Editor’s Introduction: Beyond Baudelaire, Decadent Aestheticism and Modernity

From T.S. Eliot through Walter Benjamin and the new modernist studies, Charles Baudelaire has retained his reputation as the Decadent “father” of modernism. The figure particularly of Baudelaire’s wandering French flaneur and his virtual gaze negotiating the “transient,” “fleeting,” “contingent” techno/urban milieu constitutes the originary 19^th-century “scene” of modernity—often programmatically invoked in modern studies of literature, film, technology, commodity culture, cosmopolitanism, popular culture, and transnationalism; as well as avant-garde theories of time/space flux and the body.¹

This primacy on Benjamin’s formulaic Baudelaire, among other things, has obscured Decadent Aestheticism’s unique, complex legacies to modernism and modernity.² British Decadence and/or Aestheticism is still perceived by many modernists as a “Baudelairian” derivative or dismissed as blandly “effeminate,” socially irrelevant, and elitist. While, individually, modernist and Victorian studies vigorously pursue new cultural, theoretical, and social “modernities,” less scholarly attention is given to cross-over research, both Anglo/American and trans-national as well as across periods. In this era of “long” modernities, proposals submitted to the MSA spanning WWII and contemporary studies far outnumber those extending back to the mid- or late- 19^th-century. And new scholars in turn-of-the-century modernity often feel stranded between two periods, lacking sufficient intellectual and professional venues for their work. Thus, the essays in this issue (many authored by new scholars) seek at once to redefine aspects of Decadent/Aestheticism and realign them in new Decadent-to-modern trajectories engaging cultural studies—visual, material, popular—and/or socio-political theories of flux, nature, the body, “utopia,” race, gender, and sexuality.

Accordingly, Dennis Denisoff begins by exploring how critical emphasis on the Aesthetes’ “Baudelairian” urbanism, and “unnatural” artifice has prevented inquiries into Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne’s influential, naturalist “eco-pagan” modernity. Denisoff draws his model for a fluctuating organic milieu from recent eco-philosophies of the universe as an “intersubjective mass” or “Web of interlocking energy” and particularly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s cross-species theories of “becoming-animal.” Viewed through “eco-pagan” modernity, Pater’s famous “Conclusion” and W.B. Yeats’s “Rosa Alchemica” enact sexual and spiritual “otherness” through pagan “dissipations” of the self into material interspecies collectives and matter-energy “webs.”

I would add here a reminder of the mid-to-late-19^th-century cultural and aesthetic fascination with evolutionary science, both geological (Charles Lyell) and biological (Darwin). Apart from the urban crowd, time-lapsed “scenes” of bio/geo matter’s metamorphosing constituent parts also articulated “fleeting,” “contingent” experiential realities and avant-garde politics opposed to the “eternal.”³ Beyond Yeats, Denisoff’s inquiry into Pater and Swinburne’s eco-poetics might have important implications for modern artists and writers such as Marianne Moore, H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, and William Carlos Williams whose material modernities variously engaged scientific naturalism, evolution, and ecology.

Further, discouraged perhaps by Decadent Aestheticism’s alleged detachment from socio-political reality, new modernist studies of visual and commodity culture repeatedly gesture toward Baudelaire’s “kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” scanning the techno/urban “spectacle.” Meanwhile, research into Decadence/Aestheticism’s protocinematic visualities and nuanced interrogations of material culture, race, or gender remain largely period-based in Victorian studies.

Thus Carolyn Kelley identifies an alternative affective/visual trajectory proceeding from Aubrey Beardsley’s proto-cinematic, cross-gendered art to the modern film Borderline (1930). Citing modernist literary film criticism, she traces the impact of Beardsley’s dislocated, racialized, sexualized bodies variously on Borderline’s film techniques, H.D.’s performance of “white demented Astrid,” and the film’s “white/black; hetero/queer” binary. Establishing William Morris’s disenchantment with capitalist uses of print culture, Elizabeth Miller explores William Morris’s socialist print practices both in his Commonweal newspaper and the later, seemingly “elitist” Kelmscott press. Miller elaborates how these more radically utopian antecedents to the New Age or the Clarion deliberately use Aestheticism’s art/life division as a “politicized secession” from commodity culture. Summoning Fredric Jameson’s recent theory that the “Utopia” fuses “manufactured perfection” with social revolution, Miller relocates Morris’s early and late...