Band 143, Heft 3 - Research Cluster: Late-Victorian Decadence as Mode, Theory and Attitude

In the last couple of decades Decadence studies, perched between the demarcation lines of Victorianism and Modernist studies, have evolved as an independent field of research. This special issue directs its attention to late-Victorian Decadence as mode, theory and attitude in literary texts. The introduction surveys the latest applications of the term to denominate literary research spanning from ecological to feminist issues. The special issue gathers five articles showcasing how varied authors such as Vernon Lee, Lionel Johnson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alice Meynell, Rosamund Marriott Watson and Marie Corelli saw an opportunity to query Decadence in its conflicting aesthetics, as well as embrace Decadence as a controversial attitude towards cultural and social norms.

This article considers the notion of decadence in relation to Vernon Lee’s concept of history, looking particularly at her late play, Satan the Waster (1920). In the play, Lee offers a portrayal of decadence not – as other thinkers concerned with history and decay such as Oswald Spengler or Max Nordau would have it – as destruction and collapse, but rather as potential. For Lee, decadence is seen as a moment in which old ideas, systems, or institutions fall apart and come to be replaced by something new. Instead of offering a lament, however, she offers decadence as a process of potential opening up of opportunities for change for the better. This is an ethical perspective on decadence. In this article, I trace this idea from Lee’s early aestheticist writings to the late, overtly political drama of Satan the Waster .

Marie Corelli’s 1890 novel Wormwood is set in late-nineteenth-century Paris and details the absinthe-fuelled demise of its narrator, the wealthy banker and writer Gaston Beauvais. Gaston is persuaded by the impoverished artistic genius Gessonex to seek solace in a glass of opaline absinthe, thus irrevocably setting in motion the kind of dramatic downward spiral that has since become a familiar script within addiction narratives. While Corelli’s novel has often been read as a Bourgeois critique of the Decadent movement which evoked what Kirsten MacLeod calls a “sensationalized image of Decadence”, this article seeks to show how and why absinthe came to serve as such a powerful cypher for Decadence by tracing key shifts in the consumption patterns and cultural representation of the apéritif. It then illustrates how Wormwood uses the figure of the absintheur to link moral-medical discussions of intoxication and addiction to fears of national decline and post-Darwinist anxieties of degeneration. It also explores Corelli’s critique at the level of narrative and imagery, analysing the symbolism of purity and corruption and the ideological implications of autodiegetic narration. Repeatedly invoking late-nineteenth-century poets and artists, the novel introduces an ambivalence that betrays a covert fascination with decadent subjects even as Corelli critiques the widespread misogyny found in fin-de-siècle high art and literature.

Aestheticism and, to a lesser extent, decadence are very prominent in the early writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. In his autobiographical essay “Ordered South” (1874), Stevenson echoes the “Conclusion” of Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) when he recounts his quest for moments of aesthetic experience; he also presents himself as an invalid who has become detached from life and is ready for the grave. In “An Autumn Effect” (1875), an essay about a walking tour in Buckinghamshire, he anticipates Oscar Wilde’s paradox that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” and describes his experiences in terms of paintings and literary motifs. Stevenson’s later writings are characterised by a shift from art to ethics, but he never quite abandoned his early aestheticism, as is shown by his critique of realism in a number of essays written in the 1880 s.

This article investigates the idiosyncratic nexus of idleness, reproduction, and decadence in the poetry of two influential late-Victorian women poets, Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Exploring a new perspective on their works, it investigates their complementary responses to the socio-cultural anxiety that cast non-reproducing women as the breeders of incurable hereditary idleness and decadent men as their progeny. Contributing to the prevalent interest in fin de siècle aestheticism, it is concerned with idleness as a conceptual mode of resistance to reproductive pressure and as an aesthetic choice that subverts the call for social and biological efficiency. I argue that the two women poets imagine the idle moment of reproductive inactivity as an ambiguous decadent condition between disenchantment and defiance, but invaluable to a different kind of reproduction: aesthetic fruition.

Lionel Johnson is sometimes described as a decadent writer with little thought of what that label means beyond the clichés that have come to define his literary reputation. Analysis of three essays he wrote during his initial and highly prolific years as a literary journalist – “Criticism in Corruption”, “The Cultured Faun”, and “A Note upon the Practice and Theory of Verse at the Present Time Obtaining in France” – enables an examination of how he positioned himself in relation to decadence during this early period of his literary career, as he catered to the sensibilities of a privileged male readership. It also allows for consideration of the versatility of his prose writing and his use of theatrical journalistic strategies, which see him mixing pejorative conceptions of ‘decadence’ with an evolving understanding of the term as a complex literary genre.

This essay explores the implied metaphysics of two dramatic adaptations of The Book of Margery Kempe (late 1430s): Roger Howard’s Margery Kempe. A Ballad Play (1978) and Heidi Schreck’s Creature (2009). The essay’s premise is that adapting a medieval text requires authors to engage in an act of ideological translation. This act of translation is likely to be indicative of the plays’ respective implied worldviews, of which the implied metaphysics is a central component. The essay analyses the plays’ crucial scenes and compares them to the corresponding sections of the medieval pre-text. Thereby it establishes that Howard, drawing on a Marxist understanding of history, presents Margery’s story as one of social emancipation. In contrast, Schreck, inspired by feminist theology, frames Margery’s journey as one of female self-actualisation. Despite their clear ideological thrusts, the metaphysical assumptions implied by each text are not straightforward. Howard’s play seems to allow for a metaphysical reality, whereas Schreck’s play seems to offer a postmodern take on medieval spirituality. The essay suggests that this incongruity of the plays’ implied worldviews might, at least partly, stem from their discursive features. It closes with some general remarks on how plays might imply worldviews.

This article offers a reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go in terms of economy. Drawing on insights from the New Economic Criticism, we situate this novel within a neoliberal and biopolitical context to illustrate the many ways in which the clones’ emotional and mental states interplay with a larger neoliberal economic system that ruthlessly commodifies and exploits them. We argue that the economy of affect in Ishiguro’s novel partakes of a certain ambivalence ultimately originating in contradictions and mystifications of capitalism. We refer to Giorgio Agamben, Franco Berardi, and Mark Fisher to explore the subtle intersections between Ishiguro’s novel and the broader socioeconomic paradigms. Another seminal issue we look into in this regard is how mental health issues are depoliticized to further conceal the insidiousness of economic exploitation. We also discuss how aesthetic issues in Ishiguro’s novel bear on its critique of neoliberalism. We hope that our economically-informed reading will contribute to understanding Ishiguro’s subtle socioeconomic critique of neoliberal capitalism and how readers are engaged to think beyond the neoliberal impasse, hauntingly bodied forth by the writer, as a crucial step towards overcoming it.

Gastropolitics has been at the center of attention for analyzing slavery, class struggles, and the condition of women in the writing of the Southwest Indian Ocean region (Ojwang 2013; Steiner 2022). This article seeks to analyze strategies of decolonization mediated through gastropolitics and feminism in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s memoir The Settler’s Cookbook . The Cookbook is punctuated with recipes that not only attest to the hybrid attachments of diasporic South Asian women to the coast of East Africa but also to their story of resistance and belonging. In this article, I demonstrate that the memoir decolonizes food by illustrating and describing the unique diaspora of South Asians in East Africa, and how the history of colonization can be brought to light through the food archive, offering a renewed understanding of multiculturalism through intercommunity contacts mediated by food. This article explores the food archive and decolonization from this twin axis: as a means of decolonization and as an object of the decolonization process. More concretely, I ask: How does food decolonize the understanding of the South Asian diaspora in East Africa? How can eating and transmitting recipes help understand decolonization?

This article explores the concept of African American homeplaces in Ward’s third novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Through a textual analysis, it lays bare the racial oppressions endured by Richie, a twelve-year-old African American boy who dies whilst imprisoned at Parchman Prison, Mississippi. Drawing on bell hooks’ theoretical concept of homeplaces as resistance (1991), I argue that Richie embodies the longing of Black people – living and dead – for returning to their places of origin in both tangible and intangible forms. This homecoming represents his spiritual quest to escape the white-dominated world rife with racial hostility, whilst also challenging the notion that hopelessness in the novel intervenes in his search for home. The essay concludes by asserting that homes are integral to the reconstruction of African American identity as they provide a healing outlet both in life and afterlife.