The Strange Career of American Bohemia

Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcast By Elizabeth Wilson Rutgers University Press, 2000

Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age By Mary Warner Blanchard Yale University Press, 1998

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century By Christine Stansell Metropolitan Press, 2000

Critics on both the Left and Right have of late declared the long-standing tension between bohemian and bourgeois to be a thing of the past. In his wickedly acute observations of the elite of the information age, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), David Brooks discerns the marriage of bohemian attitude and bourgeois practicality. According to Brooks, an editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, the "résumé gods," who accumulate educational rather than monetary capital, combine transcendental aims with upscale consumption and status consciousness, inverting Marx by making all that is profane sacred. Brooks intends his portrait of those who "synthesize bourgeois self-control and bohemian emancipation" (198) to reassure such conservatives as Robert Bork and William Bennett that the future might not be as apocalyptic as they fear. His notion that cultural opposition has exhausted itself has also received articulation on the Left, albeit with much less cheer. Perry Anderson argues that the multinational character of capitalism has replaced a bourgeoisie that drew upon prebourgeois values with a super rich that apes the lumpen proletariat. The demise of the "classic" bourgeoisie has led to the displacement of the conservative aesthetic against which bohemians defined themselves by spectacles of consumption, thus ending both deference and space for maneuverability. Cultural revolt is no longer on the agenda, Anderson pessimistically concludes, because "any category of the Other in the collective imaginary" has disappeared (111).

The bohemian-bourgeois antipathy Anderson and Brooks see on the wane has been at the heart of a 200-year phenomenon. Ever since journalist Felix Pyat assigned the term in 1834 to Left Bank artists and authors living a hand-to-mouth existence, bohemian has signified implacable hostility to middle-class norms. To be a bohemian has meant to live and think in an antibourgeois way. Envisioning the bourgeoisie as conformist, money grubbing, moralistic, rationalistic, naively empiricist, and fearful of the body, bohemians have embraced a prefigurative cultural politics that enacts the opposite. Championing bohemian authenticity over bourgeois falsity, cultural radicals have declared their difference by courting extreme experience, indulging in forbidden love, and living in poverty for art. If not all bohemians have been artists, virtually all have located in aesthetic experience the antidote to bourgeois utility and materialism. The impulse to remove the barriers between art and life has manifested itself in the bohemian tendency to turn lives and bodies into art objects. Wary of how bourgeois morality has constrained free expression, bohemians have forged a politics that emphasizes style, energy, and pleasure.

The maintainance of such positions has been no easy task. Anderson and Brooks are not the first to issue obituaries for bohemianism; indeed, as Elizabeth Wilson, professor of cultural studies at the University of North London, notes in Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts (her schematic and synthetic history of the phenomenon), bohemia is always past. Every generation of bohemians imagines itself to be the last authentic group of rebels. Those eulogizing genuine bohemia have perforce attributed the demise of true cultural dissent to either rampant commercialism or suburban imitators. On one hand, bohemia has proven vulnerable to the cash nexus, which works its evil ways by enticing artists to abandon their quest for authenticity or by flooding the culture with puerile entertainment for the masses. On the other hand, the spread of bohemian mores eliminates the distinctiveness of the original. No longer needed to spark a rebellion or able to signify difference, bohemia becomes irrelevant. Bohemia's very existence, it would seem, has been as much threatened by victory over bourgeois ways as by marketplace defeat.

Bourgeois incorporation of bohemia owes much to the complex and subtle interdependence of the two camps...