Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions

Lyn Pykett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138176652
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317892458
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The fin de siècle, the period 1880-1914, long associated with decadence and with the literary movements of aestheticism and symbolism, has received renewed critical interest recently. The essays in this volume form a valuable introduction to fin de siècle cultural studies and provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debate and the place of culture in society.

1 Introduction

The approaching end of the twentieth century, accompanied as it has been by ‘endisms’ of various kinds – the end of history, the end of politics, the collapse of the grand narratives – has led to a renewed critical focus on the senses of ending that characterised that earlier turn of the century, the period between around 1880 and 1914 which has been labelled as the fin de siècle. Holbrook Jackson’s pioneering study The Eighteen Nineties, a ‘comprehensive guidebook to the region by a near-native’¹ has been reissued on several occasions since its first publication in 1913, and its appearance in a new edition in 1988 was part of the torrent of new books on the period which began to appear from the mid-1980s. Several of these new studies are indebted to Jackson, but all of them modify or challenge his version of the 1890s.²

The term ‘fin de siècle’ appears to have entered cultural discourse in 1888, as the title of a play by F. de Jouvenot and H. Micard which was performed in Paris in that year. Five years later the term was so well established that one of the characters in George Egerton’s story ‘The Spell of the White Elf’ could use it as a kind of shorthand to denote a set of values and a lifestyle that together virtually constitute a cultural formation:

‘Larry Moore of the Vulture – he is one of the most wickedly amusing of men, prides himself on being fin de siècle – don’t you detest that word? – or nothing, raves about Dégas, and is a worshipper of the decadent school of verse, quotes Verlaine, you know – well he came in one evening on his way to some music hall.’³

Egerton’s story appeared in 1893 in Keynotes, a book produced by that self-consciously fin de siècle publisher John Lane. A year earlier** the fin de siècle mentality had been anatomised at great length by the Austrian Max Nordau in Degeneration. This extraordinary diatribe, which was translated into English in 1895, was a psycho-social pathology of modern ‘degeneration’, a condition which Nordau represented as both a cause and symptom of contemporary moral, cultural, and aesthetic decline. For many of those who lived through it, whether they were cultural pessimists like Nordau, or the avant-gardists and prophets of a new world order against whom he raged, the fin de siècle was a time of great cultural ferment. It was the age of ‘the Dusk of the Nations’,⁴ the rending of social, moral and aesthetic traditions, the growth of mass society, the spread of urbanism, the development of a consumer culture, and the physical and mental deterioration of ‘civilised’ man; in short, it was a crisis in civilisation.

The age of decadence and/or transition

In retrospect literary historians and critics equated the fin de siècle in Britain (and particularly in England) with yellow books and green carnations, and with the literary ‘movements’ of aestheticism and symbolism; the distinctive literary genre of the period (thus constituted) was poetry. For many later commentators the period could be summed up in one word, ‘decadence’, which Arthur Symons (who was both an advocate and practitioner of decadence) defined as a ‘morbid subtlety of analysis … [and] … morbid curiosity of form’.⁵ According to Holbrook Jackson, one of the first literary historians of the fin de siècle, the chief characteristics of decadence were perversity, artificiality, egoism, and curiosity. This equation of the fin de siècle with ‘the decadence’ has proved remarkably persistent in literary studies of the period. It can be traced in Barbara Charlesworth’s Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (1965), Ian Fletcher’s Decadence and the 1890s (1979), R. K. R. Thornton’s The Decadent Dilemma (1983), John Reed’s The Decadent Style (1985), Linda Dowling’s Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1986), and most recently in Murray Pittock’s Spectrum of Decadence (1993) (see Further Reading).

One of the main claims made about the cultural significance of fin de siècle decadence was that it was a subversion of, or reaction against, Victorianism; a tendency which was judged deplorable or laudable depending on the critic’s estimation of the Victorians. This view of the fin de siècle as a period of Decadent revolt was developed in Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties, a book which was extremely influential in establishing the 1890s as the quintessential fin de siècle decade; a decade in which,

for a few recognisably coherent years the artistic, literary, ideological, even religious strands in the Victorian revolt against Victorianism came together. Beardsley questions classical sexual morality and classical graphic conventions; Shaw gives recipes for a new drama and a new woman in the same breath; Wilde argues for art and socialism, and even, for a moment, believes in both.⁶

For Jackson, viewing the fin de siècle from the perspective of 1913, it was not simply a period of revolt, but also an age of transition:

People said it was a ‘period of transition’, and they were convinced that they were passing not only from one social system to another, but from one morality to another, from one culture to another, and from one religion to a dozen or more.⁷

The transitional status of the fin de siècle was further emphasised in Jackson’s preface to the 1927 edition of his book:

It was not, primarily, a period of achievement, but rather of effort: suggestive, tentative, rather than formative … an old civilization a little too conscious of itself and the present, and a little too much concerned for its future.⁸

As the fin de siècle became an increasingly distant prospect, and one, moreover, viewed from the perspective of Departments of English Literature in universities it was characterised, above all, as an age (perhaps the age) of transition; wandering between two worlds, one dead (Victorianism) the other (Modernism) waiting to be born. As Raymond Williams put it in 1958 in a verdict which echoes Jackson’s, the fin de siècle was a ‘working-out, rather, of unfinished lines; a tentative redirection’.⁹ In short, the fin de siècle was a space between two literary and historical periods, and not a distinct literary or historical period; it occupied a borderland between two fields of study, rather than constituting an object of study in its own right.

The ‘new’ fin de siècle

Over the last twenty years or so we have seen the construction of a ‘new’ fin de siècle, a fin de siècle which is increasingly seen as a distinctive and diverse cultural moment rather than as a limbo-like ‘age of transition’. At the same time critical attention has been redirected towards the genre (or more accurately genres) of fiction. The ‘new’ fin de siècle is, to a great extent, the product of new critical and theoretical perspectives and/or current political and ideological concerns. In the case of this period as in so many others feminist literary history and theory have provided a variety of revisionary perspectives. The post-Foucauldian interest in the histories of sexuality (and particularly of homosexuality), sexual science, and discourses of gender has also been particularly important in redefining the fin de siècle, as has the developing post-colonialist interest in the discourses of imperialism and the critique of the culture of Empire. The development of Cultural Materialism and the growth of an interdisciplinary Cultural Studies have also played important parts in shaping the new fin de siècle. Both of these Post-Structuralist approaches have redefined the relationships between literary and non-literary texts, and between texts and their contexts which had become established in literary studies as traditionally conceived. Roland Barthes’ interdisciplinary concept of the text as a ‘methodological field’¹⁰ has provided one of the theoretical models for the new Cultural Studies. Another has been provided by Raymond Williams’s rethinking of ‘culture’ as ‘a general term to describe not only the products but the processes of all signification, including the signification of values’.¹¹ This new focus on signifying practices and on all of the components of a culture, and not just the (handful of) texts of what Williams has described as the ‘selective tradition’,¹² has been particularly important for re-reading the fin de siècle, which was a period of fierce cultural contest and a defining moment for observing the processes by which the boundaries between high culture and popular culture are established and policed. In addition to these theoretical and methodological engagements, current political engagements with sexual and gender politics, and, in particular, with issues of class, race, and ethnicity, have also opened up the fin de siècle to investigation in all sorts of new and interesting ways, as will be evident in the essays reprinted in this volume.

My aim in compiling this collection of essays about fin de siècle narratives has been to demonstrate something of the range and diversity of the newly constituted fin de siècle, and also to provide examples of some of the main lines of investigation which have brought it into being. I hope that the essays and extracts I have selected for inclusion, together with this introductory material, will form an introduction to fin de siècle cultural studies and also provide a commentary on important aspects of current critical debates. Three themes or topics have dominated recent studies of the fin de siècle: gender and sexuality, decadence and degeneration, and imperialism. I have organised this collection around these three broad areas, moving from a group of essays concerned with issues of gender and sexuality, to essays concerned with aspects of decadence and degeneration, and finally to a group of extracts dealing in various ways with the discourses of imperialism. In practice, as readers will soon discover, these three areas continually intersect and overlap, and each of the essays or extracts included in a particular grouping also ventures into one or more of the areas addressed by the other groupings.

Gender and sexuality

Theoretical and political engagements with issues of gender and sexuality have been of particular importance in the re-reading of the fin de siècle, and of fin de siècle fiction in particular. The impact of feminist scholarship and criticism has been extensive, contentious, and diverse. The second wave feminists of the 1970s (and after) returned to the various and competing feminisms of the fin de siècle, seeking a historical grounding for their own movement, and (perhaps) attempting to situate and understand their own dissensions by locating them in the turbulent and divided history of the women’s movement of the late nineteenth century, from the social purity campaigns of the 1870s and 1880s – for example, on the sexual double standard, the social evil of prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts – to the increasingly militant struggle for the vote.

As late twentieth century feminists began to ‘fabricate new mythologies commensurate with our growing belief in our strength’ (Auerbach, p. 23 below) feminist literary critics turned their attention to the mythologies of the past, and re-examined and deconstructed some powerful myths of femininity in texts by late nineteenth-century male writers. The first two essays in this volume, both of them first published in the early 1980s, are examples of this latter approach. Both re-examine the fin de siècle preoccupation with the femme fatale. In the first essay Nina Auerbach re-examines what she describes as that ‘alluring conjunction of women and corpses’ (p. 23 below) in the literature and visual culture of the fin de siècle. She also reviews an important scene from the 1890s, a tableau in which three men (Du Maurier’s Svengali, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Sigmund Freud) lean longingly over ‘three mesmerized and apparently characterless women’ (Trilby, Lucy Westenra and Frau Emmy von N), and discovers in these prone women, not dispiriting victims but rather disturbingly powerful figures with a ‘capacity for amazing and empowering transformations’ (p. 31). In the second essay Sandra Gilbert revises Mario Praz’s contention that in the nineteenth century, above all others, sex was the mainspring of imaginative literature, and argues that Praz’s book¹³ in fact demonstrates that it was ‘the power of the female sex’ that ‘increasingly obsessed male writers’ at the fin de siècle. Gilbert makes her case by means of what has become a much-imitated reading of Rider Haggard’s She as ‘a symptom of a complex of late Victorian sociocultural and sexual anxieties’ (p. 40), and also as an early engagement with the phenomenon of the New Woman: the novel is ‘a definitive fin de siècle embodiment of fantasies that preoccupied countless male writers … an entirely New Woman: the all-knowing, all-powerful ruler of a matriarchal society’ (p. 40).

These essays by Auerbach and Gilbert both contain a number of elements which have been extremely important in the re-reading of fin de siècle fiction. Both look at best-sellers by male writers who were self-consciously committed to the project of producing novels that would convert men into novel-readers, and reclaim fiction from the process of feminisation to which it had supposedly succumbed. Like much of the more recent innovatory work on the period, both essays focus on popular culture and on genre fiction, and they also explore the links between different forms and genres: Auerbach compares the representations of male and female figures in fiction texts with the illustrations of those texts and with other magazine illustrations of the period; both writers make interesting connections between the forms of fiction and the e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian Freud
• 3. Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness
• 4. The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890s
• 5. Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson’s Strange Case
• 6. Homosexual Scandal and Compulsory Heterosexuality in the 1890s
• 7. Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation
• 8. Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide
• 9. ‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late Nineteenth Century
• 10. Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Fiction of the Fin de Siècle
• 11. Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880–1914
• 12. The Content and Discontents of Kipling’s Imperialism
• 13. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Histories of Empire
• Further Reading
• Index