Copyright by Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson, B.A.; M.A. 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Decadence as a Social Critique in Huysmans, D'Annunzio, and Wilde Committee: Katherine Arens, Co-Supervisor Daniela Bini, Co-Supervisor Elizabeth Richmond-Garza Janet Swaffar Antonio Gragera Decadence as a Social Critique in Huysmans, D'Annunzio, and Wilde by Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2008 To Larry and Logan Acknowledgements I want to thank my committee supervisors Daniela Bini and Katie Arens for their patience in evaluating and re-evaluating, editing, advising and supporting my work during all the years that this project took to complete. I am grateful for their support and patient coaching. My thanks also to all the other members of my dissertation committee: Antonio Gragera, Elizabeth Richmond-Garza and Janet Swaffar. All of you have been at once time mentors, friends and colleagues and a true example for me to follow. In particular, thanks to Antonio Gragera who endured the first edit of all my chapters and graciously guided me through all the toils and pangs of writing. My gratitude to Dolora Chapelle Wojciehowski and Elizabeth Richmond-Garza who encouraged me to come back and finish my dissertation, long postponed, and to the faculty at Texas State University who never lost faith in me, and whose emotional support have made this project possible: Ann Marie Ellis, dean of Liberal Arts, Robert Fischer, chairman of the department of Modern Languages, Blake Locklin, Carole Martin, and Michael Farris. I want to extend my gratitude to Jennifer Forrest for helping me get started and to Sabrina Hyde for her helping me finish it. On the home front, thanks to my husband, Larry, who has endured me for over two decades; and my son, Logan, who along with his father has supported me throughout these months of writing, chaos, madness, and also excitement; my parents-in-law, Betty and Robert Jackson, surrogate parents in dire moments of need; back in Italy, to my parents, who have instilled in me their work ethics and their sense of duty. v Last, but not least, to my brother and to all my friends, in the USA and in Italy, who are such intricate part of my life. I love you dearly and I am very proud to have partaken of you in my life. I do wish to mention in particular my friends Jennifer Adams, Rachel Martinez and Brandy Webb who helped me with their support and their availability in stepping in and helping me with childcare duties, so that I could focus on my project. My friends Sophie and Daniel Garcia and Rick and Terry Laue for constantly supporting me and always believing that I would one day finish; and to my friends Don Marco Valentini, his mother Adriana, my friends Rita Andreassi and Anna Fappiano who pushed me to continue even when I thought I could not go on. I thank you all. vi Decadence as a Social Critique in Huysmans, D'Annunzio, and Wilde Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisors: Katherine Arens & Daniela Bini When literary movements do not grow out of specific groups who adopt a name fort heir endeavors, they have usually been named to refer to certain stylistic features. Such is the case with "Decadence," a rubric referring to specific poets in turn-of-the- century France. Most extant work on the artists of decadent literature focuses on its stylistic elements and narrative tropes: their reaction against the image of artist/creator from Romanticism, to cast the artist as egotist; their plea for art's autonomy (as well as for art for art's sake and for the artist as society's outsider); and their idea that art must be sensationalist and melodramatic, bizarre, perverse, exotic, or artificial to make an impact. What is overlooked in traditional approaches to decadent literature is its own frequent claims to social critique, toward which Julia Kristeva points in the un-translated second half of her Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). Moreover, much decadent literature emerges at a historical moment in which a ruling class is under fire; the typical "decadent" work portrays the decline of a class, and the possible repercussions of that deconstruction for the individuals in it. To approach the literature of fin de siècle decadence as social critique, this project considers three novels taken as the three bibles of the decadent movement in French, Italian and English literatures: Huysmans' A rebours (1884), D'Annunzio's own recreation of A rebours, his own Il piacere (1889), and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). I will argue that, in this era of emergent modernism, decadent literature tries to claim a more resistant and social critical position from within class structure than does modernism, and that decadent literature, despite its superficial vii affinities with the Romanticism to which modernism also refers, not only is a literature of the struggle of the individual against an uncaring social world, but also underscores the necessity of reconstructing the hero/narrator's ego, as his identity reflects a class position which must be altered if it is to remain viable. viii Table of Contents Introduction: Decadence in French, Italian, and English Literary History....................... 1 Decadence as a Literary and Historical Phenomenon............................................. 5 Rethinking Decadence: Beyond Psychology and Aesthetics............................... 14 Critics' National Decadences, 1: France ............................................................... 21 Critics' National Decadences, 2: Italy................................................................... 28 Critics' National Decadences, 3: England............................................................. 43 Recasting Decadence: The Method of the Present Study .................................... 55 Chapter One: Huysmans' A rebours: Setting a New Tone ............................................. 62 Huysmans' Aesthete: Des Esseintes and Life in an Aquarium ............................ 66 Critiques of Huysmans.......................................................................................... 74 Huysmans and History.......................................................................................... 85 From Decadence to Modernism in Literary France: The Ergonomics of an 1890s Book..................................................................... 102 The Pathology of an Era ..................................................................................... 118 Chapter Two: D'Annunzio's Il piacere: A Farcical Socio-Political Dissent................. 125 Il piacere, Written as the Sun Sets on an Era, With the Hope For a New Beginning ................................................................. 130 The Critics' Gabriele ........................................................................................... 144 The Italian Decadent Hero: D'Annunzio's Aesthete .......................................... 154 Art as a Sacrifice That Serves to Bind the Community Together....................... 159 Chapter Three: Repercussions of a Class Under Fire: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Folly of Society ............................ 167 The Critics of Dorian Gray: A History of its Reception .................................... 169 ix The Social Role of Dorian Gray: Portrait of an Aesthete?................................ 188 As Art Becomes Life and life Art: Decadence as a Socio-Economic Revolution ..................................................... 202 Conclusion: Decadence as a Social Critique ................................................................. 222 Appendix........................................................................................................................ 244 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 246 Vita ................................................................................................................................. 290 x INTRODUCTION: Decadence in French, Italian, and English Literary History "The words 'decadent literature' imply something fatal and providential" — Charles Baudelaire Although the specific aesthetic movement to which the rubric "Decadence" refers is really best situated in the modern era, starting around the year 1857 and continuing at least through the First World War, the term has been used in various semantic configurations in reference to an assortment of stylistic and thematic groupings in different epochs of literary history. Because of that variance, as I shall show below, traditional discussions of Decadence have remained both wide-ranging and vague. In an attempt to show another, and yet largely under-acknowledged aspect of Decadent literature, the present project will focus on one of the strands within this broader understanding of Decadence leading from the twelfth through the twenty-first century: on the modern Decadence of the early twentieth century as a specific class- bound response to modernization. The present work aims to delineate the scope of such modern Decadent literature by studying three classics of the canon in France, Italy, and England respectively, and to show