Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920 (review)

The extraordinary reframing of familiar terms undertaken in Regenia Gagnier’s new book is captured in the provocation of her subtitle, which insists on the notion of the relationship between part and whole. Redirecting our attention to forms of organicism and functionalism which animate the fin de siècle as well as current developments in evolutionary science, this book is at once a critique and genealogy of identity thinking. In a set of finely differentiated analyses, Gagnier revisits some of the major terms and movements of the late nineteenth century—including Decadence, New Woman’s literature, socialism, new liberalism, and cosmopolitanism—to show how thinkers and artists conceived the relation of part to whole, of independence to interdependence, within a broader cultural and intellectual field that was in key ways more open than has often been acknowledged to forms of material embeddedness, community, and social consciousness.

Gagnier seeks to present intellectual and aesthetic life as a rich network of relations, as above all a dense sociological formation that has much to do with the ways in which ideas circulate and take hold. While many forms of intellectual history may seem to have operated with a similar presupposition, Gagnier’s book stands out for its careful charting of the dialogic relations—and tensions—among different groups and intellectuals at the fin de siècle. She thereby constructs a rich field of discourse, one animated by contestation and cross-fertilization. It is also worth noting that her own style of collaborative scholarship—her form of acknowledging and building on the work of others—serves to exemplify network relations as a kind of professional ethic (though she in no way draws attention to this, it is a striking feature of the book’s self-presentation).

The rich analyses contained in the study are too numerous to summarize with any justice, but two of the discussions should be singled out for their noteworthy contributions. The chapter on the “New Women” makes an incisive distinction between independence and autonomy, associating the latter with a commitment to balancing independence with relationship. While this may seem a familiar feminist way of distinguishing an ethically superior form of self-actualization, Gagnier goes on to show how certain aesthetic experiments by women gave powerful expression to this balanced, differentiated understanding of autonomy and relation (her discussion of Alice Meynell and Edith Lees, in particular, is quite striking). In a chapter such as this, Gagnier moves beyond some of the standard conceptual frameworks for understanding the art of this period and in the process undermines the standard literary histories which place Bloomsbury at the apex of modernist experimentation with fluidity and subjecthood. By drawing out the ways in which fin-de-siècle artists themselves moved beyond static understandings of selfhood, Gagnier is able to differentiate modes of response at the fin de siècle, recapturing a contested field in which forms of self and social understanding vied with one another. In Gagnier’s account, progressive ways of understanding can be evaluated as distinct from the more defended forms of self-fashioning and isolated self-aggrandizement that marked Decadence. It is precisely by angling this evaluative project through the framework of part-whole that Gagnier is able to make relevant the forms of social and evolutionary theory that often seem to be so alien to our dominant ways of assessing ethico-political thought and aesthetic expression.

Another noteworthy contribution of the book is contained within the chapter on cosmopolitanism. Gagnier frames her discussion of late-nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism with a useful map of the contemporary debates on the topic and argues that, like other key historical moments at which a cosmopolitan response was demanded by the pressure of circumstances, the late nineteenth century presented a cultural field in which the forces of ethnic identification (within emerging nation states) were prompting a range of internationalist and socialist aspirations. Gagnier aims...