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Decadence and Sexual Politics in Three Fin-de-Siècle Writers: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons and Vernon Lee Catherine Ruth Robbins Submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literature November, 1996 Contents Summary Introduction 1 Chapter One: Traditions of Nineteenth-Century Criticism 17 Chapter Two: Towards a Definition of Decadence 36 Chapter Three: 'Style, not sincerity': Wilde's Early Poems 69 Chapter Four: The Sphinx and The Ballad: Learning the Poetics of Restraint 105 Chapter Five: Arthur Symons — The Decadent Critic as Artist 137 Chapter Six: A Poetics of Decadence: Arthur Symons's bays and Nights and Silhouettes 165 Chapter Seven: 'Telling the Dancer from the Dance': Arthur Symon's London Nights 185 Chapter Eight: Vemon Lee: Decadent Woman? 211 Afterword: 'And upon this body we may press our lips' 240 Bibliography of Works Quoted and Consulted 244 List of Illustrations, bound between pages 136 and 137 Figure 1: 'The Sterner Sex', Punch, 26 November, 1891 Figure 2: 'Our Decadents', Punch, 7 July, 1894 Figure 3: 'Our Decadents', Punch, 27 October, 1894 Figure 4: Edward Bume-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image (1878), nos 1-3 Figure 5: Edward Bume-Jones, Pygmalion and the Image (1878), no. 4 Figure 6: Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Sculptor's Model (1878) Figure 7: 'Distinguished Amateurs —2: The Art Critic', Punch, 13 March, 1880 Summary An understanding of the concept of decadence in the late nineteenth century is not dependent on a purely linguistic approach to the various forms of literary language in which it might be manifested. Rather, the label of decadence invokes (and deliberately flouts) perceptions of normality in a number of cultural spaces, not all of them strictly textual. Importantly, the personality of the artist figure is also a part of the definition of decadence. Decadence, that is, is not limited to a particular mode of textual performance; it is also a matter of how the artist's personality is interpreted through a critical assumption current throughout the nineteenth century, that the text acts as an index of the moral status of the writer. Decadence, then, is about reception, as well as conception. Given that meaning accrues to the figure of the artist in the definition of decadence, and given that the late nineteenth century was a period of conflicting discourses of sexual politics, the definition of decadence is bound up with the matrix of associations around such concepts as sex, gender and sexuality. The three writers at the centre of this study all demonstrate decadent potential in their refusals to respect the conventions of gender — both in terms of the subjects and forms they each chose for literary representation, and for the choices they made about the living of their lives. In his poetry Wilde took up a series of dramatic poses, inconsistent with each other, inconsistent even within single poems. In doing so, he called into question prevailing standards and ideals of masculinity — sincerity and purposiveness — and he was attacked for doing so even before he was tried for gross indecency in 1895. Symons's subject matter — the preponderance in his poetry of the liminal figures of the dancer and the actress, and the liminal spaces of the music-hall and deserted city streets at night — explicitly courted a decadent label, and, indeed, Symons helped to defme the term. Contemporary audiences read his poetic persona back onto his personality. And his decadence, like Wilde's, also came from his flouting of the rules of masculinity, in his case, his exposure of the gender and class ideology of the gentleman, by speaking aloud of its implications. That decadence has an importance for sexual politics is signalled by the fact that there are very few women writers who seem to 'suit' the label. Vernon Lee provides a test case here of the argument that decadence is to be defmed primarily as a falling away from an idealised standard of masculinity. Lee wrote impeccably decadent fiction, but is not generally thought of as a decadent writer, perhaps precisely because she was a woman writer for whom a term that resides in conventions of the masculine is inappropriate. Decadence is a notoriously difficult term to define, and this thesis attempts to show a range of definitions of the word in terms of its favoured themes, forms and and their relation to ideas of artistic personality; it shows that the label is inextricably bound up in the sexuality debtes of the 1890s. 1 Introduction In Punch for 16 September, 1891, there appeared a cartoon captioned 'The Sterner Sex' in which two young women, dressed severely in straight skirts and buttoned-up blouses are observed in conversation. 'Hullo, Gerty! You've got Fred's hat on, and his cover coat?' 'Yes. Don't you like it?' 'Well — it makes you look like a Young Man, you know, and that's so Effeminate." (Figure 1) The cartoon represents just one of a whole series of ironic commentaries on the gender confusion of the 1890s with which this study is, in part, concerned. The certainties of earlier generations in relation to the apparently natural relative places of men and women seemed, by the 1890s, to be threatened by assertive women such as those in the cartoon, and the 'unnaturally' effeminate men to whom the cartoon makes reference. As Sally Ledger has suggested, 'gender was arguably the most destabilizing category' of the cultural politics of the fin de siècle, and it was destabilizing because gender as category, the 'natural' places of man and woman in society was, and is, itself unstable.' Earlier in the century, as Alison Hennegan suggests, there had been a sense of stability in defintion as to the precise meanings of gender classifications. A man's manliness referred to his adult status, and was contrasted to 'childishness.' But, 'by the end of the century, "manliness" is constantly defmed in opposition to "womanliness": to be a "real man" is to avoid the appalling stigma of effeminacy.'3 As Elaine Showalter puts it, 'while many critics and historians have described this period [the 1890s] as a battle between the sexes,. a period of sexual antagonism that came from male resentment of women's emancipation, ... it was also a battle within the sexes.'4 The 1890s was a period of contested definitions of masculinity and femininity, of gender roles, and of sexuality, a period of cultural crisis precipitated by, amongst other things, the looming end of the century. The future looked uncertain, particularly in contrast to the 'Golden Age' of the sexual certainty of the mid-century. Once upon a time, 'When Adam delved and Eve span) None need ask which was the man'.5 Now the natural passivity and 2 domesticity of woman, and the worldly action of man were challenged: by women who dared leave the home, to seek education and employment rather than love, marriage, motherhood and masculine protection; and by men who were powerless to resist their challenge, or who even gloried in the freedom and opportunity that female emancipation apparently offered to them. The Golden Age of the past and the uncertainties of the present were both fictitious. Writers such as Lynda Nead and Mary Poovey have demonstrated that because gender is always a socially constructed phenomenon rather than a naturally occurring biological fact, questions about the relative social positions of the sexes had recurred with varying degrees of ideological urgency throughout the nineteenth century. The nostalgia for a Golden Age when men were real men, and 'we had no trouble with our wives' ,6 is, in Poovey's phrase, a function of the 'ideological work of gender'? Lynda Nead identifies the 1860s as the cultural highpoint of the doctrine of the separate spheres, which insisted that women were caring, nurturing and domesticated whilst men were active, virile and competitive. Men and women complemented but did not compete each with each other. But at the same time as these high ideals of gender (at least for the middle classes) were perpetutated by high culture, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 which provided for the forcible registration and medical examination of prostitutes in certain garrison towns, to prevent the spread of venereal disease amongst the military. Here was official recognition that not all men and women behaved as myths of sexuality or gender ideology assumed them to; moreover, the Acts provoked a ferocious feminist campaign amongst middle- class women for their repeal on the grounds that they enacted a sexual double standard by registering and punishing the women involved in paid sex, but not the men. It was concerted campaigning by middle-class women which eventually led to the repeal of the acts in 1883. So much for domesticated doves of femininity! Just as importantly, the eventual passage of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act 'revolutionized the law' and led, according to Lee Halcombe, potentially to the greatest redistribution of property that Britain had ever seen? Women were being seen in all aspects of public 3 life, and whilst they had not yet achieved anything like equality, the change in their status was a highly visible sign that the old rules no longer held true.