Carthaginians two hundred. The Mithridatic war began with a massacre of one hundred and fifty thousand Romans, and in three single actions of the war five hundred thousand men were lost by the eastern monarch. Sylla, his ferocious conqueror, next turned his arms against his country, and the struggle between him and Marius was attended with proscriptions, butcheries and murders that knew no restraint from mercy and humanity. The Romans, at length, suffered the penalty of their iniquitous deeds; and the world was vexed for three hundred years by the irruptions of the Goths, Ostrogoths, Huns, and innumerable hordes of barbarians.50

Gone from Godwin’s assessment is the more familiar narrative that Eastern luxury corrupted Roman morals following the Punic Wars. Adam Ferguson’s The History of the Progress and the Termination of the Roman Republic (1783) had, ten years before Godwin’s Political Justice, reasserted precisely this claim: [T]‌he Romans completed their political establishment, and made their first and their greatest advances to empire, without departing from the policy by which they had been preserved in the infancy of their power. . . . But the enlargement of their territory, and the success of their arms abroad, became the sources of a ruinous corruption at home.51

Rather, Godwin realized he must turn to individuals to find the lessons that could potentially be learned from the Romans, to those republicans who had come down through the history books as exempla. Driving Political Justice is Godwin’s analysis of the historical and modern relationship between the aristocracy and the people. Aristocracies were fundamentally corrupt

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   33 (“Aristocracy, like monarchy, is founded in falsehood, the offspring of art foreign to the real nature of things, and must therefore, like monarchy, be supported by artifice and false pretenses”),52 but Rome came the closest to producing an aristocratic class with a sense of decency. To support this claim, Godwin lists the patrician exempla “Brutus, Valerius, Coriolanus, Cincinnatus, Camillus, Fabricius, Regulus, the Fabii, the Decii, the Scipios, Lucullus, Marcellus, Cato [the Younger], Cicero, and innumerable others” against the solitary two plebeian Gracchi brothers.53 These men had an illuminating effect on an otherwise dark and gloomy Roman society, but Godwin nevertheless admits they were ultimately hindered by the automatic wealth, privilege, and power that came with their birth and status. Rome’s political reliance on an upper class held the state back: “[W]‌hat might they not have been but for the iniquity of aristocratical usurpation?”54 Only a very select few members of this list get any extended individual treatment in the essay; Mucius Scaevola is mentioned,55 but Lucius Junius Brutus and Cato the Younger are afforded the most discussion. Here too their actions are, to some extent, problematized. Brutus and Cato are first employed in a short appendix titled “Of Suicide.” As we have seen, the integrity of Cato’s suicide was questioned in antiquity—​his action was not always automatically accepted as correct, even before the application of a Christian moral code. Godwin begins his “Of Suicide” with the assessment that the act is indefensible if it is used as an escape from pain or disgrace. Perhaps expectedly, the case of Cato is not immediately clear; his motivation must be determined. Godwin turns to Brutus’s decision to allow the condemnation of his own sons to interpret Cato’s final decision. “It is commonly supposed,” Godwin writes, that Brutus was correct in his actions because they helped to promote integrity and discipline in others. Cato’s death produced a similar effect, providing “lovers of virtue under subsequent tyrants of Rome . . . the lamp from which they caught the sacred flame.”56 Cato is allowed to remain a moral paradigm, but only after a discussion of the merits of his decision. Moreover, by comparing Brutus, the founder of the Republic, with Cato, the Republic’s last champion, Godwin casts Rome’s Imperial period in similar terms to that of the Republic—​both needed the actions of these exemplary men to steer the ship of state in the right direction. At no point in their history can the greater population of Romans be trusted to act virtuously on their own. Later in Political Justice, however, Godwin seems to reject the idea that Cato’s flame can still be caught in modern times: “It is absurd to think that no man believes himself the inferior of his neighbor, or that, when he reads the plays of Shakespeare, the philosophy of Rousseau, or the actions of Cato, he says ‘I am as skilful, as wise, or as virtuous as this man.’ ”57 Godwin’s statement recalls a comment made by Plutarch that no one could realistically follow Cato’s lead, as his “old-​fashioned” deeds were out of proportion in the new context of the principate.58 Cato’s relevance as an exemplum is thus significantly restricted. Godwin does not subscribe to the common view that “nations like individuals are subject to the phenomena of youth and old age, and that, when a people by luxury and depravation of manners have sunk into decrepitude, it is not in the power

34   Shushma Malik of legislation to restore them to vigour and innocence.”59 In fact, real political change is possible in the right circumstances: [T]‌he power of social institutions changing the character of nations is very different from and infinitely greater than any power which can ordinarily be brought to bear upon a solitary individual. Large bodies of men, when once they have been enlightened and persuaded, act with more vigour than solitary individuals.60

On the one hand, what chance did Brutus or Cato, as individuals, have when they stood alone as moral beacons in the stagnant Roman crowd? On the other, had they been more effective as exempla, perhaps they could have enlightened a large enough section of society to affect real legislative change. In the end, these famous Republican Romans are yet again caught out by their inabilities and failures; once more, their utility is found not in outright virtue, but in the ambiguity of exempla as contributors to larger discussions, as “working stories” to explore political, philosophical, and moral questions. Godwin’s observation that the individual is not as important as the larger social population when driving change resonates with an idea prevalent among the fin-​de-​siècle decadents, that society will only change its trajectory if it wants to. While the occasional man might be trodden down by an emperor in pursuit of his art,61 the average citizen cheered on Nero when he went by, or had their story told by Petronius in “vulgar,” idiomatic Latin.62 Even the Roman nobility succumbed to the spirit of the times, as captured by Couture in his painting The Romans of the Decadence (1847; Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3  Thomas Couture, The Romans of the Decadence (1847). Source: Paris, Musée d’Orsay (Wikimedia Commons).

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   35 In a time when change is not desired, individuals can focus on their own immediate needs, and on their own indulgences. The state is stable, if tyrannical; even an emperor who suffocates his guests with rose petals does not cause the population to question the wisdom of one-​man rule. It is not that such decadent behavior could not be found in the Roman Republic—​the displays of personal wealth by conquering generals were a spectacle for all to see.63 But individual Romans continued to put up a fight—​sumptuary laws were routinely proposed and passed, if only because senators wanted to curb the flashy spending of their rivals. Decadents preferred the Rome of the emperors because everyone, more or less, had given up, deciding instead to embrace the languor. This stagnation makes more sense when Rome is understood as a state always troubled by decline. The undercurrent of lateness, weakness, and moral failings that existed in the Republic won out in the principate. But Rome is synonymous with decadence because its hallmarks can be found embedded in the very (hi)stories the Romans told about themselves. Roman literature has left for posterity a series of complicated characters who were never intended to be beacons of perfection. Even though “decadence” is not a Latin word, the Romans nevertheless related its conceptual synonyms to every era of their history remarkably well. Thus, while we may translate Chaunu’s phrase as “Decadence is Rome,” perhaps a better expression would be, contra Verlaine, “Decline is Rome.” For as long as there is decline in the tales of individual Romans, decadence will find a happy home.

Notes 1. My thanks to Jane Desmarais and David Weir for their extremely helpful comments on and suggestions for this article. 2. Translation after William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), 119, and Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (London: Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1979), 5–​6, with additions. For the original French, see Ernest Raynaud, La mêlée symboliste (1870–​1890): Portraits et souvenirs (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1918), 64. 3. Sardanapalus is also a nickname of one of Rome’s most notoriously decadent emperors, Elagabalus. See Cassius Dio, Roman History 80.1.1. 4. Pierre Chaunu, Histoire et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1981), 165. 5. See Shushma Malik, “Decadence and Roman Historiography,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 30–​46. 6. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. John Bagnell Bury, 7 vols. (London: Methuen, 1909–​1914), 3:310. 7. Anon., “The Sack of Rome,” The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation, December 10, 1870, 788–​90. 8. Jerry Toner, “Decadence in Ancient Rome,” in Desmarais and Weir, Decadence and Literature, 15–​29. 9. See Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 251–​57. See also Isobel Hurst, “Nineteenth-​Century Literary and Artistic Responses to Roman Decadence,” in Desmarais and Weir, Decadence and Literature, 47–​65.

36   Shushma Malik Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 301. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 32. E.g., Horace, Odes 2.15.10–​14; Sallust, The Jugurthine War 41. Cassius Dio, Roman History 46.19–​20. This passage will be discussed in more detail in due course. 14. Rebecca Langlands, Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 42. 15. See Evan Jewell, “Like Father, Like Son? The Dynamics of Family Exemplarity and Ideology in (Fragmentary) Republican Oratory,” in Institutions and Ideology in Republican Rome: Speech, Audience and Decision, ed. Henriette van der Blom, Christa Gray, and Catherine Steel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 267–​82, esp. 274–​82. 16. Cicero, De oratore 2.225–​ 26, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, in Cicero: De oratore: Books I and II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 365. 17. We see Cicero adopt a similar rhetorical strategy when castigating Publius Clodius Pulcher in De Domo Sua 105 by recalling his ancestor Appius Claudius Caecus. 18. Livy, From the Foundation of the City 2.4–​5. 19. Livy 2.5.8, Livy: History of Rome: Books I–​II, trans. Benjamin Oliver Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 233. 20. Livy 2.5.7, 233. 21. Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 3.2.1–​2. 22. Polybius, Histories 6.55; Livy, From the Foundation of the City 2.10. 23. Livy, From the Foundation of the City 2.13. 24. Livy, From the Foundation of the City 2.12–​13. 25. Matthew B. Roller, Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 82–​84. 26. Manilius, Astronomica 1.778–​81; Pliny the Elder, Natural History 34.38–​39. 27. Silius Italicus, Punica 10.493–​502. 28. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 5.25.4. 29. Polybius, Histories 6.53–​4. 30. See Roller, Models from the Past, 38–​42. 31. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 5.25.3. Similarly, Plutarch writes that a bronze statue was set up to Horatius in the temple of Vulcan as consolation for his “lameness,” Publicola 16.8. 32. Cassius Dio, Roman History 45.30–​32. 33. Cassius Dio 46.19–​20, Cassius Dio: Roman History: Books 46–​50, trans. Ernest Cary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 37. 34. T. B. Macaulay, “Horatius,” stanzas 31 and 33, in Lays of Ancient Rome (1842). 35. Plutarch, Cato the Elder 16.5, 21.5–​6, 24.1. 36. E.g., Plutarch, Cato the Elder 27.5; Velleius Paterculus, Roman History 2.35; Cicero, Brutus 118. 37. Cicero, Pro Murena 58. 38. Plutarch, Cato the Younger 21.3. 39. Velleius Paterculus 2.45.5, Velleius Paterculus and Res Gestae Divi Augusti, trans. Frederick W. Shipley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 151. 40. Plutarch, Brutus 40.7. 41. Alexei V. Zadorojnyi, “Cato’s Suicide in Plutarch,” Classical Quarterly 57, no. 1 (May 2007): 216–​30. 10. 11. 12. 13.

CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY   37 42. Plutarch, Cato the Younger 70.8–​10. 43. Augustine, City of God 1.23. 44. Catharine Edwards, “Modelling Roman Suicide? The Afterlife of Cato,” Economy and Society 34, no.2 (2005): 214. 45. For discussion of this topic that goes beyond Brutus, Horatius, Cloelia, and Mucius, see Langlands, Exemplary Ethics; Roller, Models from the Past. 46. Langlands, Exemplary Ethics, 62–​64. 47. Hurst, “Roman Decadence,” 55. 48. Jonathan Sachs, Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–​1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 51–​65. 49. Sachs, Romantic Antiquity, 65. See also Mary Wollstonecraft’s response to Burke’s Reflections, in which she draws direct attention to the narrowness of Burke’s intended audience: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 36–​37. 50. William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13–​14. 51. Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (New York: J. C. Derby, 1856), 90–​91. 52. Godwin, Political Justice, 255. 53. Godwin, Political Justice, 257. 54. Godwin, Political Justice, 258. 55. Godwin, Political Justice, 38–​39 and 454. Godwin had a particular interest in Mucius Scaevola. He published six letters in The Political Herald and Review (August 1785–​December 1786), signed using the pseudonym Mucius. See Sachs, Romantic Antiquity, 66–​70. 56. Godwin, Political Justice, 58–​59. The pair appear again at Political Justice, 311, but as part of a viewpoint being critiqued by Godwin. The end of his critique is unfinished in all three manuscripts. 57. Godwin, Political Justice, 197. 58. Plutarch, Phocion 3.2. 59. Godwin, Political Justice, 47. 60. Godwin, Political Justice, 48–​49. 61. Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle De Maupin, trans. Helen Constantine (London: Penguin, 2005), 128. 62. Oscar Wilde, “The Picture of Dorian Gray, the 1890 and 1891 Texts,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 3, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 289; Huysmans, Against Nature, 30. 63. E.g., Lucius Aemilius Paulus, in Livy, From the Foundation of Rome 45.35.

Further Reading Desmarais, Jane, and David Weir, eds. Decadence and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Edwards, Catharine, ed. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–​1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hutchinson, Ben. Lateness and Modern European Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

38   Shushma Malik Langlands, Rebecca. Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Liversidge, Michael, and Catharine Edwards, eds. Imagining Rome: British Artists and Rome in the Nineteenth Century. London: Merrell Holberton, 1996. Roller, Matthew B. Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sachs, Jonathan. Romantic Antiquity: Rome in the British Imagination, 1789–​1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Saunders, Timothy, Charles Martindale, Ralph Pite, and Mathilde Skoie, eds. Romans and Romantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sellers, Mortimer N. S. “The Roman Republic and the French and American Revolutions.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic, edited by Harriet I. Flower, 347–​64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Vance, Norman. The Victorians and Ancient Rome. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

Chapter 2

Ages of Empi re Pinnacles of Decline Norman Vance

The decadence of imperial Rome peaked, repeatedly, with notorious emperors from Nero to Elagabalus. Recalling this history came naturally to nineteenth-​ century decadents, particularly in France during and after the Second Empire (1852–​1870).1 It went with stylish torpor and a classical education. In “Langueur” (“Languor,” 1883) Paul Verlaine identified himself with the Roman Empire at the close of the decadence, and a little earlier, in his prose-​poem “Plainte d’automne” (“Autumn Lament,” 1864), Stéphane Mallarmé linked himself with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence. Decadence as a condition and a process—​variously personal, cultural, and political—​was intricately bound up with opulent empires, ancient and modern. France was not the only nation with an imperial history to look back with mixed feelings at the interesting excesses of ancient, usually decaying, empires: there were broadly similar concerns in the culture of Britain, Germany, Russia, and the ever-​expanding United States of America.

Sardanapalus Rome was not the only ancient empire invoked for models and warnings. There were earlier long-​dead empires and earlier imperial decadences to stimulate or trouble nineteenth-​century imaginations. Ancient Assyria with its legendary last emperor Sardanapalus, invoked by Verlaine alongside the Roman emperor Elagabalus (also known as Heliogabalus), was a case in point. The juxtaposition may have been because the disapproving historian Cassius Dio, his contemporary, actually called Elagabalus “Sardanapalus” to express his disapproval.2 Byron’s verse-​drama Sardanapalus (1821) helped to give the Assyrian emperor a modern European reputation, presenting him as engagingly magnificent and wayward in life and death, but the name had long been a byword for effete sensuality and excess,

40   Norman Vance cited by Aristotle to illustrate the error of identifying self-​indulgent pleasure with the good and to provide an example of a contemptibly effeminate ruler all too likely to be overthrown.3 He is mentioned with disapproval in Cicero, looking back to Aristotle; in St. Augustine, looking back to Cicero; and in Dante.4 According to the late Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, Byron’s main source, Sardanapalus can be blamed for the fall of Nineveh and the collapse of the Assyrian Empire, which had lasted for more than 1,300 years.5 There is, however, no emperor actually called Sardanapalus in the Assyrian records. Gossipy Greek historians such as Diodorus, following the unreliable Ctesias, whose work on Assyrian and Persian history now survives only in fragments, did not invent him out of nothing, but when writing about much earlier times they seem to have followed tradition rather than what little documentary evidence might have been available to them. They were mainly interested in glorifying victorious Greeks at the expense of those they had defeated. This led them to supply what might be called a decadence narrative, celebrating Greek masculinity and military might and, by way of contrast, attributing effeminacy and decadent weaknesses to foreign emperors the Greeks had resisted and to dead empires in lands where they had triumphed.6 The Sardanapalus of Greek history is a kind of caricature of the emperor Ashurbanipal (reigned 668–​631 BCE). The Greeks seem to have garbled both the name and the deeds of the historical Ashurbanipal, mighty in war, the builder of the last great Assyrian palace, and founder of an extensive “library” of cuneiform tablets. He was neither the last nor the worst of the later emperors of Assyria. Elements of the Sardanapalus story in the Greek sources may have been drawn from the more decadent life and times of other emperors. Luxurious languor and effeminacy and an epitaph in which Sardanapalus apparently commends only the pleasures of eating, self-​indulgence, and making love do not really go with his reputation as an active and effective military leader. Athenaeus of Naucratis notes that he was interested in more than pleasure and was no mere idler, since he was the founder, allegedly in a single day, of the cities of Anchiale and Tarsus.7 Diodorus describes his death as disgraceful, but Athenaeus described it as noble or glorious.8 However, the confusing incoherence in the sources allowed Byron to make Sardanapalus a divided and more dramatically interesting figure, a Byronic voluptuary still capable of a certain nobility. Early in Sardanapalus his brother-​in-​law Salamenes is made to say: In his effeminate heart There is a careless courage which corruption Has not quench’d, and latent energies, Repress’d by circumstances, but not destroy’d—​ Steep’d, but not drown’d, in deep voluptuousness.9

This mixed character helped to make him a kind of prototype of the decadent hero, intriguingly perverse and wayward, an embodiment of luxury and an opulently excessive culture, and a stylish symptom and source of political decline and disaster. Rather than

Ages of Empire    41 surrendering to the enemy at the gates, Sardanapalus chooses and commands his own death by fire, surrounded by his treasures, on a massive funeral pyre. Diodorus specifies that his eunuchs and concubines were compelled to perish with him, but in Byron’s drama the barbaric harshness is softened: only his wife joins him on the pyre, and that willingly, as a final act of love.10 The melodrama, spectacle, and defiant splendor of the suicide of Sardanapalus had already given rise to at least one opera, Sardanapalus (1698) by the German organist, librettist, and composer Christian Ludwig Boxberg.11 Thanks mainly to Byron, the subject soon attracted other Romantics. Eugène Delacroix painted an awesomely dramatic and disorderly Death of Sardanapalus (1827), now in the Louvre (Figure 2.1). Responding as much to Delacroix as to Byron, Paul Verlaine was reported as saying that the “decadence” he relished, with all its rich colors and its violent splendors, was embodied in “Sardanapalus lighting the fire in the midst of his women.”12 Hector Berlioz won the Prix de Rome at the Paris Conservatoire in 1830 with his melodramatic cantata Sardanapale (1830), which has particularly vigorous music for the concluding Conflagration, added later. The subject, set by the adjudicators, was more timely than they could have imagined: Berlioz completed his score in July 1830, just as a modern king, the Bourbon

Figure 2.1.  Eugène Delacroix, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). Source: Musée de Louvre, Paris (Wikimedia Commons).

42   Norman Vance

Figure 2.2.  John Martin, The Fall of Nineveh (1829). Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London (Wikimedia Commons).

Charles XII, was losing his throne in the streets outside in the July Revolution.13 The young Franz Liszt heard Berlioz’s treatment and years later attempted to compose Sardanapalo, a full-​scale opera on the same subject, abandoning it after the first act in 1852. England and the English, fascinated by Byron, were also interested in Sardanapalus of Nineveh. Biblical condemnation of his city as corrupt and evil, and the lurid violence of its destruction as recounted in the vision of Nahum in the Old Testament, made its downfall a respectable topic for art and literature. The first version of Edwin Atherstone’s interminable epic The Fall of Nineveh (1828–​1847), in which the tale of Sardanapalus is retold, coincided with his friend John Martin’s enormous painting The Fall of Nineveh (1829) which depicts the funeral pyre of Sardanapalus in the foreground and a vast panoramic view of doomed Nineveh in the background (Figure 2.2).14

Babylon and Persia Biblical as well as classical sources alluded to subsequent empires and emperors after the collapse of Assyria and before the rise of Rome. Some ruins remained. The well-​traveled comte de Volney’s best-​selling Les ruines (1791), soon translated as The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires (1792), provided Romantics and revolutionaries with examples of the self-​defeating vanities of empire and monarchy, kings and princes.

Ages of Empire    43 There were also glimpses of glory and beauty and dramatic possibilities among the ruins, for the benefit of future generations of artists and aesthetes, decadent or otherwise. The neo-​Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, now free of Assyrian domination, gave the world of history and of culture the biblical Nebuchadnezzar or Nebuchadrezzar—​or “Nabucco” in Verdi’s opera of that name (1842). The Babylonian Belshazzar, whose great feast and death that very night is described in the fifth chapter of the book of Daniel, inspired Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1636–​1638) (Figure 2.3). John Martin, a master of the apocalyptic sublime and much attracted by vast ancient buildings and imminent or actual destruction, won a prize of £200 for his painting of Belshazzar’s Feast, exhibited at the Royal Institution in 1821.15 He had already painted The Fall of Babylon in 1819. The last Babylonian king died in 359 BCE, and it was then the turn of Persia to command immense power and influence with Cyrus the Great and the Achaemenid dynasty. The tendency to identify the empire with the emperor, anticipating Louis XIV’s claim to the Paris Parlement that “l’État, c’est moi” (I am the state), was reinforced by the Persian determination to base Persian art and architecture entirely on the glorification and worship of the king.16 Something similar lay behind the building of Versailles under Louis XIV, and it is interesting that the visual splendors of Versailles and the king’s participation in court ballets reflected his self-​identification with Cyrus, along with other emperors, such as Alexander the Great.17 But empires rise and fall. The Greek perception of the state as an organism, a living thing that could flourish but would eventually pass its peak, wither, and decay, combined

Figure 2.3. Rembrandt, Belshazzar’s Feast (c. 1636–​1638). Source: National Gallery, London (Wikimedia Commons).

44   Norman Vance in the minds of Greek historians with a tendency to associate military defeat and political decline and fall with the allegedly degenerate moral and physical condition of peoples and individual rulers.18 This applied particularly to the Persian emperor Xerxes, defeated by the Greeks at the naval battle of Salamis (480 BCE) and represented by the dramatist Aeschylus in The Persians as an enfeebled and broken man after the battle.19 Plato, in the third book of the Laws, picked up on the gendered history of Persian decline by suggesting that the education of Persian rulers such as Xerxes in pampered luxury among the womenfolk had disastrous consequences both personal and political, leading to effeminacy and debauchery—​and ultimately to military and political disaster.20 The soldier-​historian Xenophon in his semifictional Cyropaedia represented the decline of Persia’s military and political fortunes after Cyrus as owing to moral and physical decay, soft living, and luxury in a degenerate and enfeebled culture.21 The Victorian scholar George Rawlinson, historian of the ancient East, was very properly skeptical about Greek accounts of Assyrian luxuriousness and degeneracy represented by emperors such as Sardanapalus/​Ashurbanipal. For him, Ashurbanipal was “harsh, vindictive, unsparing, careless of human suffering”—​a far cry, he implied, from the effeminate decadent sluggard imagined by the Greeks.22 But he was more disposed to take the Greek narrative of Persian degeneracy at face value, particularly as represented in the person of Xerxes. “With him commenced the corruption of the court—​the fatal evil, which almost universally weakens and destroys Oriental dynasties.”23 Moral condemnation of lost empires and those who lost them had perverse consequences, however. Moral criticism and aesthetic appreciation often pointed in different directions. It was easy for the whiggish actor-​manager and dramatist Colley Cibber to make the defeated Xerxes a decadent and brutal monster degenerating into insanity in his early tragedy of that name, and by associating Xerxes with the worship of the sun he could hint at possible links with France’s absolutist Louis XIV, the roi soleil (Sun King). Archbishop Fénelon, tutor of Louis XIV’s grandson the Duke of Burgundy, wrote instructive and entertaining imaginary Dialogues of the Dead in the manner of the second-​century Lucian of Samosata. One of them was between the boastful and stormy Xerxes, represented as an extravagant glory-​seeker presiding over vast numbers of subjects and a luxurious court not unlike that of Louis XIV, and the calm and righteous Leonidas the Spartan.24 But for some the opulence of courts, the beauty of art, and the soft pleasures of luxury were more attractive than austere righteousness. Théophile Gautier’s sardonic response to the moralistic critics of his time was the famous tongue-​in-​cheek preface to his self-​consciously transgressive novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), making the case for art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art) and helping to shape the decadent aesthetics of the fin de siècle. Aubrey Beardsley published illustrations to the novel in 1898. For Gautier, Sardanapalus, as presented by Byron and Delacroix, was a much-​misunderstood philosopher. He rebuked the moralists by satirically impersonating the aesthetic dilettante for whom enjoying the pleasures of the senses was the supreme and only good, as it was for the luxurious Sardanapalus of the Greek historians.

Ages of Empire    45

Victorian Appropriations Mid-​Victorian archaeological explorations of ruined Nineveh, particularly associated with A. H. Layard, had the effect of encouraging the British public to follow the example of Gautier and to think of elegant luxury and artistic splendors more than moralized decline and fall. Layard had published beautifully illustrated accounts of what he had discovered, which included sculpted reliefs showing figures with enormous stylized Assyrian beards, winged lions, and bulls with human heads, discussed at considerable length in two substantial articles in the Times in May 1853.25 Drawing on the classical sources, Layard’s text had also provided vivid detail such as the 150 golden beds, gold and silver vases, and purple and multicolored garments said to have been piled on Sardanapalus’s funeral pyre.26 All this contributed to a kind of Assyrian craze in London. It was a good moment for Charles Kean to stage a revival of Byron’s Sardanapalus in the West End, in July 1853, even though it was never really intended for the stage and had made little impression at Drury Lane twenty years earlier. Trouble was taken this time to provide exotically authentic, or at least plausible, settings and costumes, with some help both from Layard and from Delacroix’s painting, since decadent spectacle would be good box office. The Observer called it “a piece of gorgeous spectacle, nothing more.”27 The Times remarked that at least it was “an admirable peg whereon to hang those Assyrian antiquities of which Lord Byron never dreamed.”28 The lavish spectacle was the only thing the Times liked about a more or less simultaneous burlesque version at the Adelphi Theatre.29 This version gave Sardanapalus a mother-​in-​law and a lot of bad jokes in a text studded with puns. The comic Sardanapalus is even more effeminate than he is in Byron and in Diodorus of Sicily. Diodorus’s attribution of luxurious softness (truphe, which has connotations of enervation and affectation) is emphasized from the outset. He is introduced with soft harp music, he is “very soft—​ soft as the softest silk,” and he is “ruled by five hundred wives—​poor henpecked thing.”30 His “Assyrian grenadiers” are absurdly unmilitary, singing a song about their reluctance to leave their “barrack snug and cosy” to the tune of “The British Grenadiers.” They are dancing men rather than fighting men, more familiar with the waltz and the polka than with the order of battle.31 There is some farcical military action, leading the effeminate and dandified Sardanapalus (played by Miss Woolgar as a kind of pantomime principal boy) to put on “armour,” which turns out to be a “highly illuminated waistcoat,” and to select as his weapon “my lightest single stick.” The mother-​in-​law Salymenia, played as a pantomime dame by Mr. Keeley, is more masculine than Sardanapalus, and she is at least better armed for the fray—​with an umbrella.32 The legend of the effete Sardanapalus and his crumbling empire in the East was very ancient yet also almost unnervingly topical. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling and was by now recognized as the “sick man of Europe,” a remark attributed to Nicholas I, the Russian tsar.33 Imperial Russia and France under the Second Empire of Napoleon III were both showing interest in the Danubian Principalities (part of present-​day

46   Norman Vance Romania), which were under Ottoman Turkish rule. This area was occupied by Russian troops in July 1853 as the burlesque was being performed. Events were leading up to the Crimean War, which broke out in October. Almost the last line of the play, as the funeral pyre got going, was “I’m cooked as Russia wants to cook poor Turkey.”34 The comic Sardanapalus was written by Gilbert à Beckett and Mark Lemon, editor of Punch. Both were friends of Charles Dickens, and Lemon had acted with him in the amateur production of Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep in 1857. This is probably how “Sardanapalus’s luxury,” associated with “Lucifer’s pride” and “a mole’s blindness,” found its way into Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859).35 It provided a shorthand summary of the decadence of the French court of the ancien régime as it had evolved under Louis XIV and his successors, previously described at some length in the opening chapter of Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837). Carlyle and Dickens were very much in earnest about this form of decadence, and there was a gleam of seriousness peeping through the comic Sardanapalus. In the wake of the French Revolution, nineteenth-​ century writers across Europe could revive and update the decadence narrative of antiquity with its dying empires and often sexually ambiguous defeated emperors and give it a modern twist in the context of contemporary politics and the new science of psychiatry. The Viennese sexologist Richard von Krafft-​Ebing insisted on the basis of ancient and modern history that Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, and France under Louis XIV and Louis XV all shared similar defects: The episodes of moral decay always coincide with the progression of effeminacy, lewdness and luxuriousness of the natives. . . . In such periods of civic and moral decline the most monstrous excesses of sexual life may be observed, which, however, can always be traced to psycho-​pathological or neuro-​pathological conditions of the nation involved.36

The gentle reader is usually expected to shudder at episodes of moral decay and monstrous excess and to be critical, but morbid pathology can breed fascination as well as disgust, which helps to account for the imaginative appeal of Sardanapalus or Elagabalus, or that archetypal decadent Des Esseintes in J.-​K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against Nature, 1884). The tension between individual gratification and neglected responsibilities on the part of the decadent protagonist usually lurks somewhere in the background, but it can be audaciously and engagingly ignored or minimized. It was sometimes possible to confine the effects of decadent excess or eccentricity in a ruler to a palace revolution. This happened in the legendary story in Herodotus of how Gyges was forced to collude with the beautiful wife of King Candaules of Lydia in the murder of the king, and to marry her so as to usurp his throne.37 Krafft-​Ebing was interested in the perverse sexuality and self-​harming impulse that drove Candaules to insist that Gyges see and admire his wife undressing, and so gave her the opportunity to manipulate him. This tale of decadent behavior in high places was taken up in one of La Fontaine’s Contes in the seventeenth century, then in a short story by Théophile Gautier, and finally in plays by Friedrich Hebbel and André Gide.38

Ages of Empire    47 While the murder of Candaules brought about the end of the Heraclid dynasty in Lydia after more than five hundred years, the kingdom continued undisturbed under Gyges and his descendants for five generations, according to Herodotus.39 The story makes no connection with anything particularly rotten or decadent in the state of Lydia as a whole. Connections between decadent ruler and decadent realm were, however, often made. Analogies between individual and social malaise, the pathologically disordered or disintegrating individual personality, and the disintegrating social and political structure, seen as an organism, easily shaded into some kind of implied causal relationship, variously reflected in literature and art. Empires crumbled, and decadence in individuals—​particularly emperors—​and in culture could be seen as both symptom and cause.

Moral Sickness and Militarism But the decadence narrative could be made to work in different ways. Was empire itself a symptom and a cause of moral sickness or decadence, both national and personal? Critics of imperialism, such as the British parliamentarian and classicist Robert Lowe, were less concerned with the decay of empire than with the dubious moral implications of having an empire in the first place. He felt people should remember that emperors, especially Roman emperors, were all too often associated with military violence, debauchery, and crime.40 The very existence of an imperial people and an empire that depended for its security on oppressive military might could be seen as certain to produce infectious moral decay and a paralysis of the spirit, according to the British freethinker and radical politician J. M. Robertson.41 For others, however, military might was a sign of national health and vigor. In his once-​celebrated study The Decline of the West (1918–​1922), the German philosopher of history and radical imperialist Oswald Spengler saw the imperial adventurer Cecil Rhodes as representative of the future: imperial expansion, imperial wars, militarism, despotism, and the politics of force or “Caesarism” would mark the final stage of Western civilization.42 A decadent lack of national vigor might well endanger the prospects of the nation by leaving it with badly led, more-​or-​less useless military forces, as it did in the comic Sardanapalus and in the reflections of Plato and Xenophon. This was one of the abiding fears of British imperialists, before as well as after the near disasters of the Boer War (1899–​1902). It was what lay behind Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Recessional” (1897), written after the imperial triumphalism of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, conveying a sense—​perhaps inherited from Volney’s reports of the ruins of empires—​that empire was transient and vulnerable and that sooner or later imperial Britain would be “one with Nineveh and Tyre.”43 Anxiety about imperial and national weakness and unmilitary decadence increased as war with an efficiently militarized Germany became more likely. This is picked up

48   Norman Vance by Saki (H. H. Munro) in his bitter satirical fantasy When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerens (1913). Under the easily-​achieved German occupation as he imagines it, unmilitary England is to have the humiliation of being completely demilitarized: except for specified sporting purposes, guns are to be banned altogether. Imperial bravura had been registered in Edward Elgar’s four Pomp and Circumstance Marches (1901–​1907), the first of them adapted to A. C. Benson’s words “Land of hope and glory,” but now Elgarian (and Shakespearean) “pomp and circumstance” describes the humiliating march-​past of a Bavarian company of infantry.44 The harsh irony in a defeated nation of the words “glorious triumph” being gushingly applied not to feats of arms but to a virtuoso musical performance goads the disenchanted Yeovil into recalling the military eclipse and collapse of imperial Rome, bitterly quoting the words the poet William Cowper gave to the British patriot Queen Boadicea: Other Romans shall arise, Heedless of a soldier’s name, Sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize, Harmony the path to fame.45

It was, however, possible to be critical of excessive reliance on military force without endorsing the decadence of indifference condemned by Saki. Disliking militarism in the later Roman Empire and in modern Germany, and indeed in Kipling, the Edwardian essayist G. K. Chesterton provocatively claimed that “[t]‌he evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable. The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.”46 For Saki, culture seemed to count for little in the face of military defeat, but for others the aesthetic recovery or reimagining of past beauty and lost empires was somehow an end in itself, however fragile and fleeting. The decadent individual, instead of being complicit with or even a contributor to a decadent and unhealthy social order, imperial or otherwise, might feel oppressed and alienated by it, at odds with the world, perhaps retreating into amoral self-​indulgence or a hedonistic aestheticism that in its more extreme forms could be narcissistic, almost solipsistic—​a self-​isolating world of fantasy, dreams, and the imagination. The poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy worked in the British Museum, where he could see some of Layard’s Assyrian exhibits every day. His poem “The Music Makers” (1874), originally called “The Dreamers”, set to the wistful, yearning music of Elgar, himself a dreamer, for the Birmingham Festival in 1912, revisits the doomed splendors of Nineveh and Babylon as the art of John Martin had imagined them even before Layard’s investigations: We, in the ages lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself in our mirth.47

Ages of Empire    49 One literary strategy for coping with the impossible dream, or the lure, of past empires with their strange beauty and their perverse and forbidden delights was casual reference and formal disapproval, which could nevertheless import a certain daring glamor. The once popular novelist Marie Louise de la Ramée (1839–​1908), better known as Ouida, born to an English mother and a father from Guernsey, tried this approach in Moths (1880), set partly among the decadent, glitteringly amoral cosmopolitan community of Trouville in northern France during or just after the French Second Empire. Seen through the eyes of an innocent girl, this society is described as a “mob of fine ladies and adventuresses, princes and blacklegs, ministers and dentists, reigning sovereigns and queens of the theatres, [which] seemed to her a Saturnalia of Folly, and its laugh hurt her more than a blow would have done.” In this corrupt and elegantly decadent world, civility is to be shown even to a modern Nero or “what was her name that began with an M?” (probably Messalina, the notoriously promiscuous wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, pilloried in Juvenal’s Satires). Mothers seek rich husbands for their daughters without scruple. As Lord Jura drily remarks, “But if the man’s rich it don’t matter. If the fellows we used to read about in Suetonius were alive now, you’d marry our girls to them and never ask any questions,—​except about settlements.”48 The fellows in question would have included the most spectacularly decadent of the Twelve Caesars described by the historian Suetonius: Caligula, Nero, and the gluttonous and indolent Vitellius. Caligula and Nero had both been candidates for the role of the Antichrist mysteriously described in scripture.49 Nero, in particular, persecutor of Christians, possible arsonist, spectacular sexual deviant, the would-​be musician and poet who strummed as Rome was burning, has had a probably well-​deserved bad press as the archetypal decadent, particularly among outraged Victorians, which may be why Oscar Wilde mischievously adopted him as a role model (Figure 2.4).50 His life and death could be reimagined as spectacular theater, partly reinventing him for the cause of art for art’s sake as a haunted and impassioned artist.51 There were some gestures toward revisionist biography, challenging aspects of what might have been lurid and malicious fiction.52

Elagabalus and Escapism However, Nero, only the fifth emperor, really comes too early in the history of the Roman Empire to be directly associated with its political decadence and disintegration. The notorious Elagabalus, M. Aurelius Antoninus (emperor 218–​222 CE), fitted better into the chronology of decline and fall as narrated by the historian Edward Gibbon, on the downward slope past the peak of achievement represented by the age of the Antonine emperors (138–​192 CE), which was Gibbon’s starting point. Elagabalus was even more spectacularly decadent and delinquent than Caligula or Nero, vividly and severely recreated from the hostile classical sources as a monster and a disgrace in

50   Norman Vance

Figure 2.4.  Oscar Wilde sporting a “Nero haircut.” Source: Napoléon Sarony, 1883 (Wikimedia Commons).

Gibbon’s sixth chapter. Determined to “subvert every law of nature and decency,” uncontrolled in his “lust and luxury,” presiding over public scenes of “inexpressible infamy,” and incapable of effective rule, he was soon murdered by his Praetorian guards.53 Inevitably he attracted the attention of nineteenth-​century writers and artists interested in and sometimes imaginatively complicit with the preposterous extremes of Roman decadence. As with Nero, he may have been a little less monstrous than the sources suggest. Gibbon himself conceded that “[i]‌t may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy, and blackened by prejudice.”54 This view of the matter has been endorsed and developed by some more recent commentators.55 One of the main sources, the late fourth-​century Historia Augusta, which explicitly links him with his most dissolute and disgraceful predecessors, Caligula, Nero, and Vitellius, has been severely criticized by the historian Ronald Syme as the work of a cynical and irresponsible rogue.56 But even if lurid fantasy contributed rather too much to the story of Elagabalus, his outrageous luxury; his multiple and disgusting sexual and social delinquencies; his extravagant silken dress; and his exotic oriental defiance of Western mores, Roman tradition, and Roman religion made him all the more subversively attractive to the sensation-​seeking and the aesthetically-​minded. The story of the cascade of roses that smothered his guests might well have been too good, or too bad, to be true, but it was colorful as well as disturbing: the red roses on imperial marble made for a wonderful painting by Sir Lawrence Alma-​Tadema, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer of 1888 (Figure 2.5). The impossibly transgressive world of Elagabalus

Ages of Empire    51

Figure 2.5.  Sir Lawrence Alma-​Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888). Source: Collección Pérez Simón, México. Photo by Arturo Piera (Wikimedia Commons).

belonged with Nineveh and Babylon in the world of fantasy and dream indicated in O’Shaughnessy’s “The Music Makers.” The German poet Stefan George had translated Baudelaire and was much influenced by Mallarmé and the doctrine of art for art’s sake, a more attractive prospect than the reality of political decadence and dissension in imperial Germany in the 1890s after the eclipse of Bismarck. In his early collection Algabal (1892) he invoked the figure of Elagabalus (Algabal) as tragic aesthete, defeated by reality in the form of his murderous guards, using him as a way of depicting a retreat into introverted sensuousness and inhuman splendors, a little like the world of Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, rejecting nature and glorifying artificiality. This domain involved a subterranean palace and a garden needing neither air nor warmth, and it particularly focused on rare and lifeless things, hard and glittering. The sequence ends by imagining the possibility of passing beyond this realm to where swallows fly in the open air.57 Years later, in conversation with Ernst Curtius, George would claim that Algabal and his later works were more socially and politically engaged than they seemed, enacting the struggle against a corrupt world and looking toward a new humanity.58 But critics such as the sociologist Georg Simmel felt George was ultimately singing to himself rather than to the world.59 George thought he had found a kindred spirit when he met the young poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Vienna in 1891, but although Hofmannsthal was a cultivated aesthete, he was also willing to venture beyond the palace of art. He incorporated Shakespeare’s “We are such stuff /​As dreams are made on” into an early intricately crafted poem

52   Norman Vance composed in terza rima in the Italian manner, but the poem insisted that man, the things of the world, and dream were one. He refused to let the aesthetic dreamer withdraw from society or a disintegrating imperial culture, seeking instead in poems and plays to reimagine and dramatize the enduring underlying truth and reality of art and the ideal unity and interdependence of art and life, imaginative vision, and involvement with the world. Elagabalus, willfully disengaged from normal life and the responsibilities of his office, may have been the supreme narcissist of antiquity. Narcissism, or obsessive self-​regard, first identified as a pathological condition by Havelock Ellis in 1898 and explored in an influential essay by Freud in 1914, is often seen as a dominant characteristic of decadence, particularly decadence in France and the United States.60 Post-​Napoleonic French writers from Chateaubriand onward, fascinated by the fall of the Roman Empire after the fall of their own (first) empire, had taken a special interest in this imperial narcissist as a renegade figure undermining and betraying the values and the dignity of the classical Rome of Horace and Virgil which had meant so much to French neoclassicism in the eighteenth century.61 A priest and devotee of the Syrophoenician sun god, Elagabalus could be represented as a late example of the Canaanite Baal-​worship denounced by the Old Testament prophets (Baal come to Rome), an extreme version of the heathen superstition being challenged by the early church.62 It was in this capacity that he featured in Jean Lombard’s gloomy historical novel L’agonie (1888). If cultural, moral, and religious transgression were part of the half-​horrified appeal of Roman decadence in still strongly Catholic France, there was also the underlying sense that, like the Romans of the later Empire, the French were a Latin race in decline whose glory and vigor lay in the past, in their case in the days of Louis XIV and the first and second empires. This was the premise of Joséphin Péladan’s long series of novels presented under the general heading of La décadence latine (1884–​1907), which he described as an “Éthopée,” resurrecting an archaic term taken from the Greek ethopoios that indicated the depiction of passions and manners. Mélusine (1895), the fifteenth novel in the series, mainly concerned with the production of a new play on the resonantly decadent subject of Sardanapalus, introduces Mary Alderney, a vigorous American girl, as a counterweight to effete old-​world Latin decadence, a version of the fresh vigor the barbarians brought to decadent Rome as imagined in Mallarmé’s “Plainte d’automne” and languidly observed by the decadent protagonist of Verlaine’s “Langueur.”

Decadence in Tsarist Russia Languidly effete aesthetic decadence on the Latin model, as it was reinvented and celebrated by Verlaine or Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, had a mixed reception in tsarist Russia, rejected by earnest radicals and reformers but welcomed by disaffected Russian writers. The alienated life of the “superfluous man” in mid-​century Russia, as explored in Ivan

Ages of Empire    53 Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850) and Ivan Goncharov’s novel Oblomov (1859), was analyzed not as a literary theme but as a morbid social symptom by the radical critic Nikolai Dobrolyúbov in an article titled “What is Oblomovism?” (1859). This analysis helped to set the tone for the influential serious-​minded civic criticism associated with Nikolai Chernyshevsky and others, who tended to regard literature as sociology and art as properly a didactic instrument of social improvement. They had no time for aestheticism, or at least the French-​inspired aesthetic of art for art’s sake that privileged the inner life of sensation and dream-​consciousness.63 Their soulless, materialist aesthetic laid a dead hand on Russian letters for a generation and provoked the rehabilitation of art for art’s sake in the form of French-​inspired literary decadence (dekadentsvo), not clearly distinguished from symbolism, which began to make its presence felt from about 1890. The poet and critic Dmitri Merezhkovsky made the case for it in his landmark essay “On the Reasons for the Decline of Russian Literature and the New Trends” in 1893. The new trends can be seen as imaginative recoil both from materialist aesthetics and from the crumbling tsarist regime, which entered another repressive phase after the assassination of the authoritarian reformer Alexander II in 1881, experienced military defeat at the hands of the Japanese in the Russo-​Japanese War, and encountered a failed revolution in 1905. Was imperial Russia in decline? Gibbon’s Decline and Fall became available in Russian translation in 1883–​1884 to stimulate comparison and reflection. The parallel with Roman history was apparent in Merezhkovsky’s novel about the late Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, published in 1896. The novelist, poet, and editor Valéry Briusov (1873–​1924), who had emerged as the dominant symbolist in the new century, had embraced aestheticism in an early “Sonnet to Form” (1895), a celebration of beauty and the craftsman’s art, and created an imaginative fantasy world in a poem entitled “Creation.” He had also translated Mallarmé and Verlaine, and in his poem “The Coming Huns” (1905) he identified with the French decadents and with the Romans of the decadence, imagining the arrival of new barbarians who might replace a moribund culture. The barbarians may have been the victorious Japanese, or the revolutionary masses. Briusov went on to explore the history of the later Roman empire in his novels Altar of Victory (1911–​1912) and Jupiter Overthrown, an incomplete sequel.64 More grimly, the poet Fyodor Sologub (1863–​1927) sensed himself as a sick man in a sick and decadent age of blighted hopes, intellectual stagnation, and spiritual void. This feeling prompted escapist dreams of beauty and joy, rare and powerful harmonies tinged with death and decay. The Petty Demon (1905–​1907), his self-​consciously decadent novel, set in a provincial backwater with a disturbed antihero, is about the madness and despair of a frustrated teacher. It was widely acclaimed for its presentation of petty vulgarity, bigotry, and philistinism, but also condemned in some quarters for its indulgence in fantasy and eroticism.65 Recoil from spirit-​crushing materialism and what seemed like a bankrupt culture in imperial Russia and in Western civilization as it had evolved from the Greeks

54   Norman Vance and Romans was particularly apparent in the work of Alexander Blok (1880–​1921), much admired by Briusov. His earlier poems, notably “Verses on the Beautiful Lady” (1901–​1902), blended quasi-​religious and erotic aspiration and expectation, drawing on the Russian Orthodox idea of the Divine Sophia or Heavenly Wisdom presented as a kind of feminized world-​soul or female principle.66 Blok had hoped in vain for great things from the failed revolution of 1905, and his later work moved on from solitary lyricism to more public themes, denouncing the comfortable and the complacent, and sometimes taking his tone from Roman Juvenal’s claim that indignation prompted his verse.67 He was increasingly concerned with looming disaster on a grand scale as a necessary prelude to renewal, relishing the decadent beauty of cultural decline and the sense of a falling world more cataclysmic than the decline and fall of Rome.68 His late poem “Skify” (Scythians), written early in 1918, just after the Russian Revolution (which he welcomed), invokes the term used by Herodotus and other classical writers for the primitive peoples to the far north and east of the Mediterranean world, and revisits the sense of historical crisis and new possibility associated with vigorous barbarians at the gates of Rome.

Decadence and American “Empire” American negotiation of the decadence theme was different, sometimes suggesting the barbarians were already inside the gates. There were appropriations of French literary decadence as a kind of counterculture.69 But there was also a more political running critique of decadence as empire. Thomas Jefferson’s vision of America, freed from European empires, as a new “empire of liberty,” was bound to run into difficulties: liberty and empire did not go comfortably together, as Tacitus had observed long ago.70 Empire implied a more or less autocratic emperor and an expansive attitude toward territory supported by force of arms. By the 1830s the Indian-​fighter and territorial expansionist Andrew Jackson was being attacked not just as president but as another Caesar.71 Volney’s Ruins had reminded the revolutionary generation that the ancient empires had not endured. Byron, in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, generalizing among the ruins from the Roman experience of empire, had succinctly noted as a recurring pattern “First Freedom, and then Glory—​when that fails, /​Wealth, vice, corruption,—​ barbarism at last.”72 The Decline of Carthage (1817) lay behind Thomas Cole’s celebrated sequence of five paintings showing a possible American Course of Empire (1833–​1836), from primitive origins through to destruction and final desolation. The magnificent buildings in the central picture (Figure 2.6), showing the glory days of empire but destined to be ruins, already hinting at decadence, are clearly modeled on the architecture of imperial Rome.73 Cole seemed to anticipate J. M. Robertson’s contention that empire itself was a form of decadence, corrupt and corrupting.

Ages of Empire    55

Figure 2.6.  Thomas Cole, The Consummation of Empire (1836). Source: New-York Historical Society, Gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts.

The prospect of the ever-​expanding American Republic becoming effectively an American empire under an imperial presidency caused repeated anxiety.74 Worse still, was America, with its growing luxury and conspicuous consumption, not to mention political corruption, starting to resemble the Rome of Elagabalus?75 H. L. Mencken and George Nathan light-​heartedly satirized American society in Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts (1920). More seriously, Gore Vidal, perversely fascinated with the ancient empires of Darius and Xerxes and of Julian the Apostate in his historical novels, sardonically reviewed the American Republic evolving into an undeclared empire in his fictional Narratives of Empire series. In Empire (1987), the middle novel of the series, the eccentric historian Brooks Adams is made to praise President McKinley as a Caesar or an Alexander, but the principal imperialist in the book is Adams’s friend and McKinley’s larger-​than-​life successor Theodore Roosevelt, a more conspicuous Caesar-​figure. Imperial wars such as the Spanish-​American War (1898), which ends as the novel begins, are presented as virtually the invention of populist journalism as represented by the newspaper magnate Randolph Hearst, “made for this degraded time.” He appears as a megalomaniac and narcissist with his busts of Alexander and Tiberius and is described unkindly as “the Nero of modern politics.” The self-​absorbed decadence of the society that read his newspapers seems to be summed up in Vidal’s use of a popular song of the time: “I want what I want when I want it.”76

56   Norman Vance

Conclusion The links between empire ancient and modern and moral and aesthetic decadence can be variously explained. Invoking or imitating what was written or said and done in imperial Rome or modern France would always be seen as a mark of cultural sophistication. Mental and moral recoil from the public sphere into an inner world of dream and sensation could be enjoyed and liberated from traditional decorum and restraint by contact with different customs, foods, and fabrics, or by exotic or perverse delights imported from across the empire, represented in the opulent profusion of Gustave Moreau’s painting The Triumph of Alexander the Great (c. 1886–​1892) (Figure 2.7). Luxury, leisure, and boredom with the business of empire might help it to disintegrate. The Victorian imperialist Sir Charles Dilke condemned bananas for encouraging decadent soft living, sapping effort, and causing social decline, but he had to admit they were pleasant.77

Figure 2.7.  Gustave Moreau, The Triumph of Alexander the Great (c. 1886–​1892). Source: Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris (Wikimedia Commons).

Ages of Empire    57

Notes 1. Discussed in Norman Vance, “Decadence and the Subversion of Empire,” in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–​1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 110–​24. 2. Paul Verlaine, “Melancholia: (1) Resignation” (1866), in Œuvres poétiques complètes, Pléiade edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 60; Cassius Dio, Roman History, 79. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.5; Politics 5.10. 4. Cicero, De Finibus 2.32.106, Tusculan Disputations 3.35.101; Augustine, City of God 2.20; Dante, Paradiso 15.107. 5. Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library 2.21.8. 6. Jan P. Stronk, Ctesias’s Persian History (Düsseldorf: Wellem Verlag, 2010); Pierre Briant, Histoire de l’Empire Perse de Cyrus à Alexandre (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 803–​4. 7. Diodorus 2.23–​28; Strabo, Geography 14.5.9; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.529E. 8. Diodorus 2.23.4; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.529D. 9. Byron, Sardanapalus 1.1.9–​13, Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 454. 10. Diodorus 2.27; Byron, Sardanapalus 5.1.464–​67, Poetical Works, 492. 11. Hans Mersmann, Christian Ludwig Boxberg und seine Oper “Sardanapalus” (Berlin: Schneider, 1916), 3–​4. 12. Conversation with Ernest Raynaud (summer 1886), reported in Ernest Raynaud, La Mêlée Symboliste (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1918), 64. 13. Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz (London: Dent, 1982), 19–​21. 14. Martin Myrone, ed., John Martin: Apocalypse (London: Tate Publications, 2011), 130–​32. 15. Myrone, John Martin, 97–​108, 130–​32. 16. Jean-​Louis Huot, Persia I: From the Origins to the Achaemenids (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), 153. 17. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 68. 18. See Jacqueline de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States according to Greek Authors (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 13, 39, 82. 19. Aeschylus, The Persians 909–​934. 20. Plato, Laws 3.694E–​696B. 21. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 8.8. 22. George Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World, 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1862–​1867), 2:504. 23. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, 4:485. 24. See Margaux Whiskin and David Bagot, eds., Iran and the West (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 53–​54. 25. A. H. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1849); Layard, A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh (London: John Murray, 1851); “Layard’s Last Discoveries,” Times (UK), May 17, 1853, 7; May 19, 1853, 7. 26. Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, 2:416n; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12.529D. 27. Observer, June 19, 1853, 6. 28. Times (UK), June 14, 1853, 7. 29. Times (UK), July 21, 1853, 8.

58   Norman Vance 30. Gilbert à Beckett and Mark Lemon, Sardanapalus: or the “Fast” King of Assyria. A Gorgeous Burlesque (London: Webster & Co., 1853), 6–​7; Diodorus Siculus 2.23.1, 2.23.3, 2.24.4. 31. à Beckett and Lemon, Sardanapalus, 14, 16. 32. à Beckett and Lemon, Sardanapalus, 22. 33. F. Max Müller, ed., Memoirs of Baron Stockmar, trans. G. A. Müller, 2 vols. (London: Longmans,1872), 2:107. 34. à Beckett and Lemon, Sardanapalus, 23. 35. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: Chapman & Hall, 1901), Book the Second, ­chapter 24, 184. 36. Richard von Krafft-​ Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), trans. Franklin S. Klaf (London: Staples Press, 1965), 3. 37. Herodotus 1.7–​12; compare Plato, Republic 2.359–​60, and see Kirby Flower Smith, “The Tale of Gyges and the King of Lydia,” American Journal of Philology 23, no. 3 (1902): 261–​82 and 23, no. 4 (1902): 361–​87. 38. Jean de La Fontaine, “Le Roi Candaule et le maître en droit” (1674); Théophile Gautier, “Le Roi Candaule” (1844); Friedrich Hebbel, Gyges und sein Ring (1856); André Gide, Le Roi Candaule (1901). 39. Herodotus 1.7, 13. 40. Robert Lowe, speech in the House of Commons, February 7, 1876, Hansard, 3rd ser., 227.413. See Norman Vance, “Anxieties of Empire and the Moral Tradition: Rome and Britain,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18, no. 2 (2011): 246–​61. 41. J. M. Robertson, Patriotism and Empire (London: Grant Richards, 1899), 157. 42. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. C. F. Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1926–​1928), 2:37, 351. 43. Rudyard Kipling, Verse, definitive edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), 329. 44. Saki, When William Came, in The Battle of Dorking & When William Came (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 128; Shakespeare, Othello 3.3.355. 45. Saki, When William Came, 148; William Cowper, “Boadicea: An Ode” (1782), in Poetical Works, ed. William Benham (London: Macmillan, 1893), 176. 46. G. K. Chesterton, “On Mr Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small,” in Heretics (London: Bodley Head, 1905), 37. 47. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Poems, ed. W. A. Percy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923), 39. 48. Ouida, Moths, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1880), 1:151, 207, 233. 49. Shushma Malik, The Nero-​ Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 50. Discussed in Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 258–​61. 51. See Stephen Phillips’s verse-​drama Nero (London: Macmillan, 1906). 52. G. H. Lewes, “Was Nero a Monster,” Cornhill Magazine 8 (1863): 113–​28; Isidore Latour de Saint Ybars, Néron, sa vie et son époque (Paris: Levy, 1867); B. W. Henderson, The Life and Principate of the Emperor Nero (London: Methuen, 1903). 53. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 1:167–​69. 54. Gibbon, History, 1:168. 55. See J. Stuart Hay, The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (London: Macmillan, 1911); Martijn Icks, The Crimes of Elagabalus (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012).

Ages of Empire    59 56. Ronald Syme, Ammianus and the Historia Augusta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 207. 57. C. M. Bowra, The Heritage of Symbolism (London: Macmillan, 1943), 101–​4. 58. Melissa S. Lane and Martin A. Ruehl, eds., A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 307. 59. Henry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–​1923 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 150. 60. See Jennifer Birkett, “Disinterested Narcissus: The Play of Politics in Decadent Form,” in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 29–​45; Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Americanization of Narcissism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 61. François-​René de Chateaubriand, Études ou discours historiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Dufey, 1831), 2:111–​16. 62. Jean Réville, La Religion à Rome sous les Sévères (Paris: Leroux, 1886), 246–​51. 63. James P. Scanlan, “Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the Philosophy of Realism in Nineteenth-​ Century Russian Aesthetics,” Studies in Soviet Thought 30, no. 1 (1985): 1–​14. 64. Kirsten Lodge, “Russian Decadence in the 1910s: Valéry Briusov and the Collapse of Empire,” Russian Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 276–​93. 65. Fyodor Sologub, The Petty Demon, trans. and intro. by Samuel D. Cioran (London: Quartet Books, 1990), 1–​20. 66. Samuel D. Cioran, Vladimir Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1977), 142, 183. 67. Peter France, Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 46; Juvenal, Satires, 1.79. 68. Jenifer Presto, “The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina and the Decadent Sublime,” Slavic Review 70, no. 3 (2011): 569–​90. 69. David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–​1926 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 70. Tacitus, Agricola 3. 71. Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Chichester, UK: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2009), 21–​23. 72. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV (1818), 118.3–​4, Poetical Works, 241. 73. See Alan P. Wallach, “Cole, Byron and the Course of Empire,” Art Bulletin 50, no. 4 (1968): 375–​79. 74. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1973). 75. F. T. Martin, writing in 1911, quoted in Malamud, Ancient Rome, 110. 76. Gore Vidal, Empire (London: Abacus, 1984), 40, 95, 550, 507, 528. The song referred to comes from Victor Herbert’s operetta Mlle. Modiste (1905). 77. Roy Jenkins, Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy (London: Collins, 1965), 19.

Further Reading Birkett, Jennifer. The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France, 1870–​1914. London: Quartet Books, 1986. Bradley, Mark, ed. Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

60   Norman Vance Burrow, J. W. The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848–​1914. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Edwards, Catharine, ed. Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–​1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. “Forms and/​of Decadence.” Special issue, New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004). Llewellyn-​Jones, Lloyd. King and Court in Ancient Persia, 559 to 331 BCE. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Lodge, Kirsten. “Russian Decadence in the 1910s: Valéry Briusov and the Collapse of Empire.” Russian Review 69, no. 2 (2010): 276–​93. Lunbeck, Elizabeth. The Americanization of Narcissism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Malamud, Margaret. Ancient Rome and Modern America. Chichester, UK: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009. Presto, Jenifer. “The Aesthetics of Disaster: Blok, Messina, and the Decadent Sublime.” Slavic Review 70, no. 3 (2011): 569–​90. Sherry, Vincent B. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Steinberg, Mark D. Petersburg Fin de Siècle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Stronk, Jan P. Ctesias’ Persian History. Düsseldorf: Wellem Verlag, 2010. Thomson. J. K. J. Decline in History: The European Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Vance, Norman. “Anxieties of Empire and the Moral Tradition: Rome and Britain.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 19, no. 2 (2011): 246–​61. Weir, David. Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–​1926. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Whiskin, Margot, and David Bagot, eds. Iran and the West: Cultural Perceptions from the Sassanian Empire to the Islamic Republic. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Chapter 3

Fin de Siècle, G i l de d Ag e , or Belle Ép o qu e Different Endings to the Same Century Shearer West

Decadence as an aesthetic, a way of life, and a moral climate flourished during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, when both Europe and the United States were undergoing unprecedented economic and social change. Mass media and the proliferation of international exhibitions led to the sharing of ideas, artistic styles, and literary tendencies across national boundaries. These developments also fueled a growing self-​ consciousness and self-​reflection about what the end of the century meant for society. Writers as diverse as Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edith Wharton, Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Baudelaire were read throughout the world; many countries developed their own national brand of art nouveau or symbolism; and political movements such as socialism and anarchism were internationally networked through widely circulated polemics. As the social reformer Havelock Ellis wrote in his wide-​ ranging reflection on the century, “the so-​called civilised world was almost uniform throughout; at any given moment they wore the same kind of clothes, practised the same customs, thought the same thoughts, even whistled the same tunes.”1 However, while there were many shared ideas and habits, there was also a fundamental ambivalence about whether technological progress, economic growth, urbanization, and empire were to be welcomed, or whether they were tainted by their associations with social division, nervous exhaustion, conspicuous consumption, race and class exploitation, and sexual perversion. As the world crept toward the twentieth century, this ambivalence fed the self-​consciousness that informed the way different nations were characterized and how they characterized themselves. In his definitive examination of the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson accounted for this phenomenon: “We are actually made more conscious of our standing towards time by the approaching demise of a century, just as we are made conscious of our own ages on birthday anniversaries and New Year’s Eve.”2

62   Shearer West One effect of this end-​of-​century self-​reflection was the propensity to seek labels that explained a social and cultural environment that could be backward-​looking as well as innovative, enervating as well as exciting, and impoverished as well as prosperous. Fin de siècle, Gilded Age, and Belle Époque are three terms that were used either at the time or subsequently to attempt to explain the complex climate of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. While the first of these terms was deployed as a catch-​all for a perceived degeneration of morality, regression of civilization, and decline of mental and physical health across Europe, the latter two were associated with the United States and France, respectively. In attempting to unpick the semantics of these terms and their contradictory implications in an age of decadence, it is worth taking a close look at how they took on different national inflections in Great Britain, France, and the United States. The end of the Civil War in the United States in 1865 and the Franco-​Prussian War in France in 1870 created the ingredients for an era of peace and prosperity, but both countries were also riven by postwar political and economic troubles. While Britain in the 1870s was focused on building its empire rather than recovering from war, all three countries experienced the impact of technological progress in transport and communication, immigration, urbanization, and a growing gulf between rich and poor. The range of responses to these changes, reflected in the three terms under consideration here, elaborated the ambivalence that emerged in attitudes toward the end of an extraordinary century.

Fin de Siècle Given that the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer dominated many fields beyond biology in nineteenth century, it is perhaps no surprise that as the century neared its end, their concepts of evolution influenced the ways in which people spoke about a society felt to be in decline or on the verge of obsolescence. A simplistic view of society either adapting or failing to adapt to rapid technological change became a mantra steeped in Darwinian or Spencerian language. Looking back on this period in 1930, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents recognized the irony that modernization may have improved the overall quality of life, but it also brought with it new stresses, anxieties, and obsessions. The French phrase fin de siècle, most notably adopted by the German author Max Nordau, came to signify a culture that was on its knees with exhaustion, sick and dying; concomitantly, literature, art, and music both reflected and catalyzed a sense of queasy excess and amorality—​the last throes of an overdeveloped civilization on the verge of collapse. Critics anthropomorphized the arts into an organism that had quasi-​physiological qualities and were seen to be passing “through stages corresponding to the embryonic, the adolescent, the matured, the decadent, and the exhausted.”3 As Daniel Pick has pointed out, “[t]‌he dominant sense of degeneration . . . was displaced from the individual . . . and even the family . . . to society itself—​crowds, masses, cities, modernity.”4 Fin de siècle as a concept gained traction in the 1890s, but the idea behind the term has its origins in Second Empire France

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    63 on the eve the Franco-​Prussian War. Baudelaire’s volume of poems, Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was published in 1857, but it was in 1868, when Théophile Gautier wrote an introduction to a new edition, that this collection of sensuous, erotic, and often disturbing poetry began to be associated with an evolutionary notion of age and death. Baudelaire’s poems, which were condemned by his contemporaries for obscenity, draw a picture of sex and love as both intoxicating and revolting, and a view of modern urban life as steeped in misery and despair. All of this was evoked using a compelling, sensuous language that was beautiful in its resonance even while its meaning was often obscure or unsettling. In describing Baudelaire’s poetry, Gautier frequently used forms of the verb vieillir (to grow old), reflecting the depressing and world-​weary view of life and love that dominated the poetic cycle. However, it was J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) that heralded the concepts of death, decay, and degeneration as part of a new literary aesthetic. Huysmans’s novel follows the activities of the Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, an aristocrat whose over-​indulgence in a perverse lifestyle in Paris leads him to retreat in disgust from human society and wallow in his private pleasures in a remote country estate. The novel has a meager plot and focuses instead on the narcissistic and solipsistic pleasures that Des Esseintes seeks through collections of books, perfume, paintings, tropical flowers, and an unfortunate tortoise which he kills by inlaying heavy jewels into its shell. There is much excess in Des Esseintes’s life but meager satisfaction, and his lack of attention to his health leads him—​still a young man—​to be forced to return to Paris for medical attention to avert an early death. Des Esseintes’s febrile state of mind, declining mental health, and premature physical decline become metaphors for modern society. England’s closest parallel to Huysmans’s novel was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891/​1892), which developed the notion of decay and death quite literally through the vehicle of a portrait hidden in Gray’s attic that showed the effect of the protagonist’s debauchery and excess even while Gray himself remained a beautiful young man. The novel predated by several years Wilde’s arrest and incarceration for “gross indecency” in 1895, but by that time, the relationship between beauty, decay, sexual choice, and the end of civilization had become mutually dependent tropes in the aesthetic surrounding decadence. This aesthetic also found expression in such lavishly beautiful but edgy periodicals as The Yellow Book (1894–​1897) and The Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1881–​1894), the latter of which became a channel for coded homoeroticism. Among the members of the circles that surrounded Wilde and these journals were Michael Field, the pseudonym for the lesbian poets Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. Apart from challenging societal norms, all of these individuals developed innovative styles of writing steeped in the sonority and pleasure of words wrested from meaning and content, with a strong tinge of melancholy, nostalgia, or the air of decay that permeated the poetry of Baudelaire and his followers, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. As Max Beerbohm wrote in an essay in The Yellow Book: There are signs that our English literature has reached that point, when, like the literature of all nations that have been, it must fall at length into the hands of the decadents.

64   Shearer West The qualities that I tried in my essay to travesty—​paradox and marivaudage, lassitude, a love of horror and all unusual things, a love of argot and archaism and the mysteries of style—​are not all these displayed, some by one, some by another of les jeunes écrivains?5

Ironically, literature focusing on disease, decay, and death was associated with these “jeunes écrivains” (young writers), who were all at the prime of their lives. These cultural manifestations, and those in other parts of Europe, came to be represented as examples of fin-​de-​siècle social and cultural decline through the publication of Max Nordau’s two-​volume Entartung (Degeneration) in 1892/​1893 (translated into English in 1895). Nordau, who studied in Paris under the neurologist Jean-​Martin Charcot, wholeheartedly embraced the Spencerian view of social Darwinism as advocated by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, to whom his book was dedicated. Nordau used psychological-​medical language relating to mental illness and atavism to lambaste artists and writers of the avant-​garde throughout Europe. The first section of his book was titled “Fin-​de-​Siècle” and the first chapter called “The Dusk of Nations.” To Nordau, civilization was in the last stages of decline, as evidenced by artists, writers, and musicians who—​to his mind—​exhibited qualities that he associated with degeneration—​a term that could be traced back to the French psychiatrist Bénédict Morel’s Traité des dégénerescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales (Treatise on physical, intellectual, and moral degeneration, 1857). Using a hyperbolic language of outrage combined with a pseudo-​scientific smattering of contemporary medical jargon, Nordau identified the personality of these “degenerate” individuals as egoistical, impulsive, and emotional, and claimed that they indulged in despondency, ennui, doubts, and an obsession with mysticism and the supernatural. They evinced “a contempt for traditional views of custom and morality.”6 He equated them with the criminals who were the subject of one of Lombroso’s many psychological studies. To Nordau, this tendency was widespread in contemporary culture throughout Europe, and it was dangerously contagious: [H]‌owever silly a term fin-​de-​siècle may be, the mental constitution which it indicates is actually present in influential circles. The disposition of the times is curiously confused, a compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement, of fearful presage and hang-​dog renunciation. (14)

Very few towering figures of what we now recognize as the avant-​garde avoided his denunciations: in art the Pre-​Raphaelites, the impressionists, the symbolists; in literature Zola, Ibsen, Tolstoy; in philosophy Nietzsche; and in music Wagner. The subjects of his diatribe were exclusively men, although, interestingly, many of Charcot’s studies of neurasthenia and hysteria at the Pitié-​Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris were of women. When seeking an explanation for this cultural phenomenon, Nordau identifies the rapidity of technological change and the unsettling effects of growing urbanization as the main culprits: “All the symptoms enumerated are the consequences of states of fatigue

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    65 and exhaustion, and these again are the effect of contemporary civilization, of the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life, the vastly increased number of sense impressions and organic reactions, and therefore of perceptions, judgements, and motor impulses” (59). While key figures such as George Bernard Shaw could contemptuously dismiss Nordau’s ranting as conservative outrage in the face of aesthetic daring (“I have heard it all before”),7 the fact that there were ten English editions of Degeneration within a year of its first translation suggests that in the English-​speaking world, there was a captive audience for Nordau’s ideas, and perhaps an accompanying sense of moral panic, fueled by the scandal of Wilde’s trials. There were plenty of publications during the last two decades of the nineteenth century that cast doubt over the effects of industrialization and modernization on physical and mental health, and an accompanying sense of an overly evolved society in danger of regressing to a primitive state. The discourse emerged in numerous ways, from James Cantlie’s assertion in 1885 that machines, railways, and omnibuses would lead people to forget how to use their arms and legs,8 to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which tells an inherently racist tale of British values being subsumed within the “regressive” elements of its own empire. Nevertheless, despite the critics and skeptics of new movements in art and literature, and the dire predictions that the end of the century would herald the end of progress and civilization, the vibrancy of art and literature during the 1890s belied the doom-​ mongering that the concept of fin de siècle seemed to evoke. Writing only a few months after the initial publication of Nordau’s Degeneration, the British poet Arthur Symons, in “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” waxed lyrical about the relationship between a decadent aesthetic and a creative impulse: “[I]‌t has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin decadence: an intense self-​consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-​subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity,” and he calls “[t]his representative literature of to-​day, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is . . . a new and beautiful and interesting disease.”9 Conceiving of disease as beautiful, of degeneration as generative, of decline as enabling, of the end of civilization as the impetus for aesthetic innovation are some of the contradictions inherent in the concept of “fin de siècle” as it was embraced by artists, writers, and critics during the last years of the nineteenth century.

Gilded Age While the idea that the end of the century was following the path of the decline of great civilizations of the European past, the notion of the Gilded Age to describe the culture of late nineteenth-​century America carried different social and economic connotations. However, these connotations were no less ambiguous. The idea that there was something beautiful and compelling in a decaying civilization, which accompanied the fin-​ de-​siècle mindset, was complemented by a view of economic prosperity as superficial and ultimately empty, which underlay the Gilded Age label.

66   Shearer West The term Gilded Age originated in a novel by Mark Twain and his neighbor, the journalist Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. Allegedly based on a dare by the two men’s wives to write a novel that characterized the times, Twain and Warner each wrote separate sections of the story of the impoverished Hawkins family attempting to sell land for profit in rural Tennessee. Their adopted daughter, Laura, moves to Washington, DC, and becomes embroiled in the corrupt politics surrounding Ulysses S. Grant’s presidency. The themes of land speculation, greed, social pretension, and political duplicity underpin a novel full of comic set pieces and eccentric characters. The novel was not particularly well received and has not stood the test of time, but its title caught the public imagination. Twain and Warner borrowed the idea of the Gilded Age from Shakespeare’s King John in lines spoken by the Earl of Salisbury to the King: To gild refinèd gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smooth the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-​light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.10

As with fin de siècle, the concept of a Gilded Age has cyclical connotations. We can relate a “Golden Age” to the cycle of history explored by the ancient Greek writer Hesiod in his Works and Days. However, the Golden Age represents the paradisiacal beginning of the human race, which, in Hesiod’s terms, then regressed through four stages of decline. If in a Golden Age peace and prosperity reigns before the decline of civilization sets in, a Gilded Age is an ironic reference to this utopian era. The Gilded Age of the United States during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century was, on the one hand, characterized by the security, progress, and plenty of a utopian “Golden Age,” but, on the other, these positive values were accompanied by waste and excess, as Twain and Warner’s title implies. In fact, Gilded Age as a term to describe the late nineteenth century in the United States was not fully deployed by historians until the 1920s, most notably Lewis Mumford, whose The Golden Day (1926) developed a polemical argument that rapid industrialization in the wake of the Civil War was responsible for destroying a genuine American culture represented by the Romantic transcendentalism of Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others. This retrospective view of the nineteenth century deplored the impact of urbanization and industrial developments in the mining of oil and steel that were responsible for the rise of such “robber barons” as the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the financier J. P. Morgan, the railroad developer Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth came from petroleum. As Alan Axelrod argues in his study of the period, “[t]‌he Gilded Age was pulled by contradictory impulses: towards innovation and radical forward thinking yet also towards a reactionary and retrospective longing for return to a golden age in which everyone knew

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    67 his—​or her—​place.”11 While these “contradictory impulses” created an unsettled social and economic situation, the arts flourished in their wake. The conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 marked a significant milestone in the history of the country. Between that point and the end of the century, the pace of industrialization and social change increased rapidly. This was a period of rapid innovation and invention, with the electric light bulb, the Kodak camera, the phonograph, the telephone, and the skyscraper being just a few notable examples of technology that would lead to momentous changes in how people lived. However, economic circumstances led to a widening gap between the richest and poorest in society. While the North profited from postwar industrialization, the South remained rooted in its racist and agricultural past, even as the natural resources of the West were opened up to new exploitation by a massive expansion of the railway network. Although the period between 1870 and 1900 saw the growing influence and power of individual millionaires capitalizing on new booms in petroleum and steel, the country was poorly led by a series of eight uninspiring presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to Grover Cleveland, with James Garfield’s tenure lasting only six months before his assassination. It was not until 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency, with an increasingly progressivist agenda, that this long gap in national leadership began to be healed. If there is one key element that most distinctly characterizes the superficiality of the Gilded Age, it is the rise of conspicuous consumption among the newly arisen super-​ wealthy class and the middle class who emulated them. While railways and mines became sources of the acquisition of wealth, department stores and mail order catalogues provided a significant new range of consumer goods for the more affluent in society to spend it on. As we saw in Europe, commentators conceived of the fin de siècle in social Darwinist terms, and Gilded Age thinking was not immune from this model. The era of superficiality and conspicuous consumption among the well-​to-​do was most thoroughly examined by the economist Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which argued that advanced industrial society had replaced the productive labor of “primitive” societies with “non-​productive consumption of time” and “a performance of conspicuous leisure, in the way of calls, drives, clubs, sewing-​circles, sports charity organizations, and other like social functions.”12 Ironically, Veblen felt that the very innovations that had enabled the leisure class to flourish were conceived of as vulgar by that very class: “Conservativism, being an upper-​class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-​class phenomenon, is vulgar” (200). Despite Veblen’s problematic views of the role of women and servants in both preindustrial societies and the present day, he nevertheless made some pertinent observations about the behavior and habits of the Gilded Age leisure class. He argued, for example, that in order to demonstrate their immunity from the need for useful work, dress—​particularly women’s dress—​needed to be overtly nonfunctional, even uncomfortable: The high heel, the skirt, the impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized

68   Shearer West women’s apparel, are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man. (181–​82)

Developments in fashion that constrained movement and comfort became a standard motif in portraits by John Singer Sargent when he painted sitters on both sides of the Atlantic. We can see an example of this in his portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Mrs. Henry White) of 1883 (Figure 3.1). Mrs. White, an expatriate American living in France and admired by such literary figures as Edith Wharton and Henry James, is shown wearing a layered white silk dress with a train, a plunging neckline, and diaphanous sleeves at the elbow, sporting a pearl choker and tasseled fan. The clearly tight corset that underpins this lavish garment is an example of the uncomfortable dress that Veblen saw as representing members of a leisure class demonstrably exhibiting their inability to work. This is only one example of how Sargent’s swagger portraits represented members of the leisure class displaying conspicuous consumption, but it was a method that many other portraitists in both Europe and the United States adopted as an overt signal of Gilded Age excess. It is no surprise that when Wilde gave his American lecture tour to packed audiences in 1882, his sartorial idiosyncrasies as much as his verbal fluency and performative personality were the subject of comment and, indeed, imitation. It is notable that many of his disquisitions were on the decorative arts, and especially home decoration—​linking his role as a theorist of aestheticism with the conspicuous consumption that were the habits of his largely well-​heeled audiences. While such artists as Sargent, William Merritt Chase, and Mary Cassatt could, in different ways, embody the superficial beauty of contemporary fashion and Gilded Age life, the writers of the period were less prone to embrace the vitality of the period and were quite diverse in terms of literary style and subject matter. In some cases, as with Kate Chopin, who wrote about Creole life in Louisiana, or Hamlin Garland, who focused on the hardships of prairie farm life, they were steeped in the specific challenges of their geographical regions. Others, like Henry James, portrayed the new urban elite with both nuance and acerbity. However, there were also novelists who explored the darker underbelly of Gilded Age life, especially the urban poverty or factory exploitation that underpinned the acquisition of excess wealth by monopolists and oligarchs. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) heralded this new realist trend that was carried on in the early twentieth century by such authors as Theodore Dreiser and the so-​called muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair who exposed the horrors of factory life. The critique of the excesses of the Gilded Age that concealed the real poverty, despair, and continued inequalities in society was summed up in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–​1887 (1888)—​a utopian novel that lamented the impact of industrialization on American life and posited a form of idealistic socialism that he called “nationalism.” Bellamy’s bestselling novel narrates a conversation between Julian West, a wealthy Bostonian who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in 2000, and Dr. Leete, a citizen of the radically altered city. In Bellamy’s ideal Boston, the selfish individualism of the

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    69

Figure 3.1.  John Singer Sargent, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Mrs. Henry White) (1883). Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (Wikimedia Commons).

Gilded Age robber barons has been swept away by nationalized production and distribution that replaces conspicuous consumption with public art, theater, and music that can be enjoyed by everyone. As Dr. Leete reports to Julian, “The rivalry of ostentation, which in your day led to extravagance in no way conducive to comfort, finds no place . . .

70   Shearer West in a society of people absolutely equal in resources.”13 Bellamy’s Gilded Age Boston, by contrast, is replete with poverty, with streets that “reeked with the effluvia of a slave ship’s between decks” and where “swarms of half-​clad brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses” (305). These were the realities that underlay the gloss of Gilded Age prosperity, and in some ways the latter was dependent on the exploitation of the former. No less telling were the writers and critics who exposed the unsavory characteristics of the American South during the Reconstruction Era that followed the Civil War. The 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, celebrating one hundred years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was a moment of commemoration just over a decade after the end of the Civil War. As with many world exhibitions, there was a desire to showcase advances in science, technology, and the arts, but also to attempt to bury the bitter legacy of the recent war. However, like many of the events and social developments of the Gilded Age, the Exposition was something of a public relations exercise, launched in the midst of continued racial tension and rural poverty in the South. On the surface, Reconstruction was a welcome project to abrogate the legacies of slavery and bring former Confederate states under national constitutional governance. There certainly were many positive outcomes of this project, including powerful and moving writings by activists such as the political lobbyist W. E. B. Du Bois and former slaves such as Booker T. Washington, Hannah Crafts (the pen name of Hannah Bond), and Harriet Ann Jacobs. However, the positive elements of Reconstruction did little to counter the realities of continued racial discrimination and segregation in the South through such vehicles as the Jim Crow laws, the local legislation that enforced racial segregation in Southern states. In essence, the Gilded Age represented the end of a century in America where great progress was made in scientific innovation, a leisure class enjoyed a plethora of new consumer goods, natural resources were exploited for maximum fiscal benefit, and the nation became more unified through better transport links and key developments in the South following the Civil War. However, the literature and art of this period tell us a more nuanced story of how these successes were a glittering patina disguising a range of deep social, economic, and political tensions.

Belle Époque If the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia was intended to mark a new postwar age of progress and prosperity in the United States, the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris had a comparable propagandist function: “to educate the public to the possibilities of the new technology in the services of a republican society.”14 The number of visitors to the exhibition topped thirty-​seven million people, and the engineering marvel that was the Eiffel Tower was the star of the show. Like the United States, the end of France’s century began with recovery from the Franco-​Prussian War and the ill-​fated Commune of Paris

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    71 in 1871 and the advent of the Third Republic (1870–​1940). The period usually associated with the Belle Époque, unlike that of the fin de siècle and Gilded Age, stretched until the First World War. These decades were characterized not only by the kinds of technological innovations that were seen in the United States, but also, and most notably, by a flourishing of art, design, literature, music, and, ultimately, the origins of cinema. Unlike the terms fin de siècle, which was self-​conscious and coined contemporaneously, and Gilded Age, which predated the period to which it referred but was adopted as a tendentious label in the 1920s, Belle Époque, as applied to late nineteenth-​century France, was a retrospective concept popularized by the American historian R. R. Palmer in the 1950s. It evokes a period of over forty years when Paris was seen to be the cultural capital of the world. However, the extremes and ambivalences that have already been discussed in relation to Europe and the United States during these years were also very much present in France during the Belle Époque. The advantage of the retrospective label was that historians could compare these decades with what followed in the First World War and interpret the period of peace that extended from 1871 to 1914, and the proliferation of ideas, innovation, and experiment in both science and the arts, as a “beautiful era” before the horrors of world war encroached upon the whole of Europe. In some ways, fin de siècle and Belle Époque were two sides of the same coin, as Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Mallarmé were cultural icons during this period, Wilde wrote his scandalous play Salomé (1891) in French to avoid English censorship laws, Sargent exhibited his scandalous fleshy portrait of Madame X with her plunging black dress (Figure 3.2) at the Paris Salon (1884), and Joséphin Péladan’s La vice suprême (1884) brought together an uneasy mix of sexuality and world religions. The decadent spirit was alive and well in these artistic creations, but the connotations of the Belle Époque were perhaps more appropriate for the lighter side of Parisian life as seen in the streets, theaters, music halls, and serial international exhibitions. The world that was depicted by impressionist artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-​Auguste Renoir, and Berthe Morisot—​regardless of the optical theory that underlay the literally light-​filled nature of their paintings—​was one of pleasure, leisure, entertainment, and joy. In comparison with Gilded Age excess and conspicuous consumption, many of the paintings of cafés, bars, and boating trips hinted at a society where leisure was a well-​earned way of life among ordinary people rather than a superficial expression of economic superiority. The open physical spaces of Paris enabled by Baron Haussmann’s reforms to the city plan (1853–​1870) pushed poverty and overcrowding out to the suburbs, and—​along with many other changes to the cityscape, including Hector Guimard’s art nouveau redevelopments of some of the Paris Métro stations—​created a city center that provided an appealing backdrop to this vision of leisure and pleasure. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Baudelaire promoted the notion of the flâneur—​an acute observer who perambulates through the city and watches scenes that he himself (and Baudelaire’s flâneur was a man) does not necessarily participate in and perhaps even despises. Ultimately, the flâneur was an idle character, serving no purpose but to take in the world around him.

72   Shearer West

Figure 3.2.  John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) (1884). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (Wikimedia Commons).

This sense of leisure, idleness, walking, and watching permeates the urban scenes of the impressionist and neo-​impressionist artists and gives the Belle Époque the kind of imagery that Sargent provided for the Gilded Age. Nevertheless, there were many counters to this pleasure-​filled view of life among the impressionists and beyond, including Degas’s Dans un café (1875–​1876), which, although it represented Degas’s friends in an everyday life scene, created a negative

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    73 impression of café drinking culture that led to its being retitled L’Absinthe when it was exhibited in London at the Grafton Gallery in 1893 (Figure 3.3). Toulouse Lautrec’s many images of manic activity at the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères—​laughter, dancing, drinking—​often created the impression of seediness or excess through the clever use of perspective and color. Furthermore, there were those in the cultural world who were sympathetic to some of the more extreme political views circulating at the time. Anarchism, for example, was supported by the neo-​impressionist artists Camille Pissarro and Paul Signac and the art critic Félix Fénéon, who was arrested and accused of planting a bomb in a café.

Figure 3.3.  Edgar Degas, Dans un café/​L’Absinthe (1875–​1876). Source: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons).

74   Shearer West The political undercurrents in France during the so-​called Belle Époque are particularly pertinent when it comes to understanding how this cultural renaissance of the late nineteenth century was actually functioning. In France, as in the United States, a postwar period of peace, economic prosperity, and technological and scientific innovation was ostensibly embraced by society, but without the monopolistic practices, pillage of natural resources, or conspicuous consumption that characterized Gilded Age America. In France, however, a similar battle was raging that pitted the supporters of the progress that the Eiffel Tower represented to the leaders of the Third Republic against both the conventionalists who wanted a return to Catholic hegemony and the anarchists who were opposed to all social and political institutions. This conflict played out in the cultural networks that defined France’s Belle Époque. We are perhaps accustomed to seeing avant-​garde art movements as progressive, but symbolism in France was in many ways a movement that looked backward. The artists and writers who embraced this aesthetic, from Paul Gauguin to Maurice Denis, were, on the one hand, supporting the disconnection between style and content that was a key part of the decadent aesthetic, but, on the other, they were embracing some of the more traditional elements of French religious culture. Like Huysmans, Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, they adopted an idea coined by Gautier in his preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) of l’art pour l’art or “art for art’s sake.” This concept removed the responsibility of writers and artists to make their work naturalistic or useful as long as it was serving a higher purpose, defined in Wilde’s own version of this notion as beauty. Despite its name, symbolism did not do what symbolism conventionally does—​that is, relate an image or an object directly to a specific concept. Instead, artists chose images for their evocative value, mystery, or associations rather than exact meaning. There is therefore no easy explanation for Odilon Redon’s etching of a Grinning Spider (1887) or Gustave Moreau’s Mystic Flower (1890) representing a woman holding a cross and emerging from a mammoth stem apparently surrounded by haloed angels. The combination of supernatural forces, mysticism, and vague religious connotations permeated these works and, in some sense, indicated the anti-​progressivism of the movement. One of the most prominent groups who operated within this ideologically conservative symbolist aesthetic was the Salon de la Rose+​Croix. These salons were events that exhibited art works of a mystical character and featured performances of music by Erik Satie and others. They were hosted by Joseph Péladan in Paris from 1892. Péladan, who changed his first name to Joséphin to reflect a contemporary fascination with androgyny, had previously established his own religious movement, the Mystic Order of the Rose+​Croix. Steeped in medieval mysticism, Péladan saw his order as a branch of Rosicrucianism, but with quite strong resonances of Roman Catholic theology. He appropriated the title of Sâr, which was an ancient Akkadian word for “king,” and adopted a bizarre sartorial mode of pointed beard and monk-​like tunic, which was unflinchingly represented by the artist Alexandre Séon in his portrait of Péladan of 1891 (Figure 3.4). Péladan planned a cycle of novels under the composite title La

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    75 Décadence latine, but he was best known for his scandalous La vice suprême (1884), which combined mysticism with erotica in what many found to be a self-​indulgent and turgid piece of fiction. The Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff was inspired by the novel to produce an illustration of a skeletal full-​breasted sphinx reclining behind a naked woman covering herself in the manner of the Venus de Milo (1885). Although Péladan’s self-​importance and pseudo-​theological mumbo-​jumbo was subsequently derided and left very little in the way of artistic legacy, this movement did reveal the strong links that French symbolism had with an anti-​republican movement that had ties to the Catholic Church.

Figure 3.4.  Alexandre Séon, Portrait du Sâr Joséphin Péladan (1892). Source: Musée des beaux-​arts de Lyon, Lyon (Wikimedia Commons).

76   Shearer West Péladan, reviewing the art exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1883, had already declared, “I believe in the Ideal, in Tradition, in Hierarchy.”15 The capitalization was his. This emphasis on tradition and authority and, by implication, opposition to republicanism and positivism continued to play through art criticism and symbolist writing, for example in Huysmans’s Certains (1889), where his monarchist, authoritarian Catholicism became clear. As Edward Lucie-​Smith notes in his foundational study of symbolism, “Decadence involved a renunciation of the idea of progress, spiritual as well as material, which had sustained intellectuals ever since the eighteenth century.”16 The resurgence of Jesuit influence on secondary education after the Falloux Laws of the Second Republic, and the coyness of republican leaders in the light of a long ascendency of Catholicism in French politics and society, underpinned a Belle Époque that was ostensibly devoted to both secularism and progress, but was also subject to severe tensions between the ideals and beliefs of the past and the realities of the present. Although the Falloux Laws themselves were reformed in the Third Republic, there remained a strong influence of Catholic culture and belief in French society that had never been fully reconciled or repressed by the French Revolution and the subsequent republican governments. The tensions between these tendencies surfaced most brutally in 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was imprisoned in Devil’s Island for alleged treason. The events surrounding his incarceration fueled anti-​Semitism among more conservative sectors of French society and stimulated Émile Zola to write J’Accuse (1898)—​a searing indictment of Dreyfus’s treatment and those who had conspired against him. While these conservative forces pushed against the progress, prosperity, and pleasure that were the hallmarks of the Belle Époque, at the opposite extreme the anarchist movement promoted much more radical change than what was supported by the Third Republic. Whereas symbolist artists and writers could call for hierarchy and authority, anarchists were opposed to nearly all of society’s institutions—​including religion, property, law, and family. Félix Dubois, in The Anarchist Peril of 1894, characterized the personality of anarchists as embracing a spirit of innovation, novelty, revolt against authority, the love of liberty, and the cultivation of individuality.17 This description feels like the obverse of Nordau’s characterization of the “degenerate,” but nevertheless both descriptions rely on the iconoclastic approach that characterized the world of literature, art, and music at the end of the century. Anarchists, however, were prone to detonate bombs, and during the 1890s, a number of them, including Ravachol (François Claudius Koenigstein), Auguste Vaillant, and Émile Henry, were among those responsible for a number of deaths and injuries. Such extremes as the Dreyfus Affair and the bombing of cafés and political assemblies hardly seem to represent a Belle Époque posited as a glorious end to France’s century. However, understanding the origins of the concept of Belle Époque as a stark contrast to the horrors of the First World War shows how a picture could be painted of a century’s end where pleasure, leisure, and contentment were taken for granted.

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    77

Conclusion For a century as complex and culturally rich as the nineteenth, it is no surprise that characterizations of its end would range from the doom-​mongers who predicted a decline of civilization to the utopians who conceived of a privileged society blissfully unaware of a war that would tear the world apart. However, the labels fin de siècle, Gilded Age, and Belle Époque naturally reflect the contradictions inherent in the Western societies that gave rise to the aesthetics and morality of decadence. In Britain, France, and the United States during the last thirty years of the century, the tensions between the individual and the collective, mysticism and empiricism, and tradition and innovation not only surfaced through art, literature, and music, but were at the very core of society, politics, and economics. As Terry Eagleton eloquently put it, “We are speaking of the period of Aubrey Beardsley and the Second International; of aestheticism and anarchism; of decadence and the Dock Strike.”18 It is no wonder that contemporaneous observers as well as historians found it difficult to articulate the qualities of an age that witnessed the invention of the telephone, the expansion of the railways, and the building of the Eiffel Tower, as well as the framing of an innocent Jewish military officer in France, the vilification of Wilde in England, and the racist Jim Crow laws in the American South. Only a few years after the century’s end, on the eve of the First World War, Holbrook Jackson already recognized the law of retrospect in his discussion of the 1890s: “It is obvious, then, that people felt they were living amid changes and struggles, intellectual, social and spiritual, and the interpreters of the hour—​the publicists, journalists and popular purveyors of ideas of all kinds—​did not fail to make a sort of traffic in the spirit of the times.”19 This was one century with many more than simply three different endings.

Notes 1. Havelock Ellis, The Nineteenth Century: A Dialogue in Utopia (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 106. 2. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913), 18. 3. John Addington Symonds, “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature,” in Essays, Speculative and Suggestive (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), 1:72. 4. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–​ 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4. 5. Max Beerbohm, “A Letter to the Editor,” Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 284. 6. Max Nordau, Degeneration (London: William Heinemann, 1898), 3. Further references cited parenthetically. 7. George Bernard Shaw, The Sanity of Art (1895; New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918), 22. 8. James Cantlie, Degeneration amongst Londoners (London: Field and Tuer, 1885), 30–​31. 9. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 858–​59.

78   Shearer West 10. William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, in The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed., ed. Stanley Wells et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 442. 11. Alan Axelrod, The Gilded Age 1876–​1912: Overture to the American Century (New York: Sterling, 2017), 272. 12. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of American Institutions and a Social Critique of Conspicuous Consumption (1899; New York: Macmillan, 1902), 43, 70. Further references cited parenthetically. 13. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–​1887, ed. John L. Thomas (1888; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 253–​54. Further references cited parenthetically. 14. Mary McAuliffe, Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and their Friends (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 195. 15. Joséphin Péladan, L’Art ochlocratique: Salons de 1882 & de 1883 (Paris: C. Dalou, 1888), 45: “Je crois à l’Idéal, à la Tradition, à la Hiérarchie.” 16. Edward Lucie-​Smith, Symbolist Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), 51–​52. 17. Félix Dubois, The Anarchist Peril, trans. Ralph Derechef (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), 209–​17. 18. Terry Eagleton, “The Flight to the Real,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12. 19. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 21.

Further Reading Axelrod, Alan. The Gilded Age 1876–​1912: Overture to the American Century. New York: Sterling, 2017. Birkett, Jennifer. The Sins of the Fathers: Decadence in France 1870–​1914. London: Quartet Books, 1986. Burns, Sarah. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Chamberlin, Edward, and Sander Gilman, eds. Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Fletcher, Ian. Decadence and the 1890s. London: Edward Arnold, 1979. Härmänmaa, Marja, and Christopher Nissen, eds. Decadence, Degeneration and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ledger, Sally, and Scott McCracken, eds. Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Madsen, Annelise. John Singer Sargent and Chicago’s Gilded Age. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2018. Marlais, Michael. Conservative Echoes in Fin-​ de-​ Siècle Art Criticism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Marshall, Gail, ed. The Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. McAuliffe, Mary. Dawn of the Belle Époque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and their Friends. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. McGuinness, Patrick, ed. Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000.

Fin de Siècle, Gilded Age, or Belle Époque    79 McKnight, Christopher, and Nancy C. Unger, eds. A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Mumford, Lewis. The Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture. New York: Norton, 1926. Prost, Antoine. Les Français de la Belle Époque. Paris: Gallimard, 2019. Silverman, Debora. Art Nouveau in Fin-​de-​Siècle France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Weir, David. “Decadence.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 2, edited by Michael Kelly, 297–​ 301. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. West, Shearer. Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Winnock, Michel. Décadence Fin de Siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2017.

Chapter 4

The Interwa r Pe ri od Legacies of Decadence Melanie Hawthorne

World War I wrought many changes affecting the way decadence played out in various countries over the following decades. Just as the political map of Europe was redrawn as part of the Treaty of Versailles, the cultural spaces of the West also underwent an upheaval and reconfiguration. The magnitude of the changes in the geopolitical landscape are illustrated by the fate of the vast Austro-​Hungarian Empire, which basically ceased to exist entirely after 1918 (with its rival the Ottoman Empire expiring shortly thereafter, in 1922), though a much-​reduced Austria limped along until Germany claimed it in the Anschluss of 1938. Even though interwar Vienna no longer led Europe—​except as the home of Freudian psychoanalysis—​the city had been a major site of decadence at the turn of the century, home of the Jugendstil movement and the setting for seedy stories by Arthur Schnitzler. Those stories were populated by fictional characters not so different from the neurotic Viennese patients Sigmund Freud treated. His case studies, which often read like novels, took psychological conditions such as hysteria that had been treated as signs of decadence in fin-​de-​ siècle Paris (where Freud had once studied) and gave them a new twist. The Austro-​Hungarian Empire expired in the same political conflagration that also consumed the Russian Empire, as the October Revolution of 1917 caused the country to disconnect temporarily from the rest of the world and turn inward while it concentrated on domestic issues. Formerly Eurocentric cities such as St. Petersburg (renamed Leningrad, a sign of the changing political climate) were suddenly isolated from cultural currents playing out elsewhere, and the new emphasis on the proletariat discouraged decadent elitist individualism. The Soviet Union aside, through any number of dramatic shifts and transformations, there was a remarkable degree of continuity in the way the decadence of the fin-​de-​siècle and prewar periods continued to manifest itself in the interwar years. As others have noted, decadence laid the groundwork for literary modernism in multiple ways,1 but the afterlife of decadence is not limited to literature. On the contrary, its culture is also manifest during the interwar period in the new medium of cinema as well as in other forms of popular entertainment—​and not just in Europe.

The Interwar Period    81

Interwar Paris The general mood in France, which emerged from the conflict of World War I on the winning side for a change, underwent a dramatic transformation from its fin-​de-​siècle days. Thus, the inferiority complex and desire for revenge brought about by the defeat in the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870 that fueled many aspects of French decadence in the 1880s and 1890s were exorcised in the post-​WWI period. But the transition was not entirely smooth. On the one hand, France was victorious, but at a mind-​numbing human cost that mitigated the sense of triumph, leaving a population in shock. The survivors celebrated and partied (drug addiction was ever more of a problem and displaced absinthe as a public health concern), but many had some form of what would later be called “survivor guilt” (and not just in France).2 Paris remained a major hub of decadence, carrying on the role it had played at the fin de siècle. The interplay between continuity and reinvention is perfectly encapsulated by the history of the Moulin Rouge, the popular entertainment venue of late nineteenth-​ century Paris that became a de rigueur stop for tourists who came to see the decadence of “Gay Paree” in the interwar years. Founded in 1889, it became one of the most iconic sites of the fin de siècle, thanks in no small part to its readily identifiable red windmill and the poster art of Henri de Toulouse-​Lautrec. Although the nature of the entertainments evolved over the years, it retained its reputation as a site of decadent pleasure, with its location on the Boulevard de Clichy in Pigalle, the edgy area of Paris most associated with the sex trade and adjacent to mythical Montmartre.3 Said to be the birthplace of the licentious can-​can dance in the late nineteenth century, it was an establishment that catered to popular tastes for drinking and dancing, allowed people of all classes to mix, and in its early years also offered recreations such as a giant metal elephant with stairs in each leg and belly dancers.4 In addition, there were circus acts and sensational performances such as that of the Pétomane (Joseph Pujol), who made music by farting.5 It closed in 1897, then reopened quickly once the 1900 exposition brought new crowds to Paris seeking entertainment, but burned down in 1915. It was rebuilt after World War I, illustrating so clearly not only the continuity but also the disjunction between decadence and the interwar years: the new construction took the name and the place of a mythical, lost original, but the red windmill that stood on the site was new—​a mere copy of the original. In its new incarnation, the indoor spectacle element took over as the main attraction, and the 1920s featured “revue” style shows of provocative dancing girls. Its greatest star was Mistinguett (Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois, 1875–​1956), whose risqué performances made her the superstar of her day (and at one time the highest paid female performer in the world).6 The mill of the Moulin Rouge was still turning (a profit) as a site of entertainment, and one still focused on the display of the female body, but “the ambiguous mingling of dancers and spectators gave way to pure performance” and the mass spectacle of the kick-​line routine replaced the virtuoso performances of the can-​can.7 Decadence had been commodified.

82   Melanie Hawthorne Less commercialized forms of entertainment and performance evolved in other Parisian venues, again building on traditions dating back to the previous century. The “bal des quat’z’arts” had begun in the 1890s as a wild costume ball for art students.8 It was held in Montmartre, but the carnivalesque aspect condoned licentious behavior, and the spectacle of naked women posing as artists’ models spilling out into the streets illustrated the provocative atmosphere that came to be associated with it. Each year there was a theme for the costumes, and in the interwar years some of these themes harked back to past moments associated with decadent civilizations, such as ancient Egypt (the theme in 1920) and Carthage (in 1921), to cite just two examples.9 Then there was the Magic-​City Ball, held during Lent at the Magic-​City dance hall near the Eiffel Tower from 1922 to 1934, where men in drag caroused openly in the streets, taking advantage of the temporary relaxation of Lenten austerity to flout the usual rules.10 This was among the scenes captured by Brassaï (Gyula Halász, 1899–​1984), the Transylvanian-​born artist known for his photographs that preserved the look of interwar Paris, especially its nightlife, for posterity. He also documented the scenes inside the lesbian bar Le Monocle in Montparnasse, where women in tuxedos (but with skirts rather than pants) socialized freely.11 Yet another club, La Vie Parisienne, was founded by Suzy Solidor (1900–​1983), who became famous in her own right as a singer and performer. Her role as impresario of the nightlife together with her openness about her lesbianism gave her a decadent reputation, furthered by her willingness to pose, often in the nude, for famous painters such as Tamara de Lempicka (1898–​1980), whose distinctive art deco style has become highly valued today. The portraits were displayed in the club, adding to the fame of the venue. Later, during the Occupation period, La Vie Parisienne became popular with German officers, leading Solidor to be ostracized after the war, but in the 1920s and 1930s she was part of the sexual subculture that gave Paris its “naughty” reputation.12

The Lost Generation In France, the weak franc meant that the cost of living was cheap for voluntary expatriates from the United States. Along with this financial advantage, “Paris offered an ideal retreat from the three American P’s: puritanism, philistinism, and prohibition [which lasted from 1920–​1933],” so many Americans found they could afford to prefer Paris.13 The interwar years were marked by the social and artistic activities of what Gertrude Stein dubbed the “lost generation,” comprising such expatriates as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Djuna Barnes, who grafted new, transatlantic sensibilities onto French culture with roots in the fin de siècle.14 Many of these new writers were modernists in the making, rather than identifying as decadents, but the links between the two cultural moments were unmistakable, and they illustrate the way decadent tropes persisted in art and literature despite the apparent breaks with the past in the geopolitical sphere. The beginning of Djuna Barnes’s

The Interwar Period    83 modernist classic Nightwood (1936) illustrates the cultural debt to the fin de siècle.15 The opening scene of the novel depicts the Viennese aristocrat Hedvig Volkbein giving birth to an only child before promptly dying. The heraldic motif of the House of Habsburg on the valance of her bed signals the fact that her death is also the end of a dynasty and an empire. The ironically named child, Felix, thus comes unhappily into the world as an orphan (his father Guido having died six months previously), cut loose from the ties to the family and milieu that produced him. His story will be one of nostalgia for that lost identity and the desire to reclaim it but the failure to do so: his own offspring, also named Guido, after his father, will be the sickly and mentally feeble runt so often depicted in decadent fiction as the product of inbreeding and genetic decline, suggesting that he will be the last of the line. The past is irretrievable, then, yet it is far from over. After sketching the background of Felix’s parents, the narrative picks up the story thirty years later, making no attempt to account for his childhood, as if to underscore the chasm that separates the old world of Vienna and the modernity of Paris where Felix will make his home. He assumes the title of baron and is obsessed with what he calls Old Europe, though the reader knows by this point that his father Guido’s claims to aristocracy were fabricated, and the family history is mythologized. As a substitute for the old pageantry of the hereditary aristocracy, Felix will be attracted to the showiness and gimmickry of the circus, with these two spectacles (the aristocracy, the circus) once again creating a kind of diptych distinguishing between, yet also fundamentally linking, decadence and modernism. The “high” performance of aristocracy, with its court rituals, etiquettes, and costumes, gives way to the “low” style of circus, vaudeville, and cabaret. In the world of show business, Felix is at home among the new “aristocracy” of celebrity performers such as “Princess Nadja” and “King Buffo.” It is through his connections to this underworld that Felix will meet Mathew O’Connor, a gynecologist, and Nora Flood in a cabaret in Berlin, thanks to a trapeze artist whose name, Frau Mann, evokes both that of the cabaret performer Erika Mann and also points to a broader gender confusion (“Woman Man,” perhaps a nod to the gender-​confused title of Rachilde’s decadent classic, Monsieur Vénus). Nora also meets her partner Robin Vote at a circus, but Felix meets Robin through Mathew O’Connor to complete the circle. Felix and Robin marry and have a son, Guido junior, but Robin will leave the child with Felix when she pursues her relationship with Nora, which becomes the dominant thread of the novel. Felix will try to recreate his father’s world with Guido junior, but it is an effort doomed to fail in the new reality of the 1930s. This is no longer the fin de siècle: it is a modern world in which women can vote (Robin’s last name) and new kinds of relationships (e.g., lesbian) challenge traditional family structures, yet the debt to the past is clear. Barnes’s novel consistently shows how decadent threads are rewoven into new, modern patterns while it takes the reader on a tour of the decadent capitals (Vienna, Paris, Berlin), and underscores how, rather than being a complete break with decadence, modernism was in fact an organic extension of the preoccupations of the fin de siècle.16 Barnes even hints at the connections between aspects of old-​fashioned decadence and the appeal of the sleek new fascist aesthetic that was ascendant in the 1930s, referring to Hedvig Volkbein’s militarism and goose-​stepping (a form of exaggerated

84   Melanie Hawthorne marching strongly associated with the Nazis) that echo in the world around Barnes in the years leading up to World War II. Barnes, the “lost generation,” and other leading cultural figures of many nationalities regularly rubbed shoulders at the Paris salon of the American expatriate heiress Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–​1972).17 Barnes would portray Barney as Dame Evangeline Musset in her roman à clef The Ladies Almanack (1928), which presented the lesbian coteries of Paris at the time as characters out of an old-​fashioned Elizabethan manual. The Friday gatherings at Barney’s home on the Left Bank were legendary and a notable feature of interwar Paris life.18 Barney had played a part in the turn-​of-​the-​century scene of Paris-​Lesbos, where her affair with the high-​end courtesan Liane de Pougy had sparked much gossip when it was touted in a roman à clef titled Idylle saphique (1901), so Barney provided another thread of continuity from the prewar to the interwar years. She did not cease to be a scandalous figure, thanks to her open and unapologetic lesbianism, but she had become almost an institution by the 1920s and 1930s, at least in the eyes of the cultural and artistic elite. Although nothing overtly controversial was taking place at these gatherings (unlike the prewar years, when she held parties at which semi-​naked women cavorted in the garden, or the war years when she hosted pacifist meetings at a time when pacifism was suspect), the large contingent of gay men and women in attendance, along with the cosmopolitan atmosphere, made it seem decadent anyway. The salon was one of the cultural forms of interwar decadence, an innovation that moved public gatherings of coteries such as the Hydropathes (a bohemian literary club that presaged the French decadents) from cafes into private homes.19 Not all Americans were drawn to interwar Paris for economic reasons. The African American singer and dancer Josephine Baker (Freda Josephine McDonald, 1906–​1975) left the United States to escape racism. There was no segregation to hobble her fame in France, where she became one of the superstars of her day. In October 1925, she appeared with the Revue nègre in the première of a controversial musical spectacle, La danse sauvage, at the Théâtre des Champs-​Elysées. On this occasion, she was wearing a skirt made of feathers, which was daring enough, but she went on to perfect the look, performing at the Folies-​Bergère dressed only in a skirt made entirely of suggestively shaped (though artificial) bananas and a necklace of large beads. Her shows featured jazzy “tribal” music and drums that played to racial stereotypes about “savages” and their primitive sensations. It made her a star, and not just on stage: she made a number of films that have preserved her performance style, such as Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934), and Princess Tam Tam (1935). She went on to found an orphanage, work for the French Resistance in World War II, and become a civil rights activist in postwar America, but her reputation in the interwar years was primarily that of the racialized, decadent sex symbol.20 Another refugee from puritanical America relied on the titillation of the transvestite as his ticket to fame. Known simply as “Barbette” in his professional life, Vander Clyde (1899–​1973) started out as a circus trapeze act in Texas, his home state, before he too headed for Paris. Here, he performed an aerial act in drag in the 1920s and 1930s, appearing in a number of different venues, including the famed Moulin Rouge. He

The Interwar Period    85 performed as a woman, only revealing his “true” sex at the end of the show, trading on the surprise element of what was then referred to as “female impersonation.” Discovered in flagrante delicto with another man while on tour in London, he was never able to work in England again, but his reputation flourished in more free-​thinking France (where homosexuality was not illegal). Following a fall (and/​or illness, the sources disagree) in the 1930s, he was in too much pain to continue performing, and turned to consulting in Hollywood.21 (Among other credits, he later served as a gender consultant for Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon on the gender-​bending comedy Some Like It Hot of 1959).22 The physical pain continued to take a toll, however, and he took his own life in 1973. Transvestism, drag, female impersonation, burlesque, and other sexually inflected decadent performances continued to be popular in France (Paris especially) through the interwar years and on into the post–​World War II period.

Weimar Berlin The factors that had depressed France at the turn of the previous century migrated to Germany after World War I. The country suffered the humiliation of defeat, as France had done in 1871, and it faced the financial burden of crippling debt for war reparations. Hence, the Berlin of Weimar Germany became the world capital of decadence in the postwar years.23 Its political and economic woes lent themselves to the feelings of decline already associated with decadence, while a vibrant literary and cultural scene thrived against this backdrop (some might say because of it). As in Paris, much of this activity took the form of live performance in clubs and cabarets. Such areas of artistic activity are hard to evaluate today because of their ephemerality; very little of this work was recorded, and verbal descriptions seldom capture the experience, though the novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904–​1986) gave a flavor of the milieu in his fictional recreations, the “Berlin Stories,” particularly in the larger-​than-​life character of Sally Bowles, the inspiration for the film Cabaret (1972). The reputations of those who made their mark through live performances, such as Erika Mann (1905–​ 1969), have suffered as a consequence of cabaret’s impermanence. A celebrity in her day, much of Mann’s performance work has been lost.24 Unlike her father Thomas, her uncle Heinrich, and her brother Klaus (1906–​1949), Erika left little in the way of the printed word, and therefore has not received as much attention from critics. A questioning of sex and gender roles had been an important theme of fin-​de-​siècle decadence, a trend that continued in Berlin, as it was home to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific-​Humanitarian Committee and his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Science of Sexuality), founded in 1919.25 Most notably, Hirschfeld (1868–​1935) oversaw the transition of the first transgender pioneers, beginning with Dora Richter, whose treatment began in 1921 and culminated in successful gender reassignment surgery in 1930. Such medical interventions became possible in part thanks to advances in plastic surgery made during the treatment of horrendous war injuries, as well as progress

86   Melanie Hawthorne in understanding the role of hormones in sex characteristics. In addition to pushing the boundaries of gender dimorphism, the institute also took the lead in depathologizing both male and female homosexuality.26 It has been argued that Hirschfeld and others gave credibility to the more conservative and “respectable” elements of the sexual revolution while rejecting the more radical, less conformist contingents in order to gain public acceptance, thereby driving a wedge between reformers who otherwise had many shared goals.27 In the end, though, whatever respectability Hirschfield and his followers were able to establish was not enough to stave off the disapproval of the rising forces of fascism that made such “degenerates” a target. Hirschfeld himself was beaten up as early as 1920, while in 1933 (when Hitler came to power) his institute was sacked and its library burned, one of many such spectacular book burnings. Foreseeing further trouble, Hirschfeld went into exile in Nice, where he died in 1935.28 Themes of gender and sexuality found their way into the literature of the Weimar period, where the novel continued to be a dominant form. Gay characters abounded, for example in a trilogy of novels by Anna Weirauch (1887–​1970), starting with Der Skorpion (The Scorpion) in 1919. This influential novel went into several printings and gave its name to a distinctive type of lesbian: the sexually aggressive, dangerous, and predatory woman. Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936) offered a new twist on the theme of selling one’s soul in exchange for worldly success. Novels were also a source of raw material for the newly emerging genre of film, which became a new form of decadent cultural expression. In the interwar years, film established itself as a serious art form as well as a commercial enterprise, becoming one of the dominant forms of expression in the twentieth century. In the early years after World War I, German film made a major contribution to this development through expressionist films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) and Nosferatu (1922) that explored extreme states of human subjectivity (madness and fear), while Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) tackled questions about the dehumanizing effects of alienated, industrial work and the humanity of androids (a neologism popularized in the novel L’Ève future of 1886 by Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-​Adam). German film of the interwar years also offered some of what would become classics of the gay and lesbian film canon. Notable among these is the cult classic Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in uniform, 1931), directed by Leontine Sagan (1889–​1974), an adaptation of the play Gestern und Heute (Yesterday and today) by the German author Christa Winsloe (1888–​1944), who also novelized the play as Das Mädchen Manuela (The girl Manuela, 1933). Set in a girls’ boarding school run with military discipline, it features the pupil Manuela, who experiences a (mostly) unrequited passion for one of her teachers (a commonplace in lesbian literature, especially once schools opened up to girls at the end of the nineteenth century). The original play concludes with Manuela committing suicide, but the film revised that ending, leaving it open for a more optimistic interpretation, a notable shift from the usual approach to depicting “deviant” relationships in which nonconformists must be seen to be punished. Another notable feature of Sagan’s film was the fact that it had an all-​female cast and took a cooperative approach

The Interwar Period    87 to finances and profit-​sharing. Winsloe subsequently fled to France to escape the Nazis, worked with the French Resistance, and was shot near Cluny by the French in 1944 in circumstances that remain unclear, but in the interwar years her career thrived.29 The film became an underground classic and inspired others, such as French director Jacqueline Audry’s Olivia (1950), an adaptation of the semi-​autobiographical novel by British author Dorothy Bussy of the same name (1949), also set in a girls’ school. The school was modeled on Les Ruches, a girls’ boarding school in France attended by, among others, Natalie Barney and also the future US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, showing the cosmopolitan extent of these networks, whose ripples reached the highest spheres of political power.

Hollywood, Weimar on the Pacific With the looming threat of Nazi repression, many Germans active in the film industry would move west to the United States, putting what was once the backwater of Los Angeles on the map and turning it into a decadent metropolis itself within a few decades. Film began to flourish as a form of mass entertainment in the interwar period, thanks in part to the arrival of “talkies”—​that is, synchronized sound and dialogue—​starting in 1927. Before becoming known as the home of the film industry that catered to mass tastes, Hollywood produced some memorably decadent art films, thanks in large part to the role of Europeans in exile and their influence. One of the most resonant of these productions is the silent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé by Alla Nazimova in 1922. Nazimova (1879–​1945) was an immigrant to the United States, originally from Yalta in the Crimea, who became a pioneer of Hollywood cinema. In her adaptation of the play, she relied heavily on Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for visual inspiration, so that the film looks at times like an animated version of his drawings. Although it was visually arresting, the film was not a financial success. In fact, as the producer of the film as well as its star, Nazimova suffered huge losses that brought her to the verge of bankruptcy. Before Salomé, she was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, but the box-​office failure of the film left her reputation in ruins; nevertheless, she had a cult following that has endured. Curiously, she was the godmother to Nancy Reagan, the wife of President Ronald Reagan, so in some ways one could argue that her influence stretched all the way to the White House.30 The low cost of living in France might have been drawing the lost generation from America to Paris, but the high cost of political persecution was pushing many of Germany’s elite cultural figures in the other direction. The concentration of exiles from Nazi Germany who regrouped on the California coast meant that many Hollywood films of the interwar years bear the traces of decadent influence that immigrants brought with them from their European homes. This is particularly evident in the work of superstars such as Marlene Dietrich (1901–​1992), who made her start in the German film industry, where her performance in the Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930),

88   Melanie Hawthorne directed by Josef von Sternberg, draws heavily on the femme fatale stereotype. Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat (Professor garbage, 1905), the film is set in Weimar Germany against the background of cabaret culture.31 Two different versions of the film were made—​one in German and one in English—​and the success of the English-​language version helped to establish Dietrich as a major star in Hollywood. But the film was held up for release pending the exhibition and promotion of Morocco, also starring Dietrich and directed by Sternberg in 1930 after The Blue Angel.32 Morocco gave the world the indelibly decadent image of a seductive woman cross-​ dressed in a tuxedo and top hat, flirting publicly with another woman. Blonde Venus (dir. Sternberg, 1932), with a German backdrop, continues the theme of nightclub culture. Dietrich plays Helen, a cabaret performer, and her rendition of the song “Hot VooDoo” in a gorilla costume was one of the highlights of the film. The number relied heavily on jazz trumpets and drum rhythms, what the Nazis would code as “primitive” and “Negro” music, and therefore associate with the kind of degenerate elements that were suspect in Germany (and elsewhere). The Devil is a Woman (1935), another film directed by Sternberg and staring Dietrich, is an adaptation of the 1898 fin-​de-​siècle novel La femme et le pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) by the French author Pierre Louÿs, best remembered as the author of Les Chansons de Bilitis (Songs of Bilitis) of 1894, further evidence of the influence the literature of the decadent period continued to exercise on these decades. Dietrich’s great rival in American film was the Swedish Greta Garbo (1905–​1990), who came to Hollywood in 1925, under contract to MGM.33 Garbo was famous for her on-​screen depictions of women such as the femme fatale spy Mata Hari, who was executed in World War I, and a one-​time attendee of Natalie Barney’s salon,34 in the 1931 film of that name, and the ambiguously gendered Queen Christina of Sweden in Queen Christina (1933). The private life of both Dietrich and Garbo provided much fodder for gossip that saw them as representative of the depraved Hollywood stars that the public could not get enough of, particularly when it came to speculation about their relationships. Dietrich tended to be assimilated to her show-​girl on-​screen identity, in which she was only one step away from prostitution, and she was also known to have affairs with women. Garbo, famously reclusive in later life, was also primarily attracted to women, and it has even been suggested that at one time the women had an affair with each other (before their professional rivalry came between them).35 The film industry created Los Angeles, the decadent capital of the United States. Its ambiance came not from a feeling that the city was in decline, as in older European cities, since Los Angeles was too “young” for that, but from the sense that the urban space had replaced the Garden of Eden. In the initial move westward, California was seen as an unspoiled paradise where food grew in abundance, there for the taking. The city replaced this state of nature with ugly settlements that allowed vice and corruption to thrive. This decadence was a fall of biblical proportions. It was no surprise, then, that when the independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger reached for an image to convey what had become of a city founded by and for angels, he turned to that most mythical of biblical decadent cities, Babylon, in his sensationalized exposé of the underside of

The Interwar Period    89 the film world, Hollywood Babylon (1965). (Anger is, among other things, a follower of the British occultist Aleister Crowley [1875–​1947], who founded an esoteric cult named Thelema that became the focus of his libertine activities in the interwar years.)36 Film might be an entirely new genre (though born in Paris of the 1890s) with new aesthetic possibilities, but when one of its critics wanted to sound its lower depths, he reached for one of the oldest and most familiar tropes of decadence. So many cultural refugees from Nazi Germany ended up in the Los Angeles area that it was dubbed “Weimar on the Pacific.”37 The extended Mann family (Thomas, and his children, and also his brother Heinrich) went into exile in the United States, and many other émigrés with literary and theatrical backgrounds followed, often finding employment in the burgeoning film industry. With their exiled status in common, they came together in what might be characterized as a recreation of European salon culture. A notable gathering place was the home of Salka Viertel (1889–​1978), another refugee from the German theater world, who turned to writing for MGM and was responsible for, among other things, the scripts for several Greta Garbo vehicles, including Queen Christina and Anna Karenina (1935).38

From Decadence to Degeneration While the world partied, however, shadows were gathering that would put an end, at least temporarily, to the cultural expansion. What had been seen as merely “decadent,” or a general social and cultural decline, at the end of the nineteenth century was recoded with the advent of the eugenics movement as “degenerate,” which took on sinister connotations of an existential threat. Max Nordau had already sounded the alarm in his fin-​de-​siècle bestseller Entartung (Degeneration) of 1892–​1893, but in the interwar years the label became understood more literally.39 “Degeneracy” represented a change for the worse in the genetic material of the human race, an effect opposite to that of the felicitous improvements heralded by the “eu-​” of eugenics (a movement later discredited thanks in no small part to the role it played in Nazi genocide). With their emphasis on racial purity, the Nazis latched onto this interpretation and identified degeneration as a public threat, so that by the 1930s, those with “degenerate tendencies” had become enemies of the state, not just a cultural sideshow. Degenerate art (entartete Kunst) was a favorite target of right-​wing and fascist groups, particularly in Germany. In one specific and paradigmatic instance, the Nazis themselves organized an exhibition of so-​called degenerate art in Munich in 1937 precisely so that they could denigrate it publicly and call for its censorship.40 Most of the artists represented in the exhibition were German, such as the expressionist Emil Nolde (1867–​1956) and printmaker Erich Heckel (1883–​ 1970), but the Nazis also targeted artists of an earlier generation such as Vincent van Gogh. Most of the art that the authorities considered “degenerate,” the rest of the world called simply “modernist” (the work of artists such as Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso), and the art has since been rehabilitated, but many of the artists

90   Melanie Hawthorne themselves were not so fortunate in their day. The consequences for them included exile and suicide, along with setbacks in their career as artists. The Nazis appropriated some of the more valuable works shown in the exhibition, raised money by selling others, and the Berlin Fire Brigade is suspected of burning what was deemed to have no value in 1939.41 The treatment of art was paralleled by the repression of the printed word. A formal campaign of book burning (as opposed to spontaneous events) was coordinated by the Deutsche Studentenschaft (abbreviated DSt, translated as German Student Union or Association), beginning in 1933.42 Ideologically, fire was chosen for its purgative properties, but of course it was no coincidence that this purification also entailed irretrievable destruction. Books and authors targeted in this way represented a wide range of proscribed characteristics (for example, being Jewish), political views (communists), and social causes (sexology), but a common theme was that all were somehow harmful to mainstream society. The campaign inspired later works such as Ray Bradbury’s futuristic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and François Truffaut’s film adaptation of the same name (1966). This politicization of art (in its widest sense) was not confined to movements that were identified with atavistic or “throw-​back” tendencies such as degeneracy, but took hold even in the context of modern movements that promised “clean” lines, “rational” design, and “functional” forms, values that one might assume would have aligned conveniently with forward-​thinking philosophies such as eugenics and other efforts to “improve” the human race. This paradox can be illustrated through the history of the Bauhaus (or Staatliches Bauhaus, to give it its full title), an influential art school in Weimar founded by Walter Gropius (1883–​1969) that ran from 1919 to 1933, known for its blending of crafts and fine arts. Its radical new designs for everyday living in domains such as graphics and architecture are often taken as the epitome of sleek and minimalist modernism. Such aesthetics could not be further from the florid decadent style of the fin de siècle, as epitomized by the architectural excesses of Hector Guimard, the flourishes of art nouveau fonts, and the overwrought interiors of Des Esseintes, the fictional hero of J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884).43 The Bauhaus style did not inherit the content of decadent aesthetics, but it positioned itself in the same confrontational relation to the mainstream. The Bauhaus also transformed the arts of architecture and interior decoration into a new genre, lumped together as components of “design,” whether domestic or industrial. It extended the notion that art could and should permeate every aspect of life, that style was personal as well as political, and that aesthetic principles demanded engagement and commitment. Still, the movement fell afoul of the authorities because of its perceived link to communist ideology, and the school closed under pressure from the Nazis in 1933. Its principles became so controversial that everything associated with it became politicized, to such a degree that to admire a flat roof on a house (a characteristic of Bauhaus architectural design), was to make a statement about where one stood on the political spectrum; there was no neutrality or separation of aesthetics and politics in such matters.44 Although the school drew disapproval from Nazi authorities, not all its personnel were so opposed to fascism and its ideology.45

The Interwar Period    91 The Bauhaus is just one example of the complexity of the relationship between decadence and political alignment with the left or the right in the interwar years. It would be all too easy to assume, for example, that if Nazis railed against degeneracy, then all decadents would line up against the Nazis, but the reality is far different. (A foreshadowing of this phenomenon may be seen in the responses to the Dreyfus affair in France at the turn of the century, where those aligned with decadent values ended up on opposite sides of the cause.) Decadence could lead some directly to fascism just as easily as it led others to resistance. Italy provides an excellent illustration of this tendency in the person of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–​1938).46 A dandy, aesthete, and decadent author in the waning days of the nineteenth century, D’Annunzio was transformed by his experiences in World War I and by the influence of futurism. In the interwar years, he traded on his reputation as a war hero and became increasingly attracted to the militaristic and authoritarian regime of Benito Mussolini. The glorification of war and violence found in the futurism of the Italian avant-​garde writer F. T. Marinetti had been called into question by the terrible conflicts of World War I, but the fascists doubled down on that glorification, carrying D’Annunzio along with them. A similar paradox can be seen at work in the reception of European exiles in the United States. One might think that being persecuted by Hitler would garner sympathy, if only on account of the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But in practice, the US immigration authorities created a new category of undesirable alien, that of the “premature” anti-​Nazi. While everyone eventually came to see the dangers of Hitler’s ambitions, having been too quick to see them at the outset was interpreted as a sign of dangerous communist sympathies.47 Thus, Klaus Mann could be openly gay in an increasingly homophobic America and yet serve in the US military with no apparent contradiction, but his sister Erika did not receive such a warm welcome because her political activities in Germany had branded her as someone who had opposed Hitler before it was “safe” to do so.

Conclusion In short, the story of decadence in the interwar years makes for a fascinating study in variations on a theme. Some cities associated with decadence continued to be influential (Paris, London), new “capitals” arose (Berlin, Los Angeles), and some cities saw their importance wane (St. Petersburg). Similarly, some genres endured (the novel) while others came into being (film). Along the way, modernism emerged and was well established as a movement in its own right by the advent of World War II, yet it remains impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when this new aesthetic movement ceased to be decadence. There was a constant recycling of decadent themes, tropes, and preoccupations across Europe and the United States. Indeed, this evolution of forms and themes is still in progress today (one need only think of all the echoes of the “fin de siècle” moment in

92   Melanie Hawthorne the 1990s), despite movements such as structuralism and postmodernism, and others that have displaced modernism in its turn. While the interwar period is often studied for its insights into the development of modernism, and not without good reason, a deeper examination reveals how closely the interwar years hew to the features already familiar from the decadent turn of the century. Despite the innovations and experimentation of modernism, the holdovers from decadence—​the continuities in form, style, and ideology—​are all too apparent, and as the examples discussed in this chapter testify, the interwar years of the twentieth century saw many notable additions to the decadent tradition.

Notes 1. See David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Kate Hext and Alex Murray, eds., Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 2. On morphine addiction, for example, see Ronald K. Siegel, Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-​Madeleine in the Time of Nazis (Port Townsend, WA: Process Media, 2015), especially the “Historical Notes,” 5–​16. 3. See Nicholas Hewitt, Montmartre: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 71–​73. 4. Hewitt, Montmartre, 71–​ 72; see also Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-​of-​the-​Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), especially c­ hapter 3 “Bohemian Gaiety and the New Show Business,” 53–​79. 5. On Pujol, see François Caradec and Jean Nohain, Le Pétomane, 1857–​1945, sa vie, son œuvre (London: Souvenir Press, 1967). 6. See Paul Du Noyer, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (London: Flame Tree Publishing, 2003), 420. 7. Hewitt, Montmartre, 73. 8. On the bal des quat’z’arts, see Rearick, Pleasures, 43–​46. 9. See Alexandre Dupouy, City of Pleasure: Paris between the Wars (London: Korero Press, 2019). 10. Florence Tamagne, A History of Homosexuality in Europe (New York: Algora Publishing, 2004). 11. See Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Sections on “The Ball at ‘Magic City’ ” and “Le Monocle” appear in the chapter titled “Sodom and Gomorrah.” 12. On Suzy Solidor, see Tirza True Latimer, Women Together/​Women Apart: Portraits of Lesbian Paris (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 105–​35. 13. Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 100. 14. See Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Norton, 1985).

The Interwar Period    93 15. Barnes was also inspired by decadence in her graphic art. Her stylized black and white drawings, such as the illustrations for The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), seem to owe much to the work of Aubrey Beardsley. 16. For more on Barnes’s decadence, see Len Gutkin, Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). 17. On Natalie Barney, see George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of Natalie Barney (New York: Putnam, 1976); and Suzanne Rodriguez, Wild Heart: A Life: Natalie Clifford Barney’s Journey from Victorian America to the Literary Salons of Paris (New York: Ecco Press, 2002). 18. For more on the “women of the Left Bank,” see Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–​1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). 19. On fin-​ de-​ siècle Paris cabaret culture, see Phillip Dennis Cate, ed. The Spirit of Montmartre: Cabaret, Humor, and the Avant-​Garde, 1875–​1905 (New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimerli Art Museum, 1996). 20. On Josephine Baker, see Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989). 21. For details of Barbette’s life and career, see Francis Steegmuller, “An Angel, a Flower, a Bird,” New Yorker, September 27, 1969, 130–​ 43; and Amy Lyford, “ ‘Le Numéro Barbette’: Photography and the Politics of Embodiment in Interwar Paris,” in Chadwick and Latimer, Modern Woman Revisited, 223–​35. 22. Aubrey Malone, The Defiant One: A Biography of Tony Curtis (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013), 80. 23. See Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001). For a more recent and revisionist assessment, see Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 24. See also Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 25. On Magnus Hirschfeld, see James D. Steakley, The Writings of Magnus Hirschfeld: A Bibliography (Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives, 1985); and Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017). 26. On the history of transsexuality, see, for example, Maxime Foerster, Histoire des transsexuels en France (Béziers, France: H&O, 2006). 27. See Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015). Marhoefer argues that the institute “championed the principle that science rather than religious morality ought to dictate how state and society responded to sexuality,” which led to greater tolerance of gay men and lesbians but allowed conservative forces to crack down on others whose behavior was threatening to traditional norms, such as “prostitutes who worked in public spaces” (4–​5). 28. See Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 29. On Christa Winsloe, see Claudia Schoppmann, Im Fluchtgepäck die Sprache: Deutschsprachige Schriftstellerinnen im Exil (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991). 30. See Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997), especially c­ hapter 9, “Money Matters, 1921–​1925,” 250–​79, for Salomé and 288, 348, 382–​83 for Nancy Reagan. 31. On Marlene Dietrich, see Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich: The Life (New York: Pegasus, 2017).

94   Melanie Hawthorne 32. Patrice Petro, “National Cinemas/​International Film Culture: The Blue Angel (1930) in Multiple Language Versions,” in Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era, ed. Noah Isenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 256. 33. On Greta Garbo, see Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1995); and Hugo Vickers, Loving Garbo: The Story of Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, and Mercedes de Acosta (New York: Random House, 1994). 34. See Wickes, The Amazon of Letters, 91–​93. 35. See, for example, Axel Madsen, The Sewing Circle: Hollywood’s Greatest Secret: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1995); and Diana McLellan, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 36. Keith Readdy provides a concise summation of Crowley’s Thelema in his introduction to One Truth and One Spirit: Aleister Crowley’s Spiritual Legacy (Lake Worth, FL: Ibis Press, 2018), 1–​14. 37. See Andrea Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 224. Also, Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 38. See Salka Viertel’s memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: New York Review of Books, 2019), 152–​53, 197–​98; and Donna Rifkind, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Other Press, 2020). 39. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). 40. See Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-​Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Abrams, 1991). 41. This continues to be debated. See, for example, Daniela Späth, “Conspiracies Swirl in 1939 Nazi Art Burning,” https://​www.dw.com/​en/​consp​irac​ies-​swirl-​in-​1939-​nazi-​art-​burn​ ing/​a-​17510​022 (accessed June 3, 2021). 42. Olaf Peters, Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany 1937 (Munich: Prestel, 2014). Founded during the Weimar era, the Student Union brought together all the individual student unions of German universities. It resolved to take action against what it called the “un-​German spirit” on April 8, 1933. On May 6, it attacked Hirschfeld’s institute, and four days later, burned 25,000 volumes in a public square in Berlin. See Hans-​Wolfgang Strätz, “Die studentische ‘Aktion wider den undeutschen Geist’ im Frühjahr 1933,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 16 (1968): 347–​53. 43. Art nouveau is an established and admired genre today, part of the national “patrimony” (as France refers to its heritage industry), but it was not well received at first. Although Guimard’s most integrated design for a residential building in Paris was realized on the basis of winning a competition to produce a beautiful facade, the resulting Castel Béranger in Paris (built 1895–​1898) was initially mocked for its eccentricity. It was referred to not as the Castel Béranger, but as the castel “dérangé” (deranged). Guimard was underrated in his lifetime and died in exile in New York in 1942. Much of his work was forgotten and later destroyed. The Castel Béranger was recognized as having historical significance only in 1972. 44. See Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 201. 45. See for example Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), especially

The Interwar Period    95 c­ hapter 5, “Red Bauhaus, Brown Bauhaus,” 171–​201, on the way the Nazis took over the school and appropriated the movement. 46. On D’Annunzio, see Lucy Hughes-​Hallett, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War (New York: Knopf, 2013). 47. See Weiss, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, 182, 249.

Further Reading Barron, Stephanie. Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-​Garde in Nazi Germany. New York: Abrams, 1991. Baue, Heike. The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017. Beachey, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Vintage, 2015. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–​1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Chadwick, Whitney, and Tirza True Latimer, eds. The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Dean, Carolyn J. The Frail Social Body: Pornography, Homosexuality, and Other Social Fantasies in Interwar France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Norton, 2001. Gordon, Mel. Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2008. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–​1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015. Mizejewski, Linda. Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Murat, Laure. Passage de l’Odéon: Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier et la vie littéraire à Paris dans l’entre-​deux-​guerres. Paris: Fayard, 2003. Otto, Elizabeth. Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Reynolds, Siân. France between the Wars: Gender and Politics. London: Routledge, 1996. Strachey, Nino. Rooms of Their Own: Eddy Sackville-​West, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-​West. London: Pitkin, 2018. Wetiz, Eric D. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Wiser, William. The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties. London: Thames and Hudson, 1983.

Chapter 5

C ontemp orary C ont e xts Decadence Today and Tomorrow Alice Condé

In January 2020, the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York posted the following message on Twitter, accompanied by a video of a subway train covered in graffiti art: The 70s & 80s, now in living color on a subway platform near you. A true sign of decay, one that we worked so hard to eradicate decades ago. The taggers had plenty of time to cover this entire train, because they know there are no more consequences. #backtothefuture.1

This statement establishes the “us and them” mentality (all too familiar to aficionados of decadence) that the forces of civil society use to justify the containment and “eradication” of decay in the midst of urban life. A disgruntled tweet from a group representing active and retired police officers might seem an odd way to begin this chapter, but the rhetoric of decay employed by @NYCPBA seems particularly relevant to any discussion of contemporary decadence.2 This is not to suggest that subway graffiti is decadent in itself, but if we substitute the word “decadence” for “decay” (they are, of course, partly analogous), the tweet-​statement serves as an example of the double meaning of the concept as a turn back to the “bad old days,” derided by critics and embraced by those who find beauty in what others conventionally call ugly. This combination of nostalgia and aesthetic preference that makes yesterday’s decay cause for appreciation and even emulation is one component of contemporary decadence, but there is more to today’s decadence than that retrospective maneuver suggests. Today’s creators of a self-​consciously decadent culture are less focused on decline than on advocating for social justice. As Matthew Potolsky points out, the nineteenth-​century decadent tradition in Britain, France, and Italy was not as amoral and apolitical as critics would often have it.3 Nineteenth-​century decadents engaged with political situations in different ways, be they fascist (Gabriele D’Annunzio), socialist (Oscar

Contemporary Contexts   97 Wilde), republican (young Charles Baudelaire and A. C. Swinburne), or anarchist (Octave Mirbeau), yet all are united by what Richard Dellamora defines as their radical “opposition to the organization of modern urban, industrial, and commercial society.”4 The queer potential of decadence is most significant for contemporary contexts; as Alex Murray reminds us, decadence is “fundamentally a response to the conditions of modernity, a means of articulating at moments of crisis and change the need to live, beautifully, queerly, excessively.”5 Contemporary decadent practitioners turn to similar queer expressions of the need to live beautifully and excessively as an antidote to the conservative ideology represented by the rise of right-​wing politics that signifies twenty-​first-​ century modernity.

Decadence Then and Now Decadence can be recognized in the glamour, opulence, and queerness of contemporary drag culture popularized by RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–​).6 This is an example of mainstream popular culture whose decadence might be compromised according to the tradition’s apparently elitist roots. Yet we should not overlook the fact that what is now canonized as high culture would have been popular entertainment in its time. Decadent literature exists on a spectrum ranging from the esoteric symbolist poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé to Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (July 1890), and his hugely popular society comedies staged in London’s West End. Even the decadent periodical The Yellow Book was designed for mass appeal while making its readers feel part of a distinguished “in-​crowd,” as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra observes: “The Yellow Book followed [John] Lane’s successful marketing strategy for The Bodley Head of enticing a broad middle-​class spectrum into believing they were an elite group of cultivated purchasers.”7 With decadence, it all comes down to taste in the end. For nineteenth-​century decadents, as Kirsten MacLeod states, “the cult of beauty was replaced by the cult of the beauty of ugliness and sin.”8 Twenty-​first-​century decadence can be identified in the avant-​garde identities of those who refuse to conform to conservative, heteronormative standards of taste. Like the fin-​de-​siècle dilettante Wilde, contemporary decadents champion their own outsider status while also occupying a marginalized position in terms of what the right wing might decry as “degenerate.” As Drag Race’s audience grows, decadence is to be found in the darker recesses of the countercultural drag scene represented by The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, the reality TV drag competition that deliberately positions itself on the margins of conventional taste. “As the rest of the world begins to accept us, they’re also trying to squeeze us into a little box and make us conform, and that just won’t do,” announced Swanthula Boulet after the success of the show’s first season.9 Dragula’s decadence is enacted by those who have been forced to the margins by the politics of heteronormativity, whiteness, patriarchy, and wealth. The concept of decadence is most potent when its double meaning is most clear and its

98   Alice Condé use in conservative political rhetoric is confronted by those performing the aesthetics of bodily excess in rebellion against those in power. As Dragula shows, today’s socially conscious decadents are artists, not agents, of social decline. Just as Holbrook Jackson described the decadent 1890s, with a regretful yet wistfully nostalgic tone, as “a movement of elderly youths who wrote themselves out in a slender volume or so of hot verse or ornate prose, and slipped away to die in taverns and gutters,”10 others might think back to the 1980s in New York—​Quentin Crisp’s East Village, Latinx and African American ballroom culture, Studio 54—​and fondly recall the pleasures to be found among the ruins. None could have predicted that just a few short months after @NYCPBA’s graffiti tweet, New Yorkers, along with the rest of the world, would face far greater challenges than minor subway vandalism in the form of the COVID-​19 pandemic, amplifying the dread feeling of “fin du globe” simmering in the West since the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. Police on both sides of the Atlantic would find themselves under public scrutiny after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, sparked a global wave of Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice and police brutality toward people of color. Nineteenth-​century decadence may have been in the vanguard of literature and art, but many of its practitioners regarded social progress and political modernity with skepticism. Arthur Symons described decadent literature as the diseased offspring of the excesses of the late nineteenth century: “[F]‌or its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization grown over-​luxurious, over-​inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or conduct.”11 While fin-​de-​siècle decadence lends itself to feelings of ennui, ends of exhausted and degenerate family lines, and Max Nordau’s “dusk of the nations,”12 decadence today might be considered as an act of resistance against sliding backward into a less progressive, closeted, and bigoted worldview. Twenty-​first-​century decadence confronts the negative outcomes of progress—​for example, the environmental impact of waste and pollution, the human cost of capitalism, and the rise of right-​wing politics—​or points out where progress is lacking, such as the injustices faced by those still classified as “Other,” whether due to race, nationality, gender identity, sexual orientation, economic status, disability, or a combination of these characteristics. Decadence today is the domain of the socially marginalized, even when they enjoy the relative privileges of the bourgeoisie; this is confirmed by recent scholarly efforts to (re)classify decadent work by marginalized or lesser-​known figures, particularly women and people of color, and to highlight expressions of non-​normativity in decadent works.13 At a moment when social, political, and environmental decline seemingly surrounds us in the West, the concept of decadence offers a way of understanding creative and aestheticized responses to contemporary anxieties, such as the decadent paradox of decay and beauty in the catalog for the 22nd Milan Triennial in 2019: “Our only chance at survival is to design our own beautiful extinction.”14 We find ourselves, now more than ever, in a transitional moment, facing an uncertain and perilous future.

Contemporary Contexts   99 Decadence is a multidisciplinary critical concept that is relevant to contemporary ideas about decline and decay. The discourse of decadence manifests itself most powerfully at moments of unease and crisis surrounding social and historical change and relates to extremes of taste; decadence exists in the realms of the distasteful and the overly extravagant. Contemporary decadence is not only limited to direct echoes of decadence past, but also to new manifestations of decadent concerns—​fascination with the body, natural processes, decay, and also with the self. A selection of recent examples might include the music and fiction of the Norwegian artist Jenny Hval, the work of Brooklyn-​based experimental musician serpentwithfeet (Josiah Wise), and the sculpture of the French artist Vincent Olinet. Hval’s 2016 concept album Blood Bitch intertwines themes of vampirism and menstruation, and her 2009 novel Perlebryggeriet (literally, “pearl brewery,” but translated into English as Paradise Rot, 2018), tells the story of a young woman who moves into a strange, “raw and porous”15 house in which mushrooms begin to sprout in damp corners, discarded fruit decomposes around her, and she becomes uncannily attuned to her surroundings. As she ruminates on the bodily functions of her housemate the boundaries between dreaming and waking become gradually blurred and her senses become strangely heightened. The musician serpentwithfeet, whose debut album soil was released by Tri Angle Records in 2016, describes his musical style as “pagan gospel”; his songs feature dark, heavily produced, opulent baroque sounds—​simultaneously powerful and fragile expressions of queerness. Pitchfork magazine called soil “gorgeously multivalent and strangely wrought,” a description evocative of decadence.16 The song “cherubim,” featuring lyrics such as “Boy every time I worship you /​my mouth is filled with honey,” could be regarded as a modern-​day male version of Swinburne’s “Anactoria,” in which Sappho venerates her beloved Anactoria and expresses a wish to “drink thy veins as wine, and eat /​Thy breasts like honey!”17 The music video for “cherubim” features a bejeweled and finely dressed Wise dancing through a decaying house with a male lover.18 Olinet’s 2017 Nature morte sculpture (Figure 5.1) sets a banquet of fruit, wine, and whiskey, accessorized with vases of flowers, in glassware made from ice, so the whole piece gradually decomposes as the ice melts and the fruit and flowers rot.19 Olinet’s fascination with beauty and decay—​“I like to make shiny, colorful art pieces that appeal to our dreams and urges but actually deal with decay or disillusion”20—​is reminiscent of the kind of decadence championed by nineteenth-​ century proponents of the “cult of the beauty of ugliness.” While these avant-​garde productions have a relatively niche audience, aspects of decadent subculture are now commercialized as popular entertainment. Decadence can be identified in the practice of self-​fashioning and performance of gendered identity, particularly through drag and dandyism. In February 2020 the Guardian published an article titled “The Rise of the Red-​Carpet Dandy,”21 celebrating the recent vogue for blurring gender boundaries spectacularly exemplified by Billy Porter’s Christian Siriano tuxedo gown for the 2019 Academy Awards ceremony. Likewise, the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain (March 4–​September 20, 2020) was accompanied by a video discussion between the art historian Stephen Calloway and drag performer Holly James

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Figure 5.1.  Vincent Olinet, Nature Morte (2017). Source: Lustwarande, Tilburg, Netherlands. Photo credit: Gert Jan van Rooij.

Johnston on “The Art of Being a Dandy.”22 And, most unexpectedly, in September 2020 the international fashion retailer H&M announced that their Autumn/​Winter “Refined Rebel” collection would be based on the “radically fearless style” of the gender-​fluid fin-​ de-​siècle decadent writer Vernon Lee.23 Whether through the simple act of purchasing a ruffled blouse in the style of Lee or immersing oneself deeper in the world of dandyism as a spectator or drag performer, the body is the site from which contemporary decadence is enacted. As these examples show, contemporary decadence might be broadly categorized in two ways: a turn back to the past to make sense of the present and the future, or a radical engagement with the contemporary moment.

Looking Back Nineteenth-​century decadent writers and artists frequently returned to classical models to express the decline of a civilization at the peak of its achievement. “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence” (I am the Empire at the end of decadence), wrote Paul Verlaine in “Langueur” (“Languor,” 1884). He was alluding to both the Roman Empire and France’s Second Empire while expressing the world-​weary, European fin-​de-​siècle ennui felt by a society in which “tout est bu, tout est mangé! Plus rien à dire!” (All is drunk, all is eaten!

Contemporary Contexts   101 Nothing more to say!).24 As Isobel Hurst explains, looking back to Roman decadence not only symbolized the sense of decline felt at the approach of the fin de siècle, but also offered the potential for artistic license and liberation from the constraints of Victorian sensibility: A sense of belatedness, a feeling that the greatness of the past is gone forever, connects the Silver Age and the late nineteenth century, inspiring a pessimistic world view but also a freedom from the artistic and linguistic restrictiveness of a self-​consciously great era.25

We find this attitude repeated in twenty-​first-​century reappropriations (literature, television, film, artwork, fashion) of nineteenth-​century decadent aesthetics. As Margaret D. Stetz observed a little over a decade ago: [I]‌n the post-​9/​11 transatlantic world of the arts, it is not [T. S.] Eliot and [Ezra] Pound who are supplying the fragments that we shore against our ruins; it is Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater. Aestheticism and decadence have proven themselves more than merely resilient movements. They are now resurgent ones, driving new literary cults such as the past-​futuristic genre of so-​called “gaslight romance,” and resplendent ones, bursting forth in the gleaming material surfaces of steampunk and in the dark frills of Gothic Lolita fashions.26

Once more a turn to the past enables freedom from and engagement with the present; in the years following the atrocities of 9/​11, the neo-​Victorian aesthetics of the past offer a sense of stability as well as escapism and nonconformism. The return to decadence past may be achieved in a more subtle way, as with the evocation of a decadent mood in the non-​narrative art-​house film Sea without Shore (2015), directed by Fernanda Lippi and Andre Semenza. The film, set at the fin de siècle, explores the after-​effects of a love affair between two women (Figure 5.2); the surviving lover experiences a kind of breakdown of the self, expressed through choreographed movement, voiceover fragments of decadent poetry, and bleak, desolate landscapes. Love and loss are articulated through the contemporary medium of digital film, incorporating the words of Renée Vivien (1877–​1909), the British decadent poet who wrote in French, and Swinburne into a fusion of visuals, music, and movement. The two women are dressed in quasi-​Victorian costume; after a screening at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in March 2015, Lippi described the lengths to which they went to create authentic aesthetics for the main character’s increasingly dirtied and fraying dress, eventually burying and exhuming it. In Sea without Shore, the “wild” natural process of decay is juxtaposed with the containment and precision of the choreography. One reviewer described it as a “strange, rather entrancing and unapologetically niche-​serving dance film.”27 The remote landscapes, decadent interiors, and filmography are reminiscent of the decadent solipsism of Des Esseintes, from J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against

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Figure 5.2.  Sea without Shore (2015), dir. Fernanda Lippi and Andre Semenza, Maverick Motion, Ltd., London. Available on YouTube, “Sea without Shore (2015) Official Movie Trailer HD,” https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​hwfg​kGMf​cnU.

Nature, 1884), and his strange sensory experiments. Visuals and sound are manipulated in order to provoke a bodily response in the viewer, a sense of reality out of time: Shots were slowed down, imperceptibly at times, giving the edit a sense of breathing, memory, and suspension. In post-​production, the poetry and the voices were used as musical, rhythmical punctuation, integrated into the multi-​layered soundtrack.28

Decadence, after all, is a tradition obsessed with the senses, and Catherine Maxwell describes the film as “a hypnotic dance of embodied emotion” that speaks “powerfully to the senses of sight, hearing, touch.”29 Decadent work does not allow the viewer to be passive. It evokes a sensory, bodily response, and often forces us to consider our own identity or ideology. Notably, Stetz claims in her survey of the afterlives of decadence that the “most interesting” examples are to be found in the “number of works . . . using the philosophical lens of aestheticism and decadence to examine the challenging issues of contemporary life.”30 Stetz cites examples of ways in which nineteenth-​century decadent aesthetics are brought into contemporary discussions of race, class, and gender, as in Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, in which we can identify traces of Wildean and Paterian notions of beauty and power brought face to face with contemporary concerns about race. As Stetz explains, “the ghosts of aesthetic debate are everywhere in Smith’s twenty-​ first-​century urban landscapes.”31 However, contemporary decadence is not simply a matter of raising the specters of Wilde and his ilk, but has much to do with the way in which individuals respond to their own historical moments. A particularly fertile way of considering decadence in a contemporary context is in terms of creative and personal responses to social decadence that engage directly with the concept of decline or can be regarded as decadent because of their aesthetics, particularly with respect to

Contemporary Contexts   103 the paradox of decay and beauty, as well as the use of excess to push the limits of taste to their extremes.

The Decadent Present The first episode of 2019’s eight-​part FX drama Fosse/​Verdon, which dramatizes the personal relationship and professional collaboration between Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams), sees Fosse clashing with producer Cy Feuer (Paul Reiser) over his gritty, realist directorial vision for the 1972 film Cabaret. Verdon placates Feuer, explaining that the resulting film will appeal to audiences who are disillusioned with fantasy and escapism in the age of the Vietnam War: Kids in the jungle are being zipped into body bags on the evening news. Richard Nixon is our president, God help us. People aren’t going to the movies to escape any more. They’re going to find something true.32

While this is fictionalized dialogue, the real-​life popularity of Cabaret, which made $42.8 million (the equivalent of $273.4 million today) at the box office and won eight Oscars, confirms that Fosse managed to appeal to an audience who went looking for “reality” in a high-​budget, artificially staged musical production set forty years earlier in decadent Weimar Berlin. In our present age we are confronted by daily COVID-​19 death statistics and videos of police brutality shared globally on social media. Another controversial Republican president has just left the White House, and audiences are turning to reality TV for comfort. There is escapism to be found in dating reality shows such as Love Island (2015–​), aspirational wealth in “real-​life” celebrity documentaries such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians (2007–​2021), and celebration of creativity in RuPaul’s Drag Race, even though these are paradoxically artificial versions of “reality,” with makeup and cosmetic surgery featuring prominently in all three shows. Drag Race demonstrates that we are finding relief from the present in the decadence of the past. This globally popular drag competition, available on VH1 in the United States and Netflix in the United Kingdom, has brought the underground 1980s ballroom culture documented in Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) to the masses. As with Cabaret, the superficially opulent lifestyle of the marginalized is embraced as an antidote to social and political strife. Drag Race has become increasingly politically engaged, and the tenth season, which aired from March–​June 2018, was explicitly positioned against Trump, including references throughout the season to the political situation, and backup dancers wearing pink “pussy hats” in the grand finale.33 In the penultimate episode, the four finalists performed RuPaul’s song “American,” proclaiming patriotism as well as demanding recognition as equal citizens. With drag now under the global spotlight, Paris Is Burning returned to cinema screens in 2019, and in 2020 Criterion released a restored Blu-​ray version, including previously unseen footage. In an

104   Alice Condé essay written to accompany the re-​release, Michelle Parkerson comments on the significance of the documentary in the twenty-​first century: In this era of fake news, hate speech, anti-​trans legislation, the resurgence of white-​ supremacist ideology, immigration blockades, and mass violence to suppress social change and human-​rights advancements, Paris Is Burning still provides a vision of vibrant resistance—​a fierce proclamation that queer and trans lives matter, now as they did then.34

Livingston similarly describes the self-​invention of members of the ballroom community as a powerful political standpoint against elitism and discrimination: “It questioned what America is and proved the political power of creating identity.”35 Self-​fashioning at the balls takes place in the form of mimicking the wealth of the all-​American WASP (White Anglo-​Saxon Protestant), by walking, for example, in the “Executive Realness” category, in which the prize is awarded to the contestant who could most successfully “pass” for an executive in the real world, or by performing as an opulent fashion model in clothes that have been handmade or stolen by participants who lack the means to purchase the “real thing.” A 50-​minute video lecture titled “Opulence,” released on October 12, 2019, by the American political commentator ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn), proposes that aesthetic sensibility begins with absolute pleasure, and that in contemporary US culture the display of opulence represents success, a Jay Gatsby-​style performance of the American Dream. When performed in ballroom culture, as ContraPoints notes, “opulence is not abundance. Opulence is the aesthetic of abundance. . . . For the marginalized and impoverished, opulence is a simulacrum of the wealth and power they’ve been denied.”36 In this case the simulacrum, or artifice, makes the act a decadent one.

Opulence and Excess The critical concept of decadence should not be confused with the fascination with opulence in contemporary capitalist culture, and in particular with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The taste for opulence corresponds with social class, but ContraPoints observes that the middle and upper classes often cultivate an aesthetic preference for the modest or bland in order not to draw attention to their wealth or risk provoking envy, whereas those from impoverished backgrounds are more likely to make grandiose displays of their wealth, as exemplified by the trope of flaunting money and valuable possessions in hip-​hop music videos. According to ContraPoints, Trump’s appeal among the voting public is partly attributable to the fact that he is a rich person who behaves in a way that someone who had grown up in poverty might if they suddenly became rich, his ostentatiously gilded home representing a show of wealth that a more “refined” person born into a life of fortune and privilege, as Trump actually was, would

Contemporary Contexts   105 ordinarily regard as being in poor taste. As Fran Lebowitz remarked in Vanity Fair in 2016, Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person.”37 Those with a taste for decadence might decry his aesthetics as crass or vulgar. He is a far cry from the cultivated dandy figure Baudelaire described in 1863: “[T]‌he dandy does not aspire to money as to something essential; this crude passion he leaves to vulgar mortals; he would be perfectly content with a limitless credit at the bank.”38 Opulent decadent aesthetics may necessitate the wealth and privilege of, say, the aristocratic Montesquiou-​Fézensac line, but decadence is not about making a show of wealth for wealth’s sake. Money provides the means for exploring curiosities, delighting in the weird, indulging perverse desires, and escaping into hedonism. Decadence concerns the moods, whims, and tastes of the individual, regardless of, or in deliberate opposition to, the aesthetic sensibilities of the rest of society. The prime example is, of course, Huysmans’s Des Esseintes, a character based on Robert de Montesquiou, alone in his sensorium, satisfying his own refined and peculiar tastes for the strange and artificial. The decadent lifestyle is not necessarily aspirational—​we may not want to be Des Esseintes, but we are glad Huysmans invented this character of limitless means through whom we can also delight in our own senses and celebrate our decline. He is the embodiment of decadent excess in terms of style and identity. Until recently, decadence has been an overwhelmingly white, Euro-​centric, male tradition. By contrast, in Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (2014), Julia Skelly uses the notions of excess and pleasure to read feminist textile art by women, and significantly by women of color, as decadent. While acknowledging the problematic positioning of women in the decadent tradition, Skelly reveals how her concept of “radical decadence” in feminist artworks, including subjects such as “cupcakes, cocaine, velvet, socks, dirty linens, pornography, and hangovers,” understands excessiveness as a strategy employed to challenge and alter the audience’s perception of women.39 Excess is not always decadent, but Skelly distinguishes decadent excess as a performative “sexed and gendered (and raced) act of interference” achieved through the aesthetics of excess and the transgressing of social boundaries.40 As Sarah-​Jean Zubair observes, “translating into varying types of physically-​infused aesthetic expressions, [the] decadent limit-​experience is a subversive mode that deconstructs and challenges both audience sensibilities and popular standards of taste.”41 In contemporary contexts, decadent interference is enacted on popular taste via the body and its clothing.

Distasteful Drag The mainstreaming of drag performance by RuPaul’s Drag Race has resulted in renewed interest in the ball scene, revived in the American reality-​TV voguing competition Legendary, which premiered on HBO Max in 2020 and features LGBTQ +​members of the New York ballroom “Houses” competing in different ball categories. The ballroom

106   Alice Condé scene is also dramatized in FX’s drama series Pose, which debuted to critical acclaim in 2018. Pose pointedly juxtaposes the lives of gay and transgender Latinx and African American people during the AIDS crisis with the new Trump Tower yuppies who use cocaine, hire sex workers, and enjoy the empty hedonism of obscene wealth. This contrast reminds us that true decadence is to be found outside the privileged and prejudiced milieu. As the marginal becomes mainstream, we need to turn once again to subculture to encounter a truly decadent taste for the distasteful.42 As Drag Race’s star continues to rise, it increasingly comes to represent the “American Dream” model of opulence. The show still champions the marginalized by airing the contestants’ stories of personal hardships faced on account of their sexuality, race, gender identity, or of the fact they are drag performers. Season Thirteen featured moments of engagement with social and political concerns, such as Symone’s protest against police brutality in a runway outfit bearing the slogan “Say Their Names,” embellished with bejeweled bullet holes, and Gottmik’s Keith Haring-​inspired “Trans Rights are Human Rights” finale look.43 At the socially distanced season finale, filmed in an empty Ace Hotel Theater in Los Angeles, RuPaul marked 40 years since the beginning of the HIV/​AIDS crisis, and drew an emotional parallel with the lives lost during the COVID-​19 pandemic while promoting the values of community and friendship: “Today, as we emerge from yet another pandemic, we are reminded once again what really matters: love, kindness, and friends.”44 On the whole, however, appearing on Drag Race is a signifier of success and regarded as an opportunity to achieve wealth and celebrity. Contestants invest thousands of dollars in custom-​made designer outfits. Unlike earlier seasons in which the majority of the costumes were handmade or inexpensively produced, wealth and opulence are not just performed through the “aesthetics of abundance” but through abundance itself. The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, created and hosted by the American alternative nightlife pioneers the Boulet Brothers (Figure 5.3), known by the individual monikers Swanthula and Dracmorda, originated as a YouTube series in 2016; the existing three seasons and Halloween Special were then screened on Netflix in the United States and Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom. Using the format of the reality TV drag competition popularized by Drag Race, Dragula unites drag artists under the decadent credo of “drag, filth, horror, glamour” as they compete for the title of the “World’s Next Drag Supermonster.” The Boulet Brothers celebrate underground, low-​budget drag that is decadent because of its monstrosity. Whereas only men and a handful of transgender women have been allowed to compete on Drag Race, Dragula gives a platform to drag performers regardless of sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation. While each season’s contestants have a tendency to engage in in-​fighting about whether their peers are “monstrous” enough—​the insult “pageant queen” being leveled at those considered too mainstream for the show—​the overall message of the program is one of inclusivity and community. Dragula’s contestants showcase decadent performances that confront conventional standards of taste while simultaneously promoting ideals of compassion and self-​acceptance among marginalized figures in an increasingly conservative political climate.

Contemporary Contexts   107

Figure 5.3.  Boulet Brothers, Creatures of the Night (promo poster, 2020). Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

As Swanthula Boulet declares in the introduction to Season Two, “we pride ourselves on celebrating the strange, and the wild, and the sometimes dangerous side of queer culture.”45 The adorned bodies of Dragula’s performers are the sites from which they enact resistance to the mainstream and embrace their position on the margins. Season One’s winner, Vander Von Odd, has spoken of the “awful experience of growing up queer in a small, conservative town”; the contestants’ drag is a direct reaction to their feeling of being outcast.46 As Vander explains to the top four contestants before the Season Two finale, the title of drag “Supermonster” is a powerful reclamation of pejorative labels attached to them by conservative society: I think for me a Supermonster is very much someone who has personally witnessed . . . the nasty of the world and the evils of the world, it’s the bullied kids, it’s the kids who are left out, and I think that’s why gay people or queer people as a community tend to have such a connection to horror films, or to the villains [who are] the ostracized, the weird, the ones who weren’t understood, but they took all the things that made them different, and turned them into their power. . . . [A]‌nd that’s why so many people who haven’t experienced that don’t get it, they don’t get why we love this darkness.47

108   Alice Condé Vander’s message is not one of true villainy but rather about cultivating self-​acceptance and love for similarly marginalized others by performing the role of the monstrous and weird in order to reclaim power from those who use “monster” as a derogatory term, and in this sense it is similar to the term decadent, which gains its power from its paradoxical positive and negative connotations. Dragula’s contestants take part in challenges that push the limits of taste, but also contain a message about self-​acceptance and the acceptance of others. Through dressing up as flamboyant and outrageous versions of typical monsters—​vampires, aliens, zombies, ghouls—​or creating opulent costumes from materials that others would ordinarily discard, as in Season Three’s “Trash Queen Couture” challenge, the contestants use their bodies as the sites from which to enact resistance to social norms via visually spectacular, grotesque, and confrontational performances.48 Like the controversially self-​ feminized nineteenth-​century dandy figure, today’s subversive drag performers carry an important message. As Vander states, “It’s a message of autonomy, of empowerment, of self, and of shamelessness.”49

Decadent Drag in the Age of COVID-​19 We might question whether it is acceptable to revel in morbidity at a time when so many people were dying worldwide during the COVID-​19 pandemic. Nowadays, celebrating death and disease in the same way as the classic ennui-​ridden, syphilitic decadent of the Belle Époque might be seen as distasteful. However, it is possible to employ dark, grotesque, challenging imagery to express a personal response to the social and political climate. Dragula: Resurrection is a two-​hour Halloween Special spin-​ off that premiered on the American horror streaming service Shudder on October 20, 2020. Filmed during the pandemic, it follows selected contestants from each of the previous three seasons of Dragula, who have been “resurrected” to compete in a “grand Halloween showcase,” creating looks and performances for three different categories based on a “legacy challenge” theme from each season: witch, ghost, and vampire. Due to social distancing restrictions, each performer was visited and filmed in their own home and local surroundings instead of competing together in the same studio; in the resulting show interviews with the contestants are interspersed with establishing shots of COVID-​stricken American cities, deserted roads, empty towns, and shops selling face masks. The Boulet Brothers’ instructions for Resurrection contestants were as follows: “We’re looking for a monster with a fresh perspective. Someone who has something to say, someone who’s not afraid to show us who they are.”50 Self-​fashioning through drag or other forms of glamorous or camp costume provides a means for self-​acceptance and for negotiating or overcoming social boundaries.51 In the context of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, drag performance requires sincerity and authenticity,

Contemporary Contexts   109 even when monstrous and distasteful. It is a process of self-​fashioning through artificial means akin to the “realness” documented in Paris Is Burning. However, as Owen G. Parry reminds us, the reality imitated by African American and Latinx ballroom performers of the 1980s and 1990s is the “white, middle-​class, heterosexual reality” from which they are excluded.52 Drag Race has played no small part in encouraging a cultural shift away from white heterosexuality as the idealized norm; Season Thirteen’s winner Symone is a self-​proclaimed champion of “Black Excellence” whose runway looks typically include exaggerated signifiers of Blackness in celebration of the kinds of aesthetic excess Jillian Hernandez maintains are “targeted for regulation when embodied by women and girls of color because they signify forms of class, gender, sexual, and racial difference that agitate normative discourses of respectability.”53 In terms of the Dragula: Resurrection contestants, this challenge to heteronormativity is achieved not by performing signifiers of the real but by turning to fantasy and horror in a performance of “supermonstrosity” that reaffirms one’s true identity. This maneuver is perhaps best exemplified by the output of Priscilla Chambers, who reveals her transgender identity on the show and uses her platform to advocate for trans rights. Preparing a taxidermy alligator headpiece for her swamp witch costume, she states, “I think it’s important to find beauty in death,” and her ghost look is a tribute to murdered black transgender sex workers, because “black lives matter, but that also includes trans black lives, so this whole look is gonna be dedicated to all of my fallen trans sisters of color.”54 Priscilla’s final ghostly performance included the unfurling of a trans pride flag emblazoned with the raised-​fist emblem of the Black Lives Matter movement. Other competitors are similarly candid in their interviews; for example, Frankie Doom discusses her struggles to be accepted by her family, finding strength and power through monster drag, and Victoria Black raises awareness of neurodiversity by talking about her Asperger’s diagnosis. The Boulet Brothers’ dictum of “being oneself ” is particularly significant for the contestants of color, who each speak of the challenges of fitting into an alternative culture that is often exclusionary. Dahli discusses her struggles as a mixed-​race person who has faced racism from the white side of her own family: It’s very common that people of color that are into the alternative scene aren’t looked at the same way because, as alternative people, as like, you know, goth, punk, we’ve always kind of associated beauty with being pale or light-​skinned. . . . I mean, that’s not gonna be possible for a dark-​skinned person, so they’re automatically like kind of ostracized in most of these alternative groups ’cause they’re like, “Oh, you can’t be black and goth, that’s a white person thing.” And it ain’t though.55

Similarly, African American contestant Kendra Onixxx speaks of her resilience as a drag performer doubly marginalized by her position in the alternative culture of monster drag: “[Y]‌ou have to have an even thicker skin being a black drag queen wanting to do this genre of drag.”56 Both Kendra and eventual winner Saint discuss their desire to be

110   Alice Condé role models for other alternative drag queens of color. Saint attributes her motivation in part to the trials of 2020: [I]‌t’s been a particularly trying year for black people everywhere. Seeing people who look like me be shot and killed with no justice done has been really hard to watch. . . . Just [by] being on Dragula and showing queens of color that you don’t have to do drag in any kind of way, I always wanna . . . be the light for people.57

By fearlessly being themselves through the artificial means of drag performance, the queens of Dragula provide light in dark times, even when it may take the form of a Covidian “post-​apocalyptic viral vampire” in a plague mask and hazmat suit, as performed by Loris in the final Resurrection challenge.58

Conclusion: The Decadent Future? We are, at present, in a transitional period between disease and health, conservatism and liberalism. As Livingston said on the re-​release of Paris Is Burning: “It proved to people who fund films that general audiences want to see images of a subculture that, when I started out, the powers that be were wildly resistant to.”59 Now that this subculture has become mainstream—​Parry, for instance, points out that the term “realness” (in the sense of ballroom and drag vernacular) has passed into common parlance60—​ we identify decadence in even more niche subcultures that similarly represent decadent paradoxes of beauty and decay, artifice and reality. Radical, queer art such as that performed by Dragula’s contestants is decadent because finding beauty in the grotesque and championing queer identity reaffirms what conservatives find distasteful. As Dragula reaches a wider global audience via popular streaming platforms, the Boulet Brothers fiercely resist assimilation into the mainstream. As Dragula becomes queerer and more radical in reaction to its growing success, it increasingly resembles the nineteenth-​century model of aestheticized self-​marginalization. The potency of decadence comes from its double meaning, though it only works when those with refined taste recognize it as something that may exhort cries of “degenerate” from conservative thinkers but in fact playfully celebrates the outsider in a socially conscious way. Decadence as we know it today will be a profoundly different concept in a just and equal society.61 Contemporary decadence, at least in part, involves a paradoxical aestheticization of social progressiveness anguished over its lack of fulfillment. Hence the traditional agonism of the classic avant-​garde finds its belated cognate in the stubborn refusal of the reactionary present to conform to the contemporary decadent’s ambivalent desire for social inclusiveness, for some recognition of the validity and value of the outcast, the marginal, the queer, and the nonconforming members of late modern society—​but only so long as such recognition does not involve acceptance by that same society from which today’s decadents remove themselves. Decadence by definition is without futurity, and for that reason it has more contemporary relevance than ever.

Contemporary Contexts   111

Notes 1. The Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York (@NYCPBA), January 21, 2020, https://​twit​ter.com/​NYC​PBA/​sta​tus/​1219​4559​1944​1969​152. 2. For discussions of the New York City decadence in the 1970s and 1980s, see Alice Condé, “Decadence and Popular Culture,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 379–​99; and William Rees, “ ‘Le Freak, c’est Chic’: Decadence and Disco,” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 3, no. 2 (2020): 126–​42. 3. Matthew Potolsky, “Decadence and Politics,” in Decadence: A Literary History, ed. Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 152–​66. 4. Richard Dellamora, “Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde,” New Literary History 34, no. 4 (2004): 529, quoted by Potolsky, 153. 5. Alex Murray, “Introduction: Decadent Histories,” in Decadence: A Literary History, 15. 6. Condé, “Decadence and Popular Culture,” 383. 7. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “The Yellow Book (1894–​1897): An Overview,” in The Yellow Nineties Online, ed. Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ryerson University, 2012, http://​1890s.ca/​HTML.aspx?s=​YB_​O​verv​iew.html. 8. Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2006), 28. 9. Dragula, Season 2, Episode 1. 10. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1939), 63. 11. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 252. 12. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 1. 13. For contemporary approaches to decadence, gender, and sexuality, see, for example, Julia Skelly, Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); for decadence from a postcolonial perspective, see Robert Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 14. 22nd Milan Triennial, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, 2019, quoted in Kimberly Bradley, “The End Is Nigh. Can Design Save Us,” New York Times, March 20, 2019, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2019/​03/​20/​arts/​des​ign/​milan-​trienn​ial-​rest​orat​ive-​des​ ign.html. 15. Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot: A Novel, trans. Marjam Idriss (London: Verso, 2018), 33. 16. Kevin Lozano, review of serpentwithfeet, blisters, Pitchfork, September 2, 2016, https://​ pitchf​ork.com/​revi​ews/​alb​ums/​22333-​blist​ers/​ (serpentwithfeet’s name, albums, and songs are deliberately stylized in lower-​case lettering). 17. A. C. Swinburne, “Anactoria,” in Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, ed. Kenneth Haynes (London: Penguin, 2000), 50. 18. serpentwithfeet, “cherubim,” directed by Allie Avital, YouTube, accessed April 19, 2021, https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​OYt-​eYCD​mps. 19. A time-​lapse video of the melting process of another version of this concept, Voyage à Nantes (2020), can be seen on Olinet’s Instagram page, accessed April 16, 2021, https://​ www.instag​ram.com/​p/​CFmU​iwcq​grK/​?utm​_​sou​rce=​ig_​we​b_​co​py_​l​ink. This piece

112   Alice Condé is reminiscent of Sam Taylor Wood’s video artwork Still Life (2001), a time-​lapse of a decaying bowl of fruit. 20. Vincent Olinet biography on Artspace website, accessed April 16, 2021, https://​www.artsp​ ace.com/​art​ist/​vinc​ent-​oli​net. 21. Priya Elan, “The Rise of the Red-​Carpet Dandy,” Guardian, February 2, 2020. https://​www. theg​uard​ian.com/​glo​bal/​2020/​feb/​02/​the-​rise-​of-​the-​red-​car​pet-​dand​ies-​male-​stars-​ are-​dump​ing-​the-​tux. 22. Stephen Calloway and Holly James Johnston, “The Art of Being a Dandy,” accessed April 29, 2021, https://​www.tate.org.uk/​art/​arti​sts/​aub​rey-​beards​ley-​7 16/​art-​being-​dandy. 23. H&M’s “Refined Rebel” collection, accessed April 29, 2021, https://​about.hm.com/​news/​ gene​ral-​news-​2020/​h-​m-​stu​dio-​aw20-​bri​ngs-​toget​her-​bold-​opule​nce-​and-​reb​elli​ous-​ cha.html. 24. Paul Verlaine, “Langueur” (1884), in Paul Verlaine: Selected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130. My translation. 25. Isobel Hurst, “Nineteenth-​Century Literary and Artistic Responses to Roman Decadence,” in Desmarais and Weir, Decadence and Literature, 62. 26. Margaret D. Stetz, “The Afterlives of Aestheticism and Decadence in the Twenty-​First Century,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 1 (2010): 306–​7. 27. Leslie Felperin, “Sea without Shore Review—​Dancing to the Heart of Grief,” Guardian, March 5, 2015, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​film/​2015/​mar/​05/​sea-​with​out-​shore-​ dance-​film-​rev​iew. 28. “Dancing on Ice: An Interview with André Semenza and Fernanda Lippi,” ICA Bulletin, March 4, 2015, https://​arch​ive.ica.art/​bulle​tin/​danc​ing-​ice-​interv​iew-​andr-​seme​nza-​and-​ ferna​nda-​lippi. 29. Catherine Maxwell, review of Sea without Shore, accessed April 15, 2021, https://​arch​ive. ica.art/​whats-​on/​sea-​with​out-​shore-​qa. 30. Stetz, “Afterlives of aestheticism,” 306–​7. 31. Stetz, “Afterlives of aestheticism,” 307. 32. Fosse/​Verdon, Episode 1, “Life Is a Cabaret,” first aired in the US on FX, April 9, 2019. 33. The “pussy hat” became a symbol of women’s political resistance in reference to Trump’s claim that his fame allowed him to “grab [women] by the pussy.” See “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments about Women,” New York Times, October 8, 2016, https://​www. nyti​mes.com/​2016/​10/​08/​us/​don​ald-​trump-​tape-​tra​nscr​ipt.html. 34. Michelle Parkerson, “Paris Is Burning: The Fire This Time,” Criterion, February 25, 2020, https://​www.criter​ion.com/​curr​ent/​posts/​6832-​paris-​is-​burn​ing-​the-​fire-​this-​time. 35. Jennie Livingston quoted by Cassidy George, “The Paris Is Burning Director on Its Message: ‘Be Yourself,’ ” New York Times, June 12, 2019, https://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2019/​ 06/​12/​mov​ies/​paris-​is-​burn​ing-​jen​nie-​liv​ings​ton.html?searc​hRes​ultP​osit​ion=​1. 36. ContraPoints, “Opulence,” YouTube, October 12, 2019, accessed April 29, 2021, https://​ www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​jD-​PbF3y​wGo. 37. Emily Jane Fox, “Let Fran Lebowitz soothe all your election-​related worries,” Vanity Fair, October 20, 2016, https://​www.van​ityf​air.com/​news/​2016/​10/​fran-​lebow​itz-​trump-​clin​ton-​ elect​ion. 38. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 2006), 27. 39. Skelly, Radical Decadence, 1. 40. Skelly, Radical Decadence, 16. Emphasis in original.

Contemporary Contexts   113 41. Sarah-​Jean Zubair, “Editor’s Foreword: ‘Decadence,’ ” Moveable Type 11 (2019): 3, https://​ www.ucl.ac.uk/​movea​ble-​type/​2018-​2019-​decade​nce-​vol​ume-​xi. 42. For an exploration of the “taste for the distasteful,” see David Weir, “Afterword: Decadent Taste,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 219–​28. 43. “Say their names” is a phrase used to commemorate the victims of racial inequality. Gottmik is the first trans male contestant to feature on Drag Race. 44. RuPaul’s Drag Race, Season 13, Episode 16, “Grand Finale,” first aired in the US on VH1, April 23, 2021. 45. The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, Season 2, Episode 1, accessed April 29, 2021, https://​www. ama​zon.co.uk/​dp/​B07​67RR​CFY/​ref=​dvm_​uk_​sl_​tit_​zzz_​v1ia​mupU​c_​c4​1984​9972​602. 46. Vander Von Odd interviewed by Daniel Megarry, Gay Times, accessed April 29, 2021, https://​www.gayti​mes.co.uk/​origin​als/​drag​ula-​champ​ion-​van​der-​von-​odd-​belie​ves-​the​ res-​power-​in-​stick​ing-​out/​. 47. The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, Season 2, Episode 8, accessed April 29, 2021, https://​www. ama​zon.co.uk/​gp/​video/​det​ail/​B07​7BQC​HF3/​ref=​atv_​dp_​s​easo​n_​se​lect​_​s2. 48. For further details on the relationship between decadence, trash, and ruination in contemporary performance, see, for example, Adam Alston, “Decadence and Ruination in Contemporary Performance,” accessed April 29, 2021, https://​bads.gold.ac.uk/​bads-​jeu​ dis-​2019. 49. Vander Von Odd interviewed by Daniel Megarry. 50. Dragula: Resurrection, first aired on Shudder, October 20, 2020. 51. Condé, “Decadence and Popular Culture,” 394. 52. Owen G. Parry, “Fictional Realness: Towards a Colloquial Performance Practice,” Performance Research 20, no. 5 (2015): 109. 53. Jillian Hernandez, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 18. 54. Dragula: Resurrection. 55. Dragula: Resurrection. 56. Dragula: Resurrection. 57. Dragula: Resurrection. 58. Dragula: Resurrection. 59. Livingston, “Paris Is Burning Director.” 60. Parry, “Fictional Realness,” 108. 61. Condé, “Decadence and Popular Culture,” 397.

Further Reading Condé, Alice. “Decadence and Popular Culture.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 379–​99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Constable, Liz, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mahoney, Kristin. Literature and the Politics of Post-​ Victorian Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Parry, Owen G. “Fictional Realness: Towards a Colloquial Performance Practice.” Performance Research 20, no. 5 (2015): 108–​15.

114   Alice Condé Potolsky, Matthew. “Decadence and Politics.” In Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray, 152–​66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Skelly, Julia. Radical Decadence: Excess in Contemporary Feminist Textiles and Craft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Stetz, Margaret D. “The Afterlives of Aestheticism and Decadence in the Twenty-​First Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38, no. 1 (2010): 306–​7. Weir, David. “Afterword: Decadent Taste.” In Decadence and the Senses, edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, 219–​28. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Weir, David. Decadence: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

PA RT I I

P L AC E S

Chapter 6

Franc e The Rise of Modern Decadence Bénédicte Coste

In 1950 the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch devoted an article to the notion of decadence in the distinguished Revue de métaphysique et de morale, defining it in historical terms as “both a beginning and an ending, a limit between two sides,”1 and characterizing its temporality as the “decay of the instant into an interval.”2 The idea of decadence was the result of a “realization of the historical tradition,” and therefore “itself a decadent consciousness.”3 Jankélévitch was the heir to the distinguished philosopher Montesquieu, whose Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734) argued that the empire perished because of its own excessive power. Montesquieu implicitly compared the decline of the Roman Empire to that of eighteenth-​century France, and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–​1789) also conceived of decadence in politico-​historical terms. One of the first modern philosophers to consider decadence in its transnational and transhistorical character, Jankélévitch paid attention to the decadent literary style from the Lower Roman Empire to more recent eras and noticed the existence of nineteenth-​ century literary schools that “aimed at being ‘decadent.’ ”4 What follows is devoted to perhaps one of the more famous of those schools embedded within larger debates about decadence and decline in nineteenth-​century France.

Political Decline and Literary Ascent From the French Revolution onward, both the idea and the term décadence functioned as responses to a series of political and literary crises. Fin-​de-​siècle French decadence is one expression of the partial autonomy from political power in literature and the arts, both of which established their own frames of reference and legitimation. Décadence

118   Bénédicte Coste appears both as a cultural formation embedded within the modern regime of historicity and as a literary phenomenon mediated by a specific print culture. It is the generic term for the poetic décadisme or décadentisme as well as the term that came to signify the larger legacy of decadence within fin-​de-​siècle culture. As an appellation it partly competes with “fin de siècle”; as the name of a literary movement of the early 1880s stricto sensu, decadence divided into several trends, symbolism among them. As a literary phenomenon that cannot, however, be totally envisaged as distinct from politics and from literary politics as they existed in the later nineteenth century, decadence implies strategies of naming, even branding, and involves controversies and methods of legitimation that historians and literature scholars are still discussing.5 The product of poetic debates within subversive networks of young writers, heated polemics, numerous studies then and now, and competing historiographies, decadence in France is the outcome of a history that cuts across the nineteenth century, mixing different genres, artworks, and media. As the historian Michel Winock contends, decadence can be approached as a “construction of the mimetic, collective imaginary, a Stimmung [mood], a mindset, an atmosphere, a moral climate called ‘fin de siècle,’ ” appearing officially, he argues, in 1885.6 The defeat of France by Prussia in 1871 cast a pessimistic light on the nation’s future and provided the idea of decadence with a new lease on life.7 From the 1870s onward, discussions about French decline became steeped in political as well as emerging social-​scientific and scientific discourses. Debates about the decaying state of the nation appeared in periodicals, in numerous studies published by journalists, writers, and politicians, as well as in literary contributions by poets and prose writers whom we now recognize as canonical. The latter took a singular stance as regards the much-​ discussed decline of the French nation: instead of lamenting, exhorting, or blaming various constituencies, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and J.-K. Huysmans, to name but the most famous, asserted their indifference to the national condition and their absolute jouissance in the idea of decadence—​of a poetic and pleasurable experience that heralded modernity—​in artfully crafted writings. In the early 1880s, the idea of decadence, intertwined with political debates about France’s condition, was not a fully fledged movement, according to Louis Marquèze-​Pouey, but rather the “starting-​point of modern poetry.”8 Appearing when Romanticism, Parnassianism, and naturalism were on the wane, decadent writings answered a need for poetic renovation. If décadent had been used in political and historical contexts to describe decline in reference to Rome and Byzantium, the 1880s witnessed an enlargement of the term to include literature and the arts opposed to outworn academicism. As a derogatory label, décadence saw its negative connotations turned into literary and poetic virtues. Dreaded political decline became valued cultural decadence, with Verlaine lauding the “refined thoughts of extreme civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intensive voluptuousness.”9 Such an encomium could only have appeared in one of the little magazines that functioned as an “important agent of the redefinition of literary and artistic fields,”10 where decadent writers contributed to poetic and artistic renewal, waging a battle for public recognition. Literary polemics

France   119 pitted those who dreaded the impending fall of French poetry into incomprehensibility against those who praised its capacity for creating the language of modernity; the debate also pitted various subgroups quarreling about the meaning of “decadence” against one another. Arguably, the dissemination and ubiquity of the noun in multiple publications of the time mask debates and ideas about poetic modernity. The many short-​lived periodicals proliferating from the 1880s onward—Remy de​ Gourmont numbered almost a hundred of them11—​appear as a “striking media phenomenon” expressing “the invention of a new type of periodical,”12 swift to adapt to the latest literary creeds and heralding distinguished twentieth-​century magazines such as La nouvelle revue Française. Informal literary circles meeting in cafés, whether lycée baccalaureates or heirs to small groups such as the Hydropathes, Zutistes, and Hirsutes (who had themselves published small magazines with limited print runs, such as L’hydropathe [January 22, 1879–​May 12, 1880]), helped turn decadence into both a media phenomenon and an industry. Such groups developed into a continuous flow of poets and prose writers who shared decadent conceptions of art and morality. What follows presents the history of their brief but influential adventure.

The Old Decadence and the New In 1834, Désiré Nisard (1806–​1888), editor of the literature section for the liberal daily Le National, published Études de mœurs et de critique sur les poètes latins de la décadence (Cultural-​critical studies of the Latin poets of the decadence), in which he argued in support of classicism against the Romanticism he found disgracefully embodied by the plays of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. His three-​volume study culminates in a severe indictment of the decay of the classical language of third-​and fourth-​century Latin literature, which he compares to contemporary French literature and its dramatic fall from the harmony and equilibrium of the seventeenth century. The Études launched Nisard’s literary and political career, establishing a literary parallel between the Lower Roman Empire and France that came to function as a powerful tool to attack successive waves of contemporary heterodox literature. When the Second Empire fell in 1870, French people old enough to recall the Salon of 1847 might have flashed back to Thomas Couture’s infamous Les Romains de la décadence (The Romans of the Decadence, also known as Roman Orgy, 1847), which Théophile Gautier called “the most striking piece of the Salon.”13 A rather conservative artist, Couture (1815–​1879) presented an eloquent vision of Roman decadence, replete with signs of excess, immorality, and licentiousness, in order to illustrate Juvenal, but also to expose what the painter understood as the decline of the Bourbon Restoration.14 Couture painted a vision of licentious figures under stern-​looking statues of illustrious Romans to convey his dissatisfaction with the political regime of his times without completely hiding his own ambivalence toward the sensuous pleasures of that decadence. Soon young Mallarmé would celebrate Latin decadence as a source of “voluptuousness”

120   Bénédicte Coste in his “Plainte d’automne” (Autumn lament, 1862) insisting on the pagan poetry of “Rome’s last moments.”15 Couture was prescient about the 1848 Revolution in France, but not about the demise of the Second Republic and its replacement by the Second Empire. An active proponent of the Republic turned would-​be aesthete, Charles Baudelaire (1821–​1867) abandoned sociopolitical issues to embrace poetry and art criticism. In 1857 Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) became notorious both for its flamboyantly heterodox content and the trial for obscenity that greeted its publication. The preface to the first edition extolled the expressive force of the language of the Roman decadence for picturing modern times.16 In his 1863 study on the artist Constantin Guys, Baudelaire reverted to the political sense of the term décadence: dandies appear in times of transition, “when democracy is not yet all-​mighty, when aristocracy is but partly tottering and debased.”17 Both the political and the cultural uses of the term indicate ambivalence toward the kind of history that could produce such decline and the kind of literature that could elicit such fascination. Baudelaire had dedicated his Flowers of Evil to Gautier, along with a substantial article in 1859;18 in turn, Gautier celebrated the poet’s historical vision of literature through an analogy with the day’s cycle, which led him to praise the beauty of a sunset.19 Baudelaire displayed the “decadent style” of an aging civilization, calling it an ingenious, complex, erudite style full of subtler shades and refinements, constantly pushing back the boundaries of language, borrowing from every kind of technical vocabulary, taking its colours from every palette, its notes from every keyboard, forcing itself to articulate thought at its most inexpressible and form in its most uncertain and fugitive contours.20

Intended to depict the latest expression of a civilization indulging in artificiality,21 Baudelaire’s elaborate style found its counterpart in the hybridized idiom of late antiquity, with its language “already mottled with the green hues of decomposition and a little gamy, and of the intricate refinements of the Byzantine School, that final form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence.”22 Where Nisard was politically critical, Gautier was aesthetically laudatory. The love of artificiality for its own sake was the final touch to a subtle aesthetics of inversion of what the later Roman Empire and its language represented. Such a hybrid style was not only the reverse of the apparently pure classical style but also the harbinger of novel ideas couched in novel forms, admitting precisely what classicism rejected.23 Gautier did not clearly separate literature and politics, and neither did Paul Bourget (1852–​1935), who, in 1879, defined the nascent Third Republic as an “epoch of transition” while praising Baudelaire as “this fine flower of decadence.”24 Initially a poet carving out a name for himself as one of the “Vilains Bonhommes” (Bad Guys; with Verlaine, Théodore de Banville, Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud, among others) in the 1870s, Bourget was a budding literary journalist sometimes using “this terrible word decadence,”25 and it was as a chronicler for Juliette Adam’s Nouvelle revue (1879–​1940) that he created a sensation with a series of articles on modern French writers—​Baudelaire,

France   121 Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal—​published between 1881 and 1883, presenting a systematic theory of political and stylistic decadence informed by ideas of heredity and degeneracy. In “Théorie de la decadence” from Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), he developed an organic vision of societies and texts prone to disorder and disintegration. Social decadence was the result of over-​autonomous individual cells that through heredity and acquired well-​being undermined the wholeness of the larger community.26 By “analogy,” the same “law” applied to “this other organism that is language” resulted in “decadent style” where “the unity of the book falls apart, replaced by the independence of the page, where the page decomposes to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the word.”27 Significantly, Baudelaire exemplified Bourget’s highly influential “style of decadence,” which proved seminal for Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner (1888). Freed from its Latin trappings, decadence became a sociocultural condition affecting modern societies, languages, and literatures while a plethora of publications lamented France’s decline. The parallel with Roman decadence proved long-​lasting. A former civil servant at the Hôtel de Ville de Paris turned supporter of the Commune and deserter of the National Guard, Verlaine half-​ironically praised the death throes of the Roman Empire in the famous opening quatrain of “Langueur” (1883) in the newly launched satirical magazine Le chat noir (1883–​1895): “I am the Empire at the end of its decadence /​Watching the tall, fair Barbarians pass, /​Meanwhile, I compose idle acrostics /​In a golden style where the sun’s languor dances.”28 Out-​Gautiering Gautier’s preface to Émaux et camées (Enamels and Cameos, 1852),29 Verlaine envisioned decadence as an attitude rejecting reality and history for the sake of beautiful poetry, and, like Gautier and Baudelaire, linked modernity to Greco-​Roman antiquity.

Decadent Novels The same year Verlaine included “Langueur” in Jadis et naguère (Yesteryear and yesterday, 1884) and published the first edition of Les poètes maudits (The accursed poets, 1884) devoted to Tristan Corbière, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, J.-K. Huysmans published À rebours (Against Nature, 1884). Hitherto known as an opinionated art critic and naturalist writer, and a disciple of Émile Zola, Huysmans made a spectacular volte-​face and gave literary decadence its lasting credentials. Boldly turning Nisard’s catalogue of despicable writers on its head, the bibliophile and learned neurotic Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes lauded the Latin of the period from Petronius’s “splendidly wrought style”30 to the tenth century, emphasizing its progressive hybridity and decomposition. His praise found a counterpart in the poet Jules Laforgue’s Complaintes (1885), replete with neologisms, vulgarisms, archaisms, technical terms, and foreign words. Huysmans’s comparison of language to slowly decomposing venison was a masterpiece of the decadent aesthetics of literalization. Refreshing the parallel between Roman decadence and literary modernity, Huysmans quoted from Baudelaire, Verlaine,

122   Bénédicte Coste Corbière, Mallarmé, and Villiers, while also eloquently describing Gustave Moreau’s Salomé dansant devant Hérode (Salomé Dancing before Herod, 1876), L’apparition (The Apparition, 1876), and Odilon Redon’s evocative dark engravings. Mallarmé’s sophisticated poetry was eulogized for embodying the decadence of French literature, a literature attacked by organic diseases, weakened by intellectual senility, exhausted by syntactical excesses, sensitive only to the curious whims that excite the sick, and yet eager to express itself completely in its last hours, determined to make up for all the pleasures which it had missed, afflicted on its death-​bed with a desire to leave behind the subtlest memories of suffering.31

In fact, the only difference between Roman and French decadence was the swiftness of the latter, with Huysmans suggesting a “glossary” “for the decadence of the French language” that materialized in the Petit glossaire of Jacques Plowert (Paul Adam).32 Unashamedly learned and sexually amoral, praising the pleasures of artificiality and neurotic jouissance, À rebours triggered a literary controversy by presenting the first decadent hero and becoming the canonical novel of a movement still awaiting its official name. In contrast to Des Esseintes’s secular itinerary from mere boredom to full-​blown ennui, Joséphin Péladan (1858–​1918), calling himself Sar Mérodack Péladan,33 published Le vice suprême (1884), the first volume of La décadence latine, an extensive twenty-​one-​ volume “éthopée.”34 Tinged with occultism, Péladan’s ethopeia (the word is a Greek rhetorical term meaning, roughly, “impersonation”) condemned modern materialism. Conceived as a Catholic À rebours and prefaced by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Le Vice suprême portrayed decadence as the result of the waning of Roman Catholicism. Péladan argued that his novels read like a “moral and mental diathesis [predisposition] of the Latin decadence.”35 Like Huysmans, Péladan presented morally subversive characters, including Léonora d’Este (who is enamored of the Dominican Fr. Alta) and Rabbi Sichem, who discusses the decline of the West with Mérodack and quotes from Taine’s pessimistic inquest on the defeat of 1870, Les origines de la France contemporaine (1875–​1893). The novel went into four editions in three months. Openly opposed to Zola’s naturalism, Péladan was a reader of both Bourget and Barbey d’Aurevilly, of whom the latter would famously hail Huysmans by saying that the author would be forced to choose between “the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross.”36 A staunch Roman Catholic himself, Barbey foresaw the late conversion to Rome of many a decadent. Readers in 1884 were also treated to Elémir Bourges’s Le crépuscule des dieux (The twilight of the gods), featuring Charles d’Este and his mistress along with his incestuous offspring whose lives culminate, respectively, in suicide and in entering the Carmelite Order. D’Este shows himself to be as much an adherent of anti-​Semitism as he is of Wagnerism, then as highly controversial as fashionable in France. He also displays considerable fear at the growing number of blue-​collar workers. Sexuality rather than class was at stake with Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette, 1860–​1953), one of the few women proponents of decadence. In her infamous Monsieur Vénus (1884)

France   123 Raoule de Vénérande (whose surname evokes venereal disease) has the dead body of her lover Jacques Silvert transformed into a wax figure she compulsively embraces. Despite its provocative title, the novel extols the desirability of sexless love.37 Like Monsieur Vénus, Rachilde’s La marquise de Sade (1886) relies on gender inversion, as does Catulle Mendès’s Zo’har (1886) and La première maîtresse (The first mistress, 1887), where women rape and enslave men. These works triggered a series of novels radically contesting heteronormativity, including Péladan’s L’androgyne (1891) and Gynandre (1892) and Rachilde’s own Les hors-​nature (The unnatural, 1897). With their normative endings, her novels appear more conservative than those by Jean Lorrain (Paul Duval, 1855–​1906), who was a moral and vocal (albeit discreet) proponent of dissident sexualities in Monsieur de Bougrelon (1897) and Monsieur de Phocas (1901). The 1884 bestsellers À rebours and Monsieur Vénus generated a number of decadent novels—​Villers de l’Isle-​Adam’s L’Ève future (The Future Eve, 1886), Barrès’s Sous l’œil des barbares (Under the eye of the barbarians, 1888), Gourmont’s Sixtine (1890), Anatole France’s Thaïs (1891), Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-​la-​morte (1892), Marcel Schwob’s Cœur double (Double heart, 1891) and Le livre de Monelle (The book of Monelle, 1894), and Huysmans’s later autofictions on his conversion: En rade (Stranded, 1887), Là-​Bas (Down There, 1891), and En route (1895)—​foregrounding strangeness, morbidity, sexual and moral perversions, and questioning all norms. While playgoers enjoyed Maurice Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1893) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891), readers of the period delighted in a variety of decadent writing that indulged in spleen, boredom, and neurosis, all predicated upon the more or less discreet continuation of the parallel between Latin decadence and modernity. Those writings also relied on a fair number of not always explicit foreign influences. To paraphrase Bourget, the unity of the French language and literature fell apart and was replaced by decadent cosmopolitanism.

Magazines and the Dissemination of Decadence One result of the 1881 Law on the Freedom of the Press in France was a steady growth of periodicals, including short-​lived literary magazines with a small print run meant to contest established literary values by publishing innovative writings. Competing with the more conservative mainstream magazines, these petites revues (little magazines) were also designed to promote new movements and publicize new titles, starting with their own. An expression of the “violent effervescence” of the 1880s,38 these magazines were restricted by their contributors and by their circulation among their editors’ networks, most of which consisted of lycée graduates. Their magazines were diminutive versions of mainstream magazines like Revue des deux mondes (1829) and Revue politique et littéraire (1863–​ 1939) and provided individual contributions with an

124   Bénédicte Coste acknowledged collective identity and particular aesthetics. Coming from the margins of literary production, characterized by the shifting poetic allegiances of their contributors and by fierce competition to attract a limited readership, they addressed marginal constituencies from both an aesthetic and an ethical standpoint. As their legacy shows, they also displayed the power of minorities in taste and canon formation. Those literary little magazines include Paris moderne, published by Léon Vanier, in which Verlaine made a striking reappearance with “Le squelette” (The skeleton, July 25, 1882) and “L’art poétique” (November 10, 1882). His demand of “Music first and foremost!”—​“For Nuance, not Color absolute, /​. . . subtle and shaded hue!” from “the soul gone flying”39 encapsulated the direction followed by contemporary poetry. The generalist magazine La nouvelle rive gauche (November 9, 1882–​March 30, 1883) was edited by Léo Trézenik (Léon Epinette, 1855–​1902) and Georges Rall (b. 1858), two former Zutistes using various pseudonyms, as well as Karl Mohr (Charles Morice, 1806–​1879). Soon the magazine changed its name to Lutèce (1882–​1886) and became identified with the Latin Quarter, becoming famous for attacks on individuals its editors disagreed with. Its position in relation to decadence appears ambiguous, since it published Laforgue’s Complaintes, Jean Moréas’s Les syrtes (The sandbanks), but also “Le carnet d’un décadent” (Notebook of a decadent), a pastiche of the work of the Goncourt brothers by Ernest Raynaud, and it contributed to the celebrity of Verlaine by republishing “L’art poétique” three weeks after its initial publication. After first objecting to an article by Mohr comparing him to Boileau,40 Verlaine became a regular contributor, publishing “Les poètes maudits” from August 24 to December 20, 1883, highlighting the poetry of Corbière and Mallarmé, as well as Rimbaud’s Illuminations and Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). Trézenik oversaw the publication of the subsequent volume with Léon Vanier; with 253 copies the print run was small, but the illustrated edition sold out entirely. In Lutèce, Verlaine also published Rimbaud’s sonnet “Voyelles” (“Vowels,” October 5, 1883) and “Le bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat,” November 2, 1883). If the example of Verlaine illustrates the capacity of little magazines for disseminating unknown or neglected poems, those magazines in turn stand out as a launch pad for further collections of poetry.

Real and Mock Decadents By 1885 décadent was both a celebrated and derided term. Paul Arène noted that “[o]‌ne becomes a voluntary decadent with joyful rage,”41 and the poet and political journalist Dionys Ordinaire described decadence as a contaminating disease affecting France, blaming Bourget for it in the Revue bleue.42 Arène was in fact reviewing Les déliquescences: Poèmes décadents d’Adoré Floupette.43 With its explicit subtitle, the small collection of poems by Henri Beauclair (1860–​1919) and Gabriel Vicaire (1848–​1900), mostly parodying the poetry of Verlaine and Mallarmé, was so successful that a second edition appeared in June, along with a preface by “Marius Tapora, pharmacien décadent de première classe” (first-​class decadent pharmacist), which disseminated the portrait

France   125 of a new species of littérateur—​the decadent poet, a thin, pale-​faced, fair-​haired youth full of affectation and addictions; a poseur. His real-​life counterpart was embodied by the arch-​aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, himself a poet and rumored to be one of the models for Des Esseintes. Decadence had long celebrated artificiality; it now blurred the lines between reality and fiction. That some readers mistook the good-​humored pastiche for reality testifies to the growing recognition of the poetic practices of the younger generation—​what mainstream magazines labelled “les jeunes.” Beauclair and Vicaire’s parody brought to public recognition a whole current of modern poetry characterized by the elaborately subversive handling of language, metrical rules, and themes, all intended to provoke journalistic and literary debates. From their first appearance in the mainstream press, the terms décadent and décadence were controversial: the adjective designated heterodox men of letters and the noun became a highly problematic label. The conservative critic Jules Lemaître, a reader of Les déliquescences, bemoaned the pessimism of France’s literary youth and the “quest for rare sensation,”44 which in his view induced an absolute moral indifference. He was equally critical of naturalist, pessimistic, and mystical literature, as well as the unintelligible, cloying verse of the little magazines. Lemaître blamed the younger generation’s “intellectual tiredness,” bodily ailments, and their fear of death for these cultural developments, likening the “decadents” to primitives indulging in their neurosis, before wondering whether pessimism was a craze or a more problematic symptom of something else. A few weeks later in August 1885, in a review of the second edition of the Déliquescences in the literary section of Le temps, Paul Bourde acknowledged that the parody had fooled credulous readers. Hesitating between reprobation and admiration, Bourde described the “curious group” for the readers of the distinguished daily, thereby providing a collective imaginary identity for different poetics and poets. Living in an artificial world, this group gave itself the “ironic name of decadents.”45 Spiritual heirs to Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Mohr, Moréas, and Laurent Tailhade, without any acknowledged publishers or manifesto, their quintessential decadent model was Adoré Floupette! Quoting from “Langueur,” Bourde gave a predictable portrait of the decadent that equated him (and not her) with a fumiste (a con man). However, he considered the departure of decadent poetry from metrical rules more favorably, citing Verlaine’s “Il pleure dans mon cœur” (It is raining in my heart), Mallarmé’s sophisticated language, and the use of synesthesia, analogy, and suggestion. The decadents had embarked on the “the strangest assault ever on the French language,” but Bourde disavowed any French “decadence”46 and concluded that since the deviations from the social and linguistic norms harked back to the Jeune-​France of 1835, the decadents were but the last “sickly and bizarre” flower of Romanticism. A week later, the poet Moréas responded to Bourde’s exaggerated portrait and blamed the critic for having fallen prey to a “hoax.”47 Distinguishing between real and “so-​called decadents,” he condoned their gloom and obscurity, welcoming the esotericism of so-​called decadent poetry that rejected caesura and hiatus while enriching the poetic language. Instead of “decadent,” Bourde pleaded for “symbolic” poets (“symboliques”)

126   Bénédicte Coste as a more precise name, which was a possible solution to the polemical indefiniteness of the term. The controversy continued for a while: without any single poetical credo, theoretical text, or manifesto, decadentism came to express an urge for poetic renewal, while décadent became an infamous label attached to modern poets. As Anatole Baju explained in L’école décadente,48 the adjective became a “flag” for novelty. And because it was novelty, it became controversial and contentious.

Ubiquitous Decadence In the year 1886, décadence became all-​pervasive thanks to a series of publications, from Henri Rochefort’s attack on contemporary mores (Les Français de la décadence) to numerous poetry collections, such as Moréas’s Les cantilènes (Cantilenas), Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, Laforgue’s Les moralités légendaires (Moral Tales), and Francis Vielé-​ Griffin’s Cueille d’avril (April harvest). As the last impressionist exhibition was taking place in Paris, décadent and symboliste functioned in opposition. One controversy set Baju against the poet Gustave Kahn, and another the poet René Ghil against Moréas. For a very short while, symbolism was partly synonymous with decadence. As in 1885, the 1886 debates advanced different poetic agendas, with Mallarmé’s L’avant-​dire (Foreword), Ghil’s Traité du verbe (Treaty of the verb), and Moréas’s “Le symbolisme” appearing in turn. Simultaneously, new magazines by and for the young, such as Le Scapin, La vogue, and Le décadent, also appeared. When he launched Le décadent (April 10–​December 4, 1886), Baju aimed to combat bourgeois taste while providing a magazine to bring together the “scattered forces into a single group.”49 Printing the magazine on his own press, and often acting as its sole contributor under various pseudonyms before he was joined by the poets Maurice du Plessys and Tailhade, Baju published the worst and best of decadent poetry, but he proved in the end to be a catalyst for decadence.50 Raynaud later acknowledged the importance of the publication and Baju’s role in disseminating the new poetic credo as his articles were “mentioned and commented upon” in the mainstream press. It was further evidence of the role played by the little magazines.51 They continued to be the first venue for experimental writings, as was the case with Ghil’s Traité du verbe, which, published in August and September 1886 in the newly launched La Pléiade,52 sought to establish relationships between sounds, vowels, and colors.53 The “treaty,” to which Mallarmé initially gave an “Avant-​dire,” was derided by the mainstream press but hailed by Le décadent. The two series of the Le Scapin (December 1885–​August 16, 1886; September 1–​ December 9, 1886) illustrate the instability of the editorial teams associated with the “revues de jeunes.” A laudatory Léo d’Orfer (Marius Pouget) adopted the parallel between the Lower Roman Empire and the modern epoch to highlight the poetic elevation brought about by decadence.54 Soon the generalist magazine published a short-​lived supplement, La décadence artistique et littéraire (October 1–​28, 1886), which openly

France   127 embraced the “Symbolic School”—​a confusing title foregrounding the volatility of labels and affiliations. The editor Ghil presented his own version of the “Decadent School.”55 Unfortunately, the magazine, which published poems by Mallarmé (who loathed the title), had a print run of only four issues. Verlaine was more accommodating: “We may apply this word in an ironical and novel manner, by implying the necessity to react against the platitudes of the current times by the delicate, the precious, the uncommon.”56 During its three series until its printer went bankrupt, the weekly La vogue published numerous decadent texts and campaigned for vers libre. Created and edited by d’Orfer, the first series (April 11–​December 20, 1886) displayed a sophisticated typeface. But after the first five issues, d’Orfer quarreled with the sub-​editor and joined the Scapin to be replaced by Kahn. La vogue remains famous for having published Laforgue’s Le concile féérique (The fairy council) and Rimbaud’s Illuminations in May and June of 1886 before publishing the latter on La vogue’s own presses. Kahn’s editorship of the second series of the magazine with Alphonse Retté as sub-​editor in July and August 1889, and later with Félix Fénéon in that role, gave the periodical a more symbolist tone, but the magazine continued to publish Laforgue, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Moréas, Kahn, Édouard Dujardin, and Théodore de Wyzewa—​not all of them decadent, but all of them assuredly modern. In contrast to those militant magazines, the Revue indépendante’s second series (November 1886–​December 1887), under the editorship of Dujardin, Fénéon, and Wyzewa, adopted a careful neutrality and stayed clear of the “vain decadent trouble.”57 Publishing prose and poetry, it leaned toward symbolism under Kahn’s editorship. Whether decadent, symbolist, or more neutral, those magazines relied on a friendly exchange of services and decisive breaks from tradition. Competing for a limited readership, they aggressively promoted sophisticated poetic forms and a high degree of verbal sophistication to set themselves apart from conventional magazine poetry and the language of mainstream publications. By carefully monitoring rival journals and the daily press, each of them cultivated particular critical postures in their writing that exemplified emerging schools. Such magazines adopted manifesto-​like language characterized by extreme verbal attacks or, by contrast, equally overstated encomia, so as to create a community of like-​minded readers.

Decadent Dissensions As Lemaître continued to criticize the incomprehensibility of both symbolism and decadence,58 real dissensions occurred in 1886, when La vogue published an abstruse sonnet by Ghil and the first pages of Moréas and Adam’s Thé chez Miranda (Tea at Miranda’s). In a harsh critique deriding the first sentences of the novel and berating the decadents’ lack of unity, journalist Paul Ginisty called both authors “reactionaries” and termed decadence a “dust cloud of poets and prose-​writers” producing “hieroglyphic” poetry

128   Bénédicte Coste and turning literature into “mere pleasure for the initiated” under the aegis of “the sibylline poet” Mallarmé, who was himself attacked for his adherence to fixed poetic forms. Those doctrines had appeared in Lutèce and were now aired both by La vogue (in Verlaine’s “unknown idiom”) and by La Pléiade. But regardless of where they appeared, Ginisty saw in such doctrines only “disdain” for the French tongue under the guise of “pretentious gibberish.”59 When d’Orfer mentioned “l’École du Symbole” in Le Scapin as an attack on all deliquescent writers (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Villiers de L’Isle-​Adam, Moréas, Laforgue, and Ghil), Moréas responded with his symbolist manifesto in Le Figaro on September 18, 1886.60 A week later, Baju announced that Le décadent had switched from being the organ of the “Jeunes” to “the militant magazine of the writers of the new literary school” and was opening its columns to the symbolists and to Kahn. Baju soon abandoned his commitment and realigned Le décadent with an improbable group: “Decadents proper, Symbolists, and Quintessents [sic].” Kahn, who had rejoined La vogue, responded by launching Le symboliste, a low-​priced, four-​page magazine that only ran for a month (October 7–​November 6, 1886). Edited by Moréas with Paul Adam as sub-​editor, Le symboliste published more prose than poetry (including Laforgue’s art criticism) and engaged in polemical argument.61 For his part, Ghil’s “Notre École” broke with the decadents and questioned the new “symbolist” appellation in the newly launched La décadence, presented as the “organ of l’École symbolique et Harmoniste.”62 Readers were no doubt confused by the quarrels and rapid turnarounds, but such things testified to the vitality of poetic reflection spurred by “decadent” authors. Kahn and Francis Vielé-​Griffin engaged in symbolism to “[p]‌aint not the thing but the effect it produces,”63 as Mallarmé had defined it in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, founding symbolism upon the principles of philosophical idealism and subjectivism, along with a reinterpretation of Baudelaire’s theories of symbol and synesthesia. Symbolist poets experimented with vers libre, while playwrights such as Maeterlinck, Villiers, Alfred Jarry, Schwob, Henri Régnier, and Rodenbach engaged in symbolist drama. As Patrick McGuinness contends, in spite of the different class and political affiliations of their members, decadence eventually came to be seen as somehow merging with symbolism. 64 Between 1887 and 1889, three constellations65 appeared in the decadent galaxy: Baju’s journal Le décadent, symbolism, and Ghil’s instrumentism.66 New magazines emerged. Écrits pour l’art, for example, stood against both “decadentism” and “symbolism.” Under Ghil’s editorship (1887–​1892), the magazine positioned itself as the “organ of a symbolic and instrumentist group.” Baju’s second series of Le décadent (December 1887–​ April 1889), selling some six thousand copies, continued to defend decadence and “décadentisme,” but the publication of fake Rimbaud poems led du Plessys and Tailhade to leave, while Verlaine publicly blamed the unfortunate editor. Taken over by George Leconte and Retté in May 1888, La cravache littéraire published symbolist writings and opposed Ghil before its contributors joined La vogue in 1889. While Kahn continued experimenting with vers libre, other French poets used vers libéré and vers libre.67 As poetry became increasingly informed by rhythm,68 Verlaine was already writing the

France   129 history of the 1885–​1886 quarrels in Hommes d’aujourd’hui. In his portrait of Baju, he limited the decadent poets to “my three Accursed [Corbière, Mallarmé, Rimbaud] and myself, and those among the young men . . . who had already published verses.”69

Conclusion The year 1889 witnessed both the election of General Boulanger in January and the end of Boulangism and of journalistic “décadisme,” “décadentisme,” and possibly “decadence.” The second series of La Pléiade (April–​October 1889) opposed Ghil’s instrumentism before the magazine transformed itself into Mercure de France, one of the most famous fin-​de-​siècle magazines as both the heir to decadent magazines and one of the organs of symbolism, along with La plume, L’ermitage, and Entretiens politiques et littéraires, all of which were more fully engaged in literary cosmopolitanism. The decadent magazines of the 1880s helped to fix the journalistic codes and conventions that the more structured and professional little magazines of the 1890s continued to use. At the interface between the marginal and the mainstream press, they functioned as “antechambers to great publishing houses” and “agent[s]‌of the organization of literature and of the stabilization of its relationships with media discourse.”70 As Verlaine finally repudiated décadent as a “cry and a flag without anything else,”71 decadence paradoxically became a craze, disseminating its heterodox aesthetics into everyday life, including fashion, interior decoration, and the performing arts. Attacks on decadence continued in the 1890s, most notably with the publication of Max Nordau’s anti-​decadent philippic Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–​1893) as Dégénérescence in 1894, but late antiquity continued to be a source of inspiration for novelists, including Pierre Louÿs (Aphrodite, 1896) and Jean Richepin (Contes de la décadence romaine, 1898). The 1890s were years of political turmoil in France, culminating in the Dreyfus Affair, pitting the army, the law, the press, and different communities against one another. Nationalism, regeneration, duty, athletics, and self-​confidence replaced cosmopolitanism, decline, and the jouissance of France in the 1890s. As Raynaud commented in La mêlée symboliste (1918), the decade was “an era of classical reaction.”72 Decadents converted to Roman Catholicism, joined Moréas’s “École romane” (launched in Le Figaro in 1891), or embraced other literary creeds. Decadence in its multiple embodiments equipped both writers and the public for the rowdy and reactionary 1890s. Poetry fed them with Verlaine’s hendecasyllabic verses, Laforgue’s, Kahn’s, and Marie Krysinska’s vers libre, and the dream worlds of prose-​fiction writers. References to the sister arts of poetry and the visual arts, new techniques such as the interior monologue, narrative discontinuity, and fragmentation, and an appetite for the fantastic: such was the legacy of 1880s French decadence. If décadent and décadence had not become ubiquitous in the 1880s, the name of the new movement might well have been “modernism,” as periodical titles—​La vie moderne (1879), L’art moderne (1882)—​seem to indicate. Significantly, Paris-​Moderne (1881–​1883)

130   Bénédicte Coste and La revue moderniste (December 1884–​1886) disappeared and Le décadent appeared. Admittedly, the unity shaped by Le décadent is not a poetical or theoretical one; it is created by the term itself. Verlaine’s successive definitions exemplify the flexibility of the decadent imagination. Freed from contemporary political trappings, decadence claimed freedom against literary norms and constraints, and privileged the individual, including the individual’s unconscious and dream worlds. More of a spirit or “force”73 than a school, more a media phenomenon fueled by a generational crisis between the literary establishment and new contenders, it was structurally prone to dissolution and reconfiguration for the sake of innovation. Establishing their credentials in numerous poems, booklets, and pamphlets, and historicizing what they had experienced almost simultaneously as they experienced it, proponents of decadence showed that the instant had indeed been transformed into a delightful interval.

Notes 1. “[E]‌nsemble commencement et fin, qui est limite de deux versants.” Vladimir Jankélévitch, “La décadence,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (October–​December 1950), 337. All translations from the French throughout are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. “[D]‌échéance d’Instant en Intervalle.” Jankélévitch, 347. 3. “[C]‌ onscience de la tradition historique est elle-​ même une conscience décadente.” Jankélévitch, 358. 4. “[I]‌l y eut à la fin du xixe siècle des écoles littéraires qui se voulaient elles-​mêmes ‘décadentes.’ ” Jankélévitch, 362. 5. See Noël Richard, Le mouvement décadent: Dandys, esthètes et quintessents (Paris: Nizet, 1968); Jean Pierrot, L’imaginaire décadent (1880–​1900) (Le Havre: PUF, 1977); Pierre Citti, Contre la décadence (Paris: PUF, 1987); Pierre Jourde, L’alcool du silence: Sur la décadence (Paris: Champion, 1994); Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la décadence (Paris: Séguier, 2000). 6. “[U]‌ne construction de l’imaginaire mimétique, collectif, une Stimmung, un état d’âme, une atmosphère, un climat moral que l’on a appelé ‘fin de siècle.’ ” Michel Winock, Décadence fin de siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2017), 24. 7. Jacques Lethève notes continuous mentions of the adjective in the nineteenth century. See “Le thème de la décadence dans les lettres françaises à la fin du XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 63, no. 1 (January–​March 1963): 46–​61. 8. “[P]‌oint de départ de la poésie moderne.” Louis Marquèze-​Pouey, Le mouvement décadent (Paris: PUF, 1986), 11. See also Gérard Peylet, La littérature fin de siècle de 1884 à 1898: Entre décadence et modernité (Paris: Vuibert, 1994). 9. Paul Verlaine, “Lettre au Décadent,” January 1–​15, 1888, repr. Œuvres complètes en prose, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard 1972), 696. 10. “[A]‌gent important de la redéfinition du champ littéraire et artistique.” Yoan Vérilhac, “La petite revue,” in La Civilisation du journal (Paris: NME, 2011), 359. See also Bénédicte Didier, Petites revues et esprit bohème à la fin du dix-​neuvième siècle 1878–​1889 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009). 11. Remy de Gourmont, Les petites revues: Essai de bibliographie (Paris: Librairie du Mercure de France, 1900).

France   131 12. “[P]‌hénomène médiatique frappant,” “invention d’un nouveau type de périodique.” Vérilhac, “La petite revue,” 359. 13. “[L]‌a lumière qui baigne les personnages de M. Couture semble tomber plutôt du ciel gris du nord que de la coupole de saphir du midi.” Théophile Gautier, Salon de 1847 (Paris: Collection XIX, 2016), 11. 14. See Jean-​Paul Bouillon, ed., La critique d’art en France, 1850–​1900: Actes du colloque de Clermont-​Ferrand, 25, 26, 27 mai 1987 (Paris: Cierec, 1989), 231. 15. “[L]‌a littérature à laquelle mon esprit demande une volupté sera la poésie agonisante des derniers moments de Rome, tant, cependant, qu’elle ne respire aucunement l’approche rajeunissante des Barbares et ne bégaie point le latin enfantin des premières proses chrétiennes.” Stéphane Mallarmé, “Plainte d’automne,” Œuvres complètes I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1998), 414–​15. 16. “Ne semble-​t-​il pas au lecteur comme à moi, que la langue de la dernière décadence latine—​suprême soupir d’une personne robuste et déjà transformée et préparée pour la vie spirituelle—​est singulièrement propre à exprimer la passion telle que l’a comprise et sentie le monde moderne?” Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal (Paris: Poulet-​Malassis et de Broise, 1857), 2. 17. “[O]‌ ù la démocratie n’est pas encore toute-​ puissante, où l’aristocratie n’est que partiellement chancelante et avilie.” Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, II, 711–​12. 18. Charles Baudelaire, “Gautier,” L’Artiste, March 13, 1859, repr. Œuvres complètes II, 456. 19. “[W]‌e must paint our allotted hour, and with a palette laden with all the colours needed to portray the effects this hour brings us. Has the sunset not its own beauty, just like dawn?” Théophile Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” Moniteur universel (September 9, 1867), trans. Chris Baldick, in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 79. 20. Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” trans. Baldick, 79. 21. Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” trans. Baldick, 80. 22. Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” trans. Baldick, 80. 23. Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” trans. Baldick, 80. 24. Paul Bourget, Le globe, November 6, 1879, 6. 25. Paul Bourget, “Notes sur quelques poètes contemporains,” Le siècle littéraire, nos. 12 & 13 (April 1, 1876): 265. 26. “L’organisme social . . . entre en décadence aussitôt que la vie individuelle s’est exagérée sous l’influence du bien-​être acquis et de l’hérédité.” Bourget, “Baudelaire,” Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 14. 27. “[O]‌ù l’unité du livre se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la page, où la page se décompose pour laisser la place à l’indépendance de la phrase, et la phrase pour laisser la place à l’indépendance du mot.” Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98. 28. “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence, /​Qui regarde passer les grand Barbares blanc /​ En composant des acrostiches indolents /​D’un style d’or où la langueur du soleil danse.” Verlaine, “Langueur,” Le chat noir, May 26, 1883, repr. Jadis et naguère, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Yves-​Alain Favre (Paris: Bouquins, 1992), 150. 29. “Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan /​Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées, /​Moi, j’ai fait Émaux et Camées” (ll. 12–​14). Gautier, “Préface,” Émaux et camées, Œuvres complètes, ed. Michel Brix (Paris: Bartillat, 2004), 443. 30. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 31.

132   Bénédicte Coste 31. Huysmans, 184. 32. Jacques Plowert (Paul Adam), Petit glossaire pour servir à l’intelligence des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (Paris: Vanier, bibliopole, 1888). 33. “Sar” is a title and “Mérodack” is a Babylonian first name. 34. Joséphin Péladan, La décadence latine (Éthopée), 1884–​ 1925, 21 vols. (Genève: Slatkine, 1979). 35. Joséphin Péladan, La Décadence latine VII: Cœur en peine (Paris: E. Dentu, 1890), xvi. 36. “[I]‌l ne vous reste logiquement, que la bouche d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix.” Barbey d’Aurevilly, “À Rebours,” Le constitutionnel, July 28, 1884, repr. Le XIXe siècle (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), 2: 343. 37. See Regina Bollharder Mayer, Éros décadent: Sexe et identité chez Rachilde (Paris: Champion 2002). 38. Ernest Raynaud, La mêlée symboliste (1870–​1890): Portraits et souvenirs, 3 vols. (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1918), 1:48. 39. Paul Verlaine, “Ars Poetica,” One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Norman R. Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 127. 40. Paul Verlaine, Letter to Karl Mohr (Charles Morice), Paul Verlaine, Correspondance générale, vol. 1, 1857–​1888, ed. Michael Pakenham (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 775. Morice had just published “Boileau-​Verlaine” in La Nouvelle rive gauche (December 1–​8, 1882). 41. Paul Arène, “Les Décadents,” Gil Blas, May 17, 1885, 1. 42. Dionys Ordinaire, “La jeune génération,” Revue politique et littéraire, June 6, 1885, 706–​10. 43. [Gabriel Vicaire, Henri Beauclair], Les déliquescences: Poèmes décadents d’Adoré Floupette (Byzance: Lion Vanné, 1885). Lion Vanné is an obvious joke at the expense of Léon Vanier, the publisher of “decadent” poets. 44. Jules Lemaître, “La jeunesse contemporaine,” Revue politique et littéraire, June 13, 1885, 740–​44. 45. Paul Bourde, “Les Poètes décadents,” Le Temps, August 6, 1885, 3. 46. Bourde, 3. 47. “[C]anard,” Jean Moréas, “Les décadents,” Le XIXe siècle, August 11, 1885, 3. 48. Anatole Baju, L’École décadente (Paris: Vanier, 1887). 49. Anatole Baju, “Les parasites du décadisme,” Le Décadent, January 1, 1888, 3. 50. Lethève, “Le thème de la décadence,” 55. 51. Raynaud, La Mêlée symboliste, 77. 52. Under the editorship of Rodolphe Darzens, the seven issues of La Pléiade (March–​ November 1886) also published Belgian poets. 53. Ghil’s poetical theories are known as instrumentism (Instrumentisme), a scientifically inspired attempt to go beyond Baudelairean correspondances. 54. “Notre fin de dix-​neuvième siècle . . . devait être taxée de Décadence. . . . on peut soutenir que notre poésie se hausse au lieu de descendre.” Vir (Léo d’Orfer), “La Décadence,” Le Scapin, 2nd series, no. 1 (September 1, 1886). 55. René Ghil, “Notre école,” La décadence artistique et littéraire, no. 1 (October 1, 1886): 1–​2. 56. “Nous pouvons faire une application ironique et nouvelle de ce mot, en y sous-​entendant la nécessité de réagir par le délicat, le précieux, le rare, contre les platitudes des temps présents.” Verlaine, “Lettre au Décadent,” January 1–​15, 1888, repr. Œuvres complètes en prose, 696. 57. “[A]‌gitations décadentes” (November 1886), quoted in Verilhac, “Les petites revues,” 369.

France   133 58. Jules Lemaître, “Paul Verlaine et les poètes symbolistes et décadents,” Revue politique et littéraire, January 7, 1888. 59. Paul Ginisty, “Chronique,” Le XIXe siècle, August 17, 1886, 1. La France, L’écho de Paris, La justice, Le Gaulois, Le temps, L’Evénement were also critical. 60. “Un manifeste littéraire: Le Symbolisme,” Le Figaro supplément littéraire, September 18, 1886, 1. The title was given by Le Figaro. 61. Paul Adam, “La presse et le symbolisme,” Le symboliste, no. 1 (October 7, 1886): 1. 62. René Ghil, “Notre école,” La décadence, no. 1 (October 1, 1886): 1–​2. 63. “Peindre, non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit.” Stéphane Mallarmé, “À Henry Cazalis,” October 30, 1894, Œuvres complètes I, 663. 64. Patrick McGuinness, “The Language of Politics in Symbolist and Decadent Polemic,” in Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 65. For a discussion of the differences between those schools, see Patrick McGuinness, “Introduction,” in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 1–​12. 66. Ghil’s instrumentism posits a relationship between sounds, colors and feelings, or ideas, i.e., a specific symbolism. 67. Vers libre is deliberate and continuous, while vers libéré is not continuous and may appear only in some parts of a poem. 68. See Paul Verlaine, “Un mot sur la rime,” Le Décadent, March 1, 1888, repr. Œuvres complètes en prose, ed. Jacques Borel (Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade, 1972), 695. 69. Paul Verlaine, “A. Baju,” Hommes d’aujourd’hui, no. 332 (August 1888), repr. Œuvres complètes en prose, 810–​11. 70. Verilhac, “Les petites revues,” 369. 71. “Décadent au fond ne voulait rien dire. . . . c’était un cri et un drapeau sans rien autour.” Verlaine quoted in Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891; Paris: Charpentier 1894), 71. 72. Raynaud, La mêlée symboliste, 353. 73. McGuinness, “The Language of Politics in Symbolist and Decadent Polemic,” 65.

Further Reading Bollharder Mayer, Regina. Éros décadent: Sexe et identité chez Rachilde. Paris: Champion, 2002. Didier, Bénédicte. Petites revues et esprit bohème à la fin du dix-​neuvième siècle 1878–​1889. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. Grojnowski, Daniel. Aux commencements du rire moderne: L’Esprit fumiste. Paris: José Corti, 1997. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. “La décadence.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4 (October–​ December 1950): 337–​69. Lethève, Jacques. “Le thème de la décadence dans les lettres françaises à la fin du XIXe siècle.” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 63, no. 1 (January–​March 1963): 46–​61. Marquèze-​Pouey, Louis. Le mouvement décadent. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986. McGuinness, Patrick. Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siècle France: From Anarchism to Action Française. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

134   Bénédicte Coste Peylet, Gérard. La littérature fin de siècle de 1884 à 1898: Entre décadence et modernité. Paris: Vuibert, 1994. Vérilhac, Yoan. “La petite revue.” In La civilisation du journal: Histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, edited by Dominique Kalifa and Philippe Régnier, 359–​73. Paris: Nouveau Monde Éditions, 2011. Winock, Michel. Décadence fin de siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2017.

Chapter 7

Bel gium Decadent Land, Barbarian Language Clément Dessy

Between 1880 and 1914, Belgium and Brussels acquired a reputation as places where internationalism as well as a certain conception of cosmopolitanism could take root. Brussels was regarded as a cosmopolitan city, mixing various architectural influences (Flemish, French, German, and English), while the port city of Ostend was considered one of the favorite seaside resorts, especially for English people. This image was promoted by the Belgian government and its institutions, which organized many international events in the country, including congresses, conventions, and world fairs.1 Before World War I, no less than seven world fairs had been organized in the country. At that time, the young kingdom, established in 1831, reached the peak of its power as one of the most prosperous industrial powers in the world, with dazzling successes at various levels. Unlike France, whose citizens felt a strong sense of decline after their defeat in the Franco-​Prussian War (1870–​1871), Belgium suggested little about decadence at first sight. The economy of the country was powered by an incredible accumulation of wealth resulting from its colonial enterprises in Africa. Overriding the disapproval of the Belgian Parliament to commit the country to colonial expansion, King Leopold II personally financed the expedition of a Welsh explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, to seize vast territories in Central Africa, resulting in the creation of the Congo Free State (1885–​ 1908), one of the most brutal human exploitations of the period. The country was also enjoying an artistic and literary “Renaissance” in the nineteenth century,2 although the term birth would be more accurate than rebirth, given that the period marked the first time a literary and artistic generation had gained international recognition since the creation of the state. Many members of this generation gathered around the journals La jeune Belgique (1881–​1897) and L’art moderne (1881–​1914). Reflecting the dynamism of the era, a number of other significant journals were created, such as La société nouvelle, La Wallonie, Le réveil, and Le coq rouge, all of which had an impact in France and beyond and served as steppingstones for the broader dissemination of the Belgian movement. From the beginning of the 1890s,

136   Clément Dessy the dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–​1949; awarded the Nobel Prize in 1910), the poet Émile Verhaeren (1855–​1916), the novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855–​1898), and the painter Fernand Khnopff (1858–​1921) embodied the Belgian symbolist movement across Europe and beyond. These four names were the engines that lifted the entire generation higher, including those writers who are less well known today, such as Max Elskamp (1862–​1931), Charles van Lerberghe (1861–​1907), Albert Mockel (1866–​1945), Georges Eekhoud (1854–​1927), and Albert Giraud (1860–​1929). All of these writers, whether well-​known or obscure, had a rather fraught relationship with decadence because, strictly speaking, no “movement” so designated existed in Belgium. Nonetheless, European decadence and fin-​ de-​siècle aesthetics were deeply defined by a set of representations—​attitudes, places, and use of language—​that were associated with the new Belgian movement. Because of their self-​proclaimed “Belgian soul” and northern identity, the Belgians could be perceived either as barbarians or as an energizing influence on France. They themselves represented their own cities as places of decadence, whether through the melancholy of Bruges or the corruption of Antwerp, with the result that their peculiar style of literature can be remembered as one of their most original contributions to the decadent tradition.

Belgian Decadence: A Paradoxical Stance For a variety of reasons, none of the writers or artists active at the end of the nineteenth century in Belgium explicitly claimed to be “decadent.” Rather, Belgian decadence is more of a mode of interpretation that crosses different movements as they evolve. La jeune Belgique and its “art for art’s sake” ideals aimed to oppose the utilitarian principles of the bourgeoisie, and in that context the works of prominent figures endorsed decadent themes. Iwan Gilkin, the author of La nuit who also rewrote Swinburne’s poems,3 planned to write a novel called La fin d’un monde on “the painful and subtle perversities of these end times” (“les perversités douloureuses et subtiles de ces temps finissants”).4 Even before J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), Giraud published his own decadent novel, Le scribe (1883), about a young poet called Jean Heurtaut who is obsessed by his worship of beauty. Striving to escape the overwhelming influence that Baudelaire had over him, he always ended up writing pastiches: “The poet of Les épaves exerted a diabolical possession on him, which no exorcism could cure. It was as if Baudelaire, by some gloomy mystification from beyond the grave, was guiding Jean’s hand when he was writing” (“Le poète des Épaves exerçait sur lui une diabolique possession, que nul exorcisme ne guérirait. C’était à̀ croire que par une lugubre mystification d’outre-​tombe, Baudelaire guidait la main de Jean quand il écrivait”).5 Pursued by neurosis and afflicted by a sensory disorder, the solitary poet loses himself in the city,

Belgium   137 searching for new sensations by drinking absinthe and visiting prostitutes. Heurtaut’s wanderings ultimately lead to a positive outcome: unlike most decadent heroes, he realizes that the Baudelairean ideal he aspires to could kill him—​“A contagious work, which would inoculate [him] with the sickness of writing, and whose sick perfection would only ever be equaled by a similar sacrifice” (“Une œuvre contagieuse, qui [lui] inoculerait le mal d’écrire, et, dont la malade perfection ne serait jamais égalée que par un semblable sacrifice”).6 Relieved by this revelation, he stares at the sunrise with optimism. Le scribe was later disavowed by Giraud just as La jeune Belgique took a more strident position in its defense of the art for art’s sake aesthetic by promoting poetry inspired by Parnassian forms. Despite promoting corrupted themes and decadent representations, the literary forms the Young Belgians chose remained more aligned with established authors on the French literary scene. As conflicts became more public, some prominent members of La jeune Belgique, such as Verhaeren and Rodenbach, left to join a rival group around L’art moderne, led by Octave Maus and Edmond Picard, who argued that art should contribute to social improvement. While La jeune Belgique was fiercely opposed to modernist trends, such as free verse and écriture artiste, L’art moderne promoted them as reinvigorating. Before he adopted a more open stance and championed symbolism, Picard’s opposition to decadence was clear. In 1885, Picard contributed several articles titled “Essais de pathologie contemporaine” (Essays on contemporary pathology) as an explicit response to Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Essays on contemporary psychology): “We do not want the word decadence, which some people transform into decadism. . . . We claim to be inaugurating the youth of a new art. We are not finishing a literary evolution, we are starting one” (“Nous ne voulons pas du mot décadence, que quelques-​uns transforment en décadisme. . . . Nous prétendons inaugurer la jeunesse d’un art nouveau. Nous ne finissons pas une évolution littéraire, nous en commençons une”).7 As we will see, the authors gathered around L’art moderne would later be targeted as more decadent than those affiliated with La jeune Belgique had been because of the formal innovations they were championing. Amid heightening tensions, Max Waller, the director of La jeune Belgique, targeted the poetical gibberish (charabia) promoted by L’art moderne and replied to Picard: “You tell us: ‘Don’t become decadent,’ although we have never been, and at once you become decadent yourself!” (“Vous nous dites: ‘Ne devenez pas décadents,’ à nous qui ne l’avons jamais été, et d’emblée vous le devenez vous-​même!”).8 The Belgian literary scene contradicts Arthur Symons’s assumption in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), according to which there is “no doubt that perversity of form and perversity of matter are often found together,” although he was cautious enough to clarify that “the term [decadence] is in its place only when applied to style; to that ingenious deformation of the language, in Mallarmé, for instance.”9 In the previous version of this text, an article titled “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), Symons argued that “to find a new personality, a new way of seeing things, . . . we must turn from Paris to Brussels—​to the so-​called Belgian Shakespeare, Maurice Maeterlinck.”10 Symons changed his mind significantly about Maeterlinck between 1893 and 1899: while the article addresses Maeterlinck’s early plays, the book

138   Clément Dessy focuses on the writer’s later essays. For Symons, Maeterlinck’s connection with decadence seems to depend more on his work as a dramatist than an essayist, with decadence dependent on specific themes and forms: “As a dramatist he has but one note, that of fear; he has but one method, that of repetition.”11 The underlying reflection on death provided in the plays and their frightening atmosphere associate the dramatist with a form of pessimism, as with William Archer’s article of 1891, “A Pessimist Playwright.”12 As we will see, this is precisely the feature of Maeterlinck’s writing that came to be most harshly criticized and elicited accusations of decadence. The labels “symbolism” and “naturalism” were in reality more widely used among artists and writers in Belgium—​and were more intensely intertwined—​than in France.13 The younger generation of Belgians had elected the naturalist novelist Camille Lemonnier “Maréchal des Lettres belges” (Marshal of Belgian letters) at a banquet in his honor in 1883. As an authoritative figure in Belgium, Lemonnier might have become known simply as “the Belgian Zola,” but he developed a writing style of his own, one much more elaborate than that of his French counterpart. Besides, some of his novels were steeped in decadent themes, with only their titles, such as L’hystérique (The hysteric, 1885) and Le possédé (The possessed, 1890) suggesting the kind of fin-​de-​siècle psychological exploration associated with naturalism. One of his major novels, La fin des bourgeois (The end of the bourgeois, 1892), provides a sort of Rougon-​Macquart in a single volume by portraying the decline of society through the prism of a bourgeois family. The interdependence of naturalism and symbolism and the emergence of decadence from between them can also be illustrated by the case of Verhaeren. The poet started his career by publishing two collections of poetry, Les Flamandes (The Flemish, 1883) and Les moines (The monks, 1886), both reputedly drawing their inspiration from Flemish painting. For Symons, the first collection “belongs to the Naturalistic movement,”14 while the second involves mystical inspiration. Verhaeren then produced several other collections, Les soirs (Nights, 1887), Les débâcles (Debacles, 1888, illustrated by Odilon Redon) and Les flambeaux noirs (The black torches, 1891, also illustrated by Redon). Critics traditionally call these volumes the “dark trilogy” because of their pessimistic tone and the evocation of the suffering self. This trilogy was followed by another more famous one about cities, Les campagnes hallucinées (Hallucinated countrysides, 1893), Les villes tentaculaires (Sprawling cities, 1895), and Les aubes (The dawns, 1898), in which Verhaeren sang of intimidating and powerful conflicts between the countryside and the “many-​tentacled” (“tentaculaires”) cities. Much more ambiguous in tone, this latter trilogy mixes symbolism and naturalism by representing the natural world under the pressure of industrialization and summarizing symbolically all the emotions this violent transition brings. Symons insightfully contrasts Les Flamandes with the city trilogy and observes that the contrast captures “at a glance all the difference between the Naturalistic and the Symbolistic treatment.”15 In the following years Verhaeren kept evolving toward a more optimistic vision of human progress, with Les multiples splendeurs (Multiple splendors, 1906), closer to Romain Rolland’s unanism (the theory that the actions of social groups are more significant than those of isolated individuals). The darkness of the first collections did not prevent Filippo Tommaso Marinetti from

Belgium   139 praising Les villes tentaculaires and elevating Verhaeren to the pantheon of futurist heroes,16 while Stefan Zweig described Verhaeren’s poetry as an ode to European cosmopolitanism in his monograph on the Belgian poet, the first of a long series of biographies published by the Austrian writer.17

The Des Esseintes Syndrome: A Belgian Disease? A special connection develops between Huysmans and Belgium across specific literary genres (poetry and fiction) and artistic movements (symbolism and naturalism). Writing in the early twenty-​first century, Michel Houellebecq even makes this bond central to the plot of one of his novels. In the dystopic and reactionary Soumission (Submission, 2015), the narrator François, a Huysmans specialist, starts to write a book on the decadent writer in Brussels, a city on the brink of “civil war” after the Muslim party reaches a political majority.18 Through the lens of the protagonist, Houellebecq combines Huysmans scholarship with the controversial claim that Islamization will save Europe from decadence. Beyond the excesses of Houellebecq’s provocative position, Huysmans and the Belgian capital appear to be symbolically linked. The connection is also evident in Against Nature. Huysmans refers to the “Low Countries” on several occasions, among which the mention of Théodore Hannon’s Les rimes de joie (Rhymes of joy, 1881) in Des Esseintes’s highly selective library deserves special mention. Huysmans’s close friendship with the Belgian poet Hannon, the forgotten author of this collection, was decisive to Huysmans’s debut in literature. Unfortunately, Hannon did not follow the same path: he started as editor of the Belgian journal L’artiste (1875–​1878), in which Huysmans published several articles, before quitting his literary career and becoming a civil servant. As shown by the frontispiece drawn by Félicien Rops, the famous Walloon engraver of Baudelaire’s Épaves (Scraps, 1866, an edition of the six poems banned from the first edition of Les fleurs du mal), bearing the motto “Naturalisme-​Modernité,” L’artiste played a central role in the dissemination not only of naturalist writers, including Huysmans and other French authors, but also of Henry Céard and Paul Alexis. Hannon’s Rimes de joie adopted a radical Baudelairean tone, combining spleen with lust and bewitching perfumes with morbid flowers, elements that helped determine Huysmans’s aesthetic sensibility. Illustrated by Rops (again) and prefaced by Huysmans himself, Les rimes de joie is sometimes considered the inaugural publication of the new Belgian literary movement. It was thanks to this collection that Rops became known as the pornographic and decadent illustrator par excellence, turning into pictures all the main themes of the movement (Figure 7.1).19 In a way, Hannon encapsulates Huysmans’s personal shift from naturalism to decadence. Some critics even thought the writer might have come from Belgium because of the obscure-​sounding origins of the name Huysmans. He may not have been born in

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Figure 7.1.  Félicien Rops, advertisement for Les rimes de joie (1881), etching and drypoint. Source: © Musée Félicien Rops, Namur.

Belgium (he was born in Paris, of Dutch descent), but his novel had an incomparable impact in the country.20 For Gilkin, the revolutionary impact of Against Nature was obvious: “This book explains many others. Like a torch falling into a well, it casts a dark light on the increasing depravity of art, on the growing perversion of the intellect and the senses” (“Ce livre est explicatif de beaucoup d’autres. Comme une torche tombant dans un puits, il jette une sombre lueur sur la dépravation croissante de l’art, sur la perversion grandissante des intelligences et des sens”).21 The jurist and writer Edmond Picard read the novel as a potential prophecy for the whole of society: “Is Against Nature the first expression of the fate that will later befall us all? Decadence, is this your first cry of despair that crosses our atmosphere?” (“À rebours est-​il la première expression du sort qui sera plus tard celui de tous? Décadence, est-​ce ton premier cri de désespoir qui traverse notre atmosphère?”).22 Against Nature was so admired in Belgium that it resulted in many tributes and imitations. Arnold Goffin, the brothers Jules and Olivier-​Georges Destrée, and Gilkin were among them. Maeterlinck also drew inspiration from Huysmans’s work in an unpublished piece of juvenilia, Visions typhoïdes (Typhoid visions, ca. 1886). The poems of Maeterlinck’s Serres chaudes (Hothouses, 1889) use the vegetal world and the artificiality fostered by overheated greenhouses to symbolize by analogy the interior world of the

Belgium   141 soul: fears, temptations, and mysteries. One of the first intended titles for this book was Les tentations (Temptations), making the comparison with Baudelaire and Huysmans even more explicit. Along with Huysmans’s influence the collection has a religious atmosphere inspired by early Flemish painting (Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden). Imitations went beyond the game of literary tributes and reached the real world to affect the attitudes of many writers and artists. Some of them cultivated their self-​ image as Anglophiles and shaped their own personae as English dandies, inspired by the character in Against Nature. Like Des Esseintes, who escaped Paris to live in Fontenay-​aux-​Roses, the painter Fernand Khnopff built his own house, a “Temple of the Self ” as he called it, in the suburbs of Brussels, on the border near Le Bois de la Cambre (Figure 7.2).23 It is said that, like Des Esseintes, he inlaid gemstones into the shell of his pet tortoise, but only after it died. His brother, the poet Georges Khnopff, was also the prototype of the decadent writer or the poet in the ivory tower. Several collections of his poetry were announced in the literary press in the 1880s, including Chinoiseries, Songe du coeur qui sommeille (Dream of the sleeping heart), Les rêves (Dreams), and others, but none were ever published. After he was accused of plagiarizing Verlaine by La jeune Belgique and the French journal Lutèce, he decided to stop publishing his poems, even in literary journals. From then on, he kept them zealously hidden and divulged them only to his closest friends, becoming the author of an almost invisible body of work. Instead of pursuing a literary career, he chose to dedicate himself to performing music and organizing concerts, as he was a devoted Wagnerian and a regular at the Bayreuth festival; he was also a translator, especially of the works of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Laurence Housman, and later, some parts of Wagner’s correspondence.24

Lands of Decadence If decadence did not exist as an organized movement in Belgium, that does not mean writers and artists did not play a key role in the growth of decadent culture. On the contrary, they were closely associated with it, whether through their works or through their identities. French nationalist critics like Charles Maurras described them more than once as “barbarians,” claiming that the use of French by Belgian writers was a “Trojan horse”25 for the Germanic conquest of the Latin nations: “[These Belgians] will soon be recognized for the foreigners and Adversaries they are” (“[Ces Belges] ne tarderont point à être reconnus pour les étrangers qu’ils sont bien et pour les Adversaires”).26 Influenced by Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany, 1813), Maurras opposes southern “Romans” and northern “barbarians,” and, in his view, the Belgians unquestionably belong to Northern Europe. These symbolic associations were not only

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Figure 7.2.  Fernand Khnopff ’s studio house, 1902, Av. des Courses, Brussels. Source: © Musées Royaux des Beaux-​Arts de Belgique /​AACB, Brussels.

created by Maurras’s hatred of Germanic cultures but were also fostered by Belgian writers and artists themselves, who cultivated the image of a hybrid nation and used the northern atmosphere of Flanders as a mark of exoticism or nostalgia. Whereas political and economic elites were striving to link the country with the image of progress, artists and writers created a nostalgic image of the past sometimes bordering on total

Belgium   143 invention. In Against Nature, Des Esseintes’s old female servant needs “to pass alongside the house occasionally,” but because Des Esseintes has no desire to see her commonplace silhouette through the window, he had a costume made for her of Flemish faille, with a white cap and great black hood let down on the shoulders such as the beguines still wear to this day in Ghent.27

The same kind of medieval atmosphere will be reused by Rodenbach in Bruges-​la-​Morte (1892). After the publication of the novel, the town of Bruges and its misty, pious, and mystic atmosphere became the center of an aesthetic religion in Paris, where Rodenbach had settled to work as a journalist since 1888. The old trade city, which had lost its direct access to the sea during the Middle Ages, attracted those searching for new decadent emotions. The city became a symbol of the Belgian literary “Renaissance,” as Symons’s 1918 article “Bruges” illustrates, where the writer combines an overview of Belgian literary history with the atmosphere of the city, as if the small town had somehow become established as the new capital of an aesthetic land.28 At the time, the rediscovery of early Netherlandish painters such as van Eyck and Memling was closely associated with Bruges, with the idealization of their art working in parallel with the rejection of modern industrialization.29 For the important international Flemish Primitives exhibition held in Bruges in 1902, Khnopff produced dreamy drawings that fused the realism of their photographic sources with a symbolic return of the sea (Figure 7.3). In Rodenbach’s novel, the main character Hugues Viane settles in the dead city to grieve for his deceased wife. The city with its dark waters and canals reflects his melancholy. Bruges functions as a suggestive and metaphorical place where every object revives memories of the dead woman and every street or canal mirrors the feelings of the character: That was why he had chosen Bruges, Bruges, from which the sea had withdrawn, as his great happiness had withdrawn from him. That in itself was an example of the phenomenon of resemblance, and because his mind would be in harmony with the greatest of the Grey Towns. How melancholy is the grey of the streets of Bruges, where every day is like All Saints’ Day! A grey that seems to be made by mixing the white of the nuns’ head-​ dresses with the black of the priests’ cassocks, constantly passing here and pervasive. A mystery this grey, this perpetual half mourning.30

At the time the novel was published, however, the real Bruges was quite different from its depiction in the novel. The guidebook style of the many photographs illustrating the book, showing classic city landscapes without human presence, obviously served to attract tourists. When the first English translation of the novel was published in 1903, a critic for The Scotsman evoked the link between the book and the innumerable tourists invading the city: It is meant artistically to embody the impression of the old Flemish town of Bruges, to which English tourists run over for an afternoon from Ostend, and come back

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Figure 7.3.  Fernand Khnopff, An Abandoned City (1904), pastel and pencil on paper mounted on canvas. Source: Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (© KIK-​IRPA).

without having seen anything of the sad beauty of medieval memories, grey sheets of water, old buildings, and the quiet life of which this book is full.31

In his “Impressions of Bruges,” Edmund Gosse notices the same contrast between the fictional, “dead” atmosphere popularized by Rodenbach and the unending streams of tourists crossing the city. Gosse offers some advice to visitors who would seek to escape from their “guide-​books [which] multiply indications of the stiff Rogier van der Weydens and lead-​colored Pierre Pourbus [sic] which burden the walls of the Flemish galleries.”32 To avoid the crowds massed around the Flemish painters, Gosse recommends that the visitor go to admire the Madonna of Bruges by Michelangelo, an exceptional example of the Italian Renaissance often ignored at the Church of Our Lady. At the other end of the Belgian fin-​de-​siècle spectrum, Georges Eekhoud, often labeled a naturalist, uses very different imagery to convey the sense of modern urban decadence in his novel La nouvelle Carthage (The New Carthage, 1888–​1893). While

Belgium   145 Bruges-​la-​Morte creates symbolist scenery that hides the real city behind a curtain of nostalgia, The New Carthage uses decadence to describe in an aesthetic way the collapse of Antwerp under the pressure of capitalism. The novel tells the story of Laurent Paridael, an aging orphan who decides to leave the comfort of his adoptive bourgeois family in order to gain insight into the lives of those from the lower classes, such as workers and sailors, as well as criminals. The portrait of Paridael is one of social self-​ degradation partly inspired by the writer’s biography. At the same time, the novel addresses the moral decay of Antwerp and its opulent harbor, depicting the influx of rural masses into the city and the steady flow of miserable emigrants boarding ships bound for America, as well as highlighting the suffering of the lower classes under the strain of industrial capitalism. The wealthy city grew significantly with the exploitation of the Congo, as it also served as a point of departure for thousands of miserable Belgian peasants leaving the Old World to search for a better life in America. Eekhoud’s “jewelled style,” to borrow Wilde’s expression about Against Nature,33 is an example of what the Goncourt brothers called l’écriture artiste and was deeply influenced by Lemonnier and the French novelist Léon Cladel. The discourse on decadence starts with the title The New Carthage, establishing a comparison between Antwerp and Carthage and announcing the fall of the modern city as a result of its “moral decline.”34 Laurent resents the cruelty of the city and addresses Antwerp as a sort of Moloch: City conforming to the spirit of Darwin’s law! Fecund city, but harsh mother! In your hypocritical corruption, your blatancy, your licentiousness, your opulence, your greedy instincts, your hatred of the poor, your fear of hirelings, you conjure up Carthage before me.35

While Rodenbach’s imagery draws inspiration from the mysticism evoked by Flemish painters of the fifteenth century, Eekhoud refers instead to the baroque sensuality of Peter Paul Rubens, David Terniers, and Jacob Jordaens to describe the misery of the workers amid the flamboyant opulence of the city. Although apparently opposite, these tales of different cities nonetheless represent two sides of a same decadent coin. Whether called symbolism and naturalism or mysticism and sensuality, these two artistic modalities take inspiration from the Flemish Old Masters to react against rampant industrialization and rapid modernization. Verhaeren’s more ambivalent vision in his poetical trilogy comes close to reconciling these contrasting attitudes toward modernity by combining fear over the forces of destruction with enthusiasm for the power of change. The poet’s “many-​tentacled” cities are all simultaneously monstrous and fascinating, destructive and thrilling.

The Languages of the Barbarians Another ivory tower recluse was the French-​speaking symbolist poet Max Elskamp, whose literary value seems surprisingly underestimated today. His mother was Walloon and his

146   Clément Dessy father’s family came from Scandinavia to settle in Antwerp. Living isolated in the Flemish metropolis, Elskamp expressed constant admiration for popular and local traditions and repeatedly expressed regret that he was not able to speak the language of the people. This sentiment is particularly evident in his letters, in which he complains that he is forced to see in Flemish but to write in French.36 Even more strikingly, after reading disappointing French reviews of his collection Salutations, he writes: “I guess my writing is too much in the North for them over there . . . I bitterly regret not knowing Flemish; it was the right language for me, since ‘Belgian’ does not exist” (“Il faut croire que j’écris trop au Nord pour là-​bas . . . je regrette amèrement de ne pas savoir le flamand; c’était la langue qu’il m’aurait fallu, puisque le ‘belge’ n’existe pas”).37 The dramatic case of Elskamp demonstrates how the linguistic situation of the country could result in symbolic conflicts and fragmented identities, sometimes leading to a sense of linguistic disability in literature.38 As Jean de Palacio argues, neology is a major element in the study of decadent linguistics.39 The Petit glossaire pour servir à l’intelligence des auteurs décadents et symbolistes (Little dictionary for understanding decadent and symbolist authors, 1888) published by Paul Adam under the pseudonym of Jacques Plowert, illustrates the importance of neology in decadent literature. Linguistic eccentricity and decadence are indeed closely related, and because Belgian national identity is not defined by the use of a proper language, decadence occupies a special place in the relationship of identity and language. As we know, a “Belgian” language does not exist because the inhabitants of the country speak various Romance and Germanic languages—​French, Flemish, and Walloon—​ with French having the status as a distinctive language and the other two considered dialects. For the social, political, and cultural elites of the state, including Flanders, the use of French has remained the norm and the exclusive language of education for schoolchildren over the age of twelve. The “Belgian soul,”40 as Picard called it, corresponds to a unified identity mixing Germanic and Latin components, despite the use of various languages in the country. Such a definition aims to transform the linguistic diversity into a distinctive feature from many other European nations, but the effort remains highly fraught. The promotion of this “Belgian soul” disguises the increase in linguistic tensions, especially given that the initial globalization of Belgian culture occurred mostly in French while the domination of French over Flemish has always been challenged in the country itself (with Dutch gaining official status in 1898). Most fin-​de-​siècle Belgian writers who were known internationally were indeed Flemish people writing in French, with many of them, such as Verhaeren and Elskamp, having a poor command of Flemish. Although stronger claims for the cultural recognition of Flemish was emerging at the time and was advocated by some modernist journals, such as Van nu en straks (Of now and later, or Today and tomorrow, 1893–​ 1901), founded by August Vermeylen, or by poets, like Vermeylen’s rival Pol de Mont, the impact of such efforts was limited and less decisive at an international level, except in the Netherlands. In other words, many writers of the so-​called Belgian Renaissance promoted a form of Flemishness in French, but the stance became less and less acceptable during the first half of the twentieth century.

Belgium   147 The myth of the “Belgian soul” worked for a while, but it is impossible to separate the Belgian authors writing in a decadent modality from the linguistic and cultural context in which those authors were living. The French critic Léon Bazalgette, who promoted Walt Whitman’s and Verhaeren’s works, summed up the issues quite efficiently: There are among us [the French] two common opinions about Belgian writers. Some claim that Belgium is, in literature and art, only a province of France, and Brussels a rather clumsy copy of Paris; others, regretting that Belgian artists have abandoned Flemish, deny them any ability to use the French language. For me, both opinions are equally false. . . . Why should the use of French be impossible outside France? . . . On the contrary, I see that in their hands it has been enriched and renewed, far from being impoverished or corrupted. The Flemish soil has fertilized it with its sap, colored it with its powerful emanations, perfumed it with its warm breath. (Il y a parmi nous [les Français] deux opinions courantes sur les écrivains belges. Les uns prétendent que la Belgique n’est, en littérature et en art, qu’une province de la France, et Bruxelles la copie un peu gauche de Paris; les autres, regrettant que les artistes belges aient abandonné le flamand, leur nient toute aptitude à se servir de la langue française. Pour moi, ces deux opinions sont également fausses. . . . Pourquoi l’usage du français serait-​il impossible hors de France? . . . Je constate au contraire qu’entre leurs mains elle s’est enrichie et renouvelée, loin de s’appauvrir ou de se corrompre. La terre flamande l’a fécondée de sa sève, l’a colorée de ses puissantes émanations, parfumée de sa chaude haleine.)41

Bazalgette cites many writers, such as Verhaeren, Lemonnier, and Eekhoud, who enhanced the distinctiveness of their writing style. This distinctiveness entails a certain decoupling of language and national identity that proved influential for a number of decadent writers. Wilde justified his writing of Salomé in French by comparing himself to Maeterlinck: “A great deal of the curious effect that Maeterlinck produces comes from the fact that he, a Flamand by grace, writes in an alien language.”42 Still, unlike Wilde, Maeterlinck was indeed a native speaker of French, and Wilde refers to his Flemish identity to convey a positive sense of foreignness. This sense of foreignness is also evident in psychological studies that tracked “symptoms” in Belgian literary works: Émile Laurent, in a study of decadent poetry and psychiatric science published in 1897, describes Elskamp as “one of the most incorrigible cacographers” (“un des plus incorrigibles cacographes”) with his “mash of ridiculous verses” (“purée versiculée”).43 For Jean Lorrain, Lemonnier wrote in belgimatias (playing on the word galimatias meaning “gibberish”). Alphonse Allais dedicated a “Poème morne” (Dreary poem) to Maeterlinck with the humorous subheading “traduit du belge” (translated from the Belgian). An English critic wondered why it was necessary to translate Maeterlinck’s plays, as most people could probably read them “in the original Belgian.”44 The consciousness of possibly appearing as decadent solely because of being Belgian (and thus cosmopolitan, hybrid, plagiarist, and so on) enabled artists and writers to play with the ambiguities of decadence, valorized by some as pride and hated by others as a

148   Clément Dessy threat. In Belgium and elsewhere, the use of a distinctive writing style raised eyebrows. The question of “belgimatias” was even addressed in a Parliament session by Charles Woeste, representative of the Aalst region, who publicly agreed with Lorrain when considering the works of the new Belgian generation.45 Because of its more traditional stance on literary forms, La jeune Belgique was not immunized against the fear of the “barbarians.” Although he had addressed decadent themes in Le scribe (The scribe) and Pierrot lunaire (Lunar pierrot), later adapted by Arnold Schönberg, Giraud attacked “the new idiom established here by a group of young writers” (“le nouvel idiome instauré chez nous par un groupe de jeunes écrivains”) and proposed to call it the macaque flamboyant: The flamboyant macaque is based on absolute ignorance of grammar, syntax and language, on the cult of barbarism, flandricism, walloonism, counter-​sense, nonsense and pataquès. The new idiom is called macaque because it apes the faults of bad French writers and flamboyant because it dresses up these faults in a dazzling manner. (Le macaque flamboyant est fondé sur l’ignorance absolue de la grammaire, de la syntaxe et de la langue, sur le culte du barbarisme, du flandricisme, du wallonisme, du contre-​sens, du non-​sens et du pataquès. Le nouvel idiome est appelé macaque parce qu’il singe les défauts des mauvais écrivains français et flamboyant parce qu’il revêt ces défauts d’une manière éblouissante.)46

In this sarcastic definition of a “new idiom,” that is, a language for the few, regional particularities from Flanders or Wallonia are mocked and placed at the same level as grammatical mistakes. Giraud advocates for a normative use of French. The word macaque (a species of monkey) is a common insult and suggests the French verb singer (derived from the noun singe, “ape” or “monkey”) that figuratively means “to imitate roughly.”47 In other words, the best the young poets can do is “ape” proper literature. (Incidentally, the only species of macaque indigenous to Europe is the Barbary ape of Gibraltar, which squares with Giraud’s notion of young Belgian writers as part of a “cult of barbarism.”) If some French were suggesting that barbarian invasions were coming from Belgium, some Belgians therefore felt that they were themselves being invaded. In a country allegedly mixing a northern Germanness and a southern Latinness, one never knew whose barbarian one might be, even when the barbarian was often said to come from the North.48 Gilkin titled a pamphlet “The Invasion of the Barbarians”49 and warned against the pernicious influence of Whitman on the writing of young Belgian poets (a transparent allusion to Verhaeren). Valère Gille, another La jeune Belgique poet, also repeatedly tackled the same danger of “barbarian invasions” in Belgian letters.50 In 1896, Gilkin, speaking almost as a national masochist, published an article titled “Arrière, les barbares!” (Back, barbarians!)51 in support of Maurras’s diatribe against Verhaeren and Rodenbach.52 On the other side, the “modernists” considered the inability to renovate the language as a sign of decadence. In the young Maeterlinck’s unpublished writing, commonly designated the Cahier bleu (Blue notebook),53 the French classical tradition

Belgium   149 is often presented as sclerotic, dying of its own limitations, “like a royal family whose blood was never renewed” (“comme une famille royale au sang jamais renouvelé”).54

Conclusion If La jeune Belgique was first perceived as decadent because it highlighted several decadent themes during its first years, the writers around L’art moderne were later charged with the same accusation of decadence. However, critics targeted their poetic forms and their modernist language, even though these writers claimed to regenerate the French language. There are certainly significant differences between the simplicity of Rodenbach’s and Maeterlinck’s writing styles and the overelaborated literature of Verhaeren and Eekhoud. The accusations against Belgian writers who misuse French has a long history that extends beyond the period and continues into the twentieth century, but French criticism of Belgian literature as linguistically suspect was particularly acute at the fin de siècle. Belgian authors were stigmatized as “decadent”—​possible bearers of contagious cultural diseases. The decoupling of language and nation resulting from the myth of the “Belgian soul” also emerged as the dream of a subnational cultural movement at the end of the century. Such decoupling suggested that writers could invent their own language and overcome nationalist constraints to their own cultural ambitions. This cultural dynamic probably explains why Belgian symbolist writers such as Maeterlinck and Verhaeren became so important in Catalonia, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Bohemia, and Norway. But that dream vanished after the First World War and was quickly forgotten.

Notes 1. Daniel Laqua, The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–​1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013). 2. This concept of Renaissance was widely used in Belgium and was introduced in Britain by William Sharp in “La jeune Belgique,” The Nineteenth Century (September 1893): 416–​36. 3. Iwan Gilkin, “Les adieux de Sapho,” La jeune Belgique, 2nd series, 2, no. 15 (April 10, 1897): 125–​26. 4. Jules Destrée, Journal des Destrée (Brussels: Lacomblez, 1891), 18. Quoted in Laurence Brogniez, “Le mythe de l’invasion des Barbares: art et/​ou révolution au tournant du siècle,” in Mythes de la décadence, ed. Alain Montandon (Clermont-​Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal: 2001), 144. 5. Albert Giraud, Le Scribe (Brussels: Lucien Hochsteyn, 1883), 26. 6. Giraud, Le scribe, 68. 7. [Anonymous], “Les visionnaires,” L’art moderne (October 17, 1886): 330. 8. Max Waller, “Maître Edmond Picard,” La jeune Belgique, 1st series, 6, no. 6 (June 6, 1887): 182.

150   Clément Dessy 9. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Matthew Creasy (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2014), 7. 10. Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” in Creasy, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, 177. 11. Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 178. 12. William Archer, “A Pessimist Playwright,” Fortnightly Review 50, no. 297 (September 1891): 346–​54. 13. Paul Aron and Clara Sadoun-​Édouard, “Le naturalisme en Belgique, ou les valses de l’étiquette,” Les cahiers naturalistes 90 (September 2016): 15. 14. Arthur Symons, “Introduction,” in Émile Verhaeren, The Dawn (London: Duckworth, 1898), 1. 15. Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” 6. 16. See David Gullentops, “Verhaeren and Marinetti,” Forum for Modern Languages 32, no. 2 (April 1996): 107–​18. 17. Stefan Zweig, Émile Verhaeren (London: Constable and Cie Ltd, 1914), 253–​60. 18. Michel Houellebecq, Soumission (Paris: Flammarion, 2015). 19. Hélène Védrine, De l’encre dans l’acide: L’œuvre gravé de Félicien Rops et la littérature de la décadence (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), 42–​48. 20. For more information, see Christian Berg, “La jeune Belgique et la décadence,” in Christian Berg, L’automne des idées: Symbolisme et décadence à la fin du XIXe siècle en France et en Belgique, essays collected by Kathleen Gyssels, Sabine Hillen, Luc Rasson, and Isa Van Acker (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 75–​84. 21. Iwan Gilkin, “Chronique littéraire. I. À rebours,” La jeune Belgique 3, no. 8 (July 15, 1884): 406. 22. [Edmond Picard], “À rebours par J.-​K. Huysmans. Second article,” L’art moderne 4, no. 29 (July 20, 1884): 236. 23. See Clément Dessy, “La maison d’artiste en portrait, manifeste et sanctuaire. L’exemple de Fernand Khnopff,” in The Æesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avant-​garde and Material Exchange, ed. Sarah Posman, Anne Reverseau, David Ayers, Sascha Bru, and Benedikt Hjartarson (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 235–​48. 24. See Clément Dessy, “Georges Khnopff ou la reconversion cosmopolite de l’homme de lettres,” Textyles 45 (2014): 47–​67. 25. Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin de Siècle France: From Anarchism to Action Française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 216. 26. Charles Maurras, “Barbares et Romans,” La plume 53 (July 1, 1891): 230. 27. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 18–​19. 28. Arthur Symons, “Bruges,” The Nation 2791 (December 28, 1918): 796–​97. 29. On the Neo-​Gothic movement, see Jan De Maeyer and Luc Verpoest, eds., Gothic Revival, Religion, Architecture and Style in Western Europe, 1815–​1914: Proceedings of the Leuven Colloquium, 7–​10 November 1997 (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000). 30. Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-​la-​Morte followed by The Death Throes of Towns, trans. Mike Mitchell and Will Stone, with an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2005), 61. 31. [Anonymous], “Fiction,” The Scotsman, December 7, 1903, 3. 32. Edmund Gosse, “Impressions of Bruges: Dead or Sleeping?” The Independent 52, no. 2691 (June 28, 1900): 1540–​41.

Belgium   151 33. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–​), The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (2000), 3:103. 34. Georges Eekhoud, The New Carthage, trans. Lloyd R. Morris (New York: Duffield and Company, 1917), 24. 35. Eekhoud, The New Carthage, 150. 36. Henri Davignon, L’amitié de Max Elskamp et d’Albert Mockel: Lettres inédites (Brussels: Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique, 1955), 15. 37. Max Elskamp to Henry Van de Velde. Quoted in Jeannine Paque, Le symbolisme belge (Brussels: Labor, 1989), 116–​17. 38. Patrick McGuinness, “Belgian Literature and the Symbolism of the Double,” in From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making, ed. Nathalie Aubert, Pierre-​ Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness (London: Legenda, 2007), 8–​22. 39. Jean de Palacio, La décadence: Le mot et la chose (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011), 9. 40. Edmond Picard, “L’âme belge,” Revue encyclopédique (July 24, 1897): 595–​99. 41. Léon Bazalgette, “Variété,” La cocarde (April 2, 1897). 42. “The Censure and ‘Salome’: An Interview with Mr. Oscar Wilde,” The Pall Mall Gazette, June 29, 1892, 2. 43. Émile Laurent, La Poésie décadente devant la science psychiatrique (Paris: A. Maloine, 1897), 23. 44. [Anonymous], “The Belgian Shakespeare,” The National Observer 14, no. 363 (November 2, 1895): 711. 45. “La jeune Belgique à la chambre,” La jeune Belgique 8, no. 4 (May 1884): 158. 46. [Albert Giraud], “Mémento,” La jeune Belgique 11, no. 9 (September 1892): 354. Italics in original. 47. Jean-​Pierre Bertrand, “1892. La jeune Belgique condamne le ‘macaque flamboyant’: La question de la langue littéraire,” in Histoire de la littérature belge 1830–​2000, ed. Jean-​ Pierre Bertrand, Michel Biron, Benoît Denis, and Rainier Grutman (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 187. 48. See Brogniez, “Le mythe de l’invasion des Barbares,” 143–​ 162, and Jacques Marx, Verhaeren: Biographie d’une œuvre (Brussels: Académie royale de langues et de littérature françaises, 1996), 338–​40. 49. Iwan Gilkin, “Les invasions des barbares: Walt Whitman,” La jeune Belgique 11, nos. 7–​8 (July–​August 1892): 305–​11. 50. Valère Gille, “Chronique littéraire. À propos de l’Almanach d’E. Verhaeren,” La jeune Belgique (February 1895): 122–​24; “Mémento,” La jeune Belgique 14, nos. 9–​10 (September–​ October 1895): 388–​89. 51. Iwan Gilkin, “Arrière, les barbares!” La jeune Belgique, 2nd series 1, no. 12 (April 4, 1896): 91–​92. 52. Charles Maurras, “Trois romantiques: M. Gustave Kahn. M. Émile Verhaeren. M. Georges Rodenbach,” La revue encyclopédique (March 28, 1896): 216–​18. 53. Maurice Maeterlinck, Le cahier bleu [Notes sur les préraphaélites 1888–​1889], ed. Joanne Wieland-​Burston, in Annales de la Fondation Maurice Maeterlinck 22 (1976). 54. Maeterlinck, Le cahier bleu, 138.

152   Clément Dessy

Further Reading Aron, Paul. La Belgique artistique et littéraire: Une anthologie de langue française 1848–​1914. Brussels: Complexe, 1997. Aron, Paul. Les écrivains belges et le socialisme (1880–​1913): L’expérience de l’art social, d’Edmond Picard à Émile Verhaeren. Brussels: Labor, 1997. Aron, Paul, and Clara Sadoun-​Édouard. “Le naturalisme belge.” Special issue, Les cahiers naturalistes 90 (September 2016): 5–​268. Aubert, Nathalie, Pierre-​Philippe Fraiture, and Patrick McGuinness, eds. From Art Nouveau to Surrealism: Belgian Modernity in the Making. London: Legenda, 2007. Berg, Christian. L’automne des idées: Symbolisme et décadence à la fin du XIXe siècle en France et en Belgique. Louvain: Peeters, 2013. Bertrand, Jean-​Pierre, ed. Le monde de Rodenbach. Brussels: Labor, 1999. Biron, Michel. La modernité belge: Littérature et société. Brussels: Labor, 1994. Block, Jane. Les XX and Belgian avant-​gardism, 1868–​1894. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984. Brogniez, Laurence. Préraphaélisme et symbolisme: Peinture littéraire et image poétique. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Gorceix, Paul. Maurice Maeterlinck: L’arpenteur de l’invisible. Brussels: Le Cri, 2005. Guyaux, André, ed. Échanges épistolaires franco-​belges. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-​ Sorbonne, 2007. Laqua, Daniel. The Age of Internationalism and Belgium, 1880–​1930: Peace, Progress and Prestige. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2013. Marx, Jacques. Verhaeren: Biographie d’une œuvre. Brussels: Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises, 1996. McGuinness, Patrick. Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Quaghebeur, Marc, and Nicole Savy, eds. France-​Belgique (1848–​1914): Affinités-​ambiguïtés. Brussels: Labor, 1997. Védrine, Hélène. De l’encre dans l’acide: L’œuvre gravé de Félicien Rops et la littérature de la décadence. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002.

Chapter 8

B ritain and I re l a nd Decadence beyond London Alex Murray

The relationship between the decadent tradition and urbanism is not straightforward. While cities such as London, Paris, or Vienna may have offered the opportunity for bohemian living and cultural exchange, they were also home to the bourgeois culture industries against which decadent writers would wage their unrelenting war. These cities were also held up as models of progress and development and therefore existed in symbolic opposition to decadence, the proponents of which regarded such liberal historical narratives as illusory. Yet the dependence that British and Irish decadent writers had on the London culture industry, whether it be as a jobbing journalist and theater reviewer (Arthur Symons), a fashionable playwright and socialite (Oscar Wilde), or a poet and publishing-​house reviewer (Richard Le Gallienne), meant that the majority of British decadent writers were most likely to be resident in the city at some point in their lives. Yet that did not mean decadent culture was absent from areas outside of London, even if such regional decadence has been largely neglected in criticism. In fact, various forms of decadence were manifest all over Britain and Ireland, whether in the emergence of the Celtic Revival or in the desire felt by almost all decadent writers to escape the city as they sought respite from its excesses and anxieties. The work produced outside of London offers a very different pattern of both British and Irish decadence: often pastoral, self-​ consciously provincial, less dominated by ennui and despair, and directed instead toward cultural rejuvenation. While their response to modernity is still characterized by bitter critique, the decadent writers I examine here were more concerned with neo-​ Romantic inquiries into how the past and the natural world might offer resources to overcome the homogenizing forces of modernization. Indeed, natural and pastoral motifs proliferate in decadent literature as part of the complex of cultural relations in the various constituent parts of the United Kingdom at the time. In particular, various intersections with the Celtic Revival produced a more variegated narrative of British decadence. Less focused on tropes of transgression and degeneration, these regional

154   Alex Murray decadents did not celebrate decline so much as acknowledge the need to move past it. Also less derivative of French decadence, their work found value in local traditions and regional cultures. This strain of decadence is in many ways closer to the English Romantic tradition, yet shorn of its revolutionary enthusiasms. Its adherents prefer cultural renewal over personal dissipation; they are not against nature, but for it. Where the decadent tradition typically expresses disillusion with bourgeois modernity by adopting a critical view of the urban scene, while at the same time taking advantage of the opportunities for excess and self-​indulgence the great metropolis affords, regional decadence involves a removal from the urban scene altogether as a necessary means of critiquing the liberal order of nineteenth-​century modernity. But then what is left of decadence after this maneuver? The answer lies in the way particular regional cultures are used to express decadent disenchantment with metropolitan modernity. If this decadence has some things in common with the negative capability of the Romantics, it would be in the paradoxically positive way that capacity operates. Where the original Romantics found spiritual affirmation in nature, these regional decadents find in nature confirmation of their negative assessment of modern urban life.

Archipelagic Decadence For the poet and literary critic William Sharp (1855–​1905), the relentless pull of London drawing in those from Scotland, Ireland, or Wales was not a process of dynamic development but of debilitating conformism. In the very desire to acquiesce into a facile Anglo-​Saxon orthodoxy, those writers who relocated to the capital became what they most feared. It was for this reason that Sharp, writing as Fiona Macleod, could declare, “London is so overwhelmingly provincial, because it is the centre towards which the provincial mind gravitates and where it finds its most congenial condition.”1 London was, as far as he was concerned, a center of intellectual myopia and paralysis; those most afflicted by cultural cringe—​the epitome of provincial aspiration—​reinforced the exceptionalism of the metropolis and thereby made it less dynamic, and more susceptible to self-​congratulatory navel-​gazing. London may have been the capital of British decadence, but it was in many ways an outpost of Parisian decadence. As Richard Le Gallienne would put it in “A Ballad of London” (1894), “Paris and London, World-​Flowers twain.”2 Arthur Symons (1865–​ 1945), who is perhaps the greatest London laureate of the fin de siècle, was, like his Parisian hero Charles Baudelaire, adamant that the overwhelming intensity of the modern city was generative for the modern poet: “[T]‌here is a particular kind of excitement inherent in the very aspect of a modern city, of London or Paris; in the mere sensation of being in its midst, in the sight of all those active and fatigued faces which pass so rapidly; of those long and endless streets, full of houses, each of which is like the body of a multiform soul, looking out through the eyes of many windows.” The sensory excesses of the modern city opened its citizens up to new horizons: “Every step in a great city is a step into an unknown world. A new future is possible at every street corner.”3 Symons’s

Britain and Ireland    155 two greatest poetic achievements, Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895), were exercises in translating the experiences of the decadent flâneur into poetic form. For Symons, art should capture impressions and sensations, and it was the great centers of urban modernity that offered the richest source of experience. Yet the result was a form of London decadence that, in becoming obsessed with how close it was to the Parisian original, paid less attention to the singularity of the city on the Thames. Symons’s poetry did not differentiate markedly between cities or pay much heed to the nations in which those cities were found. There was, in many respects, no such thing as national forms of decadence. The poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Symons, for example, conformed in no way to the dominant cultures of the countries in which they lived and worked. Hence, decadence is, as Matthew Potolsky has suggested, a “transnational community of literary and artistic reception, forged in and through imitation, translation, and intertextual reference.”4 Whether it be in Arthur Symons, John Gray, or Ernest Dowson, attempts to translate the poetic effects of Verlaine and Baudelaire into their own verse, or Wilde’s liberal borrowings from J.-K. Huysmans, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Rachilde, the dominant expressions of “British” decadence were imitations of the Parisian avant-​garde. Yet the image of a cosmopolitan, transnational, “imagined community” is only one manifestation of decadence. As valuable as this transnational turn has been in decentering the geographies of decadence, we should remember that a number of writers we associate with British decadence had an aversion to the fluidity of identity that emerged as a result. National identity was a complicated matter for Lionel Johnson (1867–​1902), but on the dominance of French influence in British literature he was unequivocal. His sympathies were always with the obscure British writers of the Elizabethan age, rather than with the latest French fad; as he asks his reader, “Are you so intent upon the latest eccentricity of Paris, that you have no ears for these singers?”5 While he lambasted those lured by the siren song of Gallic innovation, he had even less time for those who eschewed the nation. In another nod to an older Romantic tradition, he claims that “[a]‌cosmopolitan artist, a citizen of the world, with no local patriotism in his heart, has never yet done anything memorable in poetry, or in anything else.” Johnson, seemingly oblivious to the relentless violence of empire and the often bloody formation of nation-​states in the nineteenth century, declared patriotism to be the kernel of human nature: “It is among the strongest of earthly instincts, this clinging to our nationality and race. . . Poetry and patriotism are each other’s guardian angels, and therefore inseparable.”6 Johnson was not alone in his admiration for British and Irish, particularly Celtic, literary forms, and it is perhaps the proliferation of these regional decadences that mark out the English-​language contributions to the tradition most clearly. The most distinctive manifestations of decadence in Britain and Ireland were, arguably, not to be found in London but scattered at the edges of the four nations that, during this period, made up the United Kingdom. The decadence outside of London should not, however, be presumed to be as insular as Johnson’s reactionary patriotism might suggest. John Brannigan has recently argued that we need to understand the literary cultures of the British Isles in this period as archipelagic, a term which “implies a plural and connective vision.” Brannigan’s

156   Alex Murray archipelagic modernism challenges both the “cultural and political homogenisation” that is attached to Unionism, as well as the “exceptionalism and insularity” of the political nationalisms of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland that solidified in the twentieth century, yet it also retains something of the specificity of places and cultures that can be lost in a cosmopolitan frame.7 Recent work on regional modernism has sought to displace the propensity of literary criticism to route literary innovation through urban capitals such as London, Paris, or New York.8 A regional and archipelagic model, or even a “four nations” model, provides us with a much more fluid and pluralistic decadence, one that not only displaces the nation-state, as cosmopolitan, global, and transnational models of decadence do, but also disrupts the centrality of London as the epicenter of decadent cultural production. Displacing London as the cradle of British decadence should not, however, merely invert the metropolis-region hierarchy. Writers outside of London tended to denigrate the metropolitan appropriation of regionalism in opposition to their own authentic expression of place and identity. Yet whether it was practical lived experience or sentimental inclination, very few decadent writers maintained a hard-and-fast opposition between London and the provinces. Lionel Johnson offers a succinct expression of the complex intersection of identity and geography in his poem “London Town”: Three names mine heart with rapture hails, With homage: Ireland, Cornwall, Wales: Lands of lone moor, and mountain gales, And stormy coast: Yet London’s voice upon the air Pleads at mine heart, and enters there; Sometimes I wellnigh love and care For London most.9

Johnson would take many trips to the Celtic west (for him, Ireland, Cornwall, and Wales would all become a mystical “west”), and he devoted much of his poetry to celebrating its landscapes of myth and legend, even if he never did relocate from London once he came down from Oxford in 1890. Not only did Johnson maintain an archipelagic vision of the islands, refusing to accept the center-periphery model that accorded London greater value, but he also refused to cast the city aside as a modern Babylon. London was a source of inspiration on its own terms, not as some pale imitation of Parisian fashion.

Cornwall and Wales More often than not, Johnson headed west when he ventured out of London. As the Great Western Railway opened up Wales and the southwest of England to the world in the nineteenth century, it made what had been remote, inaccessible parts of Britain destinations that could be reached from London in a day’s travel. While mail coaches

Britain and Ireland    157 might have networked the island some years earlier, the ease of movement increased migration from rural regions to urban centers, and in turn allowed those living in cities to vacation relatively cheaply and easily in the Atlantic West. The number of decadent writers who took advantage of this two-​way movement is striking: the young Arthur Symons from Bideford in North Devon, or Arthur Machen from Caerleon in South Wales, both moving to London in the 1880s in the hope of finding literary fame and fortune. In the other direction went the large number of writers who took extended holidays in Wales, Cornwall, and Devon, including Michael Field, Ernest Rhys, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Havelock Ellis, John Davidson, and Vernon Lee. For these writers, the western edge of Britain stood, at times, in stark opposition to the modernity of London. In almost all cases it inspired them to write lyrical descriptions of desolated landscapes and mythic pasts. Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856–​1935) took a number of trips to Cornwall and Wales, landscapes she associated with violence and desolation—​both positive characteristics in Lee’s travel writing, as she lamented southern England’s “bourgeois-​bucolic” character.10 Given her antipathy to the industrialized areas of the southeast and the north of England, the savage, haunting qualities of the western fringes of Britain took on their own nobility: “These Cornish moors have something angry and sinister in that reddish, yellowish darkness of theirs, so that the blackish rocks of Rough-​Tor and the other Tors, seem merely to concentrate, as it were, to be spokesmen of their threat.” This violent landscape was no longer the home of industry, as it had been some seventy years earlier, but now of ghosts, the specter of King Arthur and Mordred: “[T]‌his scantily inhabited end of Europe seems given up to dead folk: Arthurian heroes at every step and odd local saints, unheard of in other parts of the world, and whom one suspects of having been originally giants, and perhaps ogres.”11 These revenant figures gave the landscape a mythic quality, but it was one that was clearly the product of literary association rather than any innate quality. Thanks to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859–​1885), the tiny and rather desolate fishing village of Tintagel was now famous all over the world, “[i]ts name become familiar as that of Sparta or Troy, its little chieftains gathered with the demigods of Homer in the triumphant processions of Petrarch, and the viewless winds of Dante!”12 The inference here is that this bleak village in North Cornwall has become ennobled by being overwritten by literature and myth. It is not the reality of life in the westernmost edge of England with which Lee is concerned, but the potential for that landscape to speak of the past, to find those traces of premodern life in spite of English industrial modernity. Lee’s decadent rejection of the narratives of progress meant that she was drawn to those places that possessed a genius loci, “the substance of our heart and mind, a spiritual reality. And as for visible embodiment, why that is the place itself, or the country; and the features and speech are the lie of the land, pitch of the streets, sound of bells or of weirs.”13 The west of Britain was less blighted by the effects of rationalizing modernity and was therefore more able to manifest the “spiritual reality” she craved. Katharine Bradley (1846–​1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–​1913), who wrote under the pen name Michael Field, were inveterate travelers of the British Isles. They were

158   Alex Murray particularly taken with Cornwall, where they spent a holiday in May 1896 in St. Mawgan, a small village that lies on the banks of the River Menalhyl on the north coast of the county. The remote countryside offered space for spiritual renewal and novelty of experience. They spent time visiting the Carmelite Lanherne Convent, where they were touched by the austere atmosphere of prayer. On a visit to Mawgan Porth beach they swam together for the first time. Bradley declares, “One never knows the spirit of frolic till one is in company with the waves—​they have more contagiousness than childhood.” She and Cooper find themselves in a reverie as they anoint their union: “Mick [one of Bradley’s names for Cooper] +​I were just two waves at our dance on the shore.”14 The two women were so inspired by their time there they penned a verse drama, Noontide Branches (1899), set in premodern Cornwall. The play dramatizes the complex spiritual journey the two women were making as they attempted to reconcile their investment in Bacchic transgression with their increasing reverence for Roman Catholic ritual. It was those spiritual experiences in the isolated landscapes of Cornwall that were important milestones in their turn toward Rome and in their articulation of their idiosyncratic form of conservative decadence.15 Arthur Symons also felt a powerful draw toward Cornwall, taking a number of holidays there, and composing ecstatic descriptions of its moors and windswept coastline in poetry and prose. It was here that the great poet of urban impressionism came to see the poverty of city living: “[I]‌n this solitude, away from the people of cities, one learns to be no longer alone. In the city one loses all sense of reality and of relationship.” This recognition does not mean, of course, that Symons became aware of the often brutal reality of rural living. In the landscapes of Cornwall he found space to explore his own mystical vision: “In this air, in this region, an air of dreams, a region at once formidable and mysterious, every hour of the day has its own charm and character, which change visibly and in surprising ways.”16 The change of rhythm and landscape inspired Symons to write poetry that is far more romantic and sentimental than his urban lyrics of erotic encounter and fleeting impression. “Cornish Wind” offers a representative example: There is a wind in Cornwall that I know From any other wind, because it smells Of the warm honey breath of heather-​bells And of the sea’s salt; and these meet and flow With such sweet savour in such sharpness met That the astonished sense in ecstasy Tastes the ripe earth and the unvintaged sea. Wind out of Cornwall, wind, if I forget: Not in the tunnelled streets where scarce men breathe The air they live by, but wherever seas Blossom in foam, wherever merchant bees Volubly traffic upon any heath: If I forget, shame me! or if I find A wind in England like my Cornish wind.17

Britain and Ireland    159 Symons’s poem is evidently pastoral, but we should be careful not to therefore presume that the language and form of decadence are absent. The “warm honey breath” no longer belongs to the prostitutes and dancers of London’s demimonde, and the “astonished sense in ecstasy” is not the product of post-​coital bliss. But from the awkward neologism (“unvintaged sea”) to the defamiliarizing use of metaphor (“merchant” bees that “traffic”), Symons is attempting to seek new forms of expression to convey what is, for him, a novel sensation. Cornwall becomes an antidote to London, a position that will become more and more pronounced in his work in the years leading up to his mental breakdown in 1908, and no more so than in London: A Book of Aspects (1909), where the final chapter reflects on the simple joys of life in a Cornish fishing village, a far cry from the inhuman and conforming oppression of the city.18 While Johnson, Lee, Field, and Symons may have enjoyed the Celtic west as an antidote to London, for Arthur Machen (1863–​1947), born in Caerleon in Monmouthshire, Wales was far more than a space of exotic anti-​modern alterity. In the mid-​1880s Machen moved to London, and from this point until his death in 1947 he lived in the city or in the Home Counties. While he became one of the great chroniclers of London, his Gothic decadent prose sees a continual drift back to Wales. In his work the mountainous landscapes of his childhood take on profoundly mystical qualities. In his decadent masterpiece, The Hill of Dreams (1907), the young hero Lucian Taylor’s childhood is spent in mystical reverie in the Welsh hills that are seemingly haunted by the ghosts of Roman occupation, while in his Stevensonian Gothic romances, Wales becomes the source of dark, occult forces from which rationalizing modernity cannot escape.19 In “The Novel of the Black Seal,” the narrator, Miss Lally, describes the Welsh landscape as “a territory all strange and unvisited, and more unknown to Englishmen than the very heart of Africa.”20 It is not just the landscape, but also the local people who seem to betoken a time long past. A local Welsh boy, Jervase Craddock, who helps Professor Gregg in the garden, suffers some form of fit or trance in which he “seemed to pour forth an infamous jargon, with words, or what seemed words, that might have belonged to a tongue dead since untold ages and buried deep beneath Nilotic mud, or in the inmost recesses of the Mexican forest.”21 Professor Gregg is led to believe that in the hills of Monmouthshire there lies a living remnant of the past: “[W]‌hat if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain?”22 The presence of the “little people” of the Welsh hills functions in Machen’s text as a reminder of a past that cannot be so easily forgotten in modernity. For all of Professor Gregg’s desire as an anthropologist to anatomize and analyze folk belief, there is always a living remnant of the past that eludes, and eventually overcomes, the rationalizing, scientific mind, and it is in Wales that the past, whether it be Roman or Celtic, lives and breathes. The Celtic west functions in the Wales and Cornwall of the decadents as a relatively benign, Arnoldian alternative to the rationalizing, industrializing forces of Saxon modernity. Over the Irish Sea, however, the discourse of decadence was inevitably caught up in the political ferment surrounding Home Rule and the rise of revolutionary nationalism.

160   Alex Murray

Ireland Within the context of Irish literary and cultural history, the study of the fin de siècle is dominated by the Celtic Revival and, with it, the events that led to the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence, the Civil War, and then the establishment of the Irish Free State. Yet, as Roy Foster has argued, the force of 1916 in the narrative of the period imposes something like an order on what was a complicated, intellectually febrile atmosphere.23 One component in the development of that revolutionary generation was the influence of European and English decadence and symbolism on writers across the island. The more revolutionary nationalists might have regarded decadence as a negative influence, an emasculated cosmopolitanism to be opposed, while others saw in it some vision of a new world, removed from the sectarian bitterness of old. The history of literary decadence has only looked to Ireland when it is convenient to frame Oscar Wilde as the radical Irish critic of British imperialism, yet Wilde, once he left for Oxford in 1874, spent very little time in the country of his birth. As Simon Joyce and Alison Harvey argue, aestheticism in Ireland developed into realism and naturalism, rather than decadence, in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Whether it be George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) or Katherine Cecil Thurston’s The Fly on the Wheel (1908), Irish aestheticism needed to speak to the political context of a torn nation, and depicting the poverty and suffering of its rural population was the best means of doing so.24 Yet there are many moments at the fin de siècle where Irish writers and activists turned to decadence. In the period after 1893 and the failure of the second Home Rule Bill, Ireland saw an alternative discourse that offered a challenge to what many perceived as the “decadence” of empire: revolutionary nationalism. George Bernard Shaw satirized it in John Bull’s Other Island (1904), wherein the scheming Tom Broadbent announces, “I look forward to the time when an Irish legislature shall arise once more on the emerald pasture of College Green, and the Union Jack—​that detestable symbol of a decadent Imperialism—​ be replaced by a flag as green as the island over which it waves.”25 Writing in The Shan Van Vocht in 1898, the nationalist poet William Rooney attempted to distance the true poetry of Ireland from the artifice of decadence: In these days of “decadence” and “art for art’s sake,” it may not be fashionable to hint that anything really worth study has come from the peasantry of any country. Paris, the first to lead the fashion in millinery, has latterly subdued literature and controls the study and the editorial chair as completely as she does the boudoir. Style and elegance in art or literature are to be admired, but they are not things to which everything is to be subordinated. The polish and glitter of the schools may perfect the artist, but equally in our days as in those of Horace, Nature makes the poet.26

A tendency to valorize and fetishize the peasant was a key feature of the Celtic Revival, in opposition to the fashionable and cynical literature of metropolitan culture. J. M.

Britain and Ireland    161 Synge declared that the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, was a place “where all art is unknown” and where the peasant craft objects produced by the islanders were valuable precisely because they have “something of the artistic beauty of mediaeval life.”27 The opposition between art—​perceived as a narrow, modern, elitist practice—​and the universal craft of peasant life was something Synge returned to again and again in his work, and when he did, it was clear that decadence was the supreme manifestation of elite, enfeebled art. Synge drew a stark line between the vigorous art of a ballad-​singing vagrant in County Wicklow and that associated with decadent urbanism, which was founded on the freak of nature, in itself a mere sign of atavism or disease. This latter art, which is occupied with the antics of the freak, is of interest only to the variation from ordinary minds, and, for this reason, is never universal. To be quite plain, the tramp in real life, Hamlet and Faust in the arts, are variations; but the maniac in real life, and Des Esseintes and all his ugly crew in the arts, are freaks only.28

The antihero of J.-K. Huysmans’s 1884 À rebours (Against nature), the novel eulogized by Arthur Symons as “the breviary of the decadence,” is the antithesis of vigorous life.29 The language of abnormality, atavism, and disease that Synge uses here is clearly derived from the diagnostic lexicon of the Hungarian-​born physician and cultural critic Max Nordau, whose two-​volume Entartung (1892–​1893) was translated into English as Degeneration in 1895. Yet in 1907 Synge was, perhaps, protesting too much, embarrassed by his own earlier dalliances with decadence. As Alex Davis has demonstrated, Synge’s early unpublished experiments in prose and verse, such as Vita vecchia (Ancient life) and Étude morbide (Morbid study) “flounders amid the influence of the avant-​garde nineteenth-​century French and English literature in which Synge was immersed during his sojourns in Paris from 1895 to 1903.”30 Synge’s anti-​decadent volte-​face is not dissimilar to modernist acts of disavowal, most famously those of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Such protestations should not blind us to the fact that decadence did exist in Ireland in this period, and despite the desire of many in the Irish Revival to rewrite literary history and absolve themselves of aestheticist influence, the traces of decadence are manifold. From the echoes of Symons’s lyricism in Chamber Music (1907), the pastiche of Pater in passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and the repeated references to Wilde and Swinburne in Ulysses (1922), James Joyce was steeped in the culture of decadence. Irishmen were strongly represented in the Rhymers’ Club: W. B. Yeats, John Todhunter, T. W. Roleston, and G. A. Greene all contributed to the two collections of verse that contained some of the most decadent poetry of the 1890s. The Irishman George Moore dabbled in decadence, writing a memorable Künstlerroman of bohemian Paris, Confessions of a Young Man (1888). The Irish-​Australian writer George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) would draw on a number of decadent motifs in her landmark collections of New Woman short fiction, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894).31 Yet in the majority of these cases, London (or Zurich/​Trieste/​Paris) would be the place in which they would write fondly of Ireland. It was no doubt Yeats whom Edward Thomas had in mind when he acidly noted that the decadent lovers of the Celt

162   Alex Murray were “sophisticated, neurotic—​the fine flower of sounding cities—​often producing exquisite verse and prose; preferring crême de menthe and opal hush to metheglin or stout, and Kensington to Eryri and Connemara.”32 Celtic decadence could, all too often, seem a metropolitan affair. It was in the northern Irish province of Ulster that one of the most distinctive attempts to develop an Irish decadence emerged. Provincial, industrial, conservative, and torn by sectarian division, the northeast of Ireland was seemingly a world away from the cosmopolitanism of Paris and London. While Dublin was enjoying something of an artistic and cultural renaissance thanks to the emergence of a Celtic nationalist art, literature, and politics, Ulster was, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, undergoing a mini-​industrial revolution, as shipbuilding transformed Belfast and environs. But there was no such concomitant cultural revolution. The province of Ulster is made up of nine counties, six of which were home to a majority Protestant and Unionist population and, since the partition of the island in 1921, have constituted Northern Ireland. A true ossifying of sectarian divisions was developing in this period, as the Unionist community, inspired by Edward Carson (who was the lawyer for the Marquis of Queensberry in Wilde’s libel case), responded to southern agitations for Home Rule by becoming increasingly militarized in order to defend Ulster’s place in the United Kingdom. Yet this narrative is not the whole story. In the years leading up to the signing of the Ulster Covenant of 1912, a distinct Ulster literary revival was taking place. Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine33 (see Figure 8.1) was the brief flowering of an aestheticist, Ulster literary revival that eschewed political sectarianism and social division. It ran to only four issues, from November 1904 to September 1905, and was conceived as the organ of the Ulster Literary Theatre, which was founded by two Protestants—​Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill—​as an Ulster counterpoint to the Irish Literary Theatre established by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Edward Martyn in 1899. Uladh was edited by W. B. Reynolds and illustrated by John Campbell, or Seaghan MacCathmhaoil, as he signed his illustrations. The editors of Uladh were not alone in their attempt to develop a progressive, nonsectarian, non-​nationalist artistic movement on the island of Ireland. They considered the readers of the little magazine Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought (May 1904–​April 1905), edited by William Kirkpatrick Magee, who used the pen name John Eglinton, to be fellow travelers, lamenting the collapse of that journal just before that of their own. Dana published impressionistic memoirs by George Moore, and the poetry of the young James Joyce, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Æ (George Russell), and James H. Cousins. The journal’s philosophy was humanist and individualist, and it refused to adhere to any singular artistic position; as one pseudonymous contributor put it: “We will have no etiquette of thought, or of art, be it literary, dramatic, or pictorial; all systems are open to our search, and we will choose for ourselves, and be primitive or decadent, or both together, as seems good to us.”34 So Uladh was not alone in its attempt to forge a new art, but it refused to be simply aligned with movements taking place in Dublin. The first issue announced that the difference between the Ulster and Leinster, or Dublin, schools would be of the same order

Britain and Ireland    163

Figure 8.1.  The cover of Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine. Source: Special Collections, The Queens University of Belfast.

164   Alex Murray as the difference between the satiric and the poetic. The satirical nature of Uladh and of the Ulster Literary Theatre was essential, as there was not the same cultural context in which they could develop a poetic, mythic model of creativity such as had emerged in Dublin during the Celtic Revival. The second issue announced the goal to “build a citadel in Ulster for Irish thought and art achievements such as exists in Dublin.” It was, the editorial concluded, inevitable that the result was to be “provincial rather than national,” to be “critical and destructive” as much as “constructive and creative.” It was, they made clear, the art of the decadence, of satire that they would employ to overcome cultural malaise: Satire was the art of the Greek decadence, as CONNLA [one of their contributors] points out; we live in the midst of a decadence at present, and we wish to shed it and emerge from its entanglements. We can do this best through satirising it. If satire is not the greatest art, then what of Ibsen’s best work which is pure satire? But great or little art is none of our business. We must work along the most immediate and spontaneous lines; else honesty will not be in the work, but only an affection of a mood and a manner we do not naturally possess. How many young men met a misfortune when they met Mr. W. B. Yeats and strove to imitate his work, the work of a man of genius, which is inimitable. Doubtless they strove after great art.35

These editorial notes were elaborated in “Festina Lente!,” an article by CONNLA (almost certainly the editor, W. B. Reynolds) in which the precise nature of the condition of Ulster decadence was made clear. There had been a decadence in other parts of Ireland, but that decadence was radically different in nature from that which appeared in the north of the country: [I]‌n Ulster and Belfast the decadence has been negative rather than positive—​the non-​absorption into the national stock of a large alien import. On that ground at least we can scarce claim satire, or the need of satire, an unique possession. Again, literary or dramatic satire demands a plasticity of temperament and a subtlety of word and wit, with which we do not find our average Ulsterman ordinarily gifted.36

This vision of decadent satire as a vehicle of renewal marks Ulster decadence out from its southern counterpart, the Celtic Revival, its strongest expression arguably Thompson in Tir-​na-​n-​Og (1912) by Gerald MacNamara (Harry C. Morrow). In MacNamara’s mythical satire, the eponymous Orangeman Andy Thompson finds himself in Tír na nÓg, the Irish Otherworld, or land of eternal youth. The various contributions to the second issue give some sense of how Uladh was a broad church offering numerous and often competing modes of aestheticism. Included was an article arguing that Richard Wagner’s Teutonic music-​drama should not be used as the model for a Celtic music-​art. Any new Irish symbolist music-​art must emerge organically from within the national tradition, otherwise the artist would “cause a grotesque transmutation into a hybrid art that is neither national nor cosmopolitan.”37 Other articles included guidance on how to

Britain and Ireland    165 decorate the “ordinary ‘thousand pound villa,’ ” an essay on the politics of prosecution by Roger Casement, and a review of a recent exhibition of impressionist art by Forrest Reid (the collection under review would go on to form the basis of the Hugh Lane Gallery, the first public museum devoted to modern art when it opened in 1908 at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin). Reid (1874–​1947) can lay claim to being the only true decadent in Ulster. While others may have dabbled in decadence as they attempted to create a new art form, Reid was dedicated to the Hellenism of Walter Pater and was to maintain a Uranian38 aestheticism from the publication of his first novel The Kingdom of Twilight (1904) through to his death in 1947. Reid’s short story “Pan’s Pupil” revolves around a young boy’s reverie on a riverbank in which he has a vision of the god Pan. The god talks to the young man, who expresses surprise that the god is aged, convinced that eternal youth is a given for all gods. Pan tells him that he “feels the snows of old age” in his blood and that “night will follow quickly” once his conversation with the young man is over. The boy pledges himself to Pan, but as the god continues to reflect on mortality—​far from unlovely for one who has lived so long—​the boy asks if Pan has “not heard of a gentle god who came into the world to put an end to suffering and sorrow.” This god who has “come from the east,” who was destroyed by his disciples and whose priests tore down Pan’s altars, is clearly Jesus Christ. Yet for all the appeal of Christ, Pan reminds the young man that “I am to-​day the spirit of the earth, and I am worshipped in the beauty of each passing hour.”39 Reid had set about transforming rural Ulster into an Arcadian fantasy, but it was not a transformation that the ideologically invested editors of Uladh seemed to appreciate. In his second volume of memoirs, Private Road (1940), he details the reaction of the magazine’s editors: “There were so many Irish gods, and Pan was not one of them: there were so many little boys who spoke the Ulster dialect, and mine was not one of them. . . . the story was not satiric and he [W. B. Reynolds] had this theory about the Ulster genius firmly embedded in his soul—​had even put it into practice himself by writing a parody on the overture to Tannhauser, using Orange tunes as themes.”40 While Reynolds’s parody does sound like a bizarre mode of Ulster decadence, it was not at all the same as that of Reid, who chose to eschew all political causes and positions. Following “Pan’s Pupil” he wrote a prose sketch based on the Greek Anthology for Uladh that the editors refused to publish. Their response to his story was seemingly based on his unwillingness to subscribe to the ideological commitments of the journal. As Reid concluded: “It was not due to obstinacy; it was merely that I did not see how writing could ever be anything but the expression of an individuality, while Reynolds, I gathered, thought it should be the expression of the policy and aspirations of a group.”41 Reid was to continue turning the landscapes of Northern Ireland into a Hellenic fantasia, yet it was a lonely affair. After 1912, and certainly after 1916, culture on the island was dominated by its political turmoil. For those wanting to develop the aesthetic autonomy of the 1890s, the alternatives were seemingly exile, as favored by James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, or the fantastical, as practiced by Reid and by the decadent-​inspired writer of weird fiction, Lord Dunsany.

166   Alex Murray

Scotland If the Celtic Revival was an archipelagic affair, it manifested itself in very different ways in each of the constituent nations of what was, at the fin de siècle, the United Kingdom. While Ireland and Yeats predominated, there were a number of Scottish artists and writers who attempted to create a distinctive version across the North Channel. Michael Shaw has recently offered a most expansive analysis of the role that decadence played in the Celtic Revival in Scotland. As he notes, the Revival in Scotland shared with decadence an investment in using the past to critique the narratives of progress that underpinned bourgeois modernity. It would be misleading to characterize this form of critique as Scottish decadence, but in the work of “Fiona Macleod,” and in Patrick Geddes’s little magazine The Evergreen we can see “facets of decadence.”42 As Shaw notes, in “their attempts to revive traditions and critique . . . historical progress, Scottish Revivalists frequently performed decadent styles and participated in movements that the likes of Nordau would class as ‘degenerate.’ ”43 The Scottish contexts of the 1890s differed from those in Ireland. The Scottish Revival was not annexed to a nationalist political program in the same ways as the Celtic Revival was over the North Channel. Yet there are distinct similarities: the discourses of cultural decay and decline were drawn on here to attack cultural pessimism, yet the literary tropes and styles of decadence were utilized as tools of cultural renewal. While the Scottish Revivalists were inspired by the example of Yeats and Ireland, their expression was different, and arguably the influence of continental decadence much stronger among them. Foremost was the critic William Sharp, who, under his female pseudonym Fiona Macleod, penned a number of striking novels, poems, and dramas of the western and northern isles. As Shaw has demonstrated, Sharp was deeply influenced by the La Jeune Belgique movement, and in particular the decadent-​symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck.44 The influence of the mystical element of European symbolism can be seen most clearly in the ways in which Macleod pens literary landscapes. The debut of Macleod was the novel Pharais: A Romance of the Isles (1894), a tale set in the fictional Innisrón in the Outer Hebrides. The narrative is in many ways a vehicle for Sharp/​Macleod’s decadent landscape descriptions. The following is one example among many of the Hebrides being turned into a decadent fantasia: A fiery sunset disclosed the immense and swirling procession of clouds high over the isle—​cloud not only racing after cloud, but often leaping one upon the other as flying sheep in panic. Towards the east, the vapours were larger and darker: the cohorts more densely massed. Above the mainland stretched one vast unbroken phalanx of purple-​livid gloom, out of the incessant and spasmodically convulsive travail in whose depths swept monstrous cloudbirths.45

The setting sun had been a favorite trope of decadent writers from Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier onward, and was to become the keynote of much of the writing of

Britain and Ireland    167 the Celtic Revival across the British Isles, developing associations with the dying light of fading cultures, a symbol of the inherent beauty of decline. Yet in Macleod that symbol is intensified through excess: the awkward metaphors of clouds as flying sheep (possibly derived from the French verb moutonner to describe a sky of fleecy clouds), the sky containing “monstrous cloudbirth,” and the “phalanx of purple-​livid gloom” all underscore the unrepresentability of the landscapes, of the gap between the rapture of experience and the prosaic medium of communication. An emphasis on the beauty of decay was an intrinsic element of the melancholy of Macleod’s writing. There was a conviction that spiritual truth had been lost, and with it a connection with the Celtic past, now only accessible in small flashes of mystical illumination. The past may be long gone, yet the beauty of its siren song has left in the writer “a more ardent longing, a more rapt passion in the things of outward beauty and in the things of spiritual beauty. Nor it seems to me is there any sadness, or only the serene sadness of a great day’s end, that, to others, we reveal in our best the genius of a race whose farewell is in a tragic lighting of torches of beauty around its grave.”46 Sharp’s translation of decadence into the highlands and islands of northwest Scotland represented a particularly rural, folk-​influenced, elegiac manifestation of decadence. For other Scottish writers of the period, decadence was framed as a stage in a developmental process as they attempted to inspire a rejuvenated, forward-​looking culture in fin-​de-​siècle Scotland. Patrick Geddes (1854–​1932) was a remarkable figure: a biologist, a town planner, and an energetic man of letters, he was the driving force behind The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, a semiannual publication in four volumes (1895–​ 1896/​7), with each dedicated to a particular season. As Koenraad Claes notes, Geddes and other contributors to The Evergreen considered decadence to be “a ‘season’ in the cultural-​historical cycle of Scotland that eventually will pass, to be followed by the rejuvenation of a new spring.”47 This little magazine was then not anti-​decadent, but neither did it revel in dissipation and decline. As Shaw argues, Geddes shared with decadence a resistance to modern economic structures and believed that decadents’ “distance from ‘Philistine’ modernity is something that should be harnessed to critique the current shape of society.”48 In many ways The Evergreen was regarded as decadent by virtue of its art, rather than its literary content. Many of the black-​and-​white line drawings by Pittendrigh MacGillivray, John Duncan, Charles H. Mackie, and E. A. Hornel were reminiscent of those by Aubrey Beardsley, with a number that were vaguely erotic. The literary contents were, on the whole, relatively more conventional, although the predominance of nature writing and lyrical accounts of the seasons were certainly striking and counterintuitive given its association in the press with The Yellow Book. Yet, as more sensitive reviewers noted, the journal was not, as Victor Branford put it, “merely a Scottish version of an existing English quarterly, in green instead of yellow.” Rather, he suggested, art and literature were not really the driving force behind the periodical: “It is primarily the beginning of an effort to give periodic expression to a movement that is mainly architectural, educational, scientific. Thus, it is a bye-​product [sic] of social life rather than a literary and artistic main-​product.”49 It was in this spirit that William Macdonald and J. Arthur Tomson declared in the “Proem” that introduced the first volume, “Spring,”

168   Alex Murray “we do not ignore the decadence around us, so much spoken of.” Rather, their aim was to convert those “many clever writers emulously working in a rotten vineyard, so many healthy young men eager for the distinction of decay,” to their doctrine of “Renascence” and rebirth, to make them for, rather than against, nature.50 It is in the second issue of The Evergreen, dedicated to autumn, that the dialogue with decadence comes through clearly. The literary contents are, in many ways, relatively conventional, such as the poems contributed by Sir Noël Paton. The more interesting literary contributions are all the responsibility of William Sharp, whether they be poetry under his own name, a story by Fiona Macleod, or his translation of a symbolist play by the Belgian author Charles Van Lerberghe. The illustrations by Robert Burns carry visual echoes of Beardsley, while their content is indicative of decadent influence and association. For example, Vintage (Figure 8.2) depicts a number of partially clothed women crushing harvest grapes with their feet in preparation for the making of wine. Most striking are two articles on the nature of autumn, both of which challenged the very concept of decadence. “The Biology of Autumn,” by the naturalist J. Arthur Thomson, is, at times, a beautifully lyrical reflection on the biological function of autumn within nature. The decadent hymns to autumn, the evocation of the melancholic charm of crepitating leaves and the coming of winter gloom, are many, yet Thomson asks his readers to remember that all is not as it seems. While the outward signs may suggest “a time of withering and decadence, of leave-​taking and death,” the “more careful listener will hear other very different notes, which tell of the continuance of life in spite of death, of preparation for the future amid the withering of the present.”51 In Patrick Geddes’s essay “The Sociology of Autumn,” the perspective of the botanist is transposed onto the social and cultural world. Of course, Geddes was indulging in a common decadent pastime, that of applying the biological or organic metaphor to social, cultural, and linguistic phenomena. In his 1882 essay on Baudelaire, Paul Bourget had given to the study of decadence the famous part-​ whole analogy, whereby a single corrupting cell could mutate and threaten the entire organism; in the same way, the egoism of the individual might erode social cohesion. Language became for Bourget another organism, and in decadent literature, its decomposition led to formal anarchy.52 Yet Geddes refuses the temptation to moralize, seeing the refinement of art at the fin de siècle as a process that leads to a dissipation of energy rather than morality. Geddes’s account of the development of urban aestheticism is one of the more incisive of the period. For Geddes, the decadent artist was producing the most detailed and unflinching mirror-​image to hold up to fin-​de-​siècle culture. The practitioners of both realism and “that strange and wayward subjective Romanticism” had, through the perspicacity of their analyses, been able to “amply vindicate themselves against the Philistine criticism they have been wont to meet.” Yet the progressive art of the period was in danger of falling into habit: “[T]‌he lotos land is not easily left. For the gentler natures a deepening melancholy suffuses life.” It was inevitable that mental stagnation would manifest itself physically: “[I]naction rouses the morbid strain latent in every life, and so the degeneration of the artist may set in from the physical side.” The resulting

Britain and Ireland    169

Figure 8.2.  Robert Burns, Vintage, in The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 2 (1895): 23. Source: The Yellow Nineties Online (https://​arch​ive.org/​str​eam/​eve​rgre​enno​rthe​r02g​eddu​oft#page/​22/​mode/​2up).

170   Alex Murray ennui could only but lead to dissipation, for “the end of every epoch of decadence has been the same—​an orgie [sic] of strange narcotics and of the strangest sins.” Yet Geddes refused to moralize or luxuriate in the hysterical fatalism of some in the period, for the age was “no hopeless decline, but only an autumn sickness” that would inevitably be followed by a period of rebirth and renovation. As Geddes concludes: The first word of the Sociology of Autumn is of the beauty of Nature, the glory of Life, both culminating (as our urban culture only more fully teaches us) in their Decadence. Hence there inevitably comes the second word, the pessimist antithesis: yet a third—​the vital one—​remains. Amid decay lies the best soil of Renascence: in Autumn its secret: that of survival yet initiative, of inheritance yet fresh variation—​the seed; who wills may find, may sow, and in another Autumn also reap. This last word, then, leaves Omar’s death-​song and returns to the prose of homely life. “Il faut cultiver son jardin.”53

The closing paraphrase from the final lines of Voltaire’s Candide (1759) suggests that rather than reveling in pessimism, or mindlessly seeking after the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz had suggested, the task was to cultivate our gardens, to tend to the here and now, to see what may emerge in the spring to come, and be reaped in the autumn ahead, to accept that intellectual life, like the natural world, has its seasons and its cycles, and that “decadence” is never terminal. As Richard Le Gallienne reflected in his memoir The Romantic ’90s (1925), “Those last ten years of the nineteenth century properly belong to the twentieth century, and, far from being ‘decadent,’ except in certain limited manifestations, they were years of an immense and multifarious renaissance.”54 It is in the literature produced outside of London that we can most clearly grasp the extent to which decadence was not about wallowing in decline and luxury, but about rejuvenation.

Conclusion The circulation of decadence as a literary form and a mode of cultural critique was a relentless process of adaptation and change. Even within a geographically small area like Britain and Ireland, decadence took many forms. As readers, we need to be alive to the variety of decadences on offer. As a literary style and cultural disposition it was able to travel, and in doing so it became richer and stranger. Outside of London decadence became transformed as it found new models in the rhythms of nature and the resources of regionalism. Decadence has always been a means of overcoming the banality of bourgeois modernity and suburban mediocrity, and for the writers explored here that was a project more likely to be realized in the provincial landscapes of Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland.

Britain and Ireland    171

Notes 1. Fiona Macleod, “The Irish Muse. I,” North American Review 179, no. 576 (1904): 685–​97. 2. Richard Le Gallienne, “A Ballad of London,” in The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (London: Elkin Matthews & John Lane, 1894), 20–​21. 3. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, ed. Matthew Creasy (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2014), 138. 4. Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 94. 5. Lionel Johnson, “Friends That Fail Not,” in Post Liminium: Essays and Critical Papers (London: Elkin Matthews, 1911), 214–​15. 6. Johnson, “Poetry and Patriotism in Ireland,” in Post Liminium, 176. 7. John Brannigan, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–​1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 6. 8. Major developments include: Neal Alexander and James Moran, eds., Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Dominic Head, Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 9. Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (London: Elkin Matthews, 1917), 175. 10. Vernon Lee, “An English Writer’s Notes on England,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1899, 99. 11. Vernon Lee, “An English Writer’s Notes on England, The Celtic West (Cornwall, Wales, Ireland),” Scribners, December 1913, 716, 717. 12. Lee, “An English Writer’s Notes,” 715. For a study of Lee’s British travel writing, see Alex Murray, “ ‘Through Variously Tinted Cosmopolitan Glasses’: Vernon Lee’s Travel Writing of the British Isles,” Studies in Travel Writing 23, no. 4 (2019): 342–​57. 13. Vernon Lee, Genius Loci: Notes on Places (London: John Lane, 1907), 3. 14. Michael Field, Works and Days (1896), Add. Mss. 46785, British Library fol. 74. 15. For more on this visit to Cornwall, see Alex Murray “ ‘Profane Travellers’: Michael Field, Cornwall and Modern Tourism,” in Michael Field, Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2019), 167–​87. 16. Arthur Symons, “At The Land’s End,” Cities and Sea-​Coasts and Islands (New York: Brentano’s, 1919), 269. 17. Arthur Symons, “Cornish Wind,” in The Fool of the World and Other Poems (London: W. Heinemann, 1906), 36. 18. Arthur Symons, London: A Book of Aspects (London: Privately Printed for Edmund D. Brooks and His Friends, 1909). 19. I have explored the representation of Wales in The Hill of Dreams in Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 20. Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors; Or the Transmutations (London: John Lane, 1895), 80–​81. 21. Machen, The Three Impostors, 90–​91. 22. Machen, The Three Impostors, 108–​9. 23. Roy Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–​1923 (London: Penguin, 2015).

172   Alex Murray 24. See their contributions to the special cluster of essays on Irish aestheticism edited by Joseph Bristow: Simon Joyce, “Impressionism, Naturalism, Symbolism: Trajectories of Anglo-​Irish Fiction at the Fin de Siècle,” Modernism/​modernity, 21, no. 3, (2014): 787–​803; Alison Harvey, “Irish Aestheticism in Fin-​de-​Siècle Women’s Writing: Art, Realism, and the Nation,” Modernism/​modernity 21, no. 3 (2014): 805–​26. 25. George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island and Major Barbara (New York: Brentano’s, 1908), 75. 26. William Rooney, “Our Peasant Poetry,” The Shan Van Vocht 3, no. 9 (September 5, 1898): 163–​64. 27. J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Boston: John W. Luce, 1911), 36. 28. J. M. Synge, “The Vagrants of Wicklow,” The Shanachie: An Illustrated Irish Miscellany 1 (1907): 98. 29. Arthur Symons, “J. K. Huysmans,” Fortnightly Review (March 1892): 412. 30. Alex Davis, “Learning to Be Brutal: Synge, Decadence, and the Modern Movement,” New Hibernia Review 14, no. 3 (2010): 34. 31. On Joyce and decadence, see David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 121–​33; on Yeats and decadence, see, among others, Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 82–​ 87; on Moore and decadence, see Elizabeth Grubgeld, George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 36–​63; on Egerton and other New Woman writers, see Tina O’Toole, The Irish New Woman (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 32. Edward Thomas, Beautiful Wales (London: A. & C. Black, 1905), 11. 33. The journal’s name was written on the front cover using both Gaelic script with the d lenited (Ulaḋ) and modern Irish (Uladh). For convenience I have used the modern Irish throughout. 34. Fergus, “Our Need of an Impersonal Judgement,” Dana: An Irish Magazine of Independent Thought 1, no. 5 (September 1904): 153. 35. “Editorial Notes,” Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine 1.2 (February 1905): 1–​2. 36. Connla, “Festina Lente!,” Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine 1 no. 2 (February 1905): 13–​14. 37. Herbert Hughes, “The Celtic Leit-​motif,” Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine 1, no. 2 (February 1905): 17. 38. The Uranians were a group of loosely affiliated late-​nineteenth-​and early-​twentieth-​century writers who wrote homoerotic poetry and prose. 39. Forrest Reid, “Pan’s Pupil,” Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine 1, no. 3 (May 1905): 19. 40. Forrest Reid, Private Road (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), 37–​38. 41. Reid, Private Road, 37. 42. Michael Shaw, The Fin-​de-​Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 24. 43. Shaw, The Fin-​de-​Siècle Scottish Revival, 24. 44. Shaw, The Fin-​de-​Siècle Scottish Revival, 97–​111. 45. Fiona Macleod, Pharais: A Romance of the Isles (Derby, England: Harpur and Murray, 1894), 66–​67. 46. Fiona Macleod, The Winged Destiny: Studies in the Spiritual History of the Gael (London: Chapman and Hall, 1904), 166.

Britain and Ireland    173 47. Koenraad Claes, The Late-​Victorian Little Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 175–​76. 48. Shaw, The Fin-​de-​Siècle Scottish Revival, 152. 49. Victor Branford, “Old Edinburgh and The Evergreen,” The Bookman, December 1895: 88–​90. 50. William Macdonald and J. Arthur Tomson, “Proem,” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 1 (1895): 10. 51. J. Arthur Thomson, “The Biology of Autumn,” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 2 (1895): 11. 52. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 90–​104. 53. Patrick Geddes, “The Sociology of Autumn,” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 2 (1895): 36–​38. 54. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (New York: Doubleday, 1925), 136.

Further Reading Beckson, Karl. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. Brannigan, John. Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890–​1970. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Desmarais, Jane, and Alice Condé, eds. Decadence and the Senses. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence at the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Freeman, Nick. “ ‘Poisonous Honey’: Recent Writing on Decadence and the 1890s.” Literature Compass 14, no. 9 (September 2017): e12392. doi:10.1111/​lic3.12392. Hall, Jason David, and Alex Murray, eds. Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. MacLeod, Kirsten. Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Mahoney, Kristin. Literature and the Politics of Post-​ Victorian Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Murray, Alex. Landscapes of Decadence: Literature and Place at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. O’Toole, Tina. The Irish New Woman. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Pittock, Murray G. H. Spectrum of Decadence: Literature of the 1890s. London: Routledge, 1993. Shaw, Michael. The Fin-​de-​Siècle Scottish Revival: Romance, Decadence and Celtic Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Thornton, R. K. R. The Decadent Dilemma. London: Edward Arnold, 1983.

Chapter 9

Italy Decadent Dichotomies in a Disruptive Age Lara Raffaelli

What is true of decadence in other cultural contexts is, if anything, even more true during the Italian fin de siècle. No doubt because of the recent unification of the peoples of the peninsula into a new nation, the sense that an old age had ended and a new one was beginning was felt more acutely in Italy than in France or Britain. In Italy, many who reflected on contemporary events as they occurred viewed political conquest and technological progress as barbaric and invasive. They felt alienated from a rapidly transforming world dominated by materialistic interests, removed not only from the bourgeois class that promoted capitalism and imperialism but also from the lower classes seeking emancipation through strikes and violence. The divide between intellectuals and the masses was probably greater in Italy than it was in either Britain or France, prompting some to withdraw into solitude, escaping into dreams and mysticism and compelling others to think of themselves as inherently superior to the common man, consistent with Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman living “beyond good and evil,” free and open to all pleasures, exercising a joyous, hedonistic vitality. The difference between a decadent hero like the Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes in J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) and one like Andrea Sperelli in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889) lies precisely in the latter’s active pursuit of hedonistic pleasures, whereas the former lives a life of aesthetic monasticism in which bodily pleasure is largely in the past. Similarly, Des Esseintes’s disdain for the bourgeoisie lies at the heart of the political dimension of Against Nature, whereas Sperelli’s rancor is also directed at the working classes. But in Italy, as in other parts of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the complex set of political, economic, sociological, and technological changes affecting all spheres of nineteenth-​century life led to the alienation of writers and poets from the sweeping and monumental changes that constituted progress. This historical context is especially germane to the Italian writers associated with the literary movement known as il decadentismo. The term can be translated as “decadentism,” but to do so

Italy   175 misrepresents the unique nature of the Italian phenomenon, since the better-​known manifestations of both French and British decadence might be described—​and have been described—​as examples of “decadentism.” For purposes of this discussion, the Italian term decadentismo will be retained in order to better convey a sense of the distinctiveness of the decadent culture that developed in Italy around the same time as it emerged in France and Britain. Chronology is often a problem in discussions of decadence, but the Italian variant, with D’Annunzio (1863–​1938) as its principal exponent, follows the French phenomenon and anticipates the British, to some degree. To read Pleasure is to enter a world of aesthetic obsessiveness that echoes Against Nature, but its immoral antihero, whose aesthetic enthusiasms are matched by his hedonistic compulsions, also looks forward to the title character of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/​1891). French décadence, British decadence, and Italian decadentismo may have much in common as artistic responses to the social, economic, and political changes of the late nineteenth century, but decadentismo stands out for the way it registers those changes. Years ago, Mario Praz described the cultural dichotomies of decadentismo as “a meeting of extremes in the same person: D’Annunzio is a barbarian and at the same time a Decadent, . . . a warrior as well as a voluptuary.”1 Such a statement could never be made of Huysmans or Wilde: if décadence in France descends from the Baudelairean dualism of spleen and idéal and the decadence in Britain resides in the paradox that turns life into art, decadentismo in Italy lies largely in the kinds of irreconcilable dichotomies D’Annunzio and other Italians of the era embodied.

Historical Context: The New Italy One of the larger dichotomies of the period was the simultaneous appeal of both modernity and tradition. Strictly speaking, the nation of Italy did not exist until 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy was established after the protracted battle for unification known as the Risorgimento (literally, “rising again”). The belated emergence of Italy as a modern nation, however, did nothing to ensure wholesale acceptance of modernity. For example, in his study of Italian industrial development during the latter part of the nineteenth century, Luca Cottini cites an article by the Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis, who attended the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878 but remained ambivalent about the new age of Italian industrialization.2 Known for his novel Cuore (Heart of a Boy, 1888), which promoted civic values in the post-​Risorgimento context, De Amicis was fascinated by the prospect of Italian modernity but was, at the same time, resistant to it, stressing both the pursuit of new cultural models and the desire to remain faithful to tradition.3 The conflict between modernity and tradition was visibly evident in programs of urban renovation in major Italian cities. Though not on the same scale as Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, urban renovation had an enormous impact on Italian society, particularly in Rome, which became the capital of the nation-​state in 1870. The government ordered the immediate expansion and gentrification of the city,

176   Lara Raffaelli with the 1880s witnessing the frenzied construction of residential apartments, causing a rise in prices and consequent reduction in demand for housing. The result was a spectacular crash, which provoked, from 1887, a crisis that lasted well into the 1890s.4 Building sites were abandoned, leaving apartments half-​built. Companies went bankrupt, construction workers were unemployed, and inhabitants of new residential areas were forced to live for decades with no services. The collapse of the economy and the forced suspension of construction, once again, forms a contrast with the prosperity of Britain and France and is yet another factor in distinguishing decadentismo from decadence in England and décadence in France. Logically enough, economic circumstances in the new Italy had radical social ramifications, with the traditional social substrate consisting of ecclesiasts, aristocrats, visiting foreigners, and middle-​class people rapidly transformed by the influx into the population of a dense population of workers from all over the peninsula, as well as from foreign countries.5

D’Annunzio’s Pleasure and Other Works D’Annunzio’s Pleasure vividly expresses several of the motivational forces underlying decadentismo, including the aristocratic disdain for democracy, the closely related removal from modern political reality, and the obsessive pursuit of pleasure as an escapist response to the new social and political developments. Early in the novel, the noble Sperelli family is introduced as the social antithesis of contemporary Italy: Beneath today’s gray democratic flood, which wretchedly submerges so many beautiful and rare things, that special class of ancient Italic nobility in which from generation to generation a certain family tradition of elect culture, elegance and art was kept alive, is also slowly disappearing. To this class, which I would call Arcadian because it rendered its greatest splendor in the sweet life of the eighteenth century, the Sperelli family belonged. Urbanity, elegant writing skills, a love of delicacy, a predilection for unusual studies, a mania for archaeology, refined gallantry, were all hereditary qualities of the house of Sperelli.6

Here, the narrator’s viewpoint is clear: democracy is dismal and suffocates anything refined or rare. The “sweet life of the eighteenth century” denotes the turning away from the present towards the golden age of the aristocratic past, figured here as the unspoiled Arcadia of classical mythology. A second key passage from Pleasure tells us even more about the political sensibility of Andrea Sperelli, the novel’s protagonist: Much noise came from Piazza di Montecitorio and from Piazza Colonna, and it spread like a din made by waves, growing, receding, rising again, mingled with the

Italy   177 blaring of military trumpets. The sedition was growing, in the ashen, cold evening; the horror of the distant massacre was making the masses yell; men were running, waving great bundles of paper, cutting through the crowd; above the racket, the name “Africa” could distinctly be heard. —​All for four hundred brutes, who died brutally! Andrea murmured, drawing back after having looked out of the window. (261)

Enclosed in a carriage, Sperelli observes with irritation the hubbub caused by “the masses,” from which he detaches himself. The word “Africa” tells us that Italy’s colonialist expansion into eastern Africa, specifically that part of Ethiopia that has since become the country of Eritrea, has begun. What is termed “sedition” in the passage is a protest against Italian adventurism in the region that led to the slaughter of several hundred Italian soldiers on January 26, 1887, in the Eritrean village of Dogali. Finally, the decadent resistance to progress and the compulsive need for pleasure is captured by this compelling passage: Certain fair-​haired ladies, no longer young but just out of their youth, dressed in a dull silk the color of a yellow chrysanthemum, dance [the gavotte] with adolescent dancing partners, dressed in rose, somewhat listless; they carry in their hearts the image of other, more beautiful women, the flame of a new desire. And they dance it in a hall that is too large, which has all the walls covered in mirrors; they dance it upon a floor inlaid with amaranthus and cedar, beneath a great crystal chandelier in which the candles are about to burn out, but never do. And on their slightly faded mouths the women have a faint but never-​dimming smile; and the gentlemen have an infinite boredom in their eyes. And a pendulum clock is always sounding the same hour; and the mirrors always repeat repeat repeat the same poses; and the gavotte continues continues continues, always sweet, always slow, always the same, eternally, like a prison sentence. (204)

The passage reveals the paradox of decadent compulsion, implicit in the title Pleasure: a constant pursuit of pleasure, which once fulfilled the pursuers but does so no longer. Hence the gentlemen suffer “an infinite boredom”; time remains constant; the same poses “repeat repeat repeat”; and the gavotte—​a stately, formal dance—​becomes an eternal prison sentence. Important here, also, is the absence of youth. The women are “no longer young but just out of their youth”: youth is beauty, but both youth and beauty are transitory. This is the crux of D’Annunzian decadence—​the sense that in beauty lies death, accompanied by the paradoxical knowledge that in vanquishing beauty death heightens it. Those “fair-​haired ladies” who are “no longer young” dance toward inevitable death. The “infinite boredom” of the gentlemen emphasizes their inability to sustain pleasure: when not replaced by something new and more pleasurable, pleasure becomes commonplace. The passage is actually from one of Sperelli’s diary entries, which the young aristocrat follows with a telling comment: “That sadness entices me” (204).

178   Lara Raffaelli The comment obviously reflects a wish to preserve something of the aristocratic past, however faded and weary it might be. That wish for preservation also extends to the built environment, as the narrator alludes to the building frenzy and the unease provoked by the destruction of, for example, the park at Villa Ludovisi in Rome, which was subdivided into separate plots and sold for residential and business development.7 This activity was highly distressing not only for D’Annunzio but also for other writers and artists, who saw in the irreparable damage to the city a negative symbol of the new Rome.8 Especially upsetting was the large-​scale felling of trees to make way for new construction, which D’Annunzio describes in Pleasure by personifying “the plane trees from the Orient and the cypresses of Aurora” on the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi, “which seemed immortal” but “shivered in the presentiment of the market and of death” (82). D’Annunzio returned to his critique of the building frenzy in his novel Le vergini delle rocce (The Virgins of the Rocks, 1895), where he again describes the destruction of the park and its trees: The laurels and roses of the Villa Sciarra, whose praises had been sung by the nightingales for such a long succession of nights, were being cut down to the ground, or survived in a humble position inside the gates of little gardens surrounding new villas built for grocers. The gigantic Ludovisi cypresses, those of the Aurora, the very same which had once spread the solemnity of their ancient mystery over the Olympian head of Goethe, lay on the ground (I see them always in imagination as my eyes saw them one November afternoon) side by side in a row, with the smoke from their naked roots rising up to the pale heaven above, with their black roots all laid bare.9

The reference to “grocers” with their “new villas” reveals disdain for the rising middle class. The allusion to Johann Wolfgang Goethe (a similar allusion to the German poet is part of the Villa Ludovisi plaint in Pleasure as well) makes clear the contrast between an imagined aristocracy of poets in the past and the all-​too-​real, all-​too-​commercial bourgeoisie of the present. Yet another passage about the Villa Ludovisi, however, this one from Giovanni Episcopo (1891), suggests that the destruction occasioned by the urban renovation of Rome is strangely compelling: “And we continued walking toward the house in the hot sun, over the plots of wasteland around Villa Ludovisi, through chopped down trees, piles of bricks, deep lime pits, which dazzled and attracted me.”10 Such passages show that the sense of ambivalence about Italian modernity that De Amicis described was deeply felt by D’Annunzio as well. One point about which the character Sperelli expresses no ambivalence, however, is the contempt he feels for the working class. This sense of contempt is interwoven with the abhorrence the character feels for various building projects in the new Rome, making urban renovation seem more like cultural destruction: Around the fountain of Piazza Barberini the streetlamps were already burning with small faint flames, like candles around a dead body; and the Triton was no longer

Italy   179 spouting water, perhaps due to restoration or cleaning. Carts descended the slope drawn by two or three horses harnessed one behind the other, and throngs of workmen returned from the new construction sites. Some, linked arm in arm, were staggering and singing a rude song at the tops of their voices. (74)

The ecclesiastical image comparing streetlamps to candles burning about a corpse is the kind of metaphor one might find in Huysmans, but the image of working men as a drunken mob is—​even in the context of the reactionary politics of decadent literature generally—​particularly regressive and contributes to yet another fundamental dichotomy, this one between the retrograde aristocracy and the rude but progressive working class. D’Annunzio himself referred to his character Sperelli as a “monster,”11 an indication that he placed a measure of authorial distance between himself and his protagonist, even though author and character have much in common aesthetically and morally. Such distancing, which in D’Annunzio’s case mainly concerns the politics of the character Sperelli, seems greater than one usually finds with other decadent writers, the best example being Wilde, many of whose characters, such as Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, seem at home in the same social and moral worlds in which Wilde himself moved. The distance between author and character is evident not only in Pleasure, but also in other works by D’Annunzio. Possibly the most repellent of all his characters is the womanizer Tullio Hermil in L’innocente (The Intruder, 1891–​1892), who purposefully exposes his adulterous wife’s illegitimate baby to the winter air, then documents its death from pneumonia. Giorgio Aurispa in Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894) throws himself off a cliff, taking his despised lover, Ippolita, with him. Sperelli in Pleasure loses both women he loves and ends up alone and discredited, having brought about his own decline. His fate is consistent with the way most decadent narratives play out, but Sperelli seems to have made his destiny more than most, and to deserve what he has made. The female characters in D’Annunzio’s decadent fiction often appear as the stereotypes of either virgins or whores. The pattern is very much the case in Pleasure, as Sperelli’s desire oscillates between the saintly Maria Ferres and the worldly Elena Muti. D’Annunzio wrote six major novels and a novella, Giovanni Episcopo. Throughout these novels the male protagonist is constantly seeking a woman, sometimes as a wife to bear his children, but more often as a partner in debauchery. In the latter case, especially, the image of women is never positive. The D’Annunzian woman suffers from repugnant diseases and sterility. She is carnal, lascivious, impure. She is seductive and dangerous, inspiring images of the dancing Salome and evoking visions of bloody death. In Pleasure, the two female protagonists embody the opposing stereotypes assigned to them, with the lust and feral sensuality of Elena Muti evoking images of Medusa, while the motherly love and spirituality of Maria Ferres, as her name implies, suggests the Virgin Mary. But neither is sufficient; the protagonist Sperelli comes to desire a third—​an imaginary, ideal woman who impossibly incarnates both types. His psyche is possessed by two drives: Eros, the pleasure

180   Lara Raffaelli principle, and Thanatos, the death drive. His pursuit of supreme pleasure is dedicated to both art and carnal gratification, and where carnal pleasure could be construed to signify Eros, the creative, reproductive force, his unrelenting desire to find ever-​ greater heights of enjoyment means that carnal pleasure is ultimately bound up with Thanatos, a self-​destructive quest leading to ruin. The numerous dichotomies that D’Annunzio’s work explores—​purity vs. impurity; carnality vs. spirituality; veneration for mothers and sisters vs. disdain for lovers; sisterly love vs. incest; Eros vs. Thanatos—​make him the premier exponent of decadentismo. Most of those contrasts involve a particularly misogynistic regard for women, and in this respect D’Annunzio is typical of his age. The idealization of woman that plays out in his representation of the Maria Ferres character in Pleasure takes on a more aesthetic aspect in some of D’Annunzio’s poetry, notably Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly poem, 1893), which Praz and Walter Binni regard as the first real contribution to Italian decadent literature for its evident relation to the French decadents.12 At the same time, Poema paradisiaco reveals the influence of the British Pre-​Raphaelites, especially in the poem “Psiche giacente” (Psyche reclining), inspired by Edward Burne-​Jones’s painting Cupid and Psyche (c. 1870).13 The French-​British influences on Poema paradisiaco suggests how pervasive the virgin-​whore contrast was well before D’Annunzio employed the trope. Praz claims that the 1893 poem first brought the femme fatale to “the notice of Italian readers” in the form of the woman who “united in herself the whole sensual experience of the world—​Pamphila, reincarnation of Helen and Sappho.”14 He also invokes the Medusa and “La belle dame sans merci”: the “fatal woman” who threatens the creative powers of the artist-​hero.15 D’Annunzio is reputed to have followed Algernon Charles Swinburne in his treatment of the so-​called fatal woman, but Patrick Flynn observes that Ippolita Sanzio, the heroine of The Triumph of Death, develops the fatal woman theme further than Swinburne does, noting that she has become far more sexual in her desire to have sovereignty over men; he comments that the men in D’Annunzio’s works “reacted with hatred to their involuntary devotion to this soul-​destroying vampire.”16 In any event, the main theme of The Triumph of Death is the conflict of Eros and Thanatos, showing once more that D’Annunzio’s interests lie in exploring contrary states and the fine line between love and death.17

D’Annunzio and Decadent Style Decadence as a general, unnamed “movement” may have been born in France, but it is not wholly identical with the rather limited trend known as décadisme, the brain-​child of Anatole Baju, the literary and political opportunist whose magazine Le décadent was, nonetheless, important to the wider reception of décadence as a literary culture centered on such authors as Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Paul Verlaine, and Huysmans, all of whom shared a common spirit, values, and perspective on life and art.18 Italian decadentismo was inspired by these French developments, and of the Italian writers we

Italy   181 associate with decadentismo, D’Annunzio is the one whose style is most akin to that of the French decadents. As Richard Drake puts it, D’Annunzio “came under the spell of . . . Huysmans,”19 whose hero Des Esseintes reflects on the literary style of writers from both Roman decadence and contemporary nineteenth-​century decadence in terms that seem not merely descriptive but also prescriptive. Among the stylistic traits valued by Des Esseintes in writers such as Plautus and Lucan are the tendency toward “plentiful neologisms” combined with “fine craftmanship” that results in “enamelled and jewelled verse.” Des Esseintes finds these and other qualities, such as “syntactical excesses” and a “gamey” or over-​ripe style, in the authors of his own age whom he most admires, Stéphane Mallarmé above all.20 D’Annunzio’s admiration of Huysmans must be regarded as one factor in his own cultivation of what is called in Pleasure “his own particular manner and style” (224). While that description refers to the character Sperelli, the way his personal style is detailed suggests affinities with D’Annunzio’s own style, since it is composed of “grotesque phrases,” “huge paradoxes,” “incomprehensible subtleties”—​ “an unorthodox language, mingled with slang, with a thousand flavors in a Rabelaisian olla podrida [literally, “rotten pot,” a type of Spanish meat stew], laden with strong spices and succulent flesh” (223–​24). The style in D’Annunzio’s hands makes his highly curated writing rich and melodic: every line renders intensity of emotion and depth of sensory experience while evoking sumptuousness (or squalor, depending on context). D’Annunzio loved language and loved taking liberties with it by employing archaic vocabulary, coining new words, and pushing expression beyond conventional boundaries. In Pleasure, words are used as a powerful means of seduction when they are lent “wings and flames” (226) by wine, becoming potent and alive: “precise and powerful, a real word made of flesh and bones, a sentence full of substantial marrow, a phrase that lives and breathes and palpitates like the object of which it depicts the form” (224). Indeed, language is given substantial body in D’Annunzio’s writing: it is the very medium of desire itself: “There was an inexpressible voluptuous allurement in the opening of her lips” when Elena Muti pronounces the first-​person form of the verb piacere (to like), “so liquid and sensual in the mouth of a woman” (79). D’Annunzio’s language is most malleable in the section surrounding the sonnet sequence (138–​40), where Sperelli reflects on complex poetic structures: “the precise epithets, the lucid metaphors, the studied harmonies, the exquisite combinations of hiatus and diaeresis,” as well as “the mysterious artifices of the hendecasyllable”; the poet concludes that “[t]‌he Verse is everything” (135). The sonnet itself is composed in archaic Italian, with ancient spelling, using “j” in place of “g” in “jacinto” (hyacinth; modern spelling: giacinto—​the archaic spelling also changes the modern pronunciation of the word), “laberinto” for “labirinto” (labyrinth), “fiso” for “fisso” (fixedly), “nudriti” for “nutriti” (nourished), “ascose” for “nascoste” (hidden), and “leggiero” for “leggero” (light). Even articles and prepositions are handled in archaic fashion, with “li” for “gli” (the) and “de’ ” for “dei” (of the). D’Annunzio also makes use of apocope, or the loss of sounds at the ends of words, to derive “tien” from “tiene” (holds), “fuor” from “fuori”

182   Lara Raffaelli (outside), “sen” from “seno” (breast), “gran” from “grande” (large), “mal” from “male” (evil), “or” from “ora” (now), “cor” from “cuore” (heart), and “amor” from “amore” (love). In the case of the last two examples, the apocope renders the word into the original Latin form from which the modern Italian word developed. We also find the archaic poetic form “desiata” instead of “desiderata” (desired); some words drop a consonant from the more familiar modern form in favor of the archaic original, as with “ebrezza” for “ebbrezza” (ecstasy). Syncope, or the loss of a sound from the middle of a word, is evident in “spirti” for “spiriti” (spirits). Adjectives that are usually placed after a noun are inverted in D’Annunzio’s Italian, as in these phrases: “le pure dita” (pure fingers) and “un’assai bianca donna” (a very pale woman). These are all examples that mostly involve diction, but D’Annunzio also indulges in a number of grammatical and syntactical irregularities, as when Sperelli describes a woman’s hair as “quei di foco intrichi” where we would expect to find “quei focosi intrichi” (those fiery tangles). A literal translation of Sperelli’s version would be “those of fire tangles,” but D’Annunzio is probably depending on the reader to decipher the kind of syntax we would ordinarily encounter in Latin, yielding “those tangles of fire.” A more extended and problematic Latinate quatrain from the second sonnet in the series is this one: Or nel gran cerchio de’ dolori umani entra, novizia in veste di jacinto, dietro lasciando il falso laberinto ove i belli ruggian mostri pagani.21

The quatrain can be translated thus: Now the great circle of human suffering she enters, a novice in robes of hyacinth, abandoning behind her the false labyrinth where beautiful pagan monsters were roaring. (139)

In addition to the archaic diction already discussed (or for ora, jacinto for giacinto, and so on), the passage employs (random) Latin syntax, most obviously in the placement of the adjective belli (beautiful) not before the noun but before the verb, so that the last line of the quatrain literally reads: “where the beautiful were roaring pagan monsters.” This sort of archaic usage recurs throughout the text, imbuing it with an air of antiquity that is more evocative of Dante or Petrarch than of a modern Italian writer. Overall, the language of Pleasure is hybrid and eclectic, the proof of this point being the number of languages incorporated into the novel, including German, English, French, Spanish, Latin, Sanskrit, and even Japanese. The eclecticism of the language, the sense that almost anything goes, perhaps serves as a cognate of the hedonistic behavior of the novel’s central character.

Italy   183

Decadentismo: The Literary Context The Italian literary tradition is long and influential: Renaissance Italy was a primary source in European literary history, serving as a conduit for a broad dissemination of classical texts, both Greek and Roman. The prestige of Italian culture and its influential role in the development of European culture more broadly perhaps creates the impression that all that culture was produced by Italy, a reasonable enough assumption. But it was not: it was produced by Italians all right, but those Italians—​Tuscans and Sicilians, Venetians and Romans, Piedmontese and Sardinians, and so on—​were often bitter enemies, loyal not to the nation of Italy but to their separate regions and kingdoms. After unification in 1861, these social contrasts and the misery of the poor were reflected in the literature of the movement called verismo, roughly analogous to realism in England and to naturalisme in France. The difference between verismo and decadentismo, both of which describe reality in minute detail, depends on the narrator’s perspective: verismo is a literature of objectivity, where the narrative voice simply describes what it sees, without casting judgment, while decadentismo is a literature of pure subjectivity, showing the effect of external events on individuals, prompting them to turn their attention inward. While the French writers associated with décadence were united by similarities of style, in Italy decadentismo is characterized by a general lack of commonality in stylistic terms. There is no narrow category in which we can position the Italian writers we class as “decadent.” Binni writes that anyone wanting to trace the characteristics of decadent poetics is bound to encounter great variation in the literature the critic seeks to describe, even to the point of having to identify the “single poetics of single artists.”22 Binni describes the movements of scapigliatura, estetismo, crepuscolarismo, and futurismo as being linked to decadentismo,23 with scapigliatura (unkempt), a literary circle based in the north of Italy in the 1860s, being most similar to the decadent groups of other European countries by virtue of being an established circle. Scapigliatura was, for Binni, the earliest ambit of Italian decadentismo, as it showed the first hints of a decadent consciousness. Yet he sees the group as more bohemian than decadent, in that despite their suicides and addiction to alcohol and absinthe, they lack the sense of perversion, the conscience of cursed poets, of fallen angels and of saints sublimating themselves in guilty and unnatural sensations, qualities often associated with the decadent tradition, especially manifest in the life and work of Baudelaire. But they are missing a key feature of Italian decadentismo—​the discovery of the unconscious that eliminates moral obligations and stimulates a new realm of sensations and demands the absolute fusion of life and art.24 The scapigliati have been described as related more to the Romantics than to the decadents for their inability to overcome the limits of morality; their themes of duality, of “angelism vs. demonism,” borrowed from German Romanticism, remain unresolved and separate—​a Romantic trope.25 These authors may touch upon one or another feature associated with decadentismo, but none of them embody the sensibility as fully

184   Lara Raffaelli as D’Annunzio, whose work conveys a sense of monstrous immorality and unnatural pleasures combined with the residue of Romantic spirituality. The large number of writers associated with decadentismo and the span of their work over multiple generations make the task of defining Italian decadence a continuing challenge. That said, a unifying factor across the diverse literary texts of Italian decadentismo is the worldview and nature of the protagonists, all invariably pessimistic and inert. The novels in the Italian tradition of decadence are all tragedies, but not in the Aristotelian sense of “noble tragedy.” While some protagonists may be of noble extraction, none of their actions are heroic. Consistent with the concept of decadence as decay or decline, Italian decadent heroes all follow a predestined, self-​inflicted road to solitude, excommunication, madness, and death, reflecting the social, cultural, and political turbulence of the period. The absence of heroism and the lack of a positive ending define the novel of decadentismo (and of modernism) and characterize its opposition to and difference from Romanticism. As Elio Gioanola says, Romantic characters are all “positive heroes” whose struggles are rewarded even if they die because their actions vindicate their cause, whatever it is.26 Decadent heroes are, essentially, antiheroes. Decadentismo can be located within the larger movement of modernism, characteristics of both being the idea of division within society and the role of the intellectual. The origins of Italian modernism can be traced back, Luca Somigli observes, to the fracture between artists and bourgeois society in the second half of the nineteenth century.27 The political events in Italy—​the Risorgimento, the capture of Rome, and the establishment of the newly unified state—​were fundamental in establishing the hegemony of the middle class in place of the landowning aristocracy. This social transformation, as necessary as it was for an essentially agrarian society to make progress, was viewed with apprehension.28 The Italian critic Francesco de Sanctis (1817–​1883) had earlier suggested in his Storia della letteratura italiana (The history of Italian literature, 1870) that intellectuals were to serve as the backbone of the bourgeois nation.29 He had foreseen the crisis of the liberal state post-​unification (corruption, failure of politics as conscience of society, and of democratic institutions) and had strongly believed that the function of intellectuals was to provide the critical conscience of the rising bourgeoisie.30 A number of intellectuals did ultimately offer a conscientious critique of the new nation, but perhaps not in the constructive way de Sanctis had hoped. Benedetto Croce (1866–​1952) understood decadentismo in polemical terms that went beyond literature alone and extended into “a series of moral and intellectual attitudes” that presented “objective obstacles to the foundation of a cultural civilization.”31 In other words, Croce viewed decadentismo as the obverse of the sort of cultural conscience de Sanctis imagined. Croce ascribes an instrumental importance to literature that seems quite removed from French associations of décadence with l’art pour l’art or British affiliations between decadence and the art-​for-​art’s-​sake sensibility. Describing decadentismo as a form of literary pessimism resulting from historical disappointment, Croce saw the work of decadent writers as lacking any sense of patriotism or humanity, with the bourgeois institution of the family depicted either as a purely physiological relationship or an organism of capitalist economy. He felt that a wind of brutality and

Italy   185 cynicism had blown through the world, leaving those who could not withstand its destructive forces stripped of goodness and believing they could fashion a new life only by seeking pleasure in self-​isolation, apart from any larger community.32 That negative assessment may be largely true, but as the history of Italy and D’Annunzio’s later career shows, the kind of patriotism Croce found lacking in decadentismo was no guarantee of humanity.

Decadentismo beyond D’Annunzio D’Annunzio’s work dominates discussion of decadentismo, but any number of additional Italian authors have been considered in the context as well, such as Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–​1911) and Giovanni Pascoli (1855–​1912). A full generation older than the more celebrated D’Annunzio, Fogazzaro anticipates the basic plot of Pleasure in his first novel, Malombra (1881), with the story of the aesthete Corrado Silla’s fatalistic pursuit of the beautiful but deranged Marina di Malombra. The earlier novel differs from Pleasure, however, in the neo-​Gothic device whereby Marina, the present lady of the Malombra manor, believes she is the reincarnation of a former noblewoman and that her suitor Silla is, likewise, that dead noblewoman’s lover reborn. The “evil shadow” (malombra) of the past that falls over the present perhaps serves as an allegory of Fogazzaro’s sense of unease over the materialist modernization of the new Italy.33 Pascoli likewise expressed the disenchantment and frustration of a poet confronted with modernity. The notion of decadentismo as a late, “diseased” form of Romanticism seems particularly apt in the case of Pascoli, for whom nature often seems to compound sorrow rather than offer solace or relief. A poem from his early collection Myricae (Tamarisks, 1891) shows just how removed from conventional Romanticism Pascoli’s decadent Romanticism is. In “Novembre,” the poet initially responds to a bright November day by saying that “the sun is so clear you expect to see apricot trees in bloom” (il sole così chiaro—​che tu ricerchi gli albicocchi in fiore). But at the end of the three-​ stanza poem, the poet hears “the fragile fall of leaves” (di foglie un cader fragile) after a gust of wind and modifies his earlier intimation of verdant life on the bright November day: “It is the cold /​summer, of the dead” (È l’estate—​fredda, dei morti).34 We are a long way here from the way seasonal metaphors work in traditional Romanticism. The cold wind in “Novembre” might well allude to the “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet beloved by Italians); if so, the sentiment in Shelley’s famous line—​“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”—​is rather severely reimagined.35 The focus on male authors in discussions of decadentismo, however, is somewhat misleading, because literary decadence in Italy is not exclusively a male domain. One of the things that distinguishes nineteenth-​century literary production in Italy is the high number of female writers active during the period, several of whom, such as Matilde Serao (1856–​1927) and Grazia Deledda (1871–​1936), being particularly noteworthy.36 The Nobel Prize winner Deledda escapes precise classification, often placed between verismo

186   Lara Raffaelli and decadentismo. The logic of that placement derives from her detailed descriptions of her native Sardinia, such regionalism being an attribute of verismo, whereas the lurid plots of many of her novels ally them with decadentismo, as with the one that brought Deledda her first success, La via del male (The path of evil, 1896), about a woman who marries the man who murdered her first husband. While verismo and decadentismo might be construed as yet another dichotomy of the period, in Deledda’s work the relationship between the two modalities suggests something more complex.37 Deledda may have read D’Annunzio and been influenced by his novels, but Italy’s most famous exponent of decadentismo read Serao and praised her work. Unlike Deledda, Serao was responsive to the spiritualist, mystical trends of the times, but like the Sardinian writer she focused on the derelict fringes of society, on the lowest of classes.38 Her novels offer a critique of capitalist forces that alienate the individual and objectify women’s bodies, thereby revealing the limitations of social “progress.”39 Despite this stance, like her French contemporary Rachilde she remained staunchly anti-​feminist, using her journalistic platform to argue against female suffrage. Her novels and short stories, like the work of Deledda, are hard to place in a single tradition. Although her southern Italian focus aligns her with verismo, certain motifs in her work, such as the female double, might be construed as suggestive of decadentismo as a latter-​day, “corrupted” form of Romanticism. Certainly, she is akin to D’Annunzio in her skepticism about the value of modernity: for Serao, progress was not a solution to the problems of nineteenth-​century Italy.40 Some critics consider Italo Svevo (Ettore Schmitz, 1861–​1928) and Luigi Pirandello (1867–​1936), both of whom are best known for work they did in the twentieth century, as writers in the tradition of nineteenth-​century decadentismo, while others consider them as modernists. This double identification results partly from Croce’s negative assessment of most modern literature as decadent by definition, and partly from an older Italian critical tradition that regarded decadentismo as more closely related to modernism than to the French and British traditions of decadence—​indeed, at one time Italian critics treated il decadentismo and modernism as almost synonymous.41 The relationship between the two remains a topic of ongoing discussion in Italian criticism.

Conclusion The Italian context helps to illuminate the persistent question about the relationship of decadence to modernism more broadly. Decadence may well be a mixed response to modernity, but surely the species of modernity that elicits the response makes a difference in the degree to which this or that writer might be understood as “decadent,” “modernist,” or something in between. The situation of decadent intellectuals in the context of a modern, industrialized Italy helps to make the point about how variable decadent culture can be as the conditions of modernity change over time. In the 1880s, the sort of aristocratic disdain that D’Annunzio had for modernity might have been expressed as a

Italy   187 sense of nostalgic malaise, but by the 1930s that quaint malaise had modulated into anxiety and uncertainty over the new horrors that modernity had in store.

Notes 1. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), 401. 2. Luca Cottini, The Art of Objects: The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture, 1878–​1928 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 11. 3. Cottini, 12. 4. Paolo Di Martino, “ ‘Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day’: Lobbies, Institutions and Speculation in the 1880s Building Fever,” Urban History 39, no. 3 (August 2012): 478. 5. Cristina Mazzoni, “Capital City: Rome 1870–​2010,” Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010): 15, 25–​26. 6. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pleasure, trans. Lara Gochin Raffaelli (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013), 33. Further references cited parenthetically. 7. For more information on the dismantlement of the Villa Ludovisi and discussion of the urbanization of Rome, see “ ‘The Destruction of Rome’: Herman Grimm (1886) on the Development of the Rione Ludovisi,” Archivio digitale Boncompagni Ludovisi, July 2, 2013, https://​villal​udov​isi.org/​. 8. Vittorio Vidotto, Roma contemporanea (Rome-​Bari: Editori Laterza, 2006), 80. 9. Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Virgins of the Rocks, trans. Agatha Hughes (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 55. 10. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giovanni Episcopo, trans. Raymond Rosenthal, in Nocturne and Five Tales of Love and Death (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1988), 148. 11. Alexander Stille, introduction to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pleasure, trans. Lara Raffaelli (New York: Penguin, 2013), xxii. 12. Mario Praz, “D’Annunzio nella cultura europea,” Lettere Italiane 15, no. 4 (October–​ December 1963): 440; Walter Binni, La poetica del decadentismo (Florence: Il Ponte Editore, 2014), 82. 13. Giuliana Pieri, “The Myth of Psyche in the Work of D’Annunzio and Burne-​Jones,” in Text and Image in Modern European Culture, ed. Natasha Grigorian et al. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2012), 22. 14. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 251. 15. Praz, 195. 16. Patrick Quinn, “The Erosion of Sexual Power in the Femme Fatale: D’Annunzio Transforms Swinburne,” in Proteus: The Language of Metamorphosis, ed. Carla Dente et al. (London: Routledge, 2018), 206. 17. For more insight into Eros and Thanatos in D’Annunzio’s work, see Marja Härmänmaa, “The Seduction of Thanatos: Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Decadent Death,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 225–​53. 18. Binni, La poetica del decadentismo, 27. 19. Richard Drake, “Decadence, Decadentism and Decadent Romanticism in Italy,” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 1 (January 1982): 74. Drake comments that “decadentism became a serious and widespread force in Italy only with D’Annunzio,

188   Lara Raffaelli beginning around 1885 when the poet came under the spell of À Rebours by Joris-​Karl Huysmans” (75). 20. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 29, 184. 21. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il piacere (Naples: Le Parche Edizioni, 2016), 184. 22. Binni, La poetica del decadentismo, 39. 23. Binni, 22. 24. Binni, 56. 25. For a thorough discussion of the scapigliati, see Giuseppe Farinelli, Scapigliatura: Profilo storico, protagonisti e documenti (Rome: Carocci, 2003). 26. Elio Gioanola, La narrativa tra ’800 e ’900: Svevo e Pirandello (Faenza: Tools, 1991), 7. 27. Luca Somigli, “In the Shadow of Byzantium: Modernism in Italian Literature,” in Modernism, ed. Vivian Liska and Astradur Eysteinsson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 2:912. 28. Somigli, 2:912. 29. Francesco de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (Naples: Morano, 1870), 492–​93. 30. Arcangelo Leone De Castris, Il decadentismo italiano: Svevo, Pirandello, D’Annunzio (Bari: De Donato, 1974), 13. 31. Mario Moroni, “Sensuous Maladies: The Construction of Italian Decadentismo,” in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-​Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 77. 32. Benedetto Croce, La letteratura della nuova Italia (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1922), 4:12–​13. 33. Fogazzaro explained his misgivings about modernity in an 1898 speech, “Il progresso in relazione alla felicità” (Progress in relation to happiness), in which he employed psychological and Darwinian discourse to describe how compromised the fugitive emotional states of pleasure and happiness have become in the modern world. For a published version of the speech, see Antonio Fogazzaro, Ascensioni umane, 7th ed. (Milan: Baldini, Castoldi & Co., 1906), 177–​99. 34. Giovanni Pascoli, Myricae, 7th ed. (Livorno: Giusti, 1905), 131–​32. Translation mine. 35. Percy B. Shelley, Selected Poetry and Prose (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 2002), 403. 36. At least 136 female Italian writers had seen their work published between 1870 and 1899. See Valentina Perozzo, “ ‘Chiamate all’arte buona’: Le scrittrici di romanzi nell’Italia ‘fin de siècle,’ ” Contemporanea 17, no. 3 (July–​September 2014): 365; and Miriam Mafai, Le donne italiane: Il chi è del ’900 (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993), 206, 367, 251. 37. Marilyn Migiel, for example, observes that, in “depict[ing] the clash between the demands of modern civilization and those of a less advanced society like her native Sardinia,” Deledda’s writing is “concerned primarily with transgression.” Marilyn Migiel, “Grazia Deledda,” in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-​Bibliographical Sourcebook, ed. Rinaldina Russell (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 112. 38. Mafai, Le donne italiane, 367. 39. Gabriella Romani, “Matilde Serao’s Art of Numbers: Naples and the Game of Lotto,” in Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, ed. Pellegrino D’Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 323. 40. Romani, 323. 41. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-​Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 219.

Italy   189

Further Reading Bertani, Stefano. L’ascensione della modernità: Antonio Fogazzaro tra santità ed evoluzionismo. Italy: Rubbettino, 2006. Binni, Walter. La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Il Ponte Editore, 2014. Borelli, Elena. Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Ethics of Desire: Between Action and Contemplation. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017. Cottini, Luca. The Art of Objects: The Birth of Italian Industrial Culture, 1878–​ 1928. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Drake, Richard. “Decadence, Decadentism, and Decadent Romanticism in Italy: Toward a Theory of Decadence.” Journal of Contemporary History 17, no. 1 (1982): 69–​92. Evangelista, Stefano. “Introduction: Decadence and Regeneration in Fin-​de-​Siècle Culture.” In The Poetics of Decadence in Fin-​de-​Siècle Italy: Degeneration and Regeneration in Literature and the Arts, edited by Stefano Evangelista, Valeria Giannantonio and Elisabetta Selmi, 1–​21. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018. Finco, Aldo. “L’umorismo di Antonio Fogazzaro.” Romance Notes 15, no. 3 (Spring 1974): 522–​26. Firth, Felicity. “Pirandello.” In The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, 480–​92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hughes-​Hallett, Lucy. Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War. New York: Anchor Books, 2014. Mafai, Miriam. Le donne italiane: Il chi è del ‘900. Milan: Rizzoli, 1993. Pieri, Giuliana. “Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Italian Fin-​de-​Siècle Interior.” Italian Studies 62, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 219–​30. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony. 2nd ed. Translated by Angus Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. Romani, Gabriella. “Matilde Serao’s Art of Numbers: Naples and the Game of Lotto.” In Delirious Naples: A Cultural History of the City of the Sun, edited by Pellegrino D’Acierno and Stanislao G. Pugliese, 322–​38. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Salinari, Carlo. Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano: D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Fogazzaro e Pirandello. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Somigli, Luca, and Mario Moroni, eds. Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-​Garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Varese, Claudio. Pascoli decadente. Florence: Sansoni, 1964.

Chapter 10

GERMA NY Decadence from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Weimar Republic Katharina Herold

Scholars have struggled to agree on definitions of German decadence, which defies straightforward categories because its temporal limits and geographical boundaries lead to a variety of explanations. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the literary scene was divided between naturalist writers and others, including followers of neo-​Romanticism, impressionism, and Jugendstil as well as decadence. By comparison with literary decadence in France and Britain, in German-​speaking countries, decadence appears as a far less defined tradition. At the same time, there is no denying the influence of French and British culture on German-​speaking writers at the end of the nineteenth century, not only in Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Leipzig, and Bayreuth, but also Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, and Prague. One way of understanding the problem is to focus on a generally neglected aspect of the issue; namely, the role of female authors in developing a specifically Germanic sense of decadence. Two such authors in particular, Franziska zu Reventlow (1871–​1918) and Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck (1904–​1966), were important contributors to the cultures of their respective times. Their works brought a female perspective to sociocultural debates about feminism, eugenics, homosexuality, and nationalism that proliferated from the late nineteenth century onward. Their rejection of gender roles, their reformulations of Christianity, their fascination with decay, and their dark eroticism help to clarify the multifarious picture of German decadence, because the lives of Reventlow and Landshoff-​Yorck parallel, respectively, two key periods of German decadence: the late Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic. Reventlow’s and Landshoff-​Yorck’s cultural contributions need to be situated historically in the critical debates about Dekadenz in general, because the German phenomenon differs significantly from decadent culture elsewhere in Europe. As George C. Schoolfield observes, “the strong current of optimism and even of arrogance that ran through German public life in the latter part of the nineteenth century” is incompatible

GERMANY   191 with “[a]‌decadent frame of mind.”1 The fact that Germany grew out of a loose confederation into a German nation-​state only after the end of the Franco-​Prussian war in 1871 might help to explain the multiplicity of aesthetic movements and artistic capitals in Germany. The political ascent and economic flourishing subsequent to the formation of the new nation-​state means that the element of anxiety over empire that attaches to French and British expressions of decadence does not, for the most part, obtain in Germany. Perhaps because nationhood was a relatively new concept to Germans, decadence assumed a different political resonance, manifested less at a national level and more at the individual level. What this means is that individual decadents, or groups of decadent individuals, effectively separated themselves from the nation-​state into their own bohemian communities. This formulation may have more relevance to the Wilhelmine Empire (1890–​1918) than to the Weimar Republic (1918–​1933), the former marked by nationalistic pride and economic stability, and the latter by military defeat and economic collapse, but in both eras decadence appears to be more of a progressive, liberating response to social conditions, whether imperial or republican, than a conflicted conservative reaction to national malaise (as in France) or to a deteriorating aristocratic class (as in Britain).

The Problem of German Decadence The division of German decadence into two distinct cultural phases paralleling the two political eras of the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic is one way of making sense of the phenomenon. A closer look, however, reveals something more complex, because any account of German decadence needs to consider Friedrich Nietzsche’s rich, dialectical critique of both aesthetic and moral decadence prior to 1890. In the preface to Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner), published in 1888 just before his mental collapse, Nietzsche wrote: “My greatest preoccupation hitherto has been the problem of decadence, and I had reasons for this. ‘Good and evil’ form only a playful subdivision of this problem.”2 Curiously, Nietzsche has some things in common with Max Nordau’s less sophisticated, polemical critique of decadence in Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–​ 1893), which, despite its publication date, obviously assessed the issue of decadence qua degeneration prior to 1890 as well. However different in tone and substance these two critiques may be, the fact that they originated in Germany within a few years of one another (Nietzsche, born 1844, and Nordau, born 1849, belonged to the same generation) and employed the concept of decadence to make a broader critique of European society and culture means that their work is key to any discussion of German decadence. Nietzsche’s later works combined cultural pessimism with a vitalist philosophy that called for the development of the Übermensch, popularly known as the “Superman,” a titanic personality capable of providing a new and more forceful type of cultural leadership. Nietzsche’s critique of contemporary decadence and his call for the regeneration of modern man contributes in equal measure to the term’s various negative and positive

192   Katharina Herold receptions, as Anette Horn and Caroline Pross have examined in detail.3 Nietzsche’s opinions, including his appraisal of the power of human agency, his distrust of Christian morality, and his misogynist advocacy of female subordination, were intellectual cornerstones of German and Austrian decadence. Nietzsche’s philosophy had a significant influence on definitions of decadence and aesthetic theory. His Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, 1872) maps the fundamental conflict between two opposing forces—​the Apollonian, or the desire for classical form and serenity, and the Dionysian, or the ecstatic and quasi-​religious search for liberation from formal constraints that found application in a number of decadent arts. His relationship with Richard Wagner (1813–​1883)—​a close association followed by a rancorous falling out—​ profoundly affected his philosophical reflections on decadence. In Der Fall Wagner (The Case of Wagner, 1888) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1895, written 1888), Nietzsche explains why he drastically changed his attitude to Wagner, whose friend and admirer Nietzsche had been. Wagner’s music was, in Nietzsche’s view, “expressiveness at all costs . . .—​the ideal of decadence.”4 Wagner was highly influential on the formation of European decadence. Many decadents were Wagnerites, and their enthusiasm for Wagner’s music and writing contributed to Wagnerism being identified with and suspected of causing “degeneration” by Nordau, who accused Wagner of “megalomania and mysticism; . . . anarchism, a craving for revolt and contradiction.”5 Thomas Mann’s early works confess to a cult of Wagnerian excess, which, alongside Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will and Nietzsche’s cultural pessimism, inform Mann’s engagement with decadence. His Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, 1901), which he called a “story of decadence and refinement,”6 links aesthetic decadence with social and moral decline. His later stories, such as Tonio Kröger (1903), Wälsungenblut (The blood of the Wälsungs, 1905), and the novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912), reveal a simultaneous fascination with and critique of the aestheticist impulse. All of these works bring forward into the twentieth century the engagement with nineteenth-​ century German decadence that so concerned Nietzsche and Nordau. The two volumes of Nordau’s polemic appeared after his stay in Paris in the 1880s. In Nordau’s writing, the foreign influence of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as the homegrown, dangerous, and deranged minds of Nietzsche and Wagner, served as examples of cultural decay and effeminacy, qualities Nordau deemed as causing the downfall of Western culture at large. In the final chapter of Degeneration, titled “The ‘Young-​German’ Plagiarists,” Nordau explains why generations of German writers following the 1870s were bound to succumb to cultural stagnation: Since genius was congregated at Weimar, German literature has ever taken the lead in civilized humanity. . . . Every healthy current and every pathological current in contemporary poetry and art can be traced back to a German source, every progress and every decadence in this sphere have their point of departure in Germany. . . . The

GERMANY   193 Germany of William I . . . , could not produce a Goethe or a Schiller . . . because all trace of personal or national originality is lacking.7

The movement of the “Young Germans” consisted of a group of writers who based their own naturalist style on writers of the Vormärz, the eve of the 1848 German revolution. With the Nietzsche follower Karl Bleibtreu as their intellectual voice, these writers propagated “the emancipation of the flesh.”8 Realism, as Nordau understood it, was a decadent category of literature and had little to offer in terms of original aesthetics that would bring German literature into modernity. The erratic nature of Nordau’s assessment of cultural decline, which he associates with decadence, becomes clear when considering the loose grouping of the naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann with the realist novelist Theodor Fontane and the lyrical poet Detlev von Liliencron. What Nordau construed as German decadence was not a coherent field with respect to literary categories or historical periods. Another complication to the Wilhelmine-​Weimar periodization is the rich bohemian culture that spans both eras. Moreover, whereas in France, say, it might be easier to separate the bohemians from the decadents on the basis of cultural affiliation (the bohemians with Romanticism, the décadents with symbolism), class (anti-​bourgeois bohemians and faux-​aristocratic decadents), or simply chronology, in Germany—​ Wilhelmine Germany especially—​there appears to be more of an overlap of bohemianism and decadence. To insist on calling a major figure like Stefan George (1868–​1933) either “bohemian” or “decadent” would be to make a distinction without a difference, because he seems to have been equally at home in both cultural worlds. At the same time, the wildly permissive social decadence associated with the latter half of the Weimar Republic after the hyperinflation of 1923 was brought under control suggests the need for some kind of distinction, not least because the bohemians of the latter era are not so much the declassé loft-​living artists traditionally associated with Bohemia but middle-​class debauchees who somehow manage to get up in the morning to go to work as businessmen and stenographers.9 Possibly, the Wilhelmine Empire produced decadent bohemians and the Weimar Republic bohemian decadents, but the larger point here is that cultural categories that seem clear in other European countries overlap and intermingle in Germany. A further complication to any neat description of a specifically German decadence concerns the many authors from outside the country who lived and worked there. A number of authors, publishers, and critics worked in German-​speaking territories after arriving from neighboring nations. Ibsen, for example, lived and worked in Dresden in 1868 and later also in Munich. Other Scandinavian circles formed in Berlin around August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Knut Hamsun, Ola Hansson, and Hansson’s wife, Laura Marholm. German decadence arrived slightly later in literary circles than it did in France, Belgium, England, or even Italy, which emerged as a nation-​state only in 1861. The evolution and definition of the French term décadence (which Nietzsche used) and German Dekadenz followed a different timeline in Germany than in France and Britain. For some years, critical discourse on British literary decadence has tended to focus on

194   Katharina Herold gender and sexuality, on the relationship between literature and visual culture, and on the cosmopolitan culture of the late Victorian period. Critical discourse in Germany, on the other hand, questioned the relevance of the term Dekadenz to literature and art. In comparison to the many studies on the Austrian fin de siècle, those on German Dekadenz are limited. Caroline Pross’s Dekadenz: Studien zu einer grossen Erzählung der frühen Moderne (Decadence: Studies on a great narrative of early modernism, 2013) remains the most detailed comparative study of German decadence. Focusing on the fin de siècle, she notes the resistance of German critics to the term Dekadenz to describe a particular period in German literature.10 The same is true for the lack of reliable geographical coordinates. At the time of Nordau’s writing, debates about the best way for writers and artists to give aesthetic expression to the experience of modernity were beginning to take form in German-​ speaking countries. The Austrian author, publisher, and critic Hermann Bahr (1863–​ 1934) was an important voice in communicating and qualifying decadence as an aesthetic concept to a German readership. As editor of the Freie Bühne in Berlin, Bahr published highly influential essays such as “Zur Kritik der Moderne” (Toward a critique of the modern, 1890) and “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus” (The overcoming of naturalism, 1891) in which he described French tendencies (Parnassianism, impressionism, Satanism) and authors (Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, Villiers de l’Isle-​Adam, Zola, Maurice Maeterlinck) as ill-​suited to the times. He was among the first critics to employ the term Moderne in the sense of modernism,11 and the fact that he did so in the fin-​de-​siècle context of the late Austro-​Hungarian Empire meant that the term was tinged with decadence from the start. Hence Viennese modernism was in many ways a model for German understanding of decadence, which understanding included Bahr’s critique: in his essay “Die Décadence” (1891), Bahr criticized decadence and aestheticism (especially directed against Wilde’s persona) and questioned whether the term could really be applied to German literature, which in his view had not yet overcome the influence of naturalism. Bahr’s essay “The Overcoming of Naturalism” effectively identifies decadence with modernism as the only aesthetic capable of giving expression to the new reality of the late nineteenth century: To be sure, both the old art and the new art seek the expression of man. In that regard they are in agreement in their opposition to naturalism. But when classicism says “man,” it means reason and feeling. And when romanticism says “man,” it means passion and the senses. And when modernism says “man,” it means the nerves. . . . I believe, therefore, that naturalism will be overcome by means of a nervous romanticism or, perhaps better said, by means of a mysticism of the nerves.12

Much recent criticism of decadence—​British decadence, especially—​has argued for the modulation of fin-​de-​siècle decadence into the modernism of the early twentieth century,13 but in the German-​speaking context, the two cultures are largely coterminous: decadence is, in effect, the modality of modernism. As Ezra Pound would decades

GERMANY   195 later, Bahr places a high cultural premium on newness: “The new idealism expresses the new human beings” (51). And how best to characterize this “new idealism”? Its “content . . . is nerves, nerves, nerves—​and costume. The decadence supplants the rococo and the Gothic masquerade” (51). More importantly, this decadence is a form of renewal: man has “renewed himself ” by asserting “what it is that he wants: the urgent, the impetuous, the licentious—​wild lust, the many fevers, the great enigmas” (50). Bahr’s formulations are hard to square with more conventional conceptions of decadence as crepuscular ennui or weary languor, but they capture perfectly the more vitalist sense of decadence that pervades Wilhelmine Munich and Weimar Berlin.

Franziska zu Reventlow and the Wilhelmine Period The mixture of bohemianism and decadence that characterizes Stefan George typifies the Wilhelmine period more generally. The bohemians met in Schwabing, a district of Munich comparable to Montparnasse in Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, or Fitzrovia in London.14 The Schwabing neighborhood provided particularly fertile ground for flourishing artistic movements and social experimentation. Leading figures of the German-​speaking literary world settled there, as well as the artists Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and August Macke, and others who made up the Blaue Reiter school of expressionists. Schwabing was also the cradle of Jugendstil, Germany’s version of art nouveau. Artists appreciated Munich for its inspiring serenity in comparison to Berlin’s sterile urbanity. George justified the attractiveness of the city in a letter to Melchior Lechter, noting that “life is still livable because ghosts [in the sense of spirits] still exist, something that has been chased away in Berlin’s air.”15 George and his followers sought to distance themselves from French and British forms of decadence, claiming in their journal Die Blätter für die Kunst (Pages for art) that [d]‌ecline (decadence) is in several aspects a phenomenon that people unwisely wanted to make into the sole product of our time—​[a phenomenon] that someday may certainly admit artistic treatment by the right hands but otherwise belongs in the realm of medicine.16

This editorial statement epitomizes the cultural status of decadence in Germany at the fin de siècle as a phenomenon bound up with the sickening not only of individuals or society but also of Western civilization more generally, with the prospect of “artistic treatment” consigned to an indeterminate future. Even though this perspective implicitly disavows decadence, it implicitly acknowledges that the cultural context within which George and his circle lived and worked was decadent to some degree. It follows, then, that a cultural renewal needs to occur at some point in that same future when

196   Katharina Herold decadence might admit of artistic treatment. Indeed, George’s idea of a cultural resurrection of Germany echoed parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy that understood Western society as subject to the “degenerating” force of Christianity. George was later to propose Hellenism as the means of renewal in Das neue Reich (The new realm, 1928), a title exploited by the Nazis (who had likewise exploited Nietzsche’s ideas) after 1933 as prophetic of fascism. In 1895 Reventlow (Figure 10.1) moved to Munich to work as a writer, painter, and translator. By virtue of her aristocratic roots, she became famous as the “Bohemian Countess” of the Schwabing district of Munich in the years leading up to World War I. She frequented the salon known as the Kosmiker (Cosmic Circle) and was admired by George and other prominent exponents of German aestheticism. Reventlow’s radical commentary on gender in her early essays, “Das Männerphantom der Frau” (The manphantom of woman, 1898) and “Viragines oder Hetären?” (Viragos or hetaerae?,

Figure 10.1.  Philipp Kester, Franziska zu Reventlow (1905). Source: Münchner Stadtmuseum (Wikimedia Commons).

GERMANY   197 1899) mark her out as an influential thinker whose dark eroticism and feminist ideas remain provocative today. Similarly, Reventlow’s collection of tales, Das Logierhaus zur Schwankenden Weltkugel (The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe, 1917), celebrates a world in decay reeling toward an uncertain future.17 Reventlow’s bohemian lifestyle contributed to her reputation as an extraordinary woman of her time. Born into a family of North German aristocrats (her full name was Fanny Liane Wilhelmine Sophie Auguste Adrienne Gräfin zu Reventlow), as a young girl Reventlow read Ibsen, Tolstoy, Zola, and Nietzsche. These were writers who challenged the cultural norms about marriage and the role of women. In 1890 she qualified as a teacher, a controversial undertaking and highly unusual for a young woman of her social position. She moved to Munich to study art, initially under the auspices of her husband, Walter Lübke. But when Reventlow insisted on fully devoting herself to her studies, the relationship broke down and their divorce followed in 1897. Her liberated lifestyle and her struggles as a single mother were accompanied by increasing difficulties making ends meet; she suffered recurring illnesses until her death in 1918. By the 1900s Reventlow had become a key figure of the artistic scene in Munich and wrote extensively on the Schwabing Bohemia, calling it a “spiritual movement, . . . a tendency [or school or thought], a protest, a new cult or rather an attempt to gain new religious possibilities from ancient cults” (geistige Bewegung, . . . eine Richtung, ein Protest, ein neuer Kult oder vielmehr der Versuch, aus uralten Kulten wieder neue religiöse Möglichkeiten zu gewinnen).18 Nowhere was this cultish tendency more evident than in the self-​mythologizing, self-​consciously mystical Cosmic Circle with which Reventlow was associated. The circle’s core members included the writers George, Alfred Schuler, and Ludwig Klages. In 1905 Reventlow wrote the “Schwabinger Walpurgisnacht,” a satirical mini-​drama that satirizes the carnivalesque costume soirees the circle would hold. She later parodied her experience as the only female member of this quasi-​religious, homosocial group in her roman à clef Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen; oder Begebenheiten aus einem merkwürdigen Stadtteil (Mister Dame’s records; or events from a curious quarter, 1913). In this novel, a young poet, fatigued by ennui, chronicles the narcissism of the Munich milieu, suspended between experimental avant-​gardism and extreme conservatism. Reventlow also wrote pieces of journalism for the controversial satirical magazine Simplicissimus and for the Frankfurter Zeitung, in addition to being a prolific translator of Marcel Prévost and Guy de Maupassant.19 Reventlow’s artistic output offers an intriguing glimpse into a highly unconventional life. James J. Conway, who translated most of her works, insists that her oeuvre “owes little to the strains of late Naturalism, Symbolism, Neo-​Romanticism, Decadence or Expressionism.”20 Nonetheless, her writing suggests that she found artistic inspiration in the decadent negation of social norms. Themes such as sickness, spiritualism, and death are prominent not only in her poetry but also in her numerous short stories, like the collection of seven tales translated as The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe, remarkable for its decadent motifs conjuring the “feverish anxiety of a world in violent

198   Katharina Herold transition.”21 The dark world these stories convey is one of constant flux. Reventlow chooses settings that accord with transient places: hotels, ships, resorts. The collection, rather like the guesthouse in the title, becomes a “somewhat dubious abode” (11). From the beginning of the first tale, the usage of the pronouns “we” and “us” creates the sense of converging artificial realities produced by free indirect discourse, disorienting the reader. Karl Strecker, a contemporary critic, admired “the power of observation which was drawn from Poe” but complained about the lack of structure and progression in her narrative.22 In many ways the opening story could be considered a rewriting of J.-​ K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), its protagonist, Hieronymus Edelmann (the last name means “nobleman” or “aristocrat”), viewing himself as the creator of an artificially selected race. The undertones of early twentieth-​century theories of eugenics make the surreal scenarios in this tale particularly haunting, disturbing even. As Reventlow writes in a letter to Franz Hessel in 1911, her tales are “some utterly brain-​ softened stories” (lauter ganz gehirnerweichte Geschichten).23 The anonymous narrative voice represents a group of cosmopolitan visitors to a “Spanish island”: the newly arrived guests refer to themselves in an ironic tone as “we, the victims of Hieronymus” (11). In a derelict guesthouse with “sinking walls” (13) Edelmann manipulates these visitors’ encounters so that the best possible gene pools should meet. Edelmann is dreaming of “creating even rarer specimens through experimental breeding” (12). The character of Edelmann, a grotesque figure whose dandified appearance is marked by a “monstrous, fan-​shaped beard,” has a keen interest in “zoology [and] rare and bizarre animals” (12). The story’s concern with the “refinement of humankind” (14) to which Edelmann has devoted himself is central to the story’s decadent quality in its celebration of anti-​natural selection. In Edelmann’s view, the key to a new “human stock” is to form a “correspondence association” called the “Flame Federation,” which brings together the “right people” and establishes connections both professional and erotic (14). While the guests try to change lodgings, they realize that “one can never get away” (20). As they learn that smallpox has broken out in the hotel where they came to recover from various ills, they are quarantined and have to comply with Edelmann’s visions under a sense of impending doom. Reventlow’s earlier critical essays radicalize debates on feminism and the role of women in the production of a superior race. In her essay “Viragines oder Hetären?,”24 Reventlow accused early emancipation movements of counteracting the liberation of women. She sides with Nietzsche in his vitalist program but exceeds his claims: “Why should a modern paganism not bring us a modern form of the hetaera?” (219), she asks, using the ancient Greek term for a highly educated courtesan to distinguish between a common prostitute and a contemporary woman who exercises “free will over [her] own body” (218). While many of her peers were pressing for improved social, political, and economic rights for women, Reventlow argued that ardent feminists, whom she labeled “viragos,” were actually harming women by attempting to erase or deny the natural differences between men and women, even calling them “hermaphrodites”: “Darwin tells us that English sheep breeders eliminate sexual hybrids from their flocks. . . . Nature

GERMANY   199 has already done the same among humans. The latest textbooks in pathological anatomy state that hermaphrodites are going extinct” (220). The ironic tone of her writing does not diminish her radical ideas on the reappraisal of transgressive eroticism as an attribute of womanhood. In contrast to the more bourgeois strains of female liberation movements, Reventlow’s arguments for the self-​determination of female sexuality allow a place for prostitution as a form of mental and social as well as physical liberation. As an “amazon among the writers” (221), Reventlow encouraged the “healthy erotic spirit of new paganism” (220). In “Das Männerphantom der Frau” (1898),25 Reventlow rejected the idea that women should return to their “natural” roles as wives and mothers, as the leading feminist Laura Marholm (1854–​1928) urged. Reventlow, by contrast, maintained that sexual freedom and the abolition of the institution of marriage were the best means by which women could hope to achieve a more equal social standing with men. Marholm, oddly, agreed with the kinds of assessments Nordau made about women in his reflections on Wagner and Ibsen (“Hysterical women were won over to Wagner,” Nordau claimed, while Ibsen’s heroines were “hysterical, nymphomaniacal, perverted in maternal instinct”).26 Reventlow, unsurprisingly, dismissed Marlholm’s view of woman as “the hysterical sphinx par excellence” (203). If, according to Marholm, the only purpose of woman is motherhood, Reventlow suggests, then one might as well take Nietzsche at his word in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1899): “Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy.”27 Subverting Nietzsche, she adds ironically: “The alleged misogynist has understood woman better than she could ever understand herself ” (204). Reventlow plays with the paradox of gender that fuels decadent discourses on reproduction, degeneracy, and female desire. She adds her own view on the position of woman in decadence as well as in society: the instinct of woman is best found in the “courtesan of fin-​de-​siècle circles” (208). Reventlow’s writing subverts cultural norms and elevates female self-​creation as a legitimate social function. By playing with misogynistic Nietzschean ideas targeting biological and erotic determinism, her works add a feminist note to the vitalist impulses German decadence paradoxically involves. Her version of decadence embraces the “new Hedonism” that Wilde described as mainly the province of men;28 Reventlow understands that woman is no longer merely an object of desire, but a sexually free agent unrestricted by social convention. To Reventlow the image of a woman as a wife and mother subordinate to her husband, as Marholm has it, represents the ultimate perversion of female purpose. In an ironic twist, then, it is the bourgeois married woman, not the liberated single woman, who becomes the paradigm of perversion and social decay. The empowerment of what the nineteenth-​ century moralists called the “fallen woman” thus redrafts the dynamics of gender in the context of German decadence. The trend continues with Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck, who—​writing a generation after Reventlow—​helps us understand the peculiarity of German decadence in the way she blurs gender boundaries and maximizes pleasure in both life and art.

200   Katharina Herold

Weimar Decadence and Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck The sense of an ending that the bohemian decadence of the 1890s had celebrated was paired with a frantic acceleration of the speed of modern life in the decadence of the Weimar era. As the capital of vice, Berlin offered every possible sensual distraction from economic hardship, destruction, and the sense of loss of national pride after World War I. Advances in the study of sexology led by the sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, sexual libertinage, and pornographic publications combined to make taboo pleasures such as sadomasochism more widely known to the general public, even as prostitution, drugs, cabarets, and dance palaces provided the necessary milieu for excessive indulgence and intoxication. Crime and the erotization of crime, the “sex murder” (Lustmord), became popular topics, as Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) shows. This paradoxical pairing of speed and decay produced a rich culture that attracted (and exhausted) artists from far and wide. Berlin in the 1920s also provided a haven for gay English writers such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood, who published two novellas as “Berlin Stories,” later adapted into the musical Cabaret (1966). Spender’s semi-​autobiographical novel The Temple (1930) evokes the atmosphere of the times and eternalizes the Berlin of the 1920s as “an enormous sluice, a drain.”29 Female authors writing during the Weimar era brought a new perspective on decadence by highlighting it as an active, productive, and energetic culture. Despite their opposite approaches, Nordau and Nietzsche both identified a lack of vitality and progress in culture as “decadent.” Yet in contrast to most female writers influenced by their thinking, their works confined such criticism largely to theory. The relegation of women to the roles of femmes fatales, love interests, or sexualized objects was not satisfying to most female writers and provided them with an opportunity to form their own attitudes toward sociopolitical as well as aesthetic decadence. Female responses to decadence were more in touch with life and addressed the social restrictions women faced in an effort to express their sexualities. In this context, the German-​American actress, writer, and journalist Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck stands out for her contributions to the notion of German decadence well into the twentieth century. She was active during the Weimar Republic when Berlin became the intellectual and artistic center of Europe. After attending Max Reinhardt’s acting school, she made appearances in Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna (she appeared in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, 1922) before giving up acting. In 1933 she emigrated from Nazi Germany to the United States, where she worked in New York City until her death. Her novels Die Vielen und der Eine (The many and the one, 1930) and Roman einer Tänzerin (Life of a dancer; completed 1933 but not published in its entirety until 2002) combine a morbid fascination with speed, sexual permissiveness, and active participation in male-​dominated spheres, all of which help to illuminate elements of German decadence.

GERMANY   201 Like their predecessors in Munich, the Berlin bohemians during the Wilhelmine period preferred an anarchic counterculture to conventional society.30 Unlike the Wilhelmine bohemians, however, the Berlin group was not affiliated so much with aristocratic types like Reventlow but with the newly cultured bourgeoisie. Among the several affluent bourgeois associations were Der Idealistenklub (The idealist club, 1891), Der Genieklub (The genius club, 1886, whose members read Nietzsche), and Der Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis (The poets’ club of Friedrichshagen, 1890–​1904).31 These clubs brought forth a flourishing magazine culture run by leading publicists and critics: Stanisław Przybyszewski, one of the most influential writers of Polish-​ German decadence; Richard Dehmel, who authored Die Verwandlungen der Venus (The metamorphoses of Venus, 1907), and who was George’s literary rival and cofounder of Pan magazine in 1895; the eccentric precursor of Dadaism, Paul Scheerbart; Peter Hille; Herwarth Walden (founder of the expressionist magazine Der Sturm); and the poet Else Lasker-​Schüler. These circles also included the artist Alfred Kubin, the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, the satirist Karl Kraus, and Richard Strauss, composer of the opera Salome (1905). The young Landshoff-​Yorck (Figure 10.2) grew up in this setting. In comparison to the restrictions of the Wilhelmine era, the Weimar Republic offered more opportunities for women to work professionally as authors.32 Landshoff-​Yorck’s work is as diverse as her biography is cosmopolitan. Born Ruth Levy in 1904 into a middle-​class Jewish family in Berlin, she became part of Berlin’s intelligentsia through her social connections and moved in avant-​garde circles. She was the embodiment of the “new type of woman,” celebrated for her charisma. One commentator remarked of her androgynous beauty that “the psychoses and suicide attempts of those she had rejected lined the path of this beautiful girl.”33 She was openly bisexual and frequented the hot spots of Berlin’s decadent nightlife. In the 1920s she socialized with the Manns, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, and Ernst Toller. She counted Erika Mann and Annemarie Schwarzenbach among her friends. In 1930 she lived with the writer Karl Vollmöller, a former member of George’s Cosmic Circle and screenwriter of Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930). When they lived in Venice they rented the Palazzo Vendramin, where Richard Wagner had died.34 In that same year she married Friedrich-​Heinrich Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. In her later years of exile in France and America she encountered Jean Paul Sartre, Andy Warhol, and Orson Wells. Her life and work can be divided into two phases: a Weimar phase until 1933, and her life in exile after the Nazis came to power. Following her early career as a celebrity actress she devoted herself to writing fiction and journalism, as well as translation work. One of the most influential translations during this early phase of her career was her rendering of Le libertinage (1924), a collection of experimental texts by the French surrealist Louis Aragon. Landshoff-​Yorck’s poetry is rich in commentary on decadent topics, especially her poems and drawings in Das Wehrhafte Mädchen (The fortified girl, 1929). In much of her journalism she discusses questions of gender stereotypes, cross-​dressing, and queerness, as in “Lieben lernen in Berlin” (Learning how to love in Berlin), published in

202   Katharina Herold

Figure 10.2.  Umbo (Otto Umbehr), Ruth with Mask (1927). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (© Phyllis Umbehr—​Galerie Kicken Berlin—​DACS 2021).

the lifestyle magazine Die Dame (The Lady) in the 1930s. The Many and the One, her first novel, appeared in 1930. Her early novels, among them Life of a Dancer, were prevented from being published by members of the far right, whose cultural censorship was now being felt. In order to escape persecution by the Nazis, Landshoff-​Yorck was forced to emigrate and live in exile from 1933 on, first in France, then the United Kingdom, then Switzerland, and finally America. The Many and the One is a fast-​paced mixture of reportage, satire, and fictional memoir that details the adventures of the journalist Louis Lou and a group of upper-​ class youths who first travel through America by car and then extend their grand tour abroad to include Paris, Oxford, London, and Berlin. The novel is all about excessive luxury, gay nightclubs, opium, and the intensity of a life lived to the extreme. The decadence described in this novel is comparable to other novels of the time, such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) or Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Landshoff-​Yorck evokes both of these novels in the nihilist aimlessness of a life emptied of meaning and driven by consumption. The ruinous consequences of the demise of the Wilhelmine

GERMANY   203 Empire, the disaster of World War I, and the collapse of the financial system through the hyperinflation of 1923 form a distant background to the novel, which puts the focus on the hedonistic life of the present. The first thing the novel’s protagonists Lou and Percy do after almost dying in a plane crash on a flight from London to Berlin is dive into the nightlife of the great city by attending the so-​called Reimann Ball, an actual costume gala hosted annually by the Reimann School of Art and Design in Berlin-​Schöneberg near the Berlin Zoological Garden where Berliners could indulge in hedonistic excess: The Reimann Ball at the zoo. . . . A sweltering hot wave hit them as the door to the ball was opened for them. Louis Lou stopped for a moment. That’s what made Berlin so intoxicating to her. You could not get that in any other city. A thousand happy people, laughing, dancing, loving and a continuous din that made people cover their ears in a daze. . . . The people are so wild and loud. They kiss immediately, without asking—​boys and girls, it doesn’t matter. . . . That’s how it is in Berlin. (Reimann Ball im Zoo. . . . Eine glutheiße Welle schlug ihnen entgegen, als die Tür zum Ball für sie geöffnet wurde. Louis Lou blieb einen Augenblick stehen. Da war es, was sie berauschte an Berlin. Das gab es in keiner anderen Stadt. Tausend glückliche Leute, lachend, tanzend, liebend und ein Krach, daß man betäubt die Hände an die Ohren hielt. . . . Die Leute sind so wild und laut. Sie küssen alle gleich, ohne zu fragen—​Jungens und Mädchen . . . das ist so in Berlin.)35

The ambiguity of gleich in the original German (which could mean “in the same manner” or “immediately”) helps convey the promiscuity of the scene and the indifference to gender on the part of the participants. This rendering of Berlin is consistent with Mel Gordon’s assessment that “[w]‌ith Babylon and Nero’s Rome, Weimar Berlin has entered into our topological thesaurus as a synonym for moral degeneracy.”36 The protagonist of Life of a Dancer is the free-​spirited Jewish dancer Lena Vogel, modeled on cabaret star Lena Amsel (1898–​1929), who lives her life without social or political restrictions. In his obituary of Amsel, Klaus Mann remembered her as “brimful of life . . . shimmering with the élan vital” (lebensstrotzend . . . von élan vital funkelnd) and compared her to Anita Berber,37 another cabaret dancer and Weimar celebrity, who became famous for her decadent allure by challenging social taboos with performances entitled “Cocaine” and “Morphium.”38 The life-​celebrating excess of the character Lena Vogel, however, is intrinsically linked to the presence of death, an expression of the opposing forces of Eros (life energy) and Thanatos (death drive) that define the tension of Weimar decadence, which Klaus Mann called a “fever [which] was indomitably expansive—​a mass frenzy.”39 In Landshoff-​Yorck, Lena’s obsession with speed and cars captures this vitalist sense of frenzy: “The tank is full and our speed will be sweet” (77). The novel serves as a kind of parable of the Weimar Republic, with the heroine’s hedonistic lifestyle ending abruptly when she dies in a car crash in Paris. The end of the novel, however, is set in Berlin, where two of Lena’s lovers, the poet Mar and her former husband Cerni, mourn her death. Both men start arguing about which of them can claim to be Lena’s lover for posterity. The scene portrays a dance of death as Lena’s ghost appears:

204   Katharina Herold She was so very present, in a way she had almost never been in her most powerful and tense youth. Now that she was dead. She was lying in this room, through which she had thus passed a hundred times, laid out on the grief of two men like on an altar. . . . [The poet] saw how a gentle blush slid over her pale cheeks. He saw her rough dress made of coarse wool. Naturally, even for her death, Lena didn’t know how to dress herself. Suddenly, the deathbed dissolved, and a different Lena sat naked, with an earnest expression, on his writing desk, like a goblin, between the lamps. He calmly nodded towards her, whereupon she vanished from there, stood on tiptoes in the middle of the room and played Diabolo. Don’t play, he thought, you’re actually dead. (Sie war so sehr da, wie fast nie in ihrer kraftvollsten und gespanntesten Jugend. Jetzt wo sie tot war. Sie lag hier in diesem Raum, durch den sie so hundertmal gegangen war, aufgebahrt auf dem Schmerz zweier Männer, wie auf einem Altar. . . . [Der Dichter] sah, wie über die bleichen Wangen eine zarte Röte glitt. Er sah ihr derbes Kleid aus rauher Wolle. Natürlich, selbst zum Sterben hatte Lena nicht gewusst, was man anzieht. Plötzlich zerfloss das Sterbelager und eine andere Lena sass nackt, mit ernstem Gesicht auf seinem Schreibtisch, wie ein Kobold zwischen den Lampen. Er nickte ihr ruhig zu, da verschwand sie von da, stand auf gereckten Zehen in der Mitte des Raumes und spielte Diabolo. Nicht spielen, dacht er, du bist ja tot.)40

Almost like an allegory of the vitalism of German decadence, Landshoff-​ Yorck resurrects her protagonist Lena as a larger-​than-​life character who appears even more potent and radiant in death than in life. Her pose suggests the film poster of The Blue Angel that shows Dietrich perching on a barrel as the femme fatale who transforms a respectable professor into a cabaret clown. Recalling these iconic images of female seduction, Landshoff-​Yorck symbolically plays with the sexualized images of women in Weimar culture. The ironic tone that lends Landshoff-​Yorck’s prose a unique style of intellectual (and female) superiority concludes the novel when the poet affirms to himself: “You loved only me, little Lena” (101). With a mocking and almost pitying tone, the resurrected ghost of Lena replies with the only answer the poet will be able to accept and understand: “ ‘Only you, be calm,’ whispered the shadowy voice. ‘Only you’ ” (99–​101). The novel captures the intensity of a life of glamour while exposing the artificiality of the illusion of female eroticism in the figure of the decadent dancer. Landshoff-​Yorck exposes the fabrication of this decadent fantasy as a production of male poetic tradition (Mar being a poet). In the tradition of Salome, that iconic dancer from the nineteenth century, the author crafts Lena Vogel as her Weimar sister in what Walter Fähnders calls a “masterstroke of female storytelling.”41 Her prose and poetry embody the desperate speed of life on the edge that marked the Weimar period. Her emphasis on the evanescence of the moment and the pleasure provided by the acceleration of intense experience constitutes another side of German decadence. In this context, decadence comes to concern an addiction to life itself and its many pleasures. A constant awareness of death feeds this addiction. Landshoff-​Yorck’s cosmopolitan outlook and the ironic playfulness of her work should be regarded as an expression of the enjoyment of decay in the Weimar Republic on the eve of the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.

GERMANY   205

Conclusion German decadence, or rather German decadences, centered on historical periods at the end of the Wilhelmine Empire and the Weimar Republic. While Wilhelmine decadence is roughly synchronous with other national manifestations of decadence during the fin de siècle, influential thinkers at the turn of the century like Nordau and Nietzsche formulated decadence in such a way as to allow for a paradoxically vitalist dimension that eventually came to flourish in the excesses of the Weimar era. Munich and Berlin characteristically typify the two periods: on the one hand, the Munich decadence concerned with the victorious Wilhelmine past, which included a sense of progress in its political and aesthetic endeavors; and, on the other, the decadence of Weimar Berlin in the 1920s, emerging out of a disastrous military loss, economic chaos, high unemployment, and an omnipresent sense of decline. These precarious social conditions underlay the cultural response of Weimar decadence. As we have seen in the examples of Reventlow and Landshoff-​Yorck, women contributed to the development of decadence in Germany with their ironic and radical reworkings of the femme fatale and other decadent tropes. In her fiction and critical writing, Reventlow helps us understand the emphasis on questions of race, eugenics, and emerging fascism that become particularly relevant to decadent discourses in Germany. Furthermore, she questions the role of misogyny, a continuing issue in decadence studies. Landshoff-​Yorck’s life and work demonstrate the change of decadence in Weimar Berlin that Isherwood and others have chronicled. Her works redirect our attention to the neue Frau (New Woman) who lives life with frantic intensity and exemplifies the vitality of excess. The addition of Reventlow and Landshoff-​Yorck to a canon dominated by male authors testifies to the multifarious nature of decadence in German-​speaking cultures. The varieties of German decadence reveal the wide reach and relevance of discourses of decay, whether in regard to national entities, to gender norms, or to literary categories. Indeed, the many faces of German decadence provide a cultural narrative of growth, decline, and renewal that, on a larger scale, dominated the artistic production of the twentieth century across Europe and beyond.

Notes 1. George C. Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–​1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 267–​68. 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface to The Case of Wagner,” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, ed. Oscar Levy (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 8: xxx. 3. See Anette Horn, Nietzsches Begriff Der “decadence”: Kritik und Analyse der Moderne (Hamburg: Peter Lang, 2000); and Caroline Pross, Dekadenz: Studien zu einer grossen Erzählung der frühen Moderne (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013). 4. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 34.

206   Katharina Herold 5. Max Nordau, Degeneration (1895; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 171. 6. Thomas Mann, letter to Louise Servicen, May 23, 1935, in Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–​ 1955, ed. Clara Winston and Richard Winston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 196. 7. Nordau, Degeneration, 507, 508, 534, 509. 8. B. W. Wells, “The German Novel,” Sewanee Review 2, no. 3 (1894): 325. 9. David Weir comments on the “bourgeoisification” of decadence in Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 7–​8, 81. 10. Pross, Dekadenz. 11. For a discussion of Bahr’s promotion of modernism, see Harold B. Segel, ed. and trans., The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890–​1938 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), 45–​47. 12. Hermann Bahr, “On the Overcoming of Naturalism,” in Segel, Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 49–​50. Further references cited parenthetically. 13. See David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995); Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Kate Hext and Alex Murray, eds., Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 14. Margit Dirscherl, “Luminous Munich and Beyond: The ‘Schwabinger Bohème’,” in Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century: An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space, ed. Richard Hibbitt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 223–​45. 15. Stefan George, letter to Melchior Lechter, February 1, 1901, quoted in Werner Ross, Bohemiens und Belle Epoque: Als München leuchtete (Berlin: Siedler, 1997), 152. 16. Quoted in Robert Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 158. 17. With the exception of James J. Conway’s translation of The Guesthouse at the Sign of the Teetering Globe (Berlin: Rixdorf Editions, 2017), most of Reventlow’s texts are not available in translation. A bibliography of the German texts can be found in Michael Schardt et al., eds., Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke in fünf Bänden (Oldenburg: Igel Verlag, 2004), 5:132–​49. Reventlow’s papers are kept at the Monacensia Literaturarchiv, Munich. 18. Reventlow, Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen, in Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke, 2:25–​26. Trans. mine, with Frank Krause. 19. Reventlow’s translations of these authors can be found in Schardt et al., eds., Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke; The following selection of her translations are published with Albert Langen (Munich): Starke Frauen (Les Vierges fortes), 1900; Unter uns Mädchen (Lettres de femmes), 1900; Die Fürstin von Ermingen (La Princesse d’Erminge), 1905. 20. James J. Conway, “Afterword,” in Reventlow, Guesthouse, 142. 21. Reventlow, Guesthouse, 128. Further references cited parenthetically. 22. Karl Strecker, “Neues vom Büchertisch,” Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte 32, no. 1 (1917–​ 1918): 375, in Brigitta Kubitschek, Franziska Gräfin zu Reventlow: Leben und Werk: Eine Biographie (Munich: Profil, 1998), 571–​72. 23. Reventlow, letter to Franz Hessel, November 26, 1911, in Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke, 4:290. 24. Reventlow, “Viragines oder Hetären?,” reprinted in Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke, 5:210–​20. Further references cited parenthetically. Trans. mine, with Frank Krause.

GERMANY   207 25. Reventlow, “Das Männerphantom der Frau,” in Franziska zu Reventlow: Sämtliche Werke, 5:199–​210. Further references cited parenthetically. Trans. mine, with Frank Krause. 26. Nordau, Degeneration, 211, 413. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. A. Del Caro and R. B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 48. 28. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 22–​23. 29. Stephen Spender, The Temple (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 124. 30. Helmut Kreuzer, Die Bohème: Beiträge zu ihrer Beschreibung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), 170, 256−58. 31. Karin Bruns et al., eds., Handbuch literarisch-​kultureller Vereine, Gruppen und Bünde 1825−1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016). 32. Walter Fähnders, “Nachwort,” in Ruth Landshoff-​ Yorck, Die Vielen und der Eine (Berlin: AvivA), 170. 33. Georg Zivier, Das Romanische Café (Berlin: Hande und Spener, 1965), 79−80. Trans. mine, with Frank Krause. 34. Walter Fähnders, “Nachwort,” in Das Mädchen mit Wenig PS Feuilletons aus den zwanziger Jahren (Berlin: AvivA, 2015), 185. 35. Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck, Die Vielen und der Eine (Berlin: AvivA, 2001), 149, 154, 156. Further references cited parenthetically. Trans. Frank Krause. 36. Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2006), 2. 37. Klaus Mann, “In Memoriam Lena Amsel,” Vossische Zeitung 265 (November 1929), n.p. 38. Mel Gordon, The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin’s Priestess of Debauchery (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2006), 92, 97. 39. Klaus Mann, The Turning Point (London: Gollancz, 1944), 76. 40. Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck, Roman einer Tänzerin (Berlin: AvivA, 2005), 99−100. Further references cited parenthetically. Trans. mine, with Frank Krause. 41. Walter Fähnders, “Zum Literarischen Werk von Ruth Landshoff-​Yorck in der Weimarer Republik: Mit Einer Bibliographie von Walter Fähnders und Christine Pendl,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 12, no. 3 (2002), 630. Trans. mine.

Further Reading Bauer, Roger. Die Schöne Décadence: Geschichte eines literarischen Paradoxons. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2001. Beller, Steven. Rethinking Vienna 1900. Oxford: Berghahn, 2001. Fischer, Jens Malte. Fin de siècle: Kommentar zu einer Epoche. Munich: Winkler, 1978. Furness, Raymond, ed. Voices of the Abyss: The Dedalus Book of German Decadence. New York: Hippocrene, 1994. Gordon, Mel. Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2000. Herold, Katharina. “Socio-​aesthetic Histories: Vienna 1900 and Weimar Berlin.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 283−99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

208   Katharina Herold Huddleston, Andrew. Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hutchinson, Ben. Lateness and Modern European Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Kafitz, Dieter. Décadence in Deutschland: Studien zu einem versunkenen Diskurs der 90er Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg: Winter, 2004. Krobb, Florian. “ ‘Die Kunst der Väter tödtet das Leben der Enkel’: Decadence and Crisis in Fin-​ de-​Siècle German and Austrian Discourse.” New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004): 547–​62. Lane, Melissa S., and Martin A. Ruehl, eds. A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. More, Nicholas. “The Philosophy of Decadence.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 184−99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Norton, Robert Edward. Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pross, Caroline. Dekadenz: Studien zu einer grossen Erzählung der frühen Moderne. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013. Rasch, Wolfdietrich. Die literarische Décadence um 1900. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986. Robertson, Ritchie. “George, Nietzsche, and Nazism.” In A Companion to the Works of Stefan George, edited by Jens Rieckmann, 189−205. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005. Saler, Michael, ed. The Fin-​de-​Siècle World. New York: Routledge, 2015. Sprengel, Peter. Literatur im Kaiserreich: Studien zur Moderne. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1993. Vilain, Robert. “Temporary Aesthetes: Decadence and Symbolism in Germany and Austria.” In Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, edited by Patrick McGuinness, 209–​24. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2000.

Chapter 11

Nordic CU LT U RE S From Wilderness to Metropolitan Decadence Pirjo Lyytikäinen

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nordic literary cultures developed rapidly as the first modern Nordic authors achieved international fame. France, especially, witnessed a certain “Scandinavian boom.” The younger generation of artists and authors in Scandinavia felt, more than ever, the appeal of the metropolis and a strong urge to participate in European trends; the wish to be international or cosmopolitan and belong to the European community of letters helped move cultural life in the Nordic nations forward. With its focus on everyday life and awareness of the structures of society, French naturalism inspired what was known as the “Modern Breakthrough” in Nordic literature.1 The infiltration of modern thought that conservatives denounced as a “black flood” destroying national cultures continued with symbolism and decadence.2 But decadence was problematic because Nordic countries, with few metropolitan cities and a mostly rural population, did not provide a suitable milieu for decadent culture. “Young” Nordic nations were often juxtaposed with the declining “old” nations of Western Europe and their “corrupt” metropolises. The pressure of nationalism favored closing one’s eyes to the forces that threatened to shatter the ideal of national unity. Hippolyte Taine’s theory of milieu, fashionable in the late nineteenth century, also provoked discussions about the possibilities of being a decadent writer in Nordic countries. The Estonian author Friedebert Tuglas (1886–​1971), for example, argued in his 1912 essay “Literary Style” that having “come to know the cultural moods of the city and the broader world too theoretically, indirectly, through education, foreign literature, and art” makes writers and artists in the north “theoretical Europeans” who cannot “participate actively in the creation of Europe’s cultural values.”3 Nevertheless, Nordic authors experimented with decadence and developed new varieties of it: they saw decadence in small towns and even in the countryside; investigated mythic and historical allegories of decay; and explored the connections between primitivism and decadence. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which a representative selection of Nordic prose writers reflect, modify, comment on, and reconfigure European decadence by

210   Pirjo Lyytikäinen considering local circumstances and traditions. This Nordic decadence then served as an antidote to national idealism while often retaining some ties to the respective nations of Nordic authors, creating intertextual connections to other Nordic texts. My selection of Danish, Estonian, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish texts shows the variety of decadence within the region and the interconnections between the five national literary cultures. The selection focuses on what could be called “core decadence.”4 Nordic decadence has been broadly understood to include works that thematize decay and analyze the supposed decay of modernity and modern humanity,5 which makes it compatible with naturalistic depictions of decay, in a sense, but these core decadent texts are more connected to an “inward turn” focusing on the central characters’ inner worlds. Typically, the visions and experiences of the neurotic heroes expand into larger social vistas, their minds reflecting decay not only in broad cultural, moral, and biological terms, but also illustrating the individual processes that lead to mental and physical dissolution. In the Nordic texts I explore, the dialogue with French decadence often functions as a marker directly related to such well-​known models as the one provided by J.-K. Huysmans in À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) or the characterization of the decadent society by Paul Bourget in his essay on Baudelaire (1883). The Nordic texts identify themes, motifs, authors, and background philosophers that connect them to a decadent discursive community. Mostly, the authors discussed here became known as naturalists or modernists in view of their larger careers; their markedly decadent works remained individual experiments.

Background: Nordic Diversity To speak of the Nordic countries as a group can easily blur the fact that the grouping is partly arbitrary. The countries included have all sought to establish their own national literatures rather than a transnational Nordic culture, despite their geographical proximity, historical ties, and contemporary active cooperation.6 These national literatures, however, developed in an atmosphere that afforded much interaction among them. By the end of the nineteenth century, the prior political and military conflicts between Nordic nations had been overcome, and an unprecedented degree of cultural cooperation was established, even though Finland and Estonia were still under Russian rule, and Norway only gained full independence in 1905 when the union with Sweden under a common king ended. At the same time, linguistic diversity fully appeared in literature. The most dramatic change, in this respect, was that the Finnish and Estonian languages gained the status of national literary languages, largely replacing Swedish and German, respectively. The two languages are mutually related but wholly different from the Scandinavian languages spoken in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and they do not even belong to the Indo-​European language group common to most European languages.7

Nordic CULTURES   211 The ways in which literary decadence appears in the five countries is significantly diverse: the timescale and directions of influence vary and the national situation in each country is sometimes reflected in the themes. However, despite this diversity, the generally negative response to subject matter suspected of being morally “corrupt” was quite widespread. Most of the authors mentioned in this chapter have a place in the national canon, and some were or are known internationally, but none of them were known as decadents. Most did not identify themselves as decadents at any point, although conservative critics might have labeled them as “decadents,” meaning that the works or authors themselves were subversive or immoral. Decadence was also typically a short-​lived phase in their literary careers: they established their position either as naturalists or modernists and only wrote one or two works that clearly merited the designation “decadent.” Nonetheless, the decadent strain that can be discerned in their works shows how important decadence was as a form of thought, a poetic modality, and a breeding ground of early modernism. Decadent works brought the pessimistic atmosphere and ambivalent style of the fin de siècle into Nordic literary culture and helped to introduce modernist techniques, styles, and forms of narration.

Beginnings: Denmark and Sweden The earliest works of Nordic decadence were published in Denmark, which is unsurprising, because its lively contacts with Central European culture made the country an important Nordic gateway to contemporary trends in art and literature at the end of the nineteenth century. Copenhagen was the first regional center where authors acquired elements of decadent sensibilities and styles and from which ideas of naturalism and decadence spread to the other Nordic countries. The two Danish works that became most important to the development of Nordic decadence were Niels Lyhne (1880) by J. P. Jacobsen (1847–​1885) and Haabløse Slægter (Hopeless families, 1880) by Herman Bang (1857–​1912). These early works antedate Huysmans’s Against Nature and Bourget’s influential essay on Baudelaire in Essais de psychologie contemporaine, and therefore show how a Nordic “decadent turn” developed independently, although it profited from French naturalism and the social and intellectual impulses circulating throughout Europe. These works did not reflect an existing paradigm but can retrospectively be related to decadence as defined in France.8 Jacobsen’s novel manifests the radical move toward the subjective worlds of decadent characters, downplaying the role of narrators who observe the fictional world from outside. The protagonist’s reflections and impressions pave the way for what Lis Norup sees as “the central genre characteristic of the decadent novel: undermining the naturalistic novel from within.”9 Niels Lyhne presents the reader with the eponymous protagonist, a would-​be poet who lives a childhood immersed in fantasies but in his adult

212   Pirjo Lyytikäinen years wastes his energy on unsuccessful love affairs and idle wanderings until he completely abandons his ambitions. In addition to the title character, the novel portrays several dreamers, self-​made aesthetes, and would-​be artists in his surroundings, and the omniscient narrator delights in painting beautiful women who, mostly quite innocently, function as femme fatales for men infatuated with the beauty of the women or with their own imagination. The grayness of everyday life is lamented but not depicted. All characters try to flee the dreariness of life through their dreams, and Jacobsen’s narrator focuses on their minds as well as on the aesthetic details of the women in silks and fancy accessories; exotic interior decors, gardens, and flowers are also described to complete the decadent atmosphere. Thus, Jacobsen’s decadent style foregrounds decorative details obscuring the whole, while the ironic portrayals of the secondary characters interrupt the plot loosely woven around Lyhne’s life history. The narration floats freely above social and socioeconomic realities. Money and work are not issues in the manor-​owning circles, Lyhne being clearly influenced by his dreamer-​mother, who loathes everything quotidian. By contrast, Lyhne’s father is characterized as a practical man involved in farming; he represents the usual pattern wherein the ancestors are men of action and the subsequent generations weaken both the family and the race by producing dreamers and neurotics incapable of action. These themes are common in several decadent novels and manifest themselves in Bang’s novel as well. Bang defended “realism” in the struggle between idealist and naturalistic writing, but he understood realism as psychological analysis opposing the then-​prevailing tendency, inspired by the work of Georg Brandes, toward social realism focused on discussing social problems.10 The psychological approach focused on what we can see as decadent characters: Bang’s first novel, Haabløse Slægter became a model for Nordic decadence. It was influenced by Zola’s La curée (The Kill, 1871) and despite the title focuses on the life and thoughts of a single male protagonist, William Høg, who struggles to make his old, decaying family great again. Høg is a dreamer like Lyhne whose hopeless efforts to restore the family glory by becoming an actor (a strange choice in light of the values of his noble family, whose members have devoted their energy to public administration and service to the king) merely lead to disappointments and the outbreak of the family disease: dark melancholy and a sense of emptiness. He adopts a pleasure-​seeking, decadent lifestyle with no spiritual or religious yearnings. The psychological focus on Bang’s restless hero shows how decadence emerges from a combination of naturalistic and Romantic impulses. The narration flows with Romantic freedom, revealing the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1796), the model of the Romantic bildungsroman, which lurks beneath Bang’s novel as it follows the frustrating apprenticeship years (Lehrjahre) of his young, egocentric aristocrat. At the end of the novel there is a twist: after the apparent death of the hero Høg, the author Hoff (Bang’s alter ego), who has haunted the novel as Høg’s friend, and the mysterious actor Höst (supposedly Høg after his disappearance from Copenhagen) appear as one and the

Nordic CULTURES   213 same person, thus making Høg’s supposed death a symbol of an earlier stage in the author’s life. The reception of the novel focused on its “decadence” in the sense of moral corruption. Descriptions of sexual relations and Bang’s supposed “mania pornografica” not only provoked moral indignation but also led to a court case and the confiscation of the book soon after it was published.11 Bang was forced to opt for striking out or changing certain paragraphs to publish a new edition in 1884; the first edition was not republished until much later, in 1965. Early manifestations of decadence in Sweden were strongly linked to Danish developments and the personal impact of Herman Bang. Like Bang, Ola Hansson (1860–​1925), who had met Bang in Copenhagen in 1884, and Mathilda Malling (who used the pen name Stella Kleve, 1864–​1942), who was encouraged and helped by Bang in publishing her novella Berta Funcke (1885), distanced themselves from social realism. Kleve presented the first portrait of a decadent woman protagonist, but it was Hansson who provoked the greatest scandal. Early on, Hansson became interested in French culture, and he wrote an essay on Bourget in 1886 defending psychological and artistic literature; later, he published an essay on Huysmans. In Sensitiva amorosa (1887), a collection of erotic stories, Hansson presents a gallery of sensitive characters and explores questions of sex and gender related to the weaknesses and neurotic symptoms of “modern men.” The title is the supposed Latin name of a strange, poisonous herb invented by the author. The book begins with an introductory chapter commenting on the title as a reference to “an herb growing in the overcultivated soil of modern society.”12 This herb, with its morbid veins, “sickly sweet scent,” and color resembling “the light in a hospital room,” is a trope for modern sensitivity. 13 The stories illustrate, in various situations and with ever new characters, the experiences of disgust and horror related to sexuality. The book ends with characters resigned to “ocular erotica”: a man and a woman remain perfect strangers but just “enjoy” looking at each other (a story that clearly alludes to the “flirting club” in Bourget’s novel Cruelle énigme: Profils perdus [A Cruel Enigma, 1882]).14 All in all, the book experiments with narrative form and exudes a decadent sensibility, where the erotic subject matter is linked to the death dance of modern man. The reception of the book was hostile: it was condemned for its sexual immorality and denounced as a stain on Swedish literature: the critics cried for the police to intervene to incriminate the author. Decadence was not discussed; it was the indecency that appalled.15 Hansson emigrated to Germany to become a German author, but the scandal brought fame: the work introduced French ideas in an influential way to aspiring Nordic decadents. For example, Hansson influenced the early works of the Finnish writer Volter Kilpi (1874–​1939). Kleve’s Berta Funcke and its eponymous heroine also had an afterlife in other Nordic countries: it influenced L. Onerva (pen name of Hilja Onerva Lehtinen, 1882–​1972), a Finnish novelist who borrowed elements from the character Berta Funcke to create the heroine of her novel Mirdja (1908).

214   Pirjo Lyytikäinen

From Naturalistic Portraits to Strange Fantasies and Symbolism Naturalism was the cradle of Nordic decadence, and examples of transitional texts where a naturalistic style is used to depict decadent heroes are easy to find. Trette mænd (Weary Men, 1891) by Arne Garborg (1851–​1924) is a model for many of these works and the prime example of Norwegian decadence. Unlike the internationally most prominent Norwegian authors of the period (such as Henrik Ibsen, whose works are more naturalistic than decadent), Garborg in this novel enters into textual dialogue with French decadence. Weary Men also marks a turn in the author’s naturalism. It was preceded by his articles for the newspaper Dagbladet in 1890, where he discussed a noticeable shift in European literature, arguing that naturalism had lost its appeal and that science and rationality were giving way to a new interest in spiritual matters and questions about the meaning of life.16 The novel follows the tendency established in Against Nature by turning toward an open, fragmentary form and a near-​exclusive focus on the main character’s vacillating but analytical mind. Garborg presents the reader with the self-​portrait of Gabriel Gram, an undecided and weary hero, by means of a collection of notes and diary-​like reflections that Gram himself describes as a draft for a novel, a strategy reminiscent of the ending of Bang’s Haabløse Slægter. The unreliable narrator or note-​writer tells of his own wallowing in the decadent, ego-​centric skepticism encouraged by his friends (the other “weary men” included in the title) and by his reading that includes Huysmans and Bourget as well as popular social Darwinists and philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Søren Kierkegaard. Gram’s profession as a petty civil servant, a “copyist,” reflects his condition of life more generally. The novel begins with a skeptical note on friendship as a form of egoism whereby friends devour each other mentally, anticipating Gram’s fate. The weary men drink and abuse lower-​class women while entertaining all possible prejudices against all women and other “lower races” (here Garborg alludes to August Strindberg [1849–​1912], who proclaimed such “Darwinist” ideas after reading of The Descent of Man). The most sinister source of influence proves to be the progressive utopian Georg Jonathan, who believes in science and unlimited progress and denigrates emotions, religious beliefs, and moral principles. He functions as a Mephistophelean figure to Gram, who hardly qualifies as a Faust but is simply a weak man driven to despair by the loss of any center to hold his life together. His excessive rationality leads him to destroy any chance of love and happiness by overanalyzing his loved one. Thus, he exemplifies the process that Bourget found conspicuous in Baudelaire.17 Gram’s reluctance to believe in the woman who loves him and (as far as the reader can tell) represents the purity for which he longs destroys his chances to escape from his unbearable loneliness. He then suffers from incurable nostalgia for everything that his skeptical reason deprives him of—​at one point this cosmopolitan even longs for the world of nationalistic Romanticism with its idealized landscapes, sublime fjords, and fascination with

Nordic CULTURES   215 old Norwegian myths. He shares the antimodern and antiscientific attitudes of most decadents while still clinging to pseudo-​scientific ideas that led to misogyny and racism in much fin-​de-​siècle culture. Gram’s mental breakdown finally leads him back to his native Lutheran church, despite occasional nostalgia for the Catholic rituals derived from his decadent readings. Garborg’s novel thus seems to foreground the character’s spiritual quest.18 Nevertheless, the reader is left wondering whether his return to the Lutheran church is merely a new phase in the illusions produced by his wavering mind, especially as the conversion seems to give Gram the possibility of renewing contact with his former beloved. Overall, Garborg’s novel is a naturalistic portrait of a weak decadent: Gram is a petty clerk, neither an aristocrat nor an aesthete in any significant sense; he is a product of the fashionable ideas of his drinking buddies. However, this is not the whole truth. The occasional idea that these diary-​like drafts might become a novel make the narrational situation ambiguous. As in many decadent texts, the paradoxes are left unresolved. The unreliable narrator is shown to deceive himself and make errors of judgment, but the portrait of Gram is not interpreted by an independent authorial voice, not even to the extent that it is in Against Nature, where the omniscient narrator comments on the progress of the protagonist’s illness. Whereas in Garborg’s novel visions and dreams remain at a level where they can be interpreted naturalistically, a fantasy world partly takes over in Hans Alienus (1892), a novel by Verner von Heidenstam (1859–​1940). Although the Swedish author tried to deny any association with decadence (a dangerous label even in the 1890s in northern Europe), Hans Alienus can be seen as a major contribution to the literary tradition of decadence because it alludes to numerous decadent themes.19 In this novel, realistic settings and a rural background alternate with the fantasy adventures of the eponymous hero in ancient history. The novel has an unusual structure of three seemingly disparate parts. The first part shows young Hans in modern Rome, whimsically rebelling against the modern age dominated by the “American spirit.” Beginning with a colorful description of a procession in the Vatican, described as “the castle of ghosts” and designating the pope as the castle’s prince, the novel adopts an ornate, decadent style. Hans, a clerk in the Vatican library at this point, is a fanatical worshipper of beauty: he thinks that the religion of beauty will, in the end, triumph over the ugliness of science and modern industrial society. His solemn worship does not shy away from earthly relations; the eccentric daydreamer flirts with two sisters. Hans’s attempts to live happily as a worshiper of beauty only cause unhappiness and are, in the end, desperate efforts to overcome his own deep melancholy and feeling of alienation (as his last name implies). His enthusiasm is also questioned by Catholic priests, whose idea of beauty is quite different from Hans’s. The second part narrates Hans’s imaginary flight to Hades, which even more forcefully illustrates his decadent imagination: he is “going to the shades” to be “away from the present that has only inspired boredom.”20 In the promised land of all decadent clichés, he meets his admired decadent, “Sardanapal,” or Sardanapalus of Nineveh, amid his beautiful art collections and harem. However, this beauty is ambiguous; it is all decay and the only pleasure left to the decadent king is the destruction of all the glories

216   Pirjo Lyytikäinen of the realm before facing the barbarians advancing on his city. The sense of destruction evoked by Baudelaire and signaled as a trait of decadence by Bourget is illustrated by the bloody scenes that bring the rivals Alienus and Sardanapal to murder the femme fatale they both desire.21 The third and last part of the novel takes place in Hans’s father’s house in the remote Swedish countryside: he arrives in the midst of snow and ice to reconcile with his father. The reader then understands the decline of his family that, post festum, explains the wanderings and psychic imbalance of the hero. The decadent form of Heidenstam’s novel is peculiar but illustrates the freedom inherent in the decadent style. The three stages of the hero’s life are quite disparate; nevertheless, from the point of view of the psychology or psychopathology of the hero, they fit together in a highly unclassical manner and clearly follow Romantic models. Moreover, the novel also contains a prelude and a postlude in the form of epic poems, reminiscent of Goethe’s Faust. The prelude gives away the essential truth: a mysterious old woman from the underworld predicts forthcoming miseries to young Hans, who has an idealistic faith in humanity. The postlude reveals his death as a disillusioned old man. The varieties of Nordic decadence also include works that are allied with symbolism and fantasy and entirely discard realistic milieus. Perhaps the best example of this type of decadence is Volter Kilpi’s Antinous (1903), a text immersed in aesthetic visions of the world of the eponymous (semi-​)historical figure. This Finnish example of decadence concentrates on the modern aesthetic malaise, although its setting in antiquity indicates a universal decadent condition.22 In a series of tableaux, the novel depicts the life of a decadent Schopenhauerian aesthete loosely modeled on the historical Antinous. He reacts to all things around him solely by looking; he “freezes” living people in aesthetic poses in order to treat them as artworks. However, this “beautiful soul” is infected by the “sickness” of aestheticism.23 Antinous wants to merge himself into a vision of the world as a passive observing eye. Although bodily realities are remote from this piece of symbolistic imagining, purity and aesthetic bliss cannot be maintained. Kilpi’s Antinous is betrayed by his own thoughts: the melancholic sees the horror through the veil of beauty and the narrative ends with the suicide of the aesthete when he drowns himself in the Nile. Kilpi’s Antinous shows the morbid and antisocial implications of the aesthetic attitude by connecting the figure to the narcissistic tendencies of decadent neurotics. The self-​sufficient pleasure of an individual focusing on the life of refined sensations erodes the basis of communal life and morals alike, even as it remains the source of incurable spleen.24 While echoing common decadent themes and based on the ideas of philosophers admired by the decadents, Antinous is set in a symbolical world evoking antiquity but not really immersed in it.25 Aloof and dismissive of any topic of national interest, the novel remained an oddity in Finland. Nevertheless, Kilpi’s role in inspiring other young authors, including Joel Lehtonen (1881–​1934), was important. Today, along with his later modernist works based on his early aesthetic thinking and his experiments with a kind of “stream of consciousness” in his early works, Kilpi’s Antinous is a recognized classic.

Nordic CULTURES   217

Dark Archipelago and Wilderness: August Strindberg and Joel Lehtonen The passivity of early decadent heroes is emblematic, but with the onset of Nietzschean influence, more vigorous heroes emerge. They are decadent because their energy is somehow flawed: they share the horror of life that plagues the weak decadents, which makes their struggles as “strong” decadents empty and vain. In the Nordic context, the most remarkably vigorous decadents struggle with “primitives.” Primitivism features in a variety of ways in decadent texts, but in the texts explored here the decadent heroes travel to rural milieus inhabited by simple, country people who were once ideal figures in Nordic national Romanticism. In the new decadent context, these figures exemplify primitive forces in a quite different way: rural areas and wildernesses create an alternative milieu for decadence. Urban and mythical settings are discarded, and nostalgia for rural or exotic paradises is likewise rejected.26 August Strindberg, a proponent of decadent pessimism, became famous for his fierce attacks on feminism and the ideas of equality, liberal democracy, and (after an initial period of sympathy) socialism. His vehement satirical style and reactionary ideals inform his rebellious focus on Swedish society; his decadent preoccupations are naturalistic. He placed his most clearly decadent novel in a primitive fishing community on an island situated in the archipelago near Stockholm. I havsbandet (1890, translated as By the Open Sea and On the Seaboard, both 1913) is clearly written in active dialogue with literary decadence and Huysmans’s Against Nature, while the protagonist practices and preaches Darwinian and Nietzschean concepts. The novel portrays a would-​be Superman in a struggle with what he sees as primitive, lower beings. For the hero Borg, the inhabitants of the island, who, in the national Romantic view, would have been representatives of the authentic life in idyllic natural surroundings, exemplify everything that is base in human nature. Borg is a talented man well-​versed in many fields of natural science, with a blind faith in reason and his own intellectual superiority in any company. At the same time, he is also a frail little man, an aesthete who dresses like a dandy, a personal style that quickly provokes the islanders. Borg also suffers from fits of exhaustion. As he does not hide his feelings of superiority and contempt for all that he finds unreasonable, he immediately provokes hostility in others. He is a besser-​wisser (know-​it-​all) who lacks any social sense whatsoever, an attitude that leads to disastrous consequences for him.27 Almost like a mise en abyme, the beginning of Strindberg’s novel already seems to give away the ending. Borg is taken by boat to the island by two islanders, who openly ridicule and despise the little dandy whose insolent Superman attitude is obvious. Borg questions their skills in navigating and sailing their own boat and insists on taking the oar, even though he has only a theoretical experience of sailing. He manages to sail them

218   Pirjo Lyytikäinen to the harbor in the strong wind but his fine clothes are ruined. Once he arrives, he has a fit and lies in the bottom of the boat like a dead man. His knowledge is superior but not accepted because his insolence offends the “primitives.” However, his character also has a primitive dimension; his degeneration is primarily due to his base instincts and hereditary flaws. Later developments prove that he cannot control his own instincts despite—​ or because of—​his desperate efforts to be a man of reason only. The world of the novel is mainly seen through the eyes of the protagonist, although the narrator maintains a discreet naturalistic tone. The portrait of Borg as a victim of his own weaknesses and the demands of his own base nature is given its final touches when he meets his femme fatale, a young woman who is a summer visitor to the island. Borg suffers from incurable loneliness and hopes for the bliss of love, but his contemptuous behavior toward women and his belief that every woman is a lower being would alienate even an angel. This interpretation, however, is not necessarily endorsed by Strindberg, who tends to emphasize the martyrdom of his hero. The bitter and satirical undertone of the novel is revealed by the confirmation of Borg’s scientific findings about how fishing on the island might be saved and developed by modern methods and proper knowledge. The islanders are, in the eyes of the narrator and the implied author, a thoroughly ignorant and superstitious group. The comical weakling is also a tragic victim of primitive stupidity. Strindberg’s naturalistic perspective dominates when it comes to people. On the Seaboard already anticipates the author’s later satires. At the same time, the natural elements in the beautiful Swedish archipelago are presented without dwelling on atrocities or making decadent complaints against nature, and without questioning belief in reason and science. While for Strindberg primitive forces are what threaten and destroy the highest manifestation of man and his reason, Lehtonen has a more positive take on primitivism. In his early novels, nature has primitive potential as the source of all creation. This positivity, however, comes with a twist: creation and destruction are manifestations of the same Dionysian force. The Finnish author’s novels Paholaisen viulu (The devil’s violin, 1904), Villi (Wild, 1905), and Mataleena (1905) depict recognizably decadent and individualistic heroes in rural milieus, where the decadent ambivalence between life and death as well as between good and evil are omnipresent. The contrast with early decadence is clear: an agonistic, affective atmosphere and characters fraught with transgressive passions replace resignation and analytical coldness. Pathos and mania take over and the world is seen as a cruel but also exciting playground of primitive passions, even though decadent, disgusting realities are never forgotten. In this “wilderness decadence,” Nietzschean and Romantic ideas become mixed with a naturalistic writer’s eye for ugly and grotesque details. Instead of a realistic presentation of the outside world—​let alone the social milieu—​the texts convey the feelings and fantasies of the protagonists. In Lehtonen’s third novel, Mataleena, which is “sung” by a poet who is the author’s alter ego, the autobiographical decadence, already in place in Bang’s Haabløse Slægter and Garborg’s Weary Men, is driven toward allegorical autofiction. The story follows the poet in search of his roots. In a backward region of the Finnish countryside, he visits

Nordic CULTURES   219 his biological mother, who has abandoned her son born out of wedlock. The protagonist is introduced as the “happy prince” of fairy tales, but this prince descends to the “eternal wilderness,” the dark regions where primitive life forces show their diabolic and enchanting might.28 The protagonist’s mother, found in a shack in the wilderness, can be seen as one of the wrecks that these forces have left behind, as an utterly disgusting old woman. She is dressed in rags, sick and mad, surrounded by dirt, insects, and extreme poverty, but the poet does not find her abhorrent. Mataleena (Finnish for Magdalene), reputedly a former beauty and a “whore,” is, in the eyes of her son, a saint: St. Mary rather than the sinner Mary Magdalene. This figure blends female beauty and decay—​a blend favored by decadence—​but in a very unusual way. She first manifests only the grotesque and disgusting aspects. The horror and disgust are shown first and are connected to seductive beauty only by a “lying tale” about the mother’s youth imagined and written by the son, who is also the narrator. The son thus creates a version of his mother rather than accepts her as she is. To bring home the allegorical dimensions of the story, Lehtonen introduces a mythical “mother” who appears in the hallucinatory visions of the protagonist. This creature has nothing in common with the idealized female figures of Romantic and symbolist poetry sometimes nostalgically evoked by decadents. This “Wonder of the Forest,” as she is called, is openly erotic and satanic. She is first shown as the alluring and threatening emblem of nature, with green hair like branches of a birch tree, burning eyes, naked with scarlet nipples, and fierce like a she-​wolf. This figure reappears in the narrative several times, and each time she acquires new attributes. In a scene reminiscent of decadent fairy tales,29 she appears as a mother suckling the infant poet but laughing with satanic cruelty and surrounded by devils who, like bad fairies, offer the infant ambiguous presents. The Wonder is also supposed to be the personification of the poet’s wild soul, thus adding a narcissistic aspect to this hallucinatory figure. Instead of abject otherness, it evokes passionate or even hysterical identification. The protagonist’s most crucial vision, however, emphasizes the novel’s connections to core decadence. In this scene, the mad family and the ancestors of the poet are gathered together at a feast with the Wonder and Satan himself, where the ancestors give a long speech in which they align themselves with the sick and destitute, with rebels, criminals, and prostitutes. Thus, they proclaim a community of the wretched of the earth, in a move similar to that made by many decadents before.30 This imagined community à rebours that is evoked as the obverse of bourgeois, religious, state, and national interests reveals the true roots of the poet. Lehtonen’s decadent primitivism shares against-​the-​grain attitudes typical of decadent works and exalts the male artist’s will and creative energy while aligning him with both madness and the forces of destruction. Overall, Lehtonen’s decadent novels operate with conflicted emotions and contradic­ tions that reflect the protagonists’ divided minds and unstable moods. The paradoxical style emphasizes the ambivalent atmosphere, where the wilderness becomes an allegory of terrifying and fascinating natural forces and primordial life. The background of philosophical pessimism lends the trope a metaphysical dimension: as most acutely

220   Pirjo Lyytikäinen presented by Schopenhauer, love and desire create beautiful delusions that hide the fundamental reality of death and decay.

The Femme Fatale from Within: L. Onerva’s Mirdja Among the plethora of femme fatales and female idols who are usually seen through the misogynist eyes of decadent men, it is rare to find female characters who have an independent role in a narrative, let alone a narrative wholly dominated by the point of view and thoughts of a woman. In Nordic decadence, Stella Kleve’s Bertha Funcke paves the way for other heroines to emerge later. Not that Nordic literature is deprived of strong female characters—​Ibsen’s plays, for example, have plenty—​but until L. Onerva there were no decadent heroines written by women. It was a challenge for women writers at the fin de siècle, for even Ibsen’s Nora tended to bewilder the contemporary public. L. Onerva’s eponymous protagonist in the many-​sided novel Mirdja is the notorious exception. Mirdja, an orphan girl with many talents, is raised by her uncle, a philosopher and a hermit. She becomes a highly intriguing character to whom we can attach all kinds of decadent labels: would-​be artist, New Woman, femme fatale, dilettante, Nietzschean Superman, and picara (the female incarnation of the picaresque hero).31 The intertextual background and allusions that show the author’s knowledge of French and Nordic literature and the debates on decadent issues make Mirdja a kind of breviary of Finnish decadence. Had it been translated at the time, the novel might have figured as the quintessential decadent novel presenting a female point of view. The reader follows Mirdja’s attempts to challenge the prejudices against women by playing freely with all the roles conventionally assigned to women by decadent men. She is highly intelligent and has artistic talents but, like typical decadents, suffers from constant self-​doubts and a lack of direction in her life. She also must confront mistaken beliefs concerning female creativity and support the attempts of would-​be Pygmalions to “mold” her. At the same time, she has a Nietzschean spirit of domination. Encouraged by her (male) mentors, she follows her transgressive path while suffering from self-​contradictions. The Finnish capital Helsinki, a relatively small city where modern ideas and lifestyles are only beginning to emerge, is transformed into a scene where Mirdja reigns over men moving in artistic circles. Instead of focusing on the burning political or national issues of the time, the characters discuss art, philosophize, and debate gender issues. The musings of Mirdja in her meetings and confrontations with her various lovers or admirers, who all suffer from decadent symptoms, form a center around which all decadent themes revolve. However, even travel to a metropolis—​a crucial event often alluded to or occurring in Nordic decadent texts—​is described. Mirdja tries to become a singer, and in order to receive singing lessons she travels to a metropolis that is not named but could be an amalgam of Paris and Rome. Here, the trip does not involve an initiation into

Nordic CULTURES   221 decadence as in many novels, but constitutes instead a crucial turning point. A mysterious encounter with a portrait, a mirror-​image of her soul, causes Mirdja to throw away her career. Like all decadents, she seems to be predestined to remain a dilettante and “enter on the road of her own demise.”32 She returns home and finally marries. Her decadent friend and mentor, who functions as a devil’s advocate in the novel, disapproves of the marriage and thereby reinforces her unhappiness. Mirdja becomes frustrated and tortures her husband with her neurotic fits and capricious behavior. The psychological drama with intertextual allusions continues and complicates the portrait of the heroine, whose inability to resolve her inner contradictions makes for constant suffering. The marriage continues in this fashion until everything calms down: the couple grows old and attains a certain level of peace and harmony. The last years of their marriage are very briefly indicated as the narrative hastens toward the end. The predicament of most male decadents returns, but with a new twist. After the death of her husband, Mirdja ends up mad, mourning at the grave of her husband. For a decadent, love is only possible when it is too late. In the end, L. Onerva’s heroine disappears in a foggy swamp searching for her child—​ a child that never existed. The symbolic meaning of the child remains ambiguous, but the swamp is a symbol of dissolution and death without redemption. This is also the only scene where Mirdja is deeply in touch with nature, but even here the swamp is also a symbol of life imbued with chaos and decadent pessimism. Finnish male decadents often used the swamp as a metaphor to describe the seductive power of women, often figured in their “murky,” desirous gaze, but here it signifies the fate of a woman whose life has been wasted. The novel remains a forceful and intriguing monument to decadent writing. After a long period in oblivion, it has become a recognized and studied classic.33 The main interest in the novel lies in the vivid mapping of all the traps a woman meets in trying to free herself from bourgeois constraints. All too often, she becomes imprisoned in decadent gender roles that always circle around power and seem only destined to become master-​slave relations. The misogyny and prejudices against women become a vicious circle because decadence does not offer emancipatory pathways. Nevertheless, here we follow the thoughts, moods, and uncertainties of a female ego. This depiction of the rich, experiential inner world of a woman was rare for the time and challenged the dominant image of the solipsistic male decadent protagonist.

Rural Decadence and Modernism in Estonia From the point of view of decadence studies, the transition from Nordic decadence to modernism remains relatively unexplored. This issue becomes especially pertinent with some works of late decadence, where the typical decadent novel featuring male heroes

222   Pirjo Lyytikäinen who live in their self-​centered imaginary worlds with the desire to subjugate the outside world to their own interests and fantasies is treated in a parodic way. Friedebert Tuglas’s novel Felix Ormusson (written between 1912 and 1914 in Paris and Finland and published in 1915) is a prime example of this late stage of Nordic decadent writing. At the same time, it continues to stage the confrontation between a decadent hero and a primitive rural environment.34 The Estonian author wrote his work in exile, having participated in the 1905 revolution and spent half a year in prison. Tuglas’s novel is framed by a three-​page “Letter to Felix Ormusson in Paris,” initialed F. T. This prologue indicates that the rest of the text, consisting of Ormusson’s fragmentary diary, is unreliable, but the prologue is itself unreliable, playful, and ambivalent about the relationship of the hero and the author. Here, we are reminded of the artifices of both Bang/​Høg and Garborg/​Gram. Estonian decadence was linked to the young artists’ aim to be modern and “metropolitan”; they were influenced by Taine’s ideas emphasizing the need for a proper milieu and were therefore concerned about the “backwardness” of Estonian life and society. The novel Ruth (1909) by J. Randvere (pen name of Johannes Aavik, 1880–​1973) was the first decadent Estonian novel. This exceptional work presented a female metropolitan decadent with a male psyche, but Tuglas thought the character was out of place in the local milieu. As such, Ruth served as an incentive to Tuglas’s attempt to solve the problem through the synthesis of local and metropolitan experiences in Felix Ormusson.35 Ormusson is a male decadent author and aesthete who has come to work on the farm of his friend Johannes to rest from a nervous fever related to his former life in Paris. The life in the French metropolis haunts the novel as Ormusson receives cards and letters from his decadent friends in Paris. The farm in the idyllic countryside with a lake that functions as a symbol of Ormusson’s changing moods awakens the aesthete’s feeling for beauty, but his diary notes betray his sense of distance from the place. He sees the landscape with the eyes of an impressionist painter.36 The artifice is symptomatic: all Ormusson’s observations of the milieu and its inhabitants are mediated by his ideas, accumulated through his metropolitan experiences. It becomes clear that the reader cannot trust his observations, as this misplaced decadent lives in his own imaginary world rather than observing and interacting with his surroundings. Ormusson’s fantasies also strongly affect his interaction with other characters. In the beginning, he expresses deep contempt for the country people by making observations that are highly biased by his primitivist prejudices. Ormusson extends his contempt to Johannes, a pediatrician active in the Estonian nationalist movement, whom he finds to be a dull bourgeois, still very much like the peasants on the farm. His outsider stance changes as his volatile, eroticized desires and dreams color his views on Johannes’s wife Helene and Helene’s sister Marion. Ormusson’s unreliable notes are filled with changing and self-​contradictory reflections on the two women and recycle all the clichés of symbolism and decadence. Ormusson first imagines being in love with Helene and sees in her a mysterious siren very much to his taste, while ignoring Marion’s obvious infatuation with him, but without ever considering the moral dimensions of his own behavior when he tries to seduce his friend’s

Nordic CULTURES   223 spouse. The fantasies remaining fantasies, he then suddenly believes that he has found his ideal in the dull Marion, who is now magically transformed into an angelic beauty. By this time, Marion has seen through him and coldly humiliates him with her sarcasm. Ormusson ends with Helene beginning to hate him and Marion deeply despising both him and her sister. At the same time, Ormusson’s scornful attitudes toward the “little world” of rural folk, where everything repeats itself and where fantasy life is nonexistent, transform into a longing for “real life” and primordial simplicity. Even his attitude toward Johannes changes. However, all this is, equally, mere fantasy; finally, to escape the embarrassing situation, Ormusson decides to flee to Paris. In the ironic ending, Ormusson, still in his dream-​world, rides a wooden horse (an allusion to both Don Quixote and the Trojan Horse referenced earlier in the text) like a ridiculous clown. Thus, the novel shows us the typical decadent as an utterly comical figure, a relic of a culture that is out of fashion. Tuglas’s own writings at the time show that he sees the return to realism or “finding poetry in everyday life” as the new option.37 This is what also marks the turn to modernism in Nordic literature. Some Nordic decadents—​like Lehtonen—​had already opted for everyday life and became neo-​naturalists and (rural) modernists. Tuglas, who finished Felix Ormusson in autumn 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, never continued Ormusson’s story as he had initially planned.

Conclusion We have seen how Nordic decadence developed from its early beginnings in Denmark and its subsequent manifestations in the other two Scandinavian countries, Sweden and Norway. In the early twentieth century, it took new form in Finland and Estonia, born partly out of dialogue with the earlier Scandinavian texts. The variety of Nordic decadence extends from naturalistic portraits of decadent individuals to hybrid works that flirt with fantasy, dreams, and hallucinatory visions suggesting deep recesses of the unconscious mind; furthermore, there are allegorical works with mythical or quasi-​historical scenes of decay. The narrative forms that in naturalism focus on storytelling and presuppose reliable narrators break down and flirt with or employ devices usually associated with modernism. The concern with style, which in decadence is often excessive or even “obsessive,”38 is apparent especially in the later works, where naturalism becomes grotesque and symbolic scenes imbued with philosophical pessimism and melancholy combine with Nietzschean and neo-​Romantic impulses that find expression through oxymorons, paradoxes, and contradictions. All the novels discussed here—​except Kilpi’s Antinous—​somehow relate to Nordic life: their settings in small towns or rural milieus give hints of the social life of the local scene as their protagonists travel to the countryside. Even if the protagonists only make short visits, as in Weary Men and Mirdja, they add local color and allude to national issues. Still, the theme of self-​destructive individualism that almost relishes

224   Pirjo Lyytikäinen the meaninglessness of life relates these works intimately to European decadence. The styles developed in the north both participate in common developments and evoke new variations that might have enriched the international field had there been fewer language barriers and more translations. We can never know what might have been had Nordic decadence been more broadly appreciated at the time, but at least it is not too late to appreciate it now for its richness, originality, and variety.

Notes 1. This term is used about the period 1870–​1890 in Scandinavian literary history and connected to the Danish critic Georg Brandes, who formulated the paradigm of the movement emphasizing social realism and the discussion of social problems as the core of modern literature. 2. Claes Ahlund, Medusas huvud: Dekadensens tematik i svensk sekelskiftesprosa, Historia litterarum 18 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1994), 18. 3. Friedebert Tuglas, quoted in Mirjam Hinrikus, “Theoretically European and/​or Upstart? Decadence in an Estonian Key,” in Nordic Literature of Decadence, ed. Pirjo Lyytikäinen, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2020), 175. 4. Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-​ Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus, “Decadence in Nordic Literature: An Overview,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 5–​6. 5. Ahlund, Medusas huvud, 13. 6. From the point of view of decadence, it seemed important to include Estonia, while Iceland is excluded because no Icelandic decadence is known to the author of this chapter. 7. Finnish and Estonian belong to the Finnic branch of the Finno-​Ugric subdivision of the genealogical group of languages known as Uralic. Hungarian, another Uralic language, belongs to the Ugric branch. Some linguists argue that sufficient commonalities exist between Uralic and Indo-​European languages to group them together, but others contend those commonalities are the result of borrowing, not genetic similitude. For a brief discussion of the Uralic languages in relation to Indo-​European languages, see Anatole V. Lyovin, An Introduction to the Languages of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 54–​57. 8. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 82–​83. 9. Lis Norup, “Through Decadence to Vitalism,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 41–​43. 10. The debate on psychological versus social realism is related to the defense of the “inward turn” in decadent and modernist literature against “Brandesian” realism (referring to Georg Brandes). Thus, “psychological” could mean “decadent,” which, at the time, was a term used only by the opponents of “moral decadence.” See Thomas Andersen, Dekadanse I nordisk litteratur 1880–​1900 (Oslo: Aschehaug, 1992), 141–​42. 11. Andersen, Dekadanse I nordisk litteratur, 148–​51. 12. Ola Hansson, Sensitiva amorosa (1887; Uppsala: Almqvist & Wikcells, 1957), 10. 13. Hansson, Sensitiva, 11. 14. Paul Bourget, Cruelle énigme: Profils perdus (Paris: Bibliothèque Plon, 1885), 105–​14. 15. Andersen, Dekadanse I nordisk litteratur, 158–​61.

Nordic CULTURES   225 16. Guri Ellen Barstad, “Decadence and Religious Longing in Arne Garborg’s Weary Men,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 70–​74, 80–​81; see also Andersen, Dekadanse, 172–​76. 17. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine: Études littéraires, ed. André Guyaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 4. 18. Barstad, “Decadence and Religious Longing,” 74–​79. 19. Susan Brantly, “The Fashionable Decadence of Verner von Heidenstam’s Hans Alienus,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 56–​66. 20. Verner von Heidenstam, Hans Alienus, ed. Gudmund Fröberg (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1995), 226. 21. Bourget, Essais, 13. This section, which involves staging a historical or mythical figure as a decadent, is a well-​known strategy from the French context where detailed, pseudo-​naturalistic descriptions are often mixed with a mythical and exotic fictional world. 22. Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Narkissos ja Sfinksi: Minä ja Toinen vuosisadan vaihteen kirjallisuudessa (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1997), 113. 23. Volter Kilpi, Antinous (Helsinki: Otava, 1903), 91. 24. Pirjo Lyytikäinen, “Decadent Tropologies of Sickness,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 89–​91. 25. In Kilpi’s Antinous, Schopenhauer’s aesthetic thinking is the foremost source of inspiration. 26. Riikka Rossi, Alkukantaisuus ja tunteet: Primitivismi 1900-​luvun alun suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa (Helsinki: SKS, 2020); Riikka Rossi, “Primitivism and Spiritual Emotions: F. E. Sillanpää’s Rural Decadence,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 119–​35. 27. George C. Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–​1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 44–​46. 28. Joel Lehtonen, Mataleena (Helsinki: SKS, 1998), 6. 29. Jean de Palacio, Les Perversions du merveilleux (Paris: Séguier 1993), 11–​50. 30. Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 29; Pirjo Lyytikäinen, “Passions against the Grain: Decadent Emotions in Finnish Wilderness,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 95–​97. 31. Viola Parente-​Čapková, “Spaces of Decadence: A Decadent New Woman’s Journey from the City to the Bog,” in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature,138–​41. 32. L. Onerva, Mirdja (Helsinki: SKS, 2002), 171. 33. For example, Viola Parente-​ Čapková, Decadent New Woman (Un)bound: Mimetic Strategies in L. Onerva’s “Mirdja” (Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 2014). A Swedish translation of the novel appeared in 1995; see Mirdja, trans. Sixten Johansson and Irene Virtala (Stockholm: Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 1995). 34. See also the articles on rural decadences, in Lyytikäinen, Nordic Literature, 85–​135. 35. Hinrikus, “Theoretically European,” 10. 36. The paintings by Tuglas’s friend Konrad Mägi inspired the descriptions. 37. Tuglas’s essays and aphorisms were published in 1916 in the Finnish journal Sunnuntai with the title “Critical Intermezzo.” Quoted in Kai Laitinen, afterword to Friedebert Tuglas, Felix Ormusson, trans. into Finnish by Otto Aho (Oulu, Finland: Kaleva, 1988), 197. 38. Weir, Decadence, 41.

226   Pirjo Lyytikäinen

Further Reading Barstad, Guri, and Karen P. Knutsen, eds. States of Decadence: On the Aesthetics of Beauty, Decline and Transgression across Time and Space. Vol. 1. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, ed. Changing Scenes: Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siècle. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2003. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo. “Decadent Tropologies of Sickness.” In Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, edited by Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen, 85–​102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lyytikäinen, Pirjo, Riikka Rossi, Viola Parente-​Čapková, and Mirjam Hinrikus, eds. Nordic Literature of Decadence. New York: Routledge, 2020. Parente-​Čapková, Viola. Decadent New Woman (Un)bound: Mimetic Strategies in L.Onerva’s “Mirdja.” Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 2014. Parente-​Čapková, Viola. “Decadent New Woman’s Ironic Subversions: L. Onerva’s Multi-​ layered Irony.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 82–​99. https://​volu​pte.gold.ac.uk/​wwd. Rossi, Riikka. “Primitive Passions and Nostalgia for Nature: Decadence and Primitivism in Maria Jotuni’s Work.” Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 2, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 100–​119. https://​volu​pte.gold.ac.uk/​wwd. Schoolfield, George C. A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–​1927. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.

Chapter 12

Eastern Eu rope The “New People” of Decadence Sasha Dovzhyk

The paradoxical temporality of fin-​de-​siècle decadence is defined by the uneasy linkage of endings and beginnings, decline and innovation, cultural exhaustion and modernity. Reminiscing about the 1890s in England, the decade “so conscious of its own novelty and originality,” Holbrook Jackson noted that almost as popular as the ubiquitous phrase “fin de siècle” was the adjective “new”: “it was applied in much the same way to indicate extreme modernity.”1 Taking its cue from the title of the debut book Новые люди (Novye liudi—​New people, 1896) by Zinaida Gippius (1869–​1945), the New Woman of Russian decadence, this chapter focuses on the authors who were preoccupied with the idea of the “new” and whose work their contemporaries viewed as emblematic of certain decadent traits. These writers include Gippius and Leonid Andreyev (1871–​1919), both metropolitan Russians. In addition, the chapter also discusses two Ukrainian authors: the writer-​ turned-​ statesman Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–​1951), who started his literary career in central Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), and the pioneering Ukrainian feminist Olha Kobylianska (1863–​1942), who lived in the western province of Bukovyna under Austro-​Hungarian rule. The four writers’ work in the short story—​the decadent genre of choice because of its fragmented temporality, ease of circulation in proliferating fin-​de-​siècle magazines, and the “emphasis on artistic delicacy and style”2—​is the focus of this chapter, along with their insistently “new” themes, such as “new beauty,” new gender models, or new aspects of sexuality. As was often the case in Western Europe, in Eastern Europe the arbiters of traditional culture interpreted newness as decadence, all the more so when that newness involved uncertainty about gender relations in society at large.

228   Sasha Dovzhyk

Decadence and Empire: Variations on a Theme Eastern European decadence needs to be understood in the context of both oft-​studied gender and temporal perspectives as well as the relatively neglected spatial one. The colonial situation on the culture of the region at the turn of the century means that literary engagement with decadence varied depending on political geography. As Stefano Evangelista observes, the imperial-​colonial context is integral to “the spatial imagination of decadence” which tends to juxtapose an oversophisticated metropolitan culture with images of colonial barbarism and otherness.3 Furthermore, imperial capitals such as Paris and Rome have been traditionally seen as the centers of decadent cultural production. But what happens to decadent tropes and strategies when they are used by writers based in imperial provinces and invested in anti-​colonial resistance? This chapter probes this question by highlighting decadent literature created in the colonial borderlands of the Romanov and Habsburg Empires during the period of their historical decline. The very idea of decadence is historically linked to the notion of empire. As Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick demonstrate, the historical decline of Rome provided nineteenth-​century critics and proponents of decadence with their primary frame of reference: the decay of traditional virtues, the luxuriant corruption of the ruling classes, the falling away from the linguistic standard of classical Latin, and the seduction of the late style, contaminated by fragmentation and foreign idioms.4 Thus, Charles Baudelaire maintained that “the language of the last Latin decadence—​the supreme sigh of a sturdy being already transformed and prepared for spiritual life”—​was uniquely suitable for expressing “passion as it [was] understood and felt by the modern poetic world.”5 Arthur Symons, the principal commentator on decadence in England, attributed to the newest literature of his day “all the qualities that mark[ed] the end of great periods,” the very qualities so evident “in the Greek, the Latin, decadence.”6 While the origin myth of decadence was linked to late antiquity, fin-​de-​siècle decadence was simultaneously shaped by the myths of the modern colonial empires. Thus, in the Russian Empire, the style of decadence thrived alongside the messianic concept of Russia as the “Third Rome”—​“universal empire and world saviour.”7 This vision of Moscow as the historical successor to Rome and Byzantium was rooted in nineteenth-​ century imperial historians’ rediscovery and reappraisal of the obscure writings of the sixteenth-​century monk Filofei from the old city Pskov. The messianic idea of the “Third Rome” was absorbed by the religious turn in Russian literature, political thought, and philosophy at the turn of the century. It had a crucial impact on the fin-​ de-​siècle mystical thinkers who also represented key influences on the decadent literature and arts of the period. Thus, Vladimir Solov’ev, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Gippius’s

Eastern Europe   229 husband, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, speculated about the mission of Russia to reconcile East and West in the spirit of Christianity, a project made possible by the “Russian religious renaissance.”8 Despite the recognized centrality of imperial tropes to decadence, the decadent literature of the period was produced outside of the metropolitan centers and in opposition to dominant imperial cultures. With respect to Eastern Europe, fin-​de-​siècle Ukrainian literature is a case in point. Written at the peripheries of two empires and in the language that was tolerated in Austria-​Hungary but in the Russian Empire was effectively banned until 1905, Ukrainian literary decadence was shaped by starkly different political conditions from those experienced by metropolitan authors. Looking for the “new people” of decadence beyond the imperial Russian capitals of Moscow and Saint Petersburg decenters the traditional view of the region and delineates a less predictable landscape of Eastern European literature at the fin de siècle.

Vynnychenko and Andreyev: The “Decadent Erotomania” of the New Men Volodymyr Vynnychenko is the professional revolutionary of Ukrainian letters and a “decadent in a traditional Ukrainian shirt,” as the film scholar Olha Kyrylova aptly names him.9 A socialist activist of peasant descent, he was thrice arrested for revolutionary activities during the first decade of the twentieth century. While serving his last sentence in Kyiv prison (1906–​1907), he worked not only on his short stories but also on the Ukrainian translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For the Ukrainian critics adhering to the nineteenth-​century realist and populist tradition, his writing encapsulated the “pornography, apathy, and decadence of literature.”10 During the Ukrainian Revolution, Vynnychenko headed the government of the newly created Ukrainian People’s Republic, albeit briefly and intermittently (1917–​1918 and 1918–​1919), and coauthored the fundamental edicts proclaiming, first, Ukrainian autonomy within the Russian Empire and then Ukrainian independence. As Kyrylova notes, the only comparable case of a decadent writer as the head of state is Gabriele D’Annunzio, who became the Comandante of the self-​proclaimed Italian Regency of Carnaro in the city of Fiume in 1919–​1920. The two men’s remarkable trajectories and contributions to Italian and Ukrainian decadent literatures are “inspired” by what Kyrylova calls their “contemplation of the sores of the torn potential state.”11 Certain similarities notwithstanding, D’Annunzio’s aristocratic politics were the obverse of Vynnychenko’s socialism. The fight for the emancipation of the working classes did not prevent the latter from developing a highly wrought decadent style or from exploring an array of provocative themes, from prostitution to venereal diseases and infanticide.

230   Sasha Dovzhyk In the context of the Russian Empire, one can compare Vynnychenko with the figurehead of Russian decadence, Leonid Andreyev (1871–​1919). Both authors were preoccupied with the ideas of Nietzsche, involved in revolutionary politics, and criticized for writing on sexually transgressive subjects. In his early history of psychoanalysis in Russia, Eros of the Impossible, Alexander Etkind notes that Nietzsche’s preachings on the coming of the Übermensch—​passionate, poetic, and utterly unfit for implementation in everyday life—​were read by Russians as practical manuals and later taken as the “basis for social engineering.”12 At the turn of the century, the Nietzschean idea of radical human transformation and rejection of the “natural or traditional order” influenced many would-​be Bolsheviks such as Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. It is worth mentioning that Andreyev was Gorky’s close friend and Vynnychenko his associate and political ally. As for the transgressive treatment of sexuality, Andreyev and Vynnychenko were linked in the minds of such contemporaries as Ivan Nechui-​ Levytskyi, a populist Ukrainian writer and clamorous opponent of literary decadence. In his article “Українська декадентщина” (“Ukrainsʹka dekadentshchyna”—​“Ukrainian decadentism”), Nechui-​Levytskyi accused Vynnychenko of “decadent erotomania,” also manifested by authors like Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde—​and Andreyev.13 Illustrative of the two decadents’ approach to sexuality, Andreyev’s short story “Бездна” (“The Abyss,” 1902) and Vynnychenko’s “Момент” (“The Moment,” 1907) operate with a surprisingly similar set of themes and devices. Investigating the animalistic aspects of human nature, the two texts are set in the wilderness and focus on a man and a woman who together experience an extraordinary, life-​threatening event. Andreyev depicts an enamored young couple, the student Nemovetsky and the schoolgirl Zinochka, who lose their way on a long country walk. The pair come across three “drunk and malicious” brutes who knock Nemovetsky senseless and chase down the girl.14 Later, when the young man finds Zinochka left naked and unconscious in the bushes after the rape, he cannot suppress his primordial sexuality: “There had been a banquet of beasts here, and, suddenly cast out of his comprehensible, simple, human life, he caught the scent of hot lust flooding the air, and his nostrils flared.”15 The girl’s “soft, limp body” rouses “a wild passion in him by its lifeless submissiveness.” Nemovetsky is unable to resist, and “the black abyss swallow[s]‌him up.”16 While seemingly sharing in the decadent Baudelairean vision of nature as the source of chaos, ugliness, and “crime,” Andreyev does not place his faith in culture, either.17 The rape of Nemovetsky’s beloved is deliberately contrasted with the naïve yet highly cultured symbolist love discourse enjoyed by the couple at the start of their walk. Andreyev’s writing thus encapsulates “two fundamental literary qualities” singled out by Baudelaire in “Fusées” (“Rockets,” 1897): “the supernatural, and irony.”18 The couple in Vynnychenko’s short story are two revolutionaries illegally crossing the border. The setting is doubtless informed by Vynnychenko’s experience of escaping from Eastern Ukraine to the western province of Galicia (then subject to Austria-​Hungary) between his arrests and traversing the border back and forth with fake documents and smuggled literature.19 As the couple in “The Moment” move away from civilization and

Eastern Europe   231 into the wild steppe and forest at the frontier, they are struck by mutual desire that is echoed by the surrounding landscape: I liked this process in the forest, in the steppe! It was . . . not contaminated by human morality or by the hypocrisy of lust; it was strong, open, simple. I liked the grasshoppers and the birds—​those little, simple protesters against the hypocrisy of men.20

The revolutionaries escape this hypocrisy when they run through the forest under the fire of border guards. The narrator catches a glimpse of his companion, who looks to him like a “wonderful, beautiful animal—​strong, wild, ready to fight.”21 This bestial eroticism is ubiquitous in the text: it is “the happiness of blood, brain, nerves” that demands the Nietzschean revaluation of all human values.22 As Vynnychenko puts it in his later, more recognizably decadent and diabolic novel Записки кирпатого Мефістофеля (Notes of a Pug-​Nosed Mephistopheles, 1917), morality is nothing but “the pink cosmetic powder over the laws of nature.”23 Rather than the bourgeois employment of the “natural” as a normalizing or explanatory principle, it is nature’s immorality that interests Vynnychenko. In his attempts at defending “The Abyss” against outraged Russian critics, Andreyev insisted: “The horror of our false and deceptive life lies precisely in the fact that we do not notice the brute.”24 From the point of view of the mystically inclined writer, the bestial essence of mankind is coated with a veneer of civilization. By contrast, “The Moment” focuses on the surface, the materiality of the physical world, and the corporeality of the human body. The same palpable sensuality that pervades Vynnychenko’s descriptions of erotic experiences is also present in the narrator’s visualization of his own death: I saw those little flies, Simon’s back, his little horse with its funny harness, his funny hat with its gnawed top—​and there I was, dead, lying in some wild and empty ravine. On my temple was a little black wound, and over it were gathered in a circle those same brilliantly-​colored little green flies. It looked as if they were speculating about what had happened—​looking inside the wound where death had settled, guessing about it. And my face: also greenish, hard.25

In a story preoccupied with vitality, Vynnychenko readily turns to the morbid, creating a poisonous “little black wound” of decadent description in his otherwise energetic prose. This mark of decay festers and grows incrementally in Vynnychenko’s later novels and dramas. In “The Moment,” the characters do not consummate their passion. Instead, they choose to remember it as the “moment” of great intensity, where, in line with Walter Pater’s vade mecum of aestheticism, “the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.”26 The revolutionaries separate in order to guard this extraordinary erotic and aesthetic experience against the would-​be inevitable pollution by the mundane routines of everyday life. Vynnychenko perverts this quasi-​Paterian notion in his drama

232   Sasha Dovzhyk Memento (1909), where an unwanted child represents nothing more than a “moment” of male sexual gratification, a reminder of the natural impulse to reproduce. The child’s murder becomes an ultimate decadent act in which, following Baudelaire’s vision, nature stands “corrected.”27 As the Ukrainian literary scholar Tamara Hundorova argues, Vynnychenko’s highly individualistic “new men” assert their new sexual morality through the subjugation of the natural procreative principle embodied by women.28 Although the New Women of Russian and Ukrainian decadence were likewise fixated on transforming the traditional models of reproductive sexuality, their strategies were understandably at odds with the misogyny of Andreyev and Vynnychenko. In particular, Gippius was repelled by Andreyev’s fascination with “filth.”29 Similarly, Olha Kobylianska considered Vynnychenko “the opponent of the direction and method of [her] writing.”30 Androgyny, women’s separatism, and lesbian eroticism were among those areas explored by the decadent New Women in their attempt to destabilize the patriarchal structures of gender and sexuality.

Gippius: Transcendence of Gender and Projections of Empire Zinaida Gippius not only wrote about the “new people” of decadence—​she also personified the type. Her public image combined some of the classical markers of the New Woman and the decadent dandy: she published her poetry under male pseudonyms and underlined her androgyny by dressing in men’s clothes, from the dandy costume depicted in her famous portrait by Léon Bakst (Figure 12.1) to “culottes with a Ukrainian shirt at the dacha.”31 At the same time, she applied dramatic makeup and dyed her hair red, thus underscoring the artifice of her femininity; her habit of smoking and using a lorgnette were interpreted as masculine and domineering; she also had a number of romantic affairs with women and enjoyed manipulating her numerous male admirers. Her openly discussed and reportedly celibate marriage to Dmitry Merezhkovsky was seen as an attack on biological reproduction and the “natural” female role: the couple conceived marriage as a spiritual union in which the creation of art replaced sexual procreation.32 Dissenting conceptualizations of gender and sexuality structured by the decadent dichotomy of nature and artifice were at the heart of her work from the first book Novye liudi on. The opening story of that book, “Яблони цветут” (“Apple Blossom”), also reveals an imaginative use of late-​imperial geographies. In the dedication of Novye liudi to the literary critic Akim Volynsky, Gippius describes the book as “the first step towards the new beauty” for which she envisioned both of them fighting.33 This oddly structured collection contains thirteen short stories interrupted in the middle by twelve poems. According to Jonathan Stone, Gippius indicates her “affiliation with the era’s ‘new people’ ” and “engagement with the aesthetics of rupture and regeneration that accompanied modernity.”34 Despite their proclaimed break with the

Eastern Europe   233

Figure 12.1.  Léon Bakst, Portrait of Zinaida Gippius (1906). Source: Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Wikimedia Commons).

positivist tradition, Gippius and her circle “recycled,” as Irina Paperno shows, the central metaphor of the “new people” used by the previous generation of radical realists, particularly Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose programmatic socialist novel Что делать? (What Is to Be Done?, 1863) has the subheading Из рассказов о новых людях (From the Tales about the New People).35 The mysticism and decadence of Gippius and her allies were informed by the positivist ideas of those Russian populists and realists of the 1860s who had been similarly preoccupied with the idea of radical human transformation. Whereas “Apple Blossom” indeed meditates on the “relationship between nature and civilization,” as Stone notes, it is also concerned with distinctly decadent themes, such as androgyny, incest, and suicide.36 The story is narrated in the first person by Volodia, a pianist in his late twenties, who reminisces about his relationships with two women: a symbiotic bond and cross-​gender identification with his mother, who brought him up

234   Sasha Dovzhyk as her companion and spiritual twin; and a brief encounter with an unconventional young woman named Marta, who awakens in him a longing for the transcendental. The narrator reports that, even physically, he was a mirror of his mother: a dandy popular with young ladies, he looked “so much like her”; his face used to be “beautiful and soft like Mother’s.”37 Supplementing Volodia’s feminized body with a set of feminine-​ coded character traits (his self-​acknowledged sentimentality, weakness, and coquetry), Gippius appears to fashion the recognizable fin-​de-​siècle image of the androgyne. The writer’s fascination with cross-​gendering and androgyny is well-​documented.38 “I like this deception of possibility: as if a hint of bisexuality, he appears both a woman and a man,” Gippius noted in her diary titled Contes d’amour in 1899 while analyzing a short-​ lived infatuation with an effeminate young man. Gippius revisited this psycho-​erotic experience in her short story “Ошибка” (“Oshibka”—​“Mistake”) in which the heroine falls in love with an effeminate man who is eventually revealed to be a woman in disguise.39 As Olga Matich points out in Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle, the androgyne “represents a decadent ideal: it embodies its preference for artifice over nature while also satisfying the epoch’s nostalgia for the whole.”40 The crucial notion of wholeness results from the merging of male and female qualities and corresponds with what A. J. L. Busst describes as the androgyne’s “solitary self-​sufficiency.”41 This dream of wholeness is also what “Apple Blossom” works to disrupt. In line with the androgyne’s implied asexuality, Volodia is uninterested in romantic or erotic relations with others, his every desire subdued by the intense interdependence with the mother. “You are not a bit like a man; you are just like a woman. Perhaps that is the reason we are such great friends . . . I wonder if it was my doing,” she speculates.42 She molded the son into a creature like herself and for herself, in such a way that “it was impossible to understand us apart, and when together, people said, we made a complete whole.”43 The androgyne’s idealized self-​sufficiency is thus replaced with the mutual dependence of the castrating femme fatale and the emasculated dandy, the two figures that embody, according to Matich, the decadent “gender fluidity” and revolt against the law of procreation.44 The only premonition of a conflict within their unnatural symbiosis arises from differing attitudes to nature: the mother prefers city streets to gardens, the semi-​darkness of a drawing room to sunlight, and her own perfumes to the perfume of the early spring; by contrast, the son manifests a dim sensitivity for the beauty of the natural world. This discord comes to the surface when Volodia meets a neighbor uniquely attuned to the mystical beauty of nature. Gendered expectations reveal their artificiality in Marta’s presence: in the transcendental spring garden with its apple trees in bloom, the narrator is unable to treat her superficially, as one treats a young lady. He forgets all coquetry, sharing in her contemplative world of “new beauty” instead. Like Gippius’s famous poem “Песня” (“Song,” 1893), also published in Novye liudi, “Apple Blossom” expresses a “yearning” for that “which doesn’t exist, has never existed.”45 The transcendental communion between Marta and the narrator is, nevertheless, short-​lived. His mother misconstrues their mystical relationship as a romantic and would-​be matrimonial one. Unable to accept her son’s betrayal, she dies, as the narrator believes, “from

Eastern Europe   235 violent hatred she felt” toward him.46 In stark contrast with the image of Marta and the abandoned apple garden, the mother’s last appearance in the story is in the form of a decomposing corpse that emits an “acetic and dreadful smell.”47 While being led by Gippius into the transcendental sphere, we should also follow Edward Said’s advice from Culture and Imperialism and pay attention to “the function of space, geography, and location” in the narrative.48 “Apple Blossom” is structured as a sequence of relocations between the sites of urban decadence, precisely named as Moscow and Saint Petersburg, the two metropolitan centers of the Russian Empire, and the garden, located somewhere “in a large town in the South.”49 Moscow is where the narrator goes with his mother to study at the Conservatoire; Saint Petersburg is where he moves after her death, to contemplate suicide in a Dostoevskian “flat, with its dark, curtainless windows and sagging, grimy ceiling in the middle of which is a large, austere-​looking hook.”50 This “gloomy flat” is reported to be “far away” from the unspecified place in “the South” where the narrator and Marta suddenly understand “how to live” harmoniously.51 In imperial Russian discourse, “the South” usually designates colonial domains in the Caucasus or Ukraine. While the metropolitan centers represent civilization with its decadent effects, Gippius’s idealized garden in “the South” is unspoiled by such advances and constructed as the more primitive, mysterious, and natural Other of imperial urban culture. The guardian of this place, Marta, speaks in abrupt, unrefined sentences. She urges Volodia to “get away from other people’s ideas,” to stop performing “such complex things, with so many notes,” and to play instead “something slower and simpler,” evocative of nature’s harmony. She is “in obvious difficulties to explain her meaning,” but Volodia understands.52 When he later reminisces about Marta and the garden, he thinks of “some simple little Russian song.”53 “Little Russian” is the term coined in the eighteenth century for the western Slavic language spoken by the people of today’s Ukraine to distinguish the language and people of the region from both “Great Russian” as well as “White Russian” (Belarusian) culture. Therefore, the interest of “Apple Blossom” in the “relationship between nature and civilization” is enmeshed in colonialist discourse. The mystical refuge from traditional gender conventions has its specific location on the map of the Russian Empire. Preoccupied with the transcendence of the oppressive gender binary, Gippius’s story also reveals traces of the metropolitan writer’s expansionist thought.

Kobylianska: Politics of Desire and “Crimes” against Nationalism A special attention to self-​fashioning and a curatorial approach to biography make it possible to see Gippius in parallel with Olha Kobylianska (1863–​1942). Having lived in the province of Bukovyna under the rule of the Austro-​Hungarian Empire, Kingdom of

236   Sasha Dovzhyk Romania, and the USSR, she wrote four autobiographies (in 1898, 1903, 1921–​1922, and 1927), tinkering with her narrative under dramatically changing political circumstances. In the later accounts, her early aestheticism, Nietzscheanism, and feminism became obscured, and the spotlight was turned on Kobylianska’s humble background and investment in the emancipation of the common people. However, the difficulty and significance of choosing to write in Ukrainian, her second language, remained a recurring motif.54 Coming from a typical Bukovynian household in which German, Ukrainian, and Polish cultures intermingled, she completed only four classes of elementary school and complemented this education with an extensive reading of German authors. The language of her first literary works was also German. The most popular explanation of Kobylianska’s switch to Ukrainian is the influence of the writer’s two remarkable Ukrainian friends: Nataliia Kobrynska, the leader of the women’s movement in western Ukraine, and Sofiia Okunevska, the first female gynecologist in Austria-​Hungary.55 Kobylianska’s feminism and perceived foreignness were two defining factors in her critical reception at the turn of the century. The German flavor of Kobylianska’s prose singled her out as the primary target of a diatribe against literary decadence by the influential critic Sergei Iefremov. As if echoing the dedication of Gippius’s Novye liudi, his article was originally titled “В поисках новой красоты” (“V poiskakh novoi krasoty”—​“In search of new beauty,” 1902). Iefremov’s opposition to the “epidemiological” spread of poisonous Western decadence in Ukraine presents, perhaps, the most graphic articulation of the generational conflict between the nineteenth-​century school of populist writers and the “new people” of the fin de siècle in Ukraine. From Iefremov’s populist perspective, the decadents’ attention to form, their supposed renunciation of the social mission of literature, and their disinterest in narod (the common people, identified by the populists with peasantry) were akin to the betrayal of the Ukrainian national project. The ascription of such extraordinary social and political significance to literature was conditioned, as Solomiya Pavlychko has shown, by Ukrainian statelessness. The late nineteenth-​century populist ideologues believed that, from the revived national literature, the lost Ukrainian state was eventually to be reborn.56 Considering the magnitude of the task, Iefremov could not but lament the waste of Ukrainian literary talent, be it even of a minor and contaminated sort like Kobylianska’s: We have so few workers in all the spheres of intellectual life . . . that any and every loss . . . is doubly felt on our social organism. Every premeditated waste, even of one’s own personal resources, becomes immediately not only thoughtlessness . . . but a crime against one’s country and one’s people.57

Thus, Kobylianska was guilty of an unforgivable excess: instead of invigorating the body of the nation, she chose to “waste” her (pro-​)creative resources “in search of new beauty”—​for which, as Iefremov pointed out, she developed an “insatiable craving.”58 Overall, the tone of Iefremov’s article evokes nineteenth-​century moral panic over the favored Victorian vice of masturbation. Combining privacy, imagination, and excess,

Eastern Europe   237 masturbation came to represent, as Thomas W. Laqueur shows in his cultural history of “solitary sex,” the danger of all that was beyond the control of modern bourgeois society and the reproductive heterosexual domain.59 Iefremov’s critique of Kobylianska clearly shows where the woman writer’s decadent transgressions lay. In the eyes of the dominant populist camp, her perceived “crimes” were directed against language and the nation as well as the heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality. One finds a similar constellation of charges in the criticism of Kobylianska by another patriarch of Ukrainian literature, the canonical national writer Ivan Franko. Having pointed out the unhealthy Western influences on the writer (notably Nietzsche), Franko comments on Kobylianska’s “flashy, tinted with lyricism style which often evokes the spinster-​like, sentimental style of Marlitt, [the style] we call decadence.”60 In the male critics’ reactions, sexual and national anxieties overlap. In an article on the subversive appropriation of the concept of “female betrayal” by the poets Anna Akhmatova and Natalia Livytska-​Kholodna, Alexander Averbuch maintains that this cultural trope relates to the presumed “ability of ethnically different women to corrupt men’s solidarity and undermine allegiance to the nation.”61 As an outsider and a so-​called spinster, Kobylianska constitutes a threat to the vigor and authenticity of the national revival despite her commitment to the Ukrainian political project, asserted by the difficult decision to write in a second language. Language polluted with foreignness, politics contaminated by aestheticism, and sexuality divorced from procreation: nowhere are these dangerous qualities of Kobylianska’s early writing more tangible than in her story “Valse Mélancolique” (1897). Reviewing late-​Victorian decadence, Jackson noted that it was characterized by a “widespread concern for the correct—​the most effective, most powerful, most righteous—​mode of living.”62 This same concern defines “Valse Mélancolique.” At its center, Kobylianska places the unconventional living arrangement of three young women who reside in highly aestheticized rooms of their own. Vira Aheieva observes that, unusually for a New Woman writer, Kobylianska does not counterpose the suffocating interior space and the tempting freedom of the outside world.63 In their “large, attractive” rooms, where a “finer beauty reigns,” the three women—​an artist, a musician, and a traditional domestic type who also narrates the story—​are free to put into practice their “creative ideas on how to enhance domestic living.”64 Descriptions of beautiful objects, sumptuous surfaces, and the multisensory experiences that fill their space illustrate “an oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement” that characterizes, according to Symons, decadent literature.65 Like Western European aesthetes and decadents, Kobylianska’s heroines find “in sensory experience an escape from the evil of banality” that permeates the outside world.66 Through its Germanized vocabulary and syntax, Kobylianska’s text displays a very decadent “disease of form,” intensifying the effect of a strange decadent hothouse.67 The story constructs a refined, aestheticized, and autonomous space in which new forms of women’s self-​expression and sensuality can flower. In her analysis of the association between decadence and individualism, Regenia Gagnier points out that the New Women of fin-​de-​siècle literature “wanted autonomy, individual development, but they wanted it through relationship.”68 What distinguishes

238   Sasha Dovzhyk Kobylianska’s story is that, instead of the traditional male-​female dichotomy, such possibilities are explored through the triadic relationship of the heroines with each other. At the beginning of “Valse Mélancolique,” the artist puts forward a vision of autonomy that could be achieved through a partnership of three independent women: Those bugaboos that are used to frighten unmarried women—​such as loneliness, helplessness, queerness and the like—​can draw as near as they want to. We won’t be alone. We won’t appear ridiculous, and we won’t be, so to say, pitiful. . . . We’ll be human beings who, having chosen not to become either wives or mothers, develop fully on their own.69

When the melancholic musician joins the artist and the narrator in their apartment, this utopian and inescapably “queer” vision becomes complete: She soon held sway over both of us. The artist fell in love with her like a man, and almost smothered her with sincere feelings. . . . And I quietly worshipped her. Every day, Hannusya uncovered a new beauty in her, and took charge of her outward appearance as a mother cares for her child. She combed Sofiya’s long, silky hair, arranging it in her own antique style, and dreamt up special collars and other clothing to enhance her classical profile. I loved her without any “motives.” No, I loved both of them.70

As Hundorova shows in Femina melancholica, her study of Kobylianska’s work through the lens of gender, this radical model of female intimacy which mixes eroticization with infantilization was cultivated by Kobylianska in her prose as well as her personal life through romantic friendships with women, including the canonical Ukrainian writer and feminist Lesia Ukrainka. These intimate relationships constituted, according to Hundorova, “a specific form of women’s self-​defense in a patriarchal world where the structures of male culture and male consciousness continued to dominate.”71 The musician’s tragic death interrupts the transformative potential of the triadic partnership in “Valse Mélancolique.” The most decadent character within the trio is the musician, a physically contradictory figure whose body remains still as a marble statue while her impassioned hands “flash . . . over the keyboard like white petals.”72 Since a past love for an unworthy man had already “deadened” her “entire being,” the musician’s physical death is anticipated from the start of the story.73 However, Kobylianska charts two different trajectories toward individual self-​realization for the narrator (marriage) and the artist (free love, disdain for philistine conventions, and fulfillment through her art). The artist embodies Kobylianska’s Nietzschean type who is driven by the notion of artistic self-​fashioning and self-​transformation. Kobylianska also formulates this imperative in her novella Царівна (Tsarivna—​The princess, 1896): [T]‌o be a goal unto oneself, to labor at one’s own spirit, like a bee; to enrich and enlarge it, so that it becomes radiant, beautiful, exhilarating, so that it gleams in a

Eastern Europe   239 thousand colours! Above all, to be a goal unto oneself and to hone oneself, day by day and year by year. To sculpt and polish oneself, so that all becomes complex, refined and pleasing.74

As Pavlychko points out, Kobylianska reverses the gender of the Nietzschean Übermensch, making the figure insistently female.75 Furthermore, the superior woman’s goal of individual self-​realization could not be achieved separately from the collective: here we come across the radical expansion of the New Woman’s “autonomy . . . through relationship.”76 The paradox of Kobylianska’s individualism is noted by the Ukrainian literary scholar Marko Pavlyshyn: while “in Nietzsche the condition of fulfilment, self-​understanding and power over oneself . . . occurs within an individual,” the same state of Kobylianska’s characters “should be shared by many.”77 In Tsarivna, the heroine dreams that her entire nation overcomes its “melancholy” and “nostalgia for the past” to become “a cultured people, free and indefatigable in moral power.”78 Her vision of the nation could not be further from the populists’ fascination with peasantry and native soil. For Kobylianska, national emancipation comes through culture. Her work thus exemplifies what Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj counts among the major achievements of Ukrainian modernism, of which decadence is part: the “abandonment of the populist and realist premise that art serves the narod” and the “attendant recognition of art as an institution of national culture that has civic value, independent of the proverbial ‘people’,” the advocacy of “ ‘high’ European art (i.e., for and by the intelligentsia)” regarded as “one of the indispensable attributes of Ukrainian nationhood.”79 A westernized woman of letters, Kobylianska approaches the task of nation-​building from a position that is twice marginalized and doubly subversive. According to Hundorova, the author’s gender subversion and radical revision of the national project from an outsider’s viewpoint makes Kobylianska’s contribution to Eastern European literature “revolutionary” in the sense that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ascribe to “minor literatures.”80 In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, the two critics observe: A major or established literature follows a vector which goes from content to expression: a content once given, in a given form, one must find, discover, or see the form of expression suitable to it. [ . . . ] But a minor or revolutionary literature begins by speaking and only sees and conceives afterward. . . . The expression must shatter the forms, marking the breaking points and the new tributaries. Once a form is shattered, the contents, which will necessarily have broken with the order of things, must be reconstructed.81

The Ukrainian critics hostile to Kobylianska could forgive her neither the linguistic shattering of forms nor the cracked order of patriarchal culture. While protecting their “minor” national literature from Russian and Austrian imperialist oppression and rooting nationalist ideology in the concept of native authenticity, Ukrainian populists also generously and unreflectively borrowed from the toolkit of Russian populism, which, as Pavlychko notes, included anti-​Western moods, the idealization of the

240   Sasha Dovzhyk common people, and messianic exaltation.82 The authenticity doctrine of Ukrainian populism thus replicated the structures of the oppressor’s ideology. Kobylianska’s decadence, on the other hand, is saturated with what Deleuze and Guattari call “a micropolitics, a politics of desire, which questions all proceedings” and, by way of decadent deviations, takes Ukrainian literature into the future.83

Conclusion At the turn of the twentieth century, literary decadence was new in Eastern Europe; at the same time, the “new people” whose writing both challenged the perceived natural order in sexual and gender realms and turned away from realist and populist literary conventions were considered decadent. Vynnychenko and Andreyev, the “new men” of literary decadence, were preoccupied with sexually transgressive and often misogynist themes such as rape and infanticide. The New Women, Gippius and Kobylianska, probed different escape routes from the suffocating gender prison, including androgyny, cross-​gendering, and new forms of female intimacy. And while the production of decadent literatures is often strongly associated with the centers of the modern empires and with the othering gaze of metropolitan writers toward the colonies, the thriving of decadent writing in those borderland, “minor” literatures should not be overlooked. The conditions of minority literatures are such that they invite transgressions of linguistic, territorial, and national borders. Renegotiating the relationship between language and power, the writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko and, to a greater extent, those of Olha Kobylianska, reveal the potential of decadence to undermine both oppressive imperialist ideologies and parochial nationalist sentiments.

Notes 1. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (London: Grant Richards, 1913), 24, 22. 2. Kostas Boyiopoulos, Yoonjoung Choi, and Matthew Brinton Tildesley, eds., The Decadent Short Story (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 1. 3. Stefano Evangelista, “Transnational Decadence,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 325. 4. See Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick, eds., Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 2–​4. 5. Charles Baudelaire, note to the poem “Franciscae meae laudes,” translated and quoted by Evangelista, “Transnational Decadence,” 324. 6. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s Magazine, November 1893, 858–​59. 7. Marshall Poe, “Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a ‘Pivotal Moment,’ ” Jahrbücher Für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 3 (2001): 422.

Eastern Europe   241 8. The term “Russian religious renaissance” was coined retrospectively by Nikolai Berdiaev, an active participant of the religious turn. See Nikolai Berdiaev, “Russkii dukhovnyi renessans nachala XX v. i zhurnal ‘Put´’ (k desiatiletiu ‘Puti’),” Put ´ 49 (1935). 9. O. Kyrylova, “Volodymyr Vynnychenko: ‘kinodekadent u vyshyvantsi’ (kulturna istoriia ekranizatsii—​1917–​2014),” Magisterium 68 (2017): 58–​66. 10. Sergei Iefremov’s diagnosis cited in Pavlo Khrystiuk, “V. Vynnychenko i F. Nitsshe,” Ukrainska khata 4–​5 (1913): 276. 11. O. Kyrylova, Dekadentskyi kinematograf u vymirakh kulturologii i filosofskoi tanatologii (Kyiv: Vydavnytstvo NPU im. M. P. Drahomanova, 2017), 157. 12. O. Kyrylova, Dekadentskyi kinematograf, 157. 13. Ivan Nechui-​Levytskyi, “Ukrainska dekadentshchyna,” in Zibrannia tvoriv (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1968), 10:214. 14. Leonid Andreyev, “The Abyss,” in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse, ed. Kirsten Lodge, trans. Margo Schohl Rosen and Grigory Dashevsky (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2007), 228. 15. Andreyev, 234. 16. Andreyev, 235. 17. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Charvet (Cambridge: Penguin Books, 1972), 425. 18. Charles Baudelaire, “Intimate Papers from the Unpublished Works of Baudelaire: Rockets,” in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith, trans. Joseph T. Shipley (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 211–​25. 19. Mykola Soroka, Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2012), 14. 20. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, “The Moment,” in Selected Short Stories, trans. Theodore S. Prokopov (Wolfeboro, NH: Longwood Academic, 1991), 34. 21. Vynnychenko, 36. 22. Vynnychenko, 38. 23. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Notes of a Pug-​ Nosed Mephistopheles, trans. Theodore S. Prokopov (New York: Guymard Press, 1991), 121. 24. Quoted in Frederick White, “Peering into the Abyss: Andreev’s Rejoinder to Tolstoi’s Kreutzer Sonata,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 50 (April 14, 2008): 476. 25. Vynnychenko, “The Moment,” 24. 26. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 119. 27. Baudelaire, Baudelaire, 42. 28. Tamara Hundorova, Femina melancholica: Stat’ i kul’tura v gendernii utopii Ol’hy Kobylians’koi (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2002), 214–​20. 29. Anton Krainii, Literaturnyi dnevnik (1899–​1907) (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozhkov, 1908), 82. 30. Quoted in Hundorova, Femina melancholica, 220. 31. Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 173. 32. Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 97–​101. On the marriage to Merezhkovsky, see Matich, Erotic Utopia, 162–​7 1. 33. Zinaida Gippius, Novye liudi (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. Merkusheva, 1896).

242   Sasha Dovzhyk 34. Jonathan Stone, Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture: Aesthetics and Anxiety in the 1890s (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 79. 35. Irina Paperno, “Introduction” to Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, ed. Joan Delaney Grossman and Irina Paperno (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 5. 36. Stone, Decadence and Modernism, 79. 37. Zinaida Hippius, “Apple Blossom,” in Russian Short Stories (London: Senate, 1995), 53, 51. The name is usually transliterated Gippius, usage adopted in the main text and for further references to the short story in this collection. 38. See, for example, Jenifer Presto, Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 160–​89. 39. The diary entry (1899) is cited in Zinaida Gippius, “Rasskazy: Tri damy serdtsa; Oshibka (publikatsiia i posloslovie M. Pavlovoi),” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 8 (1994): 23. The transgressive story “Oshibka” (“Erreure”) was written in French and only published in the Russian translation from the manuscript in 1994. 40. Matich, Erotic Utopia, 19. 41. A. J. L. Busst, “The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century,” in Romantic Mythologies, ed. Ian Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1967), 47–​50. 42. Hippius, “Apple Blossom,” 53. 43. Hippius, 54. 44. Matich, Erotic Utopia, 19. 45. Zinaida Gippius, “Song,” in The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse, ed. and trans. Kirsten Lodge (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2007), 219. 46. Hippius, “Apple Blossom,” 66, 65. 47. The translation is by the author, since this admittedly decadent sentence is omitted in the English publication of “Apple Blossom” cited in note 37; for the original, see Gippius, Novye liudi, 30. 48. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 84. 49. Hippius, “Apple Blossom,” 52. 50. Hippius, 60. 51. Hippius, 66, 65. 52. Hippius, 59, 60. 53. Hippius, 52. 54. Marko Pavlyshyn, “Diary, Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction: Reading Ol’ha Kobylians’ka,” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (2000): 46–​8. 55. Yuliya Ladygina, Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020), 11, 41–​42. 56. Solomiia Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu v ukraiinskii literaturi (Kyiv: Lybid, 1999), 31–​33. 57. Translated by Danylo Husar Struk, “The Journal Svit: A Barometer of Modernism,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 15, nos. 3-​4 (1991): 246. 58. Sergei Iefremov, “V poiskakh novoi krasoty,” Kievskaia starina 79, no. 11 (1902): 268. 59. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003). For the “rash of texts” on the subject of juvenile masturbation and its ideological effects, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–​1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Verso, 2003), 231–​62.

Eastern Europe   243 60. E. Marlitt was the pseudonym of Eugenie John, a popular German novelist. Franko supplied his critical overview of Kobylianska’s work in a letter to the Croatian scholar Vatroslav Jagić in 1905; Ivan Franko, Zibrannia tvoriv: Lysty (1895–​ 1916), vol. 50 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1986), 281. 61. Alexander Averbuch, “The Theurgy of Impurity: Fin-​de-​Race and Feminine Sin in Russian and Ukrainian Modernisms,” Russian Review 78, no. 3 (2019): 478. 62. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 12. 63. Vira Aheieva, “Zhinochyi prostir,” Magisterium: Vyp. 8. Literaturoznavchi studii, 2002, 6. 64. Olha Kobylianska, “Valse Mélancolique,” in But . . . The Lord Is Silent: Selected Prose Fiction, ed. Sonia Morris, trans. Roma Franko (Saskatoon, SK: Language Lanterns Publications, 1999), 145, 154. 65. Symons, “Decadent Movement in Literature,” 858. 66. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, eds., Decadence and the Senses (Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017), 2. 67. Symons, “Decadent Movement in Literature,” 859. 68. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63. 69. Kobylianska, “Valse Mélancolique,” 130–​1. 70. Kobylianska, 151. 71. Hundorova, Femina melancholica, 68. 72. Kobylianska, “Valse Mélancolique,” 148. 73. Kobylianska, 159. 74. Translated by Marko Pavlyshyn, “The Uses of Nietzsche: Olha Kobylianska’s Reading of Zarathustra,” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 3 (2008): 435. 75. Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu, 72. 76. Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization, 63. 77. Pavlyshyn, “The Uses of Nietzsche,” 439. 78. Pavlyshyn, 441. 79. Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj, “Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 34, nos. 1-​2 (1992): 116. 80. Tamara Hundorova, “The Melancholy of Gender,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 22 (2005): 167; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression,” trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History 16, no. 3 (1985): 591. 81. Deleuze and Guattari, “Kafka,” 592. 82. Pavlychko, Dyskurs modernizmu, 62. 83. Deleuze and Guattari, “Kafka,” 606.

Further Reading Averbuch, Alexander. “The Theurgy of Impurity: Fin-​de-​Race and Feminine Sin in Russian and Ukrainian Modernisms.” Russian Review 78, no. 3 (2019): 459–​85. Dowling, Linda. “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s.” Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 33, no. 4 (1979): 434–​53. Grossman, Joan Delaney. Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Hundorova, Tamara. “The Melancholy of Gender.” Acta Slavica Iaponica 22 (2005): 165–​76.

244   Sasha Dovzhyk Ilnytzkyj, Oleh S. “Ukrainian Symbolism and the Problem of Modernism.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 34, nos. 1/​2 (1992): 113–​30. Kirillova, Olga. “Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the Early Ukrainian Decadent Film (1917–​ 1918).” Naukovi zapysky NAUKMA: Teoriia ta istoriia kultury 191 (2017): 52–​55. Kobyljans’ka, Ol’ha. On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs. Translated by Marija Skrypnyk. Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2001. Ladygina, Yuliya. Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Lodge, Kirsten, ed. The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse. Translated by Kirsten Lodge, Margo Schohl Rosen, and Grigory Dashevsky. Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2007. Matich, Olga. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. McQuillen, Colleen. The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013. Paperno, Irina, and Joan Delaney Grossman, eds. Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Pavlyshyn, Marko. “Diary, Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction: Reading Ol’ha Kobylians’ka.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (2000): 43–​58. Pavlyshyn, Marko. “The Uses of Nietzsche: Olha Kobylianska’s Reading of Zarathustra.” Slavonic and East European Review 86, no. 3 (2008): 420–​42. Presto, Jenifer. Beyond the Flesh: Alexander Blok, Zinaida Gippius, and the Symbolist Sublimation of Sex. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Schwarz, Agatha, and Helga Thorson. “The Aesthetics of Change: Women Writers of the Austro-​Hungarian Monarchy.” In Crossing Central Europe, edited by Helga Mitterbauer and Carrie Smith-​Prei, 27–​49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Soroka, Mykola. Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2012. Steinberg, Mark D. Petersburg Fin de Siècle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. White, Frederick H. Degeneration, Decadence and Disease in the Russian Fin de Siècle: Neurasthenia in the Life and Work of Leonid Andreev. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Chapter 13

TURKEY Ottoman Tanzimat and the Decadence of Empire Özen Nergis Dolcerocca

All empires decline: the Persian, the Roman, the Ottoman, the Habsburg, the British, and many more. Today, only the British remains, or rather, only the residue of the empire remains. The term decadence serves to identify the culture of decline in the imperial context, and in the case of Britain (where the term is sometimes capitalized as “The Decadence” and used to designate a specific movement in arts and letters), that culture concerns a combination of class distinction and moral judgment, the class being the aristocracy and the judgment being negative. The society dramas of Oscar Wilde, such as Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), are populated by lords and ladies behaving badly, their selfish, hypocritical, and hedonistic actions offering a kind of template for social decadence, even as their tastes for all things artificial provide the pattern for aesthetic decadence. This British decadence was inspired, at least partly, by Roman decadence, as we see when Wilde himself styles his hair after the manner of the dissolute Roman emperor Nero, or when he has the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray emulate the excesses of the boy-​emperor Elagabalus. In France, this link between decadence and empire was exploited in 1834 by Désiré Nisard, whose conservative attack on his Romantic contemporaries compared them to Roman decadence. Paul Verlaine, almost half a decade later, gladly accepted the conservative reproach in his famous line, “Je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence” (I am the Empire at the end of the Decadence). What conservatives see as aesthetic inferiority and artistic disintegration, decadents welcome as a creative style that subverts aesthetic conventions. To these British and French examples can be added a handful of non-​Western cultures that have deliberately subjected themselves to the West, finding something lacking in their own cultures that required the supplement of Western modernity. The Meiji Empire (1868–​1912) in Japan is an example of this sort of supplementation, in which the leaders of the empire engaged in a kind of willful submission to the modernity of the West, inviting experts in numerous Western disciplines and practices to the island nation in an effort to break free from the isolated, feudal heritage of the

246   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–​1868). The Ottoman Empire (1299–​1922) is another example: during the late nineteenth century, in the era of reform known as the Tanzimat (literally, “reordering”), leaders looked to Western nations—​France, especially—​as a means of modernizing imperial culture.

Modernization and Decadence Decadence in a cultural and aesthetic sense emerges at the historical moment when an empire confronts the perception of its decline and societal decay. For Japanese and Ottoman intellectuals, this sense of decline was also inflected with an identity crisis. Both cultures had shared an imperial confidence in the centrality of their civilization with respect to the rest of the world. This confidence was shattered sometime in the nineteenth century by the overwhelming presence of the West, with respect to which they had to construct a cultural self-​image. This sense of both decline and the urgent need for modernization offered an ideal cultural climate for decadence to thrive. During the later years of the Meiji Empire, a form of decadent culture developed, inspired by the British and French variants, that was also, like those Western models, skeptical of progressive modernity. The reaction to the modernity that the Meiji regime had imported from Europe on the part of the practitioners of dekadansu in early twentieth-​century Japan was nonetheless different from the extreme nationalism that emerged after the period of the Meiji modernization.1 The decades of exposure to European ideals may have allowed the country to catch up with the West technologically, but it also spurred a chauvinistic reassertion of Japanese tradition. The Japanese dynamic is similar to what happened in the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, where the Tanzimat pursuit of modernity involved recognition of the dangers that European values posed for Ottoman tradition. There were also some crucial differences between the Meiji and Tanzimat projects. If the Meiji modernization inculcated both a homegrown version of European decadence and a nationalistic rejection of European values, these two cultural phenomena were largely separate from one another. Moreover, they occurred in stages. The Ottoman embrace of modernity, on the other hand, was uneasy from the start, such that modernity itself, from the perspective of Ottoman tradition, posed the threat of decadence. The Meiji regime was initially enthusiastic about modernization and only later expressed reservations about the project of reform; moreover, those reservations took on different contours, with the intellectuals exploring their version of a culture of decadence and the politicians rejecting European values outright in favor of a nationalistic affirmation of Japanese tradition. By contrast, both Ottoman politicians and intellectuals maintained reservations about the project of reform even as they pursued it, ever mindful of the necessity of balancing modernity and tradition. Some intellectuals, particularly those educated in Western European centers, saw the state as the agent of cultural progress and economic development and joined in supporting education and linguistic reforms,

TURKEY   247 as well as participating in systematic translation projects.2 Their plan involved a programmatic aesthetic and cultural modernization through formal literary innovations, vernacularization of language, translation of European works, and the creation of a reading public. On the other hand, a heightened concern for cultural authenticity and local difference, both imperial and national, emerged as well, complicating the modernizing and westernizing impulse. Decadence appeared on the Ottoman literary stage in the late nineteenth century amid a growing sense of imperial decline in response to the modernization efforts of the Tanzimat. Dejected by military defeats, territorial losses, internal unrest, and economic crises, and accompanied by Abdül-​Hamid’s authoritarian regime and censorship threats, some Ottoman writers who were part of the “New Literature” (Edebiyat-​ı Cedide) movement embraced decadent pessimism. Inspired by nineteenth-​century French literature, particularly symbolism in poetry, as well as realism and naturalism in fiction, these authors gathered around the avant-​garde journal Servet-​i Fünun (The riches of science) (Figure 13.1).3 The journal was founded by Ahmed Ihsan in 1891 with the support of his teacher, Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem (1847–​1914), a prominent figure in the development of literary modernity in Ottoman Turkish and an early modernist author. Among the new generation of intellectuals and artists who regularly published in the journal were the poet Tevfik Fikret (1867–​1915), novelist Halid Ziya (1866–​ 1945), poet and critic Cenab Şahabeddin (1870–​1934), novelist Mehmed Rauf (1875–​ 1931), critic Hüseyin Cahit (1875–​1957), and poet and illustrator Diran Çırakyan (pen name Indra, 1875–​1921).4 Although it was a male-​dominated publication, the female poet Nigâr Hanım (1856–​1918) is also worth mentioning in what came to be known as the Servet-​i Fünun group. These authors were all well-​versed both in French literary conventions and Ottoman literary tradition. Their works featured fin-​de-​siècle decadent motifs, styles, and themes, while using an uncompromisingly elaborate language in an outmoded and lofty linguistic register. Servet-​i Fünun poets created a unique verse style, experimenting with polished classical Ottoman poetic forms and traditional Arabic and Persian words, but maintaining innovative and creative principles, producing the effect of shock and estrangement inspired by the symbolists, the decadents, and the Parnassians. The novelists used the formal devices and thematic registers of the nineteenth-​century French novel, including free indirect discourse that gives access to characters’ thoughts, shocking realist details intended to outrage public morals, and a naturalistic perspective offering a negative image of reality. All combined to impart the oppressive mediocrity of the social world and an acute sense of melancholy, ennui, and entrapment, conveyed by means of a self-​enclosed, autotelic structure. The “psychological novel” genre in the Ottoman-​Turkish literary scene emerged in the works of these Servet-​i Fünun authors, particularly Ziya’s Mai ve Siyah (Blue and black) and Rauf ’s Eylül (September). Servet-​i Fünun was a significant chapter in Ottoman-​Turkish literary history, as it introduced the modernist ideal of aesthetic autonomy, an unattainable model that would haunt poets in the decades to come.5 The Servet-​i Fünun authors’ objective was to challenge the communicative language of systematic modernization and to construct

248   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca

Figure 13.1.  Cover of Servet-​i Fünun 372 (April 1898). The caption below the image reads “Levha: Baygın” (Painting: Amorous), by French painter Charles Joshua Chaplin (1825–​1891), possibly one of his “L’extase” portraits. Source: Servet-​i Fünun Magazine Database, Department of Turkish Language and Literature, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, http://​www.serv​etif​unun​derg​isi.com/​.

TURKEY   249 a more complex linguistic model that pushed the limits of its own representational function. The group aimed to separate poetic language from the language of the public sphere, renouncing communicability for ambivalence and defamiliarization. This pronounced confrontation between art and society troubled many intellectuals who were politically committed to social and cultural reforms. They attacked Servet-​i Fünun poets for being decadent and excessively influenced by French literature, and also, paradoxically, for being irresponsibly archaic in their language and therefore fostering reactionary agendas against language reforms. Among these adversaries was the most prolific author and translator of the era, Ahmet Midhat (1844–​1912), who was committed to establishing an imperial Ottoman-​Islamic identity, an ideal also promoted by Sultan Abdül-​Hamid at the time in an attempt to suppress separatist nationalisms. Midhat was the first author to use the word dekadan in an 1897 article, and he started what later came to be known as the “decadence controversy.”6 During the debate, he predictably condemned the decadent style of Servet-​i Fünun and argued that the poets affiliated with the journal lacked authentic Ottoman character because they merely imitated French poetry. Moreover, their l’art pour l’art aesthetics estranged art from society and therefore failed to fulfill the didactic function of literature, which was for Midhat its most essential aspect. The debate lasted almost four years, involved several participants, and was, in fact, part of the larger historical question of modernization and westernization. Nineteenth-​ century Ottoman culture was the scene of many disputes on, for instance, Edebiyat-​ı Cedide (new literature) and Edebiyat-​ı Atika (old literature), authenticity and foreignness, the classical and the modern, and millî (meaning both “Ottoman” and “national,” regardless of ethnicity, in contemporary terms) and gayri-​millî (non-​national). It is important for the understanding of Ottoman decadence to identify the main axis of these debates: unlike the conventional East-​West duality prevalent in Anglo-​American cultural criticism, the disagreement was not about whether Ottoman literature should be modernized or westernized, but how. The debates therefore became an effective ground for negotiating different conceptualizations of cultural identity, and the question of decadence sparked heated discussions on language and authenticity. On one side there was the millî modernization camp that included a sense of social, educational, and ideological duty to create a distinct cultural identity, and on the other there was artistic modernism that focused on anti-​representational poetics and openly defied the instrumentalization of language and culture as part of the modernization project. The most vocal adversary and the initiator of the controversy surrounding the question of decadence in the Ottoman literary sphere was Ahmet Midhat.

Ahmet Midhat and the Ottoman Novel Ottoman ambiguity about the European model of modernity found expression in the literature of the period, most notably in Midhat’s novel Felâtun Bey ile Râkım Efendi

250   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca (Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi, 1875). Widely regarded as one of the most important writers of the Tanzimat era, Midhat was a self-​made man of modest origins. He was born in 1844, five years after the proclamation of Tanzimât Fermânı (The Imperial Edict of Reorganization) that ushered in the reorganization period of reforms in the Ottoman Empire. He was witness to a tumultuous era of modernization projects, their various implementations, and repudiations. Midhat was a true Ottoman intellectual: he lived in Danube, Ruse, and Baghdad, before moving to Istanbul, with a brief period of exile in Rhodes. He studied Arabic and Persian, but also French, which allowed him to gain firsthand familiarity with European literature. Although he was ostracized by the Sublime Porte (the central government of the empire) in his early career, after the adoption of the first Ottoman Constitution by Sultan Abdül-​Hamid II in 1876 (only to be suspended two years later), Midhat returned to Istanbul and stayed in the good graces of the sultan, until Abdül-​Hamid’s overthrow in 1909. During his literary career, Midhat published thirty-​three novels as well as dozens of short stories, plays, and nonfiction on subjects as varied as pedagogy, geography, and religion. He was by far the most prolific novelist of the period—​as a comparison, the female novelist Fatma Aliye comes in second with only five novels. Midhat is widely regarded as the inventor of the Ottoman novel, or, rather, as the writer most responsible for adapting that Western genre to the expression of Ottoman life. With his productive capacity, his authority in the literary and publication scene, and his remarkable role in cultural debates, Midhat’s literary career provides an ideal historical context for understanding decadence in the late Ottoman Empire. In contrast to the emerging modernist and decadent tendencies in the face of imperial decline, Midhat’s conservative approach to modernization aspired to the ideal of an Ottoman-​Islamic society in a balanced relationship with Western civilization. As Ahmet Ersoy explains: His works generally address the dilemmas and complexities of the process of cultural Westernization brought about by the Tanzimat. Troubled by the process of over-​Westernization, he argued for a balanced reconciliation between the material benefits of Western civilization and the moral values of Ottoman-​Islamic society.7

This moral conservatism, which embraces certain benefits of modernization while maintaining a distinctive cultural identity, found a convenient target in the New Literature movement. From this perspective, the contrast between the over-​westernized decadent artist with their individualism, sensualism, and extravagance, and the ideal Ottoman subject who successfully reconciled Islamic religio-​moral codes with Western progress became a cultural stereotype. The conservative reaction to New Literature was also a symptom of the anxiety of influence in Ottoman-​Turkish society, up until the mid-​twentieth century. Although Midhat started the decadence controversy in 1897, he established this paradigm, which Şerif Mardin terms the dualist typology (tipler ikiliği), as early as 1875 in Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi, contrasting the over-​westernized, incompetent, self-​indulgent, and extravagant Felâtun with the virtuous, sophisticated, and prudent self-​made man Râkım.8

TURKEY   251 The novel registers both the necessity of cultural reform and a sense of wariness about its realization. In many ways, Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi is a parable of Ottoman modernization, with the two title characters representing different approaches to the problem of reconciling Ottoman-​Islamic imperial culture with the modern world. Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi (Bey and Efendi are honorifics roughly equivalent, respectively, to English “Sir” and “Mister”) are both in a complex, intercultural position between the Ottoman and Western worlds, and each man negotiates his relationship to the West in different ways. The polarities are expressed by the French-​Ottoman composites alafranga (à la +​ franga) and alaturka (à la +​ turka).9 In fact, Midhat includes several passages in French using the roman alphabet in the original text, which he translates and presents to the reader in the Ottoman script.10 This simple fact of literal translation—​French to Ottoman—​speaks to a much larger cultural transaction in the novel, namely the degree to which Western European culture should be “translated” into Ottoman culture and the dangers of “over-​translation”; that is, of leading a life that is so alafranga that the alaturka life is lost or diminished. In the novel, both Felâtun and Râkım are cultural sophisticates who possess an impressive familiarity with European mores and manners, but the well-​to-​do Felâtun is too alafranga for his own good and is ruined by his obsessive taste in fashion and his excessive pursuit of pleasure. He might be fairly termed a “decadent,” although Midhat does not use the term, but refers to Felâtun as züppe, or “dandy,” the first appearance of that particular alafranga type in Ottoman fiction.11 The westernized wastrel character would subsequently reappear in later novels, such as Recaizade Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (The carriage affair, 1896), Hüseyin Rahmi’s Şıpsevdi (Susceptible, also known as “Always in love,” 1911), and Ömer Seyfettin’s Efruz Bey (1919). By contrast, the working-​class but well-​educated character Râkım negotiates the boundaries between European modernity and Ottoman tradition quite successfully, and one suspects that he is able to do so because the work that he does as both a government scribe and a private tutor requires that he do a good deal of translation. Indeed, the Ottoman-​speaking Râkım is fluent in Arabic, Persian, and French. If there is an alter-​ego of Midhat in the novel, it would be Râkım, whose ability to mediate the alaturka sensibility with just the right amount of alafranga appears to embody the ideal balance Midhat later described in a series of articles published in Tarik in 1898 as part of the decadence controversy: If we try to Europeanize only for the sake of becoming European, we shall lose our own character. If we, on the other hand, add the European civilization to our own character, we shall not only preserve, perpetuate, and maintain our character but also fortify and refine it.12

The quotation seems, at first, expressive of patriotic sentiment, and to a degree it is, but the patriotism is, paradoxically, tempered by the same thing that poses the potential threat of decadence: European civilization. The problem, again, is how best to “translate” European civilization into Ottoman character. Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi

252   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca works through that problem in often amusing detail, showing both the benefits and the dangers of doing so. The question of translation and linguistic exchange, embodied in the dualist typology of the over-​westernized Felâtun and the well-​balanced Râkım characters, was in fact central to the decadence controversy. On the one hand, the Ottoman modernizers spearheaded by Midhat, who were concerned with the transformative power of language, argued for a translation model based on adaptation to Ottoman-​ Turkish morality. On the other hand, the modernists railed against such pragmatic and conservative use of translation, opening artistic language to foreign, unfamiliar, and alienating effects. This tension is dramatized by Midhat in the novel, mocking the latter in the preposterous figure of Felâtun Bey, and idealizing the former in the upstanding character of Râkım Efendi. At the beginning, as their respective honorifics “Bey” and “Efendi” imply, Felâtun is superior to Râkım on the basis of wealth and class, but at the end, as a result of Felâtun’s over-​westernization, the two friends find their social positioning effectively reversed. Râkım is an efficient bureaucrat, a translator, and a language and literature instructor. Because he helps an Armenian friend at the Ministry who needs to learn Turkish, the friend allows Râkım free access to his library, which is well-​stocked with French books. Râkım soon becomes something of a polymath whose abilities in Arabic, Persian, and French lead to wide knowledge “of geography, history, law, and international agreements.”13 He becomes so adept at drafting and translating official documents that he is able to leave the Ministry and earn his living by translation, as well as by tutoring foreigners in his native Ottoman. Râkım replaces Felâtun as the language tutor of two English sisters, given his excellent command of high Ottoman Turkish. In time, Râkım finds the girls have developed a taste for Ottoman poetry (which they now prefer to French poetry). Râkım’s instruction of the foreigners—​the English sisters and his Circassian slave (and future wife) Janan—​registers Midhat’s view on translating Europe: it is a form of exchange in which the Ottoman Turkish is inherently superior yet permits the translational contact with the foreign. There is also a libidinal dimension to this exchange: all three girls fall in love with the instructor, entirely seduced by the power of his language. Felâtun, on the other hand, “never uttered a word in anything but French” (6) at home, and when he goes out, he is so addicted to fashion that he never wears the same clothes twice. He does have a job as a clerk in a government office, but the time he spends at “pleasure spots” (4) requires so much recuperation that he has time for only three hours at the office a week, and then only to “talk about his exploits” with his coworkers. Felâtun also stays abreast of the latest developments in the world of letters, so much so that booksellers go to the trouble of binding the latest publications “alafranga style” and gilding the cover with “the letters A and P,” which stand for Felâtun’s first name, Ahmed, and Plato, “the French word for Felâtun” (4–​5). The French form of Plato is, of course, Platon, which perhaps explains why Felâtun’s hapless servant winds up calling his alafranga master “ ‘Pantolon Bey’ (Master Pants)” (5). As the ever-​intrusive narrator repeatedly reminds us, Râkım is “a young man who knows how to protect his honor and to live decently and genuinely alafranga,” while Felâtun is “a perfect example” of “the

TURKEY   253 opposite sort” (42). Felâtun fails as a tutor and as a lover. It is no coincidence that his French mistress, Pauline, an actress who encourages his dandyism, lures him into her degenerate lifestyle and quickly spends all his inheritance. Curiously, it is the exponents of classicisme that figure in the narrative of Felâtun’s ruin in the novel: the actress Pauline so excels in expressive readings “from the works of such well-​known poets as Racine, Boileau, and Molière” that “she sweeps people off their feet” (69). The joke seems to be that the actress uses the French classical tradition for purposes of romantic seduction; this much is suggested when Felâtun, struck by Pauline’s ability to emote (“she cries and cries”), tells Râkım that he has “never seen such a sentimentale woman” (69). Here, Midhat plays on the stereotype of the over-​westernized member of the elite who succumbs to the temptation of the foreign, embodied by the immoral, Western femme fatale—​also a stereotype in Ottoman-​Turkish literature. Felâtun does not know his own culture well enough, and therefore his translational exchange with the West results in linguistic, cultural, sexual, and financial defeat. Not for nothing was Midhat known by his fellow Ottomans as “the First Teacher” (hace-​i evvel), writing in a vernacular style accessible to everyone (üslûb-​ı âmiyâne), including his many juvenile readers.14 Obviously, neither the didactic quality of Midhat’s work nor its accessibility harmonize with Western conceptions of decadence. But it is not those dimensions that make it possible to link Midhat to the decadent tradition; rather, it is his evocation of decadence as a reason to be wary of the Western values he welcomed. As Nergis Ertürk argues, both in Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi and Midhat’s later novel Müşahedat, “the successful realization of conservative modernity is contingent on the establishment of moral linguistic exchange, in both translation and instruction” (Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity, 54). As “the teacher of the nation,” Midhat was certainly eager to teach moral lessons, but his principal message was more complex: his concern was not so much to caution against a certain type of individual behavior, but rather to use such behavior as an allegory of the cultural dangers of over-​westernization. Possibly the one element of Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi that strikes the Western reader as most unlike the decadent tradition is the style of the novel, the key points of which come through even in translation: the colloquialisms; the chatty, direct engagement with the reader; and the shifts from the third-​person omniscient narration to the dialogue presented in dramatic form, creating the impression that one goes from reading a novel to reading a play. These are all effects of Midhat’s novelistic adaptation of the meddah genre, the traditional form of oral storytelling dating from the fourteenth century, originally performed as a type of entertainment for the sultan in his court. The dramatic interludes in dialogue form seem especially indebted to the meddah style of performance, and they effectively create the sense of an alafranga narrative being contained by or subordinated to an alaturka presentation, such that the very structure of the novel reinforces the theme of dangerously excessive, decadent westernization checked or limited by traditional Ottoman culture. The simple, direct style of the novel likewise serves to caution against decadent over-​sophistication or over-​refinement, but only in a general sense, as there really isn’t anything like a counter-​style, a literary

254   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca style of decadence, that is elaborated in the novel as an Ottoman cognate to le style de la décadence that should be avoided.

Servet-​i Fünun and the Decadence Controversy In 1897, Midhat wrote an article titled “Dekadanlar,” attacking poets and authors publishing in Servet-​i Fünun for imitating “a couple of young men in Paris who call themselves ‘decadent’ ” and who “brought on the popping up of new literature in Istanbul.”15 Midhat compared this “impertinent” (münasebetsiz) younger generation of writers to the French decadents because of their ornate, polyglot style, which included neologisms based on classic Arabic and Persian texts. In the article, he gives a contrived example of the problems that an antiquated, artificial style present. The example concerns the noise that the furling rollers make when a sail is unfurled on a sailboat. What should passengers do who find the sound so unsettling that they are fearful of it? The advice that Midhat gives is simple and straightforward: “Those who are afraid of the rattle of the rollers should abstain from getting on a boat.” That same advice, Midhat says, would be rendered by a decadent writer as: “Those who are frightened of the rattle of the rollers with a blue-​coloured fear should refrain from hauling the load of their humanly materiality onto a rocking vehicle with open wings.”16 The absurdly overwrought style points to at least two stylistic problems: first, the writer has to consider how unsuited antiquated language is to contemporary life, even though that antiquated language has contributed to the cultural tradition to which the writer belongs; second, the writer has to recognize that a foreign idiom may not serve as the best form for expressing some specifically Ottoman cultural experience. Both problems boil down to different questions of translation: the first concerning the Perso-​Arabic tradition, the second European culture, most often French. Who are these impertinent young decadents? The “blue-​coloured fear” Midhat mentions is certainly a reference to two major Ottoman decadents and their work: Halid Ziya’s Mai ve Siyah (Figure 13.2) and Tevfik Fikret’s poetry, which was greatly inspired by Charles Baudelaire.17 It is also reminiscent of melancholy blue, a typical decadent theme as in Mallarmé’s “L’azur” (Azure) and “Soupir” (Sigh), or Paul Bourget’s La duchesse bleue (The blue duchess, 1897). We know that Midhat read the French symbolists and was particularly interested in Paul Bourget, whom he mentions in his article “Novel and Novelists.” The Ottoman-​Turkish translation of Bourget’s novel by Ahmet Ihsan, titled Mai Düşes, was serialized in Servet-​i Fünun in 1901. The debate set off by Midhat’s article was in fact a continuation of older polemics between conservatives and modernists. Midhat and Ziya had already had a heated debate on realism and the novel form.18 It was upon the serialization and favorable reception of Ziya’s Mai ve Siyah in 1896–​1897 that Midhat wrote his first critique, without directly naming the novel or its author. Ziya’s

TURKEY   255

Figure 13.2.  Servet-​i Fünun 301 (December 1896): 233. The caption reads: “Illustrations for Halit Ziya Bey’s novel Mai ve Siyah: Everyone prepares to listen to Ahmet Cemil’s work.” Illustrated by Diran Çırakyan. Source: Servet-​i Fünun Magazine Database, Department of Turkish Language and Literature, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, http://​www.serv​etif​unun​derg​isi.com/​.

novel is modeled on the Künstlerroman form with intertextual allusions to Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black, 1830), Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale (Sentimental Education, 1869), and Balzac’s Les illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–​ 1843). The protagonist Ahmet Cemil is a young aspiring poet who abandons Ottoman literary tradition and sets out to create poetry closer to French symbolism. Built on the central dilemma of the novel of formation, the protagonist is caught between his artistic ideals and the normalizing demands of society. On the one hand, as an aesthete, Ahmet Cemil follows his dreams, tirelessly reading and writing poems. He is devoted to his grand ambition to create a new artistic language with innovative manipulation of colors, symbols, and sentiments. On the other hand, he is constrained by the commercial ethos of modern society, which forces him to translate popular fiction and become involved in a publishing business. What emerges from this dilemma is a set of decadent values

256   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca and ideals: a young, promising artist who longs to assert his artistic authority against middle-​class cultural practices (and here, the novel clearly alludes to Midhat’s literary career) eventually ends up poor, disappointed, alienated, and suicidal. Mai ve Siyah focuses on the inner workings of the artist’s mind and registers his aesthetic ideas and sensibilities. The novel combines introspective narration of the protagonist’s movements of feeling and inner perception with non-​narrative digressions on aesthetics, which read like a manifesto of the Servet-​i Fünun movement: Imagine a verse work written in this way, leaping from one surging wave of meter to another, dragging all at once as if exhausted. Then surging and swelling again, rising with meter’s whirlwind up and up to violence’s most intense level, and again gradually descending to finish with the moan of a last breath lyric.19

Ahmet Cemil’s search for linguistic innovation finds expression in such esoteric reflections in the novel. Here, through the image of a rough sea, he describes his artistic pursuit of musicality in verse, recreated by repetition and alliteration, like the effects of violent waves, eventually climaxing in ecstatic lyricism. This new perspective on poetry upholds creativity and novelty, pushing further the limits of language with its elaborately chosen vocabulary, idiosyncratic style, interrupted syntax, and plays on polysemy—​reminiscent of Théophile Gautier’s famous description of the decadent style in his 1868 preface to Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857).20 This poetic paradigm Cemil extensively details in the novel became the signature style of the Servet-​i Fünun authors, particularly after 1896 when Tevfik Fikret became the editor. Cemil’s tormented search for beauty in pure form is a decadent-​symbolist ideal, unattainable and inevitably transient. This dilemma is the central organizing theme of the novel: the melancholy aesthetics between mai (blue)—​the impossible ideal of beauty—​and siyah (black)—​ decay and death. Ziya, much like many of his late fin-​de-​siècle contemporaries in Western Europe, was interested in psychology, brain science, mathematics, and chemistry. Written in what we can call psycho-​narration with an impressionistic style, the novel combines depiction of the protagonist’s psychological state with acute sensory perceptions. Cemil perceives external reality through his inner states and projects his dreams onto the external world. On that account, he is a typical Künstlerroman hero who initially sees the world as an extension of his desires and artistic ambitions. He presents his melancholy aesthetics as follows: Look at that sky—​what do you see? A sea compounded of blues. . . . Try to go into it with your eyes; tear those blues apart—​what do you see? Blue . . . always blue . . . right? Then look at the earth under our feet, and what do you find? A frozen color, blackest of black. Ugh! Break those black layers up and look inside; go down, down, down as far as you can; what do you find? Black . . . always black, right? It is this kind of thing I want to write; if you look up, blue and always blue; down, black always black. A thing that is blue and black. (61–​62)

TURKEY   257 Cemil’s poetic imagination paints a timeless artistic ideal with an imagistic perception divorced from reality. He wishes to harmonize the spirituality, immateriality, and excessive beauty symbolized by the color blue with the evil, decay, and death symbolized by the color black. He desperately holds onto the decadent aspiration to transcend a rapidly changing and alienating modern world, as well as human weakness and mediocrity, through artistic creation. Cemil’s aesthetic dream is eventually destroyed by the darkness of the real world: he burns his poems, fails in his business and literary adventures, loses his sister and his family house, contemplates suicide, and resolves to exile himself with his mother in Yemen. Like many novels of the decadent canon—J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill (1898)—​Ziya’s Mai ve Siyah ends with the destruction of the artist along with his ambition. As R. K. R. Thornton notes, “decadent literature is a literature of failure: of a failure to provide a literary synthesis for the disintegration.”21 Ahmet Cemil fails to synthesize blue and black, and even at the cost of his own destruction, he despises the instrumental subordination of art to popular, educational, or political objectives. Midhat’s covert critique of Ziya’s novel in his 1897 article and his satirical approach to the figure of the decadent artist in Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi recalls elements of Arthur Symons’s analysis in “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), although, unlike Midhat, Symons was supportive of decadence at the time.22 Felâtun could almost stand in for Des Esseintes when Symons describes Huysmans’s protagonist as “a typical Decadent” in whom “we see the sensations and ideas of the effeminate, over-​ civilized, deliberately abnormal creature who is the last product of our society.”23 But where Symons welcomed decadence, Midhat warned against it, fearing cultural degeneration as a result of modernization. For conservative modernizers like Midhat, being influenced by French aestheticism was a moral and cultural weakness. Ahmet Rasim, in a series of articles in 1898 titled Tekâmül ve Terakki (Growth and progress), summarized this view by listing all the problems regarding the Ottoman decadents: they imitate French literature; they think in French and write French sentences using Arabic, Persian, and Turkish vocabulary; they do not take into account the greater good of the reading public, who need to be kept away from bad influences; they are “carriers of others’ ideas” (efkâr-​ı saire hamalı) instead of contributing to “original ideas in the right direction” (efkâr-​ı salime mucidane); they abandon the linguistic reformation efforts.24 In response to these criticisms, many authors in and outside of Servet-​i Fünun wrote detailed pieces outlining the decadent and modernist currents of the Ottoman literary scene. In his articles “What is Decadence?” and “Decadents,” the poet and critic Cenap Şehabettin acclaimed the innovative and creative aspects of the movement, while Hüseyin Cahit wrote a theoretical piece in which he approached the question historically, demonstrating how the New Literature movement was part of the nineteenth-​century cultural context in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Cahit was somewhat critical of French decadence, arguing that it was a short-​lived movement. Süleyman Nesip underlined the unconventional and subversive aspects of the new literature, arguing against Midhat’s critique of l’art pour l’art and the incommunicability of that literature.

258   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca Another noteworthy and fresh argument came from Ahmet Hikmet, who defended the traditional elements of high Ottoman literature and argued that the new literary movement condemned for its foreignness was the most local modernization effort that Ottoman literary history had ever witnessed. This is a compelling theoretical point, as it challenges the East-​West, domestic-​foreign, and French-​Ottoman paradigms conservatives relied on. Finally, Şemsettin Sami, a prominent novelist and intellectual with considerable authority, wrote in support of the Servet-​i Fünun authors, drawing attention to their innovative form. Midhat wrote a final article in December 1898 titled Teslim-​i Hâkikat (Deference to the truth), admitting his admiration for the new literary movement. Yet he credited their recent success to his intervention, as a result of which these innovative authors returned to the rightful path. Although the controversy died down in 1900, it still remains a significant episode in the history of literary modernity and criticism in Turkey. To better understand this episode, we need to go back to the early stages of the debate: the first provocative response to Midhat’s “Dekadanlar” was Tevfik Fikret’s poem titled Timsal-​i Cehâlet (The paragon of ignorance), in which he mocked Midhat, calling him “nothing but a big mouth,” someone who frightened people with his hostility and vileness. Less than a year later, Fikret published another controversial piece in Servet-​i Fünun, this time a provocative poem titled “La danse serpentine,” in which he detailed his pursuit of a new poetics in high verse. Fikret was both a poet and a painter who understood the synesthetic relationship of these two arts in French symbolism and skillfully employed such correspondence in this poem. The title is in French, written in Ottoman script, and the poem vividly depicts the seductive dance of a woman who visits the poet for one night. Sparkling mirror-​like images are in a perpetual state of transformation in front of his eyes as the seductress named “art” (sanat) dances in ecstasy. The overwhelming physical sensation and eroticism of her dance enchants the poet. Once the swirling dance of colors, sounds, and senses ends, the poet is left alone with the memory of this magical experience: O magic caress nourishing art’s gaze, filled up with light Out from the darkness you emerge like break of dawn in Spring To be born, again turn back to darkness; everlasting Will be in my thought of you ascending with the dawn’s bright   A mysterious night; A mysterious night all coquetry and coloring Decked out with suns and roses, objects of all desiring!25

Art, in the image of this mystical dance, signifies transcendent perfection, the pure beauty that is always in flux, fleeting and unattainable. The poem’s musicality in the acoustic and rhythmic effects refined through prosody and metrical structure brings form and content together. There is nothing religious or holy about the poet’s transcendental experience; on the contrary, it is voluptuous, sensual, demonic, and female. The transgressive female dancer, reminiscent of the figure of Salomé that captured the

TURKEY   259 decadent imagination in France and Britain,26 can be understood both as the inspiration for the poet’s new artistic insight and as defiance of the aforementioned crisis of masculinity at the time of imperial decline. Fikret’s poem, set against the historical context of censorship and suppression of intellectual activity under the reign of Abdül-​Hamid, as well as the conservative demand for communicability and conventional morality, was audacious if not revolutionary. After its publication, the poem took center stage in the decadence controversy, either lauded for its innovation and beauty or condemned for its transgression and foreignness. Tevfik’s allusion to Baudelaire’s “Le serpent qui danse” (The dancing serpent) was clear to everyone involved in the debate. For the leading poet of a literary movement condemned for its reckless imitation of French literature and for its immorality, Fikret’s open allusion to Baudelaire was most likely an affront to Midhat and his followers. But, more importantly, the reference makes a larger point about modernization and cultural exchange. Baudelaire serves as an intertextual model in Fikret’s poetry, synthesizing tradition and innovation within a subversive poetics. In its theme, tone, structure, and vocabulary, Fikret’s poem is mediated through the codes of French symbolism, which are creatively adopted, transformed, and integrated into the Ottoman literary field. The strategy lays out an intertextual aesthetics that rejects Midhat’s proposed method of adaptation by domesticating the foreign. Fikret, and the Servet-​i Fünun author-​translators more generally, aim to maintain elements of the foreign, which in turn brings attention to the “other” within the Ottoman language. Freed from the ideal of transparency, they embrace incommensurability and incommunicability in art, creating a new Ottoman poetics with strong affinities to French and British decadence. Midhat’s views on the foreignness of decadence are consistent with his thinking on the nature and role of translation in infusing “classic” European literature into Ottoman culture: the source text is not translated so much as summarized and paraphrased within the dominant norms of the Ottoman literary system. Midhat made his philosophy of translation clear in his preface to Nedamet mi? Heyhat! (1888–​1889), his treatment of L’Aventurière (1848), a comic play in verse by Émile Augier (1820–​1889). He rejects word-​for-​word translation (tercime-​i ayninene) outright: “We are not in favor of translations as the same. We read a sentence or even a page written in French and rewrite it independently in Ottoman. That is why our translations appear as if they were originally written in Ottoman.”27 Midhat’s numerous translations of European literature obviously supported his efforts to infuse a sense of “classic” culture into Ottoman tradition, although he translated many European works that are hardly regarded today as “classic,” in any sense of the term (Augier’s L’Aventurière, for example). By the last decade of the nineteenth century, Midhat became a victim of his own success, in a sense, when a younger generation of Edebiyat-​ı Cedide writers turned to Europe for inspiration and found a literature that resonated with their own contemporary sensibilities. From the perspective of Midhat and others who were paradoxically circumspect about the very westernization they encouraged, the cosmopolitanism of the younger generation was perceived as a challenge to the cultural nationalism the westernization project was ultimately intended to serve.

260   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca Ahmet Midhat was a literary pioneer who almost single-​handedly invented the conditions for modern Ottoman culture. He sought to use the Western European tradition to free that culture from the influence of Arabic and Persian literatures, which, however influential they may have been, kept the culture of the empire from developing its own specifically Ottoman form. Midhat wanted nothing more than to use the “classics” of Western tradition as models to create the cultural conditions whereby the production of Ottoman classics might become possible for future writers. Hence the traditional antinomy of classicism and decadence has special resonance in the late nineteenth-​ century Ottoman context, as the very process of westernization Midhat espoused led Servet-​i Fünun writers to take what Ziya Gökalp, a key nationalist thinker, decades later called “morbid literature” as their model, rather than the “classics” Midhat promoted.28 Such literature, which both the earlier Ottoman-​Islamic intellectual Midhat and the early twentieth-​century Turkish-​nationalist Gökalp called “decadent,” could never, for Midhat, lead to the Ottoman classics of the future.29 But for Gökalp, the stakes were even higher, and darker. The demise of the empire meant that decadence had ceased to be an impediment to Ottoman classicism but had instead become something much more ominous—​a threat to Turkish purity.

Notes 1. For a discussion of decadence in the Meiji context, see Ikuho Amano, Decadent Literature in Twentieth-​Century Japan: Spectacles of Idle Labor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. Language reforms in the Ottoman Empire date back to the reign of Mahmud II (1808–​ 1839). For a detailed analysis of the language reforms and the emergence of literary modernity in Turkey, see Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. Other literary journals that published Edebiyat-​i Cedide poetry were Malumat, İrtika, Terakki, and Servet. Fazil Gökçek, Bir Tartışmanın Hikayesi Dekadanlar (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 2015), 28. For a detailed analysis of the impact of French in Ottoman-​Turkish literature, see Gül Mete-​Yuva, Modern Türk Edebiyatının Fransız Kaynakları (Istanbul: İletişim, 2017). 4. The Ottoman literary field was a complex multilingual literary system, inhabited by multiple ethnic groups, producing literature mainly in Turkish, Armenian, Ladino, Greek, Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic. Among these, Armenian was the second-​largest literary language, with a fair number of authors and readers. The Armenian poet and painter Diran Çırakyan (pen name Indra) was an avant-​garde poet and a regular Servet-​i Fünun contributor. He illustrated many serial novels, including Mai ve Siyah (Figure 13.2) and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s The Carriage Affair. 5. On modernist poetics in Turkey, see Yalçın Armağan, İmkânsız Özerklik: Türk Şiirinde Modernizm (Istanbul: İletişim, 2017). 6. The details about the debate are adapted from Birol Emil, “Servet-​i Fünuncular ve Dekandanlık Meselesi” (Istanbul, Istanbul University, 1959), and Gökçek, Dekadanlar. 7. Ahmet Ersoy, introduction to Ahmed Midhat Effendi, “The Basis of Reform,” in Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770–​1945), ed. Balázs Trencsényi

TURKEY   261 and Michal Kopeček (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 2:292. The biographical sketch of Midhat’s career is also adapted from this introduction (2:291–​92), and from Nüket Esen and Erol Köroğlu, eds., Merhaba ey Muharrir!: Ahmet Mithat üzerine eleştirel yazılar (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2006). 8. Şerif Mardin, Türk Modernleşmesi (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1992), 37. 9. Franga (Frank) refers not so much to the historical Franks (a German-​speaking people) as to the sort of European sensibility represented by France, while turka, less problematically, refers to a Turkish or Ottoman sensibility. Even though franga should not be construed as exclusively French but more generally as shorthand for a Western European lifestyle, French culture dominates in the novel. 10. The Ottoman script is also known as Perso-​Arabic—​the standard method of writing Ottoman until the language reforms of 1928–​1929, when the Latin alphabet was officially adopted by the government of the newly formed Republic of Turkey. 11. For detailed analyses of the dandy type, see Berna Moran, Türk Romanına Eleştirel Bir Bakış (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1983), 1:73–​86; Nurdan Gürbilek, Kör ayna, kayıp şark: edebiyat ve endişe (Beyoğlu, Istanbul: Metis, 2004), 51–​74. 12. Quoted in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1998), 285. Midhat discussed the question of westernization in a series of articles in Tarik, titled “Biz Nereliyiz? Asyalı mı Avrupalı mı?” (Where are we from? Asia or Europe?), “Avrupalılaşmaktaki Tehlike” (The danger in Europeanization), and “Vazifemiz” (Our mission). These articles are considered to be part of the decadence controversy and can be found in Tarik nos. 4615–​4617, 4619, and 4639. 13. Ahmet Midhat Efendi, Felâtun Bey and Râkım Efendi, trans. Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016), 11. Further references to the Levi-​ Ringer translation are cited parenthetically. 14. Abdülhak Hamid Tarhan, quoted in Bülent Yorulmaz, “Servet-​i Fünun Mensupları Gözüyle Ahmet Mithat Efendi,” in Merhaba ey Muharrir!: Ahmet Mithat üzerine eleştirel yazılar, ed. Nüket Esen and Erol Köroğlu (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2006), 313. 15. Ahmet Mithat Efendi, “Dekadanlar,” Sabah 2628 (March 22, 1897): 2–​3. 16. Quoted by Seviner, “Thinking in French,” 20. Seviner gives the two sentences in Turkish, respectively, as follows: “Makara hırıltısından pek korkanlar yelkenli gemiye binmekten içtinap eylemelidirler” (20); and “Harhara-​i meakırdan bir havf-​ı ezrak ile müstehif olanlar per ü bali küşade bir merkeb-​i randebada maddiyet-​i beşeriyetleri barını ihmalden isticnab etmelidirler” (34n3). 17. For a compelling argument about the importance of blue in Modern Turkish literature, see Jale Parla, Türk Romanında Yazar ve Başkalaşım (Istanbul: İletişim yayınları, 2012), 63. 18. Gökçek, Dekadanlar, 32. 19. Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil, Mai ve Siyah, ed. Enfel Doğan (Istanbul: Özgür, 2007), 132. First serialized in Servet-​i Fünun 1896–​1897. Excerpts from the novel translated by Victoria Holbrook for this essay. Further references to the novel are cited parenthetically. 20. Gautier wrote an article devoted to Baudelaire in 1863, which appeared in Les Poètes français, a collection of masterpieces of French poetry (ed. Eugène Crépet [Paris: Hachette]). This article later served as the preface to the edition of Les fleurs du mal of 1868 in accordance with Baudelaire’s wishes. Gautier describes Baudelaire’s decadent style as “ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research,

262   Özen Nergis Dolcerocca always pushing further the limits of language, borrowing from all technical vocabularies, taking colors from all palettes, notes from all keyboards.” Quoted and translated in R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: E. Arnold, 1983), 19. 21. Thornton, Decadent Dilemma, 188. 22. In 1899, Symons distanced himself from the movement he had earlier identified as decadent when he revised and renamed it “symbolist” in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: Heinemann, 1899). 23. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 866. 24. Quoted in Gökçek, Dekadanlar, 89–​90. 25. Tevfik Fikret, Rübâb-​i Şikeste: Kırık Saz, ed. Asim Bezirci (Istanbul: Can Yayinlari, 1984), 163. Excerpt translated by Victoria Holbrook for this essay. 26. See Charles Bernheimer, “Visions of Salome,” in Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe, ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 104–​38. 27. Quoted in Cemal Demircioğlu, “Translating Europe: The Case of Ahmed Midhat as an Ottoman Agent of Translation,” in Agents of Translation, ed. John Milton and Paul Bandia (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009), 144. 28. Zeynep Seviner, “Thinking in French, Writing in Persian: Aesthetics, Intelligibility and the Literary Turkish of the 1890s,” in Monica M. Ringer and Etienne E. Charrière, eds., Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity (London and New York: Taurus, 2020), 24. 29. Ziya Gökalp, Turkish Nationalism and Western Civilization: Selected Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 268.

Further Reading Andrews, Walter. Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985. Berkes, Niyazi. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. New York: Routledge, 1998. Booth, Marilyn, ed. Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Efendi, Ahmet Mithat. Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi: An Ottoman Novel. Translated by Melih Levi and Monica M. Ringer. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2016. Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Evin, Ahmet O. Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel. Minneapolis, MN: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1984. Finn, Robert P. The Early Turkish Novel, 1872–​1900. Istanbul: Isis Press, 1984. Göçek, Fatma Müge. Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gökçek, Fazıl. Bir Tartışmanın Hikayesi Dekadanlar. Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 2015. Gürbilek, Nurdan. “Dandies and Originals: Authenticity, Belatedness, and the Turkish Novel.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2 (2003): 599–​628. Holbrook, Victoria. The Unreadable Shores of Love: Turkish Modernity and Mystic Romance. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

TURKEY   263 Kerslake, Celia, Kerem Öktem, and Philip Robins, eds., Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change in the Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Mardin, Serif. Religion, Society, and Modernity in Turkey. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Mete-​Yuva, Gül. La littérature turque et ses sources françaises. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Özdalga, Elizabeth, ed. Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy. London: Routledge, 2005. Ringer, Monica M., and Etienne E. Charrière, eds. Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity: Reform and Translation in the Tanzimat Novel. London: Tauris, 2020. Stewart-​Robinson, James, ed. Intersections in Turkish Literature: Essays in Honor of James Stewart-​Robinson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

Chapter 14

JAPAN Decadence and Japonisme Stefano Evangelista

The close relationship between decadence and Japan is the result of a historical convergence. In the mid-​nineteenth century, after over two hundred years of self-​imposed isolation during which the country had only limited interactions with the West through the Dutch East India Company, Japan opened its ports to foreign trade under American military pressure. The resulting disclosure of this virtually unknown world captured the imagination of many artists and writers in the West and generated a distinctive artistic tendency that, from the 1870s, became known as japonisme. The mounting interest in Japan and the development of japonisme coincided with the rise of literary decadence, and the two phenomena overlapped and sometimes aided each other in challenging aesthetic and literary conventions based on ideas of realism and in promoting theories of art for art’s sake. At the same time, the intensified commercial traffic and artistic exchange that brought Japanese culture to the West also facilitated the importation of Western ideas and technologies into Japan. With the onset of the Meiji era (1868–​1912), the adoption of Western culture was institutionalized, triggering a momentous process of transculturation and social and political change. An important byproduct of this transformative encounter with the West and the accompanying course of modernization is that it caused a decline in traditional Japanese culture that many viewed as a manifestation of decadence; in time, it also introduced the Japanese to Western theories of decadence and decadent literature. Like Western japonisme, the reception of Western culture in Japan fed into preexisting local traditions, producing a vernacular literature of decadence that has subsequently become part of world literature. Far from seeking to provide an exhaustive account of this complex history, this chapter focuses on some key examples of the artistic and literary exchange between Japan and the West that have a broader relevance for our understanding of decadence in relation to questions of interartistic practice and literary cosmopolitanism.

JAPAN   265

Japonisme: Reflections of Japan in the West In the period that preceded the systematic translation of Japanese literature into European languages, the impact of Japan was felt mostly through visual and material culture. The opening to foreign trade brought Japanese objects, artifacts, and designs to Western art markets, and they became regular features in international exhibitions and art magazines. Textiles, ceramics, lacquerware, fans, and especially the striking and relatively affordable ukiyo-​e woodblock prints became not only desirable collectibles to enjoy for their intrinsic beauty, but also sources of inspiration for Western designers and artists. This sudden surge of interest in Japan was accompanied by a tendency to mythologize the country as an intrinsically artistic nation that stood in direct contrast to Western materialistic societies. In 1872 the French critic and collector of Japanese art Philippe Burty coined the term japonisme, soon borrowed by other European languages, including English, to refer to this characteristic phenomenon.1 Belgian artist Alfred Stevens’s La parisienne japonaise (1872; Figure 14.1) encapsulated the aesthetics of japonisme just as Burty’s new coinage took root within art criticism. A young European woman contemplates her reflection in the mirror, dressed head to foot in Japanese garments and accessories: a silk kimono and obi, a traditional fan, and hair pins. By reproducing these objects, especially the kimono fabric, in vivid detail, the painting asks viewers to relish in the beauty of Japanese applied arts. At the same time, the painting domesticates Japanese objects into one of the most classic settings of Western art, a wealthy Parisian bourgeois interior. By indulging in a fantasy of exoticism, la parisienne japonaise creates a new identity for herself—​maybe even a new type of autonomy—​and derives pleasure from it. Japanophilia is linked to themes of curiosity, self-​construction, and (auto)eroticism, the latter underscored by the fact that non-​ Japanese misguidedly tended to associate the kimono with a state of déshabillé, and thus with informal interactions and physical intimacy. The narcissism of the woman’s self-​absorbed gaze, however, encourages us to view her hedonism critically. Created in the transitional moment when japonisme was assuming a distinctive identity as an artistic movement, Stevens’s painting asks whether this taste for Japan should be seen as a genuine path toward knowledge and emancipation or, rather, as a form of materialism that leads to escapism and self-​deception. In other words, even while celebrating the intrinsic beauty of Japanese objects, La parisienne japonaise associates the decorative function of Japanese art with an excessive preoccupation with exteriority and surfaces that was also slowly emerging as a hallmark of decadent taste. Viewed in this light, the woman’s love of art and artifice foreshadows the moral dilemma of art for art’s sake as steering the subject dangerously away from the fabric of reality. The precarious dichotomy between reality and art, truth and deception, is visualized in the reflections of real and painted flowers that frame the woman’s image in the mirror, positioning her in an ambiguous zone between the two.

266   Stefano Evangelista

Figure 14.1.  Alfred Stevens, La parisienne japonaise (1872). Source: Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Boverie, Liège, Belgium (Wikimedia Commons).

A similar use of Japanese decorative objects characterizes the early works of the American painter James McNeill Whistler, who came under the spell of Japanese art in Paris and became one of its key mediators into Britain. La princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1863–​1865) and Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864), for instance, exploit, like Stevens, the transformative visual impact of Japan on Western female bodies and domestic interiors. In his later “nocturnes,” however, Whistler moved toward a deeper form of reception of Japanese art. Along with Mary Cassatt, Gustav Klimt, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, Vincent Van Gogh, and others, Whistler thus helped consolidate a new phase of international japonisme in which painters—​many of them associated with impressionism—​no longer used Japanese artifacts for merely decorative purposes but rather studied them closely in order to discover new ways of seeing that challenged artistic conventions.2 The importance that Whistler ascribed

JAPAN   267 to Japan can be gauged from the provocative “Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885), which concluded with a flamboyant comparison between the Parthenon marbles and “the fan of Hokusai”:3 here Whistler suggested that, for his generation, Japan was what Greece had been for artists and writers in the early part of the century (the Parthenon Marbles were transported to Britain between 1802 and 1812)—​an eye-​opening encounter that freed them from narrow academic notions of classicism and tradition. In Whistler’s case, Japanese ukiyo-​e in particular inspired his experiments with composition and perspective, as well as his radical new handling of color within the medium of oil painting. The famous Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (Figure 14.2), for instance, depicts a nighttime river scene dominated by the dark, flat expanses of water and sky, patchily illuminated by fireworks. The influence of Japanese art is evident not only in the choice of subject matter—​scenes of fireworks were favorites of ukiyo-​e artists—​but also and more significantly in the composition of the picture and the presence of a series of faintly sketched, almost transparent figures in the foreground that recall people dressed in Japanese kimonos, one of them, on the bottom right-​ hand corner, seeming to dissolve into a set of Japanese kanji.4 In this way, the painting transfigures a familiar London scene into a haunting hybrid landscape suspended between East and West. John Ruskin’s outrage over this painting is well known: after seeing it exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, he publicly berated the artist for “ask[ing] two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”5 The resulting libel trial, which triggered a public discussion on the value of art and the respective roles of artists and critics, also associated the influence of Japan with a degenerate modernity characterized, in Ruskin’s view, by deception, lack of moral values, and a perverse monetization of art driven by fashion. Ruskin’s conservative reaction was motivated by a desire to protect an ideal of art based on the painter’s close relationship with nature and the sense of place. The fluid Franco-​Japanese-​American Whistler destabilized this relationship by revisiting those very riverside settings by the Thames that had inspired Ruskin’s favorite modern artist, J. M. W. Turner. However, even a Japanophile artist such as Walter Crane spoke guardedly about the unsettling effect of Japan on artists in the West. Reviewing the transformative influence of the Japanese decorative arts on Whistler, Crane sketched a scenario of decadence, in which the hyper-​refined and cynical Western art world was simultaneously regenerated and enervated by the encounter with a “fresh and vigorous” Japan: On the whole, the effects of the discovery of Japanese art on the modern artistic mind, may be likened to a sudden and unexpected access of fortune to an impoverished man. It is certain to disorganize if not demoralize him. The sudden contact with a fresh and vigorous art, alive with potent tradition, yet intimate with the subtler forms and changes of nature, and in the full possession and mastery of its own technique—​ the sudden contact of such an art with the highly artificial and eclectic art of a complex and effete civilization must be more or less of the nature of a shock. Shocks are said to be good for sound constitutions, but their effect on the unsound are as likely as not to be fatal.6

268   Stefano Evangelista

Figure 14.2.  James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (ca. 1877). Source: Detroit Institute of Arts; Gift of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr., https://​www.dia.org/​art/​col​lect​ion/​obj​ect/​noctu​rne-​black-​and-​gold-​fall​ing-​roc​ket-​64931.

Japanese art worked together with the literary influences that Whistler absorbed from Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, which together pushed him to dispense with narrative and look instead for new organizing principles for his art based on color harmonies and the synthesis of sensual impressions. The resulting visual experiments would, in turn, affect the assimilation of japonisme into a decadent literary culture that often took inspiration from works of art. In Britain, over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, japonisme developed in step with the homegrown Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic movements, as Crane’s own work testifies, and culminated with Aubrey

JAPAN   269 Beardsley’s openly decadent appropriation of Japanese drawing in his handling of grotesque and pornographic themes.7

From Japonisme to Art for Art’s Sake When it comes to literature, the influence of Japan on decadent culture is at first more difficult to see. The very limited amount of translation from Japanese to European languages that went on in this period meant that most writers in the West knew basically nothing about Japanese literature. As a glaring example, the classic Genji monogatari, or Tale of Genji, was first translated into English, in its complete form, by Arthur Waley between 1925 and 1932.8 Meaningful engagements with Japanese poetic and dramatic forms, such as haiku and Nō theater, or with specific writers and works, will only start to emerge in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the first attempts to apply the new fascination with Japan to literature were made by writers who were able to observe how Japanese art works and objects were being used by artists. Writing in English in The Academy about his “invention” of japonisme, Philippe Burty was keen to point out that his original articles were published “in a young journal of literature and poetry” (La renaissance littéraire et artistique) and that his ideas received the support of Parnassian literary circles.9 The close interactions between artistic and literary milieus to which Burty alludes shaped the development of japonisme and its assimilation within decadent literary culture. Recent scholarship on the reception of japonisme has emphasized its impact on literary form and on the construction of social and gender identities; at the same time, critics have reflected on how the unique historical circumstances of japonisme invite us to revise Edward Said’s well-​known paradigm of orientalism, which has been extremely influential in shaping our understanding of East-​West cultural relations.10 With specific reference to French decadence, Pamela A. Genova has argued that one of the greatest advantages of japonisme is that it provides critics with a privileged viewpoint on the “cultural interdisciplinarity” of decadent writing.11 This productive traffic between visual and literary cultures certainly informs the way in which japonisme surfaces in decadent literature as a decorative motif, creating a textual equivalent to the practices of visual citation of Japanese objects that we have seen in Stevens’s and Whistler’s early works. In the opening chapter of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/​1891), for instance, Lord Henry Wotton’s glimpse of a “Japanese effect” in the shadows cast on the silk curtains by the birds outside is a shorthand way of conveying an atmosphere of worldly sophistication and aestheticism.12 Just as in La parisienne japonaise, the japoniste reference sets up Basil Hallward’s studio—​and, by extension, the whole novel—​as a cosmopolitan space of transformation, where individual identities are fluid and the outside world is mediated through different categories of perception. In similar ways, the new imagery and vocabulary that were created by the circulation of Japanese art enabled writers to enrich literary language and, in some cases, to manipulate form

270   Stefano Evangelista and style, for instance by trying to reproduce the lack of perspective and bold colors of ukiyo-​e prints.13 Decadent literature was at the vanguard of these experiments due to the interest in the crossover between literary and artistic cultures, the focus on aesthetics, the desire to question the limits of realism as a mode of representation, and, not least, the prevalent fascination with the foreign and exotic. In “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893), Arthur Symons quoted with approval Jules de Goncourt’s assessment that “the triumph of Japonisme” should be counted among the great literary and artistic revolutions of the second half of the nineteenth century.14 Together with his brother Edmond, Jules de Goncourt collected Japanese prints, ceramics, and netsuke (miniature sculpture), promoting interest in this material and using it to construct a distinctive literary and social identity. For Symons, the japonisme exemplified by the Goncourts contributed to the growing influence of visual culture on literature, resulting in a sharpened attention to the sensuous properties of language, which he associated with literary decadence. Over a decade earlier, Walter Pater had made a rare reference to Japanese art to underscore a similar point in “The School of Giorgione” (1877). There, he mentioned “Japanese fan painting” as an example of the use of “abstract colour” in art.15 In contrast to the then normative privileging of narrative and ethical readings in art criticism, Pater suggested that in fact our experience of art is first and foremost mediated through the senses; he went as far as to propose that “a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor.”16 Pater’s gesturing toward formalism and abstraction—​in the same essay he puts forward his well-​known theory that “[a]‌ll art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”17—​aligns him with Whistler’s use of Japanese references in Nocturne in Black and Gold, which was first exhibited the year that the Giorgione essay came out in periodical form.18 Like Whistler, Pater draws on Japanese art in order to challenge aesthetic and critical conventions and to bring his readers to look at the Western Old Masters with fresh eyes.19 The combined japoniste influences of Whistler and Pater resonate in Wilde’s early American lecture, “The English Renaissance of Art” (1882). Here Wilde complained of the general lack of appreciation, in modern times, for what, after Pater, he called “the sensuous element of art,”20 and he praised the minority of critics and viewers who were able to swim against the tide and refrain from viewing art exclusively through intellectual and moral prisms. He concluded: “And this is indeed the reason of the influence which Eastern art is having on us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese work. While the Western world has been laying on art the intolerable burden of its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept true to art’s primary and pictorial conditions.”21 Wilde presented japonisme as an influence on art for art’s sake, compounding it with a distinctly Paterian type of aestheticism focused on sensation and pleasure. If, in the American lecture, Wilde’s generalized argument used orientalist tropes about Japan and collapsed Japan and “the East” with surprising naivety, in “The Decay of Lying” (1889), his attitude to the Japan myth was more questioning and ironic.

JAPAN   271 Here the pressure of Wilde’s argument is on the aesthetics and ethics of cultural appropriation: The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people; that is to say, they are extremely commonplace, and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.22

In this later essay, Wilde’s detached and skeptical attitude to Japan is a reaction to the satirical portrayal of japonisme in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado (1885) and George Du Maurier’s 1880s Punch caricatures of aesthetic dilettanti surrounded by Japanese objets d’art. As japonisme became a widespread and recognizable signifier of artistic taste, it opened itself to trivialization in popular culture –​a process that weakened its appeal among the cultural avant garde. Despite all this, however, Wilde shows that Japanophilia was still capable of destabilizing the relationship between art and reality in provocative ways: for Wilde, the “invention” of Japan should not be seen as the product of Western orientalism but rather of Japan’s own, home-​grown ukiyo-​e art that, by creating an imaginary world that is more perfect than reality, exposes the fallacy of mimesis in art as well as in literature. What is wrongheaded is not the Western habit of making imaginative projections about Japan, but rather the doctrine that the arts (literature among them) must have a verifiable basis in reality. It follows that the best way to experience Japan is neither to “behave like a tourist and go to Tokio” nor to indulge in the materialistic reveries of la parisienne japonaise. Rather, in order to understand Japan, you will stay at home, and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere.23

Wilde offers the clearest articulation of how japonisme was co-​opted into a culture of art for art’s sake that took sides with Whistler against Ruskin, with Baudelaire and Pater against Émile Zola, with decadence against Romanticism and realism. The productive dialogue between japonisme and decadent literature is fully captured in J.-​K. Huysmans’s classic, À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), where the protagonist Des Esseintes, supposedly modeled on the notorious dandy and Japanese art collector Robert de Montesquiou, is also a connoisseur of Japanese objects. Des Esseintes’s obsessive search for sensual pleasure includes experiments with Japanese textiles, fragrances, and papers. Significantly for a novel that attaches so much importance to the aesthetics of the interior, the very architecture of Des Esseintes’s house is compared to “those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other.”24 As portrayed by Huysmans, the decadent home multiplies the associations with hyperesthesia, narcissism, and distortion of reality that we have seen in La parisienne japonaise. Indeed, the

272   Stefano Evangelista iconic episode of the jeweled tortoise also has a meaningful Japanese connection: the precious stones encrusted on the animal’s shell are arranged following the design of a Japanese drawing in Des Esseintes’s collection, “representing a huge bunch of flowers springing from a single gentle stalk.”25 The image of the slight stalk bending under the weight of the gorgeous, fragrant blossoms aptly prefigures the fate of the tortoise, which expires as a result of “the dazzling luxury imposed upon it.”26 Des Esseintes’s use of the Japanese design illustrates the decadent practice of recasting classical motifs in debased or perverse form. But it also shows how traditional Japanese art provided a source of inspiration for the sensibility of modern decadents, influencing, in this case, their understanding of the relationship between beauty and violence, refinement and corruption.

Between Myth and Reality: Lafcadio Hearn Early responses to Japan by European decadent writers tend to be enthusiastic but tentative. They hardly ever mention the names of individual artists or specific works; they refer, like Pater, Whistler, and Huysmans, to art forms such as woodblock prints and fan painting in vague terms, avoiding the specialized vocabulary of Japanese art, sometimes even conflating Japan and China. Vagueness was of course one of the supposed characteristics of Japanese art that attracted people in the West, but in this case it is simply a reflection of how culturally remote Japan looked from Europe at this point. Indeed, in spite of the popularity of Japan, authoritative expertise was still rare. Japonisme was essentially a form of dilettantism. Over the closing decades of the century, however, a more specialized knowledge of Japan gradually emerged through travel, scholarship, and translation. Wilde’s ironic remarks about Japan being “a pure invention” illustrate the complexity of sustaining the Japan myth created by japonisme in the face of this growing knowledge and familiarity. In the English-​speaking world, the relationship between literary decadence and a shifting understanding of Japan comes to life in the writings of Lafcadio Hearn (1850–​ 1904). Hearn’s works are now starting to interest Western scholars again after a long period of neglect, but in Japan Hearn has always been a household name and his writings have enjoyed a steady popularity and academic interest. After a childhood spent mainly in Ireland, and then twenty years in the United States and the Caribbean, Hearn moved to Japan in 1890 and remained in the country until his death. Hearn’s time in Japan coincided with the middle-​to-​late years of the outward-​looking Meiji period, when foreign residents had become a visible presence in some parts of the country. However, unlike most of the Western migrants who moved to Japan in order to contribute their expertise and technical knowledge to the fast-​developing country, Hearn made a real effort to root himself within Japanese society: he married a Japanese woman (Koizumi

JAPAN   273 Setsuko), became a naturalized Japanese citizen, which involved changing his name to Koizumi Yakumo, and even came to sympathize with Japanese nationalism.27 In a series of books that mixed travel writing, folklore, and the supernatural, as well as anthropology and philosophy, Hearn conveyed a deep and sometimes eccentric knowledge of Japanese culture, topography, and everyday life. However, at the same time, he also drew on the discourse of art for art’s sake in order to preserve the japoniste myth for his readers in Europe and America. For instance, praising the variety and remarkable quality of the traditional crafts that he came across in Japanese religious festivals, he concluded: Perhaps one inexhaustible source of the contentment, the simple happiness, belonging to Japanese common life is to be found in [the] universal cheapness of pleasure. The delight of the eyes is for everybody. Not the seasons only nor the festivals furnish enjoyment: almost any quaint street, any truly Japanese interior, can give real pleasure to the poorest servant who works without wages. The beautiful, or the suggestion of the beautiful, is free as air.28

Blending firsthand experience with exoticism and elements of aestheticism, Hearn used the myth of a democracy of the “beautiful” in Japan to criticize the degradation that, according to him, industrialization and capitalism had caused in Western societies. Hearn’s position in relation to decadence is complicated. He liked to emphasize the contrast between a vital East and a decadent West. Moreover, in his private writings he reacted suspiciously to the rise of the modern decadent school in France, which he observed remotely from America and Japan. Writing to his friend, the British Japanologist Basil Hall Chamberlain, he characterized the literature of the “décadents” as “a sort of alchemy in verse,—​totally false, with just enough glints of reality—​micaceous shimmerings—​to suggest imaginations of ghostly gold.”29 And yet these very words of condemnation convey a flavor of the highly wrought character of Hearn’s prose, which gives his writings qualities of self-​conscious artifice, decoration, and word-​ painting characteristic of decadent style. Hearn’s Japanese works are overwhelmingly concerned with what Pater and Wilde called the “sensuous element,” which Hearn attempts to reproduce by always privileging impressions and individual sensations over objective description. Particularly important to him was the impressionist notion that literature should be based, like painting, on the handling of “color” through language—​ an idea that, as we have seen, was associated with Japanophilia in the West. Moreover, Hearn, whose work was largely based on tales and legends that he collected with the help of his wife Setsuko and others, reworked traditional Japanese folklore through the prism of a highly literary sensibility that gives his essays and tales a hybrid quality. Hearn was prodigiously well read in French literature, and he was also a translator of works associated with decadence, such as Théophile Gautier’s supernatural tales and Gustave Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874). The influence of Gautier in particular can be seen in the way in which Hearn

274   Stefano Evangelista deployed nonrealist elements in his Japanese writings. Among his favorite themes were the supernatural and the uncanny, reflected in the titles of some of his most famous books, such as In Ghostly Japan (1899), Shadowings (1900), and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). In these works, following Gautier, Hearn often collapsed the supernatural and the aesthetic using Japanese ghosts and uncanny figures to channel an impossible desire to apprehend and preserve the past. In fact, the overwhelming, haunting presence of the past meant that, even in writings that are not explicitly classed as supernatural, Hearn often paused to question the reality of his experiences, seeking explanations for what he witnessed in Japan in the world of dreams, phantasms, and spirituality. It is as if what Hearn valued most about being in Japan was that the fabric of reality was always on the verge of tearing apart. This sense of dislocation is due to the fact that, for all his protestations about the vitality of Japan, he was also painfully aware that the survival of the Old Japan that he treasured was severely threatened by the radical process of modernization in which the country had embarked during the Meiji period in pursuit of Western ideas of progress. Hearn attacked the cosmopolitanism and materialism of New Japan with a rhetoric that openly flirted with cultural nationalism. However, at the same time, he was also capable of contemplating the decline of Old Japan with, as he put it, a feeling of “mingled melancholy and pleasure”—​that is, with something that closely resembled a characteristically decadent form of affect.30 Hearn’s paradoxical relationship with decadence puzzled his friend Osman Edwards, another mediating figure between decadence and japonisme, who dedicated his pioneering study of Japanese theater to Hearn.31 In an article for the American magazine The Craftsman published after Hearn’s death in 1904, Edwards showed that Hearn castigated the excesses of Paul Verlaine and Émile Verhaeren while also lamenting that, in literature, “English and American training suppress too successfully the life of the senses.”32 What Hearn disliked about decadence was the emotional coldness that he associated with it. This is what made him recoil even from Pierre Loti, whom he otherwise admired intensely for his handling of romance and exoticism. Hearn objected to Loti’s treatment of Japanese women in his popular novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), which describes the custom of temporary marriage between foreign naval officers stationed in Nagasaki and Japanese women, based on the author’s own experience. The desire to preserve a fundamentally sentimental and idealized vision of Japan, unspoiled by Loti’s decadent cynicism, was another determining factor in Hearn’s deeply ambivalent engagement with decadence in his Japanese writings.

Decadence Mirrored: Japan An account of decadence and Japan would not be complete without taking account of the fact that the exchange also went in the other direction. Japan’s opening in the second half of the nineteenth century brought an influx of foreign ideas, technologies, objects,

JAPAN   275 and art forms that transformed Japanese society. With the onset of the Meiji era in 1868, the importation of Western cultures became systematic, informing educational curricula and marking a cornerstone of the official government policy of modernization. These processes left a deep mark on Japan’s arts and literature. Once again, the dynamics of cultural exchange can be gauged from a visual example (Figure 14.3). Yōshū Chikanobu’s woodblock print, Yōfuku (Western clothing, 1889), depicts a group of fashionable Japanese women wearing French-​style dresses against

Figure 14.3.  Yōshū Chikanobu, Yōfuku (Western clothing, 1889). Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

276   Stefano Evangelista the backdrop of a traditional Japanese garden. The focus is on the colorful fabrics with their elaborate patterns that clash against each other and against the carpet, and on the designs of their bodices, ruffed collars, and bonnets, items that were deeply alien to traditional Japanese women’s wear. Chikanobu reverses the gaze of Western japonisme exemplified by Stevens’s La parisienne japonaise. Here, it is worldly Japanese women who dress up as parisiennes in order to play with practices of self-​fashioning, this time in the open setting of a garden. The Meiji-​era craze for the West is reflected not only in the women’s clothing but also in the furniture (upholstered armchair, curtain, and tassel), garden railings, and European-​style teapot and teacup that rest on the table on the left of the picture. By means of these visual props, Chikanobu updates a traditional subject of ukiyo-​e prints—​the leisure of urban society—​showing that the new forms of sociability at the end of the nineteenth century are mediated through Western tastes and habits of consumption. Other prints from the same series, Azuma fuzoku, fuku zukushi (An array of auspicious customs of eastern Japan), show metropolitan Japanese men and women playing European classical music, attending balls, and enjoying Western food. The effect of Chikanobu’s prints is quite unlike the simpler harmony of the more famous, older ukiyo-​e art that was popular in the West. Instead, he (and several of his contemporaries) experimented with a hybrid aesthetics that incorporated foreign conventions. In Yōfuku, the influence of Western art is immediately apparent in the garish colors, obtained by using imported aniline dyes, and in the composition, which is modeled on European portrait art. Chikanobu’s assimilation of European techniques mirrored the use of classical Japanese prints by Whistler and European japonistes as a way to challenge artistic conventions. And, just like Whistler’s hybrid experiments, Chinakobu’s new style attracted accusations of decadence at home: Japanese writers lamented the decline of traditional woodblock printing, ruined by commercialization and contamination.33 This negative view was shared by Western collectors, who did not—​and mostly still do not—​care for Meiji-​era prints. Even Edmond de Goncourt, who welcomed the corresponding phenomenon of Japan’s influence on European art, espoused this narrative of decay in his important monographs on “golden age” woodblock artists Utamaro and Hokusai. The image of a cosmopolitan Japan was not something that either Japanese traditionalists or Japanophile decadents in the West might have wanted to see: perhaps the impression it left was just, to borrow Wilde’s ironic remark, too “extremely commonplace.” However, it was an inescapable social and cultural reality that was there to stay, and that also left its mark on literature. Early twentieth-​century Japan witnessed an influx of foreign translations that was much more rapid and extensive than the reception of Japanese literature in the West. Critics of Japanese literature have shown that decadence, one of the most recent and controversial trends in European literature, was quickly seized on by Japanese writers who were looking for foreign models. In her study of the resulting practices of transculturation, Ikuho Amano argues that, when the term dekadansu entered the Japanese vocabulary as a loanword from French décadence

JAPAN   277 around 1905, it fed into preexisting aesthetic concepts and literary practices; the result was a vernacular Japanese literature of decadence that fused native and imported traditions. In approaching this body of works, Amano therefore cautions that literary influences from the West should be viewed as carrying complex transcultural meanings, and not merely as “the transplanted factors in the Japanese counterpart.”34 In this fluid field identified by Amano, Japanese hybrid discourses of decadence and art for art’s sake developed through translation, in cosmopolitan literary magazines, and in the activities of social movements such as the so-​called circle of Pan (Pan no kai, 1908–​1912). The writer Nagai Kafū gives us a glimpse of the countercultural potential of decadence in his 1913 volume of translations Sangoshū (The coral anthology), where he suggestively compares the introduction of French decadent poetry, notably Baudelaire, into modern Japan to the act of importing coral into the country during the period of Japan’s isolation, when such activity was supposedly forbidden.35 This imagery of transgression captures the fact that much decadent literature is explicitly or implicitly dismissive of those ideas of progress and enlightenment that educated Japanese were encouraged to absorb from the West. As with the different waves of japonisme in the West, Western decadent literature was assimilated over a long time in Japan, stretching into the Taishō period (1912–​1926) and beyond. Crucial in this respect was the work of cosmopolitan Japanese writers who were able to read European literature in the original, traveled to the West, and often also doubled as translators. One such mediator was the writer Natsume Sōseki (1867–​ 1916), whose novel Sorekara (And Then, 1909) contains distinct echoes of Gabriele D’Annunzio—​a writer who was drawn to Japanese imagery in his own work and who enjoyed an extensive early reception in Japan.36 And Then explores themes of individualism, hedonism, and dandyish masculinity in the cosmopolitan society of early twentieth-​century Tokyo. Like his counterparts in D’Annunzio’s novels, notably Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889), Sōseki’s hyper-​aesthetic and narcissistic hero, Daisuke, is simultaneously a product and an astute observer of the phenomenon that he calls the “decadence of the twentieth century”: The life appetites, which had suddenly swollen of late, exerted extreme pressure on the instinct for morality and threatened its collapse. Daisuke regarded this phenomenon as a clash between the old and new appetites. And finally, he understood that the striking growth of the life appetites was, in effect, a tidal wave that had swept from European shores.37

The effects of that “tidal wave” are powerfully registered in the works of Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–​1965), one of the most prominent writers of the Taishō period, who was well versed in European decadent literature. Alongside Mori Ōgai and Honma Hisao, he was also among Japan’s early translators of Oscar Wilde.38 Tanizaki’s short story “Aoi hana” (“Aguri,” 1922) provides a striking development of the aesthetics of transculturation depicted by Chikanobu in his late nineteenth-​century prints. The story

278   Stefano Evangelista centers on the male protagonist’s obsession to dress his young lover Aguri in imported Western clothes, shoes, and jewels. As the two lovers wander the streets of Yokohama (one of the open ports and a key center of Japan’s import industry) in search of things to buy, the aspiration for Western feminine elegance is debased into a brutal form of fetishism: European women’s clothes weren’t “things to wear”—​they were a second layer of skin. They weren’t merely wrapped over and around the body but dyed into its very surface like a kind of tattooed decoration. When he looked again, all the goods in the show windows seemed to be so many layers of Aguri’s skin, flecked with color, with drops of blood.39

Viewed through the disturbed erotic imagination of the unhinged protagonist, the relationship between the Japanese female body and imported Western fashions appears dysfunctional, a symptom of a superficial form of cosmopolitanism mediated entirely through materialistic appetites. It was, however, with Mishima Yukio (1925–​1970) that European decadence became most fully assimilated by a writer who enjoys an international reputation as one of Japan’s foremost twentieth-​century authors. Mishima’s first successful novel, Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949) is an autobiographical bildungsroman that brings into focus the convergence of extreme individualism and aestheticism that fascinated Sōseki. Mishima links the autobiographical protagonist Kochan’s struggle to fit within traditional Japanese society with his strong attraction toward Western culture: a striking scene in which Kochan experiences his first orgasm looking at a photograph of Guido Reni’s St. Sebastian uses this decadent icon that also obsessed Wilde and D’Annunzio to domesticate themes of homoerotic and sadomasochistic desire within a Japanese context. Indeed, Mishima’s development as a writer can be seen as a long dialogue with decadent tropes and ideas, culminating in his last work, the tetralogy The Sea of Fertility (1969–​1971). The final volume of the tetralogy, Tennin gosui (The Decay of the Angel, 1971) is set in post–​World War II Japan, occupied by the Americans and defaced by capitalism: here the symbols of the West have been completely emptied of the glamour and promise of enlightenment they held for Chikanobu’s generation. Picking up on the decadent atmosphere, the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar thought that the novel left the impression “of seeing dry white bones piercing decaying flesh.”40 Indeed, the spectacle of the slow moral and physical collapse of Mishima’s hero Honda in the course of the four novels invites readers to view the world through a pessimistic, degenerative prism of decadence. Mishima’s writings have fully metabolized the works of Pater, Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and D’Annunzio, among others. Even more strikingly, his biographical trajectory into extreme nationalism and self-​inflicted martyrdom—​he committed seppuku (suicide by disembowelment) after a futile attempt to stage a right-​ wing coup—​offers a perverse and spectacular rendition of the individual life (and death) as a work of art.

JAPAN   279 These brief examples from Sōseki, Tanizaki, and Mishima show that writers drew on decadence to frame the social and cultural changes that affected Japan from the time of the country’s opening in the mid-​nineteenth century through to its traumatic twentieth-​ century history. These writers’ direct and oblique engagements with Western decadence are part of an ambivalent process of transculturation, which included both the strong desire to enter a dialogue with foreign literatures and anxieties about the potentially negative effects of what we now call globalization. In Mishima’s case, these anxieties found an outlet in the form of an extreme right-​wing reaction, radicalizing the nationalist leanings that we have already seen at work in Hearn’s writings.

Conclusion The fact that Sōseki, Tanizaki, and Mishima belong to the canon of world literature is extremely significant: decadence, in this respect, also gives their works an element of familiarity for potential readers in the West—​it is a cultural framework through which their novels and stories become legible to outsiders and open to translation. The relationship between decadence and Japan developed within this long, entangled history that stretches from the rise of japonisme in metropolitan artistic cultures in the West to the assimilation of Western literatures by twentieth-​century Japanese writers. On both sides, acts of cultural translation and cosmopolitan opening are interspersed with instances of misunderstanding, stereotyping, anxiety, and hostile reaction. In the course of these generative and sometimes fraught encounters between Japan and the West, decadence provided both a hospitable culture for cosmopolitan experiments in literature and the arts, as well as a pejorative narrative that hostile critics seized on to denounce the perceived dangers of cosmopolitanism and transculturation.

Notes 1. Philippe Burty’s pioneering series of articles on japonisme were published in La renaissance littéraire et artistique from May 1872. Sophie Basch provides a detailed account of the terminology and chronology of japonisme in “Philippe Burty contre Castagnary. Philologie du japonisme, ‘ce caprice de dilettante blasé’ suivi de Le ‘jeu japonais,’ de Marcel Proust à Ernest Chesneau,” Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique, accessed March 28, 2021, https://​www.arl​lfb.be/​ebibli​othe​que/​com​muni​cati​ons/​basch1​ 3032​021.pdf. For the British context, see also Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West (London: Phaidon, 2005); and Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel, and Nineteenth-​Century Japan (London: Routledge, 2003). Research for this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 818563—​CHROMOTOPE).

280   Stefano Evangelista 2. For informative overviews with an emphasis on japonisme as an evolving artistic culture, see Evelyn Benesch, ed., Faszination Japan: Monet, Van Gogh, Klimt (Heidelberg: Kehrer, 2018); and Gabriel P. Weisberg, Anna-​Maria von Bonsdorff, and Hanne Selkokari, eds., Japanomania in the Nordic Countries, 1875–​1918 (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2016). 3. James McNeill Whistler, Mr. Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” (London: Chatto and Windus, 1888), 29. 4. Kanji are adapted Chinese logograms that, together with the phonographic hiragana and katakana scripts, form the Japanese writing system. 5. John Ruskin, “Life Guards of New Life” (letter 79, July 1877), in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–​1912), Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (1907), 29:160. 6. Walter Crane, “Art and the Commonweal: An Address delivered at Armstrong College to the Students of the School of Art,” in William Morris to Whistler: Papers and Addresses on Art & Craft & Commonweal (London: Bell, 1911), 64–​5. 7. Linda Gertner Zatlin, Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 8. Information on Japanese translation comes from Peter France, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 236–​49. 9. Philippe Burty, “Japonism,” The Academy, August 7, 1875, 150–​51. Quoted in Basch, “Philippe Burty contre Castagnary,” 11. 10. For British and American contexts, see Grace E. Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); and Christopher Reed, Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 11. Pamela A. Genova, Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-​Century French Prose (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 109. 12. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow (2000), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000–​), 3:3. 13. Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 43, 71–​75; Elwood Hartman, “Japonisme and Nineteenth-​ Century French Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 18, no. 2 (1981): 150; and, with specific reference to fragmentation in Huysmans, Genova, Writing Japonisme, 128–​31. See also W. L. Schwartz, The Imaginative Interpretation of the Far East in Modern French Literature, 1800–​1925 (Paris: Champion, 1927). 14. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 860. 15. Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 104. 16. Pater, 104. 17. Pater, 106, italics in the original. 18. On important related aspects of the dialogue between Pater and Whistler, see Lene Østermark-​Johansen, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 51–​55; and Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 272–​78. 19. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” 104.

JAPAN   281 20. Oscar Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” in Essays and Lectures, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen & Co., 1909), 133. Pater had used different versions of this formula both in the essay on Winckelmann and in “The School of Giorgione,” which by that stage had been published in periodical form but had not yet been added to The Renaissance. 21. Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” 134. 22. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Complete Works, Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4:98. 23. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 4:98. 24. J.-​K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1959), 33. 25. Huysmans, 54. 26. Huysmans, 62. 27. Throughout the chapter, historical Japanese figures are referred to using the traditional Japanese order of surname followed by first name (e.g., Koizumi Yakumo). When referring to contemporary Japanese critics operating in an international context, the order is reversed to first name followed by surname, according to the standard practice in English. 28. Lafcadio Hearn, “Notes of a Trip to Kyoto,” in Gleanings in Buddha-​Fields (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1897), 64–​65. 29. Lafcadio Hearn to Basil Hall Chamberlain, May 10, 1894, in The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Elizabeth Bisland (London: Constable; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 308. Hearn went on to qualify his assessment by citing verses by Stéphane Mallarmé. 30. Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), 1:102. 31. Osman Edwards, Japanese Plays and Playfellows (London: Heinemann, 1901). 32. Osman Edwards, “Lafcadio Hearn on the Decadent School: His Views as Expressed in Some of His Delightful Letters to a Friend,” The Craftsman 13, no. 1 (1907): 21. 33. See Amy Reigle Newland, Time Present and Time Past: Images of a Forgotten Master: Toyohara Kunichika, 1835–​1900 (Leiden: Hotei, 1999). Newland questions this negative perception of woodblock prints from this period. 34. Ikuho Amano, Decadent Literature in Twentieth-​Century Japan: Spectacles of Idle Labour (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11. Amano approaches decadence through a Marxist prism, focusing on the social sphere and the persistence of the figure of “the useless man” in Japanese decadent literature. 35. Isabelle Lavelle, “Anywhere Out of the World: Translating Décadence in Japanese Literature, 1885–​1925,” (PhD diss., Waseda University, 2018), 49. 36. See Mariko Muramatsu, ‘La fortuna dannunziana nel Giappone del primo Novecento: Studi dei documenti giapponesi nell’Archivio del Vittoriale degli Italiani’, in Segni e voci della letteratura italiana. Da Dante a D’Annunzio (Tokyo: UTCP, 2012), 95–​120; and Il buon suddito del Mikado: D’Annunzio japonisant (Milano: Archinto, 1996). On D’Annunzio’s early Japanese reception, see Jōji Hirayama, D’Annunzio to Nihon Kindai Bungaku [D’Annunzio and modern Japanese literature] (Tokyo: Shironsha, 2011); and Noriko Hiraishi, Hannon Seinen to Jogakusei no Bungakushi: ‘Seiyō’ o yomikaete [Anguished youths and girl students in modern Japan: Reinterpreting Western literature] (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2012). I am grateful to Noriko Hirashi and Mariko Muramatsu for providing this information. 37. Natsume Sōseki, And Then, trans. by Norma Moore Field (Tokyo and Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 2011), 93.

282   Stefano Evangelista 38. Yoko Hirata, “Oscar Wilde and Honma Hisao, the First Translator of ‘De Profundis’ into Japanese,” Japan Review 29 (2009): 241–​66. 39. Tanizaki Junichirō, “Aguri,” in Seven Japanese Tales, trans. Howard Hibbett (New York: Vintage, 1996), 200–​1. 40. Marguerite Yourcenar, Mishima: A Vision of the Void, trans. Alberto Manguel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), 81.

Further Reading Amano, Ikuho. Decadent Literature in Twentieth-​Century Japan: Spectacles of Idle Labor. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Berger, Klaus. Japonisme in Western Painting. Translated by David Britt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-​Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Dawson, Carl. Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Evangelista, Stefano. Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Genova, Pamela A. Writing Japonisme: Aesthetic Translation in Nineteenth-​Century French Prose. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Lambourne, Lionel. Japonisme: Cultural Crossings between Japan and the West. London: Phaidon, 2005. Lavery, Grace E. Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Lucken, Michael. Le Japon grec: Culture et possession. Paris: Gallimard, 2019. Miner, Earl. The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. Ono, Ayako. Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel, and Nineteenth-​Century Japan. New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Reed, Christopher. Bachelor Japanists: Japanese Aesthetics and Western Masculinities. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Starrs, Roy. “Lafcadio Hearn as Japanese Nationalist.” Japan Review 18 (2006): 181–​213. Yokoyama, Toshio. Japan in the Victorian Mind: A Study of Stereotyped Images of a Nation, 1850–​1880. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987. Zatlin, Linda Gertner. Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

PA RT I I I

GENRES

Chapter 15

The Decaden t Nov e l Generic Inversions Kristin Mahoney

At the midpoint of J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a veritable “breviary of the Decadence,”1 the novel’s protagonist Des Esseintes, who has withdrawn from the modern world into a villa near Fontenay, reaches the height of anxiety and depression. “His boredom [has grown] to infinite proportions,” and he is beset with insomnia and “feverish restlessness.”2 He attempts to “change the trend of his thoughts” and “cool his brain” by engaging in some “emollient reading” of the kinds of books “charmingly adapted for convalescents and invalids, whom more tetanic or phosphatic works would only fatigue” (109). He selects for this process the novels of Charles Dickens. Des Esseintes, however, is a perverse reader, and the manner in which he digests Dickens’s soothing and sentimental pap turns the material on its head, upending its intended effects, so that he emerges from the experience more aggravated, more feverish, and strangely aroused. The “exaggerated virtue” of Dickens’s “chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines” brings on an “attack of nerves” in Des Esseintes (109–​10). The British author’s “cant” (110) gets Des Esseintes thinking about different kinds of kisses: “the hybrid kiss, or the colombine kiss . . . where the tongue is brought into play” (109). Reacting “in the contrary direction” to the overwhelming wholesomeness of the novels (109), he meditates on the history of his “old dissipations” (110)—​his dalliance with Miss Urania, a circus acrobat who “made up her mind” to become a man and made him feel he was “turning female” (111); an affair with a ventriloquist who stimulated him by throwing her voice outside the bedroom door, pretending to be an angry husband catching them in the act; and, finally, his “mistrustful friendship” with a schoolboy that had produced in him excessive “satisfaction mingled with distress” (116). It is hard to imagine a more aberrant use of Dickens, a greater reversal of his perceived goals and intentions. This interlude speaks volumes about the relationship of the decadent novel to the Victorian novel tradition for which Dickens is standing in here, representing either its zenith or nadir, depending upon one’s perspective. Huysmans

286   Kristin Mahoney explained in a retrospective preface to Against Nature that his intention had been “to break apart the limits of the novel,” and Des Esseintes’s aggressive misuse of Dickens seems to indicate that the overturning of the Dickensian project should be understood as at least one component of his attempt to retool the genre.3 Huysmans, of course, enters into critical relationship with a broad range of novelistic antecedents in Against Nature. A good part of the novel is devoted to Des Esseintes’s reading practices, and the discussion of Des Esseintes’s relationship to French, as opposed to British, modes of realism and naturalism is more extensive, nuanced, and complicated.4 His attempt to break apart the limits of the novel should thus be understood as operating in conversation with French practitioners of the genre as well. As David Weir has suggested, Against Nature could, for example, be understood as a parody of “the type of novel his former mentor Zola advocated by showing what happens when the life of an aristocratic rather than a working-​class character is determined by an artificial environment instead of a naturalistic one.”5 The placement of Des Esseintes’s wild misuse of Dickens at the novel’s center, however, suggests that upending Dickens’s aims was significant for Huysmans. Here I would like to take Des Esseintes’s purposeful inversion of Dickens’s intentions as a figure for the relationship of the decadent novel to the conventions of the Victorian realist novel. Like Des Esseintes’s reading of Dickens, the decadent novel as a subgenre takes every objective the Victorian novel tradition holds dear—​the development of bourgeois interiority, the cultivation of Christian moral sympathy, the production of “properly” gendered forms of subjectivity, and the elaboration of suitable processes of romantic connection culminating in companionate marriage—​and inverts it, acting against the soothing effects of nineteenth-​century British realism. If a Dickens novel highlights the psychological depth of its heroes and heroines by showing how they are enmeshed in social networks and capable of feeling for and connecting with others, the decadent novel centers on cold and detached protagonists who withdraw from their culture and from human connection, driven toward cruelty and destruction rather than sympathy.

“Culture of Negation”: The Decadent Novel and Modernity This rejection and inversion of the conventions of the nineteenth-​century realist novel registers at the level of the form as much as the content of the decadent novel. Whereas the compelling and forward-​moving plot of the serial Victorian novel fosters a sense of connection among individual events and chapters, as well as between author and reader, the decadent novel is most often composed of isolated episodes and laborious detail, catalogues, and digressions that stall the action and alienate the reader. John R. Reed says of the decadent style that “the reader is not lured and enticed from one scene or response to the next but is . . . bludgeoned forward by detailed descriptions of perversities.”6

The Decadent Novel    287 If a Victorian bestseller invites engagement, a thrilling desire to know more, to reach a conclusion, the decadent novel is static, uninviting, and provides no satisfactory sense of an ending. The essence of narrative is connection, the fostering of a sense of relatedness between plot points that in turn engenders the audience’s connection with the text. The decadent novel, on the other hand, relays information about the isolato at its center in a disconnected and fragmented manner that shuts down the possibility of empathetic “feeling into” the protagonist’s experience on the part of the reader.7 Narrative is broken apart, as is the pact between author and audience. These characteristics of the decadent novel—​its withdrawal from modern culture and from the needs and desires of modern audiences, its refusal of connection both at the level of form and content—​have often resulted in the categorization of decadence as amoral, apolitical, or complicit with individualist ideologies.8 Here, however, I would like to draw on the work of Matei Calinescu in order to consider the possibility of understanding decadence as a “culture of negation” rather than simply a reinscription of modernity, and argue that its centering of coldness, cruelty, and pathology should be understood as a rejection of the counterfeit health of the Victorian novel.9 Reading the decadent aesthetic through the lens of Theodor Adorno, Calinescu argues, allows decadence to emerge not “as a poisonous manifestation of ‘bourgeois ideology’ but, on the contrary, as a reaction against it and, moreover, as a deep and authentic awareness of a crisis to which no easy (or even difficult) solutions can be prescribed.”10 Leo Bersani argues that the nineteenth-​century realist novel aims to manage social fragmentation and offers representations of the unified self as a form of reassurance to readers situated within a splintered and conflicted world.11 The decadent novel, however, amplifies and exaggerates alienation and fragmentation, forcing its readers into confrontation with the dissatisfactions endemic to modernity. Rather than “smoothing over the cracks and flaws in human personality that were always the product of life under capitalism,”12 providing soothing representations of reconciliation, connection, and harmony, the decadent novel dwells on the misery of the present, foregrounding the dissolute nature of the age and allowing for a more thorough reflection on isolation and depravity engendered by modern conditions. Understanding the decadent novel as purposefully inverting the conventions of the nineteenth-​century realist novel allows one to read its focus on the retreat from sociality as something more than a simple evacuation of politics from the text. As Regenia Gagnier argues, the fin de siècle fostered “polarized reactions to the excesses of modernization,” generating highly divergent approaches to conceptualizing the ideal relationship between part and whole, the tension between independence and interdependence, and the conflict between the desire for freedom and the desire for connection.13 Decadence occupies one extreme on this continuum of reactions to modernization, stressing the detachment of the individual psyche from the social whole, and the decadent novel certainly tends to highlight the independence of its isolated protagonists. However, the question of whether decadent culture, and the decadent novel more specifically, endorses withdrawal or solipsism is a complicated one. Decadent novels often amplify and exaggerate modern forms of alienation in a way that enables further reflection

288   Kristin Mahoney on the dehumanization and deprivation engendered by modernity.14 If such novels as Against Nature or The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/​1891) show us individuals guided only by their own insatiable desires and their inability to attain anything that resembles satisfaction, the pursuit of ever more complicated forms of pleasure is rarely represented as enjoyable. Radical freedom and independence more typically emerge as sources of torturous pain and restless dissatisfaction. It is worth asking, of course, how far this kind of political reflection gets us, if the magnification of the structures undergirding modern misery enables the alteration of those structures. But the decadent novel tradition seems to insist that the sentimental representation of reconciliation, order, and wholeness in, for example, the novels of Charles Dickens only serves to reinforce the myth of progress. Vincent Sherry points out that the decadent sensibility, the sense of existing within a moment of aftermath or decline, “has recurred as a dominant quality of consciousness at different moments of world history,” but “the sense of a late historical day or an aftermath circumstance is concentrated with particular intensity in European cultural history in the mid-​late nineteenth century” in response to “a decaying aristocracy, an entropic cosmos, an imperial outlook losing moral confidence even as it was gaining terrain, and the emergence of ‘the crowd’ as a randomizing force in the experience of urban modernity.”15 The illusory harmony of the Victorian novel might provide a way to manage or camouflage the fractured, fraught nature of modern experience and preserve optimistic visions of development and futurity, but decadence, in Sherry’s formulation, operates to call into question “the promissory mythologies of Progress.” Hence the focus of the decadent novel on detached individuals and damaging forms of desire forces readers to confront the anguish produced by modern conditions, to meditate on the manner in which modernization, increasing emphasis on individuation, and an escalating sense of fragmentation at the turn of the century distort subjectivity and enable ever more horrifying forms of cruelty.

Sheltered from Raging Folly by Lofty Scorn: The Decadent Isolato The manner in which the isolated protagonists of decadent novels rationalize their need for withdrawal often relies upon a discourse of elitism and disdain. As Kirsten MacLeod notes, as early as the 1880s, aesthetes such as Wilde and James McNeill Whistler “adopted aristocratic stances and represented themselves as beings marked by refinements and tastes lacking in the middle classes,” and the decadents only amplified this rhetoric of elitist antagonism.16 However, decadent novelists rarely represent their protagonists’ retreat from modern culture as solely motivated by aristocratic disdain or an authentic belief in their own superiority, which complicates the political positioning of these representations of flight from connection. The discontent of decadent protagonists frequently arises from a conflicted compound of angry feelings about mass culture and

The Decadent Novel    289 commercialism and an understanding of themselves as battered and exploited by the conditions of modernity. Furthermore, decadent novels tend to posit the rejection of interrelatedness to which their wounded protagonists turn as a solution that engenders further dissatisfaction. The terms of decadent cultural and political critique are not fundamentally dissimilar from those articulated by their more progressive or community-​oriented contemporaries who linked the conditions of capitalism to violence, catastrophe, and dehumanization. What distinguishes the decadent novel from the mid-​Victorian novel (as well as from more politically radical or engaged late Victorian texts by socialist and New Women writers) is its refusal to generate solutions or alternatives to, or rosy representations of, the political problems of the present. The decadent novel rejects the nineteenth-​century realist novel’s investment in scenes of social reconciliation and its distraction from the brutalizing conditions of contemporary life via the cultivation of sentiment and sympathy by centering on thoroughly alienated malcontents whose sense of self arises only from their increasingly rarefied tastes. The cold and withdrawn figure at the center of the decadent novel, unable to feel or connect, obsessively insisting upon their own distinctiveness, is not an ideal but a warning about the logical outcomes of modernity. The construction of the decadent antihero as flat and resistant to readerly empathy represents a purposeful departure from the conventions of the realist novel, which blithely insists upon the possibility for moral connection in a fragmented, unfeeling era of strife and competition. Rather than highlighting the sentiments that foster social networks and the feelings produced by social contact, the decadent novel focuses in on the rage and dissatisfaction that make flight and disconnection necessary. In Against Nature, for example, Des Esseintes’s decision to retreat to Fontenay arises as his “contempt for humanity [grows] fiercer” and he becomes increasingly convinced that “he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies” as his own (22). In an effort to “escape from a hateful period of sordid degradation” and “cut himself off from contemporary life” (63) and the “idiotic sentimentality combined with ruthless commercialism” that “represented the dominant spirit of the age,” he withdraws “further and further from reality and above all from the society of his day” (176, 180). The suffering of Des Esseintes, however, is not meant to evoke readerly sympathy. Just as he feels for no one, he invites no one to feel for him. The reader is blocked from understanding him, from plumbing the depths of his psychology. His character is only developed through the cataloguing of the possessions—​his paintings, his carpets, his decorated tortoise—​ that he gathers about himself. Des Esseintes is the sum of the books he chooses to read and the plants and jewels that fill his home, all of which demonstrate his fine and singular taste. We cannot know how he hurts, only what he owns. Rejecting the morally progressive plot of the bildungsroman, in which the reader witnesses the development of the protagonist’s interiority, Huysmans gives us a hero who grows increasingly incomprehensible as he becomes more and more infuriated by what he sees as the rising tide of vulgarity, withdrawing ever further from all of the philistines, including, it seems, Huysmans’s readers.

290   Kristin Mahoney Against Nature sets a pattern of tone and style that is echoed in many later decadent novels. While contemporary aesthetic novels such as Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (1885) might resemble Against Nature to a certain extent in their intense focus on the thoughts and feelings of a single individual, the more decadent strain of novelistic discourse I am tracing here amplifies the solipsism and subjectivism of Pater’s Marius to the point of absurdity. The extraction of the self from social connection becomes so severe, so distorted, so grotesque, it borders on the comic. The stylistic tendencies of the decadent novel contribute to this effect, laboriously listing the derangements of the protagonist, piling indulgence upon indulgence, in such a way that the narrative often reads as ludicrous rather than terrifying. The endless litanies of perversions and extravagances can create in the reader boredom, overload, or exhaustion. Or the catalogues of strange things purchased and strange desires indulged might become so lengthy that they can only elicit laughter, comparable to the response of A. C. Swinburne on his first reading of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, when he came to see that Sade provided only “bulk and number,” a catalogue of perversities so excessive that he was left amazed that he and Dante Gabriel Rossetti “did not raise the whole house with our screams of laughter.”17 The connection between decadence and camp emerges here, when the excesses of the decadent novel “cannot be taken altogether seriously because [they are] ‘too much.’ ”18 This stylistic tendency also inhibits any feeling of progression or development within the space of the text. Much as readers might feel themselves stalled within or sinking into excessively detailed descriptions of jewels, exotic plants, and textiles, decadent protagonists seem unable to move forward into new ways of thinking or feeling. They are simply propelled from commodity to commodity, incorporating into their lives ever more exotic objects and rarified pleasures. The decadent novel replaces the Victorian realist novel’s attentiveness to moral development with perverse scenarios of moral detachment. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde gives us a protagonist who successfully severs himself from the problem of interrelatedness by splitting in two, allowing an inanimate object to bear the brunt of his contact with living individuals and the consequences of his forms of human interaction. Dorian’s approach to existence is most often understood as a vulgarized enactment of the final paragraphs of Pater’s conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a wrongheaded way of maintaining ecstasy via the practice of insatiable consumption, but Dorian’s bifurcated practice of living might also be understood as a manifestation of modern solipsism and subjectivism. As Gagnier explains, the central issue in much decadent literature is whether the decadent figure can ever escape “his own mind to connect with others at all, the kind of mind that Pater called . . . ‘that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced . . . keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.’ ”19 Pater’s conclusion gives us a world populated with individuals “in . . . isolation” observing a Heraclitean flux of perpetually changing conditions from within the “narrow chamber[s]‌of [their] individual mind[s].”20 Dorian’s supernatural portrait allows him to divide himself even more thoroughly from the individual minds that surround him to become ever more solitary, detached, and unfeeling, as all the guilt

The Decadent Novel    291 for the hearts he breaks and the lives he destroys registers only in secret on a face that is no longer his own. Wilde most clearly satirizes the concept of moral development, so central to the conventional Victorian novel, in the novel’s final chapters, as Dorian plays at purity by deciding not to corrupt the village girl Hetty, but the text has already indicated that it operates within a universe in which these kinds of ethical transformations are impossible. Dorian himself admits finally that he had denied himself pleasure only “for curiosity’s sake,” before attempting to eradicate the painting that bears the evidence of his cruel treatment of others.21 According to George C. Schoolfield, what Dorian desires, in his destruction of the painting, is “immediate surety, not the painful process of change,” and the horrible, agonized cry he emits as he stabs the portrait indicates that he has not found salvation or peace but remains “prideful and unrepentant, [as] he is dragged down to hell.”22 Much as in Huysmans’s decadent breviary, conventional avenues of feeling are shut down in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The reader is never asked to feel for or come into sympathy with a character who only seems to weep honestly when he contemplates the possibility of his own aging. There is again no suffering or sentiment with which to connect, just endless details about the embroideries, perfumes, and exotic instruments inside Dorian’s home. Rather than insisting, as Dickens does, that one might maintain the capacity for deep feeling in the modern world, Wilde shows us what individuals become when consumption and exploitation are the only kinds of pleasures the world has on offer. Even in those decadent novels that seem to endorse their protagonists’ sense of elitism and disdain, such as Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh (1904), we are given a portrait of decadent withdrawal that emphasizes desolation and despair and thus manages to underscore the rottenness of modern conditions. The decadent writer Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe) aligned himself with reactionary modes of conservatism, penning, for example, a “counterblast” to Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy entitled “Towards Aristocracy,” but his politically ambivalent novels often get away from his conservative intentions by speaking poignantly to political injustices and systems of inequality. As his Hadrian the Seventh begins, George Arthur Rose, the novel’s Corvine protagonist, who has failed in his candidacy for the priesthood and scrambles to make a living as a writer, shudders in disgust at the rising tides of socialism and anarchism that surround him. George is clearly and materially impacted by the systems of inequality these movements seek to correct. He is tired and worn out, embittered by years of hard work with little remuneration. He remains, nevertheless, convinced of his own superiority and disdainful toward the concepts of democracy and equality, disinvested in any sense of connectedness with the social whole. He describes himself as “self-​contained,” “detached and apart from others,” motivated by a “desire to be distinct from other people,” “a thing apart” who “can’t understand [his] neighbour.”23 When, by a strange turn of events, he is selected as the next pope, we are given an individualist’s fantasy about how the problems of inequality and suffering might be addressed. He who was last is suddenly made first. Hierarchy is not undone; a pauper is simply made pope.

292   Kristin Mahoney Nevertheless, at the novel’s conclusion, the new pope remains unsatisfied and unfulfilled, alone and fundamentally disconnected: “Things lost their significance to Him. . . . He felt himself to be just off the floor and floating, a world in which everything was strange and everybody was quite strange, a world where nobody and nothing mattered the least bit” (360). He decides finally to address the many questions his colleagues might have about his existence prior to his ascension to the papacy, narrating in a “white rage” with “swift fury” the countless indignities he suffered when impoverished, the endless humiliations he experienced while living amid “an ugly obscene mob, where clean water was a difficulty, food and a bed an uncertainty, and where [he] had the inevitable certainty of ceaseless and furious conflict” (371, 384). George nevertheless understands himself, following this detailed articulation of his suffering, to be resistant to compassion: There was not a man on the earth who would have dared to risk rebuff, . . . to soar to him with that blessed salve of human sympathy—​for which,—​underneath his armour,—​and behind his warlike mien,—​he yearned. . . . He only had emphasized his own fastidious aloofness. . . . he had disclosed the cold of marble, not the warmth of human flesh. (385; italics in original)

In this most conservative of decadent novels, the isolated individualist reveals that detachment from the social body cannot be fully and entirely satisfying. Nevertheless, the protagonist is too bruised and battered by modern strife to request the sympathy for which he so yearns. He turns from the audience who has just consumed the story of his sorrows, stating, “It is Our will to be alone” (385). The decadent novel often amplifies modern individualism and avarice to the level of psychosis. M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901), for example, pursues the colonialist ethos to its logical conclusion, representing a last man whose insatiable need to explore and conquer actually destroys the rest of the human race, leaving him truly alone to rule the entire world in complete isolation. When the explorer Adam Jeffson reaches the North Pole, a poisonous gas erupts from the earth, presumably as a consequence of his violation of the “Sanctity of Sanctities,” the world’s last untouched region. The result is the elimination of all human civilization, our hero excepted. Left to his own devices, Jeffson degenerates into a parody of the plundering colonizer, saying to himself, “I will ravage and riot in my Kingdoms. I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass.”24 Moving restlessly around the world, burning and looting, his narcissism and solipsism seem to know no bounds, as he comes to think it not impossible that the whole world should have been made for me alone—​that London should have been built only in order that I might enjoy the vast heroic spectacle of its burning—​ that all history, and all civilisation should have existed only in order to accumulate for my pleasures its inventions and facilities, its stores of purples and wines, of spices and gold. (127)

The Decadent Novel    293 Pushing the seclusion and cruel detachment of the isolato to the furthest reaches of absurdity, the novel provides a portrait of extreme decadent derangement, as Jeffson outfits himself as an “Oriental monarch” (125); eats and drinks until he grows obese; takes “a dead girl with wild huggings to [his] bosom,” and then crushes her face in with his heel; builds himself a palace of gold; and travels around the world razing its cities to the ground (133). As Maria Cristina Fumagalli argues, the representation of this greedy despot in The Purple Cloud “exposes the brutality of the capitalistic profit-​motive as a basis for human relationship” and “allows doubt and conflict about the official ideology of the Empire to surface.”25 The resolution of Shiel’s novel, in which Jeffson discovers another survivor of the poisonous cloud and agrees to repopulate the earth with her, might appear almost hopeful. However, Jeffson’s relationship to the girl too closely resembles the modes of colonization and exploitation parodied in the earlier sections of the text, and his language concerning the construction of a master race in collaboration with her too firmly echoes the discourses of imperialism to offer a real way out of the violence of modernity. Like most representations of decadent love and eroticism, the novel leaves you wishing the decadent protagonist had remained entirely alone.

Loving and Hating and Wounding: Decadent Connection Romantic fulfillment has always played a central role in the novel genre. What then does it look like when a decadent falls in love? Can the decadent novel accommodate the possibility of romantic connection? While those decadent novels that center on isolated individuals invert the nineteenth-​century realist novel’s cultivation of moral sympathy and interiority, those that focus on connection and desire upend the development of the proper processes of heterosexual romance and companionate marriage in the Victorian novel. Reed states that decadent authors and artists “sought escape from Victorianism in an unnatural perversion of its standards,” and the promiscuous dandies and dissolute women in their turn-​of-​the-​century novels often read like purposeful perversions of the “chaste lovers” and “puritanical heroines” in the Dickens novels that Des Esseintes finds so ridiculous.26 The paramours within these texts operate frequently with complete disregard for Victorian codes of properly gendered conduct. Most frequently, as Laurence Porter remarks in describing Against Nature, “sexual perversion represents an attempt to defy the family by refusing to reproduce it.”27 Even when preoccupied with heterosexual desire, the project of the decadent love story is often a queer one, shutting down the possibility of reproductive futurity, revealing the heteronormative family to be a site of cruelty and violence, making a mockery of the marriage plot. If conventional familial structures appear at all, they are revealed, as in the novels of Ivy Compton-​Burnett, to be loci of incredible horror and abuse. In every sense, decadent novels distance themselves from the ideological

294   Kristin Mahoney work performed by the domestic novels of the nineteenth century, concentrating their attention on sexual and gender dissidence and fissures within patriarchy. But it is not simply that decadent novels question conventional sexual and gender ideologies and kinship structures. Their representations of love often highlight, as much as any portrait of an epicurean by himself in a strange home, the extent to which modern socioeconomic conditions have made intimacy and ethical connection difficult, if not impossible. When brought out of cloister and into contact with other human beings, these protagonists consume and destroy their beloveds, transform them into automatons, or facilitate their deaths. Affiliation and interrelatedness become sources of terror and torture rather than emotional sustenance. The destructive and unpleasant love affairs in decadent novels constitute an utter rejection of the scenarios of social healing and wholesome affection common in the nineteenth-​century domestic novel. When it is not following individualist ideologies to their logical extreme, rendering its protagonist increasingly detached and withdrawn, when it allows for the possibility of contact with alterity, the decadent novel does not suddenly involve a healthy interplay between the part and the whole. The diseased sense of solipsism and self-​interest that motivates decadent withdrawal registers just as clearly in the decadent protagonist’s manner of dealing with other people. Love is constituted in terms of obsession, control, and ownership. Rootedness within social networks is figured as a form of frightening vulnerability to similarly self-​interested and diseased individuals. Whereas happy, wholesome marriages foster scenes of social unity in the Victorian realist novel, the decadent novel substitutes perverse scenarios of torturous desire and vampiric destruction, proposing that love offers no real way out of modern misery. Decadent novels about desire tend to revolve around power struggles, concentrating on acts of humiliation and exploitation, rendering romance a zero-​sum game. Melanie Hawthorne says the French novelist Rachilde “frequently portrayed empowered female protagonists whose modes of empowerment over others were aggressive, sadistically seductive, cruel, and violent,” and her second novel Monsieur Vénus (1884) provides a rather harrowing answer to the question of what the decadent might do in love.28 The cold yet amorous Raoule de Vénérande purchases for herself the poor flower maker and painter Jacques Silvert, whom she perceives as a “beautiful instrument of pleasure.”29 Their relationship involves a series of gender inversions as Raoule feminizes Jacques through her financial support, setting him up in a furnished studio, bathing and dressing him for her pleasure, while Raoule outfits herself in men’s clothing and describes herself as “a man in love with a man” (73). While Raoule seems to be in complete control of the terms of their relationship, she nevertheless grows increasingly agitated at the thought of Jacques’s autonomy. “You drive me crazy!” she tells him: “I want you for myself alone, and yet you talk, you laugh, you listen in front of others with the poise of an ordinary being!” (84). When Jacques dares to act upon his own desires and is discovered by Raoule in another man’s bedroom, she demands that the two men duel, knowing that the inexperienced Jacques will certainly die. Raoule takes from his corpse teeth, nails, and hair to be used in a wax replica of the boy that, at the novel’s conclusion, Hawthorne argues, she seems to penetrate.30 The problem of Jacques’s agency,

The Decadent Novel    295 of his capacity to feel and think in a manner that Raoule cannot completely control, is eliminated by transforming her lover into a sex doll. If decadent novels, as Gagnier suggests, return repeatedly to the question of whether their protagonists might escape their own minds to engage with alterity, Rachilde answers firmly in the negative. She represents desire for the other as the will to power, a drive toward domination, absorption, and the extermination of the beloved’s autonomy. This is a pattern in decadent romance, a tendency in the decadent novel to treat eroticism as guided by the need for dominance as opposed to curiosity or openness. Decadents in love exhibit the same pathologies as decadents in isolation. They simply choose to torture someone besides themselves. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894) tells the story of two lovers, Giorgio and Ippolita, withdrawing together into the countryside of Abruzzo, where Giorgio becomes increasingly consumed by the desire to rule over Ippolita until he finally kills her and takes his own life. As Joseph Galbo comments, “Giorgio’s murderous desires are related to his loss of control over Ippolita, cast as the dangerous ‘other,’ whose murder, along with Giorgio’s suicide, are rendered as an aesthetic triumph.”31 In the novel’s opening chapters, Giorgio wrestles with the problem of their separateness, his inability to possess Ippolita fully, telling his mistress, “You are a perfect stranger to me. Like every other human being, you conceal within yourself a world which is impenetrable to me and to which no depth of passion can give me access.”32 Her separateness elicits a sense of covetousness in him, a jealousy of everything including “the objects reflected in her eyes” along with a wish to see her “always depressed, always ill” (9). His love letters to her reinscribe this sense of exasperation with her autonomy: “I could be content only on one condition—​that I absorbed all, all your being; that you and I no longer were more than a single being; that I lived your life; that I thought your thoughts” (60). Their retreat into Abruzzo brings him no peace and in fact seems to amplify his desire to extinguish her within himself. He comes increasingly to believe that “when she is dead she will attain the supreme perfection of her beauty”: “Dead, she would become an object for thought, a pure ideality. . . . Destroy to possess! He who seeks the absolute in love has no other means” (182, 233). At the novel’s conclusion, Giorgio makes Ippolita drunk on champagne and pulls them both to their death over a precipice while engaged in a “brief and fierce struggle, like the sudden outburst of supreme hate which, up to then, had been smouldering, unsuspected, in the hearts of implacable enemies” (412). This decadent love story ends not with a happy wedding scene or the promise of future generations but with a murder-​suicide and an acknowledgment that aggression and hate always underwrote the power struggle that passed for desire. While this vision of disconnection extends into the decadent literature of the twentieth century, Ronald Firbank’s novels offer a crucial, conceptual respite from this dark tradition through their turn to camp as a politically strategic celebration of the performance of individuality that is reaffirming rather than destructive. Firbank’s works are lighter and funnier than Rachilde’s or D’Annunzio’s, and in them the world seems to open up, to allow for the presence of more than a few tortured protagonists. However, while Firbank certainly gives us more densely populated texts, the individuals within these crowded

296   Kristin Mahoney texts speak past each other or chase after one another in a manner that is at once pathetic and disconcerting. Authentic connection between part and whole remains difficult, if not impossible. The absurd and fragmented chatter of Valmouth (1919) or the final scenario of Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in which the cardinal pursues a choirboy through a church before dying naked of a heart attack, gesture with a lighter touch toward the sense of a modern world marked by fragmentation and alienation. This frenetic energy takes a darker turn in the decadent modernist novels of the 1930s, in which the endless revelry of atomized subjects, at once crowded together and fundamentally apart, becomes more markedly miserable and destructive. Severe economic crises and the rise of fascism seem to have reinvigorated the sense of living in a moment of aftermath and devastation reminiscent of the last-​days feeling prevalent during “the last decade of the last century before the last century of the millennium.”33 Carl Van Vechten’s Parties (1930), for example, gives us a world that is, like Firbank’s, almost excessively populated and in which no one is able to truly connect. Van Vechten’s New York is filled with drunken revelers for whom “nothing goes on at all. . . . Nothing whatever. Just parties, that’s all,” parties that grow increasingly frenetic and dangerous and at which no one is able to engage in anything approaching intimacy.34 Reading the novel as part of a modernist tradition that treats pleasureless parties as evidence of the “decay of modern sociability,” Naomi Milthorpe argues, “in this social landscape, the result of the habitual pursuit of pleasure is not in fact pleasure, but its opposite: disgust, shame, boredom, and terror.”35 Van Vechten’s Manhattan of the 1930s is, as Kate Hext puts it, “exhausted, peripatetic, violent.”36 In the decadent modernist novel of the 1930s, love emerges once again as a source of destabilizing pain, a struggle for dominance that leaves the combatants in perpetual misery. Decadent modernists such as Van Vechten and Djuna Barnes provide dark visions of “[l]‌ove, that terrible thing,”37 of lovers who “follow each other around in circles, loving and hating and wounding.”38 For example, in Parties, when the married but rarely together David and Rilda do appear at the same event, they sadistically mistreat and disregard one another. And yet they are nevertheless perpetually drawn back into one another’s orbits. David insists he is Rilda’s “slave”: I never make a move or commit an action without considering whether it will annoy you or not. I swear the strongest sensation I experience when I look at another woman is to wonder what effect it will have on you. That’s why I get drunk so often. That’s why you get drunk so often. (97)

Rilda complains, “We are destroying each other, . . . eating each other alive,” but they keep at it (182). As the novel concludes, they are reunited after a series of affairs, joined by their social circle for morning cocktails where David toasts, “We’re here because we’re here, and we should be extremely silly not to make the worst of it” (285). Barnes’s Nightwood (1937) is more serious and severe in its treatment of modern, miserable love. As Jeanette Winterson observes, “There is no consolation in Nightwood. . . . It is a bleak picture of love between women.”39 Nora loves Robin, who has left her for Jenny, and Nora spends the novel relentlessly unhappy, endlessly pining for a woman she seems to want to absorb entirely. “We love each other like death,” Nora admits.40 As Robin Blyn

The Decadent Novel    297 notes, “Each version of love [Nora] develops is a love defined as narcissistic incorporation, a love that destroys subject and object relations and hence allows Nora to ‘possess’ Robin as part of herself.”41 The doctor Matthew O’Connor predicts that, ultimately, she, Robin, and Jenny will be “locked together, like the poor beasts that get their antlers mixed and are found dead that way, their heads fattened with a knowledge of each other they never wanted, having had to contemplate each other, head-​on and eye to eye, until death.”42 This is how contact and connection are envisioned in Nightwood, animals locked in combat until their last breath. In the novel’s final scene, Nora and her dog pursue Robin into a church, where Robin does seem temporarily to degenerate into an animal before she falls to the ground exhausted.43 Love has driven the women in Nightwood toward animalism, degeneration, and the narcissistic consumption of one another. The authors of decadent novels are, however, uninterested in representing love in any other way. The decadent novel provides, as Winterson puts it, “no consolation,” no health and unity, no properly functioning part operating within a thriving whole. If modernism sought to be more realistic than realism in its representation of subjectivity, decadence is more accurate than realism in its reflection of the symptoms of modernity, the sickness, sadness, and atomization engendered by modern individualism and capitalist competition. In this endeavor, decadent writers turn the genre of the novel to very different ends, allowing it to function against the grain of the realist tradition. Decadent novelists should not be understood as unified in their political orientations. Frederick Rolfe certainly has a different relationship than, for example, Oscar Wilde to the deranged dynamics he chooses to represent. But what does unite the practitioners of the decadent aesthetic when working within this genre is a rejection of the faith in facile modes of reconciliation that they associate with its earlier forms. They speak directly in order to amplify and exaggerate a culture in crisis rather than generating sentimental representations of alternatives to it. According to Calinescu’s formulation, practitioners of decadence understood the bourgeois promises of “indefinite progress, democracy, [and] generalized sharing of the ‘comforts of civilization’ ” that modernity entailed “as so many demagogical diversions from the terrible reality of increasing spiritual alienation and dehumanization.”44 The novel should, following this line of thinking, bring readers to consciousness of these conditions, rather than distract them from them. An 1895 essay on “Decadent Novels” in Outlook: A Family Paper (published by the Christian Union in New York City) characterizes the “Beardsley school of fiction” as a frighteningly accurate depiction of a culture in which modernization has occurred too quickly, disorienting and destabilizing the populace: The insane conditions of social life that have come to pass through the congestion of our populations find expression in writings of this sort. The only excuse for such stuff is that the conditions really exist that create it. The asphalt pavement, the arc light, the club and the restaurant, the crowded hotels and the apartment-​houses, the electric cars, the telephone, and the typewriter—​all these appliances of life have come upon us too rapidly; we do not adjust ourselves to them, and we are artificial, we are unnatural. Some day we may grow up to our world and become simple and natural and moral once more. Then we shall look back upon the Beardsley school of fiction as a bad dream from which God in his compassion has awakened us.45

298   Kristin Mahoney Refusing to look back to a past in which we were “simple and natural and moral,” a past marked by the “exaggerated virtue” celebrated by Dickens, or forward to a future in which we might be simple and virtuous again, decadence speaks to the “conditions [that] really exist,” the fragmentation and alienation endemic to modern culture, the bad dream from which we are yet to be awakened.

Notes 1. Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries (New York: Dutton, 1916), 294. 2. J.-​K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 108, 107. Further references cited parenthetically. 3. Quoted in Laurence M. Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-​de-​Siècle Novel,” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 96. 4. At one time Des Esseintes “worshipped the great Balzac” but more recently “had given up so much as opening his books, put off by their robust health” (180). He enjoys Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Zola, but in an effort to shun books “whose subjects were confined to modern life” expresses a preference for their historical fiction, because “when the period in which a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid,” one is drawn to representations of another age (180–​81). For further discussion of the relationship of decadence to a longer history of the French novel, see “Decadence and Romanticism: Flaubert and Salammbô” and “Decadence and Naturalism: The Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux” in David Weir’s Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 5. David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 47–​48. 6. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985), 53. 7. My use of the term isolato to describe decadent protagonists is drawn from Reed, Decadent Style, 16: “The Decadent isolato is usually an artist who finds nothing in the external world intriguing enough to draw him into action and who thus accumulates experiences and sensations within himself, hoping to fill the central void.” 8. Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-​de-​Siècle Novel,” 108, for example, states: “To characterize the novel of decadence and the fin de siècle in one word other than ‘perverse,’ one might choose ‘asocial.’ ” Richard A. Long and Iva G. Jones, “Towards a Definition of the ‘Decadent Novel,’ ” College English 22, no. 4 (January 1961), 249, similarly insist that “the ‘decadent’ novel is that novel in which a supposed aesthetic activity or quest takes precedent over all the conditions and conventions of the real world. It is consequently amoral in its outlook.” Paul Bourget’s well-​known formulation of decadence asserts that individualism is one of the key markers of a decadent society: “The social organism . . . succumbs to decadence as soon as the individual has begun to thrive under the influence of acquired well-​being and heredity.” Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98. 9. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-​Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 210. 10. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 210–​11. 11. See Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

The Decadent Novel    299 12. Francis O’Gorman, The Victorian Novel (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 121. The comment is part of a discussion of Catherine Belsey’s description of the realist novel in Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980), 67–​82. 13. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1. 14. Jane Desmarais, “Decadence and the Critique of Modernity,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 99, notes that earlier strands of decadence, as represented by Baudelaire, enact a more ambivalent and conflicted response to modernity. However, at the fin de siècle, the decadent response to modernity became increasingly marked by a deep sense of psychological alienation: “As modernity advances and intensifies, so the concept of decadence becomes reclusive and solipsistic.” 15. Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30. 16. Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 26. 17. Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters Vol. I, 1854–​1869, edited by Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 54. 18. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Partisan Review (December 1964): 523. 19. Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization, 92. 20. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), 209. 21. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Ward, Lock & Company, 1891), 332. 22. George C. Schoolfield, A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–​1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 69. 23. Frederick Rolfe, Hadrian the Seventh (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 18, 49, 53. Further references cited parenthetically. 24. M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 121. Further references cited parenthetically. 25. Maria Cristina Fumagalli, “Representing the World Instead of Reproducing It: M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud,” Ariel 33, no. 1 (2002): 79. 26. Reed, Decadent Style, 229. 27. Porter, “Decadence and the Fin-​de-​Siècle Novel,” 96. 28. Melanie Hawthorne, introduction to Monsieur Vénus, by Rachilde (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004), xxi. 29. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus, trans. Melanie Hawthorne (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004), 19. Further references cited parenthetically. 30. Melanie Hawthorne’s translation of the novel reinstates a phrase omitted from the novel’s epilogue in every edition except the first: “That phrase specifies that when Raoule . . . kisses the wax copy of her lover Jacques Silvert’s body, a spring hidden inside ‘the flanks’ of the mannequin . . . spreads the thighs apart. . . . [I]‌t does not give him an erection. The suppressed phrase makes it clear that Raoule’s relationship with the effigy involves her penetration of him.” See Hawthorne, introduction to Monsieur Vénus, xxviii–​xxix. 31. Joseph Galbo, “A Decadence Baedecker: D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death,” The European Legacy 22, no. 1 (2017): 50. 32. Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Triumph of Death, trans. Arthur Hornblow (New York: George H. Richmond, 1896), 7. Further references cited parenthetically. 33. Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, 2.

300   Kristin Mahoney 34. Carl Van Vechten, Parties: A Novel of Contemporary New York Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 84. 35. Naomi Milthorpe, “ ‘Heavy Jokes’: Festive Unpleasure in the Interwar Novel,” Journal of Modern Literature 38, no. 3 (2015): 72, 76. 36. Kate Hext, “Rethinking the Origins of Camp: The Queer Correspondence of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank,” Modernism/​modernity 27, no. 1 (2020): 179. 37. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 2006), 82. 38. Van Vechten, Parties, 93. Further references cited parenthetically. 39. Jeanette Winterson, preface to Barnes, Nightwood, x, xi. 40. Barnes, Nightwood, 148. 41. Robin Blyn, “Nightwood’s Freak Dandies: Decadence in the 1930s,” Modernism/​modernity 15, no. 3 (2008): 520. 42. Barnes, Nightwood, 107. 43. Len Gutkin, “Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Decadent Style,” Literature Compass 11, no. 6 (2014): 344, discusses this scene in terms of “Darwinian horror . . . in which the continuity between man and beast is always more than merely figurative.” 44. Calinescu, Fives Faces of Modernity, 162. 45. “Decadent Novels,” Outlook 52, no. 14 (October 5, 1895): 551–​52.

Further Reading Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-​Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987. Denisoff, Dennis. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody, 1840–​1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Desmarais, Jane. “Decadence and the Critique of Modernity.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 98–​114. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hext, Kate. “Rethinking the Origins of Camp: The Queer Correspondence of Carl Van Vechten and Ronald Firbank.” Modernism/​modernity 27, no. 1 (2020): 165–​83. Long, Richard A., and Iva G. Jones. “Towards a Definition of the ‘Decadent Novel.’ ” College English 22, no. 4 (January 1961): 245–​49. MacLeod, Kirsten. Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. O’Gorman, Francis. The Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Porter, Laurence M. “Decadence and the Fin-​de-​Siècle Novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel, edited by Timothy Unwin, 93–​110. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Reed, John R. Decadent Style. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985. Schoolfield, George C. A Baedeker of Decadence: Charting a Literary Fashion, 1884–​1927. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Sherry, Vincent. Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Chapter 16

The Deca de nt Sh ort Story Forms of the Morbid Kostas Boyiopoulos

The delimiting nature of the short story form, Vernon Lee submits, is “artificial,” as opposed to the novel, because of its “shortness, owing to the initial unnaturalness of having isolated one single action or episode from the hundred others influencing it.” It is the “artificially selected expression of a given situation.”1 The cornerstone of what we might describe as the decadent short story is this inherent artificiality, which marks the self-​consciousness of the historical moment as it grows out of an insipid Victorianism. Embracing a postlapsarian mindset inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Symons affirms that it is “not natural to be what is called ‘natural’ any longer. We have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a story.”2 In its inherent artificiality, the decadent short story challenges middle-​class moral values upheld in tales of derring-​do and hackneyed genre conventions. The serialized three-​ decker (three-​ volume novel) emphasized plot and interlocking incidents configured by cliffhangers. It was often stretched out by slapdash garrulousness and was geared toward moralistic comeuppance. The decadent short story, by contrast, is “plotless,” tendentious, and static yet evanescent, arresting rarefied psychological states. Even plot often serves as a stylistic gimmick. The quick rhythms of modern life, Anatole Baju writes in “L’école décadente” (The decadent school, 1887), prevent one from “read[ing] long adventure novels full of endless descriptions.”3 In the decadent short story, description is not narrative backcloth, but part of the foreground. In its heightened self-​awareness, it parses the nooks and crannies of an idée fixe or a morbid obsession, spaces that mid-​Victorian fiction, governed by propriety, steers clear of or glosses over. In Britain the decadent short story is a peculiar literary phenomenon that proliferates in the 1890s through the emergence of the little magazines. Still more, the “short story” and “decadence” are not coeval and coterminous by chance: they share common origins

302   Kostas Boyiopoulos that go back to Poe through French and Pre-​Raphaelite gestations. The Decadent Short Story (2014) is the first anthology that acknowledges its history. But the pivotal role of decadence in the historical development of the form has fallen through the cracks in recent scholarship. It is glaringly underplayed in the Cambridge (2016) and Edinburgh (2019) companions to the short story. John Plotz’s study of the Victorian short story omits the 1890s, while Beryl Pong glosses over The Yellow Book and its association with decadence.4 Notable critical attempts to define it were made in the mid-​to-​late twentieth century. Wendell Harris approached decadent fiction taxonomically, distinguishing three “types”: the “new realism,” the “sentimentally melancholy stories of love and romance” exemplified by Henry Harland and Ernest Dowson, and the “ ‘aesthetic’ prose represented by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.”5 The third type of decadent short fiction has “a highly wrought style with subject matter of highly exotic improbability.”6 Offering a different configuration, Derek Stanford argues that the 1890s short story is informed by an “egalitarianism of the erotic senses,” and he settles on three “themes”: “the life of sex, the life of art, bohemian and déclassé existence.”7 Adopting a more conceptual approach, Jan Gordon locates the decadent short story in the paradox generated by “the interchangeability of art and life” which he sublimates in the typical decadent formula of the narcissistic artist whose erotic obsession with the Other is really an obsession with the self: “that merger of imagining subject and aesthetic object produces a hybrid figure that exhibits the sterile perfection of a static work of art.”8 And John R. Reed takes Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887), Dowson’s Dilemmas (1895), and Symons’s Spiritual Adventures (1905) as prime examples that illustrate the move from aestheticism to decadence. For Reed, these three works center on the figure of the artist, favor “mood and character over plot,” and “describe the self-​frustrating pursuit of the ideal.”9 It is hard to define this literary phenomenon because it reaches across genres, movements, and trends. The American writer Brander Matthews, who coined the term “short story” in 1884, expounded on its “limitless possibilities,”10 ranging from stolid realism to Gothic fantasy. The short story is an intrinsically decadent form with clear decadent origins. The common origins of the short story and decadence suggest a paradoxical imperative in which morbid excess is delimited, captured, and controlled as quintessence. This phenomenon is further shaped in Britain by the print culture of the 1890s, where the short story, reflecting the intermedial and intergeneric consciousness of its decadent publishing venues, melts both formal boundaries (essay and fiction) and genre boundaries (naturalism and symbolism). As such, it leads to the ultimate hybridization, that of life and artifice. In light of these governing principles, I examine Charlotte Mew’s “Passed” (1894), M. P. Shiel’s “Xélucha” (1895), and Jean Lorrain’s “L’amant des poitrinaires” (“The Man Who Loved Consumptives,” 1891), stories that together cover the generic spectrum between realism and romance. Resonating with Gordon’s “sterile perfection” and Reed’s “self-​frustrating pursuit of the ideal,” the decadent short story leads to irresolution and futility.

The Decadent Short Story     303

Excess in Quintessence In his 1899 essay “The Short Story,” in which he calibrates the ideas of Brander Matthews, Frederick Wedmore describes the form as “quintessence,” a rebranding of Poe’s “brevity” and “unity of effect” (not plot).11 As the elusive fifth essence prized by medieval alchemists, quintessence is the most appropriate metaphor for the decadent short story, not just in the sense of concentration (rather than sublimation), but because of its curative properties. As such, it engenders an odd paradox. On the one hand, the decadent short story is disaggregated by a morbid excess of psychological and stylistic details, what Reed calls “dissolution” and “atomization.”12 On the other hand, the quintessence of the form cures this state of morbidity, or unhealthy excess. But cure, here, is not about restoring to health; it is about perfecting disease, preserving excess in form. The Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, the fictional poster-​child of decadence, conjures this paradox of excess cured in quintessence. Exhibiting a penchant for the conte, Des Esseintes reserves special praise for Poe, the “master of induction,” whose “incisive style” is marked by “a subtle, feline skill in analysis.”13 He is fascinated by Poe’s “morbid psychology” and singles out “The Imp of the Perverse,” a short story in the form of a treatise on the self-​destructive impulse to commit deviant acts such as murder. “The Imp of the Perverse” serves as a blueprint for Poe’s tales (and even for Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray): “Convulsed by hereditary neuroses, maddened by moral choreas, his characters lived on their nerves” (191). Des Esseintes prizes Villiers de l’Isle-​Adam’s Contes cruels (Cruel Tales, 1883) and dwells on their Poesque legacy (see 192–​94). In his anthology he includes Mallarmé’s prose poems as not just the dernier cri, but the “ozmazome” or “essential oil of art” of “the decadence of French literature,” which, “carried to the further limits of expression, was the quintessence of Baudelaire and Poe” (199–​200). The history of decadence is directly mapped onto that of the short story. In “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (New notes on Edgar Poe, 1857), Baudelaire treats the short story form as a thin contour that defines a variegation of styles. He writes that “the author of a short story has at his disposal a multitude of tones, of nuances of language,”14 a reflection that anticipates Gautier’s famous definition of decadent style in his 1868 “Notice” to the third edition of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) as one that borrows “colour from every palette, chords from every piano,” and strives to “capture the most ineffable qualities of thought.”15 A form that opens up a space for cultivation of style inevitably gravitates toward decadent subject matter. In the manner of a clinical diagnostician who brings the issue closer to decadent territory, Baudelaire remarks that Poe’s stories display “curious symptoms” of an “inordinate taste for beautiful forms . . . that are strange, for ornate surroundings and oriental sumptuousness.”16 Gautier’s conte fantastique, which Baudelaire calls a “poetic short story”17 (“nouvelle poétique”) is shot through with those Poesque quirks of luxuriating in unorthodox forms of beauty. Symons’s exposition of decadence in his manifesto-​essay of 1893 as a “beautiful and interesting disease” striving

304   Kostas Boyiopoulos “[t]‌o fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly,”18 catalyzes the French transmission of Poe. Symons may be referring to Paul Verlaine’s short lyrics, but his famous pronouncements fit the short story like a glove, curing morbidity with quintessence and endowing the latter with stasis and evanescence. Wilde offers incidental yet vital reflections on the short story that further anchor it to Baudelaire’s interpretations of Poe. He capitalizes on morbid beauty by blasting Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), noting that “mere lack of style in the story-​ teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us.” Instead, fiction should either convey “an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings.”19 Wilde’s devotion to style is steeped in what Gordon calls “linguistic consciousness,” a “depraved” state of language that prompts “the transformation of means to ends and vice-​versa.”20 The self-​conscious style in the short story denatures and dissolves matter-​of-​fact narratives that rely on twist and suspense. By deploying pseudoscientific language, Wilde delineates the morbid pleasures yielded by subjective points of view as the province of modern fiction: [T]‌here is still much to be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of.21

With Kipling’s colonial adventures serving as a springboard, Wilde mounts a defense of “morbidity” bred of the complex psychological interiority of the short story against documentary exactitude and narratives of causal progression. The “ivory cell” analyzed into “marvellous” and “terrible” things is itself an apt metaphor for the short story as “quintessence” that is unpacked and unraveled, inwardly amplified. Looking at the paradoxical notion of excess in quintessence from a different angle, Harland, in “Concerning the Short Story” (1897), focuses on the backgrounds of the short story’s making, the “impression” that should be tackled with “infinite delicacy.” Like Wilde, Harland employs a scientific metaphor: the short-​storyist must “study,” “analyze,” and “dissect” the impression before he commits it to paper, though the text itself works backward, “distilling and purifying his impression,” presenting it “in a phial.”22 Quintessence as the optimally aesthetic arrangement of a morbid farrago of details resists plot. Wedmore pronounced that “plot, or story proper, is no essential part” of the short story.23 The form divaricates in distinct clusters, such as the mini Künstlerroman pivoting on the subjectivity of artists (Symons, Dowson), the naturalist slice of life (Hubert Crackanthorpe), the aestheticist distortions in New Woman fiction (Ella D’Arcy, George Egerton, Theodora Cross), urban Gothic (Vernon Lee, Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel), the impressionist sketch (Lionel Johnson, Harland), and even symbolist fantasy (Wilde, Max Beerbohm). What these story types have in common is stylistic self-​consciousness at the expense of plot. Plotlessness is predicated upon the delimiting contour afforded by the short story form. As such, it mediates perfectly excess locked in

The Decadent Short Story     305 quintessence: it directs attention to choice details in suspension, which, simultaneously, produce a single, rarefied effect. Plotless fiction dramatizes irresolution and futility and comes in a wide range of molds. The purest one is the hallucinatory, synesthetic vision that resembles the amorphous, shape-​shifting evanescence of tobacco smoke or perfume. Mood pieces such as Charles Ricketts’s “Sensations” (1889), about the atmospheric effects of a thunderstorm as an aesthetic experience, Lionel Johnson’s “Tobacco Clouds” (1894), and Kate Chopin’s “An Egyptian Cigarette” (1902) roll out intoxicating reveries evocative of Thomas De Quincey’s phantasmagorias. On the other side of plotlessness are “sketches”: ekphrastic, psychographic, highly concentrated stories whose artificiality lies in arresting a momentary impression or even freezing an episode from life into a tableau vivant. Examples include Harland’s “A Broken Looking-​Glass” (1894), a haunting Zolaesque depiction of an old man’s last moments, or D’Arcy’s “The Death Mask” (1896), a kaleidoscopic meditation on Verlaine’s facial features and the crystallization of his absinthe-​fueled life of vice into a beautiful work of art. Another configuration of plotlessness is in story-​studies (a term suggestive of music, painting, and scientific analysis, as well as the process of composition) featuring the urban flâneur figure, a theme in which conventional causality of incident (plot) has collapsed into randomness. Egerton’s “A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ’93” (1894) is a case in point. In this New Woman story, we follow a woolgathering author-​ flâneur capering about London in search of beautiful sensations to inspire his “masterpiece.” The story follows “a peculiar dual action of brain and senses” that plays on the dichotomy of the narrator’s inner and “outer self.”24 If the narrator is a short-​storyist, Egerton cleverly dramatizes plotlessness, not only in a form of an aimless city adventure, but in bringing the interiority of processing impressions to the foreground: the fluid mental process of composition is itself framed as the finished product. The narrator’s city experience shapes the “mood” of the title, in which artistic perfection, presented in metaphors of precious gems, is complicated by the intrusion of disagreeable impressions. On the other end of the spectrum, there are decadent short stories that appear to be predicated upon plots, but that in essence are studies. Plot in these stories operates more like backcloth, an aesthetic gimmick that props up a tortuous paradox or an ever-​ teasing impasse. Most of Wilde’s tales that function like his reversed paradoxes writ large, such as “The Sphinx without a Secret” (1891), would fit this category. Dowson’s and Symons’s short stories, likewise, employ plot to explore niche psychological or aesthetic deadlocks. In Dowson’s “A Statute of Limitations,” for example, one of the finest decadent short stories of the period, Michael Garth, stationed in Chile, longs to unite with his fiancée in England. But he has idealized her to such a degree that he is infatuated with a photograph arresting her youth, instead of the woman herself, as her appearance slightly changes over time. His dilemma leads him to commit suicide on his way to England. A completely different type of stalemate is Symons’s “Seaward Lackland,” a story that takes the success-​in-​failure paradox to an absurd degree: in a near-​parodic piece of perverse theology, a Methodist preacher decides to commit the only unpardonable sin,

306   Kostas Boyiopoulos blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, for the love of God. Thinking that as a sinner he does not deserve God’s mercy, by condemning himself eternally he preserves God’s honor. In D’Arcy’s piquant shocker “The Pleasure-​Pilgrim,” a dandified New Woman commits suicide to prove to the man she is infatuated with that she truly was in love with him. In a perfect confounding of reality and fiction, her heroic self-​sacrifice is cynically trivialized as contrived performance. The decadent short story incarnates the pursuit of a futile ideal in a myriad of plotless and pseudo-​plot configurations between artifice and reality.

The Little Magazine and the Collection In Britain the decadent short story is further defined by the print culture of the 1890s and an awareness of philistine hostility. With the conservative press, morbidity is an equivocated notion. While the decadents wore morbidity as a badge of honor, for the philistines it became a provocation. Frank Munsey, the founder of the American magazine The Argosy, the first monthly “pulp,” declared in 1896: “We want stories. That is what we mean—​stories, not dialect sketches, not washed-​out studies of effete human nature, not ‘pretty’ writing.”25 Departure from literary convention was branded “decadent” and “morbid.” Reading anything that fostered stylistic or psychological complexity was “a morbid fondness for mental gymnastics,” as Ada Leverson writes in her story “Suggestion.”26 The “philistine” press was able to identify and target the decadent short story because it was conveniently showcased in the lavishly produced “little magazines” of the 1890s and the single-​authored collection typified by John Lane’s Keynote series. As the mainstay of the little magazine, the stylistically conscious “study” was low-​hanging fruit for hordes of philistine critics and a pet peeve for mainstream publishers. Following the Forster Education Act (1870), the lower middle classes became literate consumers and triggered an explosion of mass market broadsheets and magazines that met the growing demand for quick entertainment in tidbits and stories. These ventures came to maturity with the launch of The Strand Magazine in 1891. Enjoying Queen Victoria’s patronage, The Strand became identified with short fiction that promoted imperial values in monologic adventure stories of heroic action, though it accommodated the work of such authors as Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. The coterie magazines, however, boasted polyphonic short stories (elevating short fiction from entertainment to an art form) that focus on the sensuality of the human body, psychological analysis, the impressionist fleeting moment, and rarefied mood. With The Yellow Book, especially in light of the Wilde scandal of 1895, the short story was singled out as such. Drawing upon Max Nordau’s Degeneration, Hugh E. M. Stutfield launched a tirade against Wilde’s “New Hedonism” and especially the “Decadentism” of New Woman fiction, pillorying it as “debased and morbid” and “moral cancer.”27 The poet and short-​storyist Vincent O’Sullivan in The Savoy stressed the historical relativism of

The Decadent Short Story     307 decadence by making a compelling argument in defense of “morbid” themes in stories by pointing out that Shakespeare would be attacked were he a late Victorian.28 But aside from exposing it to philistine excoriation, how do print platforms shape the decadent short story? Although French revues and feuilletons were more outspoken in promoting decadence, formalizing it in concert with Anatole Baju’s Le décadent (1886–​1889) as the most prominent of such publications, the British little magazines adopted a cavalier stance by promoting elitist tastes and valuing insurrectionary innovation on the back of Victorian conservatism. To that end, the magazine becomes a performative space that calls attention to cross-​pollination between media and between genres; it is “inter-​generic, like decadence.”29 The short story accommodated therein is likewise intergeneric and dialogic. The Germ (1850) casts a long shadow onto the little magazines of the nineties. Its centerpiece, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” is a manifesto of aestheticism that paves the way for Pater’s Imaginary Portraits. It blends the forms of scholarly essay, memoir, allegory, and fiction, conjuring a sensuous atmosphere as it delectates in the religion of art. Its influence percolates through to various scenarios of art for art’s sake from the learned fantasies of Wilde and Vernon Lee to the à la mode stories of Symons and Dowson. The pioneering Arts-​and-​Crafts-​oriented The Century Guild Hobby Horse (1884–​ 1894); the lavishly exquisite The Dial (1889–​1897) and The Pageant (1896–​1897), with their Pre-​Raphaelite and French symbolist influences; and The Pagan Review (1892), among other minor ventures, were highbrow enterprises, paying attention to letterpress, layout, and artwork, and featuring a variety of literary forms. The editorial manifesto of The Hobby Horse, “The Guild’s Flag Unfurling,” underpinned the inseparability of artistic media. Selwyn Image, in one of its issues, defended this theory as “The Unity of the Arts” (1887), restated later by The Dome (1897–​1900). Disregarding public opinion and prizing obsolescence, the prose pieces in these magazines are accordingly hybridized. The essays featured therein, often titled “studies” or “notes” and dealing with appreciatory criticism or personal impressions, could be considered short stories, as they collapsed the boundaries between memoir, criticism, and fiction. Likewise, such short stories perform a similar genre cross-​dressing or even stripping. In the first issue of The Dial, Ricketts’s proto-​modernist, elliptical “The Cup of Happiness” (1889) is a topsy-​ turvy kaleidoscopic vortex of rhetorical flourishes and classical allusions that blends impressionistic prose with theatrical script. Charles Haslewood Shannon’s “A Simple Story,” appearing in the same issue, is its polar opposite, telling of Father Hilarion’s day-​ long visit to a remote village. Its uneventful simplicity (as the title indicates) allows for the sensuous, textured details of the aesthetic Roman Catholic ritual to linger. As the anonymous apologist for The Dial writes, the stories are praised for their “lack of story,” while capturing “the essence of all art.”30 In the two little magazines associated with Aubrey Beardsley’s art, The Yellow Book (1894–​1897), edited by Harland, with D’Arcy serving as unofficial assistant editor, and The Savoy (1896), edited by Symons, the polyphonous genre of the decadent short story is fine-​tuned to explore different facets of the paradox of life seen through the lens of

308   Kostas Boyiopoulos artificiality, as in Crackanthorpe’s “A Study in Sentimentality” (1894), where lachrymose melodrama is overhauled and turned on its head by being treated self-​consciously by the characters. In many ways, cross-​dressing of form (an example set by Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”), evolves into a subtler form of hybridity, a sort of genre chimerism or hermaphroditism in which stories are reduced to a fusion of life and artifice. By contrast, Symons’s essays in The Savoy, such as “The Gingerbread Fair at Vincennes: A Colour Study” and “At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations” (both 1896) approximate short stories by presenting flâneurs steeped in sensuous settings of glitzy cosmopolitanism, spellbinding examples of genre hybridity. Gordon writes that “[f]‌iction pretending to be something else” is “so operative in the ‘decadent’ short story” that it “synchronously disguises and reveals. To attempt the absolute is to approach nothingness. It is an art of necessary sterility.”31 While these two magazines in their short stories inherit the innovativeness of their more elitist counterparts, they gravitate more toward the contemporary moment and less to the learned, detached Paterian narratives set in the past. Beerbohm’s “A Defence of Cosmetics” (1894) and John M. Robertson’s “Concerning Preciosity” (1897), in the first and last volumes of The Yellow Book, respectively, hint at the preponderance of self-​conscious style in relation to reality by responding to contemporary trends. Symons, in the “Editorial Note” (1896) to The Savoy, while clinging to the art-​for-​art’s sake doctrine by declaring that “all art is good which is good art,” claims that the magazine intends to print “no fiction which has not a certain sense of what is finest in living fact.”32 The bulk of the short stories in The Savoy, such as Wedmore’s “Nancy” stories, Symons’s Lucy Newcome stories, or Theodore Wratislaw’s superb “Mutability” (1896), populated with music-​hall girls and worldly women, subtly distort and ephemeralize reality through the objectifying male gaze. Straddling the line between eclecticism and popularity, The Yellow Book is the bellwether for the decadent short story as a democratic and truly diverse cross-​genre enriched by a band of New Woman authors. Harland, as Richard Le Gallienne reminisces, “excitedly propound[ed] the dernier mot on the build of the short story.”33 The magazine’s short-​ storyists exaggerated stylistic approaches from naturalism to romance—​from the desiccated, sinewy prose of Crackanthorpe’s ironic “A Modern Melodrama” (1894) to the opulently dilapidated folk-​tale fantasy of R. Murray Gilchrist’s “A Crimson Weaver” (1896). Most importantly, New Woman short-​storyists honed a wide multiplicity of perspectives on the paradoxical tension between life and artifice, from the playful take on the aesthete-​author in Egerton’s “A Lost Masterpiece” and Leverson’s parodic “The Quest of Sorrow” (1896) to the orientalist cross-​dressing aesthetics of Theodora Cross’s “Theodora: A Fragment” (1895) and the tragic merger of fiction and reality in D’Arcy’s “Irremediable” (1894) and “The Pleasure-​Pilgrim” (1895). Alongside its appearance in little magazines, the short story was given a dedicated book format space: the single-​authored collection. Short-​story collections exploded onto the Nineties scene with the Keynote series published by the perspicacious John Lane in partnership with Elkin Mathews at the Bodley Head. These were lushly made and illustrated, just like little magazine volumes. They ranged from recherché New

The Decadent Short Story     309 Woman fiction, such as Egerton’s Keynotes (both lending its title to and inaugurating the series) and D’Arcy’s Monochromes, to Poesque-​Gautierian Weird Fiction, such as Machen’s The Three Impostors: or, the Transmutations and Shiel’s Shapes in the Fire. Gordon states that the collection of short stories, “expensively illustrated and bound, is a kind of instant museum,”34 and so resembles the little magazine format as an aesthetic artifact, not unlike a carefully selected item in an exclusive anthology or a cabinet of quintessential scents compiled by Des Esseintes. While chapters in a mid-​Victorian novel are shaped by plot progression and cliffhangers, decadent short stories in a collection cast light on one another through thematic specialization, arrangement, and juxtaposition. As Gordon argues, “one episode seems like a variant of the one that preceded it. There is seldom any real development.”35 Even Machen’s The Three Impostors is a collection of short stories, contrariwise styled short “novels” (as in “The Novel of the White Powder” [1895], a tale of body-​horror degeneration) segued loosely in the guise of a fragmented novel. Collections by Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Doyle, and others usually have the nondescript words “stories” or “tales” in their title, but these signifiers of form rarely appear in those associated with decadence. Instead, the titles of decadent collections operate like collective nouns for short stories: “imaginary portraits,” “keynotes,” “discords,” “monochromes,” “dilemmas,” “shapes,” “spiritual adventures,” “bargains” (Vincent O’Sullivan’s A Book of Bargains, 1896), “studies” (Count Stenbock’s Studies of Death, 1894), “nets” (Una Ashworth Taylor’s Nets for the Wind, 1896), “fancies” (Le Gallienne’s Prose Fancies, 1894). In this manner the collection encourages associations of cross-​form, simulating the fleetingness of music and the stasis of painting. Music as a metaphor, for instance, is useful in capturing the item in a collection as one in a series of fugitive impressions. In the epigraph to Keynotes, a title that functions as a wholesale descriptor for all such collections, Egerton calls them “fancies” and “toys of the brain,” suggesting that “to write them down is to destroy them.”36 In the “Dedication” to the baroque and erudite Shapes in the Fire, Shiel compares his collection of “shapes” to a “literary Concert” of “detached pieces”; he advises the reader not to “gulp” the stories “like porridge or a novel,” but savor them by extending the concert “into as many nights as there are pieces.”37

Realism, Fantasy, and In-​between A consideration of Mew’s “Passed,” Shiel’s “Xélucha,” and Lorrain’s “The Man Who Loved Consumptives” reveals the decadent short story as a cross-​genre that thrives both in the realms of new realism and fantasy and everything in between. All three in their own way nod to Poe’s Gothic, yet they focus, either manifestly or subliminally, on risqué sexuality. As Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick note, the Gothic secret in Poe, “murder” or “insanity,” in decadent fiction has evolved into the “ ‘abnormality’ of the erotic life.”38 The stories enculturate decadent morbidity, so to speak, by undermining Victorian moral mores and sexual prudishness.

310   Kostas Boyiopoulos “Passed” is a psychologically cavernous New Woman story that appeared in the second volume of The Yellow Book. Harland was enthusiastic when Mew submitted her story for publication but asked her to tone it down by removing such phrases as “starting eyeballs” and “stiffening limbs.”39 The story conjures up a Dickensian atmosphere of slum London. The narrator is a flâneuse who wanders off in the “glorious and guilty city” in search of aesthetic experiences, trying to catch “a romantic view of London in its poorest quarters.”40 In a dimly lit church she comes across a slatternly, distraught girl who leads her by the hand to a squalid dwelling where her sister is dying, having been exploited by a man of aristocratic privilege, as the narrator, engrossed in “exaggerated observation”—​like a sleuth at a crime scene—​is able to glean from a torn letter. Back home, in what could be an in-​joke about decadent subject matter in the face of Victorian censorship, her “account of the night’s adventure was abridged and unsensational” (128, 136). A few months later, the narrator recognizes the formerly despairing girl at the fair, now a vivacious prostitute, among the “insatiate daughters” with “impotently craving hands” (139), by the side of the same man who had courted her sister. The story’s destitute fallen woman has its roots in Victorian realism (Nancy in Dickens’s Oliver Twist comes to mind). Sally Ledger argues that in its depiction of a prostitute, “Passed” implicitly challenges Symons’s salacious poem “Stella Maris,” which appeared in the first volume.41 Indeed, “the chances of the night” (130) is a slight paraphrase from “Stella Maris,” though recontextualized. But Mew’s story does not just interrogate the male perspective of female objectification; instead, the female narrator likewise sensualizes and objectifies the girl through a mingling of attraction and repulsion, the “wonted pain of tingling joy” (132). While by glamorizing prostitution “Stella Maris” celebrates artifice, “Passed” rarefies artifice: as a true aesthete the narrator finds herself amid a quasi-​erotic theater of sensationalized poverty and is enraptured by it. Mew sustains the decadent paradox of finding pleasure in the disagreeableness of slum life by fusing naturalism with fantasy, transfiguring the déclassé world of pauperism through dreamlike subjectivity. In exploring the dichotomy between artificiality and reality, “Passed” comes close to what Stephen Romer highlights as the fantastique réel in decadent French short fiction.42 Mew deftly frames her narrative with the decadent-​ symbolist sunset topos, as epitomized in Verlaine’s iconic poem “Langueur”: “This hour of pink twilight has its monopoly of effects. Some of them may never be reached again” (121). The dying sunset breaking out in a mass of unique color effects is a symbol of the intensity of the forever “passed” encounter between the narrator and the alluring girl. The story is crowned with the epigraph, “Like souls that meeting pass. /​And passing never meet again” (121). The flâneur who is besotted with a magnetic passante after brushing shoulders with her is a decadent trope exemplified by Machen in The Hill of Dreams (written 1895–​1897; published 1907). Lucian Taylor is single-​mindedly fixated on a prostitute in the streets of London after they exchange a fleeting, intense glance. Mew’s story arrests the paradox that governs the decadent version of the form, “the eternity of supreme moments” (126), a temporal equivalent of excess in quintessence. The story cuts through naturalistic details, with “flaring gas jets, displaying shops of new aspect and evil smell” and “spattered panes [through which] faces of diseased and

The Decadent Short Story     311 dirty children leered into the street” (122). Notwithstanding, the narrator is apathetic toward the suffering of the disaffected. In juxtaposition, at the heart of the narrative, her bodily contact with the desperate girl in the latter’s dingy tenement is highly suggestive. Mew had homoerotic tendencies and “Passed” is shot through with undertones of lesbianism: She clung to me with ebbing force. Her heart throbbed painfully close to mine. . . . The magnetism of our meeting was already passing; and, reason asserting itself, I reviewed the incident dispassionately, as she lay like a broken piece of mechanism in my arms. Her dark hair had come unfastened and fell about my shoulder. A faint white streak of it stole through the brown. A gleam of moonlight strays thus through a dusky room, I remember noticing, as it was swept with her involuntary motions across my face, a faint fragrance which kept recurring like a subtle and seductive sprite, hiding itself with fairy cunning in the tangled maze. (128)

The scene, intimate and static, approximates postcoital bliss. But this is not an impassioned moment. It is an aesthetic, detached tableau, replete with impressionistic light effects. The girl as “a broken piece of mechanism” is a prop that conveys the narrator’s painterly, objectifying gaze against the setting of poverty. The narrator’s aestheticization of wretchedness is further evident in a series of satellite observations. When a girl’s hair is caught in the mellow light of “the dying sun,” it creates a backlighting effect that makes her look like “one of those mystically pictured faces of some medieval saint” (123). In the streets the narrator finds an art-​shop window “scarcely more inviting than the fishmonger’s next door, but less odoriferous” and is more interested in the effects of “ill-​reflecting lights” (124). Further, she notices a chromolithograph of a mannequin-​like bare-​breasted “girl in prayer”: “This personification of pseudo-​purity was sensually diverting, and consequently marketable” (124). Later she recalls the “senseless symbolism” (132) of the figure. In the church the way she observes the liturgy suggests a vacuous, mechanical ritual devoid of spirituality; two girls are part of the scene, one of them a grimacing imbecile kissed by her companion, “[a]‌sublime and ghastly scene” (138). These images are cast into sharp relief by the poor beseeching girl who slips from her cocoon as a spectacularly nonchalant prostitute. These images, moreover, hint at juxtaposed artistic sensibilities. They affirm the narrator’s gaze as that of an impressionist—​and even Pre-​Raphaelite—​painter and sculptor; simultaneously, she is a naturalist dissector who gives equal credence to both beauty and ugliness. She circumscribes impressionism within a fatalistic, uncaring universe. Yet the inverse case can be also made. Nature itself amounts to a grand impressionistic effect. The quasi-​oxymoronic “senseless symbolism” precisely accommodates both views, rendering “Passed” a truly intergeneric text. At the thoroughfare, the conflation of impressionism with naturalism is underpinned by a Darwinian twist when the narrator’s senses are assailed by a “sickening confusion of odours” from the bedecked yet animalistic prostitutes who ply their trade: “each essence a vile enticement, outraging Nature by a perversion of her own pure spell” (140). The law of sexual selection holds

312   Kostas Boyiopoulos sway as Nature is both enhanced and undermined by artifice. At the story’s close, as the unnamed girl departs with the man in a carriage, the narrator hears “a laugh mounting to a cry”: “Did it proceed from some defeated angel? Or the woman’s mouth? Or mine? God knows!” (141). This last sentence with its pervasive subjectivity resists all attempts at meaning. It renders the short story itself a psychological artifact of “senseless symbolism.” From a reverse perspective, Shiel’s “Xélucha” features a London experience not from a realist lens but from that of Gothic fantasy. “Xélucha,” a fine specimen of Weird Fiction and the first story in Shapes in the Fire, musters the entire iconography of 1890s decadent materialism. It is about death, the corruption of the grave, and lascivious passion—​an ultra-​decadent reworking of Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838). The story is constructed around a well-​ trodden femme fatale premise, yet done in prose so maximalistic and laden, and in a style so florid and exotic, that it outperforms both Huysmans’s and Wilde’s most ostentatious passages. The story would undeniably be the crown jewel of Des Esseintes’s literary collection. This is a “diary”-​like43 narrative that tells of Mérimée (a possible allusion to short-​story writer Prosper Mérimée whose supernatural shocker “La Vénus d’Ille” [1837] resonates with “Xélucha”), who reads from a packet of letters left by his now dead friend Cosmo, “the very tsar and maharajah of the Sybarites” (3), musing that Xélucha is now dead. A day later, Mérimée finds himself in an empty London square at three o’clock in the morning, encountering “a little lady, very gloriously dressed” (7). She leads him to a resplendently furnished apartment, where, “reclined on a Sigma couch” and lying “on hip and elbow” (10), she engages him in intellectual conversation. Intoxicated by wine, in the story’s climactic moment Mérimée attempts to embrace Xélucha, but, in an impending twist that calls to mind the disenchantment of Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Chambre double” (The Double Room), she turns into a phantom, “a belch of pestilent corruption puffed poisonous upon the putrid air.” Mérimée falls into a momentary coma. Upon waking up, he finds the apartment filthy and abandoned, with “the vision of luxury” (17) dispelled. Besides confusing hallucination with the supernatural, “Xélucha” dramatizes the collapse of style and content. This collapse occurs on the level of style. Recherché yet flinty, the style of “Xélucha” looks like a coruscated mosaic, ground down to an atomic level, the level of word and phrase. The prose is festooned with unusual phrasal appositions and rhetoric, hermetic allusions, bizarreries, archaisms, and inkhorn words such as “choragus,” “bdellium,” “suppurations,” “thulite,” “cap-​à-​pie,” “balneum,” “redundulate,” and many more. Shiel’s style “is so extreme that English almost morphs into an alien medium.”44 In the esoteric “Premier and Maker,” a scholastic argument in the form of fiction evocative of Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying,” Shiel describes how style germinates as it draws from the theme it conveys.45 This near-​incestuous consuming of the narrative by its own style is projected on how the story challenges gender stereotypes within decadent iconography. As a femme fatale, Xélucha is an augmented version of Pater’s Mona Lisa and Swinburne’s Dolores. She is eternal and recalls “the splendid harlots of history . . . expert as Thargelia; cultured as Aspatia; purple as Semiramis” (4). Susan Navarette argues

The Decadent Short Story     313 that “Xélucha” epitomizes “the damning . . . identification of femininity with ornament and the decorative in Western culture.”46 She deduces that the “jewelled language . . . of Mérimée’s experience with Xélucha is paradigmatic of the reader’s covertly lecherous experience with the decadent text.”47 Even though Xélucha embodies a perverse eroticization of textual style (and in that sense this double function of the textual is the ultimate form of genre hybridity), there is more to her than stereotypical femininity. Pater’s famous Mona Lisa, who possesses the knowledge of eons, does not speak; she is enigmatic, yet muted. On the contrary, Xélucha expresses herself through informed utterance; she is a flaunter of knowledge and an adept debater in philosophy. In addition, she is snappy and peremptory toward her male interlocutor. Essentially, she is a New Woman. When Mérimée asks her why she is on foot and alone, she retorts quick-​wittedly that she is “a philosopher,” and that “[t]‌o be escorted is to admit yourself a woman, and that is improper in Nowhere” (8). She comes across as both moribund and seductive, sliding into her decadent stereotype, and yet she blights any hope for Mérimée to engage her in amorous play by haranguing him with intellectual trivia that revolve around death and vanitas. Like a forensic pathologist, Xélucha interrogates and shocks Mérimée on questions related to the anatomy of the body in the tomb—​one of which concerns the part of the body first sought by the worm. When Mérimée replies “the eyes” (13), she corrects him: “The Uvula! The soft drop of mucous flesh, you know, suspended from the palate above the glottis. They eat through the face-​cloth and check, or crawl by the lips through the broken tooth, filling the mouth. They make straight for it. It is the delicioe of the vault.” (14)

A little earlier, she stresses the importance of creating matter. When he goads her by stating that matter “cannot be created, nor destroyed,” she lambasts him for his “weak intellect,” explaining: “Matter does not exist, then, there is no such thing, really,—​it is an appearance, a spectrum—​every writer not imbecile from Plato to Fichte has, voluntary or involuntary, proved that for your good. To create it is to produce an impression of its reality upon the senses of others; to destroy it is to wipe a wet rag across a scribbled slate.” (12)

Xélucha pits metaphysics against science; yet Plato’s theory of forms outvies Lavoisier’s Law of Conservation of Mass. Literary style itself (“an impression of [Matter’s] reality upon the senses of others”) may be, by analogy, twice removed from the Platonic Idea. But the quirk is that it is emphasized as something that out-​matters the material world. Thus, Xélucha’s exquisitely ghastly, materialistic little trivia are pure acts of style. However, style is authorially negotiated depending on the story’s shifting genre conventions: if the story is taken as a psychological study, its texture of style is Mérimée’s. But if the story is taken as supernatural, then it is Xélucha’s. By playing around with

314   Kostas Boyiopoulos genre clichés, the story’s sense of morbidity migrates to the level of style, coagulating on the textual crust. If Shiel focuses on the spectacle of the body’s decay after death as the phantom effect of textual style, Jean Lorrain, the enfant terrible of French decadence, in “The Man Who Loved Consumptives” obsesses over the body’s decay before death. The story appeared in Lorrain’s first collection, Sonyeuse: Soirs de province, soirs de Paris (Sonyeuse: country evenings, Paris evenings, 1891). It is neither a Gothic fantasy nor a new realist episode, but occupies a third category, that of the cosmopolitan sphere of coolheaded dandyism carved out of reality in the form of sexual perversion, “a kind of monomania,”48 like an embellished anecdote from the pages of Richard von Krafft-​Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Succinct and economical, this soir from Lorrain’s collection is set in a swanky theater; lorgnettes, opera glasses, gossip, and prying eyes give it an air of voyeurism. Despite being French, “The Man Who Loved Consumptives” responds to the Victorian consumptive sublime, the fascination with diaphanous pallor and romanticization of delicate, sickly beauties—​an aesthetic standard that has survived in today’s obsession with skinny bodies in haute couture. The narrator and another spectator chatter about Fauras, an elegant dandy “in the prime of health” and in “white evening waistcoat” who, in one of the boxes woos an extremely beautiful yet “pale and fragile woman” (144). Fauras is “a lover of doomed ladies”; his game is liaisons with pretty women “who are close to death” as they succumb to tuberculosis: “he spies, like a broken voluptuary, on the progress of their disease, and lives their dying agonies—​he’s a sybarite” and “a kind of sadist . . . the next thing to a necrophiliac, seeking the last warmth in a cadaver” (145). When his “funereal venuses” (145) die, he buries them in funerals of ceremonial splendor, another Victorian obsession. After his emotions from passion to grief come full circle, he is back in season to look for the next victim. Unlike the flâneuse in “Passed,” whose decadent thrill is random and unplanned, Lorrain’s dandy plans his thrill in advance and repeats it indefinitely. Mew’s psychology is a labyrinthine, uncharted terrain; by contrast, Lorrain’s is an intricate plotted-​out site of predictable yet ever-​finer details, a near instruction manual. Fauras’s fetish for ailing, dying lovers enables him to calculate life as an intense performance. Because of the urgency of the situation, “the doomed” mistress “abandons herself frenziedly to pleasures that fill her with burning life even as they hasten her death” (146). And like a Bluebeard figure, Fauras often with “his long, crushing, and furious embrace makes her swoon and die” (146). He is an artist in grief, “[d]‌eliciously distressed,” mourning his dead lovers by relishing loss in “exquisite manifestations of sadness” (145). In “The Critic as Artist” (1891) Wilde meditates on the harmless, “exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken”; in the theater “[w]e weep, but we are not wounded.”49 Lorrain’s story cleverly applies these principles to the stage of life itself. With his consumptive lovers, Fauras experiences the whole gamut of pathos and emotion, but his experience is a perfect Wildean simulation, at once virtual and real. He emerges unscathed from the experience, “a phoenix eternally rising from the ashes.”50

The Decadent Short Story     315

Conclusion These short stories vary widely in genre, treatment, and technique. Yet they all present thematic variations on eroticism infused with the urgency of mortality. Whether their excess is impressionistic, stylistic, or psychological, it is perfected into an essence as it is circumscribed by form. However, in their fragile stasis on the verge of evaporation, they are surely united in their inexorable, futile pursuits. These pursuits are cast as an inward excess generated by different scenarios where the categories of life and artificiality are intertwined. Aestheticism looks dispassionately at life as a work of art, but the decadent short story is interested in the hinge, the juncture, between the two. It is along these parameters that the decadent short story in the 1890s crystallizes into a distinctive genre.

Notes 1. Vernon Lee, “On Literary Construction,” in The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1923), 19. 2. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (London: William Heinemann, 1899), 137. 3. Quoted in Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick, eds., Decadence: An Annotated Anthology (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 29. 4. See John Plotz, “Victorian Short Stories,” in The Cambridge Companion to the English Short Story, ed. Ann-​Marie Einhaus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 87–​100, and Beryl Pong, “The Short Story and the ‘Little Magazine,’ ” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Short Story in English, ed. Paul Delaney and Adrian Hunter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 75–​92. 5. Wendell V. Harris, “Identifying the Decadent Fiction of the Eighteen-​Nineties,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920 5, no. 5 (1962): 4. 6. Harris, “Identifying the Decadent Fiction,” 7. 7. Derek Stanford, ed., Short Stories of the ’Nineties: A Biographical Anthology (London: John Baker, 1968), 29, 35. 8. Jan Gordon, “ ‘Wilde’s Child’: Structure and Origin in the Fin-​de-​Siècle Short Story,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920 15, no. 4 (1972): 287. 9. John R. Reed, “Decadent Style and the Short Story,” Victorians Institute Journal 11 (1982): 1 10. Quoted in Kostas Boyiopoulos, Matthew Brinton Tildesley, and Yoonjoung Choi, eds., The Decadent Short Story (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 404. 11. Frederick Wedmore, “The Short Story,” in Critics of the ’Nineties, ed. Derek Stanford (New York: Roy, 1971), 234; Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Richard Henry Stoddard (New York: Armstrong, 1884), 5:161. 12. Reed, “Decadent Style,” 1. 13. J.-​K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1959), 190. Further references are cited parenthetically.

316   Kostas Boyiopoulos 14. Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays, trans. Lois Boe Hyslop (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964), 128. 15. Martin Travers, ed., European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (London: Continuum, 2001), 140. 16. Baudelaire, Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 133. 17. Baudelaire, Baudelaire as a Literary Critic, 169. 18. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 859, 862. My emphasis. 19. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Intentions (1891; Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1904), 187. 20. Gordon, “ ‘Wilde’s Child’,” 284. 21. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 188. 22. Quoted in Boyiopoulos, et al., The Decadent Short Story, 416. 23. Wedmore, “The Short Story,” 233. 24. George Egerton, “A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. ’93,” The Yellow Book 1 (April 1894): 195, 190. 25. Quoted in Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 292. 26. Ada Leverson, “Suggestion,” The Yellow Book 5 (April 1895): 252. 27. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, “Tommyrotics,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 157 (June 1895): 833–​45. 28. Vincent O’Sullivan, “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid,” The Savoy 2 (April 1896): 168. 29. Ian Fletcher, “Decadence and the Little Magazines,” in Decadence and the 1890s (New York: Holmes, 1980), 173. 30. Anon., “The Unwritten Book,” The Dial: An Occasional Publication 2 (1892): 26, 27. 31. Gordon, “ ‘Wilde’s Child’,” 283. 32. Arthur Symons, “Editorial Note,” The Savoy 1 (Jan. 1896): 5. 33. Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (1926; London: Robin Clark, 1993), 136. 34. Gordon, “ ‘Wilde’s Child’,” 283. 35. Gordon, “ ‘Wilde’s Child’,” 287. 36. George Egerton, Keynotes (London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894), n.p. 37. M. P. Shiel, Shapes in the Fire (London: John Lane, 1895), v–​vi. 38. Desmarais and Baldick, Decadence, 149. 39. Quoted in Boyiopoulos, et al., The Decadent Short Story, 112. 40. Charlotte M. Mew, “Passed,” The Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 139, 121. 41. Sally Ledger, “The New Woman and Feminist Fictions,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gail Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 166–​67. 42. Stephen Romer, “Introduction,” in French Decadent Tales, ed. Stephen Romer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xxix. 43. Shiel, Shapes in the Fire, 3. 44. Boyiopoulos, et al., The Decadent Short Story, 370. 45. See Shiel, Shapes in the Fire, 167–​68. 46. Susan J. Navarette, The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 154. 47. Navarette, The Shape of Fear, 154. 48. Jean Lorrain, “The Man Who Loved Consumptives,” in Romer, French Decadent Tales, 145.

The Decadent Short Story     317 49. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 152. 50. Lorrain, “The Man Who Loved Consumptives,” 145.

Further Reading Baudelaire, Charles. Baudelaire as a Literary Critic: Selected Essays. Translated by Lois Boe Hyslop. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964. Boyiopoulos, Kostas, Matthew Brinton Tildesley, and Yoonjoung Choi, eds. The Decadent Short Story. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Desmarais, Jane, and Chris Baldick, eds. Decadence: An Annotated Anthology. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012. Fletcher, Ian. “Decadence and the Little Magazines.” In Decadence and the 1890s, 173–​202. New York: Holmes, 1980. Gordon, Jan. “ ‘Wilde’s Child’: Structure and Origin in the Fin-​de-​Siècle Short Story.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920 15, no. 4 (1972): 277–​90. Hanson, Clare. Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–​1980. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Harris, Wendell V. “Identifying the Decadent Fiction of the Eighteen-​Nineties.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920 5, no. 5 (1962): 1–​13. Ledger, Sally. “The New Woman and Feminist Fictions.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle, edited by Gail Marshall, 153–​68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Navarette, Susan J. The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. London and New York: Verso, 1998. Reed, John R. “Decadent Style and the Short Story.” Victorians Institute Journal 11 (1982): 1–​12. Romer, Stephen, ed. French Decadent Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Stanford, Derek, ed. Short Stories of the ’Nineties: A Biographical Anthology. London: John Baker, 1968. Travers, Martin, ed. European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice. London: Continuum, 2001.

Chapter 17

DECADENT T H E AT E R New Women and “The Eye of the Beholder” Sos Eltis

“Well, pardon me,” exclaimed a theatrical reviewer in 1900, “if I venture to disbelieve in the exactitude of the word ‘decadent’ as an index of an author’s special quality, when such diverse writers as Maeterlinck, Zola, Hauptmann, Hardy, Ibsen, and Stephen Phillips have all been called decadent.”1 Decadence, as the reviewer observed, was in the eye of the beholder, an epithet liberally “hurled at the adventurous moderns.”2 Never was this more true than when it came to the modern woman and the plays that addressed her failure to comply with traditional social and gender norms. One man’s idealistic and courageous New Woman was another man’s degenerate neurotic. Divergent diagnoses were even more prevalent where character was not only in the eye and mind of the individual, viewed through the lens of their particular assumptions and values, but also a product of theatrical performance, subject to the interpretation of actors and the infinite variables of production. The new stage heroines of the fin de siècle were further inflected by attitudes toward women on stage and the celebrity actresses who rose to prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. As professionals, themselves negotiating social assumptions about their sexual and moral status as public performers, the actresses who chose to perform iconoclastic female roles in avant-​garde plays were well aware of contemporary artistic and moral debates. Their choice of roles and how they performed can thus be understood as active interventions in debates about literary, cultural, and social notions of decadence and the role of women within them. Whereas decadent fiction and decadent poetry are well-​ established literary categories, only a tiny handful of plays are widely identified as decadent—​plays such as Maurice Maeterlinck’s La princesse Maleine (1889) and Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891)—​all notably dramas with women at their heart, whose combination of naivety, knowingness, virginal purity, and active desire makes them notoriously difficult to categorize. Alongside these avant-​garde, poetically and stylistically experimental works, a wide range of more mainstream dramas were frequently

DECADENT THEATER   319 identified as decadent, with their heroines diagnosed as displaying the classic decadent traits of hysteria, neuroticism, frigidity, or unrestrained desire. In an 1894 article, the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, W. L. Courtenay, pictured “The Heroine of 1894” breathing her last in a room decorated with Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Gioconda,” and a “choice but expressive library” containing “ ‘Studies of the Renaissance,’ ‘In the Key of Blue,’ ‘Dorian Gray,’ and a beautifully bound copy of the ‘Decameron’ of Boccaccio.”3 According to Courtenay, this well-​read decadent had appeared in many guises as the heroine not only of Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, George Egerton’s Keynotes and Discords, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Emma Brookes’s A Superfluous Woman, but also on stage in Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, Haddon Chambers’s John-​a-​Dreams, H. A. Jones’s The Masqueraders, and, above all, as Henrik Ibsen’s tempestuous Hedda Gabler. Besides being judged by Courtenay in each case as “no better than she should have been,” these fictional and dramatic heroines were unified by the challenges they posed to notions of a woman’s role, including her duties, nature, potential, and the sexual morality that should govern her actions.4 As women campaigned to extend their legal, educational, professional, and political rights and opportunities, the figure of the discontented, rebellious, or emancipated woman provoked many commentators to extreme responses, locating her in markedly opposite ways according to their attitudes toward feminist and artistic movements. For Max Nordau and the cartoonists of Punch, the mannish New Woman, variously hysterical, frigid, or nymphomaniac, was the fitting and inevitable companion to the similarly hysterical, effeminate, and egotistical male decadent. To Sarah Grand and the “social purity” feminists, the dignified, self-​restrained, and idealistic New Woman was a counter to the sexually incontinent and socially irresponsible male decadent, demanding higher standards in the name of a cleaner and healthier future for society and the human race. Subject to the twin forces of censorship and the market economy, where long runs were necessary for West End theater managers to break even, late-​nineteenth-​century theater tended strongly toward social conservatism and orthodoxy. Feminist protest was thus a common target for dramatic satire, ridicule, and dire warnings. In Sydney Grundy’s The New Woman (1894) and H. A. Jones’s The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), for example, futile feminist radicals attempt to assume the trappings of authority, upending domestic structures and imperiling their own and other women’s marriages. On the opposite side of the debate, St. John Hankin’s The Last of the De Mullins, first produced by the private avant-​garde Stage Society in 1908, celebrated an independent and enterprising unmarried mother as the savior of an otherwise defunct patriarchal line. In sole charge of a millinery business and a strapping young son, Janet De Mullin defies the authority of her withered and joyless family, glorying in the vitality and fertility of her body and mind. The House of De Mullin is left not to fall but to expire unnoticed behind its narrow, closed walls. These two opposing responses to women’s demands for an expanded sphere of activity can be seen to mirror the more recent divisions in critical responses to decadence. Long characterized by ornamental excess, fragmented and static forms, and a defiant and

320   Sos Eltis deliberate rejection of productivity, industry, fertility, and moral purpose, decadent literature was seen as embracing civilization’s and its own demise. As Jason David Hall and Alex Murray have observed, however, recently expanded definitions and approaches to decadence, viewed through the lenses of sexuality and gender studies, material culture, and posthumanism, have produced a version of decadence that—​“in contradistinction to the nineteenth-​century models of decline and atomization—​seeks revitalized poetic and cultural forms in its challenge to the over-​blown narratives, both literary and social, of the Victorian period.”5 Sterile and self-​defeating or a revitalizing rebellion against limitation and stereotype: these contrary characterizations of both decadence and the modern woman are products of the same phenomenon. As Richard Gilman observed in 1979, decadence “emerges as the underside or logical complement of something else.”6 As a result, it is “an epithet that relies entirely on the norm it implicitly calls up and points to no substantive condition.”7 The futile and self-​indulgent decadent, like the neurotic modern woman, is essentially a deviation from a healthy productive and reproductive societal norm. For those to whom traditional cultural and gender roles are stagnant and restrictive, their rejection of orthodoxy was not a symptom of self-​defeating corruption and perversity but rather the vital exploration of new avenues for life and art. Analyzing critical responses to early British productions of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1891) and Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat (Home, 1893), translated into English in 1896 as Magda, can therefore reveal underlying assumptions about social, theatrical, and sexual norms. Both plays were variously identified as decadent in either style or subject matter, though neither belongs to a recognized canon of decadent dramas, just as the women on whom they center were subject to markedly different diagnoses and judgments. Notably, Hedda and Magda were chosen roles for independent and self-​producing actresses, including international celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, and Stella Campbell (née Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner, but known professionally by her married name, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and to her fans as “Mrs. Pat”). Late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century performances of these plays and their reception can therefore highlight the ideas and assumptions that lead critics to identify plays, theatrical characters, or the women who performed in them as manifestations of social and artistic decadence or as harbingers of the future.

Hedda Gabler Hedda Gabler was first performed in London in 1891 at the Vaudeville Theatre, produced and personally funded by Elizabeth Robins and Marion Lea, who took the roles of Hedda and Thea Elvsted, respectively. The production was condemned in the familiar medico-​legal terms of moral and aesthetic distaste for decadent art: the play was a “dead-​house,” and its morbid attractions those of the “pallid features of a dead body” or a murder trial; its heroine was a “neuropathic study” in “moral insanity,” suffering from a “hopeless complication of maladies—​anaemia of the affections, with hypertrophy of the

DECADENT THEATER   321 aesthetics.”8 Hedda was greeted not just as an individual case of “névrosité,” but also as a symptom of wider social disintegration: to Justin McCarthy she was an “ill-​educated, ill-​trained, over-​civilised daughter of our super-​civilisation,” who represented “not merely the fin de siècle, but the fin des fins.”9 The charm, intelligence, and sheer artistry of Robins’s performance did not redeem the play, in Clement Scott’s view, but rather produced the ultimate Swinburnian effect of making “vice attractive by her art,” confusing the moral senses and stopping “the shudder that so repulsive a creature should have inspired.”10 Robins’s performance as Hedda can be seen as embodying not just the subject matter of decadence, but also its essential nature, its artistic expression, and its style. In his 1893 essay “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Arthur Symons defined the quintessence of decadence as “an intense self-​consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-​ subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity”—​a description that potentially captures both Hedda’s character and the methods by which Robins portrayed her.11 As Gay Gibson Cima has explained, Ibsen’s dramatic characterizations required actors to hold not only a dual consciousness of self and character, but an awareness of “the treble strata of self, character and the role the character plays”—​a subtle and complex byplay that can be seen, for example, in Hedda and Lövborg’s whispered conversation about their past relationship while supposedly admiring photos of the Tyrol, exchanging intense intimacies while outwardly engaged in nothing but social niceties.12 As Cima and Joanna Townsend have shown, drawing on detailed analysis of Robins’s performance notebooks, Robins added further complex layers, implying not only Hedda’s conscious performance of acceptable femininity to her companions, but also a sense of potentially unconscious thoughts beneath, leaving it uncertain where performance ceased and any notion of inner or “true” selfhood began. Robins frequently employed what Cima dubs “the autistic gesture,” subtle movements or expressions of the face or hands that act as a visual sign of the character’s soliloquy with self; Cima explains: “For instance, when Robins, as Hedda, heard Thea admit that she had left Sheriff Elvsted to follow Lövborg ‘straight to town,’ she delivered her response, ‘My dear good Thea, how did you find the courage?’ while ‘still sitting on arm of chair and looking off into space.’ ”13 Hedda remains impenetrable, an ornately performative surface over unreadable depths—​a staging of dramatic character that deliberately defied contemporary melodramatic norms of revealed truth and clear moral and psychological legibility. As Kirsten Shepherd-​Barr has noted, Robins’s ironic and repeated use of melodramatic gestures and effects called attention to her own theatricality, right through to her “picturesque and highly aestheticized final death tableau,” revealed when the onstage curtain was pulled back to frame her ultimate self-​staging.14 Robins’s performance thus produced a theatrical equivalent to the ornate, jeweled surfaces of decadent art, from the encrusted surfaces of Gustave Moreau’s paintings to the complex wordplay of Paul Verlaine’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry, surfaces that celebrated their own artifice and challenged accepted notions of nature and truth. Later productions of Hedda Gabler on the London stage offered a range of different emphases and perspectives on Ibsen’s heroine. By 1901 the Daily Telegraph’s critic had

322   Sos Eltis a sense that the play could be approached as darkest tragedy or more lightly as a social comedy with tragic conclusions. A visiting German production was judged to have chosen the former course, while bringing out Hedda’s self-​conscious theatricality. The Daily Telegraph’s critic commented that the leading actress, Fräulein Schwendemann-​ Pansa, “made Hedda a sort of dethroned tragedienne, mourning, as it were, over the sad fate of having to express tragic emotions within the cramping limits of a Norwegian household.”15 In 1903 Duse, an actress renowned above all for presenting the highest and noblest conceptions of womanhood, played Hedda on the London stage not as a deliberate, calculating schemer, but rather as a “minx,” whose keynotes were spontaneity and a gay carelessness. The Daily Telegraph described her tearing Lövborg’s manuscript “into a thousand pieces exactly like a wild cat with a certain fierce exultant joy at having found her opportunity, and knowing how best to make use of it.”16 Duse maintained a similar minx-​like mixture of cynicism and glee as she secreted the pistol and prepared her own death, absolutely devoid of fear or regret. The reception of her performance was remarkably free of the language of decadence; one critic judged her Hedda to be delightfully clear of neurosis and in need only of a soul to “have made a good companion and a blithe-​spirited friend.”17 In 1907 Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a leading West End actress who had become a household name after she played a kept woman attempting social rehabilitation in Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893), added Hedda to her repertoire. Campbell’s métier, as one critic put it was “the delineation of the non-​moral neuropathic woman,” but, like Duse before her, she eschewed neurosis in her rendering of Hedda, choosing instead to represent her as a great nature baffled by domestic littleness and constraint.18 Energy and power were the keynotes of her embodiment of Hedda; as the Academy summed it up: “Her tragedy is that she is alive among people dead of contentment; she is a vital creature being suffocated by her environment.”19 Oppressed by the littleness around her, “shipwrecked on an absolutely boundless sea of exasperating placidity,” her vitality turns to malignity, when she is suddenly awakened from her ennui by the scent of scandal behind Mrs. Elvsted’s appearance in Christiania.20 Emphasizing Hedda’s baffled yearning for beauty and nobility, and presenting her suicide as a final gaining of freedom, her triumph over life, Campbell interpreted the play as the tragedy of a great nature in disharmony with her surroundings. Reviewers’ responses differed markedly depending on their attitude toward unrestrained female vitality. Despite Campbell’s eschewal of the decadent tropes of neurosis and hysteria, the Daily Telegraph responded by describing Hedda’s unwomanly nature as the “extreme results of culture, the fruits of enlightenment, so far as they affect a woman’s soul.”21 The Manchester Guardian’s reviewer admired the great force of Campbell’s Hedda and her hunger for beauty, but ultimately yearned for male authority to tame the shrew, musing that, “It would be vastly interesting if a humane dramatist, big enough for the work, could confront a Hedda Gabler with a Petruchio who might undertake the great adventure that must end with her humanising or his destruction.”22 Campbell’s emphasis on Hedda’s yearning for nobility and her distaste for staid bourgeois domesticity thus distanced her from the fin-​de-​siècle neurotic but emphasized

DECADENT THEATER   323 her proximity to a different archetype of decadence: the Baudelairean dandy. Hedda perfectly embodies Charles Baudelaire’s description of the dandy’s “burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social convention,” his pleasure in causing surprise in others, his proud satisfaction in never showing himself, and the blasé stoicism he maintains even through pain.23 Baudelaire’s dandy is a product of a society in transition, an aristocratic figure isolated amid the rising tides of democracy. So Hedda is, as Justin McCarthy noted, “if not a soul, at least a body born out of due time.”24 Without the economic self-​sufficiency upon which the dandy’s life of leisure and discernment is necessarily premised, Hedda’s gender denies her the splendid isolation she dreams of; displayed by Tesman as a prized possession, her pregnancy is the ultimate loss of self, subjecting her to Aunt Julie’s intrusive gaze and surrendering her body to the incursions of bourgeois domesticity. The final irony is, of course, that Hedda in her disdain for bourgeois tastes and manners is in fact herself rooted in the bourgeoisie—​as were, so often, those oppositional figures the dandy and the decadent author.25

Magda Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat was written in German in 1893, and retitled Magda, after its heroine, by its translators in England and across Europe, where it became a central part of the late nineteenth-​century repertoire. The central role of an internationally famous opera singer who at the play’s climax springs to the defense of her child and proudly declares her right to love and happiness had clear appeal for leading actresses. Set in a provincial German town, the play begins with Magda’s return to her father’s house from which she was ejected as a young girl for refusing to marry the man of her father’s choice, Pastor Heffterdingt. Having fallen pregnant by a family friend who then abandoned her, Magda has risen as a singer to international fame, but when she visits her hometown she is drawn back under the authority of her father, the retired Lieutenant Colonel Schwartze. When Schwartze realizes that the local councilor, Von Keller, is father to Magda’s child, he insists that his daughter restore the family honor by marrying him. Keller is only too willing to acquire Magda’s money and associated glamour, but he insists that she abandon a professional career incompatible with his own ambitions in local politics. Magda submits, but when Keller demands that, in order to protect himself from any suspicion of impropriety, their child should live abroad, Magda indignantly explodes and sends Keller packing. Her outraged father threatens to shoot her if she does not submit to his will, at which she asks him how he knows she is worthy of marrying Keller—​if Keller was her only lover. As Schwartze raises his arm to shoot, he is overcome by a fatal stroke, and the curtain falls on Magda’s horrified response. The play is essentially realist, though some critics found elements of symbolism in its language and imagery, but it crucially hinged on an issue that was central to cultural and literary decadence: the relation between individual parts and the whole.26 Magda’s rejection of her father’s authority rendered the play “dangerous” and “Socialistic” in the eyes

324   Sos Eltis of some critics, who characterized it as “an endeavour to emphasise the doctrine that existing social constraints and the tradition of family life are obsolete, and ought to yield to the taste and the fancy of the individual.”27 Magda’s individual assertion of her rights as a human being was greeted as an assault upon the fundamental principles of social cohesion and stability, principles rooted in domesticity and the patriarchal family unit. Magda thus spoke to the definition of decadence articulated by Paul Bourget and quoted by Havelock Ellis: The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms composing it should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy, and in order that these lesser organisms should themselves perform their functions with energy, it is necessary that the cells comprising them should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent, the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the influence of acquired well‐being, and of heredity.28

Bourget’s definition continues on to his oft-​cited description of decadent style as one in which the unity of the literary whole is decomposed to give place to the independence of page, sentence, and word. Crucially this structural disintegration is the artistic expression of the challenge of decadence to social unity and cohesion. Sudermann’s drama is carefully neutral as to the justification or merits of Magda’s rebellion. The play originally ended with Magda asking if she may remain and the pastor saying she can pray on her father’s grave. Duse subtly altered the ending in her 1896 production of the play, cutting Magda’s request to stay, and dropping the curtain instead on the more ambiguous climax of her scream of recognition as she turns and sees her father dead.29 Notably it was in response to this production that a reviewer offered one of the strongest affirmations of the justice of Magda’s rebellion. Describing Duse’s expression of outrage at Keller’s suggestion that she abandon their child for the sake of his social standing, the American critic Charlotte Porter likened her to a “roused lioness” who simultaneously “unveils the subtler power she represents, and makes it be seen that it is destined to overcome with its superior future the obstacles of authority the past has heaped up in its path,” asserting a personal integrity that is in harmony with “the welfare of the new generation.”30 Productions could tilt the balance of sympathies, and reviewers slipped easily into stating their personal assumptions as fact. Magda’s challenge to her father as to whether she has taken other lovers is thrown out in the face of a loaded gun; it remains unclear whether it is a defiant truth or a strategic final move. Nonetheless, the Times, reviewing Bernhardt’s production in 1895, referred to the offstage child as “the fruit of Magda’s first liaison” and to Keller as “her betrayer in the first instance.”31 A self-​styled expert

DECADENT THEATER   325 on Sudermann’s theater and an adapter of Magda wrote into the Times to correct its reviewer, stating instead that Magda’s last avowal was “a subterfuge,” the hasty inspiration of a noble-​minded woman.32 Significantly, the letter-​writer simultaneously endorsed Duse’s interpretation of the role as more true to life than Bernhardt’s. The different performances of Duse, Bernhardt, and Campbell offered alternative interpretations of Magda’s nature, which in turn inspired critics to air their diverse views on the modern woman, her relation to social cohesion, and the particular role of the actress in this contested dynamic. Baudelaire’s description of the actress, a ubiquitous figure in decadent writing, as a combination of prostitute and poet neatly summarizes the contested aspects of Magda’s character over which performers and critics divided. The actress, Baudelaire wrote, is like the courtesan “a creature of show, an object of public pleasure”: But in this case the conquest and the prey are of a nobler, more spiritual kind. The aim is to win public favour, not only by pure physical beauty, but also by talents of the rarest order. If, on the one hand, the actress comes close to the courtesan, on the other she reaches up to the poet. Let us not forget that, apart from natural beauty and even artificial beauty, all beings have the stamp of their trade, a characteristic which may, on the physical level, express itself as ugliness, but also as a kind of professional beauty.33

Bernhardt and Campbell emphasized the courtesan aspect of Baudelaire’s definition, Duse the poetic, thereby inflecting the gender politics of Sudermann’s carefully balanced play. Magda’s claim to self-​expression and freedom gains weight if she is a great artist; if she is just a sexually loose and self-​indulgent woman, her rejection of male moral guidance and familial constraints could be seen as irresponsible and socially corrosive. Bernhardt’s Magda was most commonly greeted by critics attending her performances in Paris and then in London in 1895 as “capricious” and “spoilt,” characterized by “delicious coquetry” and “vulgarity” of dress and manner.34 She drew universal admiration for the force of her indignation at the suggestion that she abandon her child, but her version of Magda was repeatedly characterized as cabotine—​a term derived from strolling players, implying a hammy or cheap theatrical actor.35 The Times went further in a review of Campbell’s performance, labeling Magda not only “the born cabotine, socially impossible,” but with the accents and manner of “the courtesan, fretting under the conventional constraints of society.”36 By contrast, the Times noted the delicacy and grace of Duse’s performance as Magda, which unfitted her for the necessary “cabotinage” of the role—​a comment that drew a rebuke on the letters page, pointing out that Magda could never have become a great artist without the self-​control and discipline that such a term denies.37 Nowhere did this contrast play out more clearly than in George Bernard Shaw’s Saturday Review comparison of Duse’s and Bernhardt’s performances. To Shaw, Bernhardt was the consummate incarnation of Baudelaire’s actress as courtesan: flirtatious and petulant, coaxing the audience and practicing on their weaknesses, making

326   Sos Eltis a voluptuous appeal to their senses, complete with a “Monna Lisa smile” reminiscent of Walter Pater’s ancient seductress.38 Like Baudelaire’s courtesan, Bernhardt’s Magda is an embodiment of female artifice, from the skillful application of her makeup to the shared recognition of the incredibility of her supposed youth: “[I]‌t is all the greatest nonsense, nobody believing in it, the actress herself least of all, it is so artful, so clever, so well recognized a part of the business, and carried off with such a genial air, that it is impossible not to accept it with good humour” (787–​88). To Shaw, Duse’s Magda is by contrast convincingly youthful, not by dint of makeup, which she disdains, but rather through the illusion of her physical movements, which are as finely controlled as those of a gymnast or panther, but unlike the latter—​and often, Shaw notes, the former—​they are raised above the animal by the humanity and intelligence that informs them. Where Bernhardt presented nothing but one woman’s emotional drama of anger and appeal, Duse immediately illuminated the larger issues underlying the play: “the revolt of the modern woman against that ideal of home that exacts the sacrifice of her whole life to its care, not by her grace, and its own sole help and refuge, but as a right which it has to the services of all women as its abject slaves” (788). Above all, Shaw saw in Duse’s Magda a transcendent humanity, lit by “moral high notes,” expressing his admiration in terms that deliberately contradict central tenets of decadent art: Duse’s performance existed on a higher plane than Bernhardt’s because “[n]o physical charm is noble as well as beautiful unless it is the expression of a moral charm” (788). The pinnacle of Duse’s performance for Shaw, and the ultimate explanation for her refusal to cover her aging face with makeup, was the slow, painfully rising blush that followed her first encounter with Keller, whom she had not seen since they had been lovers many years before. As Shaw notes with wonder, Duse employed no stage trickery such as stooping and rising suddenly to achieve the effect, rather “it seemed to be a perfectly genuine effect of the dramatic imagination” (789). In “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Symons summed up the ideal of decadence as “to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul.”39 In Shaw’s admiring assessment, Duse spoke powerfully as a human soul, not by escaping the body but transcending it, bringing it miraculously under the command of her mind and imagination. Decadent and symbolist theater-​makers had long been fascinated by the potential for marionettes to eliminate the need for the actors and their troublesome bodies.40 Duse achieved a higher form of decadent theater, not disembodied but absolutely embodied, bringing her physicality fully to bear in a performance that Shaw could only attempt to describe by calling on the language of all the arts: she is an inspired painter “behind every stroke” of whose acting “is a distinctively human idea”; the delicacy with which she shields the audience from distress renders her performance “a stage poem”; the moral high notes of her range dwarf “the poor little octave and half ” on which Bernhardt plays (787–​89). Duse achieves the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, commanding every art form and sense to create the decadent dream of total theater. Shaw’s admiration for Duse’s artistic skills and the vitality of her stage presence were shared by A. B. Walkley, writing in the Speaker, who declared himself a “Dusomaniac,” enthralled by Duse’s ability to absorb and project characters on stage as an aspect of

DECADENT THEATER   327 her own capacious personality: “[S]‌he brings one face to face with life itself; she is absolutely absorbed in her part: not acts it, but lives it. . . . For the time being she is the character, saturates herself with it, and then gives it out again as a phase of herself.”41 Actress and character meld in Walkley’s description into “one hot gush of life,” summed up for him in Magda’s repeated assertion “Io son’ Io,” “I am myself.”42 Where Walkley acquiesced admiringly in the celebrity actress’s triumphant self-​assertion, both in reality and in the dramatic action of Sudermann’s play, the Saturday Review’s Max Beerbohm protested at precisely this dynamic in almost identical terms. Duse’s unpainted face and the “unhidden grey of the hair over her brows” were symbolic, Beerbohm judged, of her “Io son’ Io” attitude.43 Despite acknowledging the power and nobility in Duse’s face and the grace and strength of her movements, Beerbohm declares that he cannot surrender himself: My prevailing impression is of a great egoistic force; of a woman overriding, with an air of sombre unconcern, plays, mimes, critics and public. In a man I should admire this tremendous egoism very much indeed. In a woman it only makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it. I resent it. In the name of art, I protest against it.44

In Beerbohm’s explicitly gendered value system, female agency and vitality are antithetical to art; Duse, like Magda, has failed to subordinate herself for the greater good, as she towers egotistically over the play like some fearsome realization of Nordau’s fin-​de-​ siècle nightmares. Nearly three decades later, Robins rebutted the basic premises behind Beerbohm’s assessment of Duse and the heroine she played. In a lecture in honor of Ibsen delivered in March 1928 to the Royal Society of Arts, Robins reconfigured the relation between individualism, female self-​fulfillment, and the wider interests of society. While seemingly addressing the relatively narrow topic of “Ibsen and the Actress,” Robins refuted the assumption that women’s subordination was crucial to social cohesion. Robins was well aware of the patterns of thought that identified Magda’s rebellion as a threat to family life and social stability—​just as Hedda and other Ibsen women had been labeled “anarchist.”45 Politicized by her experiences acting in and producing Ibsen, championing the New Drama, and then by months researching the women’s suffrage movement for her play Votes for Women! (1907) and its novelization, The Convert (1907), Robins became a feminist activist and propagandist, supporting the militant Women’s Social and Political Union’s campaign for the vote—​a right that was only finally granted to women on the same terms as men three months after she gave her Royal Society speech. In Ibsen and the Actress Robins emphasized the patriarchal nature of the London theater world into which Ibsen erupted. Having secured acting rights to Hedda Gabler, Robins and Lea approached actor-​managers hoping to persuade them to produce the play, but their responses were telling: “There’s no part for me!” “But this is a woman’s play, and an uncommon bad one at that!”46

328   Sos Eltis By contrast to the male managers’ short-​sighted approach, Robins describes the enterprise of producing Hedda Gabler and other Ibsen plays as fundamentally collaborative. Ibsen, she argues, more than any other playwright, allowed for the actor’s own individual interpretation, harnessing the individual “gift and temper of the actor” to bring spontaneity and freshness to his creations (54). Her account of each production encompasses a wide community of professionals and enthusiasts, each of whom contributed their knowledge, expertise, energies, and ideas to shape every aspect of production, from nuances of translation to the shape of a collar. At the same time Robins repeatedly notes that her and other actresses’ primary and exclusive concern was their own personal fulfillment, the “joy of having in our hands—​free hands—​such glorious actable stuff,” the “vivid pleasure” and “self-​respect” that playing such real and satisfying roles gave them (31, 14). Their interests were not even feminist but specifically professional: If we had been thinking politically, concerning ourselves about the emancipation of women, we would not have given the Ibsen plays the particular kind of wholehearted, enchanted devotion we did give. We were actresses—​actresses who wouldn’t for a kingdom be anything else. (31)

The commercially and artistically successful productions that emerged from this process were thus the result of a large collaborative system within which the female artist sought her own individual fulfillment and satisfaction. Rewriting Bourget’s notion of decadence as the refusal of each element to subordinate itself, Robins offers a version of social organization and artistic creation enhanced, not fragmented, by the independence of its constituent parts. Female individualism was presented by Robins not as a corrosive but a creative force, a vital element in the rejuvenation and modernization of theater and the cultural and intellectual development of society.

Two Theatrical Ripostes In “The Heroine of 1894,” W. L. Courtenay looked forward to the heroine of 1895 as a fresh-​faced antidote to the decadent fashions of Hedda Gabler and Paula Tanqueray; bringing with her the scent of snowdrops and primroses, the “Girl with a Future” was to succeed the “Woman with a Past.”47 Courtenay’s prophecy was unfulfilled. The dramatic heroines of 1895 continued the debates begun by their predecessors. So, for example, Pinero produced a dramatic riposte to Hedda Gabler in the form of The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, which opened at the Garrick Theatre in March 1895, starring Campbell in the title role. Far from being an innocent and fresh-​faced maiden, Pinero’s new heroine was a platform speaker, dubbed “Mad Agnes,” who has been radicalized by her experiences of sexual abuse and servitude in marriage, and now dreams of achieving a purely spiritual free union with her lover, Lucas Cleeve. When Cleeve craves social acceptance and proposes to return to his marital home with Agnes as his kept woman on the side, she drops her ideals, dons a low-​cut dress, and glories in her old-​fashioned sexual power.

DECADENT THEATER   329 In a climactic end to the third act, Agnes is given a Bible by her friend Gertrude in an attempt to reform her fallen ways. Agnes defiantly throws the Bible into the onstage stove, but seconds later horror and fear overcome her, and she thrusts her hands into the flames to retrieve the charred remains. With her burnt hands carefully bandaged, Agnes ends the play shamed by the realization that she is not a fearless new thinker but simply yet another woman with a past, as she retires from the fray to the shelter of a vicarage. Agnes’s book-​burning antics starkly divided critics between those who dismissed it as gratuitous sensationalism and those who embraced it as a confirmation of love, religion, and woman’s true nature.48 The playwright’s intent, however, was plain to all. To those who, like Robins’s friend, laughingly exclaimed that “Hedda is all of us,” Pinero asserted that woman’s real nature was entirely contrary to that of Ibsen’s heroine. Agnes was a living rebuttal of Hedda Gabler. Campbell, the actress playing her, disagreed. She played Agnes’s transformation into glamorous seductress with an air of sullen resentment and lamented in her memoirs that the end of the play condemned the heroine to a future of pious conformity rather than the crusading zeal of real-​life feminist campaigners.49 Despite achieving critical acclaim for her performance as Agnes Ebbsmith, Campbell did not include her alongside Hedda, Magda, and Paula in her repertoire of favorite roles once she achieved artistic independence. Pinero’s insistence on Agnes’s ultimate instinctive conformity and self-​subordination is all the more remarkable for the fact that he presents society in The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith as a corrupt and decaying patriarchy. All husbands in the play, dead and alive, are abusive, and the voice of society is represented by the Duke of St. Olpherts, “the wreck of a very handsome man,” whose debauched life has left him struggling to stand without pain; he later predicts he will die of gout, but the spectacle of such physical debility inescapably leaves open the possibility of syphilis.50 It is this society whose economic and gender inequities Agnes once condemned from the platform and for whose stability she is finally asked to sacrifice her desires. Lucas Cleeve’s political ambitions are as emptily self-​serving and futile as the academic pursuits of Hedda Gabler’s Professor Tesman or the small-​town career of Magda’s Councilor Keller. Theirs are dreams of personal advancement and petty self-​aggrandizement in a static world of small-​scale male competition. It is to maintain this social stability—​or stagnation—​that women’s self-​suppression and subordination are demanded. Ibsen left the conclusion to Hedda Gabler characteristically open as to whether George Tesman and Thea Elvsted are pursuing yet another sterile project, or whether Lövborg’s study of the civilizing forces of the future and their probable line of development is the inspired and progressive work that Tesman takes it to be.51 Notably, reviewers who sympathized with Hedda’s or Magda’s rebellion tended to characterize the stagnant and pettily self-​important societies they inhabit as parochially and nationally distinct, and thus distant from the reviewer’s own social setting. The fierce paternal authority wielded over Magda is described as a product of a remote German province’s roots in the military and clerical values of the Middle Ages, while Edmund Gosse described Hedda Gabler as “perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen’s plays,” set not in modern Christiania but in “the half-​suburban, half-​rural little straggling town of forty years ago.”52 British and American womanhood

330   Sos Eltis are clearly not to be considered subject to any such oppressive limitations and therefore have no reason to revolt. Shaw’s theatrical riposte to Hedda Gabler came in the ambitious form of Man and Superman (1903), a four-​hour drama including an experimental dream sequence set in Hell. The play’s romantic leads, Ann Whitefield and Jack Tanner, replicate the youthful relationship between Hedda Gabler and Eilert Lövborg, with both young women eliciting secrets from the men that give them an insight into the forbidden wider sphere of male activity. But where Hedda acknowledges that she was held back by cowardice, Ann displays, in Jack’s words, “[m]‌agnificent audacity!”53 Like Hedda and Magda, Ann is full of vitality, but crucially her will is narrowly focused on getting her man. Sporting a feather boa made fashionable by Robins’s costume as Hedda Gabler, Ann enfolds Jack first in its coils, and then provocatively and temptingly in her arms. Like Hedda, she is careful to conform outwardly to the requirements of social propriety, but Ann is far more skilled in using feminine dutifulness as a cover for a fearless and relentless pursuit of her own desires, chasing Jack across the Continent until he submits to her stronger will and agrees to marry her. In Ann Whitefield, Shaw both revised Hedda Gabler and reiterated his interpretation of her motives. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Shaw wrote of Hedda’s rejection of Lövborg when he made sexual advances to her that she drove him from the house at pistol-​point, “with all that ostentation of outraged purity which is the instinctive defence of women to whom chastity is not natural.”54 In Ibsen and the Actress, Robins explicitly refuted this judgment by “an eminent critic,” explaining that Hedda drove Lövborg from her in disgust; disgust at the new aspects of vulgar sensuality which her curiosity about life had led him to reveal. She never denied it was her doing that he revealed these things; it was not her doing that he had them to reveal. They made her gorge rise. The man who had wallowed in that filth must not touch Hedda Gabler—​certainly not fresh from the latest orgy.55

In Robins’s and Campbell’s interpretations, it is Hedda’s yearning for beauty, nobility, and some larger meaning in her life that lies behind her frustration and drives her energies into misdirected cruelty and destruction. Pregnancy comes upon Hedda as a clearly unwelcome incursion into her sense of self and her bodily autonomy. In their interpretation it is aesthetic not bodily desires that drive Hedda. Ann Whitefield’s pursuit of Jack Tanner is part of Shaw’s alternative vision of female energies and their path to fulfillment. In his preface to Man and Superman and in the dream sequence in Hell, a starkly gendered division is made between the men of genius—​“that is, men selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her own instinctive purpose”—​and women, whose drive is to perpetuate the race.56 Allowance is made for the exceptional case of the female genius, a George Sand who “becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles up men of genius, Chopins, Mussets and the like, as mere hors d’oeuvres,” but she is an exception to the centuries-​long fight between the genius

DECADENT THEATER   331 in search of truth and beauty and the woman’s struggle to confine his energies for the purposes of procreation and the support of her offspring.57 In the Devil’s vision of the ultimate futility of existence, even the apparent progress of civilization is simply a swing of the everlasting pendulum, fated to swing back again in the opposite direction. This ultimate decadent scenario is countered by Don Juan’s theory of the Life Force, the inbuilt intelligence in Nature that harnesses woman’s desire to its own ends, breeding brainpower and self-​consciousness into the race in an onward evolutionary drive to produce the Superman. The dream sequence ends with Dona Ana—​an incarnation of Ann Whitefield—​calling out for “a father for the Superman!”; the subsequent final act of the play sees Ann securing her prey.58 Shaw reconceives the modern woman’s agency and determination, not as a dangerous individualism that threatens the cohesion of society, but as a progressive force that carries the race toward perfection.59 Shaw’s evolutionary optimism validated Ann’s personal drive in the name of progress—​but whether liberation in the name of a greater biological purpose was simply another form of subordination and bondage divided critics at the beginning of the twentieth century and into the twenty-​first. Variously treated as a symptom of decadence or the agent of progress, the ambitious modern woman remained an irresistible focus for debates on individualism, social cohesion, duty, and change.

Notes 1. Charlotte Porter, “Phillip’s ‘Paolo and Francesca’ and Swinburne’s ‘Rosamund,’ ” Poet-​Lore 12, no. 1 (1900): 135. 2. Porter, “Phillip’s ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ ” 135. 3. W. L. Courtenay, “The Heroine of 1894,” Daily Telegraph, December 28, 1894, 6. 4. Courtenay, “The Heroine of 1894,” 6. 5. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray, ed., Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), ix. 6. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 159. 7. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, introduction to Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 12. 8. Clement Scott, Illustrated London News, April 25, 1891, 551–​52; “Vaudeville Theatre,” Daily Telegraph, April 21, 1891, 3; “Vaudeville Theatre,” Times (London), April 21, 1891, 10; “An Ibsen Success—​Hedda Gabler at the Vaudeville,” Pall Mall Gazette, April 21, 1891, 2. 9. Justin McCarthy, Black and White, April 25, 1891, 382, in Michael Egan, ed., Henrik Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 222. 10. Clement Scott, Illustrated London News, April 25, 1891, 552. 11. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 858–​59. 12. Gay Gibson Cima, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1993), 43. See also Joanna Townsend, “Elizabeth Robins: Hysteria, Politics, and Performance,” in Women, Theatre and

332   Sos Eltis Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 102–​20. 13. Cima, Performing Women, 52. Cima quotes from Robins’s promptbook, Fales Library, New York University. 14. Kirsten Shepherd-​Barr, “Against Interpretation: Hedda and the Performing Self,” in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 193. 15. “St George’s Hall,” Daily Telegraph, Nov. 27, 1901, 7. 16. “Eleonora Duse,” Daily Telegraph, Oct. 8, 1903, 6. 17. “Eleonora Duse,” 6. 18. W. A. Lewis Bettany, “Five Years of Progress,” The Theatre, May 1894, 245. 19. H. de S., “ ‘Hedda Gabler’ at the Court Theatre,” Academy, March 9, 1907, 252. 20. Oscar Parker, “The London Stage,” English Illustrated Magazine, May 1907, 188. 21. “Court Theatre,” Daily Telegraph, March 6, 1907, 9. 22. A. N. M., “Prince’s Theatre,” Manchester Guardian, Oct. 17, 1907, 7. 23. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. and with an introduction by P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin, 1972), 420. 24. Justin McCarthy, Black and White, April 25, 1891, 382. 25. See David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 80. 26. See, for example, “Magda,” Times (London), June 11, 1895, 10. 27. The Era, February 16, 1895, 8; Standard, June 11, 1895, 3. 28. Havelock Ellis, “A Note on Paul Bourget” (1889), in Views and Reviews: A Selection of Uncollected Articles 1884–​1932 by Havelock Ellis. First Series: 1884–​1919 (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932), 52. 29. For details, see Charlotte Porter, “Sudermann’s Magda and Duse’s,” Poet-​Lore 8, no. 8 (1896): 561–​62. 30. Porter, “Sudermann’s Magda and Duse’s,” 560. 31. Times (London), June 11, 1895, 10. 32. Times (London), Letter to the Editor, June 15, 1895, 6. 33. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 431. 34. Morning Post, Feb. 14, 1895, 5; The Era, Feb. 16, 1895, 8; Standard, June 11, 1895, 3; A. B. Walkley, The Speaker, June 15, 1895, 654–​56. 35. See, for example, Times (London), June 13, 1895, 10; A. B. Walkley, The Speaker, June 15, 1895, 656. 36. Times (London), June 4, 1896, 5. 37. Times (London), June 13, 1895; Times (London), June 10 and 15, 1895, 6. 38. George Bernard Shaw, Saturday Review, June 15, 1895, 788. Further references cited parenthetically. 39. Symons, “The Decadent Movement,” 867. 40. For further details, see, for example, Frantisek Deak, Symbolist Theater, The Formation of an Avant-​Garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), and ­chapter 6 of David Charles Rose, Oscar Wilde’s Elegant Republic: Transformation, Dislocation and Fantasy in fin-​de-​siècle Paris (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015). 41. A. B. Walkley, The Speaker, June 15, 1895, 655. 42. Walkley, The Speaker, 656.

DECADENT THEATER   333 43. Max Beerbohm, “Duse at the Lyceum, May 26, 1900,” reprinted from Saturday Review in Around Theatres (London: Rupert Hart-​Davis, 1953), 82. 44. Beerbohm, “Duse at the Lyceum,” 82. 45. See, for example, “The Playhouses,” Illustrated London News, March 9, 1907, 362; W. L. Courtenay, “Realistic Drama,” Fortnightly Review, June 2, 1913, 1147. 46. Elizabeth Robins, Ibsen and the Actress (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 16. Further references cited parenthetically. 47. Courtenay, “The Heroine of 1894,” 6. 48. See, for example, Stage, March 21, 1895, 13; Illustrated London News, March 23, 1895, 348. 49. See Mrs. Patrick Campbell, My Life and Some Letters (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1922), 98–​100. 50. Arthur Wing Pinero, The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 81. 51. William Archer acknowledged a difference of opinion between himself and the Danish scholar George Brandes on this point in his preface to the play. See Introduction to Hedda Gabler, in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1912), 10:xvi–​xviii. 52. See, for example, Porter, “Sudermann’s Magda,” 557–​58, and Times (London), June 11, 1895, 10; Edmund Gosse, quoted in Kirsten Shepherd-​Barr, Ibsen and Early Modernist Theatre, 1890–​1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 109. 53. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (London: Constable & Co., 1903), 1:39. 54. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (London: Walter Scott, 1891), 114. 55. Robins, Ibsen, 22. Robins’s insistence on the genuineness of Hedda’s disgust may have had more personal reference for her, as in 1893, by Shaw’s own account, she rejected his advances at gunpoint. See Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters: 1874–​1897 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1965), 1:380, 397. 56. Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory,” Man and Superman, xix. 57. Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory,” xix. 58. Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 138. 59. It was no coincidence that St. John Hankin subsequently chose Lillah McCarthy, whose tremendous dynamism made her the perfect casting for the first Ann Whitefield, to play his Janet De Mullin, the self-​made businesswoman who glories in her unmarried motherhood and scorns her desiccated family.

Further Reading Barstow, Susan Torrey. “ ‘Hedda is all of us’: Late-​Victorian Women at the Matinee.” Victorian Studies 43, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 387–​411. Cima, Gay Gibson. Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Egan, Michael, ed. Ibsen: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Eltis, Sos. Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–​1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Eltis, Sos. “Theatre and Decadence.” In Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray, 201–​17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

334   Sos Eltis Foulkes, Richard, ed. British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Glen, Susan. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hill, Leslie. Sex, Suffrage and the Stage: First-​Wave Feminism in British Theatre. London: Palgrave, 2018. Powell, Kerry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Robins, Elizabeth. Ibsen and the Actress. London: Hogarth Press: 1928. Shepherd-​Barr, Kirsten. “Against Interpretation: Hedda and the Performing Self.” In Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler: Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Kristin Gjesdal, 174–​93. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Townsend, Joanna. “Elizabeth Robins: Hysteria, Politics, and Performance.” In Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 102–​20. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Chapter 18

Essays Defending and Describing Decadence Nick Freeman

In a review of Ernest Rhys’s anthology Modern English Essays 1870 to 1922, Virginia Woolf had no doubt that an essay should above all give pleasure, its ability to divert and entertain arising from the perfect fusion of style with content. Ideally, an essay shut out the world, leaving the writer and reader together in an intimate, private space free from the crass intrusions of everyday experience. To create this sanctuary, essayists had to know “how to write” and needed to set their sights on “eternity” rather than a deadline from the Fortnightly Review. Only then could they create something “pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.”1 Woolf rejected stylistic coloratura for its own sake, but she welcomed the deliberate expression of writerly personality, urging essayists to “make use in literature of your self.” This creative selfhood was not simply licensed egotism, for she was “nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.” Rather, it was a constant challenge. “To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening,” she said, “is a heart-​breaking task for men who know good writing from bad.”2 Woolf ’s review foregrounded the challenge facing essayists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most periodicals no longer encouraged the stately effusions of Macaulay or Froude, and writers often found themselves akin to the hacks in John Davidson’s “New Year’s Day” (1893) who bewail that “We review and report and invent: /​ In drivel our virtue is spent.”3 As the prolific essayist A. C. Benson explained: [T]‌he writer of belles-​lettres, the literary writer pure and simple, can hardly hope to earn a living wage, unless he is content to do, and indeed fortunate enough to obtain, a good deal of hackwork as well. He must be ready to write reviews and introductions; to pour out occasional articles, to compile, to edit, to select; and the chances are that if his livelihood depends upon his labour, he will have little of the

336   Nick Freeman tranquility, the serenity, the leisure, upon the enjoyment of which the quality of the best work depends.4

As Benson suggests, for all but a fortunate few it was the income generated from the treadmill of “occasional articles” that made possible more creative though usually less remunerative endeavors. There was a distinct sense of cultural hierarchy in the offices of “poet,” “critic,” and (last and definitely least) “journalist,” with writers wishing to be seen in Wildean terms as creators of beautiful things even as they subsidized those beautiful things by hackwork and devilling. The most ambitious decadent essayists, however, rejected these polarities, seeking to imbue their periodical publications with the same literary finesse and rarefied sensibility that characterized other areas of their creative practice.

Amiable Garrulity? Before the rise of the literary agent began in the early 1900s, writers needed to have a detailed knowledge of the periodical markets (in which papers appeared or disappeared at short notice) and, ideally, an extensive list of personal contacts among editors and publishers. Even with an enviably efficient postal service, these requirements encouraged writers to live in London and, in many cases, to know each other personally. This in turn led to complex imbrications of authorship and audience and to a great deal of writing about writing, whereby one paper might review and summarize the contents of a number of others, giving readers an inevitably secondhand and sometimes actively misleading sense of what might be being said elsewhere. W. T. Stead’s Review of Reviews, founded in 1890, attempted to keep up to date, but the proliferation of publications defied even its indefatigable editor. Six years later, the protagonist of Henry James’s “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) visits a society hostess and finds himself confronted by “a stiff garden of periodicals,” which “gave one of the ormolu tables the air of a stand at a station.”5 As Woolf suggested, alongside these practical concerns were questions of style and voice and the best way to combine the medium with the message. Oscar Wilde had claimed that “[i]‌n matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing,” but style took many forms, and was rarely a thing in itself.6 In his essay on the subject, Walter Pater maintained that “the literary artist” makes “a vocabulary, an entire system of composition, for himself,” so as to transcribe “his sense” of the world rather than attempting to be objective.7 Pater’s own style, emerging from drafts in which he wrote only one sentence per page of foolscap, was intoxicating for some but indigestible for others, its complex rhythms, allusions, evocative imprecision, and repeated use of favorite words inflected with personal meaning—​“subtle,” “strange,” “curious”—​making it equally unsuited to rapid creation or swift consumption. His essays addressed those with time to ponder the implications of his thoughts and made little if any attempt to connect with

Essays   337 less learned and leisured constituencies. Woolf greatly admired him, saying he was a “true writer” who possessed “vision” and made “limitations yield their own quality,” but the essays of Appreciations (1889) were not provocative editorials designed to enliven a journey on the Hammersmith omnibus.8 For casual distraction and refreshment, Woolf sought essayists who, though bowed by the pressure of deadlines and the treadmill of unceasing composition, nevertheless attempted to maintain high aesthetic standards. She dismissed those whose effusions made plain the difficulty of simultaneously pleasing an audience and its less easily satisfied component members. “[W]hile ‘we’ are gratified,” Woolf writes, “ ‘I,’ that unruly partner in the human fellowship, is reduced to despair”: “I” must always think things for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted form with the majority of well-​educated and well-​intentioned men and women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently and profit profoundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.9

Some readers of Woolf ’s review may have detected a possible allusion to W. S. Gilbert’s libretto for Patience (1881), in which Bunthorne, the “very singularly deep young man” who was often seen as a parody of Wilde, cultivates “[a]‌n attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato.”10 When Wilde is placed alongside her open admiration for Pater, Vernon Lee, and, most markedly, the sparkling Max Beerbohm, a sense begins to emerge of Woolf identifying writers associated then and now with “decadence” as being far more admirable and significant essayists than their successors. Those she praises are chiefly in the second and third volumes of Rhys’s five-​volume collection; it is notable that she wholly ignores G. K. Chesterton and mocks Hilaire Belloc as “strained and thin and full of mannerisms and affectations.”11 The year 1922 was, of course, a pivotal one in the history of modernism, one that saw the publication of Ulysses and The Waste Land, the latter published by Woolf ’s Hogarth Press. It might be surprising that she should so admire her decadent predecessors, but as Koenraad Claes reminds us, it would be a mistake to assume that “the switch to experimental art and literature happened only when Virginia Woolf ’s half-​serious essay allowed it to.”12 In recognizing their concern with “writing well” and acknowledging the difficulty of adjudicating between personal interest and commercial pressures, she implied that there was significant common ground between decadent essayists and her own practice—​thoughts she had harbored for some years. In 1905 she had contributed a pithy anonymous article to the Academy, “The Decay of Essay-​Writing,” in which she lamented that feeding “a monster like the British public” had led to the growth of the “personal essay,” with its attendant egotism and platitudinous self-​regard. She did not pull her punches. “[T]‌he great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—​the amiable garrulity of the tea-​table—​cast into the form of essays,” she said. “If men and women must write,” they should detail “that single book to which they alone have the key.” Most of all, they should write of themselves, not in

338   Nick Freeman “timid side-​glances” or the insincere “glitter of paradox” (a dig at Chesterton?), but with a sincerity that allows them to confront “the terrible spectre of themselves” without running away or shading their eyes. Egotism was only to be tolerated if the egotist was interesting and engaging; she disliked pretensions to “an oracular and infallible nature.”13 By the time this article was published, “decadence” in Britain was, in the eyes of many, a spent force, a poisonous cloud that had been dispelled by the jailing of Wilde in 1895 and the cultural realignments that had followed his disgrace. Significant male decadents were dead—​ Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Hubert Crackanthorpe—​but a number of those who had been associated with decadence were still very much alive and writing for the same periodicals as their apparent successors. Only two years after the then Virginia Stephen had published “The Decay of Essay-​Writing,” the Academy was being edited by Lord Alfred Douglas. Beerbohm was the theater critic of the Saturday Review from 1898 to 1910 and had become a columnist for the Daily Mail as early as December 1896, amply fulfilling its proprietor’s wish for provocative novelties. W. B. Yeats might not have been generally regarded as a decadent, but he had kept decadent company in person as well as in his contributions to The Savoy, mythologizing his “tragic generation” and acknowledging how Pater had inspired it. In the new century, Yeats had become an important poet, dramatist, and enabler of the Irish cultural revival, but he had not abandoned his earlier allegiances. Readers of the Dublin Daily Express might have been bewildered by his contribution to a public controversy concerning the place of myth in Irish drama, “The Autumn of the Flesh,” in which he confessed: I see, indeed, in the arts of every country those faint lights and faint colours and faint outlines and faint energies which many call “the decadence,” and which I, because I believe that the arts lie dreaming of things to come, prefer to call the autumn of the body.14

Yeats’s close friend Arthur Symons, who had announced the presence of “The Decadent Movement in Literature” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1893, appeared frequently in the Academy, and contributed to many other papers, often adding luster to the opening (and sometimes only) number of new ventures. He published travel essays in the Saturday Review; his critical assessments and disquisitions were familiar to readers of the Athenæum and the Outlook; and for over a decade his theater and music-​ hall reviews appeared in the London daily The Star, under his byline “Silhouette.” As a reader for the Bodley Head, Richard Le Gallienne had ushered many decadent works into print, works he had then “puffed” in his “Logroller” column in the Star: with Le Gallienne and Symons on its staff, the paper played an important if unacknowledged role in disseminating decadent opinions. The prolific and well-​connected Le Gallienne managed to place his work in an impressively diverse range of periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Fortnightly Review to the Smart Set and the New York Times. In the Edwardian era, John Davidson, another former member of the Rhymers’ Club and a friend of Le Gallienne, acted as a kind of foreign correspondent for the Glasgow Herald in a series of dispatches on London life that he subsequently revised as the poems of

Essays   339 Fleet Street (1909). Davidson refused to be classed as a decadent writer, seeing himself as defiantly sui generis, but he had been linked to the movement through the controversies surrounding his poem “The Ballad of a Nun” in The Yellow Book in October 1894, and his salacious satire, The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender, illustrated by Beardsley the following year. In “On Poetry,” the concluding essay of Holiday and Other Poems (1906), Davidson insisted that “decadence, in any art, is always the manure and root of a higher manifestation of that art,” and this image of decadence as at once rotting down and feeding vigorous new growth is a richly suggestive one.15 Decadence and decadents were therefore still very present within the literary culture of the early twentieth century, even if they sailed under different flags from those of the previous decade. Many of them were practicing essayists, though the essay tended to be a male preserve and rarely attracted the attention of women writers who, with the notable exception of Vernon Lee, pursued other means of expression such as poetry and prose fiction. Was there, then, such a thing as the “decadent essay”? What might its characteristics be, and where might it be found?

Roots and Branches The roots of the word “essay” lie in the French essayer, “to attempt,” and the related assay, meaning to determine the composition and purity of chemicals and precious metals. The term has further connotations of tasting and proving, of weighing-​up and considering value before making judgment. All of these position the writer as an arbiter, possibly arbiter elegentiae, and it was this sense that was of particular appeal to decadent essayists, connoisseurs of the artificial and bizarre, advocates for the autonomy of art, and those intensely committed to the superiority of the artist over mere mortals. Unsurprisingly, decadent essays tend to adopt a lofty or outright elitist tone, with their authors quite prepared to poke the eyes that read them. Typically, they ignore what “ordinary” people might consider to be the major issues of the day and scorn political debate, economics, foreign policy, and social questions. “Social rules are made by normal people for normal people,” Symons insisted, “and the man of genius is fundamentally abnormal.”16 Many commercially driven writers became literary bowerbirds, laying out their wares to woo the public. Decadents, by contrast, were solipsistic connoisseurs who gave the impression that they displayed their jeweled esoterica primarily for their own pleasure. In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde had declared that “[t]‌he artist is the creator of beautiful things,” and praised “[t]hose who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things” as “cultivated” and “the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.”17 After the failure of The Savoy, Symons struck a more mournful note, closing the eighth and final number of the magazine in December 1896 with an admission: “Comparatively very few people care for art at all, and most of these care for it because they mistake it for something else.”18 Both men, however, were identifying the

340   Nick Freeman limited constituency that decadent essays addressed, often doing so in small-​circulation “little magazines,” but occasionally reaching a larger readership in periodicals that received considerable discussion elsewhere (as when The Yellow Book and The Savoy were parodied in Punch), or when decadence secured a foothold in a more mainstream or conservative publication. Symons’s “The Decadent Movement” appeared in Harper’s, Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” in the somewhat staid pages of The Nineteenth Century and “The Autumn of the Flesh” in a Dublin morning newspaper. Some essayists played with Wilde’s inversions of the trivial and the serious, as Lionel Johnson did in “On the Appreciation of Trifles,” an essay from the only number of the Oxford University student magazine, The Chameleon (1894), or his whimsical “Tobacco Clouds” in the third Yellow Book (October 1894). Others offered a more sober declaration of aesthetic intent or a sustained analysis of their underlying assumptions, as Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-​ Thompson did in their “Beauty and Ugliness” (1900). Still others inhabited a strange, liminal space in which decadent avowals seemed to exist on the cusp of self-​parody. Just as decadence itself took many forms and revealed a wide range of preoccupations and obsessions, so the decadent essay was resistant to straightforward or unitary definition. It also appeared in a number of different guises. Symons often used the language of literary or art criticism in his “studies” and “notes,” but he occasionally adopted the “causerie” and “colloquy,” as did Le Gallienne. The latter’s “prose fancies,” fifteen of which appeared in the Yellow Book’s final seven issues between 1895 and 1897, were a curious amalgam of autobiography, opinion, and invention that created an image of a “night-​ scented littérateur” who “seemed to exist without any obvious connection with the banausic business of earning a living.”19 Writing for periodicals often took questions of nomenclature out of a writer’s hands, with editors deciding the issue: essays were not essays but “articles.” Finally, there was no established length for a decadent essay. In Davidson’s Sentences and Paragraphs (1894) or Crackanthorpe’s Vignettes (1896), subtitled “A Miniature Journal of Whim and Sentiment,” an “essay” might be as short as a generously margined page, little longer than a single exquisite sentence by Pater, James, or Lee. A more serious effusion, however, could be much more substantial: “The Decadent Movement in Literature” is almost six thousand words long and contains several illustrations. There is no single point of origin for the decadent essay in English. It drew inspiration from Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire, particularly the latter’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), with its subsections on women, cosmetics, and dandyism, but also from Hazlitt and Charles Lamb’s “Elia,” Poe’s philosophical speculations on composition and furniture, the vagabond wanderings and whimsicality of Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque (1881), the defiant proclamation of art over nature in Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock Lecture” (1885), and the insistence on a life of “moments” in the conclusion to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). All fed into an authorial perspective that was unapologetically personal (when they typed, decadents wore out their “I” key first), and apparently free from the demands of the literary marketplace in what Claes calls “a disingenuous show of commercial disinterestedness.”20 As Jennifer Birkett observes, “Decadent artists sell their own desires to the populace as the image of a common

Essays   341 dream, building on a thin foundation of historical fact the edifice of outrageous but seductive lies which is their own private fantasy.” The result is that “even today, we accept the decadents’ version of themselves,” believing that their whims were never tailored to the vulgar demands of audience and income.21 For French writers, the essay was a popular medium for the discussion of ideas and for firing off manifestos and polemics. In April 1886, Anatole Baju’s review Le Décadent announced itself with claims that “modern civilization was ‘deliquescent,’ modern man blasé and neurotic, and modern politics contemptible and of no interest to artists.”22 British decadents usually rejected such explicit declarations concerning aesthetic matters. Vernon Lee wrote complex scholarly studies of aesthetics rather than getting drawn into such squabbles, and even a defining essay such as “The Decadent Movement” leaves a great deal unsaid, not least where its author might stand in relation to the literature he discusses. The result is a diagnosis of what Symons termed “a beautiful and interesting disease” rather than an outright admission of the writer’s own infection by it. Symons had made his first visit to Paris only three years before writing the essay, but he was undeniably well informed where contemporary French literature was concerned, and his discussion of writers such as Paul Verlaine, the Brothers Goncourt, and J.-​K. Huysmans shows his enthusiasm as well as his knowledge. As early as the opening paragraph, however, he is already voicing his skepticism of the labels appended to artistic movements by the “noisy, brainsick young people [Symons was 28] who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-​Michel, and exhaust their ingenuities in theorizing over the works they cannot write.” Dismissing the trivial internecine squabbles of Parisian café culture, he argued instead that “Impressionism” and “Symbolism” were labels for aspects of a new tendency in late nineteenth-​century literature, “a decadence” which “has all the qualities we find at the end of great periods,” namely “an intense self-​ consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-​subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity.”23 Symons’s essay exhibited the first three of these qualities, but perhaps because it appeared in the somewhat conservative pages of Harper’s, it held back from embracing the fourth. After a celebration of Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a novel not yet available in English, it crosses the Channel to consider the progress of decadent literature in England where Symons identifies the “morbid subtlety of analysis” and “morbid curiosity of form” in Pater’s fiction but has little else to offer besides the surprising enlistment of the pugnacious W. E. Henley to the decadent ranks.24 Symons may have stopped short of identifying as a decadent, but it was not easy to maintain a pose of pedagogic, intellectual, or indeed anthropological detachment when writing with such exuberance about À rebours, a novel he found “[b]‌arbaric in its profusion, violent in its emphasis, wearying in its splendor” not to mention “[e]laborately and deliberately perverse—​so fascinating, so repellent, so instinctively artificial.”25 His prose was mannered, highly strung, the Paterian manner infused with an all but ungovernable excitement in its concatenation of clauses and asides. Whether or not it convinced Harper’s subscribers to read those whom it celebrated, the essay introduced Symons to American audiences and identified him as a new and distinctive critical voice. In

342   Nick Freeman the short term, it may have been this, rather than its consideration of current trends in French literature, that was more important to his literary career. Symons published poems and travel sketches in the magazine for years afterward, helped by the fact that its European edition was published by Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, whose offices were a short walk from his rooms in the Temple. Apart from the sideswipe at brain-​sick cliques, Symons’s essay was a decorous affair, but there were rather more combative productions during the 1890s. There was, for instance, Vincent O’Sullivan’s openly sarcastic “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid” from the second Savoy (April 1896), which defended writing on “exotic” and “unhealthy” subjects rather than producing “the history of Miss Perfect.” According to O’Sullivan, modern readers would condemn famous episodes from Shakespeare and jeer those who refused to offer “blithe, gamesome songs,” since “abnormal nerves are not understood or thought proper in the suburban villa: and they are not tolerated by the Press, which is almost the same thing.”26 O’Sullivan’s sardonic amusement was well suited to the early optimism surrounding The Savoy, but as the fortunes of The Yellow Book started to decline, claws were unsheathed from velvet paws, notably in the essays its editor, Henry Harland, couched as letters to himself in the guise of “The Yellow Dwarf.” These persistently attacked mainstream tastes and in “Dogs, Cats, Books, and the Average Man” (July 1896) advanced a theory of feline literary technique in opposition to the frenzied barking of popular writers such as Hall Caine and Jerome K. Jerome. Living by Wilde’s maxim, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth,” Harland lashed out at those he deemed crudely canine, promoting instead the feline subtlety of James, Beerbohm, and Crackanthorpe and sneering at the “Average Man” who “bores without convincing you” and views the “Subtle and Elusive” with either “torpid indifference” or “positive distrust and dislike.”27 Such open aggression was, however, uncommon, and attributable in some respects to the beleaguered mood in decadent circles following Wilde’s downfall. Hubert Crackanthorpe’s “Reticence in Literature,” commissioned by Harland in happier days for the second volume of the magazine, was subtitled “some roundabout remarks,” and disguised its passionate defense of artistic freedom with a haughty tone and memorable epigrammatic asides: “The theory that writing resembles the blacking of boots, the more boots you black, the better you do it, is busy evaporating.”28 Despite appearing in the periodical most associated with the movement, “Reticence in Literature” ridiculed the “weird word” which “has been invented to explain the whole business” of the era’s cultural decline. “Decadence, decadence: you are all decadent nowadays,” Crackanthorpe sighed: Ibsen, Degas, and the New English Art Club; Zola, Oscar Wilde, and The Second Mrs Tanqueray. Mr Richard Le Gallienne is hoist with his own petard; even the British playwright has not escaped the taint. Ah, what a hideous spectacle.29

Poised, witty, educated, critically aware and issuing from a writer aged only twenty-​four, the essay exemplified many of the qualities that alarmed the critics of decadence, even

Essays   343 as it dismissed those anxieties with consummate élan. Crackanthorpe portrayed himself as not “decadent” but modern, a man in the vanguard of an artistic and cultural revolution. “Before long the battle for literary freedom will be won,” he wrote, especially if those of artistic temperament accepted their “qualities and flaws” rather than passively acquiescing to contemporary orthodoxies.30 Where The Yellow Dwarf would hiss and spit at those who failed to appreciate Ella D’Arcy and Alice Meynell, Crackanthorpe opted to confuse his critics by undermining their central terms of reference and by deploying simple overstatement—​the public’s acceptance of the realist art he praised was by no means assured, as the reaction to Jude the Obscure would prove the following year. Nevertheless, it was a clever strategy in choosing to focus on radical developments in the art of prose fiction instead of engaging in the wider squabbles surrounding decadence and “Ibsenity.” Essays such as these were probably the closest to the confrontational French variety. Elsewhere, English decadents tended toward the personal and idiosyncratic, sharing their delight in the recondite and obscure, their “discoveries” of writers, artists, musicians, and performers—​Symons wrote on the poet Hugues Rebell, the cabaret singer Jane Avril, and the symbolist painter Odilon Redon, none of whom were very familiar to his English-​speaking audience. There were also occasions in which essayists consciously or otherwise revealed their own ambivalence toward the decadence with which they were associated. Le Gallienne was particularly culpable here. One example among many, “Concerning a Woman’s Smile,” collected in Le Gallienne’s Attitudes and Avowals (1910), opens with a flurry of generalizations about Woman as femme fatale, claiming, “Perhaps, on the whole, the most terrifying thing a man can meet is a beautiful woman.”31 This sounds like the “feed” for a Wildean epigram, but instead it prompts an account of how the “armour of masculine complacency” is helpless before woman’s “witchcraft.” Such “terrific artillery” is, however, “the secret of a mere Dutch doll, a curious idol made out of lace and face-​powder.”32 The first three pages of the essay mix sententious generalization, personal opinion, a kind of purportedly humorous gynophobia, and a series of bland recastings of a section from “The Painter of Modern Life.” In typical Le Gallienne style, the essay nods to its decadent influences, before shifting to a conclusion that is resoundingly conservative and bathetic, a coy celebration of Woman as nurse and mother, the smiling help-​meet of those less fortunate than herself. This, he writes, is the “good woman” whose smile is the “joy of her unconscious goodness.”33 After a parade of female stereotypes that might have come from the fevered imagination of a post-​breakdown Symons or Swinburne’s “The Masque of Queen Bersabe” (1866), Le Gallienne offers a choice between “the instinctive wickedness of woman,” the “beautiful evil” that makes her an agent of the “Powers of Darkness” on the one hand and the archetypes of the mother and the nurse on the other.34 When Le Gallienne opts for the safety of the domestic caregiver, the overall effect is of insincerity and imposture, but also shows how a writer sensitive to public taste could treat decadent iconography as a journalistic resource, or a means of adding a spicier flavor to what was ultimately anodyne essentialism.

344   Nick Freeman

Charming Our Ears As might be expected, Oscar Wilde’s essays, particularly those collected as Intentions (1891), loom large in any overview of the genre, and yet are less influential than might be anticipated. “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” demonstrate his steady movement toward the witty conversations of his comedies, but the dialogue form they exemplify was rarely adopted by his contemporaries, curiosities such as the argument between the author and the “imaginary disputant” of Davidson’s A Random Itinerary (1893) notwithstanding. Humor was an important arrow in the decadent quiver, but the essay-​as-​dialogue was not its most popular vehicle. There is always a sense in Wilde’s fictional conversations that the effect of the individual epigram is more important than who it is allocated to, with characters being distinguished by the views they hold rather than by significant differences in their mode of expression. The languid young critics, Cyril, Vivian, Gilbert, and Ernest (the first two sharing their names with Wilde’s infant sons), therefore become the gauziest of masks for their creator’s own varied opinions. In “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” discussions of the lamentable state of English fiction are transformed from the stuffy pronouncements of the armchair reviewer into the crackling epigrams that would characterize Wilde’s comic writing for the stage. Taking his lead from the Socratic dialogue rather than more formal modes of essayistic composition, Wilde was able to combine provocative paradox and subversive challenges to received wisdom—​the superiority of art to nature, the erasure of the creative/​critical hierarchy—​with sideswipes at his contemporaries. “Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty,” says Vivian in “The Decay of Lying.”35 “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning,” says the similarly bold Gilbert in “The Critic as Artist.”36 If Wilde’s ideas had their roots in Gautier and Baudelaire, his presentation of them was more audacious, partly because it deployed comic effects, partly because it conveyed so much of a world in which intelligent, wealthy young men, liberated from the dulling cares of family and social responsibility, sat up all night smoking cigarettes before heading off to Covent Garden “to look at the roses”: “The Critic as Artist” is subtitled “with some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing.”37 Wilde’s comments on memoirists might apply equally well to essayists, in that “[t]‌he opinions, the character, the achievements” of men matter less than the intimation of personal confession: “when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence.”38 “Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim,’ ” says Vivian, defending his right to inconsistent opinions before revealing his membership in a club called the Tired Hedonists who meet in order to be bored by one another’s opinions.39 Wilde told a correspondent that “The Decay of Lying” was “written only for artistic temperaments” and “the public are not allowed a chance of comprehension,” though the piece was widely praised.40 Whether the reading public enjoyed the essay for its wit or

Essays   345 for its central argument (assuming that one was divisible from the other), it was prepared to respond positively to Wilde’s critical work, and one wonders how his career as an essayist might have developed had he not pursued the greater financial rewards of novels and commercial theater. Teasing iconoclasm caught the public ear, and created, if only briefly, a significant readership for a work that could easily have passed for a transcription of Wilde’s conversation with his literary associates. This was less the “garrulity of the tea-​table” than the public being allowed to eavesdrop on an “artistic temperament” in full flow, Wilde’s opinions in print being much the same as those remembered by his friends. Yet the success of the Intentions essays may have proved dangerous to Wilde in the longer term, encouraging him to overestimate the power of his charm and to mistake recklessness for insouciance when attacking mainstream Victorian values. This mixture of acerbic critical insight and quotable wit was not unique to Wilde, though he remains its most famous (or notorious) exponent. It also distinguished the work of Beerbohm, who, almost twenty years younger than the Irishman and undoubtedly influenced by him, was nonetheless determined to avoid being cast merely as his disciple. A brilliant caricaturist, Beerbohm’s keen eye picked out the foibles of his subjects without mercy, whether he was imagining Wilde in “A Peep into the Past” (written in 1894 but not published until the 1920s), sketching Rudyard Kipling out walking with “Britannia, ’is Girl,” or writing devastating parodies of his contemporaries in A Christmas Garland (1912). Beerbohm’s impersonations were as likely to be of those he admired as those he did not, and this even-​handedness gives his writing an air of sardonic detachment. Wilde may have claimed that sincerity was the poor relation of style, but for Beerbohm, they were the same thing. Beerbohm’s essays, beginning with “The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress” in Douglas’s Oxford magazine, The Spirit Lamp (1893), and, more notoriously, the camped-​ up Baudelairean provocations of “A Defence of Cosmetics” in the opening Yellow Book (April 1894), were distinguished by their poise and playful wit. Beerbohm sprinkled his prose with allusions, inventions, and sundry curlicues, mixing the demotic with what some regarded as preciousness. Before he became one of its columnists, the Daily Mail denounced his “elaborately brocaded sentences” which “reek[ed] of pedantry and patchouli”: when not professing his simplicity and humility, “Max” preferred the term “marivaudage [affectation].”41 Over the course of his lengthy career, Beerbohm fashioned a persona characterized by a weary dandyism, a sense of being bewildered by the times in which he lived. By the time he was making radio broadcasts in the 1930s, he had become what tends to be termed a “national treasure,” a quaint reminder of a somehow more gentlemanly and certainly slower-​moving age, a man of the past “fondly strain[ing] my time-​dimmed eyes towards that backwards horizon.”42 In his 1940 essay “The Top Hat,” he depicts himself as a relic of “the Beardsley period” and insists “on his own anachronism” and “temporal outsiderism,” as Kristen Mahoney puts it, allowing him to be at once of and apart from whatever he chooses to discuss.43 This distancing did not preclude him from being an incisive observer of contemporary mores. In an earlier essay, “The Humour of the Public” (1909), the comic taste of the British is, he observes, notable for its “delight in suffering” and “contempt for the unfamiliar,” yet

346   Nick Freeman Beerbohm complicates his judgmental stance with open admissions—​“Having no love for the public, I have often accused that body of having no sense of humour”—​and by distancing his audience from his condemnations: “you, reader (who are, of course, no more a member of the public than I am).”44 At such moments, Beerbohm’s prose mirrored the understated precision of his clothing. Wilde’s mannerisms caused offense long before any revelations about his sexuality, but although Beerbohm’s precocity led to a few raised eyebrows, he was soon accepted by a surprisingly wide readership. This was partly because he was a shrewd and entertaining critic of the plays he saw—​his reviews have outlasted many of the productions he attended—​and partly because his humor tended toward the gently whimsical. The opening of “Going Out for a Walk” is a defense of idleness characterized by an agreeable rather than standoffish hauteur: It is a fact that not once in all my life have I gone out for a walk. I have been taken out for walks; but that is another matter. Even while I trotted prattling by my nurse’s side I regretted the good old days when I had, and wasn’t, a perambulator.45

“The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk,” Wilde drawled, but where the older writer has a proclamatory, even legislative, tendency in his repeated use of the formulation, “That is all,” Beerbohm is able to combine the admission of his own difference from others with a melancholy consideration of the past, the whole topped off with a neatly punning shift from noun to verb.46 Beerbohm’s essays showed how decadent ideas could gain wider approval; provided his public found him amusing and entertaining, he could speak with relative freedom on such topics as interested him. His impeccable taste helped here, too, preventing him from straying into areas readers may have found unpleasant or unduly confrontational. With the obvious exception of Wilde, humor is rarely associated with decadence in Britain. Decadence tends to be laughed at in the pages of Punch or in satirical depictions of it such as W. H. Mallock’s Paterian Mr. Rose in The New Republic (1877) or “Tubby,” the thinly disguised Wilde of G. S. Street’s The Autobiography of a Boy (1894), but its own comic style is often overlooked. Perhaps this is because of the ways that, from Yeats onward, decadents have been regarded as a “tragic generation”; perhaps it is the lack of a recognizable “canon” of decadent comedy (as opposed to the more popular “camp” with which it has obvious affinities). Perhaps, too, it is because decadent comedy could be cruel, unsentimental, and unashamedly intellectual and elitist in its style and attitudes. There was, though, a discernible permeability between the pronouncements of essayists and those of fictional characters. As his sisters burned his papers after his death, we know little of H. H. Munro’s private views, but from the fluency with which, as “Saki,” he assumed a post-​Wildean epigrammatic, ironic persona in dandified young male characters such as Reginald, Clovis Sangrail, and Comus Bassington, it is hard to imagine that their asides were radically distinct from his own attitudes. An early story, “Reginald on Christmas Presents” (1904), is an essay couched in the form of a monologue. Nothing happens—​Reginald instead tells us of the perils of receiving neckties fit

Essays   347 only for tying up currant-​bushes before offering his Wildean wish list: “liqueur glasses, and crystallized fruits, and tapestry curtains and heaps of other necessities of life . . . not to mention luxuries, such as having one’s bills paid.”47 Later stories rarely offer such arch lectures, but there are plentiful occasions when Clovis articulates decadent opinions surprising in stories published in the conservative Morning Post. Similar announcements could be found in fiction by Ada Leverson, Wilde’s beloved “Sphinx,” who was quite prepared to pause events in a novel in order to throw her audience decadent titbits. In Love’s Shadow (1908), the narrator ponders “the strange feeling of futility” that surrounds English weddings, arguing that the festivity and goodwill appropriate to an afternoon reception “can only be genuinely experienced by an Englishman at two o’clock in the morning.”48 It is easy to imagine her extending such asides into something longer in the manner of Beerbohm. The episodic, digressive structure of E. F. Benson’s early novels, particularly The Babe, B.A. (1897), often allows the characters disquisitions on their favorite topics, while Robert Hichens’s The Green Carnation (1894) somehow manages both to parody and to endorse the sayings of Wilde and Douglas, the pair being the obvious inspiration for “Esme Amarinth” and “Lord Reggie Hastings.” Thirty years later, espousals of decadent philosophy or attitude continued to inform the fiction of Aldous Huxley, notably Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), his fondness for using the epigram for displays of ostentatious erudition resurfacing in the essays of Music at Night (1931). Pieces such as “Sermons in Cats,” in which Huxley tells would-​be writers that they can learn all they need to learn of human nature merely by watching a pair of Siamese, offer plenty of provocative observations and neatly turned aphorisms, not to mention abrupt shifts of frames of reference. At one point, he segues from comparing a battered tom-​cat to a German student with dueling scars to claiming that the love-​sick mewling of a female feline is “irresistibly [reminiscent] of Mélisande in Debussy’s opera: ‘Je ne suis pas heureuse ici,’ she seemed to be saying.”49 One would hesitate to cast decadents as frustrated preachers or pedagogues, but they can rarely resist opportunities to give lectures or sermons, even when supposedly pursuing other objectives. Much of The Picture of Dorian Gray has an essayistic feel, with Lord Henry and Basil Hallward giving their views on art and life in ways familiar from Intentions. This instructive tendency can be seen in works such as Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887), as well as at the more “popular” end of the decadent market in novels such as Hichens’s lurid tale of morphine addiction, Flames (1897), Somerset Maugham’s occult farrago, The Magician (1908), and Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1914). It can also be found in some travel essays by decadent writers, notably Symons’s many evocations of Venice and his shorter pieces on the French “dead city” of Arles, reworked in his melancholy short story, “An Autumn City” (1905), where he appears in the guise of Daniel Roserra. Symons’s travel essays often refract places through their literary and artistic representations, but Vernon Lee went further, suggesting that “[o]‌ne wants to visit unknown lands in company, not with other men’s descriptions, but with one’s own wishes and fancies, even if reality does not live up to what is imagined.”50

348   Nick Freeman

Diminuendo The decadent essay, then, was an elusive phenomenon, and, with the exception of outliers such as Huxley and the ironic survivor Beerbohm, one that is associated with the 1890s and early 1900s. It tended to offer its author’s views on art and life, articulating them through the analysis of aesthetic productions and observations on personal conduct and belief, spicing them with generalized assertions, and confident of its ability to influence the public even if it argued for something the public may not have agreed with, such as Harland’s dismissal of commercially successful novelists. In many respects, therefore, it was a performance, a fantasy of agency and influence in an age of mass culture whereby the author could “essay” the role of the leisured connoisseur, the man-​ of-​the-​world, the educated, tasteful arbiter of elegance, someone immune to the vicissitudes of the conventional world. That it was often written to a tight deadline in a rented room only accentuated the gulf between the essayists’ personae and their actual circumstances.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, “The Modern Essay” (1922), in Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14, 22. 2. Woolf, “Modern Essay,” 18, 20. 3. John Davidson, “New Year’s Day,” in The Poems of John Davidson, ed. Andrew Turnbull (Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 1:194. 4. A. C. Benson, “Authorship,” in From a College Window (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1906), 179–​80. 5. Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896), in Embarrassments (London: William Heinemann, 1897), 7. 6. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), in The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 295. 7. Walter Pater, “Style,” in Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1889), 11, 6. 8. Woolf, “Modern Essay,” 15. 9. Woolf, “Modern Essay,” 20–​21. 10. W. S. Gilbert, Patience, in British Poetry and Prose, 1870–​ 1905, ed. Ian Fletcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52. 11. Woolf, “Modern Essay,” 19. 12. Koenraad Claes, The Late-​Victorian Little Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 224. Claes alludes to Woolf ’s remark that “on or about December, 1910, human character changed” in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924). 13. Virginia Woolf, “The Decay of Essay-​Writing,” in Selected Essays, 5. Wilde’s paradoxes are diamonds, Chesterton’s only glittering paste. 14. W. B. Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (London: A. H. Bullen, 1903), 300. The essay appeared in the Dublin newspaper on December 3, 1898. It was retitled “The Autumn of the Body” for volume publication.

Essays   349 15. John Davidson, Holiday and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1906), 132. The essay first appeared as “Rhyme,” Outlook, April 8, 1905, 495. 16. Arthur Symons, “Unspiritual Adventures in Paris,” in Wonderings (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), 77. 17. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3. 18. Arthur Symons, “A Literary Causerie by Way of Epilogue,” Savoy 8 (December 1896): 92. 19. Richard Whittington-​ Egan and Geoffrey Smerdon, The Quest of the Golden Boy (London: Unicorn Press, 1960), 186. 20. Claes, Little Magazine, 221. 21. Jennifer Birkett, The Sins of the Fathers (London: Quartet, 1986), 4. 22. Birkett, Sins of the Fathers, 9. 23. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893), 858–​59. 24. Symons, “Decadent Movement,” 867. 25. Symons, “Decadent Movement,” 866. 26. Vincent O’Sullivan, “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid,” Savoy 2 (April 1896), 168–​69. 27. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” Intentions (London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Company, 1894), 182. 28. Hubert Crackanthorpe, “Reticence in Literature: Some Roundabout Remarks,” Yellow Book 2 (July 1894): 268. 29. Crackanthorpe, “Reticence in Literature,” 266. 30. Crackanthorpe, “Reticence in Literature,” 268. 31. Richard Le Gallienne, “Concerning A Woman’s Smile,” in Attitudes and Avowals (London: John Lane, 1910), 63. 32. Le Gallienne, “Concerning A Woman’s Smile,” 64, 65. 33. Le Gallienne, “Concerning A Woman’s Smile,” 70. 34. Le Gallienne, “Concerning A Woman’s Smile,” 67. 35. Wilde, Intentions, 104. 36. Wilde, Intentions, 11. 37. Wilde, Intentions, 216. 38. Wilde, Intentions, 96. 39. Wilde, Intentions, 5. 40. Oscar Wilde to Amelie Rives Chanler [January 1889], in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-​Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 388. 41. “Chat about Books,” Daily Mail, August 23, 1896, 3. 42. Max Beerbohm, “The Top Hat,” in Selected Essays, ed. N. L. Clay (London: Heinemann, 1958), 130. 43. Kristin Mahoney, Literature and the Politics of Post-​Victorian Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25, 27. 44. Beerbohm, Selected Essays, 96. 45. Beerbohm, “Going Out for a Walk,” Selected Essays, 20. 46. Gilbert Burgess, “An Ideal Husband, at the Haymarket Theatre: A Talk with Mr Oscar Wilde,” The Sketch, January 9, 1895, 495. 47. Saki, The Complete Saki (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 10. 48. Ada Leverson, Love’s Shadow (London: Grant Richards, 1908), 179.

350   Nick Freeman 49. Aldous Huxley, “Sermons in Cats,” in Music at Night (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 266–​67. Only a decadent would make so recondite a connection. 50. Vernon Lee, Limbo, and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897), 91.

Further Reading Beckson, Karl, et al. Arthur Symons: A Bibliography. Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1990. Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor, eds. Dictionary of Nineteenth-​Century Journalism. London and Ghent: British Library/​Academia Press, 2009. Danson, Lawrence. Max Beerbohm and the Art of Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. De Obaldia, Olivia. The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Freeman, Nick. “Fighting Like Cats and Dogs: Decadence and Print Media.” In Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray, 87–​101. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Gagnier, Regenia. The Instability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Gross, John. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1991. Hall, N. John. Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Joeres, Ruth-​Ellen Boetcher, and Elizabeth Mittman, eds. The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Lambert, J. W., and Michael Ratcliffe. The Bodley Head: 1887–​1987. London: The Bodley Head, 1987. MacLeod, Kirsten. Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Mix, Katherine. A Study in Yellow: The “Yellow Book” and Its Contributors. London: Constable, 1960. Nelson, James G. Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Sturgis, Matthew. Oscar. London: Head of Zeus, 2019. Sullivan, Alvin, ed. British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837–​1913. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Zorn, Christa. Vernon Lee: Aesthetics, History, and the Victorian Female Intellectual. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003.

Chapter 19

Prose P oet ry All the Rest Is Literature Jane Desmarais and David Weir

The idea of “prose poetry” is one of those paradoxical formulations that work perfectly with the culture of decadence, a culture that derives so much contrarian creative energy from going against the grain of culture itself. If culture is construed, paradigmatically, as one of the formative, developmental, or constitutive measures of society itself, then the practitioners of decadence work against that paradigm by resisting it or, at least, refusing to participate in anything that smacks of Bildung, growth, progress, development, and the like. In this scheme, decadence is disharmonious with both prose and poetry, if the former is construed as a utilitarian or instrumental means of basic communication and the latter is imagined as a form of “high culture,” a heightened alternative to everyday language removed from the useful. Put them together as “prose poetry” and what you get is an oxymoron—​a literary genre that is seemingly self-​contradictory, with the prose subverting the poetry, and vice versa.1 The genre, then, seems ready-​made for a culture intent on resisting bourgeois conventions—​including literary conventions. But, of course, there is nothing ready-​ made about the genre at all, since it was self-​consciously created, or rather adapted, to suit the poetic disposition of the late Romantic poet whose sensibility had begun to shift from the countryside to the city and whose imagination is better described as decadent rather than Romantic. If nature is poetic, then the city is prosaic. But if “[n]‌ature . . . has had her day,”2 any mode of poetic expression that takes inspiration from nature is bound to question whether the various genres so well suited to Romantic contemplation of the natural world—​the sonnet, the ode, the long philosophical poem—​are really the best means of expressing either a sense of metropolitan malaise or a feeling of urbane fascination with the multiple temptations a great capital city like Paris or London affords. True, any number of decadent poets—​Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson—​wrote in conventional poetic forms, but the very conventionality of those forms makes them less suited to the subversive sensibility of decadence. Moreover,

352    Jane Desmarais and David Weir as Symons recognized, “to be modern and yet poetical, is . . . most difficult,”3 and one way of dealing with that difficulty was to cast poetic expression of modern ideas and images in the form of prose. The prose poem, in short, allowed decadents to find their voice in the midst of modernity—​to be modern and yet poetical.

A Decadent Genre Despite the seeming contradictions inherent in the hybrid genre (or perhaps because of them), prose poetry turns out to have been one of the more favored forms of expression among a number of authors associated with decadence. The roots of the genre are French and go back to the formal experimentation of the Romantic poet, playwright, and journalist Aloysius Bertrand (1807–​1841), but Baudelaire’s interventions in the last twelve years of his life (his first prose poems, “Le Crépuscule du Soir” [“Evening Twilight”] and “La Solitude,” were published in 1855) popularized the prose poem and became the standard for later writers. His Petits poèmes en prose experiment with the brevity of the form and its capacity for revelation amid conflict, whether between the traditional and the modern or the spiritual and the urban. In À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), itself a hybrid genre that is as much a compendium of literary and art criticism as a novel, J.-K. Huysmans has his protagonist muse, “Of all forms of literature, the prose poem was Des Esseintes’s favourite” (183). Because of its length, the prose poem would seem to have its closest cognate in the conte or the short story, but Des Esseintes construes the genre as a kind of mini-​novel: Handled by an alchemist of genius it should, he maintained, contain within its small compass and in concentrated form the substance of a novel, while dispensing with the latter’s long-​winded analysis and superfluous descriptions. (183)

In this formulation, a prose poem is not just brief (that would make it more like a short story), but concentrated—​not a shortening of the novel form but a distillation of it. Like so much else in Des Esseintes’s aesthetic world, the prose poem depends for its effect on some distilled essence of experience, like those “bonbons” redolent of “female essence” the character sucks on to evoke memories of former erotic indulgences (96). After all, the character’s name is very close to the French word essence (not to mention dessein, “design”), so it is perhaps unsurprising that he thinks of the prose poem as representing “the dry juice, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art” (183). Likening the prose poem to “osmazome,” or meat extract (see c­ hapter 28), is an amusing metaphor in view of Des Esseintes’s dietary difficulties later on, when his overtaxed digestive system leads his doctor to prescribe peptone enemas in an effort to keep the decadent aesthete alive (193). In a way, the distilled essence of the

Prose Poetry   353 prose poem makes it possible for Des Esseintes to “nourish” his literary tastes in like manner, that is, by “ingesting” only the most refined extracts of literature possible. The prose poem, paradoxically, also allows the literary connoisseur to spend as much time reading as he would normally spend on a novel—​because it “would open up such wide vistas that the reader could muse on its meaning . . . for weeks on end” (183). The prose poem so conceived is the perfect artistic medium for what Huysmans describes as an intellectual communion between a hieratic writer and an ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration between a dozen persons of superior intelligence scattered across the world, an aesthetic treat available to none but the most discerning. (183)4

Des Esseintes’s high estimation of the prose poem is matched by his veneration of Baudelaire, who is unquestionably the one author most admired by the reclusive aesthete: “His admiration for this author knew no bounds” (132). Such admiration is signaled well in advance of this encomium and others that appear in ­chapter 12, which catalogs Des Esseintes’s literary tastes in extensive detail. Indeed, when the character is introduced to us in ­chapter 1, Baudelaire literally has the last word. At the end of this chapter mainly devoted to a description of Des Esseintes’s tastes and choices in interior decoration, the “finishing touch” is a “magnificent triptych,” an ecclesiastical display case whose three panels have been repurposed to show off “three pieces by Baudelaire,” not printed, but copied on real vellum in exquisite missal lettering and marvellously illuminated . . .: on the right and left, the sonnets La Mort des amants [The Death of Lovers] and L’Ennemi [The Enemy], and in the middle, the prose poem bearing the English title Anywhere out of the World. (17)

Here, Baudelaire is almost literally canonized because the “magnificent triptych” is in fact “un merveilleux canon d’église.”5 His poetry is displayed as though it were holy scripture, with the prose poem “Any Where out of the World” (to give the title in Baudelaire’s original spelling) occupying the central position in the display. In 1884, when Huysmans’s novel was published, décadence was well on its way to becoming a defined cultural sensibility with contemporary resonance, with Baudelaire as the key precursor—​or, to underscore Huysmans’s ecclesiastical treatment of the poet—​the principal patron saint of decadence. Baudelaire was not the inventor of prose poetry, but he was easily its most accomplished practitioner by the time decadent culture had become established in 1880s France. Hence there is a clear alignment of the culture of decadence and the literary genre of prose poetry that suggests something more than a chance association, but rather a mutually reinforcing, codependent relationship between culture and form.

354    Jane Desmarais and David Weir

From Poetic Prose to Prose Poetry One explanation for the origin of the prose poem in France is the absence of anything like the tradition of blank verse and even free verse that had become well established in Anglophone poetry well before the mid-​nineteenth century. The blank verse of Shakespeare’s unrhymed iambic pentameter had obviously been spoken on the English stage for centuries. The first edition of Walt Whitman’s free-​verse Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, but Whitman had found inspiration for the form in the King James translation of the Bible, published in 1611, especially the Psalms, and it would be hard to argue that the Psalms and other books of the Bible, such as Ecclesiastes, are not poetry written in the form of free verse. French prosody is far less accommodating to the rhythms of ordinary speech, whereas iambic pentameter assuredly is. In his seminal description of the decadent style prefaced to the posthumous 1868 edition of Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), Théophile Gautier explains that style in traditional terms as the obverse of the classical style, which he says is ill-​suited to nineteenth-​century modernity: “The defining quality of the nineteenth century is hardly its naivety: in portraying its thoughts, dreams, and speculations it needs a rather more intricate idiom than what we might call classical language.”6 Gautier speaks here of the tradition of classicisme, which, unlike the analogous tradition of neoclassicism in England, was not understood by its practitioners as a revival of the classical tradition but a continuation of it (after all, the French development is called classicisme, not néoclassicisme). Among its most famous practitioners and apologists (Pierre Corneille, Molière, Jean Racine, and Nicolas Boileau, among others), Gautier names only Racine, and then only in the context of diction: It is not hard to see that the fourteen hundred words of Racine’s dialect are not sufficient for an author who has set himself the hard task of rendering modern people and modern things in their infinite complexity and varied colours.7

Gautier then suggests that in order to express the complexities of “modern people and modern things” Baudelaire found inspiration, paradoxically, in those authors associated with the Latin decadence (Apuleius, Petronius, Juvenal, St. Augustine, and Tertullian) rather than the Golden Age (Virgil and Cicero).8 The explanation for the paradox that finds modernity in antiquity is, of course, that the writers of both eras have in common the social and political sense of imperial decline, which finds cultural expression as decadence. Gautier says nothing about the prosody of classicisme, but a logical extension of his remarks is that if Baudelaire found the vocabulary of Racine constraining, he would also have found the prosody likewise limiting. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more severely formulaic form than Racine’s alexandrine line, with its strict tercet meter and strong medial caesura, so it is easy to understand Baudelaire making the break from the French classical tradition in prosody as well as diction, and certainly no form is freer of

Prose Poetry   355 both the diction and rhythmic phrasing of classicisme than the prose poem. After all, the obverse of classicisme would be décadence, just as the conventional antinomy of poetry is prose. Once again, there is a mutually reinforcing dynamic between the culture and the form. This explanation of the origins of prose poetry as one that is bound up with the need for the poet of decadence to find new forms of expression must be supplemented with the further explanation that Baudelaire did not invent the form but discovered it. As he wrote in his lettre-​dédicace to his friend Arsène Houssaye apropos Le spleen de Paris (Paris Spleen, 1869): I have a small confession. Leafing through Aloysius Bertrand’s famous Gaspard de la Nuit for at least the twentieth time . . . , the idea came to me to try something analogous, and to apply to the description of modern life, or rather a modern and more abstract life, the process he applied to his portrait of an earlier age, curiously picturesque.9

The reference is to a book published posthumously in 1842 that, in Jeremy Noel-​Tod’s description, is “a collection of historical vignettes offered to the reader as the vision of an old man who may be the Devil,”10 as the epithet “of the Night” (“de la Nuit”) suggests. In the guise of his persona Gaspard, Bertrand describes scenes from seventeenth-​century Holland, as in the opening poem, “Harlem”: Haarlem, that fine free-​hand sketch, birthplace of the Flemish school, Haarlem as painted by Breughel the Elder, Peter Neefs, David Teniers, and Paul Rembrandt. With its canal full of shimmering blue water, and its church with flaming, golden windows, and the stone porches with bed-​linen drying in the sun, with its roofs, green with straw. . . . And the drinkers smoking in some dark dive, and the hotel-​keeper’s servant hanging up a dead pheasant in the window.11 (Harlem, cette admirable bambochade qui résume l’école flamande, Harlem peint par Jean-​Breughel, Peeter-​Neef, David-​Téniers et Paul Rembrandt; Et le canal où l’eau bleue tremble, et l’église où le vitrage d’or flamboie, et le stoel où sèche le linge au soleil, et les toits, verts de houblon. . . . Et les buveurs qui fument dans l’estaminet borgne, et la servante de l’hôtellerie, qui accroche à la fenêtre un faisan mort.)12

Baudelaire’s description of Bertrand’s verb-​free technique as pictorial or painterly is accurate, in that the vignettes in the collection were largely inspired by Flemish and Dutch genre painting.13 More germane to Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, however, is his comment that the process Bertrand applied to “an earlier age” (here, life during the Dutch Golden Age) might be applied to “modern life.” In the letter to Houssaye, Baudelaire goes on to muse somewhat cryptically about “this miracle, a poetic prose,” which, he adds, would be “musical without rhythm or rhyme, supple and choppy enough to accommodate the

356    Jane Desmarais and David Weir lyrical movement of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of consciousness” (3). In a letter of 1859, Victor Hugo acknowledged Baudelaire’s avant-​gardism (he was astonished by the poems “Petits Vieillards” (“Seven Old Men”) and “Petites Vieilles” (“The Little Old Women”), and declared that he had created “un frisson nouveau” (a new thrill).14 A century later, Walter Benjamin interpreted the jolting sense of shock that Baudelaire articulates here as a figure for “contact with the metropolitan masses,” not in any collective political sense, but rather in a more random sense as “the amorphous crowd of passers-​by, the people in the street.”15 No doubt this is true, but surely contact with the crowd is not the only form of urban experience capable of awakening the poet’s consciousness to sudden lyrical sympathy. The key point is that the “lyrical movement” and “bump and lurch” that the lived experience of the city entails also creates the need for a poetic form flexible and adaptable enough to convey that experience: It is above all in the habit of huge cities, the endless meeting of their ways, that this obsessive ideal originates. You have yourself wished to put into song [chanson] the glazier’s grating cry, and render in lyrical prose its heartbreaking resonances, carried up to attic rooms higher than the mist in the street. (3)

Tellingly, Baudelaire mentions a traditional verse form—​and a particularly French verse form—​the chanson, as an inadequate means of rendering the lyric sense of the urban scene the poet feels when he is startled by some detail of that scene. Baudelaire’s adaptation of the literary form Bertrand devised to present the urban details of an ancient city to his own need to express both the anxieties and pleasures of the modern metropolis, combined with Gautier’s insight that the poet was forced to turn to classical tradition to find the means to express the dual experiences of modernity and decline—​that is, decadence—​makes the prose poem seem even more suited to the culture of decadence. The congruence of decadence and prose poetry is well illustrated by “Any Where out of the World.” The title is taken from “The Bridge of Sighs,” a poem by the English poet Thomas Hood (1799–​1845), whose middling career was spent mostly on humorous verse but with a late burst of social protest, of which “The Bridge of Sighs” is an example.16 Hood’s poem is not about the eponymous bridge in Venice, but instead concerns an impoverished young girl who commits suicide by throwing herself off a bridge into an unnamed “black flowing river”: Mad from life’s history, Glad to death’s mystery, Swift to be hurl’d—​ Any where, any where Out of the world!17

The suicide subtext perhaps adds further resonance to the bold metaphor that opens Baudelaire’s prose poem: “Life is like a hospital where every patient is possessed by the

Prose Poetry   357 desire to change beds” (94) (“Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit”).18 The figure establishes the human condition as an uneasy amalgam of suffering, sickness, and dissatisfaction, the decadent connotations of such helped along by the juxtaposition of suffering (malade) and desire (désir). And while the word does mean “patient,” malade is more ambiguous, connoting meanings outside the medical context that suggest an ability to forbear annoyance and pain. The ambiguity that attaches to mal (evil, sickness) in the title Les fleurs du mal likely operates to some degree with malade in the opening line of “Any Where out of the World,” especially given that the lifelong Catholic Baudelaire would insist that the state of original sin is tantamount to the human condition. And what makes all of these compressed meanings—​Huysmans would say “distilled”—​so compelling is that the poetic form is prose: the metaphor comes across as a direct statement, as though all the decadence implicit in it were a matter of fact, not figure. The declaration of decadence in “Any Where out of the World” continues with an extended apostrophe, another poetic or, at least, rhetorical device, whereby the poet addresses his own soul, speaking as a kind of metaphysical travel agent. How about a warmer climate, “my poor, shivering soul” (94) (“mon âme, pauvre âme refroidie” [1:303]), like Lisbon? Or Holland, the beauty of which the soul so admires “in museums” (94) (“dans les musées” [1:304]). Maybe Rotterdam? Or: “Perhaps Batavia would be more welcome?” (94) (“Batavia te sourirait peut-​être davantage?” [1:304]). The reference to Batavia, now Jakarta, capital of Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), highlights the colonialist background of much of the French travel writing of Baudelaire’s age, which surged in popularity after the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 spurred interest in foreign destinations and other cultures.19 If there is a specific type of prose that serves as the model for this particular example of prose poetry, travel writing would be it. After the offer of Batavia, where “the spirit of Europe [is] married to the beauty of the tropics” (94) (“l’esprit de l’Europe [est] marié à la beauté tropicale” [1:304])—​a line that makes the colonialist context clear—​the soul remains silent, which leads the poet to ask if his soul is “so numb nothing gives you pleasure except your misery?” (94) (“à ce point d’engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal?” [1:304]). Now, the poet-​cum-​ spiritual travel agent recommends the town of Tonio, Finland, situated in the northernmost reaches of the Baltic Sea, or better, the Pole itself, as the last, best place of “countries that mean death” (94) (“les pays qui sont analogies de la Mort” [1:304]). There is a certain logic to this would-​be tour being routed through Scandinavia, the birthplace of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–​1772), whose doctrine of correspondences, signaled here by the French word analogies, contributed so much to Baudelaire’s poetic imagination. As in the sonnet “Correspondances,” so here, with a natural image serving as a spiritual symbol, as the poet contemplates “life” in that land of eternal twilight and “that complement of nothingness” (“cette moitié de néant” [1:304]): There we will take long baths of shadow, while, for our delectation, the Aurora Borealis will, from time to time, send down their rosy bouquets, like reflections of Hell’s fireworks! (95)

358    Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres, cependant que, pour nous divertir, les aurores boréales nous enverront de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d’un feu d’artifice de l’Enfer! [1:304])

At this point the hitherto silent soul “erupts” (“fait explosion”) and utters the French version of the sentiment contained in the English title: “ ‘Anywhere, anywhere, so long as it’s out of this world!’ ” (94–​95) (“ ‘N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!’ ” [1:304]). The eruption of the soul seems the logical analogue of the “bump and lurch” of modern urban life that Baudelaire describes in his letter to Houssaye and that Hugo and Benjamin identify as a lyrical reaction to the metropolitan masses. In this context it is worth noting that the itinerary sketched out in the poem is mostly urban, with each city selected for its supposed correspondence to some aspect of the soul: the alleged lack of vegetation in Lisbon matches the soul’s mineral austerity, for example, with the combination of movement and stillness in Holland (no Dutch city is named, but the reference is a nod, probably, to Bertrand’s “Harlem”) being an analog of a like tendency in the soul, whose inclination for travel then takes it to Rotterdam, a city of ships with its “forests of masts” (“forêts de mâts” [1:304]), and thence to Jakarta, the colonial outpost that corresponds, paradoxically, to the contradictory human condition—​ the desire to change beds in the same hospital—​since that city combines the “spirit of Europe,” the very “bed” that the soul seeks to escape, and its antithesis, “the beauty of the tropics” (95). In fact, antithesis appears to be a condition of correspondence in this poem that proves the impossibility of escape, so perhaps we should not be surprised that the final stages of the itinerary take us through the land of Swedenborg into the antipodal realm of ice and snow, where, despite being removed from the jolting reality of the modern city, the soul experiences a sudden shock of correspondence, reversing ice into fire and transforming the frozen pole into an analog of the flaming pit of hell.

Urban Correspondences The reference to “les forêts de mâts” in “Any Where out of the World” recalls “des forêts de symboles” (forests of symbols) in the sonnet “Correspondances” in The Flowers of Evil.20 As is well known, the octave of that sonnet evokes the ancient metaphysical tradition that construes nature as an index of divine significance, the precise meaning of which might be elusive, but things in nature are nonetheless there for humankind to “read” in order to intuit spiritual truths. As numerous commentators have noted, Baudelaire, like Honoré de Balzac and other contemporaries, encountered the most forceful explanation of this metaphysical system in the writings of Swedenborg, where the idea of divine communication to humankind by means of natural symbols that only the gifted seer can read and interpret is set down in detail.21 In “Correspondances,” Baudelaire begins in conventional Swedenborgian fashion by describing Nature as a temple where “living columns” (19) (“vivants piliers” [1:11])—​an

Prose Poetry   359 evident figure for trees in a forest—​send forth obscure messages composed of “confusing speech” (19) (“confuses paroles” [1:11]). Generally, words are formed of articulated sounds, and so it seems, at first, in the case of these words that are really secret symbols carrying some metaphysical message from beyond, because they are compared to “long echoes” (19) (“longs échos” [1:11]). But the comparison is just that, since the second quatrain concludes by informing us that the message we are tasked with interpreting comes in the form not only of sound, but also of odor and color. Moreover, the message that started out encoded as a natural symbol corresponding to something spiritual beyond nature now concerns a different form of correspondence—​not spiritual, but sensuous. The divine message may echo through nature but now the senses, it seems, echo one another: “So perfumes, colours, sounds may correspond” (19) (“Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent” [1:11]). The sestet of the sonnet provides concrete examples of the abstract principle of sensuous, synesthetic correspondence that the octave ends up asserting. Some perfumes smell “fresh as a baby’s skin” (19) (“comme des chairs d’enfants” [1:11]), others smell “mellow as oboes” (19) (“Doux comme les hautbois” [1:11]), and still others smell “green as meadow grass” (19) (“verts comme les prairies” [1:11]). But there is another category of perfumes whose smell evokes things less innocent, sweet, and natural than infants, oboes, and prairies. These other perfumes are “corrupted, rich, triumphant” (19) (“corrompus, riches et triomphantes” [1:11]). Corruption, richness (in the sense of both sumptuousness and material wealth), and triumph are a long way from the beginning of the poem, which signals through its title and first four lines the spiritual system of correspondences that is supposed to permit inference into divine meaning through natural symbols. Spiritual correspondence, in short, has become secularized to the point that things themselves now appear infinite (“des choses infinies” [1:11]), with the mind and the senses now subject to the sort of rapture formerly reserved for the soul (“les transports de l’esprit et des sens” [1:11]). “Correspondances” may secularize spirituality, but it does not urbanize it, that process being reserved for the prose poetry, as “Any Where out of the World” (partially) illustrates. Despite Baudelaire’s plan to publish a large collection of a hundred-​plus prose poems divided into four thematic sections (Parisian themes, dreams, symbols and moralities, and “other possible headings”), only forty-​five made it into print during his lifetime (five more were discovered among his personal effects after his death).22 They represent scenes recorded by a solitary narrator who wanders through the city, experiencing it as both a public arena and a myriad of interior spaces. His original intention, it would seem, was to include only one themed section dealing directly with Parisian daily life, but, taken together, the fifty poems that constitute Paris Spleen are, as Martin Sorrell explains, “a quirky montage of a city at a particular historical moment . . . the reimagining of the here-​and-​now, the recreation of this world, of this Paris, a modern city in want of modern poetry.”23 The experience of the narrator is a series of insights, memories, and rapid shifts and transformations that have the potential to be poetic and divine but which serve only as reminders of quotidian reality, whether that be getting drunk, smelling a beloved’s

360    Jane Desmarais and David Weir hair, crossing the boulevard, or looking in a mirror or out of a window.24 Like the narrator who watches the clouds go by in “La Soupe et Les Nuages” (“Soup and Clouds”), contemplating “the shifting architectures God creates from vapour” (88) (“les mouvantes architectures que Dieu fait avec les vapeurs” [1:298]), the reader is repeatedly brought to their senses, often with “a violent fist landed in my back” (88) (“un violent coup de poing dans le dos” [1:298]).25 Irritated by the narrator’s daydreaming and neglect of the soup she has just served him, his mistress—​“the mad little green-​eyed monster” (88) (“la petite folle monstrueuse aux yeux verts” [1:298])—​calls him a “bloody cloud-​merchant” (88) (“sacré bougre de marchand de nuages” [1:298]), her brandy-​soaked rebarbative a rebuke to his inattention as well as to the poverty of the narrator-​poet’s analogy between the clouds and his mistress’s eyes.26 Here, the rebuke serves to point out, in effect, the limitations of self-​consciously poetic diction in conventional Romantic poetry, which the prose poem is well-​suited to surpass. In “La chambre double” (“The Double Room”), the bailiff ’s knock on the door forces the drugged and hallucinating poet to rouse himself and recognize the disgusting hovel he lives in. His body, which has been in a delightful laudanum-​induced state of suspension in a room that seemed to him to be “truly spiritual” (9) (“véritablement spirituelle” [1:233]), is jolted out of its “life asleep” (9) (“vie somnambulique” [1:234]) into a confrontation with the physical reality of the present moment: And that fragrance of another world, which sent my seasoned sensibility reeling, has been displaced, alas, by the rank odour of tobacco mixed with God knows what stomach-​churning damp. Now lungs breathe rancid desolation. (10) (Et ce parfum d’un autre monde, dont je m’énivrais avec une sensibilité perfectionnée, hélas! il est remplacé par une fétide odeur de tabac mêlée à je ne sais quelle nauséabonde moisissure. On respire ici maintenant le ranci de la désolation. [1:235])

The crepuscular hothouse atmosphere of the hallucinated dream room—​warm, harmonious, and expansive—​suddenly contracts. The furniture and furnishings that spoke to the poet of flowers, skies, and setting suns (“Les meubles ont l’air de rêver; on les dirait doués d’une vie somnambulique, comme le végétal et le minéral” [1:233–​234], now reveal themselves to be “stupide,” covered in dust and spittle. The narrator experiences unenhanced reality as restrictive and brutish, subject to the bounds of Time with “all his fiendish retinue of Memories, Regrets, Fits, Phobias, Anguish, Nightmares, Rage and Neuroses” (10) (“tout son démoniaque cortège de Souvenirs, de Regrets, de Spasmes, de Peurs, d’Angoisses, de Cauchemars, de Colères et de Névroses” [1:235]). Unlike “Correspondances,” where nature is a portal to the metaphysical realm, the narrator-​artist of the prose poem “Le Confiteor de l’Artiste” (“The Artist’s Confiteor”) fails to reach a transcendent state in his encounter with the visible landscape. Rather than allowing him to capture the material world through art, the material world does not yield to the limitations of his artistic imagination. Instead, it makes him feel ill: “The unconcern of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle, I find sickening” (7) (“L’insensibilité de la

Prose Poetry   361 mer, l’immuabilité du spectacle me révoltent” [1:232]). Nature does not care for art, and the artist confesses that he suffers from wounded pride, admitting defeat. Instead of affording the artist access to the divine sublimity of nature, the material world reflects the artist’s constrained, hapless existence; he is penetrated by this realization as by a fencer’s sword. The immensity and profundity of the landscape overwhelm him as he is swept up in a tremendous “malaise and active suffering” (7) (“malaise et une souffrance positive” [1:232]). The combination of yearning and suffering is a common theme in The Flowers of Evil, best epitomized perhaps by the figure of the swan in the poem “Le cygne” (“The Swan”), stranded in the dust of a building site with neck outstretched to the sky imploring it to rain, but through the freer, more expansive form of the prose poem, liberated from the fetter of line breaks and rhyme schemes, Baudelaire is able to offer sustained reflections on a theme that can be read individually or as a sequence. Some of the prose poems in Paris Spleen seem to comment on certain poems in The Flowers of Evil by offering a more urban, secular, or real-​world version of themes treated in a more general, spiritual manner in the poems of the earlier volume.27 A good example of such urban secularization is “La fausse monnaie” (“Counterfeit Coin”), which counters the poetic flights of “L’irrémédiable” (“The Irremediable”), one of the poems that concludes the Spleen et idéale section, with a more down-​to-​earth example. In “The Irremediable,” the lack of remedy against the machinations of Satan that limit human destiny is conveyed through a series of figures (a drowning swimmer, a prisoner in a witch’s den, a schooner locked in ice), all “p‌ure emblems . . . /​of an irremediable evil” (161) (“Emblèmes net . . . /​D’une fortune irrémédiable” [1:76]), the sole solace for humanity being the ironic awareness of sinfulness—​“Evil aware of itself ” (161) (“La conscience dans le Mal!” [1:76]). This same ironic sentiment is expressed in “Counterfeit Coin” by means of a mordant anecdote whereby a miserly friend of the poet gives a beggar a counterfeit coin. After speculating about what might happen to the beggar—​he could go to prison for passing counterfeit currency, but he also might experience a few days of prosperity—​the poet has an insight about the friend’s motives that also applies to humanity more generally: “Wickedness can never be excused, but there is merit in knowing we are wicked; the one vice beyond redemption is to do bad things out of stupidity” (59) (“On n’est jamais excusable d’être méchant, mais il y a quelque mérite à savoir qu’on l’est; et le plus irréparable des vices est de faire le mal par bêtise” [1:274]). Here, the word is irréparable, not irrémédiable, but the meaning is close. In the poem, there is relief (soulagement) in knowing that one is doing evil, whereas in the prose poem there is merit (mérite) in the awareness of wrongdoing. These differences aside, “The Counterfeit Coin” could almost serve as a gloss on “The Irremediable,” an everyday example of the consciousness of evil rendered in less elevated language that substitutes a decidedly urban sensibility for the proto-​symboliste modality of the poem in The Flowers of Evil. These examples of the secularizing maneuver whereby a poem in The Flowers of Evil is subjected to a kind of reverse alchemy in Paris Spleen, with Baudelaire’s shimmering diction and formal versification transformed into the dross of the everyday (while still maintaining its metaphorical power in prose form) could be multiplied many times. Indeed, critics have long recognized that “Paris Spleen is the prose pendant to the

362    Jane Desmarais and David Weir verse of The Flowers of Evil” that reworks some of the poems in the 1857 collection.28 A few beg for comparison because they share similar—​sometimes identical—​titles. In “L’Horloge” (“The Clock”) in The Flowers of Evil, the clock is “a sinister, impassive god” (161) (“dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible” [1:76]), a metronome of mortality that counts down the minutes until “it’s too late!” (163) (“il est trop tard!” [1:77]). In “The Clock” from Paris Spleen, the poet tells the time by gazing into the “gorgeous dial” (31) (“au fond de ses yeux adorables” [1:251]) of a cat’s eyes, seeing “the time distinctly, always the same, a vast solemn, spacious hour, undivided into minutes and seconds” (31) (“je vois toujours l’heure distinctement, toujours la même, une heure vaste, solennelle, grande comme l’espace, sans divisions de minutes ni de secondes” [1:251]). The earlier clock poem maintains its ticking intensity until the end, but the one in Paris Spleen turns at the conclusion and subverts itself, after the poet declares that what he sees in the cat’s eyes is not time, but eternity (“je vois l’heure; il est l’Éternité!” [1:252]): This, Madame, is a praiseworthy madrigal, is it not? And as magniloquent as you. To be honest, I have had such pleasure weaving this highfalutin galanterie I shall ask nothing of you in return. (31) (N’est-​ce pas, madame, que voici un madrigal vraiment méritoire, et aussi emphatique que vous-​même? En vérité, j’ai eu tant de plaisir à broder cette prétentieuse galanterie, que je ne vous demanderai rien en échange. [1:252])

This and other prose poems in Paris Spleen in a like register suggest that among the poetic conventions Baudelaire means to subvert are those that he perpetuated himself. This point becomes clear when “Bénédiction,” the very first poem in The Flowers of Evil (aside from “Au Lecteur” [“To the Reader”]), is set beside “Perte d’aureole” (“Losing a Halo”), one of the five prose poems not published in Baudelaire’s lifetime but found in his literary remains. “Bénédiction” is perhaps the most Romantic poem in The Flowers of Evil because it preserves the myth of the poet as a singular individual whose powers of language are a divine gift, “an edict of the powers supreme” (11) (“un décret des puissances suprêmes” [1:7]). Cursed and rejected by society (and his own mother), the poet cultivates his God-​given talents in solitude, weaving his own “mystic crown” (15) (“ma couronne mystique” [1:9]): “This diadem of dazzling clarity” (15) (“ce beau diadème éblouissant et clair” [1:9]). As the title “Losing a Halo” makes clear, by the end of his life Baudelaire regarded the Romantic myth of the divinely inspired poet with ironic detachment, if not open disdain. The prose poem in Paris Spleen finds the poet in dialogue with someone “in a disreputable place” (90) (“dans un mauvais lieu” [1:299]) after “darting across the boulevard, picking my way through the mud and chaos” (90) (“comme je traversais le boulevard, en grande hâte, et que je sautillais dans la boue, à travers ce chaos mouvant” [1:299]). In the rush, the poet explains, “a sudden movement . . . dislodged my halo, which fell onto the filthy asphalt” (90) (“mon auréole, dans un mouvement brusque, a glissé de ma tête dans la fange du macadam” [1:300]). Too fearful of the street traffic to retrieve it, the poet finds the loss liberating: “Now I can go about incognito, do bad things, descend to the lowest levels” (90), like everyone else (“Je puis maintenant me promener incognito, faire

Prose Poetry   363 des actions basses, et me livrer à la crapule, comme les simples mortels” [1:300]). Upon its discovery “Losing a Halo” was deemed unpublishable,29 which helps to make the point about prose poetry—​and literary prose more generally—​as the medium more amenable to the expression of decadence in the context of urban modernity. Indeed, Baudelaire says as much when the freshly de-​haloed poet, snug in some disreputable place conversing with someone equally disreputable, realizes that he no longer needs the dignity and esteem the aura of poetry confers.

Conclusion Baudelaire’s innovative modifications of the genre originated by Bertrand created the literary conditions for later poets to adapt the form to their own creative concerns. George Moore, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Ernest Dowson, and Oscar Wilde all wrote prose poetry, but their purposes were all different one from the other. Where Baudelaire had used the poem to describe aspects of modern life, Dowson subverted the narrative conventions of the fairy tale, and Wilde took inspiration from the biblical parable, referring in a letter to Alfred Douglas to the Gospels as “the four prose-​poems about Christ.”30 Baudelaire made elaborate notes for a large volume of prose poems; Dowson rarely mentioned his. They were all inspired, however, by the genre’s free and subversive character, which appealed, and continues to appeal, to writers working beyond conventional boundaries.31 Symbolists liked the freer form of prose poetry, as did the circle of writers around W. B. Yeats. As Margaret Stetz notes, “the lawless zone between poetry and prose” drew the attention of “those whose politics—​whether social, sexual, or artistic—​were radical in general . . . this often meant socialists, New Women, and members of the Celtic Renaissance, all groups with their own reasons for disliking the enforcement of either literary or other sorts of laws.”32 Anarchism and decadence had quite a few points of connection at the fin de siècle, and the lawless genre of prose poetry would seem to be one of them. The anarchistic independence of the poet from the laws of both society and literature might be yet another one of those self-​fashioning strategies—​like the pose of the dandy—​ that seem endemic to decadence. Yet however much this aesthetic affiliation with anarchism might satisfy the individual decadent’s rebellious sensibility, it also illustrates the radical transformation of the role of the artist in society that occurred over the long nineteenth century. Baudelaire’s “Losing a Halo” helps to make this point about the alienation of the artist from society at large. A brief sketch of the poem first appears in reduced form in the poet’s Intimate Journals, where, using language almost identical to the prose poem, the poet recounts losing his halo, but in this early version he recovers it: Fortunately, I had time to recover it, but a moment later the unhappy thought slipped into my brain that this was an ill omen; and from that instant the idea would not let me alone; it has given me no peace all day.33

364    Jane Desmarais and David Weir Baudelaire was not the only mid-​nineteenth-​century thinker to have intuited a change in the vocation of poet. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describe the change as a symptom of class struggle: The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-​labourers.34

Benjamin and Theodor Adorno would later follow Baudelaire and Marx in seeking to understand how the aura of art lost in an age of industrialized production and capitalist economics might be restored, or, if not restored, at least explained in historical terms.35 Baudelaire, of course, hardly offered a critique of the changing cultural conditions he was living through, but the fact that he redirected his talents from the sort of halo-​heavy poetry represented by “Bénédiction” and other expressions of l’idéal in The Flowers of Evil into such witty, splenetic, anecdotal prose poetry as “Any Where out of the World,” “Soup and Clouds,” “The Double Room,” “The Artist’s Confiteor,” “Counterfeit Coin,” “The Clock,” and others, suggests he might well have come to terms with losing that halo, finding a measure of peace in its loss at last.

Notes 1. For a full discussion of “The Prose Poem as a Decadent Genre,” see ­chapter 1 of Margueritte S. Murphy, A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 9–​60. 2. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 22. Further references cited parenthetically. 3. Arthur Symons, “Mr Henley’s Poetry,” Fortnightly Review 52, no. 308 (August 1892): 184. 4. Huysmans’s description here of an elite group of readers is characteristic of decadent culture more generally, what Matthew Potolsky, in The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11, calls “the decadent republic of letters,” “a self-​selected community of taste.” 5. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Garnier-​Flammarion, 1978), 75. 6. Théophile Gautier, “From ‘Charles Baudelaire,’ ” in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 79. 7. Gautier, “From ‘Charles Baudelaire,’ ” 80. 8. Gautier, “From ‘Charles Baudelaire,’ ” 80. 9. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, and Wine and Hashish, trans. Martin Sorrell (Richmond, UK: Alma Classics, 2015), 3. Further references cited parenthetically. 10. Jeremy Noel-​Tod, introduction to The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson (London: Penguin, 2020), xxvi. 11. Aloysius Bertrand, “Haarlem,” trans. Michael Benedikt, in The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, 408–​9.

Prose Poetry   365 12. Louis [Aloysius] Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot (Paris: Société d’éditions d’art, 1903), 1–​2. 13. Noel-​Tod, introduction to The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, xxvi. 14. “Que faites-​vous quand vous écrivez ces vers saisissants Les Sept Vieillards et Les Petites Vieilles, que vous me dédiez, et dont je vous remercie? Que faites-​vous? Vous marchez. Vous allez en avant. Vous dotez le ciel de l’art d’on ne sait quel rayon macabre. Vous créez un frisson nouveau” (What are you doing when you write those striking lines Seven Old Men and The Little Old Women, which you dedicate to me, and for which I thank you? What do you do? You walk. You go forward. You endow the sky of art with some macabre ray. You create a new thrill [our translation]). Victor Hugo, letter to Baudelaire, October 6, 1859. Claude Pichois, with Jean Ziegler, eds., Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), 2:1128–​1129. 15. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 165. 16. For a brief discussion of Thomas Hood’s career, see the “Prologue” to Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, A Self-​Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood (Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), viii–​xxii. 17. Thomas Hood, “The Bridge of Sighs,” In Poems by Thomas Hood (London: Edward Moxon, 1846), 67. 18. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), 1:303. Further references cited parenthetically. 19. Charles Forsdick, “Travel Writing in French,” in The Cambridge History of Travel Writing, ed. Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 241. 20. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 19. Further references cited parenthetically. 21. Enid Starkie, in Baudelaire (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1958), 19, 225–​28, sees the influence of Swedenborg as critical to Baudelaire’s artistic development. 22. Sorrell, introduction to Paris Spleen, vii. In a letter to Sainte-​Beuve dated May 4, 1865, Baudelaire wrote: “Faire cent bagatelles laborieuses qui exigent une bonne humeur constante (bonne humeur nécessaire même, pour traiter des sujets tristes), une excitation bizarre qui a besoin de spectacles, de foules, de musiques, de réverbères même, voilà ce que j’ai voulu faire! Je n’en suis qu’à soixante, et je ne peux plus aller. J’ai besoin de ce fameux bain de multitudes dont l’incorrection vous avez justement choqué” (To make a hundred trifling things which require constant good humor (good humor necessary even to deal with sad subjects), a strange excitement which needs spectacle, crowds, music, even street lights, that is what I wanted to do! I’ve done only sixty, and I can’t do any more. I need that famous bath of multitudes, the impropriety of which has justly shocked you [our translation]). See Charles Baudelaire, Lettres, 1841–​1866 (Paris: Société de Mercure de France, 1907), 433–​34. 23. Sorrell, introduction to Paris Spleen, ix. 24. See “Enivrez-​vous” (“Be Drunk”), “Un Hemisphère dans une Chevelure” (“A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair”), “Perte d’Auréole” (“Losing a Halo”), “Le Miroir” (“The Mirror”), “Les Fenêtres” (“Windows”) in Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, trans. Sorrell, 73, 32, 90, 81, 76 respectively. (Œuvres complètes, 1:286, 252, 299, 292, 288). 25. In his preface to Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Symons acknowledged the violence in the prose poems, claiming that “[v]‌iolent emotions produced these prose poems: and these, which are original in the extreme, ironical, cruel, complex, subtle, Satanical, are,

366    Jane Desmarais and David Weir like the rest of his impeccable work, the direct result of his heredity and of his nerves” (London: The Casanova Society, 1925), n.p. 26. See Maria C. Scott, Baudelaire’s “Le Spleen de Paris”: Shifting Perspectives (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 161–​3, for a more detailed analysis of this poem in relation to the “awkward contiguity” between the material and the immaterial. 27. Interestingly, none of the prose poems that seem to complement poems in The Flowers of Evil, including “L’Invitation au voyage,” “Le Désespoir de la vieille” (“The Old Woman’s Despair”), and “La Fausse Monnaie,” were included in Baudelaire’s “Plans and Projects” for a volume of a hundred-​plus prose poems, suggesting that he did not envisage them as part of a more coherent prose-​poem project. See Appendix of Charles Baudelaire, The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo, trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 109–​16. 28. Sorrell, introduction to Paris Spleen, v. 29. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 192. 30. Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters, ed. Rupert-​Hart Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 211. 31. Noel-​Tod refers to the “freedom of the prose poem to follow the unmetrical pathways of thought,” in the introduction to The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, xxiv. 32. Margaret Stetz, “ ‘Ballads in Prose’: Genre Crossing in Late-​Victorian Women’s Writing,” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 2 (2006): 628, 620. 33. Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, trans. Christopher Isherwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1983), 36. 34. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-​Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 476. 35. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 217–​51; and Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hulot-​Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 112: “In Benjamin’s interpretation, Baudelaire’s fable of the man who lost his aureole describes not just the demise of aura but aura itself; if artworks shine, the objectivation of aura is the path by which it perishes.”

Further Reading Bernard, Suzanne. Le Poème en prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos jours. Paris: Nizet, 1959. Caws, Mary Ann, and Hermine Riffaterre, eds. The Prose Poem in France: Theory and Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Gosetti, Valentina. Aloysius Bertrand’s “Gaspard de la Nuit”: Beyond the Prose Poem. Cambridge: Legenda, 2016. Kaplan, Edward K. Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Esthetic, the Ethical, and the Religious in The Parisian Prowler. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Monroe, Jonathan. A Poetry of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. Monson, Jane, ed. British Prose Poetry: The Poems without Lines. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Murphy, Margueritte S. A Tradition of Subversion: The Prose Poem in English from Wilde to Ashbery. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.

Prose Poetry   367 Noel-​Tod, Jeremy, ed. The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson. London: Penguin, 2020. Santilli, N[ikki]. Such Rare Citings: The Prose Poem in English Literature. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. Scott, Maria C. Baudelaire’s “Le Spleen de Paris”: Shifting Perspectives. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005. Simon, John Ivan. The Prose Poem as a Genre in Nineteenth-​century European Literature. New York: Garland, 1987. Stetz, Margaret. “ ‘Ballads in Prose’: Genre Crossing in Late-​Victorian Women’s Writing.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34, no. 2 (2006): 619–​29. Ziegler, Alan. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-​Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. New York: Persea Books, 2014.

Chapter 20

Cinema Adapting Decadence David Weir

Cinema was born the same year decadence died: the public exhibition of the Lumière brothers’ cinématographe and Oscar Wilde’s conviction on charges of “gross indecency” both occurred in 1895. Saying that the medium of film began the process of its artistic maturation just as the culture of decadence entered a period of decline may be something of an overstatement, but the point needs to be made that cinema and decadence follow different developmental timelines. Unlike all those avant-​garde movements of the early twentieth century—​futurism, expressionism, Dada, surrealism—​that grew up with cinema and found artistic expression through it, by the time film emerged as a true art form, decadence was mostly a thing of the past. In the case of surrealism, a shared aesthetic based on the strange juxtapositions of dream imagery informed both literature and cinema, as Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien andalou (Andalusian Dog, 1929) illustrates. When the two Spaniards made that film, they were part of a group that included literary types like André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and many others—​all members of the same movement who contributed to the same journals, participated in the same meetings, and so on. No such concord obtains in the case of fin-​de-​siècle decadence and modern cinema—​as the adjectives fin-​de-​siècle and modern suggest, each belongs to an altogether different, and separate, era. But the relationship between cinema and decadence can be reckoned in other ways. The “original” decadence may have begun to fade away when cinema was in its infancy, but by the time the medium reached artistic maturity in the 1920s a new set of social circumstances brought that earlier decadence back into fashion. The stylish hedonism of the Jazz Age contributed to a revival of interest in Wilde and other fin-​de-​siècle figures associated with decadence, even as contemporary writers influenced by the 1890s adapted the decadent sensibility to their own times. The phenomenon occurred both at the level of mediocre figures like James Huneker and original talents like F. Scott Fitzgerald, each of whom adapted decadent culture in distinctive ways.1 Playwrights and novelists in the 1920s rewrote decadence, in a sense, but they did not produce new

Cinema   369 “versions” of Wilde, say—​yet that is precisely what directors like Alla Nazimova and Ernst Lubitsch did when they adapted his plays Salomé (1922) and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), respectively, to the silent screen. These two adaptations, in fact, illustrate two radically different approaches to the problem of adapting literary decadence to film. Moreover, each film ultimately leads, respectively, to two subsequent cinema aesthetics that could not be more unlike: the camp and the classic. Yet the story of decadence and cinema does not end there. It goes without saying that classic cinema, like classicism generally, is rational and reserved, the product of calculated technique and refined taste. By contrast, there is nothing reserved about camp: an over-​the-​top style is a hallmark of the aesthetic, an exercise in artistic excess that gleefully transgresses the bounds of good taste into outright tastelessness. That description covers the case of Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988), a film that is as much an adaptation of Nazimova’s Salomé as of Wilde’s play. But Russell’s film differs from Nazimova’s in that his is a deliberate exercise in camp, whereas hers is inadvertent. Hence her Salomé seems a “purer” example of the aesthetic, since camp often misfires, falls short, goes wrong, loses its way, or otherwise manifests itself as an art of unintended consequences. Russell’s calculated camp nonetheless recognizes certain aesthetic boundaries (his film respects the text of Wilde’s play, for example), but what happens when a filmmaker deliberately offends good taste with a kind of overdetermined camp that is unabashedly designed to disgust? The result, surely, is “trash,” an extreme exercise in camp contrivance that titillates the audience by testing the limits of taste, as with John Waters’s Polyester (1981). Nazimova’s Salomé is camp because the film is less than the sum of the filmmaker’s artistic ambitions. Polyester is trash because Waters’s artistic ambitions were low to begin with: the filmmaker knew exactly what he wanted, and would not settle for anything more. Where classic cinema aims high and asks the audience to raise its gaze in tasteful appreciation, camp and trash both delight in low expectations. But where camp requires the audience to play along in the tasteless game, trash raises the stakes and makes the audience ask how much bad taste they are willing to tolerate. High taste, low taste, no taste: from classic to camp to trash, the cinematic spectrum of decadence is as varied, complex, and interesting as the literature on which so much of it is based.

Decadence and Classicism The basic scenarios of Salomé and Lady Windermere’s Fan follow their respective source texts quite closely. In Nazimova’s film, Salomé exploits Herod’s incestuous desires by agreeing to dance for the Tetrarch so she can get as her reward the head of Jokanaan, an act of vengeance against the prophet for spurning her advances that results in her own death when Herod orders his soldiers to kill her. In Lubitsch’s film, Mrs. Erlynne threatens to reveal her own shameful past in order to blackmail her daughter’s husband, Lord Windermere, thereby lowering his wife in the eyes of London society.

370   David Weir When the daughter discovers the payoff, she thinks her husband is having an affair with Mrs. Erlynne and reacts by accepting the romantic overtures of Lord Darlington. Lady Windermere is on the point of running away with Darlington when her mother intervenes and saves the daughter from repeating the same mistake the mother made in her youth, but without ever revealing her identity. Happily, at the end Mrs. Erlynne is elevated back into society through marriage to the wealthy Lord Augustus Lorton. Lubitsch eliminates any character in the play not associated with this basic scenario, so there are no subplots in the film—​where Wilde lists sixteen named parts in the play, Lubitsch indicates only six actors in the opening credits. By contrast, Nazimova’s Salomé includes all the parts in the original play—​more than twenty characters. This simple difference between the two approaches has far-​reaching effects: Nazimova’s fidelity to the play turns out to be an artistic liability that contributes to subsequent assessments of the film as camp, whereas Lubitsch’s omission of all but the most essential elements of the basic plot is an artistic asset that makes the film one of the touchstones of classic Hollywood filmmaking. The difference becomes even more apparent in each director’s solution to the problem of adapting all the verbal flourish associated with decadence to the silent screen. Nazimova provided as much of the original text of Salomé as she could in the form of dialogue cards: of the 102 title cards in the film (an unusually high number), some 87 are dialogue cards that—​with only minor variations—​reproduce the text of the play exactly as Wilde wrote it. By contrast, Lubitsch used only 54 dialogue cards, none of them reproducing Wilde’s text. In fact, when Lady Windermere’s Fan was in production, Lubitsch explained, “I intend to translate the story to the screen. It would be wrong to depend on Wilde’s lines to make this picture,” because “the art of picture-​making does not lay in the lines. It is in the reflection of their sense in shadow form.”2 Granted, the plays that each director adapted are very different, and an argument could be made that Nazimova was not as free to vary the poetic dialogue of a symbolist play set in antiquity as Lubitsch was to modify the clever conversations in a society drama set in the modern world. But, as Lubitsch understood, the issue boils down to the difference in artistic media: “Playing with words is fascinating to the writer and afterward to the reader, but on the screen it is quite impossible. Would much charm remain to long excerpts from Wilde’s play if the audience had to ponder laboriously over the scintillating sentences on the screen?”3 Unfortunately, Nazimova put her audience in precisely that laborious position, one of the things that explains the contemporary complaint likening viewing Salomé to watching “a slow motion reel.”4 If we turn now to a major aspect of the mise en scène—​set and costume design—​we can see, again, two radically different approaches. Nazimova’s incorporation of design elements based on the illustrations Aubrey Beardsley did for Salomé unquestionably gives the film the feel of the fin de siècle. But the stylized peacock-​feather design derived from Beardsley is obviously at odds with the visual sense of antiquity long familiar to movie audiences from historical epics of the sword-​and-​sandal variety during the silent era,5 such as, for example, Cleopatra (1912), Quo Vadis (1913), or, for that matter, the lost Theda Bara Salomé of 1918. In short, Nazimova’s fidelity to the artistic

Cinema   371 context of the original play—​Beardsley’s art nouveau illustrations—​conflicts with the visual conventions that had already been established as appropriate to scenarios set in antiquity. Possibly the oddest borrowing from Beardsley involves his drawing of the grotesque figure playing a dulcimer in the illustration titled The Stomach Dance (Figure 20.1), the inspiration for the costumes worn by the troupe of dwarf musicians who provide the music for Salomé’s performance (Figure 20.2). Such details led the influential fan magazine Photoplay to call the film “bizarre stuff.”6 “Bizarre” is not a word that comes to mind to describe the costume and set design of Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan—​“austere” would be more like it. The director makes no attempt to evoke the original fin-​de-​siècle context of the play, but instead adopts a visual style spare in the extreme. Mary Pickford famously called Lubitsch “a director of doors,”7 a comment that is especially relevant to this film, in which the actors pass through enormous doors into rooms so sparsely decorated as to prompt one critic to ask, “Do people this wealthy own no paintings?”8 Nonetheless, the mise en scène consistently evokes the 1920s: Wilde’s aristocratic characters come and go in motorcars, not carriages, and the costumes—​especially those worn by the female actors—​convey a highly contemporary fashion sense. Lubitsch felt an obligation to modify Wilde’s play in light of “social changes due to the war,” and while that comment reflects largely on the original dialogue, the director was also mindful of the social resonance of wardrobe. The New York Times reported that Lubitsch wanted the women attired “in gowns that were dignified and yet not strikingly out of vogue”—​“[t]‌o avoid any flapper aspect through following the latest fashions in short dresses.”9 By contrast, Nazimova’s Salomé starts out wearing a miniskirt and an art-​deco bubble wig, appearing later as a full-​blown flapper in a brief fantasy segment (Figure 20.3). Indeed, Nazimova conceived of Salomé as a modern woman, reflecting, as she said, “the post-​war rage for sophisticated girls with slender, boyish figures and frank, outspoken manners.”10 However admirable such feminism might be, the deployment of the kinds of markers of modernity represented by the flapper outfits in Salomé further confuses the mise en scène, already confused—​at least from the perspective of popular entertainment at the time—​by the insertion of art nouveau sets and costumes into a first-​century biblical scenario. Both Salomé and Lady Windermere’s Fan were lit and shot by the same cameraman, Charles Van Enger, but he did not direct or edit the footage he shot, and it is in these areas that the differences between Salomé and Lady Windermere’s Fan emerge most clearly. In Salomé, most of the close-​ups are of Nazimova, who, as an experienced stage actor, was equipped to convey a range of emotions through subtle facial expressions, unlike the other performers, who mug for the camera and make extravagant gestures, acting in the overstated pantomime style that was already going out of fashion when the film was made. They frequently appear in medium long shots to accommodate their exaggerated body language (Figure 20.4). In Lady Windermere’s Fan, close-​ups, medium close-​ups, and medium shots—​all types of shots that let the audience see subtle changes in facial expression and body language—​predominate and are distributed among all the actors, whose expressions are nuanced and controlled. More importantly, the juxtaposition of such shots lets the audience work out their meaning, such as when, in the

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Figure 20.1.  Aubrey Beardsley, The Stomach Dance. John Lane, London 1894. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints, Drawings & Paintings Collection.

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Figure 20.2.  The troupe of dwarf musicians from Salomé, dir. Alla Nazimova (Hollywood: Nazimova Productions, 1922; DVD, Image Entertainment, 2003).

famous race-​track scene, Mrs. Erlynne gazes lovingly at her daughter, whereupon Lord Augustus thinks the gaze is directed at him (Figures 5 and 6). Shot scale does have an impact on adaptation, especially in the case of Salomé, since the original play can hardly be called a study in human psychology. Hence there is something discordant about the close-​ups of Salomé in the film that jars with the objective, hieratic nature of the text. That aspect of the play, however, is well-​suited to the extreme long shot, of which there are many in the film, which conveys a static, frieze-​like quality to the images, all the more so because there is almost no movement within the frame. Lubitsch’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, like the play on which it is based, is much more psychologically driven than is Salomé, so the various types of close shots are more functionally consistent with the scenario. There are a few extreme long shots in Lubitsch’s film as well, but they serve either to convey a sense of social complexity (as in the race-​track scene) or to create a feeling of psychological distance and emotional confusion (as in the garden scene where Lady Windermere sees Mrs. Erlynne from afar and mistakenly assumes she is having an affair with her husband). To summarize, in Salomé, the overreliance on Wilde’s dialogue, the art nouveau set and costume design, and the editing that combines naturalistic close-​ups with pantomimic full shots and static long shots produce an aesthetic mixture that conceivably could be

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Figure 20.3.  Salomé as a stylish modern flapper.

compared to the hybrid style of decadent literature, but also seems, as Photoplay noted, just plain bizarre on the screen. In Lady Windermere’s Fan, the elimination of original dialogue, the minimalist sets and stylish costumes, and most of all the editing that allows the viewer to infer psychological action from the relationship of one close shot to another produce an aesthetic unity that is the very essence of classic filmmaking, in which cinematic technique is subordinated to storytelling. Lubitsch did not single-​handedly invent this classic style, but he perhaps went further than any other director in perfecting it. The opening and end titles of Lady Windermere’s Fan proclaim the film “A Warner Brothers Classic of the Screen,” an ambiguous phrase that might refer either to the play that has been brought to the screen or to the film itself. That ambiguity has receded only recently, with Lady Windermere’s Fan now regarded as a landmark of classic Hollywood style.11 That decadence should be a vehicle for such classicism is not without irony, but no such irony applies in the case of Nazimova’s Salomé. If anything, decadence is compounded in her film: where Lubitsch strips away all but the essence of Wilde’s decadence, Nazimova adds to it. Her Salome is a bizarre, eclectic amalgamation of sword-​and-​sandal antiquity, fin-​de-​siècle decadence, and flapper modernity. And while the classical legacy of Lubitsch is incalculable, influencing generations of filmmakers, the decadent legacy of Nazimova, though not so pervasive, is not without its imitators and admirers.

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Figure 20.4.  Herod reacts to Salomé’s demand for Jokanaan’s head.

Decadence and Camp Today, it is hard to see Nazimova’s Salomé as anything other than an art film that ran into the wall of an uncomprehending public. When it comes to popular, commercial entertainment, the audience is almost always right. The situation is different with avant-​garde films, meant for the elite viewers of the future who belatedly catch up with the artist and come to appreciate what the artist’s contemporaries could not. Buñuel and Dalí’s Un chien andalou illustrates this point precisely. But nothing about Nazimova’s Salomé suggests that it should be considered an avant-​garde effort. Nazimova may have been years ahead of the industry in her auteur-​like capacities as actor, director, writer, and editor, but she was not ahead of her audience. And even though there was a revival of interest in fin-​de-​siècle decadence in the 1920s, that interest was easier to exploit verbally rather than visually—​in literature, but not in film, that is—​mainly because there was no prior decadent tradition in cinema to revive. True, the art nouveau design is an obvious revival of Beardsley, but the style seems forever fixed in the fin de siècle—​not that the popular audience would have known this, necessarily, but they would likely have known that expectations were being placed on them that they were not prepared to meet. Hence

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Figure 20.5.  Mrs. Erlynne gazing lovingly at her daughter in Lady Windermere’s Fan, dir. Ernst Lubitsch (Hollywood: Warner Bros., 1925; DVD, National Film Preservation Association, 2004).

there is something simultaneously new and belated about Nazimova’s Salomé, a mixture of something original and derivative; decadent, in short, but not in a good way. One way of characterizing camp is as an effort at high art that falls short, that misses the mark, but that sensibility is always subsequent (at least with older works), such that a later audience takes delight in what an original audience found disappointing. Indeed, the later audience, more knowing and jaded than its earlier counterpart, actually relishes elements that disappointed or baffled the original audience. In the case of Salomé, the aesthetic experience of camp was simply not possible for audiences at the time of the film’s release. However, when the film was rediscovered during the 1960s, it came to light at precisely the moment when the concept of camp was in the process of formation. As Patricia White explains, screenings of Nazimova’s film, often in incomplete form, occurred in the aftermath of Susan Sontag’s influential essay of 1964, “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ”12 She observes that the New York Times film critic, Bosley Crowther, actually echoes Sontag in a review of 1967 when he calls Salomé “[o]‌ne of the silent movies’ more notorious Tiffany lamps, relic of a style of artsy acting that blazes as present day camp.” White adds that Tiffany lamps and the art of Beardsley, not to mention the works of Oscar Wilde (to whom “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” is dedicated), are included in Sontag’s list of things that make up the canon of camp.13 Beardsley, especially, seems to embody the camp sensibility avant la lettre, as his send-​up of the nineteenth-​century Wagner cult in The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser shows.

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Figure 20.6.  Lord Augustus assuming Mrs. Erlynne’s look is meant for him.

That sensibility has much in common with parody and satire, and, in fact, camp may be said to include elements of both. Like parody, camp overstates what it imitates; like satire, camp takes a point of view contrary to that which is satirized. But parody includes an element of respect for the forms that it imitates, and satire includes an element of morality in the material it takes as the object of the satire. Whatever else it may be, camp always includes elements of parody and satire, but less the respect and minus the morality. These qualities find their way into Salome’s Last Dance, Russell’s adaptation of Wilde that also includes allusions to Nazimova’s film. Russell, like Nazimova, follows Wilde’s text closely for the cinematic presentation of the play itself, but the scenario also incorporates other elements inspired by fin-​de-​ siècle decadence. The writer-​director imagines a performance of the play staged in a brothel run by Alfred Taylor (Stratford Johns), the man who was convicted alongside Wilde for gross indecency in 1895. All the parts in the play are taken by various servants and prostitutes—​male and female—​who work in the brothel, with the exception of the role of Jokanaan, who is played by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge), and an aristocratic woman named Lady Alice (Glenda Jackson), who plays Herodias; Taylor himself takes the role of Herod. The play is performed before an audience of one—​Oscar Wilde (Nikolas Grace)—​as an illicit tribute to the author to spite the Lord Chamberlain’s official banning of the play on grounds of indecency and blasphemy. To highlight the performance as a rebellious and illegal act, the action is set on November

378   David Weir 5—​Guy Fawkes Day—​in 1892. At the end of the film, Russell rewrites history by having Wilde and Taylor arrested, not for committing acts of gross indecency with other men, but for participating in a performance of a work of art banned by the state. The garish costumes and hammy acting styles of most of the principals clearly signal the deliberately tasteless sensibility identified with camp—​that, and certain casting choices, such as a bodybuilder with no acting experience playing one of the male guards, and a group of buxom, topless women with their nipples painted blue acting as female guards with sadistic tendencies (Russell claimed that one of these women actually ran an S & M club and worked as a dominatrix).14 If we ask what, precisely, the object of the director’s disrespectful parody or his amoral satire is—​the focus of the campiness, in short—​one answer has to be prior filmic representations of Wilde’s play, and of biblical epics of the sword-​and-​sandal variety generally (though there is nothing epic about Russell’s low-​budget, single-​set film). There are sufficient parallels to suggest that Nazimova’s film serves as both a source of inspiration and an object of ridicule. The homage to Beardsley in both films is evident: Nazimova used his Salomé illustrations as a basis for costume and set design, while Russell incorporated those illustrations into his opening credits. A single set divided into two staging areas is common to both films, and Russell’s painted moon, like Nazimova’s, changes in hue over the course of the film, from blue to red. The character Salomé is played by a woman with a slim, boyish figure in both cases, with the implicit sense of androgyny in Nazimova’s film becoming quite explicit in Russell’s. While Kenneth Anger’s claim that that Nazimova “employed only homosexual actors as ‘homage’ to Wilde” probably overstates the case,15 her direction makes the same-​sex attraction of the Page of Herodias for the young Syrian Narraboth evident; she also turns several ladies of the court into drag queens (Figure 20.7), as does Russell, who seems to have followed his predecessor rather closely on this point (Figure 20.8). Both Nazimova and Russell cast dwarves in minor roles—​the troupe of musicians in the case of Salomé, and the three Jews dressed in traditional Hassidic garb in Salome’s Last Dance. Finally, where the play calls for Salomé to be crushed by the soldiers’ shields at the end, Nazimova makes the soldiers pierce her with their spears, and Russell follows suit (although in his film Salome is speared by a single soldier, not a group of them). The similarities listed here notwithstanding, the tone of the two films could not be more different. Nazimova’s Salomé was a serious effort at high art in a popular medium, but there is nothing serious about Salome’s Last Dance. In his review, Vincent Canby of the New York Times calls the film a “comic stunt” and generally praises the director for finding “cinematic life in the old Wilde chestnut”: “With his gifts for going too far, and with his almost childlike view of decadence . . . , Mr. Russell possesses just the right mixture of innocence, passion, and theatrical intelligence the job requires.”16 Where Canby sees value in Russell’s “gifts for going too far,” the influential syndicated columnist Roger Ebert faulted the director as “the orchestrator of wretched excess” who tries too hard to “shock” the audience.17 These two critics both understand the film as an example of decadence, and both of them think of decadence in terms of excess, but in different ways, with Canby finding Russell’s over-​the-​top methods well-​suited to the subject, and Ebert seeing those same methods as inappropriate. Neither critic understands the

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Figure 20.7.  The ladies of the court in Nazimova’s Salomé.

Figure 20.8.  Herod with the ladies of the court in Salome’s Last Dance, dir. Ken Russell (London: Jolly Russell Productions, 1988; DVD, Artisan Home Entertainment, 1999).

380   David Weir film as camp, and neither mentions Nazimova’s film, which suggests that the aesthetic judgment involved in the former can only be made in light of the latter—​that is, the appreciation of camp requires recognition of some prior work of art that can serve as the basis for the overstated or excessive methods camp representation entails. In this formulation, then, Salome’s Last Dance is not so much decadent in itself, but is rather the camp version of the decadent predecessor, Salomé—​and not so much Wilde’s Salomé as Nazimova’s. We cannot know why Canby and Ebert (and many others) avoided the concept of camp in their reviews of Russell’s film, but one factor may be a certain reluctance to entertain the idea in the context of work by a heterosexual artist. One dynamic involved in camp concerns the difference between straight and gay perspectives on the same material, and it is often the case that in camp representations a gay perspective is brought to bear on something traditionally construed as straight, a good example being Waters’s Polyester (of which more presently), a send-​up of sensationalist, mid-​century Hollywood melodrama à la Douglas Sirk. Even though one critic sees in Russell’s film an “allegorical critique of homophobia,”18 for others the director’s ineluctably straight representation of gay culture is deeply problematic. The authors of a performance history of the play observe that the camera “lingers titillatingly” on heterosexual acts (e.g., Herodias disporting with two guards inside a large box that bounces about suggestively) but “cuts away . . . when the homosexual ones are to take place” (e.g., Wilde stealing off camera with the boy who plays the Page of Herodias). They see evidence of homophobia not only in the shot selection and editing, but also in “the conceit [of] placing Bosie [Lord Alfred Douglas] in the role of object of desire,” implying “a parallel between Wilde and Salome, so imputing to the author an uncontrollable and self-​destructive sexual desire.”19 These critics certainly make some valid points, but they make them as though Russell’s film were solely a straight (in both senses) adaptation of Wilde’s play. Their judgment might possibly have been less severe had they considered Russell’s film less as an adaptation of the play and more as a commentary on the prior cinematic treatment of the play by Nazimova. At the very least, some such awareness seems necessary for the viewer to shift from critique to camp, to move from condemning Russell’s “witless bad taste”20 to enjoying it.

Decadence and Trash Awareness of the dynamic between an earnest original and a camp parody is almost too easy in the case of Waters’s Polyester, an over-​the-​top homage to the Technicolor melodramas that the German émigré director Douglas Sirk (1900–​1987) made for Universal Studios during the Eisenhower era in the United States. Born Hans Detlef Sierck in Hamburg, Sirk established his reputation as a theater director before moving on to cinema, making several films for UFA before leaving Germany in 1937.21 The films for which he is best known offer scenarios of middle-​class life featuring domestic crises

Cinema   381 of 1950s conformism and class-​consciousness presented via a mise en scène that is so distinctive for its lavish costumes, opulent sets, and lurid cinematography as to have merited the entry “Sirkian” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Two of his films are especially relevant to Waters’s Polyester: All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Written on the Wind (1956). These and other films by the director achieved great box-​office success in the 1950s. At the same time, Sirk was revered as an auteur by French critics and filmmakers associated with Cahiers du cinéma for his ability to overcome the production restraints of the studio system in order to convey his singular artistic vision. This combination of popular and artistic success in the 1950s has been followed by retrospective readings of Sirk’s oeuvre that emphasize an ironic critique of mid-​century American society along with ample opportunity for certain types of audiences to indulge their camp taste to an extraordinary degree. The easiest way to illustrate the camp dimension of Sirk’s films is to focus on the way several scenarios featuring the erstwhile 1950s dreamboat Rock Hudson seem to signal his closeted homosexuality. In All That Heaven Allows, for example, when the young, marriageable widow Cary Scott (June Alyson) wonders whether the Hudson character, Ron Kirby, will ever find “the right girl,” she asks, “Or don’t you think you’re susceptible?” Barbara Klinger comments that such moments might engender recognition of “the substantial artifice behind romantic conceits and gender roles” (here, the strong, silent masculine type and the passive, dependent feminine type) and prompt a progressive response, but, she observes, the camp audience is content simply to enjoy the absurdity of the situation that puts a gay man in the role of Hollywood heartthrob talking about finding “the right girl.”22 In All That Heaven Allows, Cary and Ron fall in love, but complications ensue that are mostly based on class consciousness, since Cary is part of the affluent, country-​club society of the picture-​perfect, imaginary village of Stoningham, while the ruggedly independent Ron works as her gardener. Cary has two grown children who object when Ron proposes marriage (the son more so than the daughter) because of the dual offense to their father’s memory and to the betrayal of the social class to which they—​and their dead father—​belong. Cary at first submits to social convention and family pressure, but when the son goes off to Europe and the daughter announces her own marriage, she decides to make things right with Ron and marry him. She drives to his rustic cabin in the woods, but then drives off when she finds him not at home (he is out hunting pheasants). Just as she is leaving, Ron sees her from atop a cliff, calls out, gestures frantically, loses his balance, and falls off the cliff into a snowbank, lying unconscious from a concussion. Cary does not see the accident, but when she gets news of it, she goes to his side and is with him when, after several days, he finally awakens. So the lovers overcome all their obstacles and are finally united—​a happy ending that Sirk likened to the deus ex machina resolution of a play by Euripides.23 Part of his meaning is that the conflicts in the melodrama are not really resolved; the class differences are not overcome so much as simply ignored. All of Sirk’s melodramas involve a contrast between what the director calls a “split” character and an “immovable” or “steadfast” character.24 In All That Heaven Allows, Cary

382   David Weir is split between social convention and sexual desire, while Ron is not; he is instead possessed of a stable worldview that allows him to steadfastly act on his desires without any sort of inner conflict. In Written on the Wind the contrast between split character and steadfast character is doubled so that there are two of each. The split characters are Kyle Hadley (Robert Stack), the alcoholic son of a Texas oil magnate, and his nymphomaniac sister Marylee (Dorothy Malone); the steadfast characters are Kyle’s best friend Mitch Wayne (Hudson) and the company secretary Lucy Moore (Lauren Bacall), whom Mitch loves but Kyle marries. Marylee is in love with Mitch, who thinks of her as a sister (they grew up together). Kyle has been led to believe that he cannot father children, so when his wife becomes pregnant he thinks Mitch is the father, whereupon he strikes Lucy, who miscarries. The climax comes when Kyle threatens Mitch with a gun and Marylee grabs at it to save Mitch. In the struggle the gun goes off and Kyle is killed. Marylee initially means to blackmail Mitch into marrying her to keep her from falsely testifying that Mitch murdered Kyle, but at the inquest her love for Mitch comes through and she tells the truth. At the very end of the film Mitch and Lucy drive off together. As these summaries suggest, both All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind are sufficiently lurid, based on their scenarios alone, to qualify as decadent in a social sense, because of some combination of bourgeois hypocrisy, empty social conventions, and middle-​class hedonism of the three-​martini variety among the affluent, country-​ club class. Add to these scenarios the surging music that heightens every melodramatic moment (Sirk himself emphasized the melos [music] root of the term melodrama)25 and the Technicolor cinematography that makes the mid-​century American scene look like a candy-​colored fantasyland, and what you get is an aesthetic of artificiality that harmonizes with the decadent tradition. In a Sirk film, just about everything looks fake, including nature; in fact, nothing seems more artificial and unreal than the natural world (Figure 20.9). Speaking of his film Magnificent Obsession (1954), Sirk explained the importance of “trash” to his filmmaking: “This is the dialectic—​there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”26 Seeing Sirk’s films today, it is much easier to fix on their trashiness and harder to see them as high art “redeemed” by craziness. The Universal melodramas of the 1950s can still be read as critiques of the decadent excesses of postwar American affluence, but it takes some sociological effort to do so. More recent audiences are likely to be content simply to relax into the trash and relish the campiness for its own sake. The difference between the retrospective, vintage camp of Sirk’s melodramas and the more overt variety on display in Waters’s Polyester is the absence of anything like dialectic between high art and trash—​what we see on the screen is trash by design, created for a camp audience from the start. At an earlier stage of his career, Waters said that if he ever had a production budget of millions of dollars to make a film, he would spend the money on “fake trees, fake skies, fake everything—​and it will all look fake, like a Sirk movie.”27 As his first “big-​budget” picture,28 Polyester was as close as Waters had come to realizing his Sirkian fantasy of fakery up to that point. Known mainly as an underground director of midnight movies by virtue of his “trash trilogy”—​Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble

Cinema   383

Figure 20.9.  The end of All That Heaven Allows, dir. Douglas Sirk (Hollywood: Universal Pictures, 1955: DVD, Criterion, 2019).

(1974), and Desperate Living (1977)—​Polyester was Waters’s first effort to reach a more mainstream audience while still trying to “shock people in ways that are not so obvious” by “being a little more subtle about it.” As one critic comments, “Subtle is not the first word that comes to . . . mind while watching fifties teen idol Tab Hunter making love to Divine playing the suburban housewife Francine Fishpaw.”29 The casting coup of having Hunter play the sleazy, leisure-​suited, Corvette-​driving Todd Tomorrow adds another Sirkian element to the film, since Hunter served as a kind of teen cognate to Rock Hudson in the 1950s (a singer as well as an actor, Hunter had a hit single, Young Love, in 1957). Also like Hudson, Hunter was homosexual, although he did not come out as gay until 2005 with the publication of his memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.30 The Hunter-​Hudson connection helps to make the case for Polyester as a camp burlesque of a Sirk melodrama, with Hunter in the role of steadfast leading man and the drag queen Divine as the split or conflicted woman who looks to the male lead for reassurance and direction. At the beginning of the film, Francine is a “good Christian woman” whose husband, Elmer (David Sampson), runs a porn theater in Baltimore and is having an affair with his secretary, Sandra (Mink Stole). Francine’s nymphomaniac daughter, Lu-​Lu (Mary Garlington), wants to be a go-​go dancer and is failing every single course in high school (Lu-​Lu gyrates incessantly, and the scenes of her dancing in her bedroom recall those of Marylee doing the rhumba in her room in Written on the Wind). Francine is also mother to a glue-​sniffing punk son, Dexter (Ken King), who acts out his foot fetish by stomping on the feet of local women in supermarkets and shopping malls. With the help of her friend Cuddles Kovinsky (Edith Massey), Francine literally

384   David Weir sniffs out her husband with his mistress at a flea-​bag hotel, following the scent of the woman’s cheap perfume. Original screenings of Polyester included a scratch-​and-​sniff OdoramaTM card with ten numbered smells on it; when a number flashed on the screen the audience scratched the corresponding number on the card and so experienced the odors along with the characters (for example, number 1 was a rose, and number 2 was “number 2”). After he is caught in flagrante delicto, the philandering husband moves out to live his “erotic lifestyle” with the mistress but continues to harass Francine in various ways. Meanwhile, Dexter is caught and revealed to be “the Baltimore foot-​stomper” and sent to prison. Lu-​Lu gets pregnant but plans to have an abortion until she is hounded out of the clinic by a mob of right-​to-​life protesters, whereupon Francine calls a home for unwed mothers run by the Catholic Church and asks someone to help her daughter; two nuns show up and throw Lu-​Lu into the trunk of their car. Things are so bad that the family dog, Bonkers, commits suicide (Francine finds him hanging from the refrigerator). Now at the absolute nadir of her life, Francine begins to drink heavily. It is around this time that Francine meets Todd Tomorrow when she stops to rubberneck at a horrific traffic accident, and she starts to put her life back together. Dexter returns from prison, released on grounds of insanity, but he is now completely rehabilitated, having turned his foot fetish into artistic inspiration (he does paintings and sculptures of shoes). Lu-​Lu has a miscarriage and redirects her libido into macramé. Francine’s affair with Todd appears to be going well, but he is not as steadfast as he seems: the woman Todd really loves is Francine’s mother, who conspires with him to have Francine committed to a mental institution so they can get her house and all her money. They are on the point of succeeding when Elmer and Sandra come to the house, with a pistol, intent on killing both Todd and Francine. But Dexter stomps on Sandra’s foot as she is holding the gun, which goes off, accidentally killing Elmer. Lu-​Lu takes advantage of the confusion to strangle Sandra to death with her macramé. And just as Todd is on the point of abducting both children and making sex slaves of them, Cuddles shows up in her limousine and runs over both Todd and Francine’s mother, killing them both. The final tableau has Francine happily clutching her children to her breast and ecstatically sniffing the odor of Glade air fresher as she sprays it into the night. The scenario of Polyester may read like an absurdist version of a Sirk melodrama, but both have in common impossibly complicated domestic entanglements that cannot be resolved except by the kind of contrivance Sirk likened to the deus ex machina of Euripidean tragedy (although, with Waters’s film, deos ex machinis seems a more apt descriptor). And just as a lurid Sirk scenario is sufficient to suggest a certain type of mid-​ century American decadence all by itself, the outlandish scenario of Polyester alone is enough to establish camp trash as the dominant note of the film. But with both directors, the films really must be seen to be disbelieved. In a strange way, the scenes of Tab Hunter enjoying romantic moments with Divine (Figure 20.10) are oddly anticipated by the love scenes between Hudson and Wyman in All That Heaven Allows; in both cases, there is zero sexual chemistry between the alleged lovers. No doubt those original star-​struck audiences of the 1950s were blinded by their own idealizations of Hudson and Wyman and simply did not notice the disconnect (besides, it is always hard to see something that

Cinema   385 is not there). In 1981 the camp audience was in on the joke when the former teen idol embraced the drag queen famous for the notorious scene of canine coprophagia in Pink Flamingos. No one could take seriously the idea that Tab Hunter would even pretend to fall in love with Divine, however much the lurid, unlikely plot required it. Seriousness is key: if one measure of camp is the distance between high artistic intentions and a work that falls short of those intentions (Nazimova’s Salomé), another is the deliberate refusal to take the conventions of a particular form of high art seriously (Waters’s Polyester). In the first case, the camp aesthetic is produced by the disharmony between the original artistic intentions and a subsequent audience reception; in the second, there is no disharmony between artistic intentions and audience expectations. Between the extremes represented by Nazimova’s and Waters’s films, between the inadvertent camp that only a subsequent sensibility can appreciate and the deliberate camp that coincides with contemporary taste—​or tastelessness—​the classical decadence of Lubitsch and the camp decadence of Russell occupy a kind of shifting middle ground, but for different reasons. Lady Windermere’s Fan works because the director’s classical abilities are equal to the decadence he adapts, and as a result there cannot be a camp audience for Lubitsch’s classical decadence. Salome’s Last Dance disappoints some but not others because the director’s mannered abilities exceed the decadence he adapts, and as a result the audience will be either critical or camp depending on what the audience recognizes as the basis for the adaptation. Is the film a disrespectful treatment of Wilde’s play or a playful homage to Nazimova’s film? Again, seriousness is key, and in the case of Salome’s Last Dance, understanding the film as camp depends on whether a critic or an audience takes Russell’s lack of seriousness seriously or not. The camp dimension of Sirk’s melodramas, at first, seems to accord more with the dynamic surrounding

Figure 20.10.  Perfectly natural together: Todd (Tab Hunter) and Francine (Divine) in Polyester, dir. John Waters (Burbank, CA: New Line Cinemas, 1981; DVD, Criterion, 2019).

386   David Weir Nazimova: it took some decades for both Salomé and All That Heaven Allows to find their camp audiences. The difference, obviously, is that Nazimova’s film bombed at the box office, whereas the melodramas that Sirk made for Universal Studios were enormously successful at the time of their release. Sirk, in short, had it both ways; Nazimova did not. But there is another difference as well: Nazimova’s film is an adaptation of a work that is in the canon of literary decadence, and so there is a sound reason for understanding her Salomé in the context of decadent culture. Strangely, Salome’s Last Dance is harder to place in the decadent tradition, even though Russell’s film is an adaptation of the same work as Nazimova’s, precisely because of its camp dimension. It is, so to speak, twice removed from Wilde because of its relation to Nazimova’s film. Adaptation necessarily involves something secondary or derivative, a removal from originality that is part of the negative meaning of decadence. Adapting literary decadence, therefore, always involves a measure of artistic risk that representing social decadence does not. Sirk’s cinema makes this point: the social decadence of the affluent, mid-​century country-​club class was simply the director’s material, which he represented in a distinctive style, celebrated originally but later critiqued as camp. However close they may be in some ways, the decadent aesthetic and the camp aesthetic, in cinema at least, seem antithetical. You will find none of the subtlety and refinement of the classically decadent Lady Windermere’s Fan in Polyester, just as you will find none of Waters’s camp overstatement in Lubitsch’s deft direction. It is one thing to adapt decadence and another to debase it—​not that debasement is without its own disgusting pleasures, as anyone who has scratched and sniffed an OdoramaTM card knows.

Notes 1. For discussion of this latter-​day decadence, see David Weir, “The Decline of Decadence,” in Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 151–​ 91; “The Decadent Revival,” in Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–​1926 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 151–​89; and Kate Hext and Alex Murray, eds., Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). 2. “Optimistic Mr. Lubitsch,” New York Times, August 9, 1925, sec. 7, 3. https://​www.nyti​mes. com/​1925/​08/​09/​archi​ves/​opt​imis​tic-​mr-​lubit​sch.html. 3. “Spurns Screen Epigrams,” New York Times, December 27, 1925, sec. 7, 5. https://​times​mach​ ine.nyti​mes.com/​times​mach​ine/​1925/​12/​27/​99374​928.html?pag​eNum​ber=​145. 4. “Salome—​Alla Nazimova Production,” Photoplay 22, no. 3 (August 1922): 61. 5. Strictly speaking, the term sword and sandal usually refers to a genre of Italian films, also known as the peplum film (after Latin peplum, “robe”), costume dramas set in the ancient world. The term has generally been extended to refer to any costume drama set in antiquity. For a discussion of the genre with an emphasis on the Italian original, see Roy Kinnard and Tony Crnkovich, Italian Sword and Sandal Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017). 6. “SALOME—​Alla Nazimova Production,” Photoplay 22.3 (Aug. 1922): 61.

Cinema   387 7. Quoted in Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By . . . (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 134. 8. Kristin Thompson, Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 66. 9. “Music of the Movies,” New York Times, October 25, 1925, sec. 8, 5. https://​times​mach​ine. nyti​mes.com/​times​mach​ine/​1925/​10/​25/​issue.html. 10. Quoted in Petra Dierkes-​Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 147–​8. 11. For a discussion that recognizes the historical importance of Lady Windermere’s Fan, see Joseph McBride, How Did Lubitsch Do It? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 198–​209. 12. The essay first appeared in Partisan Review 31, no. 4 (Fall 1964): 515–​30. 13. Patricia White, “Nazimova’s Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, 68 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 14. Ken Russell, audio commentary, Salome’s Last Dance (1988; Santa Monica, CA: Artisan Home Entertainment, 1999), DVD. 15. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1975), 163. Anger’s claim has been questioned by Nazimova’s biographer; see Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1997), 257. 16. Vincent Canby, “Salome and Decadence,” New York Times, May 6, 1988, sec. C, 8. https://​ times​mach​ine.nyti​mes.com/​times​mach​ine/​1988/​05/​06/​557​288.html?pag​eNum​ber=​72. 17. Roger Ebert, “ ‘Salome’ director displays addiction to excess,” The Sentinel (Carlisle, PA), July 8, 1988, 26. https://​www.new​spap​ers.com/​image/​345993​780/​. 18. Dierkes-​Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, 176. 19. William Tydeman and Steven Price, Wilde: Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 172–​73. 20. Tydeman and Price, 172. 21. For a brief account of Sirk’s life and career, see Lucy Fischer, “Douglas Sirk: A Biographical Sketch,” in Imitation of Life, edited by Lucy Fischer, 29–​35 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 22. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 151. 23. Douglas Sirk and John Halliday, Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday (New York: Viking, 1972), 119. 24. Sirk and Halliday, 98. 25. Sirk and Halliday, 93. 26. Sirk and Halliday, 96. 27. David Chute, “Still Waters,” in John Waters: Interviews, edited by James Egan, 97 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011). 28. The budget for Polyester was $300,000, compared to the $65,000 Waters used to make his second-​highest funded film, Desperate Living (1977), at that point in his career. See Chute, 96. 29. James Egan, introduction to John Waters: Interviews, xiii. 30. Hunter himself makes the comparison to Hudson in the context of the Hollywood studio system in its waning years. See Tab Hunter, with Eddie Muller, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2005), 1, 172.

388   David Weir

Further Reading Anger, Kenneth. Hollywood Babylon. New York: Dell, 1975. Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By . . . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Dierkes-​Thrun, Petra. Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Egan, James, ed. John Waters: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011. Evans, Victoria L. Douglas Sirk, Aesthetic Modernism and the Culture of Modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Flanagan, Kevin M., ed. Ken Russell: Re-​Viewing England’s Last Mannerist. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009. Klinger, Barbara. Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Lambert, Gavin. Nazimova: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997. McBride, Joseph. How Did Lubitsch Do It? New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Sirk, Douglas, and John Halliday. Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday. New York: Viking, 1972. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ” In Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 275–​92. New York: Picador, 1966. Thompson, Kristin. Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood: German and American Film after World War I. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Tydeman, William, and Steven Price. Wilde: Salome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Weir, David. “Decadence and Cinema.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 300–​315. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Weir, David, ed. “Decadence and Cinema.” Special issue, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 2, no. 2 (Winter 2019). White, Patricia. “Nazimova’s Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, 60–​87. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

PA RT I V

M AT E R IA L I T I E S

Chapter 21

B O OK A RTS The Decadent Gesamtkunstwerk Kirsten MacLeod

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decadent culture is manifest not only between the covers of a book, but also on them, with the book itself taking material form as an aesthetic artifact of the very culture the book describes. While the end of the nineteenth century is best known for the flourishing of literary decadence, it was also, as the French bibliophile Pierre Mornand asserted, a period of decadence for the art of the book.1 These trends came together most forcefully in French bibliophile culture of the era—​an arena where the ideal of the decadent book was most fully realized. The French livres de luxe of this period were Gesamtkunstwerks, ideals of decadent book production in their extravagant designs, limited runs, and noncommercial production contexts. They were books worthy of the collector protagonists of decadent fiction—​J.-​K. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. The decadent trend in the book arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was presaged by Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), which serves as a case study for considering the decadent materiality of the book, in two senses: first, decadent bibliophilia and book arts are represented in this novel as part of the narrative; second, the novel itself was embodied as a decadent livre de luxe in a 1903 limited edition produced for the bibliophile society Les Cent Bibliophiles. The materialist consideration of this edition attends not only to the design and illustration of the edition, but also to unique bindings created for individual owners of the book. In this instantiation, Huysmans’s novel becomes a Gesamtkunstwerk ideal of the decadent book, a publication that, in its totality—​text and material body—​ realizes the decadent desire for an “intellectual communion” and “spiritual collaboration” between reader and creator.2

392   Kirsten MacLeod

Decadent Bibliophilia in the French Fin de Siècle The story of the decadent book in material terms begins, like that of literary decadence, in France, where it emerged as a consequence of sociopolitical circumstances and developments in book publishing, selling, collecting, and graphic arts. It was spurred on during the early years of the Third Republic (1870–​1940), with the rise of a new wealthy upper-​bourgeois elite with bohemian inclinations eager to assert its cultural distinctiveness. Book collecting was a key means of displaying taste, but the existing book-​collecting field was, as the bibliophile and author Henri Béraldi (1849–​1931) characterized it, dominated by bibliophilie rétrospective (retrospective bibliophilia) and reliure archéologique (archaeological binding).3 Antiquarian books were prized, and binding styles were based on historic book art designs. A growth in bibliophilia led to a diminishing supply of collectible books—​as collectible was then defined—​ and a steep rise in prices. These conditions led to a battle to redefine the terms of the collectible book.4 Younger collectors turned their attention away from antiquarian books to modern authors to practice what Béraldi termed la nouvelle bibliophilie (new bibliophilia), a creative form of bibliophilia.5 Equally disdainful of the industrial book, new bibliophiles desired modern authors in up-​to-​date dress and sought out expensively produced livres de luxe, often illustrated, issued in limited numbers to subscribers, bound in luxurious bindings, available with different types of paper, and including supplementary paratextual material such as proofs, preliminary sketches, correspondence relating to the edition, and the like. At one extreme, new bibliophiles created extravagant single-​copy editions for themselves or limited runs to distribute among friends. Increasingly, however, a more complex and organized network of what Willa Silverman calls “parapublishers” evolved, led by amateurs, a term used in the bibliophile context to denote those “passionate about beautiful editions and rare books” who were engaged creatively in the production of deluxe editions in collaboration with bibliophile societies, éditeurs-​libraires (publisher-​ booksellers), printers, authors, illustrators, critics, and bibliographers.6 A drive for innovation in the book arts was also fueled by progressive commercial and avant-​garde publishers. By the end of the century, some trade publishers, for example, produced limited editions within a larger commercial print run. In the avant-​garde domain, meanwhile, literary magazines and illustrated and satirical weeklies provided platforms for the development of modern art-​nouveau graphic style and illustration, which also exerted an influence on the book arts. While this phenomenon involved many forms of modern literature, literature of the decadent tradition was central. At the same time, a pronounced decadent aesthetic in the modern book arts in this period emerged. This tendency is exemplified in the prolific writings of Octave Uzanne (1851–​1931), the “high priest of fin-​de-​siècle

BOOK ARTS   393 bibliophilia,”7 an admirer of decadence, symbolism, and art nouveau who saw a relationship between developments in these traditions and the changes to the book arts he was calling for. Uzanne surveyed this field in an international context. While predominantly interested in the livre de luxe, he attended to the industrial book and the broader field of avant-​garde and popular print culture, including magazines and graphic arts. In a series of books—​themselves beautifully designed and written in a decadent, jeweled style marked by preciosity and neologisms—​he expresses his ideal of the modern book for new bibliophiles, those he refers to variously as néo-​biblios, biblio-​contempos, or néo-​icono-​bibliomanes. Uzanne expresses characteristically decadent impulses in his rejection of the conventional in favor of the eccentric, fantastical, innovative, extravagant, and symbolistic. He excoriates the limited range of designs in traditional bookbinding, calling for innovation in cover design, doublures (ornamental linings), endpapers, type of paper, ribbon bookmarks, typography, styles of illustration, and so on. He is a proponent of exoticism and novelty—​especially oriental styles and the work of modern French and British graphic artists. He calls for experimentation with the materials used to produce books—​typefaces and colors of leather, paper, wood, silk, and other cloth materials; embroidery, painted canvases, and fanciful marbled and decorative endpapers; but also metals, skeletal materials, stones, and jewels, with an emphasis on the “rare ou joli, précieux, coquet . . . amusant” (rare or pretty, precious, coquettish . . . fun).8 Like the decadents, Uzanne was attracted to both new and old to achieve creative and artistic effects. He was interested in modern illustration and printing technologies as a means to innovate book design, while also appreciating practices and styles of the past used to bring eccentricity to the modern book. Overall, Uzanne felt it was better to go to extremes than to be commonplace. The books in a bibliophile’s library should be saved from “l’embourgeoisement de costume” (gentrified costume) and given an “anti-​bourgeois” form9—​“expressive[s]‌, riante[s], chaude[s] et bigarrée[s], extravagante[s] même” (expressive, joyful, warm and variegated, extravagant even).10 Many of Uzanne’s contemporaries associated the style he promoted with decadence. The British bookbinder Sarah T. Prideaux, for example, regarded the art nouveau developments in France as “disastrously eccentric and decadent.”11 Walter Crane also denounced this style as a “decadent influence,” a “strange decorative disease,” and was outraged that some considered it the “offspring” of the Arts and Crafts movement.12 Even within France, some proponents of modern book design regretted the eccentricities promoted by this school. Béraldi lamented the dominance of “  ‘l’art nouveau,’ symbolisto-​mystico-​décadent-​scandinavo-​belge-​ anglo-​germano-​fumisto-​japonais.”13 This trend was also attacked by Max Nordau, who decried the symbolists’ bibliographical and typographical experimentations and their insistence that the “symbolical significance” of works must “be guessed by the colour and print of the paper and form of the book, the size and nature of the characters.”14

394   Kirsten MacLeod

Among the Decadent Bibliophile’s Books: J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours J.-​K. Huysmans’s 1884 novel À rebours was published just at the point identified by Béraldi as transitional in French bibliophile traditions. In Béraldi’s history, the years from 1870 to 1885 are characterized by a battle between the traditional and the new, while after 1885 the new decadent styles extolled by Uzanne would dominate.15 At the time Béraldi was writing, this latter phase was in process, but its parameters would later be set by Gordon N. Ray as extending to 1914, to be followed by the emergence of the art deco book.16 This context is significant for À rebours. Though best known as a “breviary” and “bible” of a specifically literary decadence, it also illuminates important aspects of the emergence of decadent book arts and bibliophilia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 First, one of the models for its protagonist, Des Esseintes, is the real-​life decadent aristocrat bibliophile, Robert de Montesquiou. Second, Des Esseintes’s book collection is documented extensively, both in a textual and material sense. Much scholarly attention has been given to the former—​Des Esseintes’s literary tastes. Matthew Potolsky, for example, has considered Des Esseintes’s collections and collecting and the novel’s intertextuality as an exemplification of the decadent interest in exerting individuality and cultural distinction, stating that “decadent collections are made up of objects gathered for their singularity or their supreme embodiment of some rare perversity.”18 Potolsky uses the term “objects” here, though his conceptualization of collecting is ultimately more textual than materialist. His insight, however, invites a consideration of the materialist aspects of bibliophilia in the novel. Certainly, Des Esseintes’s pleasure in the unique and perverse in literature applies equally to its material embodiment. Bertrand Bourgeois, for example, insists that in À rebours the book becomes an “objet ‘décadent’ de contemplation narcissique pour le collectionneur” (a decadent object of narcissistic contemplation for the collector).19 For Des Esseintes, the physical book has a talismanic quality and its materiality plays a central role in his engagement with it. Considered in view of Béraldi’s history of bibliophilia, Des Esseintes’s collecting practices are rooted in the tension between existing and emerging trends in the period from 1870 to 1885. The core of his collection consists of Latin works up to the tenth century, specialist books of the cabala and occult, Catholic works, and modern literature. His antiquarian tastes align him with old-​fashioned bibliophilia. His interests in contemporary literature, however, combined with his creative oversight of the design, production, and binding of his modern books situate him as a néo-​bibliophile. Alongside a snobbish indifference to popular literature—​“he was utterly insensible to the merits of those works it is good form to enthuse over” (134)—​is an aversion to “hav[ing] his favourite authors printed on rag paper, as they were in other people’s libraries, with characters like hobnails in a peasant’s boots” (131). Like Béraldi, whose maxim is “si tu veux des livres, fais-​les-​toi toi-​même” (if you want books, make them yourself),20 he controls the design of many of his books, commissioning special papers, typefaces,

BOOK ARTS   395 and special bindings for his collection. Given the novel’s publication date, it is not surprising that Des Esseintes’s ideas about book design look both backward and forward. He is interested in the new, but not to the extremes that would characterize the next phase, one represented in the ideals of Uzanne. This position is reflected in the real-​ world bookbinders that figure as Des Esseintes’s favorites—​Lortic, Trautz-​Bauzonnet, Chambolle, and Gruel-​Engelmann (131–​32). Of these binders, the first three were, by Uzanne’s account, excellent workers but not innovators.21 Gruel (of the firm Gruel-​ Engelmann), meanwhile, bears up better under Uzanne’s scrutiny. Though renowned for his traditional bindings and work on religious books, he was versatile and adapted well to modern styles such that Uzanne praised his “décors curieux et très artistiques” and his “imagination qui va même jusqu’au bizarre” (curious and artistic designs and imagination verging on the bizarre).22 If Des Esseintes’s taste in binders is conservative by Uzanne’s standards, his design preferences exhibit eccentricities that mark him as a néo-​biblio. He favors “unusual formats” and elaborate decoration—​“full bindings, patterned and inlaid,” “of old silk, of embossed ox-​hide, of Cape goat-​skin . . . lined with tabby or watered silk, adorned in ecclesiastic fashion with metal clasps and corners, sometimes even decorated . . . in oxidized silver and shining enamel” (131–​32). He expresses “his contempt for other bibliophiles” when he commissions candle-​paper—​a utilitarian wrapping paper—​for his books, and defiantly has the usual straw fibers of this crude paper replaced with gold flecks (131). Like Uzanne’s néo-​biblios, Des Esseintes takes a perverse pleasure in vulgar, brightly colored American and British commercial books. Though “coarser” than French commercial bindings, these books, in “their riot of brilliant colours” are, to him, “less contemptible” (121). Des Esseintes also evidences avant-​gardist taste in his love of the “slim, clear types” of Perrin of Lyons (131), typefaces that were “all the rage,” as Katherine Bergeron claims, with the Parnassian poets.23 Overall, his eccentricity and his resistance to conformity with other bibliophiles mark him as what Silverman calls an “individualistic amateur,” driven to achieve a distinctive collection that reflects the personal tastes of the collector and the private meanings he derives from the literary works.24 Beyond the attention paid to the literary qualities of Des Esseintes’s books and the meanings he makes of them, consideration is given to their physical properties. One of his prized possessions is a commissioned edition of Charles Baudelaire’s works, with a Gruel binding. With characteristic perversity, Des Esseintes clothes this study of a “morbid psychology of the mind” as a sacred text (133). Modeled after liturgical books in its sizing and lettering, it is printed with Chinese black ink on milky white Japan paper with a light rose hue. The binding and interior boards are a rare “flesh-​coloured pigskin . . . blind-​tooled in black with designs of marvellous aptness chosen by a great artist” (132), resulting in what Bourgeois argues becomes a sacrilegious fetish object.25 This sense of perversity is manifest, in a different sense, in his edition of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les diaboliques, a collection of blasphemous and obscene stories that Des Esseintes has “printed . . . in bishop’s-​purple ink, within a border of cardinal red, on a genuine parchment” with lettres de civilité, an old-​style font, newly recuperated in this

396   Kirsten MacLeod period, whose “peculiar hooks and flourishes, curling up or down, assume a satanic appearance” (149). The perverted twist to Des Esseintes’s design is that the parchment is one that has been “blessed” by judges of the ecclesiastical court (149). Des Esseintes exhibits an interest in a more symbolic form of book design that reflects the ideals of emerging modern bibliophilia and that was represented in the work of Henri Marius Michel, one of Uzanne’s favored bookbinders, who advocated for an affinity between book design and text.26 Rather than the perverse juxtaposition of binding and text that characterizes Des Esseintes’s Baudelaire and d’Aurevilly books, his edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym embodies the story’s maritime theme in a seal-​skin binding and seagull water-​marked linen laid paper (20). It is notable that the materiality of this book extends beyond its own physical parameters to include the space it inhabits. Unlike the majority of Des Esseintes’s books, which occupy his library, this book derives added symbolic significance through its prominent placement in a dining-​room designed like a ship’s cabin that provides Des Esseintes with the “sensations of a long sea-​voyage” (21). This broader conception of materiality to include physical spaces of bibliophilia is central for Des Esseintes, whose library is designed like a book, with walls and ceiling of orange-​colored “large-​grained crushed morocco,” set off by deep indigo moldings (16). In the library, as in the dining room, texts become part of the furniture, literally, notably in a triptych placed in the center of the chimney piece on which are printed three Baudelaire poems in missal lettering with illumination in the style of a Book of Hours (17). Des Esseintes’s library also includes specially designed personal anthologies, works by Stéphane Mallarmé, and prose poems dedicated to Baudelaire. His Mallarmé edition is especially notable. Its design looks to past and present styles and is reflective, in a symbolic sense, of what it contains. It is bound in skin of the onager (a wild ass, native to Asia), “dappled in water-​colour with silver clouds” (179), bespeaking modern trends in book design, but also imagery suggestive of the meanings he finds in Mallarmé’s work. Clouds were an important symbol in decadence and symbolism. For Baudelaire, the poet figure was “the prince of clouds,” while for Mallarmé the cloud is associated with the quill, as in quill pen, and ocean foam to suggest a more abstract connection to poetic creativity.27 Des Esseintes figures Mallarmé as, in effect, one living with his head in the clouds, a poet “sheltered from the raging folly all around him by his lofty scorn; taking pleasure, far from society, in the caprices of the mind and the visions of his brain” (180–​81). The anthology’s parchment paper, meanwhile, and title page printed in uncial calligraphy (a majuscule script characterized by simple, rounded strokes), colored and flecked with gold, as “in ancient manuscripts,” aligns the ultra-​modern poet with arcane medievalism (180). Des Esseintes also takes joy in his copy of Mallarme’s L’après-​midi d’une faune (The Afternoon of a Faun, 1876). The sensuality of the poem carries over into the physical design of the book, such that Des Esseintes experiences a “perverse pleasure from handling” the Japanese vellum cover, “as white as curdled milk,” and the two delicate silk cords that fasten the book—​one black, one pink (182). For Des Esseintes they bring to mind “Japanese rouge” and “a hint of eroticism,” thereby shaping his interpretation: “a discreet

BOOK ARTS   397 intimation, a vague warning, of the melancholy regrets that follow the appeasement of sexual desire, the abatement of sensual frenzy” (182). In her analysis, Silverman has assumed that this book, like others described in material terms in the text, is fictional—​a book designed after Des Esseintes’s wishes.28 Its description, however, identifies it as a real limited edition of 1876, a collaboration between Mallarmé, Édouard Manet, and the publisher Alphonse Derenne, a copy of which was owned by Huysmans.29 Considered one of the first modern livres d’artiste, it was prompted by the poet’s dedication to the concept of an ideal book, the meaning of which operates in two dimensions—​material and textual.30 This theory of the book is in keeping with Des Esseintes’s own views. Though he does not make explicit reference to Manet’s drawings, his prose summary of the poem visualizes Manet’s frontispiece (181–​82), in much the same way that his evocative descriptions encapsulate Gustave Moreau’s Salomé Dancing before Herod (1876) in other parts of the novel.

An À rebours Fit for Des Esseintes I: The Cent Bibliophiles Ornamented Edition (1903) Mallarmé was instrumental in the development of a particular kind of livre de luxe, one that understood the relationship between image and text as creative and collaborative rather than imitative.31 This form would become prevalent in the fin de siècle as the work of modern writers and artists complemented each other in limited editions produced by bibliophile societies and avant-​garde presses. These works attracted a new breed of bibliophiles that Uzanne dubbed néo-​icono-​bibliomanes, whose interests spanned literature and the graphic arts.32 Literary works from the decadent and symbolist traditions and art emerging from the modern schools of impressionism, symbolism, and art nouveau formed a significant part of this elite book market. As a landmark decadent text, one that reflects on and establishes a decadent canon and, as part of this, is centrally concerned with the book as material object, it is hardly surprising that À rebours—​unremarkable in appearance in its original publication form—​would attract the attention of the era’s bibliophiles. In what follows, I turn from a consideration of the decadent materiality of the books in Des Esseintes’s library to an examination of À rebours in a materially decadent form—​in particular, its first instantiation as a livre de luxe, created for Les Cent Bibliophiles in 1903, the height of what Ray identifies as the “golden age” of bibliophiles and the French illustrated book.33 The edition was a Gesamtkunstwerk of decadence produced by Auguste Lepère (1849–​1918), an illustrator, painter, engraver, and etcher who oversaw its production, designing a volume whose decadent materiality was harmonious with the verbal text. The edition has remained a highly prized book since its creation. In the 1920s it ranked as high as number one and no lower than number five in bibliophile

398   Kirsten MacLeod surveys of the top illustrated books, and in 1948 it was declared “the great star of the modern illustrated book.”34 Lepère produced the volume at his workshop over two years, designing 220 colored woodcut engravings—​borders and ornaments, headpieces, vignettes, tailpieces, and decorated initial letters. In addition to his illustrative and decorative work, he commissioned the design of a typeface, arranged the mise-​en-​page (layout), and directed the hand-​press printing of the edition on specially designed wove paper watermarked “les Cent Bibliophiles.” One hundred and thirty copies were produced, individually numbered and inscribed with the name of the subscriber. Lepère was anxious that Huysmans approve of his artistic treatment of the text. As he indicated to the art critic Roger Marx, the lack of incident made the text difficult to illustrate, and the visual language of Huysmans’s prose seemed to render illustration redundant.35 He discussed his illustrations with Huysmans but also consulted with him over such editorial matters as textual emendations, proofs, and the preface Huysmans was providing.36 Lepère’s understanding of illustration and book design can be situated within contemporary trends and debates that engaged writers, artists, and bibliophiles. Unlike other famed illustrators of decadent works of the day who were enthusiastic about new technologies, such as Félicien Rops and Armand Rassenfosse, Lepère opposed photomechanical processes. He was part of a movement involved in the revival and innovation of the woodcut, though he did have an appreciation for the “color revolution” that manifested itself in the modern poster movement, in productions showcasing new photo-​relief processes, and in Japanese prints that exerted an influence on modern art movements.37 With respect to illustration, Lepère was avant-​gardist in his rejection of direct or literal representation, and his production of À rebours followed Uzannian principles that conceptualized a “spirituelle, dégagée” (spiritual and free) relationship between image and text and called for illustrations to be considered not only in relation to text, but also to typography and mise-​en-​page.38 In this spirit, Lepère described his images for Huysmans’s text as “ornementations” (decorations or embellishments), the term he uses on the book’s cover. He explains this perspective in a letter to Huysmans: “Quand j’y introduirai une composition elle sera presque toujours imprimée par un mot, évoquant rapidement une image—​et non pas une description. Ce que vous décrivez si bien ne sera pas repris par moi” (When I introduce a composition it will almost always be imprinted with a word, quickly evoking an image and not a description. That which you describe so well will not be taken up by me).39 Though Huysmans admired Lepère, he expressed discontent with his work for À rebours: “il a plus dessiné, dans ce livre, des ornements délicats que des portraits de des Esseintes” (he drew more delicate ornaments in this book than portraits of Des Esseintes).40 Huysmans’s perspective here seems surprisingly conventional in its desire for more direct representation. Looking beyond Lepère’s rather false modesty and the author’s own peevishness, there is more going on in the image-​text relations than either suggest. Lepère’s artistic intervention is certainly more than ornamental, providing a significant critical-​creative commentary on the text. In its illustrative content and material form, Lepère’s À rebours exemplifies the decadent trend in the book arts of this era. Images include floral borders and decorations in

BOOK ARTS   399 an art nouveau style; city life, ancient and modern—​brothels, taverns, circuses, street scenes, and scenes of licentiousness; pastoral scenes; scenes of battle and torture; animals and creatures; seas, rivers, and boats; decorative initial letters; saints, monks, nuns, and Christ figures; femmes fatales, sirens, and monstrous women; the devil as well as mythical and grotesque creatures and beings. Lepère brings together various pictorial traditions, old and new, domestic and foreign, exemplifying the eccentricity, fantasy, play, extravagance, and allusiveness prized by Uzanne in his appreciation of the modern arts. Unsurprisingly, given the highly allusive nature of Huysmans’s own text, a striking number of the images are copies of, imitations of, or homages to artists, including Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Rodolphe Bresdin, Gustave Doré, and Hokusai; or, somewhat ironically, they serve as illustrations for other books—​those that Des Esseintes muses on. In this respect, Lepère’s images function as a visual parallel to the decadent catalogue aesthetic of Huysmans’s text, which, in turn, speaks to the eclectic and wide-​ranging nature of Des Esseintes’s preoccupations. John R. Reed argues that the decadence of the novel’s verbal text lies in its revelation of “character through ornament and decoration rather than plot complication.”41 Lepère’s images function similarly. At the same time, the graphic eclecticism of Lepère’s edition serves as a visual manifestation of what David Weir calls the “aesthetic interference” characteristic of decadent texts, which he defines as a “ ‘failure’ to adhere to the aesthetic dictates . . . or to the conventions of some established genre.”42 It is not only the eclecticism of Lepère’s images and style that constitute the decadent materiality of this edition. His design exemplifies Uzanne’s appeal for the modern book to break with convention, including a radical rethinking of image-​text relations that includes typography as well as the broader mise-​en-​page. In this sense, Lepère’s edition represents “aesthetic interference” on the graphic plane also. Rather than including illustrations in plate form, he combines image and text on every page. What his images might lose in stature in comparison with independent plates is made up for through their abundance and proliferation. Even though the images are small, they cannot be ignored. There is no regular pattern to their placement on the page, and in many cases they invade the text block. Images are also directly connected to text by way of decorated letters. While Ray notes that this design gives the book the quality of a “lavish medieval manuscript,” Eric Haskell sees it as a “cartoon-​like accompaniment of the narration,” through which Lepère “creat[es] a visual rendering of Huysmans’s verbal universe.”43 We might also productively consider the irregular and invasive quality of the design in relation to the novel’s discourse of decadence and decadent thematics. The images infect the page and text block, for example, while Lepère’s mise-​en-​page speaks also to the tastes and obsessions of Des Esseintes, the highly visual character of his mental wanderings, and the ease with which he is distracted. Lepère’s edition, then, serves as an example of what Évanghélia Stead has called a decadent “livre monstreux” (monstrous book), in which “le livre devient le théâtre de l’intrusion de l’image, de la vignette et de l’ornementation dans la typographie non plus pour éclairer, mais pour brouiller le sens” (the book becomes a stage for the intrusion of the image, of the vignette, and of ornamentation in the typographic field, not to illuminate meaning, but to confuse

400   Kirsten MacLeod it).44 This practice draws attention to the materiality of the book “non seulement comme un produit issu des innovations techniques, mais aussi comme un acte esthétique, à déchiffrer” (not only as a product of technical innovations, but also as an aesthetic act to be deciphered).45 Beyond these more general considerations of decadent content and form, how, more specifically, do Lepère’s illustrations and overall design of the book function to co-​ produce meaning with Huysmans’s text to bring together word, image, and design in a Gesamtkunstwerk of decadence? Existing scholarship on this edition has considered this question in thematic and symbolic terms. Hélène Huet, for example, reads Lepère’s images in relation to the novel’s key decadent themes: the femme fatale, the degeneration of society, and nature versus artifice.46 Haskell, meanwhile, analyzes literal, decorative, and symbolic image-​text interactions as well as the mise-​en-​page to argue for the multilayered symbolism of Lepère’s work. Neither, however, focuses on specific graphic styles exploited by Lepère. Nor do they consider a significant aspect of this edition’s materiality that was an integral part of its aesthetic design, but beyond Lepère’s control: the bindings commissioned by individual owners of the work. Though Lepère’s influences were, as I have suggested, many and various, a dominant aesthetic principle shaping the edition is japonisme: “the incorporation of Japanese devices of structure, presentation, and/​or motifs into western art.”47 Japonisme was popular with the French avant-​garde of the day, including the decadents, and was, as Elwood Hartman and Pamela Genova have shown, an important element of Huysmans’s narrative. At a basic level, as detailed by Hartman, Des Esseintes is a Japanophile, whose obsession manifests itself in the design of his house, his collection of prints and objets, his experiments with scent, and in his analysis of poetry.48 Genova delves further, identifying japonisme in À rebours at the level of theory and technique, arguing that Huysmans’s aesthetic treatment of fragmentation, ornament and décor, and a new depiction of reality rest on principles of Japanese art.49 Clearly, the text’s japonisme was not lost on Lepère, himself a Japanophile, whose woodcuts show the influence of ukiyo-​e (the floating world), including color tonalities. Ukiyo-​e was a genre prevalent in the Edo period (1615–​1868), with interests in contemporary life—​especially pleasure, hedonism, and transience—​and characterized by sensuality, wit, stylishness, and naughtiness, qualities that suggest its appeal to decadents. The aspects of japonisme that Genova identifies in the text apply equally to Lepère’s illustrations and design, together characterizing the particular nature of decadence that this edition embodies. The material features of Lepère’s edition are saturated with japonisme, even to the level of typeface—​the least obvious, but most pervasive, aspect of this motif. Lepère commissioned the typeface from the avant-​garde poet, artist, and graphic designer George Auriol. The typeface, named after him, derived from his handwriting. Auriol is calligraphic, based on Japanese art, and has the effect of a hand-​produced brushstroke.50 More typically used for poster art of this period, this typeface brought an eccentric and innovative look to the book, exemplifying Uzannian ideals. Its design is in tune with the

BOOK ARTS   401 artistic currents of avant-​garde Paris, notably its interest in bringing the aesthetics and practices of preindustrial technologies and foreign art to modern French graphic and decorative arts. Lepère’s choice of a typeface rooted in a Japanese aesthetic prompts a more careful consideration of japonisme as a dominant feature of the wider book’s decadent design. One of the most striking aspects of japonisme at the level of mise-​en-​page is the use of decorative and/​or pictorial borders randomly arranged from page to page—​on outer and/​or inner margins, and running the full or part length of the text block. The decorative bands, often floral, invoke the bird and flower subgenre of ukiyo-​e, called kachō-​ ga, and the manner in which this style was taken up in impressionism and art nouveau. More striking, however, are the plentiful pictorial borders that have the appearance of Japanese hanging scrolls, especially the form known as hashira-​e: long, narrow prints of roughly 29 x 5 inches designed for pillars in houses. Traditionally, hashira-​e often depict fragmented or cut-​off images that leave the viewer to imagine what lies beyond the picture frame. Art critics have suggested that this format positions the viewer as a voyeur, “one peeking through a parted sliding door or through the slit of a window.”51 This narrow scroll format, adapted to the book page by Lepère, is an unconventional and challenging format for illustration. Often executed in a width of less than one inch, these strips are put to different uses by Lepère. At times, they are intricately detailed. Alternatively, they are presented in fragmented form or rendered murky and ambiguous (Figure 21.1). As marginal illustrations, small in comparison with the text block, they may seem to defer to the text, but their insistent presence and ambiguity make them imposing. This narrow pillar form is used especially in chapters that treat Des Esseintes’s engagements with modern urban life or that foreground decadent themes of entrapment, dissociation, and fragmentation. In this respect, the japonisme of the novel in material terms resonates with its textual japonisme that exhibits itself, as Genova says, in an aesthetic of fragmentation.52 A series of these narrow images running down the left side of most of the verso pages in ­chapter 11 show how Lepère’s design functions in tandem with the text.53 This chapter documents Des Esseintes’s aborted trip to London, which takes him only as far as Paris’s English-​language bookstore and to some British-​style bars. The strips provide images of his imagined London and the real Parisian-​based British establishments, while their cut-​off perspectives speak to his disengagement from these scenes as well as his desire to control contact with the outside world. Most of these strips appear opposite a recto page in which the illustration invades the text block. In one example, an image of a smoke-​filled dockyard, in which the smoke exceeds the image border, sits alongside text narrating Des Esseintes’s daydream of a stinking, sprawling, wet London (Figure 21.2). This invasion of text by image, like others, is suggestive of the existential threat that encounters with the outside world pose for Des Esseintes. Japonisme also informs the edition by way of allusion. It contains explicit interpictorial allusions to Hokusai, notably in headpieces to three chapters. The headpieces of ­chapters 2 and 7 reference Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829–​1833), while that of ­chapter 11 is based on Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife (1814). In ­chapter 2, Lepère plays

402   Kirsten MacLeod

Figure 21.1.  Examples of Lepère’s use of the pillar style, demonstrating its decorative function, its foregrounding of fragmentation and ambiguity, and its voyeuristic aesthetic. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

BOOK ARTS   403

Figure 21.2.  Mise-​en-​page depicting a constrained pillar strip opposite an illustration invading the text block. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

on Hokusai’s wave, replacing the original blues with ominous grey and black, and omitting the humans and boats in the original (Figure 21.3). This image resonates with the chapter’s theme—​Des Esseintes at peril in a storm-​tossed sea—​which, at the level of plot, occurs in his dining room that is designed as a ship’s cabin and is fitted into the larger room—​“Like those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other” (19). The japonisme of the headpiece is extended to another image in the chapter, also in the ukiyo-​e style, that depicts men maneuvering boats in a rough coastal sea (Figure 21.4). This image appears alongside and invades the text block of a paragraph in which Des Esseintes reflects on how his ship’s cabin room gives him the pleasures of a sea voyage without leaving home.54 This reflection, in turn, prompts his celebration of the superiority of artifice—​ “the distinctive mark of human genius”—​over nature, which “has had her day” (22). The invasion of the text block here by an image of teeming nature—​itself referencing another Hokusai work, The Kirifuri Waterfall (1831) (Figure 21.5)—​just at the point at which Des Esseintes expresses these thoughts, serves as an ironic comment on his hubris, as does the threat of the looming wave headpiece (Figure 21.3). These images serve as a reminder

Figure 21.3.  (Left) Lepère’s headpiece for ­chapter 2 in style of Hokusai. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. (Right) Hokusai, Great Wave off Kanagawa. Source: (Left) Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica; (Right) Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 21.4. Lepère illustration from c­hapter 2. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

BOOK ARTS   405

Figure 21.5.  (Left) Lepère illustration from ­chapter 2, in style of Hokusai. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. (Right) Hokusai, The Kirifuri Waterfall. Source: (Left) Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica; (Right) Wikimedia Commons.

that nature is all powerful. The crisis symbolized by the wave is not contained by Des Esseintes’s removal from Paris.

An À rebours Fit for Des Esseintes II: Personalized Bindings of the Cent Bibliophiles Edition The lavish illustrations and mise-​en-​page of Lepère’s edition were belied by a spare cover of simple blue-​grey wrappers, with title in black, author’s name, an abstract decorative floral ornament in red, and the identification of Lepère as provider of “ornementation.” Though restrained, the design retains the hallmarks of japonisme in its abstracted floral decoration and use of Auriol typeface. Lepère was aware that, in keeping with bibliophile tradition—​ old and new—​subscribers would bind the volume to their taste. Thus, while his design and illustrations play a significant role in marking this edition as a decadent book in material terms, binding provides an additional means of establishing decadent materiality, as Des

406   Kirsten MacLeod

Figure 21.6.  Marius Michel, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Sotheby’s Paris, Lot 226, La Collection Ribes. Paris, Sotheby’s, December 2019. E-​catalogue. Source: ©ArtDigitalStudio—​Sotheby’s Paris.

Esseintes does with his own collection. In this section, drawing on information gathered about the bindings of 27 of the 130 copies of Lepère’s À rebours, I suggest how these contribute to meaning around Huysmans’s text and what they tell us about the decadent book as material object in the late-​nineteenth and early-​twentieth centuries.55 These bindings were produced from around the time of Lepère’s publication in 1903 up to the art deco period of the 1920s, which marked a resurgence of interest in the fin de siècle in both literature and the book arts.56 They represent a Who’s Who of innovators of art nouveau and art deco book arts. Eight of these twenty-​seven editions were either executed by or after the design of Henri Marius Michel (1846–​1925), the radical father of the modern bookbinding movement, much vaunted by Uzanne, who established a

BOOK ARTS   407

Figure 21.7.  Charles Meunier, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Binoche et Giquello, Lot 23, Bibliothèque R. et B. L: Livres illustrés: art nouveau—​art deco. Paris, March 2013. Source: Binoche et Giquello.

new vocabulary of floral ornamentation to express the spirit of contemporary work.57 His bindings, executed contemporaneously with the edition, are in this mode, with art nouveau mosaic floral patterns in harmony with Lepère’s floral illustrations and color palettes relevant to the novel: three, for example, are in shades of orange and blue, the colors of Des Esseintes’s library (Figure 21.6). A fourth Marius Michel binding, in lemon yellow with more delicate floral ornamentation, expresses the japonisme of the text and Lepère’s design scheme. Other known floral art nouveau binding schemes for this edition were executed by Marius Michel’s followers: three of the twenty-​seven considered are by Réné Kieffer (1875–​1964), one by Petrus Ruban (1851–​1929), and one by Gruel (1841–​1923), a binder mentioned in the novel as a favorite of Des Esseintes. Though all beautiful bindings of an art nouveau style, reflecting the break with tradition that was characterized as decadent in the period, these designs do not as clearly resonate with the spirit of the book as Marius Michel’s do. Kieffer’s bindings, for example, while extravagant in their coloring, maintain the classical and symmetrical elements that characterized his work more broadly.58

408   Kirsten MacLeod

Figure 21.8.  Georges Canape, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Christie’s London, Lot 157, Important Books and Manuscripts from the Library of Jean A. Bonna, June 2015. Source: © 2015 Christie’s Images Limited.

From the point of view of an aesthetic most in accord with the spirit of Lepère’s work and with key symbolic aspects of the text, seven of these twenty-​seven bindings stand out. Charles Meunier’s (1865–​1940) is most stereotypically decadent: a pictorial binding of incised leather, depicting a front cover with a devil holding a globe with a border of orchids and painted flowers, and a back with a centrally placed orchid and two serpents (Figure 21.7). While the image does not directly illustrate an incident from the text, it evokes key symbols that reflect the themes of artificiality and corruption. Meunier was among the

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Figure 21.9.  Saint-​André, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Source: Librairie Mesnard.

most controversial binders of the period, with many regarding his bindings as “gaudy and crudely executed.”59 The binding of Georges Canape (1864–​1940) is also pictorial, but his is based on a Lepère image (Figure 21.8). The image is not one produced in the edition, but it was probably intended for it (the original drawing is bound into this subscriber’s copy), as it includes a muscular male figure and a wave, both recurring motifs of Lepère’s illustrations. This male figure, a symbolic representation of Des Esseintes, is always depicted in the in-​text illustrations in an abject position facing away. In the cover image, by contrast, the figure is front-​facing, but still adequately captures Des Esseintes’s renunciation of the world, as he runs away from the light and shields his eyes, with a hint of the Hokusai wave functioning as a cache-​sexe. The most popular visual conceit for the binding of this edition after the art nouveau floral theme, however, is the tortoise, which is invoked in bindings by Saint-​André (Ambroise Saint-​André de Lignereux, 1861–​1936), Pierre LeGrain (1888–​1929), and Georges Cretté (1893–​1969). Within Huysmans’s text, the tortoise is an element of japonisme, while also

410   Kirsten MacLeod

Figure 21.10.  Pierre Legrain, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Binoche et Giquello, Lot 85, Bibliothèque d’un amateur. Paris, May 15, 2009. E-​catalogue. Auctioned and sold at Artcurial. Source: © Artcurial and Marc Chatelard (photographer for Artcurial), reproduced with permission of Artcurial.

functioning symbolically in a variety of ways. Des Esseintes has the tortoise gilded and bejeweled, a design he bases on a drawing from his collection of Japanese art. The weight of the jewels soon kills the tortoise. As explained in the text, the tortoise “had not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it” (49). The jeweled tortoise is another example of Des Esseintes’s efforts to privilege artifice over nature, and to do so through a Japanese artistic style that foregrounds ornament.60 At the same time, it is a metaphor for Des Esseintes who, like the tortoise, is rendered mentally and physically ill from a life of luxury and overindulgence. Further, the jeweled tortoise speaks to Huysmans himself and his own writing style in the novel, one that Genova says transposes into the textual realm Japanese theories of art that aim at a new depiction of reality.61 The tortoise was, then, understandably an inspirational symbol for binders. Saint-​ André’s is a tour de force in its exemplification of the decadent theme of artifice versus nature (Figure 21.9). The jeweled tortoise is depicted in a medallion at the center of the cover and is surrounded by elaborate stamping, color, and gilt work that reproduces, in book form, the artificiality of the tortoise. There is only a hint of the natural leather bordering a cover that otherwise has the appearance of metal and cloth. Of a later generation, LeGrain and Cretté executed their tortoise-​themed bindings in the 1920s. Their art deco aesthetic rejects the floral and pictorial innovations of their art nouveau

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Figure 21.11.  Pierre Legrain, binding for J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Ader Nordmann et Dominique, Lot 360, Littérature. Livres illustrés et éditions originales: Manuscrits et lettres autographes des XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris, November 2018. Source: Ader Nordmann et Dominique.

antecedents in favor of decadent neo-​dandyism that foregrounds artifice in a different way. LeGrain held that a binding should reflect “not the flower, but its fragrance,”62 and his and Cretté’s bindings exemplify this turn from direct representation and ornamentation to more abstracted geometric mosaic tortoise-​shell designs. Even in their abstraction, however, they convey meaning. Legrain’s two designs, for example, offer different interpretive possibilities. One in dark black and brown leather emphasizes the despair at

412   Kirsten MacLeod

Figure 21.12. Lepère’s headpiece for ­chapter 4. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica.

the heart of the text, while another, jeweled with mother of pearl and eggshell, reflects its decadent luxury (Figures 10 and 11, respectively). In terms of conceptualizing Lepère’s edition of À rebours as a Gesamtkunstwerk of decadence, the tortoise-​themed bindings offer the most satisfactory body for the text. They relate directly to the key themes and styles of the text, while also participating in the self-​reflective aspects of Huysmans’s and Lepère’s creations. This self-​reflection is aptly registered in Lepère’s headpiece of ­chapter 4, which depicts a Van Dyke bearded jeweler at work on the tortoise (Figure 21.12). The jeweler in the image, however, resembles Lepère, and, interestingly, this is the only illustration marked with the artist’s initials. At the same time, the jeweler looks like Huysmans and like Lepère’s artistic rendering of Des Esseintes’s ancestor.63 The artist-​jeweler, then, stands for all the real and fictional creators of artifice, whether decorative (the tortoise), literary (the text), or artistic (the livre de luxe). It is only fitting, therefore, that the binder—​“[l]‌ike those Japanese boxes that fit one inside the other” (19) and so inspire Des Esseintes’s decorative imagination—​should take a place in this order, providing the outermost box: the carapace for this jeweled tortoise of a novel.

Notes 1. Pierre Mornand, L’Art du livre et son illustration (Paris: Le Courier Graphique, 1947), 2:35. 2. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 183. Further references cited parenthetically.

BOOK ARTS   413 3. Henri Béraldi, La reliure du XIX siècle (Paris: Librairie L. Conquet, 1897), 4:238. 4. Béraldi, La reliure, 4:238. 5. Béraldi, La reliure, 4:5. 6. Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–​1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 107; Octave Uzanne, Dictionnaire bibliophilosophique: Typologie, iconophilesque, bibliopégique, et bibliotechnique à l’usage des bibliognostes, des bibliomanes, et des bibliophilistins (Paris: Bibliophiles Contemporains, 1896), 12. 7. Silverman, New Bibliopolis, 14. 8. Octave Uzanne, La nouvelle bibliopolis: Voyage d’un novateur au pays des néo-​icono-​ bibliomanes (Paris: Henri Floury, 1897), 195. 9. Uzanne, La nouvelle bibliopolis, 263, 262–​63. 10. Uzanne, La nouvelle bibliopolis, 262. 11. S. T. Prideaux, Modern Bookbindings: Their Design and Decoration (London: A. Constable and Co., 1906), 100. 12. Walter Crane, William Morris to Whistler: Papers and Addresses on Art and Craft and the Commonweal (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1911), 232. 13. Béraldi, La reliure, 4:157. 14. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895), 539. 15. Béraldi, La reliure, 4:238. 16. Gordon N. Ray, The Art of the French Illustrated Book: 1700–​1914, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 2:375. 17. Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1908), 139; Deborah Jenson, “Decadent Novel,” in The Encyclopedia of the Novel, ed. Peter Melville Logan et al. (London: Blackwell, 2011), 219–​20. 18. Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 74. 19. Bertrand Bourgeois, “La maison d’une artiste et À rebours: Du livre comme objet de collection à la maison-​œuvre d’art,” Voix plurielles 1 (May 2008). 20. Béraldi, La reliure, 11. 21. Octave Uzanne, L’art dans la décoration extérieure des livres en France et à létranger (Paris: Société Française d’Éditions d’Art, 1898), 193. 22. Uzanne, L’art, 207. 23. Katherine Bergeron, Decadent Enchantments: The Revival of Gregorian Chant at Solesmes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 30. 24. Silverman, New Bibliopolis, 48. 25. Bourgeois, “La maison.” 26. Alistair Duncan and Georges De Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding: French Masterpieces 1880–​1940 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 12–​13. 27. Robert G. Cohn, Mallarmé’s Masterwork (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 1966), 56–​58. 28. Silverman, New Bibliopolis, 158. 29. Lloyd James Austin, Bertrand Marchal, and Nicola Luckhurst, eds., Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondence—​Compléments et suppléments (Oxford: Legenda, 1998), 180. 30. Brigitte Ouvry-​ Vial, “Stéphane Mallarmé Self-​ Appointed Publisher of His Own Work: 1865–​98: The Editorial Epic of The Afternoon of a Faun,” Quarendo 44, nos. 1–​2 (2014): 2–​3.

414   Kirsten MacLeod 31. Kathryn Brown, Matisse’s Poets: Critical Performance in the Artist’s Book (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 37. 32. Uzanne deploys this term in the long title of La nouvelle bibliopolis. 33. Ray, Art of the French Illustrated Book, 375. Two further illustrated editions were done in the first half of the twentieth century: a 1920 edition with illustrations by August Leroux for Le Librairie des Amateurs and a 1931 trade edition with illustrations by Arthur Zaidenberg. 34. Rolf Söderberg, French Book Illustration 1880–​1905, trans. Roger Tanner (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1977), 150; Georges Première, “Enquête sur les plus beaux livres illustrés du XXe siècle,” Plaisir de bibliophile 2 (1926): 43; Léopold Carteret, Le trésor du bibliophile: Livres illustrés modernes, 1875–​1945 (Paris: Carteret, 1948), 4:210. 35. Hélène Huet, Le livre décadent: Éditer, illustrer, lire (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2015), 135. 36. Huet, Le livre décadent, 136. 37. Ray, Art of the French Illustrated Book, 423. 38. Uzanne, Dictionnaire, 234. 39. Quoted in Huet, Le livre décadent, 135–​36. 40. Gustave Coquiot, Le vrai J.-​K. Huysmans (Paris: Charles Bosse, 1912), 109. 41. John R. Reed, Decadent Style (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1985), 22. 42. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 14, 15. 43. Ray, Art of the French Illustrated Book, 432; Eric Haskell, “Huysmans, Lepère and À rebours: An Image-​Text Inquiry,” Word and Image 4, no. 1 (1988): 394. 44. Évanghélia Stead, La chair du livre: Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-​de-​siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-​Sorbonne, 2012), 75. 45. Stead, La chair, 75. 46. Huet, Le livre décadent, 145–​52. 47. Elwood Hartman, “Japonisme and Nineteenth-​Century French Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 18, no. 2 (1981): 141. 48. Hartman, “Japonisme,” 159. 49. Pamela Genova, “Japonisme and Decadence: Painting the Prose of À Rebours,” Romanic Review 88, no. 2 (1997): 278–​88. 50. Peter Dawson, The Essential Type Directory: A Sourcebook of Over 1,800 Typefaces and Their Histories (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2019), 338. 51. Roger Keyes, quoted in Allen Hockley, The Prints of Isoda Koryūsai: Floating World Culture and Its Consumers in Eighteenth-​Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 159; Julie Nelson Davis, Partners in Print: Artistic Collaboration and the Ukiyo-​e Market (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014), 118. 52. Genova, “Japonisme,” 278–​81. 53. J.-​K. Huysmans, À rebours, illustrated by Auguste Lepère (Paris: Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Digitized Bibliothèque Nationale de France copy on Gallica (https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ ark:/​12148/​btv1b8​6002​36v.image), 126, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136. 54. Huysmans, À rebours (1903), 23. 55. Information and images of these editions were gleaned from the websites of auction houses and fine booksellers (Christies, Sothebys, Alde, Drouot, Librairie Mesnard, Librairie Koegui, Binoche et Giquello, Ader Nordmann et Dominique, Baron Ribeyre & Associés) and institutional catalogues (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Getty Research

BOOK ARTS   415

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Institute, the Morgan Library, the British Library, and the Bibliothèque St Geneviève, Paris). The Getty copy, with binding by Gruel, is digitized on the Internet Archive, and the deposit copy held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is digitized on Gallica. For perspectives on this revival in a literary context, see Kate Hext and Alex Murray, eds., Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). In relation to the book arts, Gordon N. Ray, “The Art Deco Book in France,” Studies in Bibliography 55 (2002): 30, notes the “neo-​dandyism” of art deco book artists and their “cult of literature of the past.” Duncan and De Bartha, Art Nouveau, 12–​13. Duncan and De Bartha, Art Nouveau, 92. Duncan and De Bartha, Art Nouveau, 194. Genova, “Japonisme,” 285. Genova, “Japonisme,” 285, 286. Quoted in Duncan and De Bartha, Art Nouveau, 18. Huysmans, À rebours (1903), 2.

Further Reading Béraldi, Henri. La reliure du XIX siècle. Quatrième partie. Paris: Librairie L. Conquet, 1897. Bourgeois, Bertrand. “La maison d’une artiste et À rebours: Du livre comme objet de collection à la maison-​œuvre d’art.” Voix plurielles 5, no. 1 (May 2008): n.p. Carteret, Léopold. Le trésor du bibliophile: Livres illustrés modernes, 1875–​ 1945. 5 vols. Paris: Carteret, 1948. Duncan, Alistair, and Georges De Bartha. Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding: French Masterpieces 1880–​1940. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989. Genova, Pamela. “Japonisme and Decadence: Painting the Prose of À Rebours.” Romanic Review 88, no. 2 (1997): 267–​90. Hartman, Elwood. “Japonisme and Nineteenth-​Century French Literature.” Comparative Literature Studies 18, no. 2 (1981): 141–​66. Haskell, Eric. “Huysmans, Lepère and À rebours: An Image-​Text Inquiry.” Word and Image 4, no. 1 (1988): 393–​404. Huet, Hélène I. Le livre décadent: Éditer, illustrer, lire (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2015). Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature. Translated by Robert Baldick. London: Penguin, 2003. Huysmans, J.-​K. À rebours. Illustrated by Auguste Lepère. Paris: Les Cent Bibliophiles, 1903. Digitized copy owned by Bibliothèque Nationale de France. https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​ btv1b8​6002​36v.image. Jackson, Holbrook. The Anatomy of Bibliomania. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Mornand, Pierre. L’Art du livre et son illustration. 4 vols. Paris: Le Courier Graphique, 1947. Ray, Gordon N. “The Art Deco Book in France.” Studies in Bibliography 55 (2002): 1–​131. Ray, Gordon N. The Art of the French Illustrated Book: 1700–​1914. 2 vols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982. Silverman, Willa Z. The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–​ 1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Söderberg, Rolf. French Book Illustration, 1880–​1905. Translated by Roger Tanner. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1977.

416   Kirsten MacLeod Stead, Évanghélia. La chair du livre: Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-​de-​siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris-​Sorbonne, 2012. Uzanne, Octave. L’art dans la décoration extérieure des livres en France et à l’étranger. Paris: Société Française d’Éditions d’Art, 1898. Uzanne, Octave. Dictionnaire bibliophilosophique: Typologie, iconophilesque, bibliopégique, et bibliotechnique à l’usage des bibliognostes, des bibliomanes, et des bibliophilistins. Paris: Bibliophiles Contemporains, 1896. Uzanne, Octave. La nouvelle bibliopolis: Voyage d’un novateur au pays des néo-​ icono-​ bibliomanes. Paris: Henri Floury, 1897. Uzanne, Octave. La reliure moderne artistique et fantaisiste. Paris: Édouard Rouveyre, 1887.

Chapter 22

Fashion Decadent Stylings Catherine Spooner

Fashion is perhaps the ultimate decadent medium: fashionable dress has been critiqued by moralists for extravagance, luxury, and sexual licentiousness since classical times. As Aileen Ribeiro points out, “The classical world regarded excess in dress—​either extravagant dress, or too-​revealing dress—​not so much as a sin in itself, but as a violation of reason, and against Nature.”1 With the introduction of Christianity, pleasure in dress was additionally supposed to be sinful, and thus Western attitudes to fashion were determined in a way that has been handed down, with different permutations, to the present. Fashionable dress is in excess of human needs, inherently wasteful (as it presupposes that clothes must be discarded as new fashions take hold), embraces artifice, and, in modern Western culture, is primarily associated with women and “effeminate” men. Moralists have thus repeatedly associated an excessive interest in fashion with a society in decline. This chapter focuses on the relationship of dress and decadence from the late eighteenth century, when the modern fashion system first came into being. However, it harks back to the spirit of Roman decadence and emperors like Caligula in suggesting that decadent fashion is primarily centered in the cult of extraordinary individuality, whereby sartorial expression is used to make oneself into a work of art. The chapter begins by reflecting on the decadent celebration of artifice before exploring the ethos of the dandy and the men and women who embodied it. It ends with the theme of beauty in decay and an appreciation of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who renewed the spirit of decadence in the 1990s and 2000s. The overarching thread of the chapter, however, is that fashion, when viewed through a decadent lens, is neither a passive process of consumption nor trivial. Fashion offers an active engagement with aesthetics that enables a daily intervention into systems of power, privilege, and beauty. For Caligula, and many of his successors, extraordinary style was founded on extraordinary privilege, including wealth and social position—​not to mention masculinity and, later, whiteness. However, fabulousness can

418   Catherine Spooner also be adopted by the disenfranchised in order to reclaim space in a culture that has traditionally marginalized them. As Madison Moore explains, “Fabulousness [is] about making a spectacle of yourself not merely to be seen but because your body is constantly suppressed and undervalued.”2 In certain circumstances, therefore, “fabulousness is something embodied and queer—​an aesthetic—​one rooted in certain kinds of creative agency, where extravagant self-​expression is a dangerous political gesture.”3 From Beau Brummell to Lady Gaga, decadent style has flouted the mores of the society whose gaze it has sought. It has always been, as Susan Sontag says of camp, “too much.”4

Wearing Modernity The modern fashion system, understood as a rapidly changing array of styles, began to emerge in Europe in the Middle Ages but was largely confined to the ruling elite. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Industrial Revolution and the development of mass textile production irrevocably changed the relationship of Western consumers with clothes. Parisian styles were rapidly disseminated to major cities across the globe and could be made comparatively cheaply from exciting new fabrics manufactured in Britain from imported raw cotton and silk. The growth of the textile industry, fueling rapidly changing seasonal styles, could be said in some respects to be the ground or the precondition for the development of decadent culture. For the first time in history, the middle classes could aspire to the sartorial style of the aristocracy. Moreover, the shift toward an urban society inaugurated a culture in which the gaze, or the exchange of gazes, became paramount in the definition of self. As James Eli Adams writes: The increasing social and economic mobility brought about by the Industrial Revolution made the interpretation of strangers an increasingly frequent and significant challenge. As a result, men caught up in such mobility experienced with corresponding frequency and anxiety a sense of putting themselves on display, imagining themselves as spectacles offered up to an unfamiliar gaze.5

In this world of spectacle and display, dress accrued new significance for both men and women. Many of the most characteristic personae of literary decadence, from the dandy and the flâneur, to the cross-​dressed or manly woman, and even the rag-​picker, thus proceed from material changes in the production and consumption of textiles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Decadence has been succinctly summarized as “the aesthetic expression of a conflicted attitude toward modernity.”6 The decadent relationship with fashion was created by the trade routes and technologies that enabled the production of new fabrics, new cutting techniques, and the swift global dissemination of fashion illustrations; by the boulevards and arcades that enabled people to see and be seen; by the department stores revolutionizing the consumer experience; by emergent discourses of celebrity;

Fashion   419 and by advertising that stimulated aspirational desires. Decadent writers and artists were also, however, preoccupied with the perceived opulence and aesthetic charm of clothing in the past. As fashion became increasingly accessible to a wider section of the population, the decadents would cultivate sartorial styles that were more than or beyond fashion, or even a kind of anti-​fashion. Particularly in male dress, there is a sense that fashion offers an opportunity to cultivate and perform extravagant new forms of identity. As Oscar Wilde famously quipped, “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”7 Decadence offers up thrilling encounters with the dressed body, in which clothing becomes a medium for the creation of astonishing visual images and the vivid expression of the self. A clue to the significance of fashion to decadent culture in the nineteenth century can be found in Suetonius’s description of the notorious emperor Caligula (r. 37–​41 CE): In the fashion of his clothes, shoes, and all the rest of his dress, he scorned to wear what was proper for Romans, for men, or even for mere mortals. He often appeared in public wearing a short coat of stout cloth, richly embroidered and blazing with jewels, or a sleeved tunic with bracelets upon his arms; sometimes all in silk or in a woman’s gown; at other times in slippers or buskins; sometimes shod like a soldier, sometimes like a woman. He commonly sported a golden beard fixed to his chin, and would brandish some divine symbol: a thunderbolt, a trident, or a serpent-​entwined rod. Sometimes, too, he appeared dressed up as Venus. Even before a military campaign, he would festoon himself as a victorious general, sometimes wearing the breast-​plate of Alexander the Great, stolen from his tomb.8

Caligula’s garments are in excess of fashion; they deliberately go against the rules and conventions of Roman society. He wears clothes that are extravagantly luxurious, that are inappropriately gendered, that are artificial (the obviously false beard), and that are performative (dressing as Venus or in Alexander the Great’s armor). All of these things came to be the hallmarks of decadent dress in the nineteenth century and beyond: decadent dress went above and beyond fashion to be eccentric, over-​the-​top, outrageous, fabulous.

Artifice Decadent fashion is typified above all by its stress on artifice. In “Le peintre de la vie moderne” (“The Painter of Modern Life,” 1863), Charles Baudelaire wrote counterintuitively “In Praise of Cosmetics,” overturning conventional hierarchies that approved nature over artifice and declaring that makeup improved on nature’s flaws. For Baudelaire, cosmetics enhance feminine beauty rather than detract from it; furthermore, they enhance it precisely because they are artificial. In the mid-​nineteenth century, wearing more than a little face powder was seen at best as a sign that your morals were rather

420   Catherine Spooner “fast,” and at worst that you were a prostitute. The “unnatural” beauty that Baudelaire endorses is thus also one that is coded with sexual permissiveness. This association is vividly illustrated in a much later work set in the decadent culture of the Weimar Republic (1919–​1933), Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The narrator introduces the British nightclub singer and would-​be actress Sally Bowles by noticing “that her finger-​nails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-​ smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s.”9 Sally’s nails are gloriously artificial, painted in a color that flouts nature and conventional taste. The choice of color draws attention not only to Sally’s cigarette habit but also to her lax personal hygiene, both suggesting, in the expectations of the day, a certain “fastness” or moral laxity. The glamour does not conceal but rather accentuates a tawdry underside to her character. Sally does not strive for natural beauty, and this is part of her appeal: her face is “powdered dead white,” and her brown eyes match neither her hair dye nor her eyebrow pencil (229). The narrator watches her “pursing her brilliant cherry lips . . . like [he would] a performance at the theatre” (229). Sally’s cultivation of her personal appearance is simultaneously careless and theatrical. Her performance is both artless—​like a little girl’s—​and contrived. It is precisely this vivid performativity that is the source of her charisma. When she has had an abortion, the narrator visits her in the hospital and observes that “[l]‌ying there in bed without her make-​up, she looked years younger, like a little girl” (258). This more vulnerable, “authentic” Sally is implicitly less entrancing: “We only stayed a few minutes” (259). Their relationship cools soon after. Baudelaire’s reappraisal of artificial beauty leads logically to the validation of fashionable dress: Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-​a-​brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain: as a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a repeated and permanent attempt at her reformation.10

Fashion always represents a striving toward this ideal, and historical fashions capture it momentarily. Baudelaire suggests that it is the process of fashion rather than individual styles that captures the ideal, and that each style may, momentarily, represent beauty. It is a surprisingly contingent and relativist aesthetics. By describing fashion as “a sublime deformation of nature,” furthermore, Baudelaire connects it with what Arthur Symons would eventually call “a new and beautiful and interesting disease.”11 John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X (1883–​1884) (Figure 22.1) celebrates this artificial beauty; he commented in a letter to Vernon Lee that he particularly admired the way his sitter was “uniform lavender or blotting paper colour all over.”12 Liz Renes notes the ambiguous use of whiteness in the painting, in which sculptural purity is undermined by “implications of a darker, dangerous beauty, fraught with hints of decay.”13 The white (or lavender) skin of the painting’s subject, Virginie Gautreau, was, however, a product of fashionable cosmetics. Gautreau was rumored to use the

Fashion   421

Figure 22.1.  John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X (1883–​1884). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Wikimedia Commons).

fashionable technique of “enameling” to achieve her flawless complexion. This technique involved painting the skin with a bismuth preparation to give it a homogenous, pearlescent appearance, and then augmenting with rouge and blue paint to create the impression of flushed skin so translucent that the veins showed beneath—​a luminous, tubercular beauty. Sometimes, as here, the ears were rouged to recreate a “natural” blush.

422   Catherine Spooner Although the painting was controversial when first exhibited for showing the strap on Gautreau’s right shoulder falling loose, giving the impression that she was scandalously close to undress (a detail later amended by Sargent), her hourglass figure is clearly achieved by a substantial scaffolding of corsetry. The unusual profile pose, highlighting Gautreau’s striking features, gives the impression of a carefully contrived image, while the combination of the averted gaze and exposed inner wrist suggest sexual availability and refusal at the same time. Gautreau’s charisma, as captured by the painting, lies in Sargent’s placement of a highly sexualized body in tension with a self-​consciously artificial frame, thus drawing attention to Baudelaire’s “sublime deformation of nature.” This combination at least partly explains the widespread dislike the painting occasioned when exhibited at the 1884 Paris Salon. The artificial and deathly whiteness of Gautreau’s skin was remarked on at least as much as her suggestively fallen shoulder strap, with one commentator damningly comparing her to “a female clown in a pantomime.”14 Baudelaire’s artful reversal of the nature-​fashion dichotomy would provide fuel for critics of decadent culture. In Entartung (1892–​1893, translated into English as Degeneration, 1895), Max Nordau describes the decadent state of the fashionable classes in terms that overtly recall Baudelaire’s “sublime deformation”: The majority, anxious to be inconspicuous in unimaginative mediocrity, seems to have for its leading style a laboured rococo, with bewildering oblique lines, incomprehensible swellings, puffings, expansions and contractions, folds with irrational beginning and aimless ending, in which all the outlines of the human figure are lost, and which cause women’s bodies to resemble now a beast of the Apocalypse, now an armchair, now a triptych, or some other ornament.15

Fin-​de-​siècle fashion for Nordau is “bewildering,” “incomprehensible,” “irrational”: it does not subscribe to principles of utility or logic. The “swellings, puffings, expansions and contractions” suggest a grotesque body that corrupts and adulterates the wholeness and integrity of the classical form. The comic hyperbole of the comparison to “a beast of the Apocalypse” and the contrasting bathos of “an armchair” only faintly ameliorate an underlying misogyny and sense of eschatological portent. This state, moreover, afflicts the “majority” who seek to make themselves inconspicuous by following fashion but, in doing so, paradoxically solicit attention: “Every single figure strives visibly from some singularity in outline, set, cut, or colour, to startle attention violently, and imperiously to detain it. . . . The fixed idea is to cause an effect at any price” (9–​10). The desire to follow fashion, for Nordau, thus indicates both a lack of imagination and egomania, encapsulating the ills of modern society. Later in the volume, Nordau takes specific aim at Wilde’s aesthetic dress, which he regards as the “pathological aberration of a racial instinct” and “a perversion of the instinct of vanity”: Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fashions of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present

Fashion   423 time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about. It is asserted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-​heraldic symbol of the Æsthetes. (317)

Here, the fabulous artificiality and performativity of decadent fashion are recast as pretension and bad faith (“a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe”), mental illness (“hysterical”), and moral failing (“vanity”). It is Wilde’s masculinity that is implicitly held up to scrutiny here. The artificiality of decadent femininity was morally provocative, but it could be recuperated within existing gendered and heteronormative frameworks; as Max Beerbohm wickedly points out in his semi-​ parodic treatise “A Defence of Cosmetics” (1894), “there are, I fancy, many such husbands as he who, suddenly realising his wife was painted, bade her sternly, ‘Go up and take it all off,’ and, on her reappearance, bade her with increasing sternness, ‘Go up and put it all on again.’ ”16 The combination of masculinity and fashion was potentially more far-​reaching, however, and nowhere more so than in the figure of the dandy.

Dandyism The advent of industrialization revolutionized men’s dress. The production of high-​ quality linen, wool, and cotton fabrics in the textile mills of North West England enabled the new, Rousseauesque ideals of simplicity and naturalness to be put into practice, and the clothes supposedly worn by the English country gentleman came into fashion across Europe. This style was perfected by George “Beau” Brummell (1778–​1840), who found favor with the English Regency court by elevating this Rousseauesque simplicity to polished minimalism. Brummell cast off the elaborate luxury of eighteenth-​century court dress in favor of simple garments precisely cut and immaculately worn. Brummell’s legacy was twofold. If he was not the first man in the late eighteenth century to affect a simplified look, he crystallized this trend into a distinctive and replicable personal style. This look would set the pattern of men’s dress for the next two hundred years, ushering in what has sometimes, following J. C. Flügel, misleadingly been called “the Great Masculine Renunciation,” or the adoption of the soberly cut and colored suit as standard male dress. In The Psychology of Clothes (1930), Flügel explains that from the late eighteenth century onward, “Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful.”17 In actual fact, as Christopher Breward has extensively demonstrated, while the color palette of men’s fashion undoubtedly subsided in the nineteenth century, men did anything

424   Catherine Spooner but renounce fashion, and there was a rich and complex men’s fashion culture.18 The dandy has sometimes been considered as a kind of rebel against the Great Masculine Renunciation, flying the flag of beauty over utility; however, this attitude was subject to considerable nuance, as dandyism encompassed a number of different styles, from Brummell’s asceticism (which aligned perfectly with the more sober approach to men’s dress of the nineteenth century) to the flamboyance of figures such as Count Alfred Guillaume Gabriel Grimod d’Orsay (1801–​1852). Both, however, occupied a similar space in the popular imagination, with cartoons parodying the Brummellian look demonstrating that its simplicity was deceptive, and that the figure required to sport its form-​fitting tailoring was often painfully acquired through strategic padding and tight lacing, resulting in a grotesque deformation of the “natural” body (Figure 22.2). Moreover, Brummell’s life story became repeatedly mythologized by nineteenth-​century writers, crystallizing into a cult of literary dandyism. Brummell’s taste, his wit, his social ascent, and his fall from grace became mythologized into a new kind of template for living, in which style was paramount. The dandy is described by Thomas Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–​1834) as “a Clothes-​wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes.” Carlyle continues, “Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress.”19 For Carlyle, the dandy was symptomatic of the spiritual malaise of nineteenth-​century society, which had become preoccupied with the material over the spiritual. He playfully constructs dandies as devotees and sometime preachers of a new religious sect, whose sacred texts are fashionable novels and whose temple is Almack’s (a high society club). This metaphor was later realized in J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) when the hero, Des Esseintes, lectures his tradespeople on how to do their jobs: [H]‌e had had a high-​ceilinged room prepared for the reception of his tradesmen; they would enter and seat themselves side by side in church stalls, and then he would climb up into an imposing pulpit and preach to them on dandyism, exhorting his bootmakers and tailors to comply in the most scrupulous manner with his briefs on the cut of his garments.20

The incident is deliberately extreme, but dandyism as a kind of spiritual condition was taken absolutely seriously by many nineteenth-​century writers. Carlyle’s scathing satire on the privilege of the high society dandy, whom he contrasts with the Irish poor, was eclipsed in the mid-​nineteenth century by French literary dandyism, which de-​emphasized the material concerns of the dandy in order to focus instead on his internal qualities. Speaking back to Carlyle, the novelist and celebrated dandy Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, in Of Dandyism and of George Brummell (1845), insisted: Those who see things only from a narrow point of view have imagined [dandyism] to be especially the art of dress, a bold and felicitous dictatorship in the matter of clothes

Fashion   425

Figure 22.2.  Isaac Robert Cruikshank, Exquisite Dandies (1818). Source: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

and exterior elegance. That it most certainly is, but much more besides. Dandyism is a complete theory of life and its material is not its only side.21

Barbey and his successors seized on Brummell’s example and made of it not only a material practice but also a philosophy, with dandyism becoming an attitude to living

426   Catherine Spooner expressed through the meticulous management of surface appearance. As Barbey suggests, this change was based on an emerging concept of personal style rather than the following or even setting of fashion: [Dandyism] is not a suit of clothes walking about by itself! On the contrary, it is the particular way of wearing these clothes that constitutes Dandyism. One may be a dandy in creased clothes.22

Baudelaire, in “The Painter of Modern Life,” concurred: Dandyism does not even consist, as many thoughtless people seem to believe, in an immoderate taste for the toilet and material elegance. For the perfect dandy these are no more than symbols of his aristocratic superiority of mind.23

Baudelaire identifies in the practice of dandyism a kind of meritocracy, whereby in times of social instability, conventional hierarchies may be disrupted and a new measure of social superiority arises. As he implicitly recognizes, nineteenth-​century dandyism was primarily a middle-​class phenomenon and involved the performance of aristocratic taste; the simplicity of Brummell’s dress was partially necessitated by his relatively modest background, which meant that elaborate court dress was financially and socially off limits. Nevertheless, the displacement of the material practices of dandyism onto interiority is also an evasion of class and its limitations, which Carlyle, with his disquisition on the opposing sect of the “Poor-​Slaves,” is at pains to draw out.24 Baudelaire constructs dandies as protesters against convention and the commonplace: “they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt.”25 In the twentieth century, this posture is taken up by Albert Camus in The Rebel (1951). Camus sees in the dandy a model of rebellious masculinity: “The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance.”26 In most accounts of dandyism, however, such as Ellen Moers’s The Dandy (1960), this rebellious masculinity has tended to be limited to the white, middle-​to-​upper class; while dandies frequently trouble conventional definitions of gender and heteronormativity, they do so through a framework of middle-​class white privilege. Nevertheless, as Robert Stilling demonstrates, dandyism and racial otherness were both perceived as degenerate, and each could be used to denigrate the other; Wilde’s tour of America produced “the racist typing of the dandy-​as-​Negro and Negro-​as-​dandy promulgated in satirical cartoons intended both to lampoon Wilde and to dismiss the possibility of taking black subjects seriously as the objects of aesthetic appreciation.”27 Susan Fillin-​Yeh has called for “a new paradigm for dandies, a robust and diverse ‘outsider’ paradigm of sartorial finesse detached from Western upper-​class dandyism—​traditional, mainstream, and gendered as male.”28 And indeed, twenty-​first-​century scholarship has expanded the vocabulary of dandyism across the boundaries of race, class, and gender to incorporate a wider range of sartorial identities in which an oppositional pose and the cultivation of sartorial aesthetics are closely aligned.

Fashion   427 As Breward shows, male sartorial rebellion was far more widespread and crossed more class boundaries than has usually been acknowledged; a vibrant working-​ class sartorial culture existed in the nineteenth and early-​twentieth centuries that “announced a distinctiveness separate from both suburban sportiness and metropolitan flash models.”29 Young working men would count a penny shave and professional boot blacking a necessary expense and would save hard in order to splash out on “[t]‌ight green trousers, fancy buttoned waistcoats and a cut that fitted like a glove,” a style that caused disapproving commentary from the middle classes, and which, Breward notes, had much in common with “the tailored dandyism of the Piccadilly bachelor” in its sartorial flair.30 This working-​class regard for personal style anticipated what James Laver in 1968 dubbed the “New Dandyism,” the postwar countercultural style of the British Teddy Boys and Mods.31 In “The Noonday Underground”, published in the same year, Tom Wolfe describes a Mod from Brixton (a racially diverse, working-​class area of South London) called Larry Lynch: Here he is, 15 years old, and he is dressed better than any man in the office. He has on a checked suit with a double-​breasted waistcoat with a stepcollar on it and the jacket coming in at the waist about like so, and lapels like this and vents like this and flaps about so and trousers that come down close here and then flare out here, and a custom-​made shirt that comes up like . . . so at the neckband, little things very few people would even know about, least of all these poor straight noses up here that make four times his pay and they never had a suit in their lives that wasn’t off the peg. He is a working-​class boy, and like most working-​class boys he left school at 15, before the “O” level examinations. But he has been having his suits custom-​made since he was 12 at a place called Jackson’s.32

Lynch—​who may be a fictional composite created by Wolfe—​finds his purpose and identity in wearing clothing that is just so, and, like the dandies described by Baudelaire (a reference of which Wolfe is surely cognizant), he uses his fashion sense to redefine his relationship with class, so that he is “better dressed” than his social and economic superiors. Money is essential to pay his tailor but does not on its own deliver a sense of style. The curious combination of sartorial detail and a deliberately inarticulate lack of specificity in Wolfe’s description (“like this . . . like this . . . about . . . so”) suggest both its importance and its impenetrability to outsiders; Lynch’s knowledge of style is embodied and ultimately untranslatable. He and his companions are “gloriously unaffected cynics” who, in true decadent style, dance while the country declines: “They simply accept England as a country on the way down, and who gives a damn.”33 The Mods’ mode of dress, at least in Wolfe’s description, clearly echoes classic formulations of dandyism, being aspirational but from a different point on the social scale. Dandyism in historic Black communities is slightly different, as it is rooted in the use of clothing to denote belonging and identity for diasporic Africans and power for slave owners (Figure 22.3). Monica L. Miller reads Black dandyism as a form of “signifyin’,” a means of Black expression born out of the historical experiences of

428   Catherine Spooner

Figure 22.3.  Emile Wauters, The Dandy (1912). Source: Berko Fine Paintings, Knokke-Heist, Belgium (Wikimedia Commons).

enslavement through which white texts and performances are appropriated, revised, and transformed. She argues that black dandyism is often seen as being imitative of Western dress and as a sign of one’s aspiration to enter the mainstream, but when interpreted as a signifying practice, it becomes instead a dialogic process that exists in relation to white dandyism at the same time it expresses, through its own internal logic, black culture.34

Black dandyism can be a potentially incendiary means of protest and dissent. The “zoot suit,” a loose-​trousered, padded-​shouldered ensemble flaunting excessive amounts

Fashion   429

Figure 22.4.  Malcolm X wearing a zoot suit, May 25, 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

of luxurious fabric in its construction, was widely adopted in the United States in the early 1940s by young Black and Hispanic men as “an emblem of ethnicity and a way of negotiating an identity. The zoot suit was a refusal: a subcultural gesture that refused to concede to the manners of subservience.”35 The suit was effectively banned in 1942 due to wool rationing, leading to illicit backstreet tailoring and, ultimately, the 1943 “Zoot Suit Riots,” the experience of which Stuart Cosgrove credits with beginning the politicization of the young Malcolm X (Figure 22.4). Dandyism may be a mode of resistance to white hegemonies for Black communities, but it is also necessarily compromised by its very implication in the capitalist system. As Miller acknowledges, “Black dandyism has had and will always have a difficult, indeed a tortured relationship to consumption in that the procurement of clothing, accessories,

430   Catherine Spooner and luxury goods that enables the performance comes literally and sometimes metaphorically at a high cost.”36 This tendency has become painfully evident in twenty-​first-​ century hip-​hop culture, which often uses conspicuous consumption of prestige brands and custom jewelry to advertise success—​items that are produced through the exploitation of Black communities in Africa and more widely in the Global South. Hip-​hop artist Kanye West’s 2005 track “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” for example, portrays his high-​rolling lifestyle complete with Porsche cars and Yves Saint-​Laurent glasses as the deserved reward for years of poverty and struggle. The remix, however, undercuts the unqualified celebration of bling by acknowledging the modern-​day slavery of African children who mine blood diamonds in war-​torn Sierra Leone, and the awful irony that both the drug trade that pays for the diamonds and the mining industry itself bring death to Black communities, separated by continents.

Gender The dandy was considered an exclusively male phenomenon through most of fashion history. In the Regency era, a female equivalent to a dandy was sometimes called a “dandizette.”37 This sobriquet did not have the same long-​lasting reach as the dandy, however. If women were conventionally associated with fashion and, as John Berger famously pointed out, had become accustomed to constructing their own subjectivity through an observing gaze, then there was no subversive charge to their adopting an excessive interest in their appearance; they merely confirmed existing gender stereotypes.38 Nevertheless, around the turn of the twentieth century, individual women who had an exaggerated approach to personal style began to emerge as equivalent figures to male dandies; women whose preoccupation with making a spectacle was in excess of a fashionable norm, beyond fashion, “too much.” Foremost among these women was the Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881–​1957), an Italian heiress who became notorious in Belle Époque society for her extravagant parties and flamboyant appearance, and went on to sustain this lifestyle through the first three decades of the twentieth century, before exhausting her vast inheritance and living out her final years in penury. She was closely associated with several decadent figures, most prominently Gabriele D’Annunzio, for whom she was a long-​term lover, friend, and muse. Her creativity found its outlet not in art or literature, however, but in embodied spectacle; with a nod to Wilde, she insisted that “I want to be a living work of art.”39 Her self-​creation took place on multiple levels. Casati cultivated a highly distinctive look: cutting her hair before it was fashionable to do so and dying it a vivid orange-​red, occasionally augmented with tiger stripes; and drawing attention to her already strikingly large eyes with kohl, India ink, glued-​on strips of black velvet, two-​inch long false eyelashes, belladonna drops to dilate the pupils and, in later days of penury, Cherry Blossom Boot Polish. She experimented wildly with clothes, including avant-​garde fashions by Léon Bakst, Paul Poiret, Mariano Fortuny, and Erté; surrounded herself

Fashion   431 with a menagerie of exotic animals, which she sometimes brought along to parties; and stage-​managed moments of astonishing drama. For example, she became known for walking in St Mark’s Square in Venice at night, “totally nude within the folds of a voluminous fur cloak, leading her pet cheetahs by jeweled leashes. . . . Accompanied by a black escort carrying a pair of blazing torches.”40 At a party in Venice, she appeared as Sarah Bernhardt before apparently dropping dead on the carpet and causing hysteria until a friend read aloud the will of “Sarah Bernhardt,” which required the assembled guests to follow her body in a candlelit gondola to its funeral in a cemetery in a neighboring lagoon. Another time, she reportedly caused female audience members to faint by appearing at the Paris Opera with “an entire set of white peacock feathers” adorning her flaming red hair, “while blood, applied beforehand by her chauffeur from the freshly slit neck of a chicken, flowed over the pale skin of her right arm.”41 Such morbid theatrics and a taste for funereal fashion would earn her the title of “la Vénus du Père Lachaise.”42 Casati inspired or commissioned dozens of portraits during her lifetime; she is characteristically referred to as a “muse,” a figure who inspires creativity in others rather than who is herself a creator. This is an appellation that is rarely applied to male fashion innovators; Brummell, for example, is never described as a “muse” for Barbey and Baudelaire. Casati’s art was ephemeral, and her name is not recognizable in the same way as Brummell or Wilde, or even female artists of her day (many of whom she knew) such as Virginia Woolf, Romaine Brooks, or Isadora Duncan. She was an artist, nevertheless, in her cultivation of personal style and her adherence to a vision of life as performance. This artistry is showcased in two different images of Casati: a portrait by Giovanni Boldini from 1908 (Figure 22.5), and a photograph showing her wearing a “Queen of the Night” costume to a ball at the Paris Opera in 1922 (Figure 22.6). Of course, Boldini’s portrait was composed and executed by him, but Casati selected her costume, thus acting in the role of what would now be thought of as “stylist.” The painting conveys elegance through a sense of motion imparted by the loose brush-​strokes, but also through texture: although dressed almost entirely in black, Casati wears furs around her neck, plumes of feathers in her hat, and holds a black greyhound, whose satiny fur complements the texture of her Poiret dress. A bouquet of silk violets at her waist suggests scent and highlights the purple accents in her gown. A tiny, pointed shoe elongates her body, while the enormous hat draws attention to her face and her luminous eyes. The ensemble is the epitome of sensual elegance, but it also plays with space and proportion; it stage-​manages and directs the viewer’s attention. The “Queen of the Night” costume achieves its theatrical effect even more ostentatiously. Designed by Bakst and constructed by the House of Worth, the semi-​transparent dress was encrusted with real diamonds and took three months to complete. Although the photograph conveys the flamboyant, sprawling nature of the garment, it scarcely captures the dazzling effect that the diamonds had when Casati rose up through the floor on a golden disc, illuminated by the Paris Opera lighting. If, as Richard Dyer has argued, Western culture tends to construct the white woman as the idealized creature of light, then in this costume Casati constructs herself as the blazing apotheosis of that ideal.43 It is a moment

432   Catherine Spooner

Figure 22.5.  Giovanni Boldini, Luisa Casati with a Greyhound (1908), private collection. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

of spectacular egotism, and if the photograph does not quite live up to its description, then that illustrates precisely the ephemerality of the performance. Casati’s decadence, however, culminated in her later years when she found herself in debt to the tune of $25 million and retired to a reclusive existence in London after auctioning off her possessions. In 1970, Philippe Jullian recalled seeing her around this time: Under the yellow glow of fog shrouded streetlamps, Piccadilly lay deserted. A small black figure advanced uncertainly, tugged forward by two dogs . . . . The face was that

Fashion   433

Figure 22.6.  Luisa Casati wearing “Queen of the Night” dress designed by Léon Bakst, possibly made by Jean-​Charles Worth (1922). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

of a sinister Pierrot, utterly white, the thin mouth a slit that seemed to be the same black rings encircling the eyes. The high cheekbones, the forward-​thrusting chin, the long neck bespoke the apparition’s class. Was this the vampire Nosferatu in drag or the daughter of Dracula turned grandmother? Had Miss Havisham discarded her bridal veil for the costume of the Blue Angel? . . . On this skeleton tawdry fineries had acquired an elegance beyond the canons of any fashion.44

434   Catherine Spooner In her decline, Casati is reimagined as not one Gothic monstrosity but as a cavalcade or carnival of Gothic archetypes: a sinister clown, an apparition, a vampire, a decaying bride. Walking her dogs under fog-​shrouded streetlamps, she is both Jack the Ripper and Cruella de Vil. What is more, she not only embodies these figures, but these figures travestied, “in drag,” or by incongruously wearing Marlene Dietrich’s showgirl costume. On the one hand, this talent for pastiche points to the “awarishness” of her persona: the way she turns a late-​night dog-​walk into performance art suggests her engagement in what Pamela Robertson would call feminist camp.45 On the other hand, she becomes a kind of living embodiment of the danse macabre, an elegant skeleton who has transcended the worldly transience of fashion. In this incarnation, Casati suggests another perennial decadent preoccupation: the peculiar attraction of beauty in decay.

Beauty in Decay The conjunction of beauty and decay permeates the decadent fashion aesthetic. “Do you not remember we are both born of Decay?,” Fashion says to Death in Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogue between Fashion and Death (1824), “we both equally profit by the incessant change and destruction of things here below, although you do so in one way, and I in another.”46 For Caroline Evans, “The pairing of fashion and death are [sic] built in to the structures of modernity”; she cites Walter Benjamin’s proposition that “fashion was never anything but the parody of the gaily decked-​out corpse.”47 The contrast of the fashionable woman with the grisly memento mori is a perennial theme of moralists since the Middle Ages, intended to communicate the vanity of worldly pleasures. In “Danse Macabre” (1857), however, Baudelaire provides a new twist, describing “Les charmes de l’horreur,” the attractions of Death herself: Vit-​on jamais au bal une taille plus mince? Sa robe exagérée, en sa royale ampleur, S’écroule abondamment sur un pied sec que pince Un soulier pomponné, joli comme une fleur. (At any ball does one see waist so slim? In all their regal amplitude, her clothes Unfurl down to a dry foot pinched within A pomponned shoe as lovely as a rose.)48

Baudelaire sardonically acknowledges contemporary beauty ideals (“At any ball does one see waist so slim?”). Yet this is not a conventional vanitas because the poem does not simply undercut the worldly pleasures of fashion with the horrors of the grave; it also acknowledges that “les charmes de l’horreur” provide a kind of epicurean delight to those with a strong enough stomach for them. Although the speaker ultimately rejects fashion, asking “Qu’importe le parfum, l’habit ou la toilette?” (“What matter

Fashion   435 clothes, and how you put them on?”), nevertheless the “squelettes musqués” (“perfumed skeletons”) of the danse macabre have their own powerful erotic and aesthetic charm.49 The quintessential expression of this theme arises in the work of the British designer Alexander McQueen. McQueen rose to fame in the 1990s, an era in which mainstream fashion seemed consciously to revisit the style of the previous fin de siècle. In Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (2003), Caroline Evans explains that [o]‌ften permeated by death, disease and dereliction, [fashion] imagery articulated the anxieties as well as the pleasures of identity, alienation and loss against the unstable backdrop of rapid social, economic and technological change at the end of the twentieth century.50

Evans’s chapter headings, including “haunting,” “phantasmagoria,” “glamour,” “cruelty,” “deathliness,” “trauma,” and “dereliction,” effectively map out the territory that fashion occupied in this decade. The trend most often associated with the period is “heroin chic,” a predilection for models who looked pale, underweight, lank-​haired, and hollow-​eyed. This aestheticization of illness and addiction bore much in common with the fetishization of tubercular beauty and its gradual reframing as “the result of moral and hygienic shortcoming” in the later nineteenth century.51 McQueen’s debut collection in July 1992, his MA degree show at Central St Martin’s, was entitled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (Figure 22.7).The six pieces married his extraordinary cutting skills, learned from an apprenticeship on Savile Row, with a macabre sensibility. The exquisitely cut and tailored coats and jackets were those of a nineteenth-​century dandy, with the same painstaking attention to transformative detail: inverted pleats at the shoulder, to give a softened, feminine silhouette; five buttons at the cuffs; sleeves cut in two sections and the lower part reversed to reveal a mauve lining, referencing the invention and subsequent modishness of the color in the nineteenth century and its use for mourning wear. The translucent lining of the garments, however, encased locks of the designer’s own hair. McQueen stated that he had been inspired by Victorian prostitutes’ practice of selling their hair “for kits of hair locks, which were bought by people to give to their lovers.”52 The hair could be read as a grisly souvenir stolen from his victims by a serial killer, but the fact that it is the designer’s own hair, and that he thus associates himself with the sex worker and the Ripper’s victim, complicates any easy attribution of sadism or misogyny. The hair in the lining is intensely intimate and personal: it alludes to both the prostitute’s exploitation and the lover’s gift; it recalls the hair shirt, chafing at the boundaries of the body, but recuperates such references through luxury; it sews abjection into the very seams of the garment, acting as both a memento mori and as a form of memorialization for the women who were killed. The complex relationship between femininity and death in McQueen’s Jack the Ripper collection was revisited in many of his subsequent collections and proved controversial: critics were particularly distressed by his Highland Rape collection of Autumn–​ Winter 1995–​1996, which sent models down the runway in torn and dirtied garments, sometimes with their breasts and buttocks exposed (Figure 22.8).McQueen always

436   Catherine Spooner

Figure 22.7.  Coat by Alexander McQueen at Savage Beauty exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum, silk with McQueen’s hair added, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims collection (2015). Source: Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-​SA 2.0.

Fashion   437 insisted that the collection, which used traditional tartans and tweeds, was about the rape of Scotland by England (he claimed Scottish heritage), but this assertion seems disingenuous, given the catwalk show’s willfully provocative tone. Nevertheless, as both Evans and Breward point out, McQueen’s violent depiction of female sexuality reflected a “wider vision of the cruelty of the world” that resonated with his own queer sexuality and was intrinsic to his construction techniques, in which “razor sharp” tailoring “traced the body’s contours like surgical incisions.”53 McQueen also built strong working relationships with a variety of women, including the latter-​day Casati figures Isabella Blow, whose early death inspired the “extreme glamour” of La Dame Bleue in Spring–​Summer 2008, and Lady Gaga, for whom he specially designed the “hoof ” shoes worn in her “Bad Romance” video (2009).54 McQueen facilitated the extraordinary

Figure 22.8.  Dresses by Alexander McQueen at Savage Beauty exhibition, Victoria & Albert Museum, from Highland Rape collection (Autumn–​Winter 1995). Source: Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-​SA 2.0.

438   Catherine Spooner self-​fashioning of these female dandies and was in turn professionally and creatively supported by them. It is in McQueen’s work, then, that the threads of decadent fashion are drawn together: the conflicted relationship to modernity; the pleasure in artifice; the exquisite cut of the male dandy’s suit; the flamboyant self-​fashioning of the female dandy; the embrace of beauty in decay. It also draws many of the same criticisms: the glorification of cruelty and violence toward women, the promotion of unhealthy beauty ideals, even the unnatural distortion of the female silhouette (McQueen’s “bumster” trousers reset the female waistline for over a decade). Decadent fashion stylings, however, produce an active engagement with aesthetics that enable intervention into systems of power, privilege, and beauty. McQueen’s work, with its relentless interrogation of femininity, mortality, and sexual power, does just that. Far from an evacuation of moral responsibility, the decadence of fashion may be a means of astute political commentary.

Notes 1. Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London: Batsford, 1986), 19. 2. Madison Moore, Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 8. 3. Moore, Fabulous, 4. 4. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994), 284. 5. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 27. 6. David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3. 7. Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” in The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, Centenary Edition (Glasgow: HarperCollins 1999), 1245. 8. Suetonius, extracts from The Lives of the Caesars, trans. Chris Baldick after versions by Alexander Thomson (1796) and Thomas Forester (1855), in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 63. 9. Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 2008), 228. Further references cited parenthetically. 10. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1995), 33, emphasis in original. 11. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” in Arthur Symons, Selected Writings, ed. Roger Holdsworth (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1974), 72. 12. John Singer Sargent to Vernon Lee, February 12, 1883, quoted in Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 113. 13. Liz Renes, “ ‘Selecting, Transforming, Recombining’: John Singer Sargent’s Madame X and the Aesthetics of Sculptural Corporeality,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 186. 14. “Eccentricities of French Art,” The Art Amateur 11, no. 3 (August 1884): 52.

Fashion   439 15. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 8. Further references cited parenthetically. 16. Max Beerbohm, “A Defence of Cosmetics,” in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 296–​97. 17. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 111. 18. Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–​ 1914 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999). 19. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 207. 20. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 11. 21. Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Dandyism, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 31. 22. Barbey d’Aurevilly, Dandyism, 31. 23. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 27. 24. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 212–​15. 25. Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 28. 26. Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (London: Penguin 2000), 29. 27. Robert Stilling, Beginning at the End: Decadence, Modernism, and Postcolonial Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 296. 28. Susan Fillin-​Yeh, “Preface,” in Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture, ed. Susan Fillin-​Yeh (New York: New York University Press, 2001), xi. 29. Breward, The Hidden Consumer, 203. 30. Breward, The Hidden Consumer, 202. 31. James Laver, Dandies (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 114. 32. Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: The Noonday Press, 1968), 99–​100, ellipses and emphasis in original. 33. Wolfe, Pump House Gang, 104. 34. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 14. 35. Stuart Cosgrove, “The Zoot-​Suit and Style Warfare,” History Workshop 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 78. 36. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 17. 37. Thomas Wright, England under the House of Hanover: Its History and Condition during the Reigns of the Three Georges (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), 459. 38. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972). 39. Quoted in Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino, Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xiii. 40. Ryersson and Yaccarino, Infinite Variety, 41. 41. Ryersson and Yaccarino, Infinite Variety, 57. 42. Ryersson and Yaccarino, Infinite Variety, 58. 43. Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997). 44. Philippe Jullian, “Extravagant Casati,” Vogue (New York), September 1, 1970, 378, 379, 380, 381, 419, 424, 425, 426, 427, 428, 429. 45. Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

440   Catherine Spooner 46. Giacomo Leopardi, “Dialogue between Fashion and Death,” trans. Charles Edwardes, Vestoj: The Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion, n.d., http://​ves​toj.com/​dialo​gue-​ betw​een-​fash​ion-​and-​death-​on-​gioc​omo-​leopar​dis-​poem-​and-​the-​thin-​veil-​betw​een-​ fash​ion-​and-​mortal​ity/​ (accessed May 29, 2021). 47. Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 132, 136. 48. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 198, 196, 197. 49. Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, 198, 199. 50. Evans, Fashion at the Edge, 4. 51. Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 135. 52. V. Lorna, ‘“All Hail McQueen,” Time Out, September 24–​October 1, 26. 53. Caroline Evans, “Desire and Dread: Alexander McQueen and the Contemporary Femme Fatale,” in Body Dressing, ed. Joanne Entwhistle and Elizabeth Wilson (London: Berg, 2001), 203; Christopher Breward, “Su[i]ture: Tailoring and the Fashion Metropolis,” in Alexander McQueen, ed. Claire Wilcox (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015), 45. 54. Wilcox, Alexander McQueen, 319.

Further Reading Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Breward, Christopher. The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–​1914. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999. Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Fillin-​Yeh, Susan, ed. Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Gagnier, Regenia. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1986. Garelick, Rhonda K. Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender and Performance in the Fin-​de-​Siècle. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Hawkins, Stan. The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Culture and Music. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Hollander, Anne. Seeing Through Clothes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Huysmans, Joris-​Karl. Against Nature. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Laver, James. Dandies. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968. Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. New York: Viking Press, 1960. Moore, Madison. Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.

Fashion   441 Ryersson, Scot D., and Michael Orlando Yaccarino. Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2004. Wilcox, Claire, ed. Alexander McQueen. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015. Wilt, Judith. Alexander McQueen: The Life and the Legacy. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Chapter 23

Interior Dec orat i on Designing Decadence Jessica Gossling

Given the focus on interiority and the descriptions of real and fictional domestic spaces that dominate decadent lives and literature, it is surprising that decadence as an interior decorating concept has been relatively overlooked. A search for “decadent interior” in the image-​based social media network Pinterest illustrates how decadent remains a loaded term in the world of interiors, signifying such gaudy, fake decoration as Liberace’s mansion in Las Vegas or Elvis Presley’s twenty-​four-​karat gold-​plated piano, the centerpiece of his music room at the Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tennessee. Decadent decorative interiors, however, involve much more than these kinds of superficial “decadent” elements. As Ellis Hanson explains, decadent style is “elaborate, highly artificial, highly ornamented, often tortuous; it delights in strange and obscure words, sumptuous exoticism, exquisite sensations, and improbable juxtapositions; it is fraught with disruption, fragmentation, and paradox.”1 Hanson is exploring literary style here, but his comments can be equally applied to the type of interiors that we encounter in decadent fiction, such as J.-K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), a novel that played a significant role in expressing the ideal decadent dwelling as a projection of modern dreams and desires. From Edgar Allan Poe’s philosophy of furniture arrangement to Donald Trump’s “Trump Tower” penthouse, decadent interior decoration involves the adaptation and development of style in response to contemporary taste and fashion, becoming less concerned over time with beauty and refinement and more focused on the demonstration of power through opulence.

Decadent Design Origins The cluttered and claustrophobic interiors that we encounter in decadent fiction and verse originate in the Gothic fascination with luxurious spaces and secret enclosures.

Interior Decoration   443 In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), for example, the sickness of Usher’s body and soul is reflected in his crumbling house, which collapses after his death. The similitude of character and dwelling is also evident in “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), with Prince Prospero’s imperial suite composed of seven color-​themed rooms symbolizing his unconscious states of mind. The revelers in Poe’s tale are simultaneously guests at the masque and figures in the Prince’s unconscious, suggesting “a multitude of dreams” moving “to and fro in the seven chambers.”2 Similarly, Huysmans’s sickly, self-​absorbed Des Esseintes and the eponymous hero of Jean Lorrain’s novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901), both effete bachelor descendants of a worn-​out nobility, take refuge in museum-​like settings that are outward expressions of their neuroses and desires. In “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (New notes on Edgar Poe, 1857), Charles Baudelaire explains the transcendental qualities of Poe’s works in terms of his “Poetic Principle” and the connection between reality and the imagination that takes place in enclosed, private, and, often, domestic spaces.3 In “The Philosophy of Furniture,” published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in the spring of 1840, Poe outlines his aesthetic theory regarding “internal decoration” and, in his description of his ideal room, illustrates the intersection between Gothic and decadent sensibilities.4 In this satirical essay, Poe first mocks modern taste, especially that of the rising middle class in whose homes objects are chosen for the purpose of displaying wealth rather than artistry or beauty—​“a man of large purse has usually a very little soul which he keeps in it” (224); he then proposes a solution to such errors of taste through a sketch of his ideal room—​an oblong salon, thirty-​feet long by twenty-​five-​feet wide, with one door, two couches facing each other, and two full-​length windows of crimson glass that open onto a veranda. The room is furnished with sensuous and aesthetic objects, such as “two or three hundred magnificently bound books,” images of fantasy landscapes (such as “the fairy grottoes of [Clarkson] Stanfield” or J. G. Chapman’s The Lake of the Dismal Swamp, 1842), and “a tall and magnificent candelabrum, bearing a small antique lamp with highly perfumed oil” (245). The color palette of the room (red, gold, and silver) harmonizes with the delicacy of the arabesque carpet design and the Sèvres vases filled with flowers placed in each corner of the room.5 On the one hand, the gloomy space illuminated by red lamps and filtered light reminiscent of Prince Prospero’s color-​themed rooms conveys the Gothic sensibility, and on the other, the arabesque wallpaper design suggests Poe’s fascination with excess, fashion, and exotic foreign interiors. It is not an ordinary living-​room, but a place of contemplation, repose, and inspiration, in which the solitary inhabitant is asleep on one of the sofas. As is apparent in other works by Poe, such as “Ligeia” and “The Duc de l’Omelette,” both collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the curving, tendril-​like line of the arabesque appears whenever he wishes to suggest the intricate and beautiful connections between the real world and the imagination. Good interior design, Poe suggests, reflects the sensibility of the occupant and creates an atmosphere in which “repose speaks in all” (244).6 This type of interior tells of an unspoken, empathetic connection between the dweller and the dwelling. In the introduction to his 1852 translation of Poe’s essay, Baudelaire maintains the focus on creating an ideal interior

444   Jessica Gossling for dreaming and imagining when he muses, “Who among us, in his idle hours, has not taken a delicious pleasure in constructing for himself a model apartment, a dream house, a house of dreams?”7 In the decadent interior, the private fantasy spaces of the Gothic are transformed into real inhabited spaces that foreground the individual personality. Both Poe and Baudelaire share a taste for unique decoration. While Poe’s ideal interior is very different from the ordinary house on Sixteenth Street in Philadelphia that he shared with his wife Virginia and mother-​in-​law Maria Clemm (where he was living when he wrote “The Philosophy of Furniture”), Baudelaire was able to make his “house of dreams” a reality in the apartment that he designed for himself in the Hôtel Pimodan (now the Hôtel Lauzun) on the Île Saint-​Louis in Paris.8 The poet lived in this apartment from May 1843 to July 1845, drawn to the hotel because of its location and air of faded grandeur. The building dates from the era of Louis XIV and still retains its classical façade and dolphin-​shaped drainpipes. Following the 1789 Revolution, the neighborhood became unfashionable, and the hotel was divided into apartments and attics rented out to artists and writers such as Baudelaire and his friend and fellow poet Théophile Gautier, the “perfect magician” to whom he dedicated Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857).9 Baudelaire’s design of the interior of his apartment reflects a common preoccupation among aesthetes and decadents with surroundings that resonate with the personality of the occupant. In Charles Baudelaire (1868), Gautier refers to his friend’s bedroom-​study in the Hôtel Pimodan as “a retreat hidden from all, which seems to await the beloved soul,” furnished with “poetic comfort, a strange luxury.”10 In his biography of Baudelaire (1869), Charles Asselineau describes how the poet rejected the mid-​nineteenth-​century bourgeois trend for highly ornate rococo interiors, preferring instead a modern and uncluttered style—​he papered his room in broad black and red stripes, frosted the single window so as to allow only a view of the sky, hid his well-​chosen and valuable books behind sliding panels, and perfumed the air with exotic fragrances.11 Baudelaire was not interested in keeping up with contemporary trends in interior design, but his collecting habits were reported to be excessive. Théodore de Banville remembered seeing furniture movers in Baudelaire’s apartment, installing antiques and paintings bought from the Parisian art dealer Antoine Arondel that the poet later had to sell back at a loss, thereby exhausting much of his inheritance within two years of receiving it.12 Decadent interior décor emerges in part as an elitist reaction to the popularity of aestheticism, which originated in France with Gautier’s l’art pour l’art dictum and reached its peak as an interior decorating concept in the 1880s.13 The vogue for “The House Beautiful,” as Oscar Wilde titled one of his lectures from his 1882 tour of the United States, originates from the aesthetic philosophy of William Morris, who advised homeowners to “[h]‌ave nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”14 But aestheticism was more than just the unqualified enjoyment of a lovely object. It was also an attempt to establish rules for beauty that everyone could follow to guide the development of “good taste.” As Wilde remarked to an American reporter during his lecture tour,

Interior Decoration   445 [B]‌eauty is nearer to most of us than we are aware. The material is all around us but we want a systematic way of bringing it out. The science of how to get at it is what I came to lecture about.15

In her study of Wilde’s American tour, Michèle Mendelssohn observes that Wilde was keen to help his audience understand that “shabby imitations and second-​rate copies mocked the uniqueness that real artists brought to their craft.”16 Raising the level of artistic design in domestic interiors meant that ordinary Americans could express their particular tastes in an aesthetically pleasing manner that was uniquely their own: “[E]‌very home should wear an individual air in all its furnishings and decorations.”17 Even though the aesthetic Wilde of the early 1880s was not quite the decadent Wilde of the 1890s, his encouragement of “an individual air” in aesthetic décor harmonizes with the principle of individual expression in decadent design proper. At the fin de siècle, the craze for aestheticism took off in Europe, and America and was much satirized in the press.18 In 1861, after Morris established the iconic Morris & Co. brand, his wallpapers went on sale in Boston, New York, and Chicago. In 1883, Liberty of London (“Liberty’s”), a department store on Regent Street, set up a furnishing and decoration studio specializing in “exotic” furniture, imported latticework, and hybrid Anglo-​Oriental styles that fused Japanese, Moroccan, and Islamic designs with Celtic, Tudor, and medieval elements.19 The success of Liberty’s lay in supplying an expanding market with hand-​crafted goods, generating the illusion of uniqueness in a department store catering to a mass market. In her study of the correspondences between architecture and writing, Séverine Jouve explores the disorder, wealth, boredom, eccentricities, and sometimes madness that characterize the decadent interiors of the fictional spaces writers and artists create, as well as the actual homes they inhabit. From the Goncourt brothers to Stéphane Mallarmé to Huysmans to art nouveau, Jouve describes the poetics of fin-​de-​siècle literature in terms of a decorative design aesthetic.20 While the decadent home interior shares characteristics with the “House Beautiful” aesthetic (an abundance of bric-​a-​ brac, a subdued color palate, and sumptuous textiles), it is underpinned by a different decorating philosophy. Decadent interiors are built on personality and ego (Jouve calls them “tombs of the ego” [“les tombeaux de l’ego”]); they are curated like museum spaces or designed like stage sets, with the selection and placement of individual objects crucial to the overall effect. By constructing a collection piece by piece rather than buying “off-​ the-​rack,” the decadent designer creates an interior dedicated to self-​expression.

Collection and Curation In the late nineteenth century, editors of novels, newspapers, and magazines took an increasing interest in the private spaces of public figures, resulting in the fashion for private collectors opening up their homes to authors of magazine articles for glimpses by

446   Jessica Gossling the public.21 While in the twenty-​first century decadent interiors tend to be associated with kitsch arrivisme, in the nineteenth century the decadent interior was aristocratic and tasteful, exemplified by the aesthetic museum house in which real antiques, unaffordable to most people, were a key component. In her study of photojournalism and the museum house, Elizabeth Emery examines the way in which the museum-​houses and apartments of French writers were an essential part of their lives and work. The house becomes more than just a domestic living space. It is elevated to “an emotional center, a refuge where the pleasure of artistic creation protected residents from the hostile outside world.”22 Central to Emery’s study is Edmond de Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste (The house of an artist, 1881), an inventory of the collection of art, antiques, and historical artifacts that he and his brother Jules had amassed since the 1850s and a topographical guidebook to their house in Auteuil, a suburb of Paris, where they moved in 1868 (unfortunately, the book is not illustrated). Each room in the house resembled a salon space containing carefully chosen objects; each chapter of the book is titled after a room and its contents: “Dining Room (French Bronzes of the Eighteenth Century),” “Staircase (Japanese Albums),” and “Boudoir (Persian Carpets).”23 As the chapter titles suggest, the focus is less on function and more on how the space fosters connections and comparisons between objects, as we would expect in a museum or gallery. Emery takes this observation further and interprets Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste itself as another elite and expensive art object in the Goncourt collection. The two-​volume book “gave him the space to describe objects and their relationships to others in the display, while presenting the entire collection as an extension of his literary and art historical work.”24 Rather than opening up his collection to the masses, La maison d’un artiste was published in an expensive limited print run of sixty copies (fifty priced at seven franks on Hollande paper and ten at twelve franks on Chine paper), and was only accessible to a select group of fellow collectors and connoisseurs.25 As Emery argues, at a time when interior decorating was becoming mainstream, the book of the house positioned Goncourt as one of the literary and artistic elite. Goncourt’s La maison d’un artiste became a favorite handbook of Robert de Montesquiou-​Fézensac, the poet, aesthete, and dandy whose interest in the creative and evocative power of décor can be seen in his private apartment in the attic of his family home in Paris at 41 Quai d’Orsay, where he lived from 1874 to 1889. Over the course of fifteen years Montesquiou transformed his suite of eleven rooms into his personal “maison d’un artiste,” organizing the apartment as a series of set pieces in which the link between interior decoration and psychological interiority could be foregrounded.26 Montesquiou was a great admirer of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845–​ 1886), the “Dream King” who had built three castles—​Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, and Neuschwanstein—​ each representative of his extravagant, exotic, and out27 landish personal taste. A similar, albeit less grand, focus on otherworldly aesthetics characterized Montesquiou’s own apartment, which included “a forest entryway, rooms dedicated to the sun and moon, a spider garret, [and] an anteroom resembling a Gothic chapel.”28 In each of these rooms an eclectic assortment of furniture, bibelots,

Interior Decoration   447 colors, and textures were assembled. To the outsider looking in, the rooms appear to be a jumble of mismatched objects, but to Montesquiou, the collector and curator of the space, this bric-​a-​brac is infused with personal associations. Like a dream, the organization of the space is not intended to be understood by anyone other than himself. As he writes in his memoirs, it is “the grouping of objects, in association, almost in an ingenious and sometimes striking conversation, which awakens the appetite of the eyes, and communicates itself to the soul.”29 This interconnectedness is also apparent in the organization of Montesquiou’s Les hortensias bleus (Blue hydrangeas, 1896), a collection of poetry that emulates the sanctified interior of Montesquiou’s Quai d’Orsay apartment, as illustrated in the “cathedral-​corner” of his main living room (Figure 23.1). The collection is divided into Introït (after the Latin for “inside,” a reference to the entrance for a priest approaching the altar for the Eucharist), Chapelle blanche, Chambre claire, and Chambre obscure. In the poem “Intus” (Within), Montesquiou uses objects to create dream-​like images. The poem is an oneiric analogy between a bedroom and the inside of a sleeping head, filled with memories and thoughts—​the bibelots in the room are like the dreams within a mind and the curtains are like closed eyelids. In this dreamspace, the speaker mingles with these objects, reveries, and ideas, which appear to him to be as real “as crystal.”30 The manuscript collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France contains an archive of Montesquiou’s interior design plans, instructions, and photographs of his Quai d’Orsay apartment, but the intensely personal nature of the design cannot adequately be conveyed by photographs alone. The “Moon Room” (Figure 23.2), for example, is described as using “the same magic spells” as in the “Sun Room” to create a balanced dualism between them.31 Montesquiou’s eclecticism and experimentation, as well as his overarching conception that interior design can transform a space in a magical or bewitching way, is epitomized by this room of azure and silver, colors were chosen to evoke moonlight during the day and intensify the moon’s effects at night. Through fabric, curtains, and paint, Montesquiou creates a room that is reminiscent of a stage set rather than a practical living space. It has a crafted, poetic quality—​gray fabric with small monochrome designs and pale gold flecks hung on one wall, the chimney piece covered in gray leather, and the carpet made up of two shades of gray in order to emulate night-​time shadows in an alleyway. As he suggests in “Intus,” the space quite literally sets the scene for nocturnal poetic fantasies. Anyone looking at the photograph of the “Moon Room” without knowing the rationale behind the space, however, might reasonably assume that it is just some collector’s junk room—​in which objects and artifacts have been assembled at random. Unlike other forms of interior decoration where the emphasis is on how the space looks to people on the outside, decadent interior decoration is inward-​looking and personal; what matters is how the room feels to the individual who creates it. The interior décor of decadent homes was not made for public consumption and did not follow fashion protocols. Goncourt and Montesquiou, for example, went against the grain in this regard, mixing up aesthetic ideas and styles. The purposeful and refined elitism of the decadent interior means that the value of the objects and their placement can only be

448   Jessica Gossling

Figure 23.1.  The “Cathedral-​Corner” of Montesquiou’s apartment at 41, Quai d’Orsay (before 1888). Photographer unknown. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris BnF MSS NAF 15037, fol. 128.

truly understood by the collectors themselves and a select, refined group of like-​minded aesthetes. When Montesquiou’s third residence, at 96 Avenue Maillot in the expensive Parisian suburb of Neuilly-​sur-​Seine, was burglarized in August 1901, the aristocrat was concerned about the theft or destruction of his treasured objects, notably his portrait by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, but to his surprise nothing had been stolen except a few perfume burners. To his delight, the thieves reported that “there was nothing there for us.”32 For Goncourt and Montesquiou, interior decorating was as much about the

Interior Decoration   449

Figure 23.2. Montesquiou’s “Moon Room” at 41, Quai d’Orsay, circa 1887. Photographer unknown. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. BnF MSS NAF 15037, fol. 127.

collection and display of expensive and desirable objects as about creating a backdrop for artistic expression and inspiration.

À rebours: A Decorating Manual Although a single decadent interior decorating style does not exist, in Against Nature Huysmans provides a detailed inventory of the elements that it might include. In describing how Des Esseintes creates and constructs his house at Fontenay-​aux-​Roses on the outskirts of Paris, Huysmans illustrates how rooms, objects, textiles, and paint come together to create an obsessive and neurotic fictional version of the houses of Goncourt and Montesquiou. Huysmans was influenced by contemporary design ideas and fashions, and the imaginary house at Fontenay is inspired by the Goncourt brothers’ house in Auteuil, the residences of Montesquiou, and his own apartment on the fifth floor of 11 rue de Sèvres, where he lived for twenty-​three years, from 1876 to 1899. In an interview just

450   Jessica Gossling after the publication of Against Nature, Francis Enne depicts Huysmans’s apartment as an artistic sanctuary, high above the surrounding roofs and infiltrated by the sounds of church bells rather than by the noises of the city streets. As the later photographs of Huysmans in his apartment show (part of a pioneering series of famous figures in their homes by Dornac, pseudonym of Paul Cardon), this small space is crammed with stuff—​“rare Japanese curios, art objects, and richly bound books” (Figure 23.3).33 Rather than being constrained by the imperative of recording what actually exists, as in La maison d’un artiste, in Against Nature Huysmans is able to take his collector’s impulse to imaginative extremes. In the “Préface: Écrite vingt ans après le roman” (Preface: Written twenty years after the novel), Huysmans describes Against Nature as a transitional work and the beginning of his turn away from naturalism, the commonplace, and the average.34 The novel is not just about a collector languidly basking in luxurious décor, unbounded by real-​world constraints. Instead, it is an intellectual thought experiment in the effects of material surroundings and specially chosen possessions on the construction of the self. The house at Fontenay symbolizes the struggle of the decadent writer to reconcile the temptations of sexuality and modernity with his desire for retreat. Hence, instead of

Figure 23.3.  Dornac (Paul Cardon), J.-K. Huysmans at home (1903), Nos contemporains chez eux, fol. 8r., photograph. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Interior Decoration   451 creating a simple sanctuary, Huysmans designs an interior space that articulates a more complex and ambivalent relationship to the world. At the beginning of the novel, Des Esseintes withdraws from the chaos of modern urban life into a private domestic world, his “refined Thebaid” at Fontenay, where he attempts to create a new life for himself.35 Unlike Des Esseintes’s previous homes, the house at Fontenay is planned around “his own personal pleasure and not to astonish other people”—​it is “a peaceful and unique abode specially designed to meet the needs of the solitary individual” (14). As such, each room is devised to elicit a specific mood or sensory experience, the objects within the rooms chosen to function as vehicles for his fantasies and synesthetic experiences. However, rather than becoming a therapeutic retreat, the interior he designs intensifies his neuroses by evoking associations with his childhood, his previous urban existence, and his unfulfilled dreams and desires. His meticulously designed home functions almost too well, successfully serving as a theater of the imagination where, as Max Nordau remarks in Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–​1893), “[e]‌verything . . . aims at exciting the nerves and dazzling the senses.”36 At the end of the novel, on the advice of his doctor, Des Esseintes abandons his domestic experiment and returns to society for the sake of his physical and mental health. Against Nature can be read as an inventory of decadent pleasures, neuroses, and experiences, each selected and contained within the individual rooms of the villa. Some chapters are based on Des Esseintes’s collections and some involve recollections of experiences that seem to come unbidden into his imagination. From the leather-​lined library, to the quasi-​underwater dining room, to the faux-​monastic bedroom, the interior of the house at Fontenay reflects Des Esseintes’s restless, hypersensitive, and multifaceted personality. Like Des Esseintes’s decadent imagination, the interior of his house is characterized by extravagant materials, vivid colors, and decorative objects—​“jewelry, perfumes, flowers, religious and secular literature” (208). In his study, for example, the walls are “bound like books in large-​grained crushed morocco,” moldings and tall plinths are “lacquered a deep indigo,” and the floor is strewn with “tiger skins and blue fox furs” (16). While Des Esseintes comments that he intended to have only “rare books and flowers” in this room, thereby avoiding having to undertake “any laborious treasure hunts” (17), and that he has retained enough wall space to hang some drawings and paintings at a later date, his study is far from minimalist. It contains ebony bookshelves and bookcases, a fifteenth-​century money-​changer’s table, several deep-​seated wing-​ armchairs, a wrought iron church lectern, curtains made of old ecclesiastical stoles, two Byzantine monstrances on the mantelpiece, along with three illuminated poems by Baudelaire copied onto vellum and displayed in a triptych. The central poem, “Any Where Out of the World,” articulates the main function of the house at Fontenay, which is to provide a space of escape from the physical world and the alienation caused by commodification and mass consumerism. The aesthetic of his study does not depend on matching colors, patterns, and textures. Instead, it operates through a provocative juxtaposition of objects that subverts the idea of “junk” or “bric-​a-​brac” and suggests an insider’s knowledge of their value—​one that is not market-​driven but reflective of a level of curiosity and refinement inaccessible to the ordinary person. Des Esseintes’s

452   Jessica Gossling decadent decoration demonstrates an irreverence toward Parisian consumer culture; as a result, the character creates a new spectrum of value that is based on personal discernment, idiosyncrasy, and taste. The house at Fontenay is a space of withdrawal and rebellion in which Des Esseintes intends to do things differently—​for this reason his scheme of interior decoration is purposefully à rebours. The infamous pet tortoise introduced into the house in ­chapter 4 is the quintessential example of this decorative subversion. In 1882, two years before Against Nature was published, Goncourt referred to Montesquiou’s jeweled tortoise as a “a bibelot at once walking and gilded”; in the novel, Huysmans uses this creature to explore how the imagination can be stimulated by a perfectly positioned “object.”37 On a shopping trip before leaving Paris, Des Esseintes is inspired by the iridescent colors of an Oriental carpet, and after spying the creature in a shop window, he purchases the tortoise with a view to enhancing the color scheme in his house. After the tortoise is delivered to Fontenay, Des Esseintes is disappointed by its lackluster natural appearance and sends it to a series of artisans for some “adjustments” (its shell is first gilded and then set with real and artificial stones). Finally, when the tortoise is perfect, Des Esseintes spends an afternoon admiring it in the half-​light of his dining room. The decoration of the reptile’s shell, taken from a Japanese drawing of a bunch of flowers growing from a single stem, adds an extra dimension to his carpet; it creates an optical illusion whereby the floral pattern on the rug appears to be moving. Yet, despite his meticulous attention to detail, Des Esseintes finds the effect is not as he intends. After waking up from an anxiety dream about a harrowing visit to a dentist, he finds that the tortoise has died. He believes that it had “not been able to bear the dazzling luxury imposed upon it, the glittering cape in which it had been clad” (49); but, in reality, it suffers the same fate as his collection of hothouse flowers, which die from lack of proper care.38 This episode describes a situation familiar to many—​the anticlimax of ordering something that does not live up to expectations. Interestingly, when the tortoise is first delivered it is described as being gold—​its shell covering the delivery man’s chest like “a huge buckler of gold” (40)—​but it is just not golden enough for Des Esseintes’s decadent tastes. Des Esseintes is a champion of artful clutter, the essence of his decadent design aesthetic inhering in a collector’s mentality that brings together the odd and the rare, the beautiful and the uncanny, precious objects and junk. The last of these categories can be seen in the decoration of his bedroom, where he experiments with the relationship between artificiality and reality. He wishes to create a replica of a Carthusian monk’s cell that retains “a certain elegance and distinction, while yet preserving its essential ugliness” (62). In order to do this, he reverses the optical illusion of the stage, where cheap fabrics and objects are made to look expensive, and instead creates an interior that looks plain and simple but costs a fortune. The height of luxury is found in seemingly inconspicuous, private consumption. However, the reader is drawn into Des Esseintes’s artifice, becoming one of the elite who comprehends the beauty and artistry of a space that fosters the illusion of poverty.39

Interior Decoration   453

The Contemporary Decadent Interior When it comes to decadent decorating, Against Nature was the inspiration for a number of Huysmans’s contemporaries, most notably Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose hillside estate Vittoriale degli Italiani (Shrine of Italian victories), where D’Annunzio lived from 1922 until his death in 1938, is decadent by design. Many connections have been made between D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889) and Against Nature, most recently by Theresa Zeitz-​Lindamood, who draws attention to the urban geography of the two novels.40 However, it is in the design of D’Annunzio’s real house and garden that the influence of Huysmans’s fictional design is most apparent. D’Annunzio’s vast, twenty-​two-​acre complex celebrates the worship of three main themes: mechanization, war, and the individual. The historian Fred Licht describes in detail walking around the external, public parts of the estate—​comprising a hangar in which D’Annunzio’s airplane is hung from the ceiling, a vast mausoleum containing the writer’s remains, and a full-​size battleship turned garden terrace—​and entering the internal, private apartments that contain manuscripts, approximately 30,000 books, and 10,000 personal objects. The “Room of the Relics,” for example, includes Catholic monstrances, Buddhist statues, a framed piece of human skin, the steering wheel from a fatal car crash, and the hair of the driver who died in it, as well as more traditional antiques, Murano glass, and specially commissioned works of art (Figure 23.4).41 Notable among D’Annunzio’s range of artifacts is a partially bronzed tortoise on the dining room table, a pet that died of overeating tuberoses before being turned into a tribute to Des Esseintes and a caution against gluttony.42 Many of the objects in the Vittoriale degli Italiani are associated with death, but it is not an abandoned or neglected mausoleum. As Licht observes: It would be a relief to find that dust had settled on these endless objects. But there is no dust. The mustiness is in uncanny juxtaposition with immaculate cleanliness and flawless, imperturbably neat arrangement. The dust is inherent in the objects themselves. They are dust. They are the ultimate deposit in a hermetically sealed world.43

Like the house at Fontenay, the villa is a meticulously curated space in which aesthetic and sentimental objects are placed side-​by-​side, without hierarchy, inducing memories and emotions. D’Annunzio’s eclectic collection is enhanced by the villa’s artificially illuminated windows, low ceilings, and small proportions. The scale creates an effect similar to the claustrophobic and uncomfortable feeling evoked by the fictional interiors of Against Nature. From Baudelaire to D’Annunzio, the decadent interior decorator is portrayed as a fetishistic and “feminized” male, one whose taste for collecting belies his perversities and manic passions. The Vittoriale degli Italiani is a manifestation of what D’Annunzio considered most important in life: beauty and power.44 In this respect, of all of the

454   Jessica Gossling

Figure 23.4.  The Vittoriale degli Italiani, Room of the Relics. Source: Photograph by Giovanni Vanoglio, 2012. Credit: © Giovanni Vanoglio.

Figure 23.5.  The Vittoriale degli Italiani, The Room of the Leper. Source: Photograph by Giovanni Vanoglio, 2012. Credit: © Giovanni Vanoglio.

Interior Decoration   455 rooms in the house, the “Room of the Leper” (Figure 23.5) is particularly noteworthy. With its painting of St. Sebastian embracing D’Annunzio himself, represented as a leper, and a bed that resembles both a cradle and a coffin (filled with earth transported from a graveyard at Fiume, the city where D’Annunzio installed himself in 1919 as leader of the short-​lived Regency of Carnaro),45 the “Room of the Leper” shows how decadent interior decoration often involves a tension between the grotesque and the beautiful: the design has a Gothic, macabre element, but also pushes the boundaries of acceptability and fashion. Decadent taste is different from “bad taste,” David Weir argues, because it is a purposefully cultivated and developed appreciation for what is typically considered unpalatable. The deliberate “taste for the distasteful” is not confined to the fin de siècle but is a central element of decadent design that can be traced through to the twenty-​first century.46 This taste has certain things in common with what Peter York, in Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots (2006), describes as “dictator chic,” an interior decorating style that characterizes the homes of dictators and oligarchs, from the fin de siècle to the present day and across different continents. Like D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale degli Italiani, a public and private shrine to both Italian fascism and the cult of the individual, the homes of dictators are grotesque and narcissistic displays of power and wealth. In his examination of sixteen case studies, including the multiple opulent palaces and villas of Saddam Hussein and the Napoleonic style of Jean-​Bédel Bokassa (military dictator of the Central African Republic), York identifies a number of unifying design elements—​the grand size of the buildings, the use of reproduction antiques, an homage to eighteenth-​century French style (such as rococo and neoclassicism), an abundance of gold and mirrors, and the inclusion of decorations and ornaments from recognizable brands and designers.47 Despite appearances, these interiors are not empty and superficial. They call to mind the imperial estate of Marie Antoinette and the state rooms in Versailles, while at the same time evoking the glitzy glamor associated with elaborate resort casinos and the luxury lobbies of high-​end hotels: “Modern dictators have got the lot: all the powers of the Pharaohs with access to the new technologies of steel framing and glass walls, intelligent lighting, ultra security, sound systems and exotic plumbing.”48 While it does not feature as a case study in his book, York acknowledges that one of the most famous contemporary examples of “dictator chic” is Trump Tower, the 58-​ floor, 664-​foot-​tall mixed-​use skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan completed in 1983 and designed by the architect Der Scutt.49 The interior of Donald Trump’s apartment on the top three floors of the tower were originally conceived by the sophisticated and influential American interior designer Angelo Donghia, before being redecorated by Henry Conversano, a former nightclub singer who became famous in the 1980s for the interiors of lavish casinos such as the Golden Nugget Atlantic City Casino (originally named “Trump’s Castle”). In “Making America Crass Again,” Stephen Bailey describes the gold and marble interior of Trump’s apartment as a “glitterball of rococo kitsch.”50 Central to the dictator chic aesthetic is a brash and uncomfortable egotism—​money is no object, and the main focus is placed on having something completely unique. While not

456   Jessica Gossling creative and artistic, like the museum home, the interior of Trump Tower shares with other examples of decadent decoration a clear rejection of bourgeois aesthetics. With its diamond-​encrusted front door, twenty-​four-​karat gold detailing, and bespoke Louis XVI-​style furniture, Trump’s apartment could not be further removed from the laid-​ back luxury and minimalism typically associated with the contemporary homes of the extremely wealthy.51 Instead, Trump Tower pushes the boundaries of acceptable taste and can be read as a new form of unpalatable and capitalist maximalism. As Bailey puts it, “We are now post-​truth, so we may also be post-​taste.”52 Dictator chic is just one type of a decadent decorating legacy that foregrounds space, power, and opulence, but running concurrently with this tendency is another, more bohemian trend that focuses design on the unqualified enjoyment of a single artistic object. In the twenty-​first century, the current trend for maximalism draws on objects that could be considered decadent in appearance, if not in craftsmanship or rarity. Gold tortoise sculptures can be bought from mid-​range home décor stores, and in 2017, in a break from its reputation for clean, white, practical design, IKEA released its FÖREMÅL line—​with the slogan “pretty, ugly, lovely”—​a collection of ornate accessories such as skull-​shaped vases and dog candle holders designed by the Swedish ceramic and glass artist Per B. Sundberg.53 Maximalism embraces a more bric-​a-​brac aesthetic, in which mass-​produced and disposable homewares are combined with found and secondhand objects—​“where rooms can be filled with color and kookiness and objects that don’t match, and that’s the point. Because lately, it seems, all everyone seems to want is more—​and weirder—​stuff.”54 This design aesthetic is at odds with the decadent interior, however, because rather than taking time to create, curate, and organize, the advocate of mainstream maximalism is more concerned with the act of purchasing. With the Internet, cheap kitsch versions of priceless objects can be obtained with a click. As a result, it is easy to create a decadent interior without any of the investment of time, taste, or obsession.

Conclusion To a certain extent, decadent style has always been fashion-​conscious, and certainly the recurring focus on interiors that privilege the rare and the beautiful relates to late nineteenth-​century aestheticism. However, unlike aestheticism, the principles of decadent interior decoration are anti-​bourgeois and à rebours, celebrating curated junk that modifies market values and changes the significance of certain objects. Decadent spaces are, in essence, narcissistic dream-​homes that express the perverse and contradictory idiosyncrasies of their occupants. As the real and fictional museum houses of Montesquiou and Des Esseintes demonstrate, decadent interiors are shrines to personality above all. Contemporary decadent decoration builds on these nineteenth-​century notions but lacks the essential refinement and artistry traditionally associated with decadence, focusing instead on opulence, luxury, and pretention. D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale

Interior Decoration   457 degli Italiani traverses late nineteenth-​century and modern-​day decadence because of the relationship between beauty and power in the choice of objects on display. Trump Tower takes this sensibility further by focusing less on taste and curation and more on attention-​grabbing egotism and ostentatious display. Not unlike the decadence of certain Roman emperors, Trump’s taste derives less from aesthetic knowledge than from purchasing power. Today, the distinguishing feature of decadent décor is the ability to buy anything, regardless of its beauty, value, or function.

Notes 1. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2. 2. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” Graham’s Magazine 20, no. 5 (May 1842): 257. 3. Charles Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1857), xix. 4. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Furniture,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine 6, no. 5 (May 1840): 243. Further references cited parenthetically. 5. These rococo porcelains were overtly decorative but diminutive in scale, which made them especially well-​suited to the intimate interiors that were in vogue in late eighteenth-​ century France. 6. As exemplified by the “re-​creation” of the room at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic site, it is not a space that translates well to real life. 7. Charles Baudelaire, quoted in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 227. 8. For a list of Poe’s homes, see the index compiled by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. “Where Poe Lived, Worked and Visited,” Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, last modified January 19, 2014, https://​www.eapoe.org/​pla​ces/​phi​ndx.htm. 9. Charles Baudelaire, “Dedication,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3. 10. Théophile Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” in Œuvres complètes de Baudelaire (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1868), 62. My translation. 11. Charles Asselineau, Charles Baudelaire, son vie et son œuvre (Paris: Imprimerie L. Toinon et cie, 1869), 7–​9; and Théodore de Banville, Mes souvenirs (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882), 79–​82. Félix Nadar also gives a description of Baudelaire’s room in Charles Baudelaire intime: Le poète vierge (Paris: A. Blaizot, 1911), 39. 12. Théodore de Banville, Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1882), 81–​82. In May 1844 his family created a conseil de famille, which removed financial control from Baudelaire and appointed the family lawyer Narcisse Ancelle as trustee of his fortune. For more discussion of this period in Baudelaire’s life, see Rosemary Lloyd, Charles Baudelaire (London: Reaktion, 2008), 51–​53. 13. In his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834), Gautier articulates the idea that art does not need to have a moral component and can be purely aesthetic. See Théophile Gautier, “Preface,” in Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Helen Constantine (London and New York: Penguin, 2005), 3–​37.

458   Jessica Gossling 14. William Morris, “The Beauty of Life, delivered before the Birmingham Society of Arts and School of Design, February 19, 1880,” in The Collected Works of William Morris (London: Longmans Green, 1904), 22:76. 15. Oscar Wilde, “The Chief Yearner,” Boston Daily Globe (1872–​1922), January 4, 1882, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Boston Globe (1872–​1923), 4. 16. Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 158. 17. Oscar Wilde, Collins Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 5th ed. (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2003), 914. 18. The Aesthetic Movement was the subject of “The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–​1900” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (April 2–​July 17, 2011); the exhibition catalogue provides a useful overview of the development of aestheticism as well as some examples of the contemporary satire the movement received in publications such as Punch magazine. See Stephen Calloway and Lynn Federle, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–​1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). 19. Stephen Calloway, ed., The House of Liberty: Masters of Style and Decoration (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 20. See Séverine Jouve, Obsessions & perversions dans la littérature et les demeures à la fin du dix-​neuvième siècle (Paris: Hermann, 1996), 149–​61. 21. There are a number of studies of journalism and writers’ rooms in the late nineteenth century, such as Harald Hendrix, Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory (New York: Routledge, 2008); Anne Trubek, “The Evidence of Things Unseen: The Sweet Gloom of Writers’ House Museums,” The Believer 4, no. 8 (October 6, 2006): 23–​29; and Hélène Rochette, Maisons d’artistes et d’écrivains: Paris et ses alentours (Paris: Parigramme, 2007). 22. Elizabeth Emery, Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–​1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 11. 23. Edmond de Goncourt, La maison d’un artiste (Paris: Charpentier, 1881), 1:550. Italics in original. 24. Emery, Photojournalism, 18. 25. Emery, Photojournalism, 15. 26. Robert de Montesquiou, Les pas effacés: Mémoires (Paris: Émile-​Paul Frères, 1923), 2:107. 27. Simon Jervis, Designs for the Dream King: The Castles and Palaces of Ludwig II of Bavaria (London: Debrett’s Peerage Ltd, 1978), 68–​69. 28. Emery, Photojournalism, 33. 29. Montesquiou, Les pas effacés, 2:94. 30. Robert de Montesquieu, “Intus,” in Les hortensias bleus (1896; Paris: Georges Richard, 1906), 152. 31. Montesquiou, Les pas effacés, 2:117. 32. Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat (New York and Paris: Flammarion, 1995), 48. This event is discussed by Montesquiou in Les pas effacés, 3:114–​15. 33. Francis Enne, quoted in Emery, Photojournalism, 56. Photographs of Huysmans in his apartment form part of the pioneering series of famous figures by Dornac, Nos contemporains chez eux (Our contemporaries at home), ca. 1887–​1917. 34. J.-​K. Huysmans, “Préface: Écrite vingt ans après le roman,” in À rebours, Œuvres complètes, ed. Lucien Descaves (Paris: Crès, 1928–​1934), 6:xiv. 35. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 8. Further references cited parenthetically.

Interior Decoration   459 36. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 11. 37. Edmond de Goncourt, entry dated June 14, 1882, in Journal (1850–​1896), ed. A. Ricatte (Paris: Flammarion, 1959), 179. In his memoirs, Montesquiou acknowledges that the character of Des Esseintes, the interior of Fontenay, and the infamous jeweled tortoise must have been inspired by him, even though he had met Huysmans only briefly, in the Auteuil gardens, and claimed that Huysmans had heard of his decorating style secondhand from Mallarmé, who spent an evening in his Quai d’Orsay apartments in 1883. See Les pas effacés, 2:123. 38. For further discussion of Des Esseintes’s collection and arrangement of his exotic plants and hothouse flowers, see Jessica Gossling, “ ‘Things Worldly and Things Spiritual’: Huysmans’s À rebours and the House at Fontenay,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 66–​82. 39. This is an irony not unfamiliar to followers of contemporary luxury fashion, like Zoo Jeans, a Japanese brand that advertises ripped jeans distressed by lions, tigers, and bears, or Golden Goose sneakers, which have individual scuffs and marks applied by Italian artisans to give them an “authentic ‘touched by life’ feel.” See for instance, Vivien, “For Sale—​Zoo Jeans from Japan That Have Been Ripped by Claws and Teeth of Lions,” Luxury Launches, July 7, 2016, https://​lux​uryl​aunc​hes.com/​fash​ion/​for-​sale-​zoo-​jeans-​from-​japan-​that-​ have-​been-​rip​ped-​by-​claws-​and-​teeth-​of-​lions.php; and “Everything You Need to Know about Golden Goose Sneakers,” Italist, August 22, 2020, https://​www.ital​ist.com/​magaz​ ine/​how-​gol​den-​goose-​sneak​ers-​are-​made/​. 40. Theresa Zeitz-​ Lindamood, “Decadence and Urban Geography,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 267–​82. 41. Fred Licht, “The Vittoriale degli Italiani,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 4 (1982): 323. 42. Lucy Hughes-​Hallett, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War (New York: Anchor, 2014), 530. 43. Licht, “Vittoriale degli Italiani,” 322. Italics in original. 44. For more discussion of D’Annunzio’s concept of life and art and how it relates to power and war, see Monica Jansen, Srećko Jurišić, and Carmen Van den Bergh, “Life as Art, Art as Life, and Life’s Art: The ‘Living Poetics’ of Italian Modernism,” arcadia 51, no. 1 (2016): 24–​45. 45. Hughes-​Hallett, Gabriele D’Annunzio, 518, 10–​11. 46. David Weir, “Afterword: Decadent Taste,” in Decadence and the Senses, 221. 47. Peter York, Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots (London: Atlantic Books, 2005), x–​xi. 48. York, Dictator Style, ix. 49. Peter York, “Trump’s Dictator Chic,” Politico, March/​April 2017, https://​www.polit​ico. com/​magaz​ine/​story/​2017/​03/​trump-​style-​dicta​tor-​autocr​ats-​des​ign-​214​877/​. 50. Stephen Bailey, “Making America Crass Again,” The Spectator, December 10, 2016, https://​ www.specta​tor.co.uk/​arti​cle/​mak​ing-​amer​ica-​crass-​again. For photographs of the interior of Trump’s apartment, see Chase Peterson-​Withorn, “Donald Trump Has Been Lying about the Size of His Penthouse,” Forbes, May 15, 2017, https://​www.for​bes.com/​sites/​chase​ with​orn/​2017/​05/​03/​don​ald-​trump-​has-​been-​lying-​about-​the-​size-​of-​his-​pentho​use/​ ?sh=​4f8f2​23c1​ef8. 51. The Beverly Hills mansion owned by Kanye West and Kim Kardashian is a quintessential example of this hyper-​minimalist style. In an interview with Vogue, Kardashian gives a

460   Jessica Gossling tour of her polished concrete and monochromatic “minimal monastery.” See “Keeping Up with the Wests: Kim, Kanye (and Their Kids!) Answer 73 Questions,” Vogue, April 11, 2019, https://​www.vogue.com/​arti​cle/​73-​questi​ons-​with-​kim-​kar​dash​ian-​west. 52. Bailey, “Making America Crass Again.” 53. “Pretty, Ugly, Lovely: Per B. Sundberg’s FÖREMÅL,” IKEA, accessed April 26, 2021, https://​ www.ikea.com.hk/​en/​inspi​rati​ons/​pre​tty-​ugly-​lov​ely-​per-​b-​sundb​erg-​s-​fore​mal. 54. Rebecca Jennings, “The New Maximalism,” Vox, October 21, 2020, https://​www.vox.com/​ the-​highli​ght/​21506​030/​max​imal​ism-​min​imal​ism-​home-​des​ign-​junga​low.

Further Reading Apter, Emily. “Cabinet Secrets: Peep Shows, Prostitution, and Bric-​a-​Bracomania in the Fin-​ de-​siècle Interior.” In Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and the Narrative Obsession in Turn-​of-​the-​Century France, 39–​64. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Calloway, Stephen, ed. The House of Liberty: Masters of Style and Decoration. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. Calloway, Stephen, and Lynn Federle, eds. The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–​ 1900. London: V&A Publishing, 2011. Emery, Elizabeth. Photojournalism and the Origins of the French Writer House Museum (1881–​ 1914): Privacy, Publicity, and Personality. Farnham, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Gossling, Jessica. “ ‘Things Worldly and Things Spiritual’: Huysmans’s À rebours and the House at Fontenay.” In Decadence and the Senses, edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, 66–​82. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Hendrix, Harald. Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory. New York: Routledge, 2008. Jervis, Simon. Designs for the Dream King: The Castles and Palaces of Ludwig II of Bavaria. London: Debrett’s Peerage Ltd, 1978. Jouve, Séverine. Obsessions & perversions dans la littérature et les demeures à la fin du dix-​ neuvième siècle. Paris: Hermann, 1996. Licht, Fred. “The Vittoriale degli Italiani.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41, no. 4 (1982): 318–​24. Mendelssohn, Michèle. Making Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Munhall, Edgar. Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat. Paris: Flammarion, 1995. Myzelev, Alla, and John Potvin, eds. Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity. London: Routledge, 2010. Sitzia, Emilie. “Machines and Monsters: The Modern Decadent Interior as Spectacle in Huysmans’s À rebours.” In Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media, edited by Anca I. Lasc, Georgina Downey, and Mark Taylor, 59–​70. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Weir, David. “Afterword: Decadent Taste.” In Decadence and the Senses, edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, 219–​28. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. York, Peter. Dictators’ Homes: Lifestyles of the World’s Most Colorful Despots. London: Atlantic Books, 2005.

Chapter 24

Architec t u re Constructing Decadence Lori Smithey

Architecture has proven to be a recurrent register of decadence. Edward Gibbon singled out the Arch of Constantine (Figure 24.1) as “a melancholy proof of the decline of the arts,”1 J.-​K. Huysmans celebrated Chartres Cathedral with a decadent sensibility, and urban theorist Jane Jacobs decried the American built environment of the twentieth century as a “fresh-​minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization.”2 Proposing that every type of decadence, be it academic, aesthetic, or polemical, has its architectural partner suggests a promiscuous entanglement over a singular critical stance, but the fact that architecture and decadence are perennial bedfellows reveals a different relationship than standard distinctions between the art of decadence and decadent art suggest. Unlike fin-​de-​siècle decadent literature, which so often involved an aesthetic retreat that reinforced its conceptual separation from social decadence, architectural decadence can never be fully separated from the production of other forms of decadence. The protagonists of the decadent tradition are well known, from Charles Baudelaire to Théophile Gautier and Paul Bourget. Together, these and other likeminded artists and critics forged an aesthetic tradition born at once of modern conceptions and conditions of decadence while also holding earlier historical and more recent pathological connotations of the term at some remove. By contrast, many of the figures who engaged with decadent thought in architecture remain obscured by historical narratives focused on the rise of the modern movement. And while architects from the late Enlightenment through to the postmodern period partake in the intellectual and aesthetic traditions of decadence, a fully-​fledged moment of architectural decadence has yet to emerge. Through the lens of architecture, the fin de siècle is not the period of decadence, but rather one episode in an extended history. The decadent manifestations of architecture may not be as “concentrated” as those of the literary and visual arts, but its scattered moments reveal decadence as a concept that emerged from modernity writ large. Approximately thirty-​five years before Désiré Nisard compared Romantic authors such as Victor Hugo to Lucan and other writers of the Roman decadence, the French architect

462   Lori Smithey

Figure 24.1.  Arch of Constantine (315 CE). Source: Photo by Robert Macpherson, ca. 1850. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California. Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Charles-​François Viel (1745–​1819) accused his contemporaries of participating in new design methods that would lead to the decadence of architecture. Whereas literary critics drew a stylistic correlation between Silver Age poets and contemporary authors, Viel did not look to the Arch of Constantine as a formal model of decadence. Instead, the architect—​before the rise of either decadent aesthetics or decadent rhetoric—​ theorized the emergence of new construction methods based on scientific analysis and engineering techniques as causes of modern decadence because they dismantled the body of architectural knowledge and production much as war and excessive wealth had during antiquity. The Arch of Constantine was decadent because it was constructed from spolia taken from the Arch of Trajan, but the modern discipline of architecture was “spoiled” by new analytical techniques. In short, modern architecture was a producer of decadence and not merely a symptom, as its ancient example had been. Ironically, it is the identification of Viel as a decadent, of the retrograde sort, that has relegated him to obscurity within architectural history. However, his writings, widely read at the time, express not so much a fear of the new as make bold proclamations that modern architecture was decadent from the outset.

Architecture   463

The Decadence of Modern Architecture Viel was an architect and architectural theorist whose career spanned the political development of Revolutionary France from the reign of Louis XV to the Restoration. As such, he witnessed social transformations that led to the questioning of long-​standing classical models of architecture and to the development of a new architectural vocabulary that embraced standardization. His many theoretical writings intervened in the architectural debates of his time. Most notably, architects were seeking to redefine their role in the design process against the rising status of the engineer. In his influential treatises and polemics, Viel defended a conception of architecture based on classical tradition and sensory experience. While this architect-​author was a significant voice in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period when the very definition of architecture was changing, his works and writings have never been the subject of a systematic and contextualized analysis because he has always been considered conservative, even reactionary, in his opposition to both the use of mathematics as the basis for design knowledge and the use of metal in building construction. Nevertheless, Viel’s theorization of an architectural decadence foreshadows technical and stylistic developments within architectural theory and production that marked the nineteenth century. The architect’s writings on decadence include three chapters in his expansive treatise Principes de l’ordonnance et de la construction des bâtimens (Principles of the ordering and construction of buildings, 1797) and a more focused thirty-​page polemic titled Décadence de l’architecture à la fin du dix-​huitième siècle (The decline of architecture at the end of the eighteenth century, 1800). These works sit at the crossroads of Enlightenment and modern theories of history and aesthetics and foreshadow conceptualizations of decadence as a contemporary condition. The first of Viel’s texts on decadence is an architectural treatise, a genre that was the primary vehicle for theoretical writing about architecture from antiquity until the nineteenth century. In form and content, Viel adheres to the classical tradition that extended through Renaissance architectural discourse based on Vitruvius (ca. 80–​15 BCE), whose De Architectura had long been recognized as authoritative.3 Viel’s treatise unfolds over numerous chapters, beginning with a declaration that nature and antiquity are the true sources of architectural principles, before expounding on design subjects such as orders, profiles, moldings, and ornament. However, there are some chapter titles that indicate that this treatise is different from its predecessors and hint at the waning of the genre itself. Between the introduction and sections on familiar architectural topics sit three chapters devoted to decadence. The architect’s primary theoretical reference for decadence was Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734). The first two of the three sections on decadence in Viel’s treatise largely adhere to Montesquieu’s historical view of decadence, in which

464   Lori Smithey excessive prosperity led to the decline of antiquity’s greatest empire. However, Viel explores decadence as an architectural theorist, which is to say that he has a vested interest in its relationship to the production of the arts and so does not approach the concept from the intellectual distance of a historian or a philosopher. Hence, he has to account not only for the historic occurrence of the fall of Rome, but also for the long period between classical antiquity and the Renaissance during which the arts, from the classical perspective, were seen to decline. Viel goes beyond Montesquieu’s explanation of decline by theorizing that the persistence of the decadence of the arts was a result of the social instability of warring states. His argument that the arts flourish in times of peace, stability, and responsibility was an ethical position soon to be replaced by evolutionary and economic theories postulating that competition advances development. The architectural theorist thus expands the long-​standing idea of wealth as the primary cause of decadence by figuring it through commerce, such that competition creates a threat of cultural decadence and is common to both war and business. Arguing that aesthetic decadence occurs because of destabilizing social forces more generally rather than prosperity in particular allows Viel to move toward a theory of modern decadence. Therefore, what stands as one of the last treatises of the Vitruvian tradition also plants seeds for conceptualizing the imminent changes in both architectural production and discourse as decadent. Just three years separate Viel’s treatise and his polemic Décadence de l’architecture. In that time decadence moved from a set of embedded chapters within a larger meditation to the title position of a pointed essay directed at the architect’s contemporaries. The problem of decadence as a modern concern for designers would have been implicit in the theorist’s earlier tract, in that the audience for an architectural treatise is other practitioners. But where Viel’s treatise set up the terms that allowed him to transpose decadence into a contemporary critique, his polemical essay asserts his most overt claims. In his second text concerning decadence, Viel again refers to Montesquieu directly, quoting him in the opening pages. However, in this iteration the historical accounting of decadence across periods is completely gone. The classical tradition is still held up as the appropriate design method for the field, but instead of explaining periods that fall away from it, Viel explicitly enumerates the ways in which the contemporary discipline of architecture is falling into decadence. For the theorist, these include fame and self-​promotion on the part of designers and owners as well as the systematization of both structural analysis and design composition. On both counts, he is highlighting an economy of design that is emerging within the disciplinary formation of architecture, now aligned with modern engineering techniques, new materials, and mechanized technology. The turn toward engineering techniques over long-​held architectural principles of building was institutionally reinforced by the opening of the École Polytechnique, established in 1794 to instruct scientists and engineers. The institution was both a product of the French Revolution and the successor of the ancien régime practice of setting up schools for governmental engineers. The Polytechnique’s focus was on scientific and technological knowledge, with mathematics, mechanics, physics, and chemistry valued

Architecture   465 above the teaching of architecture, which initially was restricted to a straightforward application of descriptive geometry. The architect and theorist Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis Durand became the professor of architecture at the school in 1795, and he radically reconceptualized architectural production through the analytical methods utilized by the other Polytechnique disciplines. When Viel bristles at the transformation of neoclassicism into a system of applied parts, he is referring to Durand’s new method of architectural composition based on combinatorial techniques. Durand’s Recueil et parallèle des édifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes (Collection and comparison of all types of buildings, ancient and modern, 1799–​1801) presents, as the title suggests, an assortment of architectural specimens that spans history, geography, and building type. In Décadence de l’architecture, Viel denounces this ascendancy of drawing over construction and the attendant specter of eclecticism implied by Durand’s presentation of buildings “of all ages” and “in all nations.”4 Both the scope of Durand’s collection and its presentation made it a tool for aspiring architects who could compose their designs by copying parts or elements of buildings and pasting them into new combinations. Even though Viel identifies the Polytechnique methods of design and construction as a cause of architectural decadence, Durand was not a decadent by later fin-​de-​siècle standards. Nor did he embrace the eclecticism his extensive inventories of architecture invited, and he was resolutely against decoration and ornamentation. He was, in short, an early rationalist and geometrician. Nevertheless, Durand’s Recueil opens up two avenues relevant to later developments in both the decadent tradition and the architectural discourse around decadence during the fin de siècle. First, it introduces into architecture the kind of scientific apparatus that makes combinatory aesthetics possible and that underpins later manifestations of the decadent imagination (such as Des Esseintes’s “mouth organ” as one aspect of the aesthetic laboratory that is Fontenay).5 Second, it heralds the crisis of architectural ornamentation that arises with modern modes of production. In addition to writing against the use of structural engineering techniques that introduced building features such as indirect points of support and slender columns,6 Viel also opposed the use of metal in construction, a material that allowed for even greater structural “spectacles.” Projects such as Jacques-​Germain Soufflot’s work on the Panthéon, François-​Joseph Bélanger’s metal dome for the Halle aux Blés (Figure 24.2), and the construction of the first iron bridges brought these hotly debated issues to the fore, and Viel weighed in on these major Parisian structures. An important reference point for Viel’s arguments for material and structural propriety was Vitruvius’s De Architectura. In one of the most famous sections of the treatise, Vitruvius criticizes the fashion in Roman frescoed wall painting for the application of fantastical imagery that depicted structural oddities such as candelabras upholding shrines and floral motifs mixed with human figures, both growing from thin reeds and stalks. The type of visual composition Vitruvius describes is what would become known as the grotesque (subsequent to the Renaissance rediscovery of classical antiquity)

466   Lori Smithey

Figure 24.2.  François-​Joseph Bélanger, Halle aux Blés with cast iron dome addition (1807–​1811). Source: Photo by Olivier Heron (Wikimedia Commons).

and would become categorized as the Third Style by the German archeologist and art historian August Mau in the late nineteenth century.7 The formal qualities of the grotesque and the stylistic designation of “late” that critics and scholars associate with this passage are significant to the development of decadence as an art-​historical concept. Indeed the passage will later be translated as “The Decadence of Fresco Painting.”8 Yet Vitruvius never used the word decadence. Instead, later translations substitute “decadence” for the Latin words for “propriety” and “decorum.” This slippage is subtle but hugely consequential because it effectively transforms what was fundamentally a structural and material argument into one about style and form. The infamous passage is actually an argument for material decorum, the idea that the materials of a building, be they exterior stone or representations of it in interior fresco, align with the propriety of the structure.9 Thus, the arguments leveraged against the grotesque imagery of Third Style wall painting were not based on its falling away from an ideal, nor about cosmetic surface effect (all later aesthetic concerns), but rather its status as structural fantasy. Viel, perhaps because he was an architect working in the Vitruvian tradition, or perhaps because he was writing before other theories of decadence emerged, echoes this idea of material decorum in his arguments against modern structural spectacles. The French architect’s critique of the shift away from the material decorum of a building and toward structural and material display place what he sees as the emerging decadence of a modernizing

Architecture   467 architectural profession in line with the Gothic and the rococo. Removed from debates over material decorum and instead framed through the concept of style, these ideas would become the categories of decadence within art history (categories that threaten both idealized form and healthy growth or progress), as well as the architectural styles that would most fascinate decadent authors.10 As architectural debates over modern expression and structure continued to unfold across the nineteenth century, the Gothic would figure prominently as a model of structural rationality. Beyond demonstrating rational structure, the explosion of metal construction in art nouveau building at the close of the century would also seemingly afford the built expression of the grotesque—​that ancient imagery damned precisely for depicting the unbuildable. While it could be argued that the grotesque forms expressed through the use of metal in art nouveau design bring together the modern decadence of metal building and the ancient decadence of the grotesque, it is also worth noting that fin-​de-​siècle decadent artists preferred the decadent architectural styles of the Byzantine, Gothic, and rococo over art nouveau. The use of new building materials in architecture at the start of the nineteenth century is integral to the formation of modernist architecture and a key feature used by its champions to distinguish its social values and modes of production from that of the Beaux-​Arts tradition. However, when considered through the intellectual history of decadence more broadly, rather than through the narrower narrative of the modern movement in architecture, Viel’s structural and material critiques foreshadow future developments in the field and invite questions about modernization rather than stake out an ideological position. Viel offers the only fully developed theorization of what might constitute the decadence of architecture, but he is largely forgotten by scholars in the field because, paradoxically, he has himself been labeled “decadent” by later historians aiming to write a narrative of modern architecture that has new battle lines to draw.11 No longer concerned with either the extension or the exhaustion of the Vitruvian tradition, theorists focused on whether the primary aim of modern architecture was a social project or one of autonomy. Disconnected from this early architectural theorization of decadence, yet steeped in the growing social, cultural, and aesthetic theories of decadence that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century, decadent engagements with architecture branched off. Some designers embraced the style of decadence, but few, if any, fully bought into a fatalistic decadent sensibility. Indeed, most architects sought to escape the perception of societal decadence—​either through a higher level of artistic production, in which decadence was not explicitly the aim but still an acceptable expression, or through a total rejection of decadence via the double edge of machine aesthetics and utopian social callings. Nevertheless, many of the issues that Viel raises through his theorization of architectural decadence will reappear later on. The modern problem of ornamentation will continue to plague the field, claims for extending the exhausted Vitruvian tradition will be asserted not through Viel’s influence but rather that of Walter Pater, and modern processes of architectural production will again be understood as a primary source of decadence.

468   Lori Smithey

Modern Architecture, Decadent Flirtations During the fin de siècle, decadence was at the height of its cultural influence, touching such creative fields as literature, painting, illustration, the decorative arts, theater, and opera, as well as disciplines in the social sciences like urban planning, sociology, history, philosophy, and the emerging field of psychology. As a fin-​de-​siècle concept, decadence intersects with architecture both aesthetically and theoretically, but the relationship is often an uncomfortable one in a profession largely positioned against decadence. While decadent artists seemed particularly fascinated with the built environment, architecture did not readily return the favor with an interest in decadence. Still, in a field that perennially prefers a host of not-​very-​decadent preoccupations such as structural honesty, urban hygiene, and purified aesthetic expression, there are some instances of what might be loosely grouped as decadent flirtations within architecture: namely the decorative stylings of art nouveau, the work of Ralph Adams Cram (1863–​1942), and the theoretical writings of Geoffrey Scott (1884–​1929). Art nouveau is the architectural style most readily associated with the art of fin-​de-​ siècle decadence.12 Influenced by William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in England as well as the earlier writings of French architectural theorist Eugène-​ Emmanuel Viollet-​le-​Duc, the style sought to unify architecture and the decorative arts into a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” and was often expressed through the sinuous curves of plant-​based forms. Given its contemporaneity, some common design concepts, and shared visual motifs, strong connections between art nouveau architecture and decadent culture are evident, but the two do not always align philosophically. One of the primary parallels between art nouveau and decadence is the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a concept related to both the Catholic Mass and the operatic productions of Richard Wagner, each with ties to fin-​de-​siècle decadence. Another link between the two is the iconic whiplash line familiar from the decadent illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley that appears in the architectural forms of Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde. Despite these commonalities, there are reasons to challenge the assumption that art nouveau is the architectural expression of decadence, mainly because the style relied on a generative view of history and society through its allusions to nature. Architectural examples of art nouveau, including works by Horta, van de Velde, and Hector Guimard in Belgium and France; Lluís Domènech i Montaner and Antoni Gaudi in Spain; and Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–​1928) in Scotland (Figure 24.3), to name a few, are profuse with vegetal forms of expression. The widespread obsession with floral motifs and hauntingly elongated figures might easily call to mind Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), especially in some later illustrated editions, such as one from 1900 by Carlos Schwabe and Charles Meunier. However, the various iterations of art nouveau architecture were seeking vibrant alternatives to the academic design strictures of the nineteenth century rather than tapping into the fatalistic sensibility of

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Figure 24.3.  Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Design for the Dug-​Out, Willow Tea Rooms (1917), Glasgow. Source: Glasgow School of Art.

decadence.13 Ultimately, the style was more a celebration than a critique of modernity, as it sought to express creative, industrial, and even, in some instances, colonial growth,14 while also having commercial value in the bourgeois marketplace. Thus, art nouveau, as a celebration of growth and as a style with consumerist appeal, does not fully align with the decadent aesthetic. Nevertheless, the association between decadence and art nouveau has endured and does suggest a shared cultural milieu of aesthetic influences. If decadent book artists and illustrators found forms in art nouveau that offered expression for their sensibility, architects also found in it stylistic inspiration. Much of this visual exchange was happening through arts magazines such as The Yellow Book and The Studio, which featured the decadent illustrations of Beardsley alongside the new style of architecture. One of the best examples of architectural work coming out of the fin-​de-​siècle decadent milieu is that of Mackintosh. Along with his wife Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances Macdonald, and their friend James Herbert MacNair, Mackintosh was part of the design group known as “The Four.” They were influenced by the work circulated in The Yellow Book and The Studio, and their designs were also promoted in both publications. The aesthetic associations are evident, for example, within interior spaces such as the Glasgow tea rooms that Mackintosh designed in collaboration with his wife, where depictions of elongated and ghostly-​looking female figures feature prominently on the walls. This visual style earned the group the decadent label of “Spook School.” But Mackintosh’s work offered more connections to decadence than its aesthetic predisposition for depraved female figures. His architectural detailing can also be read as capturing that quintessential stylistic marker of literary decadence: the breakdown of

470   Lori Smithey the part-​to-​whole relationship. One of the few art nouveau buildings in Glasgow, the Glasgow School of Art (1896–​1909), is widely considered Mackintosh’s masterpiece. This “total work of art” mixes elements of the Scottish vernacular and the English Arts and Crafts traditions with the organic forms of art nouveau. The school forms a simple E-​shaped building with an unornamented and asymmetrical north façade that features massive studio windows. The library is the school’s crown jewel, with its dramatically lit interior that contrasts the light from its large windows with a gallery, fittings, and furnishings all stained in dark wood and decorated with splashes of red, green, and white, together creating a feverish mix of academic sobriety and modern geometric intensity. In an article titled “Alienation of Parts,” the mid-​twentieth-​century architectural critic Reyner Banham called Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art “the weirdest building I have ever been in,” and goes on to describe its effect as “just manic-​depressive—​exhilaration at its boldness, cunning and untrammeled imagination, alternating with something like sick panic at the dripping decadence of its detailing.” Banham’s assessment that “Mackintosh’s combination of unity in the whole with alienation among the parts is unique, masterly, and profoundly disturbing”15 echoes nineteenth-​century stylistic definitions of decadence from Bourget to Friedrich Nietzsche. Even if Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art might be read as one of the best architectural manifestations of not just the visual legacy but also the literary expression of decadence, it is not exactly an instance of an architect aiming to cultivate decadence. As with other architectural examples of art nouveau style, its guiding ambition was to find a flourishing modern architectural idiom. In contrast to the variety of aesthetic exchanges happening across the wide landscape of art nouveau, only the American architect Cram and the British architectural critic Scott truly engage with decadence. Cram is best known for raising the Gothic Revival to prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century through built works such as Saint John the Divine in New York City, West Point Military Academy in upstate New York, and much of the Princeton University campus in New Jersey. The architect also produced a large amount of writing. His extensive literary work began early in his career, lasted throughout his life, and carried him well beyond the typical architectural genres of the treatise and the manifesto. He wrote newspaper reviews and articles, poetry, short stories, two novels, an autobiography, and edited journals, in addition to the more typical writings of an architect. The designer’s interest in decadence appears most obviously in his having written a novel titled The Decadent (1893), which was styled after those of Huysmans and Oscar Wilde. Cram’s identity has been effectively split between his architectural and literary production. Thus, on the one hand he is the Bostonian dandy who wrote a decadent novel, and on the other he is the evangelist of American neo-​Gothic building. However, this two-​sided conception of Cram as aesthete and architect is reductive and does not fully acknowledge the ways in which decadence informed his architectural thought and production. While Wilde’s trials and the translation of Max Nordau into English (both 1895) serve as partial explanations for Cram’s seeming retreat from a literary topic that was becoming largely conflated with homosexuality and clinical neurosis, the architect did not leave decadence behind after completing his early

Architecture   471 novel. Indeed, in the early twentieth century Cram was still explicitly concerned with decadence: he devoted his final lecture to the subject in a series of talks given at the Lowell Institute in 1916, later published as The Substance of Gothic, and republished the first third of The Decadent as the preface to his architectural text Walled Towns in 1919. Furthermore, his inclusion of reflections on that first novel in his autobiography, My Life in Architecture (1936), suggests that the text was informative for his architectural thought, even if he does call it one of his “early indiscretions.”16 While Cram never discarded decadence from his discourse, he did shift from associating it with the Aesthetic movement to more sanitized academic usage reflecting the moral influence of John Ruskin. In The Substance of Gothic, Cram proposes an architectural theory of decadence argued through the historical lens of Gothic architecture; after considering the thirteenth-​century concurrence of the beneficent rule in France of Louis IX, or Saint Louis, and the construction of the Amiens Cathedral, he argues that whereas social decline was rapid within medieval culture soon after Saint Louis, the architectural development of the Gothic tradition slowly extended well into the sixteenth century. In some ways, like Viel before him, Cram is using a historical example of decadence to construct a critique of the forces of modernization that were seen as leading to the decadence of contemporary architectural production. But whereas for Viel modern architectural decadence was limited to contemporaneous shifts in the profession, including a rising focus on fame, engineering, and scientific techniques, by the twentieth century Cram takes a broader view and ties together the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution, as well as the capitalistic and industrial state as “the solar plexus of modernism.”17 In his careful separation of the lines of aesthetic and social decline, Cram developed a hybrid theory that combined the aesthetic retreat associated with the art of decadence and the utopian and moral responses to modern technological-​and industrial-​based social decadence. Within his theory of semi-​autonomous artistic development, Cram found nothing unsavory about the decadence of medieval art, and thus, unlike Viel or Durand, he was not averse to the appearance of ornamentation. The cathedral of Beauvais occupies the aesthetically decadent position in Cram’s argument, and in The Substance of Gothic he describes the late Gothic church as teetering beautifully close to imminent ruination: “Beauvais is sheer beauty, unalloyed, and therein lay its weakness. . . . [T]‌hin lace-​ like arcs springing one above the other toward the crystal walls of the clerestory. No finer conception exists, and no more brilliant and poetic design.”18 Rather than limiting applied decoration in favor of structural decorum, Beauvais, for Cram, exemplifies an oscillation between structure and decor such that, as the structural capacity of the Gothic was pushed to its limit, the built form edged toward a lace-​like display of pure decoration. Given the scope of his theoretical writings, Cram’s decadent flirtation looks less like an early indiscretion embarrassingly suppressed and more like one that afforded a sense of semi-​autonomous artistic development and a taste for architectural lateness. But, like Viel before him, he will be labeled a decadent of the retrograde sort and ultimately play the part of scapegoat in narratives focused on the emergence of modernist architecture.

472   Lori Smithey The British architectural critic Geoffrey Scott was a contemporary of Cram. The two authors shared a close friendship with Bernard Berenson, the leading American scholar on Renaissance art, and both were influenced by the intellectual and aesthetic culture of decadence in the late nineteenth century. However, where Cram tempered his interest in fin-​de-​siècle aestheticism with the moralizing perspective of Ruskin to form a more palatable position that would help his architectural career in the puritanical United States, Scott remained an aesthete. He did not face the same professional pressures as other architects because he never completed his architectural education and pursued other topics of research, publishing The Portrait of Zélide (1925), a biography of the eighteenth-​century author Isabelle de Charrière, and editing the first three volumes of the James Boswell papers. Nevertheless, his sole architectural text, The Architecture of Humanism (1914), has more currency in the field today than the writings of either Viel or Cram, and, as such, the work constitutes an important channel for the intellectual and aesthetic tradition of decadence in architecture beyond the early twentieth century. Scott’s primary influence was Pater, seen, for example, in his description of the Italian Renaissance as “an architecture of taste, seeking no logic, consistency, or justification beyond that of giving pleasure.”19 Through his close reading of Pater, Scott emphasized the humanist tradition over the Gothic, but like other architectural theorists contemplating decadence, he also criticized modern modes of architectural thought and production and developed if not quite a taste for late-​style decadence at least an acceptance of it. The critic’s singular architectural tract is primarily a defense of the classical Vitruvian tradition in architecture as it developed in the Renaissance, which he contrasts with what he calls the four “fallacies” of modern architectural production. These are represented in chapters titled “The Romantic Fallacy,” “The Mechanical Fallacy,” “The Ethical Fallacy,” and “The Biological Fallacy.” The first three fallacies already have decadent associations with the authors discussed thus far in this chapter: Viel’s writings warn against Scott’s mechanical fallacy, while Cram’s literary-​ influenced use of the Gothic style exemplifies the Romantic fallacy, even as his Ruskin-​ like morality qualifies him for the ethical fallacy. It is in the chapter on the biological fallacy, however, that Scott unpacks his thoughts on architectural decadence most explicitly. There the critic challenges the facile application of biological metaphors to historical and artistic developments. But even in dismantling this historical-​biological-​aesthetic analogue, Scott is quick to uphold the artistic value of the late phase, asserting that “the power [of an organism] to survive is no test of aesthetic quality: the fragile unfolding of a leaf in spring, its red corruption in autumn, are not less beautiful than its strength in summer,” and concluding that through the biological metaphor of flowering and decay an “injustice is usually done to the later phases.”20 Ultimately, Scott argues for the embodied Paterian “moment” over any aesthetic idea derived from history or science. Alternatively, Scott proposed a mode of being present within the unfolding of an aesthetic tradition rather than the modern discipline of art-​historical analysis. And, like Cram, he argued that art developed of its own volition and could persist germ-​like after a period of dormancy. While

Architecture   473 Scott and Cram differed over the merits of the humanist and Gothic traditions, each favored architectural expression that unfolded within an aesthetic tradition rather than being transformed by modern processes of industrialized building, mass production, and standardization.

Modern Architecture, Overcoming Decadence The art nouveau movement along with the theoretical writings of Cram and Scott mark the influence of fin-​de-​siècle decadent culture in architecture. Together they share an affinity for an embodied experience of space, a desire to work within an aesthetic tradition, and an acceptance, if not full celebration, of the late phase of that tradition. Thus, for a handful of designers and theorists during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decadence of the artistic sort was not a dead end. However, Adolf Loos argued otherwise in his seminal manifesto “Ornament and Crime” (1908). The polemic took aim at art nouveau as represented by the Vienna Secession and the growing idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Secessionist designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Otto Wagner, and Josef Maria Olbrich were influenced by the aesthetic approach of Mackintosh and invited the Scottish architect to design and display a room at the eighth Secession exhibition in 1900. Where we might identify Mackintosh as a prime architectural exponent of the decadent style, Loos saw that type of work as expressing a debauched kind of decadence. Echoing Nordau, he criticized what he identified as a primitive and erotic instinct inherent in ornament. Loos saw in the dripping, manic details of Secessionist designers “pathological symptoms”21 rather than aesthetic pleasure, and he further damned their aesthetic status by claiming such work was born of unenlightened mysticism. Pushing beyond the questions of civilizational advancement and declination, literary theorist Naomi Schor argues that the most modern aspect of Loos’s manifesto is “the pride of place accorded economic considerations.”22 Relying on the architect’s claim that “it is a crime against the national economy that [in fashioning ornaments] human labour, money, and material should thereby be ruined,” Schor identifies an important element becoming attached to decadence in the early twentieth century, namely that “ugliness is pegged to waste.”23 Indeed, there was already a current of beauty associated with an economy of material in Durand’s structural efficiency. The slender columns that Viel criticized were for Durand an expression of economic beauty in that they used less material. But by the twentieth century the most pressing architectural questions were no longer only about scientific, material efficiency but were also, as Loos’s polemic indicates, related to national economies and industrial labor. Thus, from Viel to Loos we can trace a line that begins with the architectural application of scientific techniques for the engineering of material and

474   Lori Smithey extends to the implementation of scientific management strategies and, further, to the organization of human labor. However, where the former was called out as a source of impending architectural decadence, the latter was, for a time, upheld as a modern way out of decadence. Loos’s essay is now read as an important harbinger of the rising International Style, the streamlined version of modern architecture that was built of steel, glass, and concrete and that stood for many as a symbol of social and industrial progress. Another principal piece in the advent of the International Style was the opening of the Bauhaus, the art school that had its roots in the social and cultural decadence of the Weimar Republic and the Wagnerian tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk but that would ultimately come to establish a new foundation for architectural thought, production, and education based on principles of industrial production and functionalist philosophy. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure, the pedagogical and design legacy of the Bauhaus continued to spread internationally as its former faculty emigrated. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the third and final director of the Bauhaus, ultimately landed in Chicago, where he became head of the architecture school at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Gropius was persuaded to chair the Department of Architecture at Harvard University. His presence there from 1937 to 1952 made it a center for Bauhaus activity and reception in the United States. Despite the shared late nineteenth-​century cultural references that shaped the work of contemporaneous architects such as Cram, van der Rohe and Gropius came to be characterized as representing opposite poles of an architectural culture war. Even though Cram, in his early decadent novel, opted out of a nineteenth-​century socialist-​royalist political debate and chose an aesthetic-​cum-​spiritual path rather than picking a sociopolitical side, he was nonetheless represented as the reactionary straw man to the progressive, heroic Gropius (Figure 24.4). By the 1950s the decadence of previous generations seemed to be a thing of the past. Following the Second World War, the architectural critic Reyner Banham began to assert a new morality of material honesty by echoing Loos’s condemnation of aestheticism. In a short essay titled, “Machine Aesthetes,” he contrasts the aesthetic rules of “Thirties modernists” with the material honesty of the “junior avant-​garde.” The use of the term aesthete in the title indicates the critic’s stance against the “fakery” and “double-​ talk” that presumably stems from a commitment to aesthetics. Banham avers that the designers of this new generation have finally “put surface coverings behind them” and that “they have been as honest about materials as one might hope an engineer would be.”24 Such efforts ostensibly promised a way out of the decadence of previous generations. Looking back to Scott, Banham relegated the Paterian critic to “becoming the aesthetic handbook of the Neo-​Georgian and Playboy phases of English architecture.”25 Likewise, in the United States, Albert Bush-​Brown was declaring a winner in what he described as the progressive gulf between “Ralph Adams Cram at Princeton in 1913, and Walter Gropius in 1950 at Harvard.”26 Nevertheless, two important factors would prove such victories to be short-​lived: first, a new era of decadence was on the rise, and,

Architecture   475

Figure 24.4.  Walter Gropius House, front view, Lincoln, Massachusetts (1938). Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

second, the nineteenth-​century aesthetic culture of decadence still had architectural beneficiaries.

American Decadence and Postmodern Architecture While the modernist architect Le Corbusier espoused the American industrial strategies of Taylorism and Fordism as models for reorganizing society, as early as the 1930s the designer was also becoming critical of American expansionism. Through his associations with regional syndicalists, Le Corbusier began to move away from the view of America as the industrial utopia diametrically opposed to the ancien régime notion of European decadence. He put forward a new position that American imperialism was in fact the cause of world instability and twentieth-​century French decadence.27 It is through his disapproval of the amount of labor required for the production of unnecessary and wasteful consumer goods that the architect began to use the term decadence

476   Lori Smithey polemically, largely based on his reading of Robert Aaron and Arnaud Dandieu’s Décadence de la nation française (1931). In Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches: Voyage au pays des timides (When Cathedrals Were White: Travels in the Land of the Timid, 1937), Le Corbusier reports on his first trip to America in 1935, when he was invited by the Museum of Modern Art to give a series of lectures. Mardges Bacon says that on the lecture tour Corbusier reasoned, “During the first machine age . . . mechanization had not just taken command, it had led America ‘too far’ into overproduction, waste, and ‘spiritual decadence.’ ”28 This position was then extended in Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches, where the second chapter is titled “Décadence de l’esprit” (Decadence of the spirit). In the late nineteenth century, America was perhaps too young and too Protestant to be properly decadent. That changed first with the Jazz Age of the 1920s and then with the affluent era following World War II, when America emerged as the place where the International Style could find its fullest expression. During the 1960s and 1970s the question of American decadence, if not the decadence of modernity at large, was coming into focus. In their 1972 book Learning from Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour analyzed the American city most easily identifiable as decadent in its colloquial sense.29 The 1972 demolition of Pruitt-​Igoe, the massive public housing project in St. Louis, made modernist architecture appear decadent in a morbidly physical sense, while the oil crisis and economic recession following the Arab-​Israeli war of 1973 signaled an end of the postwar golden age. Perhaps most notably, the theorist Colin Rowe deployed the concept in Collage City (1975–​1978) by referring to both Gibbon and Huysmans.30 Rowe specifically uses the Enlightenment historian to set up a lineage of utopian thought that he argues runs on to Charles Darwin and Karl Marx through the common aspiration of reconstructing society based on scientific principles. His theoretical engagement with decadence becomes critical rather than polemical as he uses it to challenge the more dominant concept of utopia. We see this maneuver, for example, in the title of the first chapter, “Utopia: Decline and Fall?,” in which Rowe juxtaposes decadent terminology with the modernist concept devised to overcome all forms of decadence. Decadence was not only resurfacing in the theoretical discourse; there were also postmodern designers who were engaged with the aesthetic and intellectual tradition of fin-​de-​siècle decadence. The School of Architecture at Princeton was one institution where the decadent tradition still had some currency. Its design program was sharply distinguished from other schools of architecture in the United States in two important ways: first, it existed within an art history department, and second, it emphasized liberal studies rather than pre-​professional training. In short, architectural education at Princeton consisted of erudite pedagogy that favored a broad, humanistic survey of many past periods and styles over the International Style. Graduates of the “Princeton System,” such as Robert Venturi and Charles W. Moore, were central figures in the emergence of postmodern design. And while Venturi brought the decadent styles of the baroque and mannerism into the postmodern architectural conversation, it was perhaps Moore who truly carried the torch of decadence forward through his aesthetic interiors.

Architecture   477

Conclusion Architectural decadence tracks broadly across the intellectual history of the concept because architecture has always been in part connected to social decadence as much as it has been to aesthetic decadence. Architectural concern over the threat of decadence appears in Viel’s critique of design methods being based in scientific analysis and engineering techniques, Cram’s extension of that critique to include design production based in managerial methods of industry and capital, and Jacob’s identification of an intentional decadence underscoring the planning of American cities. While the fin-​de-​ siècle decadent aesthetic excited Mackintosh as much as it alarmed Loos, it is really not until the second half of the twentieth century that we find an aesthetic decadent sensibility that is directly leveraged against social decadence. Unique in its ties to both the social and aesthetic sides of the decadent tradition, architecture has never enjoyed a fully developed decadent aesthetic as such. Nevertheless, because building has always been involved with the opposing traditions of social decadence and the art of decadence, architecture, perhaps more than other design fields, offers insights into the production and construction of decadence as much as its aesthetic effects.

Notes 1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1783), 2:234. 2. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 7. 3. Viel references the main architectural treatises that would have been accessible to him, starting with Claude Perrault’s translation of Vitruvius and the work of David Le Roy, which serve as sources for his textual knowledge of ancient architecture. He also studied Renaissance architectural thought through French translations of books by Italian theorists such as Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and Vignole. 4. C.-​F. Viel, Décadence de l’architecture à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Chez l’auteur et Perronneau, 1800). 5. J.-​K. Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 58. 6. See, for example, C.-​F. Viel, Des points d’appuis indirects dans la construction des bâtiments (Paris: Chez l’auteur et Perronneau, 1801). In this text, which refers to the Panthéon in Paris, Viel criticizes Soufflot’s transferring of structural loads for large masses of masonry. 7. Mau classified Roman wall paintings into four categories: the Incrustation Style (ca. 300–​80 BCE) imitated marble through painted effect, the Architectural Style (ca. 80–​10 BCE) featured architectural details such as columns in perspective, the Ornate Style (ca. 10 BCE–​ 60 CE) treated the wall as a painting rather than as an architectural feature and portrayed mythological scenes, and the Intricate Style (ca. CE 60) combined elements from all the styles. Because he theorized the styles as a chronological progression, they are often referred to simply as First, Second, Third, and Fourth Style. See August Mau, Pompeii: Its Life and Art (New York: Macmillan, 1899).

478   Lori Smithey 8. Morris Hicky Morgan, trans., Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 210. Morgan’s remains the most influential English translation of Vitruvius. 9. For more on the classical idea of material decorum, see Maggie L. Popkin, “Decorum and the Meanings of Materials in Triumphal Architecture of Republican Rome,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 3 (2015): 289–​311. 10. For a discussion on connections between literary and architectural concepts of style, see Lori Smithey, “Decadent by Design: Interplays between Architecture and Decadent Literature,” in TEXT, Special Issue no. 55, “Writing/​Architecture” (2019). http://​www.text​ jour​nal.com.au/​spec​iss/​issu​e55/​cont​ent.htm. 11. See in particular, Emil Kaufmann, Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952), 457–​58. 12. For a reading on the political and cultural connections between art nouveau and decadence, see Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-​de-​Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 13. Such academic strictures can be seen, for example, through the Beaux-​Arts design education in France, the narrow scope of architectural expression allowed under Baron Haussmann’s massive renovation of Paris, and the traditional focus on fine arts and the historicist tendency of the Vienna Academy of the Arts. 14. For discussions of art nouveau in relation to industrial and colonial growth, see Amy Kulper, “Art Nouveau Gardens of the Mind: Bell Jars, Hothouses, and Winter Gardens—​ Preserving Immanent Natures,” in Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Henriette Steiner and Maximilian Sternberg (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 101–​18; and Debora L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part III,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 20, no. 1 (2013): 3–​61. 15. Reyner Banham, “Alienation of Parts,” New Statesman 59 (March 5, 1960): 331–​32. 16. Ralph Adams Cram, My Life in Architecture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 84. 17. Ralph Adams Cram, The Substance of Gothic: Six Lectures on the Development of Architecture from Charlemagne to Henry VIII, given at the Lowell Institute, Boston, in November and December, 1916 (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1917), 198–​99. 18. Cram, The Substance of Gothic, 165–​66. 19. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1914), 192. 20. Scott, 183–​84. 21. Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos, Pioneer of Modern Architecture (New York: Praeger, 1966), 248. For more on Loos’s reading of Nordau, see Christopher Long, “The Origins and Context of Adolf Loos’s ‘Ornament and Crime,’ ” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68, no. 2 (June 2009): 200–​23. 22. Naomi Schor, “Decadence,” in Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 2007), 53. 23. Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 228; Schor, “Decadence,” 54. 24. Reyner Banham, “Machine Aesthetes,” New Statesman 55 (August 16, 1958): 192–​93. 25. Banham’s commentary on Scott’s Architecture of Humanism appears in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Butterworth, 1960), 45. 26. Albert Bush-​ Brown, “Cram and Gropius: Traditionalism and Progressivism,” New England Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1952): 3.

Architecture   479 27. Mary McLeod illuminates Le Corbusier’s associations with regional syndicalists in Urbanisme and Utopia: Le Corbusier from Regional Syndicalism to Vichy (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1985). See also Mardges Bacon, Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). Bacon builds on this work to tie it to Le Corbusier’s positions on America, which were increasingly charged with the rhetoric of decadence. 28. Bacon, Le Corbusier in America, 67. 29. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). 30. The ideas in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), first appeared in “Collage City,” Architectural Review 158, no. 942 (August 1975): 66–​ 90. In Architectural Review, Rowe and Koetter refer to decadence by including a lengthy quote from Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–​1789) and by referring to Huysmans’s À rebours (1884). While the latter is removed from the book, Gibbon stays in the form of the chapter title, “Utopia: Decline and Fall.”

Further Reading Bacon, Mardges. Le Corbusier in America: Travels in the Land of the Timid. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Emery, Elizabeth. Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-​ de-​ Siècle French Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Harpham, Geoffrey. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Kaufmann, Emil. Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952. Lieber, Jeffrey. Flintstone Modernism: Or, the Crisis in Postwar American Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Middleton, Robin, ed. The Beaux-​Arts and Nineteenth-​Century French Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Moore, Charles W. You Have to Pay for the Public Life: Selected Essays of Charles W. Moore. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Otero-​Pailos, Jorge. Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Payne, Alina. From Ornament to Object: Genealogies of Architectural Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Pérez-​Gómez, Alberto. Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Picon, Antoine. French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Routledge, 2007. Silverman, Debora L. Art Nouveau in Fin-​de-​Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Vesely, Dalibor. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

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Chapter 25

Vision Decadence in Symbolist Art of the Fin de Siècle Vivien Greene

Decadence as a concept in the visual arts had its apotheosis during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding the prevalence of the term at the fin de siècle, however, artists did not coalesce under a decadent banner, and art historians today disagree on whether a decadent movement, per se, existed. Generally, writers of the era transposed the nomenclature from poetry and prose to the visual realm. In a parallel phenomenon, some present-​day literary scholars do the same. Nonetheless, from an art-​historical stance, it could be argued that decadence was a deranged first cousin to symbolism, a widespread and syntactically varied turn-​of-​the-​century idiom that also originated in literature.1 Symbolism burgeoned when scientific developments, industrialization, and secularism spurred artistic explorations antithetical to reality and the physical world. Artists plumbed the murky depths of the imaginary, the mythical, the mystical, and the occult with equally anti-​naturalistic aesthetic treatments. Decadence was, perhaps, a subset of symbolism pushed to the extreme. This decadent subset can best be approached through close thematic and stylistic readings of specific works by a spectrum of artists associated with symbolism. Select content and pictorial language in these examples might well indicate decadent tendencies within the movement, such as overwrought, debased, or gruesome imagery, all animated by exaggerated form, distorted line, and extreme ornamentation. The reach of symbolism was international and extended beyond the canonical reign of France to touch countries across the European continent and beyond. The Western artists identified here reflect this cosmopolitanism: Gustave Moreau, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav-​Adolf Mossa, Franz von Stuck, Gustav Klimt, Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Félicien Rops, and Julio Ruelas. Despite geographical distances, the zeitgeist of the age was intrinsic to the development of all these figures. For the most part, connections also existed between them: frequently they were familiar with each other’s ideas and oeuvre, shared similar interests, and looked to like sources for their art. Several had enduring relationships with decadent literary circles. Thereby, the analogous range of narratives

484   Vivien Greene these white male artists embraced—​for it was a domain and a time dictated by white men—​while multifarious, were interrelated. In an effort to tease out what might constitute “decadence” in their work, this investigation centers on two-​ dimensional depictions of erotically charged, bestial, often exoticized women (the latter sometimes non-​European), from castrating femmes fatales and mythical beings to hybrid creatures wreaking death and mayhem.2 Contemporary scientific, pseudo-​scientific, and social theories, especially those revolving around evolutionary axes, impacted this overarchingly misogynistic or racist production.3 Such theories were often manipulated to both consolidate and justify male authority with the advent of the New Woman, whom men perceived to be a growing threat, as well as to defend white European superiority vis-​ à-​vis the colonial activities of the period. Symbolist art inclined to decadence leaned toward subject matter that represented, in various guises, threats to the status quo—​ intimidating women, nonwhite races, politically radicalized lower classes—​portraying them in a negative light and deploying hyperbolic formal means to realize these goals.

Degeneration, Decadence, and Symbolism In the 1890s, various thinkers diagnosed civilization to be in a state of degeneration. Many believed devastating diseases, from syphilis to tuberculosis to now-​debunked conditions such as female neurasthenia or manias inducing anarchic fanaticism, not to mention alarming racial, gender, and class stereotypes tied to purportedly regressive or aberrant behavior, resulted from this pervasive decay. An assortment of nineteenth-​ century intellectuals from fields including medicine, anthropology, and evolutionary science perpetrated these biases. Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and skewed understandings of his theories, contributed to the emergence of these ideas (as well as undermining religious fundamentals—​another harbinger of degeneration). So did a revival of Jean-​Baptiste Lamarck’s earlier postulations, such as those laid out in Philosophie zoologique (Zoological Philosophy, 1809), and, to some extent, the social Darwinism that Herbert Spencer propounded. Before Darwin published his ideas, the French aristocrat, diplomat, and author Arthur de Gobineau opposed degeneration to progress and developed a chilling racial theory in Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, 1853–​1855), contending that whites were more evolved than and, thus, superior to other races.4 His compatriot, the psychiatrist Bénédict-​Augustin Morel, was instrumental in popularizing another unnerving interpretation of degeneration, spuriously linking physical and psychological pathologies, as with his 1857 treatise on the topic. Post-​Darwin, the Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso relied on ostensibly empirical studies of the cranium’s size and shape, along with facial characteristics and other suspect methodologies, to bolster his take on biological determinism.5 Sigmund

Vision   485 Freud’s teacher, the French neurologist Jean-​Martin Charcot, saw physical behaviors as manifestations of psychological states and advanced an unnuanced view of hysteria as a medical disorder.6 Max Nordau, an Austro-​Hungarian physician-​turned-​author, condemned multiple aspects of late nineteenth-​century life, blaming the overly aesthetic and stimulated culture of the fin de siècle in Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–​1893), dedicated to Lombroso.7 Decadence, broadly writ, was a partner in crime to these myriad phenomena if not exactly the same as “degeneration.” Yet “decadence” remains a conundrum in art history and criticism. In historical and current writings and scholarship, untangling and differentiating symbolism from decadence is a thorny endeavor. Scholars disagree on the finer and not-​so-​fine points regarding the implications of each classification, from the spiritual regeneration or transcendence that can be associated with symbolism to the moral corrosion that tilts the scales in the direction of decadence. Michelle Facos classifies certain artists as “decadent Symbolists” and explains that pessimism (affected by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, among others) shaped their ethos.8 Sharon Hirsh notes the difficulty in differentiating decadence from symbolism, positing that there were artists who had an “introspective” decadent phase and evolved a “universal” symbolism.9 Rather than rehearse all the multiple arguments attempting to codify either or both terms, and the polemics about what separates them, I refer here to Patrick McGuinness’s explanation in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle , which calls out the contradictions in definitions and the unwieldy problematics of the labels, indicating that these very complexities defined the era.10 Ultimately, as McGuinness states, “outside the literary sphere . . . the word ‘Decadence’ connotes socio-​political, racial, intellectual and imperial decline, or a synthesis of all of these.”11 These general parameters guide the following choices and analyses of a potentially decadent subdivision of symbolist art.

Biblical Sinners The art embedded in decadent literature is an obvious starting place, notably what J.-​ K. Huysmans lauded in his novel À rebours (Against Nature, 1884). His archetypally decadent protagonist, the Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, is the ultimate aesthete who choreographs every aspect of his existence to fulfill his overwrought desires. Des Esseintes’s specular experiences concentrate on extreme living. Among the artworks Huysmans elevated to this rarified but warped milieu are those by Gustave Moreau (1826–​1898).12 The focus on this artist presents a paradox of the decadent and symbolist categories, for Moreau was neither. While eluding an “ism,” he belonged to an earlier generation and was, in essence, a history painter closer to the Parnassian poets in terms of literary equivalents. Moreau drew from the neoclassicism of Jean-​Auguste-​ Dominique Ingres for his treatment of sculpted form, integrating the chromatic bravura of the Romantic painters Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Chassériau and evolving his own language to realize complex compositions with static subjects, shadowy spaces,

486   Vivien Greene rich colors, and glittering surfaces. In the novel, Des Esseintes is transfixed by his two Moreaus, both of Salome (whom the artist often depicted): a painting of her holding aloft a lotus flower in a ritualistic pose before the enthroned Herod, the executioner stationed to the right (Salome Dancing before Herod, 1874–​1876 [Figure 25.1]), and a lively watercolor, L’apparition (The Apparition, 1876), of a bejeweled, quasi-​nude Salome pointing to the haloed head of John the Baptist supernaturally floating before her. Huysmans’s syncretic descriptions of the Jewish Salome invoke Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African deities and imagery in a tense oscillation between orgiastic sex and phobic horrors of death and castration. Huysmans’s prose portrait of Herod’s stepdaughter seductively performing the dance of the seven veils in exchange for the decapitated head of John the Baptist was an influential precursor to the stream of late nineteenth-​century Salomes: Here she was no longer just the dancing-​girl who extorts a cry of lust and lechery from an old man by the lascivious movements of her loins; who saps the morale and

Figure 25.1.  Gustave Moreau, Salome Dancing before Herod (1874–​1876). Source: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (Wikimedia Commons).

Vision   487 breaks the will of a king with the heaving of her breasts, the twitching of her belly, the quivering of her thighs. She had become, as it were, the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties by the catalepsy that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning like the Helen of ancient myth, everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she touches.13

The profusion of fin-​de-​siècle presumptions in this passage is extraordinary. Salome is the evil seductress, a font of venom, and bringer of death. Huysmans reveals his own misogyny, a sentiment intertwined with the femmes fatales ubiquitous in late nineteenth-​ century culture, together with his anti-​Semitism—​typical of the period that would witness the divisive Dreyfus affair—​in his deleterious interpretations of the corrupt Jewess. Another backdrop to Salome’s exoticism and ethnicity is that of colonialism and the fluid transpositions made between Jewish, “Oriental,” and Black women, all potentially perceived as inferior racial identities.14 These are the nefarious female typologies that ensued through the early 1900s and after. Across the Channel, a decade later, Salome was also the focus of a sensational literary and visual intersection of decadence, in the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–​1898) for the 1894 English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play.15 In opposition to the Huysmans/​Moreau dyad, Beardsley created images in response to Wilde’s words, outdoing the author’s debauched narrative in graphic form. Beardsley can be truly classified as a decadent artist, with his “dissolute” content and exaggerated aesthetic, along with his tubercular condition, an illness that resonates with decadence. Under pressure from the publisher John Lane, Beardsley modified the earlier drawings he executed for Salomé, making them less obviously salacious.16 But they were still scandalous and worrisome to the British, who by the 1890s were preoccupied with questions of decline—​moral, social, racial, and otherwise. Beardsley’s imagery, which often subverted gendered positions of power, including potent women (lethal in the case of Salome) and feminized men, as well as portraying homoerotic scenes and “Oriental” peoples, was further parsed through anxieties regarding the health of the empire.17 The Climax (1893, [Figure 25.2]) represents Salome’s conquest and corresponds to the lines at the end of the one-​act play: “I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan.”18 A witchy Salome, suspended in the pictorial space, holds John’s decapitated head. His bodily fluids drip down into a dark pond. A single erect pale flower and an eerie primordial tentacle ascend from these tenebrous waters. In this moment of Darwinian analogies, when women were often cast as primal beings, the swampy environment below may also allude to an “unevolved” time befitting Salome’s regressive behavior.19 Beardsley exploited the contrasts of his black and white medium. A swooping effect divides the rectangular space into zones, inky below and moon-​like above, to form the backdrop for Salome and John. The overlaid circular japoniste patterning—​multiplying, organic, quasi-​cellular globules—​cluster in the left-​hand corner of the frame to suggest

488   Vivien Greene

Figure 25.2.  Aubrey Beardsley, The Climax (1893). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

a clouded night sky.20 John’s hair is stylized into Medusa tendrils (perhaps the “knot of serpents” of the play)—​though the bodiless head does not have the virago’s ability to transform the living into stone. Salome’s coiling locks, the drapery hanging off her body, the rivulet from John’s head, and the curved stem of the flower bud are all rendered in variants of the whiplash line of art nouveau. This motif carries intimations of imperial rule, since it derived, in part, from the sinuous rubber plant vines and the whips viciously used on the African slaves who harvested them, especially in the Congo Free State, and added a dynamic but also violent dimension to the action.21 Through formal elements and their contextual overtones, Beardsley made tangible the depravity unleashed in this scene of sex and death. As a postscript to Salome, it is relevant that she also materialized in contemporary guise, liberated from a nebulous past or a fantastical realm. The oeuvre of a lesser-​ known painter and illustrator from Nice, Gustav-​Adolf Mossa (1883–​1971)—​coincidentally the son of a watercolorist who knew Moreau—​embraces graphic excesses and oversexualized women.22 A disturbing satirical watercolor, Salomé (1906 [Figure 25.3]),

Vision   489

Figure 25.3.  Gustav-​Adolf Mossa, Salome (1906). Source: Musée des Beaux-​Arts de Nice. Credit: © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York—​ADAGP, Paris.

is all the more sinister because Mossa transformed the New Testament character into a well-​coiffed woman walking down a street in Nice on her return from the market.23 This coquette is dressed in an extravagant red dress with billowing cream plissé bell-​ sleeves and a ruffled hem, her matching red hat trimmed with roses. Wedged in her grocery bag with fish and a lobster resembling a giant cockroach is the head of John the Baptist, his greying face sapped of life.24 Blood drips from the bottom of the bag to the stone paving. Trotting alongside her is a dog who holds in his mouth a severed hand wrapped in butcher paper. Other details lend the tableau a demented tone, from the grinning old woman (she may be Herodias) to the anthropomorphic buildings of historic Nice. The improbable scenario is catapulted into contemporary reality by the droplets of red sprayed across the work’s surface like blood in a flourish worthy of a B-​movie. Mossa’s Salome and other of his female characters solidified male fears regarding modern women and the threats they posed, reifying the misogynistic attitudes of the time.

490   Vivien Greene Salome was not the only impious biblical woman central to the decadent strain of symbolism.25 Eve was a major competitor. A snake, the signifier of temptation, usually accompanies this Christian incarnation of original sin, a twosome that also aligns with the negative women-​animal correlations prevalent in the late 1800s.26 The trope of the carnally charged woman enthralled Munich-​based artist Franz von Stuck (1863–​1928), who, in addition to Eve, produced sphinxes and Salomes. His themes and aesthetics reflected the era’s spirit, shaped by, among others, Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and, by century’s end, Freud and, soon after, Carl Jung.27 Stuck realized multiple variations of Eve and often paired the instigator of man’s downfall with a large, dark phallic serpent. His first version of Die Sünde (Sin, 1893 [Figure 25.4]) is the most notable, painted the same year that Wilde’s Salomé was published in France.28 Shown in 1893 at the inaugural Munich Secession exhibition, a group Stuck cofounded, the painter presented it in an artist-​designed gold frame mimicking a Doric portal, the title carved into its base.29 Stuck’s inversion co-​opted the tabernacle format typical of sacred art to create an altar for the venal woman. Encapsulating Stuck’s exploration of this dialectical ethos, Jo-​Anne Birnie Danzker comments on the confluence of

Figure 25.4.  Franz von Stuck, Sin (1893). Source: Neue Pinakothek, Munich (Wikimedia Commons).

Vision   491 mythical and sacred subjects in his work and describes how he “engaged in contemporary debates on moral and religious precepts.”30 Tenebrous lighting—​which also functions metaphorically—​dominates Stuck’s sensual and sinister depiction of the first woman, although she appears as a contemporary femme fatale and there are no trappings within the painting to consign her to a specific historical moment, not unlike Mossa’s Salome. Eve and the snake work in tandem to reinforce a feeling of foreboding. The latter’s cruel, glittering eyes and bared fangs amplify the danger of her come-​hither gaze. Its formidable diamond-​patterned body drapes over Eve’s luminescent white flesh, her long dark hair melding with the reptile, leaving exposed her milky torso, erect breasts, pink nipples, and navel. A fiery orange zone in the composition’s upper right suggests infernal flames. Stuck’s notes for this painting highlight his goals: “The Sin /​Enticing with glowing eyes /​proffering white breasts lasciviously /​enticing with glowing eyes /​the naked woman lures into seduction /​but alongside next to the alluring /​face, the poisonous serpent flicks its tongue.”31 In this context, women were the catalyst for humanity’s demise, literally initiating the descent into hell through their immoral and animalistic behavior.

Mythological Monsters Stuck, in turn, influenced the Austrian artist synonymous with Vienna 1900, Gustav Klimt (1862–​1918). The two artists admired each other and shared a taste for the Swiss-​German painter Arnold Böcklin, and for classical motifs and myths.32 It has been proposed that Sin was a possible basis for Klimt’s Gorgons in the Beethovenfries (Beethoven Frieze, 1902).33 The Gorgons’ pallid, naked bodies and their disturbed expressions, with black and gold snakes winding around their raven hair, are somehow elaborated, although angular and anorexic, iterations of Eve. Klimt’s extraordinary mural, created for a temporary exhibition dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven, was laid out across three walls of the 1898 Vienna Secession building Joseph Maria Olbrich designed.34 The middle scene, “Die feindlichen Gewalten” (The Hostile Forces [Figure 25.5]) symbolizes the terrifying ills that goodness must overcome.35 The monster Typhon is a gigantic, furry simian form with scaly blue wings and a huge serpent’s body extending behind him. In addition to his Gorgon daughters, an iniquitous female trio—​ Lust, Wantonness, and Excess—​flank him to the right.36 Sickness, Madness, and Death are made flesh in the zombie-​like personage with pendulous breasts leaning over the Gorgons and the ghoulish faces crowding behind her in the upper-​left part of the work. A lone, skeletal woman shrouded in a diaphanous black veil, “Gnawing Grief,” closes the line of infelicitous individuals to the scene’s right. It is well known that Klimt was interested in biology and the evolutionary sciences, which informed his art formally and conceptually.37 These preoccupations prevailed in his work from this period and are manifest in his highly stylized, organic, ornamental forms, often enclosed in embryonic cartouches, inspired by the illustrations of cellular

492   Vivien Greene

Figure 25.5.  Gustav Klimt, Beethoven Frieze (The Hostile Forces) (1902). Source: Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna (Wikimedia Commons).

structures as seen under a microscope. They also contribute to the iconography he developed for allegorical and mythical characters, such as those in the Beethoven Frieze. His atypical Typhon is an example. Often described as a monster with a hundred dragon heads, this hulking hybrid is a winged serpentine gorilla Klimt adapted from an illustrated natural history publication he owned, Illustrierte Naturgeschichte der Thiere (Illustrated natural history of animals).38 Typhon’s missing teeth and round blank eyes betray his lack of intelligence. Emily Braun argues that “[t]‌he linking of moral degradation to animal descent rather than free will comes to the fore in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, where Typhon . . . appears unconventionally as a gorilla.”39 Seen through a prejudicial Darwinian lens, Typhon would have denoted those often assigned to lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, in line with determinist and racial hypotheses about the relationship between apes and nonwhite people alleged to be degenerate or atavistic. Another undeniable reference to a regressive “other” is “Excess,” whose sagging, lopsided breasts, distended belly, and repugnant body evidence her overindulgence. Klimt appropriated this masculine woman from Beardsley’s fleshy, bejeweled eunuch-​like Ali Baba (1897 [Figure 25.6]).40 Both are in an unpalatable partial state of nudity and wear “Orientalizing” headdresses and jewelry. The Beardsley source insinuates a connection between the dissipation and backwardness of the female “Excess” and that of yet another non-​European stereotyped ethnicity.41 Klimt may not have intended such an indictment, but this orgy of corporeally and psychologically twisted characters and primal beings presents a metaphorical vision of the insalubrious milieu thought to endanger society.42 The gold-​armored knight from the first wall resolves this abysmal dilemma in the last mural, in which “The Arts,” a “Choir of Angels,” and an “Embracing Couple” conclude the metaphysical chronicle with culture, the celestial kingdom, and a union of lovers conquering evil.

Vision   493

Figure 25.6.  Aubrey Beardsley, Ali Baba (1897). Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Almost contemporaneous with “The Hostile Forces,” idiosyncratic, formidable, and frightening mythical females likewise served the Italian symbolist artist Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1860–​1932) in his diptych Diana di Efeso e gli schiavi (Diana of Ephesus and the Slaves) and La Gorgone e gli eroi (The Gorgon and the Heroes, 1895–​1899 [Figures 25.7 and 25.8]).43 Symbolism had a polyglot tenor in Italy. Sartorio admired French Romantic and academic painters, the Pre-​Raphaelites, Belgian symbolists, Böcklin, and the classically inflected symbolist artists of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna.44 He was also affiliated with the Italian decadent literary movement and friends with its greatest proponent, Gabriele D’Annunzio.45 Indeed, his diptych was partly prompted by D’Annunzio’s allusion to the line in The Tempest, “We are such stuff as dreams are

494   Vivien Greene

Figure 25.7.  Giulio Aristide Sartorio, Diana of Ephesus and the Slaves (1895–​1899). Source: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (Wikimedia Commons).

made on,” in his novel Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894)—​a response to Huysmans’s Against Nature. In his own obscure explanation Sartorio stated that he wished to mythically express two aspects of the deep vanity of human existence. On one side is the Gorgon, who has the seductive appearance of Beauty and is both Life and Death because she raises and destroys heroes. On the other is the Diana of Ephesus, of the 100 breasts, nurturer of men and their chimeras.46

Sartorio’s diptych reflected both Germanic and Francocentric traditions. Like Stuck, Sartorio looked to Greco-​Roman art, and scholars believe that he modeled his Diana after a Roman copy of Artemis of Ephesus. The sculptured Artemis’s face and hands are cast in bronze and may reprise the dark wood of archaic Anatolian examples.47 Her garment is carved from alabaster. Sartorio closely emulated his ancient model, portraying Diana with black skin and white cladding. But he also diverged in his interpretation. While the cult deity’s most unusual attributes are her polymastoid forms, which lack nipples and are not actual breasts—​Sartorio construed them as such. Characterized by these features, Sartorio’s Diana can be read as a deformed and foreign—​possibly

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Figure 25.8.  Giulio Aristide Sartorio, The Gorgon and the Heroes (ca. 1897). Source: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (Wikimedia Commons).

Black—​gendered being, subservient to her assigned mammary function to nourish humans and monsters. The sleeping “slaves,” also Sartorio’s iconographic invention, evoke a massacre and recall Delacroix’s painting La mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827–​ 1828). Black, Brown, and white naked males and females of all ages hark back to the Orientalism of Delacroix, Sartorio’s Romantic forerunner, as well as the academic artist Jean-​Louis Gêrome. Sartorio’s conception seems to follow in the spirit of the two Frenchmen’s work, which trafficked in naked, enslaved, or otherwise “exotic” women of a fictionalized North Africa or “Near East” and nonwhite men.48 The supine tiger on a blood-​stained rock (a sacrifice?) again conjures an undomesticated non-​European world. Such white male artists’ projected fantasies of a “savage” Africa or Asia were rooted as much in the desire for an imaginary, more feral, yet tamable female as they were in assertions of European supremacy enacted through colonialism and the subjugation of native populations in the name of empire. The Gorgon canvas mirrors its partner, with the female protagonist standing on the right side of the composition also presiding over inert bodies. However, she is a fin-​ de-​siècle nude not so far removed from Stuck’s Sin. The only supernatural traits that

496   Vivien Greene distinguish her are the Gorgon’s signature snakes interlaced in her cascading red hair and her incongruously winged head and feet. Of the Gorgon trio she is the mortal sister Medusa.49 Here, too, Sartorio departed from the established myth, depicting the Medusa with “heroes” he claimed derived from all human races. The Gorgon heartlessly treads on them, stepping on the head of a prone Black male who may have personified the African race for Sartorio. This development in the composition and the incorporation of Black bodies both date to circa 1896 (or soon after) and coincided with the Ethiopian defeat of the Italians at Adwa.50 Perhaps it is not accidental that Sartorio executed his diptych during the early period of Italy’s often hapless efforts to colonize in eastern Africa (the Italians had already suffered a loss at Dogali, in present-​day Eritrea, in 1887). In the land of Lombroso, these colonial difficulties magnified Italian fears of national decline and the emasculation of the body politic by supposedly less evolved people. Visual culture overturned this power dynamic by representing Black and Brown figures as “other,” abject, or dead.

Bestial Correspondences Degeneracy and decadence assumed another semblance in the hybrid females and woman-​animal pairings that abounded in symbolist art, gesturing to the bestial nature certain types of women and creatures were thought to share.51 These included harpies, sirens, and sphinxes as well as the deliberate juxtaposition of morally questionable women with uncouth fauna. Alluring naked women and live pigs appear more than once as bedfellows. The Belgian symbolist Félicien Rops (1833–​1898), who settled permanently in Paris in 1875, executed one such work in watercolor, Pornocratès (also spelled Pornokratès) or Femme au cochon (Woman with Pig [Figure 25.9]) in 1878, followed by a series of etchings in 1896.52 Noted for his works on paper, etchings, and prints, though also a painter, the anticlerical and individualistic Rops had a penchant for skeletons, erotic nudes, and satanic imagery, skewering Catholic morality and lampooning academicism, sometimes filtering his libertine, macabre confections through Greek and Roman classical motifs that he molded to his own ends.53 His impetus was to critique bourgeois norms as well as point out the negative consequences of modernity and the urban environment. Thus, Michel Draguet contends that he did not necessarily intend for his female imagery—​from the obscene, to the titillating, to the downfallen—​to condemn women specifically.54 Rops met Charles Baudelaire (1821–​1867) in Brussels in 1864, becoming a companion of the poet over the last years of his life.55 He crafted perversely dark illustrations for publications by Baudelaire and others, including Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly and Joséphin Péladan, the eccentric, self-​aggrandizing French writer and aesthete.56 In correspondence discussing his art, Rops’s style echoed the tone of decadent prose. He was quite satisfied with Pornocratès and wrote about it multiple times, though always varying

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Figure 25.9.  Félicien Rops, Pornocratès (1878). Source: Musée Félicien Rops, Namur, Belgium (Wikimedia Commons).

the story of its genesis, much like an author of fiction. In an 1879 letter he sketched it out thus: A grand nude woman the most beautiful I could find, nude like a goddess, wearing black silk stockings with red flowers, grand black gloves—​velvet Gainsborough on blond head, blindfolded, standing on the frieze of a bizarre temple . . . led by a pig—​ with a gold tail—​whose leash she holds.57

His narrative, in another letter from 1879, educes an atmosphere worthy of Des Esseintes’s decadence: “I made this in four days in a blue satin salon, in an overheated apartment, full of scents, where the opopanax and cyclamen gave me a small fever beneficial to creation and even to procreation.”58

498   Vivien Greene Rops strove to transgress boundaries of propriety in his visual repertoire. He contrasted the late nineteenth century with antiquity, in his modern-​day courtesan who improbably walks on a classical structure as three winged putti fly away in the sky to the left. Her salaciously scant attire is nonetheless sophisticated, emphasizing her nudity and implying her profession and status.59 She wears a feathered eighteenth-​ century-​style black hat, pink flowers in her hair, a white blindfold, dangling earrings and a necklace, with a gold band around her torso enhancing a gauzy wide blue ribbon tied in a bow at her back, its two ends flowing down and around the front of her lush thigh. The blue matches the bows at the tops of her thigh-​high stockings, playing against the azure tonalites of the sky. Over her elegant long black gloves are gold bracelets, while embroidered pink and red flowers decorate her stockings. Below the woman is a frieze with personifications of the arts (sculpture, music, poetry, and painting are visible), and the Greek word for pornocracy incised in the stone beneath. A pornocracy, which derives from ancient Greek, denotes a government ruled by prostitutes. Rops’s title could also allude to French left-​wing philosopher Pierre-​Joseph Proudhon’s anti-​ feminist La pornocratie, ou Les femmes dans les temps modernes (Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times, published posthumously, in 1875), which is, in substance, an indictment of modern emancipated women (such as those who engage in sex outside of marriage). Both references underscore the fetishized figure’s identity. The muscular pig leading the way only reinforces her lust and fallen status as espied through the lorgnette of late nineteenth-​century middle-​class values. Nor is this Rops’s first coupling of a female nude with a pig. His La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St. Anthony, 1878) showcases a lusty naked woman, her wrists loosely tied to a cross, who is identified as “EROS” rather than “INRI.” A Christ bearing nails through his palms falls away to the left, as though he had been knocked off the very same cross, while a horrified, kneeling St. Anthony rocks back in terror of this spiritual test, even as an alert pig looks up intently at the woman from behind the scene. Both works on paper emphasize the intersection of the beast perhaps most strongly allied with filth and excess and the presumed innate animal nature of sexualized contemporary women assumed to embody immorality, temptation, and sin. Likely inspired by Rops, Julio Ruelas (1870–​1907), a Mexican painter, engraver, and illustrator, also portrayed an eroticized nude woman with a pig, La domadora (The Dominatrix, 1897 [Figure 25.10]).60 Ruelas spent time in Europe early in his career, studying in Karlsruhe, Germany, where he saw work by Stuck and Böcklin, among other symbolists. Upon returning to Mexico, he became part of a literary and artistic circle in Mexico City called the modernistas (a movement the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío originated, which existed in both Spain and Latin America), where decadence and modernism coincided in reaction to stolid academic practices and hypocritical, prudish bourgeois canons. These men eventually came together around the journal Revista Moderna, first published in 1898, described by the poet José Juan Tablada as an “ideal world . . . populated by Baudelairean poets, steeped in the briny absinthe of Verlaine . . . , the clear dark Satanism of Rops, and the black masses of Huysmans.”61 Endeavoring to disrupt staid ethics, the modernistas emulated their European symbolist counterparts and reduced women outside of “polite”

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Figure 25.10.  Julio Ruelas, The Dominatrix (1897). Source: Colección Andrés Blaisten, Mexico City (Wikimedia Commons).

society to the role of immoderate seductress or source of evil, reiterating the binary of the Madonna and whore that is ingrained in Catholicism. In this small-​scale work, painted with more naturalism than the art nouveau idiom Ruelas employed in his illustrations, the actions of The Dominatrix unfold on a dirt racetrack surrounded by greenery, sited in a landscape with a rocky mountain in the background. The S&M title character—​another modern-​day naked woman—​incongruously stands before a tall tree in the track’s grassy center wearing only black stockings, golden shoes, and a straw boater decorated with a jaunty black and red striped band. She tellingly balances a whip in her hands, an X-​rated circus performer. The pig running around the track, no doubt encouraged by a few lashes, is her subordinate, a player in her voyeuristic act. The animal is not merely a signifier of female greed and wantonness. In the specificity of this composition, the pig is a metonym for the diminished power of men at the mercy of corrupt and cruel contemporary women who do not conform to traditional mores. The dark monkey on a rock beside the track—​maybe about to leap onto the pig’s back—​is another inclusion of a creature with potent connotations, symbolizing mischief, mimicry, or lasciviousness. From a mistaken evolutionary perspective, the monkey could also suggest the less advanced state of women, closer to the

500   Vivien Greene simian species than the male human.62 These overtones are not unlike those Klimt later captured in his “Hostile Forces,” with his trio of vices, “Lust, Wantonness, Excess” and Typhon, demonstrating the pervasiveness of these stereotypes during the fin de siècle.63

Conclusion Western society was in an exhilarating but also brittle state at the turn of the twentieth century. Progressive ideas upended normative mainstays and destabilized entrenched positions of authority, engendering a Pandora’s box of anxieties. Some of those whose power was jeopardized blamed the ills of the epoch on scapegoats and crystallized these in biased constructs of anyone deemed menacing to dominant culture—​women, people of color, the working classes. The urban scene, cosmopolitanism, shifts in social structures, innovations across multiple fields, and the turn to alternative forms of spirituality led to late modernity and its concomitant evils. Decadence, like its symbolist overlord, could be said to have expressed both: a new approach to art and literature, yet one haunted by the specters of degeneration.

Acknowledgments Writing during a pandemic is challenging, and I am thankful to those who shared scholarship with me: Tim Barringer, Emily Braun, Stephen Calloway, Laura Moure Cecchini, Alison Chang, Alessandra Comini, Caroline Corbeau-​ Parsons, Maura Coughlin, James Finch, Giovanna Ginex, Tali Han, Sharon Hecker, Alison Hokanson, Carol Jacobi, David Johnson, Alexandra Karl, Patricia Mainardi, Nicol Mocchi, Alexandra Munroe, Tanya Paul, Jonah Siegel, Debora L. Silverman, James Clois Smith, Jr., Ksenia M. Soboleva, Justin St. P. Walsh, and Joan Young. I am deeply grateful to Samantha Small. This text is dedicated to my great mentor, Robert Rosenblum (1927–​2006), whose ideas continue to guide me.

Notes 1. Music, the most ineffable and interior, yet all-​encompassing of the arts, was also crucial for symbolism and decadence, especially that of Richard Wagner. See Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). 2. It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss related threads, such as the counterpart of the femme fatale, the spiritual femme fragile, or male hybridity, manifest in the figure of the centaur or faun. 3. Recent studies on late nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Western culture accentuate the relevance of evolutionary sciences and their subsequent misinterpretations; see, for example, Barbara Larson and Fae Brauer, eds., The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms, and Visual Culture (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2009); and Fae Brauer and Anthea Callen, eds., Art, Sex and Eugenics: “Corpus Delecti” (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).

Vision   501 4. For a summary of Gobineau’s racial conclusions, see John Nale, “Arthur de Gobineau on Blood and Race,” in “Xenophobia and Racism,” special issue, Critical Philosophy of Race 2, no. 1 (2014): 106–​24. 5. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo bianco e l’uomo di colore (The White Man and the Colored Man, 1871), L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man, 1876), La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, authored with his son-​in-​law Gugliemo Ferrero, 1893). For Lombroso, see Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 6. For a perspective on Charcot’s and Freud’s theories and symbolism, see Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-​ de-​ Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 75–​106. 7. Max Nordau, Degeneration, intro. George L. Mosse, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993). Lombroso and Nordau categorized male artists as “degenerate” because they perceived them as hypersensitive, effete, and weak. Patricia Mathews addresses male “degeneracy” in Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 8. Michelle Facos, Symbolist Art in Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 62, 89. 9. Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially 28–​38. 10. Patrick McGuinness, “Introduction,” in Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle: French and European Perspectives, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 1–​15. 11. McGuinness, 8. 12. For Moreau, see Peter Cooke, Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 13. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 52–​53. 14. Recent scholarship positions Salome at the intersection of sexist, anti-​Semitic, and racial attitudes. See, for example, Johannes Hendrikus Burgers, “The Spectral Salome: Salomania and Fin-​de-​Siècle Sexology and Racial Theory,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 165–​81. For the conflation of the “Oriental” and the Jewish in Wilde’s play, see Yeeyon Im, “Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama 45, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 361–​80. Jewish women were also correlated with Black women in Orientalist painting; see Adrienne L. Childs, “Serving Exoticism: The Black Female in French Exotic Imagery, 1733–​1885” (master’s thesis, University of Maryland, 1999), 63–​ 68. For a panoramic context, see Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics: Art, Colonialism, and French North Africa, 1880–​1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 15. Beardsley is most recently treated in Stephen Calloway and Caroline Corbeau-​Parsons, eds., Aubrey Beardsley (exh. cat.) (London: Tate, 2020). 16. Chris Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 300n6. 17. These themes are synthesized in Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, “Introduction: Reading the ‘Fin de Siècle’,” in The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History, c. 1880–​1900, ed. Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiii–​xxiii. For a

502   Vivien Greene multidisciplinary view of Beardsley’s time, including the topics of empire, race, degeneration, and gender (both masculinity and the New Woman), see Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken, eds., Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 18. Oscar Wilde, Salomé, in The Portable Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub, rev. ed. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), 429. 19. For this subject, see Larson and Brauer, The Art of Evolution, and Martha Lucy, “Into the Primeval Slime: Body and Self in Redon’s Evolutionary Universe,” in “The Visual Culture of Science and Art in Fin-​de-​Siècle France,” ed. Serena Keshavjee, special issue, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/​Canadian Art Review 34, no. 1, (2009): 18–​29. 20. For Beardsley and Japanese art, see Linda Gertner Zatlin, “Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Japanese’ Grotesques,” Victorian Literature and Culture 25, no. 1 (1997): 87–​108. 21. Debora L. Silverman has traced the roots of the “whiplash” line to colonialism and the lucrative elephant ivory and rubber trade, particularly in the Congo Free State under the Belgian rule of Leopold II. Debora L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I,” West 86 th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (Fall–​Winter 2011): 139–​81. European and American ivory and rubber economies depended on this unsavory commerce. The British Empire had its own legacy of violence in its colonies around the world and in Beardsley’s time was making further incursions into Africa after the 1884–​1885 Berlin Conference. 22. For Mossa’s Salomes, see Évanghélia Stead, “Mossa et Merlet, ou La Contamination,” in La chair du livre: Matérialité, imaginaire et poétique du livre fin-​de-​siècle (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris Sorbonne, 2021), 178–​89. For Mossa’s biography, see Catherine Camboulives, “Gustav-​Adolf Mossa (Nice, 1883–​Id., 1971),” in Salomé dans les collections françaises, ed. Evelyne-​Dorothée Allemand, Catherine Camboulives, Philippe Comte, Danièle Devynck, and Micheline Durand (exh. cat.) (Saint-​ Denis: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Saint-​Denis; Tourcoing: Musée des Beaux-​Arts de Tourcoing; Albi: Musée Toulouse-​Lautrec d’Albi; Auxerre: Musée d’Auxerre, 1988), 98. 23. Camboulives, “Salomé, 1906” (cat. entry), 100. 24. These aquatic grotesques might draw upon studies of fish, crustaceans, reptiles, and mammals pervading popular press and scientific illustration, often in tandem with evolutionary investigations. The German artist Max Klinger, well-​steeped in the sciences, appropriated “Lobsters and crabs . . . as signs of eroticism and menace.” See Marsha Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture: On the Threshold of German Modernism (London: Routledge, 2014), 109. 25. Salome is not named in the Bible, but is mentioned in later texts. 26. In his discussion of women and snakes, Bram Dijkstra notes: “Eve and the serpent became coextensive.” Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-​de-​Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 305. 27. Margot Th. Brandlhuber, “Franz von Stuck: Neoclassicism and Elemental Force,” in Franz von Stuck, ed. Jo-​Anne Birnie Danzker (exh. cat.) (Seattle: Frye Art Museum, 2013), 45–​55. 28. For Sin see Thomas Raff, Franz von Stuck, der Maler und seine “Sünde(n)” (exh. cat.) (Tettenweiss: Franz von Stuck Geburtshaus, 2003). Arnold Böcklin’s Triton und Nereide (Triton and Nereid, 1873–​1874) was an essential source for Sin, depicting the half-​man, half-​fish Greek god of the sea and a Nereid splayed nude on a rock, her black hair flowing down her torso, stroking a massive sea serpent (Raff, 7).

Vision   503 29. Eva Mendgen, “A Woman to Drive You Insane,” in Franz von Stuck (1863–​1928): “A Prince of Art” (Cologne: Taschen, 1995), 19–​20 . 30. Jo-​Anne Birnie Danzker, “‘The Apotheosis of Brutality’: Franz von Stuck and America,” in Birnie Danzker, Franz von Stuck, 24. 31. Quote is from Karin Althaus, “ ‘Comme la Princesse Salomé est belle ce soir!’ Franz von Stuck Paints Salome in 1906,” in Franz von Stuck: Salome, ed. Matthias Mühling (Munich: Edition Lenbachhaus, 2014), 130. Sin quickly entered Munich’s Neue Pinakothek collection, where it drew crowds. Edwin Becker, Franz von Stuck (1863–​1928): Eros and Pathos (exh. cat.) (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 1995), 18. 32. For Stuck and Vienna, see Agnes Husslein-​Arco and Alexander Klee, eds., Sünde und Secession: Franz von Stuck in Wien /​Sin and Secession: Franz von Stuck in Vienna (exh. cat.) (Munich: Hirmer, 2016). 33. Margot Th. Brandlhuber speculates that Sin could have been a model for Klimt’s Gorgons. See “‘The Most Modern of the Modernists’: Franz von Stuck’s Impact: His Archetypes and Myths in Vienna,” in Husslein-​Arco and Klee, Sin and Secession, 88. 34. The ephemeral mural survived and, after a convoluted history, was reinstalled in the Secession building. This discussion is indebted to Emmelyn Butterfield-​ Rosen, “Beethoven’s Farewell: The Beethovenfries, 1902,” ­ chapter 2 in “The Disposition of Persons: Conventions of Pose and the Modernization of Figural Art, 1886–​1912” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015), 173–​249. See also Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven: A Study in Mythmaking, rev. ed. (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2008), 388–​415. 35. Weiner Secession, XIV. Ausstellung der Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs Secession Wien: Klinger, Beethoven April-​Juni 1902 (exh. cat.) (Vienna: Adolf Holzhausen, 1902), 25–​26. 36. “Wantonness” is my translation of Unkeuschheit, literally, “unchastity.” 37. For Klimt and evolutionary biology, see Emily Braun, “Ornament as Evolution: Gustav Klimt and Berta Zuckerkandl,” in Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections, ed. Renée Price (New York: Neue Galerie, 2007), 145–​69; and Anna Harwell Celenza, “Darwinian Visions: Beethoven Reception in Mahler’s Vienna,” Musical Quarterly 93, nos. 3–​4 (Fall/​Winter 2010): 514–​59. For evolutionary theory and Germanic culture, see also Marsha Morton, “From Monera to Man: Ernst Haeckel, Darwinismus, and Nineteenth-​Century German Art,” in Larson and Brauer, The Art of Evolution, 59–​91; and Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture, 93–​103. 38. Butterfield-​Rosen, “Beethoven’s Farewell,” 215n151, 247. 39. Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 156. 40. Beardsley’s impact on Secession-​era Vienna is explored in Nathan J. Timpano, “ ‘His Wretched Hand’: Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art,” Art History 40, no. 3 (June 2017): 554–​81. 41. Braun, “Ornament as Evolution,” 156, clarifies that the “hostile” female allegories of Lust, Wantonness, and Excess are the “precise behaviors . . . Darwin uses in his writing on the moral sense, to distinguish savage from civilized societies.” 42. Viennese architect and theorist Adolf Loos found the Vienna Secession’s ornamentation degenerate and regressive. Claude Cernuschi, Re/​Casting Kokoschka: Ethic and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-​de-​Siècle Vienna (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 21–​23. Butterfield-​Rosen, “Beethoven’s Farewell,” 218, positions this positively: “[B]‌y

504   Vivien Greene leading culturally and biologically backwards, Klimt’s mural proposed instead that ‘art is there’ to restore humanity to its ‘lower,’ animal origins.” 43. For Sartorio, see Anna Maria Damigella, “Sartorio e la pittura decorativa simbolica,” and Bruno Mantura, “Giulio Aristide Sartorio: figura e decorazione,” in Giulio Aristide Sartorio: figura e decorazione, ed. Bruno Mantura and Anna Maria Damigella (exh. cat.) (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1989), 43–​ 69, 9–​28; and Anna Maria Damigella, “Immaginazione, cultura, realtà nell’arte di Sartorio,” in Giulio Aristide Sartorio, 1860–​ 1932, ed. Renato Miracco (exh. cat.) (Florence: Maschietto Editore, 2006), 17–​33. See also: https://​www.beni-​cultur​ali.eu/​opere​_​d_​a​rte/​sch​eda/​la-​gorg​one-​e-​gli-​eroi-​-​diana-​ di-​efeso-​e-​gli-​schi​avi-​sogge​tto-​mit​olog​ico-​sarto​rio-​giu​lio-​arist​ide-​roma-​1860-​-​1932-​ 12-​00489​566/​149​734, accessed June 6, 2020. The Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna purchased the diptych the same year it was completed and exhibited at the third Venice Biennale. 44. For Böcklin and Italy, see Gianna Piantoni, “Böcklin e la cultura romana di fine ottocento,” in I “Deutsch-​Römer”: Il mito dell’Italia negli artisti tedeschi, 1850–​1900, ed. Christoph Heilmann and Gianna Piantoni (exh. cat.) (Milan: Mondadori/​Rome: De Luca, 1988), 37–​45. 45. Fernando Mazzocca, “d’Annunzio e il Simbolismo: Dal sentimento panico della natura al mito,” in Il Simbolismo in Italia, ed. Maria Vittoria Marini Clarelli, Fernando Mazzocca, and Carlo Sisi (exh. cat.) (Venice: Marsilio, 2011), 17–​21. 46. Terza esposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia, Catalogo illustrato, 2nd ed. (Venice: Ferrari, 1899), 74–​75. All translations mine, unless otherwise noted. 47. For the ancient Artemis of Ephesus, see Lynn R. LiDonnici, “The Images of Artemis Ephesia and Greco-​Roman Worship: A Reconsideration,” Harvard Theological Review 85, no. 4 (October 1992): 389–​415; and Morna D. Hooker, “Artemis of Ephesus,” Journal of Theological Studies 64, no. 1 (April 2013): 37–​46. 48. See Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” in The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-​ Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 33–​59; Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Orients and Colonies: Delacroix’s Algerian Harem,” in The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, ed. Beth S. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 69–​87, 205–​ 07; and Elizabeth A. Fraser, Delacroix, Art and Patrimony in Post-​Revolutionary France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 115–​58. 49. Rita Camerlingo, “Studio per la figura della Gorgone (Testa), 1895–​1896,” cat. entry in Giulio Aristide Sartorio, 1860–​1932, 190. 50. At least two studies exist of the men, from ca. 1896, the year Sartorio went to teach in Weimar. Gloria Raimondi, “Nudo maschile, 1896 c.” and “Studio di nudo virile (Studio per La Gorgone e gli eroi—​Diana d’Efeso), 1896 c.,” cat. entry in Giulio Aristide Sartorio, 1860–​ 1932, 193. 51. For the pairing of women and animals, particularly in sexualized scenarios, their classification as creatures of a lower order, and the male fantasies about this, see Morton, Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture, 122–​27. 52. Pornocratès is the focus of Félicien Rops: Pornocratès dans tous ses états (exh. cat.) (Namur: Musée Félicien Rops, 2018); see especially Véronique Carpiaux, “  ‘C’est philosophique en diable et moral,’ ” 21–​39. 53. Sophie Schvalberg, “ ‘Paniconographie.’ Quand Félicien Rops détourne le modèle antique,” Félicien Rops, 53.

Vision   505 54. Michel Draguet, “Idée, idea, idéalisme: Figures du mythe,” in Splendeurs de l’Idéal: Rops, Khnopff, Delville et leurs temps, ed. Michel Draguet (exh. cat.) (Gent: Snoeck-​Ducaju & Zoon, 1997), 33. Whether Rops’s intent was more nuanced, erotica collectors were interested in his work, suggesting that they objectified Rops’s women. 55. “Biographie,” Musée Félicien Rops, accessed November 12, 2020, https://​www.museer​ops. be/​bio​grap​hie#/​. For Charles Baudelaire and Rops, see Michel Draguet, Le Symbolisme en Belgique (Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 2004), 11–​29. 56. For Péladan, see Vivien Greene, ed., Mystical Symbolism: Le Salon de la Rose+​Croix in Paris, 1892–​1897 (exh. cat.) (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2017). 57. Quoted in Carpiaux, “ ‘C’est philosophique en diable et moral’,” 24, 39n8. 58. Quoted in Coralie Massin, “Pornocratès à la lumière des lettres de Rops: Éléments pour une chronologie de l’œuvre,” Félicien Rops, 90, 101n2. 59. Denis Laoureux, “Rops et Manet: Pornocratès au prisme d’Olympia,” Félicien Rops, 47. 60. For Ruelas, see Teresa del Conde, Julio Ruelas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976). My arguments are informed by Adriana Zavala, Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 63–​106 and 287–​95. See also Fausto Ramírez, “Julio Ruelas, La domadora, 1897” (cat. entry), and “El arte mexicano de la dos primeras décadas del siglo XX en la coleccíon de Andrés Blaisten,” in Arte moderno de México: Colección Andrés Blaisten, ed. James Oles and Fausto Ramírez (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 48, 13–​27; and https://​museob​ lais​ten.com/​Obra/​2992/​La-​domad​ora, accessed November 30, 2020. 61. Quoted in Zavala, Becoming Modern, 67. 62. This line of inquiry is also advanced in Tania García Lescaille, “La belleza frente al pecado: Dos ópticas de representación del cuerpo femenino (1870–​1918),” in Enjaular los cuerpos: normativas decimonónicas y feminidad en México, ed. Julia Tuñón (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2008), 446–​47. 63. As with his outré Revista Moderna illustrations, The Dominatrix’s intended viewers were male. Its diminutive size, moreover, implies that it was for private, even prurient, consumption. Zavala, Becoming Modern, 72, 86.

Further Reading Calloway, Stephen, and Caroline Corbeau-​Parsons, eds. Aubrey Beardsley. London: Tate, 2020. Exhibition catalog. Comini, Alessandra. Gustav Klimt. New York: Braziller, 1975. Cooke, Peter. Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Damigella, Anna Maria. La pittura simbolista in Italia, 1885–​1900. Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-​ de-​ Siècle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Draguet, Michel. Le Symbolisme en Belgique. Antwerp: Fonds Mercator, 2004. Facos, Michelle. Symbolist Art in Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Félicien Rops: Pornocratès dans tous ses états. Namur: Musée Félicien Rops, 2018. Exhibition catalog. Goldwater, Robert John. Symbolism. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

506   Vivien Greene Heller, Reinhold. “Concerning Symbolism and the Structure of Surface.” In “Symbolist Art and Literature.” Special issue, Art Journal 45, no. 2, (Summer 1985): 146–​53. Hirsh, Sharon L. Symbolism and Modern Urban Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Koja, Stephan, ed. Gustav Klimt: the Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art. Munich: Prestel, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Lacambre, Geneviève, ed. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, 1826–​1898. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999. Exhibition catalog. Larson, Barbara. The Dark Side of Nature: Science, Society, and the Fantastic in the Work of Odilon Redon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Mühling, Matthias, ed. Franz von Stuck: Salome. Munich: Edition Lenbachhaus, 2014. Rapetti, Rodolphe. Symbolism. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2005. Saborit, Antoni, Carlos Monsiváis, and Teresa del Conde. The Lugubrious Traveler: Julio Ruelas Mexican Modernist, 1870–​1907. Barcelona: Editorial RM Verlag, 2008. Exhibition catalog. Schorske, Carl E. Fin-​de-​Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York: Knopf, 1980. Silverman, Debora L. Art Nouveau in Fin-​de-​Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Zatlin, Linda Gertner. Aubrey Beardsley: A Catalogue Raisonné. 2 Vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2016.

Chapter 26

HEARI NG Bodies Resounding in Decadent Literature Fraser Riddell

“My nerves needed music that would bite,” recollects James Gibbons Huneker’s fictional composer Robert Chardon in “The Iron Virgin” (1902).1 Grown bored with “innocent music” that will no longer “intoxicate,” he laments that, like an “absinthe-​ drinker. . . wretched without [a]‌daily draught,” his enervated soul has been “poisoned” by the “color of the evil” that he has “sucked from all this music.” This Parisian decadent’s recently completed opera allegorizes music’s relationship with the body by aligning it with a medieval torture chamber, its “interior studded with horrid spikes that cruelly stabbed the wretches consigned to [its] diabolical embraces.”2 Such grotesque excesses—​typical of Huneker’s writing—​make his work a rich resource for sounding out the viscerally embodied nature of musical experience in literary decadence: its uncanny affective agency, its disruptive material presence, its destabilizing impact on categories of gender and sexuality, and the challenges it poses to boundaries between self and world. James Gibbons Huneker (1857–​1921) was one of the most prominent critics of the arts in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He published numerous influential studies of avant-​garde literature, theater, visual art, and music, with eclectic tastes ranging from Henri Matisse to Arnold Schoenberg, Frank Wedekind to Edith Wharton.3 His fascination with European decadence originated in his years in Paris in the late 1870s, to which he traveled with hopes of studying piano at the Paris Conservatoire. Although he abandoned his aspirations of a career as a professional musician on his return to the United States, he later developed his reputation as a prominent journalist and critic, most notably at the New York Sun.4 The wide generic range of Huneker’s writings about music, musicians, and musical subcultures in the United States and Europe at the fin de siècle—​biographies, magazine reviews, character sketches, critical essays, a bildungsroman—​not only demonstrates his versatility, but also allows for a consideration of the diversity of literary forms through which musical decadence took shape. While the discussion that follows primarily sounds out modes of

508   Fraser Riddell musical embodiment in Huneker’s self-​consciously decadent short stories—​collected in Melomaniacs (1902) and Visionaries (1905)—​it also turns to other forms, such as incidental character sketches of performers and technical treatises on pianistic technique. Huneker’s texts range in tone from austerely opinionated to campily satirical. They demonstrate the curious, even bizarre, ways in which literary decadence aligns musical experience with nervous illness and madness, how it dwells on the materiality of sound as it is sensed through the body, and how it frames musical talent as fundamentally shaped by the gender, sexuality, and race of performers and listeners. A closing section considers the decadent musical cultures that Huneker overlooks, and takes soundings about the decadent communities that might be formed through those affective responses to music that Huneker would likely disavow. Huneker’s Melomaniacs includes twenty-​four short stories, most of which had been previously published over a period of ten years in the Musical Courier. Visionaries consists of twenty stories, published in a range of newspapers and magazines between 1901 and 1905. Although the product of an American literary marketplace, his stories proceed with the cultural curiosity of a decadent flâneur: as a contemporary reviewer noted, their “tone and atmosphere” is “nothing if not cosmopolitan.”5 They take place across Europe and America, often in familiar cosmopolitan locales such as Parisian salons and Alpine holiday resorts. Their narrative form and style aim to find an English equivalent of French decadent short fiction: Huneker dedicated Melomaniacs to the French symbolist Remy de Gourmont, and his stories also show obvious stylistic debts to the contes cruels of Octave Mirbeau and the darkly ironic stories of Anatole France. Huneker himself observed that his stories “are not Anglo-​Saxon or American fiction at all”—​instead categorizing them as “what the Germans call ‘Kulturnovellen.’ ”6 The stories circulated widely in translation across Europe—​versions exist in French, German, Russian, and (in a pirated edition) Czech—​and (if Huneker is to be believed) were admired by such prominent figures in literary decadence as J.-K. Huysmans and Maurice Maeterlinck.7 For Huneker, decadent form in music is best understood in the light of Havelock Ellis’s well-​known pronouncement of “the whole. . . subordinated to the parts.”8 Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, for example, “build up their pictures by a multitude of infinitesimal touches.”9 The way these composers “decompose their themes” marks out their music as “the highest art of the decadence” (RS, 40). At the same time, decadent form is seen—​again following Ellis—​as a “further specialisation. . . of a classic style.”10 The decadence of Frederic Chopin’s music, for Huneker, inheres in its resistance to “the romantic, poetic, patriotic, sultry, sensuous, morbid”; Chopin is a “formalist,” whose music is defined by “clarity, concision, purity, structural balance.”11 Yet whereas Huneker gestures here toward an occasionally austere decadent tradition in which absolute music is emblematic of aesthetic autonomy—​Walter Pater’s “condition of music” toward which all art “aspires” (italics in original)—​elsewhere in his writing it is music’s alignment with emotionalism, insanity, perversity, and sensory intensity that predominates.12 In this respect, the decadence of music is less a question of form or style and more about the relationship between music and the body.

HEARING   509

Unsound Minds: Music and Madness Huneker’s stories present musical genius as practically inseparable from psychological abnormality—​his musicians, composers, and music critics are variously alcoholics, bigamists, megalomaniacs, and criminals; many are driven mad because of failed or frustrated ambition or are revealed to be deluded artistic frauds. His “melomania” is a variation on the theme of “monomania,” a term used from the mid-​nineteenth century onward to designate a range of irrational and harmful obsessions, typically with a fixation on one particular subject.13 Music has a range of insidious destructive powers in these stories, which range from hypnotizing the masses (“The Piper of Dreams”), to prompting paranoid hallucinations (“The Disenchanted Symphony”), to driving musicians toward intense self-​hatred (“An Involuntary Insurgent”). In “The Enchanted Yodler,” a fat and pompous music critic wastes away to a mere “skeleton,” having become obsessively transfixed by the sound of yodeling, a style of music he previously derided.14 For contemporary reviewers, such psychological extremes were the most arresting feature of Huneker’s stories. “He must have picked them up at a lunatic asylum,” speculated one, while another observed that “these visionaries are near the borderland of sanity.”15 Strikingly, Huneker was later to boast to H. L. Mencken that the stories had been “called valuable documents for alienists.”16 Huneker’s insistent association of music with the solipsistic, perverse, abnormal, amoral, and even satanic might be understood as a strategic—​and willfully extreme—​riposte to widely prevalent discourses of nineteenth-​century liberalism. These consistently aligned music (particularly Western art music) with universal humanist values such as rationalism, individual autonomy, sympathy, social progress, and moral and cultural self-​development.17 At the same time, the apparent “value” of Huneker’s stories to “alienists”—​what we would now understand as psychiatrists—​draws attention to the fact that these texts also purposefully respond to scientific and medical discourses that circulated widely in the period relating to music, illness, and the body. As James Kennaway’s work has demonstrated, late-​Romantic music was understood to prompt emotional overstimulation, contributing to fatigue disorders such as neurasthenia, associated with what Max Nordau in Entartung (1892–​1893, translated into English as Degeneration, 1895) called “an effort of the nervous system and a wearing of tissue.”18 Musical rhythm, which was understood to have a direct material impact on the nerves, was seen as contributing to such fatigue—​typically by slowing down or disrupting the organic life-​force of the healthy body. Grant Allen’s influential treatise Physiological Aesthetics (1877) argued that “disappointed” rhythm meant that “gathered energy has to dissipate itself by other channels, which involves a certain amount of conflict and waste,” leading to exhaustion.19 The wearing impact of sound on the nerves is presented by Huneker as the direct cause of mental breakdown. In “The Lord’s Prayer in B,” for instance, a musician is tortured to death by the sustained ringing of one note. The story was based on Huneker’s own experience of a “neuralgic attack” in 1896, when he heard

510   Fraser Riddell “one tone, B. (middle of piano).”20 Such stories utilize the resources of decadent narrative to evoke the nervous exhaustion of this rhythm lassitude—​they refuse the forward momentum of plot in favor of static impressionistic description, the literary equivalent of the hypnotic music in “The Piper of Dreams” that is “all color, no rhythm, no themes.”21

Sound Barriers: Music, Materiality, and the Senses Huneker’s pleasure in sounding the alarm of musicians’ nervous bodies can also be traced in his interest in the sensory experience of music, where—​once again—​he represents embodied experience at its most extreme and eccentric. In his focus on the materiality of music, Huneker breaks down barriers: between different sensory channels, in a synesthetic enfolding of sound, touch, and smell, and between bodies and objects in texts where musical instruments function as prostheses that extend the boundaries of the self. At the same time, his texts enforce new divisions of their own invention: between the normal and abnormal, as some musicians are afforded preternatural sensory capabilities, and between the nostalgic “ideal” of lost sensory practices and the degraded “real” of their current moment. Huneker’s most striking treatment of musical synesthesia is found in “The Disenchanted Symphony,” in which his composer-​conductor figure Pobloff writes an orchestral tone poem named “The Fourth Dimension.”22 While Huneker cites Strauss’s Don Quixote as Pobloff ’s apparent model in the story, the intersensory aspirations of the composer, as Jed Rasula has observed, seem closer to those of Scriabin.23 Pobloff insists that while one might very well “see pictures, poems, sculpture, and architecture” while listening to music, the truly perceptive musical listener “must hear, see, feel, smell [and] taste, to apprehend it rightfully: and all at the same time!” (DS, 327). This insistence on sensory simultaneity arises from a willfully eccentric application of materialist philosophies that ground all experience in the body’s nervous stimulation: If Man is a being afloat in an ocean of vibrations, as Maurice de Fleury wrote, then any or all vibrations are possible. Why not a synthesis? Why not a transposition of the neurons—​according to Ramon y Cajal being little erectile bodies in the cells of the cortex, stirred to reflex motor impulse when a message is sent to them from the sensory nerves? (DS, 329–​30)

The story comes to a head when Pobloff is “delirious[ly]” rehearsing his new composition, only to invoke “a scorching whiff of sulphur and violets, a thin spiral scream” (DS, 333). He finds himself on his knees, with his orchestra vanished into the fourth dimension. Breaking the barriers of sound into the other senses, Huneker ultimately

HEARING   511 suggests, leads one toward madness or worse. The ability of such synesthetic experience to place oneself outside of space and time is a theme that Huneker returns to in “The Eighth Deadly Sin.” Here, Mrs. Whistler, a perfumer, boasts to the skeptical Mr. Baldur of her ability to “evoke an odour symphony” equivalent to the music of Chopin and Strauss (“two composers who have expressed perfume in tone”).24 The core of the narrative is a passage of extravagant sensory description—​an extended evocation of Baldur’s associations between scents, flowers, and the music of specific composers. A “morbid nocturne of Chopin,” for example, is evoked by the “mingling of tuberoses, narcissus, attar of roses, and ambergris” (ED, 38). This perfumed rêverie eventually transforms, to Baldur’s horror, into a vision of Hell—​only when he awakes does he realize that the entire episode was a dream provoked by the scent of an iris. The story’s sensory excesses seem to present a parody, as much as an endorsement, of the decadent fascination with what Baudelaire calls “correspondances.”25 Yet at the same time, with this catalog of musical scents, Huneker clearly participates with enjoyment in a decadent literary network that—​as Catherine Maxell has demonstrated—​was carefully attentive to the delicate pleasures of the olfactory.26 Tactile sensory perception is another of Huneker’s fascinations, ranging from the training of pianistic finger technique to the contact of the musician’s body with his instrument. The hands, in their gestures and textures, are “the true index of the soul.”27 Like many decadent writers, Huneker is fascinated with looking back to an imagined lost “aristocratic” past and resurrecting hyper-​refined styles associated with the ancien régime that had seemingly been lost in the face of the rise of bourgeois mass culture. In the essays “A Liszt Étude” (1899) and “The Royal Road to Parnassus” (1899), this musical nostalgia is afforded an explicitly sensory dimension: Huneker contrasts the “realistic” touch that has come to dominate contemporary pianism with the “idealist” touch of an earlier period of “old, well-​bred grace, elegance and aristocratic repose.”28 In doing so, he transposes from literature to music the terms of a central debate in late nineteenth-​century literary aesthetics, particularly in France, between “Realism” or “Naturalism,” epitomized by Émile Zola, and “Idealism” or “Spiritualism,” associated with Huysmans and other reactionaries.29 Huneker’s writing on pianism demonstrates how this opposition comes to structure decadent understandings of particular embodied practices. At its simplest, the “idealist” touch—​associated with the music of Bach, Clementi, and Mozart—​is defined by “a tone production where. . . the finger-​ tips [are] considered the end-​all, the be-​all of technique,” while the “realist” touch is marked by “muscle twisting”30 pianism in which “the hand, forearm and upper arm are. . . important factors in tone production” (LE, 227). For Huneker, the chief responsibility for this “tocsin of realism” (LE, 224) lies with Franz Liszt, the physicality of whose playing was “forced to the utmost” by the new keyboard technologies that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century (what Huneker calls the “orchestral development of the piano”) (LE, 227). Huneker shares with other decadent writers, such as Vernon Lee, a fascination with the (im)possibility of recovering the bodily trace of lost forms of musical performance.

512   Fraser Riddell While Lee is haunted by the uncanny timbre of the castrato singing voice in stories such as “An Eighteenth-​Century Singer: An Imaginary Portrait” (1891), 31 Huneker searches for imaginative strategies to “get a glimpse of the technic that delighted our fathers” (RR, 261). In a similar manner to Lee’s fascination with dusty archives of forgotten manuscript scores in Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880),32 Huneker assembles an extensive collection of eighteenth-​century and early nineteenth-​century technical studies and treatises on keyboard technique, attempting to train himself in the “lightness and suppleness of wrist” of the “idealist” school by playing the exercises of Domenico Scarlatti (RR, 264). He contrasts such studies with the virtuoso physical demands of later études, such as those of Adolf von Henselt, whose “curious and repulsive postures” are presented in the terminology of nineteenth-​century degeneration theory as “perversions. . . worthy of the consideration of a musical Lombroso” (RR, 282–​83). Huneker is also preoccupied with performers who have retained something of this earlier pianistic tradition. The pianist Vladimir de Pachmann—​also a favorite of the decadent poet and essayist Arthur Symons—​is presented by Huneker as “a solitary survivor of a once powerful school” (LE, 224), the delicacy of his “idealist” playing of Chopin compared to “the polished perfection of an intricately carved ivory ornament.”33 Huneker invokes de Pachmann’s technique with a characteristically decadent trans-​medial and trans-​sensory metaphor; he hears in this music the “tender” touch of a finger on an ivory piano key, while comparing it to the perfectly wrought finish of an ornate material object. In presenting de Pachmann as a “solitary survivor,” Huneker aligns him with other figures prominent in decadent literature: attenuated remnants of an earlier age like the “Gods in Exile” that populate the works of Walter Pater, or those whose temporal displacement is marked in bodily gestures that are willfully anachronistic, such as the Wildean dandy, strolling with the poise of an eighteenth-​century libertine.34 Huneker’s writing is notable for the descriptive precision with which it evokes the training of this pianistic touch, whether “realist” or “idealist”—​“The Royal Road to Parnassus” exactingly prescribes the exercises that an aspiring pianist should follow to develop, say, “ten perfectly autonomous fingers” (RR, 273) or “powers of stretching that [would] tax most hands to their utmost” (RR, 268). In the short story “The Cursory Light,” the tactile training of the concert pianist is presented as being the perfect preparation for pursuing a double life as a burglar. Yet at the same time, Huneker returns repeatedly in his works to a central preoccupation in decadent writing on music: the idea that some individuals possess abnormally heightened sensory capabilities in a manner that is biologically innate. The tension between the training of musical proficiency and such innate musical sensitivity is central to his story “The Woman Who Loved Chopin.” The protagonist of the story is Marco Davos, a young pianist whose musical precocity is presented as at least partially the product of his racialized Hungarian and Italian heritage, “with an added infusion of gypsy wildness.”35 Davos is fixated with “revolutionary theories” that he has read in which “touch and hearing are akin” (WC, 292). Lest the reader worry that these might be mere pseudoscience, Huneker directs us to the work of Pierre Bounier, who proposes in Scientific American that “audition is a hydrodynamic,

HEARING   513 not an acoustic, phenomenon.”36 Davos extends this insight when he asserts that “so subtly could the art of touch be cultivated. . . that the blind could feel colour on the canvas of the painter” (WC, 292). Seeking to develop his own tactile sensitivity to an ever-​greater proficiency, Davos obtains a special machine to train his touch (a “sensitive manometer”) and “with a dangerous joy. . . presse[s]‌the key of his instrument, endeavoring to achieve more delicate shadings” (WC, 292–​93). Davos’s ultimate hope is that someone might manufacture a new keyboard instrument that would produce its sound through more immediate physical contact with the pianist’s hand: [E]‌verything had been improved but the keyboard—​that alone was as coldly unresponsive and inelastic as a half-​century ago. He had fugitive dreams of wires that would vibrate like a violin. The sounding-​board of a pianoforte is too far from the pianist, while the violinist presses his strings as one kisses the beloved. . . . A new pianoforte, with passionately coloured overtones, that could sob like a violoncello, sing like a violin, and resound with the brazen clangours of the orchestra. (WC, 293)

This eroticization of the tactile relationship between the violinist and his instrument participates in an established tradition in late nineteenth-​century fiction, from Richard Marsh’s “The Violin” (1891) to J. Meade Falkner’s The Lost Stradivarius (1895), in which the violin is represented as a sort of bodily prosthesis for the affective transmission of sexual desire.37 Davos’s “fugitive dreams” of the synesthetic modification of sensory perception through eccentric technological means are familiar from other decadent texts, such as Des Esseintes’s musico-​gustatory “mouth organ” in Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884).38 This interest in the modification of sensory perception exists in tension with the text’s fascination with inherited and innate musical talent. In common with other stories by Huneker, such as “Avatar,” “A Son of Liszt,” and “A Chopin of the Gutter,” “The Woman Who Loved Chopin” suggests that true musical genius is the product of heredity. Davos falls obsessively in love with the mysterious Constantia Gladowska, a young girl whose apparent pianistic prowess, it is hinted, may arise from the fact that she is the illegitimate granddaughter of Chopin. The story’s final revelation, though, is that Gladowska is a musical fraud and that it is her elderly Japanese maid, Cilli, whose playing Davos has in fact overheard. Cilli’s “spiritualized” and “crystalline” pianistic touch, with its “gossamer delicacy” (WC, 297), is explicitly presented as a function of biologically innate racial identity: “The Japanese have the finest sense of touch in the world” (WC, 305), Cilli informs Davos, mocking his evident sense of European superiority. The proof of this inheres not only in Cilli’s technique, but also in the anatomical shape of her hands. Demanding to see her fingers, Davos “groan[s]‌enviously” at the sight of these “miracles of sculpture, miracles of colour and delicacy, the slender tips well-​nigh prehensile in their cunning power” (WC, 306). These superior sensory capabilities, Davos fears, might render his own musicianship obsolete: “when the Japanese choose to play the piano,” he concludes, “we Europeans must shut up shop” (WC, 307).

514   Fraser Riddell The racism of Huneker’s depiction of Cilli—​she is variously described as “ape-​like,” “malicious,” “cunning,” and “diabolical” (WC, 306, 308)—​reflects prevalent stereotypes attaching to East Asian culture: the challenge posed to white cultural supremacy by the so-​called “yellow peril.”39 The story was first published in December 1905 in the immediate aftermath of the Russo-​Japanese War, when paranoia in the United States about the military prowess of Imperial Japan in the Pacific was at its height. Huneker’s focus on the specific sensory aspect of this perceived threat likely draws on the works of another influential decadent writer, Lafcadio Hearn, whose writings on Meiji Japan—​widely read across Europe and the United States at the fin de siècle—​detail the “almost incomparable delicacy of touch developed in special directions” in “Japanese handicraft.”40 Huneker’s characterization of the preternatural sensory proficiency of Japanese pianists draws attention to ways in which bodily capacities are racialized in the decadent imagination. His works present the sensory proficiency of the musician as shaped through encounters between bodies and objects—​whether the concert grand piano or more outlandish technologies—​while also being contingent on innate biological traits (familial, national, and racial).

Sounding Out: Music, Gender, and the Queer Body Similar discourses about the musical sensitivities and sensibilities of material bodies attach to women and queer subjects in the period. In late nineteenth-​century sexology, the pathologized body of the homosexual subject was widely held to be particularly sensitive to the emotional force of music (an emotionalism typically associated with late-​Romantic music, especially that of Wagner).41 Writers such as Havelock Ellis, for example, suggested that the artistic talent of the male musician arises from his “nervousness”—​that is, the heightened sensitivity of his nerves to stimulation by the senses—​and it is this that makes him likewise more constitutionally prone to homosexuality.42 The emotional sensitivity of the homosexual body also had implications for the styles of music that queer subjects were held to prefer. The German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld proposed that typical homosexual listeners “experience music only as an aspect of mood, a purely sensory impression.” As such, they are uninterested in “older, classical music,” which requires “intellectual engagement” to appreciate the abstract aesthetic emotions that arise from an appreciation of musical form. In this respect, they naturally prefer the “more colourful or sensual music” of nineteenth-​century musical Romanticism, with its “piling up of ecstasies.”43 Huneker himself was keenly aware of the association between music and homosexuality in the period. He was close friends with fellow music critic and writer Edward Prime Stevenson, whose account of queer subcultures in the period, The Intersexes (1908), contains extensive discussion of the relationship between music and sexuality.44

HEARING   515 Huneker was also fascinated by the rumors that circulated about the nature of Richard Wagner’s relationship with his young patron, Ludwig II of Bavaria.45 It is perhaps unsurprising, in this respect, that one of his queerest stories relates to the cult of Wagnerism. “Siegfried’s Death” recounts the story of Siegfried Brazier, “the first great American Wagner singer,” who commits suicide after it is revealed that he is a bigamist.46 Huneker transposes the adultery plot of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to the contemporary moment, so that this Wagnerian Heldentenor becomes a caricatured version of Wagner’s boisterous child of nature, Siegfried: “a man who had no brains, no heart; a reckless, handsome man, who was simply a voice” (SD, 305). While the story’s initial focus is the jealousy and mourning of Brazier’s two wives, Selene and Belle, Huneker’s narrator teasingly hints that the tenor’s most significant emotional relationship was with Selene’s brother Val. The story is clearly designed to appeal to a coterie readership that is aware of the gossip around Wagner(ism) and homosexuality in the period. Selene, it emerges, only married Brazier—​“a man [she] only met twice”—​because of her brother’s “nonsensical Wagner worship” (SD, 301). Val is presented by the narrator in terms that make him the object of a homoerotic gaze, one with a particular preference for idealized Nordic masculinity: “he was tall, very blond and his eyes were hopelessly blue” (SD, 296). Val, in this respect, is cast as the equivalent of Gunther in Götterdämmerung, asking us to rethink the queer possibilities of the relationship between Siegfried and Gunther in Wagner’s opera—​a sort of queer fan fiction, perhaps.47 While Huneker’s teasing hints of queerness make the story playful in tone, it also asks us to take seriously the manner in which intense relationships between men cannot be mourned. At Brazier’s funeral, Val is set apart from the other mourners, “a solitary figure. . . face buried in hands” (SD, 305), seemingly unable to openly express his grief for the man he loved. Huneker contrasts the theatrical displays of apparently insincere grief from the women who attend Brazier’s funeral—​“look at us and follow our example in grieving,” as they “laughed almost hysterically” (SD, 301)—​with Val’s quiet desolation: “his eyes were hollow,” “his voice broke” (SD, 302). The story can be placed in a broader tradition of decadent short stories in which Wagnerian mythic plots are transposed onto contemporary domestic and familial settings in order to unsettle bourgeois norms with the emergence of nascent perverse erotic desires. In Thomas Mann’s “Wälsungenblut” (“The Blood of the Walsungs,” 1905), for example, the brother-​sister incest of Wagner’s Die Walküre is restaged in a family home in fin-​de-​siècle Munich.48 Here, the incestuous relationship of Sieglinde and Siegmund Aarenhold is aligned with their narcissistic commodity fetishism, presented by Mann in terms that mark them out as decadent aesthetes. While “Siegfried’s Death” gestures toward the queer gossip that attached to certain musical subcommunities, other stories by Huneker are more immediately concerned with music’s power as an insidious agent that might lead a listener toward forbidden queer desire. As in a number of decadent texts, the affective force of the material voice is afforded a particularly queer disruptive potential—​notably in Huneker’s “The Hall of the Missing Footsteps.” The story is a satire on the self-​importance of Pobloff—​a recurrent figure in a number of his stories—​who prides himself on the fact that “his ear,

516   Fraser Riddell as sensitive as the eye of a Claude Monet, note[s]‌every infinitesimal variation in tone-​ colour.” 49 Pobloff travels to “Asia Minor” at the request of a “morbid,” “melancholy,” and “ailing” young prince, whose characteristically decadent constitution is aligned with his love of music (MF, 249–​50). On his train journey to this exotic court, Pobloff is met by a “slim female, draped from head to foot in virginal white” (MF, 252), whose “contralto voice of. . . indefinable timbre” “fill[s] him with ecstasy” (MF, 254). Huneker emphasizes the unsettling, embodied intensity of Pobloff ’s precognitive response to the voice’s materiality: “The girlish voice affected him strangely. It pierced his soul like a poniard. It made his spine chilly” (MF, 254). Seduced by this “dangerous contralto” (MF, 260), Pobloff agrees to give a performance of Chopin’s Ballade No. 2 at court, his rendition of which leads him into a synesthetic erotic reverie that precipitates a complete mental and physical collapse. At the story’s conclusion, it is revealed that Pobloff has, in fact, been misled by the “prankish sport” of the young prince’s “masquerades and mystifications” (MF, 265)—​the prince has not only disguised himself as a young woman, but also drugged the composer with hashish. Pobloff ’s sensitivity to sound was not sufficient, Huneker suggests, for him to recognize that the voice he was beguiled by belonged to a young man and not a woman. Indeed, the text participates in a decadent literary tradition that explores the threat of such vocal gender-​indeterminacy and its ability to provoke moments of disorientating (and unwelcome) queer object choice—​whether the spectral castrato voice of Vernon Lee’s “A Wicked Voice” (1890) or “the monstrous development of a phenomenal larynx” in George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894).50 Here, the material grain of the prince’s voice has an uncanny and destabilizing emotional effect, capable of provoking in Pobloff unconscious desires that he would rather disavow. Paranoia about the relationship between music, emotionalism, and homosexuality is also manifest in the pervasive fear articulated in Huneker’s works about the effeminacy of Western art music. This is most pronounced in “A Masque of Music”—​ a combination of a dream vision and a theatrical scenario “after the manner of John Dryden,” which presents a “grandiose vision [of]. . . the legend of sound from its unorganized beginnings to the tomorrow of the ultimate.”51 For Huneker, the teleological evolution of music toward its pinnacle in Viennese classicism is forever at risk of being compromised by the threat posed by the feminine. Late-​Romantic music, as he writes elsewhere, represents “the return of the invertebrate. . . the song of a humanity absorbed in the slime of a dying planet.”52 The degeneration of conventional musical harmony and form, toward a point where “nothing is true” and “all is permitted” is coextensive with music’s embrace of the “hysterical” (MM, 174, 173). Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia, for example, represents “detonations” of an earlier “primeval world,” yet this music is nevertheless tainted by “something disquieting and feminine” (MM, 170). Such effeminacy is figured through composers’ bodily gestures and movements, evidently reflective of their respective musical styles: the “mincing” of Haydn (a “courtly old woman”) and Mozart (“feminized, graceful”); the “pranc[ing]” of Weber “on his gayly caparisoned arpeggios” (MM, 170); the “simpering on tip toe” of Gounod (MM, 172). Only two composers categorically escape allegations of contributing to this

HEARING   517 “degradation and effeminization” (MM, 171): “A man, the first since Handel!,” Huneker’s narrator exclaims as Beethoven approaches with “his Jovian tread” (MM, 170). Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is Wagner’s music that Huneker castigates most forcefully. Music is transformed by Wagner into “a parasite of the emotions” that “evirates, effeminates, disintegrates” its “sensuality” played out on listeners’ nervous bodies (MM, 172). The misogyny of Huneker’s alignment of emotionalism and femininity is overt. In Wagner’s “new chromatic blaze” he suggests, “art [has] become as the sigh of a woman” (MM, 171). In presenting the “shriller accent” of Wagner’s music as “a sun that has lost its sex, a sun that is stricken with moon-​sickness” (MM, 171), Huneker evokes tropes of disgust that attach to woman’s voices and bodies. The “moon-​sickness” of this music is a mark of its insanity, but its “lost. . . sex” (MM, 171) also gestures toward a decadent literary tradition—​evident, for example, in Oscar Wilde’s Salome—​in which such lunacy is associated with menstruation.53 Huneker’s intense concern with music becoming effeminate—​often coextensive with a strain of misogyny prevalent in literary decadence—​is matched by a similar fascination with the apparently masculine qualities of a new generation of women musicians. This is most notable in Huneker’s writing on music hall and cabaret. The Irish American burlesque singer Maggie Cline, famous in her day for her hearty rendition of songs such as “Throw Him Down, McCloskey” and “Down Went McGinty,” provides a “new shudder” and a “new sensation” to those decadent aesthetes who have grown “weary. . . glutted with sensation, gorged with culture.”54 While Algernon Swinburne has “grown grey in phallic service” and Sarah Bernhardt has descended to “the brink of morbid hysteria,” Cline offers in her performances “a new dawn—​be it ever so brutal” (95). Unlike Huneker’s “mincing” procession of classical composers, Cline represents the “exponent of muscularity in song” (95). She is defined by her “tall, strapping, handsome” body and her “barbaric gestures”; the veritable reincarnation of a “Roman gladiator” she “strides to the footlights with the easy assurance of one who has veni-​ed, vidi-​ed and vici-​ed” (98). “Her physique” Huneker asserts, “is informed with [a]‌quivering love of slaughter.” He is fascinated by her “virile vocal technic” and the “subjugation of all femininity” in her “portrayal of lowly life” (95). The Canadian comedienne and singer May Irwin is similarly extolled as “some female Caesar.”55 Here, Huneker is simultaneously enraptured and repulsed by what he calls her “fatly magnetic” body, which he compares to “a horseless carriage in bulk” (110). She is nevertheless an artist who “carries enough magnetism about her portly person to furnish power for a trolley system” (112). Huneker’s tongue-​in-​cheek mechanical and scientific metaphors align Irwin’s masculine female body—​“radiant with promise of the future” (111)—​with an urban modernity about which he is clearly ambivalent. Her musical performances, characterized in the language of electricity, clearly satisfy a demand for a “new sensation” with appeals directly to the nerves. As Huneker himself grows weary of the worn-​out decadents of the 1890s, he mischievously wonders aloud—​with a “shudder” somewhere between pleasure and disgust—​whether “the future” might reside in the energetic bodies of these lower-​class women and their popular musical forms.

518   Fraser Riddell

Sound Affects: Music, Race, Communities Huneker’s brand of decadence is one in which the bodily materiality of music typically renders it psychologically destructive and socially corrosive. Yet there is an alternative tradition of musical decadence in which the affective force of sound functions to unfold new possibilities of community and relationality.56 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the richest archive for such experiences lies in writing about those styles of music of which Huneker was most dismissive: ragtime, jazz, blues, and African American spirituals. Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance—​such as Wallace Thurman, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Langston Hughes—​consciously positioned themselves in the tradition of European decadence so as to resist the imperatives of bourgeois respectability that dominated discourses of “racial uplift” in the New Negro movement.57 As theorists such as Kandice Chuh have observed, Harlem Renaissance writers embraced the “primacy of sound” as a “strategy of bringing to bear the corporeal substrate, the visceral body that is vanished by the abstractions of modernity.” In marshaling the resources of decadence—​ and embracing its fascination with the materiality of music—​such writers reoriented the “hierarchization of bourgeois liberalism’s representational politics” in a manner that allows for the emergence of ontologies that resist racial marginalization.58 Wallace Thurman’s work stands as a representative example. His insistent embrace of abnormal, perverse, and primitive forms of embodiment is evident in his intensely visceral descriptions of musical performance in his novels The Blacker the Berry (1929) and Infants of the Spring (1932). The former explores the colorism faced by the shy, dark-​ skinned Emma Lou Brown as she attempts to navigate the prejudice of Harlem in the 1920s. In a text that is keenly aware of how shame comes to be felt deeply in the flesh, music and movement offer a resource for inhabiting the body in a more vital, desiring way. The demure Emma Lou listens to the “husky and strident” voices of jazz singers in a cabaret club as “they. . . seem to impregnate the syncopated melody with physical content.” As the performance progresses, she feels “something in her. . . trying to give way. Her insides were stirred, and tingled.”59 Later in the text, Thurman evokes the “animal ecstasy” of a Harlem rent party, provoked by a “maniac” pianist who “punishes the piano” with brutal enthusiasm. For Emma Lou, the “music augmented by the general atmosphere of the room. . . created another person in her stead”: she begins to feel her boundaries dissolving as she becomes “very fluid, very elastic. . . all the while giving in more and more to the music and to the physical madness of the moment.”60 Thurman’s decadence is marked not only in his preoccupation with moments of joyful self-​surrender, but also in the insistent rhythmic force of his prose. Here, the repeated “m” and “mo” sounds fall with densely patterned stresses, syncopated between duple and triple meter, sweeping the reader up in the “elastic” intensity of the music the passage describes. Indeed, contemporary music critics observed that “the laws that govern jazz rule in the rhythms of great original prose”: “Imagine Walter Pater [and] Swinburne,”

HEARING   519 wrote Walter Kingsley, “swaying to the same pulses that rule the moonlit music on the banks of African rivers.”61 This dancing of text on the page—​stirring an echo of apparently primitive aesthetic emotion—​represents another decadent experiment with the affective force of sound. While the writer and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois rejected the deliberately subversive and anti-​didactic “art for art’s sake” philosophy of younger Harlem Renaissance writers, he similarly drew upon decadent formal strategies to enfold the affective intensity of embodied musical experience in the materiality of his printed texts. Du Bois’s collection of essays and fiction The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, might be placed alongside George Egerton’s collection of decadent short stories, Discords (1894): both include examples of musical notation that punctuate distinct sections of their texts. Du Bois introduces each chapter with a melody from an African American spiritual (Figure 26.1), while Egerton’s story “A Psychological Moment at Three Periods” opens with a single jarring discord (Figure 26.2):62

Figure 26.1  “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Figure 26.2  An opening discord, from George Egerton’s “A Psychological Moment at Three Periods” (1894).

Both authors seek to incorporate musical sound into the printed text as an affective framing for what follows—​a strategy for prompting a distinct emotional atmosphere in which the reader engages with the text. As Du Bois makes clear in “The Sorrow Songs”—​the essay that closes his collection—​the spirituals represent an archive of bad feelings, through which the collective memory of slavery is sustained from one generation to another. At the same time, the physical materiality of these songs allows an embodied enactment of a “truer world”: “Through all the sorrow. . . there breathes a hope—​a faith in the ultimate justice of things.”63 In similar terms, as Maura Dunst has suggested, the sound of Egerton’s notated discord prefigures the “emotional, physical

520   Fraser Riddell and. . . sexual trauma” in the narrative that follows.64 Egerton’s notation also places an additional discomfiting demand on the body of any reader who might attempt to realize this music on a keyboard: the chord on the printed page, which requires the right hand to span a major 10th from a B-​flat to the D an octave above, is practically unplayable (save for those with the largest of hands). Du Bois’s interpolation of musical notation in The Souls of Black Folk is coextensive with decadent writers’ interest in synesthetic and intermedial possibilities—​printed notation, these works suggest, might color the affective experience of reading through entangling it with musical emotion. Decadent literatures—​critical as they are of trite narratives of progress, success, or happiness—​are well placed to help us think about the shared experiences of those counter-​publics molded by their refusal of the promise of normative futures. A closing example might gesture toward the ways in which the affective force of sound can form such communities—​and enable striking moments of cross-​identification between and across marginalized groups. In Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), a group of lesbians in exile in Paris assemble to listen to a rendition by an African American singer of the spiritual “Deep River”: [A]‌ll the hope of the utterly hopeless of the world, who must live by their ultimate salvation, all the terrible, aching, homesick hope that is born of the infinite pain of the spirit, seemed to break from this man and shake those who listened, so that they sat with bent heads and clasped hands—​they who were also among the hopeless.65

In a novel that is notorious for dwelling insistently on the visceral shame of pathologized lesbian identity, Hall presents a moment of communal listening in which shared negative affect “break[s]‌” from one body to another. The “desperate hope of the hopeless” rises through this music, as it “shake[s]” the nerves of those who hear it, “motionless, scarcely breathing.” The singer, Hall’s narrator tentatively asserts, stands “pure, unashamed, triumphant.”66 Such an idealistic claim about the transformative capabilities of music would no doubt, for Huneker, sound a false note—​yet it reminds us of the manifold surprising ways in which bodies take shape through music in decadent literatures, from nervous exhaustion to perverse pleasures, introverted solipsism to new affective communities.

Notes 1. James Huneker, “The Iron Virgin,” in Melomaniacs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 275. 2. Huneker, “The Iron Virgin,” 272. 3. For Huneker’s relationship with literary decadence more broadly, see David Weir, Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–​1926 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008). 4. See Arnold T. Schwab, James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963). 5. Review of Visionaries, by James Huneker, The Speaker, January 20, 1906, 398.

HEARING   521 6. James Huneker, Letter to H. L. Mencken (April 11, 1916), in The Letters of James Gibbons Huneker (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 212. For more on Huneker’s literary influences, see Annette T. Rottenberg, “Aesthete in America: The Short Stories of James Gibbons Huneker,” Studies in Short Fiction 2, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 358–​66. 7. Huneker, Letter to Jules Bois (February 16, 1919), in Letters, 273. 8. Havelock Ellis, Affirmations, 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 175. 9. James Huneker, “Richard Strauss,” in Overtones: A Book of Temperaments (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 40. Further references cited parenthetically as RS. 10. Ellis, Affirmations, 175. 11. James Huneker, “The Classic Chopin,” in Unicorns (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 230. 12. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 86. 13. See Marina van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 14. James Huneker, “The Enchanted Yodler,” in Visionaries (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 166, 167. 15. Review of Melomaniacs, by James Huneker, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 93 (March 22, 1902): 361–​62; Review of Visionaries, by James Huneker, The Academy 70 (February 3, 1906): 116. 16. Huneker, Letter to H. L. Mencken (April 11, 1916), in Letters, 213. 17. See Sarah Collins, ed., Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 18. See James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012); Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 39. 19. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: H. S. King, 1877), 114. 20. Huneker, Letter to Dr. C. U. Ariens Kappers (October 8, 1913), in Letters, 162–​63. 21. Huneker, “The Piper of Dreams,” in Melomaniacs, 52. 22. Huneker, “The Disenchanted Symphony,” in Melomaniacs, 325. Further references cited parenthetically as DS. 23. Jed Rasula, “ ‘Listening to Incense’: Melomania & the Pathos of Emancipation,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 9. 24. James Huneker, “The Eighth Deadly Sin,” in Visionaries, 36, 33. Further references cited parenthetically as ED. 25. Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondances,” in The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 19. 26. Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 27. Huneker, “The Iron Virgin,” 275. 28. James Huneker, “A Liszt Étude,” in Mezzotints in Modern Music (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 256. Further references cited parenthetically as LE. 29. See, for example, Léon Bloy, “Les Représailles du Sphinx,” Le Chat Noir, June 14, 1884, in Le Chat Noir, 4 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprint, 1971), 1 (1882–​1885): 295. 30. James Huneker, “The Royal Road to Parnassus,” in Mezzotints in Modern Music, 271. Further references cited parenthetically as RR.

522   Fraser Riddell 31. Vernon Lee, “An Eighteenth-​Century Singer: An Imaginary Portrait,” Fortnightly Review 50 (December 1891): 842–​80. 32. Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (London: W. Satchell, 1880). 33. James Huneker, “The Grand Manner in Pianoforte Playing,” in Unicorns, 180. 34. For discussion of the “Gods in Exile” in literary decadence, see Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); for the figure of the dandy, see Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 35. “The Woman Who Loved Chopin,” in Visionaries, 291. Further references cited parenthetically as WC. 36. “Science Notes,” Scientific American 89, no. 3 (July 18, 1903): 43. 37. Richard Marsh, “The Violin,” Home Chimes 12 (December 1891), 347–​62; J. Meade Falkner, The Lost Stradivarius, ed. Edward Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 38. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 39–​40. 39. See Jean-​Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power, 1850–​ 1905 (London: Routledge, 2011). 40. Lafcadio Hearn, “Frogs,” in Exotics and Retrospectives (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898), 171; for Huneker on Hearn, see “The Cult of the Nuance: Lafcadio Hearn,” in Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 240–​48. 41. See also Fraser Riddell, Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). 42. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. 2, Sexual Inversion, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1915), 295. 43. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin: L. Marcus, 1914), 510–​11. Unpublished translation by Tom Smith. 44. Edward Prime Stevenson, as Xavier Mayne, The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (privately printed, 1908). 45. See Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 155–​56. 46. James Huneker, “Siegfried’s Death,” in Melomaniacs, 301. Further references cited parenthetically as SD. 47. As Dreyfus demonstrates, reading Wagner’s operas in queer terms was a well-​established practice in homosexual subcultures at the fin de siècle; see Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, 175–​217. 48. Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” in Death in Venice and Other Tales, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 253–​84. 49. James Huneker, “The Hall of the Missing Footsteps,” in Visionaries, 254. Further references cited parenthetically as MF. 50. Vernon Lee, “A Wicked Voice,” in Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), 154–​81; George du Maurier, Trilby, ed. Elaine Showalter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 166. 51. James Huneker, “A Masque of Music,” in Bedouins (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 164. Further references cited parenthetically as MM. 52. James Huneker, “The Corridor of Time,” in Melomaniacs, 231.

HEARING   523 53. See Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, Bodily Charm: Living Opera (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 54. James Huneker, “The Raconteur,” Musical Courier 25 (July 6, 1892): 8, cited in Americans in the Arts: 1890–​1920, ed. Arnold T. Schwab (New York: AMS Press, 1985), 95. Further references cited parenthetically. 55. James Huneker, “The Raconteur,” Musical Courier 31 (September 25, 1895): 19–​20, cited in Americans in the Arts: 1890–​1920, 112. Further references cited parenthetically. 56. For an account of “versions of decadent community,” see Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 57. See, for example, Granville Ganter, “Decadence, Sexuality, and the Bohemian Vision of Wallace Thurman,” MELUS 28, no. 2 (2003): 83–​104. 58. Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 67; see also Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003). 59. Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 108. 60. Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, 149. 61. Walter Kingsley, “Whence Comes Jass?: Facts from the Great Authority on the Subject,” New York Sun, August 5, 1917, 3. I am grateful to Kirsten Macleod for drawing this to my attention. 62. George Egerton, “A Psychological Moment at Three Periods,” in Keynotes and Discords (London: Virago, 1983), 1. 63. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 169, 175. 64. Maura Dunst, “The Elusive Melody: Music and Trauma in New Woman Short Stories,” in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now, ed. Emma Young and James Bailey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 15–​31. 65. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago, 1982), 366. 66. Hall, The Well of Loneliness, 387.

Further Reading Anderson, Paul Allen. Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Chuh, Kandice. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Collins, Sarah, ed. Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Desmarais, Jane, and Alice Condé, eds. Decadence and the Senses. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Downes, Stephen. Music and Decadence in European Modernism: The Case of Central and Eastern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Dreyfus, Laurence. Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Hext, Kate, and Alex Murray, eds. Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019.

524   Fraser Riddell Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. Bodily Charm: Living Opera. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Kennaway, James. Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012. Kramer, Lawrence. Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Riddell, Fraser. Music and the Queer Body in English Literature at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Sutton, Emma. Aubrey Beardsley and British Wagnerism in the 1890s. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Sutton, Emma. “Decadence and Music.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 152–​68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Weir, David. Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890–​1926. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008.

Chapter 27

SMEL L Perfume and Olfaction Catherine Maxwell

Recalling his childhood impressions of his father, Oscar Wilde, Vyvyan Holland wrote, “I remember him as a smiling giant, always exquisitely dressed, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigarette smoke and eau-​de-​ Cologne.”1 Holland also describes rifling through his father’s “wastepaper basket in search of treasure trove,” such as the “gaily coloured boxes which had once held cigarettes and had a lovely grown-​up smell,” and he remembers his father’s smoking room, “which smelled exquisitely of tobacco smoke.”2 Inspired by the examples of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Walter Pater, many later Victorian aesthetes and decadents prided themselves on their olfactory sensitivity, and Wilde’s delight in “exquisite” fragrances distinguishes him as an olfactif, a cultivated individual with a refined sense of smell. Wilde was a decadent dandy for whom perfume, as well as fine tobacco, formed an essential part of his urbane identity, as can be seen after the privations of prison, when he swiftly resumed his perfume and smoking habits. (An invoice of November 30, 1900, issued by the Parisian firm of Jules & Roger, shows that he was still purchasing eau de Cologne in the last months of his life.)3 Its evocative capacity makes smell a potent means of registering the particularity of a historical and cultural moment. Many educated, middle-​class Victorians undoubtedly enjoyed scent and smoking, but the intense appreciation of such odors celebrated by decadent writers ensures that perfume and tobacco emerge as the dominant olfactory keynotes of decadence.

Decadent Smoking Although Swinburne, who “never smoked and hated the very smell of tobacco,” was a notable exception, most male writers associated with decadence were keen smokers, with tobacco smoke directly contributing to the ambient creative aura.4 For the young Edmund Gosse, Latakia, a strong fragrant pipe tobacco, is one of the delicious odors,

526   Catherine Maxwell along with “[d]‌ried rose-​leaves, and spilt attar, and old wine,” that scent the poet’s “one room,” depicted in his sonnet “Perfume.”5 Tobacco itself might be fragranced with flavorings and spices like tonka beans, vanilla, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, or with essential oils like jasmine, rose, bergamot, lemon, and neroli, and blended with tinctures of musk, civet, or ambergris.6 As well as stimulating the senses and creativity, smoking as a shared pleasure offered male bonding and camaraderie, especially with other decadent writers. The Reverend F. W. Bussell presented Walter Pater as a rather austere figure in his 1894 memorial sermon, declaring that he “never smoked,” yet this contradicts the evidence of the young Lionel Johnson, who boasted after a weekend spent in London in 1889 that “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, walked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater, and fell in love with Pater.”7 In his last years, Pater may have given up his tobacco habit up for health reasons, for the artist Louise Jopling, who met him around 1885, mentions his “excessive cigarette-​smoking, which at one time brought on an acute attack of palsy.”8 Poor health does not seem to have deterred John Addington Symonds, who, like other male decadents, found smoking a pleasure and an inspiration. In spite of the respiratory problems responsible for his exile to the pure Swiss air of Davos, Symonds was a heavy smoker who enjoyed “nothing more than to sit in a bar-​room among peasants, carters, and grooms, smoking, with a glass of wine beside me, and a stiff work on one of the subjects I am bound to get up.”9 Like many older literary men, Symonds was “a devotee of the pipe,” which he found “conducive to good fellowship and sober thinking,” although he sometimes smoked cigarettes.10 Younger men favored cigars and cigarettes, both introduced among the British upper classes, with their use spreading “downward” during the later nineteenth century. Cigars came in during the 1820s and 1830s, while cigarettes started to make an appearance around 1870, becoming mass-​produced in the 1880s. Increasingly popular in the fin de siècle, though “deemed effeminate” by conservatives, they were associated with “mashers,” dandies, and other bohemian young men-​about-​town.11 For Wilde’s aristocratic dandy Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891), a cigarette represented exquisite, ephemeral, decadent “pleasure.”12 Arthur Symons experienced that decadent pleasure in the stimulating convivial fug of London’s public houses and music halls, and the smoky atmosphere infused his poetry. Cigarettes, along with cigars, occur as markers of decadent urban modernity in poems such as “Pastel,” “In Bohemia,” and “At the Cavour” from Silhouettes (1892, rev. 1896), and in the “Prologue” to London Nights (1895). Symons also recalls an afternoon spent with Symonds and Ernest Dowson smoking hashish in the company of ballet girls. Dowson remained unaffected, although Symonds and Symons saw “visions . . . as if our souls . . . were wafted on the wings of scented whirlwinds.”13 “The Opium-​Smoker,” an early poem from Symons’s Days and Nights (1889), also hints at the hallucinatory pleasures available to bolder fin-​de-​siècle smokers, although the speaker, it transpires, is a raddled addict, unlike Wilde’s soigné Lord Henry, whose witty remarks are accompanied by the elegant “blue wreaths of smoke” that curl up from his “heavy, opium-​tainted cigarette” (6). (According to Marcel Schwob’s journal of 1891, Wilde himself chain-​smoked “opium-​tainted Egyptian cigarettes”).14 Nonetheless, Dorian’s own later furtive forays into the seedy dens of London’s Chinatown, where “the heavy odour

SMELL   527 of opium met him” (156), suggest the darker side of this particular smoking habit, as does Kate Chopin’s short story “An Egyptian Cigarette,” written in 1897 and published in Vogue three years later. When Chopin’s female narrator samples one of the opium cigarettes given to her by a male friend, it transports her into a reverie in which she relives the suicidal despair of an Egyptian woman abandoned by her lover. Emerging from this vision, she crumbles her remaining cigarettes.15 Arguably, decadent texts allowed readers to imagine or sample the forbidden pleasures of smoking opium, with none of the attendant risk. Smoking was, of course, traditionally a male pursuit, with the smell of tobacco deemed offensive to most ladies. Smoky spaces like public houses and musical halls were thus automatically scent-​marked as male preserves. Lower-​class women, or those perceived as “fast” or less than respectable (e.g., actresses, dancers, and other performers, as well as demimondaines and prostitutes), might smoke in those spaces, too, but that merely reinforced the prejudice that these were not places for refined women. In the home, gentlemen were not supposed to smoke in mixed company, but were to retire to their designated masculine zone—​the smoking room—​to indulge with like-​minded companions. They might even don special caps and jackets to protect their clothing from odors and tobacco ash. In Chopin’s short story the narrator’s male friend endorses her emancipated status when he describes her as “a cigarette-​smoker” at a time when it was still considered daring for respectable middle-​class women to smoke. Presented with the Egyptian cigarettes, she draws attention to her deviation from the norm when she asks if she can try one in his “smoking-​den” as “[s]‌ome of the women here detest the odour of cigarettes.”16 Enjoying a cigarette (and thus implicitly its taste and smell) becomes one of the identifiable markers of the independent, self-​possessed New Woman heroine—​like Gypsy, the sexually confident heroine of George Egerton’s “A Cross Line” (1893), who, when she smokes her cigarette, “draws in the smoke contentedly.”17 Unsurprisingly then, cigarette smoking becomes a sign of the intellectually assured forward-​thinking woman writer, who thus surrounds herself with the visible fragrant aura of masculine freedom and independence. Although, as a concession to femininity, women could purchase cigarettes perfumed with rose and violet, there is no evidence that “ladies’ cigarettes” were used by fin-​de-​siècle women writers.18 Among the best-​ known, the Michael Fields (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, respectively the daughter and granddaughter of a Birmingham tobacconist and snuff manufacturer) were smokers, as were Sarah Grand and Alice Meynell. Although Cooper was shy about smoking in male company, Bradley would often smoke with close male friends like Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon. Sarah Grand carefully cultivated a ladylike demeanor to counteract prejudice aroused by her New Woman stance, yet did not see smoking as incompatible with her femininity. (“She smokes like a chimney,” said Ellen Terry in 1901.)19 Nor did the poet Alice Meynell, much admired by men for her ethereal grace, who, according to Katharine Tynan, “smoked as to the manner born.”20 While not all of these progressive women would have wished to identify themselves as “decadent,” to a modern reader their writings, including those of Grand, the most prominent New Woman, manifest marked decadent characteristics.21

528   Catherine Maxwell Another notable fin-​de-​siècle woman smoker associated with decadence was Vernon Lee. In April 1884, following the lead of her half-​brother, Eugene Lee-​Hamilton, and “seduced” by the “evil example” of four of her women friends, she confessed to her partner Mary Robinson that she had taken up smoking: “I find it agrees with my work.” However, in deference to the more markedly feminine Robinson, she declared, “but truly, truly, I never take more than two a day, & if you dislike the smell, shall confine them to Eugene’s bedroom.” Later in June of that year, staying at the Oxford house that Pater shared with his sisters, she told her mother that she was obliged to smoke her cigarettes “at an attic window . . . more out than in on account of a smuggled cigarette the odour of which alarms me.”22 The purchase of cigarettes by ladies was considered rather audacious. The following month Lee reports how, after lunch with two women friends in the Strand, “Mrs Stillman . . . boldly took us into a shop to buy cigarettes.”23 Lee dramatizes—​in a self-​parodic abashed and apologetic fashion—​her claim to the forbidden odor of tobacco that marks her as a modern female author, but by the end of the 1880s she was far less diffident about smoking, just like the female characters in her short stories who smoke cigarettes in polite society without compunction.24 Progressive women occasionally opted for something more outré than cigarettes. In 1957 Compton Mackenzie recorded that “[t]‌he first woman I ever saw smoking a cigar was the late Mrs Bernard Berenson, a sister of Logan Pearsall Smith, the gifted author of Trivia, and a Quakeress. That was fifty years ago.”25 Mary Berenson (formerly Mrs. Costelloe, née Whitall Smith), a gifted writer in her own right and a close associate of both Vernon Lee and Michael Field, had proven her nonconformity by living with the art critic Bernard Berenson until the death of her first husband allowed them to marry in 1900. In the early 1900s, when women’s use of cigarettes was more acceptable, her choice of the masculine and more heavily odorous cigar endorses the fact that she felt no need to bow to polite conventions.

Incense and Perfume Tobacco was not the only kind of scented smoke that pervaded decadent culture, with incense being a potent source of fascination. As frankincense (olibanum), it was associated with the lure of that dangerous siren, the Roman Catholic Church, whose sacred rituals were so seductive to impressionable natures, a prime example being Dorian Gray, who loved to watch the “fuming censers,” as well as the comely young acolytes who swung them (110). Lionel Johnson, attracted to Catholic ritualism but a genuine believer, mocked those like Dorian and his creator who saw the church’s rites as a predominantly aesthetic experience. His essay “The Cultured Faun” (1891) satirizes dilettantes who “dally with the enchanting mysteries” and their attendant sensory pleasures like “the subtle scented and mystical incense.”26 For the true believer, by contrast, incense is a powerfully symbolic scent that encapsulates Catholicism. In Johnson’s nostalgic sonnet “The Age of a Dream,” the speaker mourns for a “lost heritage” where the Catholic faith

SMELL   529 was dominant, lamenting that “[n]‌o more the frankincense drifts through the Holy Place.”27 In the companion sonnet, “The Church of a Dream,” Catholicism remains a lonely ideal amid the degeneration that modernity entails. Johnson’s speaker is attracted to the spectacle of an “ancient” solitary priest saying mass, “Swaying with tremulous hands the old censer full of spice /​In gray, sweet incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical.”28 Johnson, who, by his own admission, “went to Mass with Pater,” seems to have been more tolerant of his admired mentor’s Anglo-​Catholic and Romanist aesthetic tourism. Pater enjoyed visiting London churches, where, according to Thomas Wright, he delighted in “incense rising in swelling clouds, bell ringing, genuflections.”29 Perhaps incense replaced smoking. Johnson’s Oxford friend Laurence Binyon later recalled how, after he had dined with Pater in his Brasenose rooms on March 24, 1892, Pater gave him as a present “a little box of incense[,]‌our talk having chanced on old-​fashioned scents, gums & spices.”30 A recently discovered letter by Binyon to Johnson written shortly after that dinner (March 27, 1892) reveals that “Pater burned several kinds of incense, & gave me some in a little box, to burn ‘and remember him.’ ”31 Pater’s gift to the young poet seems charged, a scented legacy of the “curious odours” that identify the aspirant aesthete.32 Although Binyon was sensitive to fragrance, he did not actually like incense, his preference being for natural scents, but the box remained a treasured possession. Pater could easily have obtained his incense from an ecclesiastical supplier, or even from well-​known Victorian perfumery companies such as Rimmel or Piesse & Lubin, whose goods were widely available in many stores and by mail order. A Piesse & Lubin catalogue of 1861 lists for “fumigating apartments” various products, including frankincense, bdellium, balsams of Peru and Tolu, and aromatic “pastils.” (Dorian Gray lights some “Algerian pastilles” after incinerating the murdered Basil Hallward’s coat and bag [152].) Also advertised were censers, “fumigating lamps,” and “vaporizing ladles.” Gentlemen wishing to dispel stale tobacco odors might burn Piesse & Lubin’s scented ribbon, impregnated with benzoin, myrrh, musk, and rose otto, and known as “Ruban de Bruges,” or a similar product by Rimmel known as “Persian Fumigating Ribbon.”33 Piesse & Lubin also supplied their own “Frangipanni Incense,” purchased by Edith Cooper, along with various perfumes for Katharine Bradley’s birthday in 1904.34 Perfumery is the perfect partner for decadence, as both emphasize pleasure and artistry and seek to improve on nature. “On the Appreciation of Trifles,” an essay sometimes attributed to Lionel Johnson, published in 1894 in the Oxford decadent magazine The Chameleon, encourages readers not to deny themselves “the little, inexpensive luxuries that touch us most closely every day; it is by denying ourselves these in order to save a few pence that we lose the art of living.” The writer points out that “[f]‌or the additional expenditure of some small fraction of a penny each day we can indulge our senses continually by the use of soap the most delicious and costly!” Moreover, perfume is far from being, as often thought, “extravagant,” as the “small sum” of “five shillings” allows the purchase of “perfume of the most exquisite fragrance,” whose enjoyment makes the cost “sink into complete insignificance.” The writer is of course addressing an educated, well-​to-​do audience—​a laundress might earn only eight shillings a week—​and his

530   Catherine Maxwell subsequent paean to perfume marks him out as a decadent olfactif, not least because he implies that perfume has the ability of a drug or opiate to change one’s mental state, and thereby to alter, soften, or enhance reality: The use of it does not merely affect one for the second occupied in sprinkling a few drops over the hands, handkerchief, and hair: it is a lasting delight that tints the whole day with a faint, indescribable hue; it gladdens the senses; by some most mysterious process of delicate refinement it seems to screen us from the cares and trials of the day with a fragrant, rose-​tinged veil of unreality. The false economist saves his five shillings, it is true; but he knows not this rare solace, this dream-​laden narcotic for mental anxiety.35

Although perfume may still have been an unobtainable luxury for the poorest in society, advances in manufacture, including the use of new synthetic ingredients, meant that by the end of the century it was far more affordable than it had been twenty or thirty years earlier. However, the greater availability and thus popularity of certain perfumes once considered exclusive because of their cost and rarity ensured that over time they lost their cachet. Patchouli, a strong woody perfume derived from an Indonesian plant belonging to the mint family, was originally used in the 1860s by the elite. In her novel Cometh Up as a Flower (1867), Rhoda Broughton describes the air of a country-​house soirée as “faint with patchouli.”36 However, as it became more cheaply available, patchouli became debased as a perfume and—​enthusiastically embraced by a lower-​class clientele—​was strongly disapproved of by many Victorians as a heavy fragrance associated with “loose women.” A similar fate was in store for white heliotrope, a sweet vanillic floral fragrance. This was originally an expensive perfume made from the new synthetic heliotropin (also known as piperonal), discovered in 1869, which faithfully imitated the scent of heliotrope flowers. However, once the manufacturing costs had dropped substantially in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the perfume was adopted by a much larger and less select constituency; hence its use by Symons’s good-​time-​ girl heroine Lucy Newcome, and also by the unnamed woman with whom the speaker has a fleeting sexual liaison in Symons’s lyric “White Heliotrope.”37 Nonetheless, there were still plenty of “exquisite,” more exclusive perfumes available in the 1890s to gratify the author of “On the Appreciation of Trifles,” including those produced by reputable firms such as the British perfumers Grossmith, or French perfume companies such as Guerlain and Houbigant. While it was possible to spend from five to seven shillings on a bottle of upmarket perfume, the catalogues of big department stores like the Army and Navy make it clear that many brands offered smaller bottles of the same fragrance at a reduced price. As with tobacco, there were set ideas about perfume and where, when, and who might use it, although these conventions were often broken in practice. Earlier in the Victorian period, the wearing of scent by ladies and gentlemen was supposedly considered questionable, and is often used as an index of dubious character in fiction. In Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (serialized 1871–​1873), set in 1863–​1866,

SMELL   531 Lady Fawn is disconcerted by the scent worn by Lizzie Eustace, the attractive but morally dubious heroine: “A peculiar perfume came up from Lizzie’s hair which Lady Fawn did not like. Her own girls, perhaps, were not given to the use of much perfumery.”38 Some commentators, like Baroness Staffe and the American beauty adviser Harriet Hubbard Ayer, thought that a lady might permissibly wear a delicate floral fragrance, but Ayer specified that she should avoid strong sensual florals and heavy scents such as patchouli.39 She should shun in particular animalics (animal-​derived substances such as musk, ambergris, civet, and castoreum) on account of their unsavory associations, though in fact these essences were used in most perfumes to add depth and staying power. Scented men were often figures of fun, if not cads and villains, in earlier Victorian fiction, but in actuality dandies, bohemians, and men-​about-​town often wore fragrance. Perfume was more unisex than it is now, with Oscar Wilde enjoying a variety of perfumes, including white lilac, almond blossom, Canterbury Wood Violet, and Eau de Lubin, while Arthur Symons declared “Peau d’Espagne” and “Lily of the Valley” his favorite scents.40 Significantly, Wilde challenged the prejudice against men wearing scent in his own fiction. Following the influential example of J.-​K. Huysmans’s aristocratic aesthete Des Esseintes in À rebours (Against Nature; 1884), his own Dorian Gray is a connoisseur of perfumes, while Teleny, the eponymous hero of the gay pornographic novel that Wilde most likely coauthored (1893), also loves perfume, his favorite scent being white heliotrope. However, the prejudice against perfume in fiction lingers on. Sarah Grand’s fiction of the 1890s continues this well-​established trend; perfume is often associated with fast or decadent living and contrasted with health-​giving “fresh air” and natural fragrance. Her short story “Eugenia” (1893) opens with the unnamed female narrator repelled by the perfumes she smells while visiting a London theater backstage: Rank odours of a variety of scents saluted one’s afflicted nostrils on all sides. This way white rose flowed from a fan, which a much-​bedizened, vulgarly handsome daughter of the people was waving over a repulsively dissipated-​looking young man in evening dress who was sprawling disrespectfully on a couch. On the other side patchouly [sic] polluted the air, and wood violet on a nymph in front of us was waging war with the whisky and eau de Cologne which were being wafted abroad by an old unvenerable man who was essaying to ogle with dim watery eyes, and to simper with loose lips that were too tremulous to respond simultaneously to the weak-​willed intention.41

The stifling perfumes signify the questionable moral atmosphere of the theater, and, to the narrator, even the London air comes as a comparative relief. Outside, she stands on the pavement “inhaling deep draughts of the freshness, and feeling as if I could never rid myself of the fever and the fumes of that tawdry place” (108). Later she stays in the country with her friend Eugenia, a beautiful young heiress, who is being wooed by Brinkhampton, a louche man-​about-​town. His evident ineligibility is marked in olfactory terms: “There was more than a suspicion of some horrid expensive scent about him, and his cheeks had a velvety texture which was cruelly suggestive of powder” (114).

532   Catherine Maxwell To its detractors, perfume might be associated with effeminacy, although effeminacy should not necessarily be assumed to connote homosexuality, but rather—​as is the case with Brinkhampton, a heterosexual dandy—​a man whose presentation, interests, and pursuits lean toward self-​consciousness, contemplation, art, and artifice rather than the “manlier” man’s spontaneous instinct, action, and immersion in nature. When Eugenia empties the postbag at breakfast to give her guests their letters, she took out one amongst others that instantly filled the room with some strong scent of which it was reeking. “Ugh!” she exclaimed, “after the open air, how coarse this is. Who can it be for? You—​” to Brinkhampton. “It savours of ‘SOCIETY’ to me—​‘the thick of life’—​‘excitement!’ but my rustic nose is unequal to the demands of such an assault. Please take it!” (129)

In classic Victorian fiction it is generally fast women like Thackeray’s Becky Sharp who perfume their letters. Brinkhampton’s letter is from a well-​known burlesque actress, thereby momentarily importing the artificial decadent air of the theater into Eugenia’s idyllic rural estate.

The Scent of the Decadent Text Because decadent poetry and prose often delight in perfumes, incense, tobacco, opium, exotic odorous flowers, and heavily scented hothouse atmospheres communicated in rich, heady, sensuous language, decadent texts by association are commonly described as “scented” or “perfumed.” This is a negative characterization for conservative critics like the reviewer who complained that in reading Dorian Gray, “we move in a heavy atmosphere of light warm incense” and “long to push on to the light, and the blowing wind.”42 In his Preface to Silhouettes (2nd ed., 1896), also known as “In Defence of Patchouli,” Symons cheerfully embraced the critical jibe that his verses were unwholesome because “they had ‘a faint smell of Patchouli about them.’ ”43 For the decadents themselves, the exotic scent of literature is a virtue, as when Symons, admiring Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), observes that “an almost oppressive quiet, a quiet which seems to exhale an atmosphere heavy with tropical flowers, broods over these pages.”44 Although, as mentioned above, the perfumed effeminacy attributed to decadent men and their writing does not necessarily connote homosexuality, some readers and reviewers of Wilde’s and Pater’s texts undoubtedly responded, not always approvingly, to their scented aura of sexual ambiguity. Indeed, Wilde himself, writing seductively to the young Harry Marillier in 1885, channels Pater’s “strange flowers, and curious odours,” using perfume as a code to hint at alluringly transgressive sexual pleasures: “There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.”45 Wilde’s homoerotic paradise is more markedly and artificially decadent. However, he may also be remembering the less lurid yet richly scented “exquisite gardens” and

SMELL   533 natural flora of ancient Lesbos imagined in Studies of the Greek Poets (1873), where Symonds observes of the Lesbian poets, “When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colours, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse.”46 Arthur Symons also makes complex symbolic play between apparent artificial and natural fragrance in “Proem,” the opening lyric of “Lilian,” a sequence first included in his London Nights (1895). In this poem the violet, a delicately fragrant wildflower that seems to typify nature and the natural, becomes strangely decadent—​“The artificial flower of my ideal”—​by virtue of its transplantation to the “hot-​house.” There, among the more obvious, heavily perfumed blooms that diffuse “this spice-​laden atmosphere,” the violet’s evident difference and rarity, epitomized in its fresh vernal “breath,” give it added value, paradoxically making it seem more “exotic” than the other hothouse flowers. The speaker declares that usually the orchid, that icon of decadence, “is the flower I love,” and that the “mere violets of the wood” generally do not have enough interest or complexity to pique “[t]‌he curiosity that rules my blood.” 47 However, in the hothouse environment where everything seems contrived and elaborately showy, the incongruous novelty of the natural violet rouses his desire, perversely transforming the bloom into the most “artificial” flower in the hothouse. In his slim edition of Symons’s Selected Writings (1974, rev. 1989), until recently the most accessible modern selection of Symons’s poetry, Roger Holdsworth titled this poem simply “Violet,” presumably after Symons’s renaming of his sequence in 1901.48 Holdsworth may have additionally followed the lead of Karl Beckson, who, in his well-​ known anthology of 1890s prose and verse, titled the poem “Violet: Prelude,” but also refers to it in his “Introduction” as “Symons’ ‘Violet,’ which restates the decadent devotion to the hothouse.”49 These modern selections help give the overwhelming impression that the poem is primarily an exercise in floral symbolism, producing the kind of interpretation outlined above. However, when originally located in the sequences “Lilian” and “Violet” as “Proem” or “Prelude,” Symons’s lyric plainly functions on more than one level.50 The “hothouse” is also the Victorian music hall or theater, one of Symons’s favorite haunts, while the flowers are female performers, most likely ballet girls, the subject of many of his romantic and amorous yearnings. The speaker has fallen for a “sweet white wildwood violet,” a girl whose appealingly innocent demeanor goes against the grain of his usual taste for more glamorous, theatrical, exotic female types. By renaming his sequence “Violet,” Symons would intensify the gendered floral symbolism of “Prelude,” but he also augmented its private significance in that the “sweet white wildwood violet” was based on his early love, the ballet girl Violet Piggot. Symons’s speaker thus presents himself as a man-​about-​town used to keeping company with more raffish, knowing types of women. But familiarity can breed contempt, or at least boredom, and so he finds himself entranced by the sweet, more seemingly modest, and “natural” type of Victorian woman whose fresh novelty in the artificial bohemian world of the theater makes her appear all the more alluring. While “Violet” or “Lilian” takes part, along with the other girls in theatrical dance performances, her distinctive air of “natural” sweetness gives her an unusual charm and piquancy. One might read this poem somewhat cynically as the speaker’s somewhat over-​ingenious, self-​regarding justification for choosing a “sweet” simple girl over a more obviously exotic

534   Catherine Maxwell mistress. He seems to want to have things both ways and make his choice appear more sophisticated or “decadent” than it actually is, merely because he says it is uncharacteristic for him. In any event, Symons consistently uses scent to mark the distinction between the flowers that represent different feminine types. Prompted by Grand’s “Eugenia,” we might reasonably assume that the pervasive smell of perfume and cosmetics would scent the backstage areas and dressing rooms of the music-​hall theater of the 1890s, as well as its auditorium frequented by prostitutes, demimondaines, and bohemian men out on the town. It would be the stronger perfumes of the nineties such as frangipani, opopanax, musk, and patchouli, which signal sexual availability, that infuse the hothouse “spice-​ laden atmosphere” of the theater. As already mentioned, respectable women were advised to shun such perfumes, with Harriet Hubbard Ayer recommending that the “high-​bred woman . . . select the most delicate of violet extracts and so assimilate her personality with the flowers so as always to recall it.”51 Symons’s lyric hints that the speaker’s inamorata may not just evoke the violet symbolically, but also give off its fresh scent—​“its breath was as the breath of Spring.” This hint is strengthened in “In the Temple,” a later poem in the “Lilian”/​“Violet” sequence, where the speaker notes, after his girlfriend leaves, “Yet still about my lonely room /​The visionary violets bloom, /​And with her presence still perfume /​The tedious page that I resume.”52 Of course, manufactured violet fragrance, originally made from orris root, and later in the 1890s from ionone, a newly discovered violet-​smelling synthetic, is no less artificial than other perfumes, just as the speaker’s girlfriend—​modest demeanor aside—​is still a ballet-​girl and his mistress, and so hardly regarded as “respectable” by polite society. Thus, in spite of the possible cynical reading signaled above, the layering of perception in Symons’s lyric also suggests that the ballet girl who appears to be an innocent flower is, in her own way, more decadent than the exotic performers who openly advertise themselves as such.

Decadent Dislocations: Scent in the City Symons’s lyrics suggest that certain familiar, unexceptional things or characteristics can become exotic or decadent by virtue of their relocation, by being—​or at least seeming to be—​incongruous or out of place. Another version of this kind of decadent displacement, also experienced via an incongruous perfume, appears in the early poetry of Laurence Binyon. When the artist William Rothenstein recounted how he was introduced to Binyon in 1896 as a fellow “decadent,” he was amused to think of Binyon being classed as such.53 Yet marks of decadence are detectable in some of his early poems—​unsurprisingly perhaps in a writer influenced by Pater and Swinburne, who mixed with the Hobby Horse circle of Selwyn Image and Herbert Horne, and knew Yeats, Wilde, and the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon.54 Binyon’s deep love of nature, especially his pleasure in trees and flowers, informs his lyrical pastoral poems, yet after he graduated from Trinity

SMELL   535 College, Oxford, in 1892, his working life was spent in London, first in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum and then from 1895 in the museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings. Many of his poems written during the nineties would eventually make up the enlarged version of his London Visions (1908).55 Paradoxically, it is the somewhat incongruous intrusion of natural phenomena and especially natural scents into an urban environment that gives several of these poems a decadent charge. A prime example is “Narcissus,” from Binyon’s Poems (1895), in which the speaker, walking past the central London church of St. Martin’s, which borders Trafalgar Square, is suddenly struck by the scent of narcissus blown to him on the wind from baskets where the “frail” blooms are “heaped”—​presumably for sale as early spring flowers: By white St. Martin’s, where the fountain shone And plashed unheard in the busy morning air, March, with rippling shadow and sudden sun, Laughing riotous round the gusty square, From frail narcissus heaped in baskets there Blew to me, as I passed, its odour keen, Keen and strange, subtle and sweet; And lo! all new and green, Spring for me had entered the stony street.56

From his youth Binyon was fond of classical and mythological subjects, which often provide titles for his poems, and the opening lines of this short lyric depicting the monumental architecture of the city might encourage the expectation that “Narcissus” will be a classical sculpture or bas-​relief.57 But the poem upsets that expectation, as Binyon’s speaker, navigating the square, is suddenly surprised by a new sensation that removes him from his immediate surroundings. Evidently highly sensate, he hears (if others do not) the plash of the fountain, in addition to registering other sensory impressions—​the “white” church and shining water, the “busy morning air” humming with activity, the pattern and ambience of sun and shadow, and the tug of a boisterous wind. With sight, hearing, and touch already in play, smell in the guise of a delicious scent breaks in as an additional if unexpected pleasure. The pastoral scent of flowers might not normally seem decadent, but, in this context, it is delightfully incongruous, being “[k]een and strange, subtle and sweet,” thereby defamiliarizing the metropolitan space. Any anticipation of sculpture is banished by the contrast between the “stony street”—​the hard, unyielding, inanimate fabric of the urban environment—​and the vital “green” scent, an unexpected breath from the country that channels spring. “Keen,” “strange,” “subtle,” and “sweet” are key Swinburnian and Paterian epithets that loom large in the decadent lexicon, and it is the sudden unlooked-​ for irruption of a “green” spring into the city that gives this poem its decadence, reminding us, too, that the proper name of “St. Martin’s” is “St. Martin’s-​in-​the-​Fields,” a title that evokes the ancient church’s original rural position between Westminster and London. Binyon’s poem thus not only unsettles the routine perceptions of the city dweller by momentarily transporting him out of the urban environment and connecting

536   Catherine Maxwell him to the natural world, but also perhaps reminds him of the pastoral setting that preexisted the city itself. Appropriately, the heady floral scent of narcissus, commonly identified as a “green” perfume, is often said to evoke spring. Of the three types of narcissus generally employed for the extraction of narcissus oil, the most popular is the Pheasant’s-​Eye Narcissus, also known as Narcissus poeticus, or the Poet’s Narcissus, cultivated and naturalized throughout Britain. Binyon’s metropolitan speaker is surprised by an epiphanic scent specifically marked as “poetic,” but, even if we can’t know whether it is Narcissus poeticus that he smells, the narcissus’s or daffodil’s strong associations with Wordsworth make it emblematic of the Romantic poet’s imaginative capacity to recreate natural scenes from remembered impressions. Ideally suited to the epiphanic mode, the intense concentrated form of the brief lyric is often employed by fin-​de-​siècle poets to convey and capture “a single sharp impression” or Paterian “moment.”58 Here, as used by Binyon, it more unusually preserves an olfactory rather than a visual impression, but also draws on the earlier Romantic epiphany by relocating the pastoral Wordsworthian “spot of time” in the city. Also bringing natural floral scent into the urban environment in surprising and markedly decadent ways is Binyon’s longer narrative poem “Martha,” first published in Porphyrion and Other Poems (1898). “Martha” deals with the fate of its eponymous heroine, an aging and isolated middle-​class woman used to a sequestered life of “patient thrift.” When she realizes she has lost most of her meager savings because of the financial mismanagement of others, this gentle, vulnerable woman decides that she must find a way to earn money, and she fixes on flower-​selling as the least alarming option. Venturing at early morning into “the great flower-​market” (Covent Garden) to buy her wares, she is overwhelmed by the sensuous beauty of the flowers—​lilies of “rich illumined snow,” “[p]‌urple and gold” iris, “[d]eep-​umbered wall-​flowers,” “the odour keen of jonquil”—​but it is the odor of fragrant roses that finally seduces her: But most the wine-​red roses, deep In sunshine lying, warm asleep, Breathing perfume, drinking light Into their inmost bosoms bright, Seemed fathomlessly to unfold A treasure of more price than gold.59

Martha sets herself up on the Thames Embankment to sell her roses in bunches, but then finds herself unable to go through with it: But now, as her caressing hand Each odorous fresh nosegay planned, A new grief smote her to the heart: Must she from her sweet treasure part? They seemed of her own blood.

The flowers have struck deep, becoming part of her and wakening her capacity for love—​ “O now to love, if even a flower” (69). With her senses aroused “and her soul, surprised to

SMELL   537 beauty,” the roses also waken her to a larger awareness of loveliness around her, perceived in children, the “flashing river,” horses, and the voices of young men—​“All these were beautiful and free, /​Each with its joy” (67). Hurriedly gathering up her roses, Martha makes her way home, relishing “the wine of life” (70). At her door she impulsively spends the last of her money on all the flowers she can buy from a passing street vendor. Supplementing her roses, the flowers transform her dull lodgings: “the drear room /​Glows strangely; the transfigured gloom /​Flows over, prodigal in bloom” (71). As the day wears on, their spell only increases, while the dimness of evening obscures the hues of the blooms: Yet still about the room she went Touching them, and the subtle scent Wandered into her soul, and brought All memories, yet stifled thought. As in her bed she lay, the flowers Haunted her through the midnight hours: Twixt her shut lids the colours crept; . . .

When she awakes the following morning, she is at first aghast at her improvidence, “but in her brain /​A drowsy magic worked like pain.” Sinking back upon her pillows she is mesmerized by the roses beside her bed: The deep-​hued blossoms standing by With serious beauty awed her eye; Upward, inscrutable, they flamed: Of that mean fear she was ashamed. All day their fragrance in the sun Possessed her spirit . . . (72)

Martha stirs no more from her bed but remains in a half-​somnolent trance: “Her body hungered, but her soul /​Was feasting.” Eventually, as the poem moves toward its decidedly decadent dénouement, it transpires that the radiant flowers are not only sustaining her soul, but she also is sustaining them, as they literally take her breath away: The gentle flowers have need of her. Unpitying is their rich desire; Her breath, her being they require. O, she must yield! She sinks far down, Conquered, listless, happy, down Under wells of darkness, deep Into labyrinths of sleep, Perishing in sweetness dumb . . . (72–​73)

As a new dawn breaks, sunlight irradiates the massed flowers, “But Martha slept, nor stirred at all” (73). In the nineteenth century there were anxieties about the possible deleterious, even fatal, effects of flower fragrance in a confined space, and a belief still persists that it

538   Catherine Maxwell is not healthy to leave flowers in a bedroom, especially a sickroom, because of the mistaken notion that that they can deplete a room of oxygen. Most likely Binyon is drawing on such ideas, while his poem adds a darkly decadent note by suggesting that the flowers are parasitic on Martha, deliberately depriving her of life in order to feed on her breath. Like other decadent texts, such as Oscar Wilde’s story “The Nightingale and the Rose,” which signal that beauty is only achieved at a cost, Binyon’s poem hints that Martha’s newly aroused sense of beauty demands the sacrifice of her life. Yet it also suggests that Martha is compliant, implying that her death by roses—​a floral euthanasia—​comes not only as a relief to her sufferings, but also as the blissful climax to her perfumed seduction, as she expires not in “aromatic pain” but through excess of aromatic beauty.60 Martha starts out a shy, unassuming, unexceptional figure, yet Binyon’s prosaic choice of name for his heroine becomes increasingly ironic, for the Martha of the New Testament is a practical, down-​to-​earth housewife, irritated by her sister Mary’s more contemplative nature.61 Binyon’s Martha, who extravagantly squanders her slender resources on sweet-​smelling flowers, is clearly not practical, and indeed has more in common with Mary, who in St. John’s gospel pours expensive perfume over Jesus’s feet and wipes them with her hair, scenting the whole house and shocking Judas Iscariot by her prodigality.62 Transforming the formerly humble Martha into a decadent aesthete and her dingy urban room into a bower of bliss, Binyon’s poem evokes the proto-​decadent speaker of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” who, listening to the bird’s song and inhaling the scents of late spring flowers in the “embalmed darkness,” declares that “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, /​To cease upon the midnight with no pain.”63 Binyon literalizes this wish in Martha’s fragrant demise, as nature, transposed into the city, becomes eerily and decadently uncanny, and the “gentle” luxuriantly perfumed flowers, “Unpitying” with “their rich desire,” exact the ultimate sacrifice.

Conclusion The perfume of decadence might reasonably be considered an artificial affair, and certainly decadent notions of beauty favoring artifice over nature overlap with the discovery and use of synthetic fragrance materials and the concomitant birth of the modern perfume industry in the 1880s. Yet the decadent smellscape also includes exotic, voluptuous, and narcotic natural floral scents like lilies and tuberose, as well as the less flamboyant yet dislocating, disconcerting natural scents introduced into the city by Binyon’s urban Romanticism. While the decadent may more typically manipulate or curate the ambience of his or her environment with the smells of smoking, incense, perfume, or exotic flowers, decadent olfaction also allows for epiphanic pleasure in the sudden, unexpected transformative and transporting odor. Surprised by scent, like Binyon’s London pedestrian or his Martha, who found “the deep

SMELL   539 perfume /​O’ercame her,” decadent aesthetes also surrender to or are seduced by natural fragrances that defamiliarize the city and, albeit temporarily, disarrange carefully crafted urban identities. An agent of immediate irresistible penetrating power, such scent also has the capacity to remind subjects of the latent Romantic sensibility that lies at the core of their modern decadent selves.

Notes 1. Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1957), 176. In Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde (London: John Murray, 2011), Franny Moyle writes that Wilde “loved the very highest quality cigarettes supplied from the Parascho depot in Mayfair’s Park Street” (84). 2. Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde, 34, 37. 3. Invoice made out to Oscar Wilde for toiletries dated November 30, 1900: Clark Shelfmark: J94Z W6721 1900 Nov. 30, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. 4. Clara Watts-​Dunton, The Home Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (London: A. M. Philpotts, 1922), 238. 5. Edmund Gosse, “Perfume,” in On Viol and Flute (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1873), 96. 6. See the recipes in James B. Lutterman, The Tobacco Manufacturers’ Manual: A Vade-​ Mecum for the Allied Industries (London, 1887), 93–​105. 7. F. W. Bussell, “Sermon on Pater” (1894), in Walter Pater: Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 285. Letter of April 15, 1889, in Some Letters of Lionel Johnson, ed. Rev. Raymond Roseliep, University of Notre Dame PhD thesis (1955), 80. 8. Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life: 1867–​1887 (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1925), 273. 9. John Addington Symonds and Margaret Symonds, Our Life in the Swiss Highlands (London and Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1892), 302, 132–​33. Van Wyck Brooks, John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study (New York: Mitchell Kennedy, 1914), 158, 175. 10. Horatio F. Brown, John Addington Symonds: A Biography, 2 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1895), 2:319, 37. 11. Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926), 93; G. L. Apperson, The Social History of Smoking (London: Martin Secker, 1914), 139, 166, 194, 181, 182. 12. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Norton, 2007), 68. Further references cited parenthetically. 13. Arthur Symons’s account of this meeting in the Fortnightly Review (1924) is reprinted in Memoirs: Life and Art in the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 117. I cite from a longer unpublished version of the article quoted in Karl Beckson, Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 90–​91. 14. Pierre Champion, Marcel Schwob et son temps (Paris: Grosset, 1927), 99, cited in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 327. 15. Kate Chopin, “An Egyptian Cigarette,” in Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1993), 1–​5. 16. Chopin, “An Egyptian Cigarette,” 1, 2. 17. George Egerton, “A Cross Line,” in Daughters of Decadence, 55.

540   Catherine Maxwell 18. Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 21. 19. Ellen Terry, quoted in Gillian Kersley, Darling Madame: Sarah Grand and Devoted Friend (London: Virago Press, 1983), 107. 20. Katharine Tynan, Memories (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1924), 37. 21. See my essay “Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life,” in “Scales of Decadence,” ed. Dennis Denisoff, Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 4 (2021): 731–51. 22. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, ed. Amanda Gagel (London: Routledge, 2017), 1: 1865–​1884, 526 (April 30, 1884); 545–​46 (June 18, 1884). 23. Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1: 557 (July 11, 1884). 24. See her three stories of society women, first published 1889–​1890, subsequently collected in Vanitas: Polite Stories (London: William Heineman, 1892). 25. Compton Mackenzie, Sublime Tobacco (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957), 57. 26. Lionel Johnson, “The Cultured Faun,” in Incurable: The Haunted Writings of Lionel Johnson, the Decadent Era’s Dark Angel, ed. Nina Antonia (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2018), 64. 27. Lionel Johnson, “The Age of a Dream,” in Incurable, 139. 28. Johnson, “The Church of a Dream,” in Incurable, 140. 29. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater, 2 vols. (London: Everitt & Co., 1907), 2:31. 30. Laurence Binyon, letter to Cicely Powell, postmarked May 23, 1903, cited in John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 28. The letter is now in the Binyon Collection, British Library MS Loan 103/​59/​1 (letter 98). 31. Sarah Green, “Lionel Johnson and the Literary Life of the 1890s,” TLS, August 2, 2019, 13. Green explains how she recently discovered various unpublished letters to Johnson at Winchester College, interleaved in the pages of two volumes of his verse. I am most grateful to her for telling me the date of Binyon’s letter and providing me with a full transcription. 32. Walter Pater, “Conclusion,” in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. 33. Piesse & Lubin’s Toilet Almanack for 1861, 27–​28. John Johnson Collection. 34. See Cooper’s comments in the women’s shared diary “Works and Days,” British Library Add MS 46793, fol. 163r-​v (27 October 1904). 35. Anon., “On the Appreciation of Trifles,” in Incurable, 70. 36. Rhoda Broughton, Cometh Up as a Flower (Stroud, UK: Alan Sutton, 1993), 131. 37. For Symons’s “The Life and Adventures of Lucy Newcome,” probably composed between 1896 and 1898 but unpublished in his lifetime, see his Spiritual Adventures, ed. Nicholas Freeman (Cambridge: MHRA, 2017), 74–​ 87; “White Heliotrope,” in London Nights (London: Leonard Smithers, 1895), 49. “White Heliotrope” was written on June 20, 1893. 38. Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds, ed. Helen Small (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 73. 39. Baroness Staffe, The Lady’s Dressing-​Room, trans. Lady Colin Campbell (London: Cassell & Co., 1892), 324–​25; Harriet Hubbard Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Laws of Health and Beauty (New York: Home Topics Book Company, 1899), 68, 454.

SMELL   541 40. See Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 252, 262, 264. Symons, Preface to Silhouettes, 2nd ed. (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896), xiii. 41. Sarah Grand, “Eugenia,” Our Manifold Nature (London: William Heinemann, 1894), 104. “Eugenia” was first published in Temple Bar in 1893. 42. Unsigned review, Theatre 8 (June 1, 1891): 245, in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 81. 43. Symons, Preface to Silhouettes (1896), xiii. 44. Arthur Symons, review of Imaginary Portraits (1887), in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 177. 45. Pater, “Conclusion,” 120; Wilde, letter postmarked December 12, 1885, in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-​Davis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 272. 46. J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873–​1876), 1:129. 47. Arthur Symons, “Proem,” London Nights, 9. Symons retitled the “Lilian” sequence “Violet” when it reappeared in an abbreviated form in his two-​volume Poems (London: William Heinemann, 1901), 1:85–​94, where “Proem” was retitled “Prelude.” 48. See “Violet,” in Arthur Symons, Selected Writings, ed. Roger Holdsworth (Manchester, UK: Fyfield Books, 1974, rev. 1989), 39. 49. Arthur Symons, “Violet: Prelude,” Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s: An Anthology of British Poetry and Prose, ed. Karl Beckson (New York: Vintage Books, 1966; Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981; Chicago Review Press, 2005), 158; Introduction, xxxi (fn. 14). 50. See annotations in Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poems, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Cambridge: MHRA, 2017), 92. 51. Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s Book, 454. 52. Symons, “IV: In the Temple,” in London Nights, 14; Poems, 1:90; Selected Early Poems, 95. 53. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: 1872–​1900 (London: Faber & Faber, 1931, 1934), 172. 54. Hatcher, Laurence Binyon, 27. 55. Binyon’s London Visions: Collected and Augmented (London: Elkin Mathews, 1908), brings together poems previously published in earlier collections, including A First Book of London Visions (1896), A Second Book of London Visions (1899), and Porphyrion and Other Poems (1898). 56. Laurence Binyon, “Narcissus,” in Poems (Oxford: Daniel, 1895), 7, later incorporated into London Visions (1908), 11. 57. Examples of poem titles drawn from classical mythology include “Niobe” (1887), Persephone (1890), “Psyche” (1890), and “Porphyrion” (1898). 58. Pater, “Conclusion,” 119. 59. Binyon, “Martha,” in Porphyrion and Other Poems (London: Grant Richards, 1898), 67, 68. 60. I allude, as Binyon probably does, to Alexander Pope’s famous line in his “Essay on Man”: “Die of a rose in aromatic pain” (Epistle 1, Section 6). 61. Luke 10:38–​42. 62. John 12:1–​8. Martha’s sister, Mary of Bethany, is often identified with Mary Magdalen and another unnamed woman who pours perfume over Jesus’s feet or head. For discussion of these different New Testament figures and their conflations, see my Scents and Sensibility, 256.

542   Catherine Maxwell 63. “Ode to a Nightingale,” in Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1970), 529.

Further Reading Aftel, Mandy. Essence and Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume. New York: North Point Press, 2001. Apperson, G. L. The Social History of Smoking. London: Martin Secker, 1914. Bradstreet, Christina. “ ‘Wicked with Roses’: Floral Femininity and the Erotics of Scent.” Nineteenth-​Century Art Worldwide 6, no. 1 (Spring 2007). http://​www.19thc-​artwo​rldw​ide. org/​sprin​g07/​144-​qwic​ked-​with-​ros​esq-​flo​ral-​fem​inin​ity-​and-​the-​erot​ics-​of-​scent. Briot, Eugénie. “From Industry to Luxury: French Perfume in the Nineteenth Century.” Business History Review 85 (Summer 2011): 273–​94. Carlisle, Janice. Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-​ Victorian Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Classen, Constance, David Howes, and Anthony Synott. Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. New York: Routledge, 1994. Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination. London: Papermac, 1996. Desmarais, Jane. “Perfume Clouds: Olfaction, Memory, and Desire in Arthur Symons’s London Nights (1895).” In Economies of Desire at the Victorian Fin de Siècle, edited by Jane Ford, Kim Edwards, and Patricia Pulham, 62–​79. London: Routledge, 2016. Drobnick, Jim, ed. The Smell Culture Reader. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Krueger, Cheryl. “Decadent Perfume: Under the Skin and through the Page.” Modern Languages Open, October 20, 2014. http://​www.mode​rnla​ngua​geso​pen.org/​index.php/​mlo/​ arti​cle/​view/​36. Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Maxwell, Catherine. “Sweet Artifice.” Aeon, July 18, 2018. https://​aeon.co/​ess​ays/​a-​triu​mph-​ over-​nat​ure-​perf​ume-​in-​the-​age-​of-​decade​nce. Maxwell, Catherine. “ ‘Bringing the Perfume Out of Everything’: Vernon Lee and Scent.” In Smell and Social Life: Aspects of English, French, and German Literature (1880–​1939), edited by Frank Krause and Katharina Herold, 178–96. Munich: Iudicium, 2021. Maxwell, Catherine. “ ‘Unguent from a Carven Jar’: Odour and Perfume in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907).” In The Smells and Senses of Antiquity in the Modern Imagination, edited by Adeline Grand-​Clément and Charlotte Ribeyrol, 27–51. London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Rindisbacher, Hans J. The Smell of Books: A Cultural-​Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Stamelman, Richard. Perfume: Joy, Obsession, Scandal, Sin. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. Turin, Luca, and Tania Sanchez. Perfumes: The A–​Z Guide. London: Profile Books, 2009. Tinkler, Penny. Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2006. Williams, David G. Perfumes of Yesterday. Port Washington, NY: Micelle Press, 2004.

Chapter 28

Taste Savoring Decadence David Weir and Jane Desmarais

At the end of Roberto Rossellini’s film La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, made for Italian television in 1966), we see the Sun King dining alone at Versailles Palace as his entire court looks on, servants and nobles alike. Louis is “dining alone” in the sense that he is the only one eating, the meal itself serving primarily as a spectacle demonstrating the monarch’s absolute power. The king picks at one extravagant dish after another, disdaining the recent fad of the fork by using his fingers. Shots of the palace kitchen show a small army of cooks and bakers, ordered about by a man who shouts instructions from an elevated perch, looking more like a chef d’orchestre than a chef de cuisine. Every course, or “setting,” involves careful plating on fine silver, each dish garnished to achieve stunning aesthetic effect. Near the end of the meal, while the king is eating his fourteenth (!) setting, the chef orders the servants to form a procession so that the fifteenth course—​a roast suckling pig—​can be presented to the king. The dish is announced (more than once) as the procession moves up from the kitchen to the dining hall accompanied by an official who cries out the formal declaration, “La viande du roi!” The pig arrives on a platter with a cover secured by a lock, which one attendant unlocks and another removes. A third servant takes the uncovered platter to the dining table and sets it before the king (Figure 28.1), whereupon the royal doctor advises against eating pork and recommends hard-​boiled eggs instead. La viande du roi is quickly removed; presumably, the pig goes uneaten because the dish was meant for the king alone. We may not know what happens to the pig, but we do know what happened to the French monarchy. We also know what happened to the chefs and sous-​chefs who saw to it that Louis XIV and his hapless descendant Louis XVI, along with other royals and nobles, did, indeed, dine like kings: after the French Revolution, those who formerly cooked for the aristocracy found work as private chefs for the newly enfranchised and empowered bourgeoisie, or in many cases started their own restaurants. Actually, they

544    David Weir and Jane Desmarais

Figure 28.1.  La viande du roi, La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, dir. Roberto Rossellini (Paris: Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, 1966); DVD: Criterion, 2008.

reformed the recent institution of the restaurant, changing it from a modest eatery serving nourishing restorative broths (hence restaurant—​originally the name of the food, not the place to eat it) into an altogether different kind of establishment. Now, ordinary people could dine like the aristocrats who had so recently employed the new restaurant chefs.1 This familiar history does not automatically ensure that the natural act of eating will come to acquire the qualities of artifice and excess that we associate with decadence, but, at the same time, it is hard to imagine the idea of decadent dining without the historical dispersion of aristocratic cuisine into the broader society subsequent to the French Revolution. Indeed, the scene at the end of La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV suggests several rationales for designating certain types of dining decadent. One is the obvious act of eating like a king while millions starve; another is the spectacle of eating like a king, or rather, of being seen eating like a king; yet another is the artifice involved in the presentation of the food, the visual appeal it has for the diner. These rationales involve, respectively, moral, social, and aesthetic conceptions of decadence, but not taste itself. Indeed, it is difficult to say, precisely, what decadence tastes like, largely because decadence is a type of culture formed of those foregoing moral, social, and aesthetic components. This negative claim, however, can easily be turned around, such that the

Taste   545 argument becomes one where the taste of decadence is only discernible from the moral, social, and aesthetic components that constitute it.

Decadent Dining? The basic history whereby an eating establishment—​the simple restorative restaurant serving nutritious, healthy food—​is transformed into one where nutrition is almost beside the point appears to have been repeated time and time again. The best-​known recent example is probably another revolution set in motion by Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. Waters started her restaurant as a response to the excesses of haute cuisine, with its over-​complicated, sauce-​soaked dishes, in favor of natural, local, and seasonal foods prepared fresh and served simply—​California cuisine, in short.2 Thomas Keller followed suit by transforming an old stone farmhouse into The French Laundry in Yountville, California. The place has gardens on the grounds to ensure the freshness of key ingredients, but, as the name of the restaurant makes clear, the preparation was not only fresh but also French, more nouvelle cuisine than California cuisine. When Keller opened Per Se in the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle in New York City, he served some of the same signature dishes that had made The French Laundry famous, but now there was no garden outside the restaurant, and both the décor and the service had become notably upscale. Diners who treated themselves to the white Alba truffle complement marveled at the sight of a procession of servers, the leader bearing the precious pale fungi in a special casket, opened by another server, and shaved over the dish by yet another. Just about the only difference in the presentation from that of the suckling pig in Rossellini’s film is that no one declaims, “Les truffes du roi!” This rough similitude between the absolutist scene depicted in the film and the late-​capitalist reality in New York City suggests that the latter can be construed as decadent only in the light of the former; that is, that there is nothing inherently decadent in high-​end dining unless some form of moral judgment comes into play. In this case, as it often is, morality is informed by politics: such high-​end dining is bound to be subject to moral judgment by anyone on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale who finds both absolutism and unregulated capitalism objectionable. At the same time, there is no denying the aesthetic appeal of both the fictional absolutist dinner and the actual capitalist dinner, but there seems to be no way of disentangling the moral judgment from the aesthetic one. The first type of decadence demands disapproval, the second type appreciation. Here is another example of a real-​life dinner that at least one food history terms “unbelievably decadent.”3 On Christmas Day 1870, the ninety-​ninth day of the siege of Paris imposed by Otto von Bismarck during the Franco-​Prussian War (1870–​1871), when supplies of food to the capital had been cut off completely, a group of wealthy Parisians gathered for a sumptuous banquet prepared by the esteemed chef Alexandre Étienne Choron at Voisin, his restaurant on rue St. Honoré (Figure 28.2).

546    David Weir and Jane Desmarais

Figure 28.2.  1870 Christmas siege menu prepared by Alexandre Étienne Choron. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Taste   547 The story of how famished Parisians had been forced to adapt their diet to the consumption of horses, cats, dogs, rats, and the occasional sparrow is well known,4 as is the even more desperate measure of slaughtering the animals at the Jardin des Plantes, beginning with the only two elephants in the zoo, Castor and Pollux. Parts of either Castor or Pollux found their way into Choron’s feast, since the soup course included elephant consommé, served after the impressively named hors-​d’oeuvre, Buerre, Radis, Tête d’Ane farcie, Sardines (butter, radish, stuffed donkey head, sardines). A remarkable range of zoological cuisine followed, from rack of bear to camel roasted à l’Anglaise, a jokey reference to the plain style of English cooking. One of the main courses was Le Chat flanqué de Rats (cat flanked by rats), but the pièce de résistance—​not that the French were offering that much resistance to the Prussians—​was antelope and truffle terrine. These dishes were accompanied by fine Bordeaux and even finer Burgundy—​an 1846 Mouton Rothschild and an 1858 Romanée Conti, respectively (among other wines). The banquet ended in more traditional but still elevated fashion, with Gruyère cheese and an 1827 Grand Porto. No doubt this dinner was tasty, but was it tasteful? That is, was it decadent? An argument might be made that there was an element of political resistance to the dinner after all: if one is forced to eat animals from the Jardin de Plantes, then why not serve them in style? It is almost as though Choron were making the culinary point that, whereas Bismarck might have been able to defeat the nation of France, he was helpless against the French culture of haute cuisine, which remained insistently itself under the harshest possible conditions. The country may have been brought low, but the cuisine remained as high as ever. Still, it is easy to understand why some might regard the banquet as “unbelievably decadent,” given the historical circumstances: Choron and his guests were, indeed, dining on the edge of a volcano.

The Taste of Sense, the Sense of Taste Possibly, Choron’s banquet might have seemed more decadent had it not been prepared under siege conditions, which makes the point, again, that decadence as a moral judgment depends on the social and political context. Ascertaining how taste itself might be construed as decadent, however, is a particularly fraught affair, not only because of the relativity of tastes, but also because it is hard to ascribe anything inherently decadent to a particular type of taste or kind of food. Strictly speaking, we are biologically equipped to detect only the five tastes determined in advance by the receptors on the human tongue: sweet, sour, bitter, salt, and umami, the receptor for protein-​rich savory foods. Each of these five tastes has its basis in the evolution of the species and has a role in survival: sweetness means the food is rich in sugars that provide needed energy, sourness suggests the food might have gone bad and is to be avoided, bitterness warns of poison, saltiness signals something the body needs to compensate for loss in sweat and urine, and umami something the body needs for growth.5 Molecular biologists verified the taste receptor for umami only at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, but their

548    David Weir and Jane Desmarais research confirmed the discovery made in 1909 by the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, who coined the Japanese word, derived from the adjective umai, “delicious.”6 Sadly, there is no taste receptor for “decadence,” and while the umami receptor might seem like the next best thing, we would do well to remember that tastes are not the same as flavors. The flavors that we detect in foods and call “taste” are produced by the complex interplay of sensations picked up by the five taste receptors on the tongue and approximately four hundred smell receptors in the nose. Moreover, the flavors we taste are produced not only by air inhaled through the nostrils but also by air exhaled after passing through the area where the nasal and oral passages connect.7 This retronasal effect accounts for the common usage that ascribes an ability to discriminate tastes to “a fine palate,” especially in the case of wine tasting. What we call taste is, in short, a complex electro-​biochemical event in which the chemicals in food interact with sense receptors on the tongue and in the nasal passage to produce nerve impulses transmitted to the brain, which are then interpreted, depending on the chemical stimulus, as Diet Coke® or Chateau d’Yquem. One can only wonder whether Immanuel Kant, had he had the same physiological knowledge of the way flavors are tasted that we do today, would have used the physical taste of sense as a metaphor for aesthetic judgment when he wrote his philosophical treatise Critique of Judgment (1790). That Kant based his critique of aesthetic judgment in philosophical speculation rather than scientific experimentation is not surprising. The scientific knowledge of taste was in its infancy, at best, when Kant wrote his treatise, but the word Ästhetik had been around since 1735 (OED), coined by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who went on to explain in 1750 that by aesthetics he meant “the science of sensory cognition.”8 This meaning is close to the Greek etymon αìσθητά, aistheta, “things perceptible by the senses,” derived from the feminine noun aesthesis, “sensation, feeling, perception,” and the verb aisthonomai (or aisthanesthai), “to perceive, to sense, to feel” (OED). This etymological emphasis on “feeling” and “perception” provides some insight: from the start, the study of aesthetics was concerned with how we feel about what we perceive. In modern terms, then, aesthetics involves some conflux of psychology and epistemology, or perhaps simply the interaction of two types of psychology, affective and cognitive. Historically, however, aesthetics belongs not to the discipline of psychology but to philosophy, which brings us back to Kant, who was not the first to speculate as to whether human beings were in possession of some sort of special faculty that allowed them to “relish” some things as more beautiful than others. This capacity to discriminate and judge some elements of nature and some works of art as preferable to others without knowing precisely why was likened to physical taste, “the sense that delivers the most immediate and decisive verdicts of liking and disliking.”9 Even though Kant did not invent but inherited the analogy, his comparison of the taste of sense to the sense of taste—​that is, aesthetic judgment—​was powerfully influential because of his argument that such a faculty deserves a place alongside the theoretical (or cognitive) and the moral (or practical) faculties, which had formed the basis of his two prior treatises, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).

Taste   549 Crucially, while the theoretical, cognitive faculty can be imparted by logic and the moral, practical faculty can be conveyed by action, the faculty of taste or aesthetic judgment cannot be communicated at all, because, as Kant puts it, “we cannot assume that the quality of sensations is the same in all subjects.”10 Perhaps we should not be surprised that Kant waited until after the onset of the French Revolution to validate the individual right to one’s own distinctively subjective tastes. The claim, however, is philosophical, not political, but that distinction may not matter so much as the fact that distinction itself is a subjective affair, not only in matters of the heart but also of the palate. As hard as it is for some people (like us) to believe, some other people may very well prefer the taste of Diet Coke® to Chateau d’Yquem: there really is no accounting for taste, or, as the medieval adage has it, de gustibus est non disputandem. One man’s fish is another man’s poisson.11 That said, a vast literature has arisen that purports to do precisely what cannot be done, and disputes aplenty have emerged around efforts to apply taste, in the aesthetic sense of judgment, to taste, in the physical sense of gustation. But when does aesthetic discrimination enter into discussion of the otherwise ordinary and absolutely necessary ingestion of food? Such discrimination is something altogether different from the basic recognition that food is necessary to life or the medical assessment that some foods are better for us than others. One of the first writers to consider the taste of taste itself was the provincial lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat-​Savarin (1755–​1826), who published Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste) in 1825, well after Kant’s ruminations on taste and the reformation of the restaurant, both of which occurred in the years after 1789. The full title of Brillat-​Savarin’s work is Physiologie du goût, ou Méditations de gastronomie transcendante; ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savants (The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendent Gastronomy, a Theoretical, Historical, and Contemporary Work, Dedicated to the Gastronomes of Paris, by a Professor, a Member of Several Literary and Scholarly Societies). The book has never gone out of print and is best known today to readers of English in the translation by another transcendent gastronome, M. F. K. Fisher (1908–​1992). If Brillat-​Savarin’s book is the gastronome’s bible, Fisher’s 1949 translation is the King James Version.12 The full title of the book is, appropriately, a mouthful—​a mixture of key terms, some of them relatively new (like gastronomie), and some of them jokes (like professeur). This “Professor” seems to be a persona that Brillat-​Savarin invented for strategic use at certain points, mainly when the author wishes to sound most authoritative, as in the opening section of the book, “Aphorisms of the Professor,” a list that includes a number of famous sayings, including the most famous one of all: “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”13 Brillat-​Savarin may have been a member of several learned societies, but he was no professor in fact; a magistrate, rather, and a provincial one at that, living most of his life in the improbably but perfectly named village of Belley.14 This “Professor” purports to offer a physiology of taste, to subject that most personal of human faculties to the sort of scientific, procedural certainty reserved for “the normal functioning of living organisms and their systems and organs” (OED). A recent commentator asks, “Can ‘taste’ (gout) . . . be the subject of physiology? Well, yes; that is, maybe; in fact, no.”15 Brillat-​Savarin’s admirer Honoré de Balzac was clearly

550    David Weir and Jane Desmarais in on the joke when he published his Physiology of Marriage a year after The Physiology of Taste (it might be possible to detail a physiology of sex, but marriage?). Balzac was later to append an essay on modern stimulants—​tea, sugar, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco—​to an 1839 edition of Brillat-​Savarin’s book to supplement what he thought was a neglected area of the Professor’s “physiological” analysis.16 But the word that is most important in Brillat-​Savarin’s title is gastronomie, which at the time was often used as a synonym of “gluttony,” a meaning which the author of The Physiology of Taste means to rectify, as another of the Professor’s aphorisms makes clear: “Men who stuff themselves and grow tipsy know neither how to eat nor how to drink” (15). Excess has no place in gastronomy so conceived, which perhaps accounts for the adjective transcendante in the title. Etymologically speaking, gastronomy is simply the science (-​nomy, from Greek -​ νομία) of the stomach (gastro-​, from Greek γαστήρ), formed on analogy with astronomy, the science of the stars. Gastronomy, then, should be “the science of eating,” except that it is not—​an art, rather. “Animals feed themselves; men eat, but only wise men know the art of eating,” the Professor explains, and later adds an aphorism to clarify the place of this art in the hierarchy of knowledge that includes astronomy: “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star” (15).

The Physiology of Decadence Brillat-​Savarin enters the discourse of decadence by way of Charles Baudelaire’s “Du vin et du haschich” (“On Wine and Hashish”), an article published in March 1851 in four installments in the newspaper Le messager de l’assemblée. In the first installment, Baudelaire refers to Brillat-​Savarin and “quotes” from The Physiology of Taste in the first two paragraphs: A very famous man who was also a great fool . . . dared to write, in a book on dining composed from the double viewpoint of diet and pleasure, the following in his entry on wine: “Father Noah, as old stories tell us, invented wine; it is a drink made from the fruit of the grapevine.” And then? After that, nothing at all: there is no more. You can skim the volume all you like, turn it over, read it forward and backward, . . . and you will find nothing more about wine in The Physiology of Taste by the illustrious and much-​respected Brillat-​Savarin than “Father Noah . . .” and “it is a drink . . .”17

To Baudelaire, such a limited view of “the profound joy of wine” (5) is insulting in the extreme, a springboard for a wonderfully inspired encomium on the glories of the grape. Indeed, wine itself is personified and given voice as an essential partner—​a brother, even—​of the artist: “Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A God we shall create together, and we will soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things” (6–​7). True, there is nothing like this in The Physiology of Taste, but what Brillat-​Savarin does have to say about wine is also nothing like what Baudelaire says he says. Here is the passage Baudelaire misquotes in such extreme fashion: “Wine, the most

Taste   551 agreeable of beverages, whether we owe it to Noah who planted the first vine or Bacchus who pressed the first grapes, dates from the beginning of the world” (149). Moreover, where Baudelaire alleges that Brillat-​Savarin says nothing further about wine, in fact he says much more, often conveying profound insight into the way wine and food interact, as in this complementary pair of aphorisms: “XI: The proper progression of courses in a dinner is from the most substantial to the lightest. XII: The proper progression of wines or spirits is from the mildest to the headiest and most aromatic” (15). Sometimes, Brillat-​ Savarin seems not so far from Baudelaire himself in his attribution of spiritual properties to the agreeable beverage, as when he concludes his recipe for a tuna omelet by saying that it should be eaten “thoughtfully and slowly,” then—​“Let it be floated downward with a fine old wine, and miracles will happen” (353). He also writes of a roast beef and turkey dinner he had when he was exiled in New York, making a point of the fact that, despite being in America (which explains the turkey, incidentally), “[w]‌e drank à la française, which is to say that wine was served from the very beginning: it was a really good claret” (357), using the word clairet,18 which had come to refer to the red wines of Bordeaux. Elsewhere, Bordeaux wines figure prominently in an important section of The Physiology of Taste titled “On Gourmandism,” where Brillat-​Savarin seeks to define and describe the art of eating in precise terms: There is perpetual confusion of gourmandism in its proper connotation with gluttony and voracity: from which I have concluded that lexicographers, no matter how knowing otherwise, are not numbered among those agreeable scholars who can munch pleasurably at a partridge wing au suprême and then top it off, little finger quirked, with a glass of Lafitte or Clos Vougeot. (155)

“Lafitte” refers, of course, to one of the premier cru Bordeaux vineyards, ranked best of only four chateaux so classified in 1855; “Clos Vougeot”—​or Clos de Vougeot—​is a Grand Cru Burgundy (the appellation grand cru being the highest classification in Burgundy, the reverse of Bordeaux, where grand cru is inferior to premier cru) planted by Cistercian monks in the twelfth century. Almost certainly, the wine was better made when Brillat-​Savarin drank it than it is today.19 A minor yet significant detail of the foregoing passage is that “quirked” little finger, which means that the glass is being held by the stem—​not the globe—​so as not to warm the wine in the palm of the hand (appropriate in the case of cognac, not so with Bordeaux or Burgundy). Brillat-​Savarin goes on to explain how wrong the lexicographers are about the meaning of gourmandism: They have completely, utterly forgotten that social gourmandism which unites an Attic elegance with Roman luxury and French subtlety, the kind which chooses wisely, asks for exacting and knowing preparation, savors with vigor, and sums up the whole with profundity: it is a rare quality, which might easily be named a virtue, and which is at least one of our surest sources of pure pleasure. (155)

Today, the combination of elegance, luxury, and subtlety might well serve as a description—​or physiology—​of the decadent sensibility, not least because, while the Romans

552    David Weir and Jane Desmarais did not have a word meaning “decadence,” their luxuria includes meanings—​such as “excess” and “extravagance”—​that come close to popular conceptions of decadence.20 The larger point here is that there is an abundance of material in The Physiology of Taste that might have appealed to Baudelaire had he read it more closely than he evidently did. The curious thing about Baudelaire’s excoriation of Brillat-​Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste is that the book might be regarded as a kind of model for Les paradis artificiels (Artificial Paradises, 1860), a “physiology” of a different kind of taste, one that does for hashish and opium what Brillat-​Savarin’s book did for food and drink. Both books mix history, personal experience, anecdote, and moral judgment in an effort to convey to the reader each author’s obsessive concern with the proper exercise of taste, even though, in Baudelaire’s case, there is something improper about the basis of such an exercise. The first section of Artificial Paradises is titled “A TASTE FOR THE INFINITE” (31), suggesting that Baudelaire knows a thing or two about certain dimensions of “transcendental gastronomy” that Brillat-​Savarin never contemplated. Moreover, the fact that Baudelaire concerns himself with questions of taste from the outset implies that, like Balzac, he means to supplement Brillat-​Savarin by detailing additional areas of gastronomic interest, even though he does not use the term gastronomie. Possibly, he is supplementing Balzac’s supplementation of Brillat-​Savarin,21 because Baudelaire is careful to exclude both alcohol and “inhalants” (which evidently refers to tobacco), two of the five substances Balzac discusses, as unhelpful in the creation of “what I call the Artificial Ideal” because “drink . . . quickly gives rise to physical furor and drains the physical force,” while “the excessive use of [inhalants], even while rendering man’s imagination more subtle, will gradually sap his physical strength” (33). Baudelaire’s concern here with preserving bodily health while ingesting addictive substances that he knew to be harmful—​ he refers to the habitual use of hashish as “a slow suicide” (73)—​is one of those paradoxes that characterizes the poet’s decadence more generally. The paradox plays out in Artificial Paradises primarily as the price the poet has to pay for inspiration, just as “moral health” is achieved only after “guilty orgies of the imagination” (31). Baudelaire does not use the word décadence in the book, but he doesn’t have to: when he observes that “the common proverb ‘all roads lead to Rome’ ” can be applied “to the moral world” (33), it is clear that the decadence of imperial Rome is part of his meaning (the other part is that faith in Catholic Rome is the sinner’s only hope). The moral dualism that renders the “abnormal condition of the spirit as a true state of grace, a sort of magic mirror” (32), such that “the vices of man . . . contain the proof . . . of his taste for the infinite” (32) serves as a template for the artistic dualism whereby the visionary poet must first go through the abnormal, depraved, and “dangerous exercise” (52) of smoking hashish. But the exercise is worth it because “the drug sharpens the senses and the powers of perception, of taste, sight, smell, hearing—​all participate equally in this procession. The eyes pierce the infinite” (50). There is nothing like this linkage of depravity and creativity in Brillat-​Savarin, which may explain why Baudelaire reacted so strongly against him. On the contrary, Brillat-​Savarin is careful to distinguish the gourmand from the decadent, though he, like Baudelaire, does not use the word. Fisher does, however, in her translation of a passage about reclining on couches to dine, a practice Brillat-​Savarin says was imported from Sidon (both a region and city in Lebanon), a land of “soft and voluptuous people”: “This refinement . . . smacks of

Taste   553 decadence [la faiblesse (255), ‘weakness’]” (288–​89). He also describes the art of eating in such a way as to make it the very opposite of decadence when he decries “the excesses of Vitellius” (162), the Roman emperor notorious for the vice of gluttony. Years later, the portly figure of Vitellius (Figure 28.3) would appear in Thomas Couture’s The Romans of the Decadence (1847), a historical painting allegorizing the political decline of contemporary France, thereby cementing a connection that Brillat-​Savarin might well have found felicitous: culinary excess and political corruption.

Figure 28.3.  Detail of Thomas Couture, The Romans of the Decadence (1847). Source: Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Wikimedia Commons).

554    David Weir and Jane Desmarais

Black Feasts and Food Metaphors The comment concerning “les excès de Vitellius” (139) is about as close as Brillat-​Savarin comes to suggesting that decadence might play a role in dining. Indeed, the idea of excess is one of the more common connotations of decadence, not least because of historical and fictional accounts of the culinary habits of the ancient Romans. The Roman historian Suetonius says Vitellius served “two thousand of the choicest fish and seven thousand birds” at one feast (even though he does not indicate how many guests were invited, the numbers still seem impressive). Suetonius also says the insatiable Vitellius ate off a platter so large it was dubbed “the shield of Minerva.” In this platter the emperor “blended the livers of scar-​fish, the brains of pheasants and peacocks, the tongues of flamingos, and the innards of lampreys.”22 His appetite was not just insatiable but also indecent, since Vitellius was given to “snatching bits of meat and sacrificial cake among the altars, almost from the fire, and eating them on the spot.”23 In the case of certain other emperors, excess is the least of it. What stands out as decadent in the supposed diet of the boy-​emperor Elagabalus (c. 204–​222 CE; r. 218–​222)—​who is best known for smothering his dinner guests with flowers—​is a mixture of the cruel, the exotic, and the artificial: [H]‌e frequently ate camels-​heels and also cox-​combs taken from the living birds, and the tongues of peacocks and nightingales. . . . He served to the palace-​ attendants . . . huge platters heaped up with the viscera of mullets, and flamingo-​ brains, partridge-​eggs, thrush-​brains, and the heads of parrots, pheasants, and peacocks.24

The emperor was also said to “season” his food with precious metals and jewelry, “serving . . . peas with gold-​pieces, lentils with onyx, beans with amber, and rice with pearls.”25 These “historical” accounts of the eating habits of such emperors as Vitellius and Elagabalus are really moral judgments that have little value as documents of the way ancient Romans actually ate. Paradoxically, the fictional account of the feast of the nouveau-​riche freedman Trimalchio in Petronius’s Satyricon includes some details that offer a more reliable sense of the Roman diet, such as “dormice dipped in honey and sprinkled with poppy-​seed,” a dish the narrator of the novel calls “refined.”26 Refinement is coupled with such a high degree of extravagance and artifice—​an extravagance of artifice, really—​that the epithet decadent seems an especially apt descriptor of the fictional feast. These examples from Roman antiquity help to establish artifice and excess as hallmarks of decadent dining. In the imaginations of those writers—​J.-​K. Huysmans’s especially—​who now form the canon of late nineteenth-​century literary decadence, however, the role of food and drink in the cultivation of either moral depravity or aesthetic refinement is extremely limited. Moreover, that double aspect of decadence in Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884) is largely confined to the past in the

Taste   555 fictional biography of the novel’s protagonist, the Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes. Early in the first chapter Huysmans describes the elaborate funeral banquet “in memory of the host’s virility, lately but only temporarily deceased,” that Des Esseintes stages for his friends, all “men of letters” who are presumably equipped to appreciate the aesthetics of the feast, which relies for its effect on the rigorous coordination of all aspects of the dinner to the colorless color scheme signifying mourning: the dining room is “draped in black” and looks out on a garden lately redesigned with “paths . . . strewn with charcoal” and an “ornamental pond edged with black basalt and filled with ink”; the guests are served by “naked negresses” and eat off “black bordered plates” while “a hidden orchestra played funeral marches.” Most important, they eat black food—​ “caviare, . . . black puddings, . . . game served in sauces the colour of liquorice and boot-​ polish, truffle jellies, chocolate creams,” etc.—​and drink black wines “[f]‌rom dark tinted glasses,” before finishing the evening with more black beverages, such as “kvass, porter and stout.”27 At no point is the taste of the food so much as mentioned, but the relative unimportance of taste may be what makes the dinner decadent, with gustation subordinated to aesthetics: this is gourmandizing for the eye, not for the palate. The real-​life prototype for Des Esseintes’s fictional black feast is either a black banquet served by the Roman emperor Domitian (51–​96 CE), described by the Greek historian Cassius Dio (b. 163 CE), or a funerary dinner staged by Grimod de la Reynière (1758–​1838), who has an important place in food history because of the role he played, along with his contemporary Brillat-​Savarin, in developing the idea of the gourmand. For Domitian, the purpose of the black feast was to terrify his guests—​“the foremost men among the senators and knights”28—​into thinking that the meal was to be their last. Domitian invited the Roman noblemen to dine at night, alone—​that is, without their usual retinue of slaves and attendants. According to Dio, Domitian prepared a room that was pitch black on every side, ceiling, walls and floor, and had made ready bare couches of the same colour resting on the uncovered floor; . . . And first he set beside each of [his guests] a slab shaped like a gravestone, and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-​inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet. After all this all the things that are commonly offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits were likewise set before the guests, all of them black and in dishes of a similar colour. (335–​36)

Even though the Domitian dinner is an exercise in imperial power, it has much in common with Des Esseintes’s black feast, notably the consistent color scheme which extends to the food itself. The Grimod dinner also had a political purpose, the host having invited some three hundred guests, only twenty-​two (or sixteen—​accounts vary) of whom would actually dine, with the remainder relegated to spectators viewing from a mezzanine. The dinner took place on February 1, 1783, near the end of the ancien régime Grimod despised. When the guests arrived they first had to get past a sentry who asked if they had come

556    David Weir and Jane Desmarais at the behest of M. de la Reynière, “oppressor of the people” or of M. de la Reynière “defender of the people,” the former a reference to Grimod’s tax-​farming father and the latter to the pre-​Revolutionary son.29 Those fortunate (?) enough to dine had to pass through a succession of rooms, in one of which “choir boys burnt funeral incense,” before finally arriving at the banquet hall, “eerily lit by candles and antique lamps, to encounter a table set with a catafalque as centrepiece, while each guest had his (or her, in two disguised cases) own coffin placed upright behind his chair.”30 That last detail suggests that Grimod found inspiration in the funeral stele Domitian had used as place cards for that earlier mordant dinner, but the food itself at the Grimod dinner was not, in fact, black. Included in the nine to twenty courses (accounts vary) was a variety of pork dishes, evidently in honor of the host’s hog-​butchering grandfather. The dinner started around 10:00 p.m. and went on until dawn; those who tried to leave early—​including the spectators—​encountered locked doors. One culinary historian describes Grimod’s funerary feast as “a prime example of a dinner party as an act of aggression.”31 The Grimod dinner is pretty clearly a parody of the sort of royal feasting Rossellini represents in his 1966 film, including the practice of having an audience for the banquet. This spectacular dimension in elaborate dining had been around since the Renaissance,32 but where the nobles who watched Louis XIV dine felt honored to do so, the audience for Grimod’s mortuary banquet were made to feel uncomfortable. In this respect the imaginary black dinner that Des Esseintes stages for his bachelor friends stands out as different, since the host’s purpose is clearly to entertain his guests, not to awe or intimidate them. Des Esseintes’s black feast, however, is like both the Domitian and Grimod dinners in that it is indeed staged, complete with a set (the black-​draped dining room), lighting (“an eerie green light” [13]), costumes (however scant: the Black women serving the men wear “only slippers and cloth of silver embroidered with tears” [13]), and accompanying music (the funeral marches [13]). The theatrical quality of Grimod’s funerary feast is particularly noteworthy because one of the ways Grimod supported himself before the Revolution was by writing theater reviews. After the Revolution, he became the first professional critic to review restaurants,33 thereby cementing the connection between high-​end dining and “atmosphere,” which is nothing if not the restaurant equivalent of theatrical mise ​en s​ cène. The Domitian feast has the black food, the Grimod banquet does not; both are staged, but Grimod’s funerary banquet is more theatrical (he includes an audience of non-​diners, after all). So perhaps the fictional black dinner in Against Nature is a composite of its historical precedents in Roman and Revolutionary history. Huysmans turns his satiric eye to the culinary habits of his protagonist one more time in Against Nature when he has Des Esseintes take nourishment in the form of nutritive enemas near the end of the novel. The enema episode therefore balances nicely against the black feast earlier, both related to some physiological dysfunction: impotence in ­chapter 1, indigestion in ­chapter 15. Aside from the black feast and the enema dinner, however, none of Des Esseintes’s culinary experiences can be called decadent. Early on, the character is forced for medical reasons to dine on “plain and simple” fare because his former excesses “no longer allowed him to enjoy heavy or elaborate dishes” (19). Later, he makes an imaginary trip to “London” by dining in Paris establishments that cater to

Taste   557 British tourists, eating such robust English food as “roast beef and potatoes” (126). The culinary choice here, like Chef Choron’s ironic preparation of camel à l’Anglaise, reveals what decadent cuisine is not, British food being so far removed from decadent dining that it has restorative effects, allowing Des Esseintes to recover his appetite, however briefly. Huysmans does not detail the former cuisine that has wrecked the health of Des Esseintes and rendered “the feebleness of his stomach” such an impediment to elaborate gastronomy that, like Rossellini’s Louis XIV, the character is forced to dine on “boiled eggs” (19). But the author does offer hints of what types of foods he considers decadent whenever he describes the literature of decadence. Food metaphors are used to characterize both the decadence of Roman literature and that of Huysmans’s French contemporaries. Latin literature from the fourth century onward is said to have “decomposed like venison, dropping to pieces at the same time as the civilization of the Ancient World” falls apart (33). Such literature has a “gamey flavour” (33): the French original is faisandage,34 a term derived from faisan, “pheasant,” and faisandé, “gamey.”35 Venison, likewise, has the quality of faisandage, a type of richness or over-​ ripeness not found in beef or the meat of other farmed animals. In addition, the meat of both pheasant and deer has aristocratic associations because the animals were typically raised on the grounds of the great chateaux and hunted as a form of recreation (a deer hunt, for example, appears as a major segment in La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV). Des Esseintes also finds the quality of faisandage in the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, its “gamey style” (“le style faisandé,” 223) marking the decadence of the Third Republic in France as surely as the gaminess of the style of Petronius presaged the decline of Rome (183). Huysmans describes not only individual authors but also literary forms—​one in particular—​in terms borrowed from culinary analysis: “the prose poem represented in Des Esseintes’s eyes the dry juice, the osmazome of literature, the essential oil of art,” a “succulent extract concentrated in a single drop” that can be “found in Baudelaire, and also in those poems of Mallarmé’s that he savoured with such rare delight” (183–​84). The basic meaning of the food metaphor is clear enough even without the key term osmazome, now obscure but widespread in the nineteenth century thanks in part to Brillat-​ Savarin: a good prose poem is so artfully condensed that the reader-​gourmand tastes an entire feast in the smallest bite. In Brillat-​Savarin’s “Meditation 5: On Food in General,” the osmazome is of paramount importance as a specific compound in red meats, from whence come “the special tangy juices of venison and game” (75), a quality that squares nicely with Huysmans’s focus on faisandage. Today, we know that the osmazome is not some special compound (analogous to ethyl alcohol in whisky and spirits), as Brillat-​ Savarin thought, but “a myth created when analytical chemistry was in its infancy. . . . It is not the sapid element in meat; it is only one of various flavorsome extracts that can be drawn from it.”36 Like all of his culinary contemporaries, however, Huysmans would have believed that the osmazome was exactly what Brillat-​Savarin said it was, namely the compound “which has made the reputation of the richest consommés, which once made toast soaked in bouillon a favorite restorative” (75). That Huysmans should use the

558    David Weir and Jane Desmarais osmazome, once thought to be the key compound in restorative foods, as a metaphor for the most concentrated and deliciously decadent literature is rich indeed.

Conclusion Like almost all the fin-​de-​siècle figures now canonized as decadent—​Baudelaire, Rachilde, Oscar Wilde, Mallarmé, Arthur Symons, and many more—​Huysmans’s bourgeois roots run deep, his exploration of decadence being, as a result, mostly a middle-​class fantasy of the tastes and habits of a deteriorating aristocratic class. His removal—​and a like removal on the part of other decadent authors—​from actual aristocratic experience might be one explanation for the near-​total absence in the literature of decadence of references to the kind of decadent dining we associate with the aristocracy—​something rich, excessive, elaborate, artificial, and unnatural. But that association might just be a middle-​class moral judgment itself, one that has to be regarded as highly paradoxical—​precisely because of that earlier dissemination of aristocratic tastes in food into the rising middle class in the wake of the French Revolution. Aristocratic dining, in short, is now itself bourgeois, which means that when it comes to food the decadent author intent on displaying his anti-​bourgeois credentials is faced with an insurmountable conundrum. Neither Huysmans, nor Wilde, nor Rachilde, nor any other decadent writer fully addresses the issue of decadent taste in dining because to do so would force the confession—​to paraphrase Louis XIV—​“Le bourgeois, c’est moi!”

Notes 1. See Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. 2. See Thomas McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), especially the foreword by R. W. Apple Jr., for Chez Panisse. Discussion of The French Laundry and Per Se is based on firsthand experience. 3. Stéphane Hénaut and Jeni Mitchell, A Bite-​Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment (New York: New Press, 2018), 222. All the details of the banquet are taken from this source. 4. The Pennsylvania physician Robert Lowry Sibbet, in Paris for the duration of the siege, provides a justly celebrated first-​person account in The Siege of Paris (Harrisburg, PA: Meyers, 1892). In mid-​February of 1871, after the siege had been lifted, he observes that “[t]‌he domestic animals, the companions of man, have all disappeared. I have not seen a living dog in a month—​not even a poodle” (436). 5. John Krebs, Food: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 22. 6. Bernd Lindemann, Yoko Ogiwara, and Yuzo Ninomiya, “The Discovery of Umami,” Chemical Senses 27, no. 9 (November 2002): 843–​44. 7. Krebs, Food, 24–​25.

Taste   559 8. Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975), 156–​57. 9. Beardsley, Aesthetics, 180. 10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Albert Hofstadler and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 297. 11. It is hard to say who first made this pun, based on the common adage that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” 12. Joan Reardon, “The Art of Eating: In Celebration,” in M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004), xiii. 13. Jean Anthelme Brillat-​Savarin, The Physiology of Taste or, Mediations of Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Vintage, 2009), 15. Further references cited parenthetically. 14. Fisher, 15, provides a brief biography of Brillat-​Savarin in her translation of The Physiology of Taste. 15. Bill Buford, introduction to Brillat-​Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, x. 16. See Joshua Wilner, “Economies of Excess in Brillat-​Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire,” In Romantic Gastronomies, ed. Denise Gigante (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, University of Colorado Boulder, 2007), https://​romantic-​circles.org/​praxis/​gastronomy/​wilner/​ wilner_​essay.html. 17. Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing, 1996), 3. Further references cited parenthetically. 18. Brillat-​Savarin, Physiologie du goût (Paris: Charpentier, 1865), 315. Further references cited parenthetically. 19. Jancis Robinson, ed., The Oxford Companion to Wine, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 393, 766. 20. For a discussion of Roman luxury, see Jerry Toner, “Decadence in Ancient Rome,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 15–​29. 21. Wilner, “Economies of Excess,” argues that Balzac effectively mediates Brillat-​Savarin for Baudelaire, “[c]‌oming between the two” to “offer indications as to how” the “progressive transformation of the consuming subject into a figure of human perversity, partially occulted [sic] in Brillat-​Savarin, spectacularly displayed in Baudelaire,” comes about. 22. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, trans. Catharine Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 255. This type of exotic Roman cuisine was satirized in the 1979 film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, set in the first century CE, when the title character hawks his wares: “Larks’ tongues. Wrens’ livers. Chaffinch brains. Jaguars’ earlobes. Wolf nipple chips. Get ’em while they’re hot. They’re lovely. Dromedary pretzels, only half a denar. Tuscany fried bats.” See Terry Jones, dir., Monty Python’s Life of Brian: The Immaculate Edition (1979; Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008), DVD. 23. Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, 256. 24. David Magie, trans., Historia Augusta (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 2:147. 25. Magie, Historia Augusta, 2:147. 26. Petronius, The Satyricon, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24. Patrick Fass, Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Room, trans. Shaun

560    David Weir and Jane Desmarais Whiteside (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 79ff., treats Trimalchio’s feast as a basically reliable record of Roman dining, despite the satire. 27. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 2003), 13. 28. Cassius Dio Cocceianus, Dio’s Roman History, trans. Earnest Cary, 9 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1925), 8:335. Further references cited parenthetically. 29. Phyllis P. Bober, “The Black or Hell Banquet,” In Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, 1990: Feasting and Fasting, ed. Harlan Walker (London: Prospect Books, 1991), 55. 30. Bober, “Black or Hell Banquet,” 55. 31. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789 (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 227. 32. Bober, “Black or Hell Banquet,” 55. 33. Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-​Promotion during the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 77. 34. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, À rebours, ed. Pierre Waldner (Paris: Garnier-​Flammarion, 1978), 89. Further references cited parenthetically. 35. For a more extended discussion of faisandage, see David Weir, “Afterword: Decadent Taste,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 223–​24. 36. Hervé This, Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 85. This explains that “the French chemist Louis Jacques Thenard . . . coined the term ‘osmazome,’ based on the Greek osmé, ‘odor,’ and zomos, ‘soup’ ” in an 1806 article in the Bulletin de la faculté de médecine de Paris.

Further Reading Antosa, Silvia, Mariaconcetta Costantini, and Emanuela Ettorre, eds. Transgressive Appetites: Deviant Food Practices in Victorian Literature and Culture. Milan: Mimesis, 2021. Bober, Phyllis P. “The Black or Hell Banquet.” In Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, 1990: Feasting and Fasting, edited by Harlan Walker, 55–​57. London: Prospect Books, 1991. Fass, Patrick. Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Room. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Hénaut, Stéphane, and Jeni Mitchell. A Bite-​Sized History of France: Gastronomic Tales of Revolution, War, and Enlightenment. New York: New Press, 2018. Krebs, John. Food: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. McNamee, Thomas. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-​Promotion during the Age of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Pitte, Jean-​Robert. “The Rise of the Restaurant.” In Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Albert Sonnenfeld, 471–​80. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Spang, Rebecca. The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. This, Hervé. Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

Taste   561 Weir, David. “Afterword: Decadent Taste.” In Decadence and the Senses, edited by Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé, 219–​28. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Wilner, Joshua. “Economies of Excess in Brillat-​ Savarin, Balzac, and Baudelaire.” In Romantic Gastronomies, edited by Denise Gigante. Romantic Circles Praxis Series. Boulder: University of Colorado Boulder, 2007. https://​roman​tic-​circ​les.org/​pra​xis/​gas​tron​ omy/​wil​ner/​wilne​r_​es​say.html.

Chapter 29

Touc h Unfeeling Decadence Jane Desmarais

Textures, surfaces, and skins were a source of fascination to decadent writers in the late nineteenth century seeking to evoke strong physical and psychological sensations in the reader, and in the catalogues of collectible items that characterize much decadent literature, the sense of touch is often invoked. The sumptuous piling on of references to tactile objects and materials such as embroidered silk or antique vellum is contrived to make reading an embodied experience and the reader temporarily surrender any desire for narrative progression. Often this tactile surrender comes with pleasurable and erotic overtones. Holding an old book, for example, can be a decadently sensual experience. As Holbrook Jackson reminds us in The Anatomy of Bibliomania, the Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, the protagonist in J.-​K. Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), likes to fondle reverently his 1585 octavo edition of the Satyricon, and Arthur Symons declared that reading the first edition of Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance on ribbed paper left him with the “feel of it still in my fingers.”1 This essay explores the representation of touch in a selection of naturalist and decadent novels in the contexts of late nineteenth-​century consumerism and widespread fears about contamination from sexually transmitted disease, principally syphilis. It argues that while the tangible material world does matter to decadence (Émile Zola), touching the (female) body engenders fear and disgust that often leads to fragmentation, unfeeling, and aversion (Huysmans). Touching the body or body part, if touching occurs at all, is often portrayed as a transgressive and dangerous act that threatens to contaminate and corrupt (Rachilde, Octave Mirbeau). In Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (Pleasure, 1889), a novel that explores the themes of beauty and desire, touch is invoked at least as much as the other senses and is at times foregrounded in the haptoglyphic2 and synecdochic imagery of hands and fingers, but the tactile act serves only to highlight the limitations of possession, of seeking to touch too much.

Touch   563

Unfeeling Decadence Sometimes the tactile act engenders disgust, or, as David Weir proposes, a “delight in disgust, . . . delight in things that people who have normal taste react to with revulsion. . . . a taste for the distasteful.”3 This is the condition of the Englishwoman Clara in Mirbeau’s novel Le jardin des supplices (Torture Garden), who is enchanted by decomposition and decay. “You’d think we had been transported beyond life into the imagination and poetry of the age of old legends!” she enthuses to the anonymous narrator as they pick their way through the “pads of brown blood, congealed pus and greenish tissue” of the human remains strewn about the Chinese torture garden. “Doesn’t it leave you awestruck?” she asks. “I feel like I’m living in a dream here!”4 By combining references to textures and tactile sensations with strong odors, tastes, and sounds, Mirbeau reminds us of our primitive, animal drives and of the suffering involved in sentience. The “man with the ravaged face” answers his own question, “Why do painful or joyful things need to be proved? . . . They just need to be felt” (34).5 Despite the decadent emphasis on excess, the preponderance of beautiful material objects—​the hard shiny surface of Japanese lacquer inlay, the fluffy softness of a powder-​ puff, the smooth iridescence of a silk shawl, and so on—​and the pursuit, sometimes simultaneous, of extreme sensations of pleasure and pain, the act of touching in decadent writing does not lead to deep emotion or feeling, and there is remarkably little emphasis, or less emphasis than we might imagine, on touch as an isolated sense. Decadent descriptions of objects and bodies tend to be externalized and intersensory, sometimes excessively so. Touch tends to be blended sympathetically with other senses, especially sight, but also sound and smell, but it is rarely explored on its own terms.6 Touching the body is a fraught boundary-​crossing experience, one that confuses the ideas of attraction and repulsion and inverts the religious notion of touch as part of a process that is beneficent and healing. Although sexual desire is a recurrent theme, sex does not play so great a role in decadent literature, or in decadence, as is popularly supposed. The intimate sex act is often kept at arm’s length and tends to be remembered, imagined, ventriloquized, or fantasized, rather than experienced directly. We find invocations not to touch spoken by both male and female characters, and even cases of haphephobia (aversion to touch), particularly in certain femmes fatales who seek more refined and transcendent forms of beauty and pleasure. In Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893), for example, the exchanges between the intangible Salome (“like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver”) and the untouchable prophet Jokanaan (“Back, daughter of Sodom! Touch me not. Profane not the temple of the Lord God”) constitute the main dynamic that culminates in the tragic finale.7 Salome’s transgressive desire and Jokanaan’s stern rebuff, “Touch me not,” perverts the original biblical message of hope spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection (John 20:16–​17), but Wilde is not the only writer to do this. As Guy Ducrey has shown, the phrase “Touch me not!” recurs in the work of a number of European playwrights and writers around 1900, including Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean Lorrain, Victorien Sardou, D’Annunzio, and Rachilde, who all use it as a leitmotif to explore themes of pessimism, despair, violence, and possession.8 In Wilde’s

564   Jane Desmarais play, the prohibition not to touch is interpreted by Salome as a provocation when she fantasizes about possessing the prophet’s body in other ways (“I love not thy hair. . . . It is thy mouth that I desire, Jokanaan”). In his illustrations, Aubrey Beardsley embroiders the themes of desire and possession in Wilde’s play and creates a playful yet powerful tension between hands and bodies that appear both to touch and not to touch. The right hand of Wilde as Master of Ceremonies in Enter Herodias (Figure 29.1), for example, gestures to a large flame, the tip of which just skims the disguised erection of the bald grotesque figure delicately holding the edge of Herodias’s cloak, and in the first version of The Toilette of Salome, hands both visible and invisible hint at erotic play.9

Figure 29.1.  Aubrey Beardsley, Enter Herodias (ca. 1893). Source: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org.

Touch   565

Zola: The Shopper-​Flâneuse The focus on the sense of touch, or not touching, differentiates decadents from the previous generation of poets and writers. For example, the world of Charles Dickens is very noisy and often smelly, but it rarely involves the elaborate kinds of touch explored by decadent authors. In Bleak House (1852), Lady Dedlock may be the extreme case of the untouchable, but even Krook’s fondling of papers and letters lacks the heady mixture of sensory pleasures explored by the decadents. We get closer to tactile decadence with French naturalism and Zola’s Rougon-​Macquart cycle of novels (1870–​1893), especially those that focus on the consumerist paradise of modern Paris, the arcades and department stores with scenic interiors and luxury goods on display. In the nineteenth century, the sense of touch was generally regarded in Aristotelian terms as a “lower” sense and the basis for all the other senses.10 As Constance Classen confirms, touch was typified as “the crudest and most uncivilized mode of perception,” associated with the “animal” life of the body.11 Notions of “high” and “low” culture were formalized by natural history writers, like Lorenz Oken, who created a “sensory scale of ‘races’ ” that positioned the “ ‘civilized’ European ‘eye man’ ” at the top and the “African ‘skin man,’ who used touch as his primary sensory modality,” at the bottom: “Societies that touched much, it was said, did not think much and did not bear much thinking about—​except by anthropologists.”12 In the late nineteenth century, however, cultural notions about touching in Europe underwent a transformation. The emergence of a new consumer culture permitted and encouraged public touching in the service of the exchange and sale of goods. “A number of artists and writers responded,” Classen notes, “by attempting to recreate in their work the sensuous, holistic qualities they associated with a preindustrial worldview.”13 In Au bonheur des dames (The Ladies’ Paradise, 1883), Zola conveys just how sensually overwhelming the new consumerism could be. Focusing on the silk department in a modern department store modeled on Le Bon Marché, he uses a series of water metaphors to describe the damasks, brocades, and silks on display, using free indirect discourse to give us the perspectives of the salesmen and the women shoppers. At first the imagery is soothing, romantic, and sensuous, and there are references to the “satins and duchess silks . . . rolling in great waves,” the “deep bed of velvets” like a “still lake in which reflections of the sky . . . seemed to dance,” but when the perspective shifts to the crush of women shoppers ogling the rolls of material, Zola describes potential annihilation: “Faced with this wild cataract, they all remained standing there, filled with the secret fear of being caught up in the overflow of all this luxury and with an irresistible desire to throw themselves into it and be lost.”14 Zola’s department store is a decadent sensorium, a space where human avarice and gluttonous appetites are barely contained: “The salesmen were all occupied in measuring this silk; the pale light of the unfolded lengths could be seen above the customers’ hats, . . . there were not enough arms to satisfy the greedy, outstretched hands of the customers.”15 The

566   Jane Desmarais clustering of images—​the repetitive and adept movement of the salesmen’s fingers along the sticks, the sound of the scissor blades chomping down on the silk, and the grasping hands of the shoppers—​cross-​refer the senses of sight, hearing, and touch, contaminating the world of commerce with the processes of digestion, and convey the idea that vulgar appetite triumphs over taste and refinement. Zola’s oversaturated descriptions were not well-​received by the critics who regarded them as the product of a deranged mind. His detractors complained that his descriptions were excessively visceral, and in the mid-​1890s he was invited by the psychiatrist and journalist Édouard Toulouse to participate in a medical study to establish his “intellectual and physiological competencies.” The tests measured everything, from his heart rate, vision, smell, memory, sense of touch, and sensory associations, and he passed them all with flying colors.16 The emergence of the department store was a key feature of urban modernity. One of the aims of stores like Le Bon Marché in Paris, Selfridges in London, and Marshall Field’s in Chicago was to liberate the sense of touch from its cultural associations with vulgar animal urges and channel it toward a consumer experience.17 The middle-​class female shopper was encouraged to wander around at an unhurried pace, marvel at the luxury, and touch the goods on display. Like the temperate zone of a hothouse, the department store was meant to offer a comfortable sensory experience—​not too hot, not too cold—​but unlike a small shop or a museum, it was not a curated space, with goods on shelves for looking at only; on the contrary, department stores engaged the senses in a way that fostered an appetite for shopping—​for looking, smelling, and touching—​ that would culminate in a buying spree. In The Ladies’ Paradise, the women become shopper-​flâneuses, both participants in and observers of all the material wonders of the consumerist world: In the middle of the department, an exhibition of summer silks was illuminating the hall with the brilliancy of dawn, like the rising of a star amidst the most delicate shades of daylight—​pale pink, soft yellow, clear blue, a shimmering scarf of all the colours of the rainbow. There were foulards as fine as a cloud, surahs lighter than the down blown from the trees, satiny Peking fabrics as soft as the skin of a Chinese virgin. And there were also pongees from Japan, tussores and corahs from India, not to mention light French silks—​fine stripes, tiny checks, floral patterns, every design imaginable—​which conjured up visions of ladies in furbelows walking on May mornings beneath great trees in a park.18

The atmospheric luminosity of this scene, together with the evocation of virtual travelling to all corners of the globe, conveys both “the sky’s the limit” ambition of the department store and Zola’s wry awareness about exaggerated commercial claims. Like Des Esseintes, who in Against Nature builds a ship’s cabin in his dining-​room in order to “enjoy the rapidly succeeding, indeed almost simultaneous, sensations of a long voyage,”19 the women shoppers are invited to “reach for the stars” and imagine traveling to far-​flung places while in reality going nowhere.

Touch   567

Huysmans: Touch as Trauma The exhilaration and awe of the avid consumer confronted with the shopping sublime in Zola’s novels finds a darker, decadent expression in the work of Huysmans, who had been a visitor to Zola’s Médan retreat outside Paris, where writers of the naturalist school gathered to discuss their work. Huysmans based his early prose style on the principles of Zola’s naturalism, but by the time he came to write his decadent novel Against Nature he had abandoned the social-​scientific approach of Zola for a style that reflected obsessiveness and interiorization. The undiscriminating and greedy grasp of the modern consumer in Zola’s naturalist fiction gives way in Huysmans’s writings to a less social, more private, solipsistic sense of touch and an aversion to intimacy. For Des Esseintes, the proximity of other people in the urban spaces, the chance and fleeting physical encounters with strangers, are more than his nerves can bear: “one touch of a human form, brushed against in the street, had been one of his most excruciating torments” (22). Against Nature contains an abundance of Zolaesque descriptions that include long intersensory lists of objects, materials, and textures, but the most concentrated and tactile part of the novel is c­ hapter 8, devoted to descriptions of Des Esseintes’s collection of exotic plants.20 He associates different types of flowers with different social classes, expressing “pity for the lower-​class flowers, wilting in the slums under the foul breath of sewers and sinks” and a loathing for “those that go with the cream-​ and-​gold drawing-​rooms in new houses.” Unlike the shopper-​flâneuses in Zola’s department store, he exercises a more refined consumerism, maintaining “his admiration . . . for the rare and aristocratic plants from distant lands” (96). His purchases of rare specimens from the specialist greenhouses in the Avenue de Châtillon and in the Aulnay Valley, however, leave him unsatisfied with the real thing, so he collects fake plants made from a list of materials found in a theatrical costumier, “gums and threads, percalines and taffetas, papers and velvets” (73). Still not satisfied with real plants that look as if they are made out of dress material and artificial flowers that have the appearance of the real thing, Des Esseintes also purchases strange species of tropical plants that imitate artificial plants that look real. The plants are unloaded and fill the entrance hall of the house at Fontenay, and in their colors, textures, and forms the plants imitate, even surpass, man-​made materials, not to mention animal and human tissue. In a list that imitates the progression of syphilis, from the discoloration of the skin at the onset to ulceration and chancres later on (as well as the mercury “cure”), he describes plants that exhibited livid flesh marbled with roseola and damasked with dartres; others were the bright pink of scars that are healing, or the brownish tint of scabs in the process of forming; others were blistering from cautery or puffing up from burns; still others revealed hairy surfaces pitted by ulcers and embossed with chancres; and then, finally,

568   Jane Desmarais there were some which looked as though they were covered with dressings, plastered with black mercurial ointment, with green unguents made from atropine, or sprinkled with the glittery-​yellow dust of iodoform powder. (74)

The catalogue of skins, substances, and surfaces in this passage is rhetorical exaggeration, blending the discourses of colonialism, medicine, and botany. Des Esseintes’s flowers evoke the fear of invasion, or reverse colonization, by the barbarian tribes of French military outposts in Africa and the Orient, but they also suggest invasion anxieties at an individual level about sex, sexuality, and intimacy. Highly infectious, rapidly spread by prostitutes and their middle-​class clients in the cities, and with a capacity for trans-​generational infection, syphilis was regarded as an “open secret” by government officials who understood the disease as a threat to social stability and the national health, even as its symbolic power gained momentum with medical advances. The period from the 1880s to the 1930s heralded a new microbiological understanding of the disease, with a breakthrough in 1905, when Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffmann discovered the bacterial origins in Spirochaeta pallida (Treponema pallidum) and August von Wassermann developed an antibody test, but the terrifying pervasiveness of the disease caused widespread panic. In early medical accounts, the association between syphilis and the moral impurity of the lower classes (or, as Dr. Rumler put it, “the disaster-​breeding bosom of worthless love”)21 contributed to a forceful rhetoric against the poor. Late nineteenth-​century France, in crisis over falling birth rates, perceived venereal disease as an epidemic; it was feared as a terrible social and economic blight. Ideas of sexual excess and social degeneration in the medico-​scientific discourses on notions of hereditarianism sent conservative critics into fevers of moral outrage. The gendered conceptualization of syphilis shifts in the mid-​nineteenth century to incorporate both the male and female body, but the untouchable syphilitic body of the prostitute persists as a leitmotif in the work of naturalist, decadent, symbolist, and psychological novelists, including Guy de Maupassant, Robert Caze, Paul Adam, Lucien Descave, and Huysmans, whose work becomes “the projection of epochal fears such as xenophobia, contagion, social hygiene, and the prejudices they generate.”22 For Huysmans, touch engenders terror and disgust. Des Esseintes’s nightmare of the Pox bearing down on him as a monstrous hybrid of woman and plant sprouting a Nidularium flower between her thighs vividly conveys the fear of contamination: “His body lightly brushed the plant’s hideous wound; he felt himself dying” (81). And so Huysmans keeps us on the outside, making the reader a spectator of the wound, conveying male fears of women’s bodies by focusing on visual horror. His is primarily a visual and perceptual engagement with the world. Like the richly painted surfaces of Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion (described in Là-​bas [Down There, 1891]), depicting the tortured body of Christ, the voluptuous and disembodied descriptions of sores, boils, and ulcers in Against Nature do not allow us to go below the skin’s eruptive surface. As Alain Buisine has commented in Huysmans à fleur de peau (2004), the worst epidermal horrors in

Touch   569 Huysmans’s writings, particularly those of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, only serve to signify anatomization and the sickly state of the divine: “The more ignominiously disgusting and repulsive the appearance of the body’s envelope, the more carnal purification has taken place.”23 There is very little sexual action in Huysmans’s writings because the emphasis is placed on appearance or recollection rather than experience in descriptions of sexual encounters. In Croquis Parisiens (Parisian Sketches, 1880) the author sketches the appearance of the woman in “L’ambulante” (“The Streetwalker”) with a painter’s eye, drawing attention to the ravages wreaked by her profession on her face and body, which necessitate “exuberant make-​up and the tumult of over-​theatrical frocks.”24 At the end of À vau-​l’eau (Drifting, 1882) when the downtrodden clerk Folantin encounters the prostitute, the sex scene is dispatched in a very short paragraph, concluding with an anti-​climax (“after a while, as he was taking his time trying to satisfy her, she said: ‘Don’t bother about me . . . don’t bother about me. Just do your business’ ”).25 In Against Nature, Des Esseintes suffers from “mental and physical sexual frigidity” (84), the only cures for which are imagining the vices condemned by the church or sucking on a sugar-​coated violet bonbon, which “penetrated the papillae of the mouth, awakening memories of water opalescent with rare aromatic vinegars and deep, intimate kisses, steeped in perfumes” (84–​85). These sweets create reveries of “earlier debaucheries” and conjure up memories of two favorite mistresses, a sturdy-​ limbed American acrobat called Miss Urania and a ventriloquist who throws her voice during sex, on one occasion imitating the drunken rage of a cuckolded partner hammering on the door of the bedroom, and on another into two black marble sphinx statues placed at the end of the room. When the novelty wears off, the sex is unfulfilling and lifeless: All the miserable inadequacy of his own efforts chilled his heart. Gently he embraced the silent woman by his side, taking refuge in her like a disconsolate child, not even seeing the sulky expression of the ventriloquist who had to play a part and ply her trade at home, in her leisure hours, far from the footlights. (89)

In Huysmans’s work, touch tends to be a subsidiary sensory modality; there is little comfort and pleasure derived from the act of touching, which is presented as cruel, contaminating, and even corrosive. In En rade (Stranded, 1887), for example, the Château de Lourps, to which Jacques Marles and his wife Louise flee to escape the banality of Parisian life, is so rotten that it dissolves to the touch. Exploring the Château’s many rooms, Jacques is struck by the fragility and dilapidation of the place: [P]‌ieces of the partition walls were reduced to powder, which fell like fine sand if one so much as stamped the floor with one’s foot; fissures snaked down the panels, cracked the friezes, zigzagged the doors from top to bottom and criss-​crossed the fireplace, where a lifeless mirror had slipped from its tarnished frame now turned red and almost powdery.26

570   Jane Desmarais When Louise tries to comfort their sick and dying cat by stroking it, its failing body registers intense pain. It is as if there is no connection between humans and animals at all: Trembling all over, Louise leapt out of bed wanting to pick it up; but shivers coursed over the surface of its coat as soon as she even tried to touch it. . . . It whimpered at every effort, but she didn’t dare help it because its very body was like the keyboard of pain that sounded whenever she touched it.27

“Huysmans is an eye,” as Remy de Gourmont declared,28 more interested in the senses of sight and smell than touch. In all his writings we encounter the primacy of those two senses, which is not surprising given his artist-​family connections (his father and paternal grandfather were Dutch-​born artists) and his stated aim in Parisian Sketches to create the literary equivalent of great visual art. In “Des viandes cuites au four: Le poème en prose” (“Roast Meat: A Prose Poem”) and “Le Hareng” (“The Herring”), Huysmans focuses on what the bad food looks like rather than what it might taste or feel like, and in his essay on women’s armpits (“Le Gousset” [“The Armpit,” 1880]), rather than describing the feel of armpit hair, he focuses on comparing the “pungent scent of goat” on the sleeves of rustic working women with the armpits of city women that suggest a blend of “valerianate of ammonia and urine . . . a light fragrance of prussic acid, a faint hint of bruised or overripe peach.”29 Huysmans regarded the female body as a terrifying viral matrix.30 In his fiction and prose essays, certainly those published before his conversion to Catholicism in 1892, human contact is minimized, and when it is described, he represents it as unfeeling, unhealthy, and traumatic.

Haphephobic Decadence: Rachilde’s Untouchable Women Much has been written about the predatory sensuality of the femme fatale in decadent literature, but a relatively unexplored characteristic of decadent sensuality is tactile defensiveness (haphephobia), a hypersensitivity to touch often expressed as an aversion to or fetish in touching certain things. We can identify the condition in Huysmans’s solipsistic protagonist Des Esseintes, but we can also locate it in a number of femmes fatales: Wilde’s Salome, Rachilde’s Raoule de Vénérande and Éliante Donalger, and Mirbeau’s Clara—​female protagonists who manifest a complex variety of obsessions and aversions. Rachilde’s novel Monsieur Vénus was published in the same year as Against Nature, in 1884, and tells of Raoule de Vénérande, a female aristocrat who creates her own aesthetic ideal by styling herself as a man and turning Jacques Silvert, a lower-​class artificial flower-​maker, into her submissive “mistress,” whom she sexually abuses and later kills,

Touch   571 grafting his body parts onto a mechanical wax model to immortalize him. In the novel, the themes of metamorphosis and blurred distinctions are taken to extremes by shifting pronouns and flipping of gender roles, making identity and selfhood performative and elusive concepts. Nothing is fully graspable until the end, when the object of Raoule’s desire is transformed into a sex doll, complete with the hair, teeth, and nails taken from the dead body of Jacques. The descriptions of the violent and abusive relationship between Raoule and Jacques contain many references to the sense of touch, but there is no sense of connection or possession. Instead, the experience of touch is as ambiguous and confusing as the gender-​bending sexual antics of the narrative. Raoule is attracted to the velvety softness of Jacques’s skin, which is like a child’s, and she repeatedly admires its flawless and hairless appearance, which she compares to the marble of an antique statue. Raoule swiftly shape-​shifts as her desire increases, “rocking [Jacques] in her arms, calming him like a baby,” but moments later she transforms herself into a dominatrix, placing her “pointy heels” on his forehead.31 Her determination to possess his body as a man for a woman and her volatile behavior destabilize heteronormative relations; Jacques experiences a spectrum of tactility from his lover, who is both human and animal, mother and wolf, and sometimes both. When Raoule adopts the male lover role, his/​her behavior becomes monstrous, and like a wild predator she devours him, overcome by a desire to hurt him, to tear his skin and make him bleed. Jacques’s sister, the prostitute Marie Silvert, listens through the wall as Raoule, “overcome by a frenetic vertigo,” caresses Jacques in a “supreme desire to possess him . . . just as that torturer [Baron de Raittolbe] had possessed him through blows”: Raoule could control herself no longer. Violently she tore off the linen bandages she had rolled around the sacred body of her ephebe. She bit his marbled flesh, squeezed it tightly in both hands, scratched it with her pointed nails. It was a complete defloration of that marvelous beauty that, formerly, had made her swoon with a mystical happiness. (130–​31)

Raoule’s attempt to penetrate Jacques’s flesh and uncover the essential object of her desire hardly reveals a live, warm core. Underneath the bandages that she has had to apply because of a previous assault on his body that left his skin “striped from top to bottom with long, bluish scars” (128), he is but a beautiful statue, cold and inanimate, a reflection of the unempathetic and bestial nature of his abuser. Jacques recalls that “[w]‌hen he kissed her, it seemed to him that a body made of marble had slid between the sheets; he had the disagreeable sensation that a dead animal was brushing against his own warm limbs” (88). Rachilde’s heroines are cold, empowered, and untouchable fetishists. Like Wilde’s Salome, “glacial princess of the moon,” as Petra Dierkes-​Thrun has described her,32 Rachilde’s female protagonists are decadent autoerotic sensualists in pursuit of ideal beauty and perverse sexual fulfillment; their erotic preferences are idiosyncratic and cruel. In her novel La jongleuse (The Juggler), for example, first published in the Mercure

572   Jane Desmarais de France in 1900, Éliante Donalger, a French Creole widow, meets a young medical student, Léon Reille, who she invites home. He is somewhat puzzled by her rejection of his virile advances, but she explains to Léon that she has an aversion to touch. “I’m disgusted by union,” she tells him, “[it] destroys my strength. I find no delightful plenitude in it. For my flesh to be roused and to conceive the infinity of pleasure, I don’t need to look for a sex organ in the object of my love!”33 Drawing aside the curtains to a “boudoir hung in old rose crêpe,” she reveals that the object of her desire is not another human, but is in fact a tall Greek alabaster vase, the height of a man, so slim, so slender, so deliciously troubling with its ephebe’s hips, with such a human appearance, even though it retained the traditional shape of an amphora, . . . . The foot, very narrow, like a spear of hyacinth, surged up from a flat and oval base, narrowed as it rose, swelled, at mid-​height, to the size of two beautiful young thighs hermetically joined and tapered off towards the neck where, in the hollow of the throat, an alabaster collar shone like a fold of plump flesh.34

Éliante invites Léon to appreciate the vase’s androgynous beauty (in the original French, as Melanie Hawthorne points out, Rachilde alternates between “un vase” and “une urne”),35 and he watches while, in a scene suggestive of both decapitation and castration, she mounts the vase and brings herself to orgasm on the neck, which “spreading into a corolla made one think of an absent head, a head cut off or carried on shoulders other than those of the amphora.”36 The resonance here with the beheading of Jokanaan in Wilde’s play Salome is both striking and disturbing.

Mirbeau: Contaminating Bodies The steamy yet sterile eroticism of Éliante’s performance finds a counterpoint in the orgasmic tremblings of Clara, Mirbeau’s femme fatale in the novel Torture Garden, begun in 1892 and published in full in 1899. Rejecting the rigid customs of Europe for the ancient, exotic traditions of Imperial China, Clara moves to a small town south of Canton where she is joined by the anonymous narrator, a corrupt and cynical Frenchman who journeys by sea to the Far East on a spurious scientific mission as an embryologist. Their relationship is intensely sexual and sadomasochistic, with the narrator relating how Clara’s physical arousal is heightened by scenes of murder and brutality. The depths of Clara’s depravity are revealed through a series of weekly journeys from her house to the Convict-​Meat-​Market, the Prison, and the Torture Garden, a site of unmitigated inhumanity and suffering. Like Raoule and Éliante, Clara harbors perverse and sadistic desires, finding beauty in strange places. She seeks out scenes of physical violation and is delighted when her dress is ripped by a brutal mob. The texture and temperature of her skin, easily glimpsed beneath fine fabrics, indicate her state of arousal, as we are invited to see her

Touch   573 voyeuristically through the eyes of the lustful narrator. For most of the novel, Clara is hypersensual, her senses constantly alert to the external world. Above all, she desires to touch and be touched, and her body becomes a barometer for the sensual excitement derived from the spectacle of physical degradation. “Feel my breasts—​how hard they are!” she exclaims to the narrator, “The silk of my dress inflames their tips! A hot iron seems to be burning them. . . It’s delightful!” (148). The text, like the Torture Garden, is littered with disgusting bodies. The exotic flora proliferates on a base of human humus and is flecked and spattered with the remains of human skin and blood attached to petals and leaves through the force of violent mutilations and murders. Moreover, there are references throughout to deformations of the skin and grotesque body parts: Clara’s lover Annie suffers from elephantiasis, which includes an “enormous pouch, a revolting goatskin, completely grey and streaked with brown blood”; Clara’s favorite prisoner, to whom she recites his own poem “The Three Lovers,” is identified simply as “the Face”; and “Fatty,” the executioner, boasts a “serene and easy-​ going” paunch (102, 128–​30, 150). At the end of the novel, the narrator’s urge to touch, hold, and possess Clara’s body becomes sadistic. Her introspective withdrawal after an exhilarating day of witnessing the garden’s horrors frustrates and conflicts him: “I desired her and I hated her. I would like to take her into my arms and strangle her until she choked, to crush her, to drink death” (187). His increasing desire to possess her signals the decline of her physical accessibility; she becomes ill and retreats into an “icy-​cold” haphephobic state. “Leave me alone . . . ,” she entreats him, “Don’t touch me . . . don’t say anything to me . . . I’m sick” (195). Mirbeau provocatively reverses the idea of the nourishing and soothing touch of the mother-​lover and creates a monster instead. Mirbeau allegorizes the ambiguities of decadent touch. Like the artisans, gardeners, and potters tending the delicate plants in the Torture Garden, the decadent sense of touch is skillful, knowledgeable, and refined, but at the same time, like the torturers and hangmen lurking among the foliage, skinning petty criminals and performing other baroque acts of cruelty, the decadent sense of touch is also cruel, contaminating, and deathly. When Clara tells the narrator about Annie’s death, the details of which are relayed to her by a Chinese woman, she is struck by the way in which Annie’s elephantiasis infected the pearls that she wore round her neck. Mirbeau was obviously intrigued by the story of the pearls, because he published it separately in Le Journal on January 9, 1898, with the title “Les Perles mortes” (“Dead Pearls”). It tells the tale of Clara Terpe, a twenty-​seven-​year-​old European divorcee who sets off on her travels through India with her governess and numerous servants, “free to follow her diverse and imperious fantasies, and caprices not yet fulfilled.” Liberated from her marriage to a hapless poker-​player, Clara Terpe luxuriates in the hedonistic excesses of India “at the height of its triumphs.” She has sex with “black Tamals,” “effeminate statue makers, whose skin is as bronzed and satiny smooth as khaki,” and “little lace makers of Slaue Island, whose agile, vibrant bodies resemble small antique bronzes.”37 On her return to Europe two years later, she falls ill with elephantiasis, which causes her

574   Jane Desmarais skin to swell, ooze, rot, and contaminate the precious oriental pearls that she had made into “bracelets, necklaces, capes, and coats”: Little by little, they became tarnished; their smooth surface roughened in some way, and pricked with reddish spots, then the reflections faded; and of what was once pearl, an adorable, living, charming thing, there remained, by the end of several days, nothing more than a tiny ball of ash. Because pearls live. Inside them there is an organic substance that sustains the heat of life, as blood maintains the translucence of skin, and a caress on the flesh. They are, one might say, beings gifted with an unknown and exquisite sensibility, living flesh on living flesh, which suffer if the flesh they embellish suffers, and which die, if it dies.38

Female depravity, bodily degeneration, and grotesque contamination are themes that Mirbeau returns to in his fiction, and “Dead Pearls,” along with other short stories from the late 1880s and 1890s, including “Poor Tom!” (1886), “The Octogenarian” (1887), “The Ring” (1899), and “Clotilde and I” (1899), as Emily Apter maintains, are “preparatory sketches or rehearsals for Mirbeau’s Orientalist chef-​d’oeuvre of male masochism.”39 The bodies of both Claras become untouchable, but whereas Clara Terpe’s body is so hideous in its protuberances and suppurations that it defies all medical intervention, Torture-​ Garden Clara’s (she has no surname) shrinks, pales, and fragments, and is reduced to a state of childlike purity.

D’Annunzio: Haptoglyphic Decadence Decadent sensuality reaches a haptic peak in D’Annunzio’s Pleasure (1889).40 The novel tells the story of a year in the life of Andrea Sperelli, a young aristocrat in keen pursuit of beauty, pleasure, and women who is obsessed with possessing the things and the women he loves. Like Des Esseintes, he creates a “perfect theater” of his house in which all the senses are brought into rapturous play, and he furnishes it with precious objects that have “latent aphrodisiacal potentiality . . . , he felt it at certain times bursting forth and developing and palpitating around him.”41 This is the reader’s experience too. The full-​ bodied language makes the reading a sensuous and embodied experience, and the sense of touch is given equal significance to sight, smell, touch, and taste: No one, in the description of something pertaining to sensual pleasure, knew better than he how to choose a lewd word, but one that was precise and powerful, a real word made of flesh and bones, a sentence full of substantial marrow, a phrase that lives and breathes and palpitates like the object of which it depicts the form, communicating to the worthy listener a double pleasure, and enjoyment not only of the intellect but of the senses, a joy partly similar to that produced by certain paintings of the great master colorists, blended with purple and milk, bathed as if in the transparency of

Touch   575 liquid amber, impregnated with a warm and unquenchably luminous gold like immortal blood. (224)

The corporeality of the text complements the theme of possession, in the sense of both taking hold of something and seizing power and control, with D’Annunzio creating a haptoglyphic nexus of these two meanings in the image of the hand. In Pleasure, the hand both registers the beauty of the material world and serves as a tool of seduction, symbolizing possession of an object of desire (“Others possess her now. . . . Other hands touch her; other lips kiss her,” 24), but it also draws attention to that which eludes possession. When Sperelli first meets Elena at a dinner party hosted by the Marchioness of Ateleta, he cannot “take his eyes off [her] hands” (49), the sight of which increases his desire for her whole body as his lust is heightened by imagining the other men who have kissed them. Later, again aligning the senses of touch and sight, he watches her trace her bejeweled fingers along the engravings of a small Japanese saber and fantasizes what her hands suggest about the rest of her body, telling her that she “must have the body of Correggio’s Danäe. I feel it, no, I see it in the shape of your hands” (52). Elena’s hand becomes a detached artifact, another beautiful and prized synecdochic object in Sperelli’s life. The gratification of both Sperelli and the reader—​the one desiring the full form of woman and the other luxuriating in the sensual force of the language—​is delayed. The devout Maria Ferres, the second central female character in the novel, is also anatomized when Sperelli first meets her, as he lingers appreciatively on her eyes, hair, mouth, and hands. His desire to possess Maria is made manifest when he draws her “naked hand” at Schifanoja, “penetrat[ing] it with his gaze right down to the very base of it, uncovering all its innermost secrets.” He reminds her of this moment later when he meets her in Countess Starnina’s salon by asking for her glove as a token: —​Oh, your hands! Do you remember when I drew them at Schifanoja? It seems that they belong to me by right; it seems that you should concede ownership of them to me, and that of your entire body, they are the things most intimately inspired by your soul, the most spiritualized, almost I could say the purest . . . Hands of goodness, hands of forgiveness . . . How happy I would be to own at least one glove: a shadow, a semblance of their form, a slough scented with their scent . . . Will you give me a glove, before you leave? (272)

The rhetorical flourish of the anaphoric “[h]‌ands of goodness, hands of forgiveness” followed by the fawning “to own at least one glove” is seductive power-​play, but the image of a “slough scented with their scent” evokes dead skin, the cast-​off skin of a snake, and reinforces the transgressive intentions of his request. Sperelli wants to own not only her body but her pure soul, and the glove, both material and immaterial (“a shadow, a semblance of their form”) suggests both the tangible form of her hand (which he has captured in a drawing but does not own) and its absence. Unlike D’Annunzio’s personal collection of his lovers’ gloves, Maria’s glove is a trophy signifying what he has failed to possess.42

576   Jane Desmarais Pleasure is dense with elaborate descriptions of textures and surfaces, the allure of which is intensified by the imagery of skillful, creative hands and fingers that write, draw, and play music, but D’Annunzio expresses ambivalence toward “the positivist confidence in the full comprehension of the world,” finding Baudelairean correspondences in every detail.43 Sperelli can only imagine what possessing the body and soul of a woman is like. The only possession that he fully acquires is an armoire, which he purchases at a public sale of “soft furnishings and movable fittings” (324) belonging to Maria Ferres’s ruined husband, Don Manuel. At the end of the novel, as he slowly ascends the stairs of the Palazzo Zuccari in the wake of the struggling porters, we realize that despite Sperelli’s fervent desire to possess “an object [that] arouses the envy and the craving of others” (50), he ends up owning nothing more than a wardrobe.

Conclusion In the late nineteenth century, decadence was a notion with great provocative power and cultural currency, and in the literature and art of the period, the decadent sense of touch is obsessive, intersensorial, averse. To the visual spectacle of modern life documented by naturalist writers like Zola, decadent writers added smells, tastes, and textures that had never been written about before, experimenting with different combinations of senses in order to transcend humdrum reality and access correspondent immaterial realms. For many, the impact of industrialization and a new commercial culture created new sensory experiences that involved less social separation and more contact between different social classes, but for decadents the sensory realm tended to be private, interiorized, and focused on the (female) body, which both attracted and repulsed them. From the grasping fingers of shopper-​flâneuses in Zola to the veined hands of butchers’ wives in Huysmans, from the lustful clawings of Rachilde’s Raoule to the pale and delicate fingertips of D’Annunzio’s Maria, decadent touch is elaborate, cruel, and refined, but the tactile act is often an empty gesture, serving only to emphasize fear, lack of connection, or the danger of contamination.

Notes 1. Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries, 322, quoted in Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania (London: Faber, 1950), 616. Emphasis in original. 2. I borrow this term from Abbie Garrington, Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 2. 3. David Weir, “Afterword: Decadent Taste,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 221. 4. Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, trans. Michael Richardson (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 1995), 176–​77. Further references cited parenthetically.

Touch   577 5. This statement is ambiguous and intriguing in relation to decadence, suggesting that pain and pleasure need to be experienced both physically and emotionally. However, while the tactile act emphasizes sumptuousness and excess and is often combined with other sensory modalities, the other kind of decadent “feeling,” as in the sense of being moved, affected, or “touched,” tends to be perverse. 6. For a study of the elision of the boundaries of touch and vision in experiencing statuary, see Patricia Pulham, The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 21. 7. Oscar Wilde, Salome, in Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66, 73. 8. See Guy Ducrey, “ ‘Ne me touchez pas!’ Transgressions décadentes d’une parole biblique,” Nordlit 28 (2011): 141–​57. 9. The hands of the female bass-​player and the masked encephalitic hairdresser appear to be doing ordinary tasks, but the position of the fingers on the neck of the double-​bass and the pierrot’s index finger poking through the top of Salome’s hair hint at penetration, a reading of the image that is compounded by the positioning of Salome’s and the young attendant’s hands between their thighs. 10. In De Anima (ca. 350 BCE), Aristotle assigned touch to the lowest ranking for its connections to the erotic and obscene and a foundation on which the other senses are built. 11. Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), xii. 12. Classen, Deepest Sense, xii. 13. Classen, Deepest Sense, 196. 14. Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, trans. Brian Nelson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 104. 15. Zola, Ladies’ Paradise, 105. 16. Édouard Toulouse, Enquête medico-​ psychologique sur les rapports de la supériorité intellectuelle: Émile Zola (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1896). See also Margot Szarke, “Modern Sensitivity: Émile Zola’s Synaesthetic Cheeses,” French Studies 74, no. 2 (2020): 203. 17. See the section on ‘The Stuff of Dreams’ in Classen, Deepest Sense, 191–​97. 18. Zola, Ladies’ Paradise, 252. 19. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 18. Further references cited parenthetically. 20. This chapter shows the influence of Zola’s passion for cataloguing and taxonomy. The hothouse becomes a particularly significant literary motif for Zola in the 1870s and 1880s, a period when he was collecting and cataloguing the plants in the Jardin des Plantes for his novel La Curée (The Kill, 1872). 21. Dr. Rumler, The Venereal Diseases Arising from Contagion and the Principles of Their Treatment Popularly Described, 15th edition (1902), 59, quoted in Monika Pietrzak-​ Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Literature (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 7. 22. Pietrzak-​Franger, Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture, 162–​63. 23. My translation. “Plus l’apparence de l’enveloppe corporelle est ignoblement dégoûtante et repoussante, plus la purification charnelle s’est effectuée,” Alain Buisine, Huysmans à fleur de peau: Le goût des primitifs (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2004), 58..

578   Jane Desmarais 24. J.-K. ​ Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2004), 73. 25. J.-K. Huysmans, Drifting: À vau-l’eau, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2006), 92. 26. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stranded: En rade, trans. Brendan King (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2010), 68. ​ 27. Huysmans, Stranded: En rade, 207–8. 28. “Huysmans est un œil.” Remy de Gourmont, Le Livre des masques (The Book of Masks, 12th ed., Mercure de France, 1921), 201. 29. Huysmans, Parisian Sketches, 127. 30. As Charles Bernheimer has noted, the woman in Huysmans’s fiction is a “hideously wounded, bleeding creature, whose castrating power derives from the very horror of her castration and whose prostituted sexuality is a syphilitic virus infecting the entire organic world.” Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and the Culture of Fin de Siècle in Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 80. 31. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus, trans. Melanie Hawthorne (New York: MLA Press, 2004), 112, 113. Further references cited parenthetically. 32. Petra Dierkes-Thrun, “Decadent Sensuality in Rachilde and Wilde,” in Decadence and the Senses, ed. Jane Desmarais and Alice Condé (Cambridge: Legenda, 2017), 60. 33. Rachilde, The Juggler, trans. Melanie C. Hawthorne (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 22. 34. Rachilde, The Juggler, 18. 35. Hawthorne, “Introduction” to Rachilde, The Juggler, xxii. 36. Rachilde, The Juggler, 18. 37. Octave Mirbeau, “Dead Pearls,” trans. Emily Apter, in The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-siècle France, ed. Asti Hustvedt (New York: Zone, 1998), 991. 38. Mirbeau, “Dead Pearls,” 992. 39. Emily Apter, “Sexological Decadence: The Gynophobic Visions of Octave Mirbeau,” in The Decadent Reader, 963. 40. While there is no study of haptic decadence, there is much to inspire in Garrington, Haptic Modernism, especially chapter 1. 41. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pleasure, trans. Lara Gochin-Raffaelli (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2013), 18. Further references cited parenthetically. 42. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ​ The Pike (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), 227: “there are drawers full of them still in his last home.” Hughes-Hallett goes on to elaborate on D’Annunzio’s fetish: “Hands were most interesting to him when mutilated. To Elda, his first love, he wrote: ‘Tell me something that would please you and I will do it . . . would you like me to cut off a hand and send it to you, in a box, by post?’ ” 43. See Stefano Bragato, “Of Attention: D’Annunzio’s Sixth Sense,” Forum Italicum 51, no. 2 (2017), 408.

Further Reading Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and the Culture of Fin de Siècle in Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

Touch   579 Bragato, Stefano. “Of Attention: D’Annunzio’s Sixth Sense.” Forum Italicum 51, no. 2 (2017): 396–​412. Buisine, Alain. Huysmans à fleur de peau: Le goût des primitifs. Arras, France: Artois Presses Université, 2004. Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Desmarais, Jane, and Alice Condé, eds. Decadence and the Senses. Cambridge: Legenda, 2017. Ducrey, Guy. “ ‘Ne me touchez pas!’ Transgressions décadentes d’une parole biblique.” Nordlit 28 (2011): 141–​57. Garrington, Abbie. Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pietrzak-​Franger, Monika. Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture: Medicine, Knowledge and the Spectacle of Victorian Invisibility. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pulham, Patricia. The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Szarke, Margot. “Modern Sensitivity: Émile Zola’s Synaesthetic Cheeses.” French Studies 74, no. 2 (2020): 203–​22.

PA RT V I

T H E OR I E S

Chapter 30

THEOL O G Y Decadent Aesthetics, Anglo-Catholicism, and Ritual Matthew Bradley

It was a tendency that first came to widespread attention in England through the controversial writings of certain tutors at the University of Oxford and the still more controversial interpretation placed upon those writings by certain undergraduates. Punch lambasted its adherents for their pretentiousness and an unhealthy interest in the outward forms of religion. Opponents charged them with being ambassadors for foreign vice, with suspect sensuousness, and with a tendency to romanticize history and art to an unhealthy degree. Homosexuality was heavily implied when it was not openly mentioned. As it gained influence, the tendency provoked ever-​greater outrage, and even alarmed many of those seen as its intellectual progenitors. It became particularly established as an urban phenomenon, with practitioners self-​fashioning as flâneurs of the less-​reputable parts of the nineteenth-​century metropolis. Membership also led many of its adherents to ultimately embrace Roman Catholicism, simply confirming to English mainstream opinion their inherent taste for subversion. Eventually, the strength of opposition from some quarters led to the courts, including criminal conviction and imprisonment. Does the foregoing paragraph describe the decadent tendency in art and literature, or the Anglo-​Catholic tendency in religion?1 English Anglo-​Catholicism, originating in the early nineteenth century, was no less controversial than late nineteenth-​century decadence. Anglo-​Catholics proceeded from the assumption that, in the words of one early adherent, Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–​1836), the Reformation “was a limb badly set—​it must be broken again in order to be righted.”2 What Froude and other like-​ minded clergymen meant was that while the English church’s original “break” from Catholicism had been a necessity (albeit a regrettable one), a grievous error had been made in imagining that to oppose the excesses of the institution of the Roman Catholic Church necessarily meant opposing its history, its forms, and its practices. Indeed, as far as Anglo-​Catholics were concerned, the moribund state of ecclesiastical authority in England (think, for example, of Jane Austen’s spineless and worldly clergymen) only

584   Matthew Bradley illustrated how much the English church had to learn from the might of Rome’s spiritual and temporal power. That power inhered in the complex relationship of ritual, aesthetics, and authority which Anglo-​Catholics realized could be adapted to the benefit of the English church, even as English decadents understood the cultural potential of that Anglo-​Catholic strategy.

The Oxford Movement Anglo-​Catholicism had begun with a series of controversies in the early 1830s that served to highlight the Anglican Church’s lack of autonomy from the state—​even in specifically religious matters. This lack provoked what became known as the “Oxford Movement,” a concerted attempt to reassert the church’s autonomy by a group of Anglican clergymen at Oxford. It principally took the form of reviving the teachings of the early church fathers (the Oxford Movement is also known as “Tractarianism” because of the voluminous tracts issued by its adherents studying these patristic writings), a stress on the spiritual authority of the clergy as God’s representatives (much more akin to the Roman Catholic priesthood’s claims to stand in a line of unbroken descent from Christ’s apostles), and, most infamously, a belief that the spiritual grandeur of Anglican church services could be amplified by increasing their material grandeur, expressed in a greater use of church decoration and the deployment of much more elaborate ritual. Other Roman Catholic practices, including confession and holy orders, were also revived. The radical Oxford Movement “phase” of Anglo-​Catholicism effectively ended in 1845, when John Henry Newman, one of its most charismatic leaders, converted to Rome—​and thus confirmed for many hostile commentators their suspicion that it had been a fifth column for papism all along. Nonetheless, the ideas pioneered by the movement persisted as a controversial strand within Anglicanism throughout the nineteenth century, sometimes labeled Ritualism, but also, less emotively, becoming known as Anglo-​Catholicism. In that context, a famous passage in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/​ 1891) might well be read as Dorian occupying the pose of a typical Anglo-​Catholic: It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy it sought to symbolize.3

Forever thought to be on the cusp of converting to Rome, attracted by the aesthetic appeal of church ritual, living on a tipping point between subversion and orthodoxy: in England in the nineteenth century, these were the signature modes of the Anglo-​Catholic.

THEOLOGY   585 A key characteristic of decadent writing is an ambiguous religiosity played out in precisely this type of atmosphere: a world of priests, acolytes, altars, vestments, incense, and ritual. Martin Lockerd has plausibly claimed on this basis that “the decadent school of the 1890s was the most substantial Catholic literary movement in Protestant Britain until the Catholic revival of the mid-​twentieth century.”4 Yet, arguably, the cultural politics of Anglo-​Catholicism provided the model for the relationship between English decadence and Roman Catholicism more than Roman Catholicism itself did. The decadent poet Lionel Johnson (1867–​1902) wrote an article in 1891 called “The Diary of A Cultured Faun,” in which he satirically ventriloquized what he took to be the lackadaisical spiritual voice of the typical decadent (“We kneel at some hour, not too early for our convenience, repeating that solemn Latin, drinking in those Gregorian tones”) while poking fun at the decadent disinclination to discipline aesthetic pleasure in church ritual within a clear religious framework (“But to join the Church! Ah, no!”).5 This article was written in the year of Johnson’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which must have seemed to provide precisely that clarity and discipline. But Johnson might well have been sending up his own schoolboy self: in the early 1880s, he had dreamed of becoming an Anglo-​ Catholic priest, and in his correspondence of that time, we find a recognizably decadent compound. Announcing this intention, he remarks, “My nature can only lead me to the methods of spiritual, artistic, emotional expression, and I feel that for this to be carried out I must have ground to stand upon.”6 In another, he describes how he would undertake his priestly office: . . . the reading of antiquated, picturesque prayers; the preaching of heresies to one’s brothers; the whole system of Church order would be merely acts of independent creation; true, not absolutely free acts; but free, so far as I am able to use freedom: which point I have settled to my satisfaction.7

The schoolboy Johnson finds a transgressive mobility within Anglo-​Catholicism, a multifaceted tension between various types of heresy and orthodoxy that produces a markedly decadent effect. Johnson would later quote with approval Thomas Babington Macauley’s maxim that “Rome has a genius for controlling and utilizing her enthusiasts, and that the Anglican Establishment has not.”8 Indeed, there is a twofold legacy for decadence in that perceived lack of control. First, Anglo-​Catholicism generated discourses of religious decay and enfeeblement in England ahead of the emergence of literary discourses of decadence and degeneration. Second, it offered English decadence a very particular framing of the debate about the relation between the material and the metaphysical, and the implications of that relation for the freedom of the individual personality and its relation to authority. In what they said and did (and in what was said about, and done to, them), Anglo-​Catholics bequeathed to decadence a culturally pervasive version of this debate, mediating it through a controversialist take on the relation between theological ideas and liturgical practice with a strong emphasis on aesthetics. English decadence insistently reconceptualized the nature of the interface between ritual, aesthetics, and

586   Matthew Bradley authority. If, as Wilde claimed in the ritualistic ­chapter 11 of Dorian Gray, “the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal,”9 Anglo-​Catholicism provided a key methodology from within the English church for late-​Victorian decadent writers in attempting to trigger and explore that revelation.

Dress Rehearsal From its beginnings in the Oxford Movement, Anglo-​Catholicism was associated with specters of degeneracy and enfeeblement. The novelist Charles Kingsley (1819–​1875) described himself in 1851 as “unable to cope with that [the Anglo-​Catholic] school,” principally because of its allure to “the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy” in danger, as he saw it, of losing the distinction between both “bad and good taste” and “healthy and unhealthy philosophy and devotion.”10 One high-​profile example of how this reputation developed was the posthumous legacy of Richard Hurrell Froude. Having been an enthusiastic Tractarian in the early 1830s, Froude (whose health had always been delicate), died of tuberculosis in 1836 at the relatively young age of thirty-​ two. Two years later, in 1838, John Henry Newman, along with one of the other leading Oxford Movement figures, John Keble (1792–​1866), published Froude’s private spiritual journal, Remains, in two volumes. The book showed Froude to have been a keen aesthete, as one might expect of a clergyman looking to further the material grandeur of the Anglican Church—​“I believe that the affection for beauty is, in me, particularly perfect,” he says in the journals at one point11—​but it was the obsessive interest in his own sinfulness (and the bodily mortifications he inflicted upon himself to suppress it) that struck many readers as morbid and unhealthy. On September 27, 1826, for example, Froude remarks that “it came into my head this morning that it would be a good thing for me to set apart some days in the year for the commemoration of my worst acts of sin.”12 By November 30, however, he has begun to be concerned that such commemorations might themselves be sinful, remarking that they prove nothing more than “a consciousness of my shame”—​before lapsing instantly into that consciousness again by adding, “and yet they are as strong as I could express, if my shame was ever so intense.”13 Ellis Hanson, in Decadence and Catholicism (1997), has claimed that late nineteenth-​ century decadence operates through what he calls a “dialectic of shame and grace,” where part of the appeal of Catholicism for decadent writers is the opportunity to luxuriate in the drama and extremity of the oscillation.14 Froude’s controversial Remains clearly anticipates that decadent dynamic. His preoccupations also anticipate the decadent sensibility in more specific ways: Piers Brendon, in an assessment of Froude’s contribution to the Oxford Movement, notes that with his penchant for self-​flagellation, his painful sense of the sinfulness of physical existence, and his persistent association of love with death, Froude in many ways embodies the elements of decadence as a form of “contaminated” Romanticism that Mario Praz detailed in La carne, la morte e il diavolo

THEOLOGY   587 nella letteratura romantica (The flesh, death, and the devil in Romantic literature, 1930; translated into English as The Romantic Agony, 1933).15 Imputations of sexual deviance, particularly homosexuality, also began early in the history of Anglo-​Catholicism. In his 1856 novel Perversion (the main target of which is religious infidelity), the Reverend W. J. Conybeare created an effeminate Tractarian tutor who is described as bestowing “the tenderness which other men give to the softer half of creation . . . on rough and whiskered undergraduates,”16 and such characterizations were not uncommon. David Hilliard, discussing the relation between Anglo-​Catholicism and homosexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has argued that for many gay men, Anglo-​Catholicism increasingly provided “a set of institutions and religious practices through which they could express their sense of difference in an oblique and symbolic way.”17 He also notes both the barely concealed homophobia in Kingsley’s use of “effeminacy” when attacking Anglo-​Catholicism and the widespread interpretation of homosexuality as Froude’s unnamed “sin” in Remains.18 A well-​known attack on “Parsons in Petticoats” by Punch in 1865 contains a similar undertone, reporting on the phenomenon of clergymen “addicted to wearing vestments diversified with smart and gay colours” while also hinting darkly that “they will be sure of having no end of a tail of street boys for acolytes.”19 Yet in public discourse at least, the transgressions of Victorian Anglo-​Catholicism were sins of performance rather than pederasty. Theological controversies in Oxford had, by the 1870s, become frenzied public disorder over Anglo-​Catholic “Ritualism,” which had resulted in riots in some parishes. The eastward position, the use of candles at the altar, the wearing of certain vestments, the use of wafer bread—​all were considered crimes of liturgical performance by the religious establishment. Nor is this a figure of speech: between 1877 and 1887, five Anglo-​Catholic clergymen were sent to prison for their allegedly excessive use of ritual in church services.20 It was thus the model of its very public religious controversies over the relation between aesthetics and religion, at least as much as any intimations of private or displaced homosexuality, that constituted the Anglo-​Catholic “dress rehearsal” for decadence. It is no accident that Patience (1880), W. S. Gilbert’s famous satire of aestheticism (widely credited with unintentionally launching Wilde’s career, thanks to the notoriety that it granted him), began life as a satire of Anglican curates.21 Unlike aestheticism, decadence defines itself by its relationship with what it perceives to be orthodoxy, of whatever type. The word decadence connotes, of course, a state of decay—​and one can only decay from something, some higher or ideal state, and a relation with that state haunts its very etymology. As Richard Le Gallienne puts it in his satirical poem “The Décadent To His Soul”: “It is so good in sin to keep in sight /​The white hills whence we fell, to measure by.”22 Decadent writing also illustrates, often in surprising ways, a struggle to reconcile aesthetic instincts with the preexistent forms of authority and orthodoxy that seek to condemn those instincts. Sometimes it tries to do so from within those forms. In England, Anglo-​Catholicism had already played out in a remarkably similar struggle.

588   Matthew Bradley

The Ritual Sentiment No figure brings together Anglo-​Catholicism and decadence together more closely than Walter Pater (1839–​1894). In 1877, the writer W. H. Mallock (1849–​1923) penned a well-​received satire on Victorian Oxford entitled The New Republic, which contained versions of several well-​known Oxford figures, including one “Mr. Rose,” squarely based on Pater. Pater was already at this point notorious for the advice he had given in his 1873 book Studies in the History of the Renaissance that “success in life” was to seize the ecstasy of the moment and burn always with a “hard gem-​like flame”23—​advice whose intimations of hedonism subsequently made The Renaissance one of the most notoriously influential texts in English decadence. Mallock’s Pater figure is a dreamy and enfeebled apostle of beauty who loves flowers, paganism, and the more ornate parts of Christianity in equally sentimental and unhealthy degrees. “When I am in the weary mood for it,” Mr. Rose says at one point, “I attend the services of our English Ritualists”: In some places the whole thing is really managed with surprising skill. The dim religious twilight, fragrant with the smoke of incense; the tangled roofs that the music seems to cling to; the tapers, the high altar, and the strange intonation of the priests, all produce a curious old-​world effect, and seem to unite one with things that have been long dead. Indeed, it all seems to me far more a part of the past than the services of the Catholics.24

As far as Mr. Rose is concerned, these are “gem-​like” experiences, not meaningfully different from the intensity that he feels when seeing early dew on a rose, or limbs in clear water, or pagan art.25 They are aesthetic pleasures: wholly detachable from, and irrelevant to, religious matters. Yet it is worth noting that the orthodox Anglo-​Catholic Dr. Seydon in The New Republic—​a priest based largely on Edward Bouverie Pusey (1880–​1882), one of the original members of the Oxford Movement and perhaps Anglo-​Catholicism’s most representative figure after Newman had converted to Rome in 1845—​is not so different from Mr. Rose (if less well-​remembered). Seydon similarly privileges the past, the “uniting with things long-​dead,” opining that the correct reading of early ecclesiastical history is the key to all modern progress while seeking union with Greece (albeit Greek orthodox Christianity rather than paganism), even as he seemingly enjoys the privileged position of being simultaneously critical of church orthodoxy and sheltering within it.26 As a young boy, his biographer recounts, Pater’s favorite pastime was playing at being a clergyman, giving sermons to his family while wearing a surplice and getting his friends to form a solemn procession.27 Nonetheless, Pater’s statements in adult life about his interest in Anglo-​Catholic rituals seem to indicate that Mallock’s was an accurate portrait: a regular attendee at the apparently gorgeous Anglo-​Catholic rituals of St. Austin’s

THEOLOGY   589 Priory, Walworth, Pater nevertheless clashed with the presiding priest, Father Nugée, by apparently declaring that “The Church of England is nothing to me apart from its ornate services.”28 Yet as Hanson points out, this was exactly the accusation frequently leveled by anti-​Ritualists at Father Nugée himself.29 Pater, then, brought to decadence a very particular tension: a tension between, on the one hand, his protestations that he was not a part of any kind of religious orthodoxy (he had famously encouraged his readers not to acquiesce in “facile orthodoxy” in The Renaissance)30 and, on the other, the clear resemblance between his aesthetic teachings and the urgent questions being asked in the Church of England as a result of the Anglo-​Catholic controversies. Hanson claims Pater as an Anglo-​Catholic in Decadence and Catholicism, recognizing how radical some of the ways Pater theorized ritual in his writing will have seemed in that context. 31 He shows how ritual, because it is a concrete and embodied form of religious performance, provides space for Pater to explore the way Catholicism itself allows for the performance of sensual and particularly homoerotic experience. Yet Pater’s radical model of the role of ritual in religion also had implications for decadence in other, more theologically recognizable ways, particularly how it addressed the role of individual personality in inflecting and formulating that ritual. In the essay in The Renaissance on the eighteenth-​century German historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Pater argues that all religions are a product of their environment; they “brighten under a bright sky” or “grow intense and shrill in the clefts of human life, where the spirit is narrow and confined.” They are animated by what Pater calls “a universal pagan sentiment” which, he asserts, is a reaction to the melancholy we feel when we start thinking too abstractly: This sentiment attaches itself in the earliest times to certain usages of patriarchal life, the kindling of the fire, the washing of the body, the slaughter of the flock, the gathering of harvest, holidays and dances. Here are the beginnings of a ritual, at first as occasional and unfixed as the sentiment which it expresses, but destined to become the permanent element of religious life.32

The Greek contribution, as Pater sees it, was to introduce the aesthetic element, “an element of refinement, of ascension” in the creation of the religious conceptions that bloom from this seed. He concludes: “Always, the fixed element is the religious observance; the fluid unfixed element is the myth, the religious conception” (my italics).33 But the idea that “religious observance” is more stable than “religious conception,” that ritual might be the first and most important expression of the individual’s religious sense and that the direction of that ritual might legitimately emerge from within that individual’s personality, was precisely the question being asked publicly of the Anglo-​Catholics. In fact, how such an idea of religion might or might not be reconciled to orthodox Christian forms was something Pater developed at length in his only novel, Marius the Epicurean (1885), a bildungsroman narrating the spiritual development of a Roman

590   Matthew Bradley youth in the second century CE. In it, Pater incorporates his theory of ritual as the originating and permanent aspect of religion into an historical worldview. All religions, from the ancient “religion of Numa” of Marius’s childhood, to the pagan religions of Rome, to early Christianity, are shown to conform to the developmental model Pater had outlined in The Renaissance: as things not so much to be thought about as to be done; moreover, as Pater comments of Roman religion at one point, “done in minutely detailed manner . . . correctness in which had long been a matter of laborious learning with a whole school of ritualists.”34 The importance of early Christianity in the novel is that it is cast as the inheritor and culmination of this process. A “transforming spirit,” as Pater puts it, with “wonderful tact of selection, exclusion, juxtaposition” begets “a unique effect of freshness, a grave yet wholesome beauty” (239), allowing a “reorganizing” of pagan and Jewish sentiments into the early Christian rites (243). This process is echoed in Marius’s own spiritual and intellectual development: near the end of the novel, Marius pays a visit to a small house outside Rome, where he witnesses a small but beautiful Christian burial rite, an experience that creates in him “a singular novelty of feeling, like the dawning of a fresh order of experiences” (231), resulting in his tentative suspicion that “after the beholding of it, he could never again be altogether as he had been before” (234). By grounding Marius’s attraction to Christianity in the beautiful “observances” he witnesses, Pater makes religious observance interpretable as both the beginning of an orthodox conversion to religious conception and also a potential subversion of that conception from within—​consistent with his broader narrative of the development of Christianity in Marius. Pater in Marius also sees two impulses as fundamental to the “genius” of Christianity (239), the oscillation between which were important to both decadence and Anglo-​Catholicism: first, the impulse toward asceticism, and second, the impulse toward culture. Asceticism is “the sacrifice of one part of human nature to another, that it may live more completely in what survives of it” (241), and it is represented in Christian history through the ideal of monasticism, which Pater casts as a retreat from the world that allows the soul to aim at a certain type of perfection. The impulse to culture, by contrast, is “a harmonious development of all parts of human nature” (241) and is represented by the type of ritualistic Christianity to which Marius is drawn and which prospers in the historical moment that Pater calls “the minor ‘Peace of the church’” (238) in Rome under the Antonines (distinct from the “greater Peace” [240], the later formal acceptance of Christianity by Rome under Constantine). Pater’s characterization of Christianity’s central appeal thus lay on two of the most prominent controversies around Anglo-​Catholicism: the ideal of monasticism and holy orders, and the aesthetic appeal of ornate ritual. In Marius, we are given a protagonist who mediates and refracts these two “ideals” through his personality in ways that can be read as both highly orthodox and potentially subversive. And while Pater is characteristically careful to ensure that Marius does not live to resolve this tension, it is in the refraction of those ideals through the personality where the potential for decadence—​the allowing of that personality to over-​determine or distort either of both of those ideals—​resides.

THEOLOGY   591

Church and Stage The decadent potential in that Paterian impulse to culture—​the “harmonious development of all parts of human nature” through ritual and decoration—​lies, of course, in its capacity for disharmony, where, in the performance of such ritual, one aspect of human nature threatens to distort or overwhelm the whole. Perhaps the most famous example of this dynamic in decadent writing is the notorious story “The Priest and the Acolyte” by John Francis Bloxam, published in an Oxford undergraduate magazine in 1894 and cited in evidence against Wilde during his trials the following year. This story of an aesthetic priest’s sexual infatuation with a young acolyte climaxes with a Catholic Mass that is transformed, through mutually transgressive desire, into a site of doomed beauty: priest and acolyte enter into a suicide pact, which, if anything, only increases the aesthetic pleasure of the ritual: “Never had the priest’s voice trembled with such wonderful earnestness, never had the acolyte responded with such devotion, as at this midnight mass for the peace of their own departing souls.”35 In 1897, Bloxam became an Anglo-​Catholic priest, whose services in Hoxton in the East End of London were reportedly well known for their use of the Latin missal and ornate ritual.36 Nonetheless, decadence also generated other types of potential “disharmonies” in its approach to cultured self-​development through religious ritual. In Robert Hichens’s satire on Wilde and Alfred Douglas, The Green Carnation (1894), Esmé Amarinth (Hichens’s avatar for Wilde), having waxed lyrical on the Anglo-​Catholic use of elaborate vestments and Gregorian music, is interrupted by another character, who asks: Is it true that Mr Haweis introduced his congregation to a Mahatma in the vestry after service last Sunday? . . . I heard so, and that he had persuaded Little Tich to read the lessons for the rest of the season. I think it is rather hard upon the music-​halls. There is really so much competition nowadays!37

Hugh Reginald Haweis (1838–​ 1901) was an Anglican clergyman at St. James’s, Marylebone, an early and fanatical devotee of Richard Wagner. However, Hichens’s mention of “Little Tich,” a well-​known music-​hall comedian and acrobat of the time, is significant, because it indicates a decadent association between High Church ritual and the theater, or music hall. The music hall as an urban palace of performance, color, and aesthetic delights, discovered in the gaslit streets of the modern metropolis with the figure of the dancer at its center, is a powerful image in decadent writing. It is perhaps most famously given life in the many poems on music-​hall dancers by Arthur Symons (1865–​1945), who declared in the opening of his 1895 volume London Nights: My life is like a music-​hall, Where, in the impotence of rage . . . I see myself upon the stage

592   Matthew Bradley Dance to amuse a music-​hall.38

Indeed, Lytton Strachey took this connection all the way back to the Oxford Movement and Froude, commenting in Eminent Victorians that “the sort of ardor that impels more normal youths to haunt Music Halls and fall in love with actresses took the form, in Froude’s case, of a romantic devotion to the Deity and immense interest in the state of his own soul.”39 At one point in Mallock’s New Republic, a church service is performed—​ with deliberate incongruity—​in a private theater. The theater, we are told, is draped in crimson satin, with statues of fauns and bacchanals, and “the gallery rested on the heads of nine scantily-​draped Muses, who, had they been two less in number, might have passed for the seven deadly sins.”40 When the Anglo-​Catholic Mr. Seydon sweeps in, “the place seemed to grow more devotional at his presence,” and when his distinctive voice mixes with another clergyman’s, it is characterized as a “duet.”41 In English decadent writing, there is often a strong association between theatrical and liturgical performance. Aubrey Beardsley (1872–​1898), for example, in his unfinished erotic novel Under the Hill (a retelling of the legend of Venus and Tannhaüser), often blends the language of High Church ritual and the music hall. Upon waking in the Venusberg, the Abbé Fanfreluche (the Tannhaüser character) dreams of a fictional ballet called “The Bacchanals of Sporion,” which begins, Beardsley explains in a knowing footnote, with a group of satyrs followed on stage by a priest: The scene was admirably stage-​managed and nothing could have been more varied yet harmonious than this Arcadian group. The service was quaint and simple, but with sufficient ritual to give the corps de ballet an opportunity of showing its dainty skill. The dancing of the satyrs was received with huge favour, and when the priest raised his hand in final blessing, the whole troop of worshippers made such an intricate and elegant exit.42

The writer and artist Selwyn Image (1849–​ 1930)—​ himself an Anglican vicar in Tottenham and Soho until the 1870s—​has the narrator of one of his more decadent stories, “A Bundle of Letters” (where the titular letters are from a middle-​aged man to a younger man in an undefined relationship), give detailed advice on the niceties of dramatic recitation while simultaneously proclaiming himself to be in “an instructive, fervent, hortatory mood” and demanding that the younger man must imagine himself “sitting still and mute like a reverend member in his proper pew, and listen to my sermon.”43 The connection between High Anglican ritual and music-​hall entertainment was not solely a literary matter in decadent circles. The Anglo-​Catholic priest Stewart Headlam (1847–​1924), who in 1895 was to famously provide the bail money for Wilde, had in 1879 founded the Church and Stage Guild to bring together members of theatrical profession and allegedly “respectable” society. For Headlam, the idea of the theater as a near-​ consecrated space was part of a wider mission, a movement that saw the church as a place “in which all human faculties are to be fully developed, in which all callings are to

THEOLOGY   593 be consecrated.”44 Pleasure, he says in an 1881 sermon, is the chief value of the stage, and our pleasure in beauty should be always and everywhere part of our celebration of God, even offering a glimpse of “how beautiful this world will be when at last order has overcome chaos and when God is seen in perfect beauty.”45 Those who speak against the theater on moral grounds are “afraid of pleasure.”46 Headlam’s call for “all human faculties to be developed” strikes a recognizably Paterian note. Yet a decadent disharmony undoubtedly developed, partly because Headlam repeatedly found himself at odds with his episcopate (he was moved on from more than one curacy because of his views on theater), and partly because of the focus within the Guild on the pleasure to be found in the human body through dancers, who were singled out by Headlam for particular “consecration”: Those who go so far as to maintain that the human body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, will be enthusiastic supporters of the Dancers who, after much education and discipline, enable it to speak to us with the various poetry of vital motion.47

This passage is taken from Headlam’s re-​edited edition of Carlo Blasis’s Code of Terpsichore, of which the Graphic noted disapprovingly on publication that it “holds ballet-​dancing up as a kind of spiritual exercise and act of worship.”48 Image had made similar types of arguments in a paper to the Guild in 1891 entitled “The Art of Dancing: On a Question of Dress,” in which he argues that dancers’ dresses should never conceal the features of the human body (Image’s wife was herself an ex-​ dancer who had performed at the Alhambra, one of London’s best-​known music halls). What makes all this characteristically decadent is that these religious claims for the ritual of dance never quite become an open subversion of Christian orthodoxy—​but neither are they comfortably part of that orthodoxy. In practice, the relation of religious ritual and music-​hall entertainment seemed more decadent still, as Headlam took to hosting “Church and Stage” parties in his rooms at Upper Bedford Place; Johnson and Symons both attended these parties, and even Ernest Dowson (1867–​1900), who didn’t, described them as “novel and unconventional to say the least of it,” predicting that “my horror of dances will outweigh my curiosity to sample Stewart Headlam’s ballet girls.”49 Headlam’s “Church and Stage” parties were a physical enactment of the question of how far what counted as religious ritual could be pushed to the limits of subjective assertion. Aesthetic these efforts may have been, but this project of discovering the limits to the subjective elements of religion by deliberately molding them by force of personality into shapes unacceptable to orthodoxy is a recognizably decadent one. The urban setting is also important. By the end of the century, Anglo-​Catholic ritualism was prospering primarily in urban parishes, often in London’s East End. A good proportion of the priests imprisoned for excessive ritual worked in this kind of parish and were sometimes labelled “slum priests.” Bloxam’s success in Hoxton, and Headlam’s in Shoreditch, were typical. Pater had recognized the appeal of ornate ritual to the urban poor in Marius; when Marcus Aurelius introduces the “singular and in ways beautiful ritual” of the religion of Isis to Rome, its success is rooted, Pater remarks, with

594   Matthew Bradley “the enthusiasm of the swarming plebian quarters” (138). The discovery of a dreamlike church hidden in the midst of the urban sprawl, perceived by a writer who slips between both, became a marked feature in decadent writing. Some writers treated it relatively lightly: Theodore Wratislaw (1871–​1933) spends much of his poem “Palm Sunday” describing a Mass that takes place against the backdrop of the “red-​stained East,” only to undercut it by having the poet describe himself and his female companion leaving “like two slaves regaining liberty” in order “to mark /​Friends’ faces as we talked and strolled between /​The toilettes of Hyde Park.”50 Others were more reverent: Johnson’s 1894 story “Tobacco Clouds,” for example, which narrates an ambiguous mental journey provoked by the experience of tobacco-​smoking, includes such a sanctuary: “I like to think that this quiet chapel, in the obedience of Rome, in communion with that supreme apostolate, is always open to me upon this winding little by-​street.”51 Perhaps most memorable is Dowson’s “Benedictio Domini,” dedicated to Selwyn Image, which begins: Without, the sullen noises of the street! The voice of London, inarticulate, Hoarse and blaspheming, surges into meet The silent blessing of the Immaculate.52

The church is dark and incense-​laden; Dowson sees it as an aesthetic sanctuary—​and solution—​to the sinfulness of a decadent world: Strange silence here: without, the sounding street Heralds the world’s swift passage to the fire: O Benediction, perfect and complete! When shall men cease to suffer and desire?

Both Dowson and Johnson are writing of Roman Catholic spaces (both texts were written after their respective conversions in 1891); but the aesthetic salve offered by a religion that speaks to the senses, and the chance at self-​development through aesthetically powerful ritual in the midst of the city, has a clear Anglo-​Catholic inheritance.

Holy and Unholy Orders Unlike his idea of the religious impulse to culture, Pater’s characterization of the countervailing impulse to asceticism hints at a certain malformation or disharmony in the need for “the sacrifice of one part of human nature to another” (241). But public discourse on the subject did more than merely hint: Patrick O’Malley has shown how much anti-​Catholic discourse in nineteenth-​century England threw suspicions of degeneracy and perversion on what might be going on inside monastic or convent walls.53 One of the Oxford Movement’s original priorities had been to revive religious communities in

THEOLOGY   595 England, which had borne some fruit; according to one pamphlet, there were 53 English convents in 1851, and 214 by 1869.54 This tendency had led to suspicion and scandal, from mutterings around impropriety in the all-​male orders founded by original Oxford Movement founders in the 1840s, to intimations of homosexuality in an Anglican monastery in Norwich in the 1860s, and, of course, in Father Nugée’s Order of St. Augustine at St. Austin’s Priory, Walworth, whose ornate services were so beloved by Pater himself.55 Nevertheless, it is surprisingly rare for English decadent writing to draw directly on the tropes of sexual degeneracy in religious communities that were culturally available from anti-​Catholic and anti-​Anglo-​Catholic discourse; rather, such writing tends to draw together the dual impulses to culture and asceticism identified by Pater into one vision, where a potentially subversive devotion to the aesthetics of religious ritual, through glimpses of the monastic or conventual environment, is inflected through a submission of personality, rather than an assertion of it. Dowson wrote a number of poems focusing on closed and austere religious communities, most just before or just after his conversion; “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” written in 1891, recasts the contrast from “Benedictio Domini” between the beauties of religious ritual and the sick world (“Outside, the world is wild and passionate; /​Man’s weary laughter and his sick despair /​Entreat at their impenetrable gate”),56 as does “Carthusians,” written in the same year (that poem describes the monks “[d]‌espising the world’s wisdom and the world’s desire” and ends with the assurance that “[t]hough the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail”).57 His most extended meditation on this theme, however, was his 1890 short story “The Diary of a Successful Man” (1890). The story is set in Bruges, “the most medieval town in Europe,” we are told,58 and focuses on an old love-​triangle between the narrator, a man named Lorimer, and their shared love, Delphine. The narrator last left Bruges many years ago after receiving an apparent letter of rejection from Delphine and is haunted by the idea that he will see Lorimer (whom he assumes Delphine has married) in a church. This vision comes to pass, and the narrator discovers Lorimer in the Church of the Dames Rouges, near insanity and rambling obsessively about “the singing of the nuns, of the numerous religious processions, of the blessed doctrine of the intercession of saints.”59 It is then revealed in melodramatic fashion that Delphine has sent the narrator the wrong letter—​ the rejection meant for Lorimer. Guilt and obsession have led Lorimer to his current state and Delphine to the austere order of nuns of the Dames Rouges. The story ends with the narrator and Lorimer watching the intense ritual, surrounded by incense, and with “the officiating priest in his dalmatic of cloth of gold” passing from the sacristy and genuflecting at the altar. Both men listen to the singing of the nuns, “a sob of limitation,” but locate a deep aesthetic experience within that limitation, hearing a beautiful voice “of marvellous sweetness and power” rise above the tone of all others, which is Delphine’s.60 The narrator reflects that the nuns are only seen when their bodies are taken out of the convent after death, and leaves Lorimer in the church, “his whole life concentrated, as it were, in a very passion of waiting for a moment which will surely come.”61 The ritual beauty and the idealized screened-​off space of the nuns come together in an experience

596   Matthew Bradley that becomes decadent, a malformation of Lorimer’s personality (“his whole life concentrated into a passion of waiting”). Charlotte Mew’s short story “A White Night” (1903) both continues and critiques Dowson’s decadent triangulation between aesthetics, religious ritual, and holy orders. Three English travelers in Spain are locked overnight in what appears to be an abandoned convent, becoming witnesses to a secret ritual ceremony performed by a group of monks. The ceremony finishes with a young woman in white being buried alive, with the male narrator horrified but simultaneously enthralled: “For me, it was a spectacle, but more than that: it was an acquiescence in a rather splendid crime.”62 As in Dowson’s story, monasticism sees a disharmony of personality, a distorting subordination of self—​but in both stories, it is a malformation that is visited on the decadent male spectator rather than the initiates themselves. The freedom of priests to perform their own subversive rituals is also a factor: in a Catholic country, it is implied, ecclesiastics operate well outside the reach of civil law. Mew also self-​consciously delivers a critique of the fascination with monastic ritual practiced by her narrator and, by implication, other decadent writers. The narrator’s sister, Ella, deals with him sharply for his “attitude of temporary detachment,” and Mew consistently refuses to let the ritual become for the reader the spectacle that it becomes for the narrator; thanks to Ella’s empathy, the narrator eventually recognizes that the victim had in her eyes “something infinitely greater to her vision than the terror of men’s dreams.”63 While it is difficult to discern whether this is simply a further romanticization or a glimpse of the limits of his own vision, Mew makes the point that the decadent veneration of aesthetic ritual is indeed a limiting of personality for the witness, but it is certainly not one that allows one to live “more perfectly” within that limit, as Pater had taught.

Conclusion Anglo-​Catholicism has an influential but complex relation to English decadence. It is an undeniable fact that very few decadent writers were, or became, Anglo-​ Catholics: Bloxam (of “The Priest and the Acolyte”) is really the only recognized decadent writer to formally embrace it as a faith. By contrast, decadent conversions to Roman Catholicism were notoriously frequent, and Roman Catholicism exerts a persistent and obvious fascination on their writing. Yet Anglo-​Catholicism had (sometimes literally) set the stage for the nature of that engagement from within England: an exploratory and potentially subversive reinterpretation of Roman Catholic ideas, poised between heresy and orthodoxy. In its most infamous aspect—​Ritualism—​it offered a religious sensibility that tested the boundaries of religious authority, the extent to which aesthetic experience could be categorized as genuine revelation, and the point at which the orthodoxy of any given ritual collapsed into a self-​regarding reflection of the priest conducting it. Its concern with reviving religious orders offered a different but no less

THEOLOGY   597 decadent type of potential disharmony, a retreat from the world into an aesthetic realm that generated both transgression and obsession. Many decadents may have become Roman Catholics—​but many Anglo-​Catholics did too. The network of aesthetics and subversion that Anglo-​Catholicism offered, the occupation of a liminal space tentatively inside orthodoxy but potentially subverting it, shaped the relation of English decadence to Roman Catholicism in many ways more powerfully than the Roman forms and rituals that so often formed its subject matter.

Notes 1. These sorts of parallels can, of course, be tendentious: an American sociologist plays the same rhetorical trick when comparing Anglo-​Catholicism to the 1960s American youth movement, a conceit I have freely borrowed here. See John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), xxi. 2. Richard Hurrell Froude, Remains (London: J. G. and F. Rivington, 1838), 1:433. 3. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 112. 4. Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 23. 5. Lionel Johnson, “The Diary of a Cultured Faun,” The Anti-​Jacobin, March 14, 1891, 157. 6. Lionel Johnson, Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919), 85. 7. Johnson, Some Winchester Letters, 140. 8. Lionel Johnson, “St. Francis,” originally published in The Academy in February 1899, reproduced in Post Liminium: Essays and Papers by Lionel Johnson, ed. Thomas Whittemore (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 96. 9. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 113. 10. Charles Kingsley, His Letters and Memories of His Life (London: Henry S. King, 1877), 1:249–​50. 11. Froude, Remains, 1:79. 12. Froude, Remains, 1:14. 13. Froude, Remains, 1:57. 14. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 29. 15. Piers Brendon, Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement (London: Paul Elek, 1974), 34–​36. 16. W. J. Conybeare, Perversion (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1856), 2:6. 17. David Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-​ Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (1982): 184. 18. Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” 186, 188. 19. [Anon.], “Parsons in Petticoats,” Punch, June 10, 1865, 239. 20. These were Arthur Tooth (thirty-​seven days, 1877), Thomas Pelham Dale (fifty-​six days, 1880), Richard William Enraght (fifty-​one days, 1880–​1881), Sidney Faithhorn Green (five-​hundred and ninety-​five days, 1881–​1882), and James Bell Cox (sixteen days, 1887).

598   Matthew Bradley Reported by Bernard Palmer, Reverend Rebels: Five Victorian Clerics and their Fight against Authority (London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1993), 14. 21. J. W. Stedman, “The Genesis of Patience,” in W. S. Gilbert: A Century of Scholarship and Commentary, ed. J. B. Jones (New York: University Press, 1970), 286. Stedman’s article notes in detail how much of the original satire survived into the finished text. 22. Richard Le Gallienne, “The Décadent to His Soul,” in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s, ed. Karl Beckson (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981), 123–​25. 23. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. 24. W. H. Mallock, The New Republic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895), 273. 25. Mallock, The New Republic, 28. 26. Mallock, The New Republic, 234. 27. Thomas Wright, The Life of Walter Pater (London: Everett & Co., 1907), 1:21. 28. Wright, The Life of Walter Pater, 2:38. 29. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 180–​81. 30. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 120. 31. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, 179–​80. 32. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 99. 33. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 100. 34. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. Michael Levey (London: Penguin, 1985), 137. Further references cited parenthetically. 35. John Francis Bloxam, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” in The Decadent Short Story: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Kostas Boyiopoulos, Yoonjoung Choi, and Matthew Brinton Tildesley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 97. 36. As reported in Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” 198. 37. Robert Hichens, The Green Carnation (New York: D. Appleton, 1894), 91. 38. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick, eds., Arthur Symons: Selected Early Poetry (Cambridge: MHRA, 2017), 88. 39. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto and Windus, 1918), 12. 40. Mallock, The New Republic, 94. 41. Mallock, The New Republic, 340–​41. 42. Aubrey Beardsley, Under the Hill and Other Essays in Prose and Verse (London: John Lane, 1894), 30. 43. Selwyn Image, “A Bundle of Letters: Giving A Selection from Three or Four of the Less Interesting of Them,” in The Decadent Short Story, 34. 44. Stewart D. Headlam, The Function of the Stage: A Lecture by Stewart D. Headlam (London: Frederick Verinder, 1889), 10. 45. Stuart D. Headlam, Service of Humanity, and Other Sermons (London: J. Hodges, 1882), 22–​23. 46. Headlam, The Function of the Stage, 11. 47. Stewart D. Headlam, The Theory of Theatrical Dancing, edited from Carlo Blasis’s Code of Terpsichore (London: Frederick Verinder, 1888), xiii. 48. Reprinted at the end of Headlam, The Function of the Stage, 37. 49. Ernest Dowson, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. D. Flower and H. Maas (London: Cassell, 1967), 85–​86, 130, 181. 50. Reprinted in Beckson, ed., Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s, 268–​69. 51. Lionel Johnson, “Tobacco Clouds,” in The Decadent Short Story, 132.

THEOLOGY   599 52. Ernest Dowson, The Poems of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 54. 53. Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78–​81. 54. Quoted in O’Malley, Catholicism, 190. 55. Hilliard, “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” 191–​94. 56. Dowson, Poems, 42. 57. Dowson, Poems, 107, 8. 58. Ernest Dowson, The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker (London: W. H. Allen, 1949), 35. 59. Dowson, Stories, 43. 60. Dowson, Stories, 47. 61. Dowson, Stories, 49. 62. Charlotte Mew, “A White Night,” in Daughters of Decadence: Stories by Women Writers of the Fin de Siècle, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 2016), 137. 63. Mew, “A White Night,” 138.

Further Reading Bradley, Matthew. “The Theology of Decadence.” In Decadence and Literature, edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir, 216–​31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Brendon, Piers. Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement. London: Paul Elek, 1974. DeLaura, David. Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold and Pater. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. Fraser, Hilary. Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Grimwood, Tom, and Peter Yeandle. “Church on/​as Stage: Stewart Headlam’s Rhetorical Theology.” In Performing Religion in Public, edited by Claire Maria Chambers, Simon W. Du Toit, and Joshua Edelman, 97–​116. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Hilliard, David. “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-​Catholicism and Homosexuality.” Victorian Studies 25, no. 2 (1982): 181–​210. Lockerd, Martin. Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. O’Malley, Patrick. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Orens, John. Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, The Masses and the Music Hall. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Palmer, Bernard. Reverend Rebels: Five Victorian Clerics and their Fight against Authority. London: Dartman, Longman and Todd, 1993. Reed, John Shelton. Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-​Catholicism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996. Tanis, Bethany. “Diverging Paths: Fin-​de-​Siècle Britishness and the Oxford Movement.” Anglican and Episcopal History 77, no. 3 (2008): 287–​317.

Chapter 31

Scienc e Entropy, Degeneration, and Decadent Self-​Destruction Jordan Kistler

Contemporary scientific theories were integral to the literature of decadence, providing both material and methodology. In the preface to À rebours (Against Nature; 1884), written twenty years after the novel’s publication, J.-K. Huysmans notes that he desired “to break the limits of the novel, to bring art, science, history into it.”1 For Huysmans and other decadents, literature is akin to science, a form of experiment that reveals truths about human nature. The four texts considered in this chapter function as experiments in individualism, with their protagonists subjected to the recently formulated laws of thermodynamics—​resulting in nervous exhaustion and self-​destruction. Lord Kelvin’s assertion of the coming heat death of the universe was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, regularly mapped on to humanity, which was seen to be in its own decadence, using up the last of its energy. 2 The self-​destructive drive of many decadent characters—​Des Esseintes, Dorian Gray, Marius the Epicurean, and Edna Pontellier—​can be explained in terms of nineteenth-​century scientific discoveries that demonstrated that entropy was the inevitable result of the expenditure of energy in an isolated system. Thus, it is the isolation of individualism, which Paul Bourget in 1881 argues is central to a decadent style,3 that results in the eventual destruction of decadent characters. As isolated systems, these characters are “continually suffering deductions, [until] these unceasing deductions finally result in the cessation of motion.”4 The process of entropy means many decadent texts can end only with the death of their protagonists.

Decadent Thermodynamics In his theory of decadence, Bourget defines decadence as a form of individualism: The word “decadence” is often used to designate the state of a society that produces too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life. A society is comparable

Science   601 to a living organism: like an organism, it consists of a collection of lesser organisms, which in turn consist of a collection of cells. The individual is the social cell. For the whole organism to function energetically, the lesser organisms must function energetically, but with a lesser energy. If the cells’ energy becomes independent, the organisms that make up the total organism similarly cease subordinating their energy to the total energy, and the subsequent anarchy leads to the decadence of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law: it succumbs to decadence as soon as the individual has begun to thrive under the influence of acquired well-​being and heredity.5

Bourget borrows the extended metaphor of society as an organism from Herbert Spencer, who, in “The Social Organism” (1860), argued that “societies agree with individual organisms” in that they are “small aggregations” of “component units,” requiring a “mutual dependence of parts” which become “at last so great, that the activity and life of each part is made possible only by the activity and life of the rest.”6 Mary Gluck argues that “the unprecedented success of Bourget’s definition can in part be explained by its ability to translate the cultural concerns of the age into the dominant language of science. . . The authority of science helped explain and legitimate the symptoms of doubt and relativism that characterised the culture of the age.”7 Yet Bourget does not simply appropriate the language of science. His definition is grounded in the widespread scientific and sociological belief that individualism was the natural outcome of biological evolution. Spencer thus argued that individualism was the inevitable result of “the law of all progress,” which is the “change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.”8 Evolution itself is a process of individuation. Yet, if Bourget borrows these ideas from Spencer, how do we reconcile the idea of scientific “progress” with a state that Bourget saw as the precursor to the destruction of society, one that Émile Durkheim, a sociologist who pioneered the discipline of “suicidology,” argued was the cause of an epidemic of suicide across Europe? Durkheim writes: Excessive individualism not only results in favoring the actions of suicidogenic causes, but it is itself such a cause. It not only frees man’s inclination to do away with himself from a protective obstacle, but creates this inclination out of whole cloth.9

Durkheim believed that modernity, particularly widespread education and the secularization of society, led to a breakdown of community bonds; this in turn led to the self-​ destruction of the most individualistic members of society. Similarly, Bourget believed individualism necessarily led to pessimism, insisting that “only individual reflection leads some of us, in spite of our hereditary optimism, to the highest level of negativity.”10 Though couched as the “law of progress,” Spencer’s evolutionary view of individualism was entirely consistent with that of Bourget and Durkheim. Critical accounts of decadence have long associated it with degeneration, the evolutionary move from complexity to simplicity. Yet the decadence Bourget identifies is not the result of degeneration but of evolutionary advancement. In a far cry from the atavistic degeneration described by Cesare Lombroso, among others, the decline of decadence was linked—​by biologists,

602   Jordan Kistler physicians, sexologists, sociologists, and others—​to a state of over-​evolution or over-​ civilization, one that produced the “over-​luxurious” and “over-​inquiring” art described by Arthur Symons in 1893.11 Thus, the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, like Spencer, insisted that “individuation” was the inevitable outcome of evolution. Furthermore, it is this process of “individuation” that creates consciousness: “Individuation, with its train of egoism and wrong-​doing and wrong-​suffering, serves the origination of consciousness.”12 As the focus on “wrong-​doing” and “wrong-​suffering” makes clear, Hartmann believed that consciousness was inevitably followed by the development of consciousness of suffering, in which mankind realizes “the preponderating pain that every individual must endure.”13 Thus, Hartmann believed individuation and consciousness naturally led to suicidal ideation: “But if ever an idea was born as feeling, it is the pessimistic sympathy with oneself and everything living and the longing after the peace of non-​existence.”14 Hartmann thus links evolutionary advancement with individualism, pessimism, and suicide. In fact, decadence was seen to be symptomatic of biological overspecialization, in which species highly adapted to one environment are unable to adapt to new conditions. According to this theory, overspecialization was “the penultimate stage in evolution. . . prior to self-​imposed extinction.”15 It is this “self-​imposed extinction” that Bourget points to when he associates the “highly civilized” and “unusually refined” with “pessimism,” “unaccountable neuroses,” and “nihilism.”16 Decadent characters like Des Esseintes can be seen to have fallen prey to overspecialization, bound for extinction because they cannot adapt to the modern environment. Decadence has long been read in the light of Darwin’s theories. Yet at the end of the nineteenth century, science was, as Peter Bowler puts it, largely “non-​Darwinian.”17 Much of the popular understanding of science came via men like Herbert Spencer, who brought scientific theory into sociological, economic, and political thought. Spencer’s “law of progress,” which underpins Bourget’s theory of decadent individualism, is grounded not in Darwinian evolution but in Victorian physics. According to Spencer, the “universal law. . . which determines progress of every kind” is that “every active force produces more than one change—​every cause produces more than one effect,” an operation he describes as “the decomposition of one force into many forces.”18 He is interested in the “change” or transformation of “force,” and more specifically change that is a form of “decomposition.” This formulation simply restates the first two laws of thermodynamics: (1) energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed; and (2) the entropy (the unavailability of energy) of any isolated system will increase over time. Victorians interpreted the first law, the law of conservation of energy, positively, taking it as a promise of stability and longevity. In contrast, the second law, as Barri Gold demonstrates, “comes to dominate a Victorian mind-​set increasingly concerned with dissipation and degradation.”19 Thus, Spencer wrote: Towards what do these changes tend? Will they go on for ever? or will there be an end to them? Can things increase in heterogeneity through all future time?. . . Or does it work towards some ultimate state admitting no further modification of like kind?20

Science   603 These ideas led him to ask, “[A]‌re we not manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death?” and to answer, “That such a state must be the outcome of the changes everywhere going on, seems beyond doubt.”21 Thermodynamics leads Spencer to much the same pessimistic conclusion as the one reached by Bourget and Hartmann. As Spencer’s emphatic use of “we” makes clear, thermodynamics was routinely applied to mankind, leading to anxiety over the expenditure of energy and the potential for exhaustion in the modern world. As Greg Myers argues, “thermodynamics has been intertwined with social thought, influenced by it and influencing it, since the earliest formulations.”22 Nineteenth-​century physicians feared that humanity was using up its store of energy, resulting in an epidemic of “neurasthenia,” a nervous disorder resulting from the “exhaustion of the nervous system.”23 Decadent literature is populated by just such exhausted, nervous characters. They represent isolated systems, closed off emotionally and intellectually from their age due to overdeveloped individualism. Subject to the second law of thermodynamics, they succumb to entropy and self-​destruction.

Huysmans’s Against Nature and the Isolated System Perhaps the most isolated character of decadent fiction is Huysmans’s Duc Jean Floressas Des Esseintes, who chooses to “soak himself in solitude” (5) because of his “contempt for humanity” (7) and his wish to “sequester himself from a loathsome age” (44). For Des Esseintes, being “completely at home” is synonymous with being “truly alone” (12). These feelings are directly attributed to his individualism, his “spirit of independence” (64). Des Esseintes prides himself on being “free of any bond, of any constraint” (64), rejecting all the things that Durkheim believed tethered a man to life: religion, community, and family. The theme of individualism and isolation extends in Against Nature from the plot to the very form of the novel. In the preface of 1904, Huysmans frames the novel as an experiment in which he sought to “get rid of the traditional plot, to get rid even of love, of women, to concentrate the beam of light on one single character” (194). Plot in the nineteenth century, as scholars like Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth have shown, is synonymous with networks and communities, as in the multi-​plot novels of George Eliot or Charles Dickens.24 It is these networks of human life that Huysmans rejects in his focus on the individual alone. Yet the novel is not simply a character study, but a thought experiment that explores the consequences of that isolation, on both the form of the novel and the character of Des Esseintes. Like Des Esseintes, the structure of the text breaks down under the pressures of isolation and entropy, the familiar form of a novel interrupted by memories, intense sensory descriptions, and obsessive lists. Debra Segura reads Des Esseintes’s isolation in the light of nineteenth-​century germ theory, suggesting that it represents an attempt to “protect himself from the impurities, filth and contagion that contemporary scientists posited as etiological factors in medical

604   Jordan Kistler morbidity,” and she supports this reading with close attention to the theme of circulation in the novel.25 It is true that Des Esseintes sees his “self-​imposed exile” as “a particular sort of sanatorium where he can convalesce and ultimately cure himself of his physical ailments.”26 Yet it is also true that if his ailments were caused by the circulation of germs, his “hermetic utopia” would aid his recovery.27 But whereas Des Esseintes understands his illness in terms of contemporary germ theory, Huysmans frames his illness in terms of thermodynamics, or energy circulating within a system. Des Esseintes comes from a long aristocratic line of ancestors who have “declined,” “thus exhausting. . . what little strength they yet possessed” (3), an exhaustion that plagues Des Esseintes. At the outset of the novel, the character longs for death, having “spent” his inheritance and his vitality (8). The novel details his search for a cure, but it is his “idea of hiding himself away, far from the world” (8), which he believes will revitalize him, that is the real source of his illness. Thus, Jens Lohfert Jørgensen argues, “[t]‌he closed system of Des Esseintes’s existence proves itself to be increasingly problematic since it aggravates, rather than improves, his exhaustion.”28 Jørgensen follows Segura in proposing a bacteriological reading of the novel, but the aggravation of Des Esseintes’s exhaustion in an isolated system is better explained in terms of thermodynamics. Rather than germs, it is isolation itself that causes Des Esseintes’s illness. In fact, Des Esseintes’s constant longing for solitude is framed as a form of self-​harm: He lived on himself, feeding on his own substance, like those torpid creatures that bury themselves away in a hole all winter long; solitude had affected his brain like an opiate. After first making him feel edgy and strained, it had brought on a lethargy haunted by vague reveries; it annihilated his plans and nullified his desires. (62)

Like an isolated system that converts its energy from a useful to a non-​useful form until it reaches a point of equilibrium, through the “gradual augmentation and diffusion of heat, cessation of motion, and exhaustion of potential energy,”29 Des Esseintes’s isolation leaves him in a state of self-​cannibalism. He “feeds” upon himself, gradually moving from an energetic state to one of lethargy. The “annihilation” and “nullification” he feels reflects the “equilibration” that was the inevitable result of entropy.30 As in the theories of Hartmann and Durkheim, Des Esseintes’s individualism and consequent exhaustion result in pessimism and nihilism. His sense of his own individualism, his “exceptional mind” and “lofty soul” leads him to ascribe to Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Theory of Pessimism,” which “sav[es] you from disillusion by advising you to restrict your hopes as much as possible, or, if you felt sufficiently strong, not to let yourself conceive any at all” (70). This state naturally leads to nihilism. Thus, in his discussion of Baudelaire, Des Esseintes traces the “pitiable autumn” of mankind, “the ever-​increasing erosion” that leads to “exhaust[ion],” “when nothing remains but the arid recollection of hardships endured” (117). Consciousness of human suffering, Des Esseintes argues, leads man to “follow a self-​destructive pattern so as to suffer the more acutely” (118), until he experiences a “loathing for that existence” (138) to which mankind is condemned. This suicidal wish leads Des Esseintes to isolate himself further, even though he understands

Science   605 that isolation makes him ill. He desires to “break violently out of the prison of his century” (147). His isolation can be read as an extended suicide attempt. At the end of the novel, the doctor summoned to Des Esseintes’s bedside is correct in his proposed cure: “[H]‌e must abandon this solitary existence, return to Paris, get back into ordinary life, and try to enjoy himself, in short, like other people” (173). Like Durkheim, the doctor suggests that community bonds will cure suicidal tendencies. Des Esseintes must make himself an open system, able to exchange energy with others: “He finally realized that the arguments of pessimism were incapable of giving him comfort, that only the impossible belief in a future life would give him peace” (180). In the preface of 1904, Huysmans reports that “only one writer” understood his book. Barbey d’Aurevilly “saw clearly” when he wrote that “[a]fter such a book, the only thing left for the author is to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross” (197)—​ death, or the social bonds of religion; entropy or exchange. Both Des Esseintes and Huysmans ultimately resist decadence and choose the latter.

Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Entropic Equilibrium Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) also warns of the consequences of decadent individualism, but when Dorian is presented with D’Aurevilly’s choice between “the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the cross,” he chooses death. His suicide is an act of decadent individualism, the “inevitable fate of what is exquisite and rare” being “to succumb to brutality,” in Bourget’s words.31 Like Des Esseintes, Dorian can be read as a thermodynamic system that breaks down under the force of inescapable entropy. Wilde’s novel is saturated with the language of late Victorian science. His suggestive references to natural science, psychology, and chemistry have led scholars to consider the novel in the light of numerous branches of Victorian science. However, the laws of thermodynamics function as the driving force of the novel, offering the most insight into the mystery of the portrait and Dorian’s death. Wilde was familiar with thermodynamics, particularly Spencer’s articulation of the “law of progress,”32 which insists that all matter is in the process of changing, “growing or decaying, accumulating matter or wearing away, integrating or disintegrating” until eventually “evolution has run its course—​when an aggregate has reached that equilibrium in which its changes end. . . .”33 It is the inevitability and inescapability of this “progress” towards death that the novel traces. Upon first noticing a change in the portrait, Dorian wonders if there might be some scientific explanation for it, “some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him?”34 Wilde never clearly defines the “affinity” that might exist between man and portrait, but the language used in this passage suggests an exchange of energy between

606   Jordan Kistler Dorian and the portrait that causes the portrait to change state—​much as heating water will cause it to become a gas—​a reaction that affects the “form and colour” of the latter. Michael Davis notes that this passage blurs the distinction between organic and inorganic,35 in a way that is perhaps best explained through thermodynamics. As Robert MacDougall observes, thermodynamics is “[an] idea that replaced a mechanical universe of discrete objects with one of continuous matter, alive with kinetic and potential energy.”36 The distinction between Dorian and the portrait is blurred in an understanding of the world as “one of continuous matter” and continuous exchange. Energy expended by Dorian, in the pursuit of pleasure, acts as a force upon the portrait. The mechanism by which the portrait changes is, therefore, couched in vague yet plausible scientific language in line with a contemporary understanding of the relationship between systems. Dorian believes the changes to the portrait mean he has escaped the inevitability of entropy: “Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—​he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all” (86). In line with the widespread medical and scientific understanding of the human being as akin to a machine, subject to the identical laws of thermodynamics, Dorian understands himself as a perpetual motion machine—​one of the impossible dreams of the nineteenth century, a machine that could run forever with no fuel. In her work on narrative and thermodynamics, Tina Choi argues that “[e]‌ntropy demanded a linear narrative, while conservation suggested a closed, circulatory one.”37 Dorian fears linearity and human time; it is Henry’s reminder that everything is constantly in the process of decaying (a restatement of Spencer’s “law of progress”) that drives Dorian to make his wish in the first place. Once Dorian understands the fate of the portrait, he believes himself to have escaped the ravages of time through the circulatory mechanism of the conservation of energy, read in the Victorian period as “the reassuring promise of a world of eternal returns.”38 He believes he has become “eternal” and “infinite.” Yet, as Christopher Wadlaw reminds us, a perpetual motion machine that “def[ies] time” is an impossibility, “a constant reminder of the limits of human reason and the transience of human life—​an unmelancholy mechanical memento mori.”39 What Dorian has failed to understand is that he and the portrait, linked by the “affinity” between their atoms, form a single system. The energy that moves between Dorian and the portrait is subject to the second law of thermodynamics; in an isolated system, the energy necessarily degrades. Hope endures while Dorian remains “open,” particularly to the influence of the moral characters in the novel like Basil Hallward. But Dorian has been learning individualism from Lord Henry, who preaches Spencerian ethics when he insists that “the highest of all duties” is “the duty that one owes to one’s self ” (14) and that “to be good is to be in harmony with one’s self ” (63). Dorian takes these words to heart and retreats within himself, hiding the portrait and rendering himself an isolated system. Immediately after, Dorian becomes noticeably more closed off, suspicious of his servants and withdrawn from his friends. Though his body moves in society, unlike Des Esseintes, Dorian’s soul—​in the form of the portrait—​is shut away from human contact.

Science   607 As Bourget, Durkheim, and Hartmann insisted, this kind of individualism leads to self-​ destruction and suicide. It is the murder of Basil Hallward that seals Dorian’s fate. As the first person to see the changed portrait, Basil represents the potential for opening the closed system of Dorian’s soul. Dorian feels this potential: “He felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret” (125). Yet entropy has already occurred; in his behavior Michael Gillespie sees “a compulsion to maintain stasis.”40 To preserve his secret, his isolation, he destroys Basil, and in doing so, destroys himself. Dissolution has taken hold. Dorian’s death is not always considered a suicide. Gillespie, for instance, reads it as “an unfortunate accident, the consequence of reckless behaviour and not considered action.”41 Yet it cannot be denied that Dorian literally commits self-​murder, attacking the physical manifestation of his own soul. His feelings leading up to this moment, too, are indicative of suicidal ideation. He becomes “indifferent to life” (164), and at the moment he takes up the knife he seeks to escape his “monstrous soul-​life” and “be at peace” (183). Though time catches up with his body, leaving him “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (184), Dorian does achieve the “peace” he seeks in the form of equilibrium. The “stasis” and “stagnation” that Gillespie identifies in Dorian is indicative of the final stage of entropy, “that equilibrium in which . . . changes end.”42

Pater’s Marius and the Consolation of Physics Dorian’s death is manifestly ugly, the final culmination of the ugliness of sin that perverts his quest for beauty and pleasure. Yet Bourget finds beauty in the decadent drive to destruction: If the citizens of decadence are inferior contributors to the greatness of the country, are they not, on the other hand, very superior artists within their own souls?. . . The great argument against decadences is that they have no future, and that barbarity crushes them. But is it not the inevitable fate of what is exquisite and rare to succumb to brutality? One might well prize such a failing, and prefer the defeat of decadent Athens to the triumph of the sanguinary Macedonian.43

Here Bourget does not describe beauty produced in spite of decadence and destruction, but because of it. It is the art of what is “solitary” and “sterile,” the “pain” of “failing.”44 This beauty in failure through the process of decadent “equilibration” (in Spencer’s terms) is most evident in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885). Marius is set in the second century, in the decadence of the Roman Empire, when Rome “had reached its perfection . . . —​a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of decline.”45 Marius exists on a precipice, “the little point of this present moment. . . between a past which has just ceased to be and a future which may never come”

608   Jordan Kistler (113). Marius’s future won’t come; like Dorian, he dies at the end of his novel. More widely, decline and death perpetually threaten the novel, formally and thematically. Like Des Esseintes and Dorian, Marius is the last in a noble but decaying line: “The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come down to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain Marcellus two generations before” (43). Both the wealth and the vitality of the family have been “spent,” leaving Marius depleted in multiple ways. The novel, too, shows signs of dissolution. Any forward trajectory of the bildungsroman is disrupted by lengthy quotation (including a seventeen-​page translation of Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” from the Golden Ass), temporal interruptions, and summations of philosophic tradition. These disruptions render Marius almost a side note in his own novel, pushed to the margins formally as he takes to the margins personally, due to his introspective individualism. From an early age, Marius takes “the individual for [the] standard of all things” (49). Des Esseintes physically withdraws, Dorian emotionally withdraws, and Marius intellectually withdraws, living “in the realm of imagination” (49) and feeling keenly “a large dissidence between an inward and somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved, unheightened reality of the life of those about him” (110). This “dissidence” renders Marius “but a spectator” (61) of his own life, unable even as a boy to join in the interests of his peers. Pater was deeply engaged with Victorian science. Kanarakis Yannis asserts that Pater was “one of the first who attempted to modernize art by accommodating the givens of scientific advance into his aesthetic speculation and literary practice.”46 In Plato and Platonism (1893), Pater associates Darwinism with the Heraclitean flux that threatens humanity with dangerous solipsism. As Kate Hext argues, “Pater’s interaction with Darwin and Darwinism, especially when writing of the individual, is one of resistance and reinterpretation as well as acquiescence. . . . The problem of how to conceive the modern individual in deep time, which is the problem posed for Pater by Darwin, must be solved: yet not through Darwinian science.”47 Hext claims that Pater turns to art to solve this problem, but, if so, it is art that is deeply influenced by science—​just not Darwinism. For Pater, physics and the laws of thermodynamics are a comforting counter to Darwinian flux. Throughout his oeuvre, and especially in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Plato and Platonism (1893), and Marius, the conservation of energy is presented as a stabilizing force. Marius, who rejects the dogma of all religions and philosophies in his effort to live “in that full stream of refined sensation” (187), nevertheless feels certain of a uniting presence in the world, which he calls “[t]‌he one true being” (108). This “being” is identified as “a perpetual energy,” “a subtle, perpetual change in all visible things”; thus, he can identify “the universal movement of all natural things. . . the movement of that universal life, in which things, and men’s impressions of them, were ever ‘coming to be,’ alternately consumed and renewed” (108–​9). This line echoes Spencer’s conception of “a universe everywhere in motion,”48 and suggests the comforting notion of a guiding presence larger than the individual.

Science   609 Yet, Pater’s understanding of the world through the lens of thermodynamics leads him to the same paradoxical conclusion that Victorian physics revealed: all this “energy” and “motion” will lead to stasis and death. Thus, the emperor Marcus Aurelius preaches the acceptance of mortality, insisting, “ ‘to cease from action—​the ending of thine effort to think and do: there is no evil in that’ ” (151). In truth, Marius has already “ceased from action.” He is a static, rather than active, character, “on the whole, more given to contemplation than to action” (49). He watches and evaluates, but he does almost nothing throughout the novel. In contrast to the violence of Dorian’s suicide, Marius’s death—​ while still clearly self-​destructive—​seems to occur for no reason except that the novel must come to an end. He deliberately exposes himself to both a plague and religious persecution, managing to die of the former just before he is executed under the latter, but there is very little violence or even action in the final pages of the novel. He simply seems to run out of energy—​and pages. This destiny is made particularly clear in the description of death as a “dissolution,” comparable to the eventual “dissolution” of the universe: “in the dissolution of a world, or in that dissolution of self, which is, for every one, not less than the dissolution of the world it represents for him” (274–​75). The word “dissolution”—​the separation of a mass into parts or elements or atoms—​signals the particular way Marius (and Pater) conceives of death: not as an ending but as a dispersal. It is conceptually analogous to the way Spencer describes the final stages of entropy, the “absorption of motion and concomitant disintegration of matter.”49 Crucially for Pater, and for decadence as a whole, dissolution follows the moment when the system “has developed into the highest form permitted by the character of its units.”50 Here, again, we see that decadence is the opposite of degeneration. It is progress, but progress that must necessarily—​like all things—​come to an end. It is perfection that must lead to extinction. The pessimism, even nihilism, of decadence is evident in dissolution. Marius echoes the sentiments of Hartmann when he suggests that man has developed only to realize his own misery, “[f]‌or there is a certain grief in things as they are, in man as he has come to be. . . , which makes every stage of life like a dying over and over again”; Pater is clear that the “nervous perfection men have attained to” leads to this “grief ” (274), the awareness of suffering and mortality. This is a melancholy but not hopeless end to the novel. Marius witnesses the early growth of Christianity and chooses to die so that his friend Cornelius may live and grow in the new faith. Yet many critics are skeptical of the consolation of religion in the face of Marius’s pessimism, particularly as Pater assures the reader that though Marius is celebrated as a religious martyr, he never accepts the Christian faith (294). Thus, it would seem that it is not religion which offers consolation in the face of death, but rather the natural world and the laws that govern it. In the final paragraphs of the novel, Pater turns to the law of conservation in order to offer his readers what Barri Gold calls “the consolation of physics,” which “made it possible to reconceive loss as transformation.”51 The law of conservation confirms that energy remains constant; it can be transformed, but not destroyed. Thus, Spencer tells us that dissolution is the “change

610   Jordan Kistler from a concentrated, perceptible state to a dispersed, imperceptible state.”52 Here, we find Pater’s answer to the question of “how to reconcile the individual with society.” Spencer’s “concentrated” state represents the isolated individual, drawn in upon himself, while the “dispersed” state, though “imperceptible,” becomes integrated with the wider world. Earlier in the novel, Marius admits the power of a feeling of social belonging: [W]‌ithout him there is a venerable system of sentiment and idea, widely extended in time and place, in a kind of impregnable possession of human life—​a system, which, like some other great products of the conjoint efforts of human mind through many generations, is rich in the world’s experience; so that, in attaching oneself to it, one lets in a great tide of that experience, and makes, as it were with a single step, a great experience of one’s own, and with a great consequent increase to one’s sense of colour, variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things. The mere sense that one belongs to a system—​an imperial system or organization—​has, in itself, the expanding power of a great experience. (187)

Marius is unable to “attach” himself to one of the conventional systems that provides social cohesion, like religion or philosophy. Instead, it is in the “one true being,” which is not God but “energy,” that Marius finds a system to which he has always belonged. This is a sentiment that appears throughout Pater’s writing; in the essay “Wordsworth” (1874), Pater writes that “the network of man and nature was seen to be pervaded by a common, universal life:. . . one universal spirit.”53 In death, or rather dissolution, Marius feels “the link of general brotherhood, the feeling of human kinship” (293), and along with this human kinship comes kinship with the whole of the natural world: “the scent of the new-​mown hay,” “[t]‌he sunlight,” “the sounds of the cattle” (292). This passage recalls the conclusion to The Renaissance, which similarly answers the solipsistic flux with a reminder of humanity’s kinship with the entire universe, through the conservation of shared matter and energy: What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibres, are present not in the human body alone. . . . Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us; it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us these elements are broadcast, driven by many forces; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resulting combinations.54

This is the ultimate “consolation of physics.” Thermodynamics tells us that all systems succumb to entropy, but it also shows us that we exist in the deepest kinship with all other things in the universe, made of the same matter and subject to the same forces. For Pater, this is enough.

Science   611

Chopin’s Awakening and the Conservation of Energy Marius finds consolation in death, but the novel as a whole is still haunted by failure. In contrast, Kate Chopin presents self-​destruction not only as the inevitable fate of her protagonist, Edna Pontellier, but also as an assertion of individuality and independence. Chopin appropriates tropes of decadent thermodynamics—​isolation, enervation, and self-​destruction—​but reformulates them to position suicide as an essential preseveration of self in defiance of the strictures of society. The contours of Chopin’s tale are familiar. Edna “awakens” into individualism as she begins “to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.”55 As in the other texts considered here, this realization leads to isolation. The Awakening originally bore the title “The Solitary Soul”; like Marius, Edna draws a distinction between “that outward existence which conforms, [and] the inward life which questions” (16). Edna withdraws into this “inward life” in search of personal fulfillment as an individual. Yet enervation naturally follows her isolation. She becomes “self absorbed” with “no interest in anything about her” (60). She feels as if she is in “an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic” (60). Edna experiences the physical toll of mental emancipation: she possesses frenetic energy when around others, an “excitement” likened to illness, “like a remittent fever” (84), but when alone this energy leaves her: “A radiant peace settled upon her when she at last found herself alone” (80); “A sense of restfulness invaded her, such as she had not known before” (81). This restfulness mirrors the equilibrium that Marius finds in death. And like Des Esseintes, Dorian, and Marius, entropy leads Edna to self-​destruction. Despite the familiar structure of this narrative, Edna’s quest for independence is distinct from the others considered in this chapter. For Edna, individualism means “relieving herself from obligations” (104) to others, yet she lacks the freedom to do so, unlike Des Esseintes, Dorian, and Marius. She is already a mother to two children. Early in the novel Chopin makes clear the expectations that society places on mothers. “Mother women,” like the saintly Adèle Ratignolle, “idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (10). The central conflict of the novel is between this ideal of motherhood and the equally pressing ideal of American possessive individualism: “According to this concept of self evolving from the seventeenth century, every man has property in himself and thus the right to manage himself, his labor, and his property as he wishes.”56 As Gillian Brown makes clear, such self-​determination inhered in “an individualism most available to (white) men.”57 Chopin insists that women can only have access to this form of liberty if, like Mademoiselle Reisz, they forego motherhood. Unlike earlier nineteenth-​century explorations of women’s rights, Edna shakes off her husband and his control with relative ease; his claims to her as property are never

612   Jordan Kistler given serious weight. But she is unable to shake off the “obligation” she has to her children. Edna’s resolution “never again to belong to another than herself ” (89) falters when she witnesses Adèle in childbirth: “I want to be let alone. Nobody has any right—​except children, perhaps—​and even then, it seems to me—​or it did seem—​” (123). Edna struggles in her conception of individualism, between what Regenia Gagnier identifies as the “cooperative individualism” theorized by Adam Smith, in which division of labor “allows for interdependence and productivity,” and a biological model of “competitive individualism,” grounded in social Darwinism and celebrating “the self-​interested, self-​ maximizing individual.”58 Edna realizes that the individualism she has been cultivating is the latter kind; her happiness must come at the expense of others’ happiness: “I don’t want anything but my own way. That is wanting a good deal, of course, when you have to trample upon the lives, the hearts, the prejudices of others” (123). She might be content to “trample upon the rights of others” (28), like Mademoiselle Reisz, in order to get her way, but Edna insists, “I shouldn’t want to trample upon the little lives” (123). To sacrifice the happiness of another adult—​her husband’s or her lover’s—​is different than sacrificing the happiness of her own children. Spencer’s individualist ethics asserted that every man had a right to his own property, liberty, and happiness, as long as it “may be gratified without injury to his fellow-​ creatures.”59 Edna believes her suicide to be the best way to enact these ethics, to seek liberty without harming others. Hence, Peter Ramos seems not to have fully considered the implications of Edna’s suicide when he argues that it serves as a “subtle, but intentionally crafted, warning. . . of what can happen to a protagonist whose unwillingness to continue dedicating herself to any of the available social roles leads her to abandon all of them in favor of an enticing yet ever-​elusive freedom.”60 Whether or not we agree with her, Edna believes herself to be fulfilling the duties of her “social role” as a mother. She protects her children by framing her death as an unfortunate accident, while still managing to preserve her independence. In her final moments, “she thought of Léonce and the children. They were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul” (127). Her “life” is tied to the children, but Edna insists on the reality of a self that is separate from that life. Earlier in the novel, Edna explains to Adèle that “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself ” (53). The distinction that Edna draws between “life” and “self,” which baffles Adèle, is evocative of Schopenhauer’s insistence that self and will are separate from life. Thus, Schopenhauer argues: Far from being denial of the will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong assertion of will. . . . The vehemence with which it wills life, and revolts against what hinders it, namely, suffering, brings it to the point of destroying itself; so that the individual will, by its own act, puts an end to that body which is merely its particular visible expression, rather than permit suffering to break the will. Just because the suicide cannot give up willing, he gives up living.61

Science   613 Edna, too, “cannot give up willing,” cannot reconcile herself to becoming one of the perfect ministering angels of motherhood. Schopenhauer thus casts suicide as an act of possessive individualism, arguing against those who say “that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”62 If one has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then one has the equal right to discard them. Chopin appropriates the decadent narrative of isolation and self-​destruction to advocate for her heroine’s right to self-​possession, even to the point of death. It seems clear that we can read Edna’s death within the schema Carlos Gutiérrez-​Jones traces, in which “artists frequently cast self-​destructive episodes as catalysts for beneficial change.”63 Gutiérrez-​Jones looks only at attempted suicides from which protagonists can learn in what he calls “suicidal ‘rebooting,’ ”64 yet read in the light of Schopenhauer’s assertion that suicide is a “transcendental change,” we can see Edna seeking this same “beneficial change” or “rebooting” in her final act. Many critics have, of course, read the ending of The Awakening as a moment of feminist defiance of patriarchal society. Within this reading, critics see the ending as activating a “beneficial change” not for Edna, but for society. As Mary Gluck argues, decadence is not simply a critique, but a corrective: “[W]‌ithin the organic metaphor of society was not only the concept of degeneration, but also of regeneration. Paradoxically, the discourse of degeneration was both a diagnostic tool and a therapeutic vision, whose ultimate goal was the regeneration of society.”65 Yet within the wider framework of thermodynamic narratives traced here, we can further see this “beneficial change” or rejuvenation available to Edna herself, through the “consolation of physics.” In her final moment, when her energy has been completely exhausted, Edna experiences not an end but a return, to her early childhood: Edna heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. (128)

The invocation of cyclical time suggests that her death is a rebirth, through which she is reintegrated into her past and also into the natural world. The cyclical or circulatory language suggests that, in death, Edna defies entropy through the conservation of energy. She is transformed, not destroyed.

Notes 1. Joris-​Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 193. Further references cited parenthetically. 2. William Thomson, “On a universal tendency in nature to the dissipation of mechanical energy,” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 4, no. 25 (1852): 304–​6.

614   Jordan Kistler 3. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 90–​104. The essay was originally published as “Essai de psychologie contemporaine: Charles Baudelaire,” La Nouvelle Revue 13 (1881): 398–​417. 4. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 6th ed. (London: Watts & Co, 1946), 438. 5. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 98. 6. Herbert Spencer, “The Social Organism,” in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (London: William and Norgate, 1891), 1: 272. 7. Mary Gluck, “Decadence as Historical Myth and Cultural Theory,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 21, no. 3 (2014): 355. 8. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 17 (1881): 234. 9. Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (London: Routledge, 2005), 168. 10. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 95. 11. Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 87 (November 1893): 859. 12. Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, trans. William Chatterton Coupland (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), 3: 121. 13. Hartmann, Unconscious, 98. 14. Hartmann, Unconscious, 138. 15. Daniel R. Brooks, Eric P. Hoberg, and Walter A. Boeger, The Stockholm Paradigm: Climate Change and Emerging Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 32. 16. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 94–​95. 17. Peter J. Bowler, The Non-​ Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a History Myth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 18. Spencer, “Progress,” 243–​244. 19. Barri J. Gold, ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 452. 20. Spencer, First Principles, 437. 21. Spencer, First Principles, 462. 22. Greg Myers, “Nineteenth-​Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy,” Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 (1985): 35. 23. George M. Beard, “Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 3, no. 13 (1869): 117. See also Richard von Krafft-​Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Co., 1892) and Sally Shuttleworth’s discussion of “modern diseases” in “Diseases of City Life and One of Our Conquerors,” Yearbook of English Studies 49 (2019): 103–​19. 24. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, The English Novel in History, 1840–​1895 (London: Routledge, 1997). 25. Debra Segura, “The Dream of the Hermetic Utopia: À rebours as Allegory for the World after Germ Theory,” Discourse 29, no. 1, (2007): 51. 26. Segura, “Utopia,” 50, 51. 27. Segura, “Utopia,” 49. 28. Jens Lohfert Jørgensen, “The Bacteriologial Modernism of Joris-​Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature,” Literature and Medicine 31, no. 1 (2013): 104. 29. William Thomson, “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat,” Macmillan’s Magazine 5, no. 29 (1862): 388. 30. Spencer, First Principles, 437.

Science   615 31. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 99. 32. Michael Davis, “Mind and Matter in THe Picture of Dorian Gray,” Victorian Literature and Culture 41, no. 3 (2013): 557. 33. Spencer, First Principles, 251, 465. 34. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 78. Further references cited parenthetically. 35. Davis, “Mind and Matter,” 547. 36. Robert MacDougall, “Sympathetic Physics: The Keely Motor and the Laws of Thermodynamics in Nineteenth-​Century Culture,” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 443. 37. Tina Choi, “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative,” ELH 74, no. 2 (2007): 307. 38. Choi, “Forms,” 302. 39. Christopher Wadlaw, “Patents for Perpetual Motion Machines,” Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice 2, no. 3 (2007): 137. 40. Michael Patrick Gillespie, “Picturing Dorian Gray: Resistant Readings in Wilde’s Novel,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–​1920 35, no. 1 (1992): 21. 41. Gillespie, 22. 42. Spencer, First Principles, 464. 43. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 99. 44. Bourget, “Baudelaire,” 99. 45. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, ed. Michael Levey (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 132. Further references cited parenthetically. 46. Kanarakis Yannis, “The Aesthete as Scientist: Walter Pater and Nineteenth-​Century Science,” Victorian Network 2, no. 1 (2010): 88. 47. Kate Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 133. 48. Spencer, First Principles, 465. 49. Spencer, First Principles, 470. 50. Spencer, First Principles, 466. 51. Gold, ThermoPoetics, 57, 61. 52. Spencer, First Principles, 250. 53. Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), 55. 54. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 118. 55. Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16. Further references cited parenthetically. 56. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-​Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 2. 57. Brown, Domestic Individualism, 7. 58. Regenia Gagnier, “The Law of Progress and the Ironies of Individualism,” New Literary History 31, no. 2 (2000): 316, 321. 59. Herbert Spencer, “The Proper Sphere of Government,” in Political Writings, ed. John Offer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 21. 60. Peter Ramos, “Unbearable Realism: Freedom, Ethics and Identity in ‘The Awakening,” College Literature 37, no. 4 (2010), 147. 61. Arthur Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Idea,” in The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, ed. Margaret Pabst Battin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 491.

616   Jordan Kistler 62. Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Idea,” 493. 63. Carlos Gutiérrez-​Jones, Suicide and Contemporary Science Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 64. Gutiérrez-​Jones, Suicide, 1. 65. Gluck, “Historical Myth,” 355.

Further Reading Battin, Margaret Pabst, ed. The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Bonea, Amelia, Melissa Dickson, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jennifer Wallis. Anxious Times: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2019. Bowler, Peter. The Non-​ Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Choi, Tina. “Forms of Closure: The First Law of Thermodynamics and Victorian Narrative.” ELH 74, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 301–​22. Davis, Whitney. “Decadence and the Organic Metaphor.” Representations 89 (2005): 131–​50. Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Gold, Barri J. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–​1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Levine, George. Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. MacDougall, Robert. “Sympathetic Physics: The Keely Motor and the Laws of Thermodynamics in Nineteenth-​Century Culture.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 2 (2019): 438–​66. MacDuffie, Allen. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Marsh, Ian. Suicide: Foucault, History, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Underwood, Ted. The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–​1860. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Chapter 32

Ec ol o g y The Vital Forces of Decay Dennis Denisoff

In the short story “Enoch Soames” (1916), Max Beerbohm evokes his life in London in the 1890s. In addition to friends and acquaintances such as Aubrey Beardsley, John Lane, and William Rothenstein, he claims to recall a poet named Enoch Soames, who had many of the conventional interests associated with the decadents—​paganism, diabolism, Catholicism, absinthe—​ and who wrote poetry that “owe[d]‌something to the young Parisian decadents, or to the young English ones who owed something to them.”1 The reader gradually realizes the poet is a fiction. Soames, Beerbohm tells us, had published three collections as utterly shapeless and vague as the man himself. One of them he named Fungoids to “suggest . . . the quality of the poems,” which he envisioned as “strange growths, natural and wild, yet exquisite, . . . and many-​hued, and full of poisons” (15). In his floppy black hat “of Bohemian intention,” Soames comes across as the embodiment of mushroom-​ness, “a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—​or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat” (6). On one level, the story simply mocks the frequent referencing in decadent literature of things like rot, putrefaction, and fungal spread but, in having Soames embody these elements, Beerbohm also suggests that they were genuinely part of the aesthetics and ethics of decadence. This aspect becomes more apparent in “To a Young Woman,” one of the poems in Fungoids that Beerbohm partially quotes. Here, Soames melds general physical decay—​“a rotted flute,” “cymbals rouged with rust”—​with the poetry’s dissipative philosophy. The last line, directed at the titular young woman, reads “Thou hast not been nor art!” (16; italics in original), which can be understood to mean that the woman has never existed and does not exist now, or, alternatively, that she and art have both never existed. The former interpretation—​in which “art” is a verb—​seems redundant, while the latter—​where “art” is a noun—​could use a comma. Nevertheless, the latter appropriately evokes the ineffectuality of Soames’s own forgettable poetry and, it

618   Dennis Denisoff follows, the vague decadent himself. The story, after all, is about the utter disappearance of Soames from the historical record, save for in this one piece by Beerbohm. And it is not just Soames being addressed here, for, as Beerbohm observes in the story, when he turned to the index of Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties (1913)—​a real work that Jackson in fact dedicated to Beerbohm—​to see if Soames was mentioned, he found he was not, but then, among those referenced, Beerbohm notes that there were also “many writers whom I had quite forgotten, or remembered but faintly” (3)—​a veritable field of vague mushroom-​like Soameses. While the 1890s saw “so numerous and so meritorious a body of young poets,” Jackson observes in his study, “[h]‌ow much of [their writing] will survive the test of the passing years no critical judgment can say.”2 After all, the works of the fin-​de-​siècle “minor poets” often met not with veneration but with the “half-​amused antagonism of the middle classes toward the decadent movement in art and life.”3 George du Maurier, one of those middle-​class critics, has the narrator of his novel The Martian (1898) ask, “those second-​rate decadents, French and English, who so gloried in their own degeneracy—​as though one were to glory in scrofula or rickets; . . . Where are they now? . . . Who ever hears of decadents nowadays?”4 Similarly, Beerbohm’s story does not simply offer a parody of the decadent 1890s in which he himself had become a successful author, but also poignantly recalls the dozens of hopeful young writers of the decadent fashion who had seemed, fungus-​like, to appear en masse throughout the damp pubs and crowded cafes of London only to shrivel away unnoticed.5 Beerbohm’s linking of decadent culture with notions of the fungal and invasive was not coincidental. By the time literary decadence began to surface in Europe in the mid-​nineteenth century, theories of fallen societies and cultures such as that of the Roman Empire (as offered by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Edward Gibbon) were readily meshing with the interests among political philosophers, authors, and others in ecological models of organically coherent, self-​regulating systems in which culture and the act of writing were integral.6 Of course, many decadent works suggest little to no interest in the place of the human within multispecies ecologies, while others explicitly celebrate artifice while declaring an antagonism toward nature and any reliance on it. The most famous of the latter is J.-K. Huysmans’s novel À rebours (Against Nature, 1884), although even in this work we find the conflation of “the unnatural” not so much with the artificial or inorganic as with uncommon but still natural notions of the nonproductive, the decaying, and the sexually nonconformist. Or consider the infamous essay by Robert Buchanan (Thomas Maitland), “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871), published more than a decade earlier, which similarly declares that poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne produce “unnatural” works, “diligently spreading the seeds of disease broadcast wherever they are read and understood.”7 For Buchanan, the writing is the result of a curious evolution that leaves him wishing they would refrain from using explicitly sexual imagery, and that “things had remained for ever in the asexual state described in Mr. Darwin’s great chapter on Palingenesis.”8 These Pre-​Raphaelites’ early examples of British decadent writing are, for Buchanan, the product of a dangerous cultural process of infection and

Ecology   619 mutation among humans and the arts. Parodic and critical works such as Beerbohm’s, du Maurier’s, and Buchanan’s ultimately reveal a sense of literary decadence as part of a deviant, biological process that threatened the common vision of a holistic, self-​sufficient ecology reinforcing middle-​class values, authority, and prosperity. As I argue in this chapter, influential decadents such as Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde did indeed challenge this closed ecological model through their writing. Moreover, in the process of exploring the dissipative networks and processes characterized by decomposition, transspecies co-​reliance, and fungal engagements, they also addressed the act of writing itself and the role of the author as part of the open, indeterminate ecology they envisioned.

Nineteenth-​C entury Thoughts on Decomposition A wave of scientific research during the nineteenth century led people to understand decay as involving not only decomposition, but also foulness, contagion, and fungal infection. This concern was incorporated into the new field of ecology, that branch of biology having to do with an organism and its relations to its organic and inorganic surroundings. The German naturalist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, a major popularizer of Charles Darwin’s work, coined the term “oekologie” in his Generalle Morpholigie (1866), and his inclusion of the inorganic in his understanding of ecology established the field’s contemporary conceptual link to the broader sense of environmental biology. In recent decades, ethnographers, anthropologists, and others conducting research in cognate fields have developed more-​than-​human approaches to understanding these interactive livelihoods and systems (cultural, economic, imaginative) among animals, plants, bacteria, viruses, and other beings. In their introduction to a 2013 special issue of PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature focused on fungi, Alison Pouliot and John Charles Ryan make a claim that one suspects Beerbohm would have found tantalizing: that fungi “have inspired the imaginations of scientists and aesthetes alike and are deeply enmeshed in the mythologies and traditions of many cultures.”9 The editors, however, are not using the word “aesthetes” in its more common association with decadence and aestheticism; rather, they are referring to authors and artists such as contemporary poets Amy Cutler and Caroline Hawkridge, sculptor/​illustrator Joann Mott, and photographer Alison Pouliot, who have developed eco-​aesthetic paradigms by recognizing themselves and their art as arising from changes in their ecology. Fungi are a kingdom of species of multicellular microorganisms, including mushrooms, mildew, and mold. They do not produce their own food but, generally, exist in symbiotic relations with bacteria and plants, contributing to the diffusion of nutrients throughout their ecosystem. Their transmission across ecological species and

620   Dennis Denisoff sites is understood, from a human perspective, as decay or rot in a system of production and consumption.10 For Pouliot and Ryan, however, today’s eco-​artists point out, directly or indirectly, the innovative collectivism of fungi and microorganisms, as well as the ways in which engagements with such organisms are necessary for humans’ own sustenance, survival, and even sense of self. As S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich argue, nonhuman species are not passive entities but engaged contributors to the realization of their culture. For Kirksey and Helmreich, “art forms” have proven particularly “good to think with about ‘living with’ in a multispecies world,” in part because they encourage a shift in perspective from the anthropocentric to the multi-​organismal, or even microbial.11 There is no direct line of influence from nineteenth-​century Europeans’ growing understanding of the multispecies co-​reliance of their daily lives and the recent aesthetically theorized perspectives among specialists in fungal engagements; however, as Buchanan’s review and Pouliot and Ryan’s special issue suggest, individuals of both periods recognized the role of the arts in reconceptualizing the place of human beings within their multispecies ecology. In the nineteenth century, key catalysts for this greater general awareness included a series of epidemics, innovations in sanitation and agriculture, and the popularization of science. Exploring the relationship among infectious diseases, environmental change, and urban culture from 1800 to 1950, Bill Luckin argues that current scientific modeling that attempts to acknowledge the limits of human comprehension and agency has resulted in a form of “microorganic determinism.” Humans are seen as “merely one among a multitude of different types of life on this planet, potentially at the mercy of autonomous change in the ecologies of the bacteria, viruses and insect vectors which cause disease among humans,” implying the “termination of the absolute supremacy of homo sapiens both in nature and in history.”12 For Luckin, the emphasis on the role of the nonhuman in the creation of ecology and history risks overgeneralization and the erasure of actual historical developments. And yet, at the time that British decadence was at its most popular (during the period on which Luckin focuses), key historical events in fact included major nonhuman agents—​most notably the global epidemics of typhus and cholera. Outbreaks of typhus, a group of diseases caused by bacterial infection (primarily through bites from insects such as lice and fleas), were recorded throughout the nineteenth century. There was a major typhus epidemic in Ireland and England from 1846–​1849, during the Great Famine, which was itself caused in large part by a microbe-​induced potato blight combined with issues such as mono-​crop farming practices and laissez-​faire capitalism. Meanwhile, the bacterial disease of cholera resulted in outbreaks in England in 1832, 1848–​1849, and 1853–​1854, with thousands of deaths. Nineteenth-​century concerns about cholera were initially engaged primarily through religious and political discourses associating disease with filth and immorality. The French hygienist Alexandre Jean Baptiste Parent-​Duchâtelet began his work on cholera in 1814, and by the 1820s he was conducting and publishing research on the impact of the Paris sewers on public health and, with the aid of crime statistics, the impact of prostitution. The English social reformer Edwin Chadwick, who had been closely involved in

Ecology   621 the revision of the Poor Laws in 1834, contributed to a belief in Britain of the contagion as an issue of poverty and the immoral habits of the poor. Chadwick worked with others to produce The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842, and a follow-​ up report in 1843) and, through his roles as London’s Metropolitan Commissioner of Sewers (1848–​1849) and a member of the General Board of Health (1848–​1854), he was able to enhance the role of physicians in developing a medical sanitary movement.13 Cholera reached epidemic proportions in England during the 1850s and 1860s, infecting not only humans but also other animals such as cows and dogs. In London it was most pronounced during the 1854 outbreak in Soho, an area of the capital yet to have been modernized with the newer sewage system.14 John Snow’s famous studies on cholera and water purity in central London would prove crucial to understanding how the disease traveled, although it was many years before the findings he published in 1849 and 1855 attained broad acceptance.15 Publications aimed at mainstream audiences were particularly effective carriers of information regarding the discoveries and debates taking place around theories of infection and decay. Bernard Lightman has noted the immense mid-​century popularization in Britain of diverse fields of science, as well as the general population’s conception of modern science as “the glue for a new worldview” that addressed even its ethical basis.16 Andrew R. Morris observes that T. H. Huxley, a Darwin advocate and major promoter of public scientific education, was, “by his own admission, the first major biologist to make a living wholly from lecturing, writing and research. With only one ‘professional’ biologist in the country, scientific debate was not restricted to the ‘men in white coats,’ and people moving on the fringes of biology could and did make a significant contribution.”17 In his 1866 lecture “On the Advisability of Improving Natural Knowledge,” Huxley argued that, without the recent public dissemination of developments in science and technology, “the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism.”18 With improvements in public knowledge, he observed, “we have no plague; [but] because that knowledge is still very imperfect and that obedience yet incomplete, typhus is our companion and cholera our visitor.”19 Thanks to the public distribution of scientific ideas, he went on, it was now commonly realized that “man is but one of innumerable forms of life now existing in the globe, and that the present existences are but the last of an immeasurable series of predecessors.” Such comprehension, he declared, is “changing the form of men’s most cherished and most important convictions.”20 At roughly the same time that Huxley and others focused on shifting public perception of the importance of scientific knowledge to a collective engagement with issues such as infectious disease and clean water, sanitary philosophers and scientists of environmental filth were recognizing that some types of waste were not themselves conduits of disease to be eradicated, but rather products that returned needed nutrients to vegetation and were, therefore, potentially useful in sustaining modern agricultural practices, a healthy society, and, indeed, the self-​regulating progress of civilization. Meanwhile, as Christopher Hamlin points out, from a natural theological standpoint, for many people waste (especially if unused) was still seen as threatening an immoral takeover. According

622   Dennis Denisoff to Hamlin, “common to mid-​Victorian pathology . . . was an image of how the pure was corrupted by contact with impurity and in the process transformed into a replica of the impurity that would perpetuate further corruption.”21 In the words of Henry Austin, the chief superintendent of the Board of Health, in his Report on the Means of Deoderizing and Utilizing the Sewage of Towns (1857), “[t]‌he great cycle of life, decay, and reproduction must be completed, and so long as the elements of reproduction [such as sewage] are not employed for good, they will be employed for evil.”22 Such works by scientists publishing in popular magazines helped establish a context in which decadent writings could be seen either as creative reconsiderations of the place of the human and the artist in a broader ecological network of engagements and processes, or, under a more anxious lens, as invasive perspectives threatening to alter, as Huxley puts it, “the form of men’s most cherished and most important convictions.”23 Contributions to decadence that could be analyzed in this way include works by most of the Pre-​Raphaelite authors and artists, as well as Swinburne, Walter Pater, Octave Mirbeau, Michael Field, William Sharp, Vernon Lee, M. P. Shiel, Algernon Blackwood, Aubrey Beardsley, Djuna Barnes, Ben Hecht, and others up to and including recent film directors such as Peter Greenaway and Guillermo del Toro.24 The second half of this chapter addresses Baudelaire and Wilde not only as recognizing the dissipation of putrefaction, infection, and the spread of fungi as part of how society operates, but also as considering the role of their own works and themselves as artists within the processes of such an open ecology. By reading the texts of these influential decadent authors through a lens sensitive to issues of species co-​reliance and mutual modification, I demonstrate that the authors conceived of their aesthetics and politics as operating on a broader scale than the human-​centered approaches more often assumed.

Putrefaction and the Art of Decadence Nineteenth-​century authors did not so much formulate as step into a mess of decadent tropes that included decay, infection, decline, and degeneracy. Scientists, medical experts, and historians had been developing models of what can be understood as a decadent ecology for many years before the major nineteenth-​century literary and artistic contributions took shape. Works such as Montesquieu’s Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734), Voltaire’s Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations, 1756), and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–​1788) implied that the patterns of past civilizations’ declines could be extended to modern national politics. Gibbon observes that the vigor of an empire or nation is sustained by its citizens’ commitment to the nation like that of family members

Ecology   623 to a family. He describes, for example, King Leo IV’s “feeble constitution both of mind and body” as a form of “decay” to be addressed by settling succession upon his five-​year-​ old son.25 As Roman citizens shifted their focus to the glorious afterlife promised by Christianity, he suggests, their disregard of the “ancient virtue of patriotism” resulted in an increasing reliance on other nations and races to sustain their health.26 Although he does not formulate a modern notion of decadent literature, Gibbon does address the importance of literature in developing and sustaining an empire’s powerful identity.27 Moreover, in a discussion of “the decay of taste and genius” as reflected in a certain collection of Byzantine writing, he refers to stylistic weaknesses that would also be noted among nineteenth-​century decadent works: In every page our taste and reason are wounded by the choice of gigantic and obsolete words, a stiff and intricate phraseology, the discord of images, the childish play of false or unseasonable ornament, and the painful attempt to elevate themselves, to astonish the reader, and to involve a trivial meaning in the smoke of obscurity and exaggeration. Their prose is soaring to the vicious affectation of poetry: their poetry is sinking below the flatness and insipidity of prose.28

Shushma Malik points out that historiographers have debated the usefulness of the correlation of decline with decadence, the connotations of each not always being applicable to the other.29 With the rise of scientific historicism in the nineteenth century, she notes, we find a general rejection among Roman historiographers of a relationship between decadence and decline.30 As Gibbon’s work makes clear, meanwhile, some idea of literary decadence was already embedded within eighteenth-​century models of an empire or society crumbling when individuals stopped identifying themselves foremost as responsible contributors to the vitality of a larger, more complex political organism. It is a familiar point that what mainstream society deemed repellent, such as rot and decay, decadents drew on in order to question the assumed ongoing superiority and vitality of that society. It is crucial to recognize, however, that even while decadents may have challenged the model of a closed, eternally healthy ecology, they also re-​inscribed its xenophobic, misogynist, and speciesist assumptions. In the 1913 work cited by Beerbohm in “Enoch Soames,” Holbrook Jackson observes that the common-​sense of the matter is that where the so-​called decadence made for a fuller and brighter life, demanding ever more and more power and keener sensibilities from its units, it was not decadent. The decadence was decadent only when it removed energy from the common life and set its eyes in the ends of the earth whether those ends were pictures, blue and white china, or colonies.31

The European decadents exoticized and eroticized other human cultures. They also frequently venerated nonhuman species as decorative objects rather than recognizing them as part of networks of co-​reliant sentient forces. Meanwhile, they represented the white, European male as a signifier of not only the West’s intellectual superiority but also its

624   Dennis Denisoff open-​mindedness. And yet many decadents were sincerely stimulated by the concept of an open ecosystem or, more accurately, one that was somewhat closed in its cultural discourses—​such as those of beauty and function—​but open in the creative potency of its seemingly useless excess. That is, while the decadents often relied on an oppressive discourse and cultural vision rooted in the very middle class it claimed to look at with disdain, they nevertheless encouraged the deconstruction of the status quo’s holistic vision. Consider Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), a collection of poetry that is among the greatest influences on the character of nineteenth-​century decadence. In his 1868 notice to the collection, Théophile Gautier suggests that Baudelaire’s writing is the waste product of a society that has followed past civilizations into a state of decay, his language like that of “the later Roman Empire, already mottled with the green hues of decomposition and a little gamy.” “[T]‌ruly such is the necessary and destined idiom,” Gautier continues, “of people and civilisations for whom an artificial life has replaced a natural one.”32 The rationale is binary and exclusionist, with a seemingly separate foreign culture envisioned as a threat to the pure and healthy family-​state of France itself. Roughly twenty-​five years later, in Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Essays on contemporary psychology, 1883), Paul Bourget paraphrases Gautier’s argument in his opening chapter on Baudelaire. Here, Bourget configures decadence as both a social and an individual phenomenon: The word “decadence” is often used to designate the state of a society that produces too few individuals suited to the labors of communal life. A society is comparable to a living organism: like an organism, it consists of a collection of lesser organisms, which in turn consist of a collection of cells. The individual is the social cell.33

In Baudelaire’s writing, “so ripe with revelations” (91), says Bourget, “[t]‌he crisis of religious faith, Parisian life, and the scientific mind of the period combined to fashion, then to meld, these three types of sensitivity” (92). For Bourget, Baudelaire and other decadents are putrefaction itself, their writing infectious in its engagement with “a shadow-​filled life, their tongue ‘already marbled with the iridescences of decomposition’ ” (100), the quotation being from Gautier. Bourget also offers a racially inflected extension of the metaphor of illness, stating that the poet “belonged to a race condemned to misfortune. He is perhaps the author to whose name the term ‘unhealthy’ has most often been attached”; crucially, however, Baudelaire “endures his temperament, he does not choose it” (94). In Bourget’s explanation, Baudelaire is both the abject and defining element of modern French society, the abnormal “race” that establishes the context against which the nation can be distinguished as a coherent, singular identity: It can be said that in the psychological as in the physiological order sickness is as logical, as necessary, and consequently as natural as is health. It is different in that it leads to suffering and to instability as inevitably as health leads to harmony and to joy. But it can also be said—​so as not to make well-​being the ultimate test in matters of the soul—​that there is sometimes more idealism in such suffering than in happiness. (94)

Ecology   625 Permanent, unwavering happiness is a fake ideal, with the most fulfilling life being the one in which one actually engages at times with the “secret maggot” of “taedium vitae” (95). The Flowers of Evil has its fair share of maggots, rot, and foulness, the imagery and rhetoric seeping into the aesthetic itself, the curious attraction of the putrid arising from the recognition of one’s self in that which one shuns. In the poem “Je t’adore à l’égal . . .” (“I love you as I love . . .”), Baudelaire portrays an amorous lover who “climb[s]‌to the assault, attack[s] the source.”34 The effect of the paradox of military aggression as love is exacerbated by the fact that the speaker finds that the beloved’s death, and thus the unattainability of her affection, enhances her beauty and desirability. It is, however, the hero’s vision of his desiring self as “a choir of wormlets pressing towards a corpse” (53) that marks the work as particularly eco-​decadent not only in its excess and grotesqueness, but also, and more importantly for my argument, in its turn to the seemingly illogical metaphor of decomposition as fulfillment. The narrator’s love is as primal and uncalculated as the maggots’ own blind drive for sustenance; it is a force beyond his control, a system in which he is not an agent but rather a sentience conjoined to others through a vague, collective determination. The centrality of the human, in this vision, is undermined not by the graveyard worms but by the vibrant activity of decomposition itself. Baudelaire extrapolates from this metaphor elsewhere in The Flowers of Evil, extending it to the context of philosophical and spiritual skepticism. In “Une charogne” (“A Carcass”), we find a man thinking back to a romantic stroll in nature that he and his lover had taken early one sunny day. “Remember, my love, the object we saw,” he asks, “That beautiful morning in June” (59). He isn’t really interested in whether she recalls it or not; he has been thinking about the occasion rather extensively and now, having come to some new understanding, wants to share this perspective with her, bring it back fresh to her memory: By a bend in the path a carcass reclined On a bed sown with pebbles and stones; Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore, Sweating out poisonous fumes, Who opened in slick invitational style Her stinking and festering womb. (59)

As with “I love you as I love . . .,” the poem catches the reader (much as the couple is) by repulsive surprise. Rather than turn away in disgust, however, the narrator proceeds to use the body of the dead creature to sensualize the networks of consumption that circulate through his decadent aesthetic. In Baudelaire’s misogynistic rendering, he keeps the species of the carcass unclear, enhancing the correspondence between the carcass and the idea of his beloved’s body (charogne itself a feminine noun). Noting the strong link between the Romantic movement and Catholicism in France, David Weir addresses the poem’s juxtaposition of romance and realism as a study of

626   Dennis Denisoff “the tension between religion and science, Christianity and Darwinism.”35 Although published before On the Origin of Species (1859), Baudelaire’s poem “anticipates some of the cultural interpretations and misinterpretations of Darwin in the late-​nineteenth century.”36 In “A Carcass,” Baudelaire suggests a rhythm to the biological process of decay and regeneration, envisioning his young beloved, like everybody, eventually going through the same progression, as “it rose and it fell, and pulsed like a wave” (61). The image evokes both death and sexuality simultaneously. Moreover, the process turns out to be not simply rhythmic or cyclical, as it also simultaneously expands; the rotting, distending corpse “render[s]‌to Nature a hundredfold gift /​Of all she’d united in one” (61)—​a metaphor with both spiritual and ecological connotations. Having become the nutrients of flies, a dog, and “an army of maggots” (61), the object is not a corpse, nor a single animal, nor even a single species, but a multispecies ecology. “Blown with vague breath,” it “[l]ived in increasing itself ” (61; literally “lived by multiplying”). The force survives in the vitality of the innumerable maggots and flies but, more profoundly, it also extends throughout its community into the wind, the grain being cast and caught by winnowers separating the chaff, and (perhaps hinting at cholera) the flowing water. This immeasurable multiplicity scales outward even to the level of the solar system, the sun itself participating in the process of gaseous distention. In a particularly morbid turn, the narrator assures his beloved that, although she herself will dissipate into multitudes, he will keep her alive through his poetry, as “the keeper for corpses of love /​Of the form, and the essence divine!” (63). As Baudelaire recognizes, however, the egotism of the declaration fails, the ekphrastic metaphor falling apart as the narrator realizes the eternal life of the arts is the product of fake idealism as well: “The shapes wore away as if only a dream,” becoming but “a sketch that is left on the page /​Which the artist forgot and can only complete /​On the canvas, with memory’s aid” (61). Formless and fading into the forgotten (much like Enoch Soames), the narrator’s (and Baudelaire’s) composition on decomposition is itself in the process of decomposing, albeit also of energizing the vital forces entering into some other series of appreciative sentients. In accord with Haeckel’s definition of ecology, Baudelaire’s notion of decay consists of both the organic and the inorganic, including the aesthetic. “A Carcass,” with its closing consideration of the metaphor of the deteriorating painting, conceptualizes art and literature as components within the networks of decay. Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/​1891) similarly engages with the concept of the artwork and even, conceivably, the artist as organic, regenerating processes rather than artificial objects. Wilde’s interest in the relation of the individual to the social organism and evolution is well established, his notebooks from his undergraduate studies revealing the influence of both Huxley and Herbert Spencer, as well as his appreciation of Darwin.37 Taking from Spencer’s The Study of Sociology, Wilde writes, “The science of society then rests on the science of life: sociology on Biology, . . . for what characterizes an organism as opposed to the undifferentiated aggregate of protoplasm, is the mutual dependance of parts, the increased differentiation of function and of structure.” He even makes reference to Bathybius Haeckelii, a substance Huxley discovered and named after Haeckel; Huxley thought it to be primordial matter (the basis of organic life), as Wilde

Ecology   627 notes, but later acknowledged that he was wrong (112). Elsewhere in the notebooks, Wilde takes the relation of unicellular to multicellular organisms and correlates it to that of “cantonal individuality to national unity” (117). Wilde’s correlation of microscopic cellular relations to a healthy nation accords with Bourget’s description of decadence, suggesting how broadly such models were being disseminated and discussed. For the undergraduate Wilde, however, the individual was a unique component to the model: “The social organism resembles the bodily organism, but not the individual, but the generic type” (164). The dandy-​aesthete was often caricatured by George du Maurier and others as an elitist who unjustifiably claimed refined, cultural individualism; however, for Wilde, sincere individualism is “unselfish and unaffected.”38 While a few people, such as Baudelaire, he argues, may have had the privilege and financial means to realize their full individuality, such real individualism is actually “latent and potential in Mankind in general.”39 As he writes, “Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially arrested growth, or of disease, or of death” (italics in original).40 Rather than a false, cultural self-​display of originality, individualism for Wilde is the ultimate potential of an integrated biological system. The Picture of Dorian Gray challenges the selfish model of individualism with its portrayal of an elitist aesthete who is literally undone by fungus. From an ecological perspective, the rotting picture at the novel’s mysterious heart is not a fantastically fixed signifier of its subject’s physical and moral beauty or foulness, but an actual series of fungal transformations. The passage that establishes the story’s implausible premise occurs early in the text, when Lord Henry derails Dorian’s innocence by describing the young man’s inevitable turn from youth and beauty to the foulness of aging: The common hill-​flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets.41

The language here follows the trope especially common in decadent and spiritual works of cycles (seasons, eras, civilizations). Wilde scales the life cycle of a flower up to the realm of the cosmological, an expansion against which he juxtaposes the physical decomposition of the human body into hideousness. Here, then, our ecological antennae sense a foreshadowing of the revised vision captured in the rotting portrait that proves the most animated aspect of the narrative. Drawn by Lord Henry’s speech to recognize the fleeting beauty of his own being, in contrast to the macro-​cycles of ecological renewal, Dorian wishes for eternal youth, which then appears to be somehow miraculously granted. This is not the process of decomposition, rebirth, and blossoming to which Lord Henry actually refers when he describes the vitality of the hill-​flowers, clematis, and laburnum. With the perennials, some element of the predecessor genetically survives, but the actual plant that fades

628   Dennis Denisoff does not live unaltered or return year after year. Even the laburnum tree, which does remain across the years, changes drastically during that time, with the shocking yellow blossoms to which Lord Henry refers lasting for only about three weeks in summer. Dorian’s unchanging beauty, it would seem, is something different—​less a revivified energy resulting from a combination of ecological forces than a hermetic state of holistic stasis or stagnation. Part of the privilege arising from this permanent suspension appears to be the ability to experience pleasure at the expense of others with no traceable repercussions. This compels Dorian into a series of immoral acts that give him pleasure with no concern for the larger community. It actually turns out, however, that even this selfishness does engage a sort of ecological collective. Not affecting Dorian’s bodily beauty, his evil is manifest instead both in the infamous picture and in the aesthetics of human health as beauty, with decay making the figure in the artwork seem to age too quickly, to deform, and to become more sinister in appearance. Upon first entering the attic in which Dorian has hidden the portrait, Basil Hallward, the artist who painted it, notices the smell of mildew and, upon seeing the piece, imagines that it is indeed either mildew or toxins from his painting materials that have caused the piece to begin to rot.42 Fungi such as mildew are the main species that decompose dead and decaying organisms, attaining nutrients by secreting digestive enzymes into their immediate environment, thereby liquifying it into molecules that are absorbable. Basil’s own explanation of the process is informative: “It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful” (133). For those of Wilde’s contemporaries familiar with decadence, the “strange quickening of inner life” that Basil finds manifest in the decay of the picture would bring to mind the conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, in which Pater describes Jean-​Jacques Rousseau’s concerns with mortality: “An undefinable taint of death had always clung about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself stricken by mortal disease.”43 Rousseau’s sense of his life fleeting would become the impetus of Pater’s aestheticist dictum to maximize one’s experience of pleasure: “High passions give one this quickened sense of life. . . . Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art’s sake has most.”44 As Basil conjectures, his painting embodies the quickened spirit of fin-​de-​siècle aesthetics, the artwork having been brought to actual life by a fungus that is absorbing art as a nutrient of its own insatiable appetite. Wilde’s mention of the fungal infection of leprosy, meanwhile, would remind some readers of Swinburne’s notorious poem “The Leper” (1866) and its lowly scribe’s insatiable desire for his leprous beloved.45 In light of Basil’s fungal artistry, it is appropriate that Dorian has the decadent portrait’s dissolution come about with the help of a chemist-​cum-​biologist. Having murdered Basil in the attic in which the portrait is secreted, Dorian sends a servant off to bring back an old friend, Alan Campbell, from whom he has been estranged. While waiting for Alan, Dorian mindlessly doodles numerous cartoons of Basil, a sort of imaginative excess that inscribes the fungal spread of the artist into his murderer’s subconscious.

Ecology   629 Campbell, meanwhile, is himself a combination of science and art. A talented musician, he had also taken the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge and done well. Having become friends with Dorian through their shared love of music, their relationship eventually ended for reasons unexplained, and Alan gave up his artistic interests and devoted himself to science: “Every day he seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice in some of the scientific reviews, in connection with certain curious experiments” (140). The implication is that the reason Alan became cool to Dorian is also the reason for his biological experiments. As Dorian attempts to coerce Alan into using his skills in chemistry to destroy the physical evidence of Basil’s body, his argument shifts away from humanist privilege to science: “Look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view. You don’t inquire where the dead things on which you experiment come from. Don’t inquire now” (143). The situation, however, is not as clear-​ cut as Dorian hopes, in part because, even though Basil is now dead, the fungus is not and, through its actions on the portrait, has in fact been a participant in the plot for some time now. While Dorian encourages Alan’s dissolution of Basil, he fails to recognize that the life force has literally become manifest as an art-​absorbing fungus.

Eternal Absorptions Baudelaire and Wilde did not produce works akin to those that Pouliot and Ryan celebrate in the issue of PAN that I mentioned near the outset of this chapter; they do, however, explore similar conceptual paradigms regarding the ecological, artistic, and aesthetic. My reading of Baudelaire’s poetry and Wilde’s novel is not concerned so much with how much scientific knowledge the authors had about fungi or decay, but rather with the ontological perspective through which ecological models of mingling and influence permeate their decadent works. With Alan Campbell, Wilde brings in a scientist to resolve Dorian’s dilemma, but one whom Dorian first gets to know as a young aesthete with an intense love of music. Wilde depicts some of his other characters being consumed by aesthetics as well. Harry instructs Dorian to “absorb the colour of life” but not its details, a suggestion of the decadent’s own aesthetic absorption of the individual into a life of degeneracy, as opposed to the individual’s adoption of a distanced appreciation of it. Campbell is also first captivated by Dorian’s decadence—​his beauty and embodied philosophy of life. After their friendship is severed, he becomes “absorbed” instead by science (140), his expertise and experiments on the dead suggesting less a turning away from decadence than a shift of interest toward its organic formulations. Meanwhile, Basil declares more than once that Dorian threatens to take him over, to “absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself ” (9). Wilde’s repeated metaphor of decay as a form of reciprocal absorption echoes the model of consumption found in Baudelaire’s poetry and its expansiveness beyond a carcass to society, and even to an ecological system that encompasses the sun. Both authors encourage their readers to shift away from an anthropocentric vision to consider

630   Dennis Denisoff a notion of multispecies engagements that consume and are consumed by the activities of rot. Importantly, Baudelaire and Wilde also consider the place of their own art and aesthetics in these engagements. Questioning the ethical and political ideal of society as a hermetically pure bastion to be defended against invasion and contamination, the authors reconfigure it as a carcass/​canvas decomposing and simultaneously regenerating into new forms of social and artistic circulation. Just as fungi liquify and absorb humans and art objects alike into a single, mutating organism, Baudelaire’s and Wilde’s aesthetics incorporate ecological science and politics as nutrients for the generative decay of decadent culture.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Jane Desmarais, Kristin Mahoney, and David Weir for their thoughtful and instrumental suggestions on earlier versions of this article.

Notes 1. Max Beerbohm, Seven Men (London: William Heinemann, 1916), 15. Further references cited parenthetically. 2. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties (1913; London: Grant Richards, 1922), 158. 3. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 159. 4. George du Maurier, The Martian (New York: Harper, 1897), 379. 5. On the place of parody and satire in the popularization of aestheticism and decadence in Britain, see Dennis Denisoff, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–​ 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 6. Gillian Beer and Meegan Kennedy both demonstrate that science and literature have historically shared not only ideas, but also structures, techniques, and creative formulations. Kennedy’s Revising the Clinic offers especially insightful examples in nineteenth-​century sciences and the literary arts, where discourses of disease and death have been extended from the human individual to community and national levels. See Gillian Beer, Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); and Meegan Kennedy, Revising the Clinic: Vision and Representation in Victorian Medical Narrative and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010). 7. Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti,” Contemporary Review 18 (October 1871): 349, 336. 8. Buchanan, “The Fleshly School of Poetry,” 349, 343. It appears Buchanan meant “pangenesis,” Darwin’s theory of hereditary transmission in both sexual and asexual reproduction, as he discusses in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868). I thank Gowan Dawson for his help in clarifying this matter. 9. Alison Pouliot and John Charles Ryan, “Fungi: An Entangled Exploration,” PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature 10 (2013): 1. 10. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (New York: Random House, 2020) explores the complex systems in which mycorrhizal fungi (those living in symbiosis with plants) participate. These fungi

Ecology   631 have the means to link to plants to create large-​scale systems for nutrient and information transference. As his title suggests, Sheldrake is sensitive to the ways in which humans are part of fungal ecologies. 11. S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 556. 12. Bill Luckin, Death and Survival in Urban Britain: Disease, Pollution and Environment (1800–​1950) (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 31. 13. On Chadwick’s contribution to the rise of the medical understanding of cholera, see Pamela Gilbert, Cholera and Nation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 14. Pamela Gilbert, “On Cholera in Nineteenth-​ Century England,” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-​Century History, ed. Dino Felluga. http://​www.branc​hcol​ lect​ive.org/​?ps_​a​rtic​les=​pam​ela-​k-​gilb​ert-​on-​chol​era-​in-​nin​etee​nth-​cent​ury-​engl​and. Accessed November 15, 2020. 15. John Snow, “On the Pathology and Mode of Communication of Cholera,” London Medical Gazette 44 (November 2, 1849): 745–​53, and (November 30, 1849): 923–​29; John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (London: John Churchill, 1855). 16. Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5. 17. Andrew R. Morris, “Oscar Wilde and the Eclipse of Darwinism: Aestheticism, Degeneration, and Moral Reaction in Late-​Victorian Ideology,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 24, no. 4 (Oct. 1993): 513. 18. T. H. Huxley, “On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge,” Fortnightly Review 3 (1866): 629. 19. Huxley, “Improving Natural Knowledge,” 630. 20. Huxley, “Improving Natural Knowledge,” 636. 21. Christopher Hamlin, “Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease,” Victorian Studies 28, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 389. 22. Henry Austin, Report on the Means of Deoderizing and Utilizing the Sewage of Towns (London: George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1857), 3. 23. Huxley, “Improving Natural Knowledge,” 636. 24. Alicia Carroll’s New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019) suggests additional authors who speak to related formulations of the same time period. 25. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London: A. Strahan, 1788), 5:23. 26. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:10. 27. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:115, 5:187–​88, 5:425. 28. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 5:515, 516. 29. Shushma Malik, “Decadence and Roman Historiography,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 40. Weir offers an incisive summary of the historiography of decadent societies, including classical decadence, in Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 30. Malik, “Decadence and Roman Historiography,” 43. 31. Jackson, The Eighteen Nineties, 65. 32. Théophile Gautier, “Charles Baudelaire,” trans. Chris Baldick, in Decadence: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012), 80.

632   Dennis Denisoff 33. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98. 34. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 53. Further references cited parenthetically. 35. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xii. 36. Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, xii–​xiii. 37. Oscar Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 120, 134. Further references cited parenthetically. David Clifford recounts the occasion of Wilde and Huxley’s meeting in “Wilde and Evolution,” in Wilde in Context, ed. Kerry Powell and Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 211–​19. 38. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review 291 (February 1891): 316. 39. Wilde, “Soul of Man,” 296. 40. Wilde, “Soul of Man.” 316. See also Matthew Beaumont, “Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde’s Concept of Utopia: ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism,’ ” Utopian Studies 15, no. 1 (2004): 13–​29. 41. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 23. Further references cited parenthetically. 42. Charlotte Ribeyrol offers a thorough and insightful analysis of the paint in Basil’s portrait of Dorian in “Verdeurs: Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, and the Colors of Decadence,” Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 4 (2021): forthcoming. 43. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 120. 44. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, 120–​21. 45. On the eco-​aesthetics of “The Leper,” see the introduction to my Decadent Ecology in British Litrature and Art (1860–​1910): Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Further Reading Carroll, Alicia. New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond. Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Denisoff, Dennis. Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art (1860–​1910): Decay, Desire, and the Pagan Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Denisoff, Dennis. “The Dissipating Nature of Decadent Paganism from Pater to Yeats.” Modernism/​Modernity 15, no. 3 (2008): 431–​46. Desmarais, Jane, and Chris Baldick, eds. Decadence: An Annotated Anthology. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2012. Hamlin, Christopher. “Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease.” Victorian Studies 28, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 381–​411. Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–​76. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Ecology   633 Locke, Piers, and Ursula Muenster. “Multispecies Ethnography.” In Oxford Bibliographies Online. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. https://​www.oxfor​dbib​liog​raph​ies.com/​ view/​docum​ent/​obo-​978019​9766​567/​obo-​978019​9766​567-​0130.xml?rskey=​eEu​qjH&res​ ult=​1&q=​Multi​spec​ies+​Ethn​ogra​phy#fir​stMa​tch. Luckin, Bill. Death and Survival in Urban Britain: Disease, Pollution and Environment (1800–​ 1950). London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Morgan, Benjamin. “Fin du Globe: On Decadent Planets.” Victorian Studies 58, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 609–​35. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. New York: Random House, 2020. van Dooren, Thomas, and Deborah Bird Rose. “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds.” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (May 2016): 77–​94.

Chapter 33

PHIL OS OPH Y Post-Kantian Narratives of Decadence Andrew Huddleston

Decadence is a perennial theme in philosophy. Even millennia ago, things were said to be going downhill from past excellence and glory. But tracing the arc of decline becomes an especially prominent focus of attention in European philosophy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this chapter, several “narratives of decadence” in the post-​ Kantian tradition are explained and contrasted. At root, the charge of decadence, as the etymology of the word suggests, involves the diagnosis that we have “fallen away” from a height and are moving toward a condition worse than before. This idea, in one form or another, is far more important to understanding the relevant currents of thought in this post-​Kantian period than the specific term decadence or its cognates. Indeed, the term itself is relatively infrequent among canonical philosophers, with the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche. And in Nietzsche’s usage, as we shall see, he turns many of the usual connotations on their head. It bears noting at the outset that these narratives of decadence are thus similar to, and sometimes overlap with, philosophical pessimism, which we might think of as a negative verdict on the world or on existence.1 Yet it is also importantly distinct from it because the philosophical discourse of decadence is essentially historical-​narratival, seeing our present state against the backdrop of a history, even if a rather speculative one. By contrast, some pessimists—​most notably, Arthur Schopenhauer—​eschew this historical situatedness and see the fallenness of the world as a fundamental, ahistorical metaphysical problem. In Schopenhauer’s view, the problem is due to the structure of will and willing, rather than the result of a specific historical position in which we find ourselves. Thanks to his expression of world-​weariness and his flair for gripping rhetorical prose, Schopenhauer was much admired in the literary and artistic circles associated with decadent culture. But he is not central to the philosophical discourse of decadence. In what follows, the basics of G. W. F. Hegel’s optimistic view of progress and history are laid out briefly as a foil and point of reference. Then, several “narratives of decadence”

PHILOSOPHY   635 from other canonical philosophical figures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are expounded—​specifically, from Nietzsche, from Martin Heidegger, and from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. All of these thinkers see modern humanity as being in a decadent state, in some sense, but all have a rather different diagnosis of what that fallen state consists of, how we came to be in this problematic condition, and how (or whether) we might be able to extricate ourselves from it. These, it must be stressed, are all nuanced narratives that take an especially ambivalent turn in the case of Nietzsche and of Horkheimer and Adorno; they will not deny that there is progress in certain respects, and that such is the obverse side of decadence. The juxtaposition of these thinkers offers a range of perspectives on how philosophers in the post-​Kantian tradition understand the trajectory of history and our place in it, along with their treatment of the themes of progress and regress across several domains.

Hegel Hegel’s philosophy is notably both historical and progressive in its orientation. Whether discussing ethics or aesthetics, or even abstract questions in metaphysics and epistemology, Hegel situates his position narratively at the end of a chain of philosophical reflection, with his view presented as the inevitable outcome once various self-​defeating positions are excluded. This stance is most evident in the introduction to his system, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).2 But in his Lectures on Aesthetics and his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (given mainly in the 1820s, then published posthumously), among others, there is a similar progressive orientation.3 Our institutions (epistemic, political, social, artistic) have been developing, and in doing so they have been realizing a sort of internal telos. Indeed, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel goes so far as to describe philosophy as a kind of theodicy. In its traditional theological sense, a theodicy tries to show us how the existence of evil and suffering in the world is compatible with the existence of God. Hegel’s basically secular variant on theodicy is the project of showing that despite the apparent problems and contradictions, things—​while by no means perfect—​are nonetheless moving toward a better condition.4 Collectively, the sophistication and comprehensiveness of our knowledge is increasing, and we are tending, in our political arrangements, toward the eventual realization of human freedom and emancipation. Or so Hegel will maintain. Closely connected with this idea of theodicy is that of reconciliation—​Versöhnung—​a term also pregnant with quasi-​theological connotations. To find reconciliation is to see the world as tending toward this positive improvement, and therefore as one in which we can basically be “at home.”5 Hegel is usually said to be a “dialectician.” There is a potted idea of Hegelian dialectic as consisting of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, and seeing that whole process unfold historically, with the thesis and the antithesis opposing each other and being combined in

636   Andrew Huddleston the synthesis, and so on. While there is some textual grounding for this idea in Hegel’s philosophy of history, it is more unhelpful than helpful to rely on this framework. A less misleading, though still imperfect, characterization is to say that seemingly opposed ideas each have some degree of truth to them. Each is partly right, but represents a one-​sided way of looking at things, and is often the result of the wrong way of framing the question. This form of one-​sidedness occurs in a number of different domains. In the epistemic domain, we have ways of thinking that privilege the position of the subject of experience over the object, or the object over the subject. In the political domain, we have ways of thinking about the state or the social totality taking precedence over the individual. (Indeed, this view is often mistakenly attributed to Hegel himself.) And we have views that privilege the individual over the social totality or the polity. And so on. We similarly have institutions and practices that enshrine and incorporate these positions, and practices (such as philosophy) that involve explicit self-​reflection on these ideas. These are all forms of what Hegel calls Geist (Spirit). When we investigate these one-​sided positions further, whether in the abstract or in their concrete historical instantiations, we see, according to Hegel, that they have certain internal tensions. They maintain one thing, but in order to make good on that, they need to maintain something contrary to it. Going through the process of philosophical reflection, however, we see that these apparently irresolvable tensions are just that—​apparent. These seeming oppositions are overcome, or “sublated,” the somewhat strange English word used to translate the Hegelian idea of something being aufgehebt (cancelled, yet preserved). That ongoing process of reflection has in fact been happening all along in civilization’s development, and our present ideas and institutions are its outcome. History therefore manifests progress, at the level of our reflective thought and at the level of our institutions. This progress is reflected in where we have arrived in the most advanced examples of polities, artworks, and indeed philosophical reflection as well.6 In sum, Hegel’s historical vision is one, essentially, of progress. While to some extent there are fits and starts, things have, on all the important fronts, been basically getting better. Philosophical narratives of decadence will in various ways question and complicate this optimistic philosophical story.

Nietzsche Of the major philosophical figures in the post-​Kantian period, Nietzsche uses the term decadence the most, especially in his final works of 1888, where he uses the French cognate décadence specifically. With this term itself, Nietzsche’s primary application is psychological, rather than historical or sociocultural, though decadence is a condition related to broader social and historical trends.7 Yet, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s use of the term is

PHILOSOPHY   637 rather unusual. As important as the term decadence is, even more important are the larger narratives of decadence that Nietzsche presents: narratives of a decline from the heights of Attic tragedy—​thanks to Socratism—​and a decline from a noble ethics of strength to a valorization of weakness—​thanks to the “slave revolt” and Judeo-​Christianity. These narratives figure centrally in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the “First Essay” of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), respectively. In both cases, but particularly in the latter, Nietzsche’s narrative is far more subtle than a straight line downward. But he does supply us, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–​1885), with a memorable image about what we are at risk of descending into, a specter that he calls “the last man.” Though arguably the notional terminus of a chain of decadent devolution, the condition of the “last man” is (seemingly) not one of décadence in Nietzsche’s more specific usage of the term, or at least not a paradigm case of it. I will briefly review what Nietzsche means by the latter diagnosis, and then turn to expounding his two main historical narratives. The term decadence often has a glamorous, if dissolute, sheen in its artistic and literary applications—​to many, it is a thing to be celebrated as much as decried. While often associated with sickness, Nietzsche repurposes the term (and uses the French décadence) to describe a specific kind of psychological malady. At the heart of his theory is a metaphorical extension of Paul Bourget’s theory of the decadent style in literature.8 Decadence, according to Bourget, is a manifestation of a failure of unity, with the part taking over and overwhelming the whole.9 Nietzsche sees this dynamic as applicable in human psychology as well. Yet while Nietzsche maintains this connection with discourses about decadence contemporary to him, he also turns established usage on its head. Whereas one might have thought that decadence (connected with a decline in morals) is about overindulgence (think, for instance, of Thomas Couture’s painting The Romans of the Decadence [1847]), Nietzschean décadence is as much the result of combatting the appetites through zealous means and seeking to suppress them. In Twilight of the Idols (1889), Nietzsche gives us an illustration of how this dynamic plays out in the person of Socrates. One of the distinguishing marks of décadence is a kind of psychical disunity. In the case of Socrates, this condition takes the form of experiencing his drives (particularly his “lower” appetitive drives), not as truly part of himself, but as alien elements needing to be subdued. By Socrates’ lights, he is his rational, eternal soul; the body, with its appetites, is not really him. Socrates becomes fixated on reason and dialectic because he cannot cope with his own unruly impulses. Rationality is his response. But Socrates’ strategy—​allowing one part of himself (his rationality) to take over and “tyrannize” the whole—​is a manifestation of his décadence.10 In keeping with Nietzsche’s political language of tyranny, we might think of the way in which a dictator, touting a law-​and-​order campaign, gains power in situations of political unrest: scapegoating often gets coupled with an extreme plan to root out the allegedly offending element. Nietzsche’s opposition to reason as the ruling element in the self might seem to lend support to the familiar (and mistaken) charge that Nietzsche is an irrationalist. Yet when Nietzsche complains about tyranny in the self, his complaint is not against any imposition of dominant order whatsoever.

638   Andrew Huddleston What Nietzsche has in his critical sights is not rationality per se. It is instead an overzealous sort of rationality, the sort that seeks, in the relentless way that Socrates does, to keep the appetites and competitive drives in check. In addition to being the paradigm of psychological décadence, Socrates is, for Nietzsche, both an agent and emblem of broader social decadence. And here we see the interconnection between décadence in Nietzsche’s specific psychological sense and the broader narratives of decadence that we will be considering. The first of these narratives comes in Nietzsche’s 1872 book, The Birth of Tragedy. Once again, Nietzsche subverts some of the usual expectations. Whereas we might have expected decadence to be correlated with a sort of torpor, decadence is instead, in Nietzsche’s narrative about the decline of tragedy, the result of a certain form of overdeveloped scrupulousness. Nietzsche here points to Socrates’s rationalism as representative of the problem: Socrates feels a compulsive need to question everything and to subject it to rational scrutiny. This way of thinking proves to be the undoing of the sort of tragic wisdom that was present in the worldview epitomized by Aeschylus and Sophocles. Suffering does not make rational sense, but in such a worldview it can be aesthetically justified. This is part of a larger campaign on Socrates’s part to undermine the legitimacy of values that do not meet his exacting rational standards.11 Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality concerns itself with a transformation in values.12 The noble values of the Greco-​Roman world are displaced by a morality of “good and evil.” Whereas the previous noble value system celebrated strength, pride, honor, power, and courage, the new value system prioritizes compassion, selflessness, humility, turning the other cheek, and the like. These values become the new celebrated virtues (in, for example, the New Testament). Once again, we see Nietzsche turning the usual usage on its head. Whereas one influential discourse of decadence would connect it with laxity in morals, Nietzsche will conceive of morality itself as a primary manifestation (and driver) of decadence. The mechanics of exactly how this change is supposed to transpire are not entirely clear and remain a subject of interpretive controversy. But the key point that Nietzsche refers to is the so-​called “slave revolt” in morality, which leads to the toppling of the previously regnant noble values and the establishment of slavish values in their place; this change is less a discrete event than a gradual, though watershed, alteration. Nietzsche’s foremost concern in the Genealogy is with the sort of greatness that this value system denigrates and suppresses, and the sort of weakness and mediocrity it celebrates and encourages. With this sort of slavish value system in place, great individuals (such as Goethe or Beethoven) and great cultures (such as ancient Rome, at its height) will not be able to flourish. We are instead faced with a sort of decline. As he notes in the Genealogy: We see today nothing that wishes to become greater, we sense that things are still going downhill, downhill—​ into something thinner, more good-​ natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more apathetic, more Chinese, more

PHILOSOPHY   639 Christian—​man, there is no doubt, is becoming ever “better” . . . Precisely here lies Europe’s doom—​with the fear of man we have also forfeited the love of him, the reverence toward him, the hope for him, indeed the will to him.13

One of Nietzsche’s most memorable images of this decline is in fact from several years earlier, in his Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he describes the figure of “the last man.” We are not yet at this extreme of decline in the Genealogy, but “the last man” does give us some indication of where humanity is headed, and Nietzsche invites us to recognize ourselves in this sorry portrait: Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” thus asks the last man, and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-​beetle; the last man lives longest. “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. [. . .] “We have invented happiness,” say the last men, and they blink.14

Nietzsche is perhaps best-​known known for the idea of the “death of God.”15 And in a way, “the last man” can seem as though it is a similar image of decline, from the integrated, meaningful worldviews of the past to a sort of cosmic emptiness. But this “death of God” is as much a loss as an opportunity. The “last man,” as it were, is the image of where we will end if that opportunity lapses and we cease caring about important, deep things at all. While much of Nietzsche’s writing in this vein implicitly valorizes a past condition of individuals and whole cultures, he does not suggest that we should return to it. Nor does he suggest that our decline is without certain compensating advantages. He even goes so far as to say: “Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected.”16 As civilization has developed and our values have changed, we have become deeper and more interesting.17 This transformation comes about initially through a process of internalization. Whereas previously we would have expressed our drives (for example, aggressive drives toward domination) outwardly, we now turn these inward. This process creates in us a kind of sickness, but it also creates the preconditions for higher forms of rational reflection and autonomy.18 The change in values associated with the slave revolt complicates us. We are ascetically set against ourselves, but this condition allows us to achieve things we would not have achieved otherwise. So although Nietzsche presents narratives of decline, he leaves us with an interesting sort of ambivalence.

640   Andrew Huddleston

Heidegger Although discussion of decadence occupies a central place in Nietzsche’s work, the notion of a trajectory of decline is arguably even more central for (the later) Heidegger. Heidegger presents a narrative according to which we come increasingly into the grip of a technology-​centered framework that alienates us from our grounding commitments and makes it impossible to be truly at home, or, in his terminology, to “dwell.” Seinsvergessenheit (Forgetfulness of Being) is his term for this historical condition. Heidegger’s account of this decline into Forgetfulness of Being is an important inheritor of the rhetoric of decadence. Heidegger’s philosophy is typically divided into two main periods: the earlier Heidegger of Being and Time (1924),19 and the later Heidegger, whose ideas are spread across a number of different lectures and texts. While there are historicist elements in Being and Time, it is primarily a transcendental investigation into the nature of Being and the sort of Being instantiated by human beings, which Heidegger terms Dasein. The later Heidegger frames his investigation of Being, or, as he will put it instead, the history of Being, as the way in which Being reveals itself to us and how we respond (or fail to respond) to it. I will try in what follows to distill a few of the key themes, in order to illuminate the fundamental features of this account. Heidegger presents the society contemporary to him as being in a crisis and in need of a remedy. The central failing is in our relation to Being, or, perhaps more aptly, Being’s relation to us. Heidegger conceives of this relation in terms of various images: as a sort of gift of which we are the stewards, or something potentially disclosive, to which we can be (or fail to be) receptive. Being is not to be understood as God in the traditional theological sense exactly, but that is not a terrible approximation either, once we give up the anthropomorphic idea of God as a kind of powerful entity. Being is that which affords a genuine grounding, a sort of meaning and intelligibility. It does this not primarily at the individual level but rather at the social level, by infusing and informing a life-​world of practices through which things disclose themselves as important, thereby drawing a people together. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger has a narrative of decline, beginning with a time when we could be drawn together, to a situation where that possibility is increasingly foreclosed. He will describe this dynamic of decline, borrowing an image from Hölderlin, in terms of a “default of God” (Fehl Gottes). Elaborating on this concept, Heidegger writes: The default of God means that no god any longer gathers men and things unto himself, visibly and unequivocally, and by such gathering disposes the world’s history and man’s sojourn in it. The default of God forebodes something even grimmer, however. Not only have the gods and the god fled, but the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history. The time of the world’s night is the destitute [dürftiger] time, because it becomes ever more destitute. It has already grown so destitute, it can no longer discern the default of God as a default.20

PHILOSOPHY   641 This default is more than simply the decline in importance of a certain Judeo-​Christian conception of God. It is a condition of modernity whereby things become disenchanted, and divinity, in a broader and not necessarily supernatural sense, is extinguished. Nothing reveals itself as mattering in the way that it once did. In the narrative that he presents, Heidegger assigns central fault to the dominance of a certain outlook he terms das Gestell (enframing), signaling the ascendancy of a technological way of considering things that squeezes out other ways in which things might disclose or reveal themselves. Thanks to das Gestell, the world discloses itself in terms of resources to be employed. Heidegger’s famous example is of a hydroelectric plant over the Rhine, using the water as a resource, which he contrasts with Friedrich Hölderlin’s rapturous relation to the Rhine as a place of meaning and a foundation of community: The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the art work, in Hölderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.21

As we shall see in what follows, there is a similarity here with Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument about instrumental rationality (and its alliance with what they call the “culture industry”) in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), though they situate their observation in a rather different narrative. The trouble with das Gestell is that it prevents us from truly “dwelling,” which Heidegger thinks is the fundamental essence (we might also say “need”) of the human being.22 To dwell (wohnen) is a rooted way of existing. It is to find ourselves in a place that is a home, a place that we care for, and where we are cared for. Such a place will reveal itself to us in a certain way. It will be somewhere where we have a connection to the history of the place and where we feel a sense of meaning. The mark of our decline is that we are largely not in a condition where we can dwell anymore. This is not something that can be remedied by individual effort, as if it were simply a matter of making our houses cozier. It is instead a matter of where we find ourselves in the history of Being. What then is the remedy? Heidegger famously notes that “only a god can save us.”23 By this he does not mean the God of traditional Judeo-​Christianity necessarily, nor even a supernatural being. The “god” could be a sort of poet or sage who might be able to awaken us by disclosing Being in a different way. In its more palatable guises, this disclosure takes the form of poets, Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, singing, as Heidegger says, “the trace of the fugitive gods,” and thereby in their way keeping something of the divine spark alive in dark times. But his hopes can also extend into more

642   Andrew Huddleston political territory; those specifically needing to be awakened, he maintains, are a historical people, and they need to be awakened to their world-​historical destiny. Heidegger took the German Volk to be invested with such a destiny, and for a time he placed his hopes in National Socialism. He soon became disillusioned, thinking that the Nazi leaders were false prophets. But he notoriously referred later to the “inner truth and greatness” of the movement that he saw these leaders as betraying. How closely his political views were tied to his philosophical views is a matter that continues to be debated, as does, accordingly, the question of his culpability for his ideas. The recent publication of the so-​called Black Notebooks puts Heidegger in an even-​more negative light, because many of his most noxious political ideas are interlaced with anti-​Semitism.24 But whatever verdict we reach about Heidegger the man and his ideas, he is a key representative of a discourse about decadence, which sees Western Civilization as in decline, offers a diagnosis, and proposes a potential solution.

Horkheimer and Adorno Finally, I turn to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, penned in the wake of trying to come to grips with the dark political trends with which Heidegger’s later philosophy is sometimes entangled. How, Adorno and Horkheimer ask, have we degenerated into a state of barbarism in the twentieth century, with mass extermination carried out in Nazi Germany? They will point the finger at the ideals of the Enlightenment itself. In seeking to give us control over nature, the Enlightenment promised a sort of mastery—​a way of rationally triumphing over magic and myth. But the Enlightenment, particularly its outgrowth consisting in the ascendancy of a narrow form of instrumental rationality, thrusts us back to the crude state from which we sought to escape. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote this book when they were in exile. They left Germany when the Nazis rose to power and watched in horror as the events of the 1930s and 1940s unfolded. How could one of the most technologically advanced, culturally refined, and artistically sophisticated societies in human history manifest this sort of vicious cruelty, they asked. Any attempted narrative of civilization’s onward march of progress runs into a wall. Moreover, they do not view the triumph of the Nazi regime as an isolated aberration—​a matter just of a fringe group gaining power and then converting people to their nefarious mission. Instead, they see the regime as a manifestation of what they take to be a deep and central current in Western culture. At first glance, one might think of the Enlightenment as marking progress. First of all, it represents epistemic progress: we are more enlightened because we know more things—​facts about mathematics, physics, history, chemistry, and the like—​ that we never knew before. Second, it also represents moral progress because social arrangements and practices have become more just. Horkheimer and Adorno are not disputing that humanity has made genuine progress. Instead they are claiming that this

PHILOSOPHY   643 progress has a problematic concomitant. Thus, the issue is not that there are many issues still to be remedied, or that the Enlightenment has not dealt with them yet. Rather, the issue is that with the very process of enlightenment (and genuine and beneficial progress, often) being secured, problems ensue. What might seem a triumphal march is regress in disguise. As they put it, “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.” 25 In contrast to Hegel the dialectician, Adorno styles himself a “negative dialectician.” While the approach comes to be elaborated by Adorno himself in more detail, it is also a fair characterization of the approach that he and Horkheimer jointly undertake.26 Hegel will look to an idea, a society, or a form of life and identify a certain tension in its self-​conception. But this tension, he maintains, will ultimately work itself out in the progress of history. Hegel, as we have seen, is an optimist in this regard. Unlike Hegel, Horkheimer and Adorno do not think that these tensions are merely apparent. Their dialectics is negative because they think that resolution is not possible, and, methodologically speaking, they think that one should not be aiming for it. The term dialectic in the title The Dialectic of Enlightenment reflects both their methodological and historical conception of dialectic, albeit with a negative inclination. It might appear that what Horkheimer and Adorno have in mind by (the) Enlightenment is the particular, largely eighteenth-​century movement. But what they have in mind is instead something much broader, encompassing this movement but also stretching back millennia in human history; indeed, the book’s first main chapter is primarily about Odysseus. What does “Enlightenment” in this expansive sense involve? Horkheimer and Adorno tend to paint things with a broad brush. Enlightenment, in their view, is fundamentally about trying to assert control over nature. In summary form, their argument is as follows: Enlightenment, in its attempt to control nature, requires and brings technological progress and understanding. It thereby supplants myth and magic, and overcomes, or seemingly overcomes, barbarism. But it thereby also leads to (greater) alienation from nature. In attempting to compensate for that alienation from nature, enlightenment reverts to myth. And in so doing, it devolves into barbarism. I will now try to unpack each of these components of their argument and explain how Horkheimer and Adorno think this downward trajectory comes about. It is perhaps most helpful to understand what enlightenment is through thinking about its goal and how it seeks to achieve it. One might have guessed that the primary goal of enlightenment is about gaining knowledge. But in fact Adorno and Horkheimer believe there is an even more basic goal of mastery of which gaining knowledge is a manifestation: an impulse for control or power over nature. Knowledge is valued because it helps to achieve this power. There are other routes to this mastery apart from (genuine) knowledge. Precursors are to be found in myth and magic. Myths are stories that try to make the world intelligible and meaningful to us. They try to explain why things happen, albeit via stories that are not true and that do not stand up to rational scrutiny. But they help us feel in

644   Andrew Huddleston control of our world by thinking that we understand it better. We have an explanation for the lightning; it is not simply a random event. Magic goes hand in hand with myth, in that they are both trying to gain mastery over this alien and often difficult external world. When faced with a disease, one casts a spell that is supposed to heal the disease. Enlightenment tries to get us to the facts about things, exposing myths as myths, and magic as a sham. It tells us that it is antibiotics or a vaccine, not magic, that will combat the disease. With the aid of enlightenment, we have a better way of controlling this alien nature. Enlightenment triumphs over “barbarism” by undermining myth and magic. And yet enlightenment, for all its good intentions, leads to greater alienation. Progress is at once regress. The key philosophical idea with alienation is that we are cut off from some important aspect of ourselves or our world. Something that should feel natural and close to us feels distant, foreign, or alien. Once we see things as fundamentally there to be understood, manipulated, and controlled, our relation to them loses something important and is degraded. (For all their disagreements, there are interesting affinities between Heidegger and Horkheimer and Adorno on this point). Now, it is important to see that Horkheimer and Adorno are not idolizing some past. There was never any special point where we were not alienated. Indeed, it was because of an initial alienation (i.e., this sense of the world as an alien other) that we resorted to magic and myth in the first place, and then to the enlightenment strategies that came to supplant them. It is not as though Horkheimer and Adorno are thinking that we could somehow reverse things and go back to the perfect, primal arcadia. There is always this temptation to tell stories about the myth of the Fall from the Garden of Eden where things were perfect. But Adorno and Horkheimer do not fit into that mold. Alienation has always been a problem and is inescapable. We begin as subjects facing the world, needing some way to master and control it, to predict and regulate it. First, in the barbaric stage we resort to myth and magic. Then with enlightenment, we acquire more sophisticated ways of trying to master and control it, to predict and regulate it. But these measures ultimately can distance us from it. To take the most potent example, people become treated as things, instead of as subjects deserving respect. In attempting compensation for that alienation from nature, enlightenment turns back on itself and reverts to myth. A potential problem with enlightenment values is that they are too abstract to afford the sort of reconciliation that humans hunger after when they are cut off from the world and feel astray. Famously, this sense of alienation was a complaint that the German Romantics made about Enlightenment values. We need to feel at home in the world, and Enlightenment values have distanced us too much from the world and are not themselves capable of helping us overcome this distance. Instead, we have acquired a rationalistic outlook that has distanced us from the world, from our fellow humans, and from our historically specific communities, which is not ultimately satisfying. In the case of the German Romantics, they are explicit that what we need is a new mythology. This situation is perhaps not inherently problematic, but it lays the groundwork for things that are problematic. The ground is fertile for ideologies that cater to those impulses that are not being satisfied. Some of those impulses are merely impulses to

PHILOSOPHY   645 find the world a meaningful and intelligible home. Capitalism builds on this need and sells the masses cheery, pacifying entertainment, churning out hit movies and songs that try for a simulacrum of this reconciliation, in a phenomenon that Horkheimer and Adorno term the “culture industry.” Enlightenment thereby, as they put it, reverts to “mass deception.”27 But there are even cruder impulses lurking there too, and these will partly explain the rise of fascism (whose cultural complement in Germany was as much the frothy, distracting romantic comedies of the culture industry, hugely popular in the Germany of the time, as the more considerable films of Leni Riefenstahl). There is an attraction to Lebensphilosophie—​philosophy of life—​praising certain kinds of primal vitality and denigrating ratiocinative calculation. Often, this disposition is closely allied with a kind of anti-​Semitism. The Jews, in this ugly stereotype, represent the ratiocinative, calculating impulse. They are not bound to the earth and soil of the homeland, to this particular community and its way of life. This stereotype, ultimately, is itself sustained in part by myth—​myths of the German nation, of Aryan superiority, and the like. And even worse, the technological advancement of the Enlightenment does not get abandoned. It is complicit. People are so distanced from nature that they do not even recognize their fellow human beings as human. They think of them as a problem to be dealt with, like vermin to be exterminated, and in their ratiocinative, calculating way, these evildoers try to find the most efficient means of going about this. Technological advancement—​the gas chambers being the most potent example—​makes possible horrific mass killings in a way that could not have been dreamt of previously. The Nazis were able to do all this so efficiently because they were so organized and methodological. We thus have this terrible witches’ brew of the organized and methodical enlightenment impulse, coupled with both moral nihilism and the reversion to pernicious myths. It is the culmination of world barbarism, and it is all, according to Horkheimer and Adorno’s narrative, traceable back to the Enlightenment itself. A standard story about the rise of Nazism blames so-​called Volkish thinking. But what is so distinctive and interesting about the account that Horkheimer and Adorno offer is that it explains this thinking as itself part of a larger problem, a problem at the root of the Enlightenment and, indeed, of the decline of human civilization. Volkish thinking tries to answer a deep human need that the Enlightenment also tried to answer, a need that arises out of the failure of enlightenment’s project. Horkheimer and Adorno are ultimately pessimistic because they think the root problem here is not one that can be solved. We want the world to be one we can be reconciled to, one where we can feel at home. But any way of trying to achieve this reconciliation is ultimately futile because the world, at core, is a bad place to which we should not be reconciled. Horkheimer and Adorno thus recognize this felt need for reconciliation, but they think it is ultimately something that should be resisted. The world is a place from which we should be alienated. But being alienated is a bad thing too. And thus a conundrum. Horkheimer and Adorno therefore think we need to learn to get used to not being at home in the world. As Adorno says in Minima Moralia (1951), “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”28

646   Andrew Huddleston

Conclusion In the case of all three narratives of decadence we have considered, there is no indication that we can, or perhaps even should, reverse course and return to an allegedly better, earlier stage. For better or for worse, we are where we are. But all three narratives, to varying degrees, float some possibility of rescue, which takes on a messianic flavor. In Nietzsche, this possibility is epitomized by the idea of the “philosophers of the future,” who create new values and legislate a new way forward. Nietzsche dramatizes this attempt, and arguably inscribes its failure, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a prophetic figure tries to give us a new way forward but fails and returns to his secluded cave. For Heidegger, the prophetic figure will be one who awakens the Volk to their mission, to transform their relationship to Being from one of technological “enframing” to something more reverential. Such a figure will seek to further the redisclosure of the divine in a world from which it has been largely extinguished. Horkheimer and Adorno are profoundly suspicious of agendas of this kind. Indeed, Adorno is suspicious of any attempts to limn “the positive,” insofar as that would involve presenting an agenda or vision for world improvement. Any such vision risks ideological perversion. But there is nonetheless the importance of preserving a glimmer of hope, even if that necessarily takes a nonspecific form. It is a feature of all these accounts, including Hegel’s, that they try to find narrative intelligibility in history. Even if they present a narrative of decline, they want history to have a large-​scale story. A familiar point about postmodernism, as epitomized in Jean-​François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), is its suspicion of these sorts of grand narratives.29 Can the idea of decadence and decline be sustained, we might wonder, once these sorts of narratives are surrendered? Or, in a further twist, might we think it is precisely the rejection of these sorts of narratives that is the sign of our latest stage of decadence? We no longer have a story we can tell ourselves, except that we have given up on grand stories. That is another way of putting the idea that we are at the end of history. But to describe ourselves at such a point is perhaps simply to invite another narrative of decadence.

Notes 1. For a helpful overview, see Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), and Frederick Beiser, Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy: 1860–​1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vols. 1 and 2, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

PHILOSOPHY   647 4. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 42–​43. 5. Michael Hardimon, Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6. There are a number of complexities here. Artworks, for Hegel, arguably reached their peak qua artworks in ancient Greece, but this is thanks to larger progress elsewhere. More sophisticated modes of discursive reflection mean that we cannot achieve full self-​understanding through the sensuous medium of art and need to do so through philosophy. See Hegel, Aesthetics. 7. Nietzsche himself admits to being in a limited way what we might call a “recovering decadent” and claims that this gives him special insight into the condition. See “Why I Am So Wise,” in his autobiography, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 223–​25. 8. Friedrich Nietzsche, “ The Birth of Tragedy” and “The Case of Wagner,” trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 170. 9. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire,” trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98. 10. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Problem of Socrates,” Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 473–​79. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). 13. Nietzsche, Genealogy, “Essay I,” 24. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 17–​18. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 181–​82. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107. 17. Nietzsche, “Essay I,” Genealogy, 16. 18. Nietzsche, “Essay II,” Genealogy. 19. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 20. Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 1971), 89. 21. Martin Heidegger, The Question concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Collins, 1977), 16. 22. Heidegger offers a speculative etymology, meant to undergird this claim. See “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, 144–​45. 23. See Heidegger’s interview, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” in Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976, 193–​219. Heidegger gave the interview on September 23, 1966, but insisted that it not be published in his lifetime. 24. See Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–​ VI: Black Notebooks 1931–​ 1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 25. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 26. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973).

648   Andrew Huddleston 27. See Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–​136. 28. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 1978), 39. 29. Jean-​François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Further Reading Buck-​Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press, 1977. Gemes, Ken. “Postmodernism’s Use and Abuse of Nietzsche.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62, no. 2 (March 2001): 337–​60. Geuss, Raymond. “Adorno’s Gaps.” In Outside Ethics, 234–​48. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Geuss, Raymond. “Art and Theodicy.” In Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy, 78–​115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Finlayson, James Gordon. “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable.” European Journal of Philosophy 10, no. 1 (April 2002): 1–​25. Huddleston, Andrew. Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Huddleston, Andrew. “Nietzsche on Nihilism: A Unifying Thread.” Philosophers’ Imprint 19, no. 11 (April 2019): 1–​19. Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Jütten, Timo. “Adorno on Hope,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 45, no. 3 (March 2019): 284–​306. McCartney, Joseph. Hegel on History. London: Routledge, 2000. Mulhall, Stephen. Philosophical Myths of the Fall. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Neuhouser, Frederick. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. O’Connor, Brian. Adorno. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Pippin, Robert. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Richardson, John. Heidegger. Oxford: Routledge, 2012. Roberts, Julian. “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” In The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, edited by Fred Rush, 57–​73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Scott, Jacqueline. “Nietzsche and Decadence: The Revaluation of Morality.” Continental Philosophy Review 31, no. 1 (1998): 59–​78. Sluga, Hans. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Tanner, Michael. Nietzsche: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Later Philosophy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Chapter 34

Psychoana lysi s From Degeneration to Regeneration Jean-​M ichel Rabaté

One point of convergence between decadence and psychoanalysis can be allegorized by a missed encounter. During his Paris stay in 1885–​1886, Sigmund Freud went to visit Max Nordau (1849–​1923), who had been a Parisian for a while. Freud had been told that he had to meet the writer whose “cosmopolitan” essays appeared in the most important German periodicals of the time. Nordau had not yet published Degeneration, the bestseller of the fin de siècle, his idiosyncratic study of decadence. If Nordau had not given his full measure then, he was already a renowned public intellectual, whereas Freud had only a few obscure scientific papers to his name. At any rate, Freud was not impressed and did not take to Nordau. Ernest Jones’s biography gives a succinct report: “He called on Max Nordau with a letter of introduction, but he found him vain and stupid and did not cultivate his acquaintance.”1 There were too many points of contact between their interests, which could not but produce a clash.

Freud and Nordau Like Freud, who had come to Paris to work with Jean-​Martin Charcot on hysteria, Nordau was a physician who had completed a second dissertation under Charcot’s supervision. Even the title of his French dissertation has a Freudian ring: On the Castration of Women (1882). The work expanded his training as a gynecologist in Pest (not yet part of Budapest), where he had defended a first dissertation entitled Sexual Maladies in Women. In On the Castration of Women, Nordau criticized the practice, still common then, of removing ovaries to cure hysterical women. Had Freud read the short thesis, he might have avoided a few mistakes he made later in life, like his confusion of gelding (that is, testicle removal, commonly practiced with farm animals) with the cutting off of

650   Jean-Michel Rabaté the penis, and also his refusal to consider that the term “castration” might apply to the surgical removal of ovaries. Both men were proud of being Jewish but not religious. Nordau’s father, Rabbi Gabriel Südfeld, had educated his children in the liberal German tradition. His son took Heinrich Heine as a literary model, following Heine’s example by moving to Paris. The French capital was his home, which posed problems during World War I: he had to move to Madrid, and his properties were confiscated. Early on he had officially changed his name to be the opposite of his father’s name: rather than “Südfeld,” meaning “South field,” he became “Nord-​au,” meaning “North meadow.” In a similar manner, Freud had changed his first name from Sigismund to Sigmund. He too read Heine with passion. If one compares two photographs of 1886, one notes that, although Nordau was only seven years older, he looks like a mature man about town displaying a huge grey beard and a well-​earned social gravitas. Freud was still young and single, unsure of what he would do next, getting ready to marry his fiancée, Martha Bernays, and calming his social unease by taking huge doses of cocaine. Nordau must have wanted to take Freud under his wing and show him “gay Paris,” of which he could have boasted being a specialist, having published a first book called Paris Sketches in 1878, followed by Paris under the Third Republic in 1880 and “Paris letters” for varied German and Austrian periodicals. This would not have sat well with Freud, who was abstemious and wary of French dissipation. When Freud met him, Nordau had been feted all over Europe following the publication of his political book, The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization (1883), a book that anticipates Freud’s thinking in The Future of an Illusion (1927), Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and, of course, Moses and Monotheism (1939). When the book was published in Germany, the thirty-​four-​year-​old Nordau became a celebrity, and Conventional Lies was immediately translated into twenty languages. Freud read it, finding in it a tone and mode of cultural critique that echoed his earlier socialist leanings and his juvenile admiration for the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. In a late interview with Chaim Bloch, Freud admitted that he had not only read The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization but also taken it as a model. He was trying to explain why he had written his Moses, a book that had antagonized his Jewish friends, since in it he claimed that Moses was an Egyptian and that monotheism was not fundamentally a Jewish invention. Defending his motivations, Freud mentioned Nordau also because he had been a close friend of Theodor Herzl, one of the best-​known Zionists: I did not see the harm that Nordau caused when he clearly and simply stated that the Holy Scriptures are a heap of superstitious beliefs and Egyptian teachings and customs and traditions. I do not wish to conceal the fact that when I read his book, The Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, and his judgment on the Scriptures, I decided to examine this question myself.2

In this fast-​and-​furious book based on essays published as feuilletons, Nordau attacks what he calls “the lies of religion,” exposing religion not just as an illusion (as Freud would do), but also as a deliberate political manipulation of the masses. In tones that

Psychoanalysis   651 announce Freud in the twenties, Nordau exposes how humans unconsciously cling to mystical and transcendental ideas that are relics of the child’s awe. He often alludes to the sphere of the “unconscious” to explain this mystification. The huge success of the book was due to its daring and smooth urbanity. Nordau had traveled extensively in Europe and freely made comparisons, deriding the foibles of the higher classes. His relentless critique of religion was followed by a scathing debunking of a weakened European aristocracy. He moved on to politics and economics, finishing with what he called the worst lie of all—​the lie of married life! Why was Freud so disappointed by the famous author, physician, journalist, and social critic? It boils down to one central issue: they were entirely opposed in their views of rationality. Their theoretical divergence has been summarized by Hans-​Peter Söder, who points out that Nordau’s optimism in the face of “normal” values in fact reflected the ideology of an “enlightened” bourgeoisie: Nordau gave the bourgeoisie what Freud later denied them. Freud, so it seemed to the emerging middle class, showed them that everything they worked so hard to attain, their respectability, their embrace of education, and even the idea of acculturation itself, was suddenly dirty and suspect. . . . With Nordau, the nascent middle class could condemn the new and innovative literature that was threatening bourgeois order and culture by claiming that its own, hard-​fought-​for position was the more modern. Degeneration further helped the bourgeoisie come to terms with its fear of anarchism, socialism, deviant sexuality, and low birth rates by explaining that these threats to bourgeois order (evident, according to Nordau, in the works of Wagner, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Zola) were serious and real.3

Freud had not yet begun the correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess that would lead him, ten years later, to elaborate a theory of culture founded on sexual repression. Even though Nordau had glimpsed a similar factor, he was harking back to an idea of reason as the ground for “normalcy” that made him shy away from the work of those he considered neurotics, which included almost all the famous artists of the nineteenth century.

Degeneration and Decadence The notorious Degeneration of 1892–​1893 simultaneously shaped the popular perception of “decadence” in European culture and served as a compendium of the “new” in literature and the arts. As a title, Entartung, soon translated as Degeneration in 1895, was a logical choice for someone who took a medical view of culture as a symptom of disease, which is always physical and moral at once; it derives from entarten (to degenerate); moreover, for someone like Nordau, who knew French, it evokes “art,” but “bad art.” The choice was unfortunate in retrospect, given the term’s later use by

652   Jean-Michel Rabaté the Nazis in the 1930s. They regularly denounced “degenerate art” by using similar terms, attacking targets that looked almost identical. Nordau, being Jewish, rationalist, pro-​Dreyfusard (finding a belated alliance with Émile Zola, whom he skewered in earlier essays), and a staunch Zionist, would of course have been outraged by the assimilation. Degeneration is a sweeping denunciation of the modern in art under all its guises, which does not prevent it from providing a clear-​sighted panorama of nineteenth-​century literary avant-​gardes, moving among France, England, Germany, Russia, and the Nordic countries. In Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (1994), William Greenslade explores the ideological context that gave the diagnosis of “degeneration” such a hold on the imagination of the later Victorian public.4 With unerring good taste in his virulent denunciations, Nordau took to task Henrik Ibsen, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, the Pre-​Raphaelites, the French symbolists, Leo Tolstoy, Richard Wagner, and Zola for displaying unwholesome symptoms of a regression betraying a degeneracy of the human race. The medical diagnosis predicated on categories borrowed from Cesare Lombroso (the book is dedicated to him) and Bénédict Augustin Morel is gross, rapid, and executed in broad strokes. Lombroso, also a Jewish thinker, had sketched a dire portrayal of dissolute women and male geniuses who were all insane. Morel’s medical treatises, especially his Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Treatise on the physical, intellectual and moral degenerations of the human race and the causes which produce these morbid varieties; 1857), were pre-​Darwinian attempts at classifying various forms of physical and mental retardation. Nordau begins in a journalistic manner by listing symptoms of fin-​de-​siècle disease seen as a “morbid deviation from an original type.”5 After enervated “mysticism,” the main sign of disorder is the cult of the self or “ego-​mania,” a term that Nordau distinguishes from simple “egoism.” It encompasses “mysticism” to descend into madness and criminality. Nordau moves freely between the megalomania always associated with genius and the various manias credited to mental imbalance. To reach this sweeping diagnosis, Nordau adduces experimental psychology and scientific positivism; next to Lombroso and Morel, he quotes Hippolyte Taine, Théodule-​Armand Ribot, Alfred Binet, and Richard von Krafft-​Ebing. Specializing in “abnormal” psychology, he disqualifies and criminalizes whatever he deems “not normal” because of a lack of a “healthy” relation to the world and others. Everything that falls short of this norm is brutally rejected. Among the decadents and aesthetes, he surveys Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, J.-K. Huysmans, and Maurice Barrès. Nordau places Ibsen next to Nietzsche, whose “rants” reveal a measure of talent, even though the philosopher appears both hysterical and imbecilic, insane from birth (D, 453). Whatever Nordau reads is branded as “perversion,” “anthropophobia,” or criminality. Nordau’s hymn to positivistic common sense and his stubborn refusal of modernity unwittingly follow the model of Gustave Flaubert’s dictionary of “received ideas”; thus, he is often involuntarily funny, as when he comments on “Recapitulation” by Catulle Mendès, a poem composed of a long string of women’s first names ending

Psychoanalysis   653 with “And I forget a few” (D, 268). Nordau misses the irony totally. He even believes that impressionist painters produced blurry works because their retinas had degenerated! However, when Nordau tackles French symbolism, he becomes astute. The chapter on “Decadents and Aesthetes” gives the full measure of his talent. Not only has he read Baudelaire closely, but he also sees how the schools that followed brought different developments of Baudelaire’s ideas, from Satanism to the glorification of evil, from sexual explicitness to pietism or perverse Catholicism. He reproduces in full Théophile Gautier’s well-​known analysis of decadence (D, 299–​300). Thus, even when the critical language medicalizes in a demeaning manner, the analyses are solid, based on extensive firsthand readings with original quotes. Nordau grasps why a “decadent” language that is supposed to express the “disposition of the mystically degenerate mind with its shifting nebulous ideas, its fleeting formless shadowy thought, its perversions and aberrations, its tribulations and impulsions” will have to be a new language: “To express this state of mind, a new and unheard of language must in fact be found, since there cannot be in any customary language designations corresponding to presentations which in reality do not exist” (D, 300). Consequently, despite its negative tone, by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, it had become obvious that Nordau had done more than any other critic to promote the culture of decadence. Georg Lukács was among those who praised Nordau for his taste when he read his own father’s copy of Degeneration: I read the book and came to understand what real decadence meant in the work of Ibsen, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Swinburne and others. Fortunately, Nordau provided literal quotations of the poems of Baudelaire, Swinburne, and so on. I was carried away completely and of course became a staunch supporter of Ibsen and Tolstoy who were despised by my family.6

Having devoured Nordau, Lukács bought the works of these poets in cheap editions, and even tried to write a play in the style of Ibsen. An arch modernist like the American critic James Huneker followed suit by inverting Nordau’s categories. Huneker published Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) to establish a counter-​genealogy linking Stendhal and Flaubert to Baudelaire and the decadent writer he admired, J.-K. Huysmans.7 This perverse twist allows us to better understand the connection between modernism and decadence, as it has been established by Vincent Sherry and Stanley Gontarski.8 Nordau understood already that Huysmans’s À rebours (Against the Grain) offered a program of militant aestheticism that became its own parody; he denounced it as “decadent” and Huneker praised it as “decadent.” Huneker rewrites in a positive manner Nordau’s analysis of “degeneration,” only too aware of the paradoxical effect of Nordau’s work. Nordau had disseminated the works and ideas of those he was quoting at length, whereas Freud remained timid in his endorsement of new art when tainted with fin-​de-​siècle hysteria and neurosis. His attitude only changed between 1911 and 1920, when he discovered two writers, first a woman who gave him a glimpse of the death drive, and the second a man, a physician like Nordau, who helped him reject the distinction between health and

654   Jean-Michel Rabaté disease by finding a common foundation in the id. The first was Sabina Spielrein, the second was Georg Groddeck.

Spielrein Recently, Sabina Spielrein (1885–​1942) was brought to the attention of a larger public by the success of the 2011 film A Dangerous Method, although it is marred by historical distortions and a Hollywood-​style metamorphosis of the protagonist, played by Keira Knightley. If the real-​life Spielrein did not have an affair with Carl Jung while she was being “psychoanalyzed” by him, it is nevertheless true that she fell in love with him; then she appealed to Freud when her situation became impossible in Zurich. Beyond the fact that she was the first person to become a psychoanalyst as a consequence of her psychoanalysis, it remains the case that Spielrein has disappeared from most chronicles of psychoanalysis, and is only now being given her due.9 Her main contribution to psychoanalytic theory is her 1912 essay “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,”10 which brought to Freud the concept of the death drive eight years before he introduced it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Spielrein left Zurich and moved to Vienna to work with Freud. In November 1911 she presented a lecture on “Transformation” that anticipated her essay, published one year later. She had worked with schizophrenic patients in the Burghölzi clinic, presenting her medical thesis about them at the University of Zurich in 1911. The title of her essay, “Die Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens,” means literally “Destruction as the origin of becoming.” It is a compelling mixture of Freudian theory; philosophical discussion with Nietzsche as a point of reference; and analyses of dreams, myths, and poems. She begins by pointing out that the sexual drive, or “reproductive drive,” includes negative features like anxiety and disgust, which are overcome when the drive reaches its aim. Sexuality is intimately linked with death—​she quotes Wilhelm Stekel, Eugen Bleuler, Otto Gross, and Jung on this topic. In Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and symbols of the libido; 1912), Jung had insisted that the very fact of giving birth spells out the future death of the parents, and adds that anxiety is a normal and frequent component of sexuality. Spielrein moves boldly into an ontological investigation: since, in procreation, each cell is destroyed as a unit, new life emerges from destruction. Creation entails Untergang, meaning “ruin, decline, decadence, downfall.” Mutual destruction plays out at the level of the individual: The male part dissolves itself into the female part; the female part becoming restive develops a new form through the foreign intruder. The transformation affects the entire organism; destruction and regeneration, which are always taking place under ordinary circumstances, take place abruptly. The organism discharges the sex product like any excretion.11

Psychoanalysis   655 Spielrein tackles the foundations of Freudian theory, whose premises she follows with one qualification. For her, as for Freud, when it comes to the ego, the main determination is the coupling of pleasure and unpleasure; first impressions captured in infancy offer keys for these strong but buried affects. However, she insists that one should go further and deeper when it comes to the unconscious. Once there, one will find a different principle at work, something that “wants self-​damage” and generates “joy in pain” (DCB, 94). These unconscious wishes are incomprehensible if one remains at the level of the “I-​life” dominated by the principle of pleasure. For her, in a cogent phrase, the individual is not an “I” but a “Dividuum” (DCB, 94). In the depth of the psyche, the “I” is at best a “We.” She adduces a case of dementia praecox from her dissertation, in which a patient would state “I am a complete stranger to myself ” (DCB, 95). From these clinical considerations, Spielrein turns to Nietzsche, who found satisfaction in images of self-​destruction. As Zarathustra, Nietzsche wanted to be sucked into the deep sea like the sun at sunset. His regressive love tends to unite him with his mother, the sea, but if this process of dissolution succeeds, he will become a generating, creating Mother, the allegory of Becoming as such (DCB, 107). Anticipating Jacques Derrida’s analysis of femininity in Nietzsche,12 and Gilles Deleuze’s on Becoming, Spielrein finds a confirmation in Wagner. A similar desire underpins Tristan and Isolde when the lovers exchange their identities, which confirms that the act of procreation entails self-​ destruction. Shakespeare knew it, she argues. In Romeo and Juliet, the thwarted lovers face “more obstacles onto which they unload the destruction impulse, but no obstacle is great enough to pacify the passion, which only finds peace with complete destruction, with the death of the personality” (DCB, 115). Wagner and Nietzsche are not seen as “decadent” for all that, because they blend with universal myth. Spielrein concludes her survey with an appeal to the need to expand Freudian metapsychology: one has to take into consideration a death-​drive hidden within the sexual drive. She ends on a note that almost sounds anarchist: “No transformation can proceed without destruction of the old state” (DCB, 118). The statement betrays the influence of Gross, the “bad boy” of wild psychoanalysis, whom she quotes several times. Gross followed suit by quoting her in his 1914 essay “On the Symbolism of Destruction.”13 Spielrein had tried hard, but ultimately failed, to reconcile the points of view of Jung and Freud. She was the first psychoanalyst capable of moving seamlessly between presentation of case studies, analysis of symbolism, and a solid sense of modern philosophy—​ she understood before Freud a truth that Thomas Mann had found in Nietzsche: disease can be an instrument of knowledge.14

Groddeck Georg Groddeck (1866–​1934) was another nonconformist psychoanalyst. The only contemporary novel that Freud deemed worthy of being called a “psychoanalytic novel” was penned by this “wild” or “rogue” disciple. It has not yet been translated into English.15

656   Jean-Michel Rabaté This modernist masterpiece presents a forceful link between the teachings of psychoanalysis about the body, health, and disease and the idea of decadence. In 1913, Groddeck, a German physician, had published Nasamecu, whose title sums up his theory of health and disease: Natura sanat, medicus curat (nature heals, the doctor cures)—​hence the physician “cures” by understanding the workings of nature and allowing affected subjects to become conscious of the id working through their bodies and souls. Groddeck began by treating psychosomatic afflictions like skin diseases, bowel trouble (he wrote at some length on constipation), nose bleeding, asthma, allergies, and even cancer. Nasamecu alluded to Freudian psychoanalysis while keeping it at some distance. Initially, Groddeck thought that psychoanalysis was the “infection” or “symptom” of the disease it attempted to cure, which, as Karl Kraus famously quipped, “is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.”16 However, in 1917 he was converted to Freudian theories and wrote to Freud stating his sympathy. Freud endorsed Groddeck as a legitimate fellow psychoanalyst. Soon Groddeck’s theories had an impact on Freud, who borrowed the concept of the id, or “It” (das Es) from him, a notion developed in Groddeck’s The Book of the Id (1923). Groddeck’s whimsical novel is set in a fictional German city in which one recognizes Baden-​Baden, where he owned a reputed sanatorium. The picaresque tale is situated at the turn of the century. Groddeck wanted to write a satirical novel based on Don Quixote as early as 1906 in order to debunk social hypocrisy in all its forms. Completed in 1919, the novel spares nobody: it makes fun of the royal family, the nobility, doctors, the police, the army, second-​rate painters, and hysterical feminists, among others; in a passage that would shock the Victorian mentality of many psychoanalysts at the time, one even sees the hero enjoying the company of gay men. The novel was too unconventional and was rejected by all publishers. Then Groddeck sent it to Freud, who helped him by pointing out that the initial title, The bug killer, or the unveiled soul of Thomas Weltlein, was a hindrance. Freud expressed his admiration for a powerful and original text, praising the surprising ending: the hero dies in a train accident and his headless and charred body is recognized from a scar on the thigh. Here, Freud said, was a modern Don Quixote; there was no greater praise from him. Groddeck paid for the book’s publication by the Psychoanalytical Society Press. Otto Rank found a suitable title, Der Seelensucher, ein psychoanalytischer Roman (The soul-​ seeker, a psychoanalytical novel).17 Sándor Ferenczi, who spent time in Groddeck’s sanatorium, where he was cured of various ailments, including nephrosclerosis, which converted him to Groddeck’s clinical strategies, wrote a glowing review of the novel in 1921. He loved this display of bawdy humor in which serious psychoanalytical concepts were treated grotesquely. The main protagonist is August Müller, an idle intellectual who welcomes to his house his widowed sister Agathe and her teenage daughter, Alwine. Alwine falls in love with her uncle; an affair seems to develop in a discrete manner, but we find confirmation at the end only when, blushing, she is able to identify the dead body of her uncle thanks to a scar hidden “high on his leg.” The plot is triggered by this sexual tension: first, Alwine needs to have her own bedroom; then the old maid forced to vacate it finds revenge by infecting it with bed bugs. Finally, August, bitten

Psychoanalysis   657 repeatedly, develops a fever and becomes psychotic. Trying to cure himself, he leaves his house raving like a madman, thinking he has to die first and then be reborn. He wanders through the world, changes his name to Weltlein (little world), and like Zarathustra, delivers endless harangues, ranting about life, sickness, art, politics, and sexuality. He encounters grotesque characters and delivers absurd speeches. These interactions end in disaster. Thomas is arrested as a vagrant, detained in jail, and hospitalized. What he teaches sounds exactly like delirious, over-​the-​top, exaggerated Freudianism. The main theme is that everything in life derives from sexual drives, from symbols to numbers and human interactions. The publication of the novel by the official press of the psychoanalytic movement infuriated its members, including the Swiss contingent led by Oskar Pfister. Aware of the scandalous nature of the book, Ferenczi tried to defuse the bomb, writing, “The indignant bourgeois would immediately call for the straightjacket; but as the mocking author has already donned it himself, even the guardians of public morals have no choice but to put a good face on it and laugh.”18 He condenses the philosophy expounded by Groddeck as deploying a systematic use of symbolism rooted in the organic: Sexuality is the pivot round which the whole world of symbols revolves. All the work of man is only plastic representation of the genitals and of the genital act, of that archaic prototype of all longing and endeavour. . . . The whole body thinks; thoughts can find expression in the form of a moustache, a corn, even of excreta. The soul is “infected” by the body, the body by the contents of the soul; and in fact, it is not permissible to talk of an “ego.” One does not live but one “is lived” by a “something.”19

This sums up Groddeck’s philosophy: we do not think but are thought and acted through by the cosmic, sexual id. Seelensucher displays a modern concern for “auto-​immune diseases” or “auto-​infection.” One trope is the “infestation” by bed bugs (Wanzen). Like the image of vermin (Ungeziefer) used by Franz Kafka in “Metamorphosis,” bugs are associated with madness and contagion. The hero believes that he can kill bugs by contaminating them with his own infected blood. He experiences a “metamorphosis” when he sees bugs everywhere. The word for bed bug, Wanze, is at the core of the delirium: close to Wahn, meaning delirium and madness, it migrates to the center (Zentrum [DS, 256]). Groddeck plays with signifiers: when a Prussian royal prince saves Weltlein from humiliation, he is not spared. Weltlein, completely drunk, screams that the prince, too, is a bloodsucker, called the “Red Prince” because he is a “mere insect pumping our blood” (DS, 262). Anarchism and anti-​authoritarianism are blended in a theory of “inner contamination,” which means a double contamination working from body to soul and from soul to body. Groddeck’s worldview left room for political activism. He died in 1934 after a first heart attack, caused when he was detained by the Gestapo, following unsuccessful attempts to meet Hitler in person and make him become more reasonable.20 Groddeck was as provocative and rambunctious as his hero. He shocked the Freudians at his first psychoanalytic conference by mentioning bed-​wetting as a child

658   Jean-Michel Rabaté and the erotic associations this had triggered. He concluded: “I am a wild psychoanalyst.” He was too wild for most. His monism of the “It” was an antidote to Freud’s dualism, and he agreed with Freud’s later speculations, as when he wrote in 1925: “Death is always voluntary: no one dies except he has desired death.”21 If the “It” underpins all manifestations of love, desire, and transference, such a blind will causes health and sickness: “[N]‌o one is altogether ill, there is always some part which remains sound even in the worst illness; and no one is altogether well, there is always something wrong even in the perfectly healthy.”22 Freud’s admiration for Groddeck’s novel would confirm Theodor Adorno’s maxim: “In psycho-​analysis, nothing is true except the exaggerations.”23 Groddeck exaggerated all the time, in his teachings and in his fiction. Like Weltlein, he saw everything in culture, from the cross of Christianity to the mechanism of the steam engine, as obvious images of copulation. He tried to convince readers via parody, satire, and exaggeration. At the same time, the mock-​heroic mode prevents any identification with the hero. Weltlein is balding, stooping, hectoring; he has a beer belly, read as a sign of his desire for male pregnancy. His huge red nose is dotted with pustules that he squeezes whenever he gets overexcited. There is no doubt that Weltlein had to die at the end, his “little world” shattered in a locomotive accident, having played the part of a new Zarathustra delivering the gospel of the id to the whole world.

Svevo’s Zeno The heir of Thomas Weltlein is Zeno Cosini, Italo Svevo’s fictional alter-​ego. Svevo, whose real name was Ettore Schmittz (1861–​1928) spent a few weeks in Groddeck’s sanatorium, to which he had brought his brother-​in-​law. Groddeck cured the brother-​in-​ law of his addiction. This was not Zeno’s case. He is a compulsive smoker who tries to stop but always smokes a “last cigarette.” In Groddeck’s sanatorium, Svevo, whose first language was German, read Der Seelensucher and appreciated its insights on disease. He understood how addiction expressed the “It,” which gave a point of departure for La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience; 1923). Smoking cigarettes, as a vice, could be condoned, even indulged, if understood as a libidinal disposition linked with the Mother and the figure of the dead Father. Groddeck gave Svevo the courage to undertake a “psychoanalytical” novel: it begins with a statement by the hero’s psychoanalyst, who explains that he has asked Zeno Cosini to write everything he can remember about his past, his childhood, and so on, in the hope of “rejuvenating” him: “But he was an old man, and I hoped that recalling his past would rejuvenate him, and that the autobiography would serve as a useful prelude to his analysis.”24 The novel ends when the protagonist wants to retrieve the documents he wrote for “Doctor S.” But if the psychoanalyst thinks he is cured, Zeno disagrees. What the doctor manages to make him confess is rather trite: he was in love with his mother and wanted to kill his father:

Psychoanalysis   659 My therapy was supposedly finished because my sickness had been discovered. It was nothing but the one diagnosed, in his day, by the late Sophocles for poor Oedipus: I had loved my mother and I would have liked to kill my father. . . . An illustrious sickness, whose ancestors dated back to the mythological era! And I’m not angry now, either, alone here with my pen in hand. I laugh at it wholeheartedly. The best proof that I never had that sickness is supplied by the fact that I am not cured of it. (ZC, 403)

The diagnosis makes sense of his father’s death-​bed gesture, a last action that surprised Zeno: as he lay dying on his bed, he slapped his son’s face with all the strength that remained. Zeno’s Conscience is the first European novel framed as a psychoanalytic cure, appearing some time before Portnoy’s Complaint and Lolita. The novel was written during World War I. At the end, the war encroaches and interrupts Zeno’s endless introspective digressions, yet the ending promises no salvation: psychoanalysis may have worked, but problems are replaced with more pressing issues like pollution, the rise of technology, and the specter of a super-​bomb that annihilates the human race and makes the earth explode. The novel concludes with images of death and desolation, which proves that redemption through art, a sublimation still operative for Marcel Proust and James Joyce, is refused. In fact, Svevo’s dark humor is often more in tune with Kafka’s than Joyce’s. What distinguishes Svevo is that he had two literary careers; the first was unsuccessful, with two novels published in 1893 (Una vita [A Life]) and 1898 (Senilità [Senility]) that aroused no interest; the second followed the momentous meeting with Joyce in Trieste, the latter crowned by the international success of modernist works like Zeno’s Conscience. However, as P. N. Furbank notes, one observes a continuity between the three novels: Svevo’s three major novels are fairly close to each other in subject. They are equally studies in weakness. . . . His term for the weakness he studies in himself is “senility.” . . . Senility, in this metaphorical sense, is an infection of the will, a withdrawal from reality into day-​dreaming, an incapacity for taking real decisions combined with the constant illusion of doing so.25

Furbank rightly insists on a commonality between the three plots: the theme of suicide. In A Life, Alfonso, the protagonist, ends up committing suicide after he is rejected by the woman he has previously rejected. In Senility, it is the protagonist’s sister who kills herself by drinking ether, after she realizes that her brother’s friend, the swashbuckling sculptor who seduces her, has no wish to see her any longer. In Zeno’s Conscience, Guido, the narrator’s successful rival who marries the woman he adored, so that he chooses her plain and unattractive sister instead, commits suicide after accruing bad debts and gambling with the stock exchange. Furbank sends Svevo’s readers to the well-​known book on decadence by Mario Praz, who published La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (Flesh, death, and the devil in Romantic literature; published in English as The Romantic Agony in 1933) in 1930, two years after Svevo died from the

660   Jean-Michel Rabaté consequences of a car accident, and then to Nordau: “In his analysis of the degenerate type Nordau might be describing Svevo’s Alfonso word for word.”26 The disease is stated as such in A Life, a cure is attempted in Senility, but it fails, and in Zeno’s Conscience, if the method offered by psychoanalysis is effective, it soon reaches its limits. Only in Regeneration, Svevo’s last play, completed in 1928, just before he died, did he suggest a solution.27 As a comedy, Regeneration is both a fantastic extravaganza, with three dream sequences, and a witty social farce. Once more, Svevo stages worries about old age and gives shape to his wish to be young. Here, the modern Mephisto is Guido, a rather unscrupulous young physician who incites his uncle, the older, worn-​out businessman Giovanni Chierici, to undergo a Steinach operation. The operation will cure him of his dizzy spells, absent-​mindedness, and sexual apathy. After many hesitations and a near catastrophe (the uncle almost allows his grandson to be run over by a speeding car), the operation takes place. It transforms Giovanni into a lecherous old man who repeatedly attempts to seduce the sexy young maid living in the house. Seduction, too, soon turns into farce. Chierici realizes that if he cannot avoid death, at least he can recapture forgotten or repressed images from his past, the memories of a beautiful and appealing young woman he had rejected because of class difference, thus striking a truce with the unfulfilled love of his youth. Did Svevo undergo the operation himself? This is unlikely, because for him, writing provided the cure. What the psychoanalyst Doctor S. tells Zeno is that writing is enough to achieve the desired regeneration. When the psychoanalyst outlines his program, he uses the verb rinverdire: “I hoped that recalling his past would rejuvenate him,” is “ed io speria che in tale rievocazione il suo passato si rinverdisse.”28 The verb, not yet “regenerate,” suggests to “make green again,” to “rekindle,” to “reawaken.” This term encapsulates Svevo’s itinerary, going from “senility” experienced at the age of thirty to a regenerated and hard-​won “youth” at the age of seventy-​four (Giovanni’s age in the play). The real-​life model for Guido in the play was Aurelio Finzi, Svevo’s nephew. Like Guido, Finzi was a young medical student, and it was with him that Svevo translated Freud’s essay “The Dream” in 1918.29 Svevo had not only read Freud closely, but also applied his ideas to himself. His self-​knowledge would be generated by the clash between senility and rejuvenation.

Decadence and Obsolescence Can the paradigm of degeneration/​regeneration be applied to psychoanalysis itself, and—​why not?—​to the career of the founder, Freud himself? Many critics continue to speak of the “death” of psychoanalysis, its demise regularly announced in reviews and conferences. What is at stake is a certain obsolescence, or, more precisely, a conceptual “decadence” that has taken various forms. “Decadence” calls up images of degradation, decay, and increasing technical malfunction. Thus, Adorno objected to what he

Psychoanalysis   661 called the “Californization” of psychoanalysis, having witnessed its ravages firsthand during his American stay (1938 to 1949). In a lecture given in English in 1946 at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society, Adorno attacked Freudian revisionism, singling out Erich Fromm and Karen Horney as those new psychoanalysts eager to erase what they deemed to be Freud’s innate pessimism. In Adorno’s view, Horney and Fromm had replaced Freud’s metapsychology of the drives with a weak culturalism.30 In “Revised Psychoanalysis,” Adorno notes how Karen Horney changed Freudianism into a theory of social adaptation. Culturalism clashed with the darker side of Freud, whose philosophy was closer to that of Marquis de Sade. Freud’s grandeur, for Adorno, was his ambivalence facing culture and civilization, his insistence that social harmony could not be taken as a norm and had to be questioned. Adorno’s solution was to traverse death facing the obsolescence of psychoanalysis. The positioning of death should not be reduced to myth but taken instead as a solid foundation. Only thus can psychoanalysis keep its critical edge and resist the drift into meliorism, social adaptation, or religious and humanistic pieties. For Freud, as we know, the confrontation with death took place in 1920 with Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The theme of death is announced by the concept of repetition facing pleasure and reality, which Freud deduces from the compulsion to repeat a tendency to return to previous states of matter. Life would be a detour, a “circuitous path,” before a return to inorganic matter, conforming to the motto: “The aim of all life is death.” 31 This idea is deployed in the image of the “guardians of life” helping the organism to strive for survival, and who then turn into the “myrmidons of death” (BPP, 47). However, once Freud has made this point, he turns around and exclaims: “It cannot be so” (BPP, 47). This surprising change of direction marks the culmination of a complex, even tortuous movement leading from ­chapter 5 to ­chapter 6. Freud multiplies detours, aporias, and counter-​examples before introducing the death drive surreptitiously, in a parenthesis of the original text: “The opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts would then cease to hold . . .” (“Der Gegensatz von Ich(Todes-​) trieben und Sexual(Lebens)trieben würde dann entfallen . . .”) (BPP, 53). Hence this curious reversal: “Let us turn back, then, to one of the assumptions that we have already made, with the exception that we shall be able to give it a categorical denial” (BPP, 53). The assumption attacked here is the idea of life moving inexorably toward death. We think that we are destined to die from internal causes. “C’est la vie,” we say when hearing of someone’s demise. Such a cliché is debunked by Freud, for the phrase is merely a way of providing comfort: “If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature” (BPP, 53). If death is construed as the “law of Nature,” it is easier to accept it as such—​not “C’est la vie” but “C’est la nature.” Testing the validity of this widespread belief about the inescapability of death, Freud goes in another direction. He reopens the biological debate by opposing to dying cells an undying germ-​plasm. Death becomes less “natural” when it appears as a late acquisition of organisms. The American biologist L. L. Woodruff had shown that infusorians can,

662   Jean-Michel Rabaté if placed in a refreshed and nourishing environment, reproduce themselves by fission for more than 30,000 generations (BPP, 57). The focus of the discussion becomes that of “senescence” or “degenerescence” versus “rejuvenation.” In cases when the solution has not been renewed and degeneration is observed, the process can be reversed when animalculae blend together. They achieve an instant regeneration and avoid the degeneration leading to death. In the heady context of such speculations, Freud asserts that he believes in a dualism of the drives: there is a constructive principle and a destructive principle (BPP, 59). Freud insists on the idea that death is not as natural as we think, but that there is in each of us an enjoyment of death caused by the death drive. Freud’s dialectical thinking forces him to speculate always further in an anticipation of Adorno’s negative dialectics. First, Freud finds a theoretical support in Arthur Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, death is the purpose of human life, but the unconscious “will” embodying sexual instinct remains on the side of life (BPP, 59–​60). However, Freud refuses to be stuck in an idealistic dualism and makes the even “bolder” step of assuming that libido can “rejuvenate” cells. Egoistic narcissism leads to death via the uncontrolled reduplication of cells, as in cancer. If the ego-​drive can be equated with death, the sexual drive is aligned with a life-​giving force (BPP, 63). Freud almost hints that love could cure cancer. Freud’s dialectical tension between “obsolescence” or “degenerescence” and a term like “regeneration” might be understood via the movement of “juvenescence,” or, to quote T. S. Eliot’s term, “juvescence,” as in “Gerontion”: “In the juvescence of the year /​Came Christ the tiger.”32 No regeneration without a proper death: all would agree on this, from Nordau to Svevo, from Spielrein to Freud and Adorno. This context helps us understand Freud’s decision to undergo a Steinach operation. He too hoped that he would be “rejuvenated” like Giovanni Chierici. In November 1924, Freud underwent a vasectomy meant to “rejuvenate” him, following the male enhancement surgery promoted by Eugen Steinach. What would rejuvenate older males would be an infusion of home-​grown male hormones spreading through the body, revitalizing its main functions. The vasectomy would prevent sperm from getting into semen; this form of male castration would, it was hoped, benefit the entire body.33 A similar vasoligation was performed on William Butler Yeats in April 1934. Yeats announced immediately that he felt an increased vitality, and testified to regained powers in his sexual life and in poetic creativity.34 Freud, less enthusiastic, nevertheless admitted that the operation might have brought a respite from his cancer.35 This shows that Freud trusted the budding science of endocrinology and believed that a surgical castration could reverse the aging process. The same obsession preoccupied an aging Svevo, who found a better scalpel in his pen. Thus, if we return once more to Adorno’s statement—​in psychoanalysis, nothing is true but its exaggerations—​we might agree that this is truest when it struggles with decadence. Indeed, what is decadence, this blurry emanation of an obsolete historiography of which psychoanalysis is but a symptom, if not pure exaggeration, a protracted and sumptuous anticlimax, when the raised heap36 of cultural artifacts has been skillfully scattered for our greater delectation?

Psychoanalysis   663

Notes 1. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1953), 1:188. 2. Chaim Bloch, “Pegishathi Im Freud Vehitvakhuti Itho Al Moshe Rabbenu,” Bitzaron 23 (1950): 101–​8, translated by Ben-​Horin and quoted by Hans-​Peter Söder in That Way Madness Lies: Max Nordau on Fin-​de-​Siècle Genius (High Wycombe, UK: Rivendale Press, 2009), 43. 3. Söder, That Way Madness Lies, 71–​72. 4. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–​ 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 120–​33. 5. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 16. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as D. 6. Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiography, trans. Rodney Livingston (London: Verso, 1983), 30. 7. James Huneker, Egoists: A Book of Supermen (New York: Scribner’s, 1909). 8. Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Stanley Gontarski, Revisioning Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Decadent Turn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 9. See Michael Gerard Plastow, Sabina Spielrein and the Poetry of Psychoanalysis: Writing and the End of Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2019); Angela M. Sells, Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017). 10. Sabina Spielrein, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being,” Journal of Analytical Psychology 39, no. 2 (1994): 155–​86, and “Destruction as Cause of Becoming,” trans. Stuart K. Witt, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 18, no. 1 (1995): 85–​118. 11. Spielrein, “Destruction as Cause of Becoming,” 88. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as DCB. 12. See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 13. Otto Gross, “Über Destruktionssymbolik,” Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie 4 (1914): 525–​34. 14. Thomas Mann, “Freud and the Future,” in Freud, Goethe, Wagner, trans. H. T. Lowe-​Porter (New York: Knopf, 1937), 10. 15. There are French and Spanish translations by Roger Lewinter, Le chercheur d’âme: Un roman psychanalytique (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) and José Aníbal Campos, El buscador de almas (Madrid: Sexto Piso, 2014). 16. Karl Kraus, No Compromise: Selected Writings of Karl Kraus, ed. Frederick Ungar (New York: Ungar, 1977), 227. 17. See Otto Jägersberg’s Introduction in his edited volume of Georg Groddeck, Der Seelensucher (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/​Roter Stern, 1998), 269–​76. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as DS. 18. Sándor Ferenczi, “Review of Der Seelensucher, ein psychoanalytischer Roman by Georg Groddeck,” trans. Eric Mosbacher, in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-​Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2018), 346. 19. Ferenczi, 347. 20. Martin Grotjahn, “Georg Groddeck, 1866–​1934: The Untamed Analyst,” in Psychoanalytic Pioneers, ed. Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995), 318.

664   Jean-Michel Rabaté Georg Groddeck, The Unknown Self, trans. V. M. E. Collins (London: Vision, 1951), 96. Groddeck. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 49. Italo Svevo, Zeno’s Conscience, trans. William Weaver (New York: Vintage, 2003), 3. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as ZC. 25. P. N. Furbank, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), 158. 26. Furbank., 161. 27. Italo Svevo, Regeneration, trans. P. N. Furbank, in Further Confessions of Zeno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 165–​302. 28. Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno, ed. Beatrice Stasi (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2008), 3. 29. Livia Veneziani Svevo, Vita di mio marito, quoted in the Introduction to La coscienza di Zeno, 89. 30. Adorno’s “Die revidierte Psychoanalyse” (1946) criticizes Karen Horney. The English version exists as an unpublished manuscript. Retranslated from the German into English by Nan-​Nan Lee as “Revisionist Psychoanalysis,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 40, no. 3 (2014): 326–​38. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 353n85. 31. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990), 46. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text as BPP. 32. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909–​1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 29. 33. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Times (New York: Norton, 2006), 426. 34. Susan Johnston Graf, W. B. Yeats: Twentieth-​Century Magus (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 2000), 203. 35. Gay, Freud, 426. 36. The etymology of exaggeration comes from the Latin aggerare (to heap up), and agger (a heap). 21. 22. 23. 24.

Further Reading Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Translated by E. F. N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 1974. Covington, Coline, and Barbara Wharton, eds. Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. Ferenczi, Sándor. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-​ Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2018. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1990. Furbank, P. N. Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer. London: Secker and Warburg, 1966. Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880–​1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Groddeck, Georg. The Unknown Self. Translated by V. M. E. Collins. London: Vision, 1951. Groddeck, Georg. Der Seelensucher. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld/​Roter Stern, 1998. Huneker, James. Egoists: A Book of Supermen. New York: Scribner’s, 1909. Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. 3 Vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–​1957.

Psychoanalysis   665 Lukács, Georg. Record of a Life: An Autobiography. Translated by Rodney Livingston. London: Verso, 1983. Mann, Thomas. Freud, Goethe, Wagner. Translated by H. T. Lowe-​Porter. New York: Knopf, 1937. Minghelli, Giuliana. In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Nordau, Max, Degeneration. New York: Howard Fertig, 1968. Plastow, Michael Gerard. Sabina Spielrein and the Poetry of Psychoanalysis: Writing and the End of Analysis. New York: Routledge, 2019. Sells, Angela M. Sabina Spielrein: The Woman and the Myth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Söder, Hans-​Peter. That Way Madness Lies: Max Nordau on Fin-​de-​Siècle Genius. High Wycombe, UK: Rivendale Press, 2009. Spielrein, Sabina. “Destruction as Cause of Becoming.” Translated by Stuart K. Witt. Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought 18 (1995): 85–​118.

Chapter 35

P oliti c s Ideologies of Decadence Neville Morley

Decadence, understood as the deleterious effects of time and processes of change on an object, has obvious implications for political thought. The possibility of decay in the frameworks of communal life, whether the state, society, nation, or civilization, has represented both a source of anxiety and a theoretical problem since the development of self-​conscious political analysis in classical antiquity. From the nineteenth century on, the idea that modernity is decadent has underpinned both revolutionary and reactionary movements as well as political action. Nonetheless, “decadence” remains a thoroughly under-​theorized concept, both in the sense that very few political theorists have engaged with it systematically—​and certainly have not named it as such—​and in the sense that it is often deployed polemically rather than analytically, or treated as an objective description of the world rather than as a value-​laden means of interpreting it. The aim of this chapter is to begin the task of developing a political theory of decadence by providing an outline of the different contexts and strands of thought within which the idea of decadence has been implied or implicated.

Classical Antecedents The essential components of a political conception of decadence were established at the earliest stages of Western political thought. In the poem Works and Days, written in the eighth century BCE, Hesiod characterized his own generation of humanity as a “race of iron,” miserable successor to the four earlier races of gold, silver, bronze, and demigods; their fate is constant labor and sorrow, with communal life dominated by “bribe-​taking lords,” legal disputes, and destructive strife—​and with the prospect of yet another fall into degradation in the future, when men will lose all respect for the gods, law, and one another, and all human relations will be based on force (lines 109–​201). Similar visions of

Politics   667 the collapse of political institutions, social solidarity, norms, and collective values were presented by Thucydides in the fifth century, in his accounts of the impact of plague in Athens (2.51–​3) and civil war in Corcyra (3.81–​3); both these events were triggered by external factors, but it is clear from his presentation that Thucydides saw disease and war exposing and exacerbating existing tendencies toward decay—​by implication, latent in any political community—​rather than creating them. The process of change of forms of political organization (politeia), and above all the ways in which “deviant” constitutions (as tyranny is a deviant form of monarchy, or oligarchy of aristocracy) overthrow superior forms, was a particular concern of Aristotle’s analysis of communal life in the Politics (1301a–​1307b). He identified multiple causes, organized around his overall conception of the need for balance between different groups for the sake of justice and his personal preference for the dominance of the “middling” citizens rather than the arrogant rich or the resentful poor; dominant themes include the role of uncontrolled desires (for recognition, power, or wealth), the associated emotions of fear and insolence, and the difficulty of incorporating disparate elements into the homogenous society of the Greek polis. The second-​century Greek historian Polybius then elaborated a model of a single repeating cycle of natural constitutional change, known as anacyclosis (literally, “wheeling about”), in which periods of reform and improvement (oppressive tyranny is overthrown by aristocracy, degenerate mob rule collapses into chaos and is rescued by monarchy) alternate with a natural tendency to decay and collapse (6.4–​9). Polybius’s interpretation focuses on the progressive degeneration of the rulers of the state: the descendants of the king or the aristocrats (the aristoi, the best men) are morally and intellectually inferior to their forebears, take power and position for granted, and start to rule in their own interests rather than that of the community, flouting the laws and indulging in fine clothes, exotic delicacies, sexual excess (including the abuse of innocent women and boys), avarice, and the love of money. With democracy, the blame for degeneration is divided between the demagogues (“leaders of the people”), who lose their commitment to equality and freedom and seek to corrupt the demos to further their own interests, and the mob, for their susceptibility to greed and violence. “Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land; until, after losing all trace of civilization, it has once more found a master and a despot” (6.9). Polybius expressly presented his model as transhistorical and universal: If a man has a clear grasp of these principles he may perhaps make a mistake as to the dates at which this or that will happen to a particular constitution; but he will rarely be entirely mistaken as to the stage of growth or decay at which it has arrived, or as to the point at which it will undergo some revolutionary change. (6.9)

Its most directly influential element for modern political thought was his praise of the Roman system (6.11–​18) for its combination of elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, one balancing the other and producing greater stability; this “mixed constitution” was, in his view, the main cause of the Roman Empire’s remarkable success in

668   Neville Morley conquering the other Mediterranean powers, potentially deferring the moment of decay and political crisis. This proved not to be the case. Within a century, the Roman Republic had collapsed and been replaced by autocracy, and Roman authors began to make their distinctive contribution to the study of political decay. Roman “decadence” (the Romans themselves did not use the word) is strongly associated with images of excessive consumption (luxuria), sexual indulgence, and violence, epitomized initially by overly powerful generals (corrupted by their contact with the East) and then by emperors and their courts, but an inability to control one’s appetites was always understood predominantly in political terms, since it went hand in hand with the pursuit of individual power at the expense of the collective good.1 The broader context was a powerful sense of how far they had fallen away from the practices and virtues of their heroic ancestors: the wealth of empire had made the Roman elite soft, indolent, and effeminate, while the Roman people no longer had any concern for honor but had abdicated their duties—​not that there was any significant scope for political participation under the rule of the emperors—​and now lived simply for bread and circuses (Juvenal, Satire 10.77–​81). The Roman Empire lasted another half millennium in Western Europe and far longer in the eastern Mediterranean: political “decadence” did not in fact bring a swift collapse in imperial stability or control, and the majority of the Empire’s population enjoyed centuries of relative peace, largely unaffected by intermittent incompetence, corruption, and bloodletting at the top of the state structure. The influential view of the later Empire as the epitome of “decline and fall” is based to a significant degree on modern admiration for the literature and art of the classical period and the perception that the alleged inferiority of post-​classical culture might be attributed to the loss of liberty and the rise of despotism as well as a broader moral and artistic decline.2 The triumph of Christianity in the fourth century offered a further explanation for the decay of traditional Roman virtues (echoed in the laments of senators like Symmachus, pleading with a Christian emperor that they should be allowed to continue the rituals on which Roman greatness had once depended; Relation 3). It also supplied new vocabulary and themes for the repertoire of declinism, denouncing the degeneracy of “Babylon” in Revelation (18:11–​19) and the corruption of all forms of worldly government (an idea developed at greatest length in Augustine’s City of God), and at the same time mourning the destruction of civilization, however deserved, by heathen barbarians.

Early Modern Debates The example of ancient Rome, predominantly the collapse of the Republic into civil war and then autocracy, played a central role in political thought from Machiavelli and his contemporaries in fifteenth-​century Italy onward. One of the main aims of such thinkers was to learn to imitate the greatness and success of the Roman Republic and avoid civil war and ruin.3 But the historical account of Rome’s political crisis could be understood

Politics   669 in different ways, depending on a thinker’s prior assumptions and interests, and on how literally one took the claims of ancient authors: (1) as a failure of political institutions to manage the inevitable conflicts of communal life and the passions of those involved; (2) as a failure of character and virtue on the part of the leading men and/​or the people as a whole; or (3) as the result of the corrupting effects of wealth, luxury, and empire on society and culture. In hindsight, we can see how these different perspectives inspired and informed three different strands of thought and debate into the eighteenth century and beyond. The first concentrated on constitutional interpretations and solutions, aiming to establish a state that could withstand corruption and manage its internal divisions.4 For a thinker like Thomas Hobbes—​more influenced by Thucydides’s vision of social breakdown than most of his contemporaries—​the solution was an all-​powerful monarchy that could keep the destructive passions and uncontrolled appetites of people in check. Republicans and constitutionalists were more persuaded by the critique of autocracy presented by the Roman historian Tacitus and looked rather to the ideas of Polybius and Cicero about a “mixed constitution” that would establish the right balance between different political forces and avoid the tendencies toward corruption and decay that would be released if any one section of the body politic (especially the masses) became too dominant. The second strand, most prominent in Italian Renaissance humanism but continuing to influence debates well into the eighteenth century, focused on “virtue,” the characters and values of political actors.5 Virtue in this sense was distinct from, though frequently entangled with, the Christian conception of virtue as a matter of faith, love, and charity; indeed, Machiavelli emphasized the need to replace idealistic and effeminizing Christian morality with a more martial and pragmatic approach, grounded in the recognition that most men are more “treacherous” than “upright.”6 This tradition drew directly on classical concerns with the education and ethos of rulers or citizens—​and the danger, exemplified by the Athenian democracy, of entrusting the direction of the state to the uneducated and irrational masses. This theme necessarily also considered virtue’s opposite or its absence as a threat to the polity; the question was whether a lack of virtue should be considered the normal state of things, with humans naturally defaulting to self-​interest and ambition rather than the self-​sacrifice and moderation required for communal life, or whether such vice was the product of external forces such as luxury or contact with foreign manners. The corrupting effects of luxury were a concern also for the third tradition of thought, which concentrated on the condition of the nation as a whole, with political decay seen as just one area of concern. The growth of commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the increase in both national wealth and individual prosperity, suggested to many commentators that European countries might be following the same path as Rome toward moral decay, declining population, physical degeneracy, and loss of martial spirit—​the idea of “civilization” was originally coined, by Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, in 1756, as a criticism of the contemporary softening of manners.7 The solution might be characterized as one of redefinition. Within political economy, from Bernard

670   Neville Morley Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714) to the works of Adam Smith, “luxury” was understood as a positive thing, since the “vice” of the consumer nevertheless supported the virtuous labor of the producers and increased general well-​being. Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748; especially Book 20) presented the decline of warlike tendencies lamented by other authors as the rise of the “gentle virtues” of decency and moderation and the tendency of the growth in commerce to promote peace; again, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers adopted and developed this perspective, increasingly presenting rising prosperity as the answer to concerns about political crisis and the new commercial virtues as a suitable replacement for values that were no longer suited to contemporary society. The obvious problem was that such arguments did not properly answer those who remained concerned about the effects of the decline of “ancient” virtues and the extension of aristocratic privileges and lifestyle through the rest of the population. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, political communities were considered to be always at risk of decline and crisis, whether of their institutions or of the characters and morals of their members, but decay was not regarded as inevitable, nor located at a particular point in time. The debate about luxury and its effects came closest to such a view, as it suggested that nations became vulnerable as their wealth and power increased and as they turned from agriculture to trade and from civic virtue to acquisitiveness; Mirabeau spoke of “the natural cycle running from barbarism to decadence by way of civilization and wealth.”8 The sense that “progress” should better be understood as decline, as the replacement of original, natural man with artificial man and factitious passions, was still stronger in the essays of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau—​though he located the happiest and most stable human condition in the period before metallurgy and agriculture, with all subsequent developments leading to increasing inequality and thus ever greater misery and loss of freedom.9 Austere, anti-​democratic, and militaristic Sparta, rather than already unequal and decadent Rome, provided the ideal of a society resistant to decay.10 Rather than celebrating the present progress of the arts and sciences, Rousseau offered a pessimistic view of a society that was long since in a pervasive state of decadence.

Decadence Historicized Although Montesquieu’s influential 1734 essay Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline) extended the narrative of Rome’s decline (albeit in ever sketchier fashion) into the fifteenth century, the core of his interpretation remained the fall of the Republic: expansion abroad and the corruption of the people led to the loss of liberty and virtue, so that the subsequent 1,400 years were simply characterized by the impotence, servitude, weakness, and sickness of the Roman people.11 Thereafter, however, attention increasingly focused on the slow collapse of the western half of the Empire from the third century onward. Edward Gibbon’s magisterial The History of the

Politics   671 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–​1789) drew heavily on Montesquieu’s account in emphasizing the loss of freedom and then the corruption of civic virtue (in part under the influence of Christianity) as leaving Rome vulnerable to barbarian attacks; rather than inquiring into the causes of its downfall, he suggested, “we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.”12 But by shifting the focus away from the Republic (even presenting the rule of the Antonine emperors in the second century as the happiest period of human history), he encouraged readers to focus more on the condition of decadence and the working through of its consequences—​in particular, “we may inquire with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.”13 Gibbon’s own views were relatively optimistic, noting that “ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall” across human history, but that the accumulation of knowledge meant that “it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.”14 Not all his contemporaries shared that optimism, and in any case such transhistorical equanimity did nothing for concerns about the fate of one’s own society; if Rome fell, then the same could easily happen to modern states.15 Over the next hundred and fifty years, ever more elaborate accounts of human history were developed, drawing both on a developing European interest, shaped by colonial encounters with non-​Western cultures, in comparing the histories of different ancient civilizations, and on the project to raise historical studies to the status of a true science by discerning the underlying laws or principles of historical change. If the universal dynamics of the rise and fall of societies could be discerned from past experience, then the present could also be “historicized” and understood in this broader context, and thus its present and future trajectory could be identified. The optimistic narrative of “modernization” identified a moment of fundamental rupture that separated modernity from all that had gone before, and so envisaged continued unstoppable progress based on reason and science, banishing any fear of decadence—​even if it was often haunted by a sense of what had been lost in this transition.16 Karl Marx’s influential view of historical development, which built on the progressivist narratives of philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, modified this perspective by identifying a series of such ruptures: human history consisted of a series of stages (modes of production), with each one eventually falling prey to internal contradictions and being replaced by the next, higher stage, from ancient slave-​based production to feudalism to capitalism.17 Critically, capitalism—​the mode of production associated with modernity—​was not regarded as the final stage, let alone as the perfect realization of human potential. It was therefore entirely reasonable to look for signs of crisis and decay in the present, as evidence both of the impending collapse of capitalism and of the human necessity of its overthrow and replacement. As Marx observed in a speech he delivered in 1856: On the one hand there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of prior human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist

672   Neville Morley symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the later times of the Roman Empire.18

One might even take this as a call to revolutionary action, since “force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.”19 Like many other critics of modernity, Marx was strongly aware of what had been lost in the transition from earlier forms of society—​with a particular emphasis on classical art and literature, and the view of the world that had sustained it before “disenchantment” set in—​but he sought to “realise its truth at a higher stage” rather than to attempt to turn the clock back.20 The decadence of the present could not be solved through reaction: “the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future.”21 The main alternative to progressivist or Marxist narratives of historical development was a fully cyclical conception, understanding human development in terms of the rise and fall of distinct civilizations with, at best, only a limited amount of cultural and intellectual resources being transmitted from one to the next.22 Such narratives clearly had their roots in earlier ideas, from the philosophical speculations of Giambattista Vico on the recurring cycle (ricorso) of the divine, the heroic, and the human in every society to the more historical accounts of Montesquieu, Gibbon, and the universal historians; they were elaborated into detailed, complex schemes, through multiple lengthy volumes, by twentieth-​century speculative historians like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. These writers often deployed, self-​consciously or not, an organic metaphor: society or civilization had come to be understood as a living body that was therefore subject to natural growth and decay, or to youth, maturity, and old age; this thinking went hand in hand with the perception that every aspect of a culture was a manifestation of its essential character and degree of maturity or sickness, with symptoms of decline ranging from a loss of creativity and spirituality (Toynbee) to excessive egalitarianism and loss of national pride (Spengler). There was no necessary reason within such a scheme to assume that modernity must be located “late” in the cycle of development—​Toynbee in fact placed the West in the mid-​twentieth century at the stage of “the time of troubles,” not yet decaying and disintegrating—​but this idea became pervasive, even if opinions differed as to where to locate the earlier, superior state of society implied by this interpretation. In political terms, adherents to a cyclical view of history were often trapped by their chosen metaphor: if society is old and sick, then further progress will simply bring death and the rise of a new set of barbarians, with only the merest possibility of preserving one’s own integrity and carrying a small cultural legacy through the Dark Ages to come.23 Sustaining the current state of things is scarcely an attractive option, even if it is possible; the only hope is some form of reaction or restoration of earlier conditions. Spengler’s account of The Decline of the West (1918) had made him a celebrity in German-​speaking Europe for his pessimistic diagnosis of the state of contemporary society. The program he developed for his (entirely unsuccessful) political career was striking for its confusing terminology—​true socialism for Spengler involved the innately Prussian qualities of discipline, productivity, and self-​sacrifice for the nation, exemplified by Friedrich

Politics   673 Wilhelm I, whereas Marxism was the divisive “capitalism of the working classes”—​but in policy terms was entirely reactionary: trade unions, strikes, unemployment benefits, progressive taxation, and holidays were to be abolished, whereupon Germany would be united under a new aristocracy and an absolute dictatorship.24 However, the idea of decadence could easily exist without any sophisticated comparative idea of historical change by focusing solely on the past and the present and judging the corruption of the latter by comparison with the former. Enlightenment thought, especially its tendency to republicanism and atheism, had long prompted fears of the baleful effects if these two trends became too influential. The French Revolution then made this conjunction real, and its opponents increasingly drew on the rhetoric of decadence and decline.25 As Joseph de Maistre said of the French Revolution: [I]‌t reaches the highest point of corruption ever known; it is pure impurity. In what scene of history can be found so many vices acting at once on the same stage, such an appalling combination of baseness and cruelty, such profound immorality, such a disdain for all decency?26

Whereas for Marx the corruption of the present and the oppression of the masses demonstrated the need for progress, for the reactionary the corruption of the present and the growing power of the masses is a clear sign of the need for traditional hierarchies to be restored. Decadence here is an unnatural deviation from an established norm, rather than natural decay, and, as such, offers hope for the defenders of tradition: whereas the lesson that revolutionaries learned from the Terror was the difficulty of transforming politics without transforming human beings in general, reactionaries developed a sense of how easily a few committed actors can turn the clock back, since they are working to restore the “natural” condition of society and defend the traditional values and preferences of the majority.

The Politics of Decadents These debates around the nature and development of modernity provided the intellectual context for decadence itself, in the sense of an artistic movement or moment rather than an evaluative concept. The politics of decadence has been much discussed in recent years, with few firm conclusions beyond the suggestion that perhaps the wrong questions are being asked.27 The political opinions of leading decadent figures, where they express or imply any, are remarkably various, from Charles Baudelaire’s aristocratic disdain for democratic America, to Oscar Wilde’s embrace of “socialism” (albeit in his own idiosyncratic understanding) and sympathy with anarchistic ideas, to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s later commitment to far-​right authoritarian nationalism. Some changed their views quite dramatically over the course of their careers; Anatole Baju began by insisting on the subordination of politics to literary and artistic revolution and ended

674   Neville Morley as a conventional socialist, while Octave Mirbeau moved from right-​wing nationalism to anarchism.28 The tendency to regard the entire literary tradition as essentially elitist and reactionary, eschewing conventional political engagement in favor of solipsistic pronouncements on the autonomy of the artist—​and so to dismiss those who do not fit this pattern as outliers—​is misleading and driven perhaps by unexamined assumptions about the way “decadence” is deployed in later political propaganda. As we can see from the survey of the previous centuries of debate around “decline,” even if one accepts that the present state of society and culture is decadent, there is no necessary political conclusion to be drawn from this assessment. Real, existing decadence could be seen as grounds for supporting progressive or revolutionary programs, or for supporting conservative or reactionary ones, or it might simply be accepted as a fact, especially if one’s primary concern is with the appropriate artistic means for representing present reality. Self-​styled “decadent” art does not even imply a belief that the times are decadent, if such art is understood simply as the depiction of modernity, as Baudelaire suggests.29 Indeed, the adoption of aesthetic decadence might constitute a rejection of the idea of historical decadence, insofar as the latter represented a reactionary condemnation of contemporary artistic production on the basis of conservative, bourgeois taste, while the former celebrated artifice in opposition to ideologically loaded ideas of “nature” and “the natural.” Even if we focus on questions of individualism and the autonomy of the artist, a crucial theme for most decadents, it is clear that there were many different ways of understanding that theme in political terms, according to what was felt to be the main source of artistic oppression—​conservative or politically motivated critics, the tyranny of bourgeois culture, the dominance of the masses, or the decline of aristocracy. “There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob,” Wilde remarked; “All authority is bad”—​but his opinion was clearly not a universal decadent view.30 Since none of the decadents were concerned to develop a coherent political theory, it is scarcely surprising that their terminology is sometimes inconsistent, to the confusion of some later readers. Baudelaire’s idea of “aristocracy,” for example, the absence of which in the United States he laments in his essays on Edgar Allan Poe, is clearly based on the hierarchical society of ancien régime France and the association of virtue with superior birth and wealth, as opposed to egalitarianism and vulgarity; it therefore inevitably tends toward a reactionary position, if only by mourning the loss of traditional social distinctions and complaining about the excesses of liberty.31 Wilde’s aristocracy, in contrast, owed as much to classical Greek conceptions as to any hereditary nobility; the aristoi are “the best” in body and spirit, cultivated through leisure and education, rather than necessarily the highest born, and so, at least in theory, an entire population could be raised to that status. As one of his characters remarks, “In a good democracy, every man should be an aristocrat.”32 The critical problem with the current state of things, Wilde suggested, was that only a few could develop a very limited individualism as poets, philosophers, or men of culture; socialism was the answer.33 It is clearly a waste of time to look for a single coherent political theory or position within the writings of the decadents; at best, we can identify some recurring concerns or

Politics   675 themes, few of which have much connection with the wider conception of decadence. The most prominent is, of course, their focus on individualism, whether or not limited to the person of the artist, a theme identified with decadence at an early stage by Paul Bourget in an essay on Baudelaire: A society is comparable to a living organism: like an organism, it consists of a collection of lesser organisms, which in turn consist of a collection of cells. The individual is the social cell. . . . If the cells’ energy becomes independent, the organisms that make up the total organism similarly cease subordinating their energy to the total energy, and the subsequent anarchy leads to the decadence of the whole.”34

The artist’s desire for autonomy and heroism can be expressed in reactionary terms as hostility to modern mass society; this was an especially strong theme in Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of modernity, but Baudelaire’s complaints about “the tyranny of beasts, or zoocracy,” come close to such a position, and likewise his disparaging remarks about “the large number of The Rights of Man, which the nineteenth century, in its wisdom, so often enumerates with complacency.”35 However, a commitment to artistic autonomy might equally well inspire resistance to the conformism and hierarchy of older social forms as well as contemporary bourgeois morality; a rejection of mass collective action could nevertheless support the development of smaller groups for mutual support, secret fraternities, or dissident communities.36 Resistance to any form of external restriction on individual choice can echo and reinforce the liberal tradition of defending minority rights against the tyranny of the majority, especially when it comes to sexual orientation and lifestyle.37 The most striking contribution of the decadents to politics relates not to content but to style, modeling a highly self-​conscious manner of being in the world and participating in the political realm that affects an attitude of detachment while employing a repertoire of poses, gestures, and general demeanor intended to provoke.38 Baudelaire presented “dandyism” in explicitly political terms as a new kind of aristocracy, “the last flicker of heroism” in a period of transition between the decay of the old order and the triumph of democracy; the dandy does not attempt to change history, but simultaneously to highlight and defy its current state.39 Wilde’s embodiment of individualism and transgression was still more deliberate and obvious, while his ironic, paradoxical, and provocative style in “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) defied on multiple levels the sober conventions of both normal political discourse and revolutionary manifestos: It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change.40

676   Neville Morley Taken out of context, it is easy to imagine the same words being sincerely declaimed in any number of twentieth-​century revolutions; but further, precisely this combination of irony, parody, and seriousness constitutes the distinctive tone of contemporary Internet manifestos.41

Decadent Politics In Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), Thomas Mann anticipated the “politics of decadence” of the twentieth century in the character of Naphta, the negation of the liberal character Settembrini’s optimistic, humanist belief in individualism, human rights, and freedom. Naphta claims that the heroic age of “liberalism, individualism, humanistic citizenship, and all that” is long since over: [T]‌hose ideals are dead, or at best lie twitching in their death throes, and those whom they had hoped to finish off have got their foot in the door again. . . . The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—​Terror.42

The diagnosis and denunciation of decadence has been the dominant mode of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century authoritarian thought and rhetoric. This tendency has included some left-​wing thinkers and movements, following in the tradition of revolutionary declinism established by Marx. Denunciation of the decadence of the West and its values was a staple of propaganda in Soviet Russia and its satellites, while the need for the purgation of decadent urban elites and intellectuals featured in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.43 A key figure in the decolonization movement, Frantz Fanon, wrote of the decadence and sickness of the old colonial West, a view endorsed by Jean-​Paul Sartre in his preface to the original edition of Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961) as being not a political judgment but simply a medical diagnosis.44 As before, such claims both asserted the transience of the old order, its inability to command continuing respect or loyalty, and legitimized decisive and violent action to put it out of its misery and usher in the new era. Predominantly, however, “decadence” has been the characteristic motif of the forces of reaction, to the extent that belief in the bankruptcy of present-​day society and the need for its radical renewal is sometimes proposed as a core element in the definition of fascism.45 Giovanni Gentile’s “Manifesto degli intellettuali del fascismo” (Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 1925) denounced “the unleashing of base passions and instincts, which bring about social disintegration, moral degeneration, and a self-​centered and mindless spirit of rebellion against all forms of discipline and law,”46 sentiments echoed by Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), with added emphasis

Politics   677 on the role of individualism, universalism, and the glittering allure of Jewish department stores, and by Julius Evola’s Revolt against the Modern World (1934). Identical rhetoric resurged from the 1970s onward, sometimes drawing directly on these explicitly fascist and national socialist texts, sometimes employing less overtly tainted intellectual sources.47 Thinkers of the New Right in France like Alain de Benoist opposed to “the ’68ers” have been especially influential in popularizing a view of modern society as decayed, corrupt, and in desperate need of renewal, including other nationalist groups in Poland, Hungary, and Greece—​nationalism does not preclude collaboration and intellectual borrowing—​and in the would-​be trans-​European identitarian movement: as the identitarian activist Markus Willinger claimed, “We young Europeans . . . have only known a culture in collapse.”48 In Russia, Aleksandr Dugin has called for a united strategy of resistance to the “omnipresent evil” of “this age of the utmost decay in general,” driven by globalization, Westernization, and postmodernization.49 In the United States, successive generations of conservative figures have lamented the moral decline and social division unleashed by the liberals and hippies, with obvious influence in recent years in the rhetoric of “draining the swamp” and MAGA (“Make America Great Again”).50 But this category should also encompass the numerous works purporting to offer a neutral, social-​scientific account of the state of different nations or the West, which follow the same template and present the same ideas in less overtly polemical language.51 Decadence is not offered as a theory, and certainly is rarely named, but is rather presented as an objective fact: an assortment of alleged symptoms, drawn from a familiar assortment—​population decline, family crisis (blamed on feminism, uncontrolled promiscuity, and homosexuality), watering down of culture through immigration and falling critical standards, loss of patriotism, decline in religious belief, excessive tolerance of other beliefs (especially Islam)—​and traced, explicitly or not, to a single cause, namely the crisis of the traditional community and its values. As with the more openly polemical accounts of decadence, the community may be defined in different ways, as the nation, the white race, Europe, Christianity, or the West, but it is invariably treated as a natural, unified object; similarly, the threat to its integrity is variously internal (especially cosmopolitan elites and unaccountable politicians) and external (especially Islam).52 The inchoate nature of decadent thought is part of the secret of its success as a mode of political discourse and means of recruiting and energizing supporters.53 It allows every individual resentment to be refigured as the consequence of malign external forces, disclaiming any personal responsibility, and dramatized as part of an epochal struggle for the future of the nation or of civilization itself. A reactionary program focused on restoring hierarchy and elite power can become a mass movement by mobilizing all forms of anxiety about change, from whatever cause, under the single conviction that such change must be a sign of decline from the (imaginary) virtuous and superior past.

678   Neville Morley

Notes 1. Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: a Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ­chapters 2–​4. 2. Jonathan Theodore, The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), especially ­chapter 3, “The Fall of Rome and Ideas of Decline,” 83–​111. For discussion of the specific question of “corruption” in the later Empire, see Ramsay MacMullen, Corruption and the Decline of Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 3. The account of J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, new ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017) remains essential. David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017) offers an overview of early modern and modern discussions of the most extreme manifestations of political breakdown. 4. See, generally, Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, vol. 2, New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), and the more detailed and provocative analysis by Benjamin Straumann, Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Fall of the Republic to the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 5. See, most recently, James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), but Quentin Skinner’s Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) remains important; see also Russell Price, “The Senses of Virtú in Machiavelli,” European Studies Review 3 (1973): 315–​45; and Marisa Linton, Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 6. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quintin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61–​62. 7. Michael Sonenscher, “Barbarism and Civilisation,” in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016), 288–​302; Berry, Idea of Luxury, ­chapters 5–​7; Donald A. Winch, Riches and Poverty: an Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–​1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The essays in J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) offer different perspectives on the debates about virtue, commerce, and luxury. 8. Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes, ou Traité de la population (Avignon, 1756), 1:176. 9. See Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Geneva, 1750) and Discourse on the Origin and Basis of the Inequality of Mankind (Geneva, 1754), in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012); Istvan Hont, Politics in Commercial Society: Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Christopher Brooke, “Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian Origins,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 94–​123. 10. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) remains an excellent introduction to the reception and influence of Sparta as anti-​decadent and anti-​democratic; see also the overview by Paul Cartledge, “Spartan

Politics   679 Traditions and Receptions,” Hermathena 181 (2006): 41–​49, and the chapters in Stephen Hodkinson and Ian Macgregor Morris, eds., Sparta in Modern Thought: Politics, History and Culture (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2012). 11. See Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (New York: Free Press, 1965). 12. Edward Gibbon, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West,” in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 4:160–​69. 13. Gibbon 4:161. 14. Gibbon 4:167–​68. 15. For Gibbon’s intellectual context and influence, see David Womersley, The Transformation of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, especially vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jonathan Theodore, The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Karen O’Brien and Brian Young, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Edward Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 16. See Neville Morley, Antiquity and Modernity (Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), especially 117–​ 140. For “historicism” generally, see Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); and Patrick Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996). 17. For Marx’s theory of history, see Terence Ball, “History: Critique and Irony,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Marx, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124–​42; and G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). On the theme of decadence within historical theory, see Neville Morley, “Decadence as a Theory of History,” New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004): 573–​85. On decadence and modernity, albeit with a mainly literary focus, see Jane Desmarais, “Decadence and the Critique of Modernity,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Jane Desmarais and David Weir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 98–​114. 18. Karl Marx, “Speech at the Anniversary of the People’s Paper (1856),” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 14:655–​56. 19. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (1867; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1:916. Note that Marx was here talking about the use of force to transform “feudal” colonial economies into capitalist ones, but his followers extended it to their own role in hastening the transition to communism. 20. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (1857–​1858; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 111. 21. Karl Marx, “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968), 95. 22. An old but still useful discussion is R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 63–​68 on Vico, 159–​65 on Toynbee, and 181–​83 on Spengler. Nietzsche’s contribution to nineteenth-​century discussions of decadence was of course immense (as discussed elsewhere in this volume), but primarily in cultural rather than political terms, and not directed toward the development of an overarching historical framework. 23. Such “monastic” quietism continues to be promoted as a serious strategy; see, e.g., Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (London: Duckworth, 2001).

680   Neville Morley 24. Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1919). 25. Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797; Lyon: M. P. Rusand, 1854). On de Maistre and the nineteenth-​ century French counter-​ revolutionaries, see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-​Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 39–​57. 26. de Maistre, Considérations, 61–​62. 27. Essential overview from Matthew Potolsky, “Decadence and Politics,” in Decadence: A Literary History, ed. Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 152–​66. See also Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 28. David Weir, “Decadent Anarchism, Anarchistic Decadence: Contradictory Cultures, Complementary Politics,” in Anarchism and the Avant-​Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective, ed. Carolin Kosuch (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 129–​52. 29. See, most obviously, Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1859), in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 390–​435. 30. Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891), in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 4, Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 261. On Wilde’s essay, see Lawrence Danson, “Wilde as Critic and Theorist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 80–​95. 31. Baudelaire’s remarks come from his two essays on Edgar Allan Poe in Selected Writings, 162–​208; see e.g., 164, 196–​97. 32. Oscar Wilde, Vera, or the Nihilists (1880), in Complete Works (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 665. 33. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 233. 34. Paul Bourget, “The Example of Baudelaire” (1881), trans. Nancy O’Connor, New England Review 30, no. 2 (2009): 98. 35. On Nietzsche, see Nicholas D. More, “The Philosophy of Decadence,” in Decadence and Literature, ed. Desmarais and Weir, 184–​90. Baudelaire, Selected Writings, 174, 164. 36. Potolsky, “Decadence and Politics,” discusses the formation and role of decadent groups. 37. Cf. Regenia Gagnier, Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–​1920 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 38. Potolsky, “Decadence and Politics”; see Kristin Mahoney, Literature and the Politics of Post-​Victorian Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3–​16, on “decadence as a specific mode of participation in the political realm” involving detachment, camp, parody, and perversity as strategies. 39. Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” 419–​22. 40. Wilde, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” 262. 41. For an example of two different styles of twenty-​first-​century “decadent politics,” see the review of an alt-​right blogger’s manifesto by the former Trump associate Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019), https://​ cla​remo​ntre​view​ofbo​oks.com/​are-​the-​kids-​altri​ght/​. Anton had, using the pseudonym

Politics   681 Publius Decius Mus, written the notorious “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, September 5, 2016, https://​cla​remo​ntre​view​ofbo​oks.com/​digi​tal/​the-​fli​ght-​93-​ elect​ion/​, denouncing conservatives who lamented the decline of the United States but refused to support the one man who might restore American greatness. 42. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1996), 392, 393. 43. Summarized by Alex Schulman, “Purge Politik: the Political Functions of Decadence in Fascism,” Human Rights Review 8 (2006): 5–​34. 44. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1963), e.g., 9, 3, 96, 127; Sartre’s quote at 8. 45. See, e.g., Roger Griffin, “Modernity and the New Order,” in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 24–​45; Roger Eatwell, “Fascism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, ed. Michael Freeden and Marc Stears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). 46. Giovanni Gentile, “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals,” in A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 297. 47. The recently founded Oswald Spengler Society places great emphasis on the fact that Spengler disliked the Nazis for being too proletarian and too concerned with race rather than culture. 48. Jens Rydgven, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Mark Sedgwick, ed., Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). The quotation is from Markus Willinger, Generation Identity: A Declaration of War against the ’68ers (London: Arktos, 2013). 49. Aleksandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012), 158, 170–​72. 50. Robert Bork, Slouching towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Harper Collins, 1996); Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 2001); other examples in Schulman, “Purge Politik,” 28–​31. 51. See, for example, Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (New York: Harper Collins, 2000); Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader, 2020). 52. It is interesting to note how far the discourse of decadence has echoes in the way that the concept of jahiliyya, ignorance of Islam, is applied to the modern secular world in the traditions of political Islam associated with figures like Sayyid Qutb and Mawlana Mawdudi; its symptoms include homosexuality, fornication, pornography, women’s liberation, drugs, and other indulgences, which demonstrate the need for jihad to restore God’s dominion. The crucial difference is that this is ascribed to individuals deviating from the ways of Islam, not to society becoming old (Western culture is treated as inherently secular and decadent, rather than having become so). See, e.g., James Toth, Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Roy Jackson, Mawlana Mawdudi and Political Islam: Authority and the Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2010).

682   Neville Morley 53. Cf. Dimitri Almeida, “Decadence and Indifferentiation in the Ideology of the Front National,” French Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2014): 221–​32; and Robin, The Reactionary Mind, passim.

Further Reading Almeida, Dimitri. “Decadence and Indifferentiation in the Ideology of the Front National.” French Cultural Studies 25, no. 2 (2014): 221–​32. Andress, David. Cultural Dementia: How the West Has Lost its History, and Risks Losing Everything Else. London: Head of Zeus, 2018. Morley, Neville. “Decadence as a Theory of History.” New Literary History 35, no. 4 (2004): 573–​85. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. New ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. Potolsky, Matthew. “Decadence and Politics.” In Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray, 152–​66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Schulman, Alex. “Purge Politik: the Political Functions of Decadence in Fascism.” Human Rights Review 8 (2006): 5–​34. Shumate, Nancy. Nation, Empire, Decline: Studies in Rhetorical Continuity from the Romans to the Modern Era. London: Duckworth, 2006. Sonenscher, Michael. “Barbarism and Civilisation.” In A Companion to Intellectual History, edited by Richard Whatmore and Brian Young, 288–​302. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2016. Theodore, Jonathan. The Modern Cultural Myth of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Weir, David. “Decadent Anarchism, Anarchistic Decadence: Contradictory Cultures, Complementary Politics.” In Anarchism and the Avant-​Garde: Radical Arts and Politics in Perspective, edited by Carolin Kosuch, 129–​52. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Yack, Bernard. The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Index

Figures are indicated by f following the page number.

A À rebours (Against Nature) (Huysmans) aestheticism in, 90, 653 alienation in, 288–​89 artifice in, 403, 410, 452 authorial voice in, 214–​15 Belgium and, 139–​41 book arts in, 391, 394–​405 bourgeoisie in, 174 Cent Bibliophiles edition of, 397–​412, 402f, 403f dandyism in, 424 ecology in, 618 as Gesamtkunstwerk, 397, 400, 412 individualism in, 603–​4 influence of, 123, 139–​43, 161, 181, 198, 210–​11, 217, 290, 391, 394, 453 inspiration for, 271, 285, 286, 289, 600 interior decoration in, 442–​43, 449–​53, 456 isolation in, 603–​5 japonisme in, 271–​72, 400–​403, 405, 407, 409–​10 luxury in, 410, 412, 452 mise-​en-​page of, 398–​403, 402f, 403f, 405 music in, 513 naturalism in, 4, 214 opulence in, 105 personalized bindings for, 405–​12, 407–​10f, 412 perversion in, 293 pessimism in, 604–​5 prose poetry in, 352–​53 publication history of, 121, 141

reception of, 46, 122, 140, 145, 257, 341, 399, 605 science in, 600, 603–​5 solipsism in, 101–​2 symbolism in, 396, 405, 410–​12, 485–​87 taste in, 554–​58 touch in, 562, 566–​70 women in, 487, 578n30 À vau-​l’eau (Huysmans), 569 Abandoned City, An (Khnopff), 143, 144f Abdül-​Hamid II, Sultan, 247, 249–​50, 259 absinthe Belgium and, 136–​37 bourgeoisie and, 5, 7f as drink of decadence, 4–​6 Huneker and, 507 Italy and, 183 music and, 507 Verlaine and, 4, 305, 498 Wilde and, 4 women and, 15n9 “Abyss, The” (Andreyev), 230–​31 Adam, Paul (Jacques Plowert), 122, 146 Adams, James Eli, 418 Adorno, Theodor alienation and, 643–​44 bourgeoisie and, 287 Enlightenment and, 641–​45 industrialization and, 364 instrumental rationality and, 641–​45 negative dialectics of, 643, 662 overview of, 635, 642–​43 progress and, 642–​43, 646 psychoanalysis and, 658, 661–​63

684   Index aestheticism À rebours and, 90, 653 architecture and, 472 art for art’s sake and, 53 Beardsley and, 44, 77 book arts and, 392–​93, 399–​401 Bourget and, 9–​10 Catholicism and, 587–​88, 590, 594, 596–​97 contemporary decadence and, 101–​2, 110 development of, 194, 302, 445, 458n18, 474 ecology and, 617, 619–​20, 622, 629–​30 empire and, 53 fashion and, 417–​18 film and, 369 interior decoration and, 68, 443–​46, 456 Ireland and, 160–​62, 165 Japan and, 269, 270, 273, 278 luxury and, 68 music and, 508 Nordau and, 653 Nordic cultures and, 216 Pater and, 231, 270 politics and, 12–​13, 237 Russia and, 53, 236–​37 short stories and, 302, 307, 315 taste and, 444, 548–​49 Turkey and, 257 urbanization and, 168 Wilde and, 270, 587 Against Nature (Huysmans). See À rebours agonie, L’ (Lombard), 52 Aheieva, Vira, 237 Alexander the Great, 43, 56, 419 Algabal (George), 51 Ali Baba (Beardsley), 492, 493f alienation À rebours and, 288–​89 Adorno and, 643–​44 Enlightenment and, 643–​45 Italy and, 174 modernity and, 2, 188n33, 296–​97, 299n14 Nordic cultures and, 215 novels and, 287–​88, 297–​98 progress and, 2, 174 Aliye, Fatma, 250 All That Heaven Allows (1955), 381–​84, 383f, 386 Alma-​Tadema, Lawrence, 31, 50, 50f

Altar of Victory (Briusov), 53 Amano, Ikuho, 276–​77 America architecture and, 475–​76 civil war in, 62, 66–​67, 70 conservatism and, 677 empire and, 54–​55 film and, 87–​89 Gilded Age and, 66 Paris and, 54 Rome and, 55 urbanization and, 461 Amsel, Lena, 203 anarchism, 9, 61, 76–​77, 192, 291, 363, 651, 674 Anarchist Peril, The (Dubois), 76 Andreyev, Leonid, 227, 229–​32, 240 androgyne, L’ (Péladan), 123 androgyny, 74, 232–​34, 240, 378 Anger, Kenneth, 88–​89, 378 Anglo-​Catholicism. See also Catholicism aestheticism and, 587–​88, 590, 594, 596–​97 Beardsley and, 592 criticism of, 584–​85, 587, 594–​96 degeneration and, 586, 594–​95 development of, 586–​87 homosexuality and, 583, 587, 595 overview of, 14, 583–​84, 596–​97 Oxford Movement and, 584–​86, 592, 594–​95 Pater and, 588–​90, 593–​94, 596 Romanticism and, 586–​87 shame and, 586 Symons and, 591–​93 theater and, 591–​94 urbanization and, 593–​94 Wilde and, 584–​86 D’Annunzio, Gabriele. See also Il piacere authorial distance and, 179 beauty and, 177 disease and, 179 France and, 181 influence of, 175, 180, 185–​86, 277, 493 interior decoration and, 453 language and, 181–​82 overview of, 91 politics and, 229, 673 style of, 180–​82 touch and, 563, 574–​76

Index   685 urbanization and, 178 women and, 179–​80 works by, 178–​80, 295, 493–​94 Anstruther-​Thompson, Kit, 340 Antinous (Kilpi), 216, 223 antiquity. See empire; Rome anti-​Semitism, 8, 76, 122, 487, 642, 645 “Any Where out of the World” (Baudelaire), 353, 356–​59, 364 “Aoi hana” (Tanizaki), 277–​78 “Apple Blossom” (Hippius), 232–​35 Appreciations (Pater), 337 après-​midi d’une faune, L’ (Mallarmé), 396 Apter, Emily, 574 Arch of Constantine ( 315 CE), 461–​62, 462f architecture aestheticism and, 472 America and, 475–​76 art nouveau and, 467–​73 Baudelaire and, 461 Bauhaus style in, 90–​91, 474 Beardsley and, 468 Bourget and, 461 conservatism and, 463 criticism of decadence in, 473–​75 decline and, 461–​64, 471 Enlightenment and, 461, 463, 476 France and, 464–​66 Gautier and, 461 as Gesamtkunstwerk, 468, 470, 473–​74 homosexuality and, 470–​7 1 Huysmans and, 461 International Style in, 474 magazines and, 469 modernity and, 462–​67 overview of, 461–​62, 477 Pater and, 467, 472 postmodernism and, 475–​76 Rome and, 461–​64 urbanization and, 461 Vitruvian tradition in, 464, 466–​67, 472 Wilde and, 470 Architecture of Humanism, The (Scott), 472 Arendt, Hannah, 8 Arène, Paul, 124 Argosy, The, 306 Aristotle, 40, 184, 565, 577n10, 667

Arnold, Matthew, 11 art deco, 82, 371, 394, 406, 410 art for art’s sake aestheticism and, 53 artifice and, 265 Belgium and, 136 coining of, 7, 74 definition of, 7 Gautier and, 44, 74 influence of, 51 interior decoration and, 444–​45 Ireland and, 160 Italy and, 184 Japan and, 269–​72, 273 Mallarmé and, 74 Pater and, 7, 12, 270 race and, 519–​20 Rome and, 49 symbolism and, 74 Symons and, 308 Turkey and, 249 Wilde and, 74 art nouveau architecture and, 467–​73 Beardsley and, 371, 375–​76 book arts and, 393, 397, 399, 407, 409 criticism of, 94n43, 473 development of, 61, 71, 90, 392–​93, 468 film and, 375 Germany and, 195 japonisme and, 401 modernity and, 469 symbolism and, 499 “Art of Being a Dandy, The” (Calloway and James), 99–​100 “art poétique, L’ ” (Verlaine), 124 artifice À rebours and, 403, 410, 452 androgyny and, 234 art for art’s sake and, 265 authenticity and, 4, 110 book arts and, 410–​12 dandyism and, 411, 532 ecology and, 618 fashion and, 417, 419–​23 naturalism and, 4, 232, 312, 400, 410, 538, 618 opulence and, 104

686   Index artifice (cont.) short stories and, 306, 308, 310, 312 taste and, 544 theater and, 321 women and, 232, 234, 326, 381 Artificial Paradises (Baudelaire), 552 Artist and Journal of Home Culture, The, 63 artiste, L’, 139 Ashurbanipal, Emperor, 40, 44 Asselineau, Charles, 444 Assyrian Empire, 39–​45 “At the Alhambra: Impressions and Sensations” (Symons), 308 Athenaeus of Naucratis, 40 Au bonheur des dames (Zola), 565–​66 Auden, W. H., 200 Auriol, George, 400, 405 Austin, Henry, 622 Austro-​Hungarian Empire, 80, 194 authenticity, 4, 108, 110, 237, 239–​40, 247, 249 Autobiography of a Boy, The (Street), 346 “Autumn of the Flesh, The” (Yeats), 338, 340 avant-​dire, L’ (Mallarmé), 126 Awakening, The (Chopin), 611–​13 Axelrod, Alan, 66–​67 Ayer, Harriet Hubbard, 531, 534 “azur, L’ ” (Mallarmé), 254

B Babe, B.A., The (Benson), 347 Babylon, 42–​43, 46, 48, 51, 88–​89, 156, 203, 668 Bahr, Hermann, 194–​95 Bailey, Stephen, 455–​56 Baju, Anatole, 126, 128–​29, 180, 301, 341, 673–​74 Baker, Josephine, 84 Bakst, Léon, 232, 233f, 430–​31, 433f Baldick, Chris, 228, 309 “Ballad of a Nun, The” (Davidson), 339 ballroom culture, 98, 103–​6, 109–​10 Balzac, Honoré de, 255, 358, 549–​50, 552, 559n21 Bang, Herman, 211–​14, 218, 222 Banham, Reyner, 470, 474 Banville, Théodore de, 120, 444

barbarians Belgium and, 136, 141–​42, 145–​49 Enlightenment and, 642–​45 France and, 141 Italy and, 175 Nordic cultures and, 216 politics and, 671–​72 Rome and, 21, 32, 52–​54, 671 Russia and, 52–​54 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 122, 395–​96, 424, 496, 605 Barnard, F. M., 11 Barnes, Djuna, 82–​84, 93n15, 202, 296, 622 Barney, Natalie Clifford, 84, 87–​88 Basch, Sophie, 279n1 Baudelaire, Charles. See also fleurs du mal, Les architecture and, 461 beauty and, 419–​20, 422 Belle Époque and, 71–​72 bourgeoisie and, 3, 8 Bourget and, 210, 214 dandyism and, 4, 105, 120, 425–​27, 675 Darwinism and, 626 decay and, 626 decline and, 166–​67 destruction and, 216 ecology and, 619, 624–​25, 629 empire and, 228 essays and, 340 fashion and, 419–​20, 422, 426, 434–​35 Gautier and, 7–​8, 63, 120 Huysmans and, 140–​41 influence of, 63, 139, 254, 259, 262n20, 268, 363, 653 interior decoration and, 443–​44 naturalism and, 4, 230, 232 Poe and, 303–​4, 443–​44 politics and, 12–​13, 120, 673–​74 prose poetry and, 352–​64 Romanticism and, 362 Rome and, 228 short stories and, 303 symbolism and, 496 taste and, 550–​53 theater and, 323, 325 urbanization and, 358–​61 women and, 325–​26

Index   687 Bauhaus, 90–​91, 474 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 548 Bava, Alcide. See Fesq, Vic le Bazalgette, Léon, 147 Beardsley, Aubrey aestheticism and, 44, 77 architecture and, 468 art nouveau and, 371, 375–​76 camp and, 376 Catholicism and, 592 film and, 370, 375 illustrations of, 44 Japan and, 269 japonisme and, 487–​88 short stories and, 302 symbolism and, 487, 492–​93 touch and, 564 women and, 487 works by, 371, 371f, 487–​88, 487f, 492, 492f, 564, 592 Beauclair, Henri, 124–​25 beauty D’Annunzio and, 177 Baudelaire and, 419–​20, 422 contemporary decadence and, 97 decay and, 434–​38 fashion and, 419–​20, 434–​38 fin de siècle and, 63–​65 Wilde and, 74, 339, 444–​45, 538 Beckson, Karl, 533 Beer, Gillian, 630n6 Beerbohm, Max, 63–​64, 327–​28, 345–​46, 348, 423, 617–​19, 623 Beethovenfries (Klimt), 491–​92, 492f Being and Time (Heidegger), 640 Belgium À rebours and, 139–​41 absinthe and, 136–​37 art for art’s sake and, 136 barbarians and, 136, 141–​42, 145–​49 Belgian soul and, 136, 146–​47, 149 bourgeoisie and, 136 cosmopolitanism and, 135, 139, 147 decline and, 138, 145 disease and, 147–​49 France and, 135, 138, 141–​42, 146–​47 Huysmans and, 139–​41

La jeune Belgique in, 135–​37, 141, 148–​49, 156, 166 language and, 141–​42, 145–​49 literary Renaissance in, 143, 146–​47 modernity and, 137, 148–​49 naturalism and, 138 overview of, 135–​36, 149 paradox of decadence in, 136–​39 symbolism and, 136–​38, 145 Symons and, 137–​38, 143 urbanization and, 141–​45 Belle Époque anarchism and, 73, 76 Baudelaire and, 71–​72 conservatism and, 76 contemporary decadence and, 108 criticism of, 74–​76 definition of, 62, 71 development of, 70–​7 1 disease and, 108 fin de siècle and, 71 flâneur and, 71–​72 Gilded Age and, 71 impressionism and, 71–​73 luxury and, 71–​72 overview of, 77 politics and, 74–​76 symbolism and, 74–​76 Belloc, Hilaire, 337 Belshazzar’s Feast (Martin), 43 Belshazzar’s Feast (Rembrandt), 43, 43f “Benedictio Domini” (Dowson), 594 “Bénédiction” (Baudelaire), 362, 364 Benjamin, Walter, 356, 358, 364, 434 Benson, A. C., 48, 335–​36 Béraldi, Henri, 392–​95 Berenson, Bernard, 472, 528 Berenson, Mary, 528 Berger, John, 430 Bergeron, Katherine, 395 Berlin. See also Germany as capital of decadence, 85, 91, 200–​203, 205 decline and, 85 film and, 86–​88 fin de siècle and, 85 homosexuality and, 86, 200 sexuality and, 85–​86

688   Index Berlin (cont.) symbolism and, 493 Weimar period of, 85–​87, 195, 200–​203, 205 Berlin Alexanderplatz (Döblin), 200 Bernheimer, Charles, 578n30 Bersani, Leo, 287 Berta Funcke (Kleve), 213, 220 Bertrand, Aloysius, 352, 355–​56, 363 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 654, 661 bibliophilia, 121, 391–​98, 405 bildungsroman, 212, 278, 289, 507, 589–​90, 608 Binni, Walter, 180, 183 Binyon, Laurence, 529, 534–​39 “Biology of Autumn, The” (Thomson), 168 Birkett, Jennifer, 340–​41 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 637–​38 Black Notebooks (Heidegger), 642 Blätter für die Kunst, Die, 195 blaue Engel, Der (1930), 87–​88, 201 Bleibtreu, Karl, 193 Bloch, Chaim, 650 Blok, Alexander, 54 Blood Bitch (Hval), 99 Blow, Isabella, 437 Bloxam, John Francis, 591, 593, 596 Blyn, Robin, 296–​97 Böcklin, Arnold, 491, 493, 498, 502 bohemianism, 153, 161, 183, 193, 195, 197, 200–​201, 392, 456, 533 book arts À rebours and, 391, 394–​405 aestheticism and, 392–​93, 399–​401 art nouveau and, 393, 397, 399, 407, 409 artifice and, 410–​12 bibliophilia and, 121, 391–​98, 405 bourgeoisie and, 392–​93 development of, 392–​93 France and, 391–​92, 394 Gesamtkunstwerk and, 397, 399–​400, 412 Huysmans and, 398–​99 impressionism and, 397 japonisme and, 400–​403, 405, 407, 409 livres de luxe and, 391–​93, 397 Mallarmé and, 396–​97 mise-​en-​page of, 398–​403, 402f, 403f Nordau and, 393 overview of, 391

personalized bindings and, 405–​12, 407–​10f, 412f symbolism and, 10–​12, 393, 396–​97, 405 Book of the Id, The (Groddeck), 656–​57 Bosie. See Douglas, Alfred Boulet, Swanthula, 97, 107 Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, The, 97–​98, 106–​8, 107f Bounier, Pierre, 512–​13 Bourde, Paul, 125–​26 Bourgeois, Bertrand, 394–​95 bourgeoisie À rebours and, 174 absinthe and, 5, 7f Adorno and, 287 Baudelaire and, 3, 8 Belgium and, 136 book arts and, 392–​93 Britain and, 154 contemporary decadence and, 98 decline and, 7–​8, 138 Freud and, 651 Gautier and, 8 Germany and, 201 interior decoration and, 444, 456 Italy and, 184 music and, 518 Nordau and, 651 novels and, 286–​87 overview of, 2–​3, 6–​9 politics and, 675 prose poetry and, 351, 363–​64 Romanticism and, 6–​7 sexuality and, 236–​37 theater and, 323 urbanization and, 153 Bourget, Paul aestheticism and, 9–​10 architecture and, 461 Baudelaire and, 210, 214 criticism of, 124 decadent theory of, 9–​10, 121, 324, 328 decline and, 601–​2 destruction and, 216 ecology and, 624, 627 France and, 120–​21 individualism and, 9–​10, 168, 298n8, 600–​602

Index   689 influence of, 9–​10, 211, 213 Midhat and, 254 pessimism and, 601–​2 politics and, 675 science and, 600–​601, 607 suicide and, 605, 607 theater and, 324, 328 Bowler, Peter, 602 Bradley, Katharine, 25, 63, 157–​58, 527, 529 Brandes, Georg, 16n18, 212, 224n1 Branford, Victor, 167 Brannigan, John, 155–​56 Brassaï (Gyula Halász), 82 Braun, Emily, 492 Brazier, Siegfried, 515 Brendon, Piers, 586 Breward, Christopher, 423, 427, 437 Brillat-​Savarin, Jean Anthelme, 549–​55, 557 Britain. See also London archipelagic decadence in, 154–​56 bourgeoisie and, 154 Celtic Revival and, 153–​54 Cornwall in, 156–​59, 170 ecology and, 620–​21 empire and, 47–​48, 502n21 essays and, 340–​41, 346 France and, 154–​55 modernity and, 153–​54, 156, 157, 159 overview of, 153–​54, 170 prose poetry and, 354 regionalism in, 153–​56 Romanticism and, 154–​55 Rome and, 245 short stories and, 301–​2, 306 urbanization and, 153 Wales in, 156–​59, 170 Briusov, Valéry, 53–​54 Broughton, Rhoda, 530 Brown, Gillian, 611 Bruges-​la-​Morte (Rodenbach), 143–​45 Brummell, George “Beau,” 423–​26, 431 Brutus (Voltaire), 24–​25 Brutus, Lucius Junius Cato and, 33–​34 depictions of, 24–​26 as exemplum gentis, 23–​25, 33–​34 falling short and, 23–​25

Godwin and, 33 Roman Republic role of, 23–​24 sons condemned by, 24–​25, 33 suicide and, 33–​34 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 23–​24, 30 Brutus Condemning his Sons to Death (Lethière), 25, 26f Brutus Ultor (Field), 25 Buisine, Alain, 568–​69 Burke, Edmund, 31–​32 Burns, Robert, 168 Burty, Philippe, 265, 269, 279n1 Bussell, F. W., 526 Busst, A. J. L., 234 Bussy, Dorothy, 87 buveur d’absinthe, Le (Manet), 4 buveurs d’absinthe, Les (Raffaëlli), 4, 5f

C Cabaret (1966), 200 Cabaret (1972), 85, 103 Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Das (1920), 86 Cahit, Hüseyin, 247, 257 Caligula, 22–​23, 49–​50, 417–​18, 419 Calinescu, Matei, 287, 297 Calloway, Stephen, 99 camp Beardsley and, 376 definition of, 290, 376–​77 fashion and, 418, 434 film and, 369, 375–​81 high art and, 385 novels and, 290, 295 Salomé and, 376, 378, 379f, 385–​86 Salome’s Last Dance and, 377–​80, 379f, 385 seriousness and, 385 Campbell, John, 162 Campbell, Stella, 320, 322, 325, 328–​30 Canape, Georges, 408f, 409 Canby, Vincent, 378, 380 Candide (Voltaire), 170 Cantlie, James, 65 Carnegie, Andrew, 66 “carnet d’un décadent, Le” (Raynaud), 124 Casati, Marchesa Luisa, 430–​34, 432f Case of Wagner, The (Nietzsche), 121, 191–​92 Cassatt, Mary, 68, 266

690   Index Cassius Dio, 28, 39, 555 Catholicism aestheticism and, 528–​29, 587, 594 Beardsley and, 592 criticism of, 585, 594–​96 decadent writers and, 585, 586, 596, 617, 653 decay and, 585 degeneration and, 594 French society and, 76 Huysmans and, 76, 570 Pater and, 589 Péladan and, 122 Wilde and, 584 Cato (Addison), 30 Cato the Elder, 29 Cato the Younger, 29–​30, 33–​34 Celtic Revival, 153, 160–​61, 164, 166–​67 Cemil, Ahmet, 255–​57 Centennial Exposition (1876), 70 Century Guild Hobby Horse, The, 307 Certains (Huysmans), 76 Chadwick, Edwin, 620–​21 Chamber Music (Joyce), 161 Chamberlain, Basil Hall, 273 “chambre double, La” (Baudelaire), 360 Chameleon, The, 340, 529 Charcot, Jean-​Martin, 64, 485, 649 Charles Baudelaire (Gautier), 444 Chase, William Merritt, 68 Chassériau, Théodore, 485 chat noir, Le, 121 Chaunu, Pierre, 21, 35 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 53, 233 Chesterton, G. K., 48, 337–​38 chien andalou, Un (Buñuel and Dalí), 368, 375 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 54 Choi, Tina, 606 Chopin, Frederic, 508, 511–​13, 516, 611–​13 Chopin, Kate, 68, 305, 527, 611–​13 Choron, Alexandre Étienne, 545–​47, 557 Christianity, 30, 190, 196, 229, 417, 588, 590, 637, 668. See also Catholicism Chuh, Kandice, 518 Cibber, Colley, 44 Cicero, 22–​23, 28–​29, 32–​33, 40, 669 Cima, Gay Gibson, 321

cinema. See film City of God (Augustine), 30 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 62, 650 Cladel, Léon, 145 Claes, Koenraad, 167, 337, 340 Classen, Constance, 565 classical antiquity. See Rome classicism, 119–​20, 194, 260, 267, 369–​74, 516 Climax, The (Beardsley), 487–​88, 488f Cline, Maggie, 517 Cloelia, 26–​28 Clyde, Vander, 84 Collage City (Rowe), 476 Collatinus Tarquinius, 24 “Coming Huns, The” (Briusov), 53 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 364 Complaintes (Laforgue), 121, 124 “Concerning a Woman’s Smile” (Le Gallienne), 343 “Concerning Preciosity” (Robertson), 308 Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (Firbank), 296 “Concerning the Short Story” (Harland), 304 concile féérique, Le (Laforgue), 127 connoisseurship, 4, 271, 339, 348, 353, 446, 531 conservatism America and, 677 architecture and, 463 Belle Époque and, 76 contemporary decadence and, 97–​98, 106–​7, 110 cosmopolitanism and, 259 critics of decadence and, 125, 211, 245, 532, 568 decline and, 677 Japan and, 267 magazines and, 123 Midhat and, 250, 253, 257 modernity and, 250, 252–​53, 257 Nordau and, 65 Nordic cultures and, 209–​11 novels and, 291, 292 Romanticism and, 245 Rome and, 29 smell and, 532 symbolism and, 74

Index   691 taste and, 110 theater and, 319 Turkey and, 250, 252, 254 Verlaine and, 245 Victorian culture and, 307 Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Montesquieu), 117, 622, 670–​7 1 conspicuous consumption, 55, 61, 67–​70, 74, 430 Consummation of Empire, The (Cole), 54, 55f contemporary decadence aestheticism and, 101–​2, 110 ballroom culture and, 98, 103–​6, 109–​10 beauty and, 97 Belle Époque and, 108 body and, 99, 100, 102, 105 bourgeoisie and, 98 conservatism and, 97–​98, 106–​7, 110 COVID-​19 and, 108–​10 dandyism and, 99–​100 decay and, 96, 98–​99 decline and, 98–​99, 102–​3 degeneration and, 97 disease and, 110 drag and, 97, 99–​100, 105–​10 elitism and, 104 excess and, 104–​5, 109 film and, 101–​2 fin de siècle and, 98, 100–​101 futurity and, 110 interior decoration and, 453–​56 looking backward and, 100–​103 marginalized identities and, 97–​98, 106–​10 modernity and, 97 New York City and, 96, 98 opulence and, 104–​6 overview of, 96–​100, 110 popular entertainment and, 97, 99–​100, 103 queerness and, 12–​13, 97, 99, 107, 110 race and, 98, 102, 106, 109–​10 symbolism and, 97 taste and, 97, 99, 105–​8, 110 ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn), 104 Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, The (Nordau), 650 Conway, James J., 197

Cooper, Edith, 25, 63, 157–​58, 527, 529 Cornwall, England, 156–​59, 170 “Correspondances” (Baudelaire), 357–​61 cosmopolitanism Belgium and, 135, 139, 147 conservatism and, 259 development of, 123, 129 flâneurs and, 308 France and, 129 Freud and, 649 Huneker and, 508 Ireland and, 160, 162 Japan and, 274, 276, 278–​79 Nordau and, 649 symbolism and, 483, 500 Cottini, Luca, 175 “Counterfeit Coin” (Baudelaire), 361 Course of Empire (Cole), 54, 55f Courtenay, W. L., 319, 328 Couture, Thomas, 31, 34, 34f, 119–​20, 553, 553f, 637 COVID-​19 pandemic, 14, 98, 103, 106, 108–​10 Crafts, Hannah (Hannah Bond), 70 Cram, Ralph Adams, 468, 470–​75, 477 Crane, Walter, 267–​68, 393 Crassus, Lucius Licinius, 23–​24 crépuscule des dieux, Le (Bourges), 122 “Critic as Artist, The” (Wilde), 314, 344 Croce, Benedetto, 184–​86 Croquis Parisiens (Huysmans), 569 “Cross Line, A” (Egerton), 527 Crowther, Bosley, 376 Crucifixion (Grünewald), 568 Cruelle énigme (Bourget), 213 Cuore (De Amicis), 175 “Cup of Happiness, The” (Ricketts), 307 curée, La (Zola), 212 “Cursory Light, The” (Huneker), 512 “cygne, Le” (Baudelaire), 2, 361 Cyropaedia (Xenophon), 44 Cyrus the Great, 43

D Dadaism, 201, 368 Dame, Die (Landshoff-​Yorck), 202 Dana, 162 Dandy, The (Wauters), 427, 428f

692   Index dandyism À rebours and, 424 artifice and, 411, 532 Baudelaire and, 4, 105, 120, 425–​27, 675 Black dandyism, 426–​30, 428–​29f contemporary decadence and, 99–​100 definition of, 424, 426 development of, 424, 427 elitism and, 426 essays and, 340 fashion and, 423–​30, 424f France and, 120 luxury and, 423 masculinity and, 99, 426 naturalism and, 4 neo-​dandyism, 411 politics and, 428–​29, 675 rebellion and, 426 sexuality and, 314 short stories and, 314 smell and, 525, 531–​32 theater and, 323 Wilde and, 426, 525 women and, 430, 437–​38 Dangerous Method, A (Spielrein), 654 Dans un café (Degas), 4–​5, 6f, 72–​73, 73f “Danse Macabre” (Baudelaire), 434–​35 danse sauvage, La (1925), 84 “danse serpentine, La” (Fikret), 258 Dante Alighieri, 30, 40, 157, 182 Danzker, Jo-​Anne Birnie, 490–​91 Darwin, Charles, 62, 64, 484, 619 Darwinism Baudelaire and, 626 degeneration and, 64–​65, 89, 121, 484, 492 ecology and, 626 fin de siècle and, 62, 64 individualism and, 601–​2, 608, 612 Nordau and, 64, 485 Nordic cultures and, 214, 217 overspecialization and, 602 philosophy and, 608 social Darwinism, 64–​65, 121, 214, 217, 612 symbolism and, 484–​85, 487, 492 Symons and, 602 Wilde and, 626 Davidson, John, 157, 335, 338–​40, 344

Davis, Alex, 161 Davis, Michael, 606 Days and Nights (Symons), 526 De Amicis, Edmondo, 175, 178 De Architectura (Vitruvius), 463–​65 De oratore (Cicero), 23 De Quincey, Thomas, 305 Death of Sardanapalus (Delacroix), 41, 41f, 495 débâcles, Les (Verhaeren), 138 decadence. See also contemporary decadence decay’s relation to, 21–​22, 96, 587 decline’s relation to, 7–​8, 21–​22, 623 definition of, 1, 8, 21, 117, 321, 324, 418–​19, 587, 600–​601 development of, 1–​2, 7–​9, 12–​14, 61, 96–​100, 117, 228 modernity’s relation to, 2–​3, 12–​13, 80, 91, 97, 129–​30, 194–​95, 299n14, 418–​19, 653 overview of, 1–​14 Romanticism and, 11, 125 symbolism and, 76, 126, 128, 483–​85, 500 Decadence and Catholicism (Hanson), 586, 589 décadence artistique et littéraire, La, 126–​27 Décadence de la nation française (Aaron and Dandieu), 476 Décadence de l’architecture (Viel), 464 décadence latine, La (Péladan), 52, 122 décadent, Le, 126, 128, 130, 180, 307, 341 Decadent, The (Cram), 470 “Decadent Movement in Literature, The” (Symons), 65, 257, 270, 321, 338, 340 “Décadent to His Soul, The” (La Gallienne), 587 decadentismo, il, 174–​76, 180–​81, 183–​86 decay Baudelaire and, 626 beauty and, 434–​38 Catholicism and, 585 contemporary decadence and, 96, 98–​99 decadence’s relation to, 21–​22, 96, 587 ecology and, 619–​24 empire and, 47–​49 fashion and, 417, 434–​38 Germany and, 200, 204 moral decay, 46–​47, 145, 211, 669

Index   693 naturalism and, 210 Nordic cultures and, 210–​11, 215–​16 Rome and, 23 Ukraine and, 228 Wilde and, 626–​29 “Decay of Essay-​Writing, The” (Stephen), 337–​38 “Decay of Lying, The” (Wilde), 270–​7 1, 340, 344–​45 decline architecture and, 461–​64, 471 Baudelaire and, 166–​67 Belgium and, 138, 145 Berlin and, 85 bourgeoisie and, 7–​8, 138 Bourget and, 601–​2 conservatism and, 677 contemporary decadence and, 98–​99, 102–​3 decadence’s relation to, 7–​8, 21–​22, 623 ecology and, 622–​23 empire and, 21–​23, 31–​32, 35, 42–​44, 228, 245–​47, 260, 668–​69, 670 Enlightenment and, 645 essays and, 338–​39 fashion and, 417 fin de siècle and, 64 four horsemen of, 17n29 France and, 117–​19, 121 Gautier and, 166–​67 Germany and, 192 Japan and, 264 luxury and, 22 moral decline, 22–​23, 46, 145, 192, 677 Nordau and, 192–​93 novels and, 288 philosophy and, 634, 637, 639, 646 politics and, 668–​69, 670, 674, 676 psychoanalysis and, 660–​61 Rome and, 21–​23, 31–​32, 35, 49–​52, 228, 668–​69, 670 Russia and, 52–​54 science and, 601–​2 Turkey and, 246–​47, 260 Ukraine and, 228 Verlaine and, 21–​22, 35, 118 Victorian culture and, 45–​47 Western Civilization and, 642

Decline of Carthage, The (Cole), 54 Decline of the West, The (Spengler), 47, 672 decoration. See book arts; interior decoration; ornament “Defence of Cosmetics, A” (Beerbohm), 308, 345, 423 degeneration anarchism and, 76 Catholicism and, 586, 594–​95 contemporary decadence and, 97 Darwinism and, 64–​65, 89, 121, 484, 492 degenerate art, 89–​90, 652 degenerate individuals, 64–​65, 89 film and, 90 fin de siècle and, 64–​65 France and, 121 interwar period and, 89–​91 Midhat and, 257 modernity and, 89–​90 Nazism and, 89–​90, 652 Nordau and, 64, 76, 89, 161, 485, 651–​52 queerness and, 97 science and, 609, 613 symbolism and, 484–​85, 492 Victorian culture and, 652 Degeneration (Nordau). See Entartung Dehmel, Richard, 201 “Dekadanlar” (Midhat), 254, 258 Delacroix, Eugène, 41, 44–​45, 485, 495 Deledda, Grazia, 185–​86 Deleuze, Gilles, 239–​40, 655 déliquescences: Poèmes décadents d’Adoré Floupette, Les (Beauclair), 124–​25 Dellamora, Richard, 97 democracy, 8–​10, 12, 120, 176, 217, 291, 297, 323, 667, 674 Denis, Maurice, 74 Denmark, decadence in, 210–​13, 223 Derrida, Jacques, 655 Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 214, 484 Desmarais, Jane, 228, 309 Desperate Living (1977), 383 Devil is a Woman, The (1935), 88 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 641–​43 Dialogue between Fashion and Death (Leopardi), 434

694   Index Dialogues of the Dead (Fénelon), 44 Diana di Efeso e gli schiavi (Sartorio), 493, 494f “Diary of A Cultured Faun, The” (Johnson), 585 Diary of a Superfluous Man (Turgenev), 52–​53 Dickens, Charles, 46, 285–​86, 288, 291, 293, 298, 310, 565, 603 Dictator Style (York), 455 Dierkes-​Thrun, Petra, 571–​72 Dietrich, Marlene, 87–​88, 201, 204, 434 Dilemmas (Dowson), 302 Diodorus of Sicily, 40, 45 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 28 Discords (Egerton), 161, 319, 519, 519f disease D’Annunzio and, 179 Belgium and, 147–​49 Belle Époque and, 108 contemporary decadence and, 110 decadence as, 1–​2, 4, 98, 124, 149, 303, 341, 651 ecology and, 620–​21 modernity and, 13 Nordau and, 652 novels and, 294 philosophy and, 655 psychoanalysis and, 656–​60 Romanticism and, 185 sexuality and, 578n30 Symons and, 2, 4, 98, 161, 303, 321, 341 syphilis, 329, 484, 562, 567–​68 touch and, 568 “Disenchanted Symphony, The” (Huneker), 510–​11 domadora, La (Ruelas), 498–​99, 499f Domitian, Emperor, 555–​56 Dornac (Paul Cardon), 450, 450f “Double Room, The” (Baudelaire), 360 Douglas, Alfred, 338, 347, 363, 377, 380, 591 Douthat, Ross, 17n29 Dowson, Ernest, 4, 155, 302, 304–​5, 307, 363, 526, 593–​96 drag ballroom culture and, 98, 103–​6, 109–​10 contemporary decadence and, 97, 99–​ 100, 105–​10 COVID-​19 and, 108–​10

distasteful drag, 105–​8 fashion and, 433–​34 film and, 385 gender and, 99 interwar period and, 84–​85 performers of, 107–​9 RuPaul’s Drag Race and, 97, 103, 105–​6, 109 taste and, 105–​8 Draguet, Michel, 496 Dragula: Resurrection (2020), 108–​10 Drake, Richard, 181 Dreiser, Theodore, 68 Dreyfus affair (1894), 8, 76, 91, 129, 487 Du Bois, W. E. B., 70, 519–​20 “Du vin et du haschich” (Baudelaire), 550 duchesse bleue, La (Bourget), 254–​55 Ducrey, Guy, 563 Dugin, Aleksandr, 677 Dumas, Alexandre, 119 Dunst, Maura, 519–​20 Durand, Jean-​Nicolas-​Louis, 465, 471, 473 Durkheim, Émile, 601, 603–​5, 607 Duse, Eleonora, 322, 324–​27 Duval, Jeanne, 3 Dyer, Richard, 431

E Eagleton, Terry, 77 Eastern Europe. See Russia; Ukraine Ebert, Roger, 378, 380 École Polytechnique, 464–​65 “École romane” (Moréas), 129 ecology À rebours and, 618 aestheticism and, 617, 619–​20, 622, 629–​30 artifice and, 618 Baudelaire and, 619, 624–​25, 629 Bourget and, 624, 627 Britain and, 620–​21 collectivism and, 620 Darwinism and, 626 decay and, 619–​24 decline and, 622–​23 development of, 619–​22 disease and, 620–​21 education and, 621–​22 empire and, 622–​23

Index   695 fungi and, 619–​20 Gautier and, 624 individualism and, 627 natural cycles and, 627 open ecology, 622–​24 overview of, 617–​19, 629–​30 Pater and, 628 putrefaction and, 622–​29 Romanticism and, 625–​26 Rome and, 622–​24 sexuality and, 626 waste and, 621–​22 Wilde and, 619, 626–​29 Écrits pour l’art, 128 “Editorial Note” (Symons), 308 Edwards, Catharine, 30 Edwards, Osman, 274 Eekhoud, Georges, 136, 144–​45, 147, 149 Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), 161, 304–​5, 308–​9, 319, 519–​20, 527 Egoists (Huneker), 653 “Egyptian Cigarette, An” (Chopin), 305, 527 Eighteen Nineties, The (Jackson), 618 “Eighteenth-​Century Singer, An” (Lee), 512 Ekrem, Recaizade Mahmut, 247, 251 Elagabalus artistic representation of, 46, 49–​52 empire and, 49–​52 as example of decline, 49–​52 influence of, 245 taste and, 554 Verlaine and, 39 Wilde and, 245 “Elia” (Hazlitt and Lamb), 340 Eliot, T. S., 101, 161, 662 elitism contemporary decadence and, 104 dandyism and, 426 essays and, 339 fashion and, 418 interior decoration and, 446–​48 novels and, 288–​89, 291–​92 politics and, 674 short stories and, 307 taste and, 543–​45 Wilde and, 245, 288 Ellis, Havelock, 52, 61, 157, 324, 508, 514

Elskamp, Max, 136, 145–​47 Émaux et camées (Gautier), 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 66 Emery, Elizabeth, 446 empire aestheticism and, 53 America and, 54–​55 Assyrian Empire, 39–​45 Babylonian Empire, 42–​44 Baudelaire and, 228 Britain and, 47–​48, 502n21 criticism of, 47, 160, 293, 475 decadence as, 54, 245–​46 decay and, 47–​49 decline and, 21–​23, 31–​32, 35, 42–​44, 228, 245–​47, 260, 668–​69, 670 ecology and, 622–​23 escapism and, 49–​52 fin de siècle and, 228 France and, 8, 39, 45–​46, 49, 52, 62, 100, 119–​20 Germany and, 190–​91, 193, 195, 201–​3, 205 Ireland and, 160 Japan and, 245–​46, 264, 275–​76 Lydian Empire, 46–​47 militarism and, 47–​49 overview of, 39, 56 Persian Empire, 39–​44 Rome and, 31–​35, 48, 228, 667–​68 Russia and, 45–​46, 52–​54, 80, 228, 235 Symons and, 228 Turkey and, 14, 45, 80, 246, 250, 257, 260n2 Ukraine and, 228–​29 Victorian culture and, 45–​47 Empire (Vidal), 55 En rade (Huysmans), 123, 569–​70 “Enchanted Yodler, The” (Huneker), 509 Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 2 Enlightenment Adorno and, 643–​45 alienation and, 643–​45 anti-​Semitism and, 645 architecture and, 461, 463, 476 barbarians and, 642–​45 decline and, 645 instrumental rationality and, 641–​45 myth and, 644–​45

696   Index Enlightenment (cont.) naturalism and, 642–​43 Nazism and, 645 politics and, 673 progress and, 642–​45 Romanticism and, 644–​45 Enne, Francis, 450 “Enoch Soames” (Beerbohm), 617–​19, 623 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, An (Godwin), 31–​33 Entartung (Degeneration) (Nordau) fashion in, 422 hearing in, 509 influence of, 89, 129, 161, 191, 485, 651, 653 interior decoration in, 451 modernity and, 652 translation of, 65, 161, 651–​52 writing of, 64–​65 Enter Herodias (Beardsley), 564, 564f entropy, 600, 602–​7, 609, 611, 613 épaves, Les (Baudelaire), 136, 139 equality, 217, 291, 667, 670 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 603 Ersoy, Ahmet, 250 Ertürk, Nergis, 253 Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Bourget), 121, 137, 211, 624 essays Baudelaire and, 340 Britain and, 340–​41, 346 criticism of, 336–​39, 348 dandyism and, 340 decline and, 338–​39 development of, 339–​43 elitism and, 339 France and, 340–​43 Gautier and, 340 humor in, 344–​47 magazines and, 336, 340 overview of, 335–​36, 348 Pater and, 336, 340 style of, 335, 340–​43, 344 Symons and, 338–​43, 347 travel essays, 347 Victorian culture and, 345 Wilde and, 336–​37, 339–​40, 344–​47 women and, 343

Estonia, decadence in, 221–​23, 224n7 Etkind, Alexander, 230 Étude morbide (Synge), 161 “Eugenia” (Grand), 531–​32, 534 eugenics, 89–​90, 190, 198, 205 Eustace Diamonds, The (Trollope), 530–​31 Evangelista, Stefano, 228 Evans, Caroline, 434–​35, 437 Eve, 490–​91 Evergreen, The, 166–​68 excess, 46, 62–​63, 104–​5, 109, 236–​37, 303–​6, 378, 419, 553–​54, 624–​25 exoticism, 142, 265, 273–​74, 393, 442, 487 Exposition Universelle (1878), 175 Exposition Universelle (1889), 70 Exquisite Dandies (Cruikshank), 424, 425f

F Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 670 Facos, Michelle, 485 Fähnders, Walter, 204 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 90 Fall of Babylon, The (Martin), 43 Fall of Nineveh, The (Atherstone), 42 Fall of Nineveh, The (Martin), 42, 42f “Fall of the House of Usher, The” (Poe), 443 Fanon, Frantz, 676 fantasy, 50–​53, 215–​16, 223, 309–​14, 444 fascism, 9, 86, 90–​91, 196, 205, 296, 455, 645, 676 fashion aestheticism and, 417–​18 artifice and, 417, 419–​23 artistic representation of, 420–​22, 431, 432f Baudelaire and, 419–​20, 422, 426, 434–​35 beauty and, 419–​20, 434–​38 camp and, 418, 434 dandyism and, 423–​30, 425f decay and, 417, 434–​38 decline and, 417 development of, 417–​19, 423 drag and, 433–​34 elitism and, 418 fabulousness and, 417–​19 gender and, 423–​24, 430–​34 Germany and, 420 Gilded Age and, 67–​68

Index   697 identity and, 419 luxury and, 417 male fashion, 423–​30 modernity and, 418–​19, 434, 438 naturalism and, 417 Nordau and, 422 overview of, 417–​18, 438 Paris and, 418 queerness and, 437 Rome and, 417 Wilde and, 419, 422–​23, 430 women and, 430–​36 zoot suits in, 428–​29 Fashion at the Edge (Evans), 435 “fausse monnaie, La” (Baudelaire), 361 Faust (Goethe), 216 Felâtun Bey ile Râkım Efendi (Midhat), 249–​53, 257 Felix Ormusson (Tuglas), 222–​23 Female Trouble (1974), 382–​83 Femina melancholica (Hundorova), 238 femininity. See women and femininity feminism, 105, 190, 196–​98, 217, 227, 236, 319, 371, 498, 677 Femme au cochon (Rops), 496, 497f femme et le pantin, La (Louÿs), 88 femme fatale, 88, 180, 204–​5, 212, 219–​21, 234, 312, 343, 491, 570–​7 1 Fénéon, Félix, 73, 127 Ferenczi, Sándor, 656–​57 Fernand Khnopff ’s house (Brussels), 141, 142f Fesq, Vic le. See Bava, Alcide Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), 25, 63, 157–​58, 527–​28, 622 Figaro, Le, 128–​29 “Figure in the Carpet, The” (James), 336 Fikret, Tevfik, 247, 256, 258–​59 Finland, decadence in, 14, 210, 216, 222–​23, 224n7 Fillin-​Yeh, Susan, 426 film adaptations in, 368–​78, 386 aestheticism and, 369 America and, 87–​89 art nouveau and, 375 Babylon and, 88–​89 Beardsley and, 370, 375 Berlin and, 86–​88

camp and, 369, 375–​81 classicism and, 369–​74 contemporary decadence and, 101–​2 degeneration and, 90 drag and, 385 European exiles in, 86–​91 fin de siècle and, 88 Hollywood film, 87–​89 homosexuality and, 86, 380–​81, 383 Huneker and, 368 interwar period and, 86–​89 overview of, 368–​69 salon culture and, 89 set design in, 371–​72 silent era in, 370 surrealism and, 368 theater and, 368–​69 trash films, 380–​86 Wilde and, 368–​80, 386 women and, 371 fin de siècle beauty and, 63–​65 Belle Époque and, 71 Berlin and, 85 contemporary decadence and, 98, 100–​101 Darwinism and, 62, 64 decline and, 64 definition of, 61–​63 degeneration and, 64–​65 development of, 62–​65 disease and, 62, 65, 652 empire and, 228 film and, 88 Freud and, 62 Gautier and, 63, 67 Gilded Age and, 66 interwar period and, 80–​82 modernity and, 62, 65 Nordau and, 62, 64, 98 novels and, 287 overview of, 61–​62, 65, 77 Paris and, 81 Pater and, 63 Rome and, 101 sexuality and, 85 Symons and, 65 Wilde and, 63

698   Index fin des bourgeois, La (Lemonnier), 138 Finzi, Aurelio, 660 Firbank, Ronald, 295–​96 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 82, 368 Fitzgerald, Zelda, 82 Flamandes, Les (Verhaeren), 138 flambeaux noirs, Les (Verhaeren), 138 flâneur/​flâneuse, 11, 71–​72, 155, 305, 308, 310, 314, 418, 566–​67, 576, 583 Flaubert, Gustave, 121, 255, 273, 298, 652–​53 Fleet Street (Davidson), 339 “Fleshly School of Poetry, The” (Buchanan), 618–​19 fleurs du mal, Les (The Flowers of Evil) (Baudelaire) alienation and, 2 architecture in, 468 Darwinism in, 626 ecology in, 624–​26 fin de siècle and, 63 influence of, 624 obscenity charge against, 120 preface to, 7, 256 prose poetry in, 357–​64 reception of, 120 relation to other works, 362 Rome and, 120 skepticism in, 625 style of, 11, 361 symbolism and, 361 Flynn, Patrick, 180 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 185, 188n33 Fontane, Theodor, 193 Forster Education Act (1870), 306 Fosse/​Verdon (2019), 103 Foster, Roy, 160 France. See also Paris D’Annunzio and, 181 architecture and, 464–​66 barbarians and, 141 Belgium and, 135, 138, 141–​42, 146–​47 book arts and, 391–​92, 394 Bourget and, 120–​21 Britain and, 154–​55 cosmopolitanism and, 129 dandyism and, 120 decline and, 117–​19, 121

degeneration and, 121 development of decadence in, 119–​21 essays and, 340–​43 Huysmans and, 118 interior decoration and, 444, 446, 455 magazines and, 118–​19, 123–​29 Mallarmé and, 118 modernity and, 118, 121, 129–​30 naturalism and, 183, 209, 211 Nordic cultures and, 209–​11, 213–​14 novels and, 121–​23 overview of, 117, 129–​30 political crises in, 117–​21 prose poetry and, 353–​54 reception of decadence in, 124–​26 Romanticism and, 119, 125 Rome and, 117, 119, 121–​22, 126, 129 Second Empire in, 8, 39, 45–​46, 49, 52, 62, 100, 119–​20 symbolism and, 125–​27 Symons and, 341–​42 taste and, 543–​44, 547, 556–​58 Third Republic in, 71, 74, 76, 120, 392, 557 Turkey and, 246, 247 Verlaine and, 118 Franco-​Prussian War (1870–​1871), 62–​63, 70, 81, 118, 135, 191, 545 Franko, Ivan, 237 French Revolution, 46, 76, 117, 464–​65, 543–​44, 558, 673 French Revolution, The (Carlyle), 46 Freud, Sigmund. See also psychoanalysis bourgeoisie and, 651 castration and, 649–​50 cosmopolitanism and, 649 criticism of, 654–​56 death drive and, 654, 661–​62 dialectics and, 662 fin de siècle and, 62 Groddeck and, 655–​58 interwar period and, 80 modernity and, 62 narcissism and, 52 Nordau and, 649–​51 religion and, 650–​51 teacher of, 484–​85 unconscious and, 655

Index   699 Fromm, Erich, 661 Froude, Richard Hurrell, 583, 586–​87, 592 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, 293 Furbank, P. N., 659 “Fusées” (Baudelaire), 230 Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 650 futurism, 91, 183, 368

G Gagnier, Regenia, 237, 287, 290, 295, 612 Garbo, Greta, 88–​89 Garborg, Arne, 214–​15, 218, 222 Garrington, Abbie, 578n40 Garth, Michael, 305 Gauguin, Paul, 74 Gautier, Théophile architecture and, 461 art for art’s sake and, 44, 74 Baudelaire and, 7–​8, 63, 120 bourgeoisie and, 8 decadent style defined by, 303–​4 decline and, 166–​67 ecology and, 624 essays and, 340 fin de siècle and, 63, 67 influence of, 7–​8, 268, 273–​74, 653 interior decoration and, 444 politics and, 12–​13, 120 prose poetry and, 354–​56 Rome and, 31 Sardanapalus and, 44 short stories and, 303–​4 works by, 7, 44, 74, 121, 444 Geddes, Patrick, 166–​70 gender. See men and masculinity; queerness; transgender persons; women and femininity Genova, Pamela, 269, 400–​401 Gentile, Giovanni, 676 George, Stefan, 51, 193, 195–​96, 201 Germany. See also Berlin art nouveau and, 195 bohemianism and, 193, 195, 197, 200–​201 bourgeoisie and, 201 challenges of periodization in, 191–​95 decay and, 200, 204 decline and, 192

distinctness of decadence in, 190–​91, 195 fashion and, 420 homosexuality and, 190 magazines and, 201 modernity and, 193–​95 naturalism and, 194 overview of, 190–​91, 205 queerness and, 201–​2 sexuality and, 193–​94 unification of, 190–​91 Weimar Republic in, 190–​91, 193, 195–​205, 420, 474 Wilhelmine Empire in, 190–​91, 193, 195, 201–​3, 205 women and, 190, 195–​203 Young Germans in, 192–​93 Gesamtkunstwerk, 326, 391, 397, 400, 412, 468, 470, 473–​74 Ghil, René, 126–​29 Gibbon, Edward, 22, 49–​50, 461, 476, 622–​23 Gilded Age America and, 66 Belle Époque and, 71 conspicuous consumption in, 67–​70 criticism of, 68–​70 cyclical connotations of, 66 definition of, 62, 65 fashion and, 67–​68 fin de siècle and, 66 Golden Age contrasted with, 66 individualism and, 68–​70 industrialization and, 66–​69 luxury and, 67–​70 overview of, 61–​62, 65–​66, 77 Romanticism and, 66 Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, The (Twain and Warner), 66 Gilkin, Iwan, 136, 140, 148 Gille, Valère, 148 Gillespie, Michael, 607 Gilman, Richard, 320 “Gingerbread Fair at Vincennes: A Colour Study, The” (Symons), 308 Ginisty, Paul, 127–​28 Gippius, Zinaida, 227–​28, 232–​36 Giraud, Albert, 136–​37, 148 Glasgow School of Art (Mackintosh), 470

700   Index Gluck, Mary, 601, 613 Gobineau, Arthur de, 484 Godwin, William, 31–​34 “Going Out for a Walk” (Beerbohm), 346 Gökalp, Ziya, 260 Gold, Barri, 602, 609 Golden Day, The (Mumford), 66 Goncourt, Edmond de, 276, 446–​49, 452 Goncourt, Jules de, 270 Gontarski, Stanley, 653 Goodbye to Berlin (Isherwood), 202, 420 Gordon, Jan, 302, 304, 308–​9 Gordon, Mel, 203 Gorgone e gli eroi, La (Sartorio), 493–​96, 495f Gosse, Edmund, 144, 329, 525–​26 Gothic decadent, 159, 185, 302–​4, 309, 312, 314, 434, 442–​46, 467, 470–​73 Götterdämmerung (Wagner), 515 Gourmont, Remy de, 119, 123, 508, 570 Grand, Sarah, 319, 527, 531 Great Wave off Kanagawa (Hokusai), 401–​3, 404f Green Carnation, The (Hichens), 347, 591 Greenslade, William, 652 Grinning Spider (Redon), 74 Groddeck, Georg, 655–​58 Gropius, Walter, 90, 474 Gropius house, 474, 475f Guimard, Hector, 71, 90, 94n43, 468 Gutiérrez-​Jones, Carlos, 613 Guys, Constantin, 120 Gynandre (Péladan), 123

H Haabløse Slægter (Bang), 211–​14, 218 Hadrian the Seventh (Rolfe), 291–​92 Haeckel, Ernst, 490, 619 Hall, Jason David, 320 “Hall of the Missing Footsteps, The” (Huneker), 515–​16 Halle aux Blés (1807–​1811), 465, 466f Hallward, Basil, 269, 347, 529, 606–​7, 628 Hamlin, Christopher, 621–​22 Hans Alienus (Heidenstam), 215–​16 Hanson, Ellis, 442, 586, 589 Hansson, Ola, 193, 213 Harland, Henry, 302, 304–​5, 307–​8, 310, 342, 348 Harlem Renaissance, 518–​19

Harris, Wendell, 302 Hartman, Elwood, 400 Hartmann, Eduard von, 602–​4, 607, 609 Harvey, Alison, 160 Haskell, Eric, 399–​400 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 193 Haussmann, Baron, 2, 71, 175 Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 591 Hawthorne, Melanie, 294, 299n30, 572 Headlam, Stewart, 592–​93 Hearn, Lafcadio, 272–​74, 514 Hearst, Randolph, 55 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 65 Heckel, Erich, 89 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) collaborative production of, 328 criticism of, 320–​22, 329 dandyism and, 323 first performance of, 320–​21 overview of, 320–​21 riposte to, 330 women and, 321–​22, 329–​30 hedonism, 105–​6, 265, 277, 368, 382, 400, 588 Hegel, G. W. F. artworks and, 647n6 dialectic of, 10, 635–​36, 643 Geist and, 636 optimism of, 634–​36, 643 overview of, 635–​36 philosophy as theodicy for, 635 politics and, 671 reconciliation and, 635 Heidegger, Martin, 635, 640–​42, 646 Heimat (Sudermann), 320, 323 Heine, Heinrich, 650 Heliogabalus. See Elagabalus Heliogabalus: A Buffoonery in Three Acts (Mencken and Nathan), 55 Hellenism, 165, 196 Helmreich, Stefan, 620 Hemingway, Ernest, 82 Henselt, Adolf von, 512 Heraclitus, 290, 608 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 11, 13 Hernandez, Jillian, 109 Herodotus, 46–​47, 54 “Heroine of 1894, The” (Courtenay), 319, 328

Index   701 Herzl, Theodor, 650 heteronormativity, 97, 109, 123, 237, 293, 423, 426, 571 Hext, Kate, 296, 608 Highland Rape (McQueen), 435–​37, 437f Hikmet, Ahmet, 258 Hill of Dreams, The (Machen), 159, 310 Hilliard, David, 587 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 85–​86, 94n42, 200, 514 Hirsh, Sharon, 485 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 22, 53, 117, 622, 670–​7 1 History of the Progress and the Termination of the Roman Republic, The (Ferguson), 32 Hobbes, Thomas, 669 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 51–​52, 201 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 640–​41 Holdsworth, Roger, 533 Holiday and Other Poems (Davidson), 339 Hollywood Babylon (Anger), 89 Hommes d’aujourd’hui (Verlaine), 128–​29 homosexuality architecture and, 470–​7 1 Berlin and, 86 Catholicism and, 583, 587, 595 film and, 86, 380–​81, 383 Germany and, 190, 200 Huneker and, 514–​16 interwar period and, 85–​86 lesbianism, 63, 82–​84, 86, 232, 311, 520 music and, 514–​16 smell and, 532 Wilde and, 63, 306, 346, 368, 532–​33, 592 Horatius Cocles, 23, 26–​29 Horkheimer, Max alienation and, 643–​44 bourgeoisie and, 287 Enlightenment and, 641–​45 industrialization and, 364 instrumental rationality and, 641–​45 overview of, 635, 642–​43 progress and, 642–​43, 646 psychoanalysis and, 658, 661–​63 Horn, Anette, 192 Horney, Karen, 661 hors-​nature, Les (Rachilde), 123

Horta, Victor, 468 hortensias bleus, Les (Montesquiou), 447 Houellebecq, Michel, 139 “House Beautiful, The” (Wilde), 444–​45 Hudson, Rock, 381–​84 Huet, Hélène, 400 Hugo, Victor, 119, 356, 358, 461 “Humour of the Public, The” (Beerbohm), 345–​46 Hundorova, Tamara, 232, 238–​39 Huneker, James Gibbons absinthe and, 507 cosmopolitanism and, 508 film and, 368 homosexuality and, 514–​16 idealism and, 511–​12 innate talent and, 513 liberalism and, 509 madness and, 509–​10 naturalism and, 511 overview of, 507–​8 pianist tradition and, 512 queerness and, 514–​15 race and, 513–​14, 518–​20 realism and, 511–​12 reception of, 508 senses and, 510, 512–​13 synesthesia and, 510–​11 women and, 516–​17 works by, 507–​11, 513, 515–​16 Hunter, Tab, 383–​85 Hurst, Isobel, 101 Huxley, Aldous, 347–​48 Huxley, T. H., 621–​22 Huysmans, Joris-​Karl. See also À rebours architecture and, 461 Baudelaire and, 140–​41 Belgium and, 139–​41 book arts and, 398–​99 France and, 118 idealism and, 511 influence of, 139–​41, 181, 653 interior decoration and, 449–​52, 450f metaphor use by, 179 modernism and, 121–​22 naturalism and, 139 reception of, 122

702   Index Huysmans, Joris-​Karl (cont.) Rome and, 22, 121–​22 science and, 600 touch and, 568–​70, 576 women and, 570 works by, 76, 123, 569–​70 Hval, Jenny, 99 hysteria, 138, 199, 319, 423, 485, 515–​17, 649, 652–​53

I I havsbandet (Strindberg), 217–​18 Ibsen, Henrik, 2, 61, 64, 164, 192–​93, 199, 220, 319–​30, 563, 651–​53 Ibsen and the Actress (Robins), 327–​28, 330 Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 157 Iefremov, Sergei, 236–​37 Ihsan, Ahmed, 247, 254 Ikeda, Kikunae, 548 Illuminations (Rimbaud), 127 Ilnytzkyj, Oleh S., 239 Image, Selwyn, 592–​93, 594 Imaginary Portraits (Pater), 302, 307, 347 “Imp of the Perverse, The” (Poe), 303, 308 imperialism. See empire Importance of Being Earnest, The (Wilde), 245 impressionism, 71–​73, 126, 158, 190, 194, 311, 397, 401, 653 “Impressions of Bruges” (Gosse), 144 “Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress, The” (Beerbohm), 345 individualism À rebours and, 603–​4 Bourget and, 9–​10, 168, 298n8, 600–​602 cooperative individualism, 612 Darwinism and, 601–​2, 608, 612 ecology and, 627 Gilded Age and, 68–​70 interior decoration and, 444–​45 novels and, 292, 297, 298n8 overview of, 9–​10 Pater and, 610 pessimism and, 601–​2 politics and, 674–​77 science and, 600–​606, 610–​12 suicide and, 601–​2, 605–​7, 612–​13 theater and, 328, 331

women and, 237–​38, 328 Indra (Diran Çırakyan), 247, 260n4 industrialization, 65–​69, 138, 143, 145, 175, 273, 364, 423, 483, 576 Ingres, Jean-​Auguste-​Dominique, 485 innocente, L’ (D’Annunzio), 179 Intentions (Wilde), 344–​45, 347 interior decoration À rebours and, 442–​43, 449–​53, 456 aestheticism and, 68, 443–​46, 456 D’Annunzio and, 453 art for art’s sake and, 444–​45 Baudelaire and, 443–​44 bourgeoisie and, 444, 456 collection and, 445–​49 contemporary decadence and, 453–​56 curation and, 445–​49 development of, 442–​45 elitism and, 446–​48 fantasy and, 444 France and, 444, 446, 455 Gautier and, 444 Huysmans and, 449–​52 individualism and, 444–​45 luxury and, 456–​57 Nordau and, 451 overview of, 442, 456–​57 sexuality and, 450–​51 symbolism and, 450–​51 taste and, 443, 444, 455 Wilde and, 444–​45 Intersexes, The (Stevenson), 514–​15 interwar period artistic representation and, 81–​83 Berlin and, 85–​87 complexity of, 90–​91 degeneration and, 89–​91 drag and, 82, 84–​85 eugenics and, 89 European exiles and, 87–​91 film and, 86–​89 fin de siècle and, 80–​82 Freud and, 80 homosexuality and, 85–​86 lost generation of, 82–​85 modernity and, 82–​83, 91–​92 Nazism and, 87–​91

Index   703 overview of, 80, 91–​92 Paris and, 81–​82 politics and, 90–​91 salon culture and, 84, 89 Intimate Journals (Baudelaire), 363–​64 Ireland aestheticism and, 160–​62, 165 art for art’s sake and, 160 Celtic Revival and, 160–​61, 164, 338 cosmopolitanism and, 160, 162 empire and, 160 London and, 161 modernity and, 161 naturalism and, 160 overview of, 153–​54, 160, 170 realism and, 160 revolutionary nationalism in, 160 symbolism and, 160, 164 Ulster Literary Theatre in, 162–​65 urbanization and, 153, 160–​62 Wilde and, 160 “Iron Virgin, The” (Huneker), 507 “irrémédiable, L’ ” (Baudelaire), 361 Irwin, May, 517 Isherwood, Christopher, 85, 200, 202, 205, 420 Islam, 139, 249–​51, 260, 677, 681n52 isolation, 285–​94, 298n7, 603–​5 Italy absinthe and, 183 alienation and, 174 art for art’s sake and, 184 barbarians and, 175 bourgeoisie and, 184 il decadentismo in, 174–​76, 180–​86 distinctness of decadence in, 174–​ 76, 180–​83 historical context of, 175–​76 modernity and, 175–​76, 178–​79, 184, 185, 186–​87 new Italy, 175–​76, 184–​85 overview of, 174–​75, 186–​87 Romanticism and, 183–​86 scapigliatura in, 183–​84 tradition in, 175–​76, 183–​85 unification of, 174, 184 verismo in, 183–​84 women and, 185–​86

J J’accuse (Zola), 76 Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (McQueen), 435, 436f Jackson, Andrew, 54 Jackson, Holbrook, 61, 77, 98, 227, 237, 562, 618, 623 Jacobs, Harriet Ann, 70 Jacobs, Jane, 461, 477 Jacobsen, J. P., 211–​12 James, Henry, 68, 336, 344 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 117 Japan aestheticism and, 269, 270, 273, 278 art for art’s sake and, 269–​72, 273 Beardsley and, 269 conservatism and, 267 cosmopolitanism and, 274, 276, 278–​79 decline and, 264 identity and, 245–​46, 264–​65, 271 influence of, 264–​69, 279 Meiji Empire and, 245–​46, 264, 275–​76 modernity and, 264, 267, 274 myths and realities about, 272–​74 opening of, 245–​46, 264–​65, 274–​75 orientalism and, 269–​7 1 overview of, 264, 279 Pater and, 270 westernization and, 274–​79 Wilde and, 270–​7 1, 277 japonisme À rebours and, 271–​72, 400–​403, 405, 407, 409–​10 art nouveau and, 401 Beardsley and, 487–​88 book arts and, 400–​403, 405, 407, 409 definition of, 465 development of, 266, 268–​70, 277, 279, 279n1 overview of, 264–​65 Wilde and, 270–​72 jardin des supplices, Le (Mirbeau), 8, 563, 572–​73 Jefferson, Thomas, 54 jeune Belgique movement, La, 135–​37, 141, 148–​49, 156, 166 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw), 160

704   Index John the Baptist, 486, 489 Johnson, Lionel, 155–​56, 159, 340, 526, 528–​29, 585, 593–​94 Johnston, Holly James, 99–​100 Jonathan, Georg, 214 jongleuse, La (Rachilde), 571–​72 Jopling, Louise, 526 Jørgensen, Jens Lohfert, 604 Jouve, Séverine, 445 Joyce, James, 161–​62, 659 Joyce, Simon, 160 Julian the Apostate, 53, 55 Julius Caesar, 23, 30 Jullian, Philippe, 432–​33 Jung, Carl, 490, 654–​55 Junichirō, Tanizaki, 277 Jupiter Overthrown (Briusov), 53 Justine (de Sade), 290

K Kafka, Franz, 657, 659 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari), 239–​40 Kafū, Nagai, 277 Kahn, Gustave, 126–​28 Kant, Immanuel, 548–​49, 634, 671 Keble, John, 586 Keller, Thomas, 545 Keller, Von, 323–​24, 326 Kendra Onixxx (drag performer), 109 Kennaway, James, 509 Kennedy, Meegan, 630n6 Khnopff, Fernand, 75, 136, 141, 143 Khnopff, Georges, 141 Kieffer, Réné, 407 Kierkegaard, Søren, 214 Kilpi, Volter, 213, 216 Kingdom of Twilight, The (Reid), 165 Kingsley, Charles, 586–​87 Kingsley, Walter, 519 Kipling, Rudyard, 47–​48, 304, 309, 345 Kirifuri Waterfall, The (Hokusai), 403, 405f Kirksey, S. Eben, 620 Kleve, Stella, 213, 220 Klimt, Gustav, 266, 483, 491–​92, 492f, 500 Kobylianska, Olha, 227, 232, 235–​40 Krafft-​Ebing, Richard von, 46, 314, 652

Kraus, Karl, 201, 656 Kyrylova, Olha, 229

L Ladies Almanack, The (Barnes), 84 Ladies’ Paradise, The (Zola), 565–​66 Lady Gaga, 418, 437 Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925), 369–​74, 376f, 377f, 386 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde), 245, 369 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, 12 Landshoff-​Yorck, Ruth, 200–​205, 202f Lane, John, 97, 306, 308, 487, 617 Langlands, Rebecca, 23, 30 language D’Annunzio and, 181–​82 Belgium and, 141–​42, 145–​49 Mallarmé and, 137 Midhat and, 251–​54, 259 neology and, 146 Nordic cultures and, 210, 224n7 Russia and, 235 Ukraine and, 235–​36 “Langueur” (Verlaine), 39, 52, 100, 121, 125, 310 Laqueur, Thomas W., 237 Laver, James, 427 Laws (Plato), 44 Layard, A. H., 45, 48 Lays of Ancient Rome (Macaulay), 29 Le Corbusier (Charles-​Édouard Jeanneret), 475–​76 Le Gallienne, Richard, 154, 170, 308, 338, 340, 343–​44, 587 Lea, Marion, 320, 327 Learning from Las Vegas (Brown, Venturi, and Izenour), 476 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 354 Lebowitz, Fran, 105 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Hegel), 635 Ledger, Sally, 310 Lee, Vernon, 25, 63, 100, 157–​58, 301, 339–​41, 347, 511–​12, 528, 622 Legendary (2020–​), 105–​6 LeGrain, Pierre, 409–​12, 410f, 411f Lehtonen, Joel, 216–​19, 223 Lemaître, Jules, 125, 127

Index   705 Lemonnier, Camille, 138, 145, 147 Lempicka, Tamara de, 82 Leo IV, King, 623 Leopold II, King, 135, 502n21 Lepère, Auguste, 397–​405, 402f, 403f, 404f, 405f, 409, 412, 412f lesbianism, 63, 82–​84, 86, 232, 311, 520 Leverson, Ada, 306, 308, 347 Liberty of London (“Liberty’s”) (store), 445 Licht, Fred, 453 Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, The (David), 25, 25f Life, A (Svevo), 659–​60 Life of a Dancer (Landshoff-​Yorck), 202–​4 “Ligeia” (Poe), 312, 443 Lightman, Bernard, 621 Liliencron, Detlev von, 193 Liszt, Franz, 42, 511 “Liszt Étude, A” (Huneker), 511 Livingston, Jennie, 103–​4, 110 Livy, 22, 24, 27–​28 Lockerd, Martin, 585 Logierhaus zur Schwankenden Weltkugel, Das (Reventlow), 197–​98 Lombroso, Cesare, 64, 484, 496, 601, 652 London. See also Britain as capital of British decadence, 154, 156 Ireland and, 161 Paris and, 154–​55 regionalism and, 154, 156–​57 relocation of writers to, 154, 157 Symons and, 154–​55, 159 urbanization and, 153, 156–​57 London Nights (Symons), 155, 526, 533, 591–​92 “London Town” (Johnson), 156 London Visions (Binyon), 535 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 68–​70 Loos, Adolf, 473–​74, 477, 503n42 “Lord’s Prayer in B, The” (Huneker), 509 Lorrain, Jean (Paul Duval), 123, 147–​48, 302, 309, 314, 443, 563 “Losing a Halo” (Baudelaire), 362–​63, 365 “Lost Masterpiece, A” (Egerton), 305, 308 Louis XIV, King, 43–​44, 46, 52, 444, 543–​ 44, 556–​58 Louis XV, King, 46, 463 Louis XVI, King, 456, 543

Love’s Shadow (Leverson), 347 Lowe, Robert, 47 Lucie-​Smith, Edward, 76 Luckin, Bill, 620 Ludwig II of Bavaria, King, 446, 515 Luisa Casati with a Greyhound (Boldini), 431, 432f Lukács, Georg, 653 luxury À rebours and, 410, 412, 452 aestheticism and, 68 Belle Époque and, 71–​72 conspicuous consumption and, 55, 61, 67–​70, 74, 430 dandyism and, 423 decline and, 22 empire and, 44–​46, 50, 55 fashion and, 417 Gilded Age and, 67–​70 interior decoration and, 456–​57 politics and, 669–​70 Rome and, 22–​23, 29, 32–​34, 551 touch and, 565–​66 Lydian Empire, 46–​47

M Macauley, Thomas Babington, 585 Macdonald, William, 167–​68 MacDougall, Robert, 606 Machen, Arthur, 157, 159, 309–​10 Mackenzie, Compton, 347, 528 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 469–​70, 469f, 473, 477 MacLeod, Kirsten, 97, 288 Madame Chrysanthème (Loti), 274 Mädchen in Uniform (1931), 86–​87 Mädchen Manuela, Das (1933), 86 Mademoiselle de Maupin (Gautier), 7, 44, 74 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 123, 128, 136–​38, 140, 147–​49, 166, 508 magazines architecture and, 469 conservatism and, 123 essays and, 336, 340 France and, 118–​19, 123–​29 Germany and, 201 short stories and, 306–​9 Verlaine and, 124, 127–​29

706   Index Magda (Sudermann), 320, 323–​27 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 68 Magic-​City Ball, 82 Magic Mountain, The (Mann), 676 Magnificent Obsession (1954), 382 Mahoney, Kristin, 345 Mai ve Siyah (Ziya), 247, 254–​57, 255f, 260n4 maison d’un artiste, La (Goncourt), 446–​47, 450 Maistre, Joseph de, 673 Malik, Shushma, 623 Mallarmé, Stéphane art for art’s sake and, 74 book arts and, 396–​97 criticism of, 127–​28 France and, 118 influence of, 51, 71, 181 language and, 137 novels and, 121–​29 reception of, 125 Rome and, 52, 119 symbolism and, 97, 128, 396–​97 works by, 39, 52, 120, 126, 254 Malling, Mathilda, 213 Malombra (Fogazzaro), 185 Man and Superman (1903), 330–​31 “Man Who Loved Consumptives, The” (Lorrain), 309, 314 Manilius, 27–​28 Mann, Erika, 83, 85, 91 Mann, Klaus, 85–​86, 91, 203 Mann, Thomas, 192, 655 “Männerphantom der Frau, Das” (Reventlow), 196, 199 Many and the One, The (Landshoff-​Yorck), 202 Marcus Aurelius, 593–​94, 609 Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White (Sargent), 68, 69f marginalized identities, 97–​98, 106–​10 Marhoefer, Laurie, 93n27 Marholm, Laura, 193, 199 Marinetti, F. T., 91, 138–​39 Marius the Epicurean (Pater), 290, 589–​90, 593, 607–​10 Marquèze-​Pouey, Louis, 118 marquise de Sade, La (Rachilde), 123 Martian, The (Maurier), 618–​19 Martin, John, 42–​43, 42f, 48

Marx, Karl, 364, 476, 671–​73, 676 Marx, Roger, 398 “Masque of Music, A” (Huneker), 516 “Masque of the Red Death, The” (Poe), 443 Mataleena (Lehtonen), 218–​19 materiality, 3, 14, 53, 122, 265, 274, 312, 394, 510 Mathews, Elkin, 308 Matich, Olga, 234 Matthews, Brander, 302–​3 Mau, August, 466, 477n7 Maurier, George du, 271, 516, 618–​19, 627 Maurras, Charles, 141–​42 Maus, Octave, 137 Maxwell, Catherine, 102, 511 McCarthy, Justin, 321, 323 McGuinness, Patrick, 128, 485 McQueen, Alexander, 417, 435–​38 Meiji Empire, 245–​46 mêlée symboliste, La (Raynaud), 129 Melomaniacs (Huneker), 508 Mélusine (Péladan), 52 Memento (Vynnychenko), 232 men and masculinity, 40, 99, 232, 240, 259, 277, 417–​18, 423–​30, 487 Mencken, H. L., 509 Mendelssohn, Michèle, 445 Mephisto (Mann), 86 Merezhkovsky, Dmitry, 53, 229, 232 Metropolis (Lang), 86 Meunier, Charles, 408–​9, 407f, 468 Meynell, Alice, 527 Michel, Henri Marius, 396, 406–​7, 406f Micro-​organisms and Disease (Klein), 1 Midhat, Ahmet art for art’s sake and, 257 Bourget and, 254 conservatism and, 250, 253, 257 decadence controversy and, 250–​52 degeneration and, 257 influence of, 250, 253, 259–​60 language and, 251–​54, 259 modernity and, 250–​53, 257, 259–​60, 261n12 overview of, 249–​50 Servet-​i Fünun criticism of, 254–​60 symbolism and, 254 works by, 254, 258 Migiel, Marilyn, 188n37

Index   707 Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 271 Mill, John Stuart, 16n27 Miller, Monica L., 427–​30 Milthorpe, Naomi, 296 Minima Moralia (Adorno), 645 Mirabeau, Marquis de (Victor de Riqueti), 669–​70 Mirbeau, Octave, 8, 508, 563, 572–​74, 662, 674 Mirdja (Onerva), 213, 220–​21, 223 Mishima Yukio, 278–​79 Mistinguett (Jeanne Florentine Bourgeois), 81 modernism, 80–​83, 90–​92, 129, 156, 184–​86, 194, 221–​23, 249, 337, 653 modernity. See also urbanization alienation and, 2, 188n33, 296–​97, 299n14 architecture and, 462–​67 art nouveau and, 469 Belgium and, 137, 148–​49 Britain and, 153–​54, 156, 157, 159 conservatism and, 250, 252–​53, 257 contemporary decadence and, 97 decadence’s relation to, 2–​3, 12–​13, 80, 91, 97, 129–​30, 194–​95, 299n14, 418–​19, 653 degeneration and, 89–​90 disease and, 13 fashion and, 418–​19, 434, 438 fin de siècle and, 62, 65 France and, 118, 121, 129–​30 Freud and, 62 Germany and, 193–​95 industrialization in, 65–​69, 138, 143, 145, 175, 273, 364, 423, 483, 576 interwar period and, 82–​83, 91–​92 Ireland and, 161 Italy and, 175–​76, 178–​79, 184, 185, 186–​87 Japan and, 264, 267, 274 Midhat and, 250–​53, 257, 259–​60, 261n12 music and, 518 Nordau and, 653 Nordic cultures and, 209, 221–​23 novels and, 286–​298 politics and, 666, 668–​70, 673 prose poetry and, 354–​56 psychoanalysis and, 656, 659 symbolism and, 498–​99 touch and, 565–​66 Turkey and, 246–​52, 254–​55, 258

Ukraine and, 239 urbanization and, 154–​55 Verlaine and, 121 Mohr, Karl, 124 moines, Les (Verhaeren), 138 “Moment, The” (Vynnychenko), 230–​31 Monet, Claude, 516 Monocle, Le (bar), 82 Monsieur de Phocas (Lorrain), 123, 443 Monsieur Vénus (Rachilde), 83, 122–​23, 294, 570–​7 1 Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat), 117, 463–​64, 622, 670–​72 Montesquiou-​Fézensac, Robert de, 105, 125, 271, 394, 446–​49, 448f, 449f, 452 Moore, Charles W., 476 Moore, George, 160–​62 Moore, Madison, 418 Moréas, Jean, 124–​29 Moreau, Gustave, 56, 74, 122, 321, 397, 399, 483, 485, 486f, 487 Morel, Bénédict Augustin, 64, 484, 652 Morgan, J. P., 66 Mornand, Pierre, 391 Morris, Andrew R., 621 Morris, William, 444–​45, 468 mort de Sardanapale, La (Delacroix), 495 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 650 Mossa, Gustav-​Adolf, 483, 488–​89, 489f Moths (Ouida), 49 Moulin Rouge, 73, 81, 84 multiples splendeurs, Les (Verhaeren), 138 Munro, H. H., 48, 346 Munsey, Frank, 306 Murray, Alex, 97, 320 Müşahedat (Midhat), 253 music À rebours and, 513 absinthe and, 507 aestheticism and, 508 bourgeoisie and, 518 communities and, 518–​20 dangers associated with, 509 homosexuality and, 514–​16 idealism and, 511 innate talent and, 513 liberalism and, 509, 518

708   Index music (cont.) madness and, 509–​10 materiality and, 510–​14 modernity and, 518 naturalism and, 511 Nordau and, 509 overview of, 507–​8 Pater and, 508, 512, 518–​19 pianist tradition in, 508, 511–​14, 518 primitivism and, 518 queerness and, 514–​17 race and, 518–​20 realism and, 511 Romanticism and, 509, 513–​14 senses and, 510–​14 sexuality and, 507–​8, 514 Symons and, 512 synesthesia and, 510–​11 women and, 514–​17 “Music Makers, The” (O’Shaughnessy), 48–​49, 51 Mussolini, Benito, 91 My Life in Architecture (Cram), 471 Myers, Greg, 603 Myricae (Pascoli), 185 Mystic Flower (Moreau), 74

N Nabucco (Verdi), 43 narcissism, 52, 197, 265, 271, 292, 662 naturalism À rebours and, 4, 214 artifice and, 4, 232, 312, 400, 410, 538, 618 authorial voice and, 214–​15 Baudelaire and, 4, 230, 232 Belgium and, 138 dandyism and, 4 decay and, 210 Enlightenment and, 642–​43 environmental destruction and, 11–​12 fashion and, 417 France and, 183, 209, 211 Germany and, 194 Huneker and, 511 Huysmans and, 139 Ireland and, 160 music and, 511 Nordic cultures and, 210–​12, 214–​18, 221

realism and, 212 short stories and, 311–​12 symbolism and, 138 women and, 232 Nature morte (Olinet), 99, 100f Navarette, Susan, 312–​13 Nazimova, Alla, 87, 369–​80, 385–​86 Nazism, 87–​91, 196, 201–​2, 642, 645, 652 Nechui-​Levytskyi, Ivan, 230 Nero, Emperor, 3, 34, 39, 49–​50, 203, 245 Nesip, Süleyman, 257 neue Reich, Das (George), 196 Newman, John Henry, 584, 586, 588 New Republic, The (Mallock), 346, 588, 592 New Women, 205, 220, 232, 237–​40, 289, 308–​ 10, 313, 318–​19, 363 “New Year’s Day” (Davidson), 335 New York Times, 338, 371, 376, 378 Niels Lyhne (Jacobsen), 211–​12 Nietzsche, Friedrich Christianity and, 196, 637–​38 critiques of decadence by, 9–​10, 191–​92, 217, 634, 637–​38 death of God and, 639 decline and, 637, 639 influence of, 192, 217, 230–​31, 237–​38 last man of, 637, 639 modernity and, 675 morality and, 638 nationalism and, 10 overview of, 636–​39 politics and, 675 psychoanalysis and, 654–​55 rationality and, 637–​38 as recovering decadent, 647n7 rescue and, 646 revaluation of all values and, 231 skepticism and, 214 slave morality and, 637–​38 society and, 11 superman of, 174, 191, 217, 220, 230, 239 Wagner and, 10–​11, 192 women and, 199, 200, 238–​39 Nietzsche contra Wagner (Nietzsche), 192 “Nightingale and the Rose, The” (Wilde), 538 Nightwood (Barnes), 83–​84, 202, 296–​97 nihilism, 202, 602, 604, 609, 645

Index   709 Nisard, Désiré, 22, 119–​21, 245, 461–​62 Nocturne in Black and Gold (Whistler), 267, 268f, 270 Nolde, Emil, 89 Noontide Branches (Field), 158 Nordau, Max. See also Entartung aestheticism and, 653 artistic representation and, 64–​65 book arts and, 393 bourgeoisie and, 651 conservatism and, 65 cosmopolitanism and, 649 criticism of, 65 Darwinism and, 64, 485 decline and, 192–​93 degeneration and, 64, 76, 89, 161, 485, 651–​52 disease and, 652 education of, 650 fashion and, 422 fin de siècle and, 62, 64, 98 Freud and, 649–​51 impressionism and, 653 influence of, 653 interior decoration and, 451 modernity and, 653 music and, 509 optimism and, 651 rationality and, 651 realism and, 193 religion and, 650–​51 Rome and, 22 symbolism and, 653 Wilde and, 422–​23 women and, 199, 200, 319 works by, 649–​50 Nordic cultures aestheticism and, 216 alienation and, 215 barbarians and, 216 conservatism and, 209–​11 cosmopolitanism and, 209 Darwinism and, 214, 217 decay and, 210–​11, 215–​16 Denmark and, 210–​13, 223 development of, 211–​13 diversity of, 210–​11 Estonia and, 221–​23

fantasy and, 216 Finland and, 216, 218, 221 France and, 209–​11, 213–​14 freedom and, 216 language and, 210, 224n7 modernity and, 209, 221–​23 naturalism and, 210–​12, 214–​18, 221 overview of, 209–​10, 223–​24 pessimism and, 217, 219 primitivism and, 217–​18, 221–​24 realism and, 212, 215–​16, 224n10 Romanticism and, 212–​14, 216–​19 rural decadence in, 221–​23 sexuality and, 213 Sweden and, 210–​13, 223 symbolism and, 209, 216, 219, 221–​22 women and, 219–​22 Norup, Lis, 211 Nosferatu (1922), 86, 200 “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe” (Baudelaire), 303, 443 Notes of a Pug-​Nosed Mephistopheles (Vynnychenko), 231 Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith, The (Pinero), 328–​29 nouvelle Carthage, La (Eekhoud), 144–​45 nouvelle revue Française, La, 119 nouvelle rive gauche, La, 124 novels alienation and, 287–​88, 297–​98 bourgeoisie and, 286–​87 camp and, 290, 295 colonialism and, 292–​93 conservatism and, 291, 292 culture of negation and, 286–​88 decline and, 288 disease and, 294 elitism and, 288–​89, 291–​92 fin de siècle and, 287 France and, 121–​23 individualism and, 292, 297, 298n8 isolation and, 285–​94 limits of, 286 Mallarmé and, 121–​29 modernity and, 286–​98 negation culture and, 286–​88 overview of, 285–​86 parody in, 286

710   Index novels (cont.) politics and, 297 protagonists in, 286–​93 queerness and, 293 realism and, 286–​87, 290, 297 sexuality and, 293–​98 style of, 286–​87 Turkey and, 249–​54 Victorian culture and, 286–​91, 293–​94 “Novembre” (Pascoli), 185 Novye liudi (Gippius), 227, 232–​34, 236

O Oblomov (Goncharov), 53 Of Dandyism and of George Brummell (Barbey), 424–​26 Oken, Lorenz, 565 Olinet, Vincent, 99 Olivia (1950), 87 O’Malley, Patrick, 594 On Beauty (Smith), 102 On the Castration of Women (Nordau), 649–​50 On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche), 637–​39 “On the Kind of Fiction Called Morbid” (O’Sullivan), 342 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 626 “On the Symbolism of Destruction” (Gross), 655 “On Wine and Hashish” (Baudelaire), 550 Onerva, L., 213, 220–​21 opulence, 97, 104–​6, 145, 419, 442, 456 Ordinaire, Dionys, 124 Orfer, Léo d’, 126–​28 Orientalism, 269–​7 1, 492, 495, 574 ornament, 313, 319, 398–​400, 410–​11, 442, 455, 465, 470–​73, 483, 623 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, 48 “Oshibka” (Gippius), 234 Ottoman Empire, 14, 45, 80, 246, 250, 257, 260n2 “Overcoming of Naturalism, The” (Bahr), 194

P paganism, 12, 70, 99, 120, 182, 198–​99, 588–​90, 617, 674, 676 “Painter of Modern Life, The” (Baudelaire), 71–​72, 340, 343, 419, 426

Palacio, Jean de, 146 Palmer, R. R., 71 “Pan’s Pupil” (Reid), 165 Paperno, Irina, 233 paradis artificiels, Les (Baudelaire), 552 Parent-​Duchâtelet, Alexandre Jean Baptiste, 620 Paris. See also France America and, 54 fashion and, 418 fin de siècle and, 81 impressionism and, 126 interwar period and, 81–​82 London and, 154–​55 lost generation and, 82–​85 Moulin Rouge in, 73, 81, 84 public performances in, 81–​82 Rome and, 22 salon culture in, 84, 89 symbolism and, 126 Paris Is Burning (1990), 103–​4, 109–​10 Paris moderne, 124 Paris Sketches (Nordau), 650 Paris Spleen (Baudelaire), 355, 361–​62 Paris under the Third Republic (Nordau), 650 parisienne japonaise, La (Stevens), 265, 266f, 269, 271, 276 Parkerson, Michelle, 104 Parry, Owen G., 109–​10 Parties (Van Vechten), 296 Pascoli, Giovanni, 185 “Passed” (Mew), 302, 309–​11 Pater, Walter aestheticism and, 231, 270 architecture and, 467, 472 art for art’s sake and, 7, 12, 270 Catholicism and, 588–​90, 593–​94, 596 Darwinism and, 608 ecology and, 628 essays and, 336, 340 fin de siècle and, 63 Hellenism of, 165 incense and, 529 individualism and, 610 influence of, 161, 165 Japan and, 270 music and, 508, 512, 518–​19

Index   711 science and, 607–​10 sentimentality and, 270, 273 smell and, 525–​26, 528–​29, 532 smoking and, 526 style of, 336 works by, 270, 290, 302, 307, 337, 340, 347, 588–​90, 593, 607–​10 Patience (Gilbert), 337, 587 Pavlychko, Solomiya, 236, 239–​40 Pavlyshyn, Marko, 239 “peintre de la vie Moderne, Le” (Baudelaire), 71–​72, 340, 343, 419, 426 Péladan, Joséphin, 52, 71, 74–​76, 122–​23 Perlebryggeriet (Hval), 99 Persian Empire, 43–​44 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 44 “Perte d’aureole” (Baudelaire), 362–​63, 365 perversion, 2, 61, 123, 140, 293, 314, 320–​21, 512, 587–​88, 652 Perversion (Conybeare), 587–​88 pessimism À rebours and, 604–​5 Bourget and, 601–​2 individualism and, 601–​2 nihilism and, 604 Nordic cultures and, 217, 219 politics and, 672–​73 science and, 601–​3, 609 symbolism and, 485 Turkey and, 247 Pétomane (Joseph Pujol), 81 Petri, Julius Richard, 1–​2 Petronius, 21–​22, 24, 34, 121, 557 Petty Demon, The (Sologub), 53 Pfister, Oskar, 657 Pharais (Macleod), 166–​67 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 635 Philosophie zoologique (Lamarck), 484 philosophy. See also pessimism Darwinism and, 608 decline and, 634, 637, 639, 646 disease and, 655 Enlightenment and, 642–​45 overview of, 634–​35, 646 post-​Kantian tradition in, 634–​36 psychoanalysis and, 654–​55 rescue and, 646

skepticism in, 98, 186, 214, 314, 625 “Philosophy of Furniture, The” (Poe), 443–​44 Physiological Aesthetics (Allen), 509 Physiology of Taste, The (Brillat-​ Savarin), 549–​54 piacere, Il (Pleasure) (D’Annunzio) authorial distance and, 179 colonialism in, 177 importance of, 174–​76 influence of, 277 inspiration for, 185, 453 interior decoration in, 453 language and, 181–​82 overview of, 176–​77 political context of, 176–​78 style of, 181 touch in, 562, 574–​76 urbanization in, 178 women in, 179–​80 Picard, Edmond, 137, 140, 146 Pick, Daniel, 62 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) authorial distance and, 179 Catholicism in, 584, 586 decay in, 63, 626–​29 ecology in, 626–​29 essays and, 339, 347 incense in, 528 individualism in, 288, 290–​91, 606, 627 isolation in, 288, 290 japonisme in, 269 perfume in, 531–​32 preface of, 339 reception of, 97, 532 Rome and, 245 science in, 605–​7 smoking in, 526–​27 suicide in, 257, 605–​7 Pink Flamingos (1972), 382–​83, 385 “Piper of Dreams, The” (Huneker), 509–​10 Pirandello, Luigi, 186 Pissarro, Camille, 73 Plain Tales from the Hills (Kipling), 304 “Plainte d’automne” (Mallarmé), 39, 52, 120 Plato and Platonism (Pater), 608 Pleasure (D’Annunzio). See piacere, Il “Pleasure-​Pilgrim, The” (D’Arcy), 306, 308

712   Index Pléiade, La, 126, 128–​29 “pleure dans mon coeur, Il” (Verlaine), 125 Pliny the Elder, 27 Plutarch, 30, 33 Poe, Edgar Allan Baudelaire and, 303–​4, 443–​44 essays and, 340 influence of, 301–​4 interior decoration and, 442–​44 politics and, 674 sexuality and, 309 short stories and, 303–​4, 309 works by, 303, 308, 443–​44 Poema paradisiaco (D’Annunzio), 180 Poems (Binyon), 535 poetry. See prose poetry politics. See also conservatism aestheticism and, 12–​13, 237 D’Annunzio and, 229, 673 barbarians and, 671–​72 Baudelaire and, 12–​13, 120, 673–​74 Belle Époque and, 74–​76 bourgeoisie and, 675 Bourget and, 675 change in political order and, 667–​68, 672 classical antecedents of, 666–​68 dandyism and, 428–​29, 675 decline and, 668–​69, 670, 674, 676 elitism and, 674 Enlightenment and, 673 Gautier and, 12–​13, 120 historicism in, 670–​73 individualism and, 674–​77 interwar period and, 90–​91 luxury and, 669–​70 modernity and, 666, 668–​70, 673 novels and, 297 overview of, 666, 676–​77 pessimism and, 672–​73 progress and, 671–​73 reactionaries in, 676–​77 Rome and, 31–​32, 667–​68, 670–​72 socialism in, 61, 68, 217, 229, 291, 651, 672–​74 survey of thought on, 673–​76 Wilde and, 673–​74 Politics (Aristotle), 667 Polybius, 28, 667–​69

Polyester (1981), 369, 380–​84, 385f, 386 Pomp and Circumstance Marches (Elgar), 48 popular culture, 14, 97, 271 Pornocratès (Rops), 496–​97, 497f Porphyrion and Other Poems (Binyon), 536–​39 Porsenna, Lars, 26–​28 Porter, Charlotte, 324 Porter, Laurence, 293 Portrait du Sâr Joséphin Péladan (Séon), 74, 75f Portrait of Madame X (Sargent), 71, 72f, 420–​ 21, 421f Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 161 Portrait of Zélide, The (Scott), 472 Portrait of Zinaida Gippius (Bakst), 232, 233f Pose (2018–​), 106 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 646 postmodernism, 92, 461, 475–​76, 646, 677 Potolsky, Matthew, 96, 155, 394 Pougy, Liane de, 84 Pouliot, Alison, 619–​20 Pound, Ezra, 101, 161, 194–​95 Praz, Mario, 175, 180, 586–​87, 659–​60 premier verre, le sixième verre, Le (Daumier), 4 première maîtresse, La (Mendès), 123 Press, Caroline, 192 Prideaux, Sarah T., 393 “Priest and the Acolyte, The” (Bloxam), 591, 596 primitivism, 209, 217–​19, 221–​24, 518 Princess Tam Tam (1935), 84 Priscilla Chambers (drag performer), 109 prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, La (1966), 543–​ 44, 544f, 557 Private Road (Reid), 165 Professor Unrat (Mann), 88 progress, 2, 61–​62, 74–​76, 98, 174, 601, 642–​45, 646, 671–​73 prose poetry À rebours and, 352–​53 anarchism and, 363 Baudelaire and, 352–​64 bourgeoisie and, 351, 363–​64 Britain and, 354 definition of, 351 development of, 352–​58 France and, 353–​54

Index   713 Gautier and, 354–​56 modernity and, 354–​56 overview of, 351–​52, 363–​64 as paradox, 351 Romanticism and, 351 Rome and, 354–​55 symbolism and, 363 Symons and, 352, 365n25 urbanization and, 358–​64 violence and, 365n25 Pross, Caroline, 192, 194 Proudhon, Pierre-​Joseph, 498 Proust, Marcel, 659 “Psiche giacente” (D’Annunzio), 180 psychoanalysis. See also Freud, Sigmund Californization of, 661 culturalism and, 661 death of, 660–​61 decline and, 660–​61 development of, 654–​55 disease and, 656–​60 hysteria and, 649 modernity and, 656, 659 obsolescence and, 660–​62 overview of, 649 philosophy and, 654–​55 regeneration and, 662 sexuality and, 651, 654, 657 symbolism and, 654–​55, 657 women and, 649 Psychology of Clothes (Flügel), 423 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-​Ebing), 314 Punch, 46, 271, 319, 346, 583, 587 Purple Cloud, The (Shiel), 292–​93

Q Quai d’Orsay (Montesquiou’s apartment), 447, 448f “Queen of the Night” dress (Bakst), 431, 433f queerness contemporary decadence and, 12–​13, 97, 99, 107, 110 degeneration and, 97 fabulousness and, 418 fashion and, 437 Germany and, 201–​2 Huneker and, 514–​15

music and, 514–​17 novels and, 293 sexuality and, 437 Ukraine and, 238 women and, 238 Quintessence of Ibsenism, The (Ibsen), 330

R race art for art’s sake and, 519–​20 contemporary decadence and, 98, 102, 106, 109–​10 dandyism and, 426–​30, 428f–​29f Huneker and, 513–​14, 518–​20 music and, 518–​20 racism and, 14, 65, 67, 84, 109, 215, 426, 484, 514 symbolism and, 494–​96 Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery Vallette), 2, 83, 123, 294–​95, 558, 563, 570–​72, 576 Racine, Jean, 253, 354 Radical Decadence (Skelly), 105 Rall, Georges, 124 Random Itinerary, A (Davidson), 344 Rank, Otto, 656 Rasula, Jed, 510 Rawlinson, George, 44 Ray, Gordon N., 394, 397, 399 Raynaud, Ernest, 124, 126, 129 realism Huneker and, 511–​12 Ireland and, 160 music and, 511 naturalism and, 212 Nordau and, 193 Nordic cultures and, 212, 215–​16, 224n10 novels and, 286–​87, 290, 297 psychological realism, 224n10 Russia and, 233 short stories and, 309–​14 social realism, 212–​13, 224n10 theater and, 323–​24 Rebel, The (Camus), 426 rebellion, 98, 320, 324, 327, 329, 426–​27, 452 “Recapitulation” (Mendès), 652 “Recessional” (Kipling), 47 Reed, John R., 286–​87, 293, 302–​3, 399

714   Index Regeneration (Svevo), 660 “Reginald on Christmas Presents” (Munro), 346–​47 Reid, Forrest, 165 religion. See Anglo-Catholicism; Catholicism; Christianity; Islam Remains (Froude), 586 Renes, Liz, 420 “Reticence in Literature” (Crackanthorpe), 342–​43 Reventlow, Franziska zu, 195–​99, 196 205 Review of Reviews, 336 “Revised Psychoanalysis” (Adorno), 661 Revista Moderna, 498 Revolt against the Modern World (Evola), 677 Revue indépendante, 127 Reynière, Grimod de la, 555–​56 Reynolds, W. B., 162, 164–​65 Rhodes, Cecil, 47 Rhymers’ Club, 161 Rhys, Ernest, 157, 335, 337 Ribeiro, Aileen, 417 Richter, Dora, 85 Rights of Man (Paine), 31, 675 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 641–​42 Rimbaud, Arthur, 63, 74, 120–​21, 124, 126–​29, 363 rimes de joie, Les (Hannon), 139, 140f “Rise of the Red-​Carpet Dandy, The” (Guardian), 99 Robertson, J. M., 47, 54 Robertson, Pamela, 434 Robins, Elizabeth, 320, 327 Rochefort, Henri, 126 “Rockets” (Baudelaire), 230 Rodenbach, Georges, 123, 128, 136–​37, 143–​ 45, 148–​49 Rolfe, Frederick, 291, 297 Roller, Matthew, 27 Romains de la décadence, Les (Couture), 34, 34f, 119, 553, 553f, 637 Roman einer Tänzerin (Landshoff-​Yorck), 200 Romantic, The (Le Gallienne), 170, 659 Romanticism Baudelaire and, 362 bourgeoisie and, 6–​7 Britain and, 154–​55 Catholicism and, 586–​87

conservatism and, 245 criticism of, 245 decadence and, 11, 125 disease and, 185 ecology and, 625–​26 Enlightenment and, 644–​45 France and, 119, 125 Gilded Age and, 66 Italy and, 183–​86 music and, 509, 513–​14 Nordic cultures and, 212–​14, 216–​19 Rome and, 31–​32, 245, 667–​68 smell and, 538–​39 Rome America and, 55 architecture and, 461–​64 art for art’s sake and, 49 barbarians and, 21, 32, 52–​54, 671 Baudelaire and, 228 Britain and, 245 conservatism and, 29 criticism of exempla in, 27–​29, 30–​31 as decadence, 21–​22, 31, 35 decay and, 23 decline and, 21–​23, 31–​32, 35, 49–​52, 228, 668–​69, 670 ecology and, 622–​24 as example, 22, 39, 47, 101, 668–​7 1 exempla in, 23–​33 fashion and, 417 fin de siècle and, 101 France and, 117, 119, 121–​22, 126, 129 Gautier and, 31 Huysmans and, 22, 121–​22 literature in, 22–​23, 31, 35 luxury and, 22–​23, 29, 32–​34, 551 Mallarmé and, 52, 119 militarism in, 48 Nordau and, 22 overview of, 21–​22 Paris and, 22 politics and, 31–​32, 667–​68, 670–​72 prose poetry and, 354–​55 Republic of, 23–​32, 35, 668 Roman Empire, 31–​35, 48, 228, 667–​68 Romanticism and, 31–​32, 667–​68 Russia and, 228–​29

Index   715 Symons and, 228 taste and, 551–​55 urbanization and, 178–​79 Verlaine and, 21–​22, 24, 31, 39, 100, 121 Wilde and, 31, 245 Romer, Stephen, 310 Roosevelt, Theodore, 55, 67 Rops, Félicien, 139–​40, 496–​98 Rosenberg, Alfred, 676–​77 Roses of Heliogabalus, The (Alma-​Tadema), 50, 51f Rossellini, Roberto, 543, 545, 544f, 557 Rothenstein, William, 534 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 33, 423, 628, 670 Rowe, Colin, 476 “Royal Road to Parnassus, The” (Huneker), 511–​12 Ruban, Petrus, 407 Ruelas, Julio, 498–​99, 499f Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, The (Volney), 42–​43, 54 RuPaul’s Drag Race, 97, 103, 105–​6, 109 Ruskin, John, 11, 267, 271, 471–​72 Russia aestheticism and, 53, 236–​37 barbarians and, 52–​54 Christianity and, 229 decline and, 52–​54 empire and, 45–​46, 52–​54, 80, 228, 235 language and, 235 materialism and, 53–​54 overview of, 52–​54, 227–​29 populism in, 233, 237 realism and, 233 Rome and, 228–​29 sexuality and, 230, 232 Soviet Union in, 8, 80 symbolism and, 53 Ukraine and, 229–​32, 235, 236 women and, 232 Ruth (Randvere), 222 Ryan, John Charles, 619–​20

S “Sack of Rome, The” (anonymous), 22 Sade, Marquis, de, 290, 661 sadism, 294, 296, 378, 435, 572–​73

sadomasochism, 200, 278, 572 Sagan, Leontine, 86 Said, Edward, 235, 269 Saint-​André (Ambroise Saint-​André de Lignereux), 409, 409f Salomé (1922) acting in, 371, 375f art nouveau and, 373, 375–​76 camp and, 376, 378, 379f, 385–​86 cinematography of, 373–​74 costume design in, 371, 373f, 374f, 378, 379f reception of, 375–​76, 380 Salomé (Mossa), 488–​89, 489f, 491 Salomé (Wilde), 71, 87, 123, 147, 369, 563–​ 64, 572 Salomé Dancing before Herod (Moreau), 397, 486–​87, 486f Salome’s Last Dance (1988), 369, 377–​80, 379f, 385 Sanctis, Francesco de, 184 Sardanapale (Berlioz), 41–​42 Sardanapalus (Beckett and Lemon), 46–​47 Sardanapalus (Boxberg), 41 Sardanapalus (Byron), 39–​41, 45 Sardanapalus, King as caricature of decadence, 39–​41, 44 character of, 39–​41 Cicero and, 40 Dante and, 40 defenses of, 44 depiction of, 39–​42, 45–​46 empire and, 39–​42 funeral pyre of, 45 historical accounts of, 39–​41 Rome and, 21 suicide of, 41 Verlaine and, 39 Sardou, Victorien, 563 Sargent, John Singer, 68, 420, 422 Sartor Resartus (Carlyle), 424 Sartorio, Giulio Aristide, 483, 493–​96, 494f, 495f Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 201, 676 Satie, Erik, 74 Savoy, The, 306–​8, 338–​39, 342 Scaevola, Mucius, 26–​28, 33 Scapin, Le, 126–​28

716   Index Schnitzler, Arthur, 80 “School of Giorgione, The” (Pater), 270, 281n20 Schoolfield, George C., 190, 291 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 192, 214, 216, 220, 604, 612–​13, 634, 662 Schor, Naomi, 473 “Schwabinger Walpurgisnacht” (Reventlow), 197 science. See also Darwinism À rebours and, 600, 603–​5 Bourget and, 600–​601, 607 conservation of energy and, 602, 609–​10, 613 consolation of physics and, 609–​10 decline and, 601–​2 degeneration and, 609, 613 entropy in, 600, 602–​7, 609, 611, 613 Huysmans and, 600 individualism and, 600–​606, 610–​12 isolated systems and, 603–​5 memento mori and, 606 nihilism and, 604, 609 overview of, 600 Pater and, 607–​10 pessimism and, 601–​3, 609 progress and, 601 suicide and, 601–​3, 605, 609, 611–​13 thermodynamics in, 600–​603, 605–​6, 608–​ 9, 613 Victorian culture and, 602–​3 Scotland, 166–​68 Scott, Geoffrey, 468, 472–​73, 474 scribe, Le (Giraud), 136–​37, 148 Sea of Fertility, The (Mishima), 278 Sea without Shore (2015), 101, 102f “Seaward Lackland” (Symons), 305 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (Pinero), 319, 322 Seelensucher, Der (Groddeck), 656–​58 Şehabettin, Cenap, 257 Selected Writings (Symons), 533 Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin), 484 anti-​Semitism, 8, 76, 122, 487, 642, 645 “Sensations” (Rickett), 305 senses. See music; smell; symbolism; taste; touch Sensitiva amorosa (Hansson), 213 Sentences and Paragraphs (Davidson), 340

sentimentality, 156, 158, 234, 253, 270, 273, 288–​89, 308, 588–​91, 596–​97 Serao, Matilde, 185–​86 “serpent qui danse, Le” (Baudelaire), 259 serpentwithfeet (Josiah Wise), 99 Servet-​i Fünun, 247–​49, 248f, 255–​60 Seviner, Zeynep, 261n16 sexuality. See also homosexuality androgyny, 74, 232–​34, 240, 378 Berlin and, 85–​86 bourgeoisie and, 236–​37 dandyism and, 314 death and, 654 disease and, 578n30 ecology and, 626 fin de siècle and, 85 Germany and, 193–​94 heteronormativity in, 97, 109, 123, 237, 293, 423, 426, 571 interior decoration and, 450–​51 music and, 507–​8, 514 Nordic cultures and, 213 novels and, 293–​98 perversion and, 2, 61, 123, 140, 293, 314, 320–​ 21, 512, 587–​88, 652 psychoanalysis and, 651, 654, 657 queerness and, 437 Russia and, 230, 232 short stories and, 309, 311–​12, 314 smell and, 532 theater and, 320 touch and, 568 Ukraine and, 227, 232 Victorian culture and, 309 women and, 199, 232, 237, 437 Shakespeare, William, 51–​52, 66, 307, 342, 354, 655 Shan Van Vocht, The (Rooney), 160 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod), 154, 166–​68, 622 Shaw, George Bernard, 65, 160, 325–​26, 330–​31 Shaw, Michael, 166–​67 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 185 Shepherd-​Barr, Kirsten, 321 Sherry, Vincent, 288, 653 short stories aestheticism and, 302, 307, 315 artifice and, 306, 308, 310, 312

Index   717 Baudelaire and, 303 Beardsley and, 302 Britain and, 301–​2, 306 collections of, 308–​9 dandyism and, 314 definition of, 302, 306, 309 development of, 301–​6, 309 elitism and, 307 excess and, 303–​6 fantasy and, 309–​14 Gautier and, 303–​4 magazines and, 306–​9 naturalism and, 311–​12 overview of, 301–​2, 315 realism and, 309–​14 sexuality and, 309, 311–​12, 314 symbolism and, 311 Symons and, 301, 303–​4, 308, 310 themes of, 301–​2, 304–​5, 308 types of, 302, 304–​5 Victorian culture and, 301, 309–​10, 314 Wilde and, 302, 304–​5, 314–​15 women and, 308–​10, 312–​13 “Short Story, The” (Wedmore), 303 “Siegfried’s Death” (Huneker), 515 Signac, Paul, 73 Silhouettes (Symons), 155, 526 Silius Italicus, 27 Silverman, Debora L., 502n21 Silverman, Willa, 392, 395, 397 “Simple Story, A” (Shannon), 307 Sinclair, Upton, 68 Siren of the Tropics (1927), 84 Sirk, Douglas, 380–​84, 386 skepticism, 98, 186, 214, 314, 625 “Skify” (Blok), 54 Skorpion, Der (Weirauch), 86 smell conservatism and, 532 dandyism and, 525, 531–​32 homosexuality and, 532 incense and, 528–​29 olfactif and, 525, 530 overview of, 525, 538–​39 Pater and, 525–​26, 528–​29, 532 perfume and, 529–​32 Romanticism and, 538–​39

scented texts and, 532–​34 sexuality and, 532 smoking and, 525–​28 symbolism and, 533 Symons and, 532–​34 urbanization and, 534–​38 Victorian culture and, 530–​32 Wilde and, 525, 531 women and, 530–​32 Smith, Adam, 612, 670 Snow, John, 621 social justice, 12–​13, 16n27, 96 “Social Organism, The” (Spencer), 601 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore), 8 socialism, 61, 68, 217, 229, 291, 651, 672–​74 Socrates, 30, 344, 637–​38 Söder, Hans-​Peter, 651 soil (serpentwithfeet), 99 soirs, Les (Verhaeren), 138 Solidor, Suzy, 82 solipsism, 48, 101–​2, 287, 290–​94, 339, 509, 567, 608, 610, 674 Sologub, Fyodor, 53 Somigli, Luca, 184 “Song” (Gippius), 234 “Sonnet to Form” (Briusov), 53 Sontag, Susan, 376, 418 Sōseki Natsume, 277–​79 “Soul of Man under Socialism, The” (Wilde), 675–​76 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 519–​20, 519f Spanish-​American War (1898), 55 Spencer, Herbert, 62, 484, 601–​3, 606–​10, 612 Spender, Stephen, 200 Spengler, Oswald, 47, 672–​73 “Sphinx without a Secret, The” (Wilde), 305 Spielrein, Sabina, 654–​55 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 670 Spiritual Adventures (Symons), 302 spleen de Paris, Le (Baudelaire), 355, 361–​62 “squelette, Le” (Verlaine), 124 Stanford, Derek, 302 Stanley, Henry Morton, 135 “Statute of Limitations, A” (Dowson), 305 Stein, Gertrude, 82 “Stella Maris” (Symons), 310

718   Index Stephen, Virginia, 338 Stetz, Margaret D., 101–​2, 363 Stilling, Robert, 426 Stomach Dance, The (Beardsley), 371, 372f Stone, Jonathan, 232–​33 Strachey, Lytton, 592 Strand Magazine, The, 306 Strauss, Richard, 201, 508, 511–​12 Strecker, Karl, 198 Strindberg, August, 193, 214, 217–​18 Stuck, Franz von, 483, 490–​91, 490f, 494–​ 95, 498 Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Pater), 290, 340, 532, 562, 588–​90, 608, 610, 628 Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (Huneker), 512 Studies of the Greek Poets (Symonds), 533 Studio, The, 469 “Study in Sentimentality, A” (Crackanthorpe), 308 Study of Sociology, The (Spencer), 626 Stutfield, Hugh E. M., 306–​7 Substance of Gothic, The (Cram), 471 Suetonius, 3, 49, 419, 554 suicide, 33–​34, 41, 257, 601–​7, 609, 611–​13 Sundberg, Per B., 456 Sünde, Die (Stuck), 490–​91, 490f, 495, 502n28 Svevo, Italo (Ettore Schmitz), 186, 658–​60, 662 “Swan, The” (Baudelaire), 2, 361 Sweden, decadence in, 210–​11, 213, 223 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 357–​58 Swinburne, A. C., 99, 101, 136, 161, 180, 290, 517, 525, 618, 628, 653 symbolism À rebours and, 396, 405, 410–​12, 485–​87 anarchism and, 73–​74, 76 animals and, 496–​500 art for art’s sake and, 74 art nouveau and, 499 Baudelaire and, 496 Beardsley and, 487, 492–​93 Belgium and, 136–​38, 145 Belle Époque and, 74–​76 Berlin and, 493 biblical symbols in, 485–​91 book arts and, 10–​12, 393, 396–​97, 405

conservatism and, 74 contemporary decadence and, 97 cosmopolitanism and, 483, 500 Darwinism and, 484–​85, 487, 492 decadence and, 76, 126, 128, 483–​85, 500 degeneration and, 484–​85, 492 development of, 61, 128, 483 France and, 125–​27 impressionism and, 126 Ireland and, 160, 164 Mallarmé and, 97, 128, 396–​97 Midhat and, 254 modernity and, 498–​99 mythological monsters and, 491–​96 naturalism and, 138 Nordau and, 653 Nordic cultures and, 209, 216, 219, 221–​22 overview of, 483–​84, 500 Paris and, 126 pessimism and, 485 progress and, 74–​76 psychoanalysis and, 654–​55, 657 race and, 494–​96 republicanism and, 74–​76 Russia and, 53 short stories and, 311 Symons and, 137–​38, 262n22 theater and, 323 women and, 484, 487–​91, 495–​98 Symbolist Movement in Literature, The (Symons), 137 symboliste, Le, 128 Syme, Ronald, 50 Symonds, John Addington, 526 Symons, Arthur art for art’s sake and, 308 Belgium and, 137–​38, 143 Catholicism and, 591–​93 countryside holidays of, 157–​59 Darwinism and, 602 disease and, 2, 4, 98, 161, 303, 321, 341 empire and, 228 essays and, 338–​43, 347 fin de siècle and, 65 France and, 341–​42 influence of, 161 London and, 154–​55, 159

Index   719 music and, 512 prose poetry and, 352, 365n25 Rome and, 228 short stories and, 301, 303–​4, 308, 310 smell and, 532–​34 smoking and, 526 symbolism and, 137–​38, 262n22 touch and, 562 urbanization and, 154–​55, 157 synesthesia, 125, 128, 510–​11 Synge, J. M., 160–​61 syphilis, 329, 484, 562, 567–​68 syrtes, Les (Moréas), 124

T Tablada, José Juan, 498 Taine, Hippolyte, 121–​22, 209, 222, 652 Tale of Genji (1008), 269 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens), 46 Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (Poe), 443–​44 Tanizaki Junichirō, 277–​79 Tarquinius Superbus, 24–​25 taste À rebours and, 554–​58 aestheticism and, 548–​49 artifice and, 544 bad taste, 455 Baudelaire and, 550–​53 black feasts and, 554–​58 conservatism and, 110 contemporary decadence and, 97, 99, 105–​ 8, 110 dining and, 545–​47 disagreements about, 549 drag and, 105–​8 elitism and, 543–​45 food metaphors and, 554–​58 France and, 543–​44, 547, 556–​58 gourmandism and, 551–​52 haute cuisine and, 545 interior decoration and, 443, 444, 455 osmazome and, 557–​58 overview of, 543–​45, 558 physiology of, 547–​53 Rome and, 551–​55 umami and, 547–​48 Taylor, Alfred, 377–​78

Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 493–​94 Temple, The (Spender), 200 “Ten O’Clock Lecture” (Whistler), 267, 340 tentation de Saint Antoine, La (Flaubert), 273 tentation de Saint Antoine, La (Rops), 498 Teslim-​i Hâkikat (Midhat), 258 Thé chez Miranda (Moréas and Adam), 127 theater artifice and, 321 Baudelaire and, 323, 325 bourgeoisie and, 323 Bourget and, 324, 328 Catholicism and, 591–​94 conservatism and, 319 criticism of, 324–​27 dandyism and, 323 development of, 318–​19 film and, 368–​69 individualism and, 328, 331 overview of, 318–​20, 331 realism and, 323–​24 sexuality and, 320 symbolism and, 323 theatrical ripostes and, 328–​31 women and, 318–​31 theology. See Anglo-Catholicism; Catholicism; Christianity; Islam Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), 67–​68 Thomas, Edward, 161–​62 Thompson in Tir-​na-​n-​Og (MacNamara), 164 Thoreau, Henry David, 66 Thornton, R. K. R., 257 Thucydides, 667, 669 Thurman, Wallace, 518 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 199, 229, 637, 639, 646 Times (London), 45, 324–25 Timsal-​i Cehâlet (Fikret), 258 “Tobacco Clouds” (Johnson), 305, 340, 594 Tomson, J. Arthur, 167–​68 Toner, Jerry, 22 “Top Hat, The” (Beerbohm), 345 Torture Garden (Mirbeau), 8, 563, 572–​73 touch À rebours and, 562, 566–​70 D’Annunzio and, 563, 574–​76 Beardsley and, 564

720   Index touch (cont.) contaminating bodies and, 572–​74 development of, 565 disease and, 568 disgust and, 563–​64, 568–​69 flâneuses and, 565–​66 haphephobia and, 570–​72 haptoglyphics and (Garrington), 574–​76 Huysmans and, 568–​70, 576 luxury and, 565–​66 modernity and, 565–​66 overview of, 562, 576 sexuality and, 568 Symons and, 562 syphilis and, 562, 568 trauma and, 567–​70 urbanization and, 565–​66 Wilde and, 563–​64 women and, 562, 566, 570–​72, 574 Zola and, 565–​67 Toulouse-​Lautrec, Henri de, 73, 81 “Towards Aristocracy” (Corvo), 291 Towards Democracy (Carpenter), 291 Toynbee, Arnold, 672 Traité du verbe (Ghil), 126 transgender persons, 85, 106, 109 Trette mænd (Garborg), 214–​15, 218, 223 Trézenik, Léo (Léon Epinette), 124 trionfo della morte, Il (D’Annunzio), 179–​80, 295, 493–​94 Triumph of Alexander the Great, The (Moreau), 56, 56f Trump, Donald, 98, 103–​6, 112n33, 442, 455–​57 Tsarivna (Kobylianska), 238–​39 Tuglas, Friedebert, 209, 222–​23, 225n37 Turkey aestheticism and, 257 art for art’s sake and, 249 conservatism and, 250, 252, 254 decadence controversy in, 45, 250–​52 decline and, 246–​47, 260 France and, 246, 247 identity in, 246, 249–​50 modernity and, 246–​52, 254–​55, 258 novels and, 249–​54 Ottoman Empire in, 14, 45, 80, 246, 250, 257, 260n2

overview of, 245–​46, 260 pessimism and, 247 Servet-​i Fünun in, 254–​60 Tanzimat era in, 246, 250 westernization in, 249–​52, 259–​60 Turner, J. M. W., 267 Twain, Mark, 66 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 637

U Ukiyo-​e (genre), 400–​401 Ukraine barbarians and, 228 decay and, 228 decline and, 228 empire and, 228–​29 language and, 235–​36 modernity and, 239 newness and, 227, 232, 236, 240 overview of, 14, 227, 235, 240 populism and, 240 queerness and, 238 revolutionaries and, 229–​32 Russia and, 229–​32, 235, 236 sexuality and, 227, 232 statelessness of, 236 women and, 227–​28 Uladh: A Literary & Critical Magazine, 162–​ 65, 163f Ulster Literary Theatre, 162–​64 Ulysses (Joyce), 161, 337 umami, 547-​48 Under the Hill (Beardsley), 592 United Kingdom. See Britain; Ireland; Scotland United States of America. See America urbanization aestheticism and, 168 America and, 461 D’Annunzio and, 178 architecture and, 461 Baudelaire and, 358–​61 Belgium and, 141–​45 bourgeoisie and, 153 Britain and, 153 Catholicism and, 593–​94 criticism of, 61–​62, 64, 66, 461

Index   721 Ireland and, 153, 160–​62 London and, 153, 156–​57 modernity and, 154–​55 prose poetry and, 358–​64 Rome and, 178–​79 smell and, 534–​38 Symons and, 154–​55, 157 touch and, 565–​66 Uzanne, Octave, 392–​93, 395, 398–​99, 406–​7

V Valerius Maximus, 26, 28 Valmouth (Firbank), 296 “Valse Mélancolique” (Kobylianska), 237–​38 van de Velde, Henry, 468 Van Enger, Charles, 371 van Gogh, Vincent, 89 Van nu en straks, 146 Vander Von Odd (drag performer), 107–​8 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 66 Vanier, Léon, 124 Veblen, Thorstein, 67–​68 Velleius Paterculus, 29 vergini delle rocce, Le (D’Annunzio), 178 Verhaeren, Émile, 136–​39, 145, 147–​49, 274 Verlaine, Paul absinthe and, 4, 305, 498 conservatism and, 245 decadence repudiated by, 129 decline and, 21–​22, 35, 118 Elagabalus and, 39 France and, 118 influence of, 125 looking backward and, 100–​101 magazines and, 124, 127–​29 modernity and, 121 Rome and, 21–​22, 24, 31, 39, 100, 121 Sardanapalus and, 39 Second Empire and, 100 style of, 21–​22 works by, 39, 52, 100, 121, 124–​25, 128–​29, 310 “Verses on the Beautiful Lady” (Blok), 54 via del male, La (Deledda), 186 Vicaire, Gabriel, 124–​25 vice suprême, La (Péladan), 71, 75, 122 Vico, Giambattista, 672 Victoria Black (drag performer), 109

Victorian culture conservatism and, 307 decline and, 45–​47 degeneration and, 652 empire and, 45–​47 essays and, 345 novels and, 286–​91, 293–​94 science and, 602–​3 sexuality and, 309 short stories and, 301, 309–​10, 314 smell and, 530–​32 Wilde and, 290–​91 Vidal, Gore, 55 Viel, Charles-​François, 462–​66, 471–​72, 473, 477 Vielé-​Griffin, Francis, 128 Vielen und der Eine, Die (Landshoff-​ Yorck), 200 Viertel, Salka, 89 Vignettes (Crackanthorpe), 340 villes tentaculaires, Les (Verhaeren), 138–​39 Vintage (Burns), 168, 169f Viollet-​le-​Duc, Eugène-​Emmanuel, 468 “Viragines oder Hetären?” (Reventlow), 196, 198–​99 Virgins of the Rocks, The (D’Annunzio), 178 vision. See Gourmont; senses; symbolism Visionaries (Huneker), 508 Vita vecchia (Synge), 161 Vitellius, 49–​50, 553–​54 Vitruvius, 463, 465–​67 Vittoriale degli Italiani (D’Annunzio), 453–​55, 454f, 457–​58 Vivien, Renée, 101 vogue, La, 126–​28 Vogue, 527 Voisin (restaurant), 545–​47, 546f Voltaire (François-​Marie Arouet), 24–​25, 170, 618, 622 Volynsky, Akim, 232 Vynnychenko, Volodymyr, 227, 229–​30, 231–​32, 240

W Wadlaw, Christopher, 606 Wagner, Richard degeneration and, 192 Freud and, 655

722   Index Wagner, Richard (cont.) Gesamtkunstwerk and, 468 homosexuality and, 515 influence of, 11, 122, 164, 192, 508, 515, 591 nationalism and, 10 Nietzsche and, 10–​11, 192 Nordau and, 192 women and, 517 Wales, decadence in, 156–​59, 170 Walkley, A. B., 326–​27 Walküre, Die (Wagner), 515 Waller, Max, 137 “Wälsungenblut” (Mann), 192, 515 Walter Gropius House, 474, 475f Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Jung), 654 Warner, Charles Dudley, 66 Washington, Booker T., 70 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 337 Waters, Alice, 545 Waters, John, 369, 380–​86 Wedmore, Frederick, 303–​4 Weimar Republic, 190–​91, 193, 195–​205, 420, 474 Weir, David, 286, 399, 455, 563, 625–​26, 631n29 Weirauch, Anna, 85 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 520 Weltlein, Thomas, 658 West, Kanye, 430 Western Civilization, 47, 53–​54, 195, 250, 642 Wharton, Edith, 61, 68, 507 “What is Oblomovism?” (Dobrolyúbov), 53 What Is to Be Done? (Chernyshevsky), 233 When William Came (Saki), 48 Whistler, James McNeill, 266–​68, 270–​7 1, 276, 288, 340 White, Patricia, 376 “White Night, A” (Mew), 596 Whitman, Walt, 66, 147–​48, 354 “Wicked Voice, A” (Lee), 516 Wilde, Oscar. See also Picture of Dorian Gray, The absinthe and, 4 aestheticism and, 270, 587 Anglo-​Catholicism and, 584–​86 architecture and, 470 arrest of, 63, 65, 306, 338, 368, 592

art for art’s sake and, 74 authorial distance and, 179 beauty and, 74, 339, 444–​45, 538 countryside holidays of, 157 dandyism and, 426, 525 Darwinism and, 626 decay and, 626–​29 ecology and, 619, 626–​29 Elagabalus and, 245 elitism and, 245, 288 essays and, 336–​37, 339–​40, 344–​47 fashion and, 419, 422–​23, 430 film and, 368–​80, 386 fin de siècle and, 63 homosexuality and, 63, 306, 346, 368, 532–​33, 592 humor and, 345–​46 influence of, 161 interior decoration and, 444–​45 Ireland and, 160 Japan and, 270–​7 1, 277 Nero and, 49, 50f Nordau and, 422–​23 politics and, 673–​74 Rome and, 31, 245 short stories and, 302, 304–​5, 314–​15 smell and, 525, 531 touch and, 563–​64 Victorian culture and, 290–​91 Wilhelm Meister (Goethe), 212 Wilhelmine Empire, 190–​91, 193, 195, 201–​ 3, 205 Williams, Raymond, 12 Willinger, Markus, 677 Willow Tea Rooms (Mackintosh), 468, 469f Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 589 Winock, Michel, 118 Winsloe, Christa, 86–​87 Winterson, Jeanette, 296–​97 Woeste, Charles, 148 Wolfe, Tom, 427 “Woman Who Loved Chopin, The” (Huneker), 512–​13 women and femininity À rebours and, 487, 578n30 absinthe and, 15n9 androgyny and, 74, 232–​34, 240, 378

Index   723 D’Annunzio and, 179–​80 artifice and, 232, 234, 326, 381 Baudelaire and, 325–​26 Beardsley and, 487 dandyism and, 430, 437–​38 drag and, 99 essays and, 343 fashion and, 430–​36 feminism and, 105, 190, 196–​98, 217, 227, 236, 319, 371, 498, 677 femme fatale and, 88, 180, 204–​5, 212, 219–​21, 234, 312, 343, 491, 570–​7 1 film and, 371 gender roles and, 85, 190, 199, 221, 230, 232, 381, 571 Germany and, 190, 195–​203 Huneker and, 516–​17 Huysmans and, 570 hysteria and, 138, 199, 319, 423, 485, 515–​17, 649, 652–​53 individualism and, 237–​38, 328 Italy and, 185–​86 misogyny and, 205, 215, 221, 332, 422, 435, 487, 517 music and, 514–​17 naturalism and, 232 New Women, 205, 220, 232, 237–​40, 289, 308–​10, 313, 318–​19, 363 Nordau and, 199, 200, 319 Nordic cultures and, 219–​22 psychoanalysis and, 649 queerness and, 238 Russia and, 232 sexuality and, 199, 232, 237, 437 short stories and, 308–​10, 312–​13 smell and, 530–​32

smoking and, 527 symbolism and, 484, 487–​91, 495–​98 theater and, 318–​31 touch and, 562, 566, 570–​72, 574 Ukraine and, 227–​28 Woodruff, L. L., 661–​62 Woolf, Virginia, 335–​37, 431 Works and Days (Hesiod), 66, 666 Wratislaw, Theodore, 309, 594 Wright, Thomas, 529 Written on the Wind (1956), 381–​83

X X, Malcolm, 429, 429f “Xélucha” (Shiel), 302, 309, 312–​14 Xerxes the Great, 44, 55

Y Yannis, Kanarakis, 608 Yeats, William Butler, 161–​62, 164, 166, 338, 346, 363, 662 Yellow Book, The (1894–​1897), 63–​64, 97, 167, 302, 306–​8, 310, 339, 342, 469 Yōfuku (Chikanobu), 275–​76 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 278

Z Zadorojnyi, Alexei, 30 Zauberberg, Der (Mann), 676 Zeitz-​Lindamood, Theresa, 453 Zeno’s Conscience (Svevo), 658–​60 Zo’har (Mendès), 123 Zola, Émile, 2, 76, 121, 212, 271, 511, 565–​67, 576 Zouzou (1934), 84 Zubair, Sarah-​Jean, 105 Zweig, Stefan, 139