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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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 how, for each one of them, the movement is rooted in their national literature and in specific moments in national history.

My goal is to recuperate this modern Decadent literature as more than a literature of the individual hero, his fall, and his often paradoxical pleasure in pain.1 Instead, I will

1 As more than the "neo-romanticism" that designates it an issue of individual creativity, or designates decadence as a reaction to romanticism, rather more something it naturally developed into. 1

argue it as a coherent literary response against modernism—which has been more successful in establishing itself in literary history as canonical, innovative, and part of higher literary traditions—and as such a parallel development to modernism, as a literature of futuristic avant-garde. This success, however, has precluded the understanding of its specific historical relevance within the evolution of national cultures responding to social change with innovative forms of social critique. In taking up the movement in this way, I will contend that the literature of Decadence is neither simply corrupt nor backward-looking, as most critics want to assume today, but that it tries to forge a new kind of critical connection between the pre-modern and the forces of modernization that the hero confronts. In other words, this study will show that the twentieth century's high-canon literature of Decadence seeks neither to break up with or deny tradition, as its modernist counterparts, especially Joyce, Proust, and Verga, attempt to do, nor to praise the past, but rather to exert a very specific kind of social criticism from within the traditions themselves.

Subsequent sections of this introduction will outline some standard literary discussions of decadent literature and Decadence in order to identify the topics that are typically taken up by critics to define and canonize the movement as a particular kind of aesthetic statement. This brief overview will help to understand how the analysis of

Decadence has been framed as a question of aesthetic content and stylistics approach, rather than as a specific canon of literature referring to character-type and ethics of a particular era and national problematics. Against such a background I will be able to

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argue for placing this literature in postmodernism rather than the modernism with which it customarily it is associated.

The postmodern designation is, I believe, warranted, for in my reading this specific literature of Decadence questions the dominant narratives and authority of the times, as well as it overtly opposes the egocentric narrative in modernist literature. In order to situate this designation, I would like to draw upon Jean-Louis François Lyotard's post-structuralist definition of "modern art" —which happens to be consonant with

Diderot's definition—as an expression of art that devotes "little technical expertise," and his definition of 'postmodern art' as "modernism in the nascent state" and one that is not afraid to use technical axioms of avant-gardism to present the unpresentable (78-79).

Lyotard believes that art should call into question the powers of reason, drawing from the non-rational forces of sensations and emotions, rejecting humanism and the traditional notion of man as the central subject of knowledge (60). He goes on to say that art should generate ideas, championing heterogeneity and difference, and suggests that the understanding of society in terms of "progress" has been made obsolete by the scientific, technological, political and cultural changes of the late twentieth century (Lyotard 45).

Lyotard echoed Diderot's belief in the relation between human intuition and art. Diderot was in fact one of the first philosophers to try and capture art in words (Lough 253). He believed that art should "change the common way of thinking," and that every

"spectator's response to a work of art is unique" (Lough 339). Derrida was also a firm

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believer in the philosophy of art criticism as an intuition and pointed to the inevitable repetitious nature of the piece of art as propagandistic, because writing is difference. 2

If we follow these definitions, then we can straightforwardly equate postmodernism with pre-modernism, and use this definition to resituate Decadence as something other than modernism. Most critically, for Lytoard, the postmodernism to which I contend Decadence belongs remains a constant state (79). That is, the postmodern, cannot be a prelude to the modern, and cannot morph into the modern since postmodernism is always a reaction against the modern. Like this facet of post-modern criticism, the Decadence to which I refer is, I believe, a very specific reaction against the nascent modernist aesthetics of the turn of the century, in that it takes up traditional forms, not to reject them, but rather to critique them from within and transform them.

Critically, the texts that I take up each issues a warning that, if evolutionary change is not taken up by the more or less hegemonic readerships to which they are addressed, then, very much worse alternatives will emerge.

To make this case in detail, the chapters that form the body of this study will each treat one of the three most representative texts of Decadence: the French A rebours

(1884) by J. K. Huysmans, what seems to be the Italian recreation of A rebours, Il piacere (1889) by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and the British The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1890) by Oscar Wilde. In each of their respective chapters, one of the novels will be

2 Derrida believes that the finality of repetition is a paradox. Thus an art that discontinues repetition can become an art of transition, as is avant-garde theater. He notes that "Theater as repetition of that which does not repeat itself, theater as the original repetition of difference within the conflict of forces in which 'evil is good is an effort and already a cruelty added to the other cruelty'—such is the fatal limit of a cruelty which begins with its own representation" (250). 4

taken up in a threefold manner: first, as addressing a very specific social critique; second, as characterizing the hero of decadence with particular physical and intellectual attributes that mark his class (purported) class position; and third, as staging the death of the hero as a metaphor of what must be discarded and what saved of the reader's own social universe.

As it will be shown, each novel ultimately focuses not on their respective heroes' personal failings, but rather on the failings of the specific socio-historical circumstances and class-bound blindness that force individuals into decadent frames of existence, starting with the first novel A rebours (1884). The conclusion of each chapter will tie the tale of each decadent hero into the social frame of their nations at the time. By way of conclusion, the chapter devoted to the third novel selected, The Picture of Dorian Gray

(1890) will also introduce the conclusion to the project, a summative analysis on why decadent literature should be considered postmodern rather than modern. In doing so, I hope to rescue the literature of the turn of the century Decadence as more than simply an aristocratic looking-backward and establish it instead as a distinctive form of social critique—a social critique of the upper classes and their aesthetization of reality.

Decadence as a Literary and Historical Phenomenon

As noted above, "Decadence" has been discussed broadly as both a historical and an aesthetic phenomenon rather than an ideological movement. To illustrate this, it is necessary to introduce the various historicized discussions of Decadence that have set the general tone in literary criticism. The literature is voluminous, and I have no pretensions

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to exhaust it. What I hope to do instead is to characterize typical reference points in the national discussions of the literary phenomenon as currently canonized in the literary reference books.

One overriding strategy in this literature is to argue historicization of the literary phenomenon. In the Preface to his collection of essays entitled Decadence and the

1890's, for instance, Ian Fletcher (1980) states that there had been decadences before the end of the nineteenth century.3 He talks about Decadence as the "age of transition" in literature, and as such, he situates it between the "closing phase of the Victorian synthesis, [and] the opening phase in those tendencies we call for convenience

'modernism'" (Fletcher 7). This collapsible moment is further seen as filled with

"evanescence, instability, failure, the enterprise of internalizing history and manifesting it as style, [and] a historical and personal sense of decline and fall" (Fletcher 8). In a typical move establishing Decadence as a period phenomenon, not an exclusively aesthetic one, Fletcher continues by showing the intersection of movements that the last decades of the nineteenth century had molded together, he states that terms like "Pre-

Raphaelite," "Aesthetic" and "Decadent" "intersect with each other, and even tendencies like 'Naturalism' are not discrete and distinct [within themselves]" (Fletcher 9). As such, he concludes by noting that the Decadent author distinguishes himself from others in this

3 He argues that "the English 1590's were just another fin de siècle, presided by another aging iconic queen," and then goes on to say that "Callimachus, Petronius, Statius, Bernini and the Italian painters of the seicento were, for the writers of the late nineteenth century, recognizable antecedents" to the Decadent period (Fletcher, Decadence and the 1890s 7). 6

constellation of movements by a single aestheticizing move: by foregrounding his own self-mockery against it.

For a number of critics such self-mockery is the central notion of Decadence. In the essay "Decadence in Later Nineteenth-Century England," Thornton (1980) believes that what he calls the "Decadent Dilemma" lies in this mockery, which constitutes the essential element that sets the Decadent author apart from other movements (Thorton 26).

This dilemma, Thornton goes on to conclude, holds the decadent man "caught between two opposite and incompatible pulls: on one hand he is drawn by the world, its necessities, and the attractive impressions he receives from it, while on the other hand he yearns towards the eternal, the ideal, and the unwordly" (Thorton 26).

Accordingly, Jan B. Gordon labels Decadence as enigmatic and as a plethora of paradoxes. In his essay "Decadent Spaces: Notes for a Phenomenology of the Fin de

Siècle," Gordon (1980) describes the Decadent world as "composed of mirrors, epigrams, and gossip"; it is a world that only exists "under conditions of flagging energy and failed connections where there is no longer any hope of a Unity of Being" (Gordon 52). Thus the Decadent space, according to Gordon, is one where multiplicity sides with singularity or utter individuality, where the Decadent "environment" is both public yet "highly introverted," and where pornography, androgyny and narcissistic masturbation are all molded into a parodic ecstasy in which the decadent hero achieves transcendence through denial (Gordon 52). In these accounts, Decadence appears as the state of being of the author or of the character: as an attitude of resistance toward a historical moment no

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longer straightforwardly comprehensible by the Decadent hero who is incapable of dealing with it.

The paradoxical nature of the hero—as an introverted, exhausted individual— forces an abundance of familiar tropes and other stylistic features into existence in critical assessments of Decadent prose and poetry, which then are seen as means to convey the paradoxical nature of the concepts which confuse these paradigmatic decadent individuals—the world as upside down, as the title of our first novel, A rebours (1884).

In typical fashion, Gordon notes that it is within this burlesque world "where all is mirrored, reflected, capable of infinite expansion or contraction through parody, nuance and gossip[, that] only suffering provides for the collapse of all masks" (Gordon 52). In such readings of the literature, the rhetorical ornamentation in the texts stands for the mask of the hero, and, like the hero, the rhetoric's true nature is only revealed once these masks collapse and are revealed as empty. Hence, the true self of the Decadent, narcissistic hero is always shown when he is unmasked, when he is torn by the pain and corruption of his actions and revealed from behind his own pretense. In De Profundis,

Oscar Wilde provides support to these later critics when he states that "Pain, unlike pleasure, has no mask" (Complete Works 1025). This metaphor of unmasking defines for most of today's critics the moment of catharsis that the Decadent hero has to experience in order to exist fully.

While the aforementioned critics focuses on the hero as the axis of the decadent text, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics offers another view, when it defines Decadence as "a literary movement whose characteristics include ennui,

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corruption, morbidity, neurosis, an exaggerated erotic sensibility and a pervasive sense of something lost—a nostalgic semi-mysticism without clear direction or spirituality" (275).

This definition summarizes the (dis)regard with which the movement has been treated within literary circles, just as it occludes the historical specificity of a Decadence like

Wilde's. At first, this definition features characteristics of the movement that seem to share the characteristics of the decadent hero, however this is not done "without clear direction." On the contrary, I posit that the hero's purpose in these text is to create an negative effect so that these features are used not to be displayed as themselves— stressing the aestheticism of authors' works—but act as inverse effects to subtly assert a serious social criticism of its times. This decadent anti-hero and its tropes becomes the representation of an ill-culture, and as such a warning of what is to come if change does not occur.4

The Encyclopedia thus summarizes the critical paradox of Decadent Literature. If this literature's central focus were exclusively on the punitive introspection of the hero, one would be forced to accept that this kind of decadence is not restricted to the experience of one historical period alone. It is that kind of agony of alienation until atonement comes that we find in Chrétien de Troyes' Medieval heroes. In Chrétien de

Troyes' Les Romans courtois, for example, the "decadent" shows a predilection to lust, a form of decadence absent in high courtly literature. As a twelfth-century writer whose main works date from 1160 to 1190, Chrétien fuses the tradition of the Chansons de

Geste and the Antichi Romanzi. Chrétien creates a supposedly perfect hero who is

4 See footnote 11 (page 25) for additional clarification on the matter. 9

embarrassed for having fallen short of perfection because of his only weakness, his

Achilles' heel: his predisposition toward falling in physical, lustful, love for the wrong woman. Yvain, Chrétien's hero, fails to achieve the flawless character that his knighthood demands for being unable to control his physical attraction. His ultimate self- awareness ought then to make him a decadent hero of sorts. An additional common thread between Yvain and the "fin de siècle" decadent heroes around 1900 is that sex is their most obvious sign of corruption, the hallmark of the decadent hero and of the

Decadent movement in literature and in art.

This example is perhaps too drawn out, but it highlights the critical problem of the use of the term "Decadent." Sexual behavior and sin are, accordingly, not the only markers of more modern Decadent literature, as other critics concur in referring to any number of other literary "heroes" characterized like Chrétien's. Tying such social failings into psychological terms, for instance, Chris Snodgrass (1980) talks about the "ego- libido" in his essay "Swinburne's Circle of Desire: A Decadent Theme," and how sexual transgression marks an individual's sense of imprisonment in decadent literatures. He states that "it becomes clear that man's apostasy was caused, in fact, by a failure of the will—the freedom [being] the will towards passionate transgression" (Snodgrass 69).

Snodgrass goes on by stating that, while violence has to be prohibited to ensure the stability necessary for survival, there remains a repressed threat: the taboo "in assigning a negative definition to these forbidden objects and experiences, inspires fear, [as well as] it also inspires religious-erotic fascination, sometimes even adoration and devotion: it

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evokes desire" (Snodgrass 68). Hence through pain, this particular Decadent hero is unmasked, and it is in the pain of the psychological punishment that he achieves pleasure.

Again, pleasure through pain remains a distinctive feature of the narratives that present critics' romanticized stereotype of the fin de siècle variant of the decadent hero.

We see him appearing sickly and know that he will brick himself inside his Decadent castle, imprisoned not by his own physical drives but by his singularity, as the last of his kind, a dying race, reaching the ultimate desire through pain. Ultimately, whatever the scope of decadence may be, critics feel comfortable in using the term whenever the

"decadent" hero is tortured by the realization of his un-divine essence.

The preface of Ian Fletcher's Decadence and the 1890s concurs with this description as an overview for the movement as a whole. He describes the particular

Decadence of the fin de siècle as the

evolution of that narcissism, that sense of emptiness within, that incapacity to

look without, which corresponds to the successive closures of the nineteenth-

century poetic tradition, to that loss of metaphor and metonymy which leads to the

painful tautology whereby the poet can only affirm that "immortal diamond" in

the wake of collapsing inscape is indeed "immortal diamond" and "(my god)" is

"My God." (Fletcher 13)

This apocalyptic impulse expressed in largely psychological terms focused around the hero, the "collapsing inscape," is most commonly used to define specific works of literature as decadent, and which most narrowly characterizes the literature of Decadence proper (the Decadence of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), as practiced

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by writers like Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Yet that precise literary Decadence has other antecedents and echoes that persist and which keep us from historicizing more precisely the 1890s version of this general human condition and aesthetic trope.

In its most general usage, the term "decadence" is defined as "as a failure to recognize objective or timeless values that transcend and give form and direction to individual experience and effort" (New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics).

As such, the essential condition of decadence is "that of an artist whose symbolist aspirations are constantly thwarted by a persistent naturalism" (Preminger, Brogan, and

Warnke 275). Thus, as I have described, even as early a writer as Chrétien de Troyes' heroes can be considered decadent in that they fell (in the theological sense of sinning) away from perfection and abridged what separates us from animals. In fact, the word

'fall' has many other resonances with the specific Decadent movement at the end of the nineteenth century that espoused the term as its self-description—it did not only refer to sin and personal transgression, as I shall argue below. The London correspondents spoke of those more self-aware French Decadents as "the school of collapse," whose literature is believed to have impacted Italian and English literary milieus after 1886

(Fletcher 11).

Despite its consistent presence in dictionaries and literary encyclopedias, which move from the general condition to the specific Decadence of the 1880s and 1890s, the rubric has also been flattened by later critical usages, as it as been taken up repeatedly to describe various other twentieth-century decadent literatures. In some ways, the specific fin de siècle Decadence continues to threaten to disappear into many looser usages, in a

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variety of scenarios from Gay and Lesbian communities to gastronomic delicacies such as chocolate desserts. The term survives and continues to branch into different areas like antiquarian supernatural literatures or gothic jewelry, housewares, lighting and clothing.

Connections are made with German pre-war novels (as those of Thomas Knoble) as well as commentaries from the era of the Jazz Age. In literary milieus, for example, the term is often related to Marie Corelli and her occult stories (1855-1924), to Poe as the father of the detective story, to juvenile series books and other vintage young adult and children's books, as well as to the literary fairy tales of the late nineteenth century (by writers like

Lord Dunsany) that frequently duplicate themes in adult fantasy literatures. Often, too, the rubric includes Pre-Raphaelite, Gothic and Victorian literatures, or fictions of sexuality and/or of the abused such as the homosexual, dandy authors or women authors

(such as Marjorie Bowen, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge and Mary Augusta Ward). The growing arena of connections with decadent literature also includes the arts and architecture with mentions of figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickly.

These looser colloquial usages are not surprising, since they relate to the ways in which Decadence has been discussed in stylistic terms by literary histories as a proliferation of supposedly technical uses. In its most specific and stable reference to a literature characterized by particular stylistic markers, the term has been ascribed to a movement named for the aesthetic goals of a specific set of poets in France at the turn of the century (Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud).

Because of this technical reference to poetry, to this day, most extant critical work on the artists of "decadent" literature remains focused on how decadent states of being are

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reflected in particular stylistic elements (especially its narrative tropes) and on its redefinition of the artist.

Most scholars stress these artists' reaction against the image of artist/creator that had prevailed since the Romantic era, casting the artist as egotist; their plea for the autonomy of art (as well as for art for art's sake and for the artist as society's outsider); and their idea that, for art to make an impact, it must be sensationalist and melodramatic, bizarre, perverse, exotic, or artificial.5 The term may indeed frame this one group of artists who did not consider themselves Decadent, if that meant socially withdrawing.

Nonetheless, when this "decadence" is broadened to include any literature of a similar aesthetics, it again could easily accommodate a wide variety of literature, including, for example, the Marquis de Sade and Gothic literature, and other even less satisfactory comparisons. Ultimately, stylistic approaches to the phenomenon have yielded little more precision than the psychologizing ones described earlier.

Rethinking Decadence: Beyond Psychology and Aesthetics

Although I believe that decadence—as an alias for corruption, used here not capitalized—has been around since the early forms of literary texts, and continues to be around today in the more "psychologized" contexts of literature exemplified in my

Chrétien example above, the analyses that follow in later chapters of the present study

5 This is exactly the narrower understanding of postmodernism. Later I will base my argument in a comparison between the superficial understanding of decadence and the superficial understanding of the postmodern. I will even accentuate the argument by comparing this movement against the gratuitous embellishment in Spanish Modernism. 14

rely on the belief that there is a more precise literary usage of the term to be outlined, if critics are to concentrate more precisely on the period that espouses Decadence as a conscious program: the era around a series of authors whose major work fell between the last four decades of the nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century, and the

World-War-One era in Western Europe.

Each nation's literary history takes up this specific phase, in often parallel ways, but the origins of the literatures most properly called Decadent are very precise—there is a corpus of authors and texts within each literary history that deserve to be called not decadent but Decadent, as a consistent strand of literary production. According to Italian literary historian Valentina Fortichiari (1987), and to many others, Charles Beaudelaire's collection of poems, Les Fleures du mal, and Gustav Flaubert's novel, Madame Bovary,6 mark the beginning—as precursors—of this literary movement, both dating to 1857

(Fortichiari 33). In Italy, in the same year, Ippolito Nievo published the Manzoni-style novel entitled Il Conte pecoraio (The Sheeply Count), and Giosuè Carducci draws the picture of an anti-romantic society called Amici pedanti (Pedantic Friends) (Fortichiari 5).

Note that this decadence is neither purely stylistic (since it spans several genres) nor psychological (since it has different cases of characters). It is, instead, a set of literary texts that pose particular period-based problems.

A similar genealogy can be drawn for British literature. In England, Walter

Pater's mentor, John Ruskin (1819-1900), writes in his volume The Stones of Venice

(1851-1853) the praises of a poet and painter whose gothic style epitomizes the essence

6 Notice that the decadent hero in this novel is a woman. 15

of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Fortichiari 43). Ruskin's adoration for Dante Gabriel

Rossetti (1828-1882), combined with Aubrey Beardsley's veneration of Wagner, lay a foundation for A.C. Swinburne's anti-Victorian masterpiece entitled Poems and Ballads

(1886) which is seen by many as a pivotal move towards this sad, cruel, gothic and drug- induced movement that goes beyond the seemingly Parnassian concept of "Art for Art's sake" that is modern Decadence (Fortichiari 45). This again points to the ubiquitous stereotype in Western literary history.

It is, I believe, critical to rebuild this genealogy, which equates modernization, with modernism. Perhaps more crucial, as a starting point, is to recognize that these artists of original Decadence actually worked in a more general context of change, as part of the cultural criticism associated with modernism and in opposition to the dehumanizing forces of Europe's social and economic modernization. Most importantly, these precursors of modern literary Decadence come into being as correlates to the era's general world unrest, a connection which most critics fail to notice,7 since they have traditionally identified Decadence with aestheticism. Yet in 1857 Europe, the supposedly decadent Europe of Madame Bovary and Les Fleurs du mal, the air was one of revolt, uprisings, and change, and these texts were often associated with these changes.

The era, in fact, associated revolt and violence with aestheticism and Decadence in many forms. The Indian revolt in Bengal (the "Mutiny") started in 1857, signaling the beginning of the end for British colonial rule there. Less than 10 years earlier, a small

7 Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), to which I will return, is a rare exception to this generality. 16

pamphlet entitled The Communist Manifesto (1848) had gone into circulation. In its later printings and many translations, even more revolutionary impulses from Western Europe are described in its new prefaces. The Manifesto begins with the following words: "A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and

Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies" (Marx and Engels 78). Robert L.

Heilbroner (1986) describes these times as pregnant with "a revolutionary fervor in the air and a rumble underfoot that seems to be attempting to break down the old order"

(Heilbroner 136). Heilbroner further implies that the Manifesto was quite accurate in assessing the motivations behind these uprisings:

In France the plodding regime of Louis Philippe, the portly middle-class king,

wrestled with a crisis and then collapsed; the king abdicated and fled to the

security of a Surrey villa, and the workingmen of Paris rose in a wild

uncoordinated surge and ran up the Red Flag over the Hôtel de Ville. In Belgium

a frightened monarch offered to submit his resignation. In Berlin the barricades

went up and bullets whistled; in Italy mobs rioted; and in Prague and Vienna

popular uprisings imitated Paris by seizing control of the cities. (Heilbroner 136)

Therefore this era was perceived by many as one of closure and of new beginnings, of new classes and new techniques of leadership.

Friederich Engels echoes this mood when he writes in his 1893 Preface to the

Italian Edition of the Manifesto,

17

The Manifesto does full justice to the revolutionary part played by capitalism in

the past. The first capitalist nation was Italy. The close of the feudal Middle

Ages, and the opening of the modern capitalist era are marked by a colossal

figure: an Italian, Dante, both the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of

modern times. Today as in 1300, a new historical era is approaching. Will Italy

give us a new Dante, who will mark the hour of our birth of this new proletarian

era? (Engels 75-76)

He underscores how the organization of Europe had changed, requiring new patterns of association and new attitudes to traditions. This vast alteration of how men live, this

"self-transformation" into modernity, has been examined by many as historical change to an unprecedented degree. William H. McNeil (1979) notes that

older patterns of society, culture, and government altered drastically [during

these times]—so much so that some observers are inclined to treat modern

industrial revolution as different in kind from anything that went before, whether

in Europe or anywhere else. (417)

This change was reflected in a massive shift in the real conditions surrounding labor and capital, as well. The Russians abolished serfdom in 1861 and the United States abolished slavery in 1863, in the midst of a bitter Civil War (1861-1865).

Yet reactions to this new "adventure in global cosmopolitanism" were not confined to politics (McNeil 420). In the world of art, writers and architects moved away from antiquarianism and historicism, as they no longer tried to portrait authentic details of the purported glorious pasts of their now-questionable nation states. These states

18

were, in their minds, turning into the kind of global economic machines that dehumanized the great traditions while rendering them irrelevant, at the same time that older high cultures were under pressure from the newly liberated masses. In consequence, many intellectuals reacted to the economic and social changes of the era, often depicting the "venality, pomposity and stupidity of the collective," as experienced in hard-bitten realists such as Honoré Daumier (Lamm, Cross, and Turk 470). In order to help rethink the place of art in this new collective, the realists insisted on portraying everyday life, thus insisting that "one must be of one's own time" (Lamm, Cross, and Turk 470).

But the realist solution is not the only avenue to critique the era through representation. This "being of one's own time" becomes the fundamental question about modernization in general. At the venues all across Europe, like the Café Guerbois, artists like Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Whistler, the photographer Nadar, Rodin, Emile Zola and Baudelaire, all discussed what it meant to be a modern artist (Lamm, Cross, and Turk

476).

Cézanne's redefinition of space; Van Gogh's "intent on getting large quantities of paint onto the canvas" that result in the three-dimensional manner of "topographical models" (Lamm, Cross, and Turk 478-479); Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's delight "in portraying people at cabarets, theaters, the races, and brothels;" Henri Rousseau's

"startling directness of vision" his imagined picture of the "tropics of the mind" produced only "by the magical vision of a simple man who apparently, never left France;" and

Edvard Munch's "manipulated themes of evil, terror and death to depict the plight, as he saw it, of fin de siècle European civilization" (Lamm, Cross, and Turk 481-482)—all

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reflected in their own ways the need to rethink Europe's heritage, to re-encounter what it means to be an artist and to engage with the needs of the day.

But these artists who sought to redesign the means of representing their age and days to accommodate its own spirit in an explicitly modernist way were not the only voices to challenge the day. There were other groups of artists who chose to overcome the past by engaging with the present in different ways. Some groups, for example, chose to represent the parts of society who had all-too-often been overlooked, but which would indeed be determining the future, as Engels himself noted. Such groups, like the naturalists and realists, often overlooked the older ruling classes in favor of addressing the underbelly of capitalism, the power of nature rather than a culture coming to its end, and human ingenuity and originality of representation rather than fidelity to outworn traditions.

Where such modernist artists—as a group—broke with history in order to create a new one, a second group—the Decadent authors proper whom I treat—was engaged in a much darker political and social satire of the older ruling classes—the satire which will be the principle focus of the chapters that follow. In each of the three countries against whose background the targeted texts in this study are set up, France, Italy, and England, the actual Decadent movement has a different genesis and nuance, as presented in their respective literary histories. However all three share a social realism, as means of criticism.

To set up the issues which arise in the various Decadents' critiques of society, it is worth looking at the specific history of Decadence in each of the countries I will be

20

discussing. As we shall see, each country's national literary history defines the movement differently, but what these definitions share is a consistent approach to the artistic phenomenon as an issue of style, rather than as a literature correlated with political and social changes.

Critics' National Decadences, 1: France

Not surprisingly, this national literature determines how all other European

Decadences are conceived. Ironically, the French Decadent authors—principally

Symbolist poets—never intended for this movement to become so widespread, and they never expected to become the basis for modern literature in English, let alone Italian. Yet their project was not only aesthetic or elitist. These authors reacted to Zola's Naturalism in a way that sought to regain pride in the human spirit, or so it seemed at first. In his essay entitled "From Naturalism to Symbolism," John Lucas (1968) speaks for a generation of scholars when he writes that Naturalism can be equated with pessimism, which in turn can be equated with determinism (132)—thus asserting that the mood associated with Decadence was not simply a representation of one aesthetic school. He continues by noting that this "struggle for survival, the reduction of a person to his elemental, 'animal' level," is what the Decadent movement opposes (139). Symbolists, in turn, also considered themselves as the "supreme antagonists" of what Yeats calls "the slow dying of men's hearts that we call the progress of this world."8 As such, Lucas

8 Taken from "The Symbolism of Poetry," in Essays and Introductions (New York: Papermac, 1968), pp. 162-3. 21

concludes by quoting Milton Chaikin to contrast the two movements, Symbolism and

Naturalism, to identify the decision that broke the two movements apart: "it served the cause of Art better to wander in the flowered field than to roll in the mud."9 But both still remained critiques of modernization.

In this formulation, these precursors of modern literature were actually writing about the agonies of the contradictions of experience presented to modern man.

However, the Symbolists were elevating modern man to something more ethereal and complex than the Naturalists wanted to believe possible. Many critics have followed the path that these modern artist took in differentiating between Naturalism and Symbolism, and trying to situate where decadence fits. John Goode (1980) writes, referring to the symbolist artists, in his article "The Decadent Writer as Producer" that this "tragic generation foreshadows modernism" (Goode 109). W.B. Yeats' question about the era was posed in Autobiographies (1956), where he asks, "Was it that we lived in what is called 'an age of transition' and so lacked coherence, or did we pursue antithesis?"

(Goode 109). Following this suggestion, Goode goes on to state that "all this was the opposite of Zola's naturalism" (Goode 114). It is therefore unclear where one should posit the origin of the era's decadence, in a mood, a representation, or an attempted revolt.

Such statements by critics do in part reflect historical reality surrounding the emergence of the poet movements most closely associated with French Decadence. In such accounts, one may even wonder whether Naturalism or Symbolism need be

9 Milton Chaikin, George Moore's Early Fiction, as citied in George Moore's Mind and Art, ed. Graham Owens (1968), here, p.26; cited in Lucas, p. 141. 22

considered the precursor of Decadence. Huysmans himself confesses, in a preface to a new edition of his book A rebours, written twenty years after its first publication, that he had made a deliberate turn away from his early masters: "Naturalism was then at its crest," Huysmans recalls, "but that school, which rendered the undeniable service of situating true-to-life characters in true-to-life settings, was condemned to repeat itself, to marching in place."10 He was not, therefore, rejecting its program, but instead just its aesthetics.

To be sure, critics posit a clear difference: John Stokes describes Huysmans' hero

(or anti-hero) in A rebours, the young des Esseintes, as the prototype for all Decadent heroes. In his essay "The Legend of Duse," Stokes (1980) makes a typical critical move by quoting Arthur Symons's famous definition of the Decadent Ideal, "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… " (Stokes 151). This Paterian paradox, continues Stokes,

"while responsive to the efforts of the Symbolist poet and the prose stylist, was to become an intolerable ideal, a contradiction even, once the decadent was given the opportunity of assuming a public presence, an identifiable and vocal personality" (Stokes

151). Hence, the Naturalist man, purportedly so abhorred by the Decadent author, is a sub-human, whereas the decadent man seems to lead humanity towards a world of impossible paradoxes where man is equated with a reactionary puppet. However, that puppet is elevated above the common man in that he is capable of a peculiar and unique

10 Edward Mendelson, "Joris Karl Huysmans' Salomé: The Decadent Ideal," in European Writers: The Romantic Century Vol. 7, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985), pp. 1709–1730. 23

talent for the appreciation of art. This statement exaggerates, I believe, what Huysmans said.

Yet the critical logic exists. Making further links between the French origins of

Decadence and its later forms, Stokes quotes T.S. Eliott's weak attempt at attacking realism, which parallels Yeats' dislike of the movement. In both cases, realism is condemned because of its commonness. T.S. Eliott states that "[t]here has been no form to arrest so to speak, the flow of the spirit at any particular point before it expands and ends its course in the desert of exact likeness to reality which is perceived by the most common mind" (Stokes 167). And Stokes also adds Yeats' response that "Realism is created for common people and was always their peculiar delight" (Stokes 167). So to these critics of French Decadence, Decadence acts, apart from reality and arresting its effects, as a counter-agent to the anything—but common—they move from what was an original anti-Naturalist impulse to generalize Decadence as an anti-realist movement in general. In that regard, Stokes ascribes to Arthur Symons the belief that Symbolism refers to the transcendent aspect of Decadence (Stokes 170). Stokes notes that Symons'

1893 definition of decadence

had had a broad reference which related to style in that it incorporated the minor

categories of Symbolism and Impressionism which were said to be coterminous,

working on the same stylistic hypothesis that "not general truth merely, but la

vérité vraie, the very essence of truth" reflected the time the authors wrote in.

(Stokes 169-70)

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As such, the Decadent emerges, in Stokes' words, "the product of a stagnant society," not stagnant within itself (Stokes 170). This definition will be important for the discussions to follow in that it points to a strategic self-identification of Decadence vis-à-vis bourgeois society—a class-bound association that is not necessarily held visible in analyses by critics who identify Decadence with elitist aestheticism.

As a final facet to add to the French definition of Decadence, Ian Fletcher (1980) writes in his essay "Decadence and the Little Magazines" that Decadence focused much of the "artistic, psychological and cultural crisis of the late nineteenth century" (Stokes

173).11 Along with Fletcher, the vast bulk of twentieth-century criticism of Decadent literature moves away from the attested historical origins of French Decadence (a reaction to Naturalism as a particular artistic form of social criticism) and toward the kind of stylistic-thematic criticism which is the norm for later receptions of Decadence.

This perspective is beginning to be corrected, or at least altered. The most recent scholar to look back at this era in great depth is Robert Ziegler. In her review of Ziegler's book, Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle, Jennifer Forrest

(2005) underscores that the author "establishes Decadence's historical place and the literary worth of its proponents."12 Unlike his predecessors, Ziegler believes that

11 Fletcher believed that Decadence "came into being from a cultural collapse; it came from the shift toward the coterie, the movement, the avant garde; moreover, committed to the privilegedly unprivileged circle, the microcosm of a microcosm, it was normally magnetized only by the elusive mythologizing of the group personality; it transacted with obsolence, [and finally], it was inter-generic" (Stokes 173). 12 Robert Ziegler, Beauty Raises the Dead: Literature and Loss in the Fin de Siècle (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002). Ziegler's work provides discussions of the most important work on French Decadence, including: Pierre Citti, Contre la décadence: Histoire de l'imagination française dans le roman, 1890-1914 (1987); Séverine Jouve, Les Décadents: Bréviaire fin de siècle (1989); Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (1989); Jean de Palacio, Figures et formes de la décadence (1994); Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (1999); and Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, ed., Dieu, la 25

Decadence is "the bastard child of naturalists guilty of betraying the principle of hereditary accountability" (Ziegler, Beauty 30), and that through the recomposing of this

“loss of the parent when he disassociates himself from” art becomes the work of the

Decadent writer (Ziegler, Beauty 31).13 In her review, Forrest underlines precisely how

Ziegler supports his topic that Decadent novels should be portrayed as psycho-social documents, showing how individuals react to pressures from the outside (Forrest 349).

Most critically, Ziegler's project in Beauty Raises the Dead reattached Decadence to a kind of political criticism (or at least the possibility thereof) as it discusses in detail eight novels and their writers, paired off for the similarities in the way they re-present their objects of loss. Ziegler's study of Villier de l'Isle-Adam's Véra and Georges

Rodenbach's Bruges-la-Morte investigates mourning and the incorporation of the deceased beloved through the "veneration of the relics" that resurrect her, as well as, in the case of Rodenbach, kill her a second time (Forrest 348). Rachilde's La Jongleuse and

Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Bougrelon deal with "the stifling mother" who is omitted in the text only to be reconstructed as "the disapproving reader" of the novel (Forrest 349).14

Catulle Mendès's Le Chercheur de tares and Marcel Schwob's Le Livre de Monelle each distinguish themselves by their implicit commentary on the disillusionment inherent in

chair et les livres: Une approche de la décadence (2000) (for the complete bibliographic references to these texts, see the bibliography to the present study). In general, these texts take on Decadent literature as a reaction to modernization, specifically in a kind of psychosocial identity politics, tracing how the Decadent hero is figured as a representative of an ill culture. I will refer to these other texts occasionally in my analyses of particular novels, but where they stress the aestheticism of authors' works, I will stress their social realism. 13 Ziegler continues by identifying Decadence with a “flawed descendant of an unidentifiable parent”, and concludes that “Since the subject comes into being as a result of the separation from what sustains him, Decadence[, then] becomes self-aware only in the aftermath of an experience of loss” (Ziegler 31). 14 I chose Forrest's review for the summary of the chapters, but I chose to use Ziegler's book for direct quotes. 26

the process of creation, Mendès in his "doubling [of] the text both as an object substituting for what was originally lost and as a judgment on the illegitimacy of the act of substitution" (Ziegler, Beauty 89), and Schwob in the recognition that the reconstructed object is a "poor substitute" for the lost object (Ziegler, Beauty 146).

Finally, Ziegler's analyses of J. K. Huysmans's Là-bas and Octave Mirbeau's La 628-E8 center on the creation of utopias. Mirbeau, who seeks a secular utopia of social reform, purportedly baffles critics who attempt to come to terms with his "ideological volatility," from his early anti-Semitic writings, to his incarnation as a dreyfusard, to his support of

Jean Grave, the anarchist (Ziegler, Beauty 162). Ziegler contends, however, that Mirbeau cultivates precisely this ambiguity in his identity, just as he "privileges the creative process over the finished project" (Beauty 139) — he renders politics ambiguously in order to stress the author's authority (Forrest 350). For the present purpose, I would underscore the persistent association that Ziegler makes between these Decadent novels and politics.

His perspective applies to the most extreme case. As for Huysmans' Catholic novels, they function not as aberrations from the Decadent ideal, but rather are situated neatly in Decadent authors' emphasis on the process of creation itself: "there was no sequence of deaths and reincarnations, no linear, exclusionary progression from naturalist to Decadent to postconversion Catholic" (Ziegler, Beauty 161). Huysmans' "enduring interest in hagiographic subjects," points out Ziegler, "proves the latent existence of the oblate in the naturalist disciple and the survival of the naturalist in the penitent proselyte"

(Beauty 161-62).

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In such newer representative critiques of French Decadence, the movement appears as the offspring of Naturalism, infusing its writing with sensuality, imagination, and tints of modernism—stressing creativity as the alternative to the dehumanizing forces of modernization, but not necessarily ignoring explicit social critique. Thus Valentina

Fortichiari (1987) calls Baudelaire the Poet of the Modern Era juxtaposing "l'ivresse du coeur" with "la pâture de la raison" and coordinating it all with the intuitions of Poe,

Nerval and Wagner (Fortichiari 87). In this sense, Baudelaire emerges consistently as the forefather of Decadence for virtually all literary critics. From him Verlaine, Rimbaud,

Mallarmé—who himself claimed that he took off where Baudelaire left off at his premature death at 47 (Fortichiari 89)—followed.

Critics' National Decadences, 2: Italy

Many Italian Literary critics concur that French Decadence evolved from this particular Poet of Modernity, and as such, Baudelaire is generally the literary gate to

Italy's Decadence. Benedetto Croce (1903), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1905),

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (1913), Francesco Flora (1921), Walter Binni (1936),

Riccardo Scrivano (1963) and Adriano Seroni (1964) are just some of the few that trace

Italy's path towards Decadence in its literary tradition. Following Ziegler's (2002) approach to Decadence as "a psychoanalytical approach to treat, not the cult of the artificial, nor perversion, illness, and the morbid, but the very process of Decadent creation itself," the Italians see French Decadence reaching back as far as 1848, to a

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specific political moment when the delicate imbalance between the French intellectuals of the time and the French middle class started to clash (Ziegler 17).

In fact, in Italian literature, the term Decadentismo covers a much wider literary time frame than its counterparts in other European contexts. This Decadence was not at first focused around literature. The full-blown literary realization of the Italian movement started late, first as a completely imported phenomenon, an imitation of the

French literary movement. Although the Italian movement had an imitated and delayed beginning, coming only after the turn of the twentieth century, it nonetheless succeeded in developing in its own peculiar literary vein and actually continued to influence national authors until much later than the French or English movements. In its most canonical formulation, Italian Decadence encompasses twentieth-century authors such as

Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), and Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-

1938) and was early associated with protests against the existing order.

The particular historical moment in which Italian Decadence rose is crucial to my overall argument. In a series of rapid reverses, Italy had seen its rising nationalism crushed by WW I, experienced the rise of Italy's Fascist Party under dictator Benito

Mussolini on the eve of WW II, and then its collapse following the war. During these times, Gabriele D'Annunzio took up his pen to influence his country's government and culture, ending up as one of the premiere Italian voices during the first half of the twentieth century, and one of the first voices identified with Italian Decadence. In fact, through his strategic use of Decadence in his writing, D'Annunzio celebrated a type of nationalism often compared to Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of the Über-mensch.

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Many believe that D'Annunzio both helped restore the country that the Socialist Party tore to pieces after WW I, and bring the Italian Fascist Party to power.15

This joint political and cultural vision has made D'Annunzio the defining author of Italian Decadence in most critics' eyes. Thus, in an essay published in 1897,16 G. B.

Rose calls D'Annunzio brilliant and corrupt; and he adds about the author's prose that

Baudelaire's poetry has been aptly compared to a Parisian gutter, amongst whose

filth and stench blossom strange flowers of a rare and delicate grace. The works

of the young Italian genius who has flashed upon the world in the last few years

may be likened to a beautiful tropical morass, filled with luxuriant vegetation and

gorgeous flowers, peopled by birds of brilliant plumage and snakes with glittering

scales, but whose air, so full of flashing butterflies and golden scarabs, is heavy

with subtle poison. He is the most brilliant figure that has arisen in the last years

of the dying century, and if he is a promise of what the next is to bring forth the

outlook is as ominous as it is fascinating. (147)

G. B. Rose compares D'Annunzio to Theophile Gautier because of their shared worship of pagan beauty—the first aspect of Decadence generally attributed to Italian Decadence.

To give his readers a better idea of the Italian author's work, Rose expands this vision and describes him as a combination of Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Loti and Ruskin. Rose

15 "The terrible results of the World War threw everything into chaos in Italy. The masses moved violently to the Left. Aristocratic rule completely broke down. The Italian Socialist Party grew to seventy thousand members. By November, 1919, it secured 156 seats out of a total of 508, with a program calling for a dictatorship of the proletariat, and its membership rose to three hundred thousand; the membership of the Confederation of Labor jumped to two million" (http://www.weisbord.org/conquest28.htm). 16 G. B. Rose, "Gabriele D'Annunzio," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. V, No. 2 (April 1897), pp. 146-52.

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concludes that the author's voluptuousness can be compared to Pierre Louys' Aphrodite, yet D'Annunzio

is never coarse[, he] remains always the exquisite sybarite, the refined voluptuary,

and instead of the cold, glittering style in which Louys depicts the corruption of

ancient Alexandria, we have one whose rich coloring reminds us of the glories of

Venetian painting, with an immodesty surpassing that of the voluptuous queen of

the Adriatic. (150)

This mixture of historical style and high emotional coloring recurs as defining of the movement throughout the criticism on Decadence in Italy, even as seen by critics focused on aesthetics.

Yet politics are also intimately associated with D'Annunzio, as well, especially in the form of a protest against the limitations of the established order. This Decadence is never just aestheticized. Ashley Dukes, an important English dramatist and drama critic during the first half of the twentieth century, compares D'Annunzio to Maeterlinck,

Hofmannsthal, and Tchekhov, which associates him with various versions of aesthetic style.17 At the same time, Dukes (1911) stresses that D'Annunzio's dramatic work is, just as that of his three above mentioned peers, all about a "revolt against the bourgeois theatre, [it is a] theatre which is concerned mainly with the social conditions of a period, filled with moral indignation and designed to replace convention by an ethical standard"

(266)—in this description, very close to the goals of Naturalism. He claims that

17 He does so in a section entitled "Italy," in his Modern Dramatists, 1911; reprt. (New York: Books For Libraries Press, Inc., 1912), pp. 264-272. 31

"Maeterlinck rehabilitated symbolism[;] Hofmannsthal became the leader of the New

Romanticists; Tchekhov rebelled against the 'morality for household use,' and that only with the gradual decay of modern realism [does] their originality begin to be understood"

(Dukes 265). Dukes believes that, although D'Annunzio imitates a lot (he calls his work a "borrowed plume"), he nonetheless offers a magical "will to illusion," as Dukes calls the Italian author's capacity to create an atmosphere where "[t]he bald statements of scenic decoration become [convincingly] real" (270).

These early positive evaluations of D'Annunzio have not always been upheld by later critics, even while he continues to be identified as a Decadent in the cause of social criticism. According to Susan Bassnett (1991), D'Annunzio's work has shifted in importance throughout the twentieth century. In Bassnett's "The Flame: Overview," the critic states that "D'Annunzio's work declined in popularity from the 1930s onwards, and for decades his plays and novels were regarded as period pieces, and examples of the excesses of Decadent symbolist writing," an assessment that makes him part of the wider misunderstanding and shifting categorization between Symbolism and Naturalism in the history of Decadence (viii).18 However, Bassnett believes that there are "signs of a reassessment in the 1990s," and she concludes that "The Flame is probably the novel most likely to appeal to a contemporary readership, focusing as it does on the battle between the sexes: between a powerful woman and a man desperate to enjoy the same

18 This is exactly the narrower understanding of postmodernism. I will later base my argument in a comparison between the superficial understanding of decadence and the superficial understanding of the postmodern. I will accentuate the argument by comparing this movement against the gratuitous embellishment in Spanish Modernism. 32

public recognition" (xx). Bassett attributes this shift to gender criticism, so that we are now able to "look at D'Annunzio in a new way, and this novel is an ideal place to start"

(xx).

True to the prevailing stereotype, in most early critical accounts, his contemporaries already cherished D'Annunzio's own innovative treatment of passionate sex, voluptuosity and an irresistible—or what Arnold Bennett calls "superb"—passion for beauty (236). Arnold Bennett, an Edwardian novelist contemporary to D’Annunzio, does indeed propose the theory that D'Annunzio's work was misjudged due to erring English notions.19 Bennett writes that sometimes D'Annunzio is seen as "silly, foppish, extravagant, or even caddish (as in Il fuoco)," but he notes that "the English notions of what constitutes extravagance or caddishness are by no means universally held" (237).

Similarly, Mario Praz, another contemporary of D'Annunzio's and a prominent Italian critic, writes in 1922 in The London Mercury20 that

We are waiting for something. We feel that the literature of to-morrow will be

different. We strain our eyes seeking new stars on the horizon; but meanwhile we

turn to the past. We are again reading Ada Negri, Grazia Deledda and Giovanni

Verga, whose complete works Bemporad is publishing; while writers formed in

the school of d'Annunzio return to the light, and are greeted with sympathy. Thus

among books published last year I saw favorable reviews of a novel by Milly

Dandolo called Il figlio del mio dolore, and a volume of verses called Evalga, by

19 Arnold Bennett, "Unfinished Perusals," in his Books and Persons: Being Comments on A Past Epoch, 1908-1911 (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917), pp. 235-38. 20 The London Mercury, Vol. V, No. 30 (April 1922), pp. 644-46. 33

Matteo Darzi, books so deeply influenced by d'Annunzio that they would have

been pilloried when Futurism raged only a few years ago. (645)21

Many other contemporaneous critics concurred with Praz in praising

D'Annunzio's style. Exemplary of this praise is Eugune Benson's (1896) essay entitled

"Gabriele d'Annunzio: The New Poet and His Work,"22 in which Benson discloses that the "secret of [D'Annunzio's] style is that it is ever informed by an imaginative mind, shaped by a never failing sense of art" (293). Benson calls the author's prose “supple and opulent” and his words “vivid and intense” (285). Benson, like Dukes, compares

D'Annunzio's work to George Sand, Theophile Gautier, Charles Algernon Swinburne, and Charles Baudelaire (289). According to Benson, this becomes magical and superb.

Thus he states that D'Annunzio, "[w]ithout a sense of humor, seldom or never with the purpose of a humorist, without the sport of wit, [. . .] holds one fascinated by his words as he tells his tale; while he tells it, he charms one with the music, the splendor, the color and the grace of his language, and one wonders at the sustained flow and harmony of his periods" (292). Notice, however, that this evaluation emphasizes the author's style,

21 The rest of the passage shows Praz critiquing D'Annunzio: "[He] belongs, of course, to an earlier generation. His art was born under the shadow of Carducci's rough, often solid, sometimes pretentious but always strong architecture. A desire to construct, to organise has always dominated him. When no architecture underlay some poetical fancy he arranged his images in a borrowed plan forcibly; perhaps it was the architectural preconceptions which he absorbed in his artistic education that drove him to employ the novel or dramatic form, for these are pretexts for him, not his necessity. His art has reached its highest only when he has been able freely to treat of his own experiences. Whoever has read his novels and dramas (and these are more widely known abroad than his poetry) can call to mind his descriptions of scenery, passages, images and sumptuous choreography, but not a single man's character, or any chain of events. His long and dangerous eye-trouble offered him the opportunity to diarise his peculiar and marvelous sensibility, without the need to invent a plot, or construct a psychology or a philosophy, two things he is incapable of doing" (Mario Praz, “A Letter from Italy,” in The London Mercury, Vol. V, No. 30, April 1922, pp. 644-46). 22 Benson, Eugene. "Gabriele d'Annunzio: The New Poet and His Work," in The Yellow Book, Vol. XI (October, 1896), pp. 284-99. 34

ignoring the political intent of the texts, as these critics see him across national lines.

Such critics praise him but they remove him from his Italian roots.

The vivid images portrayed by D'Annunzio in his writings are also detected by

Arthur Symons, arguably the most famous British critic of the era, who believes this to be a clear Italian stylistic quality. Symons writes in his introduction to D'Annunzio's The

Child of Pleasure23 that

D'Annunzio comes to remind us, very definitely, as only an Italian can, of the

reality and the beauty of sensation, of the primary sensations; the sensations of

pain and pleasure as these come to us from our actual physical conditions; the

sensation of beauty as it comes to us from the sight of our eyes and the tasting of

our several senses; the sensation of love, coming up from a root in Boccaccio,

through the stem of Petrarch, to the very flower of Dante. (vi)

Symons also considers D'Annunzio's earlier works as quite similar to the French

Decadent authors, but he goes on to say that D'Annunzio also borrowed from Pater and the English Decadent authors.24 Symons concludes his essay by comparing D'Annunzio to Tolstoi and Dostoievsky as well (xi). This English critic follows in the habit that will persist: taking D'Annunzio as a stylist, while ignoring the context in which he worked.

23 Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure, trans. Georgina Harding (London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1898), pp. v-xii. 24 "His early stories were crude, violent, done after the French models of that day; the man himself coming out in them only in the direct touch, there already, on physical pain, more than on physical pleasure. But with Il piacere he has begun, a little uncertainly, to mould a form of his own, taking the hint, not only from some better French models, but also from an Englishman, [Walter] Pater. There is still much that is conventional and unskillful in a book which, it must be remembered, was written at the age of twenty-five; but how it suggests, already, the free form of the Trionfo della Morte and Le Vergini delle Rocce!" (v-xi). 35

A more disturbing note enters into the details of the specific stereotyped identity given to D'Annunzio's Italian Decadence as seen in the era from outside Italy, however.

H. D. Sedgwick, Jr., an American critic, points out the differences between Anglo-Saxon

Decadent authors and ones of "Latin blood" as he considers D'Annunzio to be.25 In

"D'Annunzio, Poet and Playwright," Sedgwick proposes that as Americans, we are

"separated from him by the gulf of race," and that "[i]t is not easy for an American, bred in the habits, notions, and prejudices which we call Anglo-Saxon education, to be just to

D'Annunzio" (Sedgwick 7-10).

In this, an asymmetry emerges between what Anglo-American critics attribute to

Italian Decadence and to that of England or France (and to what Italians know about their own literary history). Where authors like Wilde were noted for attempting to be more flamboyant than the puritan—or shall we call it Victorian—traditions around him, thereby challenging them, D'Annunzio achieves a different kind of flair, similar perhaps to Huysmans. Sedgwick (1906) traces what he considers an impossible chasm between these national cultures of Decadence when he comments that

Even [D'Annunzio's] virtues, in great part, are beyond our sympathies; for we, on

our side, do not belong to the gentil sangue Latin, nor do we understand

D'Annunzio's most sincere, most praiseworthy trait—the conscience of the artist,

a conscience as imperious, as self-sufficient, as disdainful as that of the Puritans.

(Sedgwick 8)

25 H. D. Sedgwick, Jr., "D'Annunzio, Poet and Playwright," The Dial, Vol. XXXIV, No. 397 (January 1, 1903), pp. 7-10. 36

In this way, D'Annunzio's work is evaluated as if it were racially-nationally situated, not necessarily as part of an international artistic movement. Taking a similar tack on the alienness of an Italian author for the English reader, Frank Moore Colby (1904) confirms the impossibility for an Anglo-Saxon reader to appreciate the Italian author. Colby purports to be horrified by D'Annunzio's writings, finding him monotonous, pathetic and confused. Comparing D'Annunzio to a bad copy of Ibsen and Sudermann, in his book

Imaginary Obligations,26 Colby declares that

[D'Annunzio] seems a monotonous and unsmiling young man of restricted

interests, who, failing in the effects of art, falls back upon the merely horrible.

With murder or mutilation or incest in the wind, you will stay on to the end, and

there is never a moment when it is not in the wind. Portents and premonitions

fever fits and chills keep the doom incessantly impending, and the unfortunate

characters are not human beings at all, but merely foregone conclusions. It fixes

the attention as surely as the gong of an ambulance. It is the interest of deferred

brutality, the common device of those who seek a short cut to strong writing, for

people will often confound the sources of their emotion and define a primitive

animal zest in complicated art terms . . . . (Colby 134-144)27

Thus British critics continually want to highlight the purported emotionalism of

D'Annunzio's Decadence and set it apart from their own.

26 Frank M. Colby, Imaginary Obligations (New York City, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1904; rpt 1913). 27 One can see in this comment how Decadence and Naturalism are intertwined in some critics' minds. 37

By contrast, contemporaneous Italian critics easily praise D'Annunzio's style, as it might be expected in the case of a national author with canonical status—and with a recognized political program as well as an aesthetic one. In fact, Pietro Isola calls this pivotal author of Italian decadentismo a revelation. In Isola's article for Poet Lore28

(1907), he glosses over D'Annunzio's defects—that he admits are “many and grave”— and he states that

D'Annunzio has surely given [Italians] a new language and a new impetus. He has

reaffirmed our national conscience. He has revealed all the potency, the glow, the

color, the life, and the heretofore almost unknown beauties of our tongue. For

years we have been servile imitators of our neighbors; we have gorged ourselves

with Gallicisms, not deeming our language capable of expressing all that others

could express. D'Annunzio has changed all that. He has given us immeasurable

power. He stands to day as our great Stylist. He has felt and feels the civic dignity

of the writer—no longer to be considered as the subtle ornament of an industrious,

laborious civilization, but as the first among its citizens; as the highest example of

the product of a people; as the interpreter, the witness, and the messenger of his

time. (Isola 487)

Clearly, Isola really believes that Italy needed a unifying author like D'Annunzio, because he "rehabilitated and dignified [Italian] narrative and descriptive prose; he has given us unsurpassable poetic gems; he has commanded attention and admiration [his] dramatic art" (Isola 488). The style is not, in his opinion, overblown—it is a rejection of

28 "Gabriele D'Annunzio," Poet Lore, Vol. XVIII, No. IV, (Winter 1907), pp. 487-500. 38

the French influences that had brought Decadence to Italy, and the origin of a new voice for the country—that of s clearly Italian Decadence. Thus, his evaluation is cast on fundamentally different terms than that of the English critics.

So what is actually so different and so pivotal to Italian decadentismo in

D'Annunzio's style? As we have seen, D'Annunzio was considered throughout Europe as the leading figure of the Decadent movement in Italy although a far-flung imitator of

French Decadence. Charles Klopp (1999) writes in "Gabriele D'Annunzio,"29 that

[w]hile other Italian novelists of the period often turned to the past for their

subjects or wrote about characters different from themselves in social class, age,

sex, temperament, and so on, all of D'Annunzio's writings of this sort have

contemporary settings and principal characters who are in one way or another

projections of their author's own personality. (25)

Klopp sees D'Annunzio's first novel as the most sociologically developed novel of his

œuvre—and situates it at the beginning of the Decadent movement in Italy. More importantly for the present discussion, he also equates the historical context of the novel with its content when he states that

The 1880s that serve as background for Il piacere were a time of political and

social crisis for the still-fledgling Italian State. Although it treats them only in

passing, the novel contains several references to such critical issues of the day as

public demonstrations by the increasingly organized Italian workers, the failure of

29 "Gabriele D'Annunzio," Twayne's World Authors Series Online (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999 [orig. Boston: 1988]). p. 5-138. 39

Italy's colonial adventures in Africa, and—in the episode of the sickly baby whom

the protagonists Elena and Andrea encounter in its first chapter—the country's

lamentable public health conditions. (Klopp,"Gabriele D'Annunzio" 67)

It seems that Rome, Italy's new capital, and D'Annunzio become closely paralleled in the decade so pivotal to Decadence (the 1880s), as many of the critics underscore. This is an explicitly political evaluation.

Klopp makes a further parallel in this vein, between the day's politics and

D'Annunzio's contributions to Roman daily magazines, calling it D'Annunzio's

"campaign to conquer Rome" (43). Klopp argues that

D'Annunzio's campaign to conquer Rome [was] financed by a new kind of literary

activity: writing for the popular Roman newspapers, both daily and weekly, that

had sprung up like mushrooms in response to the rain of money that had poured

onto the city with the transfer of the national government there. The journalistic

writing that D'Annunzio began in the 1880s was the beginning of an activity that

he would continue at intervals throughout his career. The periodicals to which he

submitted this early work had such colorful names as Fanfulla (the name of a

character in Massimo D'Azeglio's Ettore Fieramosca) and Fanfulla della

Domenica (Sunday Fanfulla), Capitan Fracassa (Captain Blusterer), and Cronaca

bizantina (Byzantine chronicle)—the last of these an allusion to Carducci's

complaint that the Rome of united Italy had more in common with Byzantium at

its most decadent, than with the virtuous and austere capital that the Risorgimento

had dreamed of. ("Gabriele D'Annunzio" 38)

40

Matilde Serao (1888) also talks about this interesting process and correlation with

D'Annunzio, in her La conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome, New York, 1902), which narrates the shift of capitals that occurred in 1871 from Firenze to Roma (Klopp,

"Gabriele D'Annunzio." 45).

In Chapter 5 of Klopp's study on D'Annunzio, the critic sees the author's political ascent as connected with his aesthetics. I find this interesting as it supports my theory that earlier critics were much more aware of the direct relation between these decadent authors and the socio-political statement they intended to make—in contrast to a more recent wave of criticism which seriously focuses on the homo-erotic aspect of the novels, as well as the highly stylistic "art pour l'art" trend seen in it, but not its "two-faced" nature. D'Annunzio recalled this duality between art and politics, and Klopp traces its development within the author's aesthetics. Klopp notes that beginning with the years of his French "exile,"

D'Annunzio had begun to take public positions on a number of political issues.

When the poet returned from France in 1915, his first public act was to deliver an

oration at Quarto near Genoa in which he urged his native country to intervene in

the war on the side of France and the values of Latin civilization. Like many of

his speeches, the Quarto oration was delivered in a highly theatrical context and

was couched in extremely dramatic terms. It has long been noticed that

D'Annunzio's entrance into active political life in 1897, when he was elected to

Parliament on a conservative ticket, coincided with the beginning of his writing

for the theater. For D'Annunzio theater and politics, like nature and art, were

41

another "dio bifronte" or two-faced god—complementary expressions of the same

creative impulse. ("Gabriele D'Annunzio" 118)

Yet this clear tie of aesthetics and politics has rarely penetrated the scholarship on Italian literature and culture beyond Italian critics, leading to a disjunction between them and their European peers.

It is worthwhile noting how deep these habits of Italian critics run. Valentina

Fortichiari (1987), for example, believes that the defeat of the Risorgimento, paralleled by the coming to power of the leftist government of Depretis in 1876, with its parliamentary nature, really marks the pivotal point where she sees the emergence of

Italian decadentismo. In her own words Decadence and avanguardia, romanticism and decadentismo emerge as a "delusione per il fallimento degli ideali risorgimentale e disprezzo per la vita parlamentare" (Fortichiari 107). Fortichiari claims that this delusion about the failings of the Risorgimento and the contempt for parliamentary life is at the origin of the gap between "le vecchie generazioni" (the old generations) and the "giovani intellettuali" (young intellectuals) who are so much more sensitive to a literary message than the former (108). This is the instance when the Italian intellectuals take a look at the

French Decadent ideals for support in their social critique. Instead they decide to turn towards an analysis of Italian Decadence that relies on French critics' tie of Decadence to the psychological and aesthetic sublimations of political problems—and hence

D'Annunzio's purported penchant toward the duality within art and politics.

Like their French peers, then, the latest generation of Italian critics rarely take their Decadent heroes as social types, even as they acknowledge political roots to the

42

movement in the way that Anglo-American ones do. Italian critics of Decadence will, as we see, construe the issue strictly partly-political, as programmatic rather than an issue of birth.

Critics' National Decadences, 3: England

To show how even the most political interpretations of European Decadence literature bend toward aestheticism, it is worthwhile considering the most political of aesthetic figures, Oscar Wilde, as the prototype of English Decadent literature, and how he is handled by the critics.

In English literature, the term Decadent/ce is, as I have noted in the discussions above, generally used to echo the French literary movement. For the present purposes, it is critical to note that the English movement comes at the apex of the British Empire, at the moment when decolonization also became inevitable. After Egypt fell under British rule in 1882, the Raj was at its zenith in 1887, when Queen Victoria (1837-1901) celebrated her Golden Jubilee and was declared Empress of India (Cuddon 1028).

In literary terms, this period has been described by critics as an "intense and prolific" period in English literature, especially for writers concerned with "contemporary social problems" (Cuddon 1028). Coexisting with this brilliant moment in foreign policy in England, a "self-styled brotherhood" of young London artists flourished between 1848 and 1882, becoming known as the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in literature and the visual arts (Cuddon 740). This group was also called "the fleshy school of poetry," in that their writings paralleled medieval nuances—in particular their archaic

43

diction and sensuousness (Cuddon 740). Many of them—Dante Gabriele Rossetti,

Everett Millais and Frederick John Stephens—directly influenced Wilde in his younger years.30

As critical discussions of the era run, the study of Decadence in England all too often becomes simply the study of Oscar Wilde, and often casts him as an aesthete sublimating his political problems into literature. Brian Stableford (1996) notes Wilde's borrowing of the theories and mannerisms from the French Decadent Movement,31 as he states that his work

clearly shows the influence of the rich French tradition of sophisticated and

morally subversive contes, which Wilde embraced as enthusiastically as he

embraced all the theories and mannerisms of the French Decadent Movement—

theories which he elaborated rather coyly in his essay "The Decay of Lying" and

mannerisms which he extrapolated with great verve and style in The Picture of

Dorian Gray. ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 610)

In the English canon, Dorian Gray became widely considered the most representative

30 David A. Upchurch describes this connection in Reference Guide to English Literature (2d ed., D. L. Kirkpatrick, ed. [Detroit: St. James Press, 1991]): "Wilde was an outspoken proponent of the Aesthetic Movement which Walter Pater, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, helped define in his book The Renaissance (1873). In the 'Conclusion' Pater stated 'to burn with this hard gem-like flame to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.' As a student of Pater's at Oxford, Wilde had embraced Pater's ideas, and in London Wilde had adopted the pose of an aesthete. Pater removed his 'Conclusion' from the 1877 version because Wilde and others had made the Aesthetic Movement too embarrassing for him, and he did not adopt their extreme views. However, the French symbolists' ideas were more sympathetic to the Aesthetic Movement. And Wilde borrowed the phrases 'art for art's sake' from Gautier's Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin. The 11th chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray is also strongly influenced, though not as much as earlier critics thought, by Huysmans' novel A rebours. Consequently, Wilde's only novel is strongly grounded in the Aesthetic Movement." 31 Taken from Brian Stableford, "Oscar Wilde: Overview," St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers, ed. David Pringle (Detroit: St. James Press, 1996). 44

text of the English Decadent movement. This connection between Wilde and the French

Decadent Movement is not completely willful, since it was acknowledged at the time.

For example, as Arthur Ransome (1912) notes in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study32:

When Dorian Gray was attacked for immorality, Wilde wrote, in a letter to a

paper: "My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the brutality of

plain realism." The Picture of Dorian Gray was [. . .] the first French novel to be

written in the English language. England has a traditional novel-form with which

even the greatest students of human comedy and tragedy square their work. In

France there is no such tradition, with the result that the novel is a plastic form,

molded in the most various ways by the most various minds. (Ransome 213)

Also confirming contemporaneous critics' problems with the novel, but nonetheless tying it to the history of the era, Debora Hill (1997) agrees that the novel attracted considerable abuse at the hands of the media.33 Hill notes that The Picture of Dorian Gray "was a damning account of the hypocrisy of Victorian England, and because it did not follow the established pattern of the popular fiction of the day, many readers and critics found it incomprehensible" (Hill 389).

Today's critics add the recognition that Wilde's paradigmatic use of Decadence had other critiques of the Victorian England in mind, especially in regard to society and its marginalization of art and artists. As a representative voice, Isobel Murray (1991) states that Wilde's prose worked against the seriousness of high aestheticism: "Rarely has

32 Murray, "Oscar Wilde: Overview" in Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd ed., ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick (Detroit: St. James Press, 1991), pp. 1098-1099. 33 Debora Hill, "Oscar Wilde: Overview," in Gay & Lesbian Biography (Detroit: St. James Press, 1997). 45

literary theory been so entertainingly written."34 At the same time, "Wilde's writing generally is more concerned with art and its relation to life" (1098), and that he felt that

"the ideal position for the critic is as spectator of life" (1098).

Important to note is that this relation of the critic to life, in Wilde's view, included an acknowledgment of homoerotic tones in art as a form of social critique of Victorian hypocrisy. In reference to contemporaneous reactions to Wilde, Karl Beckson (1994) suggests that the critical reactions of the first version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which appeared in one issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July of 1890, "indicated that many reviewers had grasped its homosexual subtext."35 He continues by stating that the Daily Chronicle of June 30, 1890, for example, called it "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Décadents—a poisonous book . . . [of] effeminate frivolity . . . [and] unbridled indulgence in every form of secret and unspeakable vice"

(Beckson 407). A similar charge was leveled in the Athenaeum of June 27, 1891, where the reviewer of the second version charged that the novel was "unmanly, sickening, vicious" (Beckson 407).36 These are the political issues in the context of Victorian law, not just the personal ones.

Still, to many critics today, Wilde's homosexual tale of sin and immorality may appear autobiographical, rather than as a critique of the legal and social blindness of his times. Taking this tactic, Jay Losey explores this sociocritical aspect of Wilde's writing in

34 Isobel Murray, "Oscar Wilde: Overview," in Reference Guide to English Literature, 2d ed., ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick (Detroit: St. James Press, 1991), pp. 1098-1099. 35 Karl Beckson, "Oscar Wilde: Overview," Gay & Lesbian Literature, Vol. 1, ed. Sharon Malinowski (Detroit: St. James Press, 1994), p. 406. 36 Such terms as "unspeakable vice" and "unmanly" were usually Victorian code words for homosexuality (Beckson 408). 46

such an autobiographical vein. He states that the author achieves this "by associating himself with de Sade and de Retz, Wilde acknowledges his fascination with sexual perversion, lust, lechery, and murder—all themes of The Picture of Dorian Gray."37

Losey also states that Wilde's "intentional anachronism—putting de Retz and de Sade in

Dante's Inferno—underscores his identification with social outcasts[:] Wilde prefers sinners to saints" (Losey 432).

This identification of Decadence with Wilde's personal experience rather than with a wider critical movement, I believe, underplays his social-critical aims, as well as those of other contemporaries. Such readings of English decadence are tinted with charges of Dandy-ism and Homo-adoration, masked by an aestheticism that is used principally for personal ends (as Dandyism was used in the eighteenth century when it originated). As Brian Martin (1985) concludes,38 what led to Wilde's downfall "was his

'art-appreciation' of the remarkable beauty he saw in the male form and his expression of it which proved too outrageous for his time" (Martin 32). According to Martin, it was

Wilde's indulging of "his decadent admirations [and] flaunt[ing] them in the face of Lord

Queensberry' that brought his demise" (Martin 32). Just as Martin punishes Wilde for his debaucheries in written and living form, however, John Simon can elevate him to stardom because of his uniqueness and his courage in walking his talk.39 In a more

37 Jay Losey, "The Aesthetics of Exile: Wilde Transforming Dante in Intentions and De Profundis," English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 36, No. 4 (University Of North Carolina, 1993), pp. 429-450. 38 Brian Martin, "Socially Most Inconvenient" (review of More Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart- Davis), The Spectator, Vol. 255, No. 8206 (October 26, 1985), p. 32. 39 John Simon, "The Prince of Paradox," New Republic (May 1986), pp. 37-39. 47

popular appreciation clearly aimed at today's audience rather than at an accurate representation of Victorian England, Simon summarizes:

[i]t is virtually impossible to write about Oscar Wilde without invoking his

quintessential self-critique spoken (note: not written) to André Gide: "Would you

like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I've put my genius into my life;

I've only put my talent into my works." (37)

Quite typically, Simon says that Wilde's work reaches its apex between 1891 and 1895, where his "style achieves that wittiness based on the most serious treatment of the absurd and the most prankish juggling of paradox" (39). Just as his own persona, Wilde then exposes his theatrical nature in life, as in his spoken word, as in his written language.

No matter that critics in Wilde's time and today have preferred to emphasize biography, part of Decadence's paradox is also located, I believe, in its search for a national identity—the Irish Wilde who is being reclaimed by critics today. Wilde's contemporaries knew that many states were rising up for independence: Garibaldi and his men sought a united Italy; Ireland refurbished its literary renaissance in search for a voice to inscribe its identity; the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the U.S., was dedicated in New York harbor. Thus I want here to underscore the significance of

Wilde's Dorian Gray in this particular political context: a novel described by Kimberly

Lutz as dark and disturbing, one which explores the consequences of realizing one's lack

48

of identity.40 The politics of identity figure large in her reading of an individual fate as part of a public situation, not just as personal psychology:

Sybil Vane, the beautiful actress in The Picture of Dorian Gray, realizes that she

has no identity beyond her nightly performance . . . Dorian cannot love the real

Sybil, only the ideal she represented in her roles[:] the [actor] can exist solely as a

performer of a part, [o]nce his public refuses to believe in his part, the [actor] loses

his identity. (Lutz 29)

Lutz, however, also ultimately prefers to draw an analogy to Wilde's person, when she describes him as "adorned in velvet breeches and with a green carnation in his button hole present[ing] himself as a brilliant dandy to London society," as "a realistic, but created, caricature in search of an identity" (33). She begins by making his story part of the public sphere, but cannot remain with that interpretation.

Other critics are more consistent in their reference to history, but not necessarily to politics. For example, they may note that, during this time, the first motion-picture show opens in New York (1890), and that Wilde is said to have been himself created like a motion-picture, as a case where "aesthetics and publicity consorted happily together."41

As such, this publicity-seeking Wilde's "wild" side defines him as central to English

40 "Serious Comedy? Finding Meaning in 'The Canterville Ghost'," in Exploring Short Stories (London: Gale Research, 1998). pp. 25-35. Also found in Short Stories for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 7. Detroit: Gale, 1998. 41 Steven Marcus, "He Resisted Everything Except Temptation," The New York Times Book Review (17 November 1985): 7, where he states: “The language of the letters is by and large charming and meretricious. To Ellen Terry he writes, 'Dear Ellen, Your love is more wonderful even than a crystal caught in bent reeds of gold.' This is the promiscuous language of show biz affection, and much of Wilde's life and career has to be understood as part of the history of publicity” (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5DB1338F934A25752C1A963948260&sec=&spo n=&pagewanted=2). 49

Decadence for many critics. Yet other critics, again, like Isobel Murray, seems to stay at the outer façade of the author's style when she adds that

Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé, his vivid, ornate, claustrophobic one-act play, in

French[, appropriately] because his Salomé was immediately seen as a

continuation of the Decadent or Symbolist tradition treated by French artists

(Baudelaire, Gautier, Flaubert, Mallarmé, and the painter Moreau), and especially

by Huysmans, author of that textbook of Decadence A rebours (Against Nature).

("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 1099)

Murray concludes that Wilde's Salomé has been widely seen as "fin de siècle femme fatale" ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 1099), a correlate to the author as the human form of such aesthetics. In this account, however, Wilde's Salomé—a mixture of aesthetics and publicity—actually becomes an improvement over the other Salomés—since he, on the other hand, mimics, transposes and creates a new identity within his version of the play.

Murray summarizes this unique style in the author's composition when she states: "As usual then, part of Wilde's achievement in Salomé is a combination of major traditions, the Decadent one in which Salomé is associated with witches, vampires, sirens, and cruel sphinxes, and the Ibsen one where the self-discovery and emancipation of women was being flaunted at panicky audiences" ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 1099). Thus Wilde's aestheticism still maintains traces of its political face. It is again another example of

50

"two-faced god (dio bi-fronte)," politics and literature—art and politics—aspect of the decadence of Wilde that Murray is detecting.42

Although Paul Elmer More overtly criticizes the Decadent authors and their stylistics, he does however recognize the battle that the Decadent authors are trying to fight—and the dual nature of their writing. He states that "there is an aspect of the revolt that is serious enough in all conscience" (567). More then goes on to re-label Decadence, with its combination of sensuous vibrating nerve –à la Rossetti and Walter Pater—mixed with the coalescence of art and life—French style aesthetics à la Gautier—and calls it a

"New Hedonism" (568).43

However, such assaults on Wilde and Decadence in England were common from early on—they do represent the critical opinion for the bulk of the twentieth century.

George Bernard Shaw's unfavorable review of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, originally published in the Saturday Review on February 23, 1895, calls into question the modernity and importance of the play from the point of view of an author who defined social activism quite differently. He criticizes Wilde and even calls him a novice writer

42 Not surprisingly, other critics counter opinions like Isobel Murray's—like Paul Elmer More, an American critic who, along with Irving Babbitt, formulated the doctrines of New Humanism in early twentieth- century American thought. More can only look negatively upon the English Decadent literary tradition of the 1890s. In a review of Holbrook Jackson's The Eighteen Nineties (1914), More situates the period of Decadence between the "publication of Oscar Wilde's "Decay of Lying" and The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890," closing with his "pitiful death in 1900" (66). More calls the English decadents "imitators" of, and not as good as, French decadents. He ridicules them saying that "they appear rather like truant boys who need to be spanked and sent again to their lessons" (66). (Paul Elmer More, "A Naughty Decade," The Nation, New York, Vol. 98, No. 2550 (14 May 1914): pp. 66-68) 43 More adds of the movement: "In this longing after the fullness of experience, without consideration of the lessons of experience, we come close to the heart of the movement, and we also see how it was no vagary of a few isolated youths, but was the product of the most characteristic evolution of the age. It was, as our present guide rightly observes, the mortal ripening of that flower which blossomed upon the ruins of the French Revolution, heralding not only the rights of man, which was an abstraction savoring more of the classical ideal, but the rights of personality, of unique, varied" (566). 51

and states his displeasure with The Importance of Being Earnest, that amused him, but didn't touch him.44

In contrast, William Archer, a Scottish dramatist and critic of the times, offers an appreciative review of the same play: "Amid so much that is negative, however, criticism may find one positive remark to make. Behind all Mr. Wilde's whim and even perversity, there lurks a very genuine science, or perhaps I should rather say instinct, of the theatre."45 That "instinct of the theater," I believe, may refer to precisely the kind of social criticism through masquerade that divides Decadence and its identity politics from aestheticism and its desire to invoke a national past—the sense of social critique also available at the time in authors like Ibsen.

Theatricality—the performance of identities on various stages, natural and not –is an important icon of the English decadent movement: that movement sought from the start to be a theatrical, unveiling, unmasking, imitating and recreating of art, rather than creating of new art-icons in an age that already had enough of them. It is therefore simple to see why some critics called Wilde a "Parrot-Poet." In an 1881 article for The

Nation,46 an anonymous critic calls Wilde a lyric poet of a limited kind, "[o]ne is never

44 "I do not suppose it to be Mr. Wilde's first play: he is too susceptible to fine art to have begun otherwise than with a strenuous imitation of a great dramatic poem, Greek or Shakespearean; but it was perhaps the first which he designed for practical commercial use at the West End theatres [. . .] I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening" George Bernard Shaw, "An Old New Play and a New Old One," Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Vol. 1, ed. James Huneker (Ann Arbor, MI: Brentano's, 1906), pp. 32-40. 45 Archer, William. "The Importance of Being Earnest." Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Karl Beckson. (London: Routledge, 1997). pp. 217-218. 46 Anonymous, "Poems," The Nation, New York, Vol. XXXIII, No. 840 (4 August 1881): 100-01; rpt. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol. 8, (Woodbridge, CT.: McMillan reference USA, 1986). 52

sure that the parrot perceives the precise bearings of his utterances." 47 Thus, according to this critic, Wilde is lacking "a natural voice of one's own, however plaintive and insignificant," and he states that Wilde is far from "having anything to communicate, or, finally, from having any emotion to express" (101). He cannot, in this account, be considered a social force.

Yet here again, the style may well be key to the poet's social-critical intent rather than to his stylistic preferences.48 For example, Donald H. Ericksen believes that this perceived superficiality of Wilde's work is in part due to the author's use of clever inversions and startling paradoxes in order to shock people. In his chapter on Wilde, in

Twayne's English Authors Series Online,49 Ericksen writes that "[a]s a consequence of these and other 'excesses,' Wilde's criticism has often been termed superficial, inconsistent, contradictory, and even insincere" (73).50 Still, in the same chapter,

Ericksen quotes Graham Hough who argued in The Last Romantics that "Wildean aestheticism was little more than a series of attitudes and undigested notions, held together for the time by what must once have been a brilliant and attractive personality."51

In a similar vein, he quotes from Jerome Buckley's The Victorian Temper that Wilde

47 "The inevitable defects of the best and most melodious parrot qualities, however, are an absence of direct inspiration, of genuine significance, and, to a measurable extent, of consciousness. One is never sure that the parrot perceives the precise bearings of his utterances, and the preponderance of the purely oral in them is an undeniable drawback to the permanence of one's enjoyment with them" (100). 48 See also footnote 11 on page 25. 49 Donald H. Ericksen, Oscar Wilde, Twayne's English Authors Series Online (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999; print ed., New York: Twayne, 1977); http://www.wtamu.edu/library/indexes/twayne.shtml. 50 Donald H. Ericksen states that "When affronting Philistine conventionality [Wilde] might assert that 'An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style' ("Preface," The Picture of Dorian Gray). When attacking the mimetic or other approaches to art he might insist that 'the only real people are those who never existed' ("Decay of Lying" 297) or, even more startling coming as it does from a supposed romantic, that 'All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling' ("Critic as Artist, II" 398)" (73). 51 Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London, Methuen, 1961), 203; rprt Duckworth, 1949. 53

"suffered—or affected to suffer—the ineffable weariness of strayed revelers lost in a palace of fading illusion" (Buckley 228). Ericksen thus finds no lack of negative critics who do not see the potential behind a style as shock.

Still, Eriksen is also able to track how Wilde's contemporaries understood a very different point for his writing, a potentially more overt political reference that again is only being reclaimed by critics in the latter twentieth century. In the St. James Gazette, which Ericksen believes reflects the general concern of contemporary critics, we could already have read at the turn of the century that "Gautier could have made [the same material—here referring to The Picture of Dorian Gray—] romantic, entrancing, beautiful [. . .] Mr. Stevenson could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic [. . .] It has been reserved for Mr. Oscar Wilde to make it dull and nasty."52 Similarly, Samuel

Henry Jeyes concludes his review by saying that "such books are revelations only of the singularly unpleasant minds from which they emerge" (7). Which is what Eriksen points to, when he concludes that "unpleasant minds" are those having critical potential, as we recognize today, once past Victorian social sensibilities—and thus, as in transition to the

Victorian thoughts.

In all these discussions, Wilde remains the pivotal figure of English Decadence, yet he is all too often equated with his Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist influences, and with the French decadence that he took as its foundation. Most critics agree on the sensuousness, perversion and immorality that run rampant in his work, but tend still to

52 Cited from Samuel Henry Jeyes, "A Study in Puppydom," St. James Gazette (June 24, 1890): 7; (Beckson 69) 54

take it as "art for art's sake," here, however, we come full circle: more recent critics, in assessing the roots of Decadence in France, recast them as reactions to the tools of

Naturalism at the service of a social criticism, which can then also be attributed to Wilde, who becomes an avatar of particular politics (most often homosocial53). As it frequently happens with the French Decadents, critics take Wilde not as part of a group of artists with very particular goals in mind, both artistic and social, but as an artist-creator in the

Romantic mode.

Recasting Decadence: The Method of the Present Study

The link between the social and economic modernization of the nineteenth century, modernism, general social decadence, and Decadent art that I will be relying on—and specifying—in the discussions that follow, has been acknowledged by critics in some ways, as I have outlined generally above, yet in large part only in very general ones.

For instance, Matei Calinescu succinctly describes the historical relativism associated with modernism in his book Five Faces of Modernity. There, he notes a pattern that has taken hold of the last one hundred and fifty years or so of "modern" western literature where "the past imitates the present far more than the present imitates the past" (Calinescu 3). In his account, modernism documents a transitory migration of literature from a "time-honored aesthetics of permanence, based on a belief in an

53 Such as Joseph Carroll (2005), Morris Kaplan (2004), Lesley J. Higgins (2008), Richard Berrong (2007), Joan Navarre (2008), Soonku Lee (2006), Richard Dellamora (2004), Clifton Snider (2003), Nicholas Ruddick (2003), Naomi Wood (2003), Franz Meier (2002) and Angela Kingston (2001), to name a few. 55

unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty [see Kant], to an aesthetics of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty" (Calinescu 3). This central focus on change and for the individual and for history that Calinescu identifies as central for modernism also, in my reading, permeates the three novels discussed in the chapters which follow in this study. I return with this to the point that modernism need not be the only critical tool applied to modernization, and that psychological and stylistic reactions nonetheless need to be seen as having social-historical sites.

This correspondence between the social milieu of Decadence and its specific styles that I want to emphasize has, however, still largely been overlooked by recent literary critics who prefer to highlight style or—especially in the case of Wilde—to

"recover" a political agenda around the author's biography rather than to place that author's work into a larger political-critical project of a particular era, as I will do below.

One scholarly exception to this pattern is Julia Kristeva, who, in the untranslated second half of her Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), specifically explores the social relevance of this poetic diction. She underscores how much decadent literature emerges at a historical moment in which a ruling class is under fire; in her vision, which I will extend here, the typical "decadent" work portrays the deconstruction 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, I argue in the subsequent chapters, that in the era around 1900 of emerging modernism, decadent literature originally tried to claim a more critical position than did the literary modernism of the era (as represented in texts like Zola's Fécondité [1899] and Carducci's Odi

56

barbare [1889])—there are actually more kinds of decadent literature than of modernism, given its more specific aesthetics and style preferences. Moreover, this decadent literature, despite its superficial affinities with the Romanticism to which modernism also refers back to, is in my reading not only a literature of the struggle of the individual against an uncaring social world, but one that underscores the necessity of reconstructing the hero/narrator's self (or eliminating it as an exemplary or even tenable reaction to the modern era), as his identity reflects a social group which must be transformed if it is to remain viable.

After introducing how each of the novels selected for the present work has been framed by recent critics, each chapter seeks to read each one of these novels within its own national context. Each novel's specific Decadence will be shown to intersect with a satirical critique on how specifically the upper class or the aesthetized heroes are failing to deal with the radical social and historical changes of their eras. Each shows their point of view in a class-consciousness that has much in it to be admired, but which must be ultimately rejected by a specific readership. The three novels that constitute the body of the present work typically condemn a decadent "old regime" class by representing the mind and heart of one of that old regime's favored types (a dandy, a decadent last descendant, a hedonist). In each novel, these characters' "natural" virtues are gradually recast as artificial, as their "real" lives are revealed as fake or as a misapplication of the ideal of art (much like the criticism of the romantic image of the creator found in novels like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). The concluding chapter of this study thus offers a new definition of "decadence" as a literary-historical term that can be applied to other

57

European literatures on ruling classes in times of threatening revolutionary change

(suggesting, for example, how the term would be applied to the Marquis de Sade at the end of the eighteenth century).

As we shall see, despite their vaunted spiritual Decadence as individuals,

Huysmans' des Esseintes, D'Annunzio's Andrea Sperelli, and Wilde's Dorian Gray are all individuals who are decadent in very particular historical ways, as dead-end representatives of their own decaying classes, not just individuals of promise gone bad.

They are three hopelessly corrupt, bored young aristocrats (or would-be aristocrats) left to torture the "real" souls around them because they will not acknowledge that their own historical moments have passed: Andrea corrupts the angelic Maria who loses everything to him; Dorian causes his sweet innocent Sybil Vane to commit suicide for love of him; and des Esseintes, even more detached than his two counterparts, continuously kills flowers and animals in order to turn them into artifacts. Each has made a Faustian bargain with a past image of reality, and while those bargains may seem comprehensible, they are by no means exemplary—they express criminality and social aberrance as much as they do decadence.

Although these heroes may not seem entirely "real" to the reader at first, the reader is gradually brought to realize that the authors themselves are condemning their heroes' behaviors—that these novels really claim the necessity for acknowledging historical change, in the kind of critique that Calinescu attributes to modernism. Wilde, for example, warns the reader that "conscience makes egotists of us all" (Dorian Gray

102). Nevertheless, his statement really means the opposite, since his Dorian is without a

58

conscience and his "art" without a truth, documents an ultimate egotist aimed at novelty, not a presence within his art. On the other hand, D'Annunzio condemns his Andrea by stating that "quel buon moto dell'anima si risolse in parole che mentivano, [dando] il tremito della sincerità a parole che mentivano" [his transport brought him to uttering untrue words, giving to them the quiver of truth to the lying words] (D'Annunzio 374).

Thus Andrea is portrayed as an exceptional liar, one who lacks conscience, as well.

Finally, Huysmans' des Esseintes, who hopelessly cries out in the night, unheard, is imprisoned within his own walls, "un chrétien qui doute, un forçat de la vie qui s'embarque seul, dans la nuit sans espoir . . . " [a prisoner doing life within life, alone, full of doubts . . .] (Huysmans 361).

Clearly, all three authors condemn their heroes and the choices such heroes make, while highlighting how each lays claims to art in a timeless sense; yet all three are actually marked as hiding from the truth of history through an appeal to an art which is revealed as artifice, as lie. Each text warns against its main character's false assertion of their historical privileges; each decries decadent aristocrats who experiment with life, experiment with people's emotions, turn things alive (including themselves into horrible fabrications, just like Dr Frankenstein creating monsters from his experiments). In one sense, such aesthetized resistance to historical change may be a critique of progress itself, as Calinescu points out for the case of modernism. He states that "progress came to be regarded as a concept having more to do with mechanics than with biology . . . a high degree of technological development appears perfectly compatible with an acute sense of decadence . . ." (Calinescu 156). Thus, as Calinescu concludes, progress itself becomes

59

synonymous with a kind of decadence, and so, I would add, does decadence become synonymous with progress in these novels of European Decadence.

The results of the individual investigations will suggest that the familiar stylistic markers of Decadence are used by the authors to distort the clear, clean lines of the world of progress. All three texts are certainly drenched in the colors of gold, orange and reddish tints, as though reality was smothered by a sense of the unreal, by a lustful image of sunset and overripeness. Such colors are continually brought to the reader's attention, making everything seem like it is seen through a stained glass. Following Maeterlinck's definition of the symbol, as in his Serres Chaudes (1889), the novels make it seem as if the readers assume the poses of souls under glass who look at the world from the inside out, conserved in museums or in hermetically sealed glass vessels. As in Maeterlinck's

"Cloches de Verres" (1889), the images shown to the reader are distorted and unfocused; all three texts also mark these images as decadent—attractive yet in some way vile, unnatural—by alluding to the Marquis de Sade, Petronius' Satyricon, and androgyny.54

Yet these authors set as their novels' stages a decaying, inner world, where evil seems to be the master, where deconstruction, corruption and lies run rampant. But, as we shall see, each intends a critique of a specific class' response to the pressures of modernism—each text is historically precise in its social critique, and in its appeal to preserve, reevaluate, and recreate tradition instead of discarding it. That issue, and the

54 Italian director Federico Fellini's own 1969 film is loosely based on the book Satyricon attributed to Petronius Arbiter, and "dated to the time of the rule of Nero (37-68 AD). The book is considered to be one of the first, if not the first, novels to have been written, but has only survived in fragments. The film imitates this by being fragmentary itself, leaving gaps between events, and even stopping in mid-sentence" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064940/synopsis). 60

relation of Decadence to modernism in general, will be the concluding remarks of this work.

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Chapter One:

Huysmans' A rebours: Setting a New Tone

With this contempt for humanity, this hatred of mediocrity, this passion for a somewhat exotic kind of modernity, an artist who is so exclusively an artist was sure, one day or another, to produce a work which, being produced to please himself, and being entirely typical of himself, would be, in a way, the quintessence of contemporary Decadence. —Arthur Symons, "J.-K. Huysmans," (The Fortnightly Review, March 1892)

The link between modernism and decadence is repeatedly acknowledged by critics of Huysmans, just as it is by those of Wilde.55 Huysmans and l'Art, Huysmans and

Decadence, Huysmans and the transitory epoch in which he wrote are prominent among the thematic ventures that critics of decadent art chose to take. These critics, like Barbara

Spackman, also seem to posit an "anatomy" of illness, or a Dandy-ish focus on detail as thematic and stylistic elements that link Huysmans to his successors in the movement.

Yet A rebours (1884), or Against Nature as it is sometimes translated, or Alone, as

Huysmans originally thought to name it, takes the conflict between aestheticism and modernity to new levels. Where Dorian Gray moves in society concealing his decadence essentially until death, des Esseintes is marked from the first as sick, as irremediably removed from both nature and the culture that provides at least a stylish refuge for his

55 See Chapter Three (on Wilde), pages 165 – 221. 62

English counterpart.56

Huysmans' description, at the beginning of the book, compares the palace in which des Esseintes imprisons himself, to an ill and jaded encasement—scented of mint—and reflecting feminine nudity in its multiple mirrored surfaces,

Cette pièce où des glaces se faisaient echo et renvoyaient à perte de vue, dans les

murs, des enfilades de boudoirs roses, avait été célèbre parmi les filles qui se

complaisaient à tremper leur nuditéˆdans ce bain d'incarnat tiède qu'aromatosait

l'odeur de menthe degage par les bois des meubles. (Huysmans 91-92) [italics

mine]

Huysmans then gives his protagonist, des Esseintes, as the man who lives in this peculiar prison-like palace, an eccentric aura to say the least, and has him play the part of the

Dandy en parachevant,57 like an artist who has constructed or fabricated this peculiarity:

Il s'acquit la reputation d'un exentrique quil paracheva en se vêtant de costumes

de velours blanc, de gilets d'orfroi en plantant, en guise de cravate, un bouquet de

parme dans l'échancrure décolletée d'une chemise, en donnant aux homes de

letters des diners retentissants, un entre autres, renouvelé du XVIIIe siècles, où,

pour célébrer la plus futile des mésaventures, il avait organisé un repas de deuil.

(Huysmans 94-95) [all italics are mine]

56 The decadent novels under discussion here are generally at pains to distort the apparent clear, clean lines of the outside world of progress—the authors show these lines from behind curtains, behind doors, and beneath layers of false representation. Like Dorian, they do not react to the modern; they simply remain willfully outside it. 57 Definition of parachever - to put the finishing touches to. 63

His dandy-ish, unusual nature personifies the decadent hero par excellence, and his sickly demeanor and a member of a marginal and waning class—that of the historically dislodged aristocracy.

As one of the most telling critics arguing for the fin de siècle as particularly marked by this tie between illness and decadence, Barbara Spackman groups various authors and critics of the era. In the preface to her book, Decadent Genealogies: The

Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D'Annunzio (1989), Spackman argues that the common denominator uniting their approaches lies within the ways they use illnesses as their own rhetoric. Spackman calls this use the rhétorique obsédante of the nineteenth century, which can be described as "rhetoric of sickness and health, decay and degeneration, pathology and normalcy" (viii). She goes on to compare convalescence to what Derrida can only describe as the gap between fiction and reality,58 and that

Spackman calls "physiologically and socially ambiguous," since it identifies a space which is not "sick-unto-death nor quite healthy either" (42). Most critically for the present study, Spackman then characterizes the Decadent hero as a "member of a historically dislocated aristocracy, a marginal and waning class, which is itself a third term between bourgeoisie and proletariat," and again "the convalescent domain appears to be the social world represented synecdochically by that great nineteenth-century obsession, the urban crowd" (43).

58 This concept is found in Derrida's Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, first presented in 1966 as a lecture at John Hopkins University, and later published in Writing and Difference (1967; trans. 1978). 64

Huysmans' des Esseintes from A rebours, unlike Dorian Gray, will be figured as part of the obsession with illness. Des Esseintes' aestheticism is that of the shut-in, the ill, and the decadent, more explicitly resistant to the idea of a future rather than simply caught in the pleasures of the present. As we shall see in this chapter, Huysmans did intend to portray des Esseintes as caught in the aquarium, looking out of distorted glass, and living out of his own time and space. Where Wilde used his hero to critique the aestheticism of the upper classes, Huysmans intended his character to serve as his critical link in a polemic leveled against the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie that was proving itself increasingly irrelevant in the critical reframing of the turn of the nineteenth century.

My discussion will thus move beyond Spackman's superb work to show

Huysmans' critique as more subtle than believed by the critics of his times. A rebours will be revealed as a critical text that "reverses" the doctrine of l'art pour l'art espoused by the increasingly aestheticized bourgeoisie by embracing the belief that art is truth

(reversing, also the era's belief to the contrary, as expressed most familiarly by George

Moore), and that moves beyond his own era to create a new hero, a new genre, a new language, and a new tone.59

I will first offer a general characterization of Huysmans' aesthetic anti-hero, des

Esseintes, in order to place him within his context. After that, I will survey some chief points made by critics, in order to situate Huysmans' use of decadent rhetoric within a specifically French intellectual criticism. Once that frame is established, I will then turn

59 George Augustus Moore is regarded as the first great modern Irish novelist. His work was influenced by Émile Zola, and his writings in turn influenced those of James Joyce. He was quite controversial at first and libraries banned his first novel, A Modern Lover (1883). 65

back to the real historical situations in which Huysmans represents his character, and then, finally, to how the rhetoric of decadence that he uses was intended to work as political criticism. The concluding section will return to this novel as a diagnosis of the particular mal de siècle of Huysmans' France, interpreting the novel as a pointed and intentional critique of those forces threatening to deprive France of its identity in a modern world, with "decadence" taking on two definitions: a very particular French strategy of social criticism, and as a plague from which France needed to be saved.

Huysmans' Aesthete: Des Esseintes and Life in an Aquarium

Identifying as the hero of his novel an unnatural man who rejects progress,

Huysmans from the first brings his readers to pity his vampire-like hero who, unable to leave Paris, has surrounded himself with dead and artificial items, with walls looking like book bindings, and windows distorted like the glass of an aquarium—a reference to the

"mental aquarium" (l'aquarium mentale) that Rodenbach uses later in his collection of poems, Les Vies encloses (1896), one of the hallmark texts for French decadence. Such a collection offers significant parallels to how Huysmans presents des Esseintes' existential essence by portraying life as seen from inside an aquarium, from where the world seems even more vague and distant than it does to a typical aesthete like Wilde's hero: "L'eau sage s'est enclose en des cloisons de verre, D'où le monde lui soit vague et lontain" (Les

Vies encloses 112). As characterized here and in À rebours, Huysmans' aesthete-hero is not only different from the ordinary man, he also appears at times as if he had returned from another dimension, as if he had lived through a convalescence that had taken him

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into another world.60 In fact, des Esseintes lives in another, even more introverted world than Dorian Gray does (as will be seen in Chapter Three): his dining room resembles the cabin of a boat, where the windows are covered by aquariums with food coloring in the water and mechanical fish.61 Thus this aesthete is one step more perverse than Wilde's

Dorian from the start, because there seems to be no society in which he can find a role.

Throughout the book, des Esseintes' imagination follows this pattern, allowing him to substitute artifice for reality at all points, while considering it art. He is constitutionally unable to accept what is really present. For example, when he travels to parts of Paris that look, sound and smell like London, he will not accept the fact that he remains in Paris. His progress to decadence is revealed by the book as the consequence of this false position that robes the self of its connections to the world, of its chance at leaving a legacy. The novel conveys to its readers an overwhelming feeling of imprisonment in a realm where alterations, simulations and artifice reign, where fabrication, illusion and recreations stem from and in turn purportedly (re)form the genius of mankind—a realm which Huysmans uses as a representation of the human condition in the modern world of progress. This ability for artifice does, indeed, differentiate man from animal: "L'artifice [c'est] la marque distinctive du génie de l'homme" (Huysmans

60 This is also a gesture that resonates on Bram Stoker's character of the weak and anemic victims of Dracula, who chooses a coffin in which to live half of his life. 61 Robert Ziegler, wrote in Romanic Review on January 1, 2000, an article entitled "Taking the Words Right Out of his Mouth: From Ventriloquism to Symbol-Reading in J.-K. Huysmans," where Ziegler acknowledges des Esseintes migration from the reality of "loss," to his gaining the autonomy of a speaking subject, when he states, "In A rebours, des Esseintes' withdrawal to a closed retreat where people are banished, light is softened, and sound is muffled, conveys a desire for somnolent under-stimulation. At the same time, however, Huysmans' hero arranges for nourishment, furniture, flowers, and a turtle to be brought in, thereby blurring the line between inside and outside, self and other, Eros and death. Certainly des Esseintes' insertion of his dining room into an aquarium attests to a longing for the oceanic fullness of the nursing infant" (Ziegler 91). 67

107). It is also the basis for a different critique of decadence from Wilde's in Picture of

Dorian Gray. Dorian had a corrupt soul revealing itself only in art; he functioned in the world by systematically devaluing the truth of that art. Des Esseintes, however, is the ill aesthete, one sick unto death (to use Kierkegaard's phrase) out of fear that he will become what he hates, a person involved with progress instead of art and beauty. Where Wilde critiques a bad use of aestheticism, ignoring art's potential to transform individuals, then,

Huysmans is directly taking on the aesthete's pose of l'art pour l'art.

Not surprisingly, Huysmans as an author-narrator does not approve of his character's solution, just as Wilde loves but disapproves of Dorian. Huysmans shows the reader very clearly that this artifice that his hero practices as art has nothing to do with eternal truth: as the novel is set, des Esseintes lives his life as nothing but a long illness approaching death. And the fear of such illness becomes the reality in which he is forced to live: "La crainte de cette maladie va finir par déterminer la maladie elle-même"

(Huysmans 180). If des Esseintes is an aesthete, then, his attraction to what he calls art will not bring him into contact with the greater truths of nature, as Romantic poets would assume. Instead, he is shown as fundamentally denaturalized by his progression toward artifice, toward a life completely removed from both nature and culture: des Esseintes is so disgusted with commonly-accepted ideas, that he compares society to a flower shop— he pities the poor cut flowers, hates any new house flowers, and in the end only admires, praises and prefers the artificial ones (Huysmans 190). To signal his particular anti- natural metamorphosis, Huysmans show us that he is intrigued by plants only when they look unreal, "aucune [plante] ne semblait réele," again simulating this desire for the

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distortion of nature as symbolic, not as a gesture of art gone wrong, but rather as a kind of progress gone wrong (Huysmans 191). This hero, then, is functioning quite differently than does Dorian Gray, even though his aesthetic message might initially seem the same.

In such passages, then, the author himself clearly marks his work as a critique of the kind of "progress" in art which men like des Esseintes claim as truer progress than the work of society of a whole toward a soulless mechanism.62 Des Esseintes may be right in criticizing modern progress and its well-known dehumanizing effects on the society of the end of the nineteenth century, but he has created an even worse monster in his soul when he equates nature with a sick, wrong, raw material that man is constantly trying to perfect and model, creating or "[en]termin[ant] les ébauches" [ending the sketches or rough-hewn] (Huysmans 200). Huysmans is thus less critiquing a general social use of aestheticism (Wilde's goal, in trying to rescue art from a class that did not know how to use it) than a critique of aestheticism itself. The Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century had believed they found healing and enlightenment of the human soul in nature; des Esseintes, as a decadent, claims for himself the authority of a superior creation, where

62 In a similar discussion of the Decadent author's use of the figure of Salomé and fin-de-siècle culture (Huysmans, Wilde, Moreau), Sarah Maier quotes Mary Chavelita Dunne Golding Bright (AKA George Egerton)'s attempt to explain how this artistic figure is changed from a "biblical innocent figure" to a "femme fatale" in order to create a soulful character who rejects Victorian ideology, by reversing the Victorian notion of purity and introducing the sinful nature of sexual pleasure. Maier believes that Egerton tries to make her reader aware of "historically conditioned" societies, and its constructions "the site of her representation[s]"; indeed, Egerton's unnamed Salomé defies the Victorian ideology of sexual passionlessness by "rejecting the traditional polarization of mind/body, reason/passion and St. John/Salomé to establish the body and desire as a determinant of mind and subjectivity" (Maier 222). Thus by taking away the soul of his main character, Huysmans points at the need to reverse the sort of progress dictated by the Victorian ideology, and like Egerton has to accentuate Salomé's sexuality, so does Huysmans need to accentuate des Esseintes' seclusion and rupture. See also Jean de Palacio's notion of Separation, where "Tout le lexique d'À rebours à cet égard est celui de la séparation, de la rupture, du détachement par rapport au livre" (Palacio 114). 69

art needs to transform nature into something higher before it can heal the sick human soul.63

Des Esseintes, however, never achieves anything like a re-creation through art, since he is caught in the city, stuck in his aquarium—in Atlantis under the waves, as it were—and increasingly out of time itself. Where Dorian looks to the past as his model and thus deprives himself of a future, des Esseintes progressively recoils from time and history themselves, at any level. As our pathetic hero tries to move outside the city walls to the outskirts of town, for example, he does not follow the Romantic ideal and find nature, but instead actually considers himself imprisoned within the "campagne"

(Huysmans 240). Any of his attempts to get out of the city-aquarium are helpless; he is forced to stay within his walls, within his city, traveling in his mind without moving.

It is not until page 290 of the novel that des Esseintes leaves on an actual trip for the first time, but even then, he does not go further than his "jardin." From that garden, he gets the inspiration to escape from Modern Man by going to Fontenay (his country estate, the symbol of a decaying class, as we shall see), but instead of feeling restored, as the Romantic poets of a century earlier would have assumed, he simply feels isolated, out of sync with his time, out of contact with both nature and culture as conventionally understood. Des Esseintes nonetheless remains superficially an attractive character at

63 In the third chapter of her dissertation, entitled "The Medan Matrix: Huysmans And Maupassant Following Zola's Model Of Naturalism," Jennifer Kristen Wolter states that Huysmans' book "marks a reversal of naturalism immediately by its title alone." She then goes on to explain that "the title has been the subject of much discussion, with the most provocative question being "A rebours de quoi?" This query presupposes a norm against which to turn, thereby conjuring images of movement or revolution. The idea of movement is prevalent in the titles of many of Huysmans' works, making a synthesis for his entire career in the themes of rupture, adaptation, and evolution" (Wolter 163). I however will try to posit that this is not the sole purpose of our author. 70

times, since he is well-read and the last of his kind, much the member of the declining

French aristocracy who is also familiar from Proust's work; yet for the reader, he is rootless, isolated and éloigné, when he is away from Paris—like a fish out of water. In case we miss the irony figured by the garden and the country estate of Fontenay, the author tells the reader that des Esseintes is also distancing himself from reality and the contemporary world during this forced exile, just as he begins to change his literary and artistic tastes: "depuis son depart de Paris, il s'éloignait, de plus en plus, de la réalité et surtout du monde contemporain" (Huysmans 307).

Note, too, that this position contains an inherent critique of Paris, echoed also in many works by Balzac and Flaubert (most notably, L'Éducation sentimentale (1869)), where it is Paris itself that robs young men of their futures and ability to work for a new

France, just as it has traditionally attracted the upper classes only to bankrupt them.

Huysmans goes one step further here, because des Esseintes, as potentially one of those aristocrats, has neither the city ability to charm (to seduce, the way Dorian Gray will be seduced by the upper classes glittering society), nor the ability of France's country nobility to revivify the nation if they stayed in and embraced what the country meant (or even left France), as both Chateaubriand and George Sand insisted for various of their heroes. There is no shred of nobility left in Huysmans' character.

Ironically, then, des Esseintes manages to become the ultimate anti-hero, preserving a kind of fatal beauty in his inevitable death, even while proclaiming a double death—of the idea of the aristocrat of the soul and that of the actual aristocracy. The spiritual illness that des Esseintes has contracted in Paris, on the one hand, parallels that

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diagnosed by Proust for his characters—une forme d'ennui, yet Huysmans makes his situation more critical, since he writes his character completely unable to engage with any reality whatsoever, while the legendary madeleines at least invoke life in the past for

Proust's narrator (a gesture of the sort that would have made sense to Dorian Gray).64

Yet des Esseintes feels nothing in Paris since he needs to be absent for things to

"shock" him again—he is so jaded, he can no longer feel the city or what created it.

Similarly, towards the end of the book he becomes ill because he needs to be near death to feel alive again. His cure is the ultimate artificiality: he absorbs food through his pores, like the plants he admires so much (Huysmans 307). Des Esseintes must leave nature and return to Paris to retain what he feels might be some connection with humanity. In Paris, he has controlled nature, captured it, preserved it—just like a human creation—unlike nature whose rules lie outside the human realm—des Esseintes pretends to be an air plant in Paris, not one representing the soil of France (Le Lys de la vallée)— as the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians would insist is the strength of the nation—but as a mechanical copy: he pretends to be a mechanical flower. With this return to Paris, however, des Esseintes embarks on a career that again superficially resembles Dorian's, but with significant difference. To prevent his own certain death, he feels, he must mix with the common people, lead a detestable existence, trying to distract himself: "[c'est] une détestable existence à laquelle la juridiction médicale le condamnait: de quitter cette solitude, revenir à Paris, rentrer dans la vie commune, tâcher de se

64 Another irony is found in knowing that Proust spent the last three years of his life largely confined to his cork-lined bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel, and thus paralleling the "buried" alive references made by Dracula and des Esseintes. 72

distraire comme les autres . . . pour soigner sa nevrose un Démenagement" (Huysmans

351). This is the ultimate paradox: if des Esseintes chooses life, he cannot be "himself;" if he remains in the tradition of his ancestors in nature, he will die. Yet he is not only hiding a personal secret, he is the anti-hero proclaiming a double death: that of the aristocracy, along with that of his soul.65

To be sure, this death echoes Dorian's death in many ways. It is the death of an era, at a moment when a century has gone by, and a new one is beginning. This death is also an escape from needing to take stock of the dubious (but often impressive, shocking) achievements of that century. In fact des Esseintes tries that himself, "il s'évade violemment du pénitencier de son siècle" (Huysmans 308).66 This death—escape from his own, past century—is taken by many critics as a movement towards modernizing, a challenge to the bourgeoisie to leave such artificial aristocratic lives behind. As such, the moral of this story might seem to be very parallel to that which Dorian Gray has to offer.67 Yet we must now turn to the critical literature to see what threads of the plot need to be picked up to make des Esseintes a specifically French character, given the very different position of the aristocracy in France from that of England or Italy in those times.

As well as to answer why Wilde, in full knowledge of des Esseintes, did not allow his

Dorian to stay in his own aquarium—since Wilde's character followed Huysmans' chronologically.

65 Des Esseintes is completely out of society. He substitutes artifice for reality, while considering it art, and cannot accept the real present. He lives his life like a long illness—and life is a process removed from nature and culture. 66 [My translation: "he violently evades the penitentiary that his own century has become for him"]. 67 Dorian looked to the past as his model, depriving himself of a future, whereas des Esseintes recoils from time and history themselves. 73

Critiques of Huysmans

The critical literature has seen this novel in considerably more conflicted terms than those described here. That is, there is a real debate as to where Huysmans stands between Baudelaire and Proust—between a decadence that was critical, hoping to use its power to change readers, and one that reflected the ennui of the haute bourgeoisie of

France—a critique already familiar from Balzac's La Cousine Bette (1846). The vast majority of today's critics, at least, do not see des Esseintes as caught in the aquarium, living out of his own time and space, as I have just depicted him. The vast majority of critics prefer to parallel him with Baudelaire; and the latter's more socially critical use of decadent tropes in literature, even when they could compare him with other of his contemporaries.

Some critics do indeed confirm that Huysmans was intending his character as critical of the bourgeoisie, a bourgeoisie that was proving itself increasingly irrelevant in a crucial reframing of the fin de siècle. For example, critic and writer for the New

Republic, Frederick H. Brown, describes Huysmans, and his confidant Edmond de

Goncourt, as "connoisseurs of morbid psychology and lovers of unfashionable art . . .

[he] challenged bourgeois taste from the gutter of realism" while de Goncourt did so from the "ivory tower of aestheticism" (42). Thus, in this account, Huysmans took both realistic and aesthetic discourses to try to challenge the bourgeoisie to resist the evils of modernization, synthesizing the approaches of both naturalism (with its inevitable reference to Zola, as well) and aestheticism. This purportedly transcendent moment in

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time in which Huysmans situated himself to claim the value of art, is also confirmed in typical critical language by Roy Jay Nelson when he states,

the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans, novelist, essayist, and art critic, provides one of

the clearest examples of the transformation of popular philosophy and literary art

that took place near the turn of the century… he is one of those rare prose writers

who have situated themselves and their work squarely on the cusp of a moment of

literary change, when ways of looking at and representing the world are being

transformed, in life as in art. (Nelson 29)

Where the character des Esseintes remains an aesthete at heart, such critics assume, his author ranged more deeply over the literary resources of the nineteenth century to critique the essentially lazy position which he felt the bourgeoisie had chosen for itself. Any number of critics, therefore, have pointed to a kind of amateurism as the problem with aristocratic aestheticism: the bourgeoisie does not know the depth of reference available to aristocrats and aristocratic souls like des Esseintes.

Yet other critics have preferred to see an adherence to decadence in what I have already presented as a critique of l'art pour l'art. For example, Edward Mendelson writes in his essay,

"Joris Karl Huysmans," that "in his time [Huysmans'] influence was decisive—he

gave shape to the decadent movement in both French and English literature—and

it was Huysmans' manner and themes that Marcel Proust later adopted and made

his own" (Mendelson 1709).

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This character as decadent epitome is also depicted by Anne Hudson Jones and Karen

Kingsley in their essay, "Salomé: The Decadent Ideal," which focuses on Huysmans' descriptions in A rebours of paintings by Gustave Moreau in which the biblical figure of

Salomé is represented. Yet in this essay, Jones and Kingsley state that "Decadence, implying a decay or falling way from something—some standard of style—can be fully understood only when contrasted with the standard it opposes" (345). Yet it is worth noting these critics assess Huysmans' contribution to the art of his time in much the same terms in which des Esseintes (not necessarily Huysmans) characterizes Flaubert's contribution to his epoch:

un style perspicace et morbide, nerveux et retors, diligent à noter l'impalpable

impression qui frappe les sens et détermine la sensation, un style expert a moduler

les nuances compliquées d'une époque qui était par elle-même singulièrement

complexe . . . . (Huysmans 310)68

Such critics, therefore, again assume that the artist and the character are one—the same kind of error I will trace in Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde. As we shall see, however, that identification needs to be called into question, yet for reasons other than those I will adduce in the case of Wilde.

One pervasive set of assumptions is that Huysmans' other writings need to be considered as if they could have been written by des Esseintes. Like all defenders of realism, for example, Annette Kahn tells us in her essay "The Aesthetic Development of

68 [My translation: "in short, that this subtle, twisted, sick style able to note imperceptible but complicated nuances of an epoch that was in itself singularly complex."] These critics thus do not consider des Esseintes an unreliable narrator, which I do, and which I believe Huysmans does, as well. 76

a Novelist Art Critic" (1987) that Huysmans "understood 'true' (vrai) not in opposition to

'ideal' but to false" (Kahn 105). Kahn thus concentrates her attention on Huysmans' art criticism, taking it as the decisive influence for his artistic production and as a key to understanding des Esseintes and other Huysmans' characters. Kahn goes on to say that

"Huysmans is looking for art based on direct, precise, and detailed observation…

Huysmans follows Zola completely in his division between l'élément réel, qui est la nature" and "l'élément individuel, qui est l'homme", so that, in L'Art moderne, "tout en

étant une reproduction exacte, presque photographique de la nature, elles sont néanmoins empreintes d'un accent particulier déterminé par le tempérament de chacun de ces peintres" (Kahn 106).69 In making this equation this way, Kahn supports a balance between nature and human art in des Esseintes, which Huysmans did explicitly not attribute to his character, who is bored by and alienated from the former and incapable of the latter. She is, in other words, trying to equate a historicist and naturalist aesthetics of observation with the representation of a particular decadent, self-deluding aristocrat—two very different types, ignoring the clear scientific parallels that might be drawn: if des

Esseintes is indeed "in an aquarium," then the author might be observing him as a kind of lab rat, as the example of a species that needs to be observed in its natural habitats, not as an exemplary hero.

Huysmans' naturalist ties are also noted by Carol A. Mossman in an essay entitled, "Gastro-Exorcism: J.-K. Huysmans and the Anatomy of Conversion," when she

69 [My translation: "the real element, which is Nature" and "the individual element, which is man", so that, in L'Art moderne, "although the [painitings] are exact, almost photographic reproductions of Nature, they are yet marked by particular accents determined by each painter's temperament" (Kahn 106).] 77

talks about a letter that Huysmans wrote to Emile Zola in May 1884. In this letter,

Huysmans declares his "struggle writing a novel which featured a single character, with no love interest—in short, a book lacking traditional narrative structure" (114).

Mossman believes that, although A rebours purportedly overturned the naturalist canon,

"an entire generation would find that it spoke directly to their sensibilities… for it was perhaps the first novel to draw on a genre which, however appreciated, had not yet crossed over into the French literary camp: the case history" (115). Thus in her account,

Huysmans, like Wilde, had to toe a narrow line: speaking of and to a generation, yet without speaking for a lead character who, while superficially attractive, represents the shallowest his generation can produce, a critic of the present who nonetheless cannot point the way to a healthier future. In this way, Huysmans' hero needs to be considered as constructed like those of Naturalism: determined by his environment and the worst forces within it, and unable to escape the trap.70 Here again, the idea of hero as laboratory subject emerges clearly: Huysmans himself tells us that he based the narrative progression of A rebours on the etymology of "nervosisme" as elaborated by Bouchut in his 1877 edition of Du nervosisme aigu et chronique et des maladies nerveuses, and it is this attention to detail, according to Mossman, this "documentary aspect of the novel

70 To place this novel within the naturalist tradition, Wolter quotes this background information found in a "Notice": "La decadence de cette ancienne maison avait [. . .] suivi régulièrement son cours; l'effémination des mâles était allée en s'accentuant; comme pour achever l'oeuvre des âges, les des Esseintes marièrent, pendant deux siècles, leurs enfants entre eux, usant leur reste de vigueur dans les unions consanguines" (61). She goes on to declare "these genetic influences reflect Zola's theorizing and the studies of Darwin and Lucas" (Wolter 164). 78

through which its links to Naturalism are retained" (115).71 The relation of the aesthetic decadence (of what is observed in that novel) to the social-critical ethic of Naturalism is, however, not pursued here.

Instead, too many critics look to the psychology of decadence as the symptom of what the time does to people. Typically, Charles Bernheimer suggests that "Castration [.

. .] is the seminal fantasy of the decadent imagination" ("Fetishism and Decadence" 62).

This castration comes from the feminization of literature—a tool used by artists during the late nineteenth century that were trying to challenge the textual norms of the times— and becomes a symptom of illness, as the character manifests a repulsive attraction to the

Derridian gap previously quoted as Différence. This contestatory textual politics obtains a realist self-referentiality that reinscribes the outcast decadent authors and re-casts them as part of the canon of writers. That is, Bernheimer takes decadence back into the literary canon of France by making it part of a younger generation's typical œdipal revolt, as the bourgeoisie rejects the "natural passions" as foul, evil, or decadent impulses that need to be overcome. This re-inscription is also achieved for the readers of such novels when the author creates for them a contradictory experience within the reading (an overt neurotic break between the character's id and the environment's super-ego), and thus through the resulting disassociation of the main character—the before-mentioned différence. Such critics then use the text as a kind of

71 In his 1877 edition of Du nervosisme aigu et chronique et des maladies nerveuses, Eugène Bouchut talks about the malaise caused by the Ennui—Mossman quotes Huysmans' Lettres as reference to the author's use of the treatise. I feel that there could be some debate as to which edition Huysmans actually used. 79

cure, creating for readers a break between the familiar and the dissimilar, and enticing repulsive reactions toward the main character as a way to create distance from the norms of the age and incitement to change. Rita Felski also correlates this imaginary identification with the feminine as resulting in a destabilization of traditional models of male bourgeois identity (1094-1105).

There are many readings of this kind of Decadence throughout French literature, all of which do similar work in underplaying Huysmans' connections to naturalism and a kind of social experiment. In one of her less controversial moments, for example,

Camille Paglia views Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, and Théophile Gautier as the three principal French authors whose works defined the Decadent movement in France, yet she, too, is cautions against taking des Esseintes as an edifying character (and thus implicitly breaking the identification of the character and the author). Paglia suggests that "A rebours contains its own ironic self-deflation . . . [and] like Madame Bovary, it shows reality comically frustrating the lofty ideals of an author-identified protagonist"

(Paglia, "Cults of Sex and Beauty" 408). That is, the hero is a kind of parody of those ideals. Her analysis of the novel's closure suggests that words are more important than plot in A rebours," in Huysmans, with his glut of rare words, language generates dense new personae [. . .] A rebours (originally called Alone) is romantically self-contained, its linguistic energy invested in internal sexual differentiation. Its words are thronging multiples, spores of competitive identity" (438). Donald Leach calls this syndrome of intense self-referentiality the "mirroring self-object," a type of self psychology that can make use of Bernheimer's description of "castration imagery" (40). Such critics,

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however, have tended to diagnose the psychological difficulties of the main character, rather than pursue the more naturalist gesture of looking at the environment in which it was functioning.

We see here again the kind of critical turn we will see for Wilde's Dorian Gray: he becomes a poor victim of a society that makes him deformed through its decadence.

Relying on the difference between Freudian psychoanalysis and Bernheimer's self psychology, for example, Leach points to another dimension of this narcissism, the pain it brings: "the violence which Freudian psychoanalysis relates to the necessary pain of realizing others are different, self psychology relates to the unnecessary pain experienced by the child or adult whose autonomous existence goes unrecognized" (45). This is a fine description of Huysmans' sick hero marked as Alone, a man who, in Leach's opinion, substitutes fantasy for reality. Leach summarizes this pathology by stating that Des

Esseintes does this

in order to replace the missing admiration of others, [creating] a world of objects

which are the incarnation of what he perceives as his own beauty: favorite

paintings and books, objects referring to significant events in his past,

demonstrations of personal fantasies; and then gazes upon them with the joyful

admiration and understanding which the outside world has denied him. (49)

This is a picture of a hero at profound odds with society, yet never himself questioning his environment. Nicole Mosher writes that the irony between the purportedly autobiographical nature of Huysmans' novel and its decadent hero is that he ultimately embraced what he supposedly rejected: "ironically, although Huysmans, like Des

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Esseintes, detested modern civilization, he wrote in Against Nature a novel that exhibits many of the features of French Modernism, particularly its surrealistic tone and its impressionistic style" (165). Such critiques, however, ignore the larger context of social- critical discourse through decadent imagery that was in fact the norms for the painters with whom Huysmans was familiar, especially those like Gustave Moreau and Odilon

Redon, or the Brothers Goncourt (and he was a founding member of the Académie

Goncourt).

Within this French context, the artificiality of Des Esseintes' world did indeed stem in part from aesthetic values that would become characteristic of the Modernism the hero would want to reject. Here again, the specific challenge to French art needs to be highlighted to see what kind of decadent imagery des Esseintes really embraced.

Marshall Berman, in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, quotes Baudelaire to argue that the

French authors of the time needed a new language to project their themes into the twentieth century. Berman calls this new language essential to the "primal modern scene," as it "propels [the French authors of the time] beyond their place and time and transforms them into archetypes of modern life" (148)—what he, quoting Baudelaire, calls "the Paradoxes of Modernity," which leads the poet into ordinariness (160). The

"primal modern scene" is in many ways the street, its blood, love, and violence, its shocking new colors and performances of desires outside the safe Victorian drawing

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rooms of Proust's characters. Artists like Baudelaire found great beauty, and a great challenge to traditional literary language, in the ability to look directly at these scenes.72

This is a reversed description of des Esseintes' illness of words, and a good way to connect French aestheticism with Naturalism: his words become progressively more hermetic as he withdraws ever further from ordinariness into his fishbowl, removing himself from both nature and the culture of his day—a historicist rather than a true aesthetic critic of the day, as his contemporaries would recognize. Departing from

Baudelaire's paradox, Berman notes, Huysmans makes his hero as extraordinary as possible, to reverse the process Berman discusses as central to the critique of society through aestheticism (not a critique of aestheticism). So this seemingly self defeating mode of action within des Esseintes, Berman argues, is actually designed by the author, to "recombin[e] the isolated, inanimate elements into vital new artistic and political forms" (Berman 164).

This new illness—le mal du siècle—becomes a transmigration of a soul who makes the transition into modernity. Berman posits that Goethe's Faust, for example, helped create a "dynamic culture within a stagnant one" by offering up new models for thinking and feeling, including the embrace of evil impulses (43). Like Faust, I maintain that Huysmans' des Esseintes, although being part of a "stagnant and closed society," became the catalyst for opening a range and depth of human desires and dreams far

72 Note that this is also the critique traced by Julia Kristeva in her Révolution du langage poétique/ Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984), especially in the untranslated second part which shows how decadent language can position itself as a critique of the bourgeoisie. 83

beyond romanticism and naturalism, using their tools to create a revolution through revulsion. Berman insists that this split occurs in places like France because these societies are "bearers of avant-garde cultures" still surrounded by "backward societies"

(43). That is, it is not aestheticism per se that is backward, it is the society that uses it wrongly—the point we will also identify as Wilde's criticism, as well. By exposing society to its own decadence overtly, these socially engaged aesthetes can force it to die or recover into a new form of life—to declare itself damned or saved—but des Esseintes refuses to do it.

Thus, des Esseintes, although part of a stagnant and closed society, becomes a catalyst for a revolution—creating a dynamic culture within a stagnant one, offering a new model of thinking and fueling even evil impulses. This critical idea of the era's

"Faustian split" as a critical tool is echoed in Brian R. Banks' The Image of Huysmans, where he provides a survey of Huysmans' fiction written during his Naturalist, Decadent, and Catholic phases.73 Banks goes on to call Huysmans' A rebours the bible of French decadence, the book which

turned out to be an incendiary device that would not only light the course of all

his later work, but all the prose of the Decadent period from Lorrain to Gourmont,

Wilde, D'Annunzio, Mallarmé, George Moore, and many others . . . [creating] a

73 Banks comments that "[t]he powerfully scented, overloaded fruits are generally traced to the Romantic Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire, and, as with those two poets, gamy decadence mingles with an earthy realism. Bertrand's famous Gaspard de la Nuit was subtitled "Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot," which finds echo in Huysmans' dedication "Aux vieux amis j'offre ce drageoir fantasque et ces menus bibelots et fanfreluches" (Banks 83). 84

prototype anti-hero . . . [who] . . . became immortal and one of literature's classic

characters. (Banks 92)74

What Banks does not go on to pursue is the original force of Romanticism as a challenge to society, nor the necessity to move on beyond naturalism, which identifies what needs to be criticized in French society in terms of its social fabric and economics.

There is more to be recovered about the position of aestheticism and decadence in this culture.

Huysmans and History

Critics have probably been seduced to reading des Esseintes as a decadent from the straight-forward historical fact that Huysmans is showing his hero at the end of a century, at the end of an epoch, the last of his kind, experiencing the rotting of the old regime around him—a vision shared by Proust, who, however, is considered a modern writer because his ancien régime figures in drawing rooms are clearly very old. But the

Huysmans I am pointing to undoubtedly still remembered Baudelaire, who asserted that through filth, the modern poet can be recast, reborn, reset in his views of the world

74 Banks traces the origins of this modern hero as "modeled partly on Folantin from Downstream as his first self-character, on King Ludwig II of Bavaria (who was allegedly the happiest when in an artificial indoor forest where mechanical lizards crawled through the painted foliage), partly also on Edmond de Goncourt, the dandy Barbey D'Aurevilly, and Baudelaire, and on the more commonly cited Comte Robert de Montesquiou, as noted in the Goncourt Journal soon after the novel's publication" (Banks 93). Banks continues to trace the Duc Jean des Esseintes' origins from another possible influence, "that of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, with its atrophic recluse Mr. Fairlie [and] an Edgar Allan Poe character (presumably after Roderick Usher);" and later to serve as the model for "Proust's Baron de Charlus and probably Wilde's Dorian Gray" (Banks 93). Banks concludes his presentation of A rebours by recognizing that "Huysmans has not just given us the confessions of a particular depraved and solitary personality, but he has at the same time written the nosography of a society destroyed by the rot of materialism . . . . Make no mistake! For a Decadent of this power to appear, and for a book such as M. Huysmans' to take root inside a human skull, we must truly have become what we in fact are—a race at its last gasp" (Banks 96). 85

around him. To do so, that artist would need only to embrace his world of cities, metropolises of desire, chaos, crime, traffic, pornographic filth, drugs and vice—a world also irrevocably heterogeneous, full of ethnographic diversity, of new languages, new states, and new nations. A world of Industrial advancement, mechanical innovation and technological advances: a topsy-turvy world. Proust shows how very far removed the aristocracy was from this world, just as Balzac and Zola showed how little the bourgeoisie was equipped to deal with its power.

What Baudelaire arguably achieved, however, clearly seemed impossible to the

Huysmans who drew des Esseintes not in the process of metamorphosing into something more complex, but in straightforward illness and dissolution. Thus, Huysmans wants to show the difficulty of such a transformation; he wants to introduce to literature a gesture paralleling that in Nietzsche's Ecce homo, showing a hero who will reveal the human nature under stress of such a material transformation. Yet at the same time, he must kill off this hero if he is to foreground a new chance for modern man, because of all that des

Esseintes represents. If figures like those in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and

Proust are to yield a more modern France, they must confront their worlds with spiritual fortitude. The characters in the Comedie humaine of Balzac are consumed by the city;

Flaubert's Madame Bovary escapes into literature, out of her reality; Zola's new capitalists murder the lower classes though labor conditions; and Proust's self-serving

"ruling classes" are revealed as beautiful, but totally past.

The way that Huysmans moves beyond these critiques to a rebirth through his particular strategy of making the aesthetic mind both decadent and ill has been detected

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by many critics. As we return to Camille Paglia's essay for an eloquent example, we see how she describes Huysmans' novel as an expansion of the "Decadent innovations of

Balzac, Gautier, Poe, and Baudelaire, [and its hero] Des Esseintes, the epicene hero," who is the product of "an incest-degenerated aristocratic line, like Poe's Usher" and who will end up in "Romantic solipsism contract[ed until] its ultimate Decadent closure" will occur; and finally, we are also led to see how "Huysmans' language becomes metamorphic" (Paglia, "Cults of Sex and Beauty" 408). Paglia suggests that Huysmans' anti-naturalism is a pronounced anti-romanticism, and as such, it becomes its own –ism, something that moves beyond Baudelaire and Zola alike.75 Paglia goes on to note that

Huysmans' criticism "is an anti-Rousseauist polemic, where not society but nature is shown as deeply corrupt" and that

with his glut of rare words, [Huysmans'] language generates dense new personae .

. . its linguistic energy [becomes] invested in internal sexual differentiation . . .

[and the] whole, subdividing into fractious parts, makes love to itself. (Paglia 676)

In this sense, Huysmans has moved beyond his own era to create a new hero, a new genre, a new language, and a new tone. Paul Bourget, a critic contemporaneous to

Huysmans, says in a letter he wrote to the Academy on July 31, 1880, about the author's modern language that in fact the author's prose

is certainly the most Byzantine product of our epoch [. . .] extremely elaborate,

75And although Wolter also considers the novel as an "instance of movement on three counts: in the rupture from naturalism, in the adaptation to a decadent aesthetics and literary style and, finally, as an evolution toward the writer's own concept of spiritual naturalism," I might add that Huysmans intended for it to do even more than being an "anti" – novel (Wolter 153). 87

full of rare words, sometimes crude to brutality, sometimes, refined to enervation,

this prose is akin to that Baudelaire and the brother Goncourt, but preserves a very

original note which secures for its author a place apart. (Bourget 81)76

His contemporary, then, saw in him a move to the future in his embracing of the almost infinite possibilities of the era—Huysmans becomes a post-realist, post-naturalist, post- symbolist.77

More contemporary critics do not necessarily see the potential in that language, because they do not see the strategy of embracing the past to declare it ill, rather than moving to creating a new language, as modernist critics of fin de siècle decadent society did. But Huysmans himself called attention to that in the 1903 preface to the reissue of his novel, that noted the limited optic of the naturalists on "the little people."78

Huysmans does not identify with his hero; he discredits him—maybe his contemporary critics could see this better. And again, contemporaneous criticism is a better index to how Huysmans was seen in his own context than many of our

76 "One of the authors of the Soirées, M. J.-K. Huysmans, has just published separately a little volume of Parisian Sketches (Vaton), in which are found some curious pictures of the poor and of the gay quarters of Paris. M. Huysmans' prose is certainly the most Byzantine product of our epoch. Extremely elaborate, full of rare words, sometimes crude to banality, sometimes refined to enervation, this prose is akin to that of Baudelaire and the brothers Goncourt, but preserves a very original note which secures for its author a place apart. M. Huysmans, who is a passionate admirer of Dickens, often employs the method of the great novelist in depicting the smallest details of miserable objects. Paul Bourget." (The Academy, July 31, 1880) 77 And may I add, also be categorized as post-modern. 78 There are exceptions to that rule that critics overlook his goals. For example, Arnold Bennett, in A Psychological Enigma (1902), comments on Huysmans' language by calling it powerful and capable of creating delusions. Bennett states that, while Huysmans' language is "incapable of delusion in the ordinary sense it might be capable of erecting one vast and splendid delusion, of arranging a factitious spectacle of emotions for its own diversion [. . . and that the] capacity of the human mind to deceive itself is illimitable; and the greater the mind, the greater, in a fine way, that capacity . . ." (Bennett 251). Ultimately, however, this reduces Huysmans' contribution to an ability to change individual consciousness, but does not necessarily grant it the reference to the age that Bourget saw.

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contemporary critics can offer. In 1909, for instance, James Huneker writes that he finds paradoxical that Huysmans, "a man of picturesque piety should have lived to be the accredited interpreter, the distiller of its quintessence, of that elusive quality, [called]

'modernity'" (167). Huneker also says that with the "intensest vision of the modern world," Huysmans unites to the "endowment of a painter the power of a rare psychologist, superimposed upon a lycanthropic nature," and that "by reason of his exacerbated temper he became the most personal writer of his generation [since] he belonged to no school, and avoided, after his beginnings, all literary groups" (167).79

Huneker concludes by saying that "A rebours is in reality a very precious work of criticism by a distinguished critical temperament, written in a prose jeweled and shining, sharp as a Damascene dagger" (185). Huysmans is the lycanthrope—according to

Huneker—not his decadent hero.80 That is, the author's position as a purported outsider, but actually functioning as something that can deeply unsettle the bourgeoisie by questioning its humanity from within, is much more dangerous than des Esseintes' life in a fishbowl-bottle.

Yet this "gem," this unique and elaborated moment that Huysmans creates with his écriture will also be hidden—and only found by critics—behind the kind of apathy that D'Annunzio depicts in his novel, Il piacere (1889), portraying another kind of dandy aesthete character at odds with its changing surroundings. It is the rare critics indeed who find in Huysmans' work the claim at this kind of epistemic rupture, since he never staged

79 See also Havelock Ellis' citation on page 92. 80 Giving the author the face of a "lycanthrope," a werewolf, argues for Huneker and Ellis' sense of how aesthetes really enact violence against the world that has nurtured them. 89

his own death and resurrection, as Wilde had done in his De Profundis—an attempt, as we will see, to give another reading to Dorian Gray. Instead, critics prefer to see only the specimen in the aquarium. Anthony Winner (1974) summarizes most of Huysmans earlier work when he analyses his earliest short novel, A Vau-l'eau, written two years prior to A rebours. Winner states that, "No one fiction so succinctly or self-consciously evokes this paralyzing depression as Huysmans' early short novel. "Down Stream" (A

Vau-l'eau) . . . once described by James Gibbons Huneker as the "Iliad of indigestion," depicts with loathing the failure of [the present] to provide any reward, meaning, or raison d'être" (Winner 39). Winner concludes his essay by comparing the short novel with A rebours.81 Thus, in this critic's account as well, Huysmans has indeed learned from

Baudelaire the power of the curse of putting distance—through revulsion—between the ordinary world and the inner person. At the same time, the text also privileges revulsion—or as Winner calls it: indigestion.82

Yet as I have cautioned it above, the reader must be careful not to assume that, since des Esseintes privileges his own revulsion as an authentic critical reaction to his day, Huysmans does as well – let's remember to keep the two distinctly separated. As I have briefly argued above, Huysmans is careful to discredit his hero's vision, even when he admires it in many ways. A man living in a fishbowl is not necessarily an appropriate

81 "Des Esseintes, two years later in A rebours, will be able to decorate his rooms to represent the pleasures of movement without its irritations: will have, for a time at least, the resources to imagine defenses against an unendurable reality . . . [hence] not only is he deprived of the large appetite that marks the heirs of Lazaro and Sancho, he is equally set off from the descendants of Don Quixote, who rebel against the material for the sake of a dream or ideal" (Winner 49). 82 Many critics of Huysmans work use the metaphor of the stomach to describe his écriture: indigestion, gastro-anatomical, ventriloquisms, and all part of this rhetoric of sickness. 90

critic of the social order—as Huysmans himself is. And if a dandy feels revulsion, that may not be precisely a key to the kind of social revulsion necessary to change—hothouse flowers are not models for the rest of us. As I have argued for Dorian Gray, the readers are meant to see more than the character himself does.

The discrediting of des Esseintes may have been more easily noticed by

Huysmans' near-contemporaries than by later critics. Thus contemporary critic G. A.

Cevasco believed that it may be "erroneous" to view A rebours as a "satire and parody," as first asserted by American scholar F. L. Van Roosbroeck, who developed around 1925 an elaborate theory on the subject (Cevasco, "Satirical and Paradocial Interpretations"

278). Cevasco continues by stating that Roosbroeck's "speculations made an interesting article," one that seemed worthy of publication because it purportedly presented a key to

"the proper understanding" of a singular novel (Cevasco, "Satirical and Paradocial

Interpretations" 278). At that point, contrary to other previous interpretations of A rebours, Roosbroeck wrote: "I believe it to be neither an autobiography nor the truthful photograph of a living 'decadent,' but mainly a caricature . . . All through the book runs, like a red thread, a constant vein of parody . . . " (Cevasco, "Satirical and Paradocial

Interpretations" 279). Cevasco then points out that A rebours did more than reflect decadent tastes. As Van Roosbroeck claimed: "It helped create them" (Cevasco,

"Satirical and Paradocial Interpretations" 281). Cevasco supports his own assertion by quoting Mario Praz (1933), who describes this novel as "the pivot upon which the whole psychology of the Decadent Movement turns; in it all the phenomena of this state of mind

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are illustrated down to the minutest detail" (Cevasco, "Satirical and Paradocial

Interpretations" 281). Both critics agreed with Arthur Symons' famous phrase describing the novel as "the breviary of the Decadence" (Cevasco, "Satirical and Paradocial

Interpretations" 281). Rather than the bible of decadence, A rebours is to me a critique of the times' cultural motives.

Another support for my reading, one that explains his attempt to create a book that is a revolutionary modern critique of its times, may be the seen through the very form that Huysmans chose: an unusual prose, not realistic and not naturalistic. As

Havelock Ellis (1898) concludes in his essay on Huysmans, des Esseintes is, in his opinion, his author's "mouthpiece, of all forms of literature" (170). Ellis thus historically sets Huysmans as beyond Baudelaire and Mallarmé. He also places him at the gates of

Modernity when he states that "Huysmans took up this form where Baudelaire and

Mallarmé had left it, and sought to carry it yet further… [he] is held to inaugurate the poetic treatments of modern things" (Ellis 170). Thus as a contemporary, Ellis holds this novel to be the pivotal novel in Huysmans' artistic development, and des Esseintes, his hero, as "the representative of his author's hyper-aesthetic experience of the world and the mouthpiece of his most personal judgments" (172). Yet he is falling into the trap of taking aestheticism as its own project, and forgetting the especially French context of decadence as social critique with which particularly Baudelaire is associated. The poetic representation of the decadence of everyday life was, in the artistic philosophy of the day, intended to have more force than naturalism—to open up Correspondences, using

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Baudelaire's expression, that are obscured in the everyday conventions of experiencing reality.

I would like to show an example of his revolutionary prose, by quoting a sentence that is made up of 142 words, filling an entire paragraph. This sentence shows the typical thumbnails of decadent themes: la haine, le mépris, une cage en fils d'argent, les cendres, un cri entendu chaque soir, l'abandon d'une jeunesse and the besoin de vengence pour des tristesses endurées. This unique prose clearly situates its author along with other decadent authors, as critics have stated. I believe, however, that this is only a veil masking the author's true intent. Huysmans paints the perfect fin de siècle set of icons with this single sentence that goes on forever,

Ainsi, par haine, par mépris de son enfance, il avait pendu au plafond de cette

pièce une petite cage en fil d'argent où un grillon enfermé chantait comme dans

les cendres des cheminées du château de Lourps; quand il écoutait ce cri tant de

fois entendu, toutes les soirées contraintes et muettes chez sa mere, tout l'abandon

d'un jeunesse souffrante et refoulée, se bousculaient devant lui, et alors, aux

secousses de la femme qui caressait machinalement et don't les paroles ou le rire

rompaient sa vision et le ramenaient brusquement dans la réalité, dans le boudoir,

à terre, un tumulte se levait en son âme, un besoin de vengeance des tristesses

endurées , une rage de salir par des turpitudes des souvenirs de famille, un désir

furieux de panteler sur des cousins de chair, d'épuiser jusqu'à leurs plus acres des

follies charnelles. (Huysmans 92)

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These images are seductive, but they also point to a world-beyond-the-world, a beautiful but totally artificial space.

Let us now continue to follow the path of Huysmans' contemporaries, not ours, and see how his poem-in-prose, with its decadent anti-hero, may be read somewhat more compellingly within the French traditions of fin de siècle revolt against both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as using decadence not only as a criticism of his era, but also to usher in a new one by condemning the last overripe fruits of the aestheticism of the nineteenth century for their inability to address the world critically. Let us begin to reclaim this position biographically, by seeing who this Huysmans was who purportedly represented himself in des Esseintes. This exploration is aimed to show how the two lives, that of the anti-hero des Esseintes and his author's, are in fact quite different—a difference which, as in Wilde's case, opens up the text as an attempt at a deep critique of the era's cultural norms rather than as the bible of decadence. That is, the biographical

Huysmans can begin to lead us to the author who led Wilde away from the Victorian decadents of Pater and into a more activist critique of society.

So who is this author who ostensibly set a new tone for Europe's literatures and artistic salons? He was born in Paris, in 1848, named Charles Marie Georges Huysmans; son of a Dutch painter, printer, and lithographer called Godfried-Jan Huysmans who died when he was very young.83 Huysmans attended the Lycée Saint-Louis from 1862 to

1865; then studied privately before receiving his baccalaureate a year later. In 1866, he

83 Contemporary Authors Online (2000): . This biography is the main source for my account. 94

began to study law in Paris, and between then and 1898 he served as a civil servant, internal security and crime prevention officer, in the French Ministry of the Interior and

Surété Générale. Novelist, essayist, and art critic, he served with sixth battalion of the

Mobile Guard in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, receiving the awards of Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1893, for work done as a civil servant; and the award of Officier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1907, for his literary achievements. Huysmans died of cancer of the jaw in 1907, at the age of 59, in the city where he was born and is buried in the

Montparnasse Cemetery. This is the career of a bourgeois civil servant with great belief in the French state, not of an aesthete.

Nonetheless, Huysmans' name remains associated with the legacy of decadence, avant-gardism, and the first open doors to what today we call modern art. Let us now turn back to A rebours to see how its hero could be seen to refer critically to the France of his day and to Huysmans' position in it. In the 1890s, the culture of France is still evolving out of the pessimistic determinism about its fate reflected in naturalists such as

Zola, even though his later novels—specifically the ones written in the late 1890s (Les trois villes—Lourdes (1894), Rome (1896), Paris (1898))—seem to focus more on the socio-religious problems of France and Europe of that time.84 This is the France that had lost the Franco-Prussian war and which was turning inward in an era of increasingly conservative religious reaction.

In his article, From Naturalism to Symbolism, John Lucas argues that the socio-

84 As compared to the rather romantic and extravagantly lyrical previous portrayals of the typical Zola earlier themes such as the "struggle for survival, the reduction of a person to his elemental, 'animal' level, success or failure depending on how well adaptation is made to given circumstances" (Lucas 132). 95

historical portrayal of modern life continuously pervades the literature of the time, even after Zola's conversion. In his reading, Huysmans takes on what Lucas calls anti-realistic

"reporting" style of the later Zola and actually satirizes Zola's earlier style by de- emphasizing—or supra-imposing—the naturalistic approach (134). Is then des Esseintes a fabrication or bastardization of Zola's earlier style? I think not: Des Esseintes is clearly not only that, although part of that style is alluded to by critics, particularly by those critics very familiar with Zola's thematics.85 And historically, Huysmans clearly distances himself from Zola when he states, through des Esseintes, that the Naturalist author should look beyond the here and now, beyond his obsession with the contemporain, of his régime, because only then, by distancing oneself, can one only truly see:

Le jour où, lui [Zola] aussi, il avait été obsédé par cette nostalgie,86 par ce besoin

qui est en somme la poésie même, de fuir lontain de ce monde contemporain qu'il

étudiat, il s'était rué dans une idéale campagne, ou la sève bouillait au plein soleil;

il avait songé a de fantastiques ruts de ciel, à des longues pàmoisons de terre, à de

fécondantes pluies de pollen tombant dans les organs haletants de fleures: il avait

abouti a un panthéisme gigantesque, avait, à son insu peut-être, crée, avec ce

milieu edenique où il plaçait son Adam et son Ève, un prodigeux poème Hindou,

célébrant un style don't les larges teintes, plaques à cru, avaient comé un bizarre

85 Wolter notes that in J.-K. Huysmans à la recherche de l'unité, Cogny discusses the lasting impact of Zola's methods on Huysmans "to include even his later works: 'Acquis, depuis les premières années de sa carrière, au naturalisme, Huysmans ne s'en détachera jamais tout à fait [. . .]' (239)" (Wolter 154). 86 Zola here is actually compared to des Esseintes, as the anti-hero also went away to the country side to escape 'life,' but as such is missing all there is to learn about the human condition. 96

éclat de peinture Indienne, l'hymne de la chair, la matière, animée, vivante,

révélant par sa fureur de generation, à la creature humaine, le fruit défendu de

l'amour, ses suffocations, ses caresses instinctives, ses naturelles poses. (312)

Des Esseintes, then, is marked by his author as representing exactly what Zola seemed to have misunderstood: the orientalism, the utopism, the return to nature—all that represents the fin de siècle and its attempts to define itself as French in the new age. Yet in a seeming contradiction to the historiography of the mid- to late-nineteenth century who celebrated the French people (under writers like Jules Michelet, Hippolyte Taine, and

Edgar Quinet, whose histories are echoed in Victor Hugo's novels and in works like

Stendahl's Rouge et le Noir [1830]), des Esseintes repudiates nature as imperfect—, which distances us from the human condition. This "hero" sees nature not as the source of strength for the French nation, but only as a hedonistic garden that eludes truth—a truth which has, for most of France participating in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the 1870-71 war with Prussia, been carved out of years of observation, and not by years of escapism. The truth of such a situation can be only attained through the careful reading of historical facts, something that our "prince inside a fish bowl" will never be able to do, for he lives his truth through a distorted gaze. He, like the ancien régime figures in Proust, is from the outset outside of the mainstream of French history since the

French Revolution.87

In the France of the late 1890s, "pessimism is now directed at history," continues

87 Note, too, that another source for the figure of des Esseintes is assumed to be the real aristocratic aesthete Robert de Montesquiou, also used by Proust in his work as a point of satire. 97

Lucas, "the individual or small group of individuals is pitted against society at large, the common enemy'" (Fletcher 137). Even the symbolists, although closely related to such authors as Huysmans and his contemporary decadent authors, do not attempt to do what

Huysmans, (as we shall see) D'Annunzio and Wilde clearly aim at achieving—taking the historical legacy of their nations forward instead of looking backward. This literature does not belong to the soul, as Arthur Symons describes the symbolist movement; this literature belongs to the political activist, who sees the reality of a changing economy and changing political situations.88

This is the start of a new reading of Huysmans' work: a state bureaucrat and war hero addresses the reality of what seems to all too many as a belle époque. It is not a flowering of the past, but rather a new social-historical context in which many of the stage-props of older ones still persist (and are still admirable and admired in their own ways). Nonetheless, this persistence of the past requires a satire, one that stages these props which can be again sorted into their proper order, so that the social problems and the social contexts of the present can be then farcically (or maybe symbolically) embedded within the literary text—a strategy subtly exploited in A rebours. In so doing,

Huysmans, like Oscar Wilde and Gabriele D'Annunzio, is trying to convince the upper classes how dangerously useless they are becoming—a message delivered by a bourgeois voice, as Wilde would also do. And so in these terms, Huysmans' novel appears not only to be the reversal of naturalism (the decadent looking backwards that all too many critics want him to be), but in sum, a new political beginning. When Lucas' article compares the

88 See Arthur Symons, The Symbolist movement in Literature (1919). 98

naturalist movement to the symbolist one, he takes the point that both are critical, but misses their larger commonality of being social-critical. Adding to Symons' assertion that the Symbolist movement in Literature is "an attempt to spiritualize literature, to evade the old bondage of rhetoric," critics like Lucas miss the basic foundation of fin de siècle literature which is not an economical critique of the times per se, but can indeed be considered a variant of the naturalistic approach which then makes it become a socio- critical text (Fletcher 142).89

And with this, we return again to questions of aesthetics. George Moore believes that the malady of Realism in Modern Painting (1894) is its desire "to compete with nature, to be nature," which "is [also] the disease from which art has suffered most in the last twenty years," because "the mission of art is not truth, but beauty" (116-119).

Huysmans is not concerned with Truth or Beauty, but sees art as a social critique, even more than Wilde, who happens to believe in the power of art itself. Therefore, Huysmans builds an explicit reversal of a contemporaneous statement like Moore's into his novel, in order to satirize it and de-emphasize its importance to society.

In A rebours, des Esseintes tries to reproduce nature unsuccessfully—he tries to be a symbolist. And in the end, his author, Huysmans, actually does more than that.

Carol A. Mossman notes an interesting gap—a break—in des Esseintes' ancestral lineage—he claims to be an aristocrat. This may well be the key to a class position, just

89 Symons states that "if you belong to the middle-class, so much the better for you…you have more chances of surviving, not because of economic factors but because nature has created certain breeds to be middle-class and hence more likely to succeed," where economic advantage becomes the effect, not the cause (Fletcher 138). 99

as Dorian Gray's and Andrea Sperelli's parentage was to theirs. Through this, I believe the author is not just refuting naturalism or symbolism as many critics agree, but he is engaged in an active social critique that is ahead of his contemporaries. Mossman notices that

Jean des Esseintes' most direct "racial" forebear, if such it can be called, is none

other than a hole: "a hole existed in the lineage of this race." This interruption of

the family chain is itself subsequently interrupted and patched over by the

insertion of one "mysterious" head which "was a suture between the past and the

present." If the missing link has been restored, the gap in the family tree has

merely been filled in. As a weak spot, it still bodes a potential for rupture. (118)

There are many such gaps in aristocratic family trees in Europe—many of which conceal families born the wrong side of the blanket, or titles bought or inherited from extremely distant relatives after difficult political times. Clearly, des Esseintes is conceived not as a true aristocrat, but only one who purports to be, and, as such, is deceiving his nation.

The image is a nice one, pointing to the very many ways in which des Esseintes' worldview must necessarily leak, since it is much less than a world. This idea of gaps, différence and leaking "hole" references (bowels, rectal/aural orifices and cavities) often associated with Huysmans' novel's various levels of interpretations, is also carried out by

Mossman when she notes that his prose is the factor which, in her opinion, creates this distancing of the reader from the textual reference. In A rebours, Mossman distinguishes the words that represent certain themes as representative of a certain kind of symbolic language. She notices that the "terms relating to healing through blocking [of] the

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apertures [—as in the persistence of the word 'panser' which occurs in Huysmans' prose—] constitute references to divine operations", and that those holes lead to "leaks

[within the prose net, that end up] in the bottom [where lies] more [of] the Devil's handiwork" (120). Mossman concludes humorously that "the dramas of Huysmans' plots are played out in the apertures [of his prose, where the] final joke [is] on Mother Nature" and that "the narrative—and [with it] des Esseintes' life—have reached, quite literally, an impasse, for which the orificial inversion, [in the end, signifies that] no future writing can be produced, no material excreted," after this breviary and thus we arrive at a constipatory turn in the history of literature (125).

This apparent literary "constipation" is precisely the kind of joke that a "true aristocrat" of France would have caught, as it metaphorically relates to the subtle, careful and extremely meticulous reclaiming of a more resistant role of the author and to the socio-critical position of the author. It becomes evident as well that decadent literature, despite its superficial affinities with Romanticism, affinities also shared by modernism, is not only 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. This "rupture" is des Esseintes' class, which, like his genealogy, is full of holes, and which, like his bowels, are full of wind. The "weak spot" in the history of the French nation cannot hold in place the pressure of modern socio-economic changes.

The pressure that has been building will erupt and will wrap the condemned decadent "old regime" class that des Esseintes seems to represent within its own society:

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one of the old regime's favored types, a decaying decadent who claims instead to be a victim of his own nobility and class position, rather than an abuser of his position.

From Decadence to Modernism in Literary France: The Ergonomics of an 1890s

Book

What I am pointing to is Huysmans' clear attempt to critique the upper classes of his day—and the haute bourgeoisie, which was detrimental to the nation. Within its national intellectual history, however, his image was that of the loser.

For example, Sartre is among the first in France to situate decadent literature as unproductive within this quickly changing era—the same that Yeats calls "an age of transition," a "pursued antithesis," and where literature lives incoherently in, as a time of

"unprecedented spectacle of an industrious society" (Yeats 304 and Sartre 108). For

Sartre, this literature seems "far from reflect[ing]" the society we live in, maybe even run

"counter to its ideology," as it identifies only "the beautiful with the unproductive," and as such lacks coherence with its times (Sartre 108). If that were the case for turn-of-the- century France, then living inside an aquarium might very well be the only way to shield oneself from this kind of distorted progress. If that were the case, then the dying, ruling class becomes the epitome of one kind of progress, in that it is equating the beautiful with the unproductive—promising a whole new level of social "development" based on Beauty to run the nation.

In this context, Art, in the l'art pour l'art sense, remains only an outer mask to hide—perhaps deny—the truth of reality, and then Huysmans and Wilde become mere

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"decorations," museum pieces of a puzzle that can be completed without them. I will argue for Wilde, and now I do so for Huysmans, that their art is one that understands so well the modern trends, the migration of this world into the modern era, that they can acutely construct a reversible message that condemns those literatures that distance themselves from their times, as Sartre refers to them, while also creating a Dandy anti- hero that is obviously representative of a dying class and who is very familiar to them. In the France and England of the 1890's (as later we'll also see for that same Italy), these three authors send a textual warning monitoring the reader that aristocrats like des

Esseintes, Dorian and Andrea Sperelli can not remain in power—and even leaving to suggest that theses Dandy anti-heroes might actually not be dying out soon enough in the real world, for the transition of their changing era to occur. This resonates with Marx and

Engels famous statement, from The Communist Manifesto that "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" (33).90

If I may use textual politics—as the physical act of reading and writing—to historically situate the aesthetic politics of the era as a kind of ergonometrics, with its tendencies to influence the rise of capitalism, and also paralleling this with the human desire to say what up to now has gone unsaid, then I will answer the important question

90 John Goode writes, in his essay entitled The Decadent Writer as Producer, that in fact "the domination of English intellectual history by the elite explains the containment of modernism;" he also, like Marx, believes that "the struggle to organize the traditional intellectual [by the elite ruling classes,] ends in victory for the hegemony [of the literary space] precisely because the whole concept of [the Decadent writer's production of an alienating effect] (stemming from Arnold) based on the felt need of a totalizing unity (the State, tradition, culture, organic form, organic community, etc.)[, which is then] produced by the fissures of utilitarian ideology as it has to cope with a higher organization of the capitalist production process" (Goode 110). 103

asked in the above paragraph. It is Poggioli who attempts to answer this question, replicated by Walter Benjamin, who refers to this new, evolving literature as the tool of a new "intelligentsia," or as a "secret agent in enemy camp" (104). I also would like to mention Maurice Blanchot's (1955) essay on The Essential Solitude, where he states that

to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not

go beyond himself towards the universal. He does not go towards a world that is

more sure, more beautiful, better justified, where everything is arranged in the

light of a just day. He does not discover the beautiful language that speaks

honorably for everyone. What speaks in him is the fact that in one way or another

he is no longer himself, he is already no longer anyone. The 'he' that is

substituted for 'I'—this is the solitude that comes to the writer through the work.

(828)

Thus writing unites us through self-effacement, according to Blanchot, as it isolates us, only to then affirm—or (re)affirm—us. Writing is like breaking a link.

This metaphor allows us insight into the dynamics between a decadent literature and its readers. An author like Huysmans implores the reader to see this need to "efface" or erase the present existence in order to belong and exist: for modernism to unleash itself, des Esseintes and the class he represents need to be eradicated to allow for the rise of the proletariat. They need to fall prey to a plague. As such, A rebours begins with the introduction of our Dandy "Prince," last of his kind due to the "decadence" of this

"ancienne maison,"—maison as the house that corresponds to a family name—which years of interbreeding have weakened into the present last link, "les des Esseintes

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marièrent, pendant deux siècles, leurs enfants entre eux, usant leur reste de vigeur dans les unions consaguines" (Huysmans 80). This is a Naturalist metaphor par excellence: social Darwinism for the upper classes that have cut themselves out of existence, instead of for the workers who have been rendered ill in their own ways.

Later in the novel, we are ambiguously told that Gustave Moreau –who painted des Esseintes favorite depiction of Salomé—is an artist because of his lack of descendents and lack of prospects (ascendants), and as such stood alone in the contemporary modern art: he is part of no dynasty, no trend, no past and no future.91 I say ambiguously because Huysmans is intending to have his (anti-)hero say things and do things that will make the reader perceive a certain irony because, after all, this one painter was surrounded by many other decadent artists in France. Once the irony is perceived, the reader will distance him/herself from the anti-hero's judgment, and then, the author clearly hopes, the ambiguity of his position will vanish for the astute reader of any class, with the mask of the "hero" discarded and his truth revealed as illness or weakness.

Goode claims that "ambiguity, irony, mask, if they make for an exposed margin, and enable us to treat modernist writers as secret agents in the enemy camp, also form part of the specific condition of the insertion of the writer in that camp" (Goode 127). In this reading, the author becomes then the demystifying agent of literature, a socio-critical observer that according to Goode, must "expel" him/herself "from the market not, in the first instance, to enter the cloister, but to expose the market and its bases" (Goode 127).

91 "Sans ascendant veritable, sans descendants possibles, [des Esseintes] demeurait, dans l'art contemporain, unique" (A rebours, 153). 105

So, for the activist decadent writers, if literature is to be only beautiful—as in l'art pour l'art—then it is useless, and like all the inanimate objects that des Esseintes so greatly values in his museum-like home, they become obsolete. Des Esseintes' real treasure lies in his book collection.

Huysmans' French context goes further than the British version that Wilde represents. Furthermore, Huysmans builds himself a self-critique of decadence into his novel—a more self-ironizing gesture than even Wilde is capable of. Right around the time of Huysmans, Wilde and D'Annunzio's writings, we see an interesting phenomenon taking place in relation to books and literature—and reading and writing. A new market arises where books have become an actual commodity for their physical existences, not for their content, and as such, of value in the sense of a marketable commodity—not only in the sense of the value that des Esseintes would like to paint in his book. Huysmans is well aware that one can own books without reading them.

And the real situation of trying to change society through literature is itself a very class-bound issue. Books cost money. But even worse, because they cost money, authors can make money through books, and so need to conform to those marketable principles if they are to survive and remain at what they consider their economic status.

Goode asserts that "it is not until the development of a literary market, in which the writer can insert himself into society as the producer of commodities, that the literary text as a production, as the object of a determined productive process, becomes truly visible"

(Goode 129). Art is therefore no longer a collector's item, as des Esseintes has assumed was the case for all his life. What he has assumed were priceless artifacts, actually take

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on the position of marketable goods in Huysmans' novel, goods that can enlighten, entertain and, if necessary, even be sold or (re)sold for money—and thus mutate and trans-mutate ad infinitum.

This notion of art (books, pictures) becoming commodities amplifies the connection of Huysmans' work to Naturalism in another way. Remember that decadence stresses art as artifice in the sense that it has been willfully constructed—or artfully manufactured. Nature might provide the raw materials, but man molds these materials into something that is built, cogitated, and produced, "la nature fournit la matière première, le germe et le sol, la matrice nourricière et les éléments de la plante que l'homme élève, modèle, peint, sculpte ensuite à sa guise" (Huysmans 198). J.E.

Chamberlain exposes the decadent writer's skillful "artifice," in his essay entitled From

High Decadence to High Modernism, where he argues that the "decadence of the last decades of the nineteenth century clarified the conditions, and determined the limits, of the Modernism of the first few decades of the twentieth" century (595). In this essay,

Chamberlin purports the importance of the transposition of, or the mechanization of that which is constructed versus that which is natural, and he believes that this is what

"attracted a generation that was becoming more and more suspicious of the tendency of language to distort, to establish irrelevant structures of meaning or intention." (597). The generation of the 1890s was becoming therefore aware of the power of words in a new

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way, and the power of the ideas that those words created.92 But at the same time, I would add, that generation was also becoming suspicious of the commodification or medialization of those words or of any artwork.

Benjamin would expose this concept a half-century later in "The Work of Art in an Era of Technical Reproducibility," stressing how great a challenge such mechanization was to the bourgeois definition of art, as intimately associated with a single artist. The naturalist impulse, in contrast, stressed mechanization as production of a group consciousness, which opened up a broader sense of how art-commodities might actually be able to transform consciousness (a vision taken up by film-makers like Sergei

Eisenstein (1898-1948) in the era of the Russian Revolution).

In turn-of-the-century aesthetic France, however, this conflict was played out using a different symbolic vocabulary that harks back to the idea of a family tree: woman was nature, where man was culture.93 Des Esseintes himself is puzzled at the transmutation, at the irony or ambiguity, of what has traditionally been considered the masculine idea of art, when it can be found as lodged from within a feminine body.

Here is another case where Huysmans' text is at great pains to reverse the aesthetic tropes of his world. In an interlude he has with an American acrobat—Miss

Urania—des Esseintes reverses the role of the man and the woman—she being the masculine and he the feminine. He admits "désappointement," in sleeping with this Eve

92 Chamberlin continues to say that the "decadent style, then, apparently like the modern style, is one in which the classical subordination of the individual parts to the unity and harmony of the whole is broken, in favor of a celebration of the constituent parts, an obsession with the part that in one sense may embody the whole and yet in another remain part of it –an obsession that is to say, with the symbol" (599). 93 See Bram Dijkstra for details. 108

Future, as her brutal force as an athlete did not at all compare with her prudishness in bed. Gender roles are completely confused in this scene of how nature has become denatured in this futuristic world. Is the feminization of the decadent text and the masculinization of Future Eve so haunting to this changing society? In admitting, sadly, that Miss Urania was but only an ordinary lover with an extraordinary body, des

Esseintes states, "la transmutation des idées masculines dans son corps de femme n'existait pas" (Huysmans 212). He cannot see past his visions of what society women or

"nature women" ought to be, into an image of other kinds of "natural" artifice of the era

(the female athlete becomes an issue in the West at the turn of the century, as much as the blue-stocking female politician or intellectual does).94 However, our anti-hero is too naïve, too distanced, too aloof to fully understand this ambiguity between the outer construct and inner construct of things, or to even be aware, as any scientific naturalist would be, that they are socially constructed.

In Huysmans book, the roles of nature and culture are thus confused. On the one hand, as in Baudelaire's Correspondences, nature held in his hero's mind as paradigmatic is paralleled to a temple, while literature is equated with a matrix in flux—a fluidity that reflects his limited awareness of the way in which his era has been transmuting by forces he does not understand. That gap shows the hero's inability to entertain an art that has

94 Blue-stocking female politicians belonged to the Blue-stocking society (act. c.1755–c.1795) which was a "network formed around a group of women who from the mid-eighteenth century introduced a new kind of informal sociability and nurtured a sense of intellectual community. The chief bluestocking hostesses were Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen, all of whom were wealthy and well- connected women who used their influence to attract the leading minds of their day to their London homes. Here they aimed to combine learning with pleasure, scholarship with sociability, and luxury with virtue" (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). 109

mass potential—that might be more than a rare artifact. For des Esseintes, nature is only barely acceptable because of its resonance with the metaphor of "les confines," "les bords" of the soul—not as the Naturalistic approach that Huysmans points to within his text—the protagonist might almost be able to break through the ties that corrode his stagnating position.

Yet the limits to his perspectives are clear. Huysmans speaks through des

Esseintes about Baudelaire's oeuvre and how such work goes beyond the confinements of joy and or evil, far away from that detestable "Ennui," which is "l'effrayant retour d'âge des sentiments et des idées" (Huysmans 261). Later, des Esseintes relates Barbey's

"modern" experience marked by constant change and dialectic transmutation when he says that "Barbey était forcément en possession d'un dialecte qui avait supporté de nombreuses modifications, qui s'était renouvelé, depuis le grand siècle;" therefore acknowledging the power of words (Huysmans 285).95 This dialectical exchange— separating language from truth in a way that makes the former social and the latter the purported issue of art—is also seen pervading the later pages, when des Esseintes comments on imperfection and its palpable force,

l'imperfection même lui plaisait, pourvu qu'elle ne fût, ni parasite, ni servile, et

peut-être y avait-il une dose de vérité dans sa théorie que l'écrivain subalterne de

la décadence, que l'écrivain encore personnel mais incomplet, alambique un

95 Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly was a French novelist and short story writer who specialized in mystery tales of exploration into the soul. He influenced such writers as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Proust (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Villiers_de_l%27Isle-Adam). 110

baume plus irritant, plus apéritif, plus acide, que l'artiste de la même époque, qui

est vraiment grand. (Huysmans 313)

For the aesthete, the collective does not exist; there is no thought of the value of shifting the age's perspective.

Instead, reading and writing are consigned to the realm of the personal and the aesthetic. This writing and (re)writing, (re)inscribing, as well as reading and

(re)reading—or even incapability of reading—are thematized by Huysmans in chapter

XII, entirely dedicated to the phenomenology of reading and the importance of classical texts through history. Many critics find that chapter to be disturbing in that it

"conspicuously disrupts this dialectic of hermeneutic exchange," and as such defines decadent fiction "through the hinterland of texts it draws upon, inviting the reader to scrutinize named volumes, while at the same time repudiating the effects of those very acts of extensive reading" (Towheed 4). Such passages are used to call the novel decadent, because the "direct impact of the written word upon the consciousness and identity formation of the individual reader was spectacularly undiminished" (Towheed 6).

This is indeed the position that Huysmans gives to his hero. In des Esseintes' mind,

le roman, ainsi conçu, ainsi condensé en une page ou deux, deviendrait une

communion de pensée entre un magique écrivain et un idéal lecteur, une

collaboration spirituelle consentie entre dix personnes supérieures éparses dans

l'univers, une délection offerte aux délicats, accessible à eux seuls. (Huysmans

331)

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Yet the author does not necessarily consider this interaction to be "magic."

Described in this way, the dynamics between author and reader becomes at best a hermetic, coded language. Not anymore a "decadent discourse" in and for itself with the potential for an increasingly modern reading community. The book in the character's mind lacks the potential "for influencing, and radically destabilizing its readers," it lacks what Huysmans hopes for in his text—that it might (re)empower the reader once stripped of their previous inscriptions, so to allow themselves to freely (re)write, (re)engrave, or

(re)print on the books a new and lasting record (Towheed 8). In light of this discrepancy between how des Esseintes uses books and the way Huysmans sees they must work, it is no wonder that Dorian's poisonous little yellow book was Huysmans' A rebours. In retrospect, it may be rather straightforward for us to see the impact, the message of this book, and yet Wilde, a contemporary of Huysmans, was already able to understand its power.

Poggioli also explains this process of enlightenment and empowerment that books may confer in his book The Theory of the Avant-Garde. In it, he describes the need "to study avant-garde art as a historical concept, a center of tendencies and ideas," with the goal of empowerment "through what it reveals, inside and outside of art itself, of a common psychological [human] condition" which is allowed by the (re)appropiation of notions or legacies that are now (re)used to (re)define the way people think (3-4). Kirsten

Strom supports this notion of the subversive power of words and art in her avant-garde article written in 2004, as well (37-49). In it Strom suggests that "[h]owever we may judge avant-garde art when we meet it, for us the phenomenon and idea are so present

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and evident that we do not stop, even momentarily, to wonder if we might be dealing with an illusion or an appearance rather than a reality, with a myth or a superstition rather than a concept" (38). Des Esseintes does indeed fall prey to such an illusion, a superstition, because he is never challenged by the group to turn his vague grasp of reality into a concept.

From Huysmans' perspective, however, words and art—and books are words— become this source of revelation, wherein knowledge lies truth. Conversely, the suppression of knowledge may also be instrumental to another kind of power –the power of the mass media and the collective, as was thematized in the era. By hiding behind

"illusions," governments can feed lies to the masses. Once these illusions crumble, then and only then can the masses see through; as Nietzsche posits, "When the natural consequences of a deed are no longer "natural," but thought of as caused by the conceptual specters of superstition . . . , then the presupposition of knowledge has been destroyed—then the greatest crime against humanity has been committed" (385; emphasis in the original). For an author to expose that instability, then, is a highly politicized gesture.

It is no coincidence that the problem of Religion and the problem of Evil are also brought forth by des Esseintes in chapter VII, where our anti-hero is confused by opposing dogmatic dilemmas. Here, he now confronts the two twin values of the beauty that has defined his existence: the true and the good. It is now a narrator, and not the main character, who says about des Esseintes that "il pensait, malgré lui, à des intérpretations contradictories de dogmes, à des apostasies perdues, consignées dans

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l'ouvrage du Conciles, du père Labbe" (Huysmans 180). This reference to church dogma is telling: he shows the first signs of functioning critically in relation to orthodoxies, catechisms of belief with no necessary reference to heres and nows.

The psychological results of such realizations will be every bit as devastating as

Dorian Gray's confrontation with his painting. James Knoll IV (2008) explains the origins of what he calls the human "Illusion of Evil". In his essay on the recurrence of

Evil as a reference point in the diagnostics for forensic psychiatry, he argues that

Evil is an entirely subjective concept created by humans, and there is nothing

inherently evil in nature or the universe. Primitive cultures believed that natural

calamities were manifestations of evil. It was in this way that humanity first began

to personify adverse circumstances or tragedy so that they could attempt to master

attendant anxiety. Yet in the formal structure of evolutionary theory and natural

selection, there is no designation for evil. The relentless and often brutal manner

of natural selection may dispose us to a belief in so-called natural evil, while the

reality is that this is nothing more than our own subjective interpretation. Further,

our own interpretations are invariably ambiguous, culture-bound, and likely to

evolve over time. (105)

Evil and religion are constructs, subjective fabrications—artifices—just like decadent art is believed to be: art as an "artifice," in the volitional, cognitive sense of the word. This is the point that Huysmans is making in des Esseintes, underlying the fact that his illusions are only able to be preserved if he stays in his aquarium or leaves the Paris that will ultimately confront him with a different world.

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Knoll goes on to draw from historical contexts, where the power of these constructs is clearly seen in the collective hysteria of certain epochs. As an example, he chooses the witch hunts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; he suggests that we follow the development of these constructs in a cyclical fashion. He warns us of its repetitive and defying nature:

The development of a profit-making deviance industry was perpetuated in cyclic

fashion. The more rigorous the detection efforts, the higher the rates of deviance

appeared to be, which then justified the use of more extreme measures of

detection. However, it was well observed that forces other than economic ones

had vested interests in defining and controlling deviance. Political, religious, and

psychological interests have also been cited as playing significant roles. One of

the lessons from the witchcraft hysteria in England was that once a definition of

deviance has been officially sanctioned, the potential for abuse becomes virtually

unlimited. (110)

Was not the apocalyptic holocaust of the Jewish people such a development? Were not

Hitler, Mussolini, and then Lenin, aware of this subjugating power found in expression?

At this point, it would only be naïve to believe that Huysmans wrote his book only for pleasurable reasons. It is much more likely, given his proximity to Naturalism and its critique of such naturalized illusions, that he saw aestheticism as one of these profit-making enterprises that imprisoned people like des Esseintes in their Midas-hordes

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of riches that would not sustain their lives.96 Huysmans portrayal of his weak, introverted hero is but a prediction of what is to come for France in the years ahead, if this orgy of things is not to be overcome (an orgy that could also be considered as part of the colonial project). There has to be an overturning of the ruling class, but who and how will the next ruler be and be picked? Echoes of paranoia trigger such alarms, alerting the reader that this has happened, and that this might happen again. In fact, Knoll reminds us that

It requires no stretch of the imagination to consider how more modern notions of

evil might be creatively imputed to those who are unable to ward off its powerful

moralistic connotations. Indeed, it is hubris to conclude that we are beyond such

societal dynamics, even today. Given the right setting and circumstances, a

regressive return to a variety of analogous behaviors is distinctly within our

repertoire of responses. (111)

Knoll's warning is echoed by Huysmans on page 331 of the novel, where the reader is alerted about a certain kind of literature, even called decadent, but not the kind of literature with the transformational power that Huysmans wants to confer on his own book. Huysmans says that this particular type of decadent writing is only weakened by time, exhausted by excesses, and ultimately only existent in a rhetoric of illness, this

"décadence d'une litérature, irréparablement atteinte dans son organisme, affaiblie par l'âge des idées, épuisée par les excés de la syntaxe, sensible seulement aux curiosités qui enfièvrent les maladies" (Huysmans 331-332). This is precisely the diction that

96 This is echoed in the text from the beginning, "quand le spleen le pressait, quand par le temps pluvieux d'automne, l'aversion de la rue, du chez soi, du ciel en boue jaune, des nuages en macadam, l'assaillait, il se refugiait dans ce réduit…" (Huysmans 92-93). 116

Huysmans has parodied as the consciousness of des Esseintes in his fishbowl—after all the name of des Esseintes is a combination of essence and essential, like is blood.

The book ends with hope, although des Esseintes is taken away by the men in white coats, confirming the diagnosis that he has been infected by the mal de siècle that has to be quarantined. The reader is left with a prayer, God have pity on the doubting

Christian, the incredulous believer, of the kind of individuality surfaced from a background of "old" regime hope—a reconstructed new persona.97 Could this last prayer not be, in synthesis, the recipe for claiming at a social critique of its times? Ending—in contrast to the gray, overall gloom of the text—with a prayer of hope—a hope is raised from the taking away of des Esseintes—does not in any way relieve us of the fear the readers bring to at this juncture where the turning of this century approaches. Are we perhaps not told to be skeptical, and to venture alone without the pathway light by the

"fanaux du vieil espoir" (361)?

One must not forget, moreover, that the message found on the last page of this book is closely tied with the socio-historical context of the time—being a critique of aestheticism within aesthetic culture. This book emerges at a historical moment in which a ruling class is under fire: revolutions, revolts, the rise of the industrial revolution, the migration from country to urban developed areas, the concept of leisure, the dissatisfaction of the lower classes towards the upper classes—even Huysmans had

97 "Seigneur, prenez pitié du chrétien qui doute, de l'incrédule qui voudrait croire, du forçat de la vie qui s'embarque seul, dans la nuit, sous un firmament qui n'éclaire plus les consolants fanaux du vieil espoir!" (Huysmans 361). 117

predicted his book would be a failure with the public because of its transparency.98 But there is no wonder that Dorian Gray would find in des Esseintes a kindred spirit—or that as gifted an author as Wilde himself would see the possible value of a critique of aestheticism from within aesthetic culture. Huysmans tried to create a new narrative of decadence to move beyond the representational voices of his contemporary artists, to yell the story of modern soul "in the age of technical reproducibility".99

The Pathology of an Era100

To bring the force of Huysmans' critique to the fore we must again remember that historians consider the 1890s in France as an ill era, a sick era. During this time, the country is seen to enter a period of "degeneration"—due in part to the corruption of the

Second Empire, fueled by commercial materialism. This period began, after all, with a commercial gesture of national self-importance that seemed at odds with its historical culture: the famous 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, whose metallic icon still stands today as the epitome of all that is French—the Eiffel Tower. But let us not misread this monument placed at the feet of the Elysian Fields just as a sign of wealth. France of the

1890s is quite a sick country, where phobias, fears, fearful constructions of paranoia, xenophobia and military defeats, as well as many State and Church ventures in unity with

98 "It will be the biggest fiasco of the year - but I don't care a damn! It will be something nobody has ever done before, and I shall have said what I want to say . . ." (conversation reported by Francis Enne in 1883, quoted by Baldick 131). 99 Borrowing Walter Benjamin's idiom. 100 Inspired by Richard Thompson's theme. 118

disregard for the individual are occurring simultaneously. This is an era when, purportedly, the government looked at people as masses, and not individuals.

Richard Thompson examines this latent threat in his book called The Troubled

Republic, Visual Culture and Social Debate in France, 1889-1900. In it, Thompson delineates the fear that was believed to exist within the unruly urban masses of the times, as well as the existence of a pervasive phobia of the crowd, especially on the part of the upper ruling classes.101 Thompson also focuses on the "renewed importance" of religion, as means to placate the masses, as a historically familiar form used in politically suspicious ways—especially the Catholic revival. After all, to the avant-garde, religion—with all its mysticism and spirituality—was seen to pose a threat to rational republicanism, especially in the accommodations sought by Church and State—in this case the Third Republic and the Catholic Church, all of which would roll secular modernization back in serious ways (Thompson 118-20). These accommodations were clearly a construction, as both factions knew cynically enough, that served their interests, and in the end worked together toward a common end: subjugating the masses.102 But it was not only internal politics that made France seem to be in decline.

Finally, Thompson surveys the role played by nationalism and militarism, and the continuing impact of the idea of la revanche against the Germans for the defeat that

France had endured in 1871—as the (re)visiting the Dreyfus case, with Dreyfus' profuse

101 "Health and decadence, Republic and religion, crowds and control, anti-German nationalism: these issues preoccupied France in the 1890" (Thompson 4). 102 As examples: Leon Bonnat's 1888 portrait of a leader of the reconciliation, Cardinal Lavigerie, at Versailles' Musee National du Chateau, is an archetype of self-satisfied plutocracy. 119

accusations and exonerations from the public split into accusers and defenders.

(Thompson 7)103 France had been used, misused, fought against, faced defeat, and, for the first time, the country sensed a new era approaching without having the capability to embrace it: modernity. Thompson sees this period as the perfect seed for the rise of decadence—which he calls obsessive self-analysis—, especially as old models (military, education, art, tradition) seemed unable to meet current challenges: "Decadence not only questioned bourgeois morality, sharply in the hands of a Valloton or Renard; it also exposed bourgeois hypocrisy and ridiculousness" (76). In addition, Thompson reads this complexity as directly tied to the "momentum of the modern," where everything in the era was seen as shattering into many different but still stratified optics, offering many new analyses on many levels for any subject matter –as happened in anatomy and psychology then, as well. He frames this era of change as a virtually cubistic view of the world that allowed its people to understand everything in a much more complex way, even as it destroyed the dominance of traditional reference points (Thompson 76).

As an example of this transformation, Thompson cites the impact of the bicycle, soon to be shared by the automobile—as an élite form of transportation—and the vision that such momentum brings forth to the onset of modernity.104 The adoption of these forms of transformation, and the mobility they guaranteed, brought a certain neurosis that

103 In the 1894, a young Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted unfairly by French intelligence for collaborating with the Germans, likely set up because of his Jewish background (Doise 75). 104 And on the subject of mobility and momentum, our focus should turn to revisit des Esseintes own non- mobility within the book; with his fear—and thus inability—to travel (see chapter XI, des Esseintes and "le voyage imaginaire à Londres"). 120

Thompson believes is at the heart of modernity (11).105 Such transformations were happening socially as well. For example, the year 1884 sees the passing of legislation that liberalized divorce—thus showing some "social" commitment from the Republic— but also many strikes (Thompson 119). Many travel magazines of the time noticed this radical new phenomenon, a new form of social critique growing parallel to Huysmans and the literature of the Decadence. The notion of this new demonstrative power—la grève (striking)—is alluded to in an article written in Edinburgh, in 1890, that casually notes that "all who have traveled in France during the last two decades have observed the increase of the intemperance among the working classes; but in spite of conflicts between capital and labour, and in spite of the decadence of the national sobriety of the French, the working man is, we think, on the whole better off in France than in England" (Davies

184). The casualties of these shifts were the last remaining scions of old families, as des

Esseintes claimed to be, and the last vestiges of the privilege of taste and aesthetic education, rather than the technical education that would fuel France's industrial modernization at the end of the century.

To conclude, then: to many, life in the fin de siècle seemed to be divided into a series of disenchantments and two economic extremes: the wealthy new bourgeois—a frivolous minority that appeared to be even more hypocritical with the advent of leisure and play—and the working class—the majority that sweats in the factories of the

Industrial Revolution (Weber 9). Old revolutions and new regimes had all failed "to

105 This is an era of emergent "modern pressures [which brought forth] modern symptoms;" and thus modernity becomes "crucial to an understanding of the 1890s," creating a new culture that is "anxious and confident, cautious and expansive" (Thompson 11). 121

usher the brave new world that they had rashly promised" (Weber 9). Darwinian notions also seemed to doom the majority of the population, cursed by notions of biological pre- selection (Weber 11).106 And hidden behind their walls were the last living remnants of the beautiful creatures of the old orders, as both Proust and Huysmans showed them to us.

Doomed, degenerate, ill and "neurasthenic," a term coined by Dr. George Miller

Beard in 1881 to describe a certain "nerve weakness" which manifested in "physical and mental lassitude, listlessness, lack of energy and enthusiasm, and a general weariness"

(Weber 11)—this is the ennui, the mal de siècle spoken about in Huysmans book. Urban living began to be abhorred by many precisely because it could cause such maladies like neurasthenia, while pollution started to be seen as the reason for many of the symptoms of these illnesses (Weber 12). In an almost diametrically opposed critique to the same end, F. T. Gaindorge found the French people of 1863 over-refined, over-civilized, artificial and decadent: "Paris is an overheated hothouse, aromatic and tainted" (Weber

13). Huysmans' novel shows this same profile from the inside of the culture—like the title of his book also suggests.

Therefore the crisis of the 1890s—the spirit of revanche against Germany, the revisitation of the Dreyfuss case, the 1889 Universal Exposition—also brought phobias and fears. This brought France to self-introspection and self-analysis, as the onsets of modernity encroached. This is a time when decadence began questioning bourgeois

106 Weber notes that "it wasn't just that men were unequal, but that inequalities were hereditary," and as such, "not meritocracy, but predetermined elitism traced the destinies of men and societies" (Weber 11). 122

morality and hypocrisy in a much more complex way than before, in order to understand reality. All of this created neurosis, which is at the heart of modernity. This starts a viral outbursts of textual pessimism.

Outwardly, the situation in France was even more dire than that in Wilde's

England. Extreme political decomposition was vividly presented to many on the streets, between the decline of the Ancien Régime, the Revolution and Napoleon, and now the new Republic which had promised so much seemed to sustain a new kind of criticism, a historical pessimism—one that is related to Hyppolite Taine's principles as exemplified in his The Origins of Contemporary France (1874-94) (Weber 14).107 Along the same lines, men like Charles Maurras and Georges Sorrel wrote about "the decay of energy and will, of social individual coherence," and concluded that "only action (and reorganization) could revitalize society, re-moralize and restructure it [. . .] by procedures of demystification and de-simplification of characteristics of the age" (Weber 16).

To reverse this process of ennui, the Baron de Coubertin, reacting to these fears of moral and physical degeneration of the western nation-states, advocated gymnastics and athletic exercise which lead to the foundation of the Liegue nationale de l'éducation physique in 1888—counting among its board members Marcelin Berthelot, Georges

Clemenceau, Louis Pasteur and Jules Verne (Weber 16). This initiative led to the creation in 1895 of the International Olympic Committee to be set up in 1895, and in

1896 to the first Olympic games and a new hope for "the romantic quest for individual

107 For Taine, Roman decadence began when Romulus had murdered Remus, and from then to modern day France, all history had been tainted with "decomposition." This was called Historical Pessimism (Weber 14). 123

affirmation, the righteous concern for moral regeneration, the social concern for equity and welfare, the 'scientific' interest in physical and psychic wellbeing (or decline) affecting all, seldom heretofore connected" (Weber 16).

In this era of aggressive physical and political realignments, then, it was left to

Huysmans to choose to write his novel in congruence with his times as a testament to the dissection of a specific class' psychological response to the pressures of modernism— remaining historically attuned with the times in his social critique—and in its appeal to preserve, reevaluate, and recreate tradition instead of discarding it. What he was trying to save, however, was not only art as a voice in the nation, but the physical and mental body of the nation itself, which risked becoming either completely proletarian or museum-like.

After all, Paris after le Baron Haussman still seemed to be the most beautiful city of the world—except now that French beauty, like the truth of dogmatism and the mercenary goodness of the era's church, was a laboratory in a bottle on how not to follow the old orders into the future. Huysmans' hero represented everything that France was built on, but would no longer be—he belongs without doubt to a madhouse, so that he can no longer seduce the youth of France.

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Chapter Two: D'Annunzio's Il piacere: A Farcical Socio-Political Dissent "He was a master of the beau geste, a peacock who could out strut [Italian fascist dictator Benito] Mussolini [. . .] But there was a major difference between these two public idols during the Fascist era, D'Annunzio had literary ability." —Mitgang, Herbert.108

Critics have found difficult to separate D'Annunzio, the man—author, poet, narrator, political activist, war hero and journalist—from his work. D'Annunzio's life might at times seem even more glamorous and extravagant than his fiction. For this particular reason I chose to introduce this chapter with a quote that not only equates

Benito Mussolini with Gabriele D'Annunzio to immediately expose the particular context that many critics of D'Annunzio make when exploring his work, but to also allow for the wide impact that such an author made in Italian political and societal life of the times.

D'Annunzio's political figure was prominent from the beginning. He would become a

WWI hero, and the leader of the famous Fiume expedition after the war. Like Mussolini, he was an immensely successful public speaker, a novelist and playwright, a highly refined Dandy, but at the same time also a notorious Don Juan (Re 6). D'Annunzio had carefully fabricated and constructed his own "public image", day by day as he would the characters of his plays, poems and novels.109 His adventurous life—full of war stories, aristocratic and artistic Salons and many amorous adventures—has often been compared

108 "Books of the Times; A Master of Form Before Function," The New York Times (July 8, 1989); . 109 Lucia Re writes about his dissatisfaction with the reception of his first volume of poems—written at the age of seventeen—did not trigger a huge response. As a result, Re reports, "D'Annunzio had the news of his own death in a tragic accident published in the newspapers" (Re 6). 125

to Andrea Sperelli's life, the protagonist of his first novel Il piacere. As a journalist, however, D'Annunzio always remained engaged with his readers and their political beliefs—by representations of decadence as a means to this end.

It is therefore imperative to begin a chapter on D'Annunzio reminding ourselves of his audacious life, his aristocratic milieu and political activism. However, the chapter will not dwell on D'Annunzio's later Fiume venture, or his fascist collaboration, which both come later in the twentieth century—although inevitably, some of it will logically spill over. Nor will it dwell on D'Annunzio's later works, or his First World War ventures or his loss of one eye, which many critics believe to have spurred on the author's increased interest in the gaze. Instead, this chapter centers on the nature of his first, and very influential novel, Il piacere, and its effect on Italian thought at the time. In my opinion, Il piacere is truly a breviary, to borrow Cevasco's term, a bible—or in socio- economic terms, a manifesto—for its time.

I will draw in what follows from Charles Altieri's Radical Poetics and from

Martin Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos and the Avant-Gardes to prove that Il piacere is indeed a social critique of its time, an attempt of D'Annunzio to bridge the gap that an Italian Unification produced by projecting a mostly agricultural country—that had long lost his epic stature, dated back to the Renaissance years—into modern thought and society. In particular, I will focus on the similarity in purpose that the three books I chose to write about aim to set this case apart from the others. I will need to build on the important notion of propagandistic literature, and how this leads the way to an "Avant-garde" blending of "isms" as we reach the twentieth century. Puchner's

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Poetry of the Revolution focuses on many manifestos of the era (Marx, Marinetti, Perloff,

Habermas), and especially on how they contributed to legitimizing artists and the art they produced. I take this as a point of departure to argue that our breviaries/bibles could thus profitably be renamed manifestos, due to their re-inscribing nature—as a redefining tool, similar to that used by feminist and post-colonial literature—and the ability to claim to be lifting a backward society and pushing it into the modern way of thinking.

Part of this account is familiar. The idea of such modernist novelists leading the way into modernity out of antiquated times, is approached by Pericles Samuel Bruce

Lewis. Lewis groups D'Annunzio, Proust, Conrad and Joyce as activist authors who produce a text which provides a philosophical bridging between a particular readership's need for order, and the chaos created within the European nations in the mid to latter nineteenth century by the dissipation of monarchies and the church. In his The Rise of the Modernist Novel and the Crisis of Liberal Nationalism, Lewis notes that D'Annunzio in his work, "proudly mingles the demands of the kingdom of earth and heaven and embodies the intimate relation between the state and the spirit in a narrative of the redemption to be gained by submitting even the most intimate and obscure parts of the self to the service of the nation" (367). As such he can be categorized in Lewis' own terms as a modernist, as he was able to perceive and communicate to his readers the "gap between the meaningful inner life of the individual consciousness and an outer world that shapes that inner life but seems in itself devoid of spiritual meaning" (367), as he "sought a means to bridge that gap, to glean a meaning from that apparently senseless outer world" (17).

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I aim to show how D'Annunzio expressed in his novel his own type of propaganda for a new era, and his role as "redeemer of the nation" a key to something that could transition the newly unified Italy into the new century, a "new type of politics that would efface the distinction between private and public, society and state" (Lewis

29).110 As I show how D'Annunzio transforms a novel of decadence into a political breviary, I will necessarily turn to Alexis de Tocqueville's notion of democracy as progress (enlightenment) to John Stuart Mill's notion of democracy as a "common" duty and of working together for the common good.

The relationship between modernist literary experiments and contemporary political developments associated with the crisis of Liberalism have been examined, among others, by Tratner, Levenson, Eagleton, Jameson, and Said.111 As literature and politics blend into a unique force to modernize man, so do the national authors use their poetics to describe the evolution of nationalism. In her essay entitled, The Place of

Liberalism, Jordanna Bailkin brings forth this idea of evolution. She notes that "Liberal thinkers embraced the concept of evolution in time, emphasizing that individuals and societies unfolded in historical stages" (83). These historical stages unfold in literature and evolve, revolve and transform the thinking of the individuals and societies they

110 Drawing on the works of the Frankfurt school, Hannah Arendt, and the recent ethical thinkers (Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Bernard Williams), Pericles Samuel Bruce Lewis believes that "The rise of racial-ethnic theories of "national character" in the last decades of the nineteenth century served to undermine the belief in a publicly observable, secular reality, equally accessible to individuals of all nations [. . .] deterministic theories, espoused by thinkers as diverse as Leslie Stephen, Karl Pearson, and Maurice Barrès, implied that the deep structures of the national psyche shape the observation of reality and control what the individual can and cannot see" (Lewis 27). 111 Michael Tratner's Modernism and Mass Politics, Michael Levenson's Modernism and the Fate of Individuality, Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Jameson The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, and Said's Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. 128

embrace. This socio-historical evolution is the thought-transforming tool that I earlier classified as re-inscription—that is the re-writing of beliefs in reference to the times they are re-written in.

Because my claim in this chapter is that D'Annunzio has a much more activist program for his novel, than the critics have illustrated in the past, this chapter will follow the lines of argument from the previous chapter, but will present the novel and its critics in reverse order. I turn to the text's socio-historical setting in order to show how

D'Annunzio constantly oscillates from narrative taken from the "reality" of the times and the narrative taken from the created "reality" of his fiction, in fact producing the same effect his hero produces in the texts with his fictitious relations alongside the more "real" ones. In conjunction with this novel, I will review typical critical assessments of

D'Annunzio's novel, especially as they consider it an example of aesthetic decadence.

Concluding that D'Annunzio's poetics is much more political than aesthetic will create a link among the three authors treated in my dissertation as analysts of their own historical situation and national rising political transformation. Through their re-focused thinking, these three novels acting as transforming agents, I will argue in the conclusion to the project, can be seen in Marxian terms as one sort of revolution, one that "must let the dead bury the dead in order to arrive at its own content[, one that] exceeds the phrase."112 The key to making that claim, however, will be a reading of D'Annunzio's novel as the propagandistic manifesto that it was meant to be, and the author himself as

112 Karl Marx wrote this sentence in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to explain the failure of the 1848 revolution in France. Quoted in Puchner's Introduction to his book, Poetry of the Revolution. 129

the new model of political activist. This new type of artist is honed by the idea that old art is over and old art is sapping the nation, placing the poet in a new role, the role of liberator—a role commensurate with my readings of the previous novel, but enacted by a writer much more willing to break with that past, as seen in his biographic examples. In

Lewis' terms:

whereas realism accepted the liberal bifurcation113 between private, ethical life

and public, socially assigned roles, the modernists sought through their

experiments to achieve a unified, public morality that would overcome the ironic

structure of life in a society constantly being transformed by history [. . .] all

focused attention on the shaping of the individual by the nation and on the

potential for the individual in turn to redeem the nation in time of war or crisis.

(26)

Il piacere, as I read it, becomes the novel able to advocate for political change in ways that Wilde's will not and Huysmans' could not, in no small part because it was heard in an era when its nation was already engaged in political transformation, with the old order already declared out of play, if not gone.

Il piacere, Written as the Sun Sets on an Era, With the Hope For a New Beginning114

As Giovanni Gentile and Lewis note, the First World War "played an important

113 Marinella Cantelmo's semiotic thematics also call upon this bifurcating nature of the modern artist, and are based on Wayne C. Booth's concepts of narration. Booth's intentional notion of meaning is criticized from a consensualist point of view. The concept of "the implied author" is rejected as superfluous, as a '"fallacy of anthropomorphic projection" (Schwarz 165). 114 As noted by Giovanni Gentile and Lewis (Lewis 333). 130

part in yielding together the disparate populations of the Italian kingdom, and thus helped to accomplish the task outlined by Massimo D'Azeglio at the time of Italian unification in

1860: 'we have made Italy; now we must make Italians'" (Lewis 333). D'Annunzio's heroes see their task in these terms, as demanding a transformation of life into art—not artifice, but something consciously made—and D'Annunzio himself sees the need to bring his country and its population up to modern European standards (367). Like

Huysmans' des Esseintes, D'Annunzio's hero is also the dying type representing the end of his era. Despite his name, Sperelli, from speranza, he is hopeless. Underscoring this irony, D'Annunzio refers to him as the "ultimo discendente d'una razza intelletuale" (42)

[the last descendant of an intellectual race] and again as belonging to a disappearing class of Italian nobility, "quella special classe di antica nobiltà italica [che sta] scomparendo"

(D'Annunzio 40). We are also told, that Andrea, like des Esseintes and Dorian, likes to surround himself with "artificial" objects, and from the first page of the novel,

D'Annunzio calls Andrea's house a prison, "quella prigione diafana" (D'Annunzio 7).

At the beginning of the novel, the reader finds Andrea awaiting a lover (his name, from the Spanish esperar also shares the stem of the verb to wait), and the first light of day seen entering the window is of a silvery, distorted red tone. We are introduced to a deeply symbolic world of decline, and into an atmosphere of latter days, as the red tint is symbolic of a tramonto (a sunset). As previously noted, as the sun sets on an era,

D'Annunzio writes with the hope for a new beginning—picking up from the prayer of hope that Huysmans closes with.

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As he waits, Andrea relives his encounter with Elena, his lover, as an artificial present moment. In his imagination, he mixes a collage of past rendez-vous with imaginary, simulated ones, trying to capture what the actual encounter will bring. This vivid imagination recalls not only Proust,115 but also Italy's major nineteenth-century poet, Giacomo Leopardi. In Leopardi's mind, the pleasure of rimembrare is more intensely enjoyable than the actual living of the moment itself. Thus, Andrea lives within his own manufactured memories, where "da tutte le cose che Elena aveva guardate o toccate sorgevano i ricordi in folla e le immagini del tempo lontano rivivevano tumultuariamente" [from where all the things sought or touched by Elena, brought memories and created feelings, that [Andrea] relived tumultuously] (D'Annunzio 10).

Almost like a drug-induced experience, Andrea's "rimembrare" causes a confusion and almost makes him lose his mind, "inebriato dalle sue parole, egli quasi perdeva la coscienza di ciò che diceva" (13). Yet by the end of the novel, the reader is supposed to react against this decadence, because this imagination, as we shall see in this chapter, is revealed as artifice, not art, since even his love games are marked as simulations, one of which recreates death itself. Simulation, however, is equal to stasis and death; such artifice cannot point the way to evolution, rather points to degeneration.

D'Annunzio therefore picks opposites to weave a tale that acts as warning to what not to

115 Much of Proust's work centers on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who waits and remembers during the night childhood episodes. Positivist Philologist Ernst Renan in France, and less liberal-minded thinkers such as the eugenicist Karl Pearson and nationalist politician and novelist Maurice Barrès, found in theories of the national character or the national will what they took to be "convincing solutions for the crisis of positivism and liberalism;" Renan and Barrès in particular seem to have influenced both Joyce and Proust directly, and Barrès was both a "friend of and a political model for D'Annunzio" (Lewis 111).

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do. The Italian author identifies his main character with degeneration (hence decadence), which is opposite of what his novel's message points to—that is evolution.

This process of transmutation—or altering one's discourse by illustrating opposites—within D'Annunzio's novel is what Nicoletta Pireddu describes as an essential transformation, a degeneration into rebirth and victory (Antropologi 382). Pireddu believes that the novel functions in abstracts: all the misery of pleasure derives from the resistance that the protagonist opposes to transitoriness—an opposition that makes him incapable of accepting and realizing "una bellezza come mimesi della morte, come pura dissipazione" (Antropologi 383). Pleasure, she concludes, is therefore far from being condemned as a "nefasto prodotto della malattia della volontà," finding the illness— malattia—and weakness — debolezza —of the protagonist in his fear of change and the uncertainties that "ostacolano la ricerca del piacere come apertura alla casualità, come amore per l'instabilità delle cose" [create obstacles to the research of pleasure as open to casualty, as is the lust for the instability of things] (Pireddu, Antropologi 383).116

Pireddu, however, does not equate that "stability of things" with a resistance to change.

Yet precisely this state of soul is what characterizes D'Annunzio's protagonists.

Playing the important role of the giver of life in his love games, Andrea is spinning an intricate web of "love" exercises in order to achieve a desired effect of artifice and self-

116 Pireddu calls this process the "paradigma estetico ed etico dell'economia simbolica del dono ne Il piacere" (Antropologi 383). 133

inducing narcissism.117 In one instance, Elena, Andrea's lover, pretends to be dead, laying naked on the bed, covered and surrounded by rose petals, while Andrea kisses her until he feels that his breath has been implanted into her lungs, and thus, resurrected by her lover, she comes back to life (D'Annunzio 13) –a similar version of the

Frankenstein/Pygmalion resurrection thematic.118 In others, Andrea sips oriental tea, spooning it into her mouth like a parent bird does for its baby—another form of digestion and regurgitation, as seen within Huysmans' work. Sperelli's charm, talent, art of loving, has nothing spontaneous. It is a calculated "exercise": "Egli sapeva, nell'esercizio dell'amore, trarre dalla sua bellezza il maggior possibile godimento" (D'Annunzio 17).

And as such, l'amore becomes so artificially distanced from reality that it no longer has anything associated with life.

Nevertheless, this decadent pleasure can not remain intact, since Elena will join a more real world when she marries an Englishman, described by the author as a "pale

English sadist," and explicitly compared to some of Sade's characters, "mani improntate di vizio, mani sadiche, poichè tali forse dovevan essere quelle di certi personaggi del

Sade" (D'Annunzio 296). Thus from his own point of view, Andrea loses his Elena to a

"maniaco," not realizing how he too played that part (D'Annunzio 296). When he loses her, it is as if he had lost an object from one of his expensive collections, he almost dies

117 In her book entitled Il piacere dei leggitori, Marinella Cantelmo expresses her notion of Sperelli's position between past and future, national tradition and European innovation, standing as a conjunction between bridging two eras: "Sperelli figura dell'ideal tipo del signore italiano del XIX secolo" sempre in bilico tra passato e futuro, fra tradizione (nazionale) e innovazione (europea): ed il probabile ricorso della definizione citata ad un codice pariniano starebbe a testimoniarlo" (Cantelmo 152). 118 This precludes the rise of curiosity and interest towards automation, science fiction and fantasy thematics which all seem to appear at once around this time in literary expansions. 134

in a duel. And the narration compares Andrea with Menelaus, who lost his Helen to an abduction that caused the Trojan war.119 Andrea is wedded to the objective character of reality as he preserves it, not to the material of reality itself.

It is no wonder, thus, that in the second part of the novel, Andrea himself becomes a Frankenstein monster, when he will "pretend" to be purportedly reborn into an innocent soul, clear of all his past debaucheries, until he decides to corrupt a woman so saintly that

D'Annunzio calls her "Maria." Up to this point, Andrea's life has been described as that in a hothouse, a reference to Maeterlink's Serres Chaudes, "[nella sua stanza] l'aria doveva essere ardente e grave come in una serra", distorted and corrupted (D'Annunzio

36). In contrast, in book two, Andrea says that he finds "the Truth and the Way" to become purified, "cara cugina, ho trovato la Verità e la Via" (D'Annunzio 177), in a phrase that echoes the trials of Jesus.

Nevertheless, as the saying goes, "once corrupted always corrupted," and in the tradition of Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses, Andrea fights all his resolutions to seduce the saintly Maria, whose voice reminds him of the voluptuous

Elena. He succeeds, but then sustains his love only through artifice: he pretends that she is Elena, which will eventually kill Maria. D'Annunzio explains that his hero, "era quasi

119 Contrary to the usual "ruductio ad unum" between author, narrator and protagonist, in Il piacere, D'Annunzio creates a distance, a clear and distinct separation between narrator and main character. Cantelmo reports this un-molding into one in her book when she states that "il narratore non fonde la propria voce con quella del protagonista," [161]). Cantelmo sees Sperelli as the "object of the vision of the author" (161) which has a "symbiotic optical effect that distorts" and not merges as seen in the two seductions occurring simoultaneously: that of reading by narrator and the one of loving by Sperelli (163). Cantelmo goes on to explain how the process where D'Annunzio comes to call his protagonist a monster becomes a scissor "una forbice" to cut a gap between reader and speaker: "il mostro chiamato dall'autore, come forbice per creare una distanza narrativa del locutore con il personaggio di Sperelli" (164). She calls this "distonia narrativa" which is also seen in the portrayal of the decadent city, "anche la Roma di Sperelli è duplice della decadenza monumentale, sociale, morale e globale del messaggio" (Cantelmo 165). 135

giunto a non poter più separare, nell'idea della voluttà, le due donne" [he could not separate, in the idea of voluptuousness, the two women] (D'Annunzio 385).

In the end, the reader is disgusted with Andrea's notion of "progress" and realizes the degree to which he is the ideal of another century, an ideal "tipo del giovane signore italiano del XIX secolo" (D'Annunzio 42). In the end, Andrea is empty, with everything he said and did virtually indistinguishable and meaningless, just as he failed to be able to distinguish two women from one another, now his role within society has become futile.

Just as Dorian will lose his salvation with Sybil Vane's suicide, the one pure soul in his life, and des Esseintes preferred to die because living meant embracing another class,

Andrea is also destined to be denied salvation because he pays the price of his class.120

How realistic this portrayal of the destiny of a class is intended to be is the subject of much critical discussion. For example, Marinella Cantelmo talks about this "narrativa tra realtà narrativa e finzione romanzesca," as she states that D'Annunzio's hero is a creator of lies, but also an intellectual. In the end, she feels, it is his creator, D'Annunzio, who attributes this intellectual conscience to his hero, leaving the narrative here to duplicate what the hero's narrative produces within the book (Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 168). She notes that "Sperelli, [. . .] è infatti ad un tempo seduttore, un esteta, un artifex, ma anche un intellettuale [. . . ;] ma è il narratore a conferire al suo eroe una coscienza intellettuale[: una doppiezza] come appannaggio della voce narrante"

120 Cantelmo notes this predestined last descent which places Sperelli along his era's most influencial characters, and as such makes of him an important historic role, as noted by D'Annunzio himself in Il Mattino: "A Sperelli esteta, artista, e scrittore, per giunta "ultimo discendente d'una razza intellettuale" (Il piacere, 36), spetta dunque l'onore di una rappresentività epocale che lo ponga tra "gli esemplari gli interpeti e i messaggeri del suo tempo" (questi i tratti distinitivi del ruolo storico, a detta dello stesso D'Annunzio ("Una tendenza," Il Mattino, a. II, n. 30 [Gennaio 1893], 30-31] (cited in Cantelmo, 173-4). 136

(Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 173). Cantelmo believes that this self-creating duplication—that Pireddu calls a "congiunzione formale di arte e dono, simbolizzazione e feticizzazione" (Il Piacere dei leggitor 401)—is what empowers D'Annunzio's first novel poetically, elevating it to epic importance. Thus she believes that it can indeed be a bible or manifesto: "La poetica che D'Annunzio presta a Sperelli dice ben poco dunque sul messaggio narrativo in cui si integra: e tuttavia essa contribuisce a fare di quel testo un

"manifesto" di rilievo epocale nella cultura italiana di fine secolo" (Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 174).

This type of fusion is also echoed within the Libro Secondo, when La Marchesa uses her rimembrare to remember how she and Francesca used to play and sing Chopin, and as she talks, Andrea fuses her words and her tone into one voice, hearing one woman but fusing her diction and creating the presence of quell'altra, molding the two (Elena and Maria) into a third entity, more perfect, more true, ideal woman, an ambiguous androgynous creation,

Una voce ambigua, direi quasi bissessuale, duplice, androginica; di due timbri. Il

timbro maschile, basso e un poco velato, s'ammorbidiva, si chiariva,

s'infemminiva [. . .] come quando una musica trascorrendo in dissonanze dolorosa

torna dopo molte battute al tono fondamentale, così quella voce ad intervalli

faceva il cangiamento. (D'Annunzio 191) 121

121 [Translation: That voice! How strangely Elena's intonations sounded on Donna Maria's lips." A mad thought flashed suddenly on him. "That voice could become the element of a fantastical creation! Because of this affinity he might blend these two affinities! And possess in his imagination a third one, more complex, more perfect, and more true, because ideal! (D'Annunzio 191)] 137

As such, duality meant ambiguity and dissonance meant ambiguity, but its variation made it so much more memorable and lasting than the conforming voice or music.122 It is no accident then that this duality can be read dialectically, with a thesis and antithesis in two female bodies, ultimately synthesized by Andrea into one—albeit a utopian one.

The form of the Androginine is further exalted in the book where, in a narrative within a narrative, we read Donna Maria's diary. On September 22nd, we read in reference to La Favola d'Ermafrodito that Maria Ferres had never been so intrigued, and that "Nessuna musica mi ha inebriata come questo poema e nessuna statua mi ha data della bellezza un'impressione più armonica (D'Annunzio 227). From this, Maria talks about the anti-naturalistic affinity of her soul to the landscape (D'Annunzio 243)123; and then, a few pages later, we read the anti-naturalistic description of purple orchids placed in an oriental, yellow vase that reminds us almost literally of a similar description made by Huysmans in his A rebours—expounding l'esotisme of the old era, compounded with l'erotismo of the new coming age.124 Clearly, the two authors are masking their message, as Rimbaud did with his prose poems, in a way that the people caught between the two eras would not immediately feel threatened by the futuristic message found in the two books—the future is hidden by images from the artistic past.

122 We are reminded here of what Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891) tries to do, only a few decades before, with his distorted Je which is omitted, to allow the fragmented third person to express the perfect consonance in which the poet inaugurates his cultural politics. 123Il piacere: "L'impressione è inesprimibile. Mi pareva dunque che quell'ora, che quei momenti, essendo stati già da me vissuti, non si svolgessero, fuori di me, indipendenti da me, ma mi appartenessero, ma avessero con la mia persona un legame naturale e indissolubile così ch'io non potessi sottrarmi a riviverli in quel dato modo ma dovessi anzi necessariamente riviverli" (D'Annunzio 243). 124 "Sul tavolo era un vaso coreano, giallastro e maculato come la pelle d'un pitone; e nel vaso era un mazzo di orchidee, di quei fiori grotteschi e multiformi che son la ricercata curiosità di Francesca [. . .] una quantità di fiori gialli, simili ad angelette in veste lunga librate a volo con le braccia alte e con l'aureola dietro il capo" (D'Annunzio 247). 138

D'Annunzio is here making his own unique use of the literary tropes of decadence that had been in place for a decade—burrowing from his artistic past. Anti-naturalism in art was a means by which the artists associated with various decadent moments tried to take control of their own bodies—through re-inscription—and their own environments— through a complete redefinition of the artifacts of life. In fact, here, human nature is not merely subordinate to convention or culture like critics have made it to be for so many years, but is, in my final analysis, itself an artifact of poetic activity. Rimbaud was exemplary of this as he made an impudent gesture against classical norms. He reacted against the Parnassian attitude to flowers—not the flowers in vases, but those in the fields—as such, control over the fresh cut flowers becomes a fashion of the "modern" times, a tribute to the idea of human nature relating to a new world. Man now captures and controls nature; no more is it the other way around. The trope continued as

Huysmans displays flowers, in his book, within his hero's nature morte prison-palace, and Wilde also talks about flowers and the control humans have over cutting and displaying them, controlling nature—versus the flowers in a field, for example.125

D'Annunzio refers to these tropes in Il Libro Terzo, which begins with an awakening of the senses and of the mind—a rebirth of Sperelli's soul, as well as the return to the city, his beloved Rome. This could in fact be the Illumination—borrowing directly from Rimbaud's poem—which D'Annunzio intends to shine on and lead the way

125 Enid Starkie writes about this impudence against nature in his book on Rimbaud where he describes Banville's predilection to "cut flowers"; Starkie notes that Banville "is a florist rather than a horticulturist [. . . n]o poet has ever put so many flowers in his shop window, so many camelias, such a profusion of violets, and especially lilies . . ."; and then Starkie quotes Rimbaud's response to these, "There is a cool impudence on Rimbaud's part—which is probably not unintentional—in sending Banville a poem which makes fun of the Parnassian attitude to flowers" (Starkie 129). 139

to guide the reader towards the new epoch. On the first page of this last section of the book, we see Sperelli finding himself, and reawakening his love for the city of cities—

L'urbs urbium—Rome, which remains young and mysterious like the sea,

Gli parve di ritrovare qualche parte di sé, qualche cosa che gli mancava [. . .] il

pieno e vivace risveglio del suo vecchio amore per Roma, per la dolcissima

Roma, per l'immensa augusta unica Roma, per la città delle città, per quella ch'è

sempre giovine e sempre novella e sempre misteriosa come il mare. (259-260)

This individual move could set Andrea closer to becoming the man of cities—L'homo urbium—transforming and evolving his social role from static dying aristocrat to modern man. Unfortunately, Andrea never quite frees himself of his old roles. Instead, he is caught frozen by his artifacts into non-evolution, caught walking slowly, step by step behind an old armoire. D'Annunzio ends his novel with Andrea's futile attempt to evade—Andrea fuggì and again repeats Andrea fuggì, quasi folle—and has been trapped on his way up the stairs, as though trapped on his way up towards progress without quite making it: "come l'armario occupava tutta la larghezza, [Andrea] non poté passare oltre [

. . .] seguì, piano, piano, di gradino in gradino, fin dentro casa" (401).

In the Libro Terzo, D'Annunzio explores further the dual nature of things. In particular within the ecclesiastic, but too rich and voluptuous, interiors of the roman religious palaces; and within the donne dell'aristocrazia romana, who were prude and pure in public, but sinners in private. D'Annunzio calls these women the ones who cannot sin, "le peccatrici impeccabili" (269-271). Here Andrea even cites Gautier's bella poesia entitled Musée Secret to parallel the secret rooms that can not be shown to the

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public (D'Annunzio 271).126 In this last portion of the novel, D'Annunzio wants the reader to focus on the picture painted between characters, environments and dialogues.

These four young Libertini, who are in rich and decadent environments draped by baccus like tapestries—"dilettose tappezzerie bacchiche"—and whose conversations, if recorded, would sum up to corruption manuals— "il Brevarium Arcanum della corruzione elegante in questa fine del XIX secolo" (274).127

In conclusion, even D'Annunzio calls his work a manifesto, a breviary of the elegant corruption of his century, a nostalgic last look at the dandy era that would be no more. In the next few pages (279 – 286), D'Annunzio throws his Andrea in an erotic odyssey and opens the second part of this third book with the statement, "Così, d'un balzo, Andrea Sperelli si rituffò nel Piacere" [So Andrea Sperelli re-dove into Il piacere]

(286). This is when Andrea starts feeling the maladie du siècle, a disconcerting feeling of "scontento più molesto, un malessere più importuno," and this feeling that nauseated him—reminding us of Sartre's later nausée—made him feel empty and because of this he dove into all that was sinful and decadent to try to shake this feeling away,

Egli si lasciò abbattere; abdicò intieramente e per sempre alla sua volontà, alla sua

energia, alla sua dignità interiore; sacrificò per sempre quello che rimaneva di

fede e d'idealtà; si gettò nella vita, come in una grande avventura senza scopo, alla

126 The term "secret museum" refers to various closed-off rooms in museums that housed erotic or obscene artifacts. The most famous one is revealed in Walter Kendrick's study entitled The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture, where he talks about a locked room containing the erotic artifacts discovered at Pompeii—of which Barré wrote a catalogue called The Secret Museum in 1875-77, and of which inspired Gautier (11 & 126). 127 The secret manual, or breviary of decadence. 141

ricerca del godimento, dell'occasione, dell'attimo felice, affidandosi al destino,

alle vicende del caso, all'accozzo fortuito delle cagioni. (D'Annunzio 287-288)

Andrea finally sees his own duplicity when he calls himself: "camaleontico, chimerico, incoerente, inconsistente," as such, someone who lives by his rule, stressing the nunc, the here and now (D'Annunzio 332). At the same time, he even realizes that the palaces are now undergoing extinction and, like the distorted palaces in Rodenbach's poem, Serres Chaudes, they look as if they were seen through a hot house, "d'una strana serra diventata opaca e bruna pel tempo" (D'Annunzio 332). So from his point of view, it is il tempo—time—that distorts the palace, as seen through a hot house. The horizon and

L'infinito—an image taken from Leopardi—also fortifies and perpetuates the symbolic forest of the poetic id.128 This is perhaps the best diagnosis of Andrea's illness, as he claims to be living in a now, while actually referencing a mythic past.

No wonder, then, that in the Libro Quarto, the last book, D'Annunzio alludes to

Le Marquis de Sade (362), Baudelaire (393) and Flaubert (350), and quotes a mixture of mysticism, orientalism and symbolic pastiche elements when he states that Sperelli's love had remained "là, nel bosco solitario, nella selva simbolica che fiorisce e fruttifica perpetuamente comtemplando l'Infinito" (372). In this last chapter, Andrea is also equated with the rest of the common people, the rigattieri—men who deal in scrap metal and recycled junk—and he is overwhelmed by nausea and disgust about what he sees as a

128 The forest standing as Leopardian siepe as a confine as well as referent to an infinite and unreachable past and/or future also stands as a great metaphor of European myth for where and how we are in life. In art, poetry, and history, but also within themselves, all the artifacts used in D'Annunzio's prose—including the forest—are what I call tropes of his poetic id. Daniela Bini unveils the revival of myth as a "cultural trend of the time, not only in Italy, where D'Annunzio was the leading promoter, but in Europe in general" (61). 142

wreck of history. In this passage, D'Annunzio wants the reader to feel his hero's inadequate fusion with the working class—with a class that self-consciously affiliates with the future. Andrea's inability to assimilate his point of view to accommodate these workers almost kills him: "Egli guardava intorno a sé le facce dei rigattieri, si sentiva toccare da quei gomiti, da quei piedi; si sentiva sfiorare da quegli arti. La nausea gli chiuse la bocca," and then again, "Egli si aprì un varco tra i corpi agglomerati, vincendo il ribrezzo, facendo uno sforzo enorme per non venir meno" (400).

And so Andrea is not assimilated, all he can do is run like a madman from reality,

"fuggì [. . .] folle" (D'Annunzio 401). Trying to escape a new generation, a new class, this sea of people, this sweaty conglomeration of the masses that the urban capitals of the last decade of the nineteenth century collect, Andrea can only bury himself alive in his own house. Only once he is "fin dentro la casa," the books last words, do we realize that he needs to die to let that new generation take over. He has buried himself alive, a living dead who cannot engage with the present or the future. Before he enters his self-inflicted prison, however, he shows us one last glimpse of how he sees the outside world. He looks out onto the windows of the Palazzo Barberini and sees flashes of what looks like flames, but turns out to be the colors of the sunset hitting the glass. Of this symbolic setting of an era, of a class, of the dandy aristocracy, Andrea, with all his amorous affairs, remains but an example; a sterile, weak, cowardly figure who cannot tell the difference between sunset and flames. He is ultimately a man who has had many romantic encounters but no offspring to continue his race, the last of his dying kind.

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Or is he perhaps the first representative of the series not yet begun? Poggioli posits the idea that the decadent aesthetics witnesses both the end of an old regime and the birth of a new mentality. In The Poets of Russia 1890-1930, Poggioli states that,

an old, tired and sophisticated society may at least in part turn the very object of

its fears into objects of hope. The last heirs of a dying tradition may be willing to

prepare the ground for the builders of another cultural order, who will be at once

their successors and destroyers; the representatives of the series already closing

may even delude themselves that they may become the first representatives of the

series not yet begun. (Poggioli 80)

The question for the current case is whether Andrea has cleared the way for the new generation by "imprisoning" himself, or whether his vision itself has any claim to making that future—a reading that seems unlikely, given the final scene.

Yet this question of politics is precisely what D'Annunzio's critics debate.

The Critics' Gabriele

With D'Annunzio, we find for the first time an author whose overt politics have been central to his reputation from the beginning, yet not always as a positive part of his reputation as an artist. Critics have debated long about his own role and what his art contributed to it. The author, in this case, lives more adventurously and is politically more involved, perhaps, than most of his protagonists. D'Annunzio was well aware that he lived in a time of change, and that his literary work should be engaging those changing

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political realities. Having written for the Tribuna section of Il Mattino, he also knew very well what his audience, the readers, expected at the time he was writing.

I would argue that he had indeed been very careful in planning the publishing of his book. Even his taking, à la Stendhal, headline news and transferring them into his novel was all a calculated plan to create the most perfect propagandistic piece of literature created for the taste of the time—a manifesto of his Politik. Marinella

Cantelmo talks about this calculated use of his knowledge of both the cronache (news) and his lettore (reader). She believes that the re-use of facts transferred into

D'Annunzio's fictional worlds created an engaging interface that involved the reader into a series of textual mosaics (mosaico testuale), déjà vus (cronaca) and déja lus (testo), thus creating a romanzo solo apparentemente da salotto, a novel which is aesthetic only in appearence (Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 148):

Il ri-uso delle cronache della Tribuna all'interno del Piacere ribalta tale

procedimento ed opera agli occhi del medesimo lettore una proiezione

specularmente inversa alla precedente: se infatti il testo giornalistico trasferiva

l'avvenimento mondano in un fictional world ad uso e gratificazione di un

ricevente spesso già partecipe degli avvenimenti descritti, l'inserimento degli

stessi brani o di succedanee variazioni su tema nel mondo fittizio della creazione

letteraria incentrata intorno alla figura di Andrea Sperelli recupera proprio quella

referenzialità a suo tempo espropriata e la mette a disposozione del medesimo

fruitore, consentendogli in tal modo di riconoscersi all'interno del nuovo testo, da

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cui frammenti costituitivi era stato in prima istanza rimosso. (Cantelmo, Il

Piacere dei leggitori 148)

This amounts to a reconsideration of the aesthetization of the reader as a voyeur, the factual recreation of reality within the fiction. Therefore again this novel within the novel is occurring and recognized within the novel itself.

Ashley Dukes also outlines how engaging transitory art could help an author match the impulses of his times. Dukes is critical of contemporary dramas that do not engage, as they become meaningless and do not serve a purpose. He admonishes us that if we consider them only in terms of the "pretty" things our heroes—all three of them— surround themselves with, then we are missing the author's main theme (Wallace 79).

Dukes notes that "if contemporary drama was to have any meaning, it would have to present characters engaged not only in being but in becoming [. . . t]he final curtain must see them changed [. . . b]oth they and the audience must have learned something"

(Wallace 79). Therefore a play, a novel, or art in general, must engage, must carry with them a message, a voice, an influencing but referential communiqué. I would add to this the realization that, for a message to be effective, that engagement must meet the tastes of the public.

Critics of his time have said of D'Annunzio that "[a]s one of the premiere Italian voices during the first half of the twentieth century, he was in a position to influence his country's government and culture" (Contemporary Authors Online The Gale Group,

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2000).129 As such, his work appeared from the start as implicating socio-political issues of his day. Filippo Donini adds, in the Times Literary Supplement, that D'Annunzio "was considered, not without foundation, as having been responsible for starting the political movement which ruined Italy."130 That movement was Fascism, and Michael A. Ledeen even goes as far as calling D'Annunzio, The First Duce, in his book under the same title.131

Yet to equate the depiction of a culture going down in flames with Fascism—is to interpret after the facts. Donini is not considering the rise of Fascism in Italy the same way other observers may perceive this movement's introduction into Italian society.

There were those who, from the first, condemned such a path, where as others believed that it might have been the only way to come out of a very critical situation—the war, for one, and mass democracy, for another—that had dramatically changed Italy, leaving the country in anarchical disarray. This state of polarized public opinion entitled certain groups—like the Bolshevists in Russia—to take over the reins of government. The upshot, however, was that they did not rule, but rather only led the country in a chaotic disorder and financial instability. I find this important to note: although pertaining to a period that occurred later than the period that I am focusing on in this study, the very

129 Cited in Contemporary Authors Online [accessed 28 September 2008]. 130 Found in Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 1966, p. 1197. 131 Ledeen argues that D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume was a major step on the path to Italian fascism (Ledeen's Introduction ix). He compares Mussolini and D'Annunzio and claims that both were masters of a political style based on personal charisma. (Ledeen 7) He goes on to say that each spoke for a "new" Italy and, eventually, for a new world (Ledeen's Introduction xiv). And that both "attempted to transform his countrymen into more heroic types by an ethic of violence and grandeur" (Ledeen's Introduction xv). 147

instability of the situation in which D'Annunzio was working, without knowing what would come of it, resulted in the changing of mind of so many important intellectuals— like Pirandello and D'Annunzio—who had really started out on one end, but then moved to the opposite site of the political spectrum. In retrospect, these decisions proved to be massive historical errors, but such decisions seem at least partially comprehended as both acknowledgments that the old order was doomed and that "the people" needed to be given a voice in Italy. The error of these authors was in misjudging Mussolini; their

"crime," in retrospect, was aiming for stability rather than seeing the change through.

The acknowledgment of Italy's chaos and of the working class parties' inability to deal with it was in fact a trope of the time. Pietro Gorgolini is able to depict this dissatisfaction with the proletarian forces in his manifesto—first published in English in

1923—entitled The Fascist Movement In Italian Life—and prefaced by Mussolini himself. In it, Gorgolini outlines the critical moral, social, political, financial, and economic conditions which, aided by the ill effects of the Franceso Nitti and Giovanni

Giolitti misgovernment, paved the way to a so called "restoration" that would purge, cleanse, strengthen and fortify the now feeble government. Gorgolini notes that

the misgovernment of the Nitti government and the first phase of the Giolittian

restoration had the effect, of subverting the spirit and conscience of a part of the

nation. It seemed, for a moment, as though the country were staggering under the

assault of the savage Bolshevist beast. Our financial, economic, political, social,

and moral conditions had never been so critical. The throne manifested a

stupefied indifference, or impotence, in front of the grave national evils. The State

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was apparently non-existent. The government was feeble and without authority.

The Law was impotent and the magistrates dared not enforce it [. . .] The Army

was insulted with impunity by the mob and the subversive Press; the police,

despised and discontented, manifested a complete inertia; the middle class, as a

whole, became more terrified with every day that passed, and looked anxiously

around with the pitiful and ridiculous appearance of one who hopes for someone

from outside to save his own life, and on this deplorable foundation of material

and moral ruin [. . . t]he only beacon lights in the midst of the intense spiritual

darkness were Gabriele D'Annunzio and Benito Mussolini. (26-27)

Therefore D'Annunzio and Mussolini provided visions of this "someone from outside to save lives," elevating the poet's national importance and political career to charismatic levels. The failure of that initiative was in D'Annunzio's succumbing to fear of this instability, not in his commitment to change, if my reading of his great decadent novel is correct.

One must also remember that, from the start—even before his Fiume days—

D'Annunzio was characterized as a modern and decadent author. In April, 1897,

D'Annunzio had already been described by G. B. Rose as "the most brilliant figure that has arisen in the last years of the dying century, and if he is a promise of what the next is to bring forth the outlook is as ominous as it is fascinating" (146). When Rose compares

Baudelaire to D'Annunzio, he states that

Baudelaire's poetry has been aptly compared to a Parisian gutter, amongst whose

filth and stench blossom strange flowers of a rare and delicate grace. The works

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of the young Italian genius who has flashed upon the world in the last few years

may be likened to a beautiful tropical morass, filled with luxuriant vegetation and

gorgeous flowers, peopled by birds of brilliant plumage and snakes with glittering

scales, but whose air, so full of flashing butterflies and golden scarabs, is heavy

with subtle poison. (Rose, G.B. 147)

This is a common description of decadent literature, seen from the point of view of contemporary bourgeoisie, as we have noted in the earlier chapters of the present project.

Following the tendency of those who sympathized with the "plight" of the dying upper classes, Rose misleadingly comments on his revolutionary novel, Il piacere

(Pleasure), in terms that particularly claim it for decadence, as a

sad book showing the bitter lees that ever lie at the bottom of pleasure's tempting

cup—the record of the career of a brilliant young man of the Roman aristocracy,

going from one facile amour to another until there comes that hardening of the

heart which Burns recognizes as the worst effect of immorality, so that he can no

longer feel even for the one woman who loves him with a true though guilty love,

while he is devoured with an unavailing desire for the most corrupt siren that he

has known. (Rose, G.B. 149)

So this hero becomes a "disillusioned, blasted, wrecked, an empty hulk drifting aimlessly upon the sea of life" (Rose, G.B. 149). These are the elements familiar to us from the evaluations of other decadent authors: aristocracy, jaded feelings, a lack of morality, and beauty so ripe that it is about to rot or turn to ashes. What the critics did not sense was the huge political impact that such a novel was intended to make, as the marker of a new

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era—it was a frontal assault on the credibility of that class in Italy, an assertion that these beautiful characters were hollow shells of people, imprisoned ultimately by their inability to deal with reality. And the Fiume venture is proof that D'Annunzio wrote with a much wider than a solely aesthetic goal.

As far back as 1911, Dukes, like me, senses this political impression. He compares D'Annunzio to Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal, and Chekhov. In the Maeterlinck and Hofmannsthal connections, he identifies the Italian author with fin de siècle decadence of Symbolism, yet also from the side of Chekhov, with critiques of decadent class positions.132 Dukes feels that what distinguishes these authors is that they "revolt against the bourgeois theatre, that theatre which is concerned mainly with the social conditions of a period, filled with moral indignation and designed to replace convention by an ethical standard" (264). Despite these remarks, it is what Dukes calls D'Annunzio's

"profusion of speech" that makes my comparison with Huysmans and Wilde even easier.

The author's language emerges as critical in this context. The richness of

D'Annunzio's vernacular is also discussed by Nicolas Perella who studies the author's poetry. Perella analyses the various manifestations of the midday sun in D'Annunzio's works in his study Midday in Italian Literature: Variations on an Archetypal Theme.

Contrary to my opinion, Perella believes that the "strange anguish" that oppresses the poet is hardly to be mistaken for a "Leopardian sentiment of metaphysical anguish," but is instead "as though the poet in the guise of a satiated faun is compelled even against his

132 Katherine Arens asserts the same for Hofmannsthal, in "Hofmannsthal's Essays: Conservation as Revolution," in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Thomas A. Kovach (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 181-202. There she argues for his case for change, but not revolution. 151

will to respond to the activation of life that the domineering midday sun as relentless lover demands from the earth and its creatures" (Perella 122). It is this regenerative power, which Perella calls "generatrix," that helps one associate D'Annunzio with

Huysmans particularly. Like Huysmans, then, D'Annunzio supposedly saw literature acting as a womb to regenerate modern man; at the same time, D'Annunzio's literature was intended to transport us beyond the decadence of the nineteenth century into the next century—and this belief I do share with Perella, disagreeing only with his underestimation of the scope of that transformation.

The point of using the language of his era is critical to my argument that

D'Annunzio was trying to engage his era broadly in a project of change. In 1995, G.

Singh—a major translator and literary critic of Eugenio Montale—commented that the grounds for regarding Gabriele D'Annunzio as a major twentieth-century Italian poet are aptly summed up by Eugenio Montale when he notes that "D'Annunzio experimented or touched upon all the linguistic and prosodic possibilities of our time [. . .] not to have learned anything from him would be a very bad sign" (400). Singh also underscores

D'Annunzio's talented prose when he states that the author's "metrical and linguistic innovations altered expression and reflected a new sensibility" (400).

A major translation theorist and practitioner, Susan Bassnett talks about

D'Annunzio and the critical new reception of his work in similar terms. Adding to my picture of the author's project, she states that "D'Annunzio's work declined in popularity from the 1930s onwards, and that, for decades his plays and novels were regarded as period pieces and as examples of the excesses of Decadent symbolist writing," but then in

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"the 1990s there are signs of a reassessment," and that "gender criticism has enabled us to look at D'Annunzio in a new way" (Bassnett 130). Bassnett believes that we are now able to dismember or disassemble the intricate fabrication that D'Annunzio created, constantly reflecting "on his own creativity and his own development [. . . developing] his own version of the Superman, modeled upon himself" (128). Gender studies enables the lettore d'Annunziano to understand the author's need to interweave his life into his writing and how is this due, in part, by the opportunities offered to him through "his relationships with women" (Bassnett 139). She is one of the new voices asserting that decadence could indeed be a critical tool to a society that needed change, but was not changing fast enough.

Nonetheless, D'Annunzio long remained in the Italian canon as a decadent. For example, in 1922, Mario Praz—one of D'Annunzio's severest critics—in his pioneer study, The Romantic Agony (1933), explores the tradition of sadism in literature, art, and music. Praz states that D'Annunzio's prose is a "succession of impressions, of memories, of fancies, broken here and there by episodes of very precise and solid outline," and that this is very typical of the authors of his time (644). He states that "Baudelaire, Rimbaud,

Moréas were the first to use this mode of expression, as the best one to note the finest shades of a keen and copious sensibility" (644).

However, it was Pamela S. Loy, in her article The Child of Pleasure, who recognizes D'Annunzio as a premier scholar of his times. She argues that D'Annunzio's work needs to be evaluated in the larger context of modernist European culture around the turn of the century; and that D'Annunzio, himself, "has been seen as a pivotal prophet

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of modernism"—and I should add as the representative of a generational gaze onto new values (Loy 106).

The Italian Decadent Hero: D'Annunzio's Aesthete

My reading thus departs from the position that these critics have taken. Andrea

Sperelli provided the Italian public with an image of the passion and escapism that was needed at that time in Italian society—but not just for escapist purposes. Yet critics like

Pamela S. Loy prefer to draw more limiting parallels between D'Annunzio the man and his hero, when she remarks that

the aesthete and his world symbolized a reaction against several societal traits:

smug conventionalism; the practical, unrealistic outlook; Catholic morality; and

other middle-class or bourgeois values. Also the aesthete was plainly

disenchanted with the patriotic ideals of the Italian Risorgimento, or Unification

Movement [. . .] D'Annunzio's fictional aesthete and the spectacle of his own real-

life example afforded his audience a vicarious, escapist, and forbidden pleasure.

(100)

D'Annunzio plays here the same part as his protagonist, but not naively.

Loy then argues for the existence of a trend for virtually all Italian aristocracy of the time, where fiction and reality seemed to cross paths. Loy quotes Barzini in Rhodes about the meta-reality lived by the Italian nobles of the era. She states that "the Italian nobles for the first time set about acting the part of 'nobles'; they ceased to be patriarchal, with a place in the people's ancient way of life, in order to live a fictitious literary and

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choreographic existence" (Loy 101). That is, the class had lost its sense of stewardship for its own country—whether the "patriarchy" is evaluated as positive or negative, that status required certain duties of the patriarch to tend those dependent on them. And that was lost. In this sense, D'Annunzio's novel becomes a model of a behavior, a book to emulate and live by for the Italian aristocracy—arguing not for its demise, but for its reform, as a class that has imprisoned itself in decadence.

The city of Rome, Loy continues "becomes a character in the novel, brooding over the action and ensnaring its inhabitants with its beauty and its potentially corrupting sensuality" (101). Loy believes that this eagerness to adopt foreign models—like that of the French Decadent writings—may have been the decisive reason why D'Annunzio chose to express his modern and revolutionary ideas under the common language of the decadent movement—he had to write a novel to the new tastes of the ruling class, if they were to read it. That movement, in Loy's terms, had broken "away from the established naturalistic mode of literature that had predominated since the unification" (101), and claimed for itself a new style. In my reading, Il piacere stresses that that new style had no new political substance.

In fact, Loy goes on to describe Andrea Sperelli as the embodiment of the modern dandy and the antithesis of the productive bourgeois individual, as he represents "the dandy of the late nineteenth century emerged as a sophisticated man who worshipped the modern city and all things elegant, graceful and artificial" (104). Yet it is clear that

D'Annunzio, the creator of his dandy Andrea, was as a public figure the anathema to the dandy, being himself industrious, politically engaged, and cultivatedly interested in the

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political future of his nation. According to Loy, not only are Andrea and Elena representations of decadence, but "they also embody a decaying social order, the landed aristocracy, as seen by the middle classes" (105). D'Annunzio the man knew that.

An interesting turn of events occurs in the Italian society of the late nineteenth century that I feel needs some attention to prove my case. As I have previously remarked, the Italian high aristocracy was acting—mimicking and imitating—the society of other European nations. As such, the middle classes—who both despised and envied the aristocracy—started acting like aristocracy: in Loy's terms, "the old landed aristocracy or pseudo-aristocracy (monied non-nobles who styled themselves as aristocrats) to which [the novel's characters] belonged was losing importance in the social and political realms" (105).133

In this sense, D'Annunzio becomes the new aristocrat, the new ruler, and his book, Il piacere, becomes the new subversive manual for the coming of a new age that appreciates new European aesthetic movements, but which is not trapped in an empty aeshteticism. The poet's real life unfolds not as his character's equal, but as his antithesis in the novel. The message that D'Annunzio brings from within his art is to call for a transition into this new era that is inevitably surpassing Italy. Let us not forget that, as his career started, Italy had just united (1861 brings a new Kingdom), and thus he was well acquainted with an on-going ambivalence in its history of aristocracy. Families like

133 Loy believes this was the natural overturning of the class status in that "as the aristocracy declined, the middle and professional classes became more prominent so that [the middle class becomes] the life, the strength, and the backbone of the nation [. . .] the decades following the Unification witnessed a dramatic rise in power among an expanding professional elite, who increasingly replaced the aristocratic landowners in parliament and government" (105). 156

the Medici had been patrons of the arts, and socially and politically progressive. Others had not. In the present, there was the on-going problem of the papal nobility—old families with titles bound to the papacy in a quasi-feudal relationship. These old families found little to engage with in post-unification politics. Garibaldi was too proletarian.

Victor Emmanuel, "King of the Italians," sat on the throne, not as a progressive ruler, and in many ways was seen as incapable of realizing the promise of national renewal that is the literal meaning of Risorgimento.134 By the time Il piacere was written, then, substantial questions were being raised. Was the old liberal ruling class exhausted?

How proletarian was Italy, and what was the role of Italian traditions in art when all the city-states still do have many a leftover count and countess?

D'Annunzio revisits Art and Science in Italy, the new values and transmutations and comes to his own conclusion with his pivotal novel that moves outside of Italy for its model—to bring a new critique to Italy. He wrote a novel that was alone in its claims, given the artistic climate of the Risorgimento. That is why it is fair to call it a manifesto designed to lead Italians into the new century—a second generation, after Verdi, needed a new synthesis of art and politics. The challenge, explains David D. Roberts in his essay on Benedetto Croce, was "not to destroy the old, which was disintegrating on its own, but to construct anew, while salvaging as much of the old as possible" (Roberts 190). Robert points out that in his opinion, "Croce was central to a generation coming of age in the

134 The Risorgimento, which culminated in the creation of a united Italian kingdom by 1861, had a two-fold significance. As a manifestation of the nationalism sweeping over Europe during the nineteenth century, the Risorgimento aimed to unite Italy under one flag/one government. However, Risorgimento meant more than political unity for many Italians, as it described a movement for the renewal of Italian society beyond political aims. (cited in Giuseppe Verdi—Biography < http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006333/bio>). 157

1890's and reacting against, or at least questioning, the cultural role of science, and especially the applicability of the natural sciences to the human world" (Roberts 190). In this same way I believe that D'Annunzio, Wilde and Huysmans were pivotal in projecting us into the new century with their little yellow books.

Roberts insists that Croce portrays historical inquiry as the key to orienting readers to the right direction, which he feels needs to include a focus on the distant past as leading toward that future, because "history seeks the seeds of the next moment, the process that leads to the future, not the past on its own terms, taken as an end itself"

(193). He believed that, if we ourselves conform to the dynamic nature of reality, then we would find the true key to the dynamic nature of our thought which always propels us to the future and not the past (Roberts 195). It is this forward projection that Marinella

Cantelmo is concerned with when she calls D'Annunzio's prose and subject matter "un assetto dinamico innovativo delle corrispettive strutture tradizionali" (Il Piacere dei leggitori 203). She believes that his prose is a code, and the reader who is able to break it is the future reader, un "lettore futuro" (Il Piacere dei leggitori 226).135

Within the Italian context, therefore, it is completely possible to consider this

"Decadent" author both political and forward-looking. D’Annunzio is therefore the autore futuro who writes for un lettore futuro in coding un messaggio futuro, in his romanzo futuro, and only the lettore futuro will be able to decode this message that is the

135"Il piacere si chiude infatti—si potrebbe leggere anche così la fine del romanzo—sul fallimento epocale anche della parola poetica, chiusa nella sua purezza adantina ad uso esclusivo di una cerchia ristretta di utenti privilegiati, messaggo a circuito chiuso, immateriale "oggetto" da salotto anch'essa—da salotto letterario, s'intende—che "mercato" travolge e disperde, a conclusione della fibula, insieme agli oggetti materiali, oggetti d'arte altrettanto preziosi, che costellano e denotano lo spazio ambientale" (Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 222). 158

key to the future—this inevitable projection of history forward à la Croce. Cantelmo echoes D'Annunzio himself who states that the future artist—"l'artista futuro"—holds the highest glory that anyone could ever imagine, that is to be the messenger of a life that presents itself to man, but that man does not understand yet.136 Therefore, il romanzo futuro becomes evasione, as a dream—"un'atmosfera di sogno"—and the author becomes aware of this new message that has changed the conditions of thought, "un nuovo messaggio, adeguato alle mutate condizioni comunicative, e di nuove vie per la diffusione" of his work (Cantelmo, Il Piacere dei leggitori 247). For D'Annunzio, however, this nuovo messaggio always involves an element of the ritual conception of art as a sacrifice that serves to bind the community together (Lewis 363).

Art as a Sacrifice That Serves to Bind the Community Together

Although it remains difficult for some critics to separate Andrea from Gabriele, as we have seen, it is clear that, although his work was somewhat autobiographical,

D'Annunzio's hero was not intended to be a representation of the author himself, an author who did not see the danger in his own position of seeming politically nostalgia.

Instead, he may better be seen as part of the Italian "high" society of the 1890s who took to mimicking and copying the past, and who was actively involved in re-inscribing its own role within this new society that was arising.

136 "l'artista futuro," scrive D'Annunzio, in questo risiede "la più alta Gloria che si possa oggi sognare:— Essere il messagero di una vita che gli uomini presentono ma non comprendono ancora!" (Cantelmo Il Piacere dei leggitori 240). 159

D'Annunzio had chosen a difficult role for the poet. Figures like Croce have made society's progress seen as inevitable, but not necessarily at the cost of rejecting the past. Lewis similarly senses that to "make one's life into a work of art is not to withdraw from life and dedicate oneself to an otherworldly undertaking but to live thoroughly in this world" (363). D'Annunzio does this, and that is where the similarities between the poet and his dandy hero—or better yet, dandy victim—end.

Like the late surrealists, then, D'Annunzio embraces immediacy and attempts to transcribe dreams and waking life with equal vividness. With this tone of almost surreality, his novel acts as an antidote or a warning against becoming its protagonist

(Lewis 367). Do not become Andrea, the modernist poet says, become Gabriele. Yet how can the reader become Gabriele? It can happen through a transformation, not by fossilizing in his role, which is prison and his sunset. If Italian nobility remains fossilized, then the gap forming between the previous century and this new one only grows. If Italian nobility, instead, could transform itself, then the gap could be filled.

And D'Annunzio wants to be the poet to lead Italian society—the way Virgilio leads

Dante through the Inferno—out of one past state and into a modern one.

Accordingly, the modernist poet sought to explore for his audience the distance that he perceives as existing between the meaningful inner life of the individual consciousness and the outer world that shapes that inner life (Roberts 190). In modern times, it is science—which seems to unravel many secrets—which leaves the individual unprotected and frail without support, because it deconstructs the myths and half-truths

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so far believed.137 Yet from the point of view of the class to whom D'Annunzio was writing, Western culture as such is seen as being left "without the religious underpinnings that had long sustained it," leaving the individual inner life devoid of spiritual meaning because, as Nietzsche proclaims, God is dead (Roberts 190).

In the introduction to this chapter I distinguished avant-garde—art—manifestos, from the political—art—manifestos. Both claim to be creating a new form of diction, set in a new content that in turn creates a new model to follow. Each have to "produce one another, if [such manifestos] want to shape and make the future," they should create artistic politics or political art (Puchner 46). As Marx and Croce taught us, a true revolution can only look to the future or it will fail. However, like a snake needs to shed its own tight skin, before it can grow a new better fitting one, so will this revolution need to shed unfitting costumes to create future ones. Therefore, only after "shedding the costumes and phrases of the past, [can] the modern revolution [. . .] somehow invite the future, [and] come up with [new] phrases, forms, genres that 'derive' their 'poetry' from the future" (Puchner 1).138

This poetry of the future is what the poet will be called on to manifest, and it is my conclusion that this is what D'Annunzio intended when he wrote Il piacere, a completely new form of novel, with diction—decadent prose—never used before—as

Wilde and Huysmans did—that projected the lettore futuro into the new era, but not as an

137 The unraveling of man's myths results in the isolation of man, because knowledge is alienating and ignorance is bliss. 138 Here the term "poetry" also used by Marx echoes the Greek meaning of an act or making—poesis—and I will call this to manifest. 161

aesthetic movement, but a socio-cultural one. Suddenly, artists in Italy become politicians, because they had created a new kind of forward-looking "naturalism," incorporating not only the proletarian present of the increasingly failed Risorgimento, but also the great political and aesthetic resources available to Italians for a millennium. The link between art and politics is also true, for example, for Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,

André Breton and Guy Debord—as their rhetoric aims at ousting the political system in power, by any means possible.139

When we define art manifestos, a common feature is performativity and theatricality—the concept of "doing things with words, in changing the world" (Puchner

5). Puchner concludes that "the history of the political manifestos is a history of repletion, of attempts to navigate between the incomparable imperatives of adapting the

Communist Manifesto and preserving its original force" (259). A manifesto should be "a means to an end and an end in itself, that would fold means and end together while sustaining them both, without collapse, in a kind of balancing act or dance, suspended between past and future yet tied to both by repetition and replacement in order to make the new once more" (Puchner 262).

In plain terms, Puchner believes that a manifesto must be a regenerating text. It is interesting that historically each manifesto was then repressed by dictatorial regimes.140

Seemingly placing the manifestos creation not only as a reaction—and/or result to—the

139 Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto (1908); Breton wrote the Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924); Debord wrote Society of the Spectacle (1967). 140 Poggioli states that the "absolute and total control of literature and art seems to be the common result of other dictatorial regimes such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Franco Spain, but no so radically as in Soviet Russia, precisely because the Communists had broken the ties to the previous society in a more thoroughgoing way than any other regime, thus becoming much more totalitarian" (Poggioli 105). 162

rise of an absolute regime, but actually a precursor—as though the artist-author of manifesto senses the instability around and writes the manifesto as a warning sign—but as beacon call. Renato Poggioli spends some time explaining how the state of alienation is a natural progression that the artist has to go through to feel the pressure of his nature to expiate and become the spokesman of his victimized society (11).141 In this version of the argument about how a call for regeneration arises, the artist's alienation can be explained not only in ethical and psychological but also in pathological terms—see

Nietzsche's and Baudelaire's exaltation of malady—establishing then a direct link between art and neurosis (Poggioli 111). Poggioli continues his proclamation of this state by concluding that madness, which he calls "the most terrible of maladies afflicting the brain and the intellect, is considered the artist's occupational hazard, precisely because alienation, by the fatal psychic dualism it causes, may attribute to the formation in the patient's mind of that doubling of personality known as schizophrenia" (112).

This is not, in my opinion, what is occurring in D'Annunzio's—and for that matter

Wilde's and Huysmans'—creation of his breviary of decadence, nor is it prescribed as necessary in Puchner's exposition. D'Annunzio was not schizophrenic (metaphorically or medically) and/or alienated. On the contrary, he became quite involved in the reformation and political activism, and called for regeneration in the terms prized by those he felt needed it. The turns that his life took after Il piacere prove that he wished to

141 Poggioli continues "the artist comes to be conceived of as an agnus dei, an expiatory scapegoat, almost as if he were the innocent creature upon which society transfers its own sense of sin and guilt, and whose sacrificial blood redeems the sins of the whole tribe" (Poggioli 111). 163

take an active part at ruling, changing and leading the new state that was being created under his eyes.

Critics have only been willing to go halfway on evaluating this transformation. In a typical approach, Barbara Spackman explores the paradox between D'Annunzio's growth going from his provincial background to what she calls a quasi-mythical position.

In her essay, she senses how D'Annunzio's life is "inextricably interwoven in his writings," possibly to inscribe an alternate reality and to "cathartically expunge from the personae of his supermen the ambiguities about the origins that always troubled him"

(Spackman, "A Passion for Dismemberment" 139).142 I go a step further to say that he created himself and inscribed himself as a new kind of aristocrat in the traditions of the

Medici—connoisseurs and rulers—in order to create for himself a place in the ruling echelons of the country, in order to rise to the ruling class levels of Italian society.

Walter Laqueur calls this transformational move "the change from hyperaestheticism to a super patriotism which came close to fascism" (Laqueur, "Fin-de-siècle" 10).143

D'Annunzio therefore becomes—in my, and not Marinetti's, opinion—the futurista that Marinetti exhalts in his manifesto. D'Annunzio becomes an –ism

(D'Annunzianism), and as such is able to achieve exactly what he sets out to, because of the validity of his new inscription. In a new Italia that was coming out of an older Italia,

D'Annunzio's writing, persona, and later military and political ventures fill the gap that

142 Cited in Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decadence in European Culture, Vol. 3, ed. Michael St. John (England: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 128-140. 143 Walter Laqueur, "Fin-de-siècle: Once More With Feeling," Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 31, No 1. (Jan 1996), pp. 5-47. 164

Walter L. Adamson calls "the inchoateness of the emerging Second Italy" (29).144

Adamson believes—quoting Marinetti—that the "role of the 'we,' the avant-garde of the

'new' generation, is to 'burn and to brighten'—to destroy the first Italy as it educates the second" (29). Adamson continues to draw upon Marinetti's rhetoric of the future ruling classes, saying that these Futuristi are those "who exalt danger, energy, speed, violence, machines, war, and the like, and who oppose what passatisti support" (42). However, I am the one drawing a parallel between D'Annunzio and Marinetti, because the latter actually labels and condemns D'Annunzio as a passatista.145

In my view such opinions are also due to the elitist and defensive nature of the

Italian bourgeoisie—echoing Fulvio Cammarano's examination of Liberal Italy—which gives a "national dimension to politics while at the same time avoiding the politization of the nation" (Carter, "Nation" 546).146 Carter sees the split nature of this newly liberal

Italia, in trying to develop "a bond between the nation state and the civil society," and to make "the population aware of its nationality—hence the politization of the nation"

(Carter, "Nation" 545). Nationalization becomes an important theme in the literature of the times. If this explains how D'Annunzio was able to rise to mythical stature and also to lead the Italians to a new Italia, how do we explain his allegiance to a fascist Italy?

144 These are the flames Andrea sees from the window of his palace, but misunderstands them as fiamme from a fuoco—also title to D'Annunzio's sixth novel written in 1900—and not as the tramonto of the vecchia Italia to which he belongs. 145 In Marinetti's opinion, i passatisti support "bourgeois institutions like museums, libraries, and universities, but also manifestations of artistic "decadence" (as in "D'Annunzianism"), including feminism—indeed women generally" (Adamson 42). 146 In Carter's opinion, it was inevitable that the Italian government at that time should "assume an apolitical, and entirely administrative, character", with the inevitable later development of "the practice of transformismo (the retention of political power through the offerings of places in government to potential opponents) and later, giolittismo"—which later failed but not before creating an antigiolittismo spirit and a move away from the concept of a liberal state (Carter, "Nation" 546). 1 65

That clearly was D'Annunzio's mistake, but my reading of his novel-as-manifesto indicates that it was not his objective. D'Annunzio's poetic intent was that of raising a critique of a specific class' response to the pressures of modernism and make and appeal to preserve, reevaluate, and recreate tradition instead of discarding it.147 As such he has retained at least some claims to being a national author of the era. And so to finish with

D'Annunzio's own words on art, the eternal faithful lover, forever young and immortal, that gets us closer to God: "L'Arte! L'Arte!–Ecco l'Amante fedele, sempre giovine, immortale; ecco la Fonte della gioia pura, vietata alle moltitudini, concessa agli eletti; ecco il prezioso Alimento che fa l'uomo simile a un dio" (D'Annunzio 164).

This transformation of l'uomo in dio only occurs within the author of these decadent novels, and not its protagonists. These protagonists are reduced—contrary to the elevation of its author—to weak, sickly, dying heroes that, as we shall also see in our third and last transformation, are unable to remain forever young and immortal, which is what gets their authors, in D'Annunzio's opinion, closer to God. Let's thus move onto the last novel treated in this project, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray written in

1890.

147 Jared Becker is convinced that this "politics of estheticism"—to use Thomas Mann's term—offers the "esthete as a political arbitrer," and offers the poet's "beauties"—in this case nationalism and imperialism— as "the substance of the nation's politics, overriding the materialist analyses of either socialist or capitalist politics" (Becker, "D'Annunzio, Socialism, and Poetry" 85-86). 166

Chapter Three: Repercussions of a Class Under Fire: Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Folly of Society Wilde, as a writer and as a man, was far ahead of his time. His crucifixion by the malevolence of the Marques of Queensberry (whose chief delight was to watch members of the lower classes beat one another senseless) put a viciously cruel end to his career, so we can only speculate as to what he might have produced given a free rein. The best of his fantasies are bitter parables in which human folly, vanity and infidelity cause untold misery—as, of course, they still do and probably always will. —Stableford ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 610)

As I have traced my way through French and Italian decadence to lead us to the third and last novel treated in this study, I am left to muse at the direct link that exists between modernism and decadence. This link that critics have acknowledged as the direct link between modernism and decadence, and which is also grounded in historical relativism. For instance, Matei Calinescu (1996) succinctly describes the historical relativism associated with modernism in his book Five Faces of Modernity. There, he notes a pattern that has taken hold of the last one hundred and fifty years or so of

"modern" western literature where "the past imitates the present far more than the present imitates the past" (Calinescu 3). As I have discussed in the introduction, many critics believe that modernism documents a transitory migration of literature from a "time- honored aesthetics of permanence, based on a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty [see Kant's Critique of Judgment (translated in 1931)], to an aesthetics of

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transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and novelty" (Calinescu

3). This central focus on change permeates the three novels discussed in this work, and in particular impacts Wilde's novel.

Wilde's hero, or perhaps anti-hero, Dorian Gray, is a decadent individual who is also the dead-end representative of this own decaying class. As I will trace in the sections below, I do not believe that Wilde intended to elevate the character that Dorian represents—elevating with him all he represents: Dandyism, hedonism, existentialism, etc. On the contrary, Wilde foregrounds his weak hero and portrays him as a hopelessly corrupt, bored young aristocrat left to torture the 'real' souls around him because he will not acknowledge that his own historical moments have passed.148 Dorian causes sweet innocent Sybil Vane to commit suicide for the love of him; and although he may seem

'real' to the reader at first, as one reads deeper, we come to the realization that the author is not partial to Dorian's behaviors – as I aim to explain further in the chapter, Wilde claims the necessity for acknowledging historical change, a trace of the attributes that

Calinescu finds in modernism.

In this chapter, I will first summarize the position that most critics have taken in regards to the decadence of Dorian Gray—because Wilde has been read and re-read by

148 Bonnie J. Robinson argues that Dorian Gray and Salomé are in fact reversing Decadence and its positive values. In her essay entitled, "The Perversion of decadence: The cases of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and Salomé," she contends that Ernest Worthing and Lord Goring are the only two successful Decadent individualists in Wilde's novel, and not the usual two "Wildean figures that critics hail as epitomizing Decadence in English Literature, that is, Dorian Gray and Salomé, [who] are actually failed individualists" (Fox 151). She continues by noting that "Dorian's error is not that he believes his picture releases him from moral judgment, as critics as Philip Cohen, Christopher Nasaar, and Epifanio San Juan suggest; or releases him from casuality, as Richard Ellmann, for instance, argues. Rather, he thinks it releases him from manifesting the expression of a thought or feeling. As Ed Cohen and Alan Sinfield, among others note, Wilde explicitly depicts Dorian's physical crimes. However, Wilde explicitly depicts Dorian's crimes against Decadent individualism" (Fox 162). 168

many, but few have correlated his particular type of aesthetics to his underlying socio- critical context within his novel. Subsequently, I will turn to an analysis of how Wilde models his "hero"—as an aesthete whose aestheticism the author condemns, through the overripe and distorting lenses of Dorian's perception. I argue that Wilde communicates an ideal of art and aestheticism subordinated to an ethos more than it is often assumed.

Finally, in the conclusion of the chapter I will position Wilde's hero against the context of the English social order of the times. Contrary to the most common assumption found in contemporary critics that the novel is a reflection of Wilde's homosexual struggle, I argue that The Picture of Dorian Gray is, first and foremost, a devastating critique of the aristocratic class and its failure to engage in a new social order.149

The Critics of Dorian Gray: A History of its Reception

To begin an analysis of the abundant criticism that exists within this context, one must first turn to the Wildean universe and its ties with French aesthetics. Contrary to the public stereotypes about Wilde's reputation, Brian Stableford calls The Picture of Dorian

Gray an unpredictably "moral novel," although it "embodies all of the mannerisms of the

French Decadent movement" ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 610). The fact that Oscar Wilde draws from the French Symbolist/Decadent authors is not surprising—Wilde's stylistic influences are well known, and that will also emerge in the present discussion.

Stableford notices that this verviesque novel is not what it appears at first reading:

149 To find out more on Wilde's homosexual struggle see Richard Dellamora, Neil, McKenna, Jason Alexande Boyd, Clifton Snider, Wildean: A Journal of Oscar Wilde Studies, Nicholas Ruddick, Ann

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Wilde's only novel is, […] a highly moral book, although not everyone saw it that

way. Dorian's attempts to make his life a work of art while his portrait suffers the

ugly legacy of his sins is, in the end, doomed to failure because he cannot

overcome the force of his guilty self-hatred. Unable to resist the force of his own

genius, Wilde hurried like Arthur Savile to fulfill the terms of the doom-laden

prophecy. ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 610)150

It is possible that Wilde may have not been completely foreign to feelings of self hatred, but the doom-laden fate of the character will emerge not as the fate that he sees in himself but rather one that lies in the class and nation that Dorian represents, and to which Wilde never truly belonged, which formed the seductive hegemonic culture that could breed a beautiful creature like Dorian. Gilbert Pham-Thanh calls this situation a symptom of the

Wildean universe where creation precedes re-creation which precedes recreation in a disharmonious and abnormal way.151

The French aesthetic influences in Wilde's novel are not new observations. In

1912, Arthur Ransome, in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study, already recalls the French influence in this novel when he calls it "the first French novel to be written in the English language" (213). In Wilde's own words, "My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the brutality of plain realism" (Ransome 213). The author's rejection of the avant-

Herndon, Marshall, Laurence Senelick, Eric Haralson and his ideas of Queer Modernity, Yvonne Marie Ivory, and hundreds more. 150 Wilde embraced all the theories and mannerisms of the French Decadent Movement. 151 "Création, re-création et récréation ne sont pas simplement unies par les liens qu'elles tissent intimement avec la volonté d'exister et la tentation de l'auto-destruction." Pham-Thanh, Gilbert. "Création, re-création et récréation dans The Picture of Dorian Gray: Logique compensatrice ou stratégie d'évitement?" Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens: Revue du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Victoriennes et Edouardiennes de l'Université Paul Valéry 51 (April 2000), pp. 243-250. 170

garde of the times in favor of such "decorative art" can be easily read as a projection of

Wilde's own more social critique of the times, as his attempt to address the here and now rather than to argue for a yet-unrealized future.

If criticism is "the most creative part of a creative work," as Isobel Murray states in her "Oscar Wilde: Overview" in Reference Guide to English Literature (1991), then

Wilde's novel becomes the embodiment of Wilde's beliefs.152 In Murray's opinion, Wilde tests the theories discussed in his two essays, "The Decay of Lying" (1891) and "The

Critic as Artist" (1891) against the themes found in The Picture of Dorian Gray.153

Murray believes that Wilde "powerfully establishes evil as a reality in the novel," and that

"what was to have been a 'flowerlike' life of self-realization [for Dorian] is manifestly evil and ugly, whatever the appearance," thus concluding that "the implicit darker side of

Dorian Gray is a turmoil of passion, cruelty, and greed for sensations," at the surface, but that in depth the novel is really a "sustained attack on realism and a defense of imagination, while investigating the nature and function of both critic and artist" (1099).

I find this correlation between the aesthetic side of Dorian and his immoral side interesting as such juxtapositions have been found in each of the three novels discussed in the present study. In all three cases, tools from French aestheticism enable the authors to paint superficially beautiful or sensuously luxuriant interiors. Yet I do not necessarily see that appeal to beauty as "an attack on realism." I believe instead that the authors

152 "Oscar Wilde: Overview," in Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991. 153 The first signs of which begin as early as page 57 (Chapter IV) where Lord Henry contemplates over the evils and poisons of reason and life, "poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken them [. . .] to a large extent the lad was his own creation" (Dorian Gray 57).

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discussed here take up this French tool for style in order to point to a deeper set of problems, distasteful ones that need to be framed aesthetically if they are to help their readers confront them. In the case of The Picture of Dorian Gray, this leads to initial problems for the critics, since the novel does not situate itself within the normal set of

Victorian parameters. As such, Gilbert Pham-Thanh believes that this is how this novel breaks away from other decadent novels. Gilbert believes it is unique in the way it tries to "re-create" the symbolic Victorian order—an order he believes is made to witness the end of degeneration at the end of Wilde's novel (Pham-Thanh 250). That is, the decorative style can be considered a more or less realistic appeal to the Victorian readership.

Critics are divided in moving toward such conclusions about the correlation of the novel's style and its more or less realistic appeal to its audience. Debora Hill also notices that "The Picture of Dorian Gray [. . .] attracted the most abuse at the hands of the media, [it] was a damning account of the hypocrisy of Victorian England, and because it did not follow the established pattern of the popular fiction of the day, many readers and critics found it incomprehensible" (Hill 182). Karl Beckson writes about Wilde's attack on Victorian England in his article in Gay & Lesbian Literature, yet he reduces that attack to a personal one. Beckson reverts to calling the novel a foreshadowing of Wilde's own doom, aligning the style with the author's position rather than society's: in this

"homoerotic novel, Wilde willingly [accepts] his symbolic 'martyrdom,' which he believed essential if homosexuals were ever to be accepted by society" ("Oscar Wilde:

Overview" 407).

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Beckson also looks especially at Wilde's last work—De Profundis—and in it he finds a chrysalis of Wilde's martyrdom, showing how it was a necessary consequence of his relation to England. To make his case, Beckson refers to the setting of Wilde's most famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), written while he was incarcerated at

Reading Prison.154 According to Beckson, this famous poem "expresses the mystery of

[Wilde's] own self-destructiveness in the famous refrain that 'all men kill the thing they love'. . ." ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 408). Beckson makes also reference to another comment written in the long autobiographical letter to Alfred Douglas (later published as

De Profundis), which in Beckson's opinion "explores his pain and suffering provoked by his relationship with Douglas and with homophobic society at large" ("Oscar Wilde:

Overview" 408). Not surprisingly, then, Beckson paints Wilde as a case of Victorian

154 I will list here the last stanza (VI) of the poem:

In Reading gaol by Reading town There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man Eaten by teeth of flame, In a burning winding-sheet he lies, And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead, In silence let him lie: No need to waste the foolish tear, Or heave the windy sigh: The man had killed the thing he loved, And so he had to die.

And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! !"

(from the Encyclopedia of the Self by Mark Zimmerman: http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/rgaol10.htm ) 173

self-hatred, even if it seems in conflict with Wilde's defense of his homosexuality: "Wilde regards Queensberry as a degenerate Philistine and rejects the view of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who regarded homosexuality as a congenital pathology"

("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 408). Beckson does not take up the option that Lombroso's work points to an overriding social problem, and so whatever realism might be found in the works ultimately ends up being a realistic portrayal of a single author's position.

Overall, like many critics, Beckson reduces Wilde's novel to the struggle between the author and his demons, noting that "the critical reactions to Wilde's novel, particularly the first version, indicated that many reviewers had grasped its homosexual subtext"

("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 407). To substantiate these claims in another way, Beckson quotes two periodicals, the Daily Chronicle of 30 June 1890, and the Athenaeum of 27

June 1891. In them, the critics attack Wilde's work and mark it as poisonous, frivolous and sickeningly vicious. Yet that these critics also fear Wilde's judgment of the ruling class of the times is apparent in the Daily Chronicle, where the novel is described as "a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents—a poisonous book . . .

[of] effeminate frivolity . . . [and] unbridled indulgence in every form of secret and unspeakable vice" (Beckson, "Oscar Wilde: Overview" 407).155 The Athenaeum also describes Dorian Gray as an "unmanly, sickening, vicious" book. Beckson does clarify

155 This fear of French style literature is accounted for in Elizabeth Godche Koonce in her dissertation entitled, Sensation, Fiction and the Law: Dangerous, Alternative Social Texts and Cultural Revolution in the 19th Century. Koonce states that Margaret Oliphant denounces French-style sensational novels in an article on the condition of women. Oliphant fears that this new type of literature will become a contaminant to English respectability, a threat to the Victorian laws and traditions, an infiltration of all that opposes the "confidence, progress and direction, the expansion, imperialism and economic advancement" so representative of England before the 1890's (Koonce 11). The style is thus not only implicated morally, but also in terms of national struggles. 174

that these particular terms "unspeakable vice" and "unmanly" were the usual Victorian code words for homosexuality ("Oscar Wilde: Overview" 407), but he does not acknowledge the specific political consequences of Wilde's militant homosexuality.

That critics like Beckson prefer to draw personal conclusions rather than explicitly social ones is surprising, given that they do cite ample material proving that

Wilde is quite conscious that he is dealing not only with a personal issue, but also with a kind of civil rights struggle. Wilde wrote to his friend George Ives, a poet and criminologist who had organized a secret order of homosexuals to advance the "Cause':

"Yes: I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good" (Beckson, "Oscar Wilde: Overview" 407).156 A step in that direction, and one that acknowledges Wilde's work in civil rights terms, occurred on the 100th anniversary of

Wilde's birth when the London County Council authorized a commemorative blue plaque to be placed on his former home on Tite Street. Three years later, the Criminal Law

Amendment Act was repealed (Beckson, "Oscar Wilde: Overview" 408). Wilde's reference to the "cause" is political vocabulary of the era; he is talking in terms familiar to those interested in workers' and women's rights, as well.

Other critics add further justification to a reading of Wilde as explicit social criticism. That Wilde was interested in social evolution and in the rise of socialism from

156In September, William Stead and five others were charged with unlawfully kidnapping a minor and committed for trial at the Old Bailey. Stead was found guilty and was imprisoned for three months in Holloway Gaol. As a result of the publicity that the Armstrong case generated, Parliament in 1885 passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, strengthened existing legislation against prostitution and proscribed all homosexual relations. (1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act: ). 175

within the working class is evident in at least two of his University essays, according to other researchers. In Wilde's essay entitled "The Rise of Historical Criticism" (1879),

Wilde states that only a society accommodating diversity will grow. In his opinion, the relationship between growth, complexity, and liberty is, as summarized by Rodney

Shewan, connecting progress with individuality (found in Oscar Wilde: Art and

Egotism).

Bruce Haley reemphasizes this point as he correlates Victorian England with a decadent society in his essay entitled Wilde's "Decadence" and the Positivist Tradition.

To Wilde

progress in thought is the assertion of individualism against authority, and

progress in matter is differentiation and specialization of function: those

organisms which are entirely subject to external influences do not progress any

more than a mind entirely subject to authority. (217)

Therefore the stagnation of Wilde's hero should be read as a reflection of instability due to the way Dorian, in this case, is affected by the external influences—and as such is not allowed evolution or progress. So if change is progress and evolution, but homogeneity is the natural condition of an unstable equilibrium, then it would seem logical to assume that rejection to authority is the only way to evolve—as this signifies a reaction to the status quo (Haley 217). And so, it is twenty years later, in his essay entitled The Souls of

Man Under Socialism (1891), that Wilde concludes that "Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism" (Haley 222). Victorian England has therefore stagnated in its appeal to socialism. Haley purports that "because a decadent

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society has a morbid interest in preserving intact its moral customs, the imaginative person will inevitably be seen as a threat to its well-being" (222). In Haley's reading, then, the Criminal Law Amendment Act may well be an attempt to prevent transgressions of the social norms of taste, as much as morality, and to create a herd rather than a society that would allow individuals to evolve.

Much, if not most, of critical attention to Wilde's homosexuality continues in this vein, reducing the thematic of not allowing for society to control one's impulses as the natural outcome of Wilde's emotional conflict or his attempt to argue for the individual as an explicitly legal reflection or a more sophisticated analysis of what individualism means within English society.157 Yet such attacks on the Victorian order were quite common at the turn of the century, Losey argues in an essay comparing Wilde with Dante

Alighieri.158 In his account, Wilde simply borrows images of exile from Dante's Divina

Commedia to "attack Victorian institutional attitudes" (Losey 429). In his essay entitled

The Aesthetics of Exile: Wilde Transforming Dante in Intentions and De Profundis,

Losey argues that, because Wilde could not have condemned the social order without being a subject of his own condemnation, his criticism of the Victorian era is about the artistic disposition of the times and the perception of the artist as subject to the established order:

157 On the contrary, I argue that Wilde's assertion of individualism against authority is not entirely based on the fact that his homosexuality casts him from society in general, but that he really believes in the necessary separation of any individual from the influences of its society in order for this kind of progress to occur. 158 Elizabeth Godche Koonce also writes about these attacks in her doctoral dissertation. 177

Wilde creates as hellish vision of late-Victorian culture in decline […] the

aesthetics of exile assumes increasing importance in Wilde's work. In the early

poetry and Intentions, he presents a fictional version of man destroying himself

through bestial desire; in De Profundis, tapping into his own experience, he

presents himself as one of the damned being flayed by Victorian authorities. But

whether theoretical or autobiographical, he indicates that the self-professed goal

of any artist should be to remain free of society and its rules. (Losey 430)159

Wilde's plight is thus "theoretical or autobiographical," and the dilemma of an artist is somehow beyond society—a reading of Wilde that explicitly contradicts what Dante achieved in his work, as he combined art, morality, and a devastating local critique.

Losey also notes that, in one of Wilde's early poems, "At Verona" (1881), the author

"imaginatively identifies with the exiled Dante and condemns Victorian politicians for being morally bankrupt" (Losey 431).160

One might thus turn Losey's own evidence against his reading, in that it seems that Wilde takes a more universal stand about the necessary course of public affairs rather than a merely aesthetical one. However, for Losey, at the time when Victorian values

159 Here is the original quote: "Wilde, who has finally eaten Dante's bitter bread, transforms a personal meditation on his own experience into a critique of the Judeo-Christian beliefs Victorians profess to follow. By doing so, Wilde creates as hellish vision of late-Victorian culture in decline. Indeed, as I shall argue, the aesthetics of exile assumes increasing importance in Wilde's work. In the early poetry and Intentions, he presents a fictional version of man destroying himself through bestial desire; in De Profundis, tapping into his own experience, he presents himself as one of the damned being flayed by Victorian authorities. But whether theoretical or autobiographical, he indicates that the self-professed goal of any artist should be to remain free of society and its rules. Although Wilde fell short of this goal by involving himself in the charges against Douglas's father, he provided in his work a model for subsequent artists. This paradigm, as I shall show, is a contemporary version of the one Dante had already provided in the Commedia" (Losey 430). 160 Hence one could say that Wilde becomes the manipulator and not the victim of his aesthetics according to Losey. 178

seem to begin to crumble, Wilde ultimately sacrifices himself at the Queensberry trial in order to denounce the hypocritical moral of the ruling class represented by the marques.

Yet Losey cites further evidence that argues for an appeal to French manners to be an explicitly political (in this case, geopolitical) matter in the era. In three articles taken from the archives of the New York Times, quoted by Losey, but not really evaluated for their political content, we read about England "intriguing against France" in an incident in Madagascar (New York Times, Oct. 4, 1894), England denouncing Ireland as vile and

"irrespective of creed and nationality" (New York Times, Nov. 24, 1899), and ultimately, on December of the same year, England as "hated" by the Germans who "do not merely dislike them [(The English)], or look on them with coldness—they hate England and its people" (New York Times, Dec 30, 1899).

Yet, and not surprisingly, Losey takes up French decadence in this context, as he correlates Wilde's own association with his plight and martyrdom with Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade—two other decadent "martyrs" to a society that does not appreciate their brilliance, but instead reduces their program to sexual martyrdom:

Since Wilde refers twice to Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade, he may have

wanted to dramatize his emotional condition. Tried and convicted for sexual

misconduct, Wilde imaginatively places himself between these two because they

were also found guilty of, among other offenses, sexual misconduct. Although

both de Retz and de Sade were imprisoned, Wilde associates his plight with that

of de Sade's. He and de Sade scoffed at orthodoxies and ridiculed hypocrisy. They

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were horribly punished by the societies they ridiculed; de Sade died in a lunatic

asylum, Wilde in a dingy hotel in Paris. (Losey 445) 161

Therefore Wilde is no Saint Oscar Wilde, but rather a sinner—a personal-moral accounting—according to Losey's text. Once more, Wilde's plight put him along with sinners. Placing himself among de Sade and de Retz, Wilde stresses the hypocrisy of

Victorian England that grants moral superiority to such a vile person as the Marques of

Queenbury. One might more profitably remember that de Sade, for example, was a victim of political scheming and was leveling a devastating critique against his class' abuse of power, as Philippe Seminet argued.162

This fixation on the personal Wilde runs throughout Wilde criticism, no matter how much evidence might be read otherwise. In his essay entitled, "Socially Most

Inconvenient," Brian Martin reviews More Letters of Oscar Wilde. Here, Martin takes a much different approach than Losey, but ends making Wilde a psychological victim rather than a political activist. He reminds the reader that what lead to Wilde's downfall,

"was his 'art-appreciation' of the remarkable beauty he saw in the male form and his expression of it which proved too outrageous for his time" (Martin 32). Ultimately, even in the most objective commentaries on his writing, it remains his homosexuality that

161 Losey quotes in full Wilde's second reference: "I have said, and with some bitterness, I admit, in this letter that such was the irony of things that your father would live to be the hero of a Sunday-school tract: that you would rank with the infant Samuel: and that my place would be between Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade" (Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 184 -85). Losey continues by stating that "by associating himself with de Sade and de Retz, Wilde acknowledges his fascination with sexual perversion, lust, lechery, and murder—all themes of The Picture of Dorian Gray. His intentional anachronism—putting de Retz and de Sade in Dante's Inferno— underscores his identification with social outcasts. Simply put, Wilde prefers sinners to saints" (Losey 445). 162 Philippe Seminet, Sade in His Own Name: An Analysis of Les crimes de l'amour (Lang, Peter New York: 2003). By considering the ramifications of Sade's goals as a writer, Seminet shows in his book how these goals compare to those of his contemporaries. 180

caused his demise, not any political crusade; his public assertion of his desires is seen as individualistic, rather than as a (failed) attempt to use his own person to force England into some kind of self-interrogation about what it was doing, nationally and internationally. The critics, therefore, seem to be espousing quite a simplistic view of

Wilde's ethics.

No matter how much the trial evidence might point to a Wilde reaching beyond the personal, then, the critics prefer to consign him to the role of aesthete rather than to see his aestheticism as a social tool, as I will be reading it here. Thus, typically, G.

Wilson Knight, in "Christ and Wilde,"163 believes that, in De Profundis Wilde, like Christ, embraced his "martyrdom," creating "a self-exhibition in agony and shame" (145) and that "Christ is [Wilde's] central interest" (146). Taking the illicit as Wilde's purpose,

Martin lets us into a secret: Wilde wrote to the American, Arthur Pickering, about The

Picture of Dorian Gray, "The fatal book that Lord Henry lent Dorian is one of my many unwritten works. Some day I must go through the formality of putting it on paper"

(Martin 32). Knowing that Wilde was a crafty self-promoter who was well aware of the commercial value of a scandalous façade, this should not be taken at "pedem literae."164

In other words, Martin reveals that Wilde was well aware of how to manipulate public opinion, but he does not follow this observation through.

Yet the alternate reading I am proposing has support in the words of other critics.

163 Found in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays. 164 There is a quote from Wilde that attests this: "One should never make one's debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age" (Lord Henry, in the Picture of Dorian Gray [Wilde, 83]). 181

In Norbert Kohl's Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel, for example, Wilde's emotions are regarded as fake. Kohl argues that Wilde's role as martyr may have been an appeal to late-Victorian society for leniency, a rhetorical gambit as much as a "real" confession of his intentions:

one might ask why Wilde should have wanted humility and suffering to play such

a vital part in his new life. The answer may perhaps be that whenever he was

revealing emotions and attitudes that seemed foreign to him—and hence insincere

to us—he was in fact guided by what he regarded as other people's expectations.

The role of the martyr was to prepare the way for social reintegration, which

would not have been possible for the prophet of pleasure. (288)

John Simon similarly points to Wilde's awareness of his public persona, how his aestheticism portrays him and limits his social address. In his essay entitled The Prince of Paradox Simon states that "[t]he Wildean epigram is a form of exaggeration," and then he notes that "[i]n one of his last letters, we find Wilde telling [Robert ] Ross[, his friend, first lover, and literary executor]: 'I am now neurasthenic. My doctor says I have all the symptoms. It is comforting to have them all, it makes one a perfect type'" (Simon

37-39).165 Thus, Wilde ultimately realizes that his critics have reduced him to a caricature, a stereotypical “perfect type", and that he has not been able to break through the stereotypes imposed upon him by his culture. One might add that Wilde's switch in the trial from aesthete (an upper-class role) to martyr (a generally recognizable Christian

165 This appeared in New Republic, on May 26, 1986. 182

role) might be taken as a strategic move to appeal to the broader English audience necessarily implicated in a trial (not just the narrower one who will read novels).

Critics thus generally persist in identifying Wilde with his characters, leading them, for example, to take Dorian Gray's death as the necessary transition to modernity that Wilde himself may not have achieved in his life.166 Through the death of the character, and through Wilde's own death, a new era, for these critics, seems to emerge.

Yet some critics refuse to make this equation, preferring to see that Wilde intended something more serious than a critique of aestheticism. Steven Marcus writes about the

Wildean transition to modernity in his essay entitled He Resisted Everything Except

Temptation.167 In this essay, Marcus traces what he believes are the key figures in the transition to modernity. Marcus believes that Wilde's ability "to see all art as an act, a fiction, a salvation counterfeit" and his ability "to utterly sever any connections between art and morality, [. . .] constitute the closest thing there was in England to Nietzsche"

(Marcus 7).168 I would stress the latter part of this quotation—and note that the "radical

166 In an essay entitled Wildean Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: Consumer Fashion at the Origins of Modernist Aesthetics, Paul L. Fortunato equates this analogization as a natural migration towards modernism. Unlike the early critics, Fortunato proposes that Wilde is the portal to modernity because of Wilde's individualism as he connects high culture—Art with a capital A—and popular culture. Fortunato believes that "Ghosting Wilde was integral to inventing modernism. I argue-together with theorists like Ardis and Said-that there is no modernism without Wilde, and particularly without Wilde's commitment to surface. Also, it is true that several high modernists used elements of consumer culture in their artistic creation-Joyce in Ulysses and Woolf in Mw. Dalloway, for example." (Fortunato 46) 167 This appeared in The New York Times Book Review, on November 17, 1985. 168 Marcus also notes that "[t]he years 1890-95 represent the top of the slope of Wilde's precipitous ascent. The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890 and received scandalized attention. In 1891 Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, known to his friends as Bosie, and in due time their homosexual love affair began. Wilde was also becoming more forthright in putting forward his radical cultural views." Marcus also notes that in The Portrait of Mr. W, "his essay on Shakespeare's sonnets, he begins by discussing certain questions of "literary forgery" and states that "all Art being to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realize one's own personality on an imaginary plane [. . .] to censure an artist for a forgery was to confuse an ethical with an aesthetical problem" (Marcus 7). 183

cultural views" could well be more than his homosexuality, which, after all, was already a kind of overt program of Walter Pater and a generation older than Wilde himself.

Claiming for the book to be treated solely in terms of its aesthetical merits, in fact, will require acknowledging that the aesthetics claim an ethical standpoint against the status quo, the sort of stand that will object organisms which are entirely subject to external influences, and who do not progress. The apparent paradox of the claim for aesthetics as social critique was noticed by Richard Ellmann in The Critic as Artist as

Wilde (1966), and then by David A. Upchurch in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Overview

(1993). Upchurch states that "the primary opposite in the novel is that art, while detached from real life is also very much involved with it" (Upchurch 43). Upchurch concludes his overview by stating that "the idea of living life without fear of death or its consequences is as old as the Faust legends and the Irish Celtic myths, but in Dorian

Gray Wilde breathed new life into the legends by infusing them with the doctrines of the

Aesthetic Movement and allowing Dorian 'to burn with a hard gem-like flame'" (43).

This critic attaches Wilde's program to life, but again does not draw a conclusion from his own example: that the Irish revival of the era that was in fact reviving Celtic myths was doing so in no small part to resist England politically. Why, then, might the aesthetic program—this aesthetic resistance—familiar in a poet like Yeats not be equally political when exercised by the era's other most famous Irishman, Wilde?

Other critics, in consequence, have argued that Wilde was not only an aesthete.

The control Wilde exercised over his work, for example, shows how carefully premeditated the message that Wilde wanted to send out to readers was. Regenia

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Gagnier, in Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986), gives a detailed analysis of Wilde's appeal to a consumerist society (Gagnier 179).

Jerome H. Buckley (1983) also supports the political odyssey that Wilde undertook.169

Wilde's own family, in the person of Merlin Holland (1980), also shifts the focus from

Wilde the "asthete" to the politics of Wilde's decadence and the social commitment he made to oppressed groups in society. M. Holland believes that Wilde's "interest in social matters, in the power of the theater to question and to criticize as well as to entertain, his belief in the importance of women's role in society and his own fragile position within it as an outsider, are all coming to light."170 It is worth looking at how Wilde comments on his political and artistic accomplishments, as well as on his persona in his final work written in Prison, De Profundis (1897):

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name,

high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and

philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was

nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took drama, the most

objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the

lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its

characterization: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic

dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth

169 This is emphasized also in his essay entitled, Towards Early-Modern Autobiography: The Roles of Oscar Wilde, George Moore, Edmund Gosse, and Henry Adams, that appeared in Modernism Reconsidered, Robert Kiely and John Hildebidle, eds. (1983). 170 Introduction to the 1994 Edition of Collin's Classics Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 4. 185

itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and

showed that false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated

Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the

imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I

summoned up all systems in phrase, and all existence in epigram. (De Profundis

1017)

This is easily read as a profession of pure aestheticism, but there is one large deviation from traditional readings of "beauty is truth", and that is the detail that he "gave what is false" to truth as its provenance, an inverse reality, à la Huysmans, of what showing the opposite of what is wished to show—the kind of statement most familiar from de Sade.

De Profundis charts this course to something more than aestheticism very clearly, especially when Wilde also talks about his literary influences. He mentions reading

Pater's Renaissance, during his first term in Oxford, and how Pater mentions Dante, and subsequently going to the College library to read the Divine Comedy (De Profundis

1024). He also says that his mother read Goethe to him, and that he always searched for that which the artist is always looking for, "that mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which

Form reveals" (De Profundis 1024). Later, Wilde admits un-regretfully, to have lived for pleasure (De Profundis 1026).171 He then admits though that in the latter part of his life, mainly the part after his trial and imprisonment, he learned that sorrow as well, as the

171 Wilde states specifically that he doesn't "regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure" (De Profundis 1026). 186

other side of the coin, also allowed him to attain the knowledge he searched for and that he had found in following pleasure. This duality also helps him be the critic of his own society more completely:

The other half of the garden [sorrow] had its secrets for me also. Of course all

this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my art. Some of it is in 'The Happy

Prince': some of it in 'The Young King,' notably in the passage where the Bishop

says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made the misery wiser than thou art?' a

phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase: a great deal

of it is hidden away in the note of Doom that like purple thread runs through the

gold cloth of Dorian Gray: in 'The Critic as Artist' it is set forth in many colours:

in The Soul of Man it is written down simply and in letters too easy to read: it is

one of the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salomé so like a piece of music

and bind it together as ballad: in the prose-poem of the man who from the bronze

of the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for Ever' it is incarnate. It could not have

been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to

be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol. (De

Profundis 1026)

Wilde's choices here point to another side of this work, addressing "man as a symbol."

What we will now turn to is what kind of symbol the ostensibly exemplary Dorian Gray might have been for Wilde. And as we shall see, "those who made the nursery" passed on not just an aesthetic, but an ethic of devastating consequence, socially and politically, to its children, its "princes" and "young kings."

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The Social Role of Dorian Gray: Portrait of an Aesthete?

Oscar Wilde's most controversial work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, presents the reader with the protagonist, Dorian, as a beautiful, rich, young uncorrupted prince-like figure who will wish narcissistically to remain forever unchanged, against time and growth. Yet the narrator is at pains throughout the novel to indicate that this Dorian is anything but exemplary, no matter how beautiful he might seem—hence beauty is not always truth, then, is it?

For example, he is first described as a "mysterious, never-thinking, brainless, beautiful creature" who can only remain angelic if his persona does not change (Wilde

Dorian Gray 3). That description begins to suggest to the reader a kind of innocent, non- reflexive, self-possessed individual. However, his chance meeting with the man who becomes his corrupted mentor, Lord Henry, who lent him the "poisonous" book—which is the first novel I treated—will turn him into an unexpected "monster."172 Or rather, it will reveal that "innocent" and "brainless" are not necessarily states of grace for an individual who has come under the sway of the social sets in which Lord Henry traffics.

As Dorian's wish to remain physically unchanged is granted, his life becomes a series of contorted corruptions and experiments into the darkest corners of evil. His outer appearance will remain unchanged, while the portrait that his friend, Basil Hallward, painted of him will wrinkle not only with the passing time but with every vile act that its

172 Hence if Beauty is not Truth, Truth then becomes a transforming device, as it turns Wilde's Dorian into a monster. 188

model is doomed to commit. Outward flawless appearance masking the inner corruption is the metaphor intended in order to lead the reader beyond a simple critique of Dorian

Gray's personal morals toward a more encompassing vision of the Victorian England that offers him his immoral choices. He is indeed a symbol of the man cherished by the upper classes, but that painting in the closet shows what that symbol really points to—a life that damages the nation as it amuses the upper classes.

Art is not necessarily life, the novel insinuates, as it speaks through the prejudices of the upper classes to its reader. At first, the artist, represented by Basil, the painter of the portrait—and hence one in tune with aristocratic tastes—appears to be a force of good, as he staves off the corruption of the world that surrounds him. Having painted the true beauty and unspoiled innocence of Dorian, he states what he considers the role of the artist should be:

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into

them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of

autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show

the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of

Dorian Gray. (Wilde, Dorian Gray 11)

This is indeed the position that Calinescu described as passé in the era: the idea that art is eternal and true. Basil does indeed portray this idea of art as eternal truth, even when he admits that he is outside society and outside current art norms. That there is "nothing of his own life" in Dorian's portrait is impossible, as the corrupt Lord Henry points out— each artwork is the reflection of its creator as much as its subject, it is not just 'abstract.'

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Unlike the biographical Wilde, then, Basil seeks to isolate art from the world, rather than using it to engage and dazzle. Basil, in many ways, thus becomes "brainless" himself.

This same commitment to isolation enables Dorian to take the path that he does through society. Basil talks of Dorian as a necessity, a "simple motive in art," he states,

[Dorian] is all my art to me now, I sometimes think, Harry, that there are two eras

of any importance in the world's history. The first is appearance of a new

medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.

Unconsciously, [Dorian] defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that

has to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the

spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in

our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar,

and ideality that is void. (Wilde, Dorian Gray 9-10)

Regardless of the homosocial overtones of the passage, there is no doubt that Wilde sets

Basil up to be the instrument of questioning the premise of the utilitarian nature of art.

Wilde has constructed this entry point consciously, to initiate a particular kind of dialectical problem, and the moments in which his era is divided against itself, are portrayed as a madness that produce voids and vulgarity. In the Preface, Wilde writes that "the nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass, [and] the nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass" (Wilde, Dorian Gray xxiii). In Wilde's account, we live in an era that condemns Realism and Romanticism alike because, like Dorian, modern man is becoming conscious of his corruption. In this situation, a realistic, historically-

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responsible art should portray, as Wilde does in his book, not just the most beautiful, but also the most sinister facets of humanity because only this dark journey will allow modern man to peek at the future through his past. Dorian hides the changing portrait away; Basil eschews realism and all reflection upon the portrait and himself, in an attempt to separate Dorian from this gaping reality. At that point, then, Dorian does not have a reflection at all—he is the "angel" outside time who will not confront his own place in society or his own responsibility about it, given that he is in neither of Caliban's mirrors, as Wilde described them. Basil, in turn, may be a gifted artist, but in his claim to representing higher abstractions, he is the agent of evil, decorating the age's golden child instead of truly representing him—the Romantic showing Caliban in the mirror—but only accidentally and behind closed doors, not publicly—as would never allow Victorian preconceptions.

It is significant that Wilde describes modern man as Caliban, a monster-like creature, a brute. But this is not the only reading of the figure. As Aimé Césaire173 portrays him in his Une Tempête, Caliban, as the "natural," plays a role that must be contrasted with Prospero, the "anti-natural" in a confrontation between two worlds (74).

Prospero, the nominal "hero" of civilization is thus revealed as denatured, a person who

173 Césaire is a political activist, a martiniquian author whose work focuses on social issues and the plight of marginalized groups. He along with his wife Suzanne Césaire, and friends Georges Gratiant, Aristide Maugée, René Ménil, Lucie Thésee edited a journal called Tropiques, which made its debut in Fort-de- France, Martinique around 1941. Césaire coined the term Négritude. In a recent article entitled: The Psychopathology of Inscription: The Mytholization of African in Aimé Césaire and the Paradoxically Illusionary Nature of Identity in Jean Genet's Plays I explore and compare this archaic notion of Négritude as first used by Césaire in his 1939 poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land), as a successful attempt to recreate a national identity through the reclaiming of a mythical past, or through magical figures such as Caliban, as later used in Césaire's version of Shakespeare's Tempest, entitled Une Tempête (1968). 191

must actually be saved through the natural monster.174 Wilde's book displays the same irony: Lord Henry seemingly plays the anti-nature, the colonizing force, as in Aimé

Césaire's play, while Dorian starts as a sublimation of the natural, the untouched, an angel-like figure who eventually loses his nature through his experiments. He is seduced by the demands of his era and "falls" from this perfection into decadence. The reality of

Dorian's confrontation with his own truth is, however, somewhat different to that of

Césaire's Prospero: the beautiful Dorian is actually denatured by Victorian society and its too-ideal brilliance, while the purportedly evil Lord Henry is just one of the voices excluded from all but a few houses of that society, labeled "decadent" because he is interested in those facts of life that have been banned from "proper" society.175 In fact,

Wilde has Lord Henry commenting on the decadent era in terms that underscore how detached from nature the era—or his version of the ruling classes—actually is: "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so somber, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 29). In this Caliban- like statement, Lord Henry seeks life in all the wrong places, at the margin of a denaturalized society, in the parts of the world labeled as "decadent."

To stress the historical relevance of this critique, Wilde also calls Dorian, the "son of Love and Death," symbolically reminding us of another decadent author, Georges

174 In another article entitled Language and Myth: Yeats & Césaire: Mythology as Representation of a Natural Identity and Literature, I have delineated the difficult move from "foreign" to "familiar" within Césaire's play, Une Tempête, where the subordinate status of Caliban is overcome through the return to nature, savagery and cruelty, and the superior status of Prospero is reversed to anti-nature—thus challenging authority through the reversal of roles. Both Yeats and Césaire utilize elements that suggest the decolonization process, aiming at an analogous goal, and thus can be situated in the same category. 175 Here Dorian moves from becoming equated with Caliban, and with Lord Henry's help, becomes equated with Prospero (l'anti-nature). 192

Rodenbach (1855-1898), who wrote a short story under the title, L'Amour et La Mort.176

In this story, Rodenbach sadly states that, "on comprend l'égoïsme de la nature, ne songeant qu'à elle-même et a se reproduire. L'homme se sent, enfin, dupe d'un mirage qui cesse avec le désir. Et il s'afflige" [one can understand the selfishness of nature that only dreams about herself and her reproduction. Man feels, in the end, victimized by the illusion that ends with desire. And then he suffers] (Rodenbach 17). Thus modern man within "proper society" is worse than Caliban, a hopeless monster who inevitably needs to experiment with its decadent nature, in almost a parody of the century's progress. But in disparity with Césaire's and Shakespeare's Calibans, who live on a magical island under open skies, responsive to nature, Wilde's protagonist lives where Lord Henry offers only darkness to contrast with Dorian's light. So Wilde seems to reverse his roles, and in the end make Lord Henry his "colonizer," his Prospero, thus recasting the earlier monster who can redeem society into a monster from society and who has freedom of motion within it until his crimes are seen publicly, until he is revealed as predatory on those like

Dorian who are not quite members of the ruling classes.

In a similar reversal of traditional stereotypes, then, Wilde describes his hero as a

"brainless, beautiful" creature until he becomes corrupt (Wilde, Dorian Gray 3). In this sense, Dorian begins his existence as a mere decoration, in Wilde's own words, "a flower to put on his coat, a bit of decoration … an ornament" and as someone with a "simple and beautiful nature" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 12-14). The supposed flower of his society,

Dorian is a tabula rasa and empty vessel; he completely lacks the essential terrors that

176 Found in a collection called Le Rouet des Brumes, 1901. 193

Wilde locates in religion and that society evokes in us. Through the painter we are told that "all influence is immoral, [. . . the] aim of life is self-development, [. . . to] realize one's own nature perfectly, [. . . and the] terror of society, which is the basis of morals,

[and] the terror of God, which is the secret of religion" are the driving forces that

"govern" us (Wilde, Dorian Gray 17). Just as J.K. Huysmans' hero can give life to lifeless, and D'Annunzio's Andrea Sperelli can turn lifeless dreams into reality, so Wilde's hero is doomed to create himself into a social creature as his blank slate is written upon by the worst society can offer. The particular physical and mental construction that he becomes will purportedly make him more real than the empty vessel he started as, but once faced with his realness he will also be forced to end his tortured existence. Dorian actually begins with no natural terror, not even a nature to realize what should or should not be, and it isn't until he acquires a consciousness from Lord Henry's engaging words

"able to give plastic form to formless things" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 19)—when he confronts the fact of his own acquisition by such figures—that he is given the tools to deal with his reality. This decoration is, at best, a hothouse flower, and no natural creation which can bring life to society; society will raise him, and render him vulnerable to its worst ills.

This psychosis of Dorian's leading to his death has been labeled the mal du siècle.

Wilde, like the other authors here, saturates his novel with allusions to that "illness," adding comments like "behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic," (Wilde, Dorian Gray 35) or those comparing "Love and death," (Wilde, Dorian

Gray 36) or yet again, "there is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with

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pain" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 40). For Wilde, these are the foreshadowing of a definite doom, but they are not the characteristics of a true, desirable human nature. Rather,

Wilde sees him and his beauty and pities him, but will remain realistic about the evil social forces which have doomed him.

Like Prospero, as Césaire characterizes him, Dorian Gray, lead by Lord Henry, disengages further from the realms of the Other that might have connected him to nature or reality. For instance, Lord Henry offers a very utilitarian concept of people to Dorian by saying: "I can't afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners [. . .] they make one's room look so picturesque" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 45). These, and other, quotes are reflections on the nature of the art that Wilde might admire, but cannot condone as the high point of society. Henry uses them to urge Dorian to explore what he considers a life beyond art, but which is actually a social mask imposed to thwart any hope that nature emerges.177 Art, according to the orthodox aesthetic canon of the time, is a mask. Wilde makes even clearer the brunt of his criticism when the reader is told that inferior poets are fascinating as they "live the poetry that [they] can not write, [while] the others write the poetry that they dare not realize" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 56). The final critique of this state of the human-as-decoration comes when Wilde has Lord Henry state that "medieval art is charming but medieval emotions are out of date, [. . .] one can use them in fiction, of course,[. . .] but then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 78). These are all descriptions of people and

177 Lord Henry's comments tend to appear superficial and purely aesthetic; whereas Dorian, pushed by Wilde, yearns to dig further under this surface. 195

things that have outlived their usefulness in society, that are just tools used by certain individuals, but which hang around as outer forms that can be, at best, decorative.

On a much deeper level, however, lies the social battle that Wilde fights. Lord

Henry says about reality that "if one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened," and thus it is expression "that gives reality to things." In consequence, naming things can change the way things are, especially when what has been seen as passive or decorative begins to function actively (Wilde, Dorian Gray 107). In the novel, it is not surprising that a book ultimately gives name to what has been unnamed and covered up by the aestheticism that Dorian represents and that Henry advocates. Wilde makes a direct reference to Huysmans' book, A rebours, when he describes the "yellow" book that Lord

Henry sent to Dorian, the catalyst that starts naming things heretofore unreal to Dorian.

We are told that it was a novel

without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological

study of a certain Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth

century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to other centuries

except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through

which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those

renunciations that men had unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural

rebellions that wise men still call sin (Wilde, Dorian Gray 125).178

Following the statements on virtues and renunciations, Wilde foreshadows the end of his hero's life, and with it, the inevitable death of his culture, when he writes: "Art, like

178 This summary matches Calinescu's pattern of literature where the present is descriptive of all that is past. 196

Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices" (Wilde,

Dorian Gray 135). These voices are the past, the ghosts of history, of another time.

From the moment Dorian lays eyes on the book, he becomes an extension of Huysmans' hero, des Esseintes, himself the last of his kind, an endangered species in itself. The book opens the gate to another time and another place, one which turns Dorian even further away from his time than his pristine appearance. Furthermore, his portrait, hidden from the view, becomes a conduit only to the past, never to the future—because Dorian cannot become himself an agent of progress. Dorian can only represent a tacit warning of what needs to be undone to evolve. One cannot help but see an additional reference that

Wilde is making, a tacit denunciation of Pater's project on the Renaissance as incapable of improving the current world.179 Huysmans' hero, after all, is also removed from the world, and thus doomed.

As the reader witnesses Dorian's becoming the last of his kind, the beautiful

Adonis only has thoughts about death. He has been named and turned into the paradigm of an individual who relates to any age but his own ("all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to other centuries except his own" [Wilde, Dorian Gray 125]).

The empty vessel that his mind was has been filled with nothing alive, with the not here and not-now, with the poison of the past, denaturing him in a particular way. Yet as we are lead into his thoughts by Wilde, we are told that Dorian believes that, "man was a

179 Pater's usual manner of exploration, his new Renaissance project in literature, involved concentrating on the mind of one and only one character, using a historical setting, and developing still another facet of a theme regularly dictated by his times, to critique a work. Here Wilde does not want improvement, to show his hero's stagnation, with his gaze reverted to the past and not the future. 197

being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 143). This descent into the past is thus simply another kind of aestheticism, a particularly devastating one. Yet the exacting irony of Wilde's book is that he remains supposedly "in society" while his portrait lives the current version of des Esseintes' isolation.

Ultimately, Dorian's new engagement with the past comes to haunt him as he revisits all his ancestors who ended in some form of violent death, for even the traces of the past that Lord Henry says has no power over the present must necessarily bring with them some kind of emotional reaction. Wilde sums up le mal de Dorian in one sentence, echoing Walter Pater's Renaissance, "Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book" (Wilde,

Dorian Gray 146). Later on, we read, "[Dorian] was prisoned in thought. Memory like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 188). The form of aestheticism that Dorian represents ends, as well, when Dorian, "sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 199), barricades himself within his house.180 Dorian has become the painter of his own life, and he has looked, briefly, into the mirror of his soul (the portrait) and seen the need to shut the result up, away from the world. The past has given him night terrors and thus has marred his flat angel soul, just as it has marked his space—so pleasure and sin isolate him.181

180 So greatly has Dorian been "altered" by looking into the "mirror" that Huysmans' book offered him that he mixes reality with illusion, and illusion with disillusion (Wilde, Dorian Gray 210). Dorian reflects a certain awareness of the situation when he says that "the things one feels absolutely certain about are never true" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 215). 181 Note here the titles of our other two novels—Alone (A rebours) and Pleasure (Il piacere). 198

Within Dorian's limited ability to look in the mirror of his soul, he has still refused a real engagement with his Caliban. Not surprisingly, Dorian blames Lord Henry for the illness that he brought into Dorian's allegedly civilized soul, turning him into a new kind of Prospero. Yet Lord Henry defends himself by saying that "Art has no influence upon action [. . . i]t annihilates the desire to act [. . .] it is superbly sterile [. . .] the books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame"

(Wilde, Dorian Gray 218). So when Dorian kills what he loathes and loves most of all, his reflection, he does so in no small part to avoid being transformed into a human being by confronting his shame. The book ends with death, Dorian's death, knife in heart, a

"withered, wrinkled, and loathsome visage," an unrecognizable alter ego of the beautiful

Dorian in the portrait (Wilde, Dorian Gray 224).182

Still, Wilde is not Dorian: using des Esseintes as a mirror in which to reflect one's soul is the choice of a nineteenth-century "ism" rather than life. Unlike Dorian (or

Wilde's account of Pater), Wilde's Decadent style closely identifies with its surrounding culture—and paradoxically "rebelling against it to express a personal vitality" (Haley

229). Offering an image that an audience of Henry's peers would reject, Wilde stages

Dorian's death not as a martyrdom, which would have to be public, inflicted from the outside, but rather as a private self-immolation, an act of penance for taking art as eternal and valuable. Here again, it is important to remember to detach the characters from the author. Wilde warns the reader that "conscience makes egotists of us all" (Wilde, Dorian

182 So that the art of the book, like the art of the painting, remains fundamentally outside the flow of society, although the portrait actually ends up portraying a form of reality. 199

Gray 102). Nevertheless, it is his lack of conscience that makes Dorian the ultimate egotist out of a quest for emotional novelty, not present within the world. He has been created by aestheticism of a particular sort, but cannot be seen as a positive representative of its type.

While highlighting how Dorian lays his claims to art in a timeless sense, Wilde does not condone his hero's choices. In fact, he issues a condemnation that indicates that this stagnant figure in Wilde's book is actually hiding from history through art as artifice, as lie. The text warns against its main character's false assertion of his historical privileges, noting that they function as decoration only—the false face of Dorian; it decries equally those decadent aristocrats who experiment with life, and people's emotions who turn everything around them, including themselves, into horrible fabrications (just like Dr. Frankenstein creating monsters from his experiments).

Dorian Gray will not find a way out into the future. In one sense, his anesthetized resistance to change may be seen as a critique of progress itself, as Calinescu points out for the case of modernism, as a form of disenchantment with the promised benefits of modernity. According to Calinescu "progress came to be regarded as a concept having more to do with mechanics than with biology [. . .] a high degree of technological development appears perfectly compatible with an acute sense of decadence . . ."

(Calinescu 156). Thus, Calinescu concludes, progress itself becomes synonymous with a form of decadence, if in fact it is not equated with the notion of ever-increasing social amelioration. I would add that so does decadence become synonymous with one kind of

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degenerate progress in Wilde's novel, but never as a direct result of a confrontation with a modern world.

As we have seen, Dorian does not even think of confronting progress; his adoption of des Esseintes as a guide to life is, at best, a new commitment to historicism, to a turning away from the present. He has not embraced any facets of contemporary

English life (remembering that Huysmans' hero himself avoids what is part of his here and now). Stylistically, the decadent novels under discussion here are generally at pains to distort the apparent clear, clean lines of the outside world of progress—the authors show these lines from behind curtains, behind doors, and beneath layers of false representation. Like Dorian, they do not react to the modern, they simply remain willfully outside it. All three texts discussed here are drenched in the colors of gold, orange and reddish tints, as though reality was smothered by a sense of the unreal, by a lusty image of sunset and over ripeness. Such colors are continually brought to the reader's attention, making everything seem like it is seen through stained glass.

Following Maeterlink's symbol, familiar from his Serres Chaudes, the novels make it seem as if the readers assume the poses of souls under glass who look at the world from the inside out, preserved (mummified) in museums or in hermetically sealed glass vessels. As in Maeterlink's "Cloches de Verres," the images shown to the reader are ultimately distorted and unfocused, and especially decadent—attractive yet in some vile, unnatural, way. They are not intended to represent a higher reality not seen by the present; they are distortions of what makes society human. Dorian is, after all, little better than Henry's orchid.

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In the next section, I will turn to Dorian Gray not as an aesthete, but as a figure who avoids not reality in general, but very specific facets of reality that conflict with his image of eternal values as guiding his life, his art, and his soul. We will see that Wilde, through the distorting lenses of Dorian Gray, actually leads the reader into a more complex view of their shared society, not just their own psyches. In other words, Wilde's critique through aestheticism is not simply a declaration of his adherence to Decadence, but rather an attempt to embrace a more realistic aestheticism, with both the good and the evil figuring into a more comprehensive representation of the era.

As Art Becomes Life and life Art: Decadence as a Socio-Economic Revolution

According to Wilde, "Art only begins where imitation ends" (De Profundis 1039).

In his own words, "Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern Art" (ibid). In the last chapter of Dorian Gray, Dorian wants a new life. He is seen 'loathing' his beauty and his youth. The two things that, traditionally, were to give others so much artistic motivation, or clarity of life's true meaning, gave Dorian, according to him, only partial exposure to this truth, if not a blinding of what he could have experienced without them.

Wilde writes, "His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth a mockery" (Wilde,

Dorian Gray 220). Dorian undergoes the real transformation, which lets him see past

"l'art pour l'art" in the end, when he is finally allowed to experience the true aim of modern art—to reveal, rather than to mask.183 But it is too late for our hero. Wilde has

183 This notion of art as revealing and un-masking is also found in Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello's plays, as well as in what Calinescu calls the new face of modernity, which in his opinion is postmodernism (265). In my conclusion I will allude at this link between decadence, modernity and postmodernism. 202

condemned Dorian, and as such, Dorian must die. Lord Henry tells Dorian that, "Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile" (Wilde,

Dorian Gray 218), but we know that Dorian believes on some level that this is not true.

What Lord Henry is alluding to is what Dorian calls the "fatality of Faith" and the

"lesson of Romance," clearly marking them as literary and traditional rather than current

(Wilde, Dorian Gray 215). In his search for the true aim of art, Dorian has discovered that the "things one feels absolutely certain about are never true" (Wilde, Dorian Gray

215). Coming close to self-reflection for one of the few times the book, Dorian almost sounds like Wilde did in his De Profundis when he discovers then that Art thus is not

"simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations," art is a way to allow for the effects that the search for pleasure or sorrow produce to surface onto the written page

(Wilde, Dorian Gray 213). Here Dorian—no longer simply the creation of Henry, but living a life that is proving even more predatory on others—may well be the one that speaks for Wilde once he has freed himself from the masks that have kept him blind. But in this book, this is a very brief moment when Dorian and Wilde seem to speak as one.

Dorian's transformation points, I believe, to what the youth of the days should undergo, in

Wilde's mind. They should all shed their masks to realize what evil they do to others and thus to experience the true meaning of life, which has been masked through the rose- colored glasses of art (Huysmans' stained glass images). However, this is a hidden and reverse argument. Dorian is the non-example of what Wilde believes, no matter how much Dorian speaks for the tradition in which Wilde was raised but ultimately had to reject. As has been argued before, the reader must be very careful in calling this text

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autobiographical, although much of this latter part of Wilde's novel is clearly revisited in

Wilde's last work—De Profundis. In it, we find many of Dorian's arguments from the short period at the end of the novel, once the character is stripped off all masks, at the end of the book.

Another parallel shift between Wilde and his protagonist may be drawn in the particular superficiality of Dorian's confession when he states that, "names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature," where Dorian speaks through the lenses of suffering about the age, but in a voice aimed only at commenting on literature, removed from life—unlike Wilde would have done—and not with the realistic criticism that the author himself is depicting his era within the book (Dorian Gray 194). Later, in De Profundis,

Wilde explains what is like to shift perspectives, once we experience life and art through pain and not only pleasure—once illusions like Dorian's are broken and when he is forced to look into the mirror of his portrait and see the pain of society, imposed by him on others, but marked in his face. We are told in this moment that, through pain, the masks set by society are discarded. One should not live like Dorian, prisoner of his class and with it, of its beliefs and prejudices, but when Dorian sees this pain, he dies. One should live life continuously trying to discard the masks, and when one is finally able to do so,

"one discerns things that one never discerned before [. . .] one approaches the whole history from a different standpoint [. . .] what one felt dimly through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realized with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension" (De Profundis 1024).

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Hence the legacy of Wilde's age is not aestheticism, but rather "sorrow," which becomes the "ultimate type both in Life and Art;" and because "Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no masks," (De Profundis 1024). It is therefore very important to let Art tell its tale, but Dorian's tale includes the abuse of others, cruelty, and evil imposed in the name of aesthetic experience, acts that cannot be retouched into beauty, but which must be represented in a novel telling the story of the "beautiful" and "brainless" bright young things of the fin de siècle in London. Wilde will steadfastly argue that the true aim of modern Art is to unmask the pretentious ideals that society is trying to force upon the individual. And as such, societal change can only occur through the visualization of liberation from those ideals. Art can do this by unmasking our minds to these truths.184

Art, then, still holds the force of revelation and the ability to stir the human soul, but the aesthete errs fundamentally if the emotions art evokes are perceived only as beauty and pleasure.

By the end of the novel, Dorian wants to escape the folly of society. He wants in one sense to refute his aristocratic brainwashing. He wants to react to his social position, and become unrecognizable, as only through anonymity can he really be himself, start over, and craft a new social role. Dorian knows that he must "escape from himself," because he is "[im]prisoned in thought," he wishes to escape 'where no one knew who he

184 To experience the world as it is, and to let society teach its lessons. Wilde feared that too much of society was repressed and too many factions of society oppressed. That is how Dorian lived before taking the mask off. Society must not hide the truth from people and let everyone move blindly as 'automatons' move, society should be more realistic and not do what Wilde fears the most, which is killing consciences and taking the ability to choose away from the individual because "at such moments, [men and women] lose their freedom of the will" (Wilde 190). Here, Wilde has created almost a parody of the Bildungsroman, where women teach the hero—but now into the realization of the evil of Dorian's own spirit, not just his beauty. 205

was," in order to fully experience life rather than continue to be the predatory hot-house creature he has become (Wilde, Dorian Gray 188).

This commitment to a radical depiction of reality is what Wilde may well have learned from the other Marquis in his intellectual life, de Sade: the pitiless requirement that each of us look in the mirror to see whatever is in there, and the requirement that art not refuse that engagement. In Dorian Gray, we are told that "Moderation is a fatal thing," and in De Profundis that "The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret" (Dorian

Gray 180 and De Profundis 1007). As such, as true as art was to Wilde, and to Dorian after his transformation, so it should be to all people and to the artist himself—that confrontation with reality is both shattering and triumphant. Because society acknowledges the power of art to impact individuals, art can also expect to change the way people see their society. In this way, then, Wilde's tale of folly can in itself be seen as a way of re-affirming reality and reclaiming an art that had been reduced to superficial by the particular aestheticism of Decadence, but which needed to be reclaimed as critical instead.185 At the end of his life, Wilde writes to Bosie—Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas— about his art in De Profundis, and calls it his own revelation: "You knew what my Art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself, and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves where marsh-water to red wine, or glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the moon"

185 Bruce Haley also notes this when he states that "the aesthetic decadent pessimistically viewed modernity with the eye of the critical historian, but came to affirm the world of the unknowable over the closed, knowable world of the positivist" (Haley 229). 206

(De Profundis 1001). His art was to Wilde the means to strip off his own masks, a liberating catharsis for an individual, but also a political gesture, forcing society to look at its unjustly persecuted victims, Wilde among them—he is, in Reading Gaol, among debtors and other criminals whose crimes were against social norms alone, not against humanity. As Jokanaan forecasts in Salomé, Art exists so that "[t]he eyes of the blind shall see the day, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened" (Wilde, Salomé 584).

This reading of Wilde's aesthetic program requires us to second Linda Dowlings' view that the years between 1870 and 1914 are to become the "age of transition" into modernism and not a "last exotic pendant of a hopelessly frumpish Victorianism"

(Fletcher and Bradbury 8). As aforementioned, hegemonic England was undergoing an epoch of failure, instability, transition, and "an historical personal sense of decline and fall," especially as cherished Victorian ideals proved increasingly poor guides to dealing with new historical forces (Fletcher and Bradbury 8). The country's reputation as a source of civilization was suffering. As seen through the eyes of the French, for example, industrialism becomes synonymous with decadence, and London receives the epitaph of "Monster City" (Fletcher and Bradbury 10). Although some still considered the British as an advanced society, with its factory system, others had begun to equate progress to regression, and to note the increasingly more sinister idea that provincial culture was declining as the "arms and legs" of the field moved to the cities. The English countryside, long identified as its source of human capital, was beginning to be put in the service of decadent city pleasures. Other factors leading to the decrying of Britain's imminent socio-economic decline include the rise of the German industrial and military

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hegemony, as well as "the continuous economic and agricultural depression from the

1870's, the persistent critique of mechanical progress and the waning of Victorian cultural confidence" (Fletcher and Bradbury 11). Distrust, decay, decline … Decadence?

From this perspective, Wilde's art in Dorian and his own self-fashioning in De

Profundis take on interesting faces as social criticism, as attempts to warn the class to which his own works and his own performances appeals (the aesthetic classes, aristocrats of birth and education alike) of the utter bankruptcy of their own interests, in terms they might be able to hear. Factors such as the fear of racial degeneration, Imperialism and the cult of adventure, "barbarous Gallicism," and modern notions following from Darwin,

Maltheus and eugenics all seemed to parallel the fall of a class structure within a country that did not allow for such a class to breed—in the physical as well as moral sense

(Fletcher and Bradbury 11). Such issues, however, seemed far away from the entitled upper classes not directly engaged with politics, and purporting their own importance as arbiters of taste and social morality.

From this perspective, what would be a better warning? Wouldn't the depiction of such a dying class, the dandy prince as last of his kind, and the ephemeral denunciation of his author, be the turning points for a re-evolution, a re-evaluation, a re-direction of a whole class' sense of time toward the modern, away from the past and into the present?

After all, Dorian himself is "trained" into his role on the estates of the great, on their faux natural meadows, and in their artificial experiences of exotic places, but then turns to the streets and reveals himself a monster.

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According to Ian Fletcher and Malcom Bradburry, Decadence becomes such a transitory vehicle for social criticism, and for that reason, "Decadence is a moment of a distinctive kind meriting a quite distinctive attention" (Fletcher and Bradburry 11). As they read Decadence, it can rightly claim a more resistant and social critical position within existing society than modernism takes because Decadence can easily be used as a critique from within—rather than the experimentative deviation that modernism created.

I would add that it was Wilde who realized that supposedly Decadent literature— literature in the Decadent style appealing to the Oxbridge elite—despite its superficial affinities with the Romanticism to which modernism also refers, has the power to emerge also as a literature of the struggle of the individual against an uncaring social world.

Yet that struggle must move past Caliban's dilemma, as I used it to start this chapter, because it 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.

That is, one might say that Wilde has, in Dorian, constructed a mirror gauged at a particular audience, whose identities are in dire need of reconstruction. And in his own performance at the moment of his downfall, Dorian again attempts—largely unsuccessfully—to show how this society has begun laying waste to its own human capital. With the moment when Dorian's own disgust is reflected back upon his perfect portrait, is paralleled the instant in which Dorian starts seeing what he could not priorly see about the decadence of the society he represents.

This conception of Decadence as having a transitory power to enact social criticism is also noted by Jeff Kline, who echoes Charles Bernheimer's notions of

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Decadence, in his preface to Bernheimer's volume (2002), when he describes Decadence as pathological

disorganizing and fragmenting individuals and societies, or [. . .] decadence

involving a subjectivity in which the self recognizes its own unknowability, [. . .]

as an aesthetic of superficiality and artifice, but most intriguingly as a stimulant

that bends thought out of shape, deforming traditional conceptual molds. (Kline

xv)

In this fashion, our authors use decadent language to shift from the critical notions of the times, to set themselves apart in order to produce a specific type of criticism that is modern, productive and thus severing the "mimetic bond of language to nature privileging reflexivity and intertextuality" in order to create a diction of evolution and progress and therefore "ending in the thrill of collapsing differences" by changing the gaze of their readers (Kline xvi).

The need for reconstruction of the class-bound subjectivity of his England, and for its transition into a new era, is clearly foretold by Wilde. He thus issues a normative warning through Lord Henry when he talks about habits and how hard they can be to break. However difficult this may be, it is imperative that such habits be broken, regardless of regret, or there will be more Dorians amidst those who should contribute to making a future rather than celebrating a past no longer adequate to current challenges.

Lord Henry reveals that "one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits," and that the

"curious mixture of bad paintings and good intentions that always entitles a man to be a representative British artist" may be in need of restructuring (Wilde, Dorian Gray 213-

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214). In this articulate declaration, Lord Henry alludes to the end of the Victorian age, the end of nobility, which seems to be missed even though it is the "worst [of] habits"

(215). Lord Henry then tells Dorian how representative he is of his class when he exclaims, "You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found," Dorian the man who has "never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 217). So this

"useless" last Dandy prince is what the age is searching for and finding. Once found, this useless Prince is assimilated and ultimately brought to his doom unless social change occurs, since he is depicted as subject to the external forces around him, and as such is dominated by his environment. The real and fake Dorian become undistinguished, as

Harry's bewilderment is expressed with his witty remark, "before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea or the one in the picture?" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 29). To which

Hallward responds, "before either" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 29). That is, to the state of grace before Dorian as blank slate was written on by all these untenable demands and formed in the image of a society that cares nothing of him nor of what he might otherwise have become.

As Dorian tries "a new life," he realizes that his attempts to return to his former status of glory are irretrievable. He is worried, for in "the living death of his own soul," he is troubled and trembles at the thought that only "vanity, curiosity, and hypocrisy" had made him become who he is at the end of the novel (Wilde, Dorian Gray 222). It is not enough to "look" innocent; Dorian now knows that he wishes to regain his former innocence—since innocence is equated with innocence which is in turn equated with

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bliss. He realizes that he has to "kill" his own conscience to go on, that we live in an epoch where the "terror of society, which is the basis of morals, [and] the terror of God, which is the secret of religion…are the two things that govern us" (Wilde, Dorian Gray

17). These are, after all, a thumbnail of Victorian England.

But the art that Dorian espouses, passive and decorative, is not the art intended by

The Picture of Dorian Gray. According to Wilde, words "have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute" (Dorian Gray 19).186 Lord Henry even remembers how "a book that he had read when he was sixteen, a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before," had made him feel as though he had been "shot" by an arrow

(Wilde, Dorian Gray 19).187 The Picture of Dorian Gray is therefore intended to be such an arrow, a revolutionary book, one that, although it is perceived as poison by some, manages to distort the conventions of Victorian reality enough to warn of what will become of those who, like Dorian, do not embrace change and who refuse to look into

Caliban's mirror. This message is also foreshadowed in the novel's preface, situating the novel as part of a new literary revolution. Koonce notes:

If we consider the nineteenth-century realist novel as a metaphor for England, we

consider that it embodies patriarchy, traditional gender roles, nationalism and any

other quality which represents "Englishness" [. . .] Victorian realist novels,

therefore, often confirmed these values by attempting to describe the enterprise of

186 Words seems to be the only "real" thing for Wilde. So if words are real, words shake our reality, impress upon the self, reveal and change the individuals, then what strength must a book hold within its collection of words. 187 That book, as previously noted, was Huysmans' book, A rebours, which was then copied into D'Annunzio's book, Il piacere, and was finally revealed by Wilde as a revolutionary tool. 212

"ordinary" life by featuring mainly middle—and working—class characters and

leading them through some process of moral development. (Koonce 12)188

She will also note that realist novels also set out to "construct from instability a stable and shared sense of self, society and . . . nation" (13). In this regard, Wilde's novel can well emerge as an attempt to write a realist novel for his generation and for his conventional audience.

In this sense, then, Wilde's novel can straightforwardly be perceived as a "threat to the English reading habits," an ominous world that presents a "confused moral world" that juxtaposes "respectable" literature with sensational, "immoral" French-style literature that becomes a "foreign intrusion into the British psyche" (Koonce 13). This language of

"invasion and revolution" is alluded to by Dorian, when he tells Lord Henry that a French book poisoned him once, and he has Lord Henry promise that he "will never lend that book to anyone," as "it does harm" (Wilde, Dorian Gray 218). This allusion to the poisonous nature of books has been seen in Huysmans' and D'Annunzio's novels, as well.189 In this reference, then, Koonce taps into the hysteria that Wilde's novel awoke in its contemporaneous critics by stating that "the type of cultural revolution that sensation

188 Koonce continues by associating Victorian England with "Confidence, direction, progress and identity, and instability, the threat of revolution, the discrediting of old traditions, the use of God as a way to sanction philanthropic and paternalistic means, and the empowerment of women and the working classes (Thomas). Victorian realist novels, therefore, often confirmed these values by attempting to describe the enterprise of "ordinary" life by featuring mainly middle—and working—class characters and leading them through some process of moral development. In The Realistic Imagination, George Levine mentions "the astonishing effort both of moral energy and art combined in Victorian realism." (4) Any attacks on the novel (vis à vis sensation, or any other literature which does not adhere to realistic literary values), therefore, become transmuted into attacks on the middle-class Establishment and its values" (Koonce 12). 189 More recently, another poisonous book reappears in Umberto Eco's novel, Nel Nome della Rosa, where the ink is poison and by the act of reading, when the pages are touched, the lethal poison is absorbed through the skin, killing the reader. 213

literature threatened was one which deconstructs rigid boundaries in both the British nation and the Victorian household—boundaries between high and low, young and old, men and women, etc." (19).190

Wilde's behaviors as well as his novel become such a challenge to the British status quo, and so it is no wonder that it became a sensational case, a performance of sensational self-fashioning that challenges precisely this hegemony.191 In an ironic twist of reality interposing fiction, Wilde's poisonous book was read aloud as evidence of his guilt in the Queenbury trial. The Picture of Dorian Gray thereby becomes one of the immoral books that, in the words of Lord Henry, show the world in its shame.192 Dorian knows that he has done wrong; he had tried to fit into the late Victorian mold—to wear

190 Koonce talks about a poem that appeared in Punch on April 25 (see footnote 36 for poem), 1863, which speaks precisely to the types of fears experienced by policemen mid century. "The danger of upside down" is that once the masses become "educated classes," there will be less separation between them and their higher class counterparts. Every traditional system, therefore, runs he risk of being turned "upside down," every privileged person runs the risk of being confused with "the lower orders," etc. (Koonce 162)

191 THE DANGER OF UPSIDE DOWN

Who are the Lower orders? The uneducated masses, The unintellectual classes? They are the Lower orders.

Who'll be the Higher Orders? The newely enfranchised masses, Preponderating classes; They'll be the Higher orders.

Who'll be the Lower Orders? Educate the masses, Or, educated classes, You'll be the Lower order. (181)

192 Knowing this, the resonance of Henry's words, echo loud and clear, as he testifies to Dorian that "the books that the world calls immoral are books that show its world in its shame," and show the danger of 'upside down' (Wilde 218)—burrowing yet another translation of Huysmans' title. 214

the "mask of goodness" and to try the "denial of the self"—and now recognizes it as

"hypocrisy," as the shame of his times, given what he has learned about what that society masks (Wilde, Dorian Gray 222).

Koonce believes that Wilde's "fictions prefigure modernity and challenge traditional definitions of British respectability and acceptable behavior patterns," in that they represent a "revulsion from realism," a "revolution in artistic norms," or as The

Daily Chronicle of April 6, 1895 suggests, represents a way of being "fetid," "putrid," full of "shame and disgrace," forms of expression in an invasive way.193 According to

Koonce The Picture of Dorian Gray, in all its surface themes and facets, actually serves as a legal text which itself challenges the "social text" of the nation of England, and it is its own passages, which in turn "resist the hegemony of the English nation"—just by virtue of being a part of the trial transcript which embodies Wilde's resistance to social norms for personal behavior–become this social critique (Koonce 190).194

I would extend this statement still further by returning to another critic of poisonous books. In reference to the relationship of aestheticism and ethics in

Decadence, Pierre Klossowski notices the paradox inherent in the relationship between

193 This quote was reprinted on pg 76 of Johnathan Goodman's The Oscar Wilde File, which is a compilation of complete newspaper articles surrounding the three trials as well as Wilde's imprisonment, "The trial of this fetid fashion has penetrated into our theaters, where it is too much the mode to burrow from the French stage the motives and combinations which season the drama to the jaded appetites of the Parisians. The shame and disgrace of it have invaded art, and we are asked to admire nowadays specimens from the impressionist galleries and fleshy galleries which are of true serious art merely the burlesque and the moquery. It has passed, with heavy damage to good taste and rightful amusement, into the domain of fiction, so that we see novel after novel aspire to a monument's popularity mainly on the grounds of prurient sexuality or of ignorant disbelief" (Goodman 76). 194 Koonce also notes that alteration will occur "when lords and ladies can be treated the same as seemingly less worthy counterparts," and that this will occur as an "extension of education;" but it will not be seen as a "good thing for those individuals [who] are accustomed to retaining their right to be in control (Koonce 162)—this theme echoes the poem The Danger of Upside-Down. 215

the imitative nature of art, the stereotypes of a nation and the reality of such a critique. In his book Decadence of the Nude (2002), Klossowski argues that art declares its "double function from the viewpoint of imitation relative to what it aims to reproduce, be it the unspeakable or the unshowable, according to social, religious, or moral censorship," and does so by "borrowing the institutional and thus conventional stereotypes of the speakable and the showable to invert them for its own imitative ends" (128). As such,

Wilde's novel seems to embrace conventional literary stereotypes, to then purge them.195

In this reading, then, The Picture of Dorian Gray becomes an "overt physical commentary on the ways that external surfaces can be mere poses or 'fictional roles' that characters and/or real people regularly follow in their daily lives," and that Dorian Gray's character "functions as a mere benevolent 'surface' who passes his pose off both figurative and literal 'readers' without the voyeuristic public suspecting the malignant

'realities' and values the character actually represents underneath" (Koonce 46). As such, the performative nature of Wilde's novel obtains a significant role in critiquing its society—as all avant-garde art precludes a re-examination of the society from within that society, and becomes what Klossowski perceives as the bias of the double game of the simulacrum, where the piece of art, in this case The Picture of Dorian Gray, becomes

"institutionalized according to the continuously variable social reasons," as it creates apprehension, negative—or positive—receptivity, and in the end "serves to alert the

195 Klossowski also states "the shortest path from one point to another is literarily the diagonal or the asymptotic" (Klossowski 165). As such Wilde's personal defense at the trial—his defense against his own literary rhetoric—becomes an attempt to alter the established traditions by irrevocably reverse when gentlemen can now be treated—at least by the police—just like their lower class men. 216

slightest change in an experience of a perception or a receptivity that is phantasmagoric, monstrous or perverse" satire to its own reality (129).196

Accordingly, this novel becomes dangerous as it posits Dorian as a stereotypical upper classman. Klossowski argues that "stereotypes are nothing more than the remains of phantasmagoric simulacra which have fallen into current usage, left to a common interpretation: but as degraded simulacra, they reflect an individual or collective reaction to a phantasm emptied of its content" (129). It is therefore this dangerous purveyance of

"alternative social scripts for human behavior" presented within Wilde's 'dangerous' novel, these emptied vessels—phantasms of what used to be—that are now just stereotypical posits exemplifying the need for changing social structure. Koonce deduces that one of Wilde's "playing strategies," at the trial, was to continually deny or deflect commentary by Lord Queensbury's lawyer, refusing to accept the "definitions or terms" with which he is presented (Koonce 199). I would add that this strategy would have presented itself to Wilde as a strategy because in that trial, he was specifically rejecting the upper-class or social-normative optic on which these questions were based. He did so, however, not to prove himself as somehow above or victimized by these norms, but rather to open Dorian's closet and show how extremely debilitating these norms were.

196 Wilde insistence through Lord Henry's words that crime to lower classes is equated to art for the upper classes, and considered "simply a way of procuring extraordinary sensations" (Dorian 213), this notion of the sensational and art, the notion that uncertainty charms (206), that the same disillusionment in the self that Dorian faces and fears throughout the novel (205), is equated with the realization that "women are not always allowed a choice" (199), that men and women can sin in automation (190), and that escaping from oneself (188), and the Victorian tenets is the only way out—"Moderation is a fatal thing [. . .] Enough is as bad as a metal [. . .] More than enough as good as a feast" (180)—implicate the novel as a poisonous text.

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Rather than becoming conventionally forced to fit an unfitting mold, then, Wilde chooses to embrace individualism (and art based upon it). Mr. Eskine, in The Picture of

Dorian Gray, calls this the Paradox of truth, where "to test reality we must see it on the tight rope…[and only] when the verities become acrobats, we can judge them" (39).

Jonathon Dollimore197 describes Wilde's individualism as the desire for a radical personal freedom (10). This freedom, in turn, is crucial as it opposes the quiet bourgeois subject, by exalting a desire for a society itself to be radically different (Dollimore 10). I would in this citation stress the point that this desire for a society itself to be radically different is present, not just in its judgment of Wilde as an individual, but in its whole constitution.

Wilde's choice to challenge the British legal system is in itself proof of how much he wished to provide a script for future generations. In Koonce's final statements, Wilde's chosen participation in the trial ultimately forces conversations about homosexuality

(Koonce 209). Even while posing as heterosexual, Wilde can be accused of posing as a sodomite, which in turn reinscribes the story of his participation, which becomes, in itself, revolutionary (Koonce 209).198 In the trials, Wilde's "sodomitical" novel is also associated with J.-K. Huysmans' novel—referred to as Dorian's poisonous text—again in a convulsive juxtaposition of real and artifice from within and without the novels—art to

197 Dollimore is author of Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. 198 Within the transcript of the trial, the first mentions of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are in the context of Lord Queensbury's formal plea regarding the reasons he called Wilde a "sodomite." In this charge, Wilde's novel is mentioned thus: "that in the month of July 1890, Mr. Wilde did write and publish, and cause and procure to be printed and published, with his name upon the title page, a certain immoral and obscene work in the form of the narrative entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray, which work was intended by Mr. Wilde, and was understood by readers there of, to describe the relations, intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits, tastes and practices." (30). 218

become life, to become art again.199 Let's not forget also the fact that Wilde is himself an

Irishman. Although posing as an English gentleman, and although at the trial he is being attacked for his French-style writing, his Irishness must have somewhat contributed to some hatred and unfair guidance in the trial; as the infallible logic presents itself (Koonce

214).200 More importantly, he understood a different role for art in society, as the Irish were showing: national myths make national subjects, and the myth that art need be

Decadent revealed a dangerous limitation to English character at the time, reflection of an unwillingness to engage reality.

I also read Wilde's novel as ultimately demonstrating the inability of the establishment to control behaviors in ways that its laws and legal codes support that it can

(Koonce 222). Along with Koonce, I support the idea that Wilde intentionally made an example of himself in the trials in order to create a legal precedent. If Dorian is exempt from laws and legal codes, he is exempt from societal inclusion. If he is excluded from society, he becomes extinct. Before extinction though, Dorian denounces his crimes so that his exemption be known—his knife at his own heart. And here a biographical parallel need be cited to make a somewhat broader conclusion than Koonce did about the relation of art to the social-political life of England, not just to individuals excluded from it.

199 In this upside down world, were ironically prophetic in foreseeing what verities and tight-rope revolutions his own life will take, Wilde might have never been able to predict where his own novel and protagonist would be used against him as evidence of his own transgression. 200 The theme of Dorian being poisoned by a yellow book, in turn becomes a poisonous text of his own, Koonce agrees that "Wilde as a poisonous text can taint the courtroom narrative, which can then seep out into the public at large as the purveyor of additional poisonous values," and as such Wilde can be come a viral epidemic of immorality for Victorian England—hence the fear of Wilde's thematics as a circle within itself. (Koonce 214). 219

Before Wilde dies in exile—only two years after his release from prison—he writes De Profundis denouncing English respectability. "Oscar the Fad Boy in

Lippicott," frightening English sensibility, becomes in this text Wilde the Irish scapegoat, who could foresee a transition and tried to ease such transition by writing about it.201 But in the more comprehensive vision that I am offering here, Wilde remains a profound believer in the power of art to change society, of words to hold a mirror up to society.

His appeal to his traditional reading public may well have failed in Dorian Gray, if they had realized how devastating the mirror Wilde was holding up to them was—as he showed them a creature, a blank slate, completely created by the worst among them, embodying the worst of their potential. It is possible, in this reading, to see Dorian's death less as a martyrdom than as an act of atonement for sins.

In similar terms, Wilde's own identity as Christ-martyr in his trial has the two sides of this figure in it, as well. He is not only the martyr of an unfeeling social order

(be that martyrdom caused by ethnicity, sexual proclivity, or Decadent hubris and immorality). De Profundis may also be read as an individual coming out of the night of the soul, out of his Gethsemane, and finding the courage to say more directly what he had said only more obliquely to that point: that the purportedly dominant orders of English society were well along the way to selling out their most cherished values, that their attention to art, morality, and social justice was at best a pose—that Lord Henry was

201 "The Queensbury courtroom proceedings—spread via the newspapers, invite the lower-class readership to re-read standard middle-class codes for conduct and gentlemanly behavior promoted by the Establishment; they allow the lower-classes to re-imagine representations of life and art, they've been 'invited' to resist and/or question social norms" (Koonce 223). 220

more common among them than they might have liked. The irony would not have been lost on Wilde that the Marques known for the rules of fair boxing was the agent of his personal destruction—an abuse of power in the name of class show, the likes of which had few public documents to that time. In De Profundis, then, Wilde not only defends his own personal decisions, but also reads into public record the other side of the story—

Caliban (a Caliban designated monster by English society, no longer natural child of the wild [Irish] winds) looking into the mirror and showing that image, for the first time, as created in a distorting glass made in the past, and an image to be rejected, if a future is to be made.

A future that brings with it what Calinescu describes to be a literature that is

"showing rather than conceiling" (302-303), and even goes beyond such modernists notions and towards a "new essential [. . .] use of narrative perspectivism" (303). A literature that treats "on an equal footing of fact and fiction; truth and lying; original and imitation as a means to emphasize undecidability; self-referentiality and 'metafiction' as a means to dramatize inescapable circularity. . ." (303-304). A new Proustian self- referentiality that Calinescu labels as postmodernist.

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Conclusion:

Decadence as a Social Critique

"For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art." —Paul Valéry, Le Conquete de l'ubiquite (Pièces sur L'Art, 1931)

As I have maintained throughout the previous chapters, decadence is not merely a stylistic exercise, it is a tool for social criticism of states and classes under stress. The three texts studied here reflect the anguish of a ruling class called into question by history.

Although "the state of decadence" encountered in these three novels seems to many literary critics to converge aesthetically with what has been called modernism, that is, with "a form of psychological, moral or aesthetic self-deception, as a result of which weakness becomes a task" (Calinescu 183), I have stressed here how these decadent authors chose heroes who embody such weakness. Through these choices, the authors distance themselves from any self deception attributable to art, while their heroes choose art in order to shield themselves from what they consider an increasingly untenable world. The psyche of the three heroes in the three novels studied are thus the direct result of the incompatibility of the "old social forms (institutions, laws, etc) supported by the ruling class, with the further development of the means of production" (Calinescu 197).

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And the authors who created them did so to acknowledge the stresses felt by those who were, by birth or avocation, drawn to the old older just as it was proving itself doomed.

I have situated the three novels treated above at the center of this conflict between old conventions and developing new paradigms. At this historical point of decision, as I have shown, the old order is represented as espousing an art-ideal, an art that is revealed as easily corrupted into artifice. Concomitantly, the would-be artists producing that art or devoting their lives to it are represented purposely avoiding commitments to a future.

To be sure, the three novels that are considered the bibles of decadence are each very different, even as they address very specific moment in their nations' histories. As the old order has to five way, the art-ideal that their characters espoused is revealed as easily corrupted into artifice, and when the supposed artists—creators of lives as artificial as paintings—"uses his art" to avoid commitment to an uncertain future. The critique of his position is clear: decadence is not a style so much as a state of these characters' souls and psyches, when they use exotic, lush, sensuous art to deaden their awareness of everyday life. In Marxist terms, the sort of historical abstractness that they see through art shows a lack of consciousness for their class, a lack which will inevitably bring society to a moment of crisis, out of which a new order will necessarily emerge.

In their respective novels, as we have seen, Huysmans, D'Annunzio and Wilde draw pictures of heroes suffering from the suspicion that such a revolution might indeed be imminent. They choose to look away from that reality, deadening their senses through art, and thus they come to suffer from one particular form of the 'weakness' before mentioned. Youthful promise degrades into lonely, pathetic, sickly, pseudo-aristocratic

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heroes who claim social positions that they were not born into, on the basis of the supposed superiority of their tastes and sensibilities—they exist on the margins of the true aristocrats of birth, fall in love with the golden images purveyed by that gilded class, turn away from real life, and then die by their own hands and their own commitment to artifice.

As the reader follows these supposed "heroes" into moments of possible redemption which would require them to change, to turn away from the artificial aestheticism and false class values they have espoused, one is led to regard them with merciless negativity. Each hero is revealed as part of a specific culture of negation or, as in Huysmans' novel, of countercultural values. Gradually, the reader becomes distanced, horrified by the crimes committed by Dorian Gray, or grows apathetic towards des

Esseintes' continuous attempts to flee reality, or scorns Andrea's pathetic and failing efforts to be the world's best lover. Such superficial beauty, the reader sees, covers over an evil that will destroy rather than educate the individuals who mistake it for a higher reality. Each "hero" is nothing more than a pretender: an illegitimate child of the ruling classes, brought into its fold by accident of birth or education, without really belonging, who takes up a supposedly higher class position and its state of soul, only to be destroyed by that choice.

The three authors thus purposely create a space between the reader and the hero in each of the novels—the same distance that the author wanted to highlight between the essence of art and the decadence of the ruling classes that claim control over it, and hide

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behind it.202 This is, indeed, the space that decadent authors claimed for themselves—the politics of representation that they engage in, showing that they understand the values and tastes of those ruling classes, yet ultimately proclaiming their bankruptcy.

In the untranslated second half of her Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), which makes the case of how decadent literature of the fin de siècle may be considered social-critical, Kristeva has nonetheless ignored another facet of the social critique implicit in the projects of these decadent writers. As is the case with many other critics, she still views decadence as an art form—a mere stylistic exercise of gratuitous preciosity that can nonetheless claim revolutionary potential for itself. Yet the authors treated in the present study lead their readers into a very dark era at the end of the century, and question

"progress" in much the way modernists like Joyce do, yet present a different solution than he does, embracing the past rather than throwing it off.

This trend of critiquing modernization begins with the Romanticism, as noted by

Italian scholars of decadentismo: "romanticism is the modern disease and the starting point of all decadence" (Calinescu 214).203 These scholars also notice that Italian decadentismo becomes a "near-perfect synonym for our modernism," which is guided by

"a negative phenomenon that stemmed as a spiritualistic reaction within the context of the last progressive manifestation of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought, positivism"

202 In these novels, the decadent aristocrats are a decaying class trying to hold tight to their dying status through the appropriation of art. The decadent authors were in turn trying to expose the dying aristocrats but needed their support one last time before the class went extinct. 203 Calinescu reserves a portion of his book to collect Italian scholars' views of Il decadentismo, and among others quotes Riccardo Scrivano (1963), Vittorio Pica (1898), Francesco Flora (1921), Benedetto Croce (1923), and Walter Binni (1936) (Calinescu 211-221). 225

(214).204 I would emphasize here that the issue I have been pointing to is that failure of the bourgeoisie to innovate—the three heroes of these novels lie closer to the bourgeoisie by birth than they do to the aristocracy, but they choose to resist the future by looking backward to the superficial beauty of a class not their own.

The common ground found among the three novelists is that they all disassociate themselves from their characters creating distance and alienation from this weak, dying aristocratic class, even as they recognize how some readers might sympathize with them.

The three authors under study are thus not aesthetes per se. On the contrary, being onlookers of a world that is becoming antiquated under their very eyes, each has a political agenda hiding behind their aesthetic rhetoric—which they use to "aesthetize" the politics of their times in order to claim it for a new social order. The social order the characters use, a new aristocracy of breeding and taste, however, leads to their demise; it is not capable of living outside of its aquarium, hothouse, or locked rooms.

All three authors know that they write in an era of transformation. They, members of an educated elite, attack the hereditary upper classes and their new generation of hangers-on by accentuating their decadent ways and show how unprogressive this class actually has become, which the authors show to push for a move out of the Victorian era into a modern way of thinking. It is critical to realize that all three authors belong to the bourgeoisie—or rather, and more importantly, they are university educated—which makes them elites, but not traditional aristocracy.

204 Decadentismo, according to Calinescu, evolved as reaction to Croce's condemnation of modern decadence in literature and the arts. Calinescu fails to see any critical depth in Decadentismo and Romanticism. 226

Moreover, all three are placed outside of the traditional national aristocracies, with

Huysmans and Wilde being doubly othered as Belgian outsider to French culture and

Irish and gay outsider to the decadent manliness of Victorian England.

However, there is an implicit longing for a true aristocracy in the novels; the three authors recognize the seductions of the order that is passing. Thus each of the heroes is almost a member of the group. Even though they may seem to be of aristocratic blood, yet that blood is not as good as it ought to be—it is illegitimate or minor or questionable.

That leaves space for aristocratic readers, whose patronage our authors needed, to look at the characters without being offended—they must fail because, after all, they are not true nobility—while bourgeois readers may look at their foibles just to conclude that "all aristocrats are alike."

These novels thus are three responses to the fin de siècle, to modernization, and it is imperative to note that all three models of decadence are marked as effeminate,205 outmoded/aristocratic, and subject to the impositions of the old high culture. This effeminization becomes a re-writing of the fundamental tropes of European patriarchy: a linguistic and poetic choice of the authors to set themselves apart from the day's bourgeoisie.

In this light, the authors' choice of decadent prose seems peripheral to their political agenda; they have simply adopted a socially visible tool to stress the abjection in need of transformation—a point also brought forth in Kristeva's The Politics of

205 Much contemporary gender studies criticism—Spackman at Berkley and Cristina Mazzini's St. Hysteria—revolves around this effeminization of literature that arises in the 1890s. 227

Language. The marginalization of the heroes within the three novels causes us to posit the authors' need to fragment, to dialogize—in Bakhtin's own terminology, a different speech-ness—the inheritance of superficial beauty which will not make a future. In consequence, the three authors make sure that their reading is occurring at multiple levels, with multiple meaning and with multiple intertextual views—à la Barthes.206

Mikhail Bakhtin's (1895-1975) views about the dialogics of the novel started as a linguistic construct, or philosophy, that allowed for his belief in the multi-layered nature of language as a commitment to change, which he called heteroglossia. Roland Barthes

(1915-1980), on the other hand, suspected that (in)scription—one's inscribing of one's reality—can become a real construct which is distinguished from style, language, and writing; he calls this écriture. Despite their respective faith in or skepticism about the power of language to transform, however, both Bakhtin and Barthes believed in the power of this multi-layered construct to upset the status quo, through words. In my opinion, these theorists are articulating the vision that was set earlier into place by the three decadent authors treated here.

The three authors in this project thus construct this mosaic of meanings aimed at upsetting the social order, to memorialize it before it collapses under its own weight, while showing through the fate of a single character what will happen to any group who follows those individuals into their false religions of aestheticism. This inscription is also reinforced at its source by the eruptions of the French language in the non-French

206 When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. 228

authors—Wilde and D'Annunzio both have plays written in French, the language of international aristocracy and the art world around the fin de siècle. Clearly, Huysmans' prose is innovative, to say the least, and could be described as a new type of French speech-ness of the times, and in his own words, compared to that of Ovid and Virgil that was

La langue verbeuse, les métaphors redontantes, les digressions amphigourique [. .

.] la jactance de ses apostrophes, le flux de ses rengaines patriotiques, l'emphase

de ses harangues, la pesante masse de son style, charnu, nourri [. . .] une

constipation incroyable et indue. (Huysmans 115-116)

His prose is fluctuating, patriotic, and constricting, but also precise and powerful in its universal translation and use of "all" languages, when transformed by Petronius into "un style d'une verdeur étrange, d'une couleur precise, dans un style puissant à tous les dialects, empruntant des expressions à toutes les langues" (Huysmans 117). Yet at the same time, that language of metaphors has lost its reference to anything outside his hero's aquarium, beautiful and deadly alike.

Recognizing the danger in the beauty carried forward in this supreme achievement in the French language, it is no wonder that D'Annunzio and Wilde follow

Huysmans and each write a play in French—and ironically each have the same actress,

Ida Rubinstein, play the lead part when they are first staged. Wilde writes his Salomé

(1893) in French, and D'Annunzio follows, a decade later, with his Le martyre de St.

Sebastien (1903), using the French language as the poetic choice and entrée into this world, as the language of decadence is conjured up to rewrite the language of Christianity

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around the display of the feminine. Baldick emphasizes this tie between the feminine and nature by quoting Léon Bloy, in his introduction to the translated version of A rebours.207

Thus, Huysmans', D'Annunzio's, and Wilde's adoption of similar syntax and prose was their calculated choice, not chance, and French was the best fitting language to match, but also mask, the social critique of a beauty which has become deadly, like the femmes fatales of their plays. This language, combined with their characters who are

"isolated; lost and bruised and ill-fitted," and with the fact that each author was also an outsider of some kind, a marginalized other, in itself becomes evidence of the three authors' search for a system that shakes existing reality, with the hope of somehow opening a new political reality beyond the world that generated these fatal creatures.

Whether this be through nationalism, socialism, individualism, libertarianism or even fascism seems irrelevant, as long as it is new, and all three authors have been implicated publicly in one or more of these social-political disasters.208 What nonetheless remains interesting is that their respective commitments to decadence serves as a historical-social critique, shown through the eyes of people who can not get into the old system, outlined by authors who are perhaps in the same situation. Each thus shows the reasons why the old order will break down—because these people are wasted by it, misled, abused, and ultimately doomed by a logic no longer up to the challenges of the era.

207 Baldick notes that Huysmans' characters "were often isolated; lost and bruised and ill-fitted to their lives," he then quotes Bloy, saying that Huysmans is "continually dragging mother image by the hair or feet down the worm eaten staircase of syntax" (Introduction to Against the Grain, xxi – xxii). Spackman recalls Lombroso's and Anatole Baju's notice of this "more feminine, more divine" aspect of the decadent speech— ness and calls it degenderation (Preface to Decadent genealogies viii). 208 Mary Ann Frese Witt calls this type of poetic the aesthetics of fascism in her book, The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001). 230

In fact, as previously noted, at least two of these authors are quite literally "ill- fitted": Huysmans' father is Belgian, and Wilde is Irish, living and writing in England— outsiders, so to speak—while D'Annunzio is simply a member of the wrong class who hopes to rise to power. Their characters also are outsiders—as previously noted, half- breeds—, and they fail, thus showing us the limits of a hegemonic national narrative that requires pluralization, one that doesn't work if the assumption is that outsiders want to be assimilated, which has been the norm for this system.

We must not overlook that the key to overcoming this outsider-ness lies within the texts themselves, when they show us the decisions that should not have been made.

As I have shown, Dorian and des Esseintes both have some problems that make them not quite one of us, from the point of view of the true aristocracy—they probably are related to aristocratic families and try to act like true aristocrats, but there's a feeling of incomplete heritage in the lineage and behavior of each. The three novels are thus presented to the reader as an almost-insider's subtle critique of the upper classes—which is why critics may be willfully missing the nuances that the authors have built into them.

Where each one differs from the others is how the authors evaluate what that cultural elite and its aristocratic supporters have to offer.

Wilde believed that it was possible to restore a natural order of common well- being that accommodates aestheticism and still affirm individuality rather than a blanket class position.209 Therefore, Wilde has to draw a character who is the victim of a

209 In an essay on Socialism, Wilde states that, to instill order within our social context, we need to "aim to try and reconstruct society"—only in so doing can we lead through Socialism to Individualism: "Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and 231

corrupted member of the upper class. Lord Henry does not quite situate aestheticism up to what Wilde thinks might be its potential, as he blames Dorian for being all sensitivity and no thinking.210 Dorian thus becomes just like the form of art that he epitomizes—his portrait—and therefore both must die. Critically, this is what Lord Henry does not want to allow (a position which is probably disingenuous, to be sure—the reader, after all, needs to see him as questionable, not a good representative of aristocracy). Wilde's message is clear: Art has to engage in the here and now, and art can remain valuable because it can re-inscribe and even reinvent one's identity within the space of culture.

Therefore, there are artists, and there are aristocrats who understand that art needs to provoke, that art needs to make all the dorians feel the alienation, the solitude of a soul lost in the changing world of an industrial modern London.211 Art must be more than decoration.

In contrast, Huysmans had been malicious and spiteful about his poetics. His avant-garde Paris is from the first very different from Wilde's London. France, after all

substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material wellbeing of each member of the community" (Wilde The Soul of Man 4 & 6). 210 Wilde thus claims the opposite—by having Lord Henry say the opposite—that people should think more than they actually do. 211 In his essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde point out that "the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men," and "how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule, and destroyed throughout all France all those fine freedoms of expression that had made tradition new in beauty, and new modes one with antique form" (Wilde The Soul of Man 52-33). According to Wilde, " the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are" (Wilde The Soul of Man 53). Such statements show him grappling with Walter Pater's Renaissance and his commitment to a past rather than a future. 232

the beheadings and various revolutions, is in reality quite devoid of true aristocrats, and its art is not in the hands of an Oxford- and Cambridge-educated intellectual elite, but rather in the hands of the commercially successful bourgeoisie. Des Esseintes is a simulation of a typical post-1789 aristocrate; the only aristocrates—also called aristos— who survived the political troubles were buried out in the country with old books, as is shown in George Sand's Lys dans la Valée, or in the real case of George Sand herself.

The court nobility is dead or scattered. So by the late nineteenth century, the world that

Huysmans shows is already on the decline, or perhaps even dead. By the end of the century, the reader will only find in Paris the kind of strange, out-of-touch aristos that are all over in Proust's novels, some of whom are living in Paris on no money in their old houses, or eating up what is left of their sizeable inheritances in good rural land. This version of aestheticism is shared by Dorian's mentor, good old Gautier, albeit without the author revisiting its relevance.212 There is in Huysmans' novel no relation of his hero's beliefs to any contemporary form of ethics or aesthetics at all; they are all museum specimens from a lost time—un-mutating and fossilized—aristocratic dinosaurs failing to renew with the approaching modern era. 213 Huysmans' novel is thus not aimed at any

212 Decadence revised is seen as an implied expansion of self, whereas l'art pour l'art is seen as a mere mask of the self—an outer skin of that same self, without change and/or expansion. As such, if decadence were to be a mere aesthetic movement, it could never attain the levels the three authors claim it to have. 213 The tale of corrupting evils, whether in the form of blindly embracing or reflecting all that is new is not reserved exclusively for the Decadence. It appears in Balzac's Cousine Bette (1846), which tells the story of the fall of the house of Hulot, precipitated by the presence of the devilish peasant Lisbeth (or Bette); in Edgar Allan Poe's perfectly constructed formulaic tale of horror The Fall of the House of Usher (1840), which features themes of unidentifiable disease, madness, and resurrection; in Brian Stableford's science fiction story entitled The Growth of the House of Usher (1988), which adverts against the intimidating rise of a technology, situated within the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the approaching turn of the century, that can go completely wrong. In the same venue, we encounter Auguste Villiers' L'Eve Future (1886), and the rise of Science Fiction with Jules Verne and Barbey D'Aurevilly featuring tales of automated nightmares—all occurring at this same point in time. 233

aristocratic group in a strict sense. It cannot be, because there are not enough aristrocates left in France. What he is pointing to, however, is the class that has inherited the real estate and props, not the breeding, of the vanished aristocrats: the haute bourgeoisie, who have bought all the old trappings of the class. He is warning them to

"not go there," warning them against becoming a new form of old aristocracy. These new commercial millionaires have enough money to buy every left-over palace, but they do not recognize art, or even know what art represents. This thoughtless, mindless, outward form of continuity is precisely what Huysmans is trying to advise against. These aesthetes are trying to buy art that once belonged to senseless owners like des Esseintes— displaying this art without really understanding it, trapped in a glass showcase outside of reality. Here the author wants to make sure that the "new" haute bourgeoisie understands that they should not want their children to grow up being pathetic figures like Huysmans' hero, even if they need to be educated as he was.214

In order to counter the seduction of that Paris, therefore, Huysmans is purposely tasteless in his novel—or rather, over the top in creating high-flown images. He expects the reader to be able to read it as is, and become completely alienated by the effects of the pretty, but toxic, collector's clutter. In consequence, Huysmans apparently espouses the rhetoric of art for the sake of art in order to argue that art is not only art in its possible relevance. On the contrary, art engages, art kills, art monitors, art leads you toward or away from progress.

214 Virtually the same critique is found in Flaubert's L'Éducation Sentimentale (1869), which traces a young man falling into that same trap. 234

Unlike in France, there is in England an aristocracy still standing that continues to be a force— at least in the House of Lords in parliament—, so Wilde has to reform through them, to address real people. In France, the remnant of the aristocracy is still dwindling, and a growing majority of the people in power are behaving like a new aristocracy with few apparent concessions to democratic institutions.215 In Wilde's own words, the problem with English law is that it has become fixed, forcing the people into an un-natural state modeled on the past, thus resisting the natural impetus of evolution and change that will be necessary for the survival of the nation. In Wilde's own terms, evolution is "the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism [. . . w]here this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially arrested growth, or of disease, or of death" (Wilde, The Soul of Man 55). This evolution will not come if forced out—or excluded—by the class structure, but rather it needs to just evolve naturally, because individualism "does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation" (54). "Duty" as defined by old England will continue to maim a promising class of semi-outsiders like

Dorian (or Wilde himself) who have not been born to England's leadership, but who have been bred to it by education and culture.

215 In chapter 26 of his A World History, William McNeill shows this difference between England and France when he notes that "Until about 1870, the Industrial Revolution had its primary seat in great Britain [. . .] After 1789, the primary seat of the democratic revolution was in France, where the defects of the royal bureaucratic government and the critical temper of the public combined to provoke a long drawn-out, impassioned, and deliberate effort to remake traditional political institutions in accordance with reason and the (presumed) will of the people" (McNeill 417).

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In this era, Italy was a different matter, coming to the issue of modernization and social change from a different struggle, although also trying to cope with its own changing times. As we read in the chapter on D'Annunzio, Italy was dealing with massive internal reorganizations, from monarchic to republican ideas, from feudal to modern, from separate city-states to one massive liberal entity. In the Italy of the 1890s, there was in fact a lot of talk about regeneration in the social and political spheres, an interesting metaphor, considering the lexicon of decadence we have been dealing with here. The Unificazione movement that ended in 1861, called the Risorgimento, was supposed to bring forth a rejuvenated, secular religion (much like the one in Germany that ultimately and unfortunately generated the Nazi state, unfortunately) that would bring together a nation through the creation of a spiritual unity. Mark Antliff quotes

Gentile as he explains how Mazzini was attempting to create a nationalistic discourse through which he "envisioned an Italy regenerated and united through a political revolution based on faith in freedom and on the religion of the fatherland" (Antliff

155).216 This is the inevitable move that Walter Laqueur noted had occurred when the fin de siècle cultural ideologies went from hyper-aestheticism to hyper-patriotism and thus created the void that may be best described as the Derridian gap (Laqueur 10).217 As mentioned earlier, Croce also pointed at the void created by the lack of spiritual

216 Mazzini played an interesting role in the Italian Unification process. He always sided with patriots of oppressed nationalities. As he lived in a region of Italy—Liguria—also oppressed by French rule, he started creating many societies called "Giovine Polonia," "Giovine Germania," and "Giovine Italia" in an attempt to create a "Giovine Europa"—similar to our modern European community. His attempt failed, but his push for nationalism helped shape the impetus of unification. Source: "Società Mazziniana" . 217 The use of language to create an adverse—alienating—effect can be considered a Derridean gap. With his écriture, Derrida, performs a substantial dualism that splits the world of his writing into different poles.

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fulfillment in secular humanism, and thus, in his opinion, the rise of an age dominated by a tone of irrationality and debauchery (Laqueur 16). There was a tone of pessimism throughout this era and these books, and yet inventions, electricity, automation, tales of progress were some of the glimpses of the new twentieth century, which would bring with it a age of hope, inventions and innovations. The question was if the nations run by the old orders, or the new governments succeeding them, would be able to transmit that hope to its people and build a new future.

Perhaps this tone of hope originates in the fact that the 1890s had been such a global disaster, so that people welcomed the new century with optimism. The panic of

1893 in the United States, for example, brought fears of depression and crashing economies; the declined growth rate in Britain, like its failing industry, brought debates and famine; the French tales of scandalous corruption and of course the Dreyfus Affair became a theatrical pantomime of "new" politics; Italy's complete anarchical frenzy, with a weakened left in power, brought the country to a systematically critical condition, and was the final proof that order was missing; Germany faced an economic crisis in the

1890s; and finally, the Russian famine of 1892/3 helped foment the revolution that would bring down the Romanovs. These are but a few of the examples of the domino effect that rippled throughout Europe when our three authors were trying to depict their tales of corruption (Laqueur 18). The new century was to bring regeneration, and hope.

Ironically, and in spite of all omens, as Laqueur notes, "the idea that the future was open was a tremendous moral stimulus and all that despite ruinous floods and abnormal

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snowfall in the last week of December which stopped trains in Britain, and swept away buildings and bridges, and isolated villages" (19).

Swinburne—considered the grandfather of decadence, admirer of Baudelaire, and ally of the Pre-Raphaelites—wrote about this transitional time in a poem entitled "1901" that this was "an age too great for thought of ours to scan a wave upon the sleepless sea of time." Verlaine echoes this sentiment in the famous first lines of his poem, the yearning for a new beginning, and the end to the moral and economical decadence of the

1890s: "Je suis l'Empire a la fin de la decadence."218 He is confident that this transitional moment would lead to modernity—that of the Paris of 1900 hosting the world exhibition and showing off the epitome of modern technology: the Eiffel Tower, made of iron and metal. This was, after all, an era that would see Madame Curie's work on radium, the first showing of movies—the Lumièrie brothers—and the opening of the first permanent

218 Paul Verlaine : Langueur (1883)

Je suis l'Empire à la fin de la décadence, Qui regarde passer les grands Barbares blancs En composant des acrostiches indolents  D'un style d'or où la langueur du soleil danse.

L'ame seulette a mal au coeur d'un ennui dense, Là-bas on dit qu'il est de longs combats sanglants. O n'y pouvoir, étant si faible aux voeux si lents, O n'y vouloir fleurir un peu cette existence!

O n'y vouloir, ô n'y pouvoir mourir un peu! Ah! tout est bu ! Bathylle, as-tu fini de rire? Ah! tout est bu, tout est mangé ! Plus rien à dire!

Seul un poème un peu niais qu'on jette au feu, Seul un esclave un peu coureur qui vous negligé,  Seul un ennui d'on ne sait quoi qui vous afflige! 238

cinema houses (1897), Coubertin's revival of the Olympic games, and the first flight—the

Wright brothers (1903).

The reality for the great masses of people was somewhat different than the mood of the old aristocracy, as the Italian situation particularly indicates. Laqueur notes that the early twentieth-century was not really a "triste époque," but rather a period of

"considerable achievements and great optimism" (Laqueur 22). Indeed, the main trend of transition into the twentieth century was one of optimism, "despite the strains and stresses of modern city life, loneliness and insecurity, social unrest and economic setbacks"

(Laqueur 23).219

The fin du siècle neuroses end in the manner that decadent heroes do and are thus symptoms of a dying class, not of the culture as a whole. In this realization, the three authors here must be seen as revisiting and illustrating the need for impulses to regenerate a stagnant hegemonic culture, not a popular one. Unlike the usual assumption that these authors show "signs of petrifaction or decomposition" and cultivate language in a way that "style [is] working apart from content,"220 I have shown that, instead, they worked their style and language in very manipulative ways to translate their ulterior critical motives into images that might appeal particularly to the upper classes and force them into rethinking their own positions. I also echo Julian North in concluding that each

219 In Voices of the Unclassed, a story by George Gissing entitled "The Whirlpool" (1897), describes this new way of living as a nervous pathology of modern living full of insecurity, social unrest and economic setbacks. 220 Taken from North's essay, entitled Defining Decadence in Nineteenth-Century French and British Criticism (North 88). 239

national literature has its own decadent literature that although parallel at times, is also quite distinct, and not just a mimicked copy.221

I would like to add that, judged in literary-historical terms, there seems to be a tie between Decadence and fragmentation that does not emerge when considering literary style alone, but which is clear if social-historical references are also considered. Critics have always equated Decadence with the roots of Modernism, because Decadence quotes and undermines the visual metaphors and orientalist tropes that the aesthetics of

Modernism also seek to undermine. Against the background of popular culture, however, the literature of decadence, I believe, confuses the critics who tend to focus on the appearance and identify it with the movement's core philosophy, rather than as the vehicle for a critique pointing outward, beyond the locked rooms and aquaria represented in the novels.222 This disorientation of the critics who equate decadence with modernism and/or postmodernism should thus in my opinion be re-directed—to which their work pays unnecessary attention. Naturally, the fragmenting nature of the three prose styles might be equated with various styles and –isms preferred by critics focusing on the structure of the works themselves. However, the constant truth revealed in my three analyses is that decadence should be instead taken as parallel interventions into the

221 North also notes that "the process of defining decadence has a subtler and a longer history than has usually been granted—a history deeply embedded within Romantic and Victorian criticism" (North 94). 222 In his review of Komla Aggor, Francisco Nieva and Postmodernist Theatre [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006], Antonio Gragera call this the Paradox of Postmodernism, in that "Postmodernism seems inhabited by internal contradictions because of its capability to raise awareness of the impossibility of complete, absolute systems of representation;" he posits that "[w]hat makes postmodernism difficult to convey, and, consequently, the source of many a misunderstanding, is the conceptual limits that our modern (Cartesian), ideal world of universal conceptual clarity has imposed upon us." 240

modernity and modernization of hegemonic cultures in politically and cultural quite confused eras.

Not surprisingly, given their different national loci, our authors use three different discourses of decadence—one per country of origin—, but I believe they convey the same message to their readerships: "old art is over," and "it is sapping the nation," if it becomes, or remains, the religion of the masses rather than a tool for dealing with new societies. We must, overall, consider the moral decay of Andrea, Dorian and des

Esseintes in their chosen roles as adopted sons of old aristocratic cultures. Since each author writes from a particular national crisis, we end up with three different versions of

"what do we do about it?" Huysmans, D'Annunzio, and Wilde thus each take on the role of catalysts of change through the art that has started to retard the progress of the

Educated class. In other words: they become avant-garde poets in prose, for "what the avant-garde poets still need to do for a time is serve as agents of change, which is recognizable when still newer change is in progress" (Hassan 10).223

Frese Witt comments in parallel terms on D'Annunzio's service as an "agent of change" in her book, The Search for Modern Tragedy. She notes that the Italian author seems to combine aesthetics and politics, and through the intertwining of the two discourses, he writes his art (Witt, 35). Witt quotes the Italian poet's own words, in a

1902 interview where D'Annunzio admits that art and politics, in his opinion, "have never

223 Ihab Hassan joins the monitoring warning when he concludes his essay by saying that "All the more skeptical in periods of excess, the culture of the Logos insists on old orders in clever or current guises, and, with the means of communication at hand, inhibits and restrains," which is the exact opposite of what Huysmans, D'Annunzio, and Wilde proposed to do. 241

been disassociated" (35). Witt explains that D'Annunzio adapted "the Nietzsche of

Zarathustra into his aesthetic/political program; he read The Birth of Tragedy with a view toward the creation of his own modern tragedies and toward a vision of a new kind of theater" (Witt 37). It is therefore apparent that D'Annunzio, along with his French and

English counterparts, lived, wrote and believed in a highly political life, where the poet recognizes first and foremost when change is in progress and needs to be integrated into the fiber of the nation's taste and education.

In a somewhat parallel vein, yet stressing again artistic movements rather than society, Calinescu observes that modernism and decadence reveal some striking likeness with each other "particularly in [their] opposition to the principle of authority [… their] refined eclecticism, [their] questioning of unity, and [their] valuation of the part against the whole" (Calinescu 312). Indeed, Huysmans, D'Annunzio and Wilde each bear the scars of modernism in this way, and have been discussed as modernists (or precursors thereto). As Calinescu also posits, we "perceive these varied faces as related because of their common association with a larger modernity and with its spirit […] in which, for better or for worse, we continue to recognize ourselves" (312). And as Richmond-Garza point out in her essay on "Narrative Theory and Renaissance Drama," modernity "seems to be in love with the category, with the quarantine, with that Jesuitical, and even

Aristotelian, need to classify, and to codify [. . .] with the desire to construct [. . . and] hybridize" (Garza, 183). I would reiterate here that the goal of their shared strategies of critique need to be stated in terms of social change, not aesthetics or spirit alone. If they

242

"classify" and "codify," they do so as scientists of one branch of society, trying to identify and diagnose the ills out of their (aesthetic and anesthetizing) symptoms.

So to end this present study with Wilde's own words: "There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven" (222). This earth is the portal of our heaven and these authors' narratives become the telling of their sins. These three novels are, in this sense, confessional narratives that the upper classes need to read, because the sins are their own. Huysmans', Wilde's and D'Annunzio's are, in turn, also three narratives of redemption: three particular faces—or facets—of how the old orders should not react to upcoming modernity. They show the reasons why the old order should break down, if changes are not made, and how individuals might gain control over their own destinies, by not making the choices these heroes might make. The literature of

Decadence thus needs to be seen as a revolutionary social literature, a rewriting of traditions near and dear to the tastes and education of the older political orders that would lead toward a new mode of thinking.

243

Appendix

20th Century Innovation Timeline224

YEAR INVENTION

1900 Dirigible (Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin) Radio, Wireless Signaling Escalator

1901 Electrostatic Motor Neon light (George Claude) Lie detector /polygraph machine (James Mackenzie)

1902 Air Conditioner Flashlight

1903 Airplane (Wright brothers) Airplane Engine Radioactivity, study of (Marie Curie)

1904 Banking, Consumer

1905 Theory of Relativity (Albert Einstein)

1907 Color photography (Auguste and Louis Lumiere) First piloted helicopter (Paul Cornu)

1909 Alexanderson alternator (Ernst Alexanderson)

1910 Thomas Edison demonstrated the first talking motion picture

1911 First automobile electrical ignition system (C. F. Kettering)

1912 Rocket, Liquid-fueled First tank patented (De La Mole)

1913 Mass Production Zipper

1914 Radio Remote Control

224 Twentieth Century Innovation Time Line: 244

1919 Toaster

1920 Band-Aid Hair Dryer Traffic Light

1921 Artificial life begins—the first robot built.

1922 Insulin invented (Sir Frederick Grant Banting) First 3-D movie (spectacles with one red and one green lens)

1923 Traffic signal (Garrett A. Morgan) Television/iconoscope (cathode-ray tube) (V. K. Zworykin) Self-winding watch (John Harwood) Frozen food (Clarence Birdseye)

1925 Masking Tape Television, mechanical (John Logie Baird)

1928 Penicillin (Alexander Fleming)

1936 multiplane camera (Walt Disney)

245

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VITA

Moira M. Di Mauro-Jackson attended high school at Marymount International School of Rome, Italy, and graduated with honors. In 1982 she entered Texas State University (then Southwest Texas State University) in San Marcos, Texas, where she graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and French in May 1987. She continued studies at Texas State University, where she later received a Master of Arts in French in December 1990. During the following years she was employed as a French Instructor and Lecturer there. In September 1993, she entered the Graduate School at The University of Texas at Austin to pursue a Doctoral Degree in Comparative Literature.

Business Address: 601 University Drive, San Marcos, TX 78666

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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