Art, Androgyny, and the Femme Fatale in Decadent Fictions of the Nineteenth Century
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Art, Androgyny, and the Femme Fatale in Decadent Fictions of the Nineteenth Century IAN ROBERT MURPHY PhD 2020 1 Art, Androgyny, and the Femme Fatale in Decadent Fictions of the Nineteenth Century IAN ROBERT MURPHY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature Manchester Metropolitan University 2020 2 3 CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS / 4 ABSTRACT / 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / 8 PROLEGOMENON / 10 The Clinging Vines of Decadence / 10 Dramatis Personae: The Femme Fatale and the Decadent Androgyne / 13 Defining Decadence: Adornment, Decay, Destruction / 21 Variations On A Theme / 28 CHAPTER I - THE DARK GALLERY: PAINTED PORTRAITS & VAMPIRIC VISIONS / 34 Gothic Origins: Poe and the Most Poetical Topic in the World / 36 Medieval Regressions: Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Cult of the Dead Beloved / 41 Ritual Devotees: Vernon Lee and the Sacrificial Man / 53 Sexual Alchemy: E. Nesbit’s Androgynous Experiment / 62 The Vampiric Visions of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray / 65 CHAPTER II - DEATH AND THE MODEL: DOLLS, DISSECTION, & DEATHLY DESIRE / 70 Renaissance to Revolution / 76 The Erotic Automaton of E.T.A. Hoffmann / 82 Exhuming the Muse in Baudelaire and Zola / 85 Rachilde’s Vénus, as a Boy / 93 Artificial Anatomy in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Ève Future / 96 Dolls, Desire and Destruction in Vernon Lee’s ‘The Image’ / 103 CHAPTER III - BEARING MUTILATION or THE MUTABILITIES OF MARBLE: FRAGMENTS, FETISHISM & FORMLESSNESS / 107 The Architectural Venus of Prosper Mérimée / 114 Pygmalion and the Fetish / 117 The Liquid Limbs of Johann Joachim Winckelmann / 123 Mutability and Mutilation in Eugene-Lee Hamilton’s Venus Sonnets / 126 Dionysian Duality in Walter Pater’s ‘Denys l’Auxerrois’ / 131 Fantasy, Femininity and Formlessness in Vernon Lee’s Sculptural Narratives / 135 4 CHAPTER IV - MARBLE MONSTERS OF BOTH SEXES: ANDROGYNOUS ILLUSIONS & CASTRATED CHIMERAS / 142 Martyrs to Melody: A Brief History of the Castrati / 144 The Aesthetic Bloodlines of La Zambinella / 149 The Sleeping Hermaphrodite in the Nineteenth Century / 157 Théophile Gautier’s Fantasies of the Chimera / 161 Swinburne, and the Crimson Kiss of the Androgyne / 166 Violins of Flesh and Blood / 169 Decadent Endings, Modernist Beginnings / 174 CODA - THE VISUAL AFTERLIVES OF THE DECADENT FEMME FATALE / 177 Images in the Dark: Celluloid Portraits of the Femme Fatale / 179 Deconstructing the Doll in the Digital Age / 182 Venus Revisited in ‘Death in Venice’ / 184 Performing Venus in Charles Vidor’s Gilda / 186 BIBLIOGRAPHY / 189 APPENDIX / 208 List of Illustrations / 208 Illustrations / 211 5 ABSTRACT This thesis offers a reappraisal of the recurring figure of the femme fatale within Decadent art and literature of the nineteenth century. Despite the ubiquity of studies concerning the femme fatale, most notably within genres such as Film Noir and Romanticism, the Decadent femme fatale has often been relegated to a single chapter or footnote within these studies. It is here the purpose of this thesis to rectify this critical disregard. Combining multiple disciplines (literature, aesthetics, history, mythology and psychology) each of the four chapters of this thesis will locate the femme fatale within nineteenth-century European Decadent texts as represented as a specific objet d’art: the haunted portrait, the corpse-doll, the fragmented sculpture, and the mutilated and/or sculpted body of the androgyne. Invoking Harold Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence, the influence and trajectory of each chapter’s respective femme fatale will be traced from the mid- nineteenth century through to the fin de siècle. By tracing the lineage of the aesthetic impression made by French Decadent writers of the mid-nineteenth century (such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire) upon subsequent French and British writers and artists of the late- nineteenth century (such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, Rachilde, and Vernon Lee), this thesis interrogates how the re/construction and usage of the Decadent femme fatale was utilized as a means of exploring ulterior philosophies of classical beauty and a fluid range of forbidden sexualities, including androgyny and homoeroticism. Offering interdisciplinary readings of the nineteenth-century Decadent femme fatale, this thesis shows the different ways in which nineteenth-century Decadent writers and artists move beyond the femme fatale’s malevolence, though without losing sight of it, to explore the mysterious relationships between life and death, art and artifice, pleasure and pain, and the seen and unseen. 6 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Doctors Emma Liggins, Angelica Michelis, and Elizabeth Nolan have been a tremendous source of encouragement and practical help throughout the research and writing of this project. I am incredibly grateful for their warm hospitality to my ideas, and support throughout the completion of this thesis. My parents, Neil and Yvonne Murphy, have provided unflagging support in all of my endeavours. Thanks must also be given to my aunt, Gail Lamb, and my friends, Laura Burke, Chloe Hall, Mia Kennedy and Kate Palmer, for their unwavering support, both personal and material, over the past four years. 8 9 PROLEGOMENON The Clinging Vines of Decadence Housed in Manchester Art Gallery, John William Waterhouse’s oil painting Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) [fig. 0.1.] illustrates the climactic denouement of the myth of Hylas. Recounted by ancients, such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus and Ovid, Hylas’s myth vaunts the impulsive erotic overtones of the spectative gaze. Raised as the attendant and lover of Herakles, Hylas subsequently became an Argonaut, accompanying Jason on his voyage aboard the Argo. Sent ashore to gather fresh water on the Aegean isle of Mysia, Hylas discovered a spring in which naiads (water nymphs) were gathered by moonlight to sing the praise of Artemis. Emerging from the pool, one naiad noticed Hylas submerging his bronze ewer beneath the waters. ‘And there,’ Apollonius writes, ‘with the full moon shining on him from a clear sky, she saw him in all his radiant beauty and alluring grace.’1 Infatuated by Hylas’s radiance, the naiad embraced him within a withering grip and dragged him to his death in the murky depths of the spring. Crystallizing the inciting moment before Hylas’s death, Waterhouse’s canvas emphasizes the overwhelming power of beauty upon the desirous gaze exchanged between Hylas and the nymph. Waterhouse re-casts Apollonius’s lunar tableau within a hazy panorama of oppressive flora. Ancient sources have Hylas ensnared by one nymph, yet Waterhouse multiplies his nymphs to seven, each one bearing the same languid face, their vine-like hair adorned with white waterlilies. Nymphaea, the botanical name for waterlilies, aligns the nymphs with flowers: beautiful, naked, yet identical. Seen together, the recapitulated beauty of the nymphs constitutes what Peter Trippi interprets as the fin-de-siècle Decadent motif of ‘deadly, long tendrilled flowers rising from the water’.2 Indeed, fin-de-siècle audiences may have been aware of the neologism ‘nymphomaniac’, a term used since the 1860s to describe an ‘abnormal’ interest of some women for sexual gratification, and which Richard von Krafft- Ebing pathologized as a ‘syndrome within the sphere of physical degeneration’.3 Dragging the resplendent Hylas to his aquatic tomb, Waterhouse’s nymphs are the clinging vines of Decadence. 1 Apollonius of Rhodes, The Voyage of the Argo – The Argonautica trans. by E. V. Rieu (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1959), p. 96. 2 Peter Trippi, J. W. Waterhouse (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2013), p. 145. 3 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis trans. By Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), p. 322. 10 Of recent scholarship concerning Waterhouse’s oeuvre, Elizabeth Prettejohn remorsefully notes that ‘when Waterhouse’s work has been discussed at all, it has usually been to castigate him for his misogyny in representing the female figure as evil in her very beauty’.4 Alas, Prettejohn’s words were prophetic: in early 2018, Manchester Art Gallery temporarily withdrew Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs from public view to encourage debate concerning the exploitation and objectification of women within public discourse. Clare Gannaway, curator of Modern Art at the Manchester gallery, expressed discomfort with the latent eroticism in Waterhouse’s painting, alongside other works of pre-Raphaelite artists, due to their depictions of women as ‘either passive, beautiful objects or femmes fatales’.5 When pressed for comment on the gallery’s removal of the artwork, Prettejohn concisely stated: ‘The Victorians are always getting criticized because they’re supposed to be prudish. But here it would seem it’s us who are taking the roles of what we think of as very moralistic Victorians.’6 Tellingly, Gannaway’s formulation of Waterhouse’s nymphs as either passive objects or femmes fatales echoes the critical appraisals of Waterhouse’s canvas following its debut at the Manchester Autumn Exhibition of 1896. The Magazine of Art serenaded the poetical daintiness of Waterhouse’s composition, describing the grouping of the ‘sweet-eyed nymphs’ as ‘superb […] their fair forms rise like flowers from among lily-leaves […] and a spirit of real poetry pervades the canvas’.7 Art Journal’s A. C. R. Carter similarly articulated the tranquil charm of the naiads as bearing