Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1969 The eF mme Fatale as Symbol of the Creative Imagination in Late Victorian Fiction. Larry Thomas Biddison Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Biddison, Larry Thomas, "The eF mme Fatale as Symbol of the Creative Imagination in Late Victorian Fiction." (1969). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1637. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1637 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 70-9037 BIDDISON, Larry Thomas, 1936- THE FEMME FATALE AS SYMBOL OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Michanical College, Ph.D., 1969 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE FEMME FATALE AS SYMBOL OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Larry Thomas Biddison B.A., Texas A & I University, 1958 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1963 August, 1969 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my deep appreciation to Dr. Thomas L. Watson for contributing much to my understanding of both the Victorian and the modern novel, as well as for making many important suggestions concerning this study. I want also to thank Dr. Fabian Gudas and Dr. John Hazard Wildman for the valuable insights into literature which they have communicated to me over the years. Finally, I want to acknowledge Dr. Albert E. Johnson, whose scholarship I have long admired and whose friendship I have always treasured. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. ..................................... ii ABSTRACT ............................................... iv CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.................................. 1 II. BACKGROUNDS IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ARTISTIC CREATIVITY ...................... 8 III. ALGERNON CHARLES S W I N B U R N E ................... 43 IV. DECADENCE AND DANDYISM ....................... 86 V. HENRY JAMES.................................... 127 VI. JOSEPH CONRAD.................................. 168 VII. CONCLUSION.................................... 214 LIST OF WORKS CITED.................................... 224 VITA ..................................................... 229 iii ABSTRACT The idea of the narcissistic artist in love with the extensions of his own psyche-— his image reflected in his artistic creations— has been a frequent subject of serious fiction since the mid-nineteenth century. Writers wishing to treat the conflicts of the artist between his commitment to life and his commitment to his craft have suggested this divided self in symbolic mirrors, twins, doppelgSnqers, and hermaphrodites. However, students of the fiction which marks the transition to what is called "modern" have little noted one symbol of this psychic conflict. It is the thesis of this study that the relationship of the femme fatale and her victim-lover in certain late Victorian novels is essen­ tially that which exists between art and the artist enamored of his own aesthetic powers. Whether as a conscious literary device of the novelist, or as the projection of the arche­ type of his unconscious mind, the femme fatale in these novels exercises a paradoxical life-death influence upon the narcissistic artist. In selected key works of fiction by writers preoccupied with the problem of reconciling aesthetic and moral values in art, there is discernible a pattern of increasing narcissism among the novelists of the late nineteenth century. In each of these novels, when art (a subjectively conceived pattern of order) seems to offer the artistic protagonist the ful­ fillment he cannot find in the external world, he willingly forswears his human responsibilities and turns to embrace the seductive lady— the aesthetic ideal of his own creative imagination. The artist, like the lover-hero in myth and legend, is easily lured by the magic of the siren's song promising unusual sensory experiences. For the lover the attraction is to an erotic ideal: the unlimited pleasures of the flesh; for the artist, to an aesthetic ideal: the unlimited pleasures of the imagination. But the artist, like the lover, is deceived by the melodic voice. Aesthetic pleasure: is indeed all that it purports to be; but it ignores the matter of genuine human relationships. Art, by demanding much of the artist, necessarily takes much that is vital in him; and the success of the work of art— as of the vampirish femme fatale— is proportional to the amount of the artist's own humanity that is sacrificed to the object of his devotion. This dissertation demonstrates that, despite the recurrence of the same enigmatic figure in these novels, the femme fatale does not have a uniform personality and thus reveals the unique nature of each writer's creative imagina­ tion. Margaret Wariston in Lesbia Brandon, for example, suggests Swinburne' s masochistic devotion to a harsh and unyielding ideal. Sibyl Vane and (implicitly) the portrait v in The Picture of Dorian Gray are types of the femme fatale embodying Wilde's deceptive ideal of dandiacal self-love. Zuleika in Zuleika Dobson, though a caricature rather than a serious portrait, shows Beerbohm's awareness, too, of the necessary destructiveness of the artist-dandy's self-dedica­ tion, and Beardsley's Helen in "Under the Hill" epitomizes the barrenness of the aesthetic ideal of the artist who lives in the realm of pure fantasy. Christina Light in James's Roderick Hudson is not the sadist that Swinburne's ideal woman is, but she is coldly indifferent to the suf­ fering she causes idealistic artists who become infatuated with her. Of the six novelists considered, only Conrad, through Lena in Victory, reveals a devotion to an ideal which, though destructive, is also redemptive. This study contends, finally, that the narcissism of the writers of the late Victorian period has continued into the present century and is symptomatic of what can be described as "modernism" in fiction. vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION During the closing decades of the last century and in the early years of the present one, a number of serious writers in England (as in America and on the Continent) became increasingly conscious of themselves as artists as distinct from their roles as moralists and propagandists for honesty, sobriety, and monagamy. This turning inward upon themselves resulted in their discovery that the value of a work of art for its own sake was equal, if not superior, to its value as an instrument for the moral improvement of society. As an ordered pattern (e.g., of colors, words, ideas, events), a work of art had a "beauty," an "aesthetic" value that had nothing at all to do with its moral worth. Sensing the conflict of values, such literary artists as Swinburne, Stevenson, Conrad, Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats gave a significant amount of attention to the problem of reconciling the demands of art with the demands of society. The political, economic, social, and religious atti­ tudes of Victorian England were formed and enforced, for the most part, by the earnest (if somewhat hypocritical) middle classes. Invariably, society judged all alleged works of art by the criteria set forth by the philistine custodians of the status quo. A painting, a novel, or a poem was "good" if it inculcated or reinforced the prevailing social or moral conventions. It was judged "bad" if no moral purpose could be discerned, or if the work was blatantly "immoral." Because Victorian public-oriented art critics refused to acknowledge that a work of art also had a valuable intrinsic "aesthetic" aspect which had no connection with the world of manners and morals, an increasing number of sensitive and conscientious literary craftsmen either deprecatingly ignored or vigorously denounced their would-be judges. Students of modern literature are keenly aware of the persistence in fiction of the theme of alienation— and especially of the alienation of the artist from society. The artist of the late nineteenth century faced a dilemma that has not yet been resolved, even in the third quarter of the twentieth century. He was obsessed with his own dualism. As a man, he felt the need to participate in the world of men; but as an artist, he felt the need to consecrate himself to art, much as a monk makes vows of celibacy and poverty in order to experience the sublimity of his religious ideal. The world for such an artist was not only an inferior source of amusement; it in fact palled on him. In a typical novel portraying this dilemma the artist, finding communication between himself and others either impossible or unfruitful, openly rebels and begins a private search for fulfillment. However, his voluntary exile serves but to alienate him further from the whole in which he unconsciously yearns to participate. When he comes to realize that he "can't go home again," he remains in psychic exile, turning inward for the communion denied him from without. Knowing as he does that only the imagination is capable of infinite creation and appreciation, and convinced of his own self-sufficiency, the artist is stimulated by the promises of the imagination to satisfy the needs of his soul. In devoting himself to "art for art's sake" he at once rejects the external world and becomes the willing slave of the artifice proceeding from his own mind.1 ^rank Kermode's study of the artist and the image in the poetry of Yeats (Romantic Image [New York, 1957]) makes several of these points concerning the artist's fatal fasci­ nation with his own creative powers and their products.