Dowson & the Fin de Siècle

BOOK REVIEWS not seem to consider them incompatible although many critics, like Toril Moi in Sexual / Textual Politics (Routledge, 1985), have suggested conflicts in the basic assumptions of each school. Instead, Foster and Simons try to settle their theoretical mixing pot by quoting Annette Kolodny's statement on the necessity of pluralism for feminism, a comment and a stance already questioned by feminist critics like Moi. Furthermore, they label this approach a "revised feminist critical framework " (86). In using well-established, one might say "traditional," feminism like Showalter's adaptation of the muted and dominant anthropological model, Foster and Simons fail to demonstrate exactly how their feminist critical framework is revised. They indicate that it is their readings which are revisionist, "set against contemporary reactions and ideologies" in order to offer "new insights into the representation of gender roles and women's writing practices" (31); but, as I have mentioned, by not conducting a more exhaustive survey of the critical work on each author, they fail to demonstrate how their readings of the text are re-readings, how their insights are new. Overall, however, this study makes an important contribution to the field of children's literature by grouping together these girl's stories and subjecting them to similar scrutiny. Where some critics have seen The Daisy Chain, for example, as incompatible with Little Women in terms of its ideological outlook, Foster and Simons place it on the same spectrum. An examination of the works in chronological order enables readers to witness changes and movements over the course of almost a century. As Foster and Simons demonstrate, girls' stories are not simply straightforward little tales but complicated explorations of women's contradictory position in society, stories which are, indeed, worthy of study. Laura M. Robinson ___________ Queen's University Dowson & the Fin de Siècle Jean-Jacques Chardin. Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) et la crise fin de siècle anglaise. Paris: Editions Messene, 1995. 435 pp. Paper 220FF IN THIS ABSORBING and insightful work—the first full-length critical study devoted to the writer since T. B. Swann's 1964 TWAS volume—Jean-Jacques Chardin sets out to explore the relation between the Ernest Dowson text and the literary and intellectual context of the English fin de siècle. Adopting a theoretical framework based on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and Gaston Bachelard's pheno369 ELT 39:3 1996 menological studies of the imagination, Chardin offers a meticulous examination of the language, recurrent themes, images, and motifs of Dowson's work, through which he seeks to lay bare the unconscious of the writer generally regarded as the Decadent par excellence. Although the biographical reading of the text is emphatically rejected as too limiting and indeed trivializing, Chardin's scope is broad, embracing an astute historical perspective on 1890s thought and culture, original manuscript research, and a fine appreciation of the technical aspects of the lyric form. Following a substantial introductory survey of the historical and philosophical background, and a useful chronological summary of Dowson's literary career that pays particular attention to contemporary critical reactions, Chardin begins his penetrating and exhaustive investigation into the manifestations of characteristically fin-de-siècle obsessions and dilemmas in Dowson's writing ("Time," "Love," "the Self," "Art," and "Religion"). The focus is predominantly on the poetry, but Chardin is deeply immersed in the Dowson corpus and makes frequent instructive references to the shorter prose fiction and the novels. Chapter 3, "Le Temps et l'Etre," explores Dowson's horror of mutability, the consequent valorization of the present moment, and the deleterious effect on love of the passing of time, which inevitably leads to physical desire and loss of innocence. Dowson's conception of love and his fear of the flesh are taken up in Chapter 4, "La Femme: variations sur une obsession fin de siècle." The two female figures in Dowson's oneiric universe, the innocent woman-child, endowed with an almost mystical redemptive power, and the cold distant femme fatale are examined in all their varied and complex representations. (The analyses of "Souvenirs of an Egotist" and the sonnet sequence "Of a Little Girl" are especially illuminating here.) Chardin argues forcefully that the mistress...