Desire Nisard's opinions on literary decadence:
In his work Etudes de moeurs et de critique sur les poetes latins de la decadence in 1834, Nisard viewed a "decadent style" as a reflection of romantic excesses in the artist's mind. According to Nisard, the main characteristics of literary decadence were the following: "the profuse use of description, the prominence of detail, and [...] the elevation of the imaginative power, to the detriment of reason" (Calinescu 161). As a result of this unchecked imagination and excessive precision in detail,Nisard believed that "the normal relationship pf a wprl's parts to its whole is destroyed, the work disintegrating into a multitude of overwrought fragments" (Calinescu 158). Furthermore, Nisard emphasized the harmful deceptive nature of literary decadence and its potential to hurt others.
Baudelaire's belief in the synthetic and unifying nature of decadent art:
"It is an inevitable result of decadence that every art today reveals a desire to encroach upon neighboring arts, and the painters introduce musical scales, sculptors use color, writers use the plastic means, and other artists, those who concern us today, display a kind of encyclopedic philosophy in the plastic arts themselves"
Theophile Gautier's view of decadence as mentioned in his 1868 preface to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal:
"The style inadequately called decadence is nothing but art arrived at the point of extreme maturity yielded by the slanting suns of aged civilizations: an ingenious, complicated style, full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries of speech, borrowing from all technical vocabularies, taking color from all palettes and notes from all keyboards, struggling to render what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive in the outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, the dying confessions of passions grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness."
Paul Bourget's depiction of literary decadence:
"a style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book breaks down to make place for the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down to make place for the independence of the sentence and in which the sentence breaks down to make place for the independence of the word"
Richard Le Gallienne's view of Decadence:
[...] in decadent literature the relations, the due proportions, are ignored. One might say that literary decadence consists in the euphuistic expression of isolated observations.Thus disease, which is the favourite theme of decadents, does not in itself make for decadence: it is only when as often, it is studied apart from its relations to health, to the great vital center of things, that it does so. Any point of view, seriously taken, which ignores the complete view, approaches decadence.
To notice only the picturesqye effects of a begger's rags as Gautier, the colour-scheme of a tippler's nose, like M. Huysmans, to consider one's mother merely prismatically like Mr. Whistler - these are examples of the decadent attitude. At the bottom, decadence is merely limited thinking, often insane thinking...".
Anatole Baju's Thoughts on Decadence as a Defiance of Conventions:
"Not to recognize the state of decadence which we are in would be the height of insensibility. Religion, customs, justice, everything decays...Society comes apart under the corrosive action of a deliquescent civilization...We commit this leaf to murdersome innovations, to stupefying audacities, to incoherence of thirty-six atmospheres at the furthest limit of their compatibility with those archaic conventions labeled by the term public morality. We will be the stars of an ideal literature...In a word, we will be the Mahdis screaming and preaching eternally the dogma of elixir, the quintessential word of triumphant decadisme".
The ideal of literary decadence according to Arthur Symons:
"To fix the last fine shade, the quintessence of things; to fix it fleetingly; to be a disembodied voice, and yet the voice of a human soul: that is the ideal of Decadence, and it is what Paul Verlaine has achieved."
Arthur Symons'Perception of Literary Decadence:
"If what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art-those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities-then this representative literature of today, interesting, beautiful, novel as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease."
Friedriech Nietzsche's views on literary decadence:
Nietzche's views on decadence were mostly formed out of his belief that Richard Wagner's music reflected such decadence. In The Case against Wagner, Nietzsche wrote: "Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence-I had reasons. "Good and Evil" is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptons of decline, one understands morality, too - one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life." Although like Nisard, Nietzsche mainly stresses the deceptive character of decadence and underlines how its corruption can be seen underneath its pose of transcendent art.In Nietzsche's view, decadence in art is tied to a loss of the will to live which, in turn, creates within resentful individuals the desire to revenge themselves on life.To Nietzche, decadence is often a willed phenomenon. Yet, he still sees it as a necessary element which belongs to many periods and affects many people, but also warns against its power to weaken the parts of the healthy social organism in a psychological manner.Thus, according to Nietzsche, decadence "appears as a psychological, moral, or aesthetic self-deception, as a result of which weakness becomes a task." (Calinescu 183). Nietzsche even believes that decadence creates a confusion between cause and effect. Although Nietzsche faults decadent art for its illusive qualities, he still believes that it is the nature of art to promote the will to illusion. However, to Nietzsche, decadent art's will to illusion hinders life and, as a result, he assigns it a negative value.Nietzsche believes that decadent art confuses illusion with reality as opposed to other artistic expressions in which the illusion becomes self-conscious. Because decadent art thus invokes the dangers of self-deception, Nietzche feels it hinders life. In a passage which echoes Bourget, Nietzsche writes: "What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole-the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will...". Finally, Nietzsche attributed the manifestation of decadence and its flaws to an excessive form of Romanticism.
Works Consulted
Calinescu, Matei. Five faces of modernity : modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism.Durham : Duke University Press, 1987.
John Reed- Reed divides fictional decadence into two categories: the decadent novel and the novel of decadence.A decadent novel contains a style which embodies Decadent aesthetic assumptions while a novel of decadence contains decadent themes and subjects,often told in a rather conventional manner. As for decadent art itself, Reed believes it possess a "transitional, ambiguous nature"(17) and then goes on to state that in decadent art "No state is permanent; all is open to rearrangement.Life is a form of art, but one that can never be completed. Decadent art balances linearity and spatiality, between explicitness and suggestion, between harmony and discord, between tradition and innovation, between story and image."
George Ross Ridge- Ross Ridge, in contrast to Reed's division of decadent fiction and his emphasis on style, believes decadence to be a "style or a social state reflected in literature, or both at once" and even underlines the latter in his definition of French decadence as "the literature of this period which implicitly or explicitly reflects the general obsession with social, political, moral decadence."
R.K.R. Thornton - More so than other critics, Thornton holds a more pessimistic view of decadence, but still acknowledges it wide reach in this passage: "the idea of decline reached into many different areas of Victorian thought: general theories of population and the degeneration of races; socialism and the rise of the lower classes; the decline of British agriculture; the terrible condition of the poorest people in the country; evolutionary theories; theories of mental health; and the increasingly pressing question of belief, religion and morality." However, overall, Thornton sees decadent literature as characterized by failure and believes that their aesthetic ideal was a fundamental impossibility: "Behind all this is always the consciousness of the impossibility of the task.[...] There are no better analyses of the impossibility of the Decadent ideal nor more perceptive smiles at its failure than those written by Decadent writers themselves: Huysmans, Max Beerbohm, Lionel Johnson; and it seems an essential part of Decadent writing. Just as essential is that failure to bring together the real and ideal, both temptingly attractive, which results in the Decadent dilemma, seeing no possibility of reaching that Unity of Being which was, as Harold Bloom reminds us in his books on Yeats, the 'goal of the Paterian quest'". As Thornton argues that decadence failed to create a coherent and structured outlook, he claims that Symbolism achieved it.
David Weir- Weir sees decadence as a "dynamics of transition" from romanticism to modernism in which decadent writers "move away from classical mimesis as an aesthetic base" and increasingly introduce the use of poesis (willed artificiality) in their work. In addition, Weir also argues that romanticism and decadence exist in a form of "dialectical relationship (with"natural" and "antinatural" as key terms in the relationship) that leads to a synthesis in modernism". Thus, Weir sees decadence as a movement which facilitated the transition into modernism.
Matei Calinescu- Similar to Weir, Calinescu sees decadence as a prototype of modernism. In his book The five faces of Modernity, he claims that: "a style of decadence is simply a style favourable to the unrestricted manifestation of aesthetic individualism,a style that has done away with traditional authoritarian requirements such as unity, hierarchy, objectivity, etc. Decadence thus understood and modernity coincide in their rejection of the tyranny of tradition".
A.E. Carter-In Carter's opinion, decadence is primarily a reaction to Romanticism and its cult of nature, despite the preservation of some of its elements. In order to oppose the romantic glorification of Nature,Decadent artists promoted a cult of artificiality which would subvert nature. Carter even states that "Artificiality, in fact, is the chief characteristic of decadence as the nineteenth century understood the word." However, Carter qualifies this assertion bu revealing the innate contradictions within this cult of artificiality: "They accept civilization as corrupt, but take a perverse pleasure in that very corruption, prefering the civilized to the primitive and the artificial to the natural. They add nothing new to Rousseau's premise; they simply adopt a different attitude-eschewing inspiration in favour of cold calculation, whether in aesthetics, literary theory, or psychology." Furthemore, it is also Carter's belief that late nineteenth century decadence passed through three phases: "The first is the late Romantic phase (the subject of the present chapter) when the moody, introspective and fatal hero of 1830 adopts the cult of the artifical and the abnormal;then the Naturalist phase, marked by the influence of psychopathology, which leads to an interpretation of decadence in terms of nervous disease;finally, the fin de siècle phase, when there is a return to the monstrous characters of late Romanticism."
Jean Pierrot- Pierrot disagrees with the view that Symbolism provided a more coherent doctrine than decadence and even emphasizes its own incoherency. He disagrees with the characterization of decadence as a mere negative reaction to naturalism and Parnassianism. Mainly Pierrot claims that, influenced by a pessimistic view of life, decadents "were to shut themselves away inside their inner worlds, straining to perceive the slightest tremor from their secret depths, often terrified by the strange or monstrous feelings that could suddenly erupt into the light of day; and in this anguished quest many were to discover, even before Freud, the realities of the unconscious. They were to seek for escape from the boredom and banality of everyday life through exquisite refinements of sensation. Convinced that the material universe is nothing but an appearance, and that our consciousness can never apprehend anything but its own ideas and representations, they were to make of imagination a kind of higher power by means of which the world's reality could be transformed. Thet were to create secret, inner paradises for themselves [...] where they could cultivate the dream." Pierrot then goes on to illustrate the deification of the imagination in decadent thought. Like Weir and Calinescu, Pierrot sees decadence as a period which constitutes "an essential line of cleavage between the classical esthetic and the modern esthetic".
Holbrook Jackson-Jackson appears to view decadence as a age which posed as if in decline and there is argument to support this view, while also simultaneously possessing the spirit of an age of renaissance which promoted experiment and the "New". He even emphasizes how one principal characteristic of decadent art was its defiance of past conventions. As a result,Jackson views decadence as a pathway to modernism and some of his opinions are in line with the views of Weir and Calinescu.
Eric C. Hansen - In Hansen's opinion, due to a pessimistic vision of modern society, decadents sought to create a new religion in the form of aestheticism in order to fill the spiritual void caused by modernity.In addition to traits such as its antinaturalism and artificiality, other basid tenets of aestheticism, according to Hansen,included amorality, impersonality, disinteredness, and exclusiveness. Decadents thus sought to create an artifical paradise, separate from society, in order to compensate for their loss of faith. However, Hansen believes that decadents would fail to sustain their new religion, aestheticism, and often contradicted their aesthetic doctrine in both life and art. This crisis of faith would cause decadent artists to become skeptical about whether they were truly different from the bourgeois individual and whether they coulf achieve their aesthetic ideal. As a result,Hansen characterizes the decadent project as a moderate failure.
Works Consulted
Calinescu, Matei. Five faces of modernity : modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism.Durham : Duke University Press, 1987.
Carter, A.E. The Idea of Decadence in French Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1968.
Hansen, Eric. Disaffection and decadence: a crisis in French intellectual thought, 1848-1898 . Washington, D.C. : University Press of America, c1982.
Jackson, Holbrook. The Eighteen-Nineties: A Review of Art at the Close of the Nineteenth Century. 1913. New York: Capricorn, 1966.
Pierrot, Jean. The decadent imagination, 1880-1900 Trans. Derek Coltman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Reed, John R.Decadent Style. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985.
Ridge, George Ross. The Hero in French Decadent Literature Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961.
Thornton, R.K.R. The Decadent Dilemma.London : Arnold, 1983.
Weir, David. Decadence and the Making of Modernism . Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1995.
Within the nineteenth century, the works of Darwin and an increase in medical research linked to psychopathology would both become forces which would construct the cultural perception of degeneration. Daniel Pick claims that, during this period, European countries began to use their imperialist images of the colonized Other as degenerate and to apply it within their own country. In France, a prominent influence in the formation of degeneration would be Benedict Augustin Morel. Morel was lead to research on degeneracy through his early studies on cretinism and its origins. Eventually, he would formulate a theory of hereditary degeneration which he called degenerescence. In his 1857 publication Traité des dégéneréscences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine, his views on hereditary degeneration were enumerated. Morel's views were then taken up by Philipe Buchez who incorporated them into his views on progress.Buchez, like Hyppolite Taine, believed saw society as an organic system which could degenerate if individualism took root and fragmented the social whole. Another French social psychologist and physicist, Gustave Le Bon, would investigate the degenerate aspect of mass society and the lower class while also attributing degeneracy to women.
Furthermore,in Italy, the work of Cesare Lombroso in the field of criminology would also have great influence on the perception of social degeneration. Lombroso believed that there was a degenerate 'criminal element" in the criminals of Italy, primarily Southern Italy. He would posit social exclusion as a means to prevent the spread of criminal degeneracy in Italy. Degenerate criminals were seen to reflect the traits of a regressive form of humanity in mankind's evolutionary past. This belief formed Lombroso's theory of atavism which he believed could be detected through the physical inspection of the criminal. Thus, Lombroso eventually enumerated the physical aspects thought to indicate a regressive being who shares kinship with a more primitive ancestor of mankind. Lombroso believed his social evolutionary model would help truly unite the fragmentary nature of post-unification Italy and improve the "backwardness" of Southern Italy in order to regenerate united Italy. However, the views of Lombroso and Morel eventually became discredited when the twentieth century began.
Although, in England, individuals were more reluctant to believe in a degenerate element within their borders, the theory of degeneration was still had its effect on English society. Various factors such as the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, the criticism of liberalism, mass democracy, as well as the state of the urban city contributed to the perception of degeneration in England. Henry Maudsley would contribute to this development with his views of degeneration as a threat to social progress and his belief that democracy was a cause of degeneracy.
However, in relation to the decadent movement, it was Max Nordau's publication of his book Degeneration in 1892 which would link degeneration with decadent and aesthetic art. Nordau would incorporate the past theories of degeneration such as those of Lombroso in order to form a critique against the manifestations of degeneracy in literature and other art forms. In Nordau's book, he views degeneracy as a "morbid deviation from an original style" which hurts the ability of an individual to function properly in life. In his diagnosis, Nordau attributes several traits to the degenerate such as 'moral insanity," emotionalism, pessimism, inactivity, and an excessive love for imagination/mysticism. Nordau even regards artistic genius as a sign of degeneracy. As for the "hysterical subject," Norday links him/her to traits such as emotionalism, impressionability, imitative nature, and egotism. As a result of these beliefs, Nordau would then accuse impressionist painters of being degenerates. When addressing the causes of degeneration, Nordau attributes its origins to the effects of prolonged consumption of drugs and alcohol in society as well as urban living and disease epidemics. Furthermore, Nordau traces the causes of degeneration to the collective fatigue and exhaustion which he saw in late nineteenth century society. One of Nordau's main claims against degenerate artists, often depicted as decadent artists, is that they lacked the attention needed to create order among the association of ideas in one's mind. As a result,these degenerates could only hold a disordered view of the world which often lead to mysticism, another trait of the degenerate according to Nordau. Nordau also encourages the use of constant judgment and morality to restrain the instinctive and potentially dangerous impulses of the individual. For example, Nordau accuses the Pre-Raphaelites of degeneracy and mysticism in their paintings. Nordau thus sees science and rationalism as forces superior to the excesses of imaginative mysticism. Later, in his criticism, Nordau judges all symbolist artists as degenerates for their lack of coherency and the ambiguity in their art. Nordau even asserts that egoism or, as he calls it, ego-mania is another manifestation of degeneracy in the individual. Nordau believes that this egoism prevents the degenerate from properly receiving external stimuli and thus seeing the world outside himself which, as a result, leads to a distorted view of life. In Nordau's mind, ego-maniacs are inherently anti-social and unable to adapt to life. It is this inability to function in life which Nordau fears will be transmitted through racial degeneration. Eventually, Nordau manipulates these beliefs to accuse Charles Baudelaire of degeneracy for his antinaturalism, his mysticism, and his pessimistic view of life. Furthemore, he would then declare the degeneracy of several decadent authors such as Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Barvey D'Aurevilly, and Joris-Karl Huysmans.Nordau would see their defiance of social conventions as a reflection of their egotistical and irrational degeneracy. Eventually, Nordau addresses the works of Oscar Wilde and, like Huysmans, accuses him of anti-social ego-mania in his life and work as well as of artistic mysticism for his promotion of artificiality and his antinaturalism. Other targets stigmatized by Nordau are the plays of Henrik Ibsen, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the "distorted" naturalism of Emile Zola, all categorized as degenerates in thought.
Works Consulted
Nordau, Max Simon. Degeneration. New York, D. Appleton and company, 1895.
Pick, Daniel. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-c.1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Although Desire Nisard would be one of the first to comment on a a decadent style closely linked to that of the nineteenth century, it would be other writers who would develop its construction and came closer to expressing a coherent meaning behind the unstable term.The first among these writers to have considerable influence on the social construction of decadence is Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. Theophile Gautier would first begin to touch on some of the aesthetics of the term in his 1863 preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin in which he would disparage morality's intrusion into art and the condemnation of "immoral" art. In an often quoted passage, Gautier foreshadows aestheticism's opposition to didacticism and Nature in art: "Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature.". In another preface, this time to Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, Gautier would offer one of the first characterizations of decadence and one of great importance:" The style inadequately called decadence is nothing but art arrived at the point of extreme maturity yielded by the slanting suns of aged civilizations: an ingenious, complicated style, full of shades and of research, constantly pushing back the boundaries of speech, borrowing from all technical vocabularies, taking color from all palettes and notes from all keyboards, struggling to render what is most inexpressible in thought, what is vague and most elusive in the outlines of form, listening to translate the subtle confidences of neurosis, the dying confessions of passions grown depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the obsession which is turning to madness."
In addition to Gautier, Baudelaire's poetry and prose would form other aspects of the decadent perspective. For instance, similar to Gautier's disgust with the physical and the natural, Baudelaire reflects similar disgust towards Nature and classicism in his critical essay "In Praise of Make-Up". However, unlike Gautier, Baudelaire specifically encourages the use of artificiality, represented by make-up, as a means to counteract the horrible effects of Nature.Thus, to Baudelaire, a woman who uses artificiality to enhance her appearance is infinitely superior to "natural" women who he viewed with misogynistic disgust. This praise of artificiality over Nature can also be felt in his poem, but is never written in such specific detail as in this essay. The decadent preference for artificiality is also present in his essay on the dandy.
Later on, Paul Bourget would bring his critical expertise to the question of literary decadence within his series of essays entitled essais de psychologie contemporaine which began in 1883 and ended in 1885. In these essays, Bourget would address several notable figures of the nineteenth century including Baudelaire. In his essay on Baudelaire, he would further develop the image of a decadent style with the famous passage: "a style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book breaks down to make place for the independence of the page, in which the page breaks down to make place for the independence of the sentence and in which the sentence breaks down to make place for the independence of the word". Although this sense of individualistic atomism was partially alluded to by earlier theoriticians on decadence such as Nisard, Bourget's words would reinforce the perception that the decadent style was a anarchistic style which rebelled against the structural order, coherency, and wholeness of former art and deliberately emphasized art's individual components for this destructive purpose.
1.The Disappointment over the negative and often horrible effects of the French Revolution initially contributed to the atmosphere of decadence.
2.The Failure of 1848 Revolution sharpened this atmosphere.
3.Finally, the humiliating French defeat by the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 dealt a considerable blow to French nationalism and collective sense of confidence. This military loss was often seen to be the result of the degeneration of the French race and social organism into weakness and "effeminacy".
4.The horrible events which repressed the Paris Commune in 1871 further influenced an atmosphere of social decline.
5. The increase of medical research related to psychopathology and Darwinism such as that of Benedict Augustin Morel increased the belief in the degeneration of the nation.
Before English decadence was fully formed, the conclusion to Walter Pater's 1873 publication The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature would create the necessary foundation from which Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons would further the concept. Arthur Symons would admit the decadent's debt to Walter Pater in his 1893 essay "The Decadent Movement in Literature".Although most decadents were influenced by what some literary critics deem a misinterpretation of Pater's Conclusion, its influence was nonetheless crucial to the formation of English decadence. Here are some important excerpts from Pater's Conclusion:
"To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habits is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirrings of the senses, strange dyes, strange colors, and curious odors, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. [...] What we have to do is to be forever curiouslyy testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own."
"Well! we are all condamnés as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve-les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort acec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion- that it does yield you this fruit of quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most, for art comes to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments'sake.
In addition to Pater's influential contribution, the earlier emergence and development of French decadence also had its effect and influence in England. Joris-Karl Huysmans'sA Rebours would influence Wilde's conception of decadence as well as his own work like The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thus,to the select few artists who were receptive to the decadent fiction and poetry emerging out of France, French decadence would have considerable influence on their works.Works Consulted
Pater, Walter. "Conclusion." Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s. Ed. Karl Beckson. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981.287-291.In the nineteenth century, a figure would emerge into the social consciousness of the period who would reflect the aestheticism often tied to decadence as well as many others components of its creed. This figure would be the dandy and his presence did not limit itself to society, but he would also make his appearance in the decadent literature of the period, Des Esseintes in A Rebours being the most famous. Wilde's Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton would be other manifestations of the dandy figure in decadent literature as well as some of Wilde's theatrical characters.However, the image of the dandy would be gradually developed by artists of the decadent movement such as Baudelaire and eventually incorporated diverse elements of the movement.In the recent past, there have been many investigations into the literary representations of the dandy as well as interest in the activities of real self-proclaimed dandies.
Charles Baudelaire- In Baudelaire's opinion, dandies "have no other occupation than that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their person, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking". Baudelaire then explains how the dandy's materialistic concerns with money and fine clothes are "only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind". He thus uses these elements to distinguish himself in society. Baudelaire refers to this desire as "the burning need to create an originality for oneself". Furthermore, Baudelaire underlines the "characteristic of opposition and revolt" which is often found within the dandy.
George Ross Ridge - Ridge sees the dandy, who he links to the aesthete, as "artistically oriented toward a decadent ideal in life". Thus, for the dandy, life is art, a concept which inverses classicism. Furthermore, the dandy/aesthete is disgusted with "vulgar" bourgeois society and nature, both of which he reacts against.The dandy also ties himself to the art for art's sake doctrine in order to become part of an intellectual elite separate from mass society. To the dandy, art has no utilitarian purpose and this trait makes it beautiful.
Many critics even attribute the characteristics of "effeminacy" and passivity to the dandy and see him as a reactionary figure to the active and virile bourgeois gentleman. During the late nineteenth century, after the Wilde trial, Victorian critics and individuals in society began to see these characteristics of the dandy as a reflection of his potential homosexuality, thus laying the foundations for the hurtful stereotype of the "effeminate" homosexual in the twentieth and twenty first century. However, overall, the dandy was seen as an embodiment of the aesthetic ideal. A figure who turned his being, appearance, and life into art, therefore subverting the "proper" relationship between art and life promoted by classicism.
The vampiric femme fatale/androgyne
Aside from the dandy, there is another prominent decadent figure frequently found within the pages of late nineteenth century literature: the vampiric femme fatale. The vampiric femme fatale, like the dandy, is a subversive figure, who stands in opposition to the mores of Victorian society, specifically sexual mores and gender conventions. Often, she is a misogynistic representation of the destructive power associated with the New Woman. Male decadent writers thus manipulate this figure in order to reveal the dangers to patriarchal society which the New Woman poses. This figure can be seen in many of Rachilde's novels such as Raoule in Monsieur Vénus, Eliante in La Jongleuse, and Mary Barbe in La Marquise de Sade. This figure would even appear in J-K. Huysmans's La-Bas as Mme. Chantelouve in a more demonic form which is tied to Satanism. However, the most famous representation of this figure is the biblical figure Salome, whom Huysmans depicted as a beast of the apocalypse. The tale of Salome and the beheading of Saint John the Baptist embodies the unconscious masculine fears of the New Woman's power to usurp his power and symbolically castrate him. Like Salome, the figure of the femme fatale becomes a castrating medusa whom men would fear, as Freud would claim. Tied to this figure is the female androgyne who inverts gender conventions through cross-dressing like Raoule and who is also viewed by patriarchal society as a anarchic threat to the the stability of civilization. The social construction of both these figures would be later examined frequently within contemporary criticism.
George Ross Ridge - Ridge claims that the vampiric femme fatale stems from the misogynistic images of the modern active woman by male writers. Thus, the femme fatale is constructed as a destructive Other who will render men weak and passive, traits thought to be "naturally" tied to women. Often in decadent texts, the femme fatale does reduce men into passivity and there is an "inversion" of Victorian gender roles. Furthermore, the femme fatale figure was seen as opposing the image of the "natural woman" who conforms to the role of a wife and mother. The decadent heroine is thus sterile and destructive rather than procreative; as a result, Victorian society views her as an "unnatural" being. Furthermore, this new decadent heroine opposes the passivity of the Romantic heroine of the past. However,the femme fatale is primarily viewed as a destroyer of the family as well as the macrocosm it is seen to reflect, civilization, both of which are patriarchal. Sado-masochism and neurosis are often attributed to this figure and she is even seen as the cause of hereditary degeneration by writers such as Emile Zola.
Dijkstra, Bram - Djikstra claims that men often saw similarly sexually active women such as prostitutes as dangerous predators, carrying "atavistic evils" as well as a bringer of the apocalypse. She even demonstrates how, during the late nineteenth century, sexually active women were identified with death and destruction, thus mingling the traits of Eros and Thanatos in women. Like Ridge, Dijkstra argues that active women invoked fears of a rejection of the reproductive role often aligned with women. In addition, the active nature of the femme fatale and her rejection of passive motherhood caused her to degenerate. Thus, an active and dominant woman became a degenerate "Other" and was seen as "unnatural".Dijkstra even argues that the victimized and passive masochistic male who was subject to this dominant women in literature was often paradoxically used to reinforce the patriarchal structure of Victorian society.
Showalter, Elaine - Showalter focuses on a specific manifestation of the femme fatale, the veiled woman, whom Salome is again the most representative. According to Showalter, the veiled woman was viewed as an exotic and mysterious "Other" to male observers as well as a castrating medusa. When the veiled woman removes her veils, the masculine observer sees the dangerous "specter of female sexuality" (or the vagina dentata) without a penis and, according to Freud, fears "his own possible castration". As a result, the veiled woman is seen as a sexual threat to the male and patriarchal society.
Works Consulted
Baudelaire, Charles. "The Dandy." Flowers of Evil and Other Works. Ed. Wallace Fowlie. Trans. Wallace Fowlie. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1992. p. 193-199.
Ridge, George Ross. The Hero in French Decadent Literature Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1961.
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