The Fin-de-Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (review)

Although Joseph Bristow's introduction attempts to redress inattention to the women poets of the fin de siècle and to material history of the book, most of the essays in this anthology do not share his polemical tone. Rather, they tend to corroborate Talia Schaffer's view, in The Forgotten Female Aesthetes (2000), that "the gulf between the foremost and the forgotten is our experience, not theirs" (qtd. in Bristow 236); they also tend to approach women writers of the period with the men, and formal analysis and the materiality of the book with biography and myth.

Ever since W. B. Yeats called the Rhymers' Club poets the "Tragic Generation," the Decadence has been popularly associated with masculinity and death—morbidity, degeneration, suicide—emphasizing their self-conscious, self-dramatized, or, in more contemporary terms, performative self-destruction. But of course men had no patent on suicide. Amy Levy was as performative as any suicide before Sylvia Plath (see Linda Hunt Beckman's "Amy Levy: Urban Poetry, Poetic Innovation, and the Fin-de-Siècle Woman Poet"), and Eleanor Marx was as tragic as—probably more tragic than—Oscar Wilde.

For this period, the usual distinctions between aesthetic formalism and history or biography fail to comprehend the ethos. Since Théophile Gautier's preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), art for art's sake was a critique of utility rather than a fetishism of art. In that famous preface, Gautier did not write about art but about pleasure, in fact about sexual pleasure as divorced from reproduction. Women, as compulsory reproducers of the relations of production, have long had reason to critique utility. Lesbianism in France was a figure for aestheticism because it represented nonreproductive pleasure, which was for Gautier what distinguished humankind from nonhuman animals. Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (1857) was first entitled Les Lesbiennes.

This rejection of utility in favour of the useless pleasures of art and sex (Wilde's "All art is quite useless") was by no means a rejection of form. When Holbrook Jackson accurately characterized the period as "a decade singularly rich in ideas, personal genius, and social will," whose "central characteristic was a widespread concern for the correct—the most effective, most powerful, most righteous—mode of living," he captured the aesthetic formula that one might try to live as if life were a work of art ( The Eighteen Nineties [Kennerley, 1913] 12, 17). That is, men and women tried to shape their lives as if they were works of art, and to suicide, as John Davidson wrote, was to subdue the conqueror of kings. Mythologized biography, the well-formed poem, the well planned and formed state, were all part of Jackson's "personal genius and social will." You either love form or you do not. Aesthetes, then as now, tend to love sonnets (emotion contained in form), decorum (formed behaviour), civility (formed interaction), beautiful objects (formed labour), beautiful Nature (formed matter), games (formed competition), personal ascesis (formed self), and, often, socialism (formed society—reforming self-interest into the social good). Detachment from one's own self-interest, a corollary of formalism since Immanuel Kant, is both dandiacal and critical.

None of the essays takes such a broad synthetic view as this: each focuses on particular men and women, particular poems, or particular literary and publishing institutions. Jerusha McCormack asks how women could match the Rhymers' self-generated myth of tragedy. Holly Laird almost single-handedly establishes a field of self-murder in literature in "The Death of the Author by Suicide," though it is a pity in doing so that she does not discuss Davidson's Wagnerian celebration of suicide, "The Testament of John Davidson" (1908). Nor, in her interesting locating of the bhakti tradition in what has otherwise been interpreted as Laurence Hope's sadomasochism, does she mention that Hope (Adela Florence Cory) was Victoria Cross's sister, and Cross's literature abounds with...